Bernard MacLaverty: New Critical Readings 9781441137869, 9781472593924, 9781441132963

Citation preview

Bernard MacLaverty

Also available from Bloomsbury Irish Writing London: Volume 1: Revival to the Second World War, Tom Herron Irish Writing London: Volume 2: Post-War to the Present, Tom Herron Irish Literature in the Celtic Tiger Years 1990 to 2008: Gender, Bodies, Memory, Susan Cahill The Life and Work of Thomas MacGreevy: A Critical Reappraisal, Susan Schreibman Maggie Gee: Writing the Condition-of-England Novel, Mine Özyurt Kiliç

Bernard MacLaverty New Critical Readings Edited by Richard Rankin Russell

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 Paperback edition first published 2016 © Richard Rankin Russell and contributors, 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-3786-9 PB: 978-1-4742-7551-4 ePub: 978-1-4411-4268-9 ePDF: 978-1-4411-3296-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bernard MacLaverty : new critical readings / Richard Rankin Russell, editor. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4411-3786-9 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-4411-3296-3 (epdf) -ISBN 978-1-4411-4268-9 (epub) 1. MacLaverty, Bernard--Criticism and interpretation. I. Russell, Richard Rankin, editor of compilation. PR6063.A2474Z56 2014 823’.914--dc23 2013048124 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN Printed and bound in Great Britain

To my sister Marjorie, with whom I shared many happy reading experiences in our childhood

Contents Acknowledgments Foreword  Glenn Patterson Contributors Introduction  Richard Rankin Russell   1 “Made-Up Truth[s]”: Themes, Tropes, and Narrative Technique in Bernard MacLaverty’s Early Short Stories  Michael Parker   2 Parabolic Plots in Bernard MacLaverty’s Lamb  Richard Rankin Russell   3 “Join us”: Musical Style and Identity in “My Dear Palestrina”  Gerry Smyth   4 “That Orange and Green Dilemma”: Violence and the Traumatized Subject in Bernard MacLaverty’s Screenplays of Cal (1983) and Lamb (1985)  Richard Mills   5 Character and Construction in MacLaverty’s “Troubles” Stories: The Great Profundo and Walking the Dog  Richard Haslam   6 MacLaverty’s Holocaust: Affect, Memory, and the “Troubles”  Stephen Watt   7 The Personal is Political: Bernard MacLaverty’s Grace Notes as a Peace Process Novel  Marilynn J. Richtarik   8 “Moving from One Element to Another”: Body and Soul in Bernard MacLaverty’s The Anatomy School  Michael Rawl   9 Bernard MacLaverty’s Fictional Geographies  Neal Alexander 10 Ireland and Elsewhere: The “Non-Irish” in Bernard MacLaverty’s Fiction  Laura Pelaschiar Afterword: Looking at Art in Bernard MacLaverty’s Fiction    David Holdeman Bibliography Index

viii ix xii 1

9 27 45

63 75 89 101 117 133 151

165 179 189

Acknowledgments I am very grateful to the many academics that responded to my e-mail queries in 2011 about teaching MacLaverty; their great enthusiasm for his work enabled me to make a successful case for putting together this collection. Hearty thanks to each of my contributors for such fine essays and for helping shape this collection. I am very grateful to Bernard MacLaverty for answering questions that I and other contributors have had. All citations from Bernard MacLaverty’s work fall within the fair-use doctrine for non-profit publishing. Please note that MacLaverty writes in UK English but these essays are in US English, hence the differences between his and our contributors’ spelling of certain words. Many thanks to my editor at Bloomsbury Academic, David Avital, for believing in and nurturing this project, and to the outside readers for helpful suggestions and comments.

Foreword Glenn Patterson

Dinky and the egg A friend was launching her third book. It had been a while since I had seen her—since she was doing the rounds with her first book, in fact. I asked her how everything was. “Good,” she said. “Enjoying these sorts of things more. Funny, isn’t it? The one thing nobody teaches you is how to do readings.” The conversation brought to mind the hard lesson of my own first reading (I only ever drink now after the event), brought to mind too my first reading tour, to Germany, winter 1993, in the company of Bernard MacLaverty. Bernard and I had never met before. I think it’s safe to say I knew a deal more about him than he knew about me. A decade and a bit earlier, just out of school, I had got a job in Crane’s bookshop in the center of Belfast. I call it a bookshop, but really Crane’s offered a sort of indoor relief for the various reps, and disreps, of the Belfast book world. Anne Tannahill, managing director of Blackstaff Press, was a frequent visitor. I don’t know that anyone in 1981 used the word “accessibility,” but I could not help being struck, as a 19-year-old with an interest in writing myself, by the fact that the MD of a publishing house popped into the staffroom two or three times a week for coffee, any more than I could by the fact that the authors she published popped in too the odd time. I can still see Roy Bradford, as he came in the door, give that quick flick of the eyes that all of us who publish give towards our own books (The Last Ditch, in his case), a glance that manages to calculate in an instant total sales since the last time you entered the shop and any gain in or—God forbid—loss of prominence in your book’s display. Roy Bradford had been a minister in the last Stormont before Direct Rule, although perhaps not today’s stereotypical idea of a Unionist minister in the period before Direct Rule. I was interested in him and his book but I was much more interested in another Blackstaff author with a novel, published the year before: Lamb. Bernard MacLaverty, I knew for a fact, had worked in the labs at Queen’s, across the road from Methody [Methodist College], where I had gone to school.

x Foreword

He had also lived for a time in Greystown estate (if two streets constitute an estate), further up Finaghy Road South from my own estate of Erinvale. All of this brought the thought of writing novels much closer to home than it had ever been before. It wasn’t so much a permission to write as a prompt. Besides, Bernard, in the photo accompanying the book, was wearing a fur-lined sheepskin jacket, which as any Undertones fan and their ma could have told you back then cost a packet. I filed that away too. Well, you could dream, couldn’t you? By the time we hooked up in Cologne, Lamb had been succeeded by three more books: the story collections A Time to Dance and The Great Profundo and a second novel, Cal, which Bernard himself had adapted, to great acclaim, for the screen, as indeed he had, subsequently, Lamb. Bernard could not have done more to put me at my ease but the prospect of having to read with him, all the same, was daunting. The tour was to take us to six cities so I had selected six passages, which I had been rehearsing and rehearsing in the weeks leading up to the trip: which I rehearsed again at every available opportunity in my hotel room. In the first city—Cologne—I read what I considered the best of the six passages and got, if I say so myself, a very good response; in the second city I read the next best passage and got a pretty good response; in the third city I read the third best bit … to lukewarm applause. In the fourth city, Bernard, who had read the same passage every night, took me aside and said, “Don’t worry about me, I’m not really listening: worry about the audience, they only get to hear it once.” The point of this story—apart from the priceless advice that it contains— is that I was listening to Bernard, very, very closely, and the experience was revelatory. He did not appear to read so much as let the words speak through him. And it occurred to me that something very like that happened with the novels and the stories themselves: he was at one and the same time among the most distinctive writers I had read—close to inimitable—and among the most self-effacing. Time and subsequent books have only served to bear out that impression. There is a passage in “A Belfast Memory,” from his collection Matters of Life and Death, that I find myself going back to time and again. The narrator (he shares certain biographical details with his author) is eight years old when word reaches him that the great Charlie Tully, of Glasgow Celtic fame, is paying a visit to the narrator’s Aunt Cissy who lives just across the street. So of course the boy and his father have to go and have a look. There Tully is, all right, sat on the sofa in the front room, his coat still on, a cup of tea in his hand, and there

Foreword

xi

too is Father Barney (brother to Cissy and the narrator’s father), in whose car it transpires Tully has arrived. At a certain point Cissy’s friend Corinna turns up as well, her sister Dinky in tow, looking to borrow an egg. Cissy introduces them to the footballer: “Charlie Tully,” said Cissy. “This is Corinna Coyle. And her sister Dinky.” Cissy pointed over heads in the direction of the front hall. Dinky went up on her toes and smiled. “A good looking man,” says Corinna. “Worth eight thousand pounds in transfer fees,” said Father Barney. “He’s above rubies, Cissy. Above rubies.” And away she went with her egg and her sister.1 These few sentences form, for me, a strand of DNA from which it would almost be possible to grow Bernard MacLaverty’s entire work, a combination of eye, ear, and elegant construction, and yet by the end of them he is scarcely there at all, upstaged by his own creations, Corinna and the entirely mute Dinky (Dinky!) whose only action in the story has been to go “up on her toes” and smile. Nobody teaches you to do that either. The best that the rest of us can hope is that by listening to—reading—writers like Bernard MacLaverty attentively enough, we might just absorb a little of it.

Note 1 MacLaverty, Matters of Life and Death, 95.

Works cited MacLaverty, Bernard. Matters of Life and Death. New York: Norton, 2006.

Contributors Neal Alexander is Lecturer in Twentieth Century Literature at Aberystwyth University, Wales. He is the author of Ciaran Carson: Space, Place, Writing (Liverpool, 2010) and co-editor (with David Cooper) of Poetry & Geography: Space and Place in Post-war Poetry (Liverpool, 2013), and (with James Moran) of Regional Modernisms (Liverpool, 2013). Richard Haslam is an Associate Professor of English at Saint Joseph’s University, Philadelphia, where he teaches courses in Irish literature and film. His previous essays on the fiction of Bernard MacLaverty have appeared in the journals Nua (2002), Irish University Review (2011), and The Journal of the Short Story in English (2011), and in the collections Contemporary Irish Fiction: Themes, Tropes, Theories (Palgrave, 2000) and Representing the Troubles: Texts and Images, 1979–2000 (Four Courts, 2004). David Holdeman is Professor of English and Department Chair at the University of North Texas. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of W. B. Yeats in Context (Cambridge, 2010), The Cambridge Introduction to W. B. Yeats (Cambridge, 2006), “In the Seven Woods” and “The Green Helmet and Other Poems”: Manuscript Materials by W. B. Yeats (Cornell, 2002), and Much Labouring: The Texts and Authors of Yeats’s First Modernist Books (Michigan, 1997). Richard Mills is a Senior Lecturer in Irish Literature and Screen Media at St Mary’s University College, London. His work has been published in New Voices in Irish Criticism (Four Courts, 2000), Popular Music on British Television (Ashgate, 2010), The Impact of the Beatles on Contemporary Culture (University of Lodz Press, 2010), and The Playful Air of Lightness in Irish Literature and Culture (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011). Upcoming publications include chapters in Monty Python in Its International Cultural Contexts (Scarecrow, 2013) and David Bowie: Critical Perspectives (Routledge, 2014), an edited collection, Mad Dogs and Englishness: English Identities and Popular Music, and a monograph entitled The Beatles and their Audience.

Contributors

xiii

Michael Parker is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at University of Central Lancashire. He is the author of Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet (Macmillan, 1993), Northern Irish Literature 1956–2006 (Palgrave, 2007), and co-editor of Contemporary Irish Fiction (Macmillan, 2000), Irish Literature since 1990 (Manchester University Press, 2009), and William Trevor: Revaluations (Manchester University Press, 2013). His next major publication will be Seamus Heaney: Legacies, Afterlives (Palgrave, 2015). Glenn Patterson lectures in creative writing at Queen’s University, Belfast. He is the author of eight novels and two works of non-fiction. His plays and stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4 and articles and essays have appeared in the Guardian, Observer, Sunday Times, Independent, Irish Times, and Dublin Review. Before coming to Queen’s as Writer-in-Residence (1994) he was Creative Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia and writerin-residence at University College, Cork. He has also presented numerous television documentaries and an arts review series for RTÉ. He co-wrote the film Good Vibrations (2013) with Colin Carberry about Belfast record store owner Terry Hooley, who helped develop that city’s punk rock scene. In 2008 he was awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship. He is a member of Aosdána. Laura Pelaschiar is Director of the Trieste Joyce School. She has worked as a translator, translating over 50 books for Mondadori, E. Elle Einaudi Ragazzi, and Fazi Editore. Her research focuses mainly on the work of James Joyce and the nexus between Joycean texts, the Gothic tradition and Shakespeare. She published Ulisse Gotico (Pacini Editore) in 2009. She has also published widely on the Northern Irish novel, including her monograph, Writing the North: The Contemporary Novel in Northern Ireland (Edizioni Parnaso, 1998). She teaches English literature and English language at the University of Trieste, Italy. Michael Rawl is a candidate for the Ph.D. in English at Baylor University in Texas. His primary area of research interest is twentieth-century British and Irish literature with a special emphasis on the works of W. B. Yeats, on whom he is writing his dissertation under the direction of Richard Rankin Russell. Marilynn Richtarik is the author of Acting between the Lines: The Field Day Theatre Company and Irish Cultural Politics 1980–1984 (Oxford, 1994) and Stewart Parker: A Life (Oxford, 2012), the latter of which won both the Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature from the American Conference for Irish

xiv Contributors

Studies and the SAMLA Studies Book Award from the South Atlantic Modern Language Association, as well as being short-listed for the Christopher EwartBiggs Memorial Prize as a work promoting peace and reconciliation in Ireland. She teaches at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Richard Rankin Russell was 2012–13 Centennial Professor and is Professor of English at Baylor University in Texas where he directs the Beall Poetry Festival. His publications include Martin McDonagh: a Casebook (Routledge, 2007), Bernard MacLaverty (Bucknell, 2009), Poetry and Peace: Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, and Northern Ireland (Notre Dame, 2010), Peter Fallon: Poet, Editor, Translator, and Publisher (Irish Academic Press, 2013), Modernity, Community, and Place in Brian Friel’s Drama (Syracuse, 2013), and Seamus Heaney’s Regions (Notre Dame, 2014). Originally from Dublin, Gerry Smyth is a musician, actor, and academic working in Liverpool, UK. He is the author of a number of works on Irish cultural history, including The Novel and the Nation (1997), Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination (2001), Noisy Island: a Short History of Irish Popular Music (2005), and Music in Irish Cultural History (2009). He has performed in his adaptation of Flann O’Brien’s The Brother in Vienna, Trieste, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Liverpool, and London. In 2012 he recorded a version of James Joyce’s Chamber Music, extracts from which he has performed in concerts in Liverpool, Nijmegen, Leuven, Lille, Rennes, and Paris. Stephen Watt is Provost Professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington. His books include Beckett and Contemporary Irish Writing (Cambridge, 2009), Postmodern/Drama: Reading the Contemporary Stage (Michigan, 1998), and Joyce, O’Casey, and the Irish Popular Theater (Syracuse, 1991); and he has co-edited such anthologies as A Century of Irish Drama: Widening the Stage (Indiana, 2000) and, with co-editor Kevin J. H. Dettmar, Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, Rereading (Michigan, 1995). He is completing a book on the cultural interactions of Irish- and Jewish-Americans.

Introduction Richard Rankin Russell

Northern Ireland-born Bernard MacLaverty has written four novels, five short story collections, along with a collected short stories, multiple screenplays for film and television featuring stars such as Helen Mirren (Cal) and Liam Neeson (Lamb), radio plays, three children’s books and several opera libretti, yet there are only two monographs on his work and no collections of essays.1 The present volume aims to redress this relative critical neglect by covering the entirety of MacLaverty’s fictional output along with the two screenplays he wrote based on his novels Lamb (1980) and Cal (1983). It also offers genuinely new interpretive strategies for understanding these works as promised by the subtitle of the collection, “New Critical Readings.” The contributors here are all veteran readers and teachers of MacLaverty’s work and their essays are all commissioned especially for this volume. Born into a Catholic family in 1942, MacLaverty has devoted much of his work to exploring the geographic, psychological, cultural, and spiritual terrain of his divided native Belfast—covered here adroitly by Neal Alexander in his essay—yet his work over the years has increasingly ranged farther abroad to locales such as Kiev and the American state of Iowa. His influences are similarly varied and include Americans such as Ernest Hemingway and Flannery O’Connor, Russians including Dostoevsky and Chekhov, and, closer to home, those from Northern Ireland such as Michael McLaverty (no relation) and Ireland such as James Joyce, along with Samuel Beckett, as one of the present essayists, Stephen Watt, has shown.2 One story, “A Foreign Dignitary” (Walking the Dog, 1994), even occurs in a non-place. “Placing” MacLaverty as merely a Northern Irish, Irish, or now Scottish writer (he has resided in Scotland since 1975) does him and his richly drawn characters from a variety of backgrounds a serious disservice. Instead, he is a world writer in the best sense of the term.

2

Bernard MacLaverty

Increasingly, MacLaverty, whose literary fame has been slower coming than that of his Belfast Group poetic contemporaries such as Michael Longley and Seamus Heaney, has garnered many awards for his work and is looked to as an exemplar by younger generations of writers from the United Kingdom and Ireland such as the Belfast-born Glenn Patterson, who has graciously contributed the foreword to this collection. MacLaverty’s influence on the wider culture is even more remarkable. For instance, he is credited with originating the phrase describing the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland as “the elephant in our living room” that nobody wants to talk about and his novel Cal has been termed “The Passage to India of the Troubles” by Michael Gorra (back cover of American edition of Cal). Elephant, the heralded 1989 British film that offers recreations of 18 murders in Northern Ireland, produced by BBC Northern Ireland and screened on BBC 2 (directed by Alan Clarke and produced by Danny Boyle), purportedly takes its title from “Bernard MacLaverty’s description … of the ‘Troubles’ as ‘the elephant in our living room’— a reference to the collective denial of the underlying social problems of Northern Ireland.”3 This film, perhaps inspired by MacLaverty’s remark, in turn inspired Gus Van Sant’s film of the same name, released in 2003, of the Columbine school massacre in Colorado. Recently, an article in The Guardian about a new BBC television drama set in Belfast and starring Gillian Anderson, The Fall, begins with an implicit reference to MacLaverty’s statement,“Throughout the 30 years of the ‘Troubles’—and even after—TV was reluctant to explore the divisions of Northern Ireland. Can the new BBC 2 crime drama face up to the issues?”, and quotes MacLaverty’s statement directly, terming him the writer of the first Elephant film. It concludes by stating, “Through the genre of crime fiction, TV drama has found another way of getting the elephant into UK living rooms.”4 Whether or not MacLaverty made the statement or wrote the film—in fact, he did make the statement but did not write the film—is now beside the point. The comment both illuminates a central truth about coverage of the “Troubles” and suggests MacLaverty’s influence in our thinking about the conflict.5 Strangely enough, elephants have featured several times in MacLaverty’s work. For instance, he published a children’s book, A Man in Search of a Pet (1978), featuring a man and his elephant. And in September of 2012, to celebrate its 50th anniversary, Scottish Opera staged his libretto Elephant Angel about the elephant named Sheila who endured the Blitz in Belfast during World War Two.6 Various groups of schoolchildren across Scotland and Northern Ireland sang in the chorus as the show toured nine different venues, including Belfast. The kindness shown by the female zookeepers in taking Sheila home

Introduction

3

with them at night from the zoo and stroking her ears as bombs dropped on the city highlights the quality of mercy often privileged in MacLaverty’s work. Other examples of MacLaverty’s continuing relevance to popular culture and higher education abound. Several years ago, two articles appeared in Scottish newspapers suggesting that he inspired the lead singers of the band Travis and another band, Belle and Sebastian. For instance, Travis’s lead singer Fran Healy used a line from Grace Notes—“I’m seeing a tunnel at the end of all these lights”—in his song “Why Does It Always Rain on Me?.”7 Recently, I have become convinced that the hilarious exploding cow story and image verbalized by the violent young man on the train in Martin McDonagh’s Academy Awardwinning short film Six Shooter is borrowed from a similar scene in Cal.8 Perhaps the surest sign of his work’s significance for younger generations is that his fiction often features on the college entrance examinations in Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Scotland. When I was gauging interest among college and university teachers for this collection, I was amazed at the range of countries where there was strong interest in MacLaverty’s work, including Australia, Germany, Spain, the Czech Republic, America, and even Macedonia! His fiction is taught not just in Irish or British literary courses but also on interdisciplinary Irish Studies courses, creative writing courses, courses on short fiction and the novel, and conflict and peace courses. One academic, Lucy Collins, who lectures in English at University College, Dublin, wrote to say, “There is a real shortage of good critical work on MacLaverty, so your book is much needed.”9 “Fair enough,” one might say, “but what about its trans-cultural appeal?” Anecdotal evidence for that sort of “translation factor” comes from an English professor who wrote to me observing, “I have taught Cal very successfully at a Catholic Historically Black University [Xavier in New Orleans] several times at first-year and senior levels. … African-American students always respond really well to the novel and ‘get it’ immediately. They also have loved his style.”10 Much has been made of MacLaverty’s linkage of Cal to working-class black males in that novel through his manual labor and affection for blues ballads. And essays in the present collection by Gerry Smyth and Stephen Watt explore MacLaverty’s abiding interest in Jewish characters, culture, and the Holocaust in stories such as “My Dear Palestrina” from Matters of Life and Death and Other Stories (1982), and in Grace Notes, MacLaverty’s 1997 novel, a nominee for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Man Booker Prize, and the Whitbread Prize. He has explored other, often-marginalized communities tenderly and evocatively across his career, including the character of Hugo’s mentally disabled brother

4

Bernard MacLaverty

in “Hugo” (Secrets and Other Stories); the “mentally handicapped men” and the protagonist Norman with his temporarily locked jaw in “Language, Truth and Lockjaw” (A Time to Dance and Other Stories, 160); the abandoned child in his short film based on Seamus Heaney’s poem of the same name, Bye-Child (2003); and Mrs Quinn, who has dementia, in his short story, “The Assessment,” from Matters of Life and Death and Other Stories (2006), among others. He developed “The Assessment” into a play, The Woman from the North, broadcast by BBC Northern Ireland Radio 4 in 2007; it was first given a rehearsed reading on 7 May 2008 at the conference on “Embracing the Challenge: Citizenship and Dementia,” to benefit the Dementia Services Development Centre at the University of Stirling. MacLaverty’s continuing appeal lies in his interest in the human (and animal) condition and his ability to convey all its vagaries through his crystalline prose and striking images. His work has outlasted the “Troubles” and will continue to charm and entertain readers for generations to come. His steadfast commitment to chronicling not only the violence of his native province but also the ordinary events of our lives has led finally to unforgettable portraits of ourselves. The well-known novelist, essayist, and memoirist Glenn Patterson opens this collection with a foreword detailing his early impressions of MacLaverty as a writer with a similar educational background who hailed from the same area of Belfast. Patterson concludes by giving his memories of a 1993 reading tour they undertook together in Germany and musing upon MacLaverty’s distinctive and self-effacing qualities as a writer in an analysis of a scene from the older writer’s short story, “A Belfast Memory.” Michael Parker’s essay plumbs the intricacies of selected short stories in MacLaverty’s first collection, Secrets and Other Stories, arguing that they are best read through the active participation of the reader, who often must infer significance and read into the silences in a Barthean manner. My own “Parabolic Plots in Bernard MacLaverty’s Lamb” similarly privileges the role of the reader, arguing we should attend to the Christian parables, “The Good Samaritan,” and “The Lost Sheep,” which drive the novel’s action and into which Brother Sebastian/Michael Lamb inserts himself as a secular savior figure with disastrous results. Gerry Smyth’s essay also treats MacLaverty’s early short fiction, in particular the long short story, “My Dear Palestrina,” which was collected in A Time to Dance and Other Stories. Smyth shows how music acts as an emotional index to reveal the characters of the boy Danny and his parents, the exiled Polish Jew Marysia Schwartz, and the local blacksmith, all of whom interact in the newly

Introduction

5

charged context of sectarianism in 1957 Northern Ireland that followed the Irish Republican Army’s “Border Campaign” against the Northern Irish state. Continuing this emphasis on various types of trauma, Richard Mills draws on Dominick La Capra’s work about violence to analyze the visual depiction of haunting and trauma in MacLaverty’s screenplays of Lamb and Cal that show their central characters do not experience ideological transformation. Richard Haslam’s essay examines the conflict in MacLaverty’s short fiction collections The Great Profundo (1987) and Walking the Dog (1994), focusing on the rhetorical issue of how the author creates his characters, the hermeneutical issue of how readers might construe or interpret those characters, and the architectural issue of how characters interact with the environments constructed within the stories. Drawing on both studies of collective memory and affect theory, Stephen Watt’s essay shows how the novels Cal and especially Grace Notes wrestle with the historical novelist’s obligation to represent truth objectively by assessing how putting the Northern Ireland “Troubles” into an analogical relationship with seminal passages from Grace Notes works as a hermeneutical endeavor. Marilynn Richtarik also treats Grace Notes in her essay but does so by probing Catherine McKenna’s vexed relationship and eventual tentative reconciliation with her newly widowed mother as a way of enabling us to understand how MacLaverty is simultaneously and indirectly portraying the ongoing cultural and political process of reconciliation in Northern Ireland. Such a deep focus on character is likewise maintained by Michael Rawl in his essay, which argues that protagonist Martin Brennan from The Anatomy School comes to reject Catholicism, particularly the Gnostic strain in certain manifestations of that faith. Martin finally embraces secular transcendence in his appreciation of the human body and the quotidian world, a new “faith” that enables him to mourn for the bodies broken by violence in the “Troubles.” The last two essays in the collection explore the wider context of Belfast and beyond. By tracing the ambiguous absent presence of Belfast in MacLaverty’s early work, Neal Alexander’s essay identifies the resistances that the city offers to fictional representation, showing that from his mid-period onwards, Belfast functions less as a cipher and more as a real place, the material context for human relationships, memories, and the humdrum business of ordinary life. Drawing upon recent work in literary geography, the essay offers detailed close readings of the novel The Anatomy School (2001) as well as stories collected in Walking the Dog and Matters of Life and Death. The Italian scholar Laura Pelaschiar analyzes the non-Irish elements in MacLaverty’s fiction, ranging

6

Bernard MacLaverty

from the Latin spoken by local Belfast priests, to sexualized characters in the short fiction and the novels such as Marcella Morton’s Italian origins in Cal, through to the representations of the Ukraine in Grace Notes and Russian writers such as Chekhov in “The Clinic,” from Matters of Life and Death. She concludes that such elements are often in a dynamic tension with the Irish ones, a tension that is only occasionally suspended. Finally, the well-known Yeats critic David Holdeman concludes this collection with a moving meditation on his reactions to MacLaverty’s work over the years and offers his responses to many of the essays collected here. I also offer a “Further Readings” section, which lists MacLaverty’s work across a range of genres and gives the secondary criticism on his work, excluding reviews.

Notes   1 The two monographs are the limited circulation study by Christian J. Ganter, Hoffnung wider die Hoffnungslosigkeit: das Irlandbild im Erzählwerk Bernard MacLavertys and my own Bernard MacLaverty.   2 See Watt, 92–124.   3 See “Elephant (1989 Film).”   4 See “Belfast-set Thriller The Fall Joins the Few Dramas to Tackle the Troubles.” The phrase continues to be used in association with sectarianism related to the conflict. For instance, longtime Belfast Telegraph columnist Alf McCreary, in his article headlined “King Billy Would Be a Loser with Today’s Orangemen,” recently used a variation on the phrase in the wake of loyalist riots in north and east Belfast over the decision to curtail a march by the Orange Order to describe the Order’s attitude. In discussing the condemnation of the violence by senior Church of Ireland clerics, McCreary stated, “the Anglican clerics did not mention the large elephant in the room or, more aptly, lingering in the area where the police and rioters were in confrontation. That elephant is the Orange Order itself which forgets nothing and learns nothing.”   5 In “Personal E-mail to the Author,” MacLaverty made this statement about the phrase: “I do believe now that I am the author of the cliché about the elephant in the room. I only vaguely remember the incident. Live radio interviews are about filling the silences that arise no matter what junk comes into your head. Some years ago a journalist in The Guardian, Marcel Berlins, wrote and asked the same question. I attach the relevant part of my answer [which follows here]: My memory of it is a radio interview. I was asked what it was like to live in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. My reply was that it was like living in a room with an elephant and trying to ignore it. Occasionally it stood on your toe

Introduction

7

or crapped on your head but mostly you tried to get on with things. I suppose the thought was in my head from a children’s story I had written and illustrated, “A Man in Search of a Pet,” in which a man tries out various pets—a dog, a cat— before opting for an elephant, albeit a small one. But “there were days when the elephant seemed much too big. It seemed to take up all the room in the flat. On these days he took it for a walk in the park and left it in the middle of the grass. He sat down on a seat well away from it so that it looked much, much smaller.” The equivalent technique to reduce the size of the Troubles was to read a book or go to see a film or listen to some good music. The radio interview happened 30 years ago. So I hope you’ll forgive my sketchy recall of it.

[Berlins] had something in the paper about it around 20 September, 2006. The TV film you speak of, Elephant, was by Alan Clarke and I have heard (but have no proof) that he named his film after hearing the cliché. The next step was a film by Gus Van Sant called Elephant, about the Columbine shootings. I presume he had seen Alan Clarke’s remarkable film. I was NOT the screenwriter in either of these ventures unfortunately. But once something gets on the internet it is very hard to get rid of it. As Flannery O’ Connor said about something else entirely … It’s like getting ticks off a dog.”  6 See Elephant Angel for a description and summary. For local reaction in Belfast to the opera, see Matthew McCreary.   7 See Craig McLean. See also John McGurk.   8 At the end of Chapter Four, Cal sees a cow that has exploded: “It was half a cow— udders, hindquarters with muscles red-raw and still jigging. … The cows were Friesians and as he passed them he saw the white panels of their hides happed with blood” (Cal 120–1). The young man’s graphic account of a “cow with trapped wind” in Six Shooter that explodes after a man sticks a sharp object in it and then lights the escaping gas recalls MacLaverty’s prose description of the destroyed cow nearly exactly.   9 See Lucy Collins. 10 See Nicole Pepinster Greene.

Works cited “Belfast-set Thriller The Fall Joins the Few Dramas to Tackle the Troubles.” The Guardian, 14 May 2013. http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/ tvandradioblog/2013/may/14/the-fall-northern-ireland-troubles. [last accessed 1 June 2013]. Collins, Lucy. “E-mail to the Author.” 4 October 2011. “Elephant (1989 Film).” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_(1989_film). [last accessed 5 June 2013].

8

Bernard MacLaverty

“Elephant Angel.” http://www.operascotland.org/operas/468/Elephant+Angel/. [last accessed 5 June 2013]. Ganter, Christian J. Hoffnung wider die Hoffnungslosigkeit: das Irlandbild im Erzählwerk Bernard MacLavertys. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999. MacLaverty, Bernard. Cal. New York: Norton, 1983. —“Personal E-mail to the Author.” 18 July 2013. —The Woman from the North. First broadcast: BBC Northern Ireland Radio 4, 1 November 2007. University of Stirling (Scotland), Dementia Services Development Centre, 2008. McCreary, Alf. “King Billy Would Be a Loser with Today’s Orangemen.” Belfast Telegraph, 20 July 2013. http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/columnists/ alf-mccreary/king-billy-would-be-a-loser-with-todays-orangemen–29436837.html. [last accessed 21 July 2013]. McCreary, Matthew. “Belfast Festival: How Sheila Survived the Terror of the Blitz.” Belfast Telegraph, 18 October 2012. http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/ entertainment/belfast-festival/previews/belfast-festival-how-sheila-survived-theterror-of-the-blitz–28875171.html. [last accessed 6 June 2013]. McDonagh, Martin. Six Shooter. Short film dir. and writ. by McDonagh. Produced by Film Four and The Irish Film Board (as Bord Scannán na hÉireann) in association with Missing in Action Films, Funny Farm Films and Fantastic Films, 2004. McGurk, John. “The Man Who … Inspired!”, Sunday Life, 28 May 2000, n. p. McLean, Craig. “The Man Who … Inspired Travis.” The Scotsman, 12 May 2000, S2. Pepinster Greene, Nicole. “E-mail to the Author.” 3 October 2011. Russell, Richard Rankin. Bernard MacLaverty. Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press, 2009. Watt, Stephen. Beckett and Contemporary Irish Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 92–124.

1

“Made-Up Truth[s]”: Themes, Tropes, and Narrative Technique in Bernard MacLaverty’s Early Short Stories Michael Parker “One day when I was teaching I tried to come up with a definition for fiction. It was a class of third years and this wee girl said: ‘Sir, sir, it’s made-up truth,’ and I thought that was the best definition of fiction I had heard. But the final product must have the possibility of being true. And yet into that truth and that very specific story you must in some way conceal the universal.”1 “One story encodes many stories, like genetics; it’s all there. It’s there in what’s left out too. Absences. Omissions.”2

Readers encountering Bernard MacLaverty’s fiction for the first time are struck initially by the immediacy with which his characters are realized, the exactitude and authenticity with which he evokes their speech, thoughts and deeds, and the physical spaces they inhabit. In crafting these imagined lives, he frequently employs allusions to other texts and offers recurring glimpses of characters in the act of reading and writing. Within the stories such moments function as a means of delineating distinctions in class, education, gender, and age, but may also be seen as indicative of their author’s self-consciousness about “language, literary form, and the act of writing fictions” and of his awareness of the fictionality of the world his texts enter.3 His is a “writerly” art, to employ Roland Barthes’ term, one that invites readers to engage actively in the process of meaning-making, picking up on the gaps, foreshadowings, and ironies that thread through the text. It is such features of his work that this essay will explore by focusing closely on selected stories from Secrets and Other Stories (1977), his first short story collection. Academically and intellectually, MacLaverty was a late developer, whose school years were blighted by the loss of his father to cancer when he was not quite 12. As a sixth-former at St Malachy’s College, Belfast, he had wanted to study Art, thereby following in his father’s footsteps, yet he ended up opting for

10

Bernard MacLaverty

science subjects instead, compelled to do so by one of the priests. Without sufficiently good grades to secure a place at university, he entered the labor market in 1960 as a technician in a medical laboratory at Queen’s. Over the next ten years, he endeavored to find his voice as a writer, spurred on by the “immense pleasure”4 he derived from reading Russian classics (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev), major modernists (Kafka, Joyce) and local contemporaries (Michael McLaverty and Brian Friel). Verification of his potential came gradually in this period, not least when, after a recommendation from Joan Newmann, he was invited by Philip Hobsbaum to join the Belfast “Group,” in which he rubbed shoulders with other talented young writers such as Seamus Heaney, Stewart Parker, Michael and Edna Longley.5 In a BBC Radio 3 programme, “Hobsbaum’s Choice,” first broadcast on 30 January 2000, MacLaverty recalled the transformative effect the critic’s presence had on him and his contemporaries. In Belfast, he comments, nothing exciting was happening. Philip came into this and said, “What you’re all writing about is as valid and as brilliant as anywhere else.” Always Philip was 100 per cent behind the writer … and he would find, whether it was in his heart or his head, he could find something to say to validate what was written on the page.6

Before long MacLaverty’s stories started filtering their way into local literary magazines, including Interest and The Honest Ulsterman, at times under a nom-de-plume, Bernard Kieran, at others under his own name. The early 1970s saw them taken up by Northern Ireland’s Schools Council and, thanks to John Boyd’s support, 7 by the BBC. MacLaverty’s literary apprenticeship coincided with the prelude to and onset of political crisis in Northern Ireland, so it is hardly surprising that his debut collection bears traces of the malaise that prompted that crisis. Although Secrets makes relatively few direct allusions to the violence,8 the conflict is nevertheless a definite presence. The very first words of the opening story, “‘We never got the chance,’” (7) confront us immediately with injustice and deprivation, voiced as they are by a woman raised in a particular class and community. Kevin’s mother refers to the lack of educational opportunities for her generation, yet her comment possesses a wider resonance, particularly when set in the context of its first appearances in print in 1971 and then 1977, when it reached a larger readership. To a certain extent this inequity was rectified by Northern Ireland’s 1947 Education Act, which provided free access to secondary and tertiary education to bright working-class children of both communities.



“Made-Up Truth[s]”

11

However, the instruments by which academic ability was measured—initially the 11-plus examination, but later “O” levels at 16 and “A” Levels at 18— classified many pupils as failures, thereby limiting and, often, obliterating their employment prospects and inflicting huge damage to their self-esteem. As Northern Ireland’s economy continued contracting from the late 1950s onwards, keeping unemployment persistently high,9 large numbers of men and women felt impelled to travel to England and Scotland to pick up seasonal work, like the protagonist in MacLaverty’s story, “Between Two Shores.”10 Whether successful at school and at university or not, members of the nationalist minority community faced discrimination once they sought work. Until the British Government’s introduction of Direct Rule, posts in Northern Ireland’s public sector, particularly in such areas as the civil service and the judiciary, were generally closed to them.11 Evidence that unequal treatment was not just confined to the workplace but extended to housing allocation, to the franchise and policing, became increasingly apparent from 1964 onwards, as a result of the activities of the Campaign for Social Justice and, subsequently, the Civil Rights Movement.12 That the latter generated considerable hostility among many working-class Protestants can be seen in “A Happy Birthday,” the fourth story in Secrets. Its jobless anti-hero, Sammy, harangues a group of student demonstrators whose placards denounce Stormont’s failure to curb unemployment: “‘Who do you think is paying your grants for you, eh? You’ll get no work coming into the country with the likes of you parading about making trouble. … Why don’t yis go down south where yis belong?’” (29). This is but one of many instances of reading and misreading in Secrets, in which a character demonstrates an incapacity to interpret and understand relatively simple written, spoken and visual signs. Programmed to respond and act in accordance with ideological assumptions imbibed from their culture of origin, the individuals peopling MacLaverty’s texts display that common all-too-human tendency to immerse themselves in fictions about themselves around others. This predilection is exemplified in “The Exercise,” Secrets’ opening story, a portrait of a working-class family and the intimate, often unspoken love that moves within it. Told through the eyes of an 11-year-old, Kevin Sweeny, the narrative privileges the figure of the father. Initially prominence is given to the mother’s perspective and how, despite her deep affection and admiration for her husband, she is prepared to make an example of him. She indicts not just “the System,” when she states, “‘We never got the chance,’” but also him for failing to capitalize on his talents and opportunities. Significantly she uses the modal

12

Bernard MacLaverty

verbs “could” and “would” to voice her disappointment at a potential unfulfilled. Access to secondary education “‘wouldn’t have done me much good,’”13 she asserts, but “‘could have’” enabled Kevin’s father to better himself: “‘He’d be teaching or something now instead of serving behind a bar. He could stand up with the best of them’” (7; my emphases). The story’s second paragraph establishes the context for these reflections. Kevin, her eldest boy, has just started at grammar school, which has spurred her husband into trying to contribute to his academic success. Successive positive perceptions of the father ensue, making him an endearing figure for the reader. These begin with the comical mannerisms he displays as he concentrates on his son’s homework, such as sticking his tongue out and shoving “his non-writing hand … down the back of his trousers …” (7). Kevin relishes the pungent, “grown up smell” of porter, tobacco and sweat he exudes, while the narrator pictures him reading bedtime stories to his doting sons and later captures a tender, arrested gesture, when he attempts to kiss Kevin, after having provided the answers to his Latin homework. Nice ironies are woven into this and subsequent scenes, since among the phrases Sweeny père translates are “an evil deed” and “a wise father” (8). When the setting shifts to a classroom in Kevin’s school the following day, his father’s intervention is disclosed as not so much “evil” but more a misguided deed. The agent of the father and son’s undoing is a priest, Father Waldo, who bears some resemblance to Father Arnall in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.14 Waldo’s skill at terrorizing pupils is conveyed through a steady accumulation of images of repressed (“clenched,” “pressed,” “impassive”) and released violence (“swung,” “crash,” “snapping,” “explosion,” “leap,” “slapped,” “whipping,” “whipped”). Unhappily for Kevin, when the lesson starts, Waldo asks him to read out his homework. The discovery that each of his answers is incorrect prompts disbelief, then dismay. Class humiliation, in a double sense, follows when Waldo extracts a confession about his father’s involvement and belittles his father’s occupation.15 What gives greater anguish than the caning Kevin receives is the verbal scathing preceding it: “‘If your brilliant father continues to do your homework for you, Sweeny, you’ll end up a barman yourself ’” (12). Privately, after the other pupils are dismissed, the priest offers a brief apology: “‘I meant your father no harm—he’s probably a good man,’” but more significant than Waldo’s late act of contrition are the lessons Kevin has learned (12). Like many other characters in Secrets, Kevin is presented at a threshold moment, starting a journey that might lead to individuation. Earlier in the



“Made-Up Truth[s]”

13

narrative he is depicted tracing a symbolic path through his father’s shavings, signifiers of the manhood to which he aspires. Ironically, having just delineated a space of his own, Kevin reverts to dependency, replicating “in ink” (9) words dictated by his father. It would be easy to read into the story’s conclusion a continuation of that unreflecting trust, a reaffirmation of family, but MacLaverty’s ending is ambivalent, subtler than might first appear. The intimate, playful way his father clips and smacks Kevin’s head with a newspaper invites comparisons with the ritual Waldo employs when exacting punishment. Without question, the final sentence reiterates the warmth and depth of the father-son relationship, a contrast to the exposure outside the home, where a “cutting wind” leaves Kevin “trembling” (10), “shivering” (13), “quivering” (13), and faltering (13). That the 11-year-old is now engaged in a process of selfcomposition can be seen in his decision to edit out what happened in the Latin class, the better to protect his father and preserve his father’s illusions about himself. Whereas “The Exercise” employs a linear plot, the title story operates in dual time and turns upon a far more damaging break in a young boy’s life. Bearing the deep imprint of MacLaverty’s own Catholic upbringing, it is a tale which depicts the consequences of a child’s first disobedience, a man’s selfsacrifice and the inability of each to atone. What brings these large concepts into focus is a flashback midway through, which reveals how a child’s desire to unlock his aunt’s past prompts him to rifle through her private correspondence without permission. On her unexpected return, he is caught in flagrante, with momentous repercussions for their relationship. The title story demonstrates a core strength in MacLaverty’s short fiction, which, like William Trevor’s, “leaves out just as much as … it puts in, if not more.”16 Its attention centers almost exclusively on the feelings of its unnamed focalizer—first as a young boy, later as a 17- or 18-year-old—and those of his great-aunt. The opening sentences establish the imminence of Aunt Mary’s death, yet what surprises the reader is that her nephew has to be summoned home and that his description of her dying is delivered in such a flat manner. Without a redeeming adjective or adverb in sight, he observes how They had tried to wrap her fingers around a crucifix but they kept loosening. She lay low on the pillow and her face seemed to have shrunk by half since he had gone out earlier in the night. … The lower half of her face seemed to collapse. (31)

Having edged his way closer to the death-bed, he attempts to block out its stark burden. Although able to cover his eyes and to inhale from his hands

14

Bernard MacLaverty

scent-traces of his girlfriend’s hand-cream, he cannot suppress the “intolerable” noise issuing from the dying woman’s throat. His perception that “She had lost all the dignity he knew her to have” indicates that there was a time when Aunt Mary generated respect and awe. To distance himself from the collective grief, he seeks the privacy of her sitting-room, where he wells up “with anger or sorrow, he didn’t know which” (32). A re-reading of the story makes clear the irony of this choice of retreat, along with the recognition that his anger is selfdirected. This very room was the scene of his crime, a space whose integrity he had violated years earlier. Placed center stage, the withering irises perform an obvious, anticipatory function, a reminder of Aunt Mary’s tenuous future. The protagonist’s choice of metaphors suggests a strong associative link between the flowers’ neat, delicate “scrolling” and the “frail, khaki-coloured” (36) love-letters he had illicitly pored over there. The irises’ skill in “clearing up after themselves” contrasts with his failure to do so on a fateful day, years earlier. An ellipsis marks an analeptic shift to the period when the boy and his aunt had held each other dear. Ironies again permeate this section, not least the reader’s discovery that what bonded them originally—a shared love of reading, his curiosity about family history—caused their severing. As in his later fiction,17 MacLaverty embeds intertextual references with telling effect. For instance, each of the stories Aunt Mary cherished most (Lorna Doone, Persuasion, Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations) incorporates a romance of young love thwarted. Not surprisingly she feels a particular affinity with Dickens’s Miss Havisham, who, like her, was abandoned, suffering irreparable loss. Significantly, this key paragraph ends referring to her “keeping her place in the closed book” (32), while trying to fend off the boy’s distracting questions about her cameo ring.18 Her admonitions, “‘Don’t be so inquisitive,’” and “‘Let’s see what happens next in the story’” (32) anticipate the narrative’s climax and underline its self-reflexive freight. What happens next arises from the boy’s interest in philately, a sign of a growing impulse to extend the parameters of his world. Though able to assign stamps to their correct countries of origin, his observations yield further reminders about the limited scope of his knowledge, his lack of a historical and political frame of reference with which to interpret and decode data. Looking at Spanish and Italian stamps, he sees only “a bald man,” rather than General Franco, “a chimney sweep’s bundle and a hatchet,” rather than the symbol of Mussolini’s fascism, while pre-war, Nazi-era German stamps appear notable principally for their “funny jerky print” (33). To discerning readers, these elliptical references to the late 1930s and the prelude to World War Two anticipate



“Made-Up Truth[s]”

15

the story’s concluding concern with war and personal sacrifice, themes with intense resonance in Northern Ireland at the time of publication.19 A pattern of attempted encroachment and resistance characterizes the action and dialogue that ensues. Recognizing an almost immediate shift in her nephew’s interest in her postcards and letters from visual to verbal content, Aunt Mary repeatedly tries to deflect questions about one particular correspondent. Ironically, the very evasiveness and ambiguity of her responses quickens the boy’s and readers’ curiosity: “Who is Brother Benignus?” he asked. She seemed not to hear. He asked again and she looked over her glasses. “He was a friend.” His flourishing signature appeared again and again. Sometimes Bro Benignus, sometimes Benignus and once Iggy. “Is he alive?’” “No, he’s dead now. Watch the kettle doesn’t run dry.” (34; my emphases)

Prohibited from accessing her cache of letters, the youngster chances on snaps of his aunt as a young woman, then of a young man. Spidery handwriting on the reverse of the photograph identifies this as “John,” and as taken in August 1915, 12 months after war broke out: “Who is that in the uniform?” the boy asked. “He’s a soldier,” she answered without looking up. … “He was a friend of mine before you were born,” she said. … “I thought maybe it was Brother Benignus,” he said. She looked at him not answering. “Was your friend killed in the war?” At first she said no, but then she changed her mind. “Perhaps he was,” she said, then smiled. “You are far too inquisitive. Put it to use and go and see what is for tea.” (35; my emphases)

Not content at suborning readers as witnesses, MacLaverty makes them complicit in the subsequent act of trespass, when, during her absence at Sunday devotions, the boy carries through a premeditated plan to rifle through his aunt’s locked bureau to explore its mysteries. The selection of letters that he and we pore over discloses the reasons Aunt Mary never married and why her soldier lover sacrificed their potential happiness together. These epistles from the frontline register the severe psychological damage endured by survivors of bloody conflict and how one individual’s guilt at being implicated in the carnage compelled him to dedicate the remainder of his life to priestly service.

16

Bernard MacLaverty

In a characteristically wry, self-reflexive touch on MacLaverty’s part, John informs his beloved that the first task assigned him in the Great War was to act as a censor, spending entire days scanning other people’s letters. It alerts us to his deeply fraternal feelings towards his fellow men and incorporates a brief, but not inconsequential, reflection upon linguistic disadvantage. Observing how few soldiers possess basic skills in reading and writing, he commends Mary’s efforts to rectify this lamentable state of affairs through her vocation, teaching. Unlike them, John is initially confident in articulating his emotions, yet his confidence will not last. Lacking any conception of the horrors ahead, he concludes equating his and Mary’s pain in separation with “‘the hurt’” (36) of war. Drastic changes to John’s morale surface in his second letter, which asserts that his sanity depends on evoking memories of her, an act he likens to “‘reading.’” He endeavors to conjure her presence by writing, itemizing lovingly her physical attributes and actions—her long, dark hair, her neck, her eyes “‘that said so much without words,’” her “‘look of disbelief ’” when he kissed her. At no point does he recall anything she actually says. John’s account exhibits what feminist critics have referred to as “the male gaze,” a term which might be extended to incorporate the boy’s action.20 Allusions to Mary lying beside him, with hair “‘undone, between me and the sun’” hint at intimacies, as does the Hardyesque21 nature imagery which locates them in a hollow, with “‘the air full of pollen’” (37). He ends highlighting the contrast between that shared erotic moment then and his location now, thigh-deep in mud and alone. The complete antithesis of its predecessor, the third letter reworks and relocates several of its key images and tropes. It progresses from descriptions of paralyzing cold afflicting his body and of the slate-grey, frozen faces of the dead, to an account of a man dying beside him, whom he had dragged into a crater to save; pierced in the neck by shrapnel, the soldier choked to death in his blood. The introduction of a pause to John’s reports from the front again illustrates MacLaverty’s deft technique. Mention of the sun’s having “fallen low in the sky” and its “glare” works effectively on several levels: it leads the reader back into the present and, like references to the boy’s hurried, cursory skimming through the letters, serves as a reminder of time passing; it underscores the illuminations John’s letters contain, motifs of descent and decline within “Secrets” as a whole; finally, the word “glare” anticipates the boy’s impending exposure on his aunt’s sudden return. One final, revelatory passage offers clues about why its writer became Brother Benignus. While, like its predecessors, this letter opens greeting Mary as “‘dearest,’” crucially the first person possessive pronoun, “my,” has been dropped (38). Penned in a hospital bed, the letter features John confessing to repeatedly



“Made-Up Truth[s]”

17

postponing writing, disingenuously voicing the hope that his love was “‘not too worried’” (38). When he refers to subjects dominating his thoughts, Mary features third in a sequence behind “‘the war’” and “‘myself ’” (38). The pronoun “I” appears nine times in eight lines, a sign that his preoccupation with his own conflicting emotions remains undiminished. The self-assurance that marked the early letters has gone, replaced by diffidence. In his final sentence the subject position is occupied by Christ, who, John avers, “‘has spoken to me through the carnage’” (38). His claim to divine calling would have recommended him to the religious order he joined; a sceptical audience, however, might interpret this decision as a result of trauma, reflective of crucial, psychological needs to restore coherence, to forge a new identity. Apart from that sole, early, enigmatic comment that perhaps her friend was killed in the war (35), the text yields nothing of Mary’s response to John’s letters or subsequent vocation. The continuing rawness of her hurt may explain her rage at her nephew’s intrusion into her private territory. Emphatic verbs (“snapped,” “blazed,” “struck,” “hissed”) and reiterations capture the intensity of their confrontation.22 Caught red-handed, the boy is rendered speechless by the verbal and physical ferocity he has unleashed. Far worse, more enduring than the stinging blow is her prediction that she will recall his crime till her dying day, thereby underlining her belief in the word’s power to survive. The story’s dénouement, however, questions this conviction, as it depicts the fragility of words, texts, memories, the very “stuff ” (39) that comprises people’s lives. No mention is made of the aunt’s funeral, interment or mourners, so quickly has she passed into history’s cold embrace. Attention is drawn instead to what is alive, a “fire in the large fireplace,” and different occupants in his aunt’s sitting-room (39). Now legitimately there, the boy again finds himself cast as an onlooker, this time looking on while his mother systematically incinerates Mary’s past, salvaging from the flames only what she deems “useful” like the elastic bands (39). The closing scene replicates elements from preceding ones, invariably with ironic effect; his mother possesses the bureau keys but displays no interest in unlocking the narrative hidden there; the brief scrutiny she gives to the cards and letters resembles his, though where he lingers, she merely destroys; questions about Brother Benignus’s identity remain unanswered, in this instance because of an absence rather than a withholding of knowledge. To the very end the room continues as a site of partial exchange, its currency silence and inconsolable grief. The young man knows no relief learning his aunt had not denounced him. His need for absolution and forgiveness cannot be met; the love he still feels for her cannot be reciprocated.

18

Bernard MacLaverty

The collection’s longest story maintains its strongly self-reflexive concerns. The first-person speaker of “Hugo” suspends his narrative several times to address his listeners on the status of fiction. An avid reader and literary critic, he clearly derives considerable pleasure from composing sentences “about himself,”23 like the principal character in Joyce’s “A Painful Case.” Given the recurring allusions to Joyce (74, 77, 83–5, 88), he might well have appropriated the phrase as his story’s title since it applies equally to Hugo and himself (84). Self-regarding, self-justifying, the narrator—in a double sense—is not dissimilar to Joyce’s Mr Duffy. Though responsive to the sensitivity, generosity and uniqueness of its subject, the way he relates Hugo’s story alerts us to his own limitations and partiality. The action opens at a wedding reception, with the narrator’s mother lamenting that “‘Hugo couldn’t be here’” (72). The finality of that absence soon becomes apparent, as the groom and her son confer over their friend’s tragic end, without arriving at an explanation (or, indeed, revealing to the reader what that “end” had been). Whereas Paul, the groom, ascribes it to “a simple sadness,” the narrator affirms that he “knew it to be a tragedy of a different order” (72; my emphasis). Whatever knowledge he possesses, he chooses not to divulge to Paul or to readers at this stage. Instead he speaks vaguely of the “effect” Hugo’s life had on him personally, “an effect out of all proportion to its duration” (72). Tellingly, he omits any mention of the damage he personally inflicted on Hugo, dashing his friend’s literary aspirations. Crucial to understanding these two would-be artists and the “‘intersections’” (87) between them is their shared fatherlessness. The first piece of information the narrator tenders about himself, its effectiveness is immediately lessened by his disconcerting admission that his father’s absence only hit home when he reached adolescence and “felt the need of him” (72). It was then that he craved a mentor capable of resolving his anxieties about “the complexities of love” and “the horrors of sex,”24 of guiding his taste in art (72). An indication that his burgeoning interest in aesthetics has a competitive Oedipal dimension may be seen in his responses to his father’s drawings. He reports how he used to stare at them “for hours and try to find words for their shortcomings” (73; my emphasis). A positive gloss on this comment might suggest it signals a desire to formulate precise, independent critical judgments, yet it could be seen as symptomatic of a recurring impulse to advance his own authority at others’ expense if need be. Much later, readers are made privy to scathing assessments of Hugo’s “crude” sketches of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (85–6) and then his intended masterwork which is summarily dismissed as “embarrassingly bad” (89).



