Adorno mapped literary avant-garde stages onto the stages of musical technique.

Evidence

Samuel Beckett’s Endgame and Hans G. Helms’s FA: M’AHNIESGWOW stimulated Adorno into recognizing a development in literature that went beyond Proust, Kafka and Joyce. In Adorno’s opinion, Beckett’s Endgame was to Kafka’s novels, and Helms’s FA: M’AHNIESGWOW was to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, what serial music was to Schoenberg, free atonality and twelve-tone technique. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 552

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels Adorno’s serial-music narrative (Schoenberg to total organization) transposed onto prose (Kafka to Beckett, Joyce to Helms). — connects to: Adorno’s aesthetic position shifted repeatedly across four distinct phases of modern music. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 680; Adorno read Schoenberg’s atonality as the rational endpoint of Wagner’s musical nominalism — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1267
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Adorno’s aesthetic position shifted repeatedly across four distinct phases of modern music. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 680; Adorno read Schoenberg’s atonality as the rational endpoint of Wagner’s musical nominalism — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1267