Abstract:
This thesis considers the role that musical atonality plays in Keri Hulme's the bone
people, and explores the ways in which an atonal reading can suggest interpretations for
the novel 's cultural location. From a survey of the interdisciplinary study of music-inliterature
as a method, three criteria for analysing music in the bone people are
identified - narratology, symbology and sound-interpretation. The thesis traces the
sometimes-intersecting histories of both Maori and Pakeha music. It considers how
instances of atonality in the bone people relocate Maori singing, in function and to
some extent in form, to the page. A survey of critical readings shows how the bone
people has often been assigned intentions of biculturalism. This thesis challenges that
notion and asserts that Hulme transforms cultural ingredients of both Maori and Pakeha
in an atonal space, and re-imagines them in a Maori framework.
