"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

Both texts deploy the notion of an inherent Irish musicality, with narrative and character developed against the background of a society in which music performs important functions. But Joyce manages to expose the limitations of received narrative forms in a culture possessed of a fractured, "nightmarish" history. Related to this point, "The Dead" dramatizes the tension between what Terence Brown describes as "the music with which an Irish Catholic middle class at the turn of the century could feel comfortable and a music which speaks for a more vital, dangerous territory of the national consciousness." (19) That is to say, different kinds of music (on the one hand, the well-made songs associated with Thomas Moore and the polite society represented by the Morkan sisters and their guests, and on the other, the ballad tradition associated with Michael Furey) represent different versions of Irish identity--the first an expression of a modernizing class "who wished to escape the nightmare of history and to settle for a comfortable, eventually constitutional, nationalism"; the second an intimation of older forms of national desire based upon an "elemental passion," one that threatens and eventually fractures "the elegant complacency of an Edwardian Dublin social occasion." (20) If "The Dead" is about music and its ability to dramatize the tension between social memory and individual experience in an Irish historical context, "Sirens" stands as the most famous experiment in any tradition (with the possible exception of Jazz) in blending musical and literary form. Narrative temporarily surrenders to noise in that chapter, with meaning organized in existentially elevated musical, rather than historically damaged linguistic, terms.

Joyce's work functions as the bridge between the two broad areas of interest discussed thus far, then: music and fiction, and music and Irish identity. On the one hand, Joyce invokes a specifically musical system of signification to explore the crisis of early-twentieth-century novelistic discourse and the deeper historical crisis of the western subject which the novel had traditionally served. This is Joyce the (proto-post-) modernist. Whereas the short story attempts to recuperate the "unpresentable" (in this case, "the dead") through a discourse of nostalgic representation, the chapter invokes the good musical form of the fuga per canonem precisely to point up the tendentiousness of all forms of representation, in Lyotard's terms, "to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable." (21) At the same time, Joyce's engagement with music is overdetermined by his location within a national cultural tradition in which music performs specific ideological functions. This is Joyce the (proto-) postcolonialist. In this reading, the short story reveals the implication of different musical discourses within different decolonizing narratives, while the chapter articulates a self-consciousness with regard to the role of language in the formation of subaltern identities.