Napoleon Symphony by Anthony Burgess

First published: 1974

Type of work: Historical novel

Time of work: The first quarter of the nineteenth century

Locale: Eastern Europe, Egypt, Elba, France, Italy, St. Helena, and the Mediterranean region

Principal Characters:

• Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of France
• Josephine, Napoleon’s wife
• Bellitote Foures, one of Napoleon’s mistresses
• Alexander, boy Czar of Russia
• Nameless Soldiers, who recount the grotesque realities of battle

The Novel

Napoleon Symphony is an intricate book that deals with the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte, beginning with his marriage to Josephine and ending with his final days in exile on St. Helena. Much of what Anthony Burgess presents in the interim is witty, sardonic, intellectually demanding horseplay. The novel is structurally modeled after Ludwig van Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the Eroica, which Beethoven originally wrote to honor Napoleon but which finally, when he became outraged at Napoleon for declaring himself emperor, he dedicated instead to Prometheus.

The Eroica is written in four movements with an overture and a coda. Burgess wrote his novel within this symphonic structure, adhering closely to the demands that such a structure placed upon him. His overture presents Napoleon waiting for Josephine on their wedding day and ends with the word “Begin,” which leads into the first part of the book’s four major sections, parallel to the first movement of the Beethoven symphony, marked allegro con brio, a passage whose tempo is light and rapid.

The first part of the book begins with Napoleon’s campaign in Italy, carries through to his campaign in Egypt, and chronicles his election as First Consul General of France. After his election, Napoleon gathers together for a dinner such members of the Bonaparte family “as were willing to come.” Josephine manages to avoid attending the dinner, offering the excuse that she has a headache, and in this quite uproarious section, Napoleon shows that although he may be First Consul General of France, he is not up to the task of controlling the irrepressible Bonapartes.

The second movement of Eroica is essentially a funeral march written in a minor key. Part 2 of Napoleon Symphony begins with a nonsense poem with a heavy beat. The poem recurs throughout the rest of the book not only as a leitmotif but also as a strong thematic element. This section of the book is in the same sort of minor key in which the corresponding movement of the symphony is written, detailing as it does the bloody defeats that Napoleon suffered in battle against the eastern Europeans.

In this, the longest section of the book, the same Napoleon who took concubines in Egypt now becomes sexually aroused by the young Czar Alexander of Russia, who has come to discuss the reshaping of Europe: “You, if I may say this without offense, the Bonaparte of the East and I the Alexander of the West.” As the meeting continues, Napoleon becomes physically more aggressive with Alexander, at the same time discussing with him his conclusion that men make better friends than women.

Beethoven startled people in his day by using a scherzo in his third movement to replace the more conventional minuet of his day. The scherzo, lighthearted and lively, is meant to amuse, and Burgess does so with a spoof, a dance, a Prometheus ballet. A large portion of the third part of Napoleon Symphony is devoted to catalogs of the names of royalty used to ironic effect, given the fact that Napoleon is to meet his Waterloo in this section.

The fourth part of Eroica has many variations on a theme, and part 4 of Napoleon Symphony follows suit by working through a series of variations on interfecimus napoleonem regem imperatorem, the first four letters of which are the letters that were on the Cross at the time of Christ’s crucifixion. In part 4, Napoleon undergoes his suffering—his own crucifixion, as it were. Burgess presents a man in exile, a man defeated and expelled from his own country, a man whose greed for power has led to his inevitable downfall. Finally the coda with which the Beethoven symphony ends is paralleled in Napoleon Symphony by the five-and-a-half-page epistle to the reader which concludes the novel, written in heroic couplets that are reminiscent of the poetry of Alexander Pope.

