New Hibernia Review

New Hibernia Review 6.2 (2002) 53-64

Beckett, Late Modernism, and Bernard MacLaverty's Grace Notes

Stephen Watt

My fascination with Bernard MacLaverty's writing, particularly with his novels Lamb (1980) and Cal (1983), began almost twenty years ago. After teaching his fiction in several courses, I endeavored some years ago to explain its representation of human subjectivity and weigh the possibilities MacLaverty affords his characters for resistance to—dare I say, happiness in spite of?—the despair wrought by violence in Northern Ireland. One of my conclusions was that, although the fates of MacLaverty's protagonists "appear to result from choices they themselves make," he "always makes such a determination exceedingly difficult, because his characters' 'freedom of choice' is typically exercised within a narrowly circumscribed ambit of possibility." ¹ I was also intrigued by the narrative function of the derelict cottage in Cal, a site of momentary respite from the "Troubles," where Cal and Marcella Morton share a measure of bliss: "As Marcella's feeling for Cal evolves into sexual passion, the cottage itself is transformed, albeit momentarily and precariously, into an alternative space for both of them." ² A decade after writing these sentences, both suppositions about subjectivity and resistance in Bernard MacLaverty's fiction strike me not so much as indefensible, but as imprecise and incomplete. The simple passage of time and my own changing critical commitments are hardly the only things responsible for my querulousness. MacLaverty's more recent fiction, his now enlarged oeuvre, in some ways demands such a reassessment. ³

Now, there is more and different MacLaverty to consider, his volume of short stories Walking the Dog (1994) and his novel Grace Notes (1997), most obviously. Both works reveal MacLaverty's increasingly ironic understanding of subjectivity—one might push the matter a little further and say Northern Irish [End Page 53] subjectivity—and, considered together, comprise a primer by which we might reread his earlier work. I do not intend to revisit Cal or Lamb here, however, although I will suggest along the way interpretive possibilities for doing so. Instead, I want to focus on the central characters of several stories in Walking the Dog, on Catherine McKenna, MacLaverty's depressed composer in Grace Notes, and on Samuel Beckett, who makes cameo appearances in Walking the Dog and whose presence in Grace Notes, although never explicit, may lead us to a fuller sense of the relationship between ironic Beckettian laughter and subjectivity in MacLaverty's fiction. In the process, the concept "late modernism" will rear its helpful yet inherently vexed head, as the aesthetic context and sensibility that this term connotes has often been employed to illuminate Beckett's writing. It is, in my view, similarly helpful in considering MacLaverty's recent work.

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Irony, riant sensibility, depression—Samuel Beckett. A subjectivity formed in a crucible of violence, chance, and at times numbing sense of loss; an ill-perceiving, ill-speaking subject wandering in the dead whiteness of Ill Seen Ill Said (1981) or the dim void of Worstward Ho (1983). Or Derry. Or Belfast. A father, like Catherine McKenna's, rendered deaf one day by a bullet richocheting off a wall near his right ear, the otic brother of Beckett's Pozzo, fully sentient one day and diminished the next. Nonetheless, these victims of capricious chance persist, at times with an admirably wry sense of humor: "On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on," Worstward Ho begins. "Dim light source unknown. Know minimum. Know nothing no. Too much to hope. At most mere minimum. Meremost minimum." ⁴ And then there is the aesthetic that such a lived reality seems to cultivate, part of which Catherine, a student of musical composition in Grace Notes, so much admires in her Russian mentor, Anatoli Ivanovich Melnichuck: "Melnichuck's music had a spareness and an austerity which she loved-like Janácek, with his fragments of melody. . . . [T]here was also something very spiritual about everything he wrote." ⁵ Spareness, austerity, spirituality—all of these topics are pertinent to my understanding of Grace Notes, MacLaverty's first...