By Katarina Dyck
In Bernard MacLaverty’s 1997 book, Grace Notes, Catherine’s hearing governs her understanding of the world. It outranks, for her, the two senses humans first develop: touch and sight. In Frances Devlin-Glass’ article, “‘Visceral music’: shifting perspectives on Northern Irish violence in the novels of Bernard MacLaverty,” he argues that Catherine’s precarious relationship with sound stems from her family and society’s tendency to alienate her as a child because they did not know how to properly show her affection (Glass 128). This emotional detachment from her parents manifests as a physical remoteness when Catherine severs contact with them and her creativity, which led to her postpartum depression. Harmonious sound, which was at first a therapeutic compensation for the abrasive noise Catherine experienced as a child, eventually becomes a chore to produce. Her composition, Vernicle, reclaims an original musical beauty spoiled for a young Catherine by her mother and her partner, Dave. The smaller musical instances preceding the concert are futile exhales. Peter Schwenger insists in his work, “Phenomenology of the Scream,” that breath alone is not enough, whereas a scream is a force which extends itself outside the body (Schwenger 394). Using Schwenger’s conception of the instrumental force behind a scream, I contend that the symphony is a manifestation of a screaming force occurring outside Catherine’s body. The orchestral performance of Vernicle is a counter to Catherine’s harmful musical and sound recollections. While her previous musical experiences resemble momentary exhales, the symphony expresses a profound, drawn-out scream capable of filling the void inside her. As an externalization of Catherine’s postpartum depression and the emotional struggles she must confront, the symphony issues the cathartic scream Catherine needs to let out in order to escape the cycle of abuse she has been trapped in for years, and to finally reconnect with both her daughter and music.
The first half of the novel anticipates the concert symphony through its illustrations of Catherine’s earlier, more impactful aural memories which damaged her relationship with sound and her motivation to compose music. The repetition of the word “fade” in Part One marks the moments in Catherine’s life that deepened the hollowness inside her. This inner void is first expressed in a reminiscence of Catherine’s first encounter with the piano. She was intimidated by the lower notes on the left side which were “dark, deep, thundery,” much like the drums of the Northern Ireland Orangemen she heard a few years later with her father (MacLaverty 23). The sonorous drums left her feeling “the vibrations in her body,” recalling her sensation of the ‘thundery’ notes of the piano’s lower register (8). Upon hitting the lower note on the piano, the “booming faded away and the noise of the birds outside came back” (23; emphasis added). Even as a child, the piano could suppress the troubling sounds that plagued Catherine. Years later, during the symphony, the instrument no longer mutes the painful noises, but it helps her transform them into more manageable ones with the hope that, eventually, the hurt attached to them will disappear altogether. The higher notes of the piano are described as “nicer, not so frightening” while the chirping birds are relegated to undesirable “noise.” (23). Typical noise, even natural, does not satisfy her the way musical sounds do. The fading of the notes after she plays them is said to “ma[ke] her feel lonely,” leaving a void, even when she presses them repeatedly (23). “Fading” elicits the sound of a breath slowly being released, like an exhale. In this vein, the frequency with which she hits the keys in her first encounter with the piano conjures imagery of a panting breath; short, quick exhales, like those she issues during childbirth in Part Two. Additionally, her repetition of the notes and the emptiness she feels when they end suggest Catherine’s awareness, however conscious, that music is the only force capable of fulfilling her. The exterior sound of music fills her inner void and becomes her guarded sanctuary where no outer “noise” can enter, that is until Anna, her child’s, arrival. Soon after the young Catherine experiments with the keys, her mother storms in, chastising her for risking her fingers getting caught in the piano lid (23). Her mother’s tone and heavy gait echo the ‘dark, deep, thundery’ sound of the piano and of the drums, again participating in the noise Catherine avoids.
Further on the subject of fading sound, Catherine’s recital for her former piano teacher, Miss Bingham, is described as “tentative” music, ultimately demonstrating how before Catherine composed the symphony, her struggle to repair her connection with music made it impossible to be satisfied by other attempts to play. The recital for Miss Bingham’s is said to have a “random, melancholy feel as if it had never been thought about before. Like a child seeking out a tune but never succeeding. […] It faded, died softly as if not to wake the girl asleep” (109; emphasis added). Though an adult in this section, Catherine was once the child ‘seeking out a tune’ by way of her attempts to use music to mitigate the hole inside her, formed out of a lack of motherly affection due to her mother’s inability to display pride or love for Catherine’s talent. In addition, Catherine alludes to Vermeer’s painting, Girl Asleep, to mirror her own catatonic state regarding her musical composition. The short pieces she plays for Miss Bingham, while certainly well done, are merely cursory exhales that pale in comparison to the final performance–and scream–of Vernicle. Catherine remains empty inside; she has yet to purge her mind of repressed emotions. The employment of “fade” and “died” in this circumstance also explain her hollowness in that they embody Catherine’s subconsciously self-inflicted creative blocks. She is the girl asleep. Only when she allows herself to hear music again will she wake up and escape the repressive chains of ‘tentative’ music to achieve her creative ambitions.
