The Short Stories of John MacGahern - OpenEdition Journals

Journal of the Short Story in EnglishLes Cahiers de la nouvelle

53 | Autumn 2009The Short Stories of John MacGahern

Édition électroniqueURL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/969ISSN : 1969-6108

ÉditeurPresses universitaires de Rennes

Édition impriméeDate de publication : 1 décembre 2009ISSN : 0294-04442

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SOMMAIRE

ForewordLinda Collinge-Germain et Emmanuel Vernadakis

PrefaceJohn McGahern

Introduction – The art of Under-Exposure:“Out of the Depths, into the Depths”Claude Maisonnat

Reinvented, reimagined and somehow dislocatedFergus Fahey

Reading John McGahern's "Love of the world" a fistful of imagesLiliane Louvel

Homesickness in John McGahern's short stories "Wheels" and "A slip-up"Ellen McWilliams

Love and solitary enjoyment in "my love, my umbrella": some of John McGahern's uses of DublinersPascal Bataillard

"Fellows like yourself": fathers in John McGahern's short stories"Michael L. Storey

“Absence does not cast a shadow”: yeats's shadowy presence in McGahern's “The winebreath”Bertrand Cardin

Legends of the fall: John McGahern's "Christmas" and "The creamery manager"Bernice Schrank

Violence and ontological doubt in "The stoat"Danine Farquharson

Art, biography, and philosophy three aspects of John McGahern's short fiction asexemplified by "Gold watch", "Like all other men", and "The white boat"Michael C. Prusse

"The road away becomes the road back": prodigal sons in the short stories of John McGahernMargaret Lasch Carroll

"Getting the knack of the chains": the issue of transmission in "Crossing the line"Claude Maisonnat

"The conversion of William Kirkwood"Arthur Broomfield

"Along the edges": along the edges of meaningClaire Majola-Leblond

"Korea" by John McGahernDouglas Cowie

Evaluation in "High ground": from ethics to aestheticsVanina Jobert-Martini

"Grave of the images of dead passions and their days": "The country funeral" as McGahern'spoetic tombeauJosiane Paccaud-Huguet

Journal of the Short Story in English, 53 | Autumn 2009

1

Bibliography

John MacGahern: A Bibliography


2

ForewordLinda Collinge-Germain et Emmanuel Vernadakis

1 John McGahern, to whom the present issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English is

devoted, has been a part of the Journal’s history since the first publication of a critical

article on the story “Christmas” in the Autumn 1985 issue. In March 2000 the author

himself, accompanied by his wife Madeline, was guest of honor at the Research Center’s

Conference on the Irish and Irish-American Short Story held at Belmont University in

Nashville and organized by John Paine and Corinne Dale, American editors of the

Journal. The Angers Research group all travelled to Nashville for the Conference

together with Liliane Louvel from the University of Poitiers, a specialist of John

McGahern’s short stories and a personal friend of the writer. John McGahern attended

all the presentations given during the conference with the exception of the five papers

concerning his own stories for, as he put it, he never felt comfortable when his works

were praised. All members of the research group were impressed by his kindness and

generosity, by his easy manner and his genuine friendliness, including his quite

unexpected and unprecedented invitation of all members of the group to a Nashville

restaurant at the conclusion of the conference.

2 After this first encounter, John McGahern and his wife Madeline accepted the Journal’s

invitation to be guests of honor at the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the JSSE in

May 2003. During this visit he recