A note on symphonic form in fiction

While listening to Beethoven's seventh symphony on NPR, I wondered about the feasibility of a symphonic formal paradigm in novelistic fiction. I imagined a four-part form, each part both a complete artwork in itself and integrated thematically into a whole greater than the individual parts... But before I became too excited by the possibility, I realized that it was not a terribly original idea. Broch did it in The Death of Virgil; Burgess explicitly did it in Napoleon Symphony; Durrell's Alexandria Quartet is symphonically structured; as are, it suddenly occurred to me, W. G. Sebald's four-part inventions, Vertigo and The Emigrants. Strange that I hadn't previously noticed the symphonic formal analogy in Sebald, which may well be a direct influence from Broch's Virgil. I presume a Central European critic, from a culture more attuned to symphonic music, would have noticed it immediately... And from this thought arose the idea that the young Irish tenor James Joyce, writing in obscurity in Trieste, deliberately arranged his story collection Dubliners in the form of a symphonic novel. Dubliners is a grand, Beethovenesque Irish symphony in four movements, each movement focused upon a different stage of an (even more ghostly) underlying biographical narrative line. The first three stories--"The Sisters," "An Encounter," "Araby"--comprise a movement we might title Youth. The next four--"Eveline," "After the Race," "Two Gallants," "The Boarding House"--fall together into an Early Adulthood movement. A third movement that we might call Maturity consists of "A Little Cloud," "Counterparts," "Clay," and "A Painful Case." Finally, "Ivy Day in the Committee Room," "A Mother," "Grace," and "The Dead" constitute a Public Life movement that culminates in the grand finale of that final novella-length story--Joyce's self-consciously Romantic (and ironic) answer to the "Ode to Joy" in Beethoven's Ninth. Also, the style and pacing of individual stories might be identified as largo or grave ("Eveline"), molto allegro ("After the Race"), and so forth. In Dubliners Joyce seems to be using the 19th-century symphony to fill the role that Homer's Odyssey will play in Ulysses and Vico's New Science in Finnegans Wake. (Like most of my ideas about Joyce, this is probably something Hugh Kenner said many decades ago.... Well, if so, it bears repeating.)