Moreover, in both parts of the novel various sounds, once innocent and mundane, take on corrupted meanings for Catherine. As Saeed Hydaralli states in his chapter, “What is noise? An inquiry into its formal properties,” loud sounds, or noise, have “always been a source of disquiet and worry” (219). This is true for Catherine, as the undesirable sounds recall anxiety from her previous life in Belfast, transmuting into noise in her adulthood. Take, for example, how any time Catherine would misbehave as a child, her mother would threaten to hit her with the reins of a harness designed to prevent babies from falling as they learned to walk (MacLaverty 50). If the warning, “I’ll take the reins to you” was not enough to deter Catherine, her mother would open the cupboard so her daughter could hear the harness’ bells “clas[h] and jingl[e]” (50). This pure, pleasing sound emanating from an object meant to protect infants, became “one which inspired fear” (50-51). In other words, the bells became a triggering noise for Catherine. One of the last things she tells her mother before boarding the plane back to Glasgow is that she will “write a piece of music for [her] someday” (119). This promise illustrates Catherine’s determination to channel the distress of her mother’s abusive tones and sounds into a musical composition. The cathartic outcome, Vernicle, displays her vow to produce music as a counter to the noise of her childhood.
Following Anna’s birth, Catherine’s postpartum depression is depicted as a partial result of her hypersensitivity to sound. Catherine’s pre-existing anxiety and strained mother-daughter relationship, in tandem with her “baby blues,” distort natural sounds, rendering them intense, insufferable noises. For instance, she becomes attuned to her heart beating, though rather than coming from inside her chest, Catherine hears and feels it in her ear, furthering the point that her mind prioritizes hearing above the other senses (199). In this same section, there is another mention of birds “cheep[ing]” outside her window (199). Both details have negative connotations for Catherine in that one “tell[s] her she [is] alive whether she like[s] it or not” and the other is an unremitting noise she associates with the fade at the end of a musical note (199). These hypersensitivities reconceive the connection between Catherine’s emotional state and the aural cacophony that surrounds her, demonstrating the extent to which the noises from her childhood continue to harass her in her adulthood.
Additionally, Anna’s crying becomes an exceedingly overwhelming noise for Catherine. The baby is described as a “car alarm that sh[its] and pisse[s]” and when she tries to play classical music to muffle the cries, she grows too worried something has happened to her baby (210). As a result of this, Catherine can never “listen with any attention to the music” and she “hates [Anna]” because of this (211). The crying also heightens Catherine’s unease around Dave, which is validated by his later abusiveness towards her. She tells Anna “shhh or [she]’ll wake him,” demonstrating the amount of power he wields over Catherine (203). The fear Dave instills in Catherine weakens her ability to listen to, compose, or truly hear music. This agitation goes one step further to include Catherine’s avoidance of making even the faintest of sounds, like the “chink [of a] spoon against the side [of a mug]” (203). Instigated by her past and intensified by her postpartum depression, Catherine converts these seemingly mundane sounds into noise. Having said this, Vernicle is her opportunity to unleash a symbolic, cleansing scream to exact retribution on her mother and alcoholic partner, Dave, and open herself up to music once again. This ‘scream,’ meant to relieve, also redefines Anna’s screams as natural sounds rather than hostile ones.
The devising of the symphony is itself cathartic by signalling the moment Catherine begins to hear melodies again. To do so, she needed to confront her past at home and her relationship with her mother to connect the strands of her trauma and begin to heal. Her father’s funeral was the catalyst in that it forced Catherine to return home, whether she was ready to or not, and to unpack the baggage with her mother she had tried to leave behind. In the cab on her way back to Anna and her friend, Liz, it is in the silence that she hears the opening of a potential symphony which she had heard previously in a plane. This time, however, it is “more agitato. Driving forward. In the fast lane. The first section of something. Leading the way. A symphony. Called Symphony” (132). She then changes the name to Credo (132), pointing to the musical piece’s purpose as being a guiding figure for Catherine. Having felt this remedial inspiration, she suddenly “feels good about herself. Someday she will be better. Wellness was inside her, waiting, on the edge of its seat” (133). The sound that was buried low beneath her inner void is starting to surge, ready to supersede the emptiness within her after the symphony expels her negative emotions.