“Made-Up Truth[s]”

19

The story of the narrator’s formative years begins properly with the arrival at his mother’s boarding house of first one, then another pharmacy student, almost in answer to his prayer for adult male role-models. MacLaverty, through his speaker, depicts Paul as a tall, uncomplicated charmer with Gregory Peck looks, but his companion, Hugo, as an unprepossessing geek, complete with thicklensed glasses and prominent Adam’s apple. (The latter’s only saving grace visually is a facial resemblance to the great James Joyce.) By assisting the youngster with his homework at their first encounter, Hugo establishes himself immediately as a “friendly, positive”25 father-substitute; by sustaining his involvement in the boy’s intellectual development, he “invites” him “to draw close, to form an alliance … and to accept his values.”26 A critical stage in that process comes when, after hearing his musical rendition of “I Know that My Redeemer Liveth,” the new lodger not only confronts the uncomfortable issue of the boy’s stammer but also supplies the cure. Given the dramatic, transformative effect he has on the teenager’s future, Hugo can be legitimately regarded as a kind of savior. His sayings are cited at length, particularly his pronouncements during an excursion that he, Paul and the narrator make to Cave Hill. Countering Paul’s assertion that Science is “‘the only thing with any future,’” Hugo argues that “‘it only looks at the surface of things.’” To illustrate his view, he instructs his listeners “‘not to consider the lilies of the field’” (Mt. 6.28), but to “Look at those trees. … Just look. A scientist can tell us about phloem and xylem and tap roots and chromosomes but he can’t tell us what it looks like or feels like. … Literature is the science of feeling. The artist analyses what feelings are, then … tries to reproduce in the reader those same feelings. … Nuances. That’s the secret. The lines in the spectrum between pity and sympathy. Literature is the space between words. It fills the gaps that language leaves.” (81)

Paul’s affectionate mocking of his fellow student (“‘There’s not another idiot like him’”) leaves little impression on Hugo’s novice disciple. Shortly afterwards, we learn that Paul has failed his finals while Hugo “had passed with high commendation” (82). His stricken reaction at having been found “‘not good enough’” (82) prefigures Hugo’s when he is left devastated by the narrator’s negative critique of his novel. This phase in the story finds Hugo at the zenith of his influence, praised for his erudition, sensitivity, and selflessness. Enjoying their companionship, gaining affirmation from his ability to meet their needs, Hugo stays on as a lodger in order to help Paul through his re-sits and the narrator through his fresher year at university. For the new literature student what hugely enhances Hugo’s value is an encyclopedic knowledge of

20

Bernard MacLaverty

Joyce’s works and works about Joyce. In a further instance of ironic foreshadowing, the reader learns from an impromptu, private tutorial on The Portrait of the Artist Hugo’s deep empathy for Joyce’s psychologically scarred daughter, Lucia, whose confinement to an asylum in England in 1951 only ended with her death in 1982.27 Describing her as “a sacrificial victim for the cause of Art” (84), Hugo is fully aware of the costs exacted in striving for artistic achievement; they are costs that all too soon he will personally pay. Only on re-reading the story does one grasp the ironic parallels here, witnessing MacLaverty’s variations on a theme of failed obligations, parent to child, disciple to master. The relationship’s turning-point occurs when the narrator calls without warning at Hugo’s home to consult him about Joyce once more. An emotional ambivalence towards his mentor comes into play at this juncture, the result perhaps of disquiet seeing his father-substitute within a different familial context. A certain distancing from his earliest role model is essential for the young man’s journey towards maturation, Freud avers: Now he must make the discoveries that undermine the high esteem in which he originally held his father … to break away from that first ideal. He becomes dissatisfied with him, learns to criticize him and classify him in social terms, and then usually makes him pay heavily for the disappointment he has given him.28

Hugo’s family home is presented negatively from the outset, judgments passed on its small exterior, its blind-covered windows that make it resemble a “dead house” (84). Evidence that callers are infrequent comes when an odd, but smiling grey-haired woman answers the door, then shuts it again to fetch Hugo. When the latter finally appears, his unease is manifest. He attempts to confine his uninvited visitor to the hallway and enquires with curious formality, “‘What can I do for you?’” (85). Finally admitted into a cold, dark front-room, the narrator barely responds to Hugo’s mother’s prattling, giving greater attention to several naïve paintings on the wall, depictions of Cervantes’ famous duo, he surmises: “Quixote’s white horse was stick-like and flat. Sancho’s mule was even more badly drawn, if that was possible” (85). Surprise, then discomfiture ensue when he is introduced by Hugo’s mother to Bobby, Hugo’s intellectually disabled brother, whose speech he “couldn’t begin to interpret” (86). Mistakenly, he attributes the drawings to Bobby, though later discovers them to be Hugo’s own. Despite his supposed expertise in textual analysis, the narrator misses the import of his friend’s remark that painting is “‘a kind of therapy for him as well,’” (86, my emphasis) an admission about Hugo’s own need for forms of sublimation.



“Made-Up Truth[s]”

21

Later on the way to the pub, Hugo apologizes for his mother’s eccentricities, adding that “‘She’s had a lot to put up with in her life, what with Bobby and things’” (86). What those things might be, Hugo never intimates, and delicacy prevents the narrator from asking. At some point after Hugo’s death, the speaker learns that Hugo’s father had also committed suicide (86). This disclosure renders even less plausible the narrator’s and Paul’s reiterated claims at being mystified by the downward spiral Hugo’s life took.29 During their exchanges in the pub, Hugo becomes increasingly relaxed and voluble, confiding some of his secrets to the younger man, such as that he had once studied for the priesthood and is currently at work on a substantial novel. A putative covenant is agreed between them that if Hugo were to allow him to read the novel, his response would have to be completely frank. A supplementary comment that “‘I want my book to be great. It has to be’” (87), alerts his auditor and readers to the extent of his emotional investment. Deflecting a question about its subject-matter, Hugo alludes instead to its defamiliarizing technique, which relies on juxtapositions, or intersections, to employ his preferred term. To illustrate his method, he describes a recent instance in which two flawed sensory experiences were conjoined, one in long-shot involving musicians performing badly at an open-air mass, the other a close-up of a rose bush succumbing to parasites and disease.30 Conscious the narrator has not understood, Hugo follows up with an illustration drawn from his reading of Jean Rhys’s Good Morning Midnight, whose first-person narrator, Sasha, “loses her baby, the only thing that gave her any hope…” (88). MacLaverty invokes this pitiful episode to stress Hugo’s intense identification with others’ grief but also to foreshadow his reaction on losing his “baby,” his fictive creation.31 Hugo assumes that his protégé shares his susceptibility to poignant literary texts, whereas in fact the latter is a dispassionate, distanced reader, far less sincere than Hugo imagines. Despite having “never experienced what” his mentor “talked about,”32 he implies that he has, nodding in agreement, remaining mute: “There was nothing I could say” (88), he lamely claims. Naïvely, at the evening’s end, Hugo entrusts the novel into his care. The narrator’s verdict is brusque and uncompromising; Hugo’s book is an utter failure, because of its “lamentable” (89) exposition of its ideas.33 Surprisingly for an academic, he declines to provide evidence to justify this assessment, arguing that quoting from the novel would do “disservice” to his friend (89). The reader is left to imagine Hugo’s devastation at receiving an unenthusiastic, clearly negative critique of his work. Consequently, he avoids further contact with the narrator, “slip[ping] away like a ghost” (89).

22

Bernard MacLaverty

A year, then years elapse, with fleeting, accidental encounters occurring, from which it emerges that Hugo has joined the ranks of Northern Ireland’s jobless and is clearly on the skids: His shape had slumped and he walked as if looking for something on the pavement. He walked slower than the crowd. … He looked terrible—dirty, unshaven. His shirt was filthy. … His glasses were mended at the bridge of his nose with sticking plaster. (90)34

Hugo greets an enquiry about his writing with a rueful laugh. A patronizing remark about persisting with his “‘gift,’” followed by protestations that he never intended to dampen Hugo’s creative aspirations meet with steely scepticism: “He looked at me straight, his eyes hard and needle-like. ‘If you say so,’ and he walked away into the crowd” (91). The tragedy’s final act swiftly follows with the narrator recalling his mother relaying the news of Hugo’s suicide while he was reading in his study. Tellingly, a long silence forms part of his reaction, until observing his mother’s deep distress, he recalls how he “closed the book” (91) to comfort her. A more moral, feeling man might have reflected that without Hugo’s interventions he might not have had a study or be reading at home. The thought of sending belated condolences to his friend’s bereaved family does not cross his mind. After reproving himself for not keeping in touch, he speculates whether he might have “given him some hope” (91). Curiously, and very unfeelingly, he talks of his “consolation” (91) on discovering Paul’s equally passive reaction to Hugo’s estrangement. The story concludes back at the wedding reception, where the narrator experiences relief learning that his part in precipitating Hugo’s decline remains secret. The last glimpse we have finds him reunited with Paul, chatting and laughing, “but not loudly enough to betray ourselves to anyone” (92). The presence of that reflexive verb spurs readers to ponder what they have just read, what has been disclosed about its teller’s integrity and more widely about human nature. Earlier, the narrator appeared to be acquiring a measure of selfawareness about why this text needed composing: “Why should I write it at all? Perhaps to show something of my respect, perhaps to assuage my guilt. I owe it to Hugo. … I intend to be as close to truth as my memory will permit. I must be honest” (80). There are positive developments here, recognitions that a debt remains unpaid, that though truth and candor are essential to “the telling” of this life, the fallibility of memory means that the best that can be achieved is an approximation to “truth.” Although he concedes that “perhaps” guilt is a factor, the conditional clause he employs (“If it had not been for the novel he had



“Made-Up Truth[s]”

23

written … ”) attempts to deflect moral responsibility from himself (80). It is as if the very fact that Hugo wrote a novel caused this regrettable situation of his having to write and right himself. “‘Nobody can enter into another’s nature truly: that’s what is so grievous,’”35 observes Hardy’s earliest heroine, and throughout Secrets we encounter protagonists afflicted by the “sadness of this damned world,”36 isolated through age, class, gender, education, temperament, experience, economic circumstances. Elsewhere in the collection there are youngsters who witness untimely death (“The Deep End”); another casualty of parental bereavement (“Anodyne”); a betrayer and the wife he betrays (“Between Two Shores”); fantasists whose desires are unfulfilled (“Umberto Verdi,” “Anodyne,” and “The Bull in the Hard Hat”). Fortunately, there are stories giving respite from pain and yearning, such as “The Miraculous Candidate” and “A Pornographer Woos,” the latter a record of a husband’s first-ever foray into erotic prose. Re-reading Secrets one cannot but be impressed by the linguistic dexterity and precision the young writer displays and, above all, the remarkable skill with which he draws his readers into the writing enterprise, as partners in a pursuit for truth, the “unconcealed.”37

Notes   1 MacLaverty, “The One Letter that Says It All,” 5.   2 MacLaverty, quoted in Mackenzie, 25.   3 Waugh, 2. Waugh proceeds to argue that by consciously arresting the forward movement of the narrative, writers are able “to critique their own methods of construction” and to “explore the possible fictionality of the world” that exists beyond the text.   4 Parker, “Unpublished Interview with Bernard MacLaverty.”   5 Clark, 57–8.   6 Quoted in Clark, 44.   7 Belfast-born playwright John Boyd (1912–2002) was a BBC producer, literary editor, and keen promoter of the younger generation of local writers that emerged in the mid-1960s.   8 Russell, 15, identifies in Secrets “a studied reluctance to write about the Troubles … that bespeaks MacLaverty’s unease with doing so.”   9 Bew et al., 114. 10 Feeling terribly alone in London, he takes a lover who questions him about “what he did, why he could not do something better” (55). 11 O’Connor, 14–15.

24

Bernard MacLaverty

12 Parker, Northern Irish Literature, 42–6, 72–5. 13 MacLaverty leaves unsaid whether this is a sign of how effectively patriarchal ideology has inscribed itself within her or simply an honest recognition of her husband’s superior intellect. 14 Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 47–8. 15 Lest the reader fails to note the Catholic clergy’s frequent obsession with social class, Kevin recalls Waldo’s attempt to place him in the social hierarchy: “You’re not Dr John’s son, are you. … Or anything to do with the milk people?” 16 Stout, n. p. 17 Cal includes several references to the story of Matt Talbot, the reformed sinner who sought to atone for his misdeeds by encasing his flesh in chains (36). When choosing a book to take out of the library to impress Marcella, Cal opts for Crime and Punishment (74, 107). Later the narrative contains apt allusions to Rapunzel, Quasimodo, and Sleeping Beauty (115, 124, 124, 155), which are appropriate given the novel’s concern with lost innocence and its chief protagonist’s self-loathing. 18 The presence of the cameo ring alerts us to the absence of a wedding band from her hand. 19 Michael Longley’s poems frequently allude to World War One and its carnage, on occasion to draw comparisons with contemporary violence in Northern Ireland. 20 The term was originally employed by Laura Mulvey in Visual and Other Pleasures. There is nothing to suggest this pre-pubescent boy’s fascination with his aunt’s history has a sexual component, or could be described as “voyeuristic,” yet he is clearly driven by a desire to possess knowledge that she has denied. 21 In Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, Troy’s seduction of Bathsheba takes place in a “hollow amid the ferns,” and similarly climaxes in a kiss (245–50). 22 The brittle elastic band’s snapping prefigures her snapping on entering the room. On confirmation of his “‘crime,’” she slaps his face and castigates him as “‘dirt’” (39). 23 Joyce, Dubliners, 104. 24 Neither features in the selective autobiography he proffers. 25 Fisher and Greenberg, 222. 26 Ibid. 27 Thorpe, n. p. 28 Freud, 356–7. 29 Early in his account, the narrator states that he has “looked long and hard at this early period to try and read something into it of the tragedy that was to follow, but can find nothing. No prefiguring whatsoever” (76). There are clues trailed from the start, however, which alert more discerning readers to Hugo’s troubled, introverted character and low self-esteem. These include his self-deprecating speech (75); the strange, suppressed quality of his laughter (75); the “gnashing” of his teeth and



“Made-Up Truth[s]”

25

high-pitched snoring when he sleeps (77). Even his secret experiments with yoga (76) might be seen as an attempt to establish an inner balance he lacks. 30 MacLaverty’s juxtaposing of differently flawed characters is a feature of this story and recurs throughout Secrets. 31 Ibsen’s heroine, Hedda Gabler, repeatedly likens her former admirer’s masterwork to a child before wantonly destroying it (343, 345, 358). 32 There may be an echo here of Gabriel Conroy’s admission in “The Dead” that “He had never felt like that himself…” (Joyce, Dubliners, 224). In the conclusion, Joyce’s protagonist demonstrates far greater emotional acuity than MacLaverty’s. 33 Haslam, 89, accepts without question the narrator’s verdict. 34 Keen always to trumpet his successes, the narrator relates how their final meeting took place when he had been employed for some time as a lecturer. 35 Hardy, Desperate Remedies, 273. 36 Rhys, 373. 37 This is one of two translations of the Greek word for truth (aletheia) used by Martin Heidegger, cited in Kołakowski, 268.

Works cited Baldick, Chris. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Bew, Paul, Peter Gibbon, and Henry Patterson. Northern Ireland 1921–1994. London: Serif, 1995. Clark, Heather. The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast 1962–1972. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Fisher, Seymour and Roger F. Greenberg. The Scientific Credibility of Freud’s Theories and Therapy. Basic Books: New York, 1977. Freud, Sigmund. “On the Psychology of the Grammar School Boy.” The Penguin Freud Reader. Ed. Adam Phillips. London: Penguin, 2006. Hardy, Thomas. Desperate Remedies. London: Macmillan, 1975. —Far from the Madding Crowd. London: Macmillan, 1975. Haslam, Richard. “Character and Construction in Bernard MacLaverty’s Early Short Stories about the Troubles.” Irish University Review 41.2 (Autumn/Winter 2011): 74–92. Holy Bible. King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1976. Ibsen, Henrik. Hedda Gabler and Other Plays. London: Penguin, 1968. Joyce, James. Dubliners. Ed. Terence Brown. London: Penguin, 1992. —A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ed. Seamus Deane. London: Penguin, 1992. MacLaverty, Bernard. Secrets and Other Stories. Belfast: Blackstaff, 1977. —“The One Letter that Says it All.” Interview with Stephen McGinty. Glasgow Herald, 20 August 1994, n. p.

26

Bernard MacLaverty

—“Days of Grace.” Interview with Susie Mackenzie. Guardian Weekend, 12 July 1997, 25. Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. O’Connor, Fionnuala. In Search of A State: Catholics in Northern Ireland. Belfast: Blackstaff, 1993. Parker, Michael. “Interview with Bernard MacLaverty.” 18 October 1987. —Northern Irish Literature 1956–1975: The Imprint of History. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2007. Rhys, Jean. Good Morning Midnight. Jean Rhys: The Early Novels. London: Deutsch, 1984. Russell, Richard Rankin. Bernard MacLaverty. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2009. Stout, Mira. “The Art of Fiction CVIII: William Trevor.” Paris Review 110 (Winter/ Spring 1989–90). http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/. [last accessed 9 June 2013]. Thorpe, Vanessa. “Alone at the End: the Tragic Muse Who Inspired James Joyce.” The Guardian, 20 February 2010. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/feb/21/ james-joyce-daughter-in-asylum. [last accessed 9 June 2013]. Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. London: Routledge, 1984.

2

Parabolic Plots in Bernard MacLaverty’s Lamb Richard Rankin Russell

Slavoj Žižek has recently lamented that “the central human right in latecapitalist society is the right not to be harassed, which is a right to remain at a safe distance from others.”1 Traditionally, not only the “mere physical proximity” of the potential victim often has mitigated against torture, but also, “at its most fundamental, the proximity of the Neighbour, with all the JudeoChristian-Freudian weight of this term. …”2 Contemporary practitioners of torture disavow this model, enabling them to reduce their victims to mere objects. Torture’s reprehensibility makes it easy to revile, but what if someone embraces his role fully as loving the Neighbor, giving hospitality to the afflicted, yet somehow ends up torturing and killing the Neighbor? What is our reaction to this process? This essay explores how the eponymous protagonist of Northern Ireland-born author Bernard MacLaverty’s 1980 novel Lamb disastrously attempts to re-enact two parables from the New Testament—the Good Samaritan and the Lost Sheep. Michael Lamb selfishly (if somewhat unknowingly) reshapes these selfdenying parables in befriending and then spiriting away a young epileptic boy named Owen Kane, whom he takes to Scotland, London, and then back to Ireland, finally drowning him near a Donegal beach in a misguided attempt to save the abused boy. Lamb murders Owen because he mistakenly believes he will prevent his experiencing further pain in the future and thus becomes exactly the kind of oppressor he swears he will never be. Thus out a position of extreme narcissistic sympathy does Lamb become a killer. In a comprehensive essay on the entirety of MacLaverty’s fiction in 2003, Michael Molino argued that “Lamb represents one man’s attempt to escape the strictures of Irish religion. …”3 But such a reading neglects how Lamb rejects a pernicious, disabling Irish religious narrative—Brother Benedict’s

28

Bernard MacLaverty

heavy-handed discipline, inspired by his belief in a sheerly wrathful God—only to replace it both with secularized variants of Christian narratives inspired by a belief in a sentimentalized, saccharine version of God and then with himself as a god through his naiveté and good intentions. In particular, Brother Sebastian’s/ Michael Lamb’s misreading of two “rescue” narratives—the Good Samaritan parable, which is gradually conflated with his unconscious insertion of himself into the parable of the Lost Sheep—leads him to construct destructive, selfish variants on these stories that he gradually pursues and wrongly inserts himself and others into with devastating consequences. As I argue throughout my monograph on MacLaverty, love—whether perverted and selfish or exemplary and sacrificial—drives all of his fiction, and the selfishness inherent in these parabolic plots contrasts MacLaverty’s endorsement of the unselfish love exhibited by Lamb’s father and by Christ and Mary in the novel.4 Despite his current atheism, MacLaverty repeatedly has told interviewers of the importance of his childhood Catholicism for his fiction.5 He is, in David J. Gordon’s term, a “sophisticated or literary atheist,” who does not believe “in the ghosts of religion yet to some degree, as a participant in her culture, [is] continuing to be haunted by them,” not “dismissing what is after all an active myth but rather … opposing it, making literary use of it.”6 His entire body of fiction bears out this faith’s significance, even though several critics have downplayed or mischaracterized its influence on novels such as Cal (1983).7 MacLaverty uses aspects of Catholic faith and practice to inform and color his stories, drive their action, and impart deeper meaning to them. More specifically for the argument of this essay, he usually invokes such Catholic devotional practices and Christian narratives in general to show how they are part of a given, complex tradition his protagonists have absorbed and sometimes re-imagined in their attempts to gain agency and break out of what they view as entrapping, authoritarian situations. As just one of many instances, I would cite Catherine McKenna’s terming herself “the prodigal daughter” after she does not return home after her “postgraduate year in Glasgow” in the novel Grace Notes (1997).8 In his reading of MacLaverty’s Cal, Stephen Watt convincingly argues that MacLaverty shares “demythologizing tendencies” with other Irish writers such as Seamus Deane and Brian Friel, which are usually directed at “History” and “mythology,” even though such formulations are marked by their own changing characteristics and their close relationship to each other.9 Watt employs the term “politics” to suggest “the possibility of a subject’s freedom, however relative or contingent, to choose a course of action and to accept responsibility for this



Parabolic Plots in Bernard MacLaverty’s Lamb

29

choice”; further, his reading of Lamb and other early works by MacLaverty through their protagonists’ possibilities for agency crucially hinges upon “our recognition” that “his characters’ ‘freedom of choice’ is typically exercised within a narrowly circumscribed ambit of possibility. The ‘politics’ of MacLaverty’s fiction exists precisely within the tension between individual choice and the power of ideological apparatuses to determine such choice well in advance.”10 I admire Watt’s nuanced articulation of how this process occurs in these first two novels and in MacLaverty’s early short fiction, even as I posit here a third element helping create this tension—the presence of sometimes unrecognized narratives that form part of our cultural inheritance and substratum and exert a powerful force upon our actions. Although “parable” might call immediately to mind those stories told by Jesus and collected in the New Testament, there is a long Jewish tradition of parable as well and indeed the term’s original Greek etymology suggests its wide application: parabole meant to toss or throw one thing beside another. Turning back to this sense of parable, Mark Turner argued in his 1996 study The Literary Mind that parables actually structure human thought itself. Turner offers a fairly broad definition: “The essence of parable is its intricate combining of two of our basic forms of knowledge—story and projection.”11 Then, distinguishing between parable as a creative literary convention and parable as a way in which the mind functions, Turner holds that we constantly engage in narrative acts on a daily basis: “Literary works known as parables may reside within fiction, but the mental instrument I call parable has the widest utility in the everyday mind.”12 Parable, we might say, is an inherently human habitus and for minds steeped in the Christian tradition, as Michael Lamb’s mind has been, the human tendency to place stories alongside each other to make sense of the world leads us back ineluctably to the parables of Christ. Moreover, Lamb’s immersion in Scripture has so conditioned his actions that even when he does not consciously recognize and apply a guiding Biblical narrative to a particular situation, a parable likely is still exerting its influence upon him. When Lamb attempts to best the actions of the Good Samaritan in rescuing the neglected, beaten Owen Kane, his tacit acceptance of the typology of that parable as prefiguring Christ’s Second Coming and gradual insertion of himself as a perverse Christ figure into the narrative signifies his doom and that of Owen. It is only after reading, rereading and teaching Lamb for several years that I have fully realized how it works in this manner—as an exemplary, hermeneutical caution against misreading sacred narratives and twisting them to promote our attempts to save others and ourselves and as a call to us to truly love our neighbors.

30

Bernard MacLaverty

Michael Lamb’s mind is replete with conscious and unconscious narratives, from didactic stories to myths. For instance, when Lamb catches Owen looking at pornography early during their time in London, he spins a didactic, monitory story: “‘I can just see it now,’ said Michael. ‘Yes, Officer, I want to report a missing boy. I know he couldn’t find his way back to the hotel. So he’s well and truly lost—in London, a city of … fourteen million? Yes, you see we ran away together from a Borstal in Ireland. No, I’m not his father.’”13 He offers another warning tale when he finds out Owen has stolen the Papermate pen he gives him (63). More important, the actions of Icarus and Daedalus unconsciously guide the actions of Owen and Lamb, respectively, as I have argued elsewhere, suggesting how MacLaverty may believe that such myths condition our lives whether or not we are entirely aware of them—or if we are at all.14 In this belief, he shares with both James Joyce in his depiction of Leopold Bloom as a modern-day Odysseus in Ulysses and Brian Friel, in his portrayal of Frank Hardy as a contemporary version of the Irish mythological Naoise figure in Faith Healer, their “conviction that primitive myths are not impositions of a culture but innate possessions of every single man, who professes to be a unique being but is in fact a copy, consciously or unconsciously emulating the lives of more original predecessors.”15 Intriguingly, many of Lamb’s beliefs and actions are unconscious repetitions of Biblical narratives and Catholic traditions. Brother Sebastian, who after leaving the borstal returns to his original name, “Michael Lamb,” likely took his Christian Brothers’ name from Saint Sebastian, which shapes his view of himself as martyr throughout the novel. Similarly, he lives up to his Christian name’s association with the Archangel Michael, who is associated with water and judgment, in drowning Owen in the novel’s conclusion. And “Lamb” connotes both his casting of himself as a Christ figure and his simultaneous desire to rescue the “lost lamb,” Owen Kane. While Michael Lamb’s religious beliefs do recede, his way of making meaning is thus still indelibly influenced by exemplary narratives from the Bible even in his largely unconscious attempts to reshape them. Lamb is driven by a series of Biblical narratives all focused on the rescue of victims or potential victims. The first of these occurs in a remembered scene in which Lamb saves Owen Kane from a sure death during a basketball game while he is having a fit. Owen topples off the wall-bars and is trapped between them and the brick wall: “He gyrated and threshed, his knees and legs unable to bend. His head pummeled on the bars” (52). He is also being burned by the pipes and soon, “There was blood on his face and collar … and he was making a noise in his throat like the draining of a sink” (52). After Brother Sebastian and some older boys save him



Parabolic Plots in Bernard MacLaverty’s Lamb

31

by gradually “easing the stricken Owen to the surface,” Benedict notes how, “‘in the past,’” epilepsy could be “‘construed as demonic possession’” (52). Here Benedict implicitly casts Sebastian as a Christ-like healer (see Mt. 8.16, 8.28–34, 9.32, 12.22–28; Mk 1.32–34, 5.1–20, Lk. 8.26–40).16 This first rescue narrative, repeatedly cast in aquatic language, is completely reversed in the closing scene of the novel, when Lamb allows Owen to have an epileptic fit and holds his head under the surface of the sea off Donegal, drowning him. Lamb also consciously evokes the Abraham/Isaac sacrifice story from Genesis only to savagely reverse it by killing Owen, the real lamb of the novel. Watt has pointed out the presence of this Abraham/Isaac narrative17 and certainly, given Lamb’s murder of his “son” in the novel’s conclusion, there is an irony in his signing himself as “M. Abraham” in the register of the first hotel in London where they stay. He is led to this appellation by his viewing of the title page of a story the clerk is reading: “‘An Act of Love’ by Garth Abrahams”; his conscious addition of, “after a moment’s hesitation[,] ‘and son,’” suggests his clear recognition of this Old Testament narrative (45). Lamb’s insertion of himself as Abraham into a contemporary version of this Old Testament account exemplifies his penchant for rescue narratives and this passage similarly illustrates his associative tendency—here, done consciously—to insert himself into Biblical stories. Another instance of such narrative association and personal incorporation occurs later during their first night in London after Owen has gone to sleep. When the barmaid asks Lamb if he wants a bitter to drink, he muses, “What a strange thing to call a drink. Bitter. Aloes. Sorrow. For something that was supposed to make you feel happy. Vinegar on a sponge offered as an act of kindness. One of the Brothers had told him of being in Rome and drinking a wine called ‘Tears of Christ’” (53). Here, Lamb consciously models himself as the “Man of Sorrows,” already consciously suffering as a Christ figure for Owen, drinking his literal bitter and his figurative suffering. Later, through his largely unconscious reworking of the parable of the Lost Sheep, Lamb will perceive himself as the Good Shepherd, a sort of secular Christ, activated by love, searching for his lost sheep, Owen Kane; but he finally kills him rather than rescuing him. In an insightful but little-noticed comment on Michael Lamb’s character, Gregory McNamee terms him “the essence of the Good Samaritan despite his having lost his faith.”18 MacLaverty has been drawn to the Good Samaritan parable beginning with Lamb: his short story collection, Matters of Life and Death (2006), is framed with two such contemporary versions of narrators who

32

Bernard MacLaverty

go in literal circles then take straight paths toward delivery and safety: “On the Roundabout” features a family man who stops and picks up a stranger who is being attacked by Protestant loyalist thugs and brings him to hospital, while the visiting Scottish writer, lost in an Iowa snowstorm and literally going in circles, is rescued by the Native American housekeeper in “Winter Storm.” At the end of “On the Roundabout,” the narrator recalls that after the incident in which he and his wife save the man’s life, he wrote a letter to the Belfast Telegraph, the leading newspaper in the province, explicitly casting the narrative in terms of this well-known parable: “The guy was outa hospital and he was trying to thank the Good Samaritan family who’d helped him on the roundabout that night.”19 Additionally, another story from that collection, “A Trusted Neighbor,” roughly reverses the Good Samaritan parable in showing the deceitfulness of a Protestant policeman, next-door neighbor to a Catholic family, whom he endangers by repeatedly parking his car in front of their house when he begins receiving death threats from the IRA. In this case, the stranger whom others are attempting to wound tries in turn to ensure that those who have befriended him are wounded instead, a parabolic perversion if ever there was one. MacLaverty, like his character Lamb, immersed from early on in Scripture, was likely drawn back to Biblical narratives when he became a prose writer because of their literariness and their implicit formal endorsement of characters’ agency. Robert Alter has argued that the authors of the Hebrew texts (the New Testament is not his remit) invented this new medium of prose narration both because of its “range and flexibility in the means of presentation” and its ability to “liberate fictional personages from the fixed choreography of timeless events,” thus transforming “storytelling from ritual rehearsal to the delineation of the wayward paths of human freedom, the quirks and contradictions seen as moral agents and complex centers of motive and feeling.”20 MacLaverty subtly shows how the potentially liberating power of later, New Testament narratives becomes entrapping when Michael Lamb casts himself as a veritable god. More specifically, MacLaverty must have delighted to find not only the suitability of the particularities of the Good Samaritan plot for Lamb but also its narrative appropriateness for a long fiction. Frank Kermode has argued that because of the length of parables like the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son, “they are about to merge into long narratives, which may also retain some of the qualities of parable.”21 Interestingly, the story of the Good Samaritan only appears in the Gospel of Luke, “who is generally thought of as the most literary as well as the most genial and bourgeois of the evangelists.”22 Sallie McFague TeSelle has delineated a subgenre she terms the “parabolic novel,” which gives us “insight



Parabolic Plots in Bernard MacLaverty’s Lamb

33

into evil through metaphoric transformation,” in novels such as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Melville’s Moby Dick, and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and The Brother Karamazov,23 it seems likely that Dostoevsky’s major parabolic novels played a role in MacLaverty’s writing Lamb in this mode. He has explicitly and repeatedly identified Dostoevsky as a major influence, noting to me that his Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot were early models and telling C. J. Ganter that he read The Brothers Karamazov “at great length, for weeks and weeks. It was the first book that truly communicated and created such an excitement inside my head that I went on to read other Dostoevsky [novels].”24 MacLaverty has averred when asked if he has a particular message he wants to communicate to readers that “it’s a plea for respect and love, the way we treat each other. It’s anti-violence, it’s anti-institutionalized church, those kinds of things.”25 The Good Samaritan parable expresses just this “plea for respect and love” and the merciful treatment of others. Christ’s iteration of this parable is provoked by a lawyer, who has just asked him “‘what shall I do to inherit eternal life?’” (Lk. 10.25). Christ famously replies, “‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbor as thyself ’” (Lk. 10.27). But the lawyer, who, we are told, wants to “justify himself,” cunningly asks Jesus, “‘Who is my neighbor?’” (10.29). Christ responds by telling him the parable of the Good Samaritan, in which a priest, then a Levite, refuse to render aid to a wounded man who has been robbed and who is finally helped by a member not of his own tribe, a Samaritan (10.30–7). When Christ asks him which of the three men proved to a neighbor to the man, the chastened lawyer has to answer, “‘He that shewed mercy to him’” (10.37). The Jewish lawyer is humbled mainly because Jews thought Samaritans unclean: to emphasize this belief, Jerram Barrs has recently pointed out that “The Jews had a saying that if one met a Samaritan walking along the road one should walk into the ditch to avoid contact even between the two shadows.”26 MacLaverty employs this parable because of his consistent fictional emphasis on love, as I noted earlier, and once we realize that the Good Samaritan parable drives Sebastian’s early actions, we recognize its resonances, especially concerning his desire to lovingly “rescue” and care for the “beaten stranger,” Owen Kane. His implicit and tacit identification with Christ’s parable of the Good Samaritan allows him to seemingly unconsciously cast himself as rescuing a young boy who should be his enemy according to the antagonistic teacher/student relationship modeled by the masochistic Benedict. For example, as Chapter One opens with Brother Sebastian’s return to the industrial

34

Bernard MacLaverty

school after the death of his father, he tells Brother Benedict, his superior, that he is considering leaving the Brothers, musing, “‘a place that can treat a twelveyear-old boy as a criminal for mitching school and running away from home. That can’t be right?’” (13). When Benedict then tells him he is spending too much time with Owen, Sebastian replies, “‘But he needs a lot of time. Nobody has ever spent time on him before’” (14). Benedict rejects this model of care, offering instead an educational model of conformity and physical discipline, concluding grimly, “‘If they do not conform, we thrash them. We teach them a little of God and a lot of fear’” (14). Owen has been not just beaten by Benedict at the school, often unfairly, but also repeatedly by his itinerant, drunken father before he came to the school: “When he came home, he would get drunk and whip Owen with whatever came to hand, a length of electrical flex, his belt, a bamboo cane, an old leather his own father used to sharpen his razor on” (17). Owen, outcast at home, is similarly marginalized at the industrial school: “Because he was younger than the others, he made few friends. He was a loner walking the perimeter wire” (19). Through the repetitious beatings given him at home, then at this school, Owen in a sense re-enacts the beating of the man in the parable of the Good Samaritan over and over until his Samaritan, Brother Sebastian, appears and rescues him. Sebastian is led to be merciful to Owen because of his genuine interest in the boy’s welfare and the recent loss of his father, who was always merciful to him, his mother and animals on their farm. The most poignant and important passage, particularly for understanding its parabolic plots, occurs when Sebastian, now Michael Lamb, recalls his father’s sacrificial care for his crippled wife (85), then recalls how he loved animals, except for seagulls, whose eggs he would lead Michael to smash “on climbing trips around the cliffs and rocky coves” because “‘They’re a curse. … They do more damage than enough. They’ll peck the eyes from a lamb before the ewe can get her born—aye, and the tongue too. They’ll leave it in such a state that there’s nothing left to do but kill it’” (86). We have here in miniature Michael’s model for fatherly love coupled with an endorsement of mercy toward the less fortunate.27 Michael thus desires to protect Owen (Gaelic for “lamb”), whom he sees as a beaten and tormented creature, slowly being destroyed by the pecking, birdlike Brother Benedict, whose active torment of the boys in his charge can also be read as a variation MacLaverty introduces to the parable of the Good Samaritan.28 Recall that Christ notes in Lk. 10.31, after the man has been beaten and robbed, “And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.” This priest, the first of three potential



Parabolic Plots in Bernard MacLaverty’s Lamb

35

rescuers for the poor traveler, refuses to get involved and walks by the man, exemplifying the neglect of Christ’s commandment to “Love … thy neighbor as thyself (Lk. 10.27). In Lamb, Owen likely expected Brother Benedict to be a helping, loving “neighbor” to him, but instead he only gets rejection, disdain, and unfair punishment from him. The various orders of Brothers in Ireland were not priests but nevertheless were representatives of the Catholic Church and meant to extend the mercy of Christ to those in need under their care. Benedict’s dereliction of duty aligns him with the neglectful priest in the Good Samaritan parable, but his active persecution of Owen inflects MacLaverty’s use of that narrative with a strain of hatred absent from Christ’s parable. There is no second potential helper in MacLaverty’s novel like the Levite who appears in Lk. 10.32, but the hateful treatment of Owen by Benedict seemingly demands a similarly strong but loving response by Sebastian, the Samaritan figure. In Christ’s parable, the gaze of the Samaritan upon the wounded man leads him to have “compassion on him. And [he] went up to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him” (Lk. 10.33–4). Portraying this action of mercy by a Samaritan is especially striking and generous of Christ since earlier, he had tried to enter “a village of the Samaritans. … And they did not receive him, because his face was as though he would go to Jerusalem” (Lk. 9.52–3). When the disciples James and John see the Samaritans’ refusal to grant hospitality to Jesus, they advocate commanding fire to come down from heaven and consume the Samaritans (9.54), but Christ “turned, and rebuked them, and said, ‘Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of. For the Son of man is not come to destroy men’s lives but to save them’” (9.55). Taken in its proper context, as it often is not, Christ’s parable is truly full of grace: he not only refuses to destroy or hate the Samaritans for their refusal of him earlier, but offers one of their tribe up as an exemplar of mercy, thus inscribing a fictive narrative of hope through imagining true neighborliness committed with abandon and profligacy by a Samaritan whose tribe has just been associated with a distinct lack of compassion and mercy in Luke’s previous chapter. The novel never explicitly states that Sebastian/Michael Lamb is consciously invoking himself as the Good Samaritan from the parable, but he surely would have known the story as a Brother in this Catholic religious order; moreover, his desire to rescue Owen, the beaten stranger, re-inscribes that parable in MacLaverty’s narrative. For example, Michael feeds the boy repeatedly during their escape to the Britain and while on the ferry from Belfast to Scotland, he “cover[s] him with the tail of his anorak” (29), just as the Good Samaritan covers

36

Bernard MacLaverty

the stranger he finds on the road. In fact, Lamb even goes beyond the mercy modeled in that parable for a time, because while the Samaritan leaves the stranger at an inn and pays for his care, vowing to repay the innkeeper for more expenses when he returns (Lk. 10.34–5), Lamb takes Owen to several hotels in London and stays with him, trying to make him healthier and lead him into some kind of normalcy. But Lamb gradually transforms his role borrowed from Christ’s parable of the Good Samaritan into the role of Christ Himself, coming to see himself on a mission to save Owen, perhaps inspired by Lk. 9.55, where Jesus vows not to destroy humans but to save them as a prelude to this parable. As MacLaverty’s novel progresses, Lamb replaces the Good Samaritan narrative with a secularized version of the Christian narrative of salvation; the consequences are devastating. Realizing that the Good Samaritan parable has often been read typologically for the coming of Christ enables us to apprehend this transformation of Lamb in the novel from the figure of the helpful Samaritan to that of a finally perverse Christ. Keeping in mind that Christ offered his parable as an answer to the lawyer who asked how to attain eternal life, Kermode observes that “Samaritan” (as Augustine seems to have known) comes from the same root as “shepherd”; the Samaritan is the Good Shepherd. Moreover, plēsion, neighbor, is related to another Hebrew word meaning “shepherd” … So the lawyer asked a new question and got the answer to an old one: the Good Shepherd, who comforts our distress and will return hereafter. This “futuristic” eschatology is wholly lost in Luke’s hortatory conclusion, “go and do likewise.”29

Again, it is difficult to prove whether Lamb is consciously engaging in this kind of hermeneutical endeavor in the novel, but MacLaverty suggests at one point that Lamb has a sense (even if twisted) of the basic typology of Scripture as moving from the Old Testament law to the New Testament emphasis on grace embodied in Christ. On the ferry crossing from Belfast to Stranraer, Scotland, Lamb thinks: “The whole system was totally unjust. He had tried to change it from within, tempering the law at every opportunity with his own warmth. Now the saving of an individual was more important than the law. Owen was more important” (33; my emphases). By associating the industrial school with the “law” and himself as an roving savior figure (recalling Jesus’ call to his disciples to leave their homes for an itinerant life with Him at the end of Luke 9), offering grace and mercy to the outcast like the boy Owen, Lamb fails to understand Christ’s incarnation and ministry in the New Testament as a fulfillment of the Old Testament law. Instead, he sees himself as rejecting not just the Biblical law but law in general, not with



Parabolic Plots in Bernard MacLaverty’s Lamb

37

Christian grace and mercy grounded in the salvific work of Christ, but with a bland, abstracted notion of himself as love. Thus MacLaverty shows Lamb finally jettisoning the model of the Good Samaritan as too uninvolved in the stranger’s life and embracing the model of the Good Shepherd in his Second Coming, particularly through the narrative use of another parable—the Lost Sheep. But crucially, his adoption of the Good Samaritan parable leads him to become fully secular even as he inserts himself into the Lost Sheep parable, one which he also renders secular. In fact, as Robert Funk has shown in analyzing why Jesus chose the Samaritan as the central figure of the parable, “it is not simply satisfactory to answer that the Samaritan is merely a model of neighborliness. … Rather, the Samaritan is the one whom the victim does not, could not expect would help, indeed does not want his help … the Samaritan is a secular figure; he functions not as an esoteric cipher for a religious factor … but in his concrete, everyday significance.”30 As Lamb continues to enact the central plot of this parable, what strikes us is exactly this: his helping Owen Kane is part and parcel of his leaving the order of the Brothers. To put it another way: he feels he must become secular, a Samaritan, in order to express mercy to the boy. In his mind, retaining the Catholic identity of “Brother Sebastian” within the rigid, cruel system administered by Brother Benedict at the borstal would prevent him from being an agent of mercy. But as secular “Michael Lamb,” he attends to the “concrete, everyday” needs of Owen. As they travel on the ferry to Scotland, he muses, “It was this caring for the boy that Michael looked forward to. Dressing him well, not prissily, buying him things he had never had before, taking him places. Teaching him. … Sacrifice was what was required. He had never really felt this way before” (34). This new feeling of caring differs from the emotion he had for his parents—“something born of respect and gratefulness”—and “the religious fervor, of self-denial,” during which “all of his love was channeled toward Jesus and Mary” (34). Rather than going to this extreme of religious feeling, as Michael Lamb the secular Samaritan, he is free to move fully into providing for the material needs of the “stranger,” Owen Kane. Michael’s jettisoning of his faith and movement into secularism through this first parable and into the Lost Sheep parable clashes with his guiding earthly figure of mercy—his own father—who is clearly a Christian believer as evidenced in his sacrificial care for his wife and love of creation. George Watson observes that “Michael’s relationship with his dead father, and his desire to create something similar for the deprived Owen, are two sides of the one coin.”31 In this regard, the narrator even tells us directly, “Michael wanted to be to Owen what his father had been to him” (89). Lamb’s father models the Lost Sheep

38

Bernard MacLaverty

parable to him by his active pursuit of animals in his care, particularly sheep. In the middle of the novel, Michael muses about his father, “He was a man who had respect for every living thing. Although he was plagued by rabbits,” he would kill the ones with myxomatosis quickly and mercifully, and “He pulled chickens’ necks so fast and expertly that they never felt a thing” (86). This long passage is followed by his father’s attempts to save his lambs from the pecking seagulls I cited above (86). Lamb’s “rescue” of Owen from the avian Brother Benedict thus recalls not only the Good Samaritan parable, but also Lamb’s father’s version of the Lost Sheep parable. Crucially, however, while Brother Sebastian is able to assume the Samaritan role as he leaves the religious order behind and becomes Michael Lamb, he cannot truly assume the role of the Good Shepherd, Christ, in the Lost Sheep parable like his earthly father has because of his rejection of his faith. His father’s faith is signified by his loving care of creation and the animals within it, except for the seagulls that would kill his lambs, signifying his dependence on God. Paul Ricoeur clarifies and confirms such a stance when he argues that for believers, our significance and teleology is confirmed in “an original but ongoing creation,” noting further that “The sense of our radical dependence on a higher power … may be reflected in a love for the creature, for every creature, in every creature …”.32 Yet Michael Lamb increasingly cuts himself off from not just the natural world, but from human community as well, as he attempts to be all things to Owen, his lost sheep that he has rescued. Michael Lamb, because of his determination to save Owen from the various predatory birds in the novel, finally fails in his rescue mission because he cannot become Love divine; his affirmation of a sheerly secular love wallows in sentimentality rather than the love and justice of Christ. When he vows, “I am love,” and further thinks, “He knew he was good. I am love,” he seems to be trying to convince himself that he is a sort of secular Christ to justify his determination “to help in whatever way he could the suffering of the world” (113). Rather than saving Owen, he stages a scene at the beach in Donegal at the end of the novel where Owen, denied his epilepsy-preventing medicine, is then “spared” and sacrificed by Lamb as he drowns him. If Christ’s sacrificial love for believers is signified supremely for Catholics in the wine and bread of the Eucharist, Michael and Owen’s drinking wine and eating bread on the beach (148) instead signifies Michael’s pending false sacrifice of the boy and inability to drown himself (152–3) as part of his movement into murder. Even in the conclusion, he refuses to accept responsibility for his act, musing, “He had no luck. No faith. And now, no love. He had started with a pure loving simple ideal but it had gone foul on him, turned inevitably into something evil” (152).



Parabolic Plots in Bernard MacLaverty’s Lamb

39

Instead of modeling himself on his childhood print of Jesus walking on the water with “His lightly bearded face full of love of pity,” reaching out to the terrified disciple Peter (34) or on another print depicting Mary’s love for the infant Jesus that “Michael had tried to imitate” as a child (35), he terrifies and drowns Owen Kane, reversing the narrative trajectory of those illustrations. He believes that more terrible things will happen if he does not kill the boy: “Brother Benedict’s triumph, his punishments and victimization; the boy’s mother weeping and drinking and hating, neither of them appreciating the goodness that was in the boy. Smothering. A life of misery, of frustration that led to inevitable crime and lovelessness, in his own, Michael’s absence, stretched into the future” (147). Such a calculation aligns him with torturers who jettison the model of loving our neighbor as ourselves and accords with Žižek’s analysis of how torturers now operate from a belief that “The tortured subject is no longer a Neighbour, but an object whose pain is neutralized, reduced to a property that has to be dealt with in a rational utilitarian calculus (so much pain is tolerable if it prevents a much greater amount of pain).”33 At least if Lamb allowed the boy to live, he would have a chance to escape the horrors of this projected narrative of wrongs; as it is, Lamb circumscribes Owen’s agency and sets up a false mercy killing, a deadly smothering. Lamb’s unconscious and selfish re-enactment of the “rescue” parables of the Good Samaritan and the Lost Sheep finally stems from his excess sentimentality compounded with his rampant egotism and pride. Both the Good Samaritan and the Good Shepherd forget self in pursuit of healing a victim and rescuing a lamb (and by extension believers), respectively, but Brother Sebastian/Michael Lamb re-imagines them to feature himself as a hero and forgets mercy in the process. Thus his comment early in the novel that “he had also to save himself from the slack tide of his own life,” which concludes the paragraph where he vows about his mission to rescue Owen—“Now the saving of an individual was more important than the law”—reveals how his mercy mission is compromised by his pride from the start (33). Inserting himself into these re-imagined parables gives him excitement and purpose but leads him to neglect Owen repeatedly once they are in London, then finally kill him. Brother Benedict thus assesses Sebastian/Lamb correctly early in the novel when he states, “There is no room here for your soft-centred, self-centred idealism” (14). Žižek’s description of those whose “respect [of] the vulnerable Other [is] brought to an extreme through an attitude of narcissistic subjectivity which experiences the self as vulnerable, constantly exposed to a multitude of potential ‘harassments,’” precisely fits Michael Lamb.34 Moreover, Lamb’s eventual murder of Owen out of

40

Bernard MacLaverty

a seemingly abundant compassion for him concretely illuminates Žižek’s claim that the ideology of “narcissistic subjectivity” springs from the same root as an ideology that subscribes to torture, since both positions share “an underlying refusal of any higher causes, the notion that the ultimate goal of our lives is life itself.”35 Thus, Lamb and Benedict, although they start from seemingly opposed ideological poles—mercy and endorsement of physical beatings and Irish republican violence, respectively—actually are very similar. We might even say Benedict is slightly superior ethically since at least he publicly articulates his shameful ideology about physically punishing their students and supporting the IRA, while Lamb vows to act mercifully in rejecting Benedict’s example. Lamb resembles the “average Catholic reader” identified by Flannery O’Connor (one of MacLaverty’s exemplars), who “forgets that sentimentality is an excess, a distortion of sentiment usually in the direction of an overemphasis on innocence, and that innocence, whenever it is overemphasized in the ordinary human condition, tends by some natural law to become its opposite.”36 Wallowing in sentiment and trusting in a false sense of his own innocence, Lamb neglects the parables of mercy that should have guided him and becomes the worst predator of all in the novel. In closing, I would note that besides showing how easily such scriptural narratives can be misread and perverted in deadly ways by characters such as Lamb, MacLaverty also suggests that we have our own responsibility to act ethically in response to his parabolic novel. Funk has articulated how the concluding verse of the Good Samaritan parable, “‘Then go and do likewise’” (Lk. 10.37), even if a “misleading … moralistic interpretation,” has “the virtue of calling attention to the event-character of what transpires in the parable and, as a consequence, of what is intended to transpire in the listeners.”37 If we think the true audience of this parable is limited to the skeptical lawyer, we fail our hermeneutical responsibility in reading the parable and, frankly, in reading and responding to MacLaverty’s fiction. This process should mirror the expected response of hearers and readers of New Testament parables as articulated by Sallie McFague TeSelle: “The spectators must participate imaginatively, must so live in the story that insight into its strangeness and novelty come home to them.” Because this kind of parable is “primarily concerned not with knowing but with doing,” therefore, we “must not forget that the goal of a parable is finally in the realm of willing, not of knowing.”38 Susan Colón argues similarly that parables “demand an embodied response to the challenge they pose,” going on to assert, “The invitation to think very differently about something one thought one knew carries with it



Parabolic Plots in Bernard MacLaverty’s Lamb

41

an invitation to act very differently, according to a new construal of reality.”39 Thus we must move out into the world in actively loving the Other, not merely tolerating her presence and congratulating ourselves for doing so. In “Catholic Novelists,” Flannery O’Connor observed that “There are those who maintain that you can’t demand anything of the reader. They say the reader knows nothing about art, and that if you are going to reach him, you have to be humble enough to descend to his level.” But she rejects such condescension, arguing that “Art. … is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.”40 Bernard MacLaverty’s first novel, like all his fiction, demands we make an effort to understand it fully. In so doing, particularly through apprehending its parabolic nature, we see our own vainglorious attitudes in Lamb, are disabused of them, and move toward becoming truly neighborly.

Notes   1 Žižek, 41.  2 Ibid.   3 Molino, 175.   4 See my Bernard MacLaverty, where I posit that “In MacLaverty’s fiction, real sacrificial love points away from the petty concerns of self and country and toward an ideal worth of our full pursuit” (22).   5 See “An Interview with Bernard MacLaverty,” Russell, 22, and “An Interview with Bernard MacLaverty,” Fernandes, for clear affirmations of Catholicism’s influence on his fiction.   6 Gordon, 5.   7 See my “The Mortification Motif in Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal,” 107–9, for a critique of recent treatments of Cal by critics such as Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, who contends that Catholic elements in that novel epitomize a “traditional Catholic victim mentality” (246).  8 MacLaverty, Grace Notes, 40. See also Barry Sloan’s argument that Catherine McKenna’s “reflections on music and on her creativity are formulated in Christian, and often specifically Catholic, terminology” (311; 311–15).   9 Watt, 131 and throughout. 10 Ibid., 136, 138. 11 Turner, 5. 12 Ibid., 7. 13 MacLaverty, Lamb, 59. All subsequent references to the novel will be given parenthetically in the text.

42

Bernard MacLaverty

14 See Russell, Bernard MacLaverty, 43–6. 15 Kiberd, 224. 16 Holy Bible (King James Study version). All further references to passages from Scripture will be given parenthetically in the text by book, chapter, and verse. 17 Watt, 139. 18 MacLaverty, “Capturing the Whirlwind,” 14. 19 MacLaverty, Matters of Life and Death, 4. 20 Alter, 28. 21 Kermode, 25. 22 Ibid., 34. 23 TeSelle, 126. 24 MacLaverty, “An Interview with Bernard MacLaverty,” Russell, 22; MacLaverty, “Bernard MacLaverty, Glasgow, in Interview,” 18. 25 MacLaverty, “Bernard MacLaverty, Glasgow, in Interview,” 14. 26 Barrs, 36–7. 27 MacLaverty’s brief portrayal of James Delargy’s tender nursing of his mother through her last year of life in “Anodyne” anticipates Lamb’s father’s merciful, sacrificial care for his crippled wife: “Teaching through the day, sitting up most of the night, putting her on the commode, feeding her, caring for her, watching death insinuate itself into her face” (Secrets 106–7). 28 See Russell, Bernard MacLaverty, 44, for a brief discussion of Benedict as a monstrous bird. 29 Kermode, 38. 30 Funk, 77. 31 Watson, xi. 32 Ricoeur, 297, 298. 33 Ibid., 45. 34 Žižek, 42. 35 Ibid. 36 See O’Connor, “The Church and the Fiction Writer,” 147–8. MacLaverty has praised O’Connor often, noting in “Writing Is a State of Mind, Not an Achievement,” that “She has a book called Mystery and Manners I would give to anybody who wanted to write short stories,” 202. 37 Funk, 82. 38 TeSelle, 71, 79, 80. 39 Colón, 6–7. 40 O’Connor, “Catholic Novelists,” 189.



Parabolic Plots in Bernard MacLaverty’s Lamb

43

Works cited Alter, Robert. The Art of Biblical Narrative. Revised and updated edn. New York: Basic Books, 2011. Barrs, Jerram. Learning Evangelism from Jesus. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009. Colón, Susan. Victorian Parables. London and New York: Continuum, 2012. Funk, Robert W. “The Old Testament in Parable: The Good Samaritan.” Funk on Parables: Collected Essays. Ed. and introd. Bernard Brandon Scott. Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press, 2006. 67–84. Gordon, David J. Literary Atheism. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. Haslam, Richard. “‘The Pose Arranged and Lingered Over’: Visualizing the ‘Troubles.’” Contemporary Irish Fiction: Themes, Tropes, Theories. Eds Liam Harte and Michael Parker. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. 192–212. Holy Bible. King James Study Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1999. Kennedy-Andrews, Elmer. “The Novel and the Northern Troubles.” The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel. Ed. John Wilson Foster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 238–58. Kermode, Frank. The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979. Kiberd, Declan. “Brian Friel’s Faith Healer.” Brian Friel: A Casebook. Ed. William Kerwin. New York: Garland Press, 1997. 211–25. MacLaverty, Bernard. Lamb. New York: George Braziller, 1980. —Secrets and Other Stories. New York: Viking, 1984. —“Capturing the Whirlwind.” Conducted by Gregory McNamee. The Bloomsbury Review 5.9 (June 1985): 14–15, 20. —Cal. New York: Norton, 1995 rpt of 1983 edn. —“Bernard MacLaverty, Glasgow, in Interview.” Conducted by Christian Ganter. Anglistik: Organ des Verbandes Deutscher Anglisten 7.2 (1996): 5–22. —Grace Notes. New York: Vintage, 1997. —“Writing Is a State of Mind Not an Achievement”: An Interview with Bernard MacLaverty. Conducted by Marisol Morales Ladrón. Atlantis 23.2 (December 2001): 201–11. —“An Interview with Bernard MacLaverty.” Conducted by Richard Rankin Russell. Irish Literary Supplement 26.1 (Fall 2006): 22. —Matters of Life and Death. New York: Norton, 2006. —“An Interview with Bernard MacLaverty.” Conducted by Dave Ramos Fernandes. Barcelona Review 56 (November/December 2006): http://www.barcelonareview. com/56/e_int.htm. [last accessed 12 December 2012] Molino, Michael. “Bernard MacLaverty.” Dictionary of Literary Biography (First Series) 267: British Novelists of the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Molino. Detroit: Gale Research Group, 2003. 172–80.

44

Bernard MacLaverty

O’Connor, Flannery. “Catholic Novelists.” Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Selected and ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Noonday, 1995 rpt. of 1961 ed. 169–90. —“The Church and the Fiction Writer.” Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose 143–53. Ricoeur, Paul. “Ethical and Theological Considerations on the Golden Rule.” Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Trans. David Pellauer. Ed. Mark I. Wallace. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995. 293–302. Russell, Richard Rankin. Bernard MacLaverty. Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press, 2009. —“The Mortification Motif in Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal.” Literature and Belief 33.1 (2013): 107–25. Sloan, Barry. “The Redress of Imagination: Bernard MacLaverty’s Grace Notes.” The Gift of Story: Narrating Hope in a Postmodern World. Eds Emily Griesinger and Mark Eaton. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2006. 303–16. TeSelle, Sallie McFague. Speaking in Parables: A Study in Metaphor and Theology. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975. Turner, Mark. The Literary Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Watson, George. “The Writer on Writing.” Lamb, Bernard MacLaverty. Ed. Hamish Robertson. Essex, UK: Longman, 1991. v–xii. Watt, Stephen. “The Politics of Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal.” Èire-Ireland: A Journal of Irish Studies 28.3 (Fall 1993): 130–46. Žižek, Slavoj. Violence. New York: Picador, 2008.

3

“Join us”: Musical Style and Identity in “My Dear Palestrina” Gerry Smyth

Introduction A particularly odious joke did the rounds at my secondary school in Dublin during the late 1970s: a man walking home from the pub in Belfast one night is hauled into an alleyway by another man who points a pistol at his head. “Catholic or Protestant?” asks the gunman. “Actually, I’m Jewish,” says the first man. “I must be the luckiest Arab in Belfast,” says the other, and pulls the trigger. The “humor” here depends on the listener’s knowledge of two contexts: first, the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland which, by the time I heard the joke, had been a part of Irish life (north and south of the border) for a decade or so; secondly, contemporary Middle Eastern politics and the bitter ethno-religious conflict consequent upon the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948. Ostensibly oriented towards the first, the joke “turns” on the incongruous invocation of the second; we “get” it; the tension resolves; the Jew dies. Bernard MacLaverty’s long short story “My Dear Palestrina” (A Time to Dance) also introduces a Jewish presence—in the form of the exiled Polish music teacher Marysia Schwartz—into the context of sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland. Both her religion and her profession throw into relief certain aspects of Northern Irish society in the pre-“Troubles” era. The story also serves as an early indication of the role played by art—and particularly music—in MacLaverty’s work and the function of music in relation to the sectarian society in which he grew up.

MacLaverty’s music My father had an old gramophone on which he played Schubert piano with pine needles. Huge shellac records, with a red circle and a white dog singing

46

Bernard MacLaverty into a horn, which whirred with static but which induced a calm in me, as a child, which I have not known since. When they were finished, after about two minutes, the tick of the over-run seemed the vilest sound in the world. The clack of teeth after divine music.1

This description by the unnamed narrator of “Hugo” (Secrets and Other Stories) initiates two recurring aspects of MacLaverty’s engagement with music: its material and technological presence within late twentieth-century (Northern) Irish society; and the inherently positive impact that music—or at least some forms of music—can have on those who hear it. Time and again throughout his stories, MacLaverty makes reference to the material tools of music-making: to the piano, the radio and the record player; and although they perform different functions in relation to the various characters and situations of which he writes, it is their presence—so simple yet so remarkable—that is significant. A “child monotonously played single notes on a piano” in “Anodyne” (Secrets 114), although the piano in “Matters of Life and Death I: Learning to Dance” is reserved “‘for visitors who can play’” (Matters of Life and Death 32); a transistor radio soundtracks the inexorable tragedy of Michael and Owen in Lamb (1980), while a young boy listens to Radio Luxembourg on the “wireless” in “The Beginnings of a Sin” (A Time to Dance 140); the inhabitants of an old folks’ home dance to the music of a record player in “No Joke” (129), while the eponymous protagonist of Cal “[puts] on an LP of the Rolling Stones to drown the silence” (10). Pianos, radios and records represent just some of the means whereby music makes its way into the everyday lives of MacLaverty’s characters. Each “thing” represents a moment in the community’s ongoing quest to incorporate music as a meaningful part of their lives. The technology it describes may be of a relatively simple kind; yet a signifier such as “LP” locates Cal in a very specific set of circumstances, while also implicating him in an incredibly complex array of physical practices and mental attitudes. A crucial element of the reader’s response to his character derives from his choice of music, and in the appreciation of the technological means he uses to reproduce it. Related to this is the realization that music serves as an extremely sensitive index of emotional experience, whether that emotion derives from “normal” human interaction or from the energies generated by living in a politically divided society. But what kind of music? Different styles, it seems, are capable of generating different emotional charges in relation to the different situations in which various characters find themselves. In the early story “Hugo,” again, the music of Schubert represents



“Join us”: Musical Style and Identity in “My Dear Palestrina”

47

valuable cultural capital, whereas the “popular melodies and country and western tunes” (Secrets 74) played by another of his mother’s lodgers do not meet with the approval of the narrator. In “Hugo” and “Anodyne”, popular music—a “pop group playing the hymns very badly” at an open-air mass (Secrets 88) and “a sing-song in the bar” (112)—is invoked in symbolic opposition to the high artistic pretensions of self-deluded characters. Popular music retains its negative connotations in Lamb when it forms the soundtrack to Michael’s realization that his attempt to forge a life for himself and Owen in London has failed (Lamb 131–2). Cal is probably the most musicalized of all MacLaverty’s characters, a quality that is closely associated with the tragedy of his situation. Cal is a musician himself, albeit (as befits his passive nature) of a fairly desultory kind. Throughout the novel he engages in a number of music-making activities, including buying records and cassettes of rock and blues music, playing his guitar and singing—the latter both for pleasure and as an accompaniment to work—and remembering his mother’s penchant for rebel ballads. Cal is a romantic (and, although he does not realize it, a Romantic) who associates music with freedom and love, as when he imagines using his guitar to serenade Marcella (Cal 83). Such positive associations are increasingly belied, however, over the course of a narrative in which music, along with everything else, becomes poisoned by a toxic sectarianism. Cal hears a jukebox as he waits for the IRA gunman Crilly to emerge from a shop he is robbing (61); a showband provides music for dancing as the same two men establish alibis for the murder they are about to commit (84). Marcella is implicated in this romantic discourse; a diary entry reveals the fact that she prefers the silence and birdsong on Slieve Gallon to the “shatteringly loud” Country and Western band to which she is exposed when accompanying her bitterly sectarian husband to a club (126). When Cal’s house is the object of a fire attack, more is destroyed than just his cassettes: In his own room he paused and picked out his guitar with the torch. The tuning knobs had melted. He picked the instrument up and the back banged away from the top with a faint grating chord, the way the sole of a shoe splits from its upper. “Aw Jesus no.” He threw the guitar on to the floor, where it boomed and repeated the chord thinly, and he eased himself out of the window. (77)

This “faint grating chord” signals more than just the destruction of a young man’s guitar: it deprives that young man—and the community which he

48

Bernard MacLaverty

represents—of a creative means for emotional expression. Where, the text implicitly asks, will this energy relocate? How will it be organized in relation to the community? The answer is already there, inasmuch as the description of musical failure (“boomed and repeated”) anticipates the echo of the bombs which constitute the failure of the community itself. We observe, then, that different genres of music—popular, folk, and art music—feature throughout MacLaverty’s work, and that these different genres function in different ways in relation to the various characters and contexts which the author creates. Sometimes music has positive connotations, as when Hugo uses a singing technique to help cure the narrator’s stammer (Secrets 78–9)—literally giving the young man a voice; or the various styles (jazz, blues, rock ’n’ roll, pop) that provide the soundtrack for Martin’s sexual adventures in the latter sections of The Anatomy School (2001). Sometimes music seems symbolically attuned with a range of negative emotions—regret, failure, fear, betrayal, prejudice; we observe this in the suicidal flautist and depressed narrator from “Across the Street” (The Great Profundo 130–43), or in the exploitative policeman from “A Trusted Neighbour” (Matters of Life and Death 63–87) whose unquestioned love for Elvis leaves him with no time for Miles Davis or what he dismisses as “‘Diddley-di music’” (72). All these associations, moreover, accrue extra resonance in the context of a politically divided community in which every value, every preference, every gesture registers at one and the same time as a political value, a political preference, and a political gesture. Because of its quasi-universal qualities, music is eminently symbolic—available for re-narrativization in relation to any given context; and this facility renders music eminently exploitable in situations of heightened political consciousness. As a writer emerging from just such a situation and as someone self-conscious with regard to his role within a literary tradition in which music features so strongly, it is perhaps no wonder that MacLaverty engages with music so frequently and so sensitively.

“My name is Danny McErlane” Like Catherine McKenna in Grace Notes, Danny McErlane’s principal mode of engagement with the world in “My Dear Palestrina” is auditory. “He liked listening to things” (A Time to Dance 39); he hears the world more than he sees it, and this both anticipates and symbolizes his “natural” facility for music. We notice this from the opening scene as Danny and his mother walk towards the house of the woman who will be his piano teacher: the “slow, raucous



“Join us”: Musical Style and Identity in “My Dear Palestrina”

49

cawing” of the rooks, the cinders that “spat and cracked” beneath their feet; the “high pinging of the blacksmith’s hammer” as they pass the forge, the “deep [resonance]” of Miss Schwartz’s door knocker (31). Even before he meets Miss Schwartz, Danny already has a heightened emotional relationship with music in general and with the inherited piano in particular: When he had visited Uncle George, Danny would slip into the front room on his own and climb up on the piano stool and single-finger notes. He liked to play the white ones because afterwards, when he struck a black note it was so sad that it gave him a funny feeling in his tummy. The piano stool had a padded seat which opened. Inside were wads of old sheet music with film stars’ pictures on the front. Bing Crosby, Johnny Ray, Rosemary Clooney. He had heard her singing on the radio. (32)

The physical response to various note clusters signals Danny’s aptitude for music; the ability of music to precipitate physical changes, and of certain people to experience those changes in a heightened form, have been a part of music theory since antiquity and became a cornerstone of Romantic musicology.2 Questions remain, however: what kind of music? How is music encountered? And how does music relate to the world in which it is made and/or consumed? The allusion to various popular contemporary singers—as well as to the principal contemporary medium (radio) for encountering these singers— initiates a discourse of musical value which informs the story throughout. This discourse both instantiates and symbolizes Danny’s predicament as a musically gifted, working-class Catholic boy living in a society divided along sectarian lines. The issue, then, is one of identity: “‘My name is Danny McErlane’” (43) sounds like a declarative statement but the story is in fact a dramatization of the extent to which Danny must learn to “perform” that identity, and to find a kind of musical experience equal to the name. There are three discursive centers operating within the story, each of which connotes a range of aesthetic, social, and technological values that are distinguishable from (although clearly related in some aspects to) the others, each of which is vying for the ownership rights over “‘Danny McErlane.’” These discursive centers relate to the three principal fields through which musical matter has been organized in the modern era: folk, popular, and art.3 For the remainder of this essay I would like to examine each of these in turn, considering

50

Bernard MacLaverty

what MacLaverty’s story implies with regard to the relations between them and what this in turn implies for life in pre-“Troubles” Northern Ireland.

“Am I right or am I wrong?” The McErlanes are a respectable working-class Catholic family living in a small town near Belfast. The story is set in 1957—the year in which the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, an unmanned research satellite which features in the latter part of the story.4 The state of Northern Ireland had been in existence since 1922, when the island was partitioned under the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. In the three and a half decades since then the state’s major constituent populations—Catholic and the majority Protestant—had lived for the most part in an uneasy truce. That truce was broken in December 1956, however, when, under pressure from internal hawkish elements, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) launched Operation Harvest, the so-called “Border Campaign” against the Northern Irish state.5 The IRA had spent the years since the end of World War Two attempting to reconstitute itself as a viable military and ideological presence throughout the island as a whole. The very existence of Northern Ireland was an affront to that ideology, as was the de facto constitution of Catholics as second-class citizens within that state. The campaign gathered some momentum after the deaths of two Volunteers—Seán South (aged 29) and Fergal O’Hanlon (aged 20)—in a botched raid on a police barracks on 1 January, 1957; apart from that it was a desultory affair, especially when compared in retrospect with the “Troubles” that commenced a decade later. Operation Harvest petered out in the early years of the new decade and was finally abandoned in February 1962. The blacksmith in Danny’s town represents a strain of opinion that has been active in Irish politics throughout the modern era—one which prioritizes class above nationalist or ethnic concerns. As he says to Danny: “This bloody country is full of yes-men and the most of them’s working class.” … “Yes, your honour, no, your honour. Dukes and bloody linen lords squeezing us for everything we’ve got, setting one side against the other. Divide and conquer. It’s an old ploy and the Fenians and Orangemen of this godforsaken country have fallen for it again.” (51)

The blacksmith’s communistic leanings are established by his association with one of the recurring images of Soviet ideology: the hammer. Although the blacksmith cites the Great Lock Out of 1913 as an example to be learned from,



“Join us”: Musical Style and Identity in “My Dear Palestrina”

51

the fact is that nation, ethnicity, and class have been ineradicably enmeshed throughout modern Irish history; and that ideologues such as James Connolly and James Larkin (whom he also invokes) were obliged throughout their careers to negotiate with ethnic politics of one form or another. As we have already observed, the forge is associated with sound—“the high pinging of the blacksmith’s hammer”—from the outset. This association develops over the course of the story, so that the blacksmith’s moral presence comes to register as an element of Danny’s aural landscape. The boy’s first encounter with the blacksmith comes directly after his first piano lesson, and a comparison between the two musical domains is made explicit when the narrative informs us that “[each] hammer blow pulsed through Danny’s head like the record at Miss Schwartz’s” (36). The comparison is then extended: “And what has you up this end of town?” Danny told him he was going to music. “To Miss Warts and all”? he shouted. “I wonder would she like this song?” He began to sing loudly, and bang his hammer to the rhythm, “If I was a blackbird.” When he came to the line “And I’d bury my head on her lily white breast,” he winked at Danny. He had a good voice and could get twirls into it—like Rosemary Clooney. (36–7)

The three musical domains which will set the limits on Danny’s world are invoked here in close proximity: the art music of “Miss Warts and all,” the popular music signaled with reference to a contemporary American singer and the folk tradition represented both by the ballad “If I Was a Blackbird” and by the blacksmith himself, the living embodiment of a character who features widely throughout that tradition. In one celebrated family of songs “the blacksmith” features as a handsome dissembler who lies about his part in the ruination of a local village girl. Associated as he immediately is with the ballad tradition, the blacksmith in MacLaverty’s story trails this inheritance, and there is as a consequence a question mark over his moral status within the text. “If I Was a Blackbird” is popular in many different versions across the Atlantic Archipelago; here it has the status of a work song—rhythmical music performed (like shanties and field hollers) in order to facilitate demanding manual labor. This association is attuned to the blacksmith’s political agenda, in which music provides aural testament to the history of a range of exploitative social systems. At the same time, the blacksmith’s use of music here represents a bodily response to aural stimulation, thus initiating a discourse of physicality within the narrative. Danny’s status as an adolescent who is becoming

52

Bernard MacLaverty

increasingly aware of his body draws him away from the cerebral art music associated with “‘Miss Warts and all,’” but towards the “rhythmical” music beaten out by the blacksmith with the obviously phallic symbol of his trade. As the story progresses, however, Miss Schwartz’s association with art music is increasingly offset by Danny’s growing awareness of her sexual presence. Read from this perspective, we could say that Danny wishes to play the “lusty” blacksmith to her “village girl.”6 We note also that the blacksmith’s presence is established in this opening encounter by the repetition of a particular sentence: “‘Am I right or am I wrong?’” This question becomes (along with the sound of the ringing hammer) the blacksmith’s leitmotif—in musical practice, a short phrase with which a listener comes to associate a particular idea or personality.7 Oscillating between playfulness and confrontation, the blacksmith’s question retains a powerful rhetorical force inasmuch as it assumes an asymmetric relationship between questioner and respondent, while at the same time demanding the interlocutor’s acknowledgment of the “reality” of the questioner’s vision of the world and how it works. For all his attractive and sympathetic nature, the blacksmith’s insistent question works to implicate the boy in a dualistic reality characterized by a series of related, symbiotic dyads: Soviet/American, class/nation, communist/ capitalist, Catholic/Protestant, nationalist/unionist, male/female, mind/body, art/labor, blacksmith/father. “My Dear Palestrina” works to show that music, so far from providing an escape from this system, is fully implicated in it. That is the lesson Danny must learn. The blacksmith’s “music” (the principal characteristic of which is a strong rhythmical emphasis) comes to form a powerful presence in Danny’s aural imagination—a robust, strident voice which the boy will struggle to harmonize with the other insistent voices in his life. His most significant contribution to Danny’s development is the suggestion that the boy is of an age to find his own voice, his own rhythm. Once again, this is expressed in terms of a musical conceit: so, whereas after their first encounter “Danny tried to walk the road in step to the fading ring of his hammer” (37), after their final meeting “Danny waited for the hammer blows so that he could walk in step but none came and he had to choose his own rhythm” (61).

“Something with a bit of a tune to it” If folk music represents one important dimension of Danny’s musical imagination, the popular music of the 1950s represents another. Whereas the



“Join us”: Musical Style and Identity in “My Dear Palestrina”

53

blacksmith’s music emerges from the clash of hammer and anvil, popular music is associated with the radio and (initially at least) with the piano, for it is in the inherited piano stool that he finds the sheet music for songs by popular contemporary artists such as Bing Crosby, Johnny Ray, and Rosemary Clooney. His primary identification with this style of music is established when, asked by Miss Schwartz at their first meeting if he has a favorite singer, Danny cites Elvis Presley, to which she replies “‘Rubbish’” (33–4). Popular music has two characteristics which attract Danny in the first instance: lyrics and a memorable melody. The music to which Miss Schwartz is trying to introduce him, however, is different: She lifted the lid on one of the pieces of furniture and put on a record. She turned it up so loud that the music bulged in the room. Danny had never heard anything like it and he hated it. It had no tune and he kept waiting for somebody to sing but nobody did. (35)

The reference to “tune” is immediately picked up by the blacksmith who, as observed above, “had a good voice and could get twirls into it—like Rosemary Clooney.” Soon after, Danny’s mother passes a damning verdict on his practice scales: “‘There’s not much of a tune to that’” (39). Danny will learn in time that art music does in fact feature melodic elements; and later in the story his training will enable him to “hum the melody” (41) of the piece of music that initially so baffles him. For the uninitiated, however, the problem remains. Popular music’s roots in folk music bring these two fields into temporary alliance against a form of music which by this point in its evolution tended to disdain popularity or accessibility as relevant criteria. If folk music was for the “folk” and popular music was about being “popular,” art music distinguished itself by being neither of those; its pleasures and rewards were oriented elsewhere and otherwise. Despite his “good voice,” the blacksmith’s music is principally defined by its rhythmic qualities—the steady beat of his hammer symbolizing the onward march of time as humanity struggles to harness nature’s resources. The principal attractive feature of the popular music favored by Danny (at the outset) and his family, however, is melody—the “tune.” What is interesting is the manner in which the idea of “tune,” as with the blacksmith’s rhythm, takes on symbolic overtones over the course of the story. Danny’s developing response to tunefulness comes to represent the process of negotiation between his own developing sense of identity and his changing relationship with the community from which he has emerged.

54

Bernard MacLaverty

At the reception for his sister’s wedding, some members of that same community conduct a conversation on the relevant merits of various musical genres. A neighbor, Red Tam, extols the virtues of Winifred Atwell, an extremely popular and successful West Indian pianist who made her name and fame during the 1950s with a string of light jazz recordings. Rock ’n’ roll fares less well, described by Harry (Danny’s father, in a direct echo of Miss Schwartz’s verdict) as “‘rubbish’”—“‘[it’ll] not be heard of in another year’s time’” he prophesizes (48). Tam’s idea of “classic” music is Mantovani, an Anglo-Italian conductor and arranger who achieved phenomenal international success during this period with his lush orchestral arrangements of popular songs and light classical pieces. Even as he dismisses rock ’n’ roll, Harry covets a job for his son in a “‘dance band,’” which, as he puts it, “‘is the place where the money is’” (48).8 Finally, he puts his finger on it: “‘I like good music—something with a bit of a tune to it … Bing’s my man’” (48). The reader is provided here with a description of a highly stratified musical array, as heard from the perspective of Danny’s working-class, Ulster Catholic background. Music is judged according to its accessibility, its economic viability and, ultimately, its inherent value—whether it is “good” or not. Contemporary rock ’n’ roll is culpable insofar as it is associated with rhythm rather than melody; value is explicitly linked to “tune,” with the music of Bing Crosby providing (for Harry at least) a clear example. Atwell, Mantovani and the “dance bands” represent a different kind of value: the financial reward accruing from the transposition of musical skill into an economically viable product. Into this musical world Danny introduces his “highfalutin’” (47) Haydn sonata—representative of a form of music which adheres (ostensibly at least) to a radically different value system. More than this, Danny is literally “out of tune” with the prevailing soundscape, for even as he performs the piece, alternative melodies vie for attention: “the noise of somebody in the kitchen washing dishes,” the “notes [rung by Red Tam] on his empty whiskey glass with a horny fingernail,” the hiss of his Aunt Letty asking if Danny’s father “‘will … have another stout’” (47). To put it in musical terms, the party is characterized by a complex, discordant harmony, with different musical traditions, genres and values vying with each other in order to dominate the meaning and character of the sound. Precisely because of his specialized training, Danny is, ironically, highly discordant in relation to the “natural” musical context from which he comes, alienated from its values and its characteristic sounds. In symbolic terms, Danny himself is “‘a bit of a tune,’” albeit one that no one from his “natural”



“Join us”: Musical Style and Identity in “My Dear Palestrina”

55

milieu can hear or understand. While this sets him apart from his family and his culture, it qualifies the criterion of “tunefulness” so prized by his father: for the “tune” only comes into musical focus in terms of the harmonization that it attracts, and the same tune (as Danny’s training reveals over the course of the story) can mean very different things when harmonized differently.

(No) Art after Auschwitz Miss Schwartz explains her philosophy of music to Danny during their first lesson: “Music is the most beautiful thing in the world. Today beautiful is a word that has been dirtied but I mean it truly. … Music is why I do not die. Other people—they have blood put in their arms,” she stabbed a fingernail at the inside of her elbow, “I am kept alive by music. … Rilke says that music begins where speech ends—and he should know.” (34)

Impressive claims—none more so than the final one that prioritizes music above spoken language. But to what kind of music is Miss Schwartz alluding here? Not the folk music associated with the blacksmith, it emerges, and certainly not the various “pop” styles discussed by Danny’s father and Red Tam. Rather, she is referring to “art music,” a very specific array of cultural attitudes and practices comprising specialized techniques of composition, training, performing, listening, and explication. This form of music tends to be produced by individuals who have the training, the leisure, and the desire to produce complex pieces of art which reflect or engage in some way with the question of what it means to be human. Art music is as a rule demanding and difficult; to make these works requires time, energy, and focus; to listen and understand how they work requires more of the same. The promise of the artwork, however, is that all such effort will be rewarded by a deeper understanding of the human condition than would otherwise be available. None of these particular attributes is in ready supply for a person from Danny’s background, however, where time and energy are devoted in large part to survival, and such focus as remains tends to be taken up by less demanding practices. Danny’s growing engagement with Miss Schwartz’s idea of music serves to alienate him from his “natural” milieu, where the piano can only ever be “‘the old Joanna’” (46)—a vehicle for popular amusement rather than a key to the human spirit. Danny is in fact a classic example of the 1950s grammar school boy, marooned between the lifestyle from which he has emerged and the

56

Bernard MacLaverty

lifestyle to which specialized education has exposed him. And like all grammar school boys, he has to negotiate all the feelings of angst and guilt that ensue from that putative “betrayal.”9 Over the course of the story Miss Schwartz introduces Danny to a range of ideas associated with the discourse of art music. After her intense opening statement regarding the absolute importance of music, she goes on to discuss “‘the black marks’”—that is, the sophisticated notation system used in art music (35). The history of this system and its relation to the concept of “the performance” is complex and contested; but it remains a powerful element of art music’s philosophy—the idea that “the text” constitutes a coherent statement on the part of an individual creator, and that one must master the language of such texts before one is in a position to understand the creator’s intentions, or to transpose those intentions into a sound.10 Mastering technique is not enough, however, as Miss Schwartz will insist: “‘[Your] heart must be right. Without it technique is useless’” (64). She criticizes Danny for playing mechanically and tries to teach him by example: “She sat on the stool and began to play. Danny listened, watching her closed eyes, the almost imperceptible sway of her body as she stroked music from the notes” (40). The literary language here retreats into a register that is both mystifying (“closed eyes … imperceptible sway”) and metaphorical (“stroked”). This process suggests two insights: the first relating to Danny’s experience within the story, the second relating to the way in which that story is related by MacLaverty. First, this description enables us to observe that the quality of “interpretation” is ultimately, and despite the premium placed on it in musicological discourse, impervious to rational description. Danny will have to feel what Miss Schwartz is feeling before he can authentically replicate or understand her performance; and while technique is teachable, emotional response is not. And secondly, because of their fundamental differences as signifying media, literature tends to revert to metaphor when it attempts to describe specific musical sounds or effects.11 All these elements coalesce at the climax of the story, during Danny’s final lesson. As he plays for his disgraced, soon to be former, teacher, Danny attempts “[t]o feel, as she had so often urged him, the heart and soul of what Schubert had heard when he wrote down the music” (63). As his performance, and her response, intensifies, so too does the language used by MacLaverty to describe them: The melody, more sombre than he had played it before, flowed out over the rippling left hand. Then came the heavy base [sic] like a dross, holding the piece



“Join us”: Musical Style and Identity in “My Dear Palestrina”

57

to earth. The right hand moved easily into the melody again, the highest note seeming never to reach high enough, pinioned by a ceiling Schubert had set on it. … The piece reached its full development and swung into its lovely main melody for the last time. It ended quietly, dying into a hush. Both were silent, afraid to break the spell that had come with the music. (63)

Finally, Miss Schwartz invokes the composer Palestrina as an example of music’s beautiful, mysterious, salvific power and she nominates Danny as a member of an unspecified group—“‘one of us’” (65)—enabled, through some indeterminate combination of training and intuition, to recognize that power. The specialized group postulated by Miss Schwartz is challenged in the final line of the story when Danny’s mother, coaxing her son from the garden where he has been sulking because of the termination of his piano lessons, invites him to “‘Join us’” (67). Of course, the invocation to belong to a specific group— especially when invoked via the rhetoric of “joining”—resonates ominously within a society so deeply divided along sectarian lines. Miss Schwartz is implicated in this insofar as her “sect” (art music)—always suspect to some degree because of her ethnicity and her unusual social status as a single working woman—becomes ostracized after her extramarital pregnancy flouts the established moral order.12 As a woman, a Jew, a refugee, and a trafficker in elitist cultural capital, this is a role for which she is eminently qualified. Miss Schwartz’s “unnatural” status throws into relief what is regarded as “normality”; as in the schoolboy joke with which I commenced this essay, her different “difference” (her Jewishness) exposes the economy of difference and sameness which underpins the established system of Northern Irish sectarianism. MacLaverty does not eschew sectarianism in “My Dear Palestrina,” then; but he does attempt to replace two culpable local sects with one that appears to be essentially more valuable and more deserving. Like all sects, however, Miss Schwartz’s is founded upon a profoundly partial view of the world and how it operates. This view is encapsulated in her impassioned description of the power of art music to transcend suffering and to engender altruistic, empathetic emotions in the listening subject: “‘People are like the beasts of the field. They know nothing of music or tenderness. Anyone whom music has spoken to—really spoken to—must be gentle, must be kind—could not be guilty of a cruelty’” (64).13 This is the “sect” to which she offers Danny membership— those capable of hearing the language of music as it truly is. Spoken by a Polish Jewish refugee from the Nazi terror, such words are deeply ironic. In fact, the

58

Bernard MacLaverty

Nazis took great pride in Germany’s glorious musical history; indeed, the image of the refined, sophisticated SS officer enjoying a symphony (or novel or painting) between acts of inhuman cruelty has become a cliché of the post-war imagination.14 Music functioned as a fully incorporated element of the Third Reich’s cultural programme, including, most sinisterly, its attitude towards and treatment of those perceived to be enemies. Holocaust historian Shirli Gilbert describes the specially constructed prisoner orchestras of Auschwitz (a few miles to the south of Miss Schwartz’s hometown of Praszka) which played at the camp gates each morning and evening as the labour contingents marched to and from work, and regularly accompanied executions. These orchestras played a valuable role in the extermination process, helping the operation to run smoothly and assisting in the maintenance of discipline and order. As in Sachsenhausen, the SS also imposed frequent forced singing sessions, and torture sessions in which music was used in inventive and sadistic ways. (145)

One might argue that the Nazis did not “really” hear the music—that they incorporated it as part of an instrumentalist rationale which was in itself a perversion of the music’s true communicative essence. That they could do so, however, militates against the notion of an essence per se.15 Auschwitz gives the lie to the notion of art’s inherent civilizing nature; and for all her convictions regarding (art) music’s positive effects, Miss Schwartz’s “sect” is revealed to be as contingent and as corruptible as those with which it vies for Danny’s identity. Music’s vulnerability vis-à-vis this instrumental rationale is then compounded by the text’s categorical inability to reproduce that music, and by its reliance on language to try to describe music’s affective powers. “‘Listen to this,’” (65) demands Miss Schwartz as she puts on a record of music by Palestrina. But of course the reader cannot “‘listen to this’”; he can only read the author’s interpretation of what the music sounds like and what that sound means to the character of Danny.16 As the climax of a story about the power of music, the resolute silence of this moment is striking.17 MacLaverty utilizes music’s deeply affective powers in order to explore the formation of a representative Irish identity at an important moment in the wider political history of the island. His particular mode of musical engagement, however, exposes (as it does in Grace Notes) the limitations of that turn. “My Dear Palestrina” instantiates an aesthetic impasse comprising two inter-related elements: the first concerns the unwarranted privileging of art music as a superior “sect” with the wider musical community; the second derives from



“Join us”: Musical Style and Identity in “My Dear Palestrina”

59

prose fiction’s inadequacy before the musical event—the fact that no language can ever describe musical experience, precisely because such experience is incorporated within the literary text as the very sign of a pre-, post-, or simply non-linguistic presence. As with Grace Notes, the surprise is that, despite these problems, MacLaverty manages to produce such an effective and affecting narrative.

Notes   1 MacLaverty, “Hugo” (Secrets and Other Stories 72–3); all subsequent references to MacLaverty’s work will be given parenthetically in the text.   2 The literature is vast, but see Cook, passim. On the ability of music to arouse deep and significant emotion in those who interact with it, see Sloboda.   3 Both Haslam and Russell (57–9) identify Miss Schwartz, the blacksmith, and his parents as the three principal forces operating in Danny’s life; my purpose here is to explore the musical associations of these forces.   4 This date was confirmed in correspondence with the author.   5 See the chapter “The Border Campaign: 1956–62” in Coogan, 377–418.   6 Danny’s name and age implicate him in the blacksmith’s musical discourse, inasmuch as he is the living embodiment of a popular song traditionally associated with Nothern Ireland. The lyrics of “Danny Boy” were in fact written by an English songwriter named Fred Weatherly and set by him to an old Irish melody in 1913. The blacksmith sings this song to Danny on the occasion of their final meeting.   7 The employment of a linguistic leitmotif in this fashion signals the quasi-musical status of MacLaverty’s technique—the fact that he is deploying language here to achieve a particular kind of musical effect. This effect might be described as “difference-in-repetition”—what in Grace Notes he would describe as “the same sound but with a different meaning” (275). On the wider use of the leitmotif as a literary device see Smyth, Music in Irish Cultural History, 75–7.   8 By “dance band” Harry is referring here to the “showband” phenomenon which by the late 1950s was extremely popular across the entire island. In 1958, Danny’s slightly older contemporary—one Ivan Paul Morrison—was playing in just such a dance band: The Monarchs. For accounts of this potentially lucrative business see Power and also Smyth, Noisy Island: A Short History of Irish Popular Music, 11–18.   9 See Hoggart’s description of the alienation assailing the post-war scholarship boy in his book The Uses of Literacy—published (in 1957) in the same year in which MacLaverty’s story is set. The artist Liam Diamond from “Life Drawing” (the story following “My Dear Palestrina”) provides a devastating example of a similar character (A Time to Dance 69–82).

60

Bernard MacLaverty

10 On the significance of notated score in relation to art music see Shepherd. For an analysis of the deference to the idea of the score in fiction about music see Benson, 106–17. 11 I say “tends to” because there are many examples in which writers have attempted to resist the turn to metaphor, and to develop different ways to represent music. For a description and analysis of some of these experiments see Benson, Smyth, Music in Contemporary British Fiction, and Wolf. 12 Miss Schwartz’s condition anticipates Catherine McKenna’s in Grace Notes, whose pregnancy likewise engenders a narrative crisis. 13 Miss Schwartz’s phrase (“‘the beasts of the fields’”) is a direct repetition of Harry McElhone’s description of those who engage in extramarital sex (47). This technique—in which the same phrase is shown to mean very different things—is essentially musical in derivation, as the difference in meaning is produced not by the phrase itself but the way it is “harmonized” in different contexts. 14 Dennis, passim. 15 See Adorno, Can One Live after Auschwitz?, passim, and Eagleton, “Art after Auschwitz: Theodor Adorno,” 341–65. Adorno’s profile in Philosophy of Modern Music as one of the twentieth century’s leading music theorists is also of interest here. 16 The paragraph which describes Danny’s response to the Palestrina recording anticipates the seven-page section at the end of Grace Notes, insofar as each comprises “a patchwork of memory, affect, metaphor and narrative, the representation of a mind and a body idiosyncratically responding to musical stimuli in all their (mind, body, music) worldliness” (Benson, 136). 17 Danny’s experience is “tragic” insofar as it instantiates what Joseph Cleary refers to as “the deadlock or stalemate of a blocked and apparently static period” (259). Discussing the tragic mode in relation to Northern Irish drama, Cleary goes on to say: “[A] certain grieving for the failure of the new to emerge is audible. However, what cannot be overlooked is the contrapuntal movement in which this grief for the obstruction of the new can also modulate into a sense of mourning for the old that is perceived to be dying.” (259)

Given the focus of the present essay, the musical register of this analysis is suggestive.



“Join us”: Musical Style and Identity in “My Dear Palestrina”

61

Works cited Adorno, Theodor W. Philosophy of Modern Music. Trans. A. G. Mitchell and W. V. Blomster. New York: Seabury, 1973. —Can One Live after Auschwitz?: A Philosophical Reader. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Benson, Stephen. Literary Music: Writing Music in Contemporary Fiction. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006. Bowen, Zack. Music Allusions in the Works of James Joyce: Early Poetry through Ulysses. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974. Cleary, Joseph. Outrageous Fortune: Culture and Capital in Modern Ireland. Dublin: Field Day, 2007. Coogan, Tim Pat. The IRA. London: Fontana, 1971 rpt of 1970 edn. Cook, Nicholas. Music: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000 rpt of 1998 ed. Dennis, David B. Inhumanities: Nazi Interpretations of Western Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990. Gilbert, Shirli. Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005. Haslam, Richard. “Character and Construction in Bernard MacLaverty’s Early Short Stories about the Troubles.” Irish University Review 41.2 (Autumn/Winter 2011): 74–92 Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life. London: Penguin, 2009 rpt of 1957 edn. James, Jamie. The Music of the Spheres: Music, Science, and the Natural Order of the Universe. London: Abacus, 1995. MacLaverty, Bernard. Lamb. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1981 rpt of 1980 edn. —Cal. London: Penguin, 1984 rpt of 1983 edn. —Secrets and Other Stories. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1985 rpt of 1977 edn. —A Time to Dance. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1985 rpt of 1982 edn. —The Great Profundo and Other Stories. London: Penguin, 1989 rpt of 1987 edn. —Grace Notes. London: Vintage, 1998 rpt of 1997 edn. —Walking the Dog. London: Vintage, 1999 rpt of 1994 edn. —The Anatomy School. London: Vintage, 2002 rpt of 2001 edn. —Matters of Life and Death. London: Vintage, 2007 rpt of 2006 edn. Power, Vincent. “Send ‘Em Home Sweatin’”: The Showbands’ Story. Dublin: Kildanore Press, 1990. Russell, Richard Rankin. Bernard MacLaverty. Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press, 2009. Shepherd, John. “Text.” Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture. Eds Bruce Horner and Thomas Swiss. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1999. 156–74.

62

Bernard MacLaverty

Sloboda, John. Exploring the Musical Mind: Cognition, Emotion, Ability, Function. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Smyth, Gerry. Noisy Island: A Short History of Irish Popular Music. Cork: Cork University Press, 2005. —Music in Contemporary British Fiction: Listening to the Novel. London: Palgrave, 2008. —Music in Irish Cultural History. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009. Wolf, Werner. The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999.

4

“That Orange and Green Dilemma”: Violence and the Traumatized Subject in Bernard MacLaverty’s Screenplays of Cal (1983) and Lamb (1985) Richard Mills In the 1980s Bernard MacLaverty adapted two of his novels, Cal (1980) and Lamb (1983), into screenplays. Although both films are the visual imagining of the directors Pat O’Connor (Cal) and Colin Gregg (Lamb), their celluloid reworking of MacLaverty’s work has a scrupulous fidelity to his written texts. In fact, both novels’ central theme is the effect political violence has on the human subject. MacLaverty uses his traumatized central characters (Cal and Lamb) as a vehicle to comment on irreducible ideas of political, religious and cultural selfhood. What I want to argue in this essay is that MacLaverty’s screenplays attack Irish nationalist ideology but he replaces essentialist republicanism and Catholicism with a victim stereotype. The characters Cal and Lamb are victims: they are traumatized subjects who are stereotypical of a nationalist victim culture. In portraying the respective characters’ trauma as a permanent impasse, an inability to heal, MacLaverty is writing in a long tradition of blood sacrifice and martyrdom. These films replace republican and nationalist clichés with another well-known Irish type: the victim who is martyred for Ireland. The films Cal and Lamb are about the problem of representing trauma. The orange and green dilemma in both texts can be summed up by the extent to which they have a problem of representing the unrepresentable that is mirroring trauma in a manner that avoids reductive ideas of long-suffering, psychic wounds. MacLaverty uses the trope of the traumatized fictional subject to discredit fixed notions of identity. Both films have ideological targets and MacLaverty’s screenplay of Cal (1983) damningly portrays violent Irish republicanism and Ulster loyalism, while his screenplay of Lamb (1985) critiques essentialist ideas of Catholicism, republicanism, and Irishness.

64

Bernard MacLaverty

MacLaverty makes this position clear not only in his fiction, but also conveys it in his interviews: You question your own home background. All the truths that you’ve been given, you eventually question and come up with some sort of different answer; and mine is to be born and reared in a place like this under Catholic thought: that orange and green dilemma and to come out of it an atheistic pacifist.1

Cal and Lamb are films that encode MacLaverty’s attitude to essentialist ideological dogma. The authorial and directorial intention in these texts is to offer a riposte to “green and orange” (nationalist/republican and unionist/ loyalist, respectively) ideologies. My analysis of both films will show how this deconstruction has been achieved through the traumatic portrayal of the miserable lives of Cal and Lamb. Both characters are so thoroughly brutalized by the end of these films that we are left with broken human subjects. The trauma undergone by these characters produces fragmented subjects. The political violence of the Northern Irish “Troubles” has traumatized Cal and the Catholic Church has damaged Lamb. Violence and trauma have left unresolved confusion; and at the end of these films Cal and Lamb are locked in an “impasse of endless melancholy, mourning, and interminable aporia.”2 The continued haunting of these traumatized characters creates traumatic subjects who “conform very closely to familiar forms of nationalist interpellation of the subject.”3 Both films have the intention of putting into effect a narrative that attacks unionist and nationalist ideologies and fixed notions of identity, but the traumatic subjects conform, paradoxically, to historical stereotypes of Irish victimhood. In fact, Cal and Lamb’s complete breakdown makes the institutions such as the Northern Irish state and the Catholic Church and its nationalisms preferable to psychic void and a haunting inertia. The choice to evade ideology may be the only viable options for MacLaverty’s characters and it can be argued that “atheistic pacifism”4 is the only rational response to violent and brutal ideology. However, “that orange and green dilemma” remains a serious problem for the artist. Escape and Joycean flight, as we shall see, is one of MacLaverty’s narrative strategies, but my argument contends it is a flight that ends in an absence of self and disempowerment. For Cal and Lamb, “notions of fragmentation and extremity function to integrate and legitimize notions of identity.”5 The subjects at the end of these films are broken nationalist victims. Cal waits helplessly for a beating from the RUC officers who track him to his hideaway, while Lamb returns to Ireland where the film ends with him murdering his young companion Owen Kane.



“That Orange and Green Dilemma”

65

The celluloid shudder and the stark Bergmanesque imagery of these films is ideal aesthetic for depicting mutable versions of the human subject as victim. This is why these films are important: they set out to ridicule ideology, but end with effective adaptations of familiar Irish shattered subjects. The films deviate very little from the novels in this respect. MacLaverty’s work raises profound questions about the individual’s relationship to ideology: in the case of these films that is Irish politics, culture, and religion. The films strive to offer visual representations of Irish trauma; and both texts end not with escape, but with paralysis. The film Cal deals with the love affair between a young man and the widow of his victim. Cal is an accessory to the murder and is wracked with guilt. The narrative makes it clear that he is trapped in extraordinary circumstances. He tries to avoid violence and is press-ganged into driving a getaway car in the murder of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) man. The film then has an unexpected plot twist: Cal falls in love with the RUC man’s wife and this love affair forces him into a psychological renegotiation. An arbitrary and unlikely scenario shocks him into reassessing his situation and makes him aware of the sectarian dogma embodied by Irish Republican Army (IRA) men Finbar Skeffington and Crilly. Skeffington is a middle-class intellectual republican; Crilly, on the other hand, is the muscle. He works in an abattoir and is depicted as an unthinking violent thug, while Skeffington justifies violence in a more coolly detached and intellectual manner. The film eschews violent republicanism through both these figures. Loyalism is also rejected since Cal and his father, Shamie (both Catholics) live on a loyalist estate and are in constant danger from loyalist attacks. The film opens with the pivotal event: Cal drives Crilly to a remote Protestant farmhouse where Crilly shoots and kills an RUC reservist, Robert Morton, and also injures his elderly father. As Morton bleeds to death, he shouts his wife’s name, “‘Marcella,’” his widow who will become Cal’s lover. Cal slams his foot on the car’s accelerator and speeds into a bleak, rainy, and cold night. There is then a jump-cut and the traumatic opening scene is replaced by a typical rural Irish scene. A winding road recedes into the distance framed by green and lush Irish fields. This bucolic idyll is accompanied by traditional Irish music, played and arranged by Dire Straits’ front man Mark Knopfler. This sentimental music is one of the many cultural markers that recur throughout the film, signifying a melancholic cliché of Irish identity. The pastoral Irish scene is a predictable version of Ireland, especially when music and landscape are combined in such a hackneyed manner: they produce a sign of recognizable

66

Bernard MacLaverty

and conservative nationalist Irish ideology. This type of music and imagery recall a Bord Fáilte (Irish Tourist Board) Ireland. Thus, the film is in the grip of Irish stereotypes from which it tries to escape. The next cultural markers are visual. For instance, Crilly is captured covered in blood in an abattoir. The camera shows the slaughter of cattle, which suggests to the viewer that we are in for an unflinchingly violent film. This scene is notable for Crilly’s casual acceptance of death and blood. It is interrupted with another jump-cut to a dark, wet village in Northern Ireland where the skinny Cal (played by a very young John Lynch) walks to the village’s library; he is hunched over and soaking wet. He shelters in the doorway and sees Marcella (Morton’s widow) for the first time. She does not see him and as a result, Cal’s voyeuristic nature is established early on. The town’s security cameras also make it quite clear that this is a film about forms of state and sexual surveillance. The sectarian divide is established early on in the film. For example, as Cal leaves the library, Marcella (played by Helen Mirren) is described by one of the locals as “‘one of ours,’” meaning a Catholic, and further suggests that her husband’s murder was inevitable or by design: this unnamed character suggests to Cal that there is “‘no luck with a mixed marriage.’”6 Sectarianism is emphasized in the next scene where Cal walks through an Orange parade to his home. When he reaches home he watches television and impatiently turns the television off when the British national anthem, “God Save the Queen,” is played to signal the end of that evening’s broadcast. The British national anthem ended all television broadcasts in Northern Ireland until the late 1980s. Its playing drives home the point that Cal is surrounded by unionist culture in the public and private sphere. His house, in a loyalist estate, is pervaded by loyalist culture, which even invades his front room. The film’s atmosphere and dialogue establish the victimhood of Cal and his father. Shamie and Cal’s house is shot in a gloomy chiaroscuro. The sepia brown interior is given a portentous atmosphere by brown furnishings and a blanket of asthmatic cigarette smoke; Cal smokes incessantly throughout the film. The claustrophobia is created by the screenplay’s emphasis on conversation; the dialogue here is almost a verbatim simulation of the novel. Cal’s father Shamie screams that “‘No loyalist bastard is going to force me out of my home.’”7 In fact, it is made clear that they are the only Catholic family left on the estate and they are eventually burned out of their house by Protestant thugs. Again, throughout both film and novel, Cal and his father are victims. Director Pat O’Connor’s visual tropes are a basic palette: Cal drives a battered old green van; he wears a green army jacket; he is beaten up by a loyalist youth in a Union Jack sweater; the family home is engulfed in bright orange flames;



“That Orange and Green Dilemma”

67

and there is a shot of a fundamentalist Protestant preacher hammering a sign to a solitary tree in a field with the biblical slogan, “‘the wages of sin is death.’”8 And when Cal eventually secures a job at Marcella Morton’s house, the visual markers come thick and fast. The interior of their house juxtaposes reds and greens on the walls and the furniture. British symbols abound throughout the house. For instance, Cal sees pictures of the Queen Mother, Prince Charles, Princess Diana, and an infant Prince William. When he works at the Mortons’, Cal drives a red tractor through green fields; the library, where Marcella works, is a quilt of brown, reds, and greens. Nationalist symbols recur as well. When Cal visits Skeffington’s house to receive instructions on a robbery to raise funds for the IRA, he first makes it clear that wants out of the movement after the trauma of being an accessory to Morton’s murder. Skeffington’s house is replete with republican symbols, including a copy of the proclamation of the Irish Republic, his temperance badge, and a poster of the 1916 Easter Rising rebels. Skeffington embodies middle-class nationalism and to MacLaverty is a deeply unsympathetic figure. This character speaks in an educated and “posh” accent to Cal’s ears and he propounds republican ideology to persuade the young man to activism: “‘Not to act is to act,’” he states at one point in the film.9 However, the most important visual clues in the film are the shots that trap Cal as a victim. They often flash back to the murder when he returns to the Morton house. He buys an art book as a present for Marcella, in which the camera lingers on a long shot of Grunewald’s Crucifixion of Christ that portrays Christ’s brutalized, elongated, and emaciated bleeding limbs nailed to a cross. Immediately after this shot, the camera then focuses on the skinny and pale Christ-like “victim” Cal, as both images meld together. The symbolism is clear: Cal identifies with Christ and he is filled with Catholic guilt and masochistic identification. Masochism and guilt coalesce at the end of the film, when after his affair with Marcella, he is arrested for his part in the murder and looks forward with excited anticipation to his beating by the RUC with masochistic relish. O’Connor makes consistent use in the film Cal of the flashback technique to disrupt the linear flow of time. Roger Luckhurst explains the use of this technique in contemporary cinema: “The flashback is an intrusive, anachronic image that throws off the linear temporality of the story.”10 This is indeed its function in Cal, which starts and ends with Cal’s flashback to his part in the murder. It shows his mentality and how the traumatic event supposedly has robbed him of agency. He cannot move forward and is trapped in a cycle of

68

Bernard MacLaverty

repeating trauma. Whereas “Trauma studies generally emphasize the significance of returning to the site of the original trauma to confront and ‘work through’ the past,”11 Cal never goes through such a process. He is inarticulate and cowed by his experience of violence. In fact, his inertia is predicated on sexual voyeurism (he constantly spies on Marcella before their affair). He also experiences a tremendous amount of guilt and masochism. In the film, as in the novel, he waits eagerly for a beating in the conclusion. He stares and does not try to flee, but is silently engulfed by green RUC uniforms and given a beating in the film, whereas that beating is only anticipated in the novel. The concluding passage from the novel illuminates Pat O’Connor’s intention here: “The next morning, Christmas Eve, almost as if he expected it, the police arrived to arrest him and he stood in a dead man’s Y-fronts listening to the charge, grateful that at last someone was going to beat him to within an inch of his life.”12 This guilt and masochism has trapped Cal in a debilitating cycle from which he cannot escape. He is no Joycean artist fleeing into exile. As he waits for his physical punishment, the Christ-Cal identification is strong. MacLaverty intends to ridicule all Northern Irish ideological certitudes: violent loyalism, violent republicanism, and all reductive ideologies. He succeeds in his critique of these calcified identities by showing how brutal their adherents can be. His negative stereotypes of blood sacrifice and the stereotypical Irish republican victim, however, undermine his aim to challenge stereotypes and fixed ideology. Moreover, MacLaverty’s attempt to criticize ideological fixity falters because his protagonist is a debilitating Irish cliché. Cal’s fascination with the martyred Christ-like male nationalist is, at its heart, a father figure identification; much, but not all, of the ideology and violence in this text originates with male loyalist and nationalist ideology. Harold Bloom, writing about Freud’s “A Child Being Beaten,” captures Cal’s identification with mythologizing republican blood sacrifice and also his inability to transcend debilitating trauma. Here, in an essay that investigates an universal if unconscious sense of guilt, Freud prepares the ground concepts of which will spring … the most acute speculation on the “need for punishment” that any psychologist or theologian has ever written, … with its dread convincing analysis of “moral masochism,” a kind of drive toward failure.13

As we shall see, the film Lamb is book-ended in the same manner as Cal, which begins with the central character driving to a murder, then returning to it through a flashback. Cal ends with the same stretch of road, indicating his entrapment in a cycle of trauma.



“That Orange and Green Dilemma”

69

Director Colin Gregg’s film of Lamb employs similar visual imagery to that in Cal, again suggesting paralysis and entrapment; the name “Lamb” signifies how he will use Owen (Gaelic for “lamb”) Kane as a “sacrificial lamb.” Michael Lamb, played by Liam Neeson, is a member of the staff of a borstal run by religious brothers and begins a tragic relationship with one of his young charges, Owen. Michael Lamb abducts the boy and they flee the borstal. This story is MacLaverty’s vehicle to criticize what he sees as the reactionary nature of the Catholic Church. The most revealing exchange in the novel takes place between Brother Sebastian (Michael Lamb’s name while in the borstal) and the head of the borstal, Brother Benedict. Sebastian feels that the regime is without hope and his response to this hopelessness is to abduct the boy with predictably tragic circumstances. Benedict tells Sebastian that there is no room for his idealism at the borstal and further chillingly tells him that if he rebels against his will and leaves the school he will make it very difficult for him to work again in Ireland. As he puts it, “‘the church in Ireland, Brother, has as many fingers as there are pies. Remember that.’”14 Benedict’s antagonism to Sebastian drives the opening and pivotal moments of the film. The first scene of the film features Sebastian (a head shot of Liam Neeson) discussing Brother Benedict, who is cruel, beats the boys, and also adheres rigidly to Catholic dogma, with one of Sebastian’s superiors. Sebastian seemingly represents liberalism and Benedict embodies clerical inflexibility. The film then jump-cuts to a series of scenes that recall the style and aesthetics of Cal. Like the winding Irish road that is accompanied by Mark Knopfler’s Irish music in the earlier film, the elegiac tone of Lamb is established by opening shots of a deserted, bucolic Irish beach. The long and lingering shots of the strand are accompanied by a Van Morrison soundtrack that relies heavily on a melancholic saxophone playing riffs on Irish traditional music. The stylistic similarities between Lamb and Cal come into sharp relief when the camera focuses on Lamb emerging from the sea gasping for breath. Again we have a leitmotif between both pieces of work. This beginning is repeated at the end of the film. Sebastian is disgusted by the borstal’s brutality so he abducts Owen and flees to London, reverting to his former identity of “Michael Lamb.” Life in London without money and a job quickly becomes untenable and Lamb and Owen return to Ireland where, in a scene reminiscent of the opening, Lamb drowns the epileptic Owen in the sea. The “baptism” shot from the opening is repeated. The metaphor is complete: Lamb and Owen Kane cannot escape the clutches of the Catholic Church and are trapped in a cycle of “green wound culture.”15 This stylistic trope in both films is very important because

70

Bernard MacLaverty a post-traumatic response of unsettlement becomes questionable when it is routinized in a methodology or style that enacts compulsive repetition, including the compulsively repetitive turn to aporia, paradox, or impasse.16

That is the danger of this repetitious feature: MacLaverty’s screenplay critiques one type of nationalist and Catholic essentialism, but he seems to perpetuate a victim culture in its place. Before Lamb flees to London in the film, Benedict instructs him to “‘bend your will’” to the Church and argues that his “‘loss of faith can be temporary.’”17 Lamb, however, does not regain his faith and the tragic end seems inevitable because the viewer knows what is going to happen at the end of the film. Again, MacLaverty and Gregg are using Lamb’s exchange with Benedict to criticize the Church and violent republicans who are wrecking the country they love. MacLaverty clarifies his intention with Lamb, observing, “Lamb was my first crack at it, to write about people destroying the thing they loved.”18 In the final scene Lamb drowns the boy he professes to love, providing a grim end to the film and a conclusion that connotes paralysis. Joyce’s influence colors the screenplays for Lamb and Cal, both of which are Joycean attacks on nationalism and Catholicism. Lamb may reference this influence when both Michael Lamb and Owen Kane are on the run in London. In their cheap hotel room in London, Lamb reads the story of Dedalus and Icarus to Owen, perhaps a conscious allusion to Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which he re-works the myth of Icarus. Stephen Dedalus thinks he will escape the narrow confines of country and church but unconsciously casts himself as an Icarus figure at the end of that novel, signifying his fated fall. However, Owen Kane, like Icarus, drowns, and the Icarus scene is a portent of the end the viewer knows is coming. Owen drowns at the beginning and at the end, and the Icarus myth thus reminds the viewer of teleological nature of the film. In a very real sense, failure is predetermined in both texts. Portents of blood sacrifice, failure, Catholic guilt, and religious conditioning recur throughout the film. An early scene perhaps reveals this disturbing motif best. Rows and rows of reform school boys hammer nails in crucifixes, including Owen. The camera frames this production line from above and the shot teems with young boys banging nails into wooden Christ-figures. This evocative shot recalls the Grunewald crucifixion painting in Cal, thus linking the scapegoat Cal and the doomed Owen Kane. Moreover, Van Morrison’s soundtrack contributes to the portentous tone in the film of Lamb. The elegiac saxophone is accompanied by bass rumblings



“That Orange and Green Dilemma”

71

and minimalist musical textures. The soundtrack combines Morrison’s clichéd traditional Celtic whimsy with a more modern electronic and atonal sound palette. It is an entirely fitting soundtrack for a film that examines failure and the breakdown of the human subject. Both Cal and Lamb critique “orange” and “green” psychological wounds. Lamb is an anti-clerical film, whereas Cal is a text which interrogates both republican and loyalist violence. In Lamb, Catholic conservatism is embodied in Brother Benedict, the sadistic priest. Republican violence and political cant is disavowed through the satire of middle-class intellectual republicanism embodied by Skeffington, and violence is eschewed with the depiction of Crilly’s violent thuggery. The key to both films is the same opening and closing shots, a visual trope that suggests entrapment in a continuous cycle of trauma. In Cal, we are left with the insect-thin protagonist waiting for a kicking from the police. The last shot of Lamb too, is a frozen image of failure. The green and orange dilemma for us is difficult: we must interrogate cultural and political dogma while managing to avoid putting a victim stereotype into effect. Each film traces the perpetration of violence on the traumatized subjects (Michael Lamb, Owen Kane and Cal) to illustrate the brutality of violent nationalism and clerical abuse of the Catholic Church. More chillingly perhaps than the concluding scene of Cal, the closing shot of Lamb is a silent cinematic scream of victims who cannot escape. In fact, Cal and Lamb uphold and predicate an essentialist, disempowered, and gaping cultural nationalist wound. The trauma in these texts is a continuous loop of defeated subjects who are haunted by their traumatic Irish childhoods and “hauntings are, in their way, very specific.”19 The films capture the haunting of pre-peace process Northern Ireland in the 1980s. Cal and Lamb both have debilitating ends: the Icarus figure Owen Kane drowns; Cal waits for a violent masochistic kicking; and Michael Lamb regresses to a watery traumatic baptism in the opening and closing shots of the film. We are left with a defeated subject in both cases and the films’ final imagery belies MacLaverty’s authorial intention. In this work, a martyred stereotype endures in place of other hackneyed versions of Irishness that these films seek to rebuke. Audience reception theory and fandom have liberated the viewer from the despotism of the writer and filmmakers, and audiences can and do appropriate meanings that contradict the intentions of the producers. For this viewer, MacLaverty’s screenplays do not possess the nuances of his novels and the huge faces on the cinema screen enshrine negative stereotypes more than his literary work. The ending/beginning conceit in both films unfortunately contradicts the

72

Bernard MacLaverty

desire of both screenwriter and filmmaker to contribute “to the end of certain conceptions of Ireland rather than continuing in the service of some all too familiar ends.”20 MacLaverty’s analysis of the difference between a written text and a visual one reveals a major problem with the translation from page to screen: “You and your page are the only things involved in a novel and when it becomes a film script then there are about eighty people who want to interfere.”21 However, in both films there is a close fidelity to the novels since he himself wrote the screenplays. The significant difference between the novels and the films is that the fiction does not have the beginning/end conceit beloved by O’Connor and Gregg in the 90/120minute format for feature films. The trope of teleological failure and the defeated subject is not a motif that recurs in MacLaverty’s other fiction; it is unique to the screenplays and these early novels upon which they are based. For instance, in MacLaverty’s later novel, Grace Notes (1997), by contrast, Catherine McKenna’s music avoids the logic of distinction. It subverts the distinctions of Catholic and Protestant; it avoids the specificity of both identities and is neither one nor the other, a liberating space that examines the fault-lines of cross-cultural interactions. In sum, then, the trauma that is reenacted in Cal and Lamb is “not subject to the usual narrative of verbal mechanisms of recall, but it is organized as bodily sensations, behavioral reenactments, nightmares, and flashbacks.”22 The word “flashback” is key in this discussion. The leitmotif of the flashback in both films essentializes a stereotype of (Northern) Irish suffering and also conflates collective and individual memory into an “afterlife of silenced or diverted grief that appears everywhere.”23 In other words, MacLaverty’s critique of nationalism, the Catholic Church, and loyalism is undermined by the creation of victim stereotypes in these early novels and films. Unlike the radical poetry of the denouement in Grace Notes, he is “[k]eeping the wound green.”24 Freud’s concept of Nachtraglichkeit is appropriate to both films since the concealment of grief and trauma is realized as a cinematic eternal return. To conclude, Cal and Lamb disrupt conventional narrative modes by “the beginning and ending” trope, but this imagery traps the protagonists in a cycle of extreme events from which there is no respite. The dilemma for Cal and Lamb is that while the films explore the disruption of trauma, they do so in a manner that does not shock, but perpetuates clichéd images of essentialist suffering and victimhood. For this viewer, the most dramatic scene in both films is the production line of young boys hammering nails into mass-produced crucifixes in the reform school during Lamb. But both films suffer from the problem of representing violence and trauma effectively.



“That Orange and Green Dilemma”

73

Notes   1 MacLaverty, “Personal Interview with Richard Mills.”   2 LaCapra, 46.  3 Carville, The Ends of Ireland: Criticism, History, Subjectivity, 15.   4 MacLaverty, “Personal Interview with Richard Mills.”  5 Carville, The Ends of Ireland, 30.  6 Cal (film).  7 Cal (novel), 9.  8 Cal (film).  9 Ibid. 10 Luckhurst, 180. 11 Wong, 183. 12 Cal (novel), 154. 13 Bloom, 122. 14 MacLaverty, Lamb (film). 15 Critical discussions of this term can be found in Seltzer and in Conor Carville, The Ends of Ireland. 16 LaCapra, 47. 17 Lamb (film). 18 MacLaverty, “Personal Interview with Richard Mills.” 19 Deane, 225. 20 Carville, The Ends of Ireland, 19. 21 MacLaverty, “Personal Interview with Richard Mills.” 22 Whitehead, 115. 23 See Lloyd, 22–72. 24 Carville, “Keeping the Wound Green: Irish Studies and Traumaculture,” 45–71.

Works cited Bloom, Harold. “Freud: Frontier Concepts, Jewishness, and Interpretation.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. 113–27. Carville, Conor. “Keeping the Wound Green: Irish Studies and Traumaculture.” What Rough Beasts? Irish and Scottish Studies in the New Millennium. Ed. Shane AlcobiaMurphy. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. 45–71. —The Ends of Ireland: Criticism, History, Subjectivity. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011. Deane, Seamus. Reading in the Dark. New York: Vintage, 1997.

74

Bernard MacLaverty

LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Lloyd, David. Irish Times: Temporalities of Modernity. Dublin: Field Day, 2008. Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. New York: Routledge, 2008. MacLaverty, Bernard. Cal. London: Vintage, 1983. —Cal. Dir. Pat O’Connor. Writ. Bernard MacLaverty. Enigma Productions, Goldcrest Films International and Warner Bros. (UK), 1984. DVD, Manga Films, 2005. —Lamb. Dir. Colin Gregg. Writ. Bernard MacLaverty. Flickers Productions and Limehouse Pictures in association with Channel Four Films (UK), 1986. DVD, Film 4, 2003. —“Personal Interview with Richard Mills.” June 2001. Seltzer, Mark. Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. New York: Routledge, 1998. Whitehead, Anne. Memory. Abington, UK: Routledge, 2009. Wong, Edlie L. “Haunting Absences: Witnessing Loss in Doris Salcedo’s Atrabilarios and Beyond.” The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory, and Visual Culture. Eds Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas. London: Wallflower Press, 2007. 173–88.

5

Character and Construction in MacLaverty’s “Troubles” Stories: The Great Profundo and Walking the Dog Richard Haslam In an earlier essay on Bernard MacLaverty’s representations of the Northern Irish “Troubles,” I examined his first two short-story collections, Secrets (1977) and A Time to Dance (1982), exploring the rhetorical issue of how MacLaverty constructs his characters, the hermeneutical issue of how readers might construe (or interpret) those characters, and the architectural issue of how the characters interact with the environments constructed within the stories.1 The present essay continues this project, addressing “Troubles” stories in The Great Profundo (1987) and Walking the Dog (1994).

The Great Profundo In “Some Surrender,” MacLaverty revisits the neoclassical unities of time, place and action he used in “A Happy Birthday” (Secrets), “Between Two Shores” (Secrets), and “The Daily Woman” (A Time to Dance). The narrative’s event time lasts under an hour, during which a father and son ascend and descend the Cave Hill, on the outskirts of Belfast. As in “A Happy Birthday,” readers observe the birthday activities of a doctrinaire unionist. However, by taking only one sip of whiskey from the “silver hip-flask” his son Roy gives him as a 75th birthday gift, the father celebrates in a rather more restrained manner than the drinkguzzling, vomit-spewing Sammy in “A Happy Birthday.”2 The first of the four sections in “Some Surrender” establishes that son and father have only recently renewed contact because Roy’s earlier decision to marry a Catholic horrified his Protestant parents, producing a 20-year estrangement. Despite making peace with his father, Roy resists reconciling with his mother: “‘She has got to ask me back,’” he declares, and his father replies, “‘It’s not off the

76

Bernard MacLaverty

ground you lick it—you’re both stubborn’” (118). Towards the end of this first section, MacLaverty reveals the depth of parental prejudice: [Roy’s father] “You know the way you feel about Jews?” [Roy] “I don’t feel anything about Jews.” [Roy’s father] “Well, the way most people feel about them. That’s what we think of Roman Catholics. There’s something spooky about them. As my father said, ‘Neither employ them nor play with them.’” (122)

However, the generational transfer of intolerance that deformed the parents has proceeded less smoothly with the child, who labels his father “‘an oul bigot’” (122). The story probes this schism between the political attitudes of two generations. In the second section, family disputes intersect with national ones, and past grievances with present ones, via a structural device that MacLaverty employed in earlier “Troubles” short stories.3 At the precipice of Napoleon’s Nose, father and son discover the loyalist motto “‘No Surrender’” spray-painted on “a concrete beacon” (123). To Roy’s remark that he would “‘like to see a new slogan, SOME SURRENDER,’” his father responds, “‘Never’” (124). As is subsequently revealed, contrasting perspectives on Irish history lie at the heart of their dispute. When Roy observes that they are standing at “‘the place [where] the United Irishmen took an oath to overthrow the English’” and that “‘[t]hey were all Prods as well,’” his father replies, “‘History, Roy. It’s not the way things are now’” (123). Contrariwise, when defending loyalist intransigence towards nationalists and towards (what he perceives as) the betraying British government, the father declares, “‘What matters is our identity. We’ve been here from the sixteenth century’” (124). Noting his father’s discrepant attitude towards historical inheritance, Roy remarks, “‘History in Ireland is what the other side have [sic] done to you. People have got to stop killing each other and talk’” (124). Such “surrender” infuriates his father, who starts to cite a quotation from “Sunday’s paper … ‘For evil to flourish all that need happen …’” (124). Roy completes it: “‘Is that good men do nothing.’ That was Burke. We must read the same paper” (124). Here, the narrative’s scope expands from Ireland to a wider world of political violence. Adapting the quotation, Roy’s father claims that “‘the Civil Rights and the IRA got a foothold’” because “‘[t]he good men of Ulster sat back and did nothing’”; Roy replies, “‘Rubbish. The IRA probably say exactly the same thing’” (124): “They see the Prods and the Brits as an evil force. Reagan used it as an excuse to bomb Libya. It sounds like a good phrase … but … good and evil are very personal—like false teeth, they don’t transfer easily.”



Character and Construction in MacLaverty’s “Troubles” Stories

77

“But there must be standards. Rules.” “That’s the Catholic way. Do you want me to get you an introduction?” “Catch yourself on.” (124)

Since The Great Profundo was published in 1987, we can tentatively date the event-time of “Some Surrender” to 1986, following the USA’s bombing of Libya on 15 April of that year. Speaking shortly after the bombing to members of the American Business Conference, President Reagan stated: Terrorism is the preferred weapon of weak and evil men. And as Edmund Burke reminded us: In order for evil to succeed, it’s only necessary that good men do nothing. Yesterday we demonstrated once again that doing nothing is not America’s policy; it’s not America’s way. America’s policy has been and remains to use only force as a last result—or resort, I should say. We would prefer not to have to repeat the events of last night. What is required is for Libya to end its pursuit of terror for political goals. The choice is theirs.4

Roy’s critique of the Burke quotation reveals that he—unlike his father—has broken with the simplistic binaries of political absolutism, at either regional or international levels. The narrative’s first part thus constructs through dialogue the two characters’ familial conflict, and its second part encourages readers to construe intersections between the characters’ divergent world-views and the possibilities of larger, generational divergences within the unionist and Protestant communities. The third part foregrounds another dimension of construction: the father, a retired architect, views through binoculars the demolition of a residential tower block he had designed decades earlier. Roy asks whether the problem is “‘structural,’” and his father replies, “‘It’s everything’” (125). When the father faults “‘the Belfast climate,’” “‘shortcuts’” taken because of the need for “‘cheap housing,’” and “‘the Belfast working-class,’” Roy retorts that he is trying to “‘shift the blame’” (125–6). As the conversation turns back from architectural to familial failure, the father broaches and Roy allows for the possibility of a reconciliatory meeting between mother and son. Rapprochement—“‘some surrender’”—is not impossible, yet how to reach it remains unclear. The father unwittingly provides an answer, as he gazes at the tower block’s remains: “‘The constructive thing to get into these days is demolition’” (129). His tone may be resigned, grimly humorous, or pragmatic, but MacLaverty allows readers to construe the implications the father misses: a more constructive approach to domestic, inter-communal, or international harmony necessitates the demolition of stereotypes, suspicions, resentments, and claims to possess the moral high ground.5

78

Bernard MacLaverty

Immediately after his utterance, the father says, “‘When I die bury me here for the view’” (129). After “a long silence,” Roy “laugh[s]” and promises, “‘Sure thing’” (129). The father’s acknowledgment of mortality foreshadows the story’s brief, final section. The men descend the hill and the father remarks that “‘you know your age. … [w]hen going down is harder than coming up’” (129). At the close, Roy “puts his hand on his father’s back and is startled to feel his shoulderblades, the shape of butterfly wings, through the thin material of his jacket” (129). The lyrical replaces the polemical: Roy’s gesture, his discomposure and the narrator’s metaphor evoke beauty, fragility, and finitude; a son’s love for his flawed father flames up in a sudden illumination of vulnerability—the insight that his parent’s body is another construction that will fail. The complexity of Roy’s feelings intersects with the complexity of Irish, British, and global politics, and no easy solution emerges. Nevertheless, the narrative’s overall tone is more optimistic than in “Between Two Shores” (Secrets) or “Father and Son” (Time). Significant political change, although unlikely for Roy’s father’s generation, may be more achievable for those willing to surrender some preconceptions and demolish some misconstructions. At first sight, the structure and technique of “Some Surrender,” as well as its final metaphor, appear to illustrate Nadine Gordimer’s argument that the short story is better equipped than the novel to “convey the quality of human life, where contact is more like the flash of fireflies, in and out, now here, now there, in darkness”: Short-story writers see by the light of the flash; theirs is the art of the only thing one can be sure of—the present moment. Ideally, they have learned to do without explanation of what went before and what happens beyond this point. How the characters will appear, think, behave, comprehend, tomorrow or at any other time in their lives is irrelevant. A discrete moment of truth is aimed at—not the moment of truth, because the short story does not deal in cumulatives, … The short story recognizes that full comprehension of a particular kind in the reader, like full apprehension of a particular kind in the writer, is something of limited duration. The short story is a fragmented and restless form, a matter of hit or miss, and it is perhaps for this reason that it suits modern consciousness—which seems best expressed as flashes of fearful insight alternating with near-hypnotic states of indifference.6

By employing the neo-classical unities, by structuring the narrative so that its event-time approaches its reading-time and, above all, by utilizing the present tense throughout, MacLaverty too seeks to illuminate a—rather than



Character and Construction in MacLaverty’s “Troubles” Stories

79

the—“moment of truth.” Thus, it is not surprising that, in discussing Gordimer’s theory with an interviewer, he found “the light of the flash” concept apposite. However, he disagreed that short-story writers should aspire “to do without explanation of what went before, and what happens beyond this point.”7 His complementary simile evokes instead “a tree where you cut in to see the rings … you choose this particular place and you see through the rings what it was like in the past, what it was like living, what it will be like in the future. You can interpret the rings, the patterns.”8 For MacLaverty, a crucial part of “the craft of the story” is “finding that present, and in that present, describing and relating things that are evidence of the past and the future.”9 Thus, the closing image of “Some Surrender” construes the present as an intersection not only between the hurts that were and the losses that will be, but also between the possibilities of a re-interpreted past and a re-imagined future, possibilities whose potential can be activated by the reader’s own construction.10

Walking the Dog In “Walking the Dog,” the lighting up of a present moment shadows forth a past and future considerably bleaker than those of “Some Surrender.” Using once more the neoclassical unities, MacLaverty reduces the story’s event-time to ten minutes, almost matching its reading-time, to emphasize the vertiginous velocity of the protagonist’s abduction and interrogation by two loyalist paramilitaries. Hoping to trick the protagonist into revealing that he is Catholic, the paramilitaries initially pretend to be IRA members. Their captive, calling himself John Shields (a possible alias), frustrates them by refusing alignment with any denomination: “‘I’m … I don’t believe in any of that crap. I suppose I’m nothing.’”11 Eventually, the paramilitaries release John, concluding that he is a Protestant “‘nothing,’” although the story does not confirm that surmise.12 In closing, the narrative wryly highlights its leitmotif: “The street was so quiet he could hear the clinking of the dog’s identity disk as it padded along beside him” (12).13 The story’s primary spatial construct is the car that incarcerates John. Face downwards in the back seat, wedged between his dog and the gunman, he looks and listens for clues to his destination and destiny. The scraps of information he gleans relate in a grimly humorous way to the identity theme. For example, the direction indicators make a “clinking” noise (7; 10), like the dog tag, and they counterpoint the “beeping of a ‘cross now’ signal”: “For the benefit of the blind.

80

Bernard MacLaverty

Like the pimples on the pavement. To let them know where they were” (9).14 These ironic acoustic allusions to John’s plight and veiled affiliation accompany visual ones. For example, he is situated with “one foot on either side of the ridge covering the main drive shaft” (6).15 In addition, he infers (via “reflections from the chrome inside the car”) that the traffic signals are switching “from [unionist] orange to [nationalist] green” (9–10)—a piece of authorial irony, since the driver has just concluded that the captive is “‘no more a Fenian than I am’” (10).16 In a further irony of identity, the gunman even mistakes the dog’s sex (11). Although “Walking” seems focused on the present, it too manifests what MacLaverty terms “evidence of the past and the future.”17 The motive for the abduction and that motive’s bleak history are not stated explicitly, but remain for readers to infer, through references to “‘Fenians’” (9) and “the myth that Protestants and Roman Catholics, because of different schooling, pronounced the eighth letter of the alphabet differently” (8). John’s future seems equally bleak: the “white scars where it [the dog leash] had bitten into his skin” might fade, but the emotional damage may not (12). No comfort is offered, at the personal or national level, other than the ability to find humor in even the most horrific experiences. A similar bleakness, leavened with comparable flashes of humor, pervades “A Silent Retreat.” Like “Some Surrender” and “Walking the Dog,” it employs the classical unities, although its event-time is somewhat longer—a little over 24 hours. And it too includes “evidence of the past and the future,” not least because it is set some decades earlier than its time of writing.18 Thus, the present during which “A Silent Retreat” was composed (the early 1990s) is—from the perspective of the story’s depicted past—the future, and the story implicitly asks how we got from there to here and where from here we go. At the start, a young Protestant B-Special policeman, weary of silently standing guard in front of a prison, addresses a 16-year-old Catholic schoolboy. The architectural dimension of the story’s construction operates by juxtaposing two buildings: a jail and a school. Among other questions, the narrative asks: what do these two institutions and their inhabitants have in common, and what divides them? The B-Special has his own questions, many springing from skepticism about priestly celibacy (44–5). The boy mentions his interest in becoming a priest and the policeman asks him his name. On hearing “‘Declan MacEntaggart,’” he responds sarcastically, disclosing inadvertently the sectarian inequalities that would fuel Civil Rights protests in the late 1960s: “‘You’d better be a priest because you’ll not get too many jobs with a name like that’” (46). The policeman, whose discriminatorily advantageous name is Irvine Todd, then



Character and Construction in MacLaverty’s “Troubles” Stories

81

cajoles Declan into rendezvousing the following day, during the school’s silent retreat. At that rendezvous, we learn that Declan, as a boarder, may not leave the school grounds and that he and Todd both suffer under “‘rules’” (48–9; 58). This recognition highlights the narrative’s motif of imprisonment, especially the kind involving “mind-forg’d manacles.”19 Todd describes his mother as “‘a fierce oul bigot’” (51), echoing Roy’s branding of his father as “‘an oul bigot’” in “Some Surrender” (Profundo 122). Although Todd appears less imprisoned by prejudice than the older generation, he ultimately reveals himself as considerably less tolerant than Roy. Nonetheless, MacLaverty first provides Todd with some trenchant observations, to indicate that the policeman is not the only prisoner of ideology. For example, when Todd circles back to the topic of celibacy, his earthy language offends the boy: “‘Tell me this, Declan, do you intend to get your hole, before you become a priest?’” Walking (51). “‘Don’t be so bloody filthy,’” Declan replies. However, when Declan again remarks that he doesn’t “‘like filth … [s]ex things…,’” Todd retorts: “It’s the world, son. You’d better get to know it if you’re gonna spend the rest of your life tidying it up. You better know what happens beneath the blankets— every fuckin push and pull of it—before you go telling people what they’re not allowed to do.” (52)

Similarly, Declan attempts to prove God’s existence through an argument from design, asserting that “‘if the world is as complex as a watch—which you have just agreed—then a watchmaker—aye ee—God, or some intelligence called God, had to put it together’”; but Todd will have none of this: “That is SO FUCKIN STUPID I can hardly believe you said it, Declan. The most complicated thing I know is my milk round. Who made that up? God? It just happened. People who drink milk live in different places. It’s as simple as that.” (56)

Todd’s Dr Johnson-like response to Declan’s metaphysics also anticipates the story’s threatening conclusion: “The world is not complex. It’s dead fuckin simple. A stone is a stone. And a wall is a wall.” He slapped the [prison] wall with the flat of his hand. “And this wall is full of fuckin stones. Am I right? Is that complex or simple?” (56)

The pivotal switch from banter to belligerence occurs when Todd’s attempted rebuttal of another theological argument leads Declan to claim, “‘I think you’ve

82

Bernard MacLaverty

an inferiority complex’” (57). “‘[S]top fuckin patting me on the head. You have that Papish tone in your voice’” (57), Todd replies. After Declan accuses him of being “‘far too touchy,’” Todd repeats the words, points his gun at Declan, reprises the “‘inferiority complex’” phrase, declares that he is “‘giving the orders,’” and tells Declan to “‘[s]ay your prayers’” (58). At this point, “A Silent Retreat” intersects with “Walking the Dog”: in the latter, a loyalist paramilitary points a gun at a man and asks him whether he can “‘say the Hail Mary’” to “‘save … [his] bacon’” (9); in the former, a loyalist policeman points a gun at a boy and asks him to say the “Our Father” in order to humiliate him: “‘Say after me—Our father WHICH art in heaven…’” (58).20 Todd’s final utterance—the story’s final sentence—constitutes the node between the stories: “‘Fuck the future’” (59). The B-Special curses what he sees as the inevitable prospect that educated and upwardly mobile Catholics will threaten his social privilege, a curse that leads inexorably to the brutal scenario of “Walking the Dog.” The ironic title “A Silent Retreat” refers to the school’s religious ritual, Declan’s final actions and the overall movement away from mutual understanding. As he “back[s] … down the slope staring at the gun” (58), Declan gruesomely enacts Todd’s earlier definition of “a silent retreat,” one at which they had both “laughed”: “‘Sounds like an army. Tip-toeing. Backwards’” (47). Declan and Todd’s breakthrough in communication breaks down in intimidation; the wall between them now accompanies the wall behind them. However, MacLaverty counterpoints these two gloomy stories with “The Wake House,” which depicts a more hopeful encounter between representatives of opposing groups. He again employs the unities of time, place, and action; and the light of the present is again shaded by recollections and intimations. This story’s key architectural juxtaposition is not between a Catholic-run school and a Protestant-run prison, but between two houses facing each other in the same street. Mrs McQuillan and her son Dermot, both Catholics, attend a wake in the house of Mrs Blair and her son Cecil, both Protestants. The deceased is Mrs Blair’s husband Bobby, another bigot, who used to yell “‘Fuck the Pope and No Surrender’” at the McQuillan house every Friday night, on his way home from the pub. The recollection of Bobby’s battle-cry links “A Wake House” to “A Silent Retreat,” in which Todd humorously proclaims the same two slogans to Declan, to emphasize the impossibility of attaining “‘a United Ireland with you and me in it’” (53).21 By placing four specific recollections of Bobby’s taunt in “The Wake House,” MacLaverty portrays successive phases of Dermot’s understanding of Bobby. The first recollection occurs when Dermot asks his mother why they should attend the wake:



Character and Construction in MacLaverty’s “Troubles” Stories

83

“Respect. Respect for the dead,” she said. [Dermot] “You’d no respect for him when he was alive.” … [Dermot] “Eff the Pope and No Surrender.” “Don’t use that word,” she said. “Not even in fun.” “I didn’t use it. I said eff, didn’t I?” “I should hope so. Anyway, it’s not for him, it’s for her. She came over here when your father died.” (112)

A few moments later, Dermot repeats his euphemized version of the cry, this time emphasizing Bobby’s distinctive intonation (“Eff the Pope and NO Surrender”), so that even his mother is amused; his mimicry thereby serves to reduce the tension involved in their first visit to the Blairs’ house (112). Whereas Dermot’s first two recollections occur in his own house and out loud (albeit in censored form), the second two occur at the wake in the Blairs’ house and silently. Asked “‘Did you know Bobby?’” Dermot replies, “‘Not well. Just to see’” (115). This triggers Dermot’s less comical and less censored memory of a recent provocation by Bobby: [Bobby] “I see your curtains moving, you bastards.” A step forward, a step back. A dismissive wave of the hand in the direction of the McQuillans’. Then very quietly, “Fuck yis all.” He stood for a long time, his legs agape. A step forward, a step back. Then he shouted at the top of his voice, “Fuck the Pope and …” Dermot let the curtains fall together and lay down. But he couldn’t sleep waiting for the No Surrender. After a while he had another look but the street was empty. No movement except for the slow flopping of the Union Jack in Bobby Blair’s garden. (115–16)

Unlike the first two, this recollection captures the full ugliness of Bobby’s bigotry; the ugliness is reinforced by another guest’s would-be humorous recollection of Bobby’s response to the release of Nelson Mandela, revealing how the dead man’s sectarianism merged seamlessly with his racism (116–17). However, the final recollection, which occurs when Dermot revisits the wake, sounds a different note. Earlier, his mother declined to view the corpse, saying that “‘It’d bring it all back to me’” (117). Yet, learning that Dermot also declined, she becomes worried that “‘[i]t looks … bad’” and pressures him to return “‘[f]or your father’s sake’” (118, 119). Reluctantly agreeing, he soon finds himself contemplating Bobby’s corpse:

84

Bernard MacLaverty In a Catholic house he would have knelt, blessed himself and pretended to say a prayer. He could have hidden behind his joined hands. Now he just stared. … The dead man’s face was the colour of a mushroom, his nostrils wide black triangles of different sizes. Fuck the Pope and No Surrender. Dermot held his wrist with his other hand and bowed his head. (120)

For Dermot—and the reader—the presence of the corpse recontextualizes Bobby’s sectarian rancor, but not in any easily classifiable way. On his way out, Dermot lets Mrs Blair know that he “‘was just up seeing Mr Blair’” (122). She replies, “‘Very good, son. That was nice of you,’” and starts “to cry” (122). The story concludes with a blend of pathos and humor, as one fatherless son (Cecil) speaks to another (Dermot): “‘Thanks for coming,’ he said. ‘Again’” (122). To understand better the narrative’s emotional complexity, we can look in its mirrors. Returning home after his first visit to the wake, Dermot realizes that his “house and the Blairs’ were exactly the same—mirror images of each other” (117). Later, when briefly left alone with the corpse, Dermot folds down the “white scalloped paper like inside an expensive box of biscuits” that covers everything in the coffin except the face, and he sees that Bobby “was wearing a dark suit, a white shirt and tie,” in addition to “his Orange sash—the whole regalia” (120). He irreverently thinks, “All dressed up and nowhere to go,” but then catches “a reflection of himself prying in the dressing-table mirror” and replaces the covering (120–1). After learning something unpleasant about himself, Dermot learns something about his dead neighbor from two women who weep in genuine grief: “‘Bobby, Bobby—who’ll make us laugh now? … I never met a man like him for dancing. He would have danced the legs off you’” (121). This new perspective does not obliterate Bobby’s bigotry, but it complicates it, by portraying a more agreeable side of his personality, albeit one only displayed within his own group. In an interview, MacLaverty was asked whether “The Wake House” depicted “how Catholic and Protestant communities outside the very centres of sectarian violence … have actually been getting on with each other or … [whether it was] also a blueprint for a peaceful co-existence in the future of Ireland.” He replied, “It’s just a story about a wake”—and laughed.22 Nevertheless, he acknowledged that the story “was based on an actual incident” and that he wished to explore how “part of the trouble [is] that one side stereotypes the other and they are dealing with stereotypes rather than people.”23 The women’s recollections do not replace or fully counterbalance those of Dermot, but they do problematize them, as can be seen in MacLaverty’s description of the story as “an attempt to



Character and Construction in MacLaverty’s “Troubles” Stories

85

humanize that Unionist man, although he was a monster character.”24 On his first visit to the wake, Dermot was asked, “‘Did you know Bobby?’” and the story poses that question to the reader too (115).

“[C]onstructive [ … D]emolition” “‘The constructive thing to get into these days is demolition’”: this observation by Roy’s father connects all four “Troubles” stories in MacLaverty’s two mid-career collections (Profundo 129).25 In “Walking the Dog” and “A Silent Retreat,” readers encounter the physical, emotional, and verbal violence exhibited by characters who incarcerate themselves and others within stereotypes; in “Some Surrender” and “The Wake House,” characters (and readers) enter the constructive space of possibility that emerges when such stereotypes start to be demolished.

Notes   1 Haslam, “Character and Construction in Bernard MacLaverty’s Early Short Stories about the Troubles.”  2 MacLaverty, The Great Profundo and Other Stories, 127. Further page references to this volume are given parenthetically in the main text.   3 On MacLaverty’s use of the device of “intersection,” and its origins in his story “Hugo,” see Haslam, “Character and Construction.”   4 Reagan, “Remarks at a White House Meeting with Members of the American Business Conference. 15 April 1986.”   5 Ingman, 241, states that the father delivers the sentence “bitterly”; however, his tone is not specified. Ingman persuasively argues that the father expresses one type of “Ulster Protestant viewpoint: just as his own life’s work, in the form of flats he designed, is in the process of being demolished, so Ulster’s Protestants feel that their identity is being compromised by a British government that seems to favour the other side” (241). Nevertheless, the narrative also implies that, for certain political structures and beliefs, demolition may be more constructive than refurbishing.   6 Gordimer, 264–5.   7 Gordimer, 264, cited in MacLaverty, “Bernard MacLaverty,” Interviewed by Rosa González, 26.   8 MacLaverty, “Bernard MacLaverty,” Interviewed by Rosa González, 26.  9 Ibid.

86

Bernard MacLaverty

10 This is a point also made by Russell, 83, who argues that the “story’s refusal of structural closure, signified in part by its use of present tense … enables its ideological openness.” My reading of “Some Surrender” is indebted to Russell’s astute analysis. 11 Bernard MacLaverty, Walking the Dog and Other Stories, 7. Further page references to this work will be given parenthetically in the main text. 12 For an examination of conflicting critical accounts concerning the protagonist’s denomination, see Haslam, “The Inquisitional Impulse: Bernard MacLaverty’s ‘Walking the Dog,’” 45–58. 13 This point is also noted by the following critics: Jarniewicz, 505; Storey, 223; and Russell, 86. 14 See Storey, 223. 15 Compare Jarniewicz, 505, who points out that after the protagonist is permitted to exit from the car, his body projects “a double shadow, one from each headlight” (Walking 11). 16 See Adair, 27, and Storey, 223. 17 MacLaverty, “Bernard MacLaverty,” Interviewed by Rosa González, 26. 18 The precise time frame of “A Silent Retreat” is unclear. It is definitely set before April 1970, when the B-Specials were disbanded: see “Ulster Special Constabulary (USC).” Given the story’s references to the prison’s “Republican wing” (Walking 42) it may be set during the IRA’s “Border Campaign” of the later 1950s and early 1960s, a period intersecting with MacLaverty’s own teenage years. 19 Blake, 150. Russell highlights the theme of imprisonment in “A Silent Retreat” and two other stories in Walking the Dog—“In Bed” and “A Foreign Dignitary”—as well as throughout MacLaverty’s oeuvre (21–2, 85, 87–8, 144). 20 By stressing “‘which,’” Todd differentiates the Anglican version of the prayer from the Catholic one (which uses “‘who’”); he also appears to allude to the “myth” about the pronunciation of the letter “h,” when he questions Declan about God: “‘And what did he—with a capital aitch—say to you today?’” (Walking 51). 21 The “No Surrender” part of Bobby’s taunt is, of course, invoked and queried in “Some Surrender” (Profundo 123–4). 22 MacLaverty, “Bernard MacLaverty, Glasgow, in Interview,” 16. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. There are clear parallels here with the humanizing representation of Sammy in “A Happy Birthday” (Secrets) and of Roy’s father in “Some Surrender” (Profundo); there is also a contrast with the distorting representations by Danny’s father of the blacksmith and Miss Schwartz, in “My Dear Palestrina” (A Time to Dance). Nonetheless, MacLaverty has acknowledged that Lamb was less successful in de-stereotyping homosexuals and Cal less successful in de-stereotyping Irish republicans. See MacLaverty, “Bernard MacLaverty,” Interviewed by Rosa González, 29; MacLaverty, “Bernard MacLaverty, Glasgow, in Interview,” 14–15;



Character and Construction in MacLaverty’s “Troubles” Stories

87

and Ganter, Hoffnung wider die Hoffnungslosigkeit: das Irlandbild im Erzählwerk Bernard MacLavertys, 316. 25 Space restrictions preclude an exploration of how “A Foreign Dignitary” (Walking the Dog) might also be construed as a “Troubles” story.

Works cited Adair, Tom. “Orange Turns towards Green: Walking the Dog.” The Independent Weekend, Books Section, 23 July 1994, 27. Blake, William. Songs of Innocence and Experience. [1794] Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970. Ganter, Christian J. Hoffnung wider die Hoffnungslosigkeit: das Irlandbild im Erzählwerk Bernard MacLavertys. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999. Gordimer, Nadine. “The Flash of Fireflies.” The New Short Story Theories. Ed. Charles E. May. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994. 263–7. Haslam, Richard. “Character and Construction in Bernard MacLaverty’s Early Short Stories about the Troubles.” Irish University Review 41.2 (2011): 74–92. —“The Inquisitional Impulse: Bernard MacLaverty’s ‘Walking the Dog.’” Journal of the Short Story in English 57 (2011): 45–58. Ingman, Heather. A History of the Irish Short Story. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Jarniewicz, Jerzy. “The Clinking of an Identity Disk: Bernard MacLaverty’s ‘Walking the Dog.’” A Companion to the British and Irish Short Story. Eds Cheryl Alexander and David Malcolm. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008. 498–506. MacLaverty, Bernard. A Time to Dance and Other Stories. New York: Braziller, 1982. —Secrets and Other Stories. New York: Viking, 1984; first published 1977. —The Great Profundo and Other Stories. London: Penguin, 1987. —Walking the Dog and Other Stories. London: Penguin, 1995; first published 1994. —“Bernard MacLaverty, Glasgow, in Interview.” Conducted by Christian Ganter. Anglistik: Organ des Verbandes Deutscher Anglisten 7.2 (1996): 5–22. —“Bernard MacLaverty.” Interviewed by Rosa González. Ireland in Writing: Interviews with Writers and Academics. Eds Jacqueline Hurtley, Rosa González, Inés Praga, Esther Aliaga. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998. 21–38. —Matters of Life and Death and Other Stories. New York: Norton, 2006. Reagan, Ronald. “Remarks at a White House Meeting with Members of the American Business Conference. 15 April 1986.” “John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters: The American Presidency Project.” http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu. [last accessed 26 July 2012] Russell, Richard Rankin. Bernard MacLaverty. Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press, 2009.

88

Bernard MacLaverty

Storey, Michael. Representing the Troubles in Irish Short Fiction. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2004. “Ulster Special Constabulary (USC).” CAIN Website http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/othelem/ organ/uorgan.htm#usc. [last accessed 26 July 2012]

6

MacLaverty’s Holocaust: Affect, Memory, and the “Troubles” Stephen Watt

“Everyday life is not simply the material relationships. … It is about how you can move across those relationships, where you can and cannot invest, where you can stop/rest and where you can move and make new connections, what matters and in what ways.”1

—Lawrence Grossberg (2010) Situated as it is in a moment of cultural trauma—and consistent, I think, with the aims of the present volume—Bernard MacLaverty’s oeuvre might be illuminated by two emergent intellectual projects, both of which endeavor to address the lived experience of historical traumas like the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland. These projects include, first, and regarded here as a definable interpretive “turn,” the proliferation of studies of collective memory since the events of 11 September 2001, a scholarly complement to what Yale University theologian and former political prisoner Miroslav Volf regards as a larger “memory boom” in the fast-paced, “entertainment-saturated culture in which we live.”2 The second of these discourses is often referred to as “affect theory” which, although a quite different critical enterprise, might be articulated with studies of collective memory in reading MacLaverty’s most significant representations of the “Troubles,” his novels Cal (1983) and Grace Notes (1997).3 One result of a reading inflected by these twin discourses will be a reconsideration of the historical novelist’s obligation to represent objective truth, if such an ambition were ever realizable in the first place beyond the domains of accountancy or statistics (and, as we shall see, even these are fallible). Instead, this articulation might help us better understand both MacLaverty’s depiction of personal, emotional truths (if not specific historical ones) and his strategy of adding resonance to these truths by juxtaposing them to those of other historical moments and traumas, a strategy Michael Rothberg has identified as

90

Bernard MacLaverty

the operation of “multidirectional memory”: memory that is “subject to ongoing negotiation, cross referencing, and borrowing”; memory that is “productive, not privative.”4 MacLaverty’s evocation of the Holocaust in Grace Notes serves as an exemplar of the very productive memorial operations Rothberg describes. “Affect theory,” by contrast, as gestured to by Lawrence Grossberg and by implication Raymond Williams, whose “structure of feeling” informs the epigraph above, attempts to understand not only the often intense registers of individual and shared emotion, but also the processes by way of which the intensity of lived experience at times catalyzes autonomic responses that exceed consciousness.5 More particularly, such contributors to this discourse as Sianne Ngai and Sara Ahmed explore dimensions of emotive experience and “ugly feelings” that MacLaverty’s characters know all too well: fear, anxiety, and shame, for instance. Readers of Ngai and Ernst Bloch will glean from this short list a distinction between so-called “filled” emotions like shame or disgust— those experienced acutely in the present—and “expectant” ones like fear that anticipate futures no sane person or literary character would welcome.6 The former emotions, as Ahmed emphasizes, are almost always “relational”; that is to say, they involve “(re)actions or relations of ‘towardness’ or ‘awayness’” in relation to certain objects.7 Some, like shame, seem to require the presence of another person even to exist, a witness to our exposure or abject failure; even if one feels shame while alone, she argues, “it is the imagined view of the other that is taken on by the subject in relation to itself.”8 Shame moves us inward, in other words, unlike the repulsion instantiated by disgust that repels us away from things. Fear works differently and describes a feeling of negative expectation more psychically pervasive, more continuous and often more debilitating than filled emotions as it is oriented toward the future with the common result of impinging upon, even paralyzing, life in the present. The opening section of Cal foregrounds its protagonist’s lived experience as MacLaverty’s narrator emphasizes the quotidian unease of a working-class Catholic living in a Protestant neighborhood, relying literally and repeatedly upon the verb “felt”: Cal “felt the muscles of his stomach relax” after lighting a cigarette and thereby quelling the nausea occasioned by his visit to the abattoir where his father works (8; my emphasis); as “he turned down into his street he felt the eyes on him” (9; my emphasis); he “felt” the red, white, and blue curbstones were aimed at him and his father (9); and as the sense of Protestant hegemony grew ominously around him, Cal and his father “felt” increasingly “excluded and isolated” (9). Not surprisingly given this experience, Cal’s predominant emotion is fear, a “feeling he had had ever since childhood”;



MacLaverty’s Holocaust: Affect, Memory, and the “Troubles”

91

moreover, the narrator confides, “there were times when he experienced fear more than others” (53), and he does so throughout the novel. Later when contemplating his complicity in Robert Morton’s murder, for instance, he fears he “would lose his dignity” if he were apprehended by the police and tortured (88); and in one scene after taking residence at the Morton farm, he is afraid Marcella will catch him gazing into her window hoping to see the faintest glimpse of her. Fear and anxiety, however, do not comprise the entirety of Cal’s emotional repertoire; so, in one awkward encounter with Marcella at the library as his love for her begins to flower, Cal “felt himself begin to blush and fought it helplessly.” To “be out of his own control” in Marcella’s company irritates and embarrasses him (79), and all that remains for him to do is to stare helplessly at the floor hoping to avert her gaze. This momentary loss of control serves as a prelude to the more devastating shame of impotence as Cal’s relationship with Marcella evolves. As they initiate their physical intimacy and his failure is revealed, the “shame of his weakness blotted out the sickening visions of her genuflecting husband” (154), guilt over his involvement in Robert’s murder in this instance trumped by the exposure of this humiliating inadequacy. Even his recovery of sexual competence is marred by premature excitation, his emotional instrumentation requiring more fine-tuning to become fully functional in his congress with Marcella. These moments of unease later in the novel are juxtaposed to moments of Cal’s nascent sense of self-satisfaction—emotive places, Grossberg might call them, where Cal can stop for a moment and rest—and a new-found sense of confidence quickly vanquished either by external forces he cannot control or internal ones he cannot suppress. Thus, after taking residence in the Mortons’ cottage and enjoying the “cleansing” effect of work, Cal “felt a surge of his own power to direct his life into whatever path he wanted.” Yet, almost immediately, just as he “felt safe from the world,” he began to be “attacked from within his own head” (117). Like fear, the anxiety that disturbs his dreams propels the future jarringly into the present, undermining his confidence and preparing us for the dispiriting subjective truth of the novel’s final paragraph: he was “grateful that at last someone was going to beat him to within an inch of his life” (170). Better a present comprising brutal certainty than one marked by constant fear. Like Cal, Grace Notes, at least for one critic, represents the “Irish colonialist problematic” as a “specific historical instance of a deeper human problematic, one focused on the relations between the unique and the general in human affairs…”.9 I would like to revise the problematic to which Gerry Smyth

92

Bernard MacLaverty

alludes while retaining one of his emphases: namely, the relation of specific human truths to general ones and, more particularly, the relation between one specific history—The “Troubles” in Northern Ireland—and another, Nazi atrocities during World War Two, a relationship forming a powerful, in some ways disturbing leitmotif in MacLaverty’s novel. The relationality of these two historical traumas emerges violently during the performance of the protagonist Catherine McKenna’s musical triumph in the book’s final pages, and it is a connection that MacLaverty cultivates throughout, in part to help Catherine transform her feelings about the Protestant Orangemen and the local history of sectarian violence she carries in her memory. Both this history and her response to it, not surprisingly, are connected to her father whose death requires Catherine’s return home for his funeral, hence the dimensions of a deeper “human problematic” Smyth identifies. Related to this problematic and the thickening of its textures are both the multidirectional memory linking the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland to the Holocaust of World War Two and the notion that a musical composition can be reified into something more substantial, into a thing resembling a headstone or memorial dedicated to an individual or event that has passed into our collective memory. And this is the issue, I hope, from which we might wrest answers to the conventional, always vexing challenge of “So What?”: in other words, why should we care about this very good novel that originates in a large corpus of accomplished literature about the “Troubles” that includes such texts as Seamus Heaney’s poetry, Brian Friel’s The Freedom of the City, Eoin MacNamee’s Resurrection Man, Robert McLiam Wilson’s Eureka Street, and many more? Following Volf and Rothberg, I would begin my answer by gesturing to the “multidirectional” matter of reading the “Troubles” by way of the Holocaust, of “remembering rightly,” and continue by underscoring the relationship between memory and affect. “Remembering rightly,” Volf postulates, means not only remembering the traumatic event but, in an echo of Augustine, “also forgetting— forgetting how suffering and evil felt.”10 This assertion is in itself controversial and MacLaverty implicitly responds to it, I believe, by presenting not an “emotionless recollection” (Volf ’s phrase), but rather a transposition of emotion from one register to another, much as a musician transposes a song from one key signature to another. It is thus Catherine’s ability not only to incorporate the “Troubles” into her music, but also to re-circuit the emotion produced by sectarian violence and simple bullying represented by Orange lodge marches that in the end matters both to the processes of collective memory and to her own affective repertoire and psychical well-being.



MacLaverty’s Holocaust: Affect, Memory, and the “Troubles”

93

One might argue further that such a process represents a strategy of multi­ directional memory deployed by MacLaverty in works published both before and after Grace Notes, but never quite so fully. Cal, we might recall, implicitly juxtaposes his minoritarian position to that of American blacks, even slaves, through his singing of African-American rhythm and blues; and in “Up the Coast” from Matters of Life and Death and Other Stories (2006) both MacLaverty’s narrator and the notebooks of a young rape victim evoke the specter of Famine-era emigrants forced from their homes as affective surrogates for the story’s victim-protagonist. Here, as in Grace Notes, the victim-artist wields her art to confront and transpose intensely ugly feelings, but the question remains about how successful the historical borrowing is in providing a multidirectional layering of the affective truth of her trauma. Is her brutal assault by one of MacLaverty’s most despicable and intellectually dim characters illuminated by this juxtaposition? That is, how are rape and its aftermath clarified by evocations of the Great Hunger and its victims, exiles like MacLaverty’s young artist forced off their land by an unspeakable malevolence? If it is not too grandiose a statement to make, Grace Notes marks MacLaverty’s most significant contribution to the growing body of texts addressing the conjoined issues of trauma, collective and personal memory, and—ultimately— healing and the even more complex project of reparation. Needless to say, commentary on the Holocaust is crucial to this conversation. As Theodor Adorno, speaking of the Holocaust, notes, “One wants to get free of the past … since one cannot live in its shadow, and since there is no end to terror if guilt and violence are only repaid, again and again, with guilt and violence.” At the same time, he asks, how does one enact a “serious working through of the past, the breaking of its spell through an act of clear consciousness?”11 How does one achieve more than a shallow, even craven, “coming to terms,” a concept Adorno denigrates as implying less than a serious engagement with histories personal and collective? A perhaps surprising answer suggested by Paul Ricouer and implicitly endorsed by Primo Levi in Survival in Auschwitz (1947/1958) involves a complex formula of memory and its putative opposite, forgetting. In his final and great book Memory, History, Forgetting (2004), Ricouer postulates that forgetting and forgiveness form an important horizon—“for forgetting, the problematic of memory and faithfulness to the past; for forgiveness, guilt and reconciliation with the past.”12 Contrary to any notion that forgetting constitutes a kind of dysfunctionality, Ricouer wonders if forgetting is actually a necessary adjunct to, not an “enemy of,” memory; and weighs the possibility that one must find an appropriate balance between the two, suggesting that

94

Bernard MacLaverty

“appropriate memory” may entail the “renunciation of total reflection.”13 For his part, enduring the privations of the concentration camp or “Lager,” as he calls it, Levi bemoans the fact that memories of the “world outside” crowd his “sleeping and waking hours.” He and his fellow inmates became acutely aware that they had “forgotten nothing,” as every memory “rises in front of us painfully clear.”14 Happy recollections of their former homes, Levi notes, are as painful to internees “as the thrusts of a sword.” Perhaps for this reason, he grew determined to erase from his mind the abusive conditions of the camp: “Many things were then said and done among us,” Levi recalls when brutally introduced to the punishing reality of his captivity, “but of these it is better that there remain no memory.”15 In assessing the intervention in critical memory MacLaverty makes in Grace Notes, then, one must ask how it facilitates the complicated processes of “remembering rightly” or helps negotiate a serious “coming to terms” with historical atrocity. These projects, as I have tried to suggest, inevitably put pressure on such issues as memory, memorializing, narrative and narrativization, and even what Ricouer terms the “mnestic trace”: the imprinted historical image that persists precisely because it has “struck us, touched us, affected us, and the affective mark remains in our mind.”16 Such traces often remain isolated, shorn of context, and are just the opposite of Miroslav Volf ’s notion of “remembering rightly.” In The End of Memory, Volf recalls his 1984 arrest in then-Communist Yugoslavia on the charge of being a spy working for the United States. Married to an American woman and pressed into compulsory military service the year before, Volf was relentlessly interrogated and tortured by a security officer known only as Captain G. Describing his interrogation as a “mid-level form of abuse—greater than an insult or a blow, but mild compared to the torture and suffering many others have undergone at the hands of their tormentors” (6)—Volf became nonetheless “fear-ridden” and “humiliated.” Self-described as broken into pieces and then reassembled, he was eventually driven to contemplate the thorny question of how to remember his confinement and abuse. “To remember a wrongdoing,” he advises, is to “struggle against it”; and to “remember rightly,” he adds, “must mean also what is right for those who have wronged that individual and for the larger community” (11). Given the profoundly Christian ethic Volf espouses, remembering rightly thus requires of the victim an inclusive contextualizing of brutalization and abuse within two larger narratives: that of the perpetrator’s entire life, of which military duty is merely a part, and that of the master narrative of Christianity. Not coincidentally, both of these larger narratives are inherently salvific: the perpetrator of the



MacLaverty’s Holocaust: Affect, Memory, and the “Troubles”

95

brutality amounts to more than his wrongdoing and is in some ways redeemed; and torturer and victim alike are equally saved by the blood of Christ. These are almost impossible issues to unpack properly here, but all are posed finally in the service of addressing one larger question prompted by MacLaverty’s novel, which is simply this: To what extent is any analogizing between the Holocaust and the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland intellectually admissible, let alone valuable? After all, among other connotations, such a juxtaposition immediately posits homologous relationships between Jewish victims and an historically marginalized Northern Catholic minority; and, equally or even more problematically, between the rebarbative actions of World War Two German soldiers and those of Northern Protestants (and, in other narratives of the “Troubles,” the IRA, RUC, and the British). We have grown comfortable, I think, with adducing parallels between the discriminations suffered by Northern Catholics and African-Americans in pre-Civil Rights America—we have heard and enjoyed the chorus of “We Shall Overcome” sung with a Belfast accent—but comparisons between the Holocaust and the “Troubles” seem a different analogical matter altogether, and may prove offensive both to Jewish survivors and their families and to Northern Irish Orangemen and theirs. Surely, MacLaverty must have been aware of this risk and, as readers, we are finally obligated to determine if it was worth taking. We might begin this assessment with three relevant motifs that inform Grace Notes: first, its several references to the 1941 Nazi massacre of 33,000 men, women and children at Babi Yar, a ravine outside the city of Kiev, the vast majority of whom were guilty of nothing but being Jewish;17 second, a deliberative repetition in Grace Notes of interrupted linearity or teleology gestured to, in part, by the novel’s title; and third, as I have suggested, the notion, contemplated by the novel’s protagonist Catherine Anne McKenna, of a musical composition forming a kind of memorial to an historical moment or specific episode. This last matter, in my view, raises an obvious question: namely, what kind of memorial or collective remembering does Catherine’s Vernicle, the title of her composition, form? One answer resides in the kinds of music Catherine prefers and writes herself, all of which are noted for their non-linearity; thus, her memorial to the “Troubles” might be viewed as similarly resistant to larger narratives, just the opposite of Volf ’s strategies of remembering rightly through a purposeful insertion of traumatic events into the larger master narratives of biography and the New Testament. Grace Notes identifies numerous examples of Catherine’s privileging of a de-narrativizing or minimalizing aesthetic. Visiting the cemetery in which

96

Bernard MacLaverty

her father will be interred—a visit that actually occurs after the broadcast of her symphony on BBC Radio—Catherine spies the headstone of Paddy Fleck, a young IRA soldier she once knew. Seeing this marker, she immediately thinks of Leoš Janáček’s “Adagio” commemorating the shooting of a boy by Austrian troops in 1905: “She wondered about writing something for Paddy Fleck—what would it be like? … Was the nationalism Janáček represented different from the kind espoused by the Provisional IRA?” (85). Or, we might ask, does it differ from the politics of Yevgeny Evtushenko’s poem “Babi Yar” or Dimitri Shostakovich’s “Thirteenth Symphony” based on the poem, both of which Catherine’s mentor Melnichuck had recalled during her earlier study with him: “You know Babi Yar?” [he asked]. “No, not…” “Maybe you are too young. Babi Yar is a place of death. In 1941 the Nazis made all the Jews of Kiev come together and they took them to Babi Yar—thirtyfive thousand—men, women, children—and they shot them and put them down in a ravine to be buried. Evtushenko wrote a poem and Shostakovich put it in a symphony.” (126)

Catherine’s Vernicle is intimately related to this memorializing project—the representation of history and historical atrocity in music—a relation underscored as Catherine listens to the four Orangemen drummers she retained for her concert. As they savagely pound their mammoth Lambeg drums near the end of the novel, she makes the connection between their brutal display and Nazi atrocities: Their aggression, their swagger put her in mind of Fascism. She was not trying to copy the vulgarity of Shostakovich Seven—the March of the Nazis on Leningrad—but that was the effect. A brutalizing of the body, the spirit, humanity. Thundering and thundering and thundering. When the drums stopped … the only thing that remained was a feeling of depression and darkness. Utter despair. (272–3)

In this moment of performance, at least for Catherine, Nazi violence and Protestant domination merge, but to what end? How does the production of “utter despair,” however fleeting, achieve meaningful cultural and psychical work? It may very well be the case that this climactic moment was both prepared for and facilitated by the larger, two-part structure of Vernicle. Still, MacLaverty’s



MacLaverty’s Holocaust: Affect, Memory, and the “Troubles”

97

description of the drumming itself emphasizes its disruptive, violent quality: the strings’ ascent to an F sharp apex allows for no larger “vista,” as the “short bursts” of drums “like machine-gun fire” destroy the view (271). The merciful silence or respite that follows is shattered by a second volley of drum “fire,” a “sustained burst” creating a “throbbing” of echoes in the non-palliative second moment of silence that follows (272). Eventually, all the instruments in the orchestra yield, giving way to the superior force represented by the drums; they have triumphed and effectively silenced all. And here is where theories of memorialization, traumatic memory, and “remembering rightly” collide in a kind of vertiginous spiral of possibility. One could say that, in terms of the novel’s privileging of non-linearity, fragmentation, and, most obviously, of grace notes—“notes which were neither one thing nor the other. A note between the notes. Notes that occurred outside time” (133)—the thunderous drumming in Vernicle is consistent with the aesthetic Catherine admires. This mnestic and aural image, one Catherine recalls early in the novel as something far more “thrill[ing]” than an example of “‘bloody bigotry,’” as her father had once characterized it (8), has survived in her memory and there joined another mode of representation: one marked by interruption and spasmodic eruption, not narrative coherence. Indeed, she “loved” Melnichuck’s “spareness and austerity,” and Janáček “fragments” (62), “clusters of short phrases,” and “aimless exploration” (84); equally pertinent, from the teaching of Huang Xaio Gang, she adhered to the conviction that “Music was not linear as some people would have us believe” (41). Neither is history or historical memory, she seems to say. In this regard, the drumming in Vernicle constitutes a kind of anecdote, what Joel Fineman once described as a “literary form that uniquely lets history happen by virtue of the way it introduces an opening into the teleological, and therefore timeless, narration of beginning, middle, and end. The anecdote produces the effect of the real, the occurrence of contingency, by establishing an event as an event within and yet without the framing context of historical successivity. …”18 As Catherine discusses her music with the four Lambeg drummers during rehearsal earlier, she gestures toward this anecdotal or disruptive quality by advising them, “‘You’re accompanying a tune which doesn’t exist anymore’” (259). Eventually, though, the entrance of the drummers “suddenly cuts everything short,” just as Catherine’s reflection on the writing process before the concert underscores the one thing she hates the most: interruption. A telephone ringing, a baby crying—interrupted writing and interrupted sex. That is the interrupted historical and aesthetic reality of Vernicle.

98

Bernard MacLaverty

Yet another interpretive possibility, as MacLaverty’s narrator emphasizes, is the capacity of “grace notes” themselves—a potentiality akin to the miracle of transubstantiation in the Catholic mass, as the novel’s narrator observes—to be two things at once, or, more properly, “the ability unique to music to say two or more things at once” (275). Does this novel, to return to the larger question that animated this brief meditation, imply that the Holocaust and “Troubles” are somehow analogous? Or, is MacLaverty making a subtler point about collective memory of and memorials to the “Troubles” being healed by way of reference to Evtushenko, Shostakovich and Babi Yar? Does “remembering rightly” depend upon an exhaustive memory and a narrative capable of encompassing the wide array of historical facts such a memory might accumulate? Or, heeding Ricoeur’s admonition while discussing the delicate balance between memory and forgetting, are testimony and narrative simply too susceptible to ideology, which could manipulate memory in not only inaccurate, but destructive ways? MacLaverty and Catherine McKenna seem to suggest that coming to terms with the past does not in fact require an Aristotelian narrative with a beginning, middle and end, all the events of which are linked by probability and necessity. It requires no redemption or salvific apotheosis—none of the larger contexts Volf employs—but rather a recontextualization of traumatic events and maybe a little forgetting. A mnestic trace or image exploding thunderously into a collective consciousness might just suffice, therefore, in transforming historical trauma and by so doing coming to terms with the past: not in a cursory or shallow way, but in a way that allows one to revise the feeling of the trauma into something more productive. For, as depressive and ominous as the drumming is, its performance ultimately leads not to Catherine’s collapse but to her rise to receive an audience’s enthusiastic applause. In this way, to echo Michael Rothberg’s thesis in Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009), MacLaverty seems to ask, “When memories of slavery and colonialism bump up against memories of the Holocaust in contemporary multicultural societies, must a competition of victims ensue?”19 Rejecting the notion that identities are “pure” and “authentic,” Rothberg insists that memory’s “multi-directionality encourages us to think of the public sphere as a malleable discursive space in which groups do not simply articulate established positions but actually come into being through their dialogical interactions with others.”20 Memory is labor, a form of work—and victimization is not a “zero-sum” game. We also understand that the juxtaposition of events of the Shoah with contemporary impasses is a hazardous, even incendiary enterprise, as Caryl Churchill learned from the



MacLaverty’s Holocaust: Affect, Memory, and the “Troubles”

99

outrage caused by her controversial play Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza (2009). For MacLaverty and Grace Notes, though, the analogy seems less controversial or objectionable. The historical surrogation of performance helps heal Catherine McKenna. More important, perhaps, MacLaverty’s multi-directional gambit of juxtaposing the Holocaust with the “Troubles” and thus transposing the negative affect associated with a particular traumatic moment may suggest for all of us a crucial stage in the reparative process.

Notes   1 Grossberg, 313.   2 Volf, 39–40.   3 Quotations from MacLaverty’s fiction come from Cal and Grace Notes. All quotations will be followed by page numbers in the text.   4 Rothberg, 3.   5 Clough, 209. Here, Clough is discussing the work of Brian Massumi who, like Grossberg, is a major contributor to this theoretical conversation.   6 See Ngai, 209–215.   7 Ahmed, 8.   8 Ibid., 105.   9 Smyth, 15. 10 Volf, 23. 11 Adorno, 115. 12 Ricouer, 412. 13 Ibid., 413. 14 Levi, 46. 15 Ibid., 4. 16 Ricouer, 427. 17 See Young, 105, 112. Young cites an inscription on the monument in Denver’s Babi Yar Park that 100,000 “citizens of Kiev and prisoners of war” died there. He observes that 33,000 people died at the Babi Yar ravine (MacLaverty’s Melnichuck specifies this number as 35,000) and notes that the figure of 100,000 represents the total murdered in and around Kiev by Nazi troops between 1941 and 1943. More important, he argues that such vague descriptors as “prisoners of war” and “citizens” obscure the fact that “almost all were killed for having been Jews” (105). 18 Fineman, 61. 19 Rothberg, 2. 20 Ibid., 5.

100

Bernard MacLaverty

Works cited Adorno, Theodor H. “What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?” Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective. Ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. 114–129. Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004. Clough, Patricia T. “The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia, and Bodies.” The Affect Theory Reader. Eds Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. 206–225. Fineman, Joel. “The History of the Anecdote.” The New Historicism. Ed. H. Aram Veeser. New York: Routledge, 1989. 49–76. Grossberg, Lawrence, interviewed by Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg. “Affect’s Future: Rediscovering the Virtual in the Actual.” The Affect Theory Reader. Eds Gregg and Seigworth. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. 309–338. Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz. [1947/1958] New York: Classic House Books, 2008. MacLaverty, Bernard. Cal. London: George Braziller, 1983. —Grace Notes. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. Ricouer, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Smyth, Gerry. “‘The Same Sound but with a Different Meaning’: Music, Repetition and Identity in Bernard MacLaverty’s Grace Notes.” Éire-Ireland 37.3–4 (Fall-Winter 2002): 5–24. Volf, Miroslav. The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2006. Young, James E. “Memory and Monument.” Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective. Ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. 103–113.

7

The Personal is Political: Bernard MacLaverty’s Grace Notes as a Peace Process Novel Marilynn J. Richtarik

Bernard MacLaverty has remarked that “all writing … is political, even writing that … pretends not to be.”1 “[S]ituations of conflict,” in particular, contain “human beings trying to work out things happening to them,” so that “even if you focus on those individuals, the situation in which they find themselves involved will come out.”2 His third novel, Grace Notes (1997), centers on a female composer, Catherine McKenna, striving to master her art form and restore amicable relations with her mother while suffering from postnatal depression. The “Troubles” in Northern Ireland serve as the backdrop to her story, but my reading of the novel will steer clear of its overtly political content while positing the existence within it of a subliminal primer on the means of resolving differences. In short, I will argue that, through Catherine’s interactions with her mother, MacLaverty dramatizes the difficult process of reconciliation. Michael Parker and Liam Harte report that MacLaverty conceived Grace Notes in 1994, “around the time of the first IRA ceasefire” that marked a crucial step in the peace process resulting in the Good Friday Agreement of April 1998. In a telephone conversation with them in July 1998, he explicitly contrasted the “bleak” period during which his earlier novels, Lamb (1980) and Cal (1983), had been written with “the opening up of possibilities” he perceived when he embarked on this one.3 Readings of Grace Notes in terms of its treatment of Northern Ireland’s sectarian politics generally culminate in a discussion of the final section of the novel, in which MacLaverty evokes in words the experience of listening to a performance of Catherine’s first major symphonic piece, Vernicle. In this work (which she briefly considers calling “Reconciliation”),4 the young composer from a Northern Catholic background includes Lambeg drums, instruments usually associated with Northern Protestant triumphalism and loyalist displays. By presenting them in two radically different musical

102

Bernard MacLaverty

contexts, she first exposes their oppressive power and then bends them to her own, musical, purposes. Thus, in Stephen Watt’s words, “Catherine successfully transforms, thereby controls, … the one thing that for many Catholics symbolizes sectarian violence: Orangemen drumming.”5 “Through the interplay of words and music,” Patrick Grant aptly notes, “MacLaverty … attempts to have his novel do what music also does, effecting a transubstantiation, a transfiguration and reconciliation of opposites in a new synthesis that delights and enhances understanding. … What happens to the lambeg drums in the musical composition is what might happen also in a polity marked by a reconciliation of old and violent differences.”6 Discussing Catherine’s rejection of her father’s opinion of Lambeg drumming as expressing “‘Sheer bloody bigotry’” (8), Gerry Smyth states that she “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.” MacLaverty, in Smyth’s view, “represents one medium of (musical) repetition by means of another (literary) medium, and … deploys both to reflect on a sectarian society that has traditionally fetishized the ability to repeat the past without transformation.”7 Richard Rankin Russell, author of the first critical monograph in English on MacLaverty’s work, likewise endorses, as do I, the critical consensus that the Lambeg drums Catherine employs in Vernicle work “both to iterate the hatreds of the province’s past and suggest an avenue for a more harmonious future.”8 MacLaverty himself has commented that his description of Catherine’s composition represented his own reaction to “the cease-fire, the reconciliation or peace. … [T]his was a symbolic way to do it, because she is a musician and can use the power of the drums musically once the bigotry is being subtracted from them.”9 It is worth noting, however, that in the novel Catherine and her former music teacher, Miss Bingham, speak dismissively of the English critics’ fixation on “‘A Roman Catholic using Protestant drums’” in their coverage of the concert (105).10 This exchange should make us hesitant to attribute too much significance to Catherine’s musical innovation. After all, as Grant trenchantly observes, “such a ‘transubstantiation’ is realized in art in all too depressing contrast to the actual realities of politics, religion, and the many ordinary human relationships compromised by violence, bitterness and alienation.”11 As Northern Irish people have discovered in the years since the adoption of the Good Friday Agreement, reconciliation is easy to prescribe, harder to describe, and more difficult still to achieve. Obstacles to reconciliation remained glaringly obvious throughout the time MacLaverty worked on Grace Notes. From late 1994 through the book’s launch



The Personal is Political

103

in June 199712 and beyond, the peace process existed in a near-constant state of crisis. On 31 August 1994, the Provisional IRA announced “a complete cessation of military operations,” and loyalist paramilitaries responded six weeks later with a ceasefire of their own. The British government and unionists, however, objected that the PIRA declaration did not include the word “permanent” and insisted that Sinn Féin, the political party linked to the PIRA, should not be allowed to participate in talks until the PIRA handed over its weapons, something it categorically refused to do. There followed nearly a year and a half of fruitless dispute over the terms on which peace talks might take place, which groups could be part of them and what would be on the agenda. Angry over the delay, militant republicans broke the ceasefire in February 1996. Only in the late summer of 1997, after its renewal and changes of government in both the UK and the Republic of Ireland, did any substantive progress begin to be made.13 Meanwhile, a potent mixture of nationalist frustration and unionist fear led to the most acrimonious marching seasons in recent memory in the summers of 1995 and 1996. Efforts by nationalists and police to prevent unionists from parading through nationalist areas were violently resisted, and tensions between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland rose as a result. Sean Farren and Robert F. Mulvihill, authors of an early study of the peace process, record that “The combination of such protests with a renewed IRA campaign … was precipitating Northern Ireland into one of its most dangerous periods since the [republican] hunger strikes” of 1980–1.14 Thus, the most hopeful thing that could have been said about prospects for peace in mid-September 1996, when MacLaverty sent a draft of Grace Notes to his agent,15 was that the situation remained radically unresolved. MacLaverty had begun to think seriously about writing a new novel in the autumn of 1994 largely because he had a contract to write one. W. W. Norton, the press that had published the American edition of his latest collection of stories, Walking the Dog (which came out in the UK in 1994 and the US in 1995), had agreed to do so on the condition that he promise them “the next novel,” but MacLaverty remembers that “I hadn’t a clue what I was going to do.”16 One of the first things he decided, though, was that his central character would be a woman. A female friend, also a writer, gave MacLaverty the main idea for Grace Notes. He recalls that “She said, ‘It’s all right for you—you don’t have to have the babies,’” and in this “throwaway remark” he glimpsed “the whole of the novel.”17 He had been writing mainly short stories and had two unpublished ones with female protagonists: “one of them was having a baby, and the other

104

Bernard MacLaverty

one was someone who had the courage to break a relationship.” Thinking about his novel, he “realised” that these women “were the same person.”18 He also incorporated elements of another story he had begun about an Irish woman mistakenly imprisoned for republican activity; though the literal prison dropped out of the narrative, Catherine’s depression acts in the novel as a type of “mental imprisonment.”19 Conscious of his penchant for writing father-son stories, MacLaverty deliberately chose to write a mother-daughter story this time instead, and he set himself the further challenge of “not really us[ing] any male characters.”20 (Though men such as Catherine’s father, her problematic lover, and her musical mentors feature in the story, they are presented exclusively through her thoughts and memories of them.) MacLaverty’s audacity and success at entering the consciousness of a woman are alike considerable, but he knew from the start that he did not want “just to create a handbag female.”21 Possibly for this reason, he included a large autobiographical element in Grace Notes by making Catherine an artist. As he told Richard Rankin Russell, “I’ve always found it difficult to write about writers, but thought it might be possible to write about a creative person who was creating in a different discipline,” and “I have had a deep interest in music since I was about sixteen.”22 Perhaps MacLaverty’s determination to write a novel with a female protagonist had something to do with the hopefulness he felt when the PIRA declared their ceasefire in 1994. Maybe he shared Catherine’s opinion of “the geography of the places of death in her own country” as “a map which would not exist if women made the decisions” (127). At any rate, he wanted, for a change, to write a novel with a happy ending. Whereas Lamb and Cal, he remarks, reflect the “negativity, the disappointment, the gloom of the situation in Northern Ireland” at the time when they were written, “Grace Notes came to be written during the cease-fire and I’m not a gloomy person.”23 Circumstances, however, made it hard to maintain a sense of optimism about the outcome of the peace process. “This time last year,” he told an interviewer in September 1995, “I … had more hope than at any time.” But after a year’s worth of “struggle,” we “realize that we are not even at the start. Nobody has said anything to anybody else, there are no negotiations … they haven’t even sat down.”24 The following month, he complained about the “obtuse” British government’s stance on the decommissioning of weapons: “to make this a pre-condition … is very foolish indeed. … What you want is people to sit down and say, ‘Okay, we have got a problem. How can we solve it?’ That’s what needs to happen.”25



The Personal is Political

105

MacLaverty’s worries about where the peace process was going, or if it was going anywhere at all, found expression in a structural decision about the novel that he made early in its composition. He would divide the story into two parts but readers would encounter the second half of it first. “The fact that there are two parts to the book’s structure,” he explains, “means you can end on a high note before you realise that the actual end has been in the middle of the book when she relapsed into another depression. But it wasn’t as bad as what she first suffered, so some small progress has been made … .”26 This formal device gave him “an opportunity to end the book with hope although it doesn’t end on a kind of an unreasonable level of hope; it is a very attenuated hope.”27 Grace Notes is not set during the peace process. None of the characters alludes to negotiations and there are references to continuing violence, the most prominent being a description of the aftermath of a large bomb attack in the middle of Catherine’s hometown that has left the place “hardly recognisable”: “Shop-fronts were covered in hardboard, the Orange Hall and other buildings bristled with scaffolding. Some roofs were covered in green tarpaulins, others were protected by lath and sheets of polythene” (9–10).28 Perhaps because he considered himself “not well-informed” about life in Northern Ireland during the ceasefire, MacLaverty imagined the action of the novel as taking place entirely during the late 1980s.29 Nevertheless, Grace Notes speaks to the time in which it was written and first published in its portrayal of strained and broken relationships and awkward conversations. These personal interactions serve as metaphors for the tense political situation and what would be required to improve it.30 If Catherine’s musical composition represents the glorious possibilities of reconciliation, this interpersonal level of the novel encodes both its difficulty and its necessity if Northern Ireland is to progress. Scholars and those working in conflict resolution have noted the role of narrative in changing destructive habits of mind and patterns of interaction. Robert Schreiter, a theologian and consultant to the Roman Catholic Church for reconciliation and peace building programs, identifies “establishing a shared identity between the two aggrieved or separated parties” as a key part of the “long and complex process” of “social reconciliation.” This project involves “analysis of current identities … as well as adjudicating the different versions of history maintained by each party,” and the purpose of this shared identity is “not just to create a common past, but also to provide a platform for a different future.” Schreiter stresses that memory, “an essential part of identity,” “turns on … the relationship of the present to things and events past” and “is continually shaped by a dialectic of remembering and forgetting,” so “To forgive is not to

106

Bernard MacLaverty

forget … but to remember in a different way.” Changing relationships with the past in turn “make possible the establishing of a new, common identity between parties that have become estranged or divided in whatever way.”31 Social scientists William J. Long and Peter Brecke, in a study on reason and emotion in conflict resolution, describe the first two phases in the process of forgiveness and reconciliation thus: “First, parties to a conflict must recognize shame and anger from a perceived wrong, injustice, frustration, or injury. They must acknowledge the harm. … Second, forgiveness involves a changed understanding of oneself and of the other party to a conflict. … Forgiving involves a self-transformation wherein the party sees itself as something other than a victim and achieves a more complete and balanced identity.” It also entails “constructing a new identity for the other … separate from the injury he or she inflicted.”32 As Graham Spencer, editor of a collection of essays on memory and forgiveness in Northern Ireland, puts similar ideas, changing one’s association with another via forgiveness “requires a change in the narrative of experience away from resentment, pain, anger etc. towards strength, compassion and understanding—a narrative … shaped less by attention to the self and more by attention to the other.” Change, he asserts, “will emerge with dialogue, understanding and empathy. In that reconciliation evolves from the growth of new narratives (along with different experiences of telling and listening) it becomes not an end, but a new beginning or continuation … of the past.”33 Bernard MacLaverty agrees that “Narrative is a way of thinking,”34 and his story about Catherine McKenna struggling to adjust to her changed circumstances and to renegotiate the terms of her relationships with important people in her life as well as with her personal and communal histories can be read as a case study in the process of reconciliation itself. Regarded in this light, the scenes in Grace Notes depicting Catherine’s tentative rapprochement with her mother acquire special significance. Critics have largely ignored the character of Mrs McKenna, or have regarded her disapproval of certain aspects of Catherine’s behavior as one more barrier between the young composer and her pursuit of her art.35 The limited third-person narration induces readers to identify with Catherine’s thoughts and emotions and to overlook her mother’s. Yet the text provides us with enough information to see what motivates her and to find in it grounds for a new affiliation between the two. Thus, subtly, MacLaverty points the way forward for parties who have defined themselves by their differences. The estrangement between Catherine and her parents has persisted for several years at the time of the novel’s present. An only child, she had been a “nice” girl, sharing her parents’ devout Catholic faith and fulfilling their expectations for



The Personal is Political

107

her by graduating with a first-class degree from Queen’s University in Belfast, undertaking a year of postgraduate study in Glasgow, and winning an award to be spent on travel “to encounter the music of other countries” (89–90, 111, 61). Catherine has always been independent-minded, but her self-assertion has typically taken the form of not doing things rather than of doing them—Miss Bingham remembers Catherine’s refusal to stand during the Hallelujah Chorus once she realized the practice had been inaugurated by an English monarch, and the biggest argument she ever had with her father centered on her twin failures to observe the Feast of the Immaculate Conception and to come home for Christmas the year she finished her course in Glasgow (107–8, 153–4). Readers, with their privileged access to Catherine’s mind, know that she had lost her faith some time before after hearing on the radio a dramatized version of Georg Büchner’s story of the mad poet Lenz and his embrace of atheism (36–38), but evidently her father had not, until then, grasped that she no longer believed. He could not be blamed for his ignorance, however, since Catherine had concealed her change of heart, keeping her real opinions to herself to avoid confrontation. Readers gather that silence and secrecy have been Catherine’s habitual defenses against perceived opposition. Early in the novel she remembers defying her parents when, as a 13-year-old, she lied to them to spend an illicit afternoon with a slightly older boy. She recalls this as “the first lie I ever told” (46). Her parents discovered the subterfuge and grilled her about her activities, and her mother had “smacked her across the face with her open hand” when Catherine resisted her attempts to find out exactly what had happened, though immediately after this she “walked to the other side of the room so that she wouldn’t hit her again” (47). The incident and its aftermath were exceptional enough for Catherine to recall them vividly a dozen years later, but even in this case she deceived her mother and father rather than arguing with them. Catherine has not been abused by her parents, nor has she ever openly rebelled, and she left for her postgraduate year on apparently good terms with them (21). Paradoxically, it may be because she had always been close to her parents that she felt an obscure need to distance herself from them. She reflects in Part One that “It was simpler to conform when she was at home. This was one of the reasons she’d left—if she’d stayed everything would have been done because it was the line of least resistance. It wasn’t so much that she’d left—she just failed to come back after her postgraduate year in Glasgow. … It was a gut reaction and she evolved reasons for it later. She became the prodigal daughter” (40). Catherine’s desertion has taken various forms during the past several years: she did not invite her parents to her graduation in Glasgow; she has not visited

108

Bernard MacLaverty

since the “big falling out” on the telephone with her father (who had ended their conversation by saying that “‘he wouldn’t care if she never came home again’”); she last wrote to them from Kiev during her scholarship travel three years ago; and she has not kept them informed about her whereabouts or anything that has been going on in her life since then (90, 153–4, 69, 14). She considered telling them that Vernicle would be broadcast by the BBC but “delayed too long,” with the uneasy recognition that “A girl who doesn’t tell her parents of her success is more estranged than one who conceals her mistakes” (268). Readers know that Catherine has been preoccupied with her personal drama throughout the time in which she has not been in contact with her parents. She has trained as a teacher; traveled to the Ukraine to meet a composer she admires; launched her professional composing career; moved to the Scottish island of Islay to take up a teaching position; become romantically involved with the Englishman Dave; gotten pregnant accidentally; had the baby (Anna); suffered from depression; and watched Dave turn from a heavy drinker into an alcoholic. We do not know what her parents have been doing during this time or how they have explained her silence to themselves. Aware that they would condemn many of her decisions, beliefs, and actions, and unwilling or unable to defend them, she has merely kept her distance: “The longer it went on the harder it became to think of writing. Or simply picking up the phone” (156). Deep down, Catherine believes that “she, the daughter, … should have enough sense to mend fences. Her parents were set in their ways. She should forgive them” (156). Before Anna’s birth she thinks seriously about writing to let them know “they soon would be grandparents,” but she loses her nerve after imagining “the scene at the breakfast table” (156). Later, in her depressed state, she even tells herself that her parents would be so distressed by her view of religion as “organised superstition” that “They would rather endure the pain of seeing her dead. At least then they would think of her as in heaven” (217–18). So things stand a few months before the present time of the novel, when Catherine’s father dies suddenly of a heart attack (14–15), and without this disruptive event they could, and probably would, have gone on this way indefinitely. The division between Catherine and her mother might seem to be on an entirely different scale to that caused, say, by sectarian murder, but, as any parent who has ever been rejected by a child or any child who has ever felt disowned by a parent can attest, the pain is both intense and intimately challenging to one’s sense of self. In any case, it is my contention that the steps the two of them take in Part One of the novel to start to repair their relationship are not different in kind to those required to end a political conflict like that in Northern Ireland.



The Personal is Political

109

First, there must be a mutual desire to reconcile. MacLaverty’s style is so economical (James Joyce might call it scrupulously mean) that this goodwill is not always obvious, but it is there. Mrs McKenna has gone to great lengths to locate Catherine to inform her of her father’s death (14), and Catherine has come home for the funeral “to comfort her mother” despite the facts that she has had to borrow money and leave her baby with a friend in order to make the trip (29, 4, 95). By now, she has acknowledged to herself the enormity of the wrong she did her parents, reflecting before the Vernicle premiere that “It was unheard of. For an only child to walk out like that. An only girl” (268). Upon her arrival at home, however, her mother clearly indicates her desire to reconnect: “‘Catherine,’ she said. She opened her arms and stood like that. Her chin went lumpy and she began to cry. Catherine went to her and they held on to each other. Both women were crying” (12). Significantly, Catherine’s first words to her mother are “‘I’m sorry—I’m sorry’” (13), although these are rendered ambiguous by the fact that the conventional expression of condolence in Northern Ireland is “I’m sorry for your trouble.” And their initial conversation establishes that it will take more than remorse to fix what is wrong with their relationship. “‘That was terrible about the bomb,’” Catherine essays. “‘I like the way you phoned to check we were all still alive,’” her mother retorts (15). Reconciliation also requires that the parties to it both change themselves and recognize the other as capable of change. Much of the transformation within Catherine has occurred prior to this reunion, and readers do not learn about most of it until the second half of the novel. There we encounter, for example, her overwhelming response to Anna’s birth: She felt she could fly—she felt light with love. For her girl, for herself. For all the other women in the world who had ever given birth. Especially for her own mother—the feeling was totally unexpected, came from nowhere into her. She wanted to be with her mother, they had both shared an experience which should unite them in love. She wanted to tell her as another mother, as an equal about her girl child who would some day, maybe, give birth to her own girl. (164–5)

On the spot, Catherine had forgiven her mother “for some of her anxieties which grew out of concern, grew out of love” (165). In addition to her experience of motherhood, Catherine’s troubles with Dave have given her new insight into some of the burdens her mother has borne. Though there is no indication in the novel that Catherine’s publican father was an alcoholic, his drinking caused contention between himself and his wife. Catherine’s heated discussions with Dave about his drinking problem recall to her part of her childhood: “She had

110

Bernard MacLaverty

heard arguments like this before, coming from other rooms—between her mother and father. And she had put her hands over her ears to try and stop the sounds” (184). Since Catherine’s depression has locked her into her own perspective, MacLaverty leaves readers to imagine the changes her mother has undergone during the years of non-communication. However, signs of her alteration penetrate even Catherine’s consciousness. Her first sight of Mrs McKenna shocks her, as “her hair had gone grey and she looked too old to be her mother” (12). Seemingly trivial details reinforce our perception that Catherine’s mother has the capacity to surprise her; she notices, for instance, that her parents have purchased a compact disc player and had a shower installed (22–3, 26–7). In discussing what he terms the “healing of memories” that makes reconciliation possible, Robert Schreiter identifies three stages in the healing process: acknowledging loss, making connections, and taking new action, and he associates the first stage with mourning: “Acknowledging loss and engaging in rituals of grieving for that loss are ways of admitting that the past is no longer in our grasp.”36 Early in Grace Notes, Catherine and her mother bond, literally, over the dead body of her father. As his coffin is being removed from the house, “‘Catherine looked at her mother and reached out and they held hands, a thing they had not done since she was a child’” (55). Both women also, however, display an inclination to hide behind his memory at first. Mrs McKenna tells Catherine her father had been “‘very hurt’” by her withdrawal (65), and she confides that he was “‘terribly disappointed’” to have missed the Vernicle broadcast (68). Later, when her mother says accusingly, “‘You never came home once in five years,’” Catherine replies, “‘I was told not to’” (90). Mrs McKenna insists that “‘He didn’t really mean that. He was always saying things he regretted. And there was too much foolish man in him to take anything back’” (90). Catherine just sighs heavily in response, and, rather than taking the opportunity to speak on her own behalf, her mother follows this comment up with a question about why Catherine had not invited them to her graduation in Glasgow: “‘That hurt him as well, missing that’” (90). The level of tension between Catherine and her mother rises with each of the four days of her visit, but this escalation represents progress. Schreiter asserts that “To acknowledge loss … is to allow the venting of anger, the feelings of betrayal and abandonment and violation. It is only in acknowledging loss that we can position ourselves to have a new relationship with the past.”37 The night before her father’s requiem mass, Catherine wonders how to tell her mother about Anna, speculating that “Maybe it would be better to say nothing” (57)—the time-honored Northern Irish strategy of co-existence being



The Personal is Political

111

summed up in the expression “whatever you say, say nothing” (106). The next day’s conversation hardly conduces to such revelations, since every question that Mrs McKenna asks and Catherine answers seems to give them more to disagree about. Catherine’s mother cannot understand why she would give up a teaching job to collect the dole and write music; she informs her daughter that “‘some’” who did hear Vernicle on the radio “‘were none too keen on it’”; she is distressed when Catherine confirms her lack of faith and dismisses as blasphemy Catherine’s current project of writing a mass. Despite all this, however, she ends the discussion by urging Catherine to stay on “‘a day or two longer.’” Catherine, still withholding the news that she has a child, says only that she must get back because “‘there’s people depending on me’” and refuses to elaborate, but when she asks if “‘somebody’” can take her to the airport the next day, her mother quickly promises to do it (88–91). By the last morning of her visit, Catherine has lapsed even more deeply into the depression in which “There was no future. … She was forced to look back because it was impossible to look forward” (30). Perhaps her knowledge that she will soon be leaving combines with her sense that things cannot get much worse to make her risk further upsetting her mother. When Mrs McKenna wakes her for her appointment with Miss Bingham, she notices the bottle of tablets on the bedside table. Catherine does not immediately answer her mother’s question about them, but eventually she reveals that they are anti-depressants (91–2). Crucially, throughout her stay, Catherine answers her mother’s queries truthfully, even when she knows Mrs McKenna will not like the answers—“truth telling,” experts tell us, is an essential part of the reconciliation process.38 On this last morning, though, she does something she has not done before: she volunteers vital information. Having deflected an earlier question about why “‘someone like you’” would be depressed, Catherine pauses once the conversation has moved on and says, “‘Mum, it’s a kind of post-natal depression’” (92, 94). This confession marks a major advance on Catherine’s part, but her mother’s initial reaction confirms her fears about sharing the facts of her current life. Mrs McKenna has been brushing her daughter’s hair but, once she realizes Catherine is not joking, moves away from her and stands up, with the declaration that “‘I’m just glad your father’s dead. … If the heart attack hadn’t killed him, this certainly would’” (94). Now she sees Catherine as “dirty” and, after learning that the baby is a girl, predicts, “‘She’ll break her mother’s heart—just like you’re breaking mine’” before bursting into tears and fleeing the room, slamming the door behind her. Catherine, weeping, resolves to leave without speaking to her again: “Say nothing” (95).

112

Bernard MacLaverty

This painful encounter between the two women proves cathartic, however. Admitting loss, in Schreiter’s terms, allows “a space” to open “between ourselves and those whom we have lost and the displacement we have experienced from a certain kind of lived world. … [I]n that space, where our relation to the past is no longer immediate but dialectical, … new connections can begin to be made.”39 As Catherine walks to Miss Bingham’s house, willing herself not to think about her mother and feeling wholly alienated from her, she suddenly recalls that “It was her mother who had started the whole music thing. She had asked Miss Bingham, when Catherine was ten, to call and give her piano lessons” (96, 99). She still plans to avoid her mother when she gets home, though, not expecting her even to say goodbye. But Mrs McKenna has obviously been doing some thinking of her own and, before Catherine can slip out of the house with her luggage, emerges from the kitchen “with her own coat on.” “‘I said I’d run you for three-thirty—so I will,’” she says, “her face averted,” and brushes off Catherine’s protests that she can take a bus with the words, “‘You have to be there an hour before. And it’ll take us the best part of an hour to get there. So we’re all right. There’s some more talking to be done’” (114–15). Overcoming their current impasse will require radical readjustment on both sides, along with a will to establish new connections, what Schreiter calls “new bonds of sociality that do not consign past relations to erasure and oblivion, but allow new and more immediate ones to emerge.”40 As the women initiate their revised relationship, they pass through the rebuilding underway in the middle of their town. “‘So how am I supposed to react to your news?’” Mrs McKenna asks, and Catherine replies, “‘I don’t know. That’s for you to decide.’” The narrator tells us that “‘Having passed through all the dust and debris of the reconstruction the windscreen was dirty,’” and, while Mrs McKenna squirts water on it to clean it, she launches a series of clarifying questions about the baby and her father (115). Only at this juncture does she begin to speak solely for herself, instead of as a representative of her late husband, telling Catherine, “‘I’m just very angry, very hurt about this,’” before commenting, “‘Your father would have probably banned you from the house for ever and a day.’” Catherine agrees, and, significantly, the two fall “silent” (116). When Mrs McKenna finally breaks this silence, she demonstrates her readiness to move on to Schreiter’s third stage of healing, characterized by “a new vision” and “new action.”41 “‘When am I going to get to see it?’” she asks. When Catherine ignores the question, she hastily revises it: “‘I mean her. When am I going to get to see her?’” (116). “‘I haven’t thought all this out yet,’” she adds, “‘but you must always remember that there’s a home for you here. And



The Personal is Political

113

your baby. And your man if it comes to that.’” Readers will not disagree with Catherine, who thanks her mother while insisting that “‘It would never work’” (117), and the conversation rapidly devolves into wrangling about Anna’s unbaptized state, but Mrs McKenna has proved that her love for Catherine is not conditional on “good” behavior. By the end of their drive she has already begun “to remember in a different way,” which Schreiter sees as the essence of forgiveness, reflecting aloud that “‘Your father was a grandfather for eighteen months and he died before he found out. I don’t know which is worse. Him knowing or not knowing’” (118). MacLaverty is too much of a realist to imply that the relationship between Catherine and her mother can be redeemed easily or quickly. In the airport, Catherine’s further admission that “The baby’s father is no longer on the scene” prompts the discouraging response, “‘Oh Jesus, Catherine—you’re really making a mess of things’” (118). Nonetheless, Mrs McKenna obtains Catherine’s contact information, and Catherine promises to phone. Mrs McKenna repeats her offer of shelter, in a more convincingly doubtful way: “‘If you want to come home … I could get used to it. I would hate to lose you a second time’” (118–19). And the women exchange gifts. Mrs McKenna gives her daughter a loaf of wheaten bread, symbolizing, as Linden Peach has observed, “the flesh that she and Catherine, and her granddaughter Anna, share.”42 Catherine’s offering to her mother is prospective. “‘I’ll write a piece of music for you someday,’” she vows, to which her mother humorously rejoins, “‘The Tune the Oul Cow Died of ’” (119). Notably, neither woman utters the words “‘I forgive you,’” and the other would probably angrily deny the need for them if she did. Instead they hug, “once,” and Catherine hurries off to catch her plane (119). This development may not seem like much, but, in the context of Northern Ireland in the mid-1990s, it is a start.

Notes   1 MacLaverty, “‘Writing Is a State of Mind Not an Achievement,’” 206.   2 MacLaverty, “Bernard MacLaverty,” Interviewed by Rosa González, 29.   3 Harte and Parker, 250–1.  4 MacLaverty, Grace Notes, 214. Future references to this novel will be given in parentheses in the text.   5 Watt, 116.   6 Grant, 148–9. See also Harte and Parker, 248, and Sloan, 312.   7 Smyth, 20, 18.

114   8   9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29

30

Bernard MacLaverty Russell, 106. MacLaverty, “Writing Is a State of Mind Not an Achievement,” 207–8. Russell, 108, and Sloan, 312, each make a similar observation. Grant, 150. MacLaverty, “E-mail message to Marilynn Richtarik,” 25 February 2013. Barton, 12–37. Farren and Mulvihill, 178–9. See also Smith, Making the Peace in Ireland. MacLaverty, “E-mail message to Marilynn Richtarik,” 26 February 2013. MacLaverty, “E-mail message to Marilynn Richtarik,” 25 February 2013. MacLaverty, “Bernard MacLaverty,” Interview with Sharon Monteith and Jenny Newman, 110. MacLaverty, “Writing Is a State of Mind Not an Achievement,” 203. MacLaverty, “Bernard MacLaverty,” Interview with Monteith and Newman, 110; MacLaverty, “An Interview with Richard Rankin Russell,” 22. MacLaverty, “Writing Is a State of Mind Not an Achievement,” 209, 206. Ibid., 206. MacLaverty, “An Interview with Richard Rankin Russell,” 22. MacLaverty, “Writing Is a State of Mind Not an Achievement,” 206. MacLaverty, “Bernard MacLaverty,” Interviewed by Rosa González, 37. MacLaverty, “Bernard MacLaverty, Glasgow, in Interview,” 20–1. MacLaverty, “Bernard MacLaverty,” Interview with Monteith and Newman, 109. MacLaverty, “Writing Is a State of Mind Not an Achievement,” 206–7. Other signs of the ongoing “Troubles” include special security for air travelers to Northern Ireland (5) and the narrator’s account of a BBC local news report: “Nobody had been killed” (45). MacLaverty, “Bernard MacLaverty, Glasgow, in Interview,” 10; MacLaverty, “A Calendar of Events Grace Notes,” sent as an attachment to “E-mail Message to Richtarik, 25 February 2013.” MacLaverty compiled this chronology after completing a draft of the novel as an aid to himself in checking the details of his “mosaic.” In it, he identified the present of the novel (Catherine’s trip home for her father’s funeral) as January 1988, with the concert performance of Vernicle taking place in December 1987. It should be emphasized, however, that this “Calendar” is a private document; no specific dates are mentioned in the novel itself. MacLaverty’s first novel, Lamb, offers a precedent for his use of personal relationships to speak metaphorically about the political situation in Ireland. As he explains, “Right from the beginning, my thinking was that it was an image of what was happening in Ireland, that there were certain violent organisations and people who claimed to love Ireland but, in fact, were destroying it. … My story was the destruction of a boy by someone who claimed to love him. I saw a parallel in the



The Personal is Political

115

Irish situation with violent republicans” (MacLaverty, “Writing Is a State of Mind Not an Achievement,” 208). 31 Schreiter, 7, 9–11. 32 Long and Brecke, 29–30. 33 Spencer, 11, 14–15. 34 MacLaverty, “Bernard MacLaverty, Glasgow, in Interview,” 17. 35 Exceptions are Patrick Grant and Richard Rankin Russell. Grant calls attention, as I also seek to do, to the “broken and disrupted human relationships” in the novel, suggesting that, in the course of Grace Notes, “art becomes the type and pattern of redeemed relationships” and noting “some tentative but imperfect reconciliation” between Catherine and her mother, while stressing that their relationship “remains strained and uncertain” (145, 149, 144, 145). Russell points out that Catherine’s efforts “to negotiate a better relationship with her mother” loom large in the first half of the novel and argues that “if she and her estranged mother can reconcile and love each other again, then perhaps even the most intransigent bigots of Northern Ireland can learn to love those they have hated” (Bernard MacLaverty, 97, 109). 36 Schreiter, 13. 37 Ibid. 38 Long and Brecke, 30. 39 Schreiter, 13. 40 Schreiter, 13–14. 41 Schreiter, 14, 13. 42 Peach, 201.

Works cited Barton, Brian. “The Historical Background to the Belfast Agreement.” The Northern Ireland Question: The Peace Process and the Belfast Agreement. Eds Brian Barton and Patrick J. Roche. Basingstoke, UK/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 12–37. Farren, Sean and Robert F. Mulvihill. Paths to a Settlement in Northern Ireland. Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire: Colin Smythe, 2000. Grant, Patrick. Literature, Rhetoric and Violence in Northern Ireland, 1968–98: Hardened to Death. Basingstoke, UK/New York: Palgrave, 2001. Harte, Liam and Michael Parker. “Reconfiguring Identities: Recent Northern Irish Fiction.” Eds and Introd. Harte and Parker. Contemporary Irish Fiction: Themes, Tropes, Theories. Basingstoke, UK/New York: 2000. 232–54. Long, William J. and Peter Brecke. War and Reconciliation: Reason and Emotion in Conflict Resolution. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003.

116

Bernard MacLaverty

MacLaverty, Bernard. Lamb. London: Jonathan Cape, 1980. —Cal. London: Jonathan Cape, 1983. —“Bernard MacLaverty, Glasgow, in Interview.” Conducted by Christian Ganter. Anglistik: Organ des Verbandes Deutscher Anglisten 7.2 (1996): 5–22. —Grace Notes. New York: Norton, 1997. —“Bernard MacLaverty.” Interviewed by Rosa González. Ireland in Writing: Interviews with Writers and Academics. Eds Jacqueline Hurtley, Rosa González, Inés Praga, Esther Aliaga. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998. 21–38. —“‘Writing Is a State of Mind Not an Achievement’: An Interview with Bernard MacLaverty.” Conducted by Marisol Morales Ladrón. Atlantis 23.2 (December 2001): 201–11. —“Bernard MacLaverty.” Interview with Sharon Monteith and Jenny Newman. Contemporary British and Irish Fiction: An Introduction through Interviews. London: Arnold, 2004. 103–18. —“An Interview with Richard Rankin Russell.” Irish Literary Supplement 26.1 (Fall 2006): 21–2. —“E-mail Message to Marilynn Richtarik.” 25 February 2013. —“E-mail Message to Marilynn Richtarik.” 26 February 2013. Peach, Linden. The Contemporary Irish Novel: Critical Readings. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2004. Russell, Richard Rankin. Bernard MacLaverty. Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press, 2009. Schreiter, Robert. “Establishing a Shared Identity: The Role of the Healing of Memories and of Narrative.” Peace and Reconciliation: In Search of Shared Identity. Eds Sebastian C. H. Kim, Pauline Kollontai, and Greg Hoyland. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008. 7–20. Sloan, Barry. “The Redress of Imagination: Bernard MacLaverty’s Grace Notes.” The Gift of Story: Narrating Hope in a Postmodern World. Eds Emily Griesinger and Mark Eaton. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2006. 303–15. Smith, Jeremy. Making the Peace in Ireland. London: Longman, 2002. Smyth, Gerry. “‘The Same Sound but with a Different Meaning’: Music, Repetition, and Identity in Bernard MacLaverty’s Grace Notes.” Èire-Ireland: A Journal of Irish Studies 37.3–4 (Fall-Winter 2002): 5–24. Spencer, Graham. “Introduction: Forgiving and Remembering in Northern Ireland.” Forgiving and Remembering in Northern Ireland: Approaches to Conflict Resolution. Ed. Graham Spencer. London/New York: Continuum, 2011. 1–19. Watt, Stephen. Beckett and Contemporary Irish Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

8

“Moving from One Element to Another”: Body and Soul in Bernard MacLaverty’s The Anatomy School Michael Rawl Although he has written fictions from the perspective of young protagonists before, most notably in Lamb and Cal, it was not until 2001’s semi-autobiographical novel The Anatomy School that Bernard MacLaverty would write a novel that could be accurately described as a Bildungsroman. Written with the elegance and grace that are the hallmarks of his style, The Anatomy School traces the personal and artistic development of Martin Brennan, a Catholic youth who lives with his mother in Belfast, as he navigates the challenges of coming of age during the early years of the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland. The novel is divided into two major parts, with each portion detailing a crucial period of Martin’s growth. Beginning in the late 1960s, Part One follows 17-year-old Martin in his last year at school as he handles the pressures of challenging relationships with his schoolmates while preparing to retake the A-level exams he failed the previous year. Part Two, which is of almost equal length, is set several years later and covers the span of a single night in the university anatomy lab where Martin is a technician. With the violence of the “Troubles” framing its action, Part Two depicts Martin’s initiation into sexual experience and concludes with his final decision to abandon a career in science in order to follow his artistic vocation as a photographer. Martin’s growth as an artist and individual shares a key feature with MacLaverty’s own personal development: like Martin, MacLaverty has rejected the Catholicism of his upbringing in favor of a secular humanism while nevertheless maintaining a belief in the transcendent. In an interview with Dave Ramos Fernandes, MacLaverty discusses his abandoning the Catholic faith, describing his disengagement with religion as a conscious struggle and ultimately “an achievement” for him.1 Although MacLaverty no longer affirms the Catholicism in which he was raised, he describes his current secular humanism as the faith of his elder years.