The Characters

Napoleon Symphony might, in some respects, be said to have only one character. Certainly Napoleon, as both protagonist and narrator, is the sort of strong central character whose shadow falls on every other character in the novel. Readers meet all the characters through Napoleon’s narration, and Burgess has been skillful in maintaining this focused point of view except where he needs to have someone tell about the retreat of Napoleon’s forces from eastern Europe. For this purpose, he introduces into the story an unnamed soldier from the Corps of Engineers who recounts the horrors the men experienced in building bridges over the freezing waters of the Berezina River, only to see them collapse before their eyes, but not before many soldiers have died.

Occasionally throughout the novel, Burgess uses the common soldier to provide necessary information and to represent the hardships of the torturous campaigns that the French lost. Through the common soldier, Burgess exposes his readers to the cold and the wet, to the mud and the squalor, to injury and death on the battlefield. Burgess’ Napoleon in the role of narrator would have no way of conveying to readers this necessary information, given his position as commander.

Burgess’ Napoleon is a highly complex character, a man whose ambition comes before all else. Like most madly ambitious leaders, Napoleon crushes people before him in order to get ahead. He orders four thousand prisoners killed with bayonets, lamenting anachronistically that gas chambers are not yet available to do the job more efficiently. He arouses passion in people, which great leaders must do. The passion he arouses, however, is sometimes so negative that it places him in danger, as when the German Duc D’Enghien attempts to assassinate him.

Josephine is a cardboard character in the book, as are the assorted military men, politicians, nobility, mistresses of Napoleon, and other supernumeraries who are necessary to the telling of the story. The novel is not weakened by Burgess’ failure to develop his other characters; rather, the book’s strength lies in the fact that Burgess realizes that he is writing about such a monumental figure that everyone else in the narrative must be enormously overshadowed by him. Casting Napoleon as narrator assures both the centrality of his position within the novel and his being presented in human terms, indeed to the point that Napoleon’s deepest intentions and inmost thoughts are available to Burgess’ readers.

Critical Context

At the time Burgess wrote Napoleon Symphony, he was deeply steeped in the work of James Joyce. He had presented detailed assessments and explications of Joyce in Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader (1965; published in the United States as Re: Joyce, 1965), in The Novel Now (1967, 1971), and in Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce (1972). In 1973, he also produced the radio drama Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake. Napoleon Symphony is so filled with Joycean invention and has so many direct parallels to Joyce’s work that the novel, like Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939), bears reading and rereading and rereading. The book is rich with literary allusion, and besides the calculated parallels with Joyce and with Beethoven, it often presents sustained parodies of Henry James and of other notable writers.

The book makes apparent Burgess’ great interest in and admiration for Napoleon. It presents both the public and private Napoleon and, because Burgess uses Napoleon as the narrator through whose eyes the story is seen, readers not only see his actions but also are continually privy to his thoughts, which results in their being presented with a sympathetic view of an imperious emperor who had his distinctly human side.

Burgess, as a writer, is exceptionally well-read and well-informed about literature. He also has a deep understanding of music and language, a combination which makes Napoleon Symphony a complex intellectual game as well as a satisfying work of fiction. This book will delight relatively unsophisticated readers, who can read and enjoy it at a somewhat literal level, but it also will entice the most sophisticated readers and will richly reward those who enjoy rereading and digging for allusions. In this book, Burgess is more accessible than Joyce often is, and for readers who are wary about approaching Joyce’s more demanding novels, Napoleon Symphony will serve as a good introduction to the kind of writing that Joyce produced.

Bibliography

Aggeler, Geoffrey, ed. Anthony Burgess: The Artist as Novelist, 1979.

Aggeler, Geoffrey, ed. Critical Essays on Anthony Burgess, 1986.

Boytinck, Paul W. Anthony Burgess: An Annotated Bibliography and References, 1985.

Boytnick, Paul W. Anthony Burgess: A Bibliography, Works by and About Him, 1977.

Brewer, Jeutonne. Anthony Burgess: A Bibliography, 1980.

Coale, Samuel. Anthony Burgess, 1981.

Matthews, Richard. Clockwork Universe of Anthony Burgess, 1978.