The performance of Vernicle parallels sounds and noise from Catherine’s past, but she writes them into the piece as a means of controlling and surmounting them. The opening is a “wisp of music, barely there,” recalling the time spent with Anna at the beach but also the fading sound of the piano keys she had discerned years ago (269). Rather than leaving the composition’s resolution in this dismal, lonely state, Catherine rearranges the sound to reflect the beginning of something that will leave her full. Following the wisp are the cellos and bases which cause the music to “darke[n] and gro[w], ris[e] and fal[l],” indicating the crescendo and decrescendo of Catherine’s audial experiences (270). The climax likely denotes Anna’s birth since it provides Catherine with temporary physical relief, but she eventually feels as vacant as she did before the pregnancy. In Vernicle, this restored emptiness comes in the form of an interruption by the Lambeg drums, which enter with noise like “machine-gun fire. A short burst – enough to kill and maim. Silence. It’s the kind of silence induced by a slap in the face or the roarings of a drunk” (271). In other words, it is a violent instant followed by a stunned, pregnant silence. The drunken slaps and shouts are references to both Dave and Catherine’s father. These drums remind her of the distress she felt in those instances when both men would become violent when drunk and for a moment she is “afraid the music will induce it again for real” (272). It is crucial that she face her trauma in order to move on, and she is doing so the best way she can: by revisiting noise and listening to it as music.
Catherine’s anxiety is emblemized further with the entrance of the drums. At their cacophonous arrival, the rest of the instruments become “angry and shrill […]. The tormented orchestra tries to keep its head above the din of these strangers” (272). Catherine is the tormented orchestra; she is the woodwinds, the strings, the brass. According to Philip Friedheim in his text, “Wagner and the Aesthetics of the Scream,” Kundry, the female high dramatic soprano in Wagner’s opera Parsifal, once lets out a “loud wail of misery, then sinks gradually into low accents of fear” (Friedheim 66). High dramatic sopranos possess the strength to overpower the orchestra, which is what occurs in the second movement of Vernicle when the Lambegs return and are “stripped of their bigotry and have become pure sound” (MacLaverty 276). Catherine scales down the noise and reinstates it as the innocent sounds which her family, Dave, and postpartum depression had ruined for her. She, via the symphony uproar, is letting out a high soprano scream of her own.
As the tempo increases, so does Catherine’s hope. She feels that “things are possible. Work can be done – good work at that. Love is not lost or wasted” (274-75). Schwenger’s clarification that the scream is a “projection of the self out of the body” continues, as he adds that “this outpouring is both us and an elsewhere, an outside of us, the only way that we can find an outside that takes us out of our too solid flesh” (394). If this projection were to succeed, Catherine would fade away alongside her scream, but Schwenger says this is impossible, for “the flesh unrelentingly persists” (394). Catherine’s music, particularly Vernicle, disembodies her and drives her into the realm of the acoustic. Her scream is an external, discorporate sound that cannot reenter the body once it has left. After the scream, the final segment of the piece depicts the drums and the rest of the instruments playing in harmony to produce “sheer fucking unadulterated joy” (MacLavery 276).
Catherine feels both musically and emotionally rejuvenated following her cathartic scream and when she rises, supposedly to accept the applause, she is also rising to walk out on her mother’s harmful words and beliefs, on Dave, as well as on her dark postnatal thoughts. While the short musical exhales of her past provided relief in the moment, they were not enough to save Catherine. The scream encourages her to finally break the cycle of loving alcoholics and projecting her fears and anger onto her child. It also helps her realize her true priorities: Anna and music. Once Catherine becomes cognizant of this, composition comes to her as easily as breathing.
Works Cited
Devlin-Glass, Frances. “‘Visceral Music’: Shifting Perspectives on Northern Irish Violence in the Novels of Bernard MacLaverty.” Deakin Research Online, Deakin University, 16 June 2024, hdl.handle.net/10536/DRO/DU:30001027.
Friedheim, Philip. “Wagner and the Aesthetics of the Scream.” 19th-Century Music, vol. 7, no. 1, 1983, pp. 63–70. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/746547. Accessed 17 Dec. 2024.
Ganter, C. J. “Bernard MacLaverty, Grace Notes”. International Fiction Review, vol. 24, no. 1 and 2, June 1997, https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/IFR/article/view/14315.
Hydaralli, Saeed. “What Is Noise? An Inquiry into Its Formal Properties.” Reverberations: The Philosophy, Aesthetics and Politics of Noise, edited by Michael N Goddard et al., Bloomsbury Publishing Inc., New York, NY, 2012, pp. 219–232.
MacLaverty, Bernard. Grace Notes. London, UK, Vintage, 1998.
Schwenger, Peter. “Phenomenology of the Scream.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 40, no. 2, 2014, pp. 382–95. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1086/674119. Accessed 17 Dec. 2024.