118

Bernard MacLaverty

Discussing his appreciation for the art of the Church, MacLaverty says that I love all that, but I can love it as an atheist. What I’m looking at is the way people did things, the way people created, and you can feel that humanity in those medieval artefacts, the way they carved the choir stalls, the vibrancy and colours in the glass. All of that speaks across the centuries to you. It exists in the music as well, in Gregorian chants. I sit at night listening to the Earthquake Mass from 1490 and think wow, that’s wonderful, and yet I’m coming at it from a totally different angle, as an unbeliever. But I believe in mankind and its creativity. You don’t believe in god, but you believe in the people that made the things. It is the humanity of a mother and child group which moves, not their divinity.2

MacLaverty here describes his religious trajectory in terms of a transposition of belief: although he has renounced his inherited Catholicism he nevertheless maintains a form of faith. Specifically, his current belief “in mankind and its creativity” acts as a kind of secular humanist replacement for religious faith. In place of the Christian God, MacLaverty affirms a secular transcendence that can be embodied in art, a transcendence that allows the profound “humanity” of those long dead to “speak across the centuries” to those in the present. In an earlier interview, MacLaverty makes clear that he sees art as a substitute for religion, saying that “painting, music, writing,” along with photography, as in The Anatomy School, are “method[s] of self examination which was previously done by religion … [Art] is an exercise in holding ourselves up to look at ourselves.”3 Here, I argue that The Anatomy School’s Martin Brennan follows a spiritual trajectory similar to the one suggested by MacLaverty himself in the interviews cited above. Specifically, I suggest that Martin comes to be a non-believing believer who has rejected Catholicism while replacing it with a belief in a secular transcendence.4 In Martin’s case, this belief takes the form of a humanism that is chiefly expressed by his reverence for the human body and his sense that the sensuous is a significant vehicle for epiphanic moments of quasi-spiritual intensity. Martin’s high view of the body, however, directly conflicts with the Catholic Church’s dualistic repudiation of the body and its pleasures in favor of the spirit. After demonstrating how the Church’s discourse on the body undermines itself, in large part through the hypocrisy of the novel’s priests, I suggest that Martin resists and ultimately rejects the Church’s dualistic view of the self by affirming the body and the physical world as good and as teeming with significance; in other words, I argue that Martin ultimately treats the physical as



“Moving from One Element to Another”

119

spiritual. The ethical consequences of Martin’s reverence for the body are a deep sympathy for those whose bodies have been broken and a profound abhorrence of physical violence. Martin’s rejection of Catholicism, his reverence for the body and his repudiation of violence place him in a unique relationship to the “Troubles”, which by the novel’s end have been raging for several years. Unlike the devout Catholics by whom Martin is surrounded, in the end he does not see the “Troubles” in sectarian terms; instead, he sees the outbreak of violence as a tragedy in which the shared humanity of all members of the community, regardless of political or religious affiliation, is violated. I conclude by reflecting that Martin’s development bodes well for his future career in photography since he is newly attuned to sympathizing with and representing the traumatized human body. Martin’s rejection of Catholicism and his reverence for the body are in some respects a comic revision of certain characteristics of Cal McCluskey from MacLaverty’s 1983 novel Cal. Like Martin, Cal is a young Catholic male from Belfast who no longer accepts the Catholicism of his upbringing and who attempts, in Richard Haslam’s words, to “fabricate a creed” by which he can live in the absence of his former faith.5 Cal’s “creed” centers, as Martin’s does, on the body, although here differences emerge: whereas Martin sees the body and sensuous pleasure as offering nearly mystical moments of exalted experience, Cal believes he must punish his body with pain in order to purge himself of the guilt for his part in the death of the RUC member Robert Morton. Indeed, Cal repeatedly subjects himself to self-punishment for his part in the murder: he curses himself in “pidgin French,”6 enjoys the sight of his beaten body after being attacked in his neighborhood (47), and lies “inert on broken glass, his eyes open to the night” while ruminating on “the terrible thing he had done” by assisting in Morton’s murder (43). Because of his great guilt, Cal thinks admiringly of such ascetics as Matt Talbot, a reformed alcoholic who, after his conversion, lived the rest of his life in a state of perpetual penance for his youthful sins by wrapping chains around his body “so tightly … that it was impossible to remove them from the mortified flesh of his body” after he had died (36). As Richard Rankin Russell has argued, Cal is driven “to a mentally and physically painful process of mortification and expiation” of his guilt, which he sees in religious terms as stemming from his “sin.”7 Indeed, Cal sees himself as the atheistic counterpart to the hermits and ascetics who so haunt his imagination. Like most of MacLaverty’s lapsed Catholic characters, both Cal and Martin remain deeply and permanently marked by the Church; however, a fundamental

120

Bernard MacLaverty

difference between the two youths lies in their respective attitudes towards the Church’s discourse on the physical body. Entrapped by his guilt but rejecting the Christian God, Cal nevertheless retains the doctrine that strict penances must be imposed on his body in order to make amends for the sins he has committed. In the end, his penitential suffering amounts to a form of masochism because Cal does not believe there is a Being to receive and approve of his sacrifice of pain. Martin, by contrast, renounces both the Christian God and the Catholic Church’s low view of the physical body as it is expressed in the novel. Rather than inflicting pain on his body, Martin cultivates sensuous and sensual pleasure, often experiencing such pleasure as a good in itself rather than as suspect or sinful. As he comes to reject Catholicism, his high view of the body gradually takes its place as his personal creed. The view of the human person expressed by the Church’s representatives in The Anatomy School is traditionally and familiarly dualistic: human beings are made up of two distinct parts, body and soul, and these parts have unequal ontological value. This dualism is most explicitly articulated by Father Barry, the instructor of the Religious Knowledge class at Martin’s school. During one class, Father Barry is challenged by the atheist and empirically minded new student, Blaise Foley, who argues that the school is fraught by a contradiction between opposing “‘ways of thinking’” about reality: “‘the scientific way’” practiced in science classes and the theological, “‘speculat[ive]’” way of the religious classes; for Foley, the real is only what can be “‘weigh[ed]’” and “‘measur[ed].’”8 In responding to the young man’s materialist argument, Barry approvingly invokes Descartes’ dualism in order to explain the relationship between the body and spirit: “‘the human body may be regarded as a hugely complicated machine but it only becomes a person when it is joined to an incorporeal soul. The body bit we can measure; the other we can’t’” (130). For Barry and the other priests in the novel, the body is primarily a husk for the soul to animate. If the body has any value, it is solely as a vehicle for the intangible soul, which is unavailable to the scrutiny and analyses of the scientific method. One result of such a religious dualism as that espoused by Barry, with its implied hierarchy of spirit over the body, is, as poet Octavio Paz has observed, a “severe condemnation of physical pleasure and the preaching of chastity as the path to virtue.”9 In Ireland, the endorsement of chastity as a means of achieving virtue has long been a constituent feature of culture. Indeed, Marjorie Howes observes that “[t]wentieth-century Ireland became famous for its determined and multi-faceted repression of sexuality.”10 She goes on to enumerate various measures taken by the Irish Free State to curb sexual immorality in the country,



“Moving from One Element to Another”

121

such as “establish[ing] censorship of films, books, and magazines, outlaw[ing] contraception, … [and] establish[ing] stricter regulations for dance halls.”11 Although it would be reductive to attribute the complex state of affairs regarding sexual morality in Ireland to only one cause, Tom Inglis has convincingly argued that the Catholic Church, with its repudiation of the body and “culture of selfabnegation,” was instrumental in establishing a socio-cultural “sexual regime” in which “desire and pleasure, especially sexual desire and pleasure” were policed and censored.12 This regime, Inglis maintains, was primarily enforced at the local level through Church “teachings, censures, and prohibitions enacted by priests, nuns, and brothers.”13 Although Inglis’s discussion deals primarily with the Irish Republic, his argument regarding an Irish Catholic regime of sexual control is relevant to the Northern Irish setting of The Anatomy School for two reasons: first, as Howes observes, historically “the sexual culture of the North [has] had a great deal in common” with that of the Republic;14 secondly, the novel depicts a relatively small and self-contained subsection of the Catholic community in Belfast, a community which would presumably share many of the traditional attitudes towards the body also held by the Catholic majority of the Republic. In such an insular environment, the novel’s priests act as enforcers of a system of sexual control analogous to that which Inglis identifies. Throughout the novel, the religious figures in Martin’s life repudiate the body and police sexual morality. Early in the novel, Father Albert tells the students attending the religious retreat at Ardglass that, sexually, it is the “‘strong character is one who doesn’t give in to his passions. Failure to master oneself is to be in thrall to the most complete slavery imaginable’” (34). Albert’s rhetoric of self-mastery stems from his dualistic view of the human self in which the soul must subdue and suppress the desires of the body. In this scheme, the body becomes an object of fear because its inherent thirst for pleasure is also a drive towards sin and therefore towards damnation. The fear of the body leads to its policing, as in the priests’ censorship of certain materials in the school’s library. When Martin looks through a book of photographs of artworks in the library, for example, he notices that the priestly “‘powers-that-be’” (115) have drawn a swimsuit in “Indian ink” on the photo to cover the genitals of the statue of David (114). The repudiation of the body and the policing of sexual morality take a more sinister form by underlying the novel’s most troubling scene of violence, the beating of Blaise Foley. Diarmaid Ferriter has remarked that the mid-century Irish Catholic school had a culture in which “[s]ouls, not bodies, were the intense preoccupation” and in which, as a result “[t]here was a casual indifference to

122

Bernard MacLaverty

everyday violence” because of the body’s relative insignificance compared to the eternal soul.15 Such a culture is also shared by the school of MacLaverty’s novel, which bears a striking resemblance to his own secondary school, St Malachy’s College in north Belfast. When rumors reach the school’s head disciplinarian, a priest the students call Condor, that a student (Blaise Foley, as it happens) has brought pornographic photographs to school, he responds by initiating an inquiry into the situation with an eye towards punishing the guilty party. During a Gaelic football match, Condor approaches Martin, Blaise, and Kavanagh (all of whom are spectators) and gives them his tacit permission to give a beating—a “‘good doing,’” in Condor’s words—to the student who so flagrantly violated the sexual mores of the Catholic school (217–18). Even more troubling is Condor’s offer to be “‘otherwise engaged’” so that the beating can take place without hindrance (218). The priest, believing his students’ sexual morality has been compromised, thus reveals his willingness to have the body of the perpetrator subjected to a punishing violence, which occurs later in the novel when Blaise is beaten in the school restroom by the nationalist student Sharkey.16 As enforcers of morality, the priests in the novel are the ones who most clearly articulate and defend the priority of the spirit over the sinful and rebellious body; however, they are also the ones who most profoundly undermine the legitimacy of their claims through the disparity between their professed beliefs and their behavior. At key moments in the narrative, Martin witnesses moments of troubling hypocrisy in the priests with whom he interacts: claiming to be men of the spirit, they cannot renounce their attachment to physical comforts and pleasures, thereby demonstrating the vacuity of their ideals. One such priest is Father Farquharson, Mrs Brennan’s friend, whose affection for luxury and for financial gain belies his claims to be solely a man of the spirit. During one of the weekly evenings Mrs Brennan hosts for her friends, she asks Father Farquharson to sign a mass card for her. When Farquharson opens his jacket for a pen, Martin registers the unusual extravagance in his priestly clothing when he notes that “the lining of his black suit was silk” (112). When Farquharson opens the card and nearly drops the money that Mrs Brennan has secretly placed in it, he “barely touche[s] [the five pound note] but guide[s] it into his trouser pocket” without drawing attention to himself (112). Father Farquharson’s adroitness and furtiveness in handling the money suggest that this is not the first time he has secretly taken money for performing his priestly duties. Indeed, when Mary Lawless asks him whether he is “‘settled’” (112) in the parish, he gives an “embarrassed grin” and ironically reveals perhaps more than he intends when he answers by saying that “‘[t]his has been a very good



“Moving from One Element to Another”

123

parish for me,’” thereby implying the financial gains he has garnered as a priest (113). In terms of the Church’s repudiation of the body in favor of the spirit, the hypocrisy of Father O’Hare is much more damning than Farquharson’s because, while Farquharson exhibits a persistent carnality through his attachment to money and material comforts, his friend Estyn O’Hare’s hypocrisy lies in his embrace of sexual perversion. MacLaverty explicitly invites the reader to interpret the priest’s actions as a failure to embody the ideal of the spiritual man who has transcended the sinful desires of the flesh by having Farquharson invoke the spirit/body dualism in his description of O’Hare as “‘a man more of the spirit than the body’” and an admirer of the “‘Desert Fathers,’” the early Christian monks renowned for their harsh ascetic discipline (112). Remembered by Martin as “the most seriously weird priest he had ever met,” O’Hare betrays his aberrant sexual proclivities during his stay with the Brennans (113). After O’Hare has said his final mass on his last day lodging with the Brennans, he tells the then ten-year-old Martin that his mother requested him to talk with the boy about the proper procedure for washing his foreskin. As this conversation proceeds, however, it becomes evident that Martin’s mother has had nothing to do with the priest’s broaching the subject; indeed, it is clear that O’Hare is sexually aroused by talking with the boy about his genitals. Martin registers O’Hare’s arousal when he notices the priest’s voice “shaking” while he speaks “very fast,” though he does not interpret these facts’ significance (119). After telling the boy that he must wash himself correctly, O’Hare invites Martin to the toilet to teach him how to do it; as he ominously says, “‘a demonstration is worth a thousand words’” (119). O’Hare fails to molest the boy only because the two are interrupted by Father Farquharson, who joins them in the sacristy. As they return to Martin’s house, O’Hare bribes Martin with money to not say anything to his mother about what had transpired that morning as she would most likely be “‘embarrassed’” by the conversation (120). As the examples of Farquharson and O’Hare make clear to differing degrees, the ideal of a life of pure spirit is a chimera in the world of the novel. Although they profess to have transcended the body and subjected its desires to the wary watchfulness of their spirits, the priests remain constrained by the ineradicable reality of their bodies. Indeed, the priests’ lives are untransformed by their own doctrines and they fail to recognize that their aspirations to purity of spirit at the expense of the body are doomed to failure and hypocrisy. Thus the dualism they espouse encourages a way of life that is a practical impossibility. Although Martin is significantly marked by the Church’s repudiation of the body—he periodically suffers guilt over his sexual desires—he nevertheless

124

Bernard MacLaverty

demonstrates his unwillingness to accept the Church’s low view of the physical in favor of the spirit and registers an awareness of that view’s emptiness. One of the ways Martin evinces this unwillingness is through his recourse, at various points in the novel, to a bawdy humor in which the body is made to undermine the spirit. In the beginning, Martin’s deployment of humor is a reflexive and largely unconscious defensive gesture. For instance, early in the novel, Martin reflects on his generally tentative personality and he frustratedly associates himself with the diffident speaker of T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by quoting the line “[d]o I dare to eat a peach?” in reference to himself (8). As the high modernist who famously converted to Anglicanism in mid-career, Eliot represents for Martin and his schoolmates a solemn “quest for the spiritual” (8). Yet no sooner has Eliot come to Martin’s mind than the young man quickly and humorously undercuts the spirituality the poet represents by attaching the grossly physical to him when Martin recalls that “Kavanagh had whispered [during class] that the poet’s name was an anagram of TOILETS” (8). Likewise, when Father Valerian reminds the boys on the retreat that “‘[w]e are not testing bodies—we are examining our minds, our souls,’” Martin and the other boys mishear the “last two words as ‘arse holes,’” which causes them to break their silence with stifled laughter (9). As he matures, Martin’s recourse to humor as a mode of rejecting the religious repudiation of the body becomes more pronounced in addition to becoming a conscious gesture on his part. While he is working overnight at the lab in the novel’s second part, he pauses to go through the belongings of his fellow student and Kavanagh’s girlfriend Pippa, who is “[v]ery Christian” and therefore sternly chaste (246). Discovering a dictionary among her belongings, Martin thumbs through the contents and looks up the word “perineum” and he is extremely pleased “to know that such a dirty little definition was embedded in a dictionary belonging to Pippa. And that she ha[s] one. Pippa’s perineum” (246). This humorous moment underscores Martin’s delight at the persistence of the body in the face of the spirit: despite their hopes of achieving spiritual purity, the devout stubbornly remain carnal beings. Although Martin occasionally employs a bodily humor to cast a comic light on the spiritual, he nevertheless cherishes a high view of the physical that is signaled in part by his cultivation of pleasure through the sensuous apprehension of his surroundings. As a nascent artist, Martin rejects the asceticism of the Church in favor of an aesthetic appreciation of a concretely embodied, physical form of beauty. At the religious retreat, for example, Martin’s photographer’s eye causes him to see his peers as “statues” as they stand around the



“Moving from One Element to Another”

125

garden (28). Taking pictures of the sight, Martin takes great pleasure in the sound of the camera’s “whirr and clunk,” though he recognizes that what he is doing is decidedly not “the business of the Lord” (28). Later, when Martin is in the chapel at his school, he responds powerfully to the “intensity” of the colors of the stained-glass windows: “[b]lue sandwiched with yellow gave a voluptuous green. … Undersea blues, intense ruby reds, violets, celery greens were vivid on the parquet tiles” (115). His deeply sensuous appreciation of beauty is strikingly evinced when Martin sounds a chord on a piano in the parlor of Blaise’s father. Hearing the chord, he experiences the sound synaesthetically as “a rich mixture of brown and cream that hummed infinitely”; the sound assumes for Martin a spatial, almost physical dimension as he perceives it as “fitt[ing] the room” (149). His profound aesthetic receptiveness is highlighted by being contrasted in this scene with the response of the more practically minded Kavanagh, who betrays his insensitivity to beauty when he says “‘[t]hat’s such a mournful fucking sound’” (149). Occasionally Martin’s sensuous apprehension of the physical serves as a catalyst for moments of transcendence of a kind traditionally associated with spiritual things. For instance, when he and his friends skip school to visit the local Waterworks, the three boys lie down on the grass and Martin begins to take in his surroundings sensuously. Lying on his side, Martin closely examines the grass, which “creat[es] a pattern that [is] perfect. … The blades fitted the sky the way a key fits a lock” (145). Martin’s aesthetic perception of pattern and beauty in the physical world leads him to feel a deep “rush of intensity at the rightness of things” (145). This perception builds towards Martin’s mystical awareness that “Love [is] in it somewhere but he [cannot] tell where or with whom” (145). Rejecting the spirit/body hierarchy, Martin experiences transcendence as inhering in the physical and as available to the senses. The high view of the body implicit in Martin’s cultivation of sensuous pleasure and enjoyment of the physical world attains a fuller expression in those scenes depicting his erotic experiences, which for him border on the religious. During the priests’ discussion of chastity at the religious retreat, Martin’s mind wanders to an episode from his memory in which he kissed a girl at party. In his memory, this event assumes an almost sacramental significance. He describes the pleasure of the kiss in cosmic terms: the girl’s “mouth … became huge inside his mind, like a universe” (35). Significantly, this kiss occurs in a closet which Martin remembers as having “a confessional darkness” (35). In the context of the priests’ exhortation to the boys to remain sexually pure that is going on around him in the present, the remembered association of the kiss with the

126

Bernard MacLaverty

sacrament of confession is gently ironic and reveals the way Martin diverges from the Church’s discourse on the body. For the priests, the kiss and Martin’s pleasurable recollection of it, especially at a moment of religious solemnity, would be regarded as sinful and therefore as necessitating confession. For him, however, the association of the kiss with confession is positive and suggests how he sees such pleasure as bordering on the sacramental and holy rather than the sinful or shameful. In the novel’s second part, “A Night in the Lab,” Martin’s high view of the body and his experience of the erotic as sacred are vividly rendered in the depiction of his first sexual encounter. While he works through the night on a project for Kavanagh, Martin meets an Australian girl named Cindy who has been stood up by her date to the jazz concert being held at the university that night. Although MacLaverty realistically and (at times) hilariously depicts the pair’s growing intimacy and subsequent love-making as somewhat awkward (especially for the virgin Martin), he nevertheless renders their physical contact as embodying a form of secular sacredness. Indeed, throughout this portion of the novel Martin employs the language and imagery of the Church and its rituals to register his reverence for the body and his affirmation of physical pleasure as a transcendent good rather than an evil to be shunned. When they begin to dance to the jazz music drifting into the lab from the concert in the basement, for example, the dance becomes a sort of prayer for Martin: when Cindy clasps her hands behind his head, the gesture makes him think of “the way he had seen old women join their hands in prayer with fingers interlocked” (297). A little later, when Cindy takes her shirt off to make love to Martin, he thinks she looks “like a priest getting out of his chasuble” after celebrating the Mass (306). Martin’s use of religious language to evince his high view of the body persists when, in an interlude between love-making, Cindy kneels in front of Martin to “anoint the wound on his shin” as a priest of the Church anoints the sick with blessed oil (310). Finally and perhaps most strikingly, when they make love a second time Martin whispers the last words of Christ on the cross in Church Latin—“consummatum est”—in Cindy’s ear just after he climaxes (314). Martin’s appropriation of the language of the Church to describe physical intimacy must be understood as being partially an antithetical gesture directed at the Church. By this point in the novel he has thoroughly rejected the Catholicism of his upbringing. His use of spiritual language, therefore, must be seen as an act of conscious resistance to the Church’s repudiation of the body and physical pleasure. Indeed, it is a defiant act that marks as sacred what the Church throughout the novel has deemed sinful. The specifically antithetical



“Moving from One Element to Another”

127

quality of Martin’s use of religious language in a sexual context is underscored by the very physical space in which the scene takes place. MacLaverty employs a spatial metaphor in the layout of the university itself to establish an antithesis between body and soul: the anatomy lab in which Martin and Cindy make love is in the building directly facing the (now empty) Theology department. Indeed, Martin is delighted by this spatial arrangement and almost jokes that “even God’s away home” at that late hour and so would not see the couple’s intimacy (306). The spatial opposition of the Theology building and the building in which Martin is making love thus re-inscribes the ideological opposition between him and the religious beliefs he has by now jettisoned. Although he takes pleasure in seeing his love-making as an act of defiance directed at the Church, Martin’s use of religious language serves an additional and more positive purpose: it registers both the persistence of his need to affirm the transcendence as well as identifies the body—rather than God—as the object of his reverence. Although he has abandoned the Church, Martin nevertheless attaches religious significance to the body. Unlike another atheist in the novel, Blaise Foley, Martin is unwilling to repudiate the notion of transcendence even as he rejects the Christian God to whom that notion is traditionally applied. Shorn of his belief in God, Martin re-appropriates religious language in a sexual context in order to suggest that the body—with all its pleasures—has now become the object of his secular faith. He has indeed “moved from one element to another,” from a religious orthodoxy and its attendant disdain for the sensuous to a humanism that finds its highest expression in the reverence of the human body (40). Through this process, Martin’s high view of the body as somehow innately sacred leads to his deep sympathy for those whose bodies are tragically broken. Walking home from school early in the novel, he encounters a group of people gathered near the scene of a recent traffic accident. Hearing that a young man and woman have been killed in a collision with a bus, Martin instinctively and imaginatively empathizes with the dead, attempting “to envisage the pressure of a bus tyre on a head. And the blood and brain stuff in the sand. And [feels] his stomach heave” (62). Later, in the anatomy lab, Martin reflects on an incident when his superior in the lab, Dr Cowie, asks him to dispose of a fetus by taking it to the incinerator. Unlike Dr Cowie, Martin cannot relate to the body as a scientific object to be studied and summarily disposed; instead, he sympathetically sees the fetus as a victim of violence: “[a]ll Martin could see was how defensive it looked. … It had gathered itself into a ball—the way someone would if he was getting a kicking” (248). Martin’s reverence for the body finds

128

Bernard MacLaverty

expression here in his desire to ritualize and commemorate the incineration of the fetus by “walk[ing] slowly” as in a funeral procession (249). Furthermore, as he nears the incinerator Martin wants to memorialize the fetus, though he does not “want to pray for it”; instead, he feels the desire to name the fetus, to “call it something other than ‘it.’ To burn something without a name seemed wrong somehow” (257). Martin’s wish to confer dignity on the fetus signals both his sense of the body’s great worth and the way that he is as out of place in the scientific community as he was in the Church: whereas the Church devalues the body because it is the locus of sin, science denies the body any transcendent or intangible significance. In sympathizing with the broken body of the fetus, therefore, Martin indicates his refusal to see bodies as mere matter. Because of his deep sympathy for broken bodies, Martin ultimately comes to repudiate violence, which he associates with institutionalized religion. The signal event in his development in this regard occurs when Blaise is beaten, with Condor’s indirect approval, for bringing pornography to school. When Blaise is attacked in the school restroom by the Catholic nationalist student Sharkey, Martin is horrified by the effect of violence on his body: when he sees “Blaise’s head jerk as it bounce[s] off the toilet bowl,” he is sickened by the “sound of bone on delf ” (220). Unlike Condor, Martin does not believe that Blaise’s body should be bruised in order to punish him for bringing pornography into the school. Although Condor intends the beating to be a spiritual “lesson” for the other boys, it is a decisive event in driving Martin away from the Church. Prior to the attack, Martin had been at least somewhat devout; afterwards, however, when he has the impulse to pray, he bitterly thinks to himself “[f]uck the prayers” because he no longer “believe[s] they were of any use” (233). His reverence for the physical and his profound sympathy for broken bodies coalesce in the events surrounding Blaise’s beating to contribute to his abandonment of the Church because he sees it as a collaborator in violence. The association of religion and violence in Martin’s mind lies behind the harsh judgment he makes when he rides onto campus early in the novel’s second part: seeing the laburnum tree outside the Theology department, he thinks that “[i]t [is] the right place for a tree with poisonous seeds—outside Theology” (244). Martin’s high view of the body, taken together with his repudiation of violence and his rejection of the Church, places him in a unique position to experience the burgeoning “Troubles”: because he has severed ties to institutional religion and because he affirms the sacredness of the human body, Martin is able to experience the violent “Troubles” primarily as a human tragedy and without the coloring of sectarian allegiance. Near the end of the novel, he rides home after



“Moving from One Element to Another”

129

his transformative night at the lab with Cindy (a Protestant) and he sees a group of policemen on the street. He wonders sympathetically whether “anybody had been killed” (347). He goes on to curse “[t]hese fucking Troubles” in which “[h]undreds had been killed” (347). Despairingly, he asks himself, “[h]­ow long was it going to go on? How many more would die?” (347). Crucially, Martin’s thoughts on the “Troubles” do not register a religious dimension; he does not think of the violence as involving a Catholic “us” and a Protestant “them.” The lack of a religious coloring to his reflections on the “Troubles” suggests that he sees the violence primarily as a tragic rending of bodies and therefore as a violation of the victims’ shared humanity regardless of religious or political affiliation. In order to emphasize the degree to which Martin sees the “Troubles” in non-sectarian terms, MacLaverty juxtaposes the above passage with an episode at Martin’s mother’s house in which Mrs Brennan and her friends ruminate on the violence from a decidedly entrenched and sectarian perspective. Marianne Elliott, reflecting on the effect of the “Troubles” on the Ulster Catholic community, describes a “traditional Catholic reluctance to criticize one’s own that was reinforced by the ‘Troubles.’”17 Although Elliott associates this trait primarily with the clergy, it is the dominant feature of the conversation of Mrs Brennan and her friends, for whom the boundaries separating Protestant from Catholic have grown extremely sharp in recent days. To Nurse Gilliland, for example, Protestants are simply the “‘Other Crowd’” who “‘started the whole thing’” (347). Mrs Brennan, too, blames the recent violence on Protestants as a group, saying “‘[d]on’t tell me it was Catholics jumped out of a car and stabbed that poor man on the Falls Road’” (348). Mrs Brennan and her friends fail to recognize the shared culpability of both militant Catholics and Protestants in perpetuating the recent violence. Although Father Farquharson presumably agrees with Mrs Brennan and her friends—he fails to express disagreement and does not offer any correction—the priest nevertheless unwittingly hints at a different way of seeing the circumstances in the North by quoting from Macbeth, a play that is constantly on Martin’s mind throughout the novel. Farquharson quotes the passage in the play that reads, “‘I think our country sinks beneath the yoke; it weeps, it bleeds and each new day a gash is added to her wounds’” (348, emphasis in original). Although the priest attaches no other importance to the quotation than that it is remarkable that he still remembers it from his school days, the passage he chooses to quote is singularly apt when considered in light of Martin’s reverence for the body and rejection of violence by metaphorically casting the North as a single, collectively wounded body.

130

Bernard MacLaverty

As a novel of formation, The Anatomy School invites readers to pose the question, what precisely is Martin being formed for? By way of closing, I would like to suggest that his personal development ultimately prepares him to be a truthful witness to the “Troubles” as an artist. By renouncing Catholicism, Martin is partially released from personal allegiance to institutionalized religion and has thereby begun to extricate himself from the sectarianism of the “Troubles.” His secular reverence for the body and the physical world leads him to repudiate violence, the victims of which he is movingly able to sympathize with regardless of their political or religious affiliation. Moreover, his high view of the physical and his choice of photography as an artistic medium—a medium which takes bodies as its subject, unlike a non-representational or expressive art, like Catherine McKenna’s music in Grace Notes—suggest that one purpose of his art will be represent reality faithfully and compassionately, showing us “‘how to see’” others truly in a time of violence (341).

Notes   1 MacLaverty, “An Interview with Bernard MacLaverty,” Conducted by Dave Ramos Fernandes, n. p.  2 Ibid.   3 MacLaverty, “Interview with Bernard MacLaverty: ‘There is No Harm in Being Bleak If You Are Reflecting the World As You See It,’” 203.   4 Barry Sloan has suggested that Grace Notes’ Catherine McKenna follows a similar spiritual trajectory. Citing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “exhortation to ‘do what we can to rekindle the smouldering nigh quenched fire on the altar’” of a rejected Christianity, Sloan claims that “Catherine McKenna’s imagined music might be regarded as just such an effort at rekindling, and a successful one at that” (312). Like Martin, Catherine has rejected her inherited Catholicism but (as Sloan argues) continues to “search [for] the wellsprings of spirituality, which she glimpses” in music and art (311).   5 Haslam, 43.  6 MacLaverty, Cal, 10. All subsequent references to the novel will be given parenthetically in the text.   7 Russell, “The Mortification Motif in Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal,” 111–12.  8 MacLaverty, The Anatomy School, 129–130. All subsequent references to the novel will be given parenthetically in the text.   9 Paz, 50–1. 10 Howes, 923.



“Moving from One Element to Another”

131

11 12 13 14 15 16

Howes, 924. Inglis, 10–11. Inglis, 33. Howes, 924. Ferriter, 333. Of course, the nationalist motivation for Condor’s approval of violence should not be overlooked. Russell remarks that this scene, in conjunction with that depicting the beating, “impl[ies] a collusion between Irish Catholicism and nationalism based on their joint interest in protecting sexual purity” (Bernard MacLaverty, 121). 17 Elliott, 474.

Works cited Elliott, Marianne. The Catholics of Ulster. New York: Basic, 2001. Ferriter, Diarmaid. Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland. London: Profile, 2009. Haslam, Richard. “‘Designed to Cause Suffering’: Cal and the Politics of Imprisonment.” Nua: Studies in Contemporary Irish Writing 3.1–2 (2002): 41–56. Howes, Marjorie. “Public Discourse, Private Reflection, 1916–70.” The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions. Vol. 4. Eds Angela Bourke, Mairín Ní Dhonneadha, Siobhan Kilfeather, Maria Luddy, Margaret MacCurtain, Geraldine Meaney, Mary O’Dowd, and Clair Wills. New York: New York University Press, 2002. 923–30. Inglis, Tom. “Origins and Legacies of Irish Prudery: Sexuality and Social Control in Modern Ireland.” Éire-Ireland: A Journal of Irish Studies 40.3–4 (2005): 9–38. MacLaverty, Bernard. Cal. New York: Norton, 1995 rpt of 1983 edn. —The Anatomy School. New York: Norton, 2001. —“Interview with Bernard MacLaverty: ‘There Is No Harm in Being Bleak If You Are Reflecting the World As You See It.’” Conducted by Tamara Benito de la Iglesia. Odisea (2002): 199–206. http://www.ual.es/odisea/Odisea02_BenitoIglesia.pdf2 [last accessed 28 October 2012] —“An Interview with Bernard MacLaverty.” Conducted by Dave Ramos Fernandes. Barcelona Review 56 (November/December 2006): http://www.barcelonareview. com/56/e_int.htm. [last accessed 12 November 2012 Paz, Octavio. The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism. Trans. Helen Lane. Orlando: Harcourt, 1995. Russell, Richard Rankin. Bernard MacLaverty. Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press, 2006.

132

Bernard MacLaverty

—“The Mortification Motif in Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal.” Literature and Belief 33.1 (2013): 107–125. Sloan, Barry. “The Redress of Imagination: Bernard MacLaverty’s Grace Notes.” The Gift of Story: Narrating Hope in a Postmodern World. Eds Emily Griesinger and Mark Eaton. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2006. 303–16.

9

Bernard MacLaverty’s Fictional Geographies Neal Alexander

History has long been understood to weigh like a nightmare on the minds of Irish writers. In Ulysses (1922), James Joyce famously has Stephen Dedalus remark that history “‘is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.’”1 However, with important qualifications, it might be said that an awakening of sorts has taken place in the critical practice of Irish Studies over the past 20 years or so. Certainly, history and historical traditions seem less all-consuming preoccupations, in part because of an ongoing “spatial turn” that seeks to acknowledge the importance of questions of space, place, and geography for Irish literary and cultural criticism.2 This is not to say that geography has somehow replaced history as a critical problematic, but rather to note that there is an increasingly sophisticated awareness on the part of critics that history and geography, time and space are mutually implicated as determining contextual factors in Irish culture. To this end, Gerry Smyth argues forcefully that “the primary theme of Irish (cultural, political, and social) history would appear to be not historical but geographical—specifically, the presence and function of a ‘special relationship’ between people and place.”3 By Smyth’s account, the “content,” as it were, of Irish history and cultural production is intrinsically geographical, so that ideas of space and place are central rather than peripheral to the practice of Irish criticism. Nonetheless, the precise nature of that “special relationship” between people and place remains in question. Anticipating Smyth’s argument in his 1975 essay on “The Geography of Irish Fiction,” John Wilson Foster views the matter chiefly in terms of literature’s function as a mode of self-expression, contending that “the Irish writer’s concern with place is evidence of subjectivity he is unwilling or unable to transcend.”4 For Foster, then, Irish fiction’s characteristic “preoccupation with place” is both a strength and a limitation, an index of “Ireland’s” paradoxically “nationwide provincialism.”5 In light of Ireland’s

134

Bernard MacLaverty

recent history, which has been marked by economic success and disaster on the European stage, significant international immigration, and far-reaching social transformations, Foster’s judgment loses much of its force, and his reading of Irish fictional geographies in terms of a binary opposition between entrapment and escape also seems unhelpfully reductive. Taking a less prescriptive view, Smyth emphasizes literature’s “high-profile negotiation of ideological space,” its profound investment in “the ongoing battle for control of the ‘space’ of Ireland, a battle which is no less real for the fact that it is conducted in the virtual realm of language and literature.”6 Accordingly, one of the challenges confronting any literary geography of Irish writing is to understand how representations of space overlay material spaces and places with symbolic or metaphorical associations, which in turn condition the ways in which those places are perceived and experienced. At first glance, the fiction of Bernard MacLaverty does not seem readily amenable to a critical approach that would foreground questions of geography and place. If, as Foster avers, “Irish writers tend to have almost totemic relations with one or two places,” then MacLaverty’s novels and short stories would appear to buck this trend.7 Although his biography and career trajectory fit a familiar narrative of Irish exile—born in Belfast in 1942, he has lived in Scotland since 1975—the geography of his fiction is more difficult to map, partly because its points of reference are various and inconstant, but also because of its tendency to suppress topographical and toponymic particulars. Borrowing Peter Barry’s terms, we might say that MacLaverty’s texts typically present the reader with a fictional “setting,” chiefly composed of generic indicators of location, rather than a fully realized “geography,” which would comprise “locospecific” depictions of particular places through acts of naming and detailed description.8 For instance, the small market town in County Derry that is the setting for both Cal (1983) and Part One of Grace Notes (1997) is a fictionalized version of Moneymore, but remains anonymous throughout both novels (though nearby Magherafelt and Toomebridge are named explicitly). Similarly, the Catholic grammar school that provides a location for events in both the short story “A Silent Retreat,” from Walking the Dog (1994), and the greater part of The Anatomy School (2001) is never named, but is clearly modeled on St Malachy’s College in north Belfast. Of course, it is the writer’s prerogative to insist upon the fictional, imagined character of the places and spaces s/he depicts. Moreover, as J. Hillis Miller observes, “every narrative, even the most apparently abstract and inward …, traces out in its course an arrangement of places, dwellings, and rooms joined by paths or roads.”9 Miller’s stress upon



Bernard MacLaverty’s Fictional Geographies

135

the “arrangement” of, and connections between, the various elements of any fictional geography seems particularly relevant to MacLaverty’s work. Indeed, it is worth noting the prominence that narratives of exile and return, travel and transit have in his fiction: think of the desperate journeys between Britain and Ireland made by Michael Lamb and Owen Kane in Lamb (1980), or Catherine McKenna’s circular movements between Northern Ireland, Scotland, and the Ukraine in Grace Notes. In this regard, MacLaverty’s fiction might be read in the light of Doreen Massey’s characterization of space as “the realm of the configuration of potentially dissonant (or concordant) narratives,” so that the meanings of any given place are understood in terms of its relationships with many other places.10 Strikingly, MacLaverty’s fiction is underpinned by a complex, highly realized imaginative geography that remains largely implicit or unconscious at a textual level, for matters of space and place are rarely thematized overtly. In fact, when geography does occasionally become the focus of the narrative it is typically as a metaphor or plot device that, in turn, serves to foreground MacLaverty’s primary concern with human relationships, people rather than place. For example, in his story “Life Drawing,” from A Time to Dance (1982), the protagonist, Liam, recalls painting his first self-portrait as an experience of liberating self-estrangement: “It became a face he had not known, the holes, the lines, the spots. He was in a new geography.”11 Here, it is the capacity of art to reveal deeper realities through a process of defamiliarization that matters, and the “new geography” described is plainly one of personal identity and feeling; by contrast, the story itself conveys relatively little feeling for geography or place. Similarly, when Catherine’s friend Liz brings her students on a geography field trip to Islay in Grace Notes, this is merely a plot device that allows Catherine to meet her future partner, Dave, for the first time: The island was full of interesting deposits of pudding-stone and gneiss and shale and God knows what. They had aimed to tour the whole place but they didn’t see much of it because of the head-high cloud. It was the insides of pubs they had seen. And she’d met Dave.12

Shifting its attention from the geological complexity of the Islay landscape to the social complexity of the pub as a space of human encounters, this passage, which is directed by Catherine’s thoughts and perspective through the use of free indirect style, provides a succinct illustration of MacLaverty’s fictional priorities across much of his oeuvre. Geography is deemed to be secondary, inessential, something from which the characters’ (and reader’s) attention is easily diverted;

136

Bernard MacLaverty

yet it is also what makes it possible for narrative events to “take place,” to unfold in time, space and language. A final example worth noting occurs in part two of The Anatomy School, where the adolescent Martin Brennan fixates upon an anatomical diagram of the female genitalia: “URETHRA, ORIFICE OF VAGINA, ANUS, GLANDS OF BARTHOLIN, CLITORIS, MONS VENERIS. The geography of a place he’d never been.”13 Besides conveying the awe and bewilderment that are symptomatic of Martin’s delayed sexual maturation, this passage neatly inverts the common trope whereby Irish landscapes are both feminized and sexualized: here, it is the female body that is conceived as a geographical landscape.14 Nonetheless, the role of the male gaze in constituting that body—woman and landscape, woman-as-landscape—as an object of knowledge and desire is reaffirmed even as it is ironized. The fictional geographies described in MacLaverty’s texts are diverse and shifting rather than consistent, ranging from the wave-swept Atlantic coast in the opening pages of Lamb to the Ulster market towns and rural Bible-belt of Cal and the transnational displacements of Grace Notes. Several of his stories, including “A Pornographer Woos,” “In the Hills above Lugano,” “The Grandmaster,” and “At the Beach” are set in continental Europe, often in Mediterranean holiday resorts; while the strikingly Kakfa-esque “A Foreign Dignitary” describes the customs and penal system of an imaginary country “thousands of miles from any coast.”15 MacLaverty’s characters often find themselves placed on edges, margins, or borderlands—both actual and metaphorical—that make their habitations either uncertain or profoundly uncomfortable. Indeed, as I have already noted, questions of geography are frequently problematic not only for characters but also for readers, as places are imagined with a combination of specificity and indirection that makes it difficult to interpret the texts’ “literary cartography” with confidence.16 In what follows, I will argue that this indeterminate yet particular imagining of place is particularly true of the city of Belfast, which has played a significant part in MacLaverty’s formation as a creative writer but is typically an elusive or peripheral presence in his novels and stories, a locus of violent extremism that shadows many of his texts but is rarely confronted directly. Observing that “the city, with its violence and alienation, shapes MacLaverty’s fictive vision,” Gary Brienzo contends that Belfast is “a powerful presence, as integral to his works as his characters.”17 By contrast, my purpose will be to highlight the ambiguous play of presence and absence that is central to MacLaverty’s representations of Belfast, for the city is significant as much for the resistance it offers to fictional depiction in his texts as for the actual figurations it provokes. Indeed, Brienzo



Bernard MacLaverty’s Fictional Geographies

137

himself notes that MacLaverty’s early fictions tend to emphasize “the malevolence of Belfast,” often by way of “contrapuntal glimpses of a rural peace that offer his most successful characters a real, if ultimately failed, escape from urban horrors.”18 This tendency to recoil from what Raymond Williams calls “the opaque complexity of modern city life” should be recognized as an instance of literature’s negotiation of ideological space.19 However, I also want to show that from the late 1980s onwards Belfast begins to feature in MacLaverty’s fiction less as a cipher, a metaphorical heart of darkness, and more as a real place, the material context for human relationships, memories, and the humdrum business of everyday life. MacLaverty’s fictional depictions of the city need to be understood in light of the wider history of Belfast’s literary representation, which is itself notably elliptical and fraught with paradox. Although Gerry Smyth rightly observes that Belfast “has traditionally been the focus for artistic (especially novelistic and cinematic) engagements with the ‘Troubles,’” this fictional pre-eminence is a fairly recent phenomenon and is not without its problems.20 Indeed, Richard Kirkland contends that, in spite of its significance as an industrial city and regional center since the early nineteenth century, “Belfast has been, until recently, an unwritten city placed beyond the process of metaphoric displacement by its own self-evident physicality.”21 On this reading, then, Belfast is the proverbial elephant in the room of Irish literature which writers have consistently refused to see. Since the outbreak of the “Troubles” in the late 1960s, however, Belfast’s socio-historical complexity has also been obscured or drastically reduced by a welter of representations that seek to configure it as an archetypal site of violence and political crisis. As Nicholas Allen and Aaron Kelly remark, “Belfast is commonly understood to be a place familiar precisely because of its familiarity: its representation is supersaturated with images of strangeness, anomaly and deviance.”22 Paradoxically, then, Belfast in literature is at once unwritten and over-written, an imagined geography characterized both by silence and a monotonous insistence on its sheer otherness. This paradox is perhaps especially evident in fictional representations of the city, as Eamonn Hughes has persuasively argued. Echoing Kirkland’s analysis, Hughes also employs metaphors of silence and invisibility, identifying two main factors that have determined Belfast’s unusually late emergence into fictional representation. First, the city’s status as “a place dominated by its ‘Troubles’” has meant that many novels, particularly thrillers, depict Belfast exclusively in terms of its “imputed attributes of danger, violence and mayhem” rather than as “an actual place to be mimetically represented.”23 Secondly, Belfast also has to contend

138

Bernard MacLaverty

with the fact that Irish culture “has long been at best indifferent, at worst hostile, to the city,” an antipathy that is further exacerbated by its industrial, Protestant character.24 As a consequence, Hughes contends, “the history of the representation of Belfast is largely a history of absence,” though he also goes on to note its emergent role as “a paradigmatic city” in several novels published in the mid-1990s.25 Laura Pelaschiar develops this observation further when she claims that, in novels by Glenn Patterson and Robert MacLiam Wilson, “Belfast has gradually become a new, fertile location, no longer a place from which escape is necessary, but rather a laboratory of opportunities”; in short, a city that can be understood in terms of “its European normalcy.”26 MacLaverty’s fictional geographies can be read in dialogue with this brief history of Belfast’s literary representation and are certainly marked by the tropes of absence, silence and invisibility that it highlights. For, although many of his early stories are set in the city, the manner in which Belfast is depicted often seems to bear out Catherine McKenna’s remark, in Grace Notes, that “obliqueness” is “[t]he Northern Ireland art form” (96). Typically, the characters of these stories either withdraw from or have little experience of what Richard Sennett would call the city’s “public geography,” its “milieu of strangers whose lives touch.”27 Familial relations and a primarily domestic setting tend to establish a known community of kith and kin; and because the narrative perspective is so closely aligned with that of the characters—either through focalization or the use of first-person narration—the city, in Sennett’s sense of “a human settlement in which strangers are likely to meet,” is largely an absence.28 Accordingly, the reader is offered only the barest descriptions of the built environment of Belfast: in “A Rat and Some Renovations,” from Secrets (1977), the boy-narrator describes living in “a terrace of dilapidated Victorian houses whose front gardens measured two feet by the breadth of the house”; and the main events of “Hugo” unfold in “a large old terrace house with four bedrooms in an area of the city which had seen better days.”29 In both cases, the physical and social fabric of the city is represented in a state of decline, even disintegration, and this trope is elaborated more fully in “St Paul Could Hit the Nail on the Head.” Offering a sympathetic and gently humorous insight into the domestic drudgery endured by Mary, a Belfast housewife, MacLaverty’s story turns on a parallel between exterior and interior worlds, urban demolition and nervous collapse: “All that afternoon Mary’s world seemed to be falling apart at the seams” (Secrets 18). During a visit to the building site where her husband works, Mary is horrified by the spectacle of physical “devastation” before her:



Bernard MacLaverty’s Fictional Geographies

139

Bulldozers snarled in, crashing through kitchen walls, teetering staircases, leaving bedrooms exposed. They took great bites of the house then spilled the gulp into the back of a waiting lorry, the mandible unhinging at the back rather than the front. Mary felt she shouldn’t look, seeing the choice of wallpapers: pink rosebuds, scorned in her own family, faded flowers, patterns modern a generation ago. She felt it was too private. (20)

What upsets and unnerves Mary in this scene is the way it stages the deconstruction of proper distinctions between inside and outside, the private space of the home and the public space of the city. Subsequently, she withdraws to the security of her own hearth, forsaking the public world of work in a move that is clearly symbolic, and which tacitly affirms the differential gendering of urban and domestic spaces, public and private realms.30 If Belfast is made present in MacLaverty’s early stories only through fragmentary glimpses or oblique allusions, then in his novels the city tends to figure as “a place of transit” rather than as “a place to settle in.”31 Moreover, Belfast occasionally disappears altogether into narrative ellipses and lacunae, illustrating Pierre Macherey’s claim that every literary text “reveals a determinate absence, resorts to an eloquent silence.”32 For instance, when Michael Lamb liberates Owen Kane from a Christian Brothers’ borstal school on the Galway coast in Lamb, they travel by ferry and train to London, where they seek refuge and a new life as “father” and “son.” However, rather than sailing from Dublin to Liverpool, they take the boat from Belfast to Cairnryan before travelling south through Scotland and England. This meandering, indirect route is puzzling enough, but what is more striking is the way in which the narrative cuts abruptly from Michael’s tense conversation with the domineering Brother Benedict in the Galway borstal to a scene the following day in which he and Owen are depicted on board the ferry as it sets sail: “[Michael] stood on the deck of the boat as it pulled away from the harbour, his elbows taking his weight on the wooden rail. The boat threshed through the soupy green water, skinning it with white wake.”33 In this evocative scene the familiar literary trajectory of Irish exile is crossed by narratives of escape, pursuit, and kidnap, but it is telling that neither the harbor itself nor the waterway onto which it opens is identified. Indeed, it is only several pages later, via a brief analepsis, that the reader learns that Michael and Owen have passed through Belfast on their way to Britain. A similar play of presence and absence can also be discerned in the opening pages of Grace Notes, where Catherine McKenna travels from Glasgow to a

140

Bernard MacLaverty

small town in County Derry for her father’s funeral. Again, like that of Michael and Owen, her journey is oddly roundabout and indirect, involving a brief passage through Belfast before she can head for “home”: When they dropped down through the cloud at Aldergrove she saw how green the land was. And how small the fields. The mosaic of vivid greens and yellows and browns. She wanted to cry again. The bus into Belfast was stopped at a checkpoint and a policeman in a flak jacket, a young guy with a ginger moustache, walked up the aisle towards her, his head moving in a slow no as he looked from side to side, from seat to opposite seat for bombs. He winked at her, “Cheer up love, it might never happen.” But it already had. On the bus home she watched the familiar landmarks she used as a child pass one by one. Toomebridge, her convent school, the drop into low gear to take the hill out of Magherafelt. (Grace Notes 6–7)

Tellingly, the reference to Belfast in this passage is bookended by Catherine’s conflicted but richly affective responses to the “familiar” landscapes of “home,” which are predominantly rural and pastoral in their “vivid” colorings. By contrast, the city is named as a destination but never actually described as a place; it is a mere stopover, an unmemorable stage in an onward journey. However, through the brief passage in which the policeman boards Catherine’s city-bound bus, Belfast is implicitly associated with both the threat of violence (“bombs”) and the intrusive authority of the security forces, not least through the emphatically negative connotations of that “slow no.” In this passage, then, Belfast is both a determinate absence and a negative presence, a place of no importance and a site of minatory power. This paradoxical maneuver, whereby Belfast is made present in the text through its determinate absence is further illustrated in a third example, where the city’s dual role as place of transit and fateful destination takes on obvious allegorical overtones. “Between Two Shores,” from Secrets, tells the story of an Irish exile returning by ferry from Britain to Ireland and is set entirely while the boat is at sea, between two shores. Through a series of staggered analepses, the reader learns of the protagonist’s longing for his wife and children in rural Donegal, and of his guilt over an affair with a nurse in London, from whom he has contracted syphilis. Reflecting morbidly on his condition, he is tormented by the thought that he, in turn, will be a source of infection and death: “She had said they were like tiny corkscrews. He thought of them boring into



Bernard MacLaverty’s Fictional Geographies

141

his wife’s womb” (Secrets 54). This trope of disease and terminal sickness is amplified over the course of the story by a recurrent pattern of images, metaphors and similes: among his lover’s friends in London, the protagonist had felt “like a leper”; his sleeping-place on the ferry is “like a tomb”; and, in the early morning gloom, the jumble of sleeping bodies in the boat’s lounge “reminded him of a graveyard” (55, 56, 57). It is crucial, then, that the story should conclude with the ferry approaching Belfast in the ambiguous “grey light” of dawn: His life was over. Objects on the shore began to become distinct through the mist. Gasometers, chimney-stacks, railway trucks. They looked washed out, a putty grey against the pale lumps of the hills. Cars were moving and then he made out people hurrying to work. He closed his eyes and put his head down on his arms. Indistinctly at first, but with a growing clarity, he heard the sound of an ambulance. (59)

In this passage, the city remains unnamed and the features of its industrial landscapes can only be perceived indistinctly through the mist. Yet it is immediately associated with the protagonist’s sense of hopelessness—“His life was over”—and seems to manifest the morbid symptoms not just of an individual but of a whole society. As Richard Rankin Russell comments, “the metaphor of disease … runs through the story” achieving a kind of symbolic resolution in this passage by representing “the unhealthy, sectarian Northern Irish society and its infectious nature.”34 In this regard, “Between Two Shores” offers a somewhat clichéd liberal diagnosis of the causes of the “Troubles,” alluding to civil and state violence by way of what Henri Lefebvre calls “the pathology of space,” which holds that “the modern city is a product not of the capitalist or neocapitalist system but rather of some putative ‘sickness’ of society.”35 Moreover, Belfast again figures as a negative presence that cannot be brought fully into view within the representational space of the text itself. MacLaverty’s fiction also characterizes Belfast as a “Troubles” city through its second-order representation in media news stories, which are often embedded reflexively in the texture of his novels. For instance, when Cal McCluskey and his father watch the news on television in Cal the distant city momentarily invades their home with its threat of sectarian violence: A Catholic father of three had been stabbed to death in a Belfast entry. The police said that there was no known motive for the killing. Gerry Fitt had had a steel door put on his house. “Any jobs in the paper today?” asked his father.

142

Bernard MacLaverty

Cal shook his head, his mouth full. When he had swallowed he said, “A couple in Belfast.” “You’re safer away from the city.”36

In this short passage Belfast is named twice but is never present as such, referred to only as a site of random murder and therefore as an unsuitable place for a young Catholic man to seek work. Later in the novel, another news report tells of “hooded bodies … found on the outskirts of Belfast”; and, when Cal’s fear and paranoia lead him to imagine his own assassination, he pictures his killers “in Belfast having a cup of tea” before he can even think of defending himself (Cal 57, 80). A similar technique is employed to more complex and subtle effect in Grace Notes, where Catherine McKenna walks with her young daughter on an Islay beach and recalls a radio news story of a young British soldier who had “been killed on a street in Belfast, thirty-five miles from her home town” (Grace Notes 203). This image recurs as a point of mediation between different places—Scotland and Northern Ireland—and between very different experiences of suffering—the soldier’s violent death, Catherine’s post-natal depression and violent abuse at the hands of her alcoholic partner. Once again, though, Belfast is a city defined chiefly in terms of its “Troubles,” and a place held at a safe geographical remove from the text’s central concerns. Such figurations of Belfast are partial in both senses of the word, at once fragmentary and tendentious, but since the late 1980s the city has also come to be represented as “a site of possibility” in MacLaverty’s fiction, or at least as a place characterized as much by its ordinariness as by its abnormality.37 The change in emphasis has been gradual and uneven, though, subject to reversals and qualifications even as Belfast’s resistance to representation has waned. The short story “Some Surrender,” from The Great Profundo (1987), provides a good case in point, focusing as it does on an elderly father and his middle-aged son as they ascend Cave Hill, a prominent hill on the north-western edge of Belfast. At the crux of the story, the two men reach the summit and achieve a panoramic view of the city below: “The blue Lough lies like a wedge between the Holywood Hills at the far side and the grey mass of the city at his feet and to his right. Spires and factory chimneys poke up in equal numbers. Soccer pitches appear as green squares with staples for goalposts.”38 In this scene, physical elevation above the “grey mass” of the city permits a measure of aesthetizisation at the expense of detail and personal involvement. Indeed, as Hughes observes, this kind of panoramic view from the hills is “an almost universal feature of Belfast fiction,” which appears to “suggest that the only way to comprehend the city is



Bernard MacLaverty’s Fictional Geographies

143

[to] leave it, to become an observer rather than a participant.”39 Yet, the personal drama that is worked out dialogically in the text between father and son also seeks to foreground some of the key contradictions informing Belfast’s history and political geography. For, while the father is made to articulate the idées reçues of Protestant bigotry and to proudly affirm Belfast’s founding virtues of “‘[h]ard work and thrift,’” his son Roy reminds him that Cave Hill “‘was the place the United Irishmen took an oath to overthrow the English. They were all Prods as well’” (The Great Profundo 122, 123). Belfast’s defining Protestantism is thus revealed to be complex and conflictual, and the city’s “Britishness” at best equivocal. MacLaverty also seems to identify a shift in values that is both generational and a matter of changing historical conditions. So, while the design faults that have led to the wholesale demolition of the father’s architectural projects—his “‘complete works’”—are implicitly linked to the sectarian outlook to which he gives voice, Roy’s projected book of photographs depicting “‘Belfast people’” implies a creative, non-sectarian interest in the ordinary life of the city (125, 120). In this regard, although “Some Surrender” reprises the imagery of demolition and deconstruction that is a feature of earlier stories, here it seems to suggest the possibility of starting anew, dismantling some of the ideological structures that have restricted the city’s potential and fostering an urban society predicated upon compromise and negotiation. As Roy muses: “‘I’d like to see a new slogan, SOME SURRENDER’” (125). Another story that at least qualifies Belfast’s status as a city utterly dominated by its violent conflict is “Walking the Dog,” a tale of abduction and interrogation by terrorists that is by turns disturbing and wryly comical. Its effect depends upon disappointing the expectations of its readers through an anticlimax in which the plot elements of a thriller narrative slide inexorably into farce. While walking his dog one evening along “a country road lined by hedges and ditches” on the southern outskirts of Belfast, John Shields is bundled into a car by men claiming to be “‘from the IRA.’”40 Gradually it becomes clear that they are, in fact, a loyalist gang looking for Catholics to murder, but their attempts to decipher John’s identity are repeatedly frustrated by his stubborn refusal to accept the either/or logic of their questions, because it fails to tally with who and what he thinks he is. While in the car, John tries to orient himself in relation to the urban landscape through which they pass, often drawing upon non-visual modes of sensory perception: “The car slowed and went down the gears. The driver indicated and John heard the rhythmic clinking as it flashed. This must be the Lisburn Road. A main road. This was happening on a main road in Belfast” (Walking the Dog 7). MacLaverty’s restrained use of free indirect style

144

Bernard MacLaverty

here serves both to underline the absurd unreality of the situation described and to define it in opposition to the ordinary life of the city. When John and his dog are eventually freed in the affluent Malone Road area of Belfast, it becomes apparent that that the whole episode has taken only ten minutes, and John’s initial impulse to contact the authorities is almost immediately checked: “He began to walk towards the lights of the main road where he knew there was a phone box. But what was the point? He wouldn’t even have been missed yet” (12). In this way, the text both acknowledges the life-changing effects that a brush with terrorist violence can have on individual citizens and also performs an act of ironic deflation, underlining the inconsequence of this brief irruption into one man’s everyday routines. MacLaverty’s most sustained representation of Belfast is to be found in his fourth novel, The Anatomy School, which concerns itself, for the most part, with the ordinary anxieties and confusions of male adolescence but also examines the intersection of personal and historical “troubles.” Indeed, like several other novels published soon after the Good Friday Agreement of 10 April 1998—such as Glenn Patterson’s The International (1999), Eoin McNamee’s The Blue Tango (2001), and David Park’s The Big Snow (2002)—The Anatomy School employs a characteristically “retrospective” aesthetic, recreating a period from before the “Troubles” in response to the burden of history in contemporary Northern Ireland.41 The novel is divided into two unequal parts: the first and longer takes place during the spring and summer of 1969 as Martin Brennan, a Catholic grammar schoolboy, and his friends Kavanagh and Blaise prepare for their final exams and “entry into the adult world” (12). The second is set three years later, over the course of a summer’s night during which Martin, now a laboratory technician at Queen’s University and keen amateur photographer, gets caught up in a riot, has his first experience of sex, and begins to plan a new life-course for himself. Through its dyadic structure, the text not only connects different moments in Martin’s personal and social development, thereby dramatizing his rejection of the institutions and authorities (school, Church, family) to which he has formerly been compliant; it also straddles an important historical coupure, joining the before and after of Northern Ireland’s descent into civil conflict by way of a temporal lacuna, and ends in a period of accelerating violence and sectarian polarization. Linking parts one and two is the recurrent image of a man rowing a boat: “‘We are all like a man rowing a boat. We have our backs to the way we’re going. We can’t look ahead, can’t see the future. All we can see is the past behind us’” (134; 213, 303, 335). There is an obvious echo here of Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, who is also propelled backwards into the future by a



Bernard MacLaverty’s Fictional Geographies

145

storm of “progress” that piles “wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”42 On the other hand, MacLaverty’s image allegorizes the situation of the Northern Irish novelist in retrospective mode, looking to the past in an effort to comprehend the present and remember the future. It is significant, then, that the novel should end on a note of cautious optimism, even as Martin cycles through a cityscape scarred by the previous night’s violence. Looking up at Elizabeth Frink’s abstract sculptures on the wall of the Ulster Bank in Shaftesbury Square, he imagines them as simultaneously falling and flying, symbols of failure and figures rising skyward, “buoyed up on thermals of hope” (354). MacLaverty’s representation of Belfast also undergoes an important shift between parts one and two of The Anatomy School. In Part One, the geographical focus of the narrative is fairly tightly circumscribed, centering on the (unnamed) grammar school that Martin and his friends attend and the immediately adjoining Antrim Road area north of the city center, with occasional forays to Belfast Waterworks—“a park but not a park”—and Belfast Central Library on Royal Avenue (132, 83). In keeping with MacLaverty’s earlier texts, toponyms are rarely used and places are typically evoked merely as settings for actions rather than as interesting or important in themselves. Moreover, the schoolboy protagonists condemn their city, in characteristically provincial fashion, as a “‘provincial hole’” and “‘a godforsaken backwater,’” noting the irony of their Catholic college’s pretensions “‘to be an English public school’” (70, 124). In Part Two, however, the situation is different: Martin’s experience of the city is now much fuller and richer, and this is reflected in the narrative through the frequent use of street names and the meticulous charting of his cycle route from the Royal Victoria Hospital to the university via the city center. Consequently, it becomes easier for the reader to grasp the novel as “a figurative mapping” of the urban spaces that it represents and of the relations between them.43 On his way to the university, Martin stops briefly by a burnt-out car showroom that has caught the attention of a photojournalist and reflects upon Belfast’s new prominence on the map of newsworthy places: It was a strange feeling to be in the world’s eye. Things of note were happening in his place—it hardly mattered that they were bad things. The pride was in getting noticed. There were pictures of his town in every paper in the world, every TV in the world— the fact that it was pictures of his town being burned or blown to fuckin bits was neither here nor there. (242)

If Martin’s attitudes still retain a kernel of provincialism here, it is combined with a worldly irony that is capable of seeing the disparity between Belfast’s

146

Bernard MacLaverty

ordinary actuality and its image-in-circulation. The use of possessive pronouns in combination with free indirect discourse—“his place,” “his town”—is also telling, denoting a nascent consciousness of his status as a citizen, of belonging in and to Belfast, just as the city belongs to him. Russell observes that Martin is himself an aspiring photographer whose “guiding principle of beauty is grounded in a pursuit of the quotidian, the apprehension of which leads similarly to the ineffable.”44 I would argue that it is through his fidelity to the ordinary and the quotidian as ends in themselves, rather than through some transcendental pursuit of the ineffable, that MacLaverty’s depictions of Belfast come most fully to life and begin to exhibit a latent public geography. In The Anatomy School, Belfast is at once a provincial backwater, a notorious war zone, and simply a place in which to learn to live. If, as Robert T. Tally Jr. claims, the critical reader can be understood as “a kind of geographer who actively interprets the literary map in such a way as to present new, sometimes hitherto unforeseen mappings,” then literary geography must also seek to identify and interpret the gaps or elisions that mark the text’s representations of space and place.45 In this essay I have tried to show that, while questions of geography are often suppressed or approached only obliquely in MacLaverty’s fiction, they nonetheless have far-reaching significance. His novels and stories are not consistent in their descriptions of a single imaginative territory—like Joyce’s Dublin or Patrick Kavanagh’s Mucker—and they are often notable for their tendency to elide topographical particulars, the landmarks and place-names by which a specific place or landscape is made known. Yet, I have argued that the city of Belfast occupies a significant place in MacLaverty’s fictional geographies precisely because of the fragmentary, elliptical manner in which it is represented. As a locus of sectarian violence and the threat of social dissolution, Belfast often figures in his texts as a determinate absence or negative presence, a place that is always imaginatively displaced or out-of-place. However, I have also shown that from the late 1980s onwards, and most prominently in The Anatomy School, Belfast has begun to emerge in Bernard MacLaverty’s fiction as an actual place to be represented rather than as an emblem of pure negativity, a city that can be understood in terms of its ordinary civic life as well as through its recent historical traumas.

Notes   1 Joyce, 34.   2 See, for instance, Whelan and Harte. A useful overview of the “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences can be found in Warf and Arias.



Bernard MacLaverty’s Fictional Geographies

147

  3 Smyth, 20.   4 Foster, 31.   5 Ibid., 30, 38.   6 Smyth, 71.   7 Foster, 31.   8 Barry, 48–9.   9 Miller, 10. 10 Massey, for space, 71. 11 MacLaverty, A Time to Dance, 77. 12 MacLaverty, Grace Notes, 178. All subsequent references to this novel will be cited in the text. 13 MacLaverty, The Anatomy School, 256. All subsequent references to this novel will be cited in the text. 14 See Nash. 15 MacLaverty, Walking the Dog, 140. All subsequent references to this collection will be cited in the text. 16 Tally, Jr., 45. 17 Brienzo, 17. 18 Ibid., 20, 17. 19 Williams, 227. Franco Moretti also regards the overwhelming “confusion” and “over-complication” of urban spaces as a problem of “legibility” in nineteenthcentury fiction. See Moretti, 78–9. 20 Smyth, 136. 21 Kirkland, 34. 22 Allen and Kelly, 8. 23 Hughes, “Town of Shadows,” 141. 24 Ibid., 142. For an astute political critique of the anti-urban bias in Irish culture and political ideology, with regard to fictional representations of Belfast, see Kelly, 83–110. 25 Hughes, “Town of Shadows,” 142, 154. 26 Pelaschiar, “Transforming Belfast,” 117, 122. See also Pelaschiar, Writing the North, 99–135. 27 Sennett, 41, 39. 28 Ibid., 39. 29 MacLaverty, Secrets, 15, 73. All subsequent references to this collection will be cited in the text. 30 For a succinct account of the gendering of modern urban spaces, see Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, 233–5. A more extended literary-critical discussion is offered in Parsons. 31 Eamonn Hughes, “What itch of contradiction?”, 101.

148

Bernard MacLaverty

32 Macherey, 79. 33 MacLaverty, Lamb, 27. 34 Russell, 31. 35 Lefebvre, 99. 36 MacLaverty, Cal, 15. The subsequent reference to this novel will be cited in the text. 37 Allen and Kelly, “Introduction,” 7. 38 MacLaverty, The Great Profundo, 123. All subsequent references to this collection will be cited in the text. 39 Hughes, “Town of Shadows,” 144. More positively, David Brett remarks: “The view from Cave Hill is among the best urban panoramas in the islands, Edinburgh not excluded, for it takes in the sea and ships and the far mountains of Mourne. Seeing it whole, you see Belfast as a grouping of settlements that spread in patches along the trench and its sides, separated from one another by rivers and woods and water-meadows, and now by the motorway” (19). 40 MacLaverty, Walking the Dog, 3, 5. All subsequent references to this collection will be cited in the text. 41 See Alexander. 42 Benjamin, 249. 43 Miller, 19. 44 Russell, 115. 45 Tally Jr., 79.

Works cited Alexander, Neal. “Remembering To Forget: Northern Irish Fiction After the Troubles.” Irish Literature since 1990: Diverse Voices. Eds Scott Brewster and Michael Parker. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. 272–83. Allen, Nicholas and Aaron Kelly. “Introduction.” The Cities of Belfast. Eds Nicholas Allen and Aaron Kelly. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003. 7–11. Barry, Peter. Contemporary British Poetry and the City. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Pimlico, 1999. Brett, David. “Geologies of Site and Settlement.” The Cities of Belfast. Eds Nicholas Allen and Aaron Kelly. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003. 13–26. Brienzo, Gary. “Belfast: Bernard MacLaverty’s Heart of Darkness.” Writing the City: Eden, Babylon and the New Jerusalem. Eds Peter Preston and Paul SimpsonHousley. London: Routledge, 1994. 17–28. Foster, John Wilson. “The Geography of Irish Fiction.” Colonial Consequences: Essays in Irish Literature and Culture. Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1991. 30–43.



Bernard MacLaverty’s Fictional Geographies

149

Hughes, Eamonn. “Town of Shadows: Representations of Belfast in Recent Fiction.” Religion & Literature 28.2–3 (1996): 141–60. —“‘What itch of contradiction?’ Belfast in Poetry.” The Cities of Belfast. Eds Nicholas Allen and Aaron Kelly. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003. 101–16. Joyce, James. Ulysses: The 1922 Text. Ed. Jeri Johnson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Kelly, Aaron. The Thriller and Northern Ireland since 1969: Utterly Resigned Terror. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005. Kirkland, Richard. Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland since 1965: Moments of Danger. London: Longman, 1996. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Macherey, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Production. Trans. Geoffrey Wall. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978. MacLaverty, Bernard. Secrets and Other Stories. Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1984. —A Time to Dance and Other Stories. London: Penguin, 1985. —Grace Notes. London: Jonathan Cape, 1997. —The Great Profundo and Other Stories. London: Vintage, 1997. —Cal. London: Vintage, 1998. —Walking the Dog and Other Stories. London: Vintage, 1999. —Lamb. London: Vintage, 2000. —The Anatomy School. London: Vintage, 2002. Massey, Doreen. Space, Place, and Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994. —for space. London: Sage, 2005. Miller, J. Hillis. Topographies. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900. London: Verso, 1998. Nash, Catherine. “Embodied Irishness: Gender, Sexuality and Irish Identities.” In Search of Ireland: a Cultural Geography. Ed. Brian Graham. London: Routledge, 1997. 108–27. Parsons, Deborah L. Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pelaschiar, Laura. Writing the North: The Contemporary Novel in Northern Ireland. Trieste: Edizioni Parnaso, 1998. —“Transforming Belfast: The Evolving Role of the City in Northern Irish Fiction.” Irish University Review 30.1 (2000): 117–31. Russell, Richard Rankin. Bernard MacLaverty. Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press, 2009. Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man. London: Penguin, 2002. Smyth, Gerry. Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2001. Tally Jr., Robert T. Spatiality. London: Routledge, 2013. Warf, Barney and Santa Arias, eds. The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. London: Routledge, 2008.

150

Bernard MacLaverty

Whelan, Yvonne and Liam Harte. “Placing Geography in Irish Studies: Symbolic Landscapes of Spectacle and Memory.” Ireland Beyond Boundaries: Mapping Irish Studies for the Twenty-First Century. Eds Liam Harte and Yvonne Whelan. London: Pluto Press, 2007. 175–97. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. London: The Hogarth Press, 1993.

10

Ireland and Elsewhere: The “Non-Irish” in Bernard MacLaverty’s Fiction Laura Pelaschiar

Bernard MacLaverty’s fiction is one of the most Irish found throughout Irish literature in terms of characters, locations, motifs, atmospheres. The vast majority of his short stories and all of his novels focus on Irish characters entangled in classic Irish situations tackling typically Irish issues: displaced at home or in an exilic elsewhere, they cope with the stifling and crippling tentacles of Irish Catholicism (canonically embodied by sadistic priests and castrating mother figures), the dynamics of Northern Irish politics and the inner as well as outer sustained violence of the “Troubles,” exile and return, imprisonment and failed or successful attempts at escape, the clash between sexuality, religion and morality, the conflict between personal aspirations and the demands of authority in its classic Irish forms of family (ineffectual patriarch plus devout mother) and nation. Unlike writers such as Colm Tóibín, John Banville, Glenn Patterson, Joseph O’Connor, Robert McLiam Wilson, Anne Enright, and others, who have fictionally frequented foreign characters and far-away lands, MacLaverty has stayed fairly consistently Irish (and strictly contemporary) regarding space, time, and characterization. Nevertheless, within his rich Irish texture, the author of Cal and Grace Notes makes ample and significant use of what I will term, for the purpose of this essay, the non-Irish, by which I mean all those textual elements—characters, locations, and atmospheres—which are not Irish but which are not necessarily implicated in a process of othering. In other words, the non-Irish of this essay are not automatically to be intended as Others with a capital letter: they are not sites of fear, negativity, cultural anxieties, or prejudice, as are, for example, the subjects analyzed by Elizabeth Butler Cullingford in her Ireland’s Others1; nor are they members of subaltern groups which David Lloyd and other critics of post-colonial and Marxist formation consider proper objects of investigation

152

Bernard MacLaverty

and representation. The non-Irish here are to be intended, simply and neutrally, as foreign elements that are part of textual narratives, structures, and strategies. The non-Irish in MacLaverty’s fiction takes on different forms and interrelates with the text in diverse ways. Already in the two opening stories in his first collection, Secrets and Other Stories (1977), it begins to surface and operate in a fashion which will be expanded and developed in later texts. In “The Exercise,” the non-Irish element is linguistic, Latin and is—as the title suggests—the dark catalyst at the center of the plot. Latin obviously carries multiple symbolic significances which are charged with class as well as religious connotations: it is both the language of culture, one that can only be learned with hard work and study in educational institutions, and also the language of Catholicism, of the Roman Catholic Church, and of the Pope. In both cases it is a symbol, as well as an instrument, of power and it is (interestingly) both alien and homely in Ireland, given that it is the official foreign voice of a foundational element of Irish identity. In “The Exercise”—as in Lamb (1980), where Father Benedict (possibly the most sinister of all of MacLaverty’s characters) is an eager practitioner of Latin, Greek, and Gaelic2—the custodian of this potent symbol is Waldo, one of the many cruel religious figures in Irish literature. Father Waldo brandishes it with ruthless precision to humiliate Kevin, the young protagonist, and his father, an honest publican who, in trying to help his son to finish his Latin homework, compounds his mistakes and is therefore responsible for the boy’s failure when Father Waldo asks him to read the exercise. The episode concludes with a worrying, although endearing, inversion of roles, with the child lying to the adult by telling his father that that day in school the Latin went “‘Ok. Fine,’” to protect him from disappointment and reality.3 At the end of the story the father/son relationship is cemented—a rare event indeed in Irish fiction—but nevertheless the father figures are an ineffectual patriarch and a dysfunctional and sadist priest, respectively. In “A Rat and Some Renovations” it is American visitors, “The Yanks,” who function as agents to introduce the foreign element; the mother of the young protagonist decides to renovate the house to impress her guests while she pretends with them that the renovation had taken place the year before. At the end of the story, which is only two pages long, she is already picking up the American accent in an evident show of insecurity and colonial mimicry which even her son is able to detect. In the first two stories of this collection, therefore, the employment of the foreign works as an instrument to expose the multiple inferiority complexes and cultural inadequacies of the Irish. But in “Between Two Shores,” the longest story in Secrets, MacLaverty’s strategy becomes more



Ireland and Elsewhere: The “Non-Irish” in Bernard MacLaverty’s Fiction

153

intense and the darkest and most consistent side of the Irish/non-Irish nexus is represented for the first time. When MacLaverty’s use of the alien takes the form of encounters between characters, these encounters are always cross-gender, with Irish males meeting non-Irish females and, conversely, Irish females bumping into non-Irish males. The connection is always sexual or at least erotic. Therefore desire and its dynamics and destructive components define the core of the event. What MacLaverty’s texts invariably depict is either the impossibility of the relationship, which is often illicit, or the inevitability of the dire consequences that will be caused. Both are absolute, radical, and non-negotiable. After “Between Two Shores,” this pattern will be repeated in numerous short stories and in the novels Cal (Cal/Marcella), Grace Notes (Catherine/Dave), and—although on a much lighter and comic note—also in The Anatomy School (Martin/Cindy). Two mimetic models usefully advance our analysis of the non-Irish and its net of significances in MacLaverty’s textuality: the typically Northern Irish “loveacross-the-barricades” pattern and the Western archetype of the adulterous stranger. MacLaverty’s fiction makes very original use of a classic master trope of Northern Irish fiction, the so-called “love-across-the-divide,” or “loveacross-the-barricades” plot, where love stories develop, with varying outcomes, between protagonists belonging to warring communities. This framework has often been read politically by critics, for example by Joe Cleary, Richard Haslam, and Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, and, while these interpretations are indeed valid within the Northern Ireland context, it is nevertheless interesting to consider that this paradigm is also part and parcel of a universal narrative mode which takes form whenever and wherever a barricade—be it racial, religious, social, cultural, and even biological—exists: from Troilus and Cressida to Pyramus and Thisbe in classic mythology, from Romeo and Juliet to Antony and Cleopatra, from Pinkerton and Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly to Tony and Maria in West Side Story, from Joanna Drayton and Dr John Prentice in Guess Who’s Coming for Dinner to the He and She of Hiroshima Mon Amour, from John Dunbar and Stand With a Fist in Dances with Wolves to Bella and Edward in the immensely successful teenage pop series Twilight. This list could be enlarged ad libitum. MacLaverty expands and transcends this model. In his texts the erotic embrace with the non-Irish—whatever its origin—is represented as being just as inaccessible and dangerous as the classic romance between members of warring factions, where othering processes and practices are clearly identifiable. It is as

154

Bernard MacLaverty

if, for the Irish, any exogamic liaison was a non-navigable, off-limits Scylla-andCharybdis stretch of turbulent waters. “Between Two Shores” presents such a narrative situation in one of its most tragic and punitive versions. The nameless protagonist of the story is a middleaged immigrant worker from Donegal, where his wife and family still live, who works in London on building sites and has an affair with a nurse from New Zealand, the promiscuous Helen Mitchell. With a dark ironic twist which is typical of MacLaverty’s black humor, the woman, having nursed him “back to health” (Secrets 50) after an appendix removal, will proceed to infect the man with syphilis; this will ruin his marital and personal life forever. Helen Mitchell is a sexually aggressive female (“She changed as he touched her. She bit his tongue and hurt his body with her nails,” 51) who openly admits to a promiscuous erotic lifestyle in an accent which not only proclaims difference but clearly indicates danger: “‘Many, many men’ she had replied, her New Zealand vowels thin and hard like knives” (51). In the story the contact between Irish and non-Irish takes the form of adulterous contamination, an adulteration of the worst type which can only be rewarded with a fitting punishment: sexual, physical, and permanent. In true Joycean fashion, “Between Two Shores” is followed by a countershort story which represents its double by deflation and reversal. In “Umberto Verdi, Chimney Sweep” the Irish/non-Irish pattern is re-explored in tragi-comic fashion: here the foreignness of the (supposed) stranger is at least initially represented as more desirable than the Irishness of the insider (the Irish husband). But illusion and delusion are very clearly in store. The protagonist, Nan, is one of the many frustrated and maltreated wives of MacLaverty’s fiction, who live entrapped in their domestic cages tending to too many children and putting up with careless and physically repellent husbands. Nan needs to have her chimney cleaned and when she looks up a chimney sweep in the directory, she immediately responds to the romantic sound of an Italian name, Umberto Verdi. She calls his office, is answered by a woman with an Italian accent whom she makes sure is not Mr Verdi’s wife, and arranges for the visit. Nan spends the two remaining days building up expectations for a romantic (adulterous) encounter, buying expensive bottles of Campari, and reminiscing about exotic holidays with girlfriends on the Italian Riviera and tanned, attractive young men with eyes full of desire: “The way they looked at you—nobody had ever looked at her like that, before or since” (Secrets 62). Interestingly, in this story MacLaverty intensifies the presence of the non-Irish by providing his heroine with a past foreign suitor: the gentle and polite Dr Kamel, a Muslim doctor who proposed



Ireland and Elsewhere: The “Non-Irish” in Bernard MacLaverty’s Fiction

155

to Nan with the intention of taking her to Sudan, his place of origin, where the adoption of Muslim African habits would be, in his words or perhaps in Nan’s memory of his words, the adventure that she would have loved to experience. At night, while she lies in bed with her unattractive Irish husband, Nan exoticizes her distant memory, transfiguring Kamel into the unattainable—a perfect suitor worthy of A Thousand and One Nights: “That night, as she lay tucked in behind John’s back, Kamel’s black face kept appearing, pleading, pointing to the deserts and pyramids” (64). That this fantastic and orientalizing pre-sleep vision is just yet another of Nan’s illusions—“With Kamel it would have been different” (63)—becomes more than obvious not only because the text makes it clear that it would have been totally up to Nan to cross the gulf between Western and Muslim culture, with Dr Kamel enjoying the process, but also because Umberto Verdi will turn out to be not Nan’s hoped-for Latin lover but a small, fat, and bald 50-year-old with no trace of exoticism, not even a vague hint of an Italian accent, not to mention his Prufrock-like trousers coming up to his chest. If Helen Mitchell is the sexually rapacious non-Irish female who adulterates the Irish male in exile, the Sudanese doctor and the Italian chimney sweeper represent two versions of a delusional symmetric ideal—the perfect match irrevocably lost for ever and the ideal lover that never happened—which MacLaverty situates outside Irish borders. In MacLaverty’s texts, even if in its degraded version, the institution of marriage firmly remains endogamously Irish: any intrusion of the non-Irish is confined to extramarital affairs, illicit sex, or adulterous longing. In this regard, MacLaverty seems to follow that alterity-adulteration-adultery topos of Western tradition so brilliantly scrutinized by Tony Tanner in his by now classic Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression. In a sub-chapter entitled “The Stranger in the House,” Tanner connects the motif of adultery—which is present in Western tradition since Homer—to that of alterity and inspects the transgressions of marital contracts in classical literature: Helen of Troy, Tristan and Iseult, Lancelot and Guinevere, through Shakespeare’s adulterous plots in Othello, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale. All the males implicated in these adulterous plots, Tanner claims, have one thing in common: their alterity. They are all aliens of mysterious origin, strangers, to use Tanner’s term, in somebody else’s house. From an anthropological perspective, Tanner observes that the basic goal of the art of hospitality since ancient times has always been to transform the “stranger” into a “guest,” in order to elide the potential threat that the Other always represents for the social order and the balance of the hosting tribe. But

156

Bernard MacLaverty

hospitality remains an uncertain bet, because the ontological danger implicit in the Other is always potentially active (and easy to activate); the process of de-alienation which is the purpose of hospitality can never be said to be complete. Paris, Tristan, Lancelot, Iachimo are all strangers in the house who break the pact they had symbolically signed with their host by transgressing (or pretending to transgress) in the most socially unacceptable way: by desiring and possessing the body of a woman who belongs by contract to another man. MacLaverty does not write about adultery but rather focuses on the inescapable failures of the Irish marriage; and since, as Tanner competently puts it, marriage “is the central subject for the bourgeois novel; not marriage as a paradigm for the resolution of problems of bringing unity out of difference, harmony out of opposition, identity out of separation, concord out of discord … but just marriage in all its social and domestic ramifications in a demythologized society. Or rather a society in which marriage is the mythology (at least the socially avowed one; it would be possible to say that money and profits made up a more secret mythology),”4 MacLaverty’s dismal marriage portraits powerfully critique the bourgeois and Catholic ideology that supports them. Yet in his texts adulterous acts are more often fantasized than carried out (in this sense “Between Two Shores” is an exception); but whenever a non-Irish character becomes an object of desire, this desire is connected to socially and culturally forbidden sexual practices. Therefore, if on the one hand marriage is endogamous and unhappy, adultery often is exogamic, impossible, and destructive. This tendency explains why in “The Bull with the Hard Hat,” when Dick, the artificial cow inseminator entrapped in a marriage with an Irish woman who refuses to follow any form of birth control (she is expecting their ninth child), fantasizes about his (Irish) secretary Carmel as an object of adulterous desire, he exoticizes and de-Irishizes his own image into that of Italian macho-lover actor Rossano Brazzi: “He looked at himself again in the driving mirror. He thought he was fairly handsome for his age … except that he hadn’t had time to shave that morning … he thought he would be attractive to any young girl. Not a seedy middle aged man but a lover, like Rossano Brazzi” (Secrets 120). Once again the erotic non-Irish is evoked in close vicinity to the motif of adulterous sex. “The Daily Woman,” in A Time to Dance and Other Stories, is yet another depiction of a devastatingly unhappy marriage. The protagonist, symbolically named Liz O’Prey, is the victim of a violent, unemployed, and uncaring husband, Eamonn, who spends his days at the Provos (republican) club, drinks his dole money, and lives off what Liz makes as a cleaning woman at the house



Ireland and Elsewhere: The “Non-Irish” in Bernard MacLaverty’s Fiction

157

of Mr Henderson, a unionist who “liked to be able to say that he employed Catholics” (A Time to Dance 103), and who has several times proposed paid sex to her. Liz’s case presents a combination of the “love-across-the-barricades” pattern (originally a Protestant, she has married a Catholic) and of the non-Irish as the unreachable and impossible object of adulterous desire. Fascinatingly, MacLaverty avoids representing the consummation proper of the extramarital sexual encounter because when Liz decides to accept Mr Henderson’s proposal, the man ejaculates before penetration. With the extra money she earns, Liz decides to indulge and spend a night in a posh hotel away from home, after leaving the children with her mother. At the bar she meets a nice, older American journalist. They have dinner together and he makes her feel good and relaxed. She is attracted to him to the point of telling him her room number, but the man is interested in her as a person and not as a one-night-stand sexual object. She then goes back to her room, lies down trying to “take up as much space as possible” (118) in the hotel bed, and enjoy her night of freedom and luxury before facing the wrath of her husband the day after, which will no doubt lead to more beating. The non-Irish male’s non-erotic appreciation of Liz is pitched against the complementary forms—republican (Eamonn) and unionist (Mr Henderson)— of Irish patriarchal exploitation: the employer sexualizes her and her husband sees her as merely a financial provider, and thus both men objectify her. Both Liz and the American tend to orientalize each other through cultural clichés and religious stereotypes—the American by asking Liz which side she is on and Liz by imagining him on horseback—but the encounter is clearly positive and the alien male is by far a more reassuring presence than his Irish counterparts. He is also given an explicit religious identity when he tells Liz that he had been a Catholic priest who left the Church for a crisis of conscience: “‘Vietnam, contraception, the nature of authority all contributing’” (114). In their erotically occluded encounter, Liz and the American would therefore form another version of the “love-across-the-barricades” story, for which the text does not allow space. Not only is he non-Irish, but also he is one who has radically rejected faith and its constricting consequences, and at some point this is a position that he and Liz share. As a matter of fact, Liz’s answer to his question “‘which side are you on?’” is in fact ‘“I am sort of in the middle’” (114). The dialogue is important and worth quoting in full.

“I’m sort of in the middle.” “That can’t help.”

158

Bernard MacLaverty

“Well I was born nothing—but a Protestant nothing and I married a Catholic nothing and so I’m a mixture of nothing. I hate the whole thing. I couldn’t give a damn.” “One of the silent minority.” He smiled. “Boy, have you got problems.” Liz thought he was talking about her. “Me?” “Not you—the country.” (114)

Richard Haslam, like Ronan McDonald before him5, reads the passage as a very explicit example of that allegorical representational strategy of Irish “Troubles” fiction which magnifies the personal/individual into the political/ national.6 Yet the symbolic import of the story is ampler than this. The triangle of male characters which Liz is connected to is to be read contrapuntually, but the nameless non-Irish also functions as a contrastive figure for Liz, as his story brings into the text a narrative of successful self-liberation from a condition—that of priesthood—which is based on just as coercive a vow as that of Liz’s marriage; the ending of the text, as Haslam rightly points out in his essay,7 leaves the reader uncertain as to Liz’s possibilities for future agency. Indeed the text keeps wavering between desire for action/ reaction and the paralysis of resignation in passages such as “From now on she should lock Eamonn out and begin to fight her own corner—for the children’s sake at least,” to “Resignation. That was all left to her” (117). But— unlike the New Zealander of “Between Two Shores”—the foreign in “The Daily Woman” is assigned a curative role which gives Liz back her power to speak: “He made her feel good, relaxed. In his company she felt she could say anything” (114). This empowerment to “say anything” refutes Ronan McDonald’s interpretation of the story. McDonald—whose entire study on the short stories of the “Troubles” is structured around the assumption that this genre, often associated with marginal and colonial conditions, is characterized by a rhetoric of silence and reticence8—claims that Liz “is tellingly silent during the story, far more acted upon than an agent in her own right.”9 But the text seems to point in the opposite direction since Liz’s loquaciousness is explicitly mentioned and it is part of a liberating, even if temporary, empowering experience of self-affirmation. For instance, we are told, “In the bar she felt good, for the first time in years felt herself ” (112). The encounter with the American is made possible by what must be considered a deeply subversive act of rebellion that includes Liz’s decision to accept her boss’s proposition to pay her for sex; the choice to spend Henderson’s money



Ireland and Elsewhere: The “Non-Irish” in Bernard MacLaverty’s Fiction

159

on herself; the carrying out of the plan to leave the children with her mother for the night; and to keep everything hidden from her husband. Richard Haslam, therefore, rightly identifies the developing factor in the story as “a perceptible increase in self-knowledge,”10 with the possibility of the reader imagining for young Liz O’Prey more empowering acts of at least partial selfliberation and resistance. Tragedy and imprisonment (in the literal sense of the word) await instead for the reader at the end of what is possibly MacLaverty’s most famous novel, Cal. The text has often been targeted by critics for offering what has been considered a reactionary message in the portrait of the republican Catholic hero, who rejects the tenets and practice of the physical force tradition. Yet, if considered from another perspective, MacLaverty’s novel may well read as one of those texts “in which the writers’ own communities and their value systems have been subjected to a rigorous scrutiny.”11 In Cal the erotic encounter between Irish and non-Irish is a central structural component and once again a tragically impossible nexus. The love story between Cal and Marcella has been read as love-across-the-barricades (Joe Cleary, Elmer Kennedy-Andrews), but the paradigm does not really apply since Marcella is not a Protestant but a Catholic of Italian origins (“D’Agostino” is her maiden name) married to Protestant Robert Morton, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) reserve officer killed in an IRA attack during which Cal drove the getaway car. Her marriage to Robert Morton thus suggests the love-across-the-barricades paradigm, a relationship which, as the reader learns well into the book, had already reached its diminishing arc towards emotional and sexual indifference long before Morton’s assassination. Joe Cleary reads the Cal/Marcella romance politically and sees Marcella’s Italian-ness as symbolically charged, with Rome as the metonym for Papal authority. Within the theoretical framework of his book, inspired by Lukács and Adorno, Cleary sees the romance as a “veiled allegory or furtive fantasy of a ‘nationalizing embrace’ for which the state equivalent could only be a united Ireland.”12 Seductive as this analysis may be, and superbly articulated as it is in Cleary’s book, it is nevertheless important not to ignore that the textual strategy in Cal constantly and repeatedly communicates Marcella’s otherness in the Northern Irish context. The woman is perceived by Cal as non-Irish from the very moment he sees her at the library—“She looked foreign, had that sallowness of skin which he associated with France”—and her looks continue to convey a sensation of difference and the other.13 Cal muses that she is “Hairless and tanned, as if she had been to the Continent. Marcella was a Continental name. He shuddered” (Cal 37). Italy appears only fleetingly, but

160

Bernard MacLaverty

always as an alternative location and a place to escape to, rather than a symbol of that unified Irish state that Cleary reads as the sub-text of Marcella’s Roman origins. Italy is where Marcella goes to mourn the loss and the violence of the very Irish act that killed her husband; it is the distant location where she would like to go and live, while Ireland is the country she rejects in a passage of her diary that Cal reads the day he sneaks into the empty house of the Mortons’. The entry (which MacLaverty positions after the 1974 Birmingham bombing) is important because on the one hand it identifies her as Irish while on the other it also expresses her desire to disown her Irishness and substitutes it with an Italian identity, as for example, when she writes, “‘I am deeply ashamed of my country. From now on I think I will say I am Italian’” (127). James M. Cahalan’s interpretation of the novel, which pre-dates Cleary’s reading and proleptically refutes it, postulates that in Cal Italy is conjured up “as a kind of Irish Caribbean and refuge from the Troubles.”14 Indeed, the web of symbolism which the text articulates around its non-Irish element—Marcella’s foreign origin and her connections with Italy—always posits the non-Irish as the inaccessible and alternative elsewhere. The impossible exogamic romance set side by side the unhappy endogamous marriage seals the image of Ireland as impossible location for romantic happiness. And since happy romances traditionally epitomize the possibility of love and of future (also in terms of fertility and regeneration), Ireland as an unsuitable location for love and desire is also Ireland unable to have a hopeful future. Once again, in Cal the aura of adultery is associated to the non-Irish object of desire even if Marcella’s husband is dead,15 and adulterous as well as Oedipal shadows obscure the relationship. Robert Morton’s ghost is a presence-inabsence throughout the novel and, like all ghosts, it is primarily connected with guilt and the still unatoned act of sectarian violence which lies at the core of the novel and that moves Cal’s incessant search for punishment. As Richard Rankin Russell has coherently established in his monograph on Bernard MacLaverty, Grace Notes is the novel that marks the unveiling of new fictional territories for many different reasons. Nevertheless the plot stages once again an unhappy and impossible relationship between an Irish protagonist, music composer Catherine McKenna, and her non-Irish English partner, Dave. Catherine McKenna is MacLaverty’s most accomplished character on many different levels. Professionally she becomes a very successful composer; as an Irish Catholic, she chooses to include the Protestant Lambeg drums in her symphony Vernicle, having rid them of their threatening sectarian significance. Despite being a woman and facing some bias because of her sex, she succeeds



Ireland and Elsewhere: The “Non-Irish” in Bernard MacLaverty’s Fiction

161

in the overwhelmingly male world of classical music. As a mother and a woman she finds the determination to overcome her post-partum depression and to leave drunken and violent Dave, her daughter Anna’s father; she moves back to Glasgow to continue her work in spite of the heavy chores of single motherhood. Catherine is a fulfilled version of Nan, of Liz O’Prey, and of Marcella. But in the first place she is a positive version of Miss Schwartz, the tragic heroine of “My Dear Palestrina” (A Time to Dance) and one of the most unforgettable female creations in MacLaverty’s fiction. A talented Polish piano teacher who, when she gets pregnant, is ostracized and reduced to poverty by the Irish community she has emigrated to, Miss Schwartz is a Jewish émigré who suffers in Ireland a type of social and cultural rejection similar to that which an Irish immigrant would have suffered, say, in England. Once again the practice of illicit sex (which here is sex outside marriage) is associated with a non-Irish object of desire and is ruthlessly and tragically punished. Miss Schwartz is also very important because she is an early example of that other fundamental non-Irish trope of MacLaverty’s fiction: art. Art, especially in its non-verbal forms (visual arts and music), is a powerful and constant theme that fulfills the important role of calling into existence a level, a sphere, a dimension, or even a parallel meta-world—both spiritual and material—which defines itself not only as non-Irish, but as international and transnational, if not supranational. In his essay on Grace Notes as a musical novel, Gerry Smyth suggests that in Western literature the novel has suffered from an inferiority complex with regards to music: unlike poets, for example, who can write and do write a musical type of literature, novelists remained primarily story-oriented, mortgaged to the remorseless logic of the bourgeois realist narrative and its attendant discourses: character, plot, plausibility. … 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.”16

Bernard MacLaverty has made reference to this transnational transcendentalism of art time and again in his fiction, but Grace Notes is the text in which

162

Bernard MacLaverty

this metaphysical internationalism finds its most wide-ranging version. Though mainly Irish in its location, the novel is also very international with its non-stop references to the multicultural, intercultural, and a-temporal community of music: China, France, Italy, Austria, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Greece, England, Hungary, Ireland, South America, America, Turkey, and so on. The entire planet is summoned in the book and Catherine is the Irish catalyst around which the multiple nationalities of the grand, inexhaustible meta-reality of music coalesce. As a result, in her Vernicle the Lambegs finally revert to their a-political original essence of pure and simple sound. The political implications of this process cannot be ignored and while Smyth cogently observes that in Grace Notes music becomes “the medium through which identity and otherness may commune,”17 Russell pushes the symbolism further and identifies in the protagonist’s formative development into a representation of artistic transnationalism “the kind of citizen who will hopefully emerge out of the context of the hope generated by the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.”18 In MacLaverty’s collection of short stories Matters of Life and Death, literature is also part of this mighty multinational space. In “The Clinic”—a most minimalistic and meta-literary text—at the waiting room of a diabetic clinic the protagonist is waiting for his appointment with a doctor. As he waits, he reads Chekhov’s “The Beauties,” and the words of the Russian writer (an old passion of MacLaverty’s own very multinational literary repertoire) have the power to physically carry him across borders, boundaries and time, straight into the “heat and dust of the countryside to Rostov-on-the-Don” (53). As the man reads, the clinic surroundings fade away and the existing reality, with its limits of time and space, is temporarily doused. This transcendentalism and transnationalism may appear akin to the Romantic concept of art as capable of resolving contradictions and conflicts. Yet any objection to an ideological hidden agenda in which differences and multiplicities are subsumed, muted, and occluded in the transcendental and the metaphysical would be misdirected: in MacLaverty’s texts the non-Irish, even in the most extreme form of the cosmopolitan Artistic, are always represented in contention with the Irish and are threatened and often destroyed by it. Hence the authority and power of the Irish element—even if signified in its most off-putting and destructive potential (the “Troubles,” Catholic bigotry, cultural prejudice, historical backwardness, sectarianism, sexual repressiveness, poverty, emigration, patriarchal aggressiveness, and matriarchal castration)—is always something to be reckoned with. MacLaverty’s protagonists are caught in



Ireland and Elsewhere: The “Non-Irish” in Bernard MacLaverty’s Fiction

163

dynamics of unrelenting tension between the Irish and the non-Irish which only on occasion and temporarily can be suspended. Whether the representation of this ineluctable force of the Irish is an explicit critique or, instead, an oblique and even involuntary celebration—like that Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost—is up to the reader to decide and the critic to debate.

Notes   1 Cullingford, 6, observes, “The ‘Others’ of my title are numerous, and they are both real and fictive. Ireland is accustomed to being stigmatized as the feminized object of English discourse, but in women, gays, abused children, travellers and the working class it has produced its own internal Others.”   2 In MacLaverty, Lamb, 8, Benedict states, “‘I decided long ago to specialize. Latin, Greek and Gaelic. You’ll find nothing else among my books. I always say that a man with one language is like a man with one eye. Now I myself have four good eyes and a few lesser ones—which could be polished up, as it were. Like glass eyes—not much use but presentable.’” All subsequent references to this novel will be made parenthetically in the text.  3 MacLaverty, Secrets, 14. All subsequent references to this collection will be made parenthetically in the text.   4 Tanner, 15.   5 McDonald, 254.   6 Haslam, 86.   7 Ibid., 87.   8 McDonald, 249.   9 Ibid., 254. 10 Haslam, 86, 87. 11 Parker, 3. 12 Cleary, 251. 13 MacLaverty, Cal, 12. All subsequent references to this novel will be made parenthetically in the text. 14 Cahalan, 136. 15 Shumaker, 9. 16 Smyth, “‘The Isle is full of noises’: Music in Contemporary Ireland,” 3. 17 Smyth, “‘The Same Sound but with a Different Meaning,’” 16–17. 18 Russell, 219.

164

Bernard MacLaverty

Works cited Cahalan, James M. Double Visions: Women and Men in Modern Contemporary Irish Fiction. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999. Cleary, Joe. “‘Fork-Tongued on the Border Bit’: Partition and the Politics of Form in Contemporary Narratives on the Northern Irish Conflict.” South Atlantic Quarterly 95.1 (1996): 227–276. Cullingford Butler, Elizabeth. Ireland’s Others: Gender and Ethnicity in Irish Literature and Popular Culture. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001. Haslam, Richard. “Character and Construction in Bernard MacLaverty’s Early Short Stories of the Troubles.” Irish University Review 41.2 (Winter 2011): 74–92. Kennedy-Andrews, Elmer. Fiction and the Northern Ireland Troubles since 1969: (de)constructing the North. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003. MacDonald, Ronan. “Strategies of Silence: Colonial Strains in Short Stories of the Troubles.” The Yearbook of English Studies 35 (2005): 249–263. MacLaverty, Bernard. Lamb. London: Penguin Books, 1980. —A Time to Dance and Other Stories. London: Jonathan Cape, 1982. —Cal. London: Penguin Books, 1984. —Secrets and Other Stories. London: Penguin Books, 1984. —Grace Notes. London: Jonathan Cape, 1997. —The Anatomy School. London: Jonathan Cape, 2001. —Matters of Life and Death and Other Stories. London: Vintage Books, 2007. Parker, Michael, ed. The Hurt World: Short Stories of the Troubles. Dublin: The Blackstaff Press, 1995. Russell, Richard Rankin. Bernard MacLaverty. Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press, 2009. Schwerter, Stephanie. “Transgressing Boundaries: Belfast and the ‘Romance-Acrossthe-Divide.’” Estudios Irlandeses 2 (2007): 173–182. Smyth, Gerry. “‘The Same Sound but with a Different Meaning’: Music, Repetition, and Identity in Bernard MacLaverty’s Grace Notes.” Éire-Ireland 37.3–4 (Fall-Winter 2002): 5–24. —“‘The Isle is full of noises’: Music in Contemporary Ireland.” Irish Studies Review 12.1 (2004): 3–10. Tanner, Tony. Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.

Afterword: Looking at Art in Bernard MacLaverty’s Fiction David Holdeman

I first visited Belfast in the summer of 1994 as the best man at the wedding of a friend, a fellow American who had come to study at Queen’s for a year, fallen in love with a local and decided to stay. Afterward, I wanted to learn more about the unfamiliar place I’d glimpsed (and where dear friends now lived) and so began steadily reading Bernard MacLaverty, Seamus Heaney, and other Northern writers. Like Glenn Patterson and other contributors to this collection, I quickly came to admire MacLaverty’s self-effacing manner and his gifts for description and characterization. He seemed to have a Vermeer-like capacity for imagining frail beings and bringing them to life with gentle precision. Before long I developed an equally strong interest in the repeated efforts of both MacLaverty and Heaney to weigh and sometimes cautiously defend traditional claims about art’s capacity for responding in helpful ways to suffering and injustice. I had gone to graduate school in the 1980s: a time when such claims were coming under ferocious attack from critics inspired by various lines of Marxist, feminist, and post-structuralist thought. And though I gained a healthy respect for those lines of thought and made use of them in my own scholarship, their most cynical manifestations sometimes prompted me to feel the same sort of resistance that Catherine McKenna, the protagonist of Grace Notes (1997), expresses toward proponents of musical “indeterminacy” and in particular toward the propositions that “‘Any piece of music is as ‘good’ as any other’” and “‘Traditional concepts of value, expertise and authority are meaningless.’”1 It fascinated me to observe MacLaverty and Heaney—writers whose personal exposure to cultural trauma had been far more direct and extensive than my own—consider the extent to which works of visual, musical, and verbal art might alleviate or exacerbate what people in the North of Ireland were suffering during the “Troubles.” Both writers kept faith with many traditional claims for

166

Bernard MacLaverty

art, but both also worried about the morality of profiting aesthetically from suffering and about art’s power to sugarcoat distress or reinforce its causes. Neither adopted an idealized, naively Romantic perspective, posing, like Shelley, as an “unacknowledged [legislator]” able to turn “all things to loveliness” and “author to others … the highest wisdom, pleasure, virtue, and glory.”2 Instead, they subjected themselves, their society, and their art to profoundly skeptical questioning. It seemed to me then—and still seems now—that by questioning themselves, MacLaverty and Heaney model for readers self-critical stances that may promote more sensitive, tolerant seeing and that in turn may also foster peace. These writers advance the art of looking at others sympathetically by looking at their own art skeptically. Heaney typically writes lyric poems in which he speaks in the first person, and his self-questioning can therefore be explicit: he accuses himself of being “the artful voyeur” of someone else’s suffering or of having “saccharined” a death with poetry’s “morning dew.”3 MacLaverty, by contrast, writes prose fiction and thus must contrive less overt ways to interrogate himself and his art. His best-known work, the novel Cal (1983), manages this difficulty by skillfully interweaving its narrative with scenes that consider the effects of various forms of aesthetic experience. Set in the mid-1970s, the novel paints a sympathetic but thoroughly antiheroic portrait of its protagonist, a young Catholic man from the outskirts of Magherafelt who has been drawn into the orbit of the local Irish Republican Army (IRA) cell and driven the getaway car during the murder of a Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) reservist. Tortured by guilt, Cal longs for comfort and forgiveness from his victim’s young Catholic widow, Marcella. He befriends her and eventually becomes her lover. But he cannot confess his terrible crime and ultimately is the recipient not of forgiveness but of punishment. MacLaverty makes this young “terrorist” human and pitiable— despite his participation in an act of detestable violence—by exploring the psychological and social pressures he faces, and by showing us that Cal hates himself far more than readers could ever hate him. In a similar way MacLaverty lends credibility to the premise that certain modes of art might foster peace in the North by demonstrating his acute understanding of art’s potential for doing harm. From its opening pages, the novel makes its readers keenly aware of the welter of visual and verbal artifacts that confront Cal. He is constantly bombarded by blaring records and TV screens; as a small child he was sung rebel songs by his mother, and his current home—the single remaining Catholic household in an otherwise Protestant estate—is surrounded by threatening Unionist flags



Afterword: Looking at Art in Bernard MacLaverty’s Fiction

167

and painted red-white-and-blue curbstones. Some of these artifacts serve as narcotics, like the Rolling Stones records he plays alone in his room “to drown the silence” or the uninspiring sermons he hears at mass but doesn’t really listen to, which put him into “a kind of warm limbo” where he is “kept … from thinking his own black thoughts.”4 Others constitute one brand or another of partisan or sectarian propaganda. In Chapter One, for example, Cal listens as Skeffington—the head of the local IRA cell—tells a story about some of “‘our lads’” in Belfast who robbed a supermarket, gave the money to poor Catholics who used it to pay their rent, and then robbed the rent man of what he had collected. “‘Stories like that,” Skeffington concludes, “‘are good for us. Even if they didn’t happen we should make them up. Win the propaganda war and the rest will follow’” (24). Cal’s aversion to such forms of art and his corresponding longing for alternative modes of expression and description are explored more extensively in three key scenes in Chapter Three. The first takes place as Cal waits alone for Crilly, Skeffington’s working-class henchman, in the front room of Crilly’s house, noticing the objects that decorate it: The muted waves of unreal laughter from some show on the television rose and fell in the next room. There was a picture on the wall of a ragged child with one glistening teardrop standing on his dirty cheek. Beside it was a plaque of wood and burned into it with a needle were the words made in long kesh concentration camp. It had a badly drawn clenched fist surrounded by barbed wire and the words ireland unfree shall never be at peace. There was a brass picture hammered out in some way so that the words and the figure were raised up from its surface. The figure was of an old woman sitting sideways wearing a bonnet and beneath her was a poem called “A Mother.” It told of all the good things a mother ever did and ended with the line “The only bad thing she ever does is to die and leave you.” (64)

The significance of these objects is manifold and has partly to do with the novel’s psychological portrait of Cal. Cal’s mother died when he was young and MacLaverty encourages the reader to see him in Freudian terms, as someone whose development has been arrested by this premature loss. More generally, the description sums up the qualities that MacLaverty repeatedly associates with the popular art of Northern Ireland: sentimentality on the one hand and propaganda on the other. Both modes are equally uncritical, equally minddulling, and both work to reinforce habits of seeing and thinking that underlie the Northern conflict. That they do so becomes clearer in the chapter’s second

168

Bernard MacLaverty

key scene, which takes place in Skeffington’s far grander house after Cal and Crilly return from a robbery they have committed to provide the cause—and themselves—with funds. Insisting that he wants out, that he can no longer participate in “‘pointless’” violence, Cal accuses Skeffington of having “‘no feelings.’” Skeffington responds by quoting from Patrick Pearse’s sentimental, patriotic poem, “Mother,” in which a woman rejoices that her sons have died “‘In bloody protest for a glorious thing.’” He further argues that whatever violent acts the IRA commits now will be seen “‘in a hundred years’ time’” in the same approving light as shines (for most Irish people) on the actions of the men and women of 1916. When Cal objects that such narratives “‘leave out the shit and the guts and the tears,’” Skeffington tells him that “‘We must be strong enough … to ignore that. It is not a part of history’” (73–4). Cal allows Skeffington to have the last word in this scene, but in the next he visits the local library, where Marcella works and where Cal frequently goes to browse magazines, borrow blues and rock cassettes and gaze adoringly at Marcella. At this point in the story she has become somewhat acquainted with him and suggests that he try reading novels. Cal agrees to go and “‘have a look’” but initially wanders into the “Irish History section.” He pulls a book off the shelf and opens it to find ugly “pictures of Sir Edward Carson, Sir James Craig, and the Reverend Ian Paisley.” Turning the page, he encounters a photograph of Pearse, with text recounting Pearse’s view “‘that the heart of Ireland would be refreshed by the red wine of the battlefields, that Ireland needed its bloody sacrifice.’” With the wail of a passing siren in his ears, Cal closes the book and moves to the fiction section. Almost at random, he selects a “fat red book” that he thinks will impress Marcella: he checks it out and leaves the library with what the reader later discovers to be a copy of Crime and Punishment (80–1). The fact that this book is destroyed before Cal can read it when his father and he are burned out by the Ulster Volunteer Force, a Protestant paramilitary group, and the further fact that the library itself is later threatened by an IRA fire-bomb hidden in a copy of Middlemarch demonstrate MacLaverty’s awareness that novels cannot easily or directly prevent violence. And surely MacLaverty is shrewd enough to know that not all historical narratives “‘leave out the shit and the guts and the tears.’” But he also seems to recognize that, as a character in another of his stories puts it, “‘History in Ireland is what the other side have done to you.’”5 By making Cal reject history and prefer fiction MacLaverty suggests that the artistic practices of writers like Dostoevsky and Eliot can provide alternatives to the propagandistic narratives and simplistic icons produced by men like Skeffington and the prisoners in Long Kesh. If images of tearful children,



Afterword: Looking at Art in Bernard MacLaverty’s Fiction

169

clenched fists, and mothers who are proud to sacrifice their sons reinforce problematically uncomplicated ways of seeing, then perhaps the more complex, multi-sided visions of great novels and other supposedly higher forms of art can provide an antithetical experience: perhaps the novel Cal itself provides such an experience, a narrative that opens readers’ eyes to new, more tolerant modes of perception precisely by leaving in “‘the shit and the guts and the tears.’” Merely by writing a novel like Cal, MacLaverty testifies to his hope that art can provide such experiences. But he is too smart and too self-searching to express such hopes in confident or self-congratulatory ways. At the climax of the novel he includes a scene that implicitly questions whether so-called high art is really much different from the various forms of popular art he has repeatedly critiqued. This scene centers on a famous painting of Christ on the cross by Matthias Grünewald and is set up by an earlier scene in which Cal attends mass with Marcella at a bright new church with a modern painting of Christ that is “designed to match the pale colour scheme of the building” (39). As they leave the church in this earlier scene, Marcella asks Cal what he thinks of the modern painting inside. When his response is noncommittal, she describes it as “‘awful’” and “‘deodorised.’” She goes on to tell him about seeing Grünewald’s very different crucifixion while on a continental school trip: “‘[I]t was the first thing like that which had any effect on me. … I stood and stared at it for so long the teachers lost me and had to come back for me. The pain in it is terrible. Not like our Walt Disney mural.’” She then asks Cal if he is interested in painting and he replies that “‘I liked looking at the art books in school. Everybody said I was looking at the nudes’” (121). Marcella’s comments reinforce the novel’s implied contention that at its best art does something other than present us with deodorized religion or history, that it makes us more aware of our own suffering and, hence, of the sufferings of others. Cal’s response, however, prepares us for the more skeptical exploration of this claim that is suggested when the Grünewald painting makes its second, climactic appearance. This manifestation occurs within a page of the novel’s conclusion. It is two days before Christmas. Cal and Marcella have finally become lovers, but Skeffington and Crilly have been lifted by the police and Cal’s own arrest is imminent. After making love, Cal gives Marcella two presents, a bottle of perfume and a book of Grünewald reproductions: She touched between her breasts with the perfume and kissed him. Then in the book she sought and found Grünewald’s picture of Christ crucified and held it up for Cal to see. The weight of the Christ figure bent the cross down like a

170

Bernard MacLaverty

bow; the hands were cupped to heaven like nailed starfish; the body with its taut ribcage was pulled to the shape of an egg-timer by the weight of the lower body; the flesh was diseased with sores from the knotted scourges, the mouth open and gasping for breath. She was sitting on the floor with her back to the couch, her legs open in a yoga position and the book facing him, just below her breasts. Cal looked at the flesh of Christ spotted and torn, bubonic almost, and then behind it at the smoothness of Marcella’s body and it became a permanent picture in his mind. (169)

The fact that something is wrong with this picture is immediately signaled by the sacrilegious qualities of what both Cal and the reader see: an image of Christ’s hands cupping not only heaven but also Marcella’s breasts. This image is not a mirror allowing Cal to see himself more clearly: mirrors are something that he habitually avoids. Neither is it a window that opens clearly on the rest of the world. This is an image, rather, that partially and artificially satisfies Cal’s immature desires and may consequently prolong his entrapment by them. As I mentioned earlier, the novel encourages us to see him—and, by extension, the Catholic community in the North—as having gone developmentally astray as the result of a scarring loss, in Cal’s case, of his mother, and in the community’s case, of Mother Ireland. Cal’s mother died before he could learn to find adequate substitutes for her maternal comforts, hence his tendency to see the somewhat older Marcella simultaneously in maternal and sexual terms. Hence also his childlike weakness in response to aggressive men like Skeffington and Crilly; his inability to resist their violent commands or to direct himself toward anything other than passive suffering and longing for the sort of New Testament forgiveness tantalizingly but impossibly pictured in the conjunction of the suffering Christ and the Marian figure of Marcella. Cal does not really live in the world of the “permanent picture [that he makes] in his mind.” He lives in a world where both Catholics and Protestants insist on the Old Testament code of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth and no work of art can alter the fact that he has helped to kill Marcella’s husband. After silently adoring the image of Marcella holding the Grünewald, Cal fantasizes about seeking forgiveness and redemption by confessing his deed to Marcella. He is checked, however, by his fear that she will inform the police, and realizes that only if he is caught will he ever be able to “write to her and try to tell it as it was.” This is one reason why he finds himself “grateful that at last someone was going to beat him to within an inch of his life” when he is arrested the next morning (170). Neither visual nor verbal constructs can undo the past: at most they can hope to influence the future by telling it like it is. This, however, is something they rarely manage



Afterword: Looking at Art in Bernard MacLaverty’s Fiction

171

to do. Most of the pictures and stories encountered in MacLaverty’s novel are shown to arouse uncritical and negative emotional responses and/or to misdescribe the world through willful or unconscious omissions and inventions. Even a supposed masterpiece like Grünewald’s crucifixion—which seemingly works to sensitize its audience to the reality of pain and suffering—can sustain escapist fantasies when placed in a compromising context or examined by an immature percipient. But if context or the state of mind of the percipient can compromise the effect of a work of art, then perhaps they can also sometimes redeem it. MacLaverty positions his reader not to see Grünewald’s Christ cupping Marcella’s breasts but rather to view Cal perceiving this image. He distances us both from the aesthetic object and from the percipient of that object and thus allows us to think critically about their relationship. In doing so he also distances himself and his readers from his novel’s cautious, implicit claim that some works of art create experiences antithetical to those produced by partisan sentimentality or propaganda. Backing up from this claim, however, turns out to be the best possible way of supporting it. By proceeding self-critically MacLaverty dramatizes his own struggle to become self-aware and encourages his readers to pursue similar postures. This process is precisely what allows his novel to function as something other than a piece of political or emotional self-deception—what permits it to create for the reader the things that Grünewald’s great painting fails to create for Cal, a mirror and a window opening on worlds that can only be transformed if seen in ways that acknowledge their complexity, ways that leave in “‘the shit and the guts and the tears’” experienced by everyone, even by “terrorists” like Cal. MacLaverty’s novel has been criticized by some for implying that the only choices available to Catholics in the North during the “Troubles” were the horrific, nationalist violence that Cal ultimately eschews or the passive suffering in the face of oppression that he ultimately embraces. And it is true that, as Joe Cleary puts it, “some more emancipatory political resolution is something the novel seems unable to imagine.”6 But in my view, the effect of the novel is not to argue that violence or suffering are in fact the only choices possible but rather to allow readers imaginatively to enter a world and a psyche where these seem like the only options. This process is important for readers to undergo. As Fintan O’Toole and others have argued, fostering and sustaining peace in places like the North of Ireland depend fundamentally on the premise that “people who engage in organized political violence are not necessarily, or exclusively, the kind of warped individuals who would be a menace to any society.”7 It relies, in

172

Bernard MacLaverty

other words, on the recognition that some of the people who might ordinarily be dismissed as “terrorists” or as “evil” are motivated by legitimate grievances, are willing to engage in rational negotiations, and will move away from violence when given other reliable options for pressing their concerns. This recognition has permitted some former members of republican and loyalist paramilitaries to be reinvented as peaceful citizens and even government officials. I do not know whether any of the persons responsible for the peace process in Northern Ireland were ever influenced by reading Cal or MacLaverty’s other writings. But his oeuvre certainly has shaped my own thinking about the conflict there as well as about other similar conflicts. And it has bolstered my faith in art’s continuing capacity to make a positive difference in the world. Judging by the essays in this collection, others share my admiration for Bernard MacLaverty as both a perceptive observer of life in the North and as a discerning student of the dangers and rewards of encounters with art. For instance, Michael Parker’s essay demonstrates that as early as Secrets and Other Stories (1977), MacLaverty had already developed a strong propensity to depict “characters in the act of reading and writing” and to dramatize his awareness that the narratives constructed or construed through these acts are as likely to do damage as to spread enlightenment or redress wrong (9). Richard Rankin Russell’s essay on Lamb (1980) similarly emphasizes MacLaverty’s preoccupation with “how easily such scriptural narratives [as the parable of the Good Samaritan] can be misread and perverted in deadly ways” (40). Considering MacLaverty’s later tendency to focus on painting, music, photography, and other non-verbal forms, it is useful to be reminded that his first two books paid so much attention to the creation and consumption of verbal texts. I am struck by Parker’s perceptive explication of the story “Secrets,” and in particular by his account of how MacLaverty, in relating the young protagonist’s voyeuristic perusal of his elderly aunt’s secret letters, is Not content at suborning readers solely as witnesses, [but also at] mak[ing] them complicit in the subsequent act of trespass, when, during her absence at Sunday devotions, the boy carries through a premeditated plan to rifle through his aunt’s locked bureau to explore its mysteries. (15)

As in the scene when Cal looks at Marcella holding the Grünewald painting, MacLaverty depicts a character in the act of encountering a text. In both cases that encounter’s potential to allow the character to perceive himself or others more fully is short-circuited by his immaturity and by an illicit context. In both cases, too, readers are positioned not only to identify and sympathize with the



Afterword: Looking at Art in Bernard MacLaverty’s Fiction

173

character’s “act of trespass,” but also to distance themselves critically and to consider whether different circumstances might allow a reading of the same text to promote genuine understanding. To turn from Cal to Grace Notes is to turn from a novel partly about an immature percipient’s encounters with works of both popular and “high” art to a novel centering on an accomplished artist whose most significant composition transforms the demotic thundering of Lambeg drums into orchestral music. Stephen Watt’s illuminating essay on Grace Notes in relation to the Holocaust, studies of collective memory, and “affect theory” attributes Catherine McKenna’s success in responding artistically to the “Troubles” to the nonlinear mode of “remembering rightly” she evolves. Watt argues that, unlike Miroslav Volf, whose “strategies of remembering rightly” involve “a purposeful insertion of traumatic events into the larger master narratives of biography and the New Testament” (95), MacLaverty and Catherine MacKenna seem to suggest that coming to terms with the past does not in fact require an Aristotelian narrative with a beginning, middle and end, all the events of which are linked by probability and necessity. It requires no redemption or salvific apotheosis—none of the larger contexts Volf employs—but rather a recontextualization of traumatic events and maybe a little forgetting. (98)

Given MacLaverty’s longstanding efforts to resist the imprisoning effects of linear master narratives—efforts traced by Russell and Parker back to his first two books—and given also the stress he places in works like “Secrets” and Cal on the influence of context on acts of perception, it makes perfect sense that the most successful artist he has yet allowed himself to imagine founds her art on nonlinear techniques that simultaneously disrupt such narratives and create fresh contexts for perceiving and transforming the past. According to Richard Mills, “MacLaverty’s screenplays do not possess the nuances of his novels” (71). Mills’s central claim—that the film versions of Lamb and Cal portray their “respective characters’ trauma as a permanent impasse: an inability to heal”—recalls Cleary’s complaint that the novel version of Cal fails to imagine an “emancipatory political resolution” (63). Mills ends his essay by suggesting that in Grace Notes, by contrast, Catherine McKenna’s “music avoids the logic of distinction. It subverts the distinctions of Catholic and Protestant; it avoids the specificity of both identities and is neither one nor the other, a liberating space that examines the fault-lines of cross-cultural interactions” (72). This claim resonates not only with Watt’s remarks but also with Gerry

174

Bernard MacLaverty

Smyth’s article “‘Join us’: Musical Style and Identity in ‘My Dear Palestrina,’” which traces MacLaverty’s interests in music and in the comparative merits of popular and “high” art to a story from the early 1980s. Smyth argues that “three discursive centers” contend for “ownership rights” over Danny McErlane, the young pianist who is the story’s protagonist. As he contends, “These discursive centers relate to the three principal fields through which musical matter has been organized in the modern era”: folk music (associated with the singing of the communistic blacksmith Danny encounters en route to his piano lessons); the popular music enjoyed by Danny’s respectable working-class family; and the art music he is taught to appreciate by his Jewish piano teacher, Miss Schwartz (49). As in Cal and Grace Notes, MacLaverty cautiously advances the premise that the complex structures of “high” art may promote more nuanced forms of understanding than the propagandistic or sentimental tones of folk or popular art. Miss Schwartz argues eloquently in favor of this premise and, when she is ostracized as a result of an extramarital pregnancy, both she and her views arouse the reader’s sympathy. But finally, Smyth argues, “Miss Schwartz’s [musical] ‘sect’ is revealed to be as contingent and as corruptible as those [other musical and non-musical sects] with which it vies for Danny’s identity” (58). This revelation occurs largely by means of the text’s categorical inability to reproduce that music, and by its reliance on language to try to describe music’s affective powers. “‘Listen to this’” demands Miss Schwartz as she puts on a record of music by Palestrina. But of course the reader cannot “‘listen to this’”; he can only read the author’s interpretation of what the music sounds like and what that sound means to the character of Danny. As the climax of a story about the power of music, the resolute silence of this moment is striking. (58)

For me, Smyth’s reading of this moment once again recalls Cal’s encounter with the Grünewald painting: in both cases MacLaverty declares his faith in art’s power to console and illuminate while simultaneously acknowledging that any human interaction with a work of art is necessarily “contingent and corruptible.” MacLaverty’s interest in interactions between people and artworks has of course always been entwined with his interest in interactions between people and other people: neither Cal nor “My Dear Palestrina” culminates in an encounter between a solitary person and an aesthetic object; instead, they dramatize triangular relationships between two people and a work of art in which the limitations of the artwork’s ability to mediate between the two people are exposed. With this insight in mind, part of what I find fascinating about



Afterword: Looking at Art in Bernard MacLaverty’s Fiction

175

Marilynn Richtarik’s essay “The Personal Is Political: Grace Notes as a Peace Process Novel”—in which she argues persuasively that “through Catherine’s interactions with her mother, MacLaverty dramatizes the difficult process of reconciliation”—is that it makes apparent that no aesthetic artifacts are involved in the process of reconciliation initiated by Catherine and her mother (101). By the time Catherine returns home for her father’s funeral and renews her relationship with her mother, she has matured as an artist and enjoyed a significant success with Vernicle, the composition that incorporates Lambeg drums. So it may well be that her growth as an artist has helped to prepare her to perceive and understand her mother more fully. But her mother does not attend the performance of Vernicle: no artwork mediates their interactions. The new and more fluid narratives that Catherine and her mother construct about each other as they begin to alter “destructive habits of mind and patterns of interaction” are improvised conversationally, on the fly, without reference to any fixed point, as Richtarik points out (105). To the extent that they discuss art—as when Catherine tells her mother than she intends to write a mass because she is attracted to the form and not because she believes in God—such discussion throws up obstacles between them. Is MacLaverty thus suggesting that such works as the Grünewald painting or Catherine’s Vernicle influence us most fruitfully when we contemplate them without reference to any other person, and that when we turn to another person it is better to let artworks retreat into the background? This collection’s remaining essays place less emphasis on MacLaverty’s thinking about the nature of art but nevertheless offer much that I find illuminating. Richard Haslam provides an informative tour of the stories in The Great Profundo (1987) and Walking the Dog (1994), concentrating on “Some Surrender,” “Walking the Dog,” “A Silent Retreat,” and “The Wake House.” His explication of the father-son relationship in “Some Surrender” dovetails with Richtarik’s reading of the mother-daughter relationship in Grace Notes: in both cases, a partial reconciliation between a parent and a child establishes a framework for contemplating reconciliation between the opposing communities of Northern Ireland. Next, Neal Alexander examines MacLaverty in relation to the ongoing “spatial turn” in Irish Studies. He argues that in the early work, geography runs a distant second to “MacLaverty’s primary concern with human relationships, people rather than place” but that “from the late 1980s onwards, and most prominently in The Anatomy School, Belfast has begun to emerge in Bernard MacLaverty’s fiction as an actual place to be represented rather than as an emblem of pure negativity … ” (135, 146). Also focusing on

176

Bernard MacLaverty

The Anatomy School, Michael Rawl offers an enlightening account of how its protagonist Martin Brennan “resists and ultimately rejects the Church’s dualistic view of the self by affirming the body and the physical world as good and as teeming with significance. … The ethical consequences of Martin’s reverence for the body are a deep sympathy for those whose bodies have been broken and a profound abhorrence of physical violence” (118–19). Interestingly, one of the non-Irish “textual elements” examined by Laura Pelaschiar in her essay, “Ireland and Elsewhere: The ‘Non-Irish’ in Bernard MacLaverty’s Fiction,” is art: “a powerful and constant theme that fulfills the important role of calling into existence a level, a sphere, a dimension, or even a parallel meta-world—both spiritual and material—which defines itself not only as non-Irish, but as international and transnational, if not supranational” (161). According to Pelaschiar, Catherine McKenna’s formative exposure to “artistic transnationalism” plays a significant role in enabling her to imagine a context in which Lambeg drumming could be made to “revert to [its] a-political original essence of pure and simple sound” (162). She makes a similar point about the function of Chekhov’s “The Beauties” in MacLaverty’s recent story “The Clinic,” and of course the most important artworks encountered in Cal and “My Dear Palestrina” are also non-Irish in origin. Taking a line that is consistent with the thinking of most of the contributors to this collection, she contends that while this “transcendentalism and transnationalism may appear akin to the Romantic concept of art as capable of resolving contradictions and conflicts,” MacLaverty does not promote a view of art as something that compels “differences and multiplicities [to be] subsumed, muted, and occluded in the transcendental and the metaphysical … ” (162). Instead, he presents aesthetic experience as, to quote Gerry Smyth once again, “contingent and corruptible,” dependent on the percipient and the context in which perception occurs (58). But as I and this collection’s other contributors have attempted to show, if things often go wrong, sometimes they go right. Michael Rawl quotes MacLaverty as saying that “I believe in mankind and its creativity” and that faith is everywhere evident in his oeuvre (118).

Notes 1 MacLaverty, Grace Notes, 220. 2 Shelley, 512–13.



Afterword: Looking at Art in Bernard MacLaverty’s Fiction

177

3 See Heaney, “Punishment” and “Station Island,” in Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966–1996, 112–13, 224–36. 4 MacLaverty, Cal, 10, 39. Subsequent references to this novel are given parenthetically in the text. 5 MacLaverty, “Some Surrender,” in The Great Profundo and Other Stories, 124. 6 Cleary, 129. 7 O’Toole, 30.

Works cited Cleary, Joe. Literature, Partition, and the Nation State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel, and Palestine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Heaney, Seamus. Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966–1996. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. MacLaverty, Bernard. Cal. New York: George Braziller, 1983. —The Great Profundo and Other Stories. New York: Grove, 1987. —Grace Notes. New York: Norton, 1997. O’Toole, Fintan. “Guns in the Family.” Rev. of Joseph O’Neill, Blood-Dark Track. The New York Review of Books, 11 April 2002, 30. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “A Defense of Poetry.” Critical Theory since Plato. Ed. Hazard Adams. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1971. 512–13.

Bibliography Primary works Adaption for television: The Real Charlotte. Adaptation. Granada/Gandon (UK), 1989. Children’s books (chronological order from most recent to earliest): Andrew McAndrew. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick Press, 1993; Walker Books (UK), 1988. A Man in Search of a Pet. Illustrations by MacLaverty. Belfast: Blackstaff, 1978. Drama documentary: Hostages. HBO (USA), 1993; Granada (UK), 1992. Interviews (chronological order from most recent to earliest): “An Interview with Bernard MacLaverty.” Conducted by Mariella Frostrup. BBC Radio 4, 24 November 2013. http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b03j8srq/. [last accessed 15 December 2013]. “An Interview with Richard Rankin Russell.” Irish Literary Supplement 26.1 (Fall 2006): 21–2. “An Interview with David Puttnam, Bernard MacLaverty, and John Lynch on Cal.” FilmIreland 108, January/February, 2006, n. p. “An Interview with Bernard MacLaverty.” Conducted by Dave Ramos Fernandes. Barcelona Review 56 (November/December 2006): http://www.barcelonareview. com/56/e_int.htm. [last accessed 12 December 2012]. “The Hatred in Northern Ireland Is As Vibrant As Ever, but At Least Both Sides Seem to Have Rationally and Reasonably Stopped Killing Each Other.” Interview with Stephen Phelan. The Sunday Herald, 25 May 2006, http:www.sundayherald.com/ print55622. [last accessed 13 December 2012]. “Bernard MacLaverty.” Interview with Sharon Monteith and Jenny Newman. Contemporary British and Irish Fiction: An Introduction through Interviews. London: Arnold, 2004. 103–18. “An Interview with Bernard MacLaverty.” Conducted by Margarita Estévez Saá and Anne MacCarthy. A Pilgrimage from Belfast to Santiago de Compostela: The Anatomy of Bernard MacLaverty’s Triumph Over Frontiers. Santiago de Compostela, Spain: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 2002. 55–74.

180 Bibliography “Interview: Bernard MacLaverty in Conversation with Bibliophile.” The Scotsman, 5 January 2002. http://www.bernardmaclaverty.com/biography/interview1.htm. [last accessed 13 December 2012]. “Interview with Bernard MacLaverty: ‘There is No Harm in Being Bleak If You are Reflecting the World As You See It.’” Conducted by Tamara Benito de la Iglesia. Odisea (2002): 199–206. http://www.ual.es/odisea/Odisea02_BenitoIglesia.pdf2. [last accessed 13 December 2012]. “Bernard MacLaverty.” Scottish Writers Talking 2. Ed. Isobel Murray. East Linton, UK: Tuckwell Press, 2002. 35–65. “‘Writing Is a State of Mind Not an Achievement’: An Interview with Bernard MacLaverty.” Conducted by Marisol Morales Ladrón. Atlantis 23.2 (December 2001): 201–11. “A Graceful Note on Why Too Much Freedom Is Not Always the Answer: Author Bernard MacLaverty Regrets the Loss of Old Family Values.” Interview with Jeremy Hodges. Daily Mail, 12 October 1999, n. p. “Interview mit Bernard MacLaverty (Augsburg, 1/17/95).” Conducted by Christian J. Ganter. Hoffnung wider die Hoffnungslosigkeit: das Irlandbild im Erzählwerk Bernard MacLavertys. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999. 313–17. “Bernard MacLaverty.” Interviewed by Rosa González. Ireland in Writing: Interviews with Writers and Academics. Eds Jacqueline Hurtley, Rosa González, Inés Praga, Esther Aliaga. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998. 21–38. “Interview with Bernard MacLaverty.” Conducted by Chris Gilligan. Irish Post, 29 August 1998, n. p. “In A Coat with a Measure of Guilt.” Interview with Anne Simpson. The Herald, 29 September 1997, 14. “In Which the Author Reviews Himself.” Self-interview. 1997. http://www. bernardmaclaverty.com/biography/interview2.htm. [last accessed 6 June 2013]. “Days of Grace.” Interview with Susie Mackenzie. Guardian Weekend, 12 July 1997, 25. “Lost in Music.” Interview with Helen Meaney. The Irish Times, 3 July 1997, n. p. “Bernard MacLaverty, Glasgow, in Interview.” Conducted by Christian Ganter. Anglistik: Organ des Verbandes Deutscher Anglisten 7.2 (1996): 5–22. “The One Letter That Says it All.” Interview with Stephen McGinty. Glasgow Herald, 20 August 1994, n. p. “Whatever You Say Say Nothing.” Museum number 4010. Transmission date 24 July 1994. BBC Northern Ireland Radio Archives. Cultra, Northern Ireland. “The Secret Garden.” Radio Interview with Frank Delany. BBC Scotland, April/May, 1990. “The Glass Word Game.” Interview with Deirdre Purcell. The Sunday Tribune, 25 September 1988, n. p. “Interview with Bernard MacLaverty.” Conducted by Kevin Smith. Gown Literary Supplement, 1986, n. p. “Capturing The Whirlwind: An Interview with Northern Irish Writer Bernard MacLaverty.” Conducted by Gregory McNamee. The Bloomsbury Review 5.9 (June 1985): 14–15, 20.

Bibliography

181

“In the Beginning Was the Word: Paul Campbell Interviews Bernard MacLaverty.” The Linenhall Review (Winter 1984–85): 4–6. “Bernard MacLaverty: an Interview.” Conducted by Kees Helsloot. Bookmarks/ Leestekens 6.2 (June 1984): 7–18. “The Saturday Interview: Ray Rosenfield Talked to Bernard MacLaverty.” The Irish Times, 12 February 1983, 14; Weekend edn, 6. Non-fiction (alphabetical order): “Aunt Mary’s Christmas.” http://www.bernardmaclaverty.com/works/articles/aunt_ mary.htm. [last accessed 8 June 2013]. “A Dream.” The Tiger Garden—A Book of Writers’ Dreams. Ed. Nicholas Royle. London: Serpent’s Tail Press. 153. http://www.bernardmaclaverty.com/works/ articles/a_dream.htm. [last accessed 8 June 2013]. “The Great Gate at Kilkenny.” http://www.bernardmaclaverty.com/works/articles/ kilkenny.htm. [last accessed 8 June 2013]. “Introduction.” Work—New Scottish Writing (The Scotsman and Orange Short Story Collection 2006). Edinburgh: Polygon, 2006. xiii. “Kiev Diary.” http://www.bernardmaclaverty.com/works/travel/kiev.htm. [last accessed 8 June 2013]. “Marginalia.” http://www.bernardmaclaverty.com/about_writing/marginalia.htm. [last accessed 8 June 2013]. “A Personal Choice.” http://www.bernardmaclaverty.com/about_writing/personal_ choice.htm. [last accessed 8 June 2013]. “Postscript.” Last Before America—Irish and American Writing: Essays in Honour of Michael Allen. Eds Fran Brearton and Eamonn Hughes. Belfast: Blackstaff, 2001. 212–13. “Rural Bulgaria in April.” http://www.bernardmaclaverty.com/works/travel/bulgaria. htm. [last accessed 8 June 2013]. “Why Do I Write?” http://www.bernardmaclaverty.com/about_writing/why_i_write. htm. [last accessed 8 June 2013]. Libretti (chronological order from most recent to earliest): Elephant Angel. Music by Gareth Williams. Scottish National Opera Tour of Scotland and Northern Ireland, October-November 2012. The Letter. Music by Vitali Khodosh. Scottish National Opera’s “Five: 15” Series, May 2010. The Leaving. Music by Stephen Taylor. Tapestry New Opera Works and Scottish Opera, September 2009. Toronto, Canada. The Sermon. Music by John Harris. Tapestry New Opera Works and Scottish Opera, September 2009. Toronto, Canada. The Telegram. Music by Gareth Williams. Tapestry New Opera Works and Scottish Opera, September 2009. Toronto, Canada.

182 Bibliography The King’s Conjecture. Music by Gareth Williams. Scottish National Opera’s “Five: 15” Series, February 2008. Glasgow, Scotland. Novels (chronological order from most recent to earliest): The Anatomy School. Belfast: Blackstaff, 2001; London: Jonathan Cape, 2001; New York: Norton, 2002. Grace Notes. Belfast: Blackstaff, 1997; London: Jonathan Cape, 1997; New York: Norton, 1998. The Bernard MacLaverty Collection. Ed. Hamish Robertson. Harlow, UK: Longman, 1991. Cal. Belfast: Blackstaff, 1983; London: Jonathan Cape, 1983; New York: Braziller, 1983. Lamb. Belfast: Blackstaff, 1980; London: Jonathan Cape, 1980; New York: Braziller, 1980. Radio plays (chronological order from most recent to earliest): Winter Storm, adapted by MacLaverty from his short story of that title in Matters of Life and Death. First broadcast: BBC Radio 4, 8 December 2009. The Woman from the North. First broadcast: BBC Northern Ireland Radio 4, 1 November 2007. University of Stirling (Scotland), Dementia Services Development Centre, 2008. Grace Notes. Radio Scotland, 1999; BBC Radio 3, 2003. Lamb. BBC, 1992. Some Surrender, adapted by MacLaverty from his short story of that title in The Great Profundo, BBC, 1988. The Break, adapted by MacLaverty from his short story of that title in The Great Profundo. BBC, 1988. No Joke, adapted by MacLaverty from his short story of that title in A Time to Dance. BBC, 1983. Secrets, adapted by MacLaverty from his short story of that title in Secrets. BBC, 1981. My Dear Palestrina. BBC, November 1980. Screenplays (chronological order from most recent to earliest): Bye-Child, adapted by MacLaverty from Seamus Heaney’s poem of that title. Dir. MacLaverty, Poetry in Motion (UK), 2003. The Dawning, adapted from Jennifer Johnston’s novel The Old Jest; cowritten with MacLaverty. Dir. Robert Knights. Lawson Productions (UK), 1988. Lamb, adapted by MacLaverty from his novel of that title. Dir. Colin Gregg. Flickers Productions and Limehouse Pictures in association with Channel Four Films (UK), 1986. Cal, adapted by MacLaverty from his novel of that title. Dir. Pat O’Connor. Enigma Productions, Goldcrest Films International, and Warner Bros. (UK), 1984. Short stories: Collected Stories. New York/London: Vintage, 2014 (paperback); London: Jonathan Cape, 2013 (hardcover).

Bibliography

183

Matters of Life and Death and Other Stories. Belfast: Blackstaff, 2006; London: Jonathan Cape, 2006; New York: Norton, 2006. Walking the Dog and Other Stories. Belfast: Blackstaff, 1994; London: Jonathan Cape, 1994; New York: Norton, 1995. The Bernard MacLaverty Collection. Ed. Hamish Robertson. Harlow, UK: Longman, 1991. The Best of Bernard MacLaverty: Short Stories, New Windmills Series. Oxford: Heinemann, 1990. The Great Profundo and Other Stories. Belfast: Blackstaff, 1987; London: Jonathan Cape, 1987; New York: Grove Press, 1988. A Time to Dance and Other Stories. Belfast: Blackstaff, 1982; London: Jonathan Cape, 1982; New York: Braziller,1982. Secrets and Other Stories. Belfast: Blackstaff, 1977; New York: Viking, 1984; London: Allison and Busby, 1984. “A Legacy and Some Gunks.” www.bernardmaclaverty.com/works/short_stories/a_ legacy.htm. [last accessed 8 July 2013]. Also published as “A Legacy and Some Gunks—An Entirely True Story” in The Brandon Book of Irish Short Stories. Ed. Steve MacDonogh. Dingle, Ireland: Brandon, 1998. 171–80. Television plays (chronological order from most recent to earliest): Sometime in August. BBC, 1988. The Daily Woman. BBC, 1986. Phonefun Limited. BBC, 1982. My Dear Palestrina. BBC, December 1980. Website: http://www.bernardmaclaverty.com/. [last accessed 23 December 2013].

Secondary works “The Belfast Group: A Symposium.” The Honest Ulsterman 53 (November/December 1976): 53–63. Bell, Ian. “Bernard MacLaverty.” Contemporary Novelists, 6th edn. Detroit: St. James, 1995. 634–5. Brienzo, Gary. “The Voice of Despair in Ireland’s Bernard MacLaverty.” North Dakota Quarterly 57.1 (Winter 1989): 67–77. —“Belfast: Bernard MacLaverty’s Heart of Darkness.” Writing the City: Eden, Babylon, and the New Jerusalem. Eds Peter Preston and Paul Simpson-Housley. London: Routledge, 1994. 17–28. Burger, Günter. “Ein Nordirland-Roman im Fortgeschrittenen Englischunterricht: Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal.” Die Neuren Sprachen 86.2 (April 1987): 101–16. Cleary, Joe. “‘Fork-Tongued on the Border Bit’: Partition and the Politics of Form in

184 Bibliography Contemporary Narratives of the Northern Irish Conflict.” South Atlantic Quarterly 95.1 (Winter 1996): 227–76. Estévez Saá, Margarita. “Grace Notes de Bernard MacLaverty o el Retrato de la Artista Como Una Joven Madre.” Ed. and Preface, Anne MacCarthy, Margarita Estévez Saá, Susana Domínguez Pena; Intro. Juan Casas Rigall and Antonio Raúl de Toro Santos. Ireland in the Coming Time: New Insights on Irish Literature/Nuevas Incursiones en Literatura Irlandesa. La Coruña, Spain: Netbiblo; 2006. 139–152. Estévez Saá, Margarita and Anne MacCarthy. A Pilgrimage from Belfast to Santiago de Compostela: the Anatomy of Bernard MacLaverty’s Triumph over Frontiers. Santiago de Compostela, Spain: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 2002. Fahmy, Nazek. “Cal: A Contemporary Irish Exile.” Encounters in Language and Literature. Ed. Hoda Gindi. Cairo, Egypt: Jāmi’at al-Qāhirah, 1993. 397–405. Foster, John Wilson. “Irish Fiction 1965–1990.” The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. Vol. III. Ed. Seamus Deane. Derry, Northern Ireland: Field Day Publications, 1991. 937–43. Ganter, C. J. “Bleakness and Comedy: Stoic Humor in Bernard MacLaverty’s Short Stories.” International Fiction Review 26.1–2 (1999): 1–7. —Hoffnung wider die Hoffnungslosigkeit: das Irlandbild im Erzählwerk Bernard MacLavertys. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999. —“Cottages, Farmhouses, Mansions, and Pre-Fabs: Bernard MacLaverty and the Big House.” The Australian Journal of Irish Studies 5 (2005): 128–34. Gibson, Jordan Leigh. “Through the Lens of the Land: Changing Identity in the Novels of Bernard MacLaverty.” MA Thesis, Baylor University. Director: Richard Rankin Russell. 2008. Goarzin, Anne. “Traversées en eaux Troubles: Reading in the Dark de Seamus Deane et Grace Notes de Bernard MacLaverty.” Etudes Irlandaises 29.1 (Spring 2004): 41–53. Griffith, Benjamin. “Ireland’s Ironies, Grim and Droll: The Fiction of Bernard MacLaverty.” Irish Literature Today: Special Issue of The Sewanee Review 106.2 (Spring 1998): 334–8. Harmon, Maurice. “First Impressions: 1968–1978.” The Irish Short Story. Eds Patrick Rafroidi and Terence Brown. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979. 63–77. Harte, Liam and Michael Parker. “Reconfiguring Identities: Recent Northern Irish Fiction.” Eds and Introd. Harte and Parker. Contemporary Irish Fiction: Themes, Tropes, Theories. Basingstoke, UK/New York: Macmillan, 2000. 232–54. Haslam, Richard. “‘The Pose Arranged and Lingered Over’: Visualizing the ‘Troubles.’” Contemporary Irish Fiction: Themes, Tropes, Theories. Eds Liam Harte and Michael Parker. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. 192–212. —“‘Designed to Cause Suffering’: Cal and the Politics of Imprisonment.” Nua: Studies in Contemporary Irish Writing 3.1–2 (2002): 41–56. —“Critical Reductionism and Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal.” Representing the Troubles: Text and Images, 1970–2000. Eds Brian Cliff and Eibhear Walshe. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004. 39–54.

Bibliography

185

—“Character and Construction in Bernard MacLaverty’s Early Short Stories about the Troubles.” Irish University Review 41.2 (2011): 74–92. —“The Inquisitional Impulse: Bernard MacLaverty’s ‘Walking the Dog.’” Journal of the Short Story in English 57 (2011): 45–58. Head, Dominic. The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Fiction, 1950–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Hobsbaum, Philip. “The Belfast Group: A Recollection.” Èire-Ireland 32.2–3 (Summer-Fall, 1997): 173–82. Hogan, Robert. “Old Boys, Young Bucks, and New Women: The Contemporary Irish Short Story.” The Irish Short Story: A Critical History. Ed. James F. Kilroy. Boston: Twayne, 1984. 169–215. Ingman, Heather. A History of the Irish Short Story. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Jarniewicz, Jerzy. “The Clinking of an Identity Disk: Bernard MacLaverty’s ‘Walking the Dog.’” Eds Cheryl Alexander and David Malcolm. A Companion to the British and Irish Short Story. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008. 498–506. Kelly, Aaron. The Thriller and Northern Ireland since 1969: Utterly Resigned Terror. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005. Kelly, Thomas. “Secrets and Other Stories by Bernard MacLaverty.” Èire-Ireland: A Journal of Irish Studies 16.1 (Spring 1981): 155–58. Kennedy-Andrews, Elmer. Fiction and the Northern Ireland Troubles since 1969: (de-)constructing the North. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003. —“The Novel and the Northern Troubles.” The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel. Ed. John Wilson Foster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 238–58. Mahon, Peter. “Blood, Shit, and Tears: The Textual Reinscription of Sacrifice, Ritual, and Victimhood in Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal.” English Literary History 77.1 (Spring 2010): 71–104. Makowsky, Reid. “Two Ways of Responding to ‘Troubles.’” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 25.1 (2012): 37–43. McDonald, Ronan. “Strategies of Silence: Colonial Strains in Short Stories of the Troubles.” The Yearbook of English 35 (2005): 249–63. Mergenthal, Silvia. “Visceral Music: The Female Composer in Bernard MacLaverty’s Grace Notes.” Anglistik und Englischunterricht 81 (2012): 225–239. Miller, Jim. “A Bittersweet Story of Battles Fought—and Lost.” Rev. of Cal. Newsweek, 5 September 1983: 49. Mitchell, Domhnall. “Meat and Murder in Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal.” Sprǻk og Sprǻkun, v. 4 14.12 (1991): 7–11. Molino, Michael R. “Bernard MacLaverty.” Dictionary of Literary Biography (First Series), Vol. 267: British Novelists of the Twenty-first Century. Ed. Molino. Detroit: Gale Research Group, 2003. 172–80. Moore, J. Cameron. “‘Hewers of Wood and Drawers of Water, Right Enough’: The

186 Bibliography Rural Landscape in Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal.” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 25.1 (2012): 31–6. Morrison, Kristin. “Ireland and the Sea: Where Is ‘The Mainland’?”. Eds Patricia A. Lynch, Joachim Fischer, and Brian Coates. Back to the Present, Forward to the Past: Irish Writing and History since 1798. Vol. II. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. 111–20. Onkey, Lauren. “Celtic Soul Brothers.” Èire-Ireland: A Journal of Irish Studies 28.3 (Fall 1993): 147–58. Parker, Michael. Northern Irish Literature, 1956–1975: The Imprint of History and Northern Irish Literature, 1975–2006: The Imprint of History. Vols. I and II. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2007. Paterson, Dale. “Silence and Secrets: an Introduction to Bernard MacLaverty.” M.Phil. Thesis, Trinity College, Dublin. Director: Nicholas Grene. 1990. Peach, Linden. The Contemporary Irish Novel: Critical Readings. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2004. Pelaschiar, Laura. Writing the North: The Contemporary Novel in Northern Ireland. Trieste, Italy: Edizioni Parnaso, 1998. —“Transforming Belfast: The Evolving Role of the City in Northern Irish Fiction.” Irish University Review 30. 1 (2000): 117–31. Piwinski, David J. “Names in Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal: Etymology, Onomastics, and Irony.” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 15.4 (Fall 2002): 41–5. Russell, Richard Rankin. Bernard MacLaverty. Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press, 2009. —“The Mortification Motif in Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal.” Literature and Belief 33.1 (2013): 107–25. Saxton, Arnold. “An Introduction to the Stories of Bernard MacLaverty.” Journal of the Short Story in English 8 (1987): 113–23. Scanlan, Margaret. “The Unbearable Present: Northern Ireland in Four Contemporary Novels.” Etudes Irlandaises 10 (December 1985): 145–61. Shumaker, Jeanette. “Rivalry, Confession, and Healing in Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal.” Notes on Modern Irish Literature 9 (1997): 9–15. Simpson, Paul and Martin Montgomery. “Language, Literature, and Film: The Stylistics of Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal.” Twentieth-Century Fiction: from Text to Context. Eds Peter Verdonk and Jean Jacques Weber. New York: Routledge, 1995. 138–64. Sloan, Barry. “The Redress of Imagination: Bernard MacLaverty’s Grace Notes.” The Gift of Story: Narrating Hope in a Postmodern World. Eds Emily Griesinger and Mark Eaton. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2006. 303–16. Smyth, Gerry. “‘The Same Sound but with a Different Meaning’: Music, Repetition, and Identity in Bernard MacLaverty’s Grace Notes.” Èire-Ireland: A Journal of Irish Studies 37.3–4 (Fall-Winter 2002): 5–24. Storey, Michael L. Representing the Troubles in Irish Short Fiction. Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 2004.

Bibliography

187

Tew, Philip. “The Lexicon of Youth in MacLaverty, Bolger, and Doyle: Theorizing Contemporary Irish Fiction Via Lefebvre’s Tenth Prelude.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 5.1 (1999): 181–97. Watson, George. “The Writer on Writing.” Lamb. Ed. Hamish Robertson. Longman Literature Series. Gen. ed. Roy Blatchford. Essex, UK: Longman, 1991. v-xii. Watt, Stephen. “The Politics of Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal.” Èire-Ireland: A Journal of Irish Studies 28.3 (Fall 1993): 130–46. —“Beckett, Late Modernism, and Bernard MacLaverty’s Grace Notes.” New Hibernia Review: A Quarterly Record of Irish Studies 6.2 (Summer 2002): 53–64. —Beckett and Contemporary Irish Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Index adaptation of novels into film 63–74, 173 affect theory 5, 89–100, 173 Alexander, Neal 1, 5, 133–50, 175 allusions to James Joyce 12, 18, 20, 30, 70, 133, 154 art as reconciler 41, 93, 130, 174, 175, 176 art as social critique 165, 166, 168–9, 176 artistic discouragement/failure 18, 19, 21–3, 48, 77 artistic empathy 21, 119, 124–5, 161, 166, 169, 171, 172–3, 176 atheism 28, 81, 107, 108, 117–18, 120, 175 autobiography 13, 28, 117, 122 Aunt Mary (“S”) 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 Barthes, Roland 9 Belfast, importance of/as central theme or trope 5, 136, 137–8, 140, 142, 144–5, 146, 175 Biblical allusion 29–31, 36 Bildungsroman 117, 124 binaries/dualism 77, 120, 121, 123, 124, 134, 171 Blair, Bobby (“WH”) 82–4 Blair, Cecil (“WH”) 82 Bloom, Harold 68 Bobby (“H”) 20–1 Boyd, John 10, 23n. 7 Brennan, Martin (TAS) 5, 48, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 136, 144, 146, 153, 176 Brother Benedict (L) 28, 33, 34, 35, 37, 39, 69, 71, 139, 152 Brother Benignus/John 15, 16, 17 Brother Sebastian (L) 30, 33, 34, 35, 69 Catholic faith/as motivation/as determinant 28, 29, 30, 107, 119 Catholic morality/doctrine 28, 34, 37, 64, 69, 81, 106–7, 112, 113, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 127, 128, 130, 156, 161, 170, 176

Catholic violence 12 Catholicism, institutional 33, 64, 69, 80, 81, 111, 127, 130, 152, 156, 158, 159 character agency/maturation/lack of agency 12–13, 14, 28–9, 91, 158–9, 160–1, 170–1 character creation 5, 9, 77, 165 Christ figure 4, 19, 30, 31, 36, 38, 67, 68, 70 class division 3, 12, 50, 67, 80, 90, 152, 154 collective memory 5, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95, 173 Colón, Susan 40 color/as symbol 63, 64, 66–7, 71, 80, 125, 166–7 crisis of faith 5, 30, 37–8, 70, 107, 117, 119, 126, 157 cyclical narratives 32, 71, 72 dark humor 80, 154 deconstruction/of identity/of relationship/ literal 20, 21–2, 64, 77, 85, 105, 107, 108, 115, 138–9 Dick (“BHH”) 156 domesticity 20–1, 77, 138–9, 154–6, 159, 160 Dr Kamel (“UV”) 154, 155 emotional identity 22, 49, 90–1, 109–10, 111, 142 exile/journey 68, 107, 110, 135, 139, 140, 154 father/son relationships 12–13, 18, 19, 20, 34, 37–8, 66, 75–6, 78, 139, 143, 152, 175 Father Waldo (“E”) 12, 13, 152 film technique and symbolism 65–8, 69, 70, 72 gender/class inequality 10–12, 23, 103–4, 156, 160–1 gender/and sexuality 6, 66, 68, 81, 103–4, 107, 118–19, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125,

190 Index 126, 127, 136, 140, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 160–1, 167, 170, 171 geographical context/space/place 1, 5, 14, 79, 133–4, 138, 142, 161–2, 175 Gordimer, Nadine 78–9 Gospel of sentiment 28, 40 Grossberg, Lawrence 90, 91 Haslam, Richard 5, 75–88, 119, 175 Heaney, Seamus 92, 165, 166 historical context 4–5, 10–11, 14–15, 45, 50, 67, 77, 86n. 18, 89, 92, 95, 96, 99n, 101, 102–3, 104, 114n. 28, 120–1, 144 Holdeman, David 6, 165–78 Holocaust 3, 92, 93, 95, 96, 98, 99, 173 Hugo (“H”) 3, 19, 20, 21, 22, 48 hypocrisy 122–3 identity 79–80, 171 intertextuality 9, 11, 14, 16 Irish stereotype 63, 64, 65–6, 68, 70, 71–2, 80, 84 isolation 23, 57, 110, 158 Judaism/Jewish identity 3, 45, 57, 95, 161 Kane, Owen (L) 27, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 46, 64, 68, 69, 70, 71, 135, 139, 140 Kevin (“E”) 11–13 Kevin’s mother (“E”) 11–12 Lamb, Michael (L) 4, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 46, 63, 64, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 135, 139, 140 Liam (“LD”) 135 literary allusions 14, 18, 20, 33, 129, 168 love/respect for others 33, 35, 36, 39 love/selfless 2–3, 28, 36, 39–41 MacEntaggart, Declan (“SR”) 80, 81, 82 MacLaverty, Bernard biography beginnings as a writer 10 “Belfast Group” 2, 10 Catholic upbringing 1, 13, 28 education 9 exile 134 Heaney, Seamus 2, 10

interest in Bible as literature 32 lab technician 10 lack of critical attention 1 late bloomer 9 literary influences 1, 10, 33 loss of father 9 proliferation 3 pseudonym 10 “The Troubles” 2, 10 works “Across the Street” (“AS”) 48 Anatomy School, The (TAS) 5, 48, 117–32, 134, 136, 144–6, 153, 175, 176 “Anodyne” (“A”) 23, 46, 47 “Assessment, The” (“TA”) 4 “At the Beach” (“AB”) 136 “Between Two Shores” (“BTS”) 11, 23, 75, 78, 140–1, 152–3, 154, 156, 158 “Bull in the Hard Hat, The” (“BHH”) 23, 156 Bye-Child (BC) 4 Cal (C) 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 23n, 28, 46, 63–8, 69, 70, 71, 72, 89–91, 101, 104, 117, 119, 134, 136, 141–2, 151, 153, 159–60, 166–72, 173, 174, 176 “Clinic, The” (“TC”) 6, 162, 176 “Daily Woman, The” (“DW”) 75, 156–9 “Deep End, The” (“DE”) 23 Elephant Angel (EA) 2 “Exercise, The” (“E”) 11–13, 152 “Father and Son” (“FAS”) 78 “Foreign Dignitary, A” (“AFD”) 1, 136 Grace Notes (GN) 3, 5, 6, 28, 48, 58, 59, 72, 89–90, 91–9, 101–16, 130, 134, 135–6, 138, 139–40, 142, 151, 153, 160–2, 165, 173, 175 “Grandmaster, The” (“TG”) 136 Great Profundo, The (TGP) 5, 48, 75–9, 142, 175 “Happy Birthday, A” (“HB”) 11, 75 “Hugo” (“H”) 4, 18–23, 46, 47, 138 “In the Hills above Lugano” (“IHL”) 136 Lamb (L) 1, 4, 27–44, 46, 47, 63, 64, 68–72, 101, 104, 117, 135, 136, 139, 152, 172, 173

Index

“Language, Truth, and Lockjaw” (“LTL”) 4 “Life Drawing” (“LD”) 135 Man in Search of a Pet, A (MSP) 2 Matters of Life and Death (MLD) 3, 4, 5, 6, 31, 46, 48, 93, 162 “Miraculous Candidate, The” (“TMC”) 23 “My Dear Palestrina” (“MDP”) 3, 4, 45–62, 48, 161, 174, 176 “On the Roundabout” (“OTR”) 32 “Pornographer Woos, A” (“PW”) 23, 136 “Rat and Some Renovations, A” (“RSR”) 138, 152 “Secrets” 13–17, 172–3 Secrets and Other Stories (SOS) 4, 9–23, 47, 48, 75, 138, 140, 152, 154, 156, 172 “Silent Retreat, A” (“SR”) 80–2, 85, 134, 175 “Some Surrender” (“SS”) 75–9, 80, 81, 85, 142–3, 175 “St. Paul Could Hit the Nail on the Head” (“SP”) 138–9 Time to Dance, A (TD) 4, 48, 75, 135, 156, 157, 161 “Trusted Neighbor, A” (“TN”) 32, 48 “Umberto Verdi” (“UV”) 23, 154–5 “Up the Coast” (“UC”) 93 “Wake House, The” (“WH”) 82–5, 175 Walking the Dog (WTD) 1, 5, 75, 103, 134, 143, 175 “Walking the Dog” (“WTD”) 5, 79–80, 82, 85, 143–4, 175 “Winter Storm” (“WS”) 32 “male gaze” 16, 91, 136, 168 Marginalization 3–4, 10, 23, 34, 95, 136, 158, 161, 171 McCluskey, Cal (C) 3, 47, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 71, 72, 90, 91, 93, 119, 120 142, 153, 159, 160, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 174, 175 McErlane, Danny (“MDP”) 4, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 174 McKenna, Catherine (GN) 5, 28, 48, 72, 92, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 101, 102, 104, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 130,

191

135, 138, 139, 140, 142, 153, 160, 161, 165, 173, 175, 176 McQuillan, Dermot (“WH”) 82, 83, 84 Mills, Richard 5, 63–74, 173 Miss Bingham (GN) 102, 111, 112 Miss Schwartz (“MDP”) 4, 49, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 161, 174 Mitchell, Helen (“BTS”) 154, 155 mortality 13–14, 78, 83–4, 110 Morton, Marcella (C) 47, 65, 66, 67, 68, 91, 153, 159, 160, 161, 166, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172 Mr Sweeney (“E”) 11, 12, 13 Mrs Blair (“WH”) 82, 84 Mrs McQuillan (“WH”) 82 Mrs Quinn (“TA”) 4 multidirectional memory 90, 92, 93, 98, 99 music and class/status; musical genre and class 46–7, 48, 49, 51, 52, 54–5, 65, 174 music as emotional/character barometer 4–5, 46–7, 48–9, 50, 52–3, 96 music genre and identity 49, 51, 53, 55, 65, 70–1, 174 music and identity 46, 47, 49, 50–1, 52, 53, 56, 57, 58, 69, 70–1, 92, 96, 102, 112, 161–2, 174 music/impact of 45–6, 48, 97, 175 music and language 56, 58, 59 music/material components 46 music and memory 96, 97, 98, 112 music and musical technique 56 music and sectarianism 45, 47, 48, 49–50, 57–8, 92, 96, 101–2, 162, 173, 175 music and sexuality 47, 52, 56 music/textual components 56 Myth/allusions to mythology 28, 30, 70 Nan (“UV”) 154, 161 narcissism 27, 39, 40, 41 narrative breaks 18, 97, 105, 117, 126 narrative technique 13, 16, 32, 64, 78–9, 86n. 10, 105, 106, 117, 126, 140, 144, 154, 159, 160, 173 narrative unities 75, 78, 79, 80, 82 national identity 63, 64, 65–6, 69, 78, 137–8, 151, 159, 170 non-linear plots 13, 14, 106, 173

192 Index O’Prey, Liz (“DW”) 156, 157, 161 others/otherness/foreignness 5–6, 41, 45, 151–64, 176 parable of the Good Samaritan 4, 27, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39 parable of the Lost Sheep 4, 27, 37, 39 parable of the Prodigal Son 107, 109, 113 parables 27–44, 107, 172 parabolic inversion/biblical inversion 32, 36–7, 39, 107 parallel scenes 17 Parker, Michael 9–26, 172, 173 Patterson, Glenn ix-xi, 2, 4, 138, 144, 165 Paul (“H”) 18, 19, 22 peace process 101–16, 171, 175 Pelaschiar, Laura 5, 151–64, 176 political identity 63–4, 67, 77, 79, 85n. 5, 102, 108 psychoanalytical reading 18, 20, 72, 167, 170 Rawl, Michael 5, 117–32, 172, 176 reader-response 4, 9, 40, 79, 169 reading and misreading 11, 12, 14, 16, 28, 29, 170–1, 172 reception (of MacLaverty’s works) 6 redemption/reconciliation 5, 36–7, 75, 77, 79, 94–5, 101, 105–6, 108, 109, 110, 112–13, 115, 171, 173, 175 religious imagery/symbolism 30, 38, 67, 69, 71, 98, 113, 117, 125–6, 127, 152, 169–71 Richtarik, Marilynn J. 5, 101–16, 175 Roy (“SS”) 75, 76, 77, 78, 81, 143 Russell, Richard Rankin 1–8, 27–44, 102, 115, 160, 172, 173 Sammy (“HB”) 11 sectarian division and desire 1, 5, 10, 11, 45, 57, 66, 67, 72, 75–6, 78, 79, 80,

82, 83, 89, 90, 95, 101, 105, 128–9, 130, 141–2, 143, 144, 153–4, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 165, 166–7 sectarian violence 5, 6n. 4, 64, 65, 71, 79, 117, 119, 128–9, 131n. 16, 143–4, 146, 157, 160, 166, 168 sectarianism and art/literature 166–7, 168, 171 sectarianism as literary/character metaphor 5 secular gospel 5, 31, 37, 117, 118–19, 120, 125, 126, 127–8 self-reflection 18, 22, 84, 90, 124, 135 Shields, John (“WTD”) 79, 80, 143, 144 Smyth, Gerry 3, 4, 45–62, 91–2, 102, 133, 134, 137, 161, 162, 173–4, 176 sound as symbol 79, 80 space 134, 135, 136, 140–1, 142, 143, 146, 154–5, 162 Sweeney, Kevin (“TE”) 11, 12, 13, 152 Todd, Irvine (“SR”) 80, 81, 82 traumatized subject 5, 15–16, 34, 39, 63, 64, 65, 67–8, 69, 71, 72, 93, 97, 99, 104, 154, 156, 157, 165–6, 173 Verdi, Umberto (“UV”) 154, 155 Victimhood 30, 39, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 72, 93, 170 Violent imagery 12, 16–17, 34, 38, 40, 66, 70, 82, 91, 96–7, 121–2, 127–8, 129, 140–1 Volf, Miroslav 89, 92, 94, 98, 173 Voyeurism 16, 66, 68, 172 Watt, Stephen 1, 5, 3, 28, 31, 89–100, 173 Williams, Raymond 90, 137 Žižek, Slavoj 27, 39–40