SOURCE: "Fullness of Dissonance: Music and the Reader's Experience of Modern Fiction," in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 25, No. 2, Summer, 1979, pp. 209-22.

In the following essay, Melnick explores the ethos of dissonance in modern fiction, by which he means the capacity of the modern novel to evoke the reader's creative response to the disordered vision of reality it presents.

Dissonance, as a critical term, is conventionally used to characterize a particular tone or "musical" style in fiction; yet the bearing of the idea of dissonance on modern fiction is profounder and more far-reaching than that use supposes. Dissonance—with its revelation of disorder—can be understood as a means by which modern fiction offers the reader the opportunity actively to engage a vision of disintegrating experience. Joyce's Ulysses, in this conception, invites and requires the reader's active, creative response, and the novel's dissonance is its capacity so to involve...