Afterword: The Song Pact – How the Novel Sings

Abstract The Afterword proposes that novelists who cite songs, most often art songs or arias, typically write for a preferred reader who shares the author’s cultural frame of reference. The reader’s recognition of the song becomes the basis of a “song pact” through which the reader and the author (the actual author, not a fictional persona) form a bond of mutual trust. This bond also parallels the bond(s) formed through shared song between characters in a novel. Examples include the aria ‘Nessun maggior dolore’ from Giacomo Rossini’s Otello and Ludwig von Beethoven’s concert aria ‘Ah, Perfido’ in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876); Beethoven’s ‘Adelaide’ in Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark (1915); and Henry’s Purcell’s ‘Dido’s Lament’ in Sebastian Barry’s The Temporary Gentleman (2014). The song pact has a parallel in novelistic citations of instrumental music, very often of music by Beethoven.