Rhythm, music and love in Alison Macleod's story ‘The heart of Denis Noble’

Life around us is very dynamic and ever-changing, very rhythmic in its essence. What about the rhythm of the ocean, its regular tides and waves, the sound of the rain that can definitely affect people’s mood. Moreover, our body is a living rhythmic instrument creating sounds and movements. The beating of a human’s heart ( heart rhythm , the beat of her heart, the mysterious life of the heart), the regular intake and outflow of breath are resonating through our body impacting its physical and emotional wellbeing. If our body is in tune with the surrounding sounds, it flourishes. We are unconsciously striving after rhythm, following the rhythmical sense (think of a baby being soothed by a lullaby). So, the word rhythm is of much wider application. We are all embedded in a rhythmic Universe. All being mentioned above are the sources of art if the measured movements of language are ennobled into rhythmical prose.

So, having read the brilliant story by Alison MacLeod, I started thinking about her great, personal sense of rhythm, which the reader can’t help feeling, while reading the story. In writing, rhythm is defined by punctuations, the stress patterns of words and phrases in sentences. By varying sentence length and structure, you can find a rhythm that suits you, your voice and mood. MacLeod in one of her interviews talks about the form and the content of a short story:

The short story form bears as much relation to poetry as it does to novels. It’s mysterious in the way poetry is mysterious. Novels require entire ‘plaits’ of story and sound. They are orchestral. They demand different movements or acts, melodies to unify the whole, counterpoint too or sub-plot, and the interplay of voice and rhythm. Novels have to carry you through waves of experience and meaning, while a short story is, let’s say, a piano or a violin sonata, intimate and hypnotic. If the novel is an orchestra in motion, the short story is a spell [2].

This core idea is reiterated in the story under discussion. As the hero’s girlfriend, Ella, puts it:

‘A story isn’t an it. It’s a living thing’ [MacLeod 2017:50].

In ‘ The Heart of Denis Noble’ the author elaborately weaves rhythm through the whole story, enhancing and shaping the overall complex unity at multifarious levels: phonetic, syntactic, stylistic, compositional, and thematic. The three core motifs – heart, love and music – work as complementary to each other, making the narrative emotional, elegant and involving the reader into the charming world of passion, feelings, sufferings, losses.

The story opens with the scene at the hospital where the patient Denis Noble’s heart is going to be operated on. Everything is prepared for the operation, and the narrative runs smoothly. We can follow the character’s thoughts concerning music, his grandson’s unwillingness to play the classical guitar. Undoubtedly, music has played an essential role in Denis’s life. His choice of the compelling Schubert’s Trio is suggestive of many motifs that will unfold through the narrative: mysteries of love and heart, birth and life, consciousness, affinity. Schubert’s work is downright a background for the entire protagonist’s life. Music is a background against which Denis’ life is unfolding. The theme of music is the through-line of the whole story, emerging in different moments of his life: first, in his mother’s womb, being inseparable part of the world of sounds and sensations; later in his student’s room, being played by a cello student. And finally, before the operation, the Schubert’s Trio transcends him into the fascinating world of youth and love. Music saved him from the shocks of war and bombings when his mother whispered:

‘Let’s sing a song”, but forgot to tell which song to sing’ [MacLeod : 2017: 40].

At that time, Denis felt his mother’s warmth radiating through her arm and the mysterious life of the heart. So, music enhances the content, the core message of the story and weaves it into the whole elegant entity. Comparing heart with an orchestra binds all the central motifs together expressing the message of the story:

The heart ‘listens’ to itself. It’s a beautiful loop of feedback. Its parts listen to each other as surely as musicians in the ensemble. No, forget the ensemble. The heart is an orchestra [MacLeod: 2017: 57].

The mystery of Denis’s birth and his heart are at the centre of the story plot’s development. Being part of his mother Ethel, he was’ a dangle of the thread, heart and sound’ , inseparable from the world around him. The rhythm of this scene is romantic, elegant and created through the repetition of the syntactic anaphoric structures and sounds:

He was the cloth smoothed beneath Ethel’s cool palm, and the pumping of her foot on the pedal of the Singer machine. He was the hiss of her iron over the sleeve press and the clink of brass patternweights in her apron pocket. He was the soft spring light through the open window, the warmth of it bathing her face, and the serotonin surging in her synapses at the sight of a magnolia tree in flower. He was the manifold sound-waves of passers- by: of motor cars hooting, of old men hocking and spitting, and of delivery boys teetering down Savile Row under bolts of cloth bigger than they were . Indeed it is impossible to say where Denis stopped and the world began [MacLeod: 2017: 39].

The rhythm changes to allegro and becomes faster and faster together with the plot development. The sentence structures are short and abrupt, adding to the rhythmic movement:

His trolley is a precision vehicle. It glides. It shunts around corners. There’s no time to waste – the heart must be fresh – and he wonders if he has missed his stop. Kentish Town. Archway. Highgate. East Finchley [MacLeod: 2017: 42].

Denis’ familiar music from his youth, the Schubert Trio, helps evoke sweet memories of his past love experiences and his experimenting with hearts. Reflecting on the nature of love, Denis’s understanding of it has undergone an ineffable shift from materialistic to more divine mysterious one at the end of the story:

In his later years, Denis Noble has allowed himself to wonder, privately, about the physiology of love. He has loved – with gratitude and frustration – parents, siblings, a spouse, and two children. What, he asks himself, is love if not a force within? And what is a force within if not something lived through the body? Nevertheless, as Emeritus Professor of Cardiovascular Physiology, he has to admit he knows little more about love than he did on the night he fell in love with his mother; the night their shelter was bombed; the night he felt with utter certainty the strange life of the heart in his chest [MacLeod: 2017: 53].

His girlfriend Ella makes Denis realize all the complexity of human’s heart and love. Moreover, the vivid image of Ella behind the kissing gates, which open and close, represents the symbolic extended metaphor of Denis’ discovery:

He checked the amp and the connections. He wondered if he wasn’t merely observing his own wishful thinking. He started again. He shook things up. He subjected the cells to change – changes of voltage, of ions, of temperature [MacLeod: 2017: 56].

We can observe here again the recurrent anaphoric rhythmic pattern contributing to the fluent fast movement of the changing activities Denis performed to make his discovery. He understands that Ella was right describing ‘ heart as a great creation’:

Ella was right. He can’t wait to tell her she was. The channels aren’t merely passive conduits. They’re not just machinery or component parts. They’re alive and responsive. The evidence was there all along. Somehow – he doesn’t know how – she allowed him to see it [MacLeod: 2017: 56–57].

The idea of love and music is sustained at the thematic level by the allusions to troubadours’ songs and Occitan’s music; St Teresa’s account of a loving seraph.

So, the story ends again with the image of Denis’ heart, at that time not being part of his mother, but part of medical history. And receiving his new young heart, Denis becomes suddenly aware of the mysteries the heart holds:

As his recuperation begins, he will realize, with not a little impatience, that he knows nothing at all about the whereabouts of love. He knows only where it isn’t. It is not in the heart, or if it is, it is not only in the heart. The organ that first beat in the depth of Ethel in the upstairs room of Wilson & Jeffries is now consigned to the scrapheap of cardiovascular history. Yet in this moment, with a heart that is not strictly his, he loves Ella as powerfully as he did the night she reappeared in his room on Tavistock Square [MacLeod: 2017: 59].

Speaking about the role of the rhythm in the story, we can’t help admiring the author’s powerful talent. She manages to incorporate it at all levels creating a living vibrant story with changing rhythm according to the plot’s movement, enhancing the content and emotionally involving the reader into the mysteries of heart, music and love.