INTRODUCTION THE last decade of twentieth century witnessed a proliferation of novels dealing with subject of music. I shall leave it to some enthusiastic young scholar to undertake a full inventory, but even a cursory browse of bookshelves and catalogues is enough to confirm trend. The scene was set in 1992 by Toni Morrison with Jazz, a difficult that attempted to reproduce elaborate systems of early-twentieth-century African-American in literary form. More recently, high-profile examples have been provided by Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Vikram Seth's An Equal Music, and Jackie Kay's Trumpet. (1) As these texts demonstrate, moreover, music was very liberally understood by their authors, encompassing traditions of classical, jazz, and rock/pop. Although neither Rushdie's nor Seth's novels was particularly well received (critical orthodoxy maintaining that authors will never repeat achievement of Midnight's Children and A Suitable Boy, respectively), together with Kay's striking debut all three reveal a widespread tendency toward invocation of matter through medium of extended prose fiction. Another such is Bernard Mac Laverty's Grace Notes, a work not only about on a number of related levels, but one that also attempts to invoke effects and to incorporate form into its own structure. (2) In this, it makes intertextual reference to a long (though infrequently considered) tradition of what in this essay I shall refer to as the At same time, as a story about contemporary Northern Ireland, it engages with a (critically orthodox) tradition of colonial and postcolonial fiction foregrounding questions of representation, resistance, identity, and voice. These traditions--the well-known one concerning novelistic representation of (sub-)national identity, and lesser remarked one concerning novelistic representation of music--have productively cross-fertilized at a number of points in Irish cultural history. In this article, I describe type and provenance of those moments of productive cross-fertilization before considering how Grace Notes adopts and/or modifies a range of issues attending upon novel. MUSIC AND FICTION What could account for rise of musical novel during recent times? One might speculate that contemporary novelist's concern with represents a response to fin de siecle growth of interdisciplinarity in critical languages that service creative arts. Cultural Studies offers one such obvious language, less concerned with traditional disciplines (whether creative or critical), it seems, than with organization and dissemination of power across a range of discursive practices and institutional sites. Cultural Studies--indeed, modern criticism in general--is by and large theory-driven rather than text-driven; it tends to read text in terms of a range of a priori precepts rather than granting it courtesy of an immanent response. The provenance and effect of such a practice is subject of ongoing debate; but, in meantime, currently dominant critical mood might be described as holistic rather than discrete, and this may have created, or at least contributed to, a general intellectual/academic zeitgeist in which can flourish. Rather than representing some entirely new departure, however, admixture of artistic concerns in in fact partakes of a well-established tradition. The novel, it turns out, has always been fascinated with music, and at some points in its history this fascination has become an obsession. (3) Perhaps this development should not come as too much of a surprise: modern form of and tradition of classical art developed alongside each other from early eighteenth century, although for much of their shared history, latter has represented a far more respectable (understood in bourgeois terms that set standards for artistic decorum) than former. …
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Jul 1, 2023
Yukiko Yoden 
Open Access