"The same sound but with a different meaning": music, repetition, and identity in Bernard Mac Laverty's Grace Notes

INTRODUCTION

THE last decade of the twentieth century witnessed a proliferation of novels dealing with the subject of music. I shall leave it to some enthusiastic young scholar to undertake a full inventory, but even a cursory browse of the bookshelves and catalogues is enough to confirm the trend. The scene was set in 1992 by Toni Morrison with Jazz, a difficult novel that attempted to reproduce the elaborate systems of early-twentieth-century African-American music in literary form. More recently, high-profile examples have been provided by Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Vikram Seth's An Equal Music, and Jackie Kay's Trumpet. (1) As these texts demonstrate, moreover, "music" was very liberally understood by their authors, encompassing the traditions of classical, jazz, and rock/pop. Although neither Rushdie's nor Seth's novels was particularly well received (critical orthodoxy maintaining that the authors will never repeat the achievement of Midnight's Children and A Suitable Boy, respectively), together with Kay's striking debut all three reveal a widespread tendency toward the invocation of musical matter through the medium of extended prose fiction.

Another such novel is Bernard Mac Laverty's Grace Notes, a work not only about music on a number of related levels, but one that also attempts to invoke musical effects and to incorporate musical form into its own structure. (2) In this, it makes intertextual reference to a long (though infrequently considered) tradition of what in this essay I shall refer to as "the musical novel." At the same time, as a story about contemporary Northern Ireland, it engages with a (critically orthodox) tradition of colonial and postcolonial fiction foregrounding questions of representation, resistance, identity, and voice. These traditions--the well-known one concerning the novelistic representation of (sub-)national identity, and the lesser remarked one concerning the novelistic representation of music--have productively cross-fertilized at a number of points in Irish cultural history. In this article, I describe the type and provenance of those moments of productive cross-fertilization before considering how Grace Notes adopts and/or modifies a range of issues attending upon the musical novel.

MUSIC AND FICTION

What could account for the rise of the "musical novel" during recent times? One might speculate that the contemporary novelist's concern with music represents a response to the fin de siecle growth of interdisciplinarity in the critical languages that service the creative arts. Cultural Studies offers one such obvious language, less concerned with traditional disciplines (whether creative or critical), it seems, than with the organization and dissemination of power across a range of discursive practices and institutional sites. Cultural Studies--indeed, modern criticism in general--is by and large theory-driven rather than text-driven; it tends to read the text in terms of a range of a priori precepts rather than granting it the courtesy of an immanent response. The provenance and effect of such a practice is the subject of ongoing debate; but, in the meantime, the currently dominant critical mood might be described as holistic rather than discrete, and this may have created, or at least contributed to, a general intellectual/academic zeitgeist in which the musical novel can flourish.

Rather than representing some entirely new departure, however, the admixture of artistic concerns in the musical novel in fact partakes of a well-established tradition. The novel, it turns out, has always been fascinated with music, and at some points in its history this fascination has become an obsession. (3) Perhaps this development should not come as too much of a surprise: the modern form of the novel and the tradition of classical art music developed alongside each other from the early eighteenth century, although for much of their shared history, the latter has represented a far more respectable (understood in the bourgeois terms that set the standards for artistic decorum) than the former. The novel has in fact suffered an inferiority complex with regard to what is widely seen as its more developed, better patronized, and frankly more popular sister art form. With its invocation of ritual elements such as rhythm, rhyme, and repetition, poetry may have been a reminder of language's link to music; fiction, however, remained primarily story-oriented, mortgaged to the remorseless logic of the bourgeois realist narrative and its attendant discourses: character, plot, plausibility.

Jealous of their poetic and musical rivals, novelists made a virtue of the verbal medium within which they worked, with the consequence that the novel developed into a mass form during the nineteenth century. Novelists clinging to an image of themselves as artists rather than "mere" story-tellers, however, continued to envy what they perceived to be the more favorable medium of their musical counterparts. Such envy helps to account for the ubiquity of musical references in the writings of a host of modern(ist) novelists, most notably Forster, Joyce, Proust, Woolf, Beckett, Hesse, and Mann. The attraction of music for these writers, as Alex Aronson suggests in his extended study of the subject, was that it was both transcendent and historical at the same time. Specifically, music alerted the writer to "the existence of a non-verbal reality more expressive than speech and conforming to the dictates of inner time beyond anything that the novelist's language could communicate." (4) Simultaneously, it enabled the writers to dramatize much more fully than language ever could the tension (supposedly essential but actually consequent on the evolving bourgeois imagination) between individual expression and social compulsion. I shall return to this duality presently but, meanwhile, the significant point to note is that music became much more than an occasion for the development of narrative or the explication of character; in many cases it replaced verbal language-narrative as the principal expressive medium. By the period of the high modernist avant-garde, in other words, the time seemed ripe for some kind of rapprochement between fiction and music.