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

Eire-Ireland:Journal of Irish Studies, Fall-Winter, 2002 by Gerry Smyth

Grace Notes thus functions as a plea for political tolerance based on the notion of a form of repetition that does not reproduce an "original." Repetition is thematized in the text as part of the process--simultaneously artistic and sociopolitical--whereby Catherine refuses to be used by the past (her father, sectarian tradition) but instead finds the strength and courage to use it as part of her own ongoing project of creative self-identity. By incorporating the "Protestant" drums into her work, she metaphorically kills her father; at the same time, however, she salvages him as a positive, creative influence on her own life, the independent life she must lead if she is not to remain the sum of the influences to which she has been exposed.

The themes of repetition and tension between generations obviously recall modernism in general, and Joyce in particular. But the thematization of repetition in this novel is also linked with Joyce's attempt to install musical discourse at a formal level within "Sirens." The text works continually to point to the differences that occur when themes, emotions, and situations are repeated in different contexts, or when they are remembered from alternative perspectives--what the narrator refers to as "the ability unique to music to say one or more things at once" (275), or (focalized by Catherine) the ability both to appreciate and to articulate "the same sound but with a different meaning" (275). This capacity is signaled throughout the text by a series of linguistic puns and homophones: "linseed oil" and "Lynn C. Doyle" (24), "Bartok" and "bar talk" (25), "pressing" (ironing) and "pressing" (urgent) (49), "stand" (arise) and "stand" (tolerate) (108), and so on.

As in Joyce, this theme is also borne out at a formal level. Thus, the bells Catherine hears early in the text (50) remind her of the bells on a strap used for childhood chastisement. The taped bells which sound as her father's remains are being removed to church (56) excite in her emotions of loss and guilt, while also making intertextual reference to all the other Catholic funerals that have taken place in this sectarian society. However, these generally negative connotations are mitigated by the bells she hears (123-24) when visiting the composer Melnichuck in Kiev, bells that create in Catherine an infectious "excitement and joy," and whose description--"Tin-tinn-ab-you-la-ish-on"--recall the seven syllables that will in time respark her own creativity. Because of the form of the text, no straight-forwardly linear relationship exists between these moments. The plot--first childhood, then Kiev, then funeral--is belied by the narrative--first childhood, then funeral, then Kiev. We may assume that Catherine's negative response to the taped bells at her father's funeral (56) relates to her negative experience of bells in childhood (50), but we will eventually learn that it is also a response to the positive experience of bells in Kiev (123-24). We may also assume that the "excitement and joy" Catherine felt on hearing the bells of Kiev were a response to the negative connotations carried from childhood. All these moments are then positively reclaimed and formalized in the final appearance of the bells (274) as part of the second movement of Vernicle, the orchestral composition that closes the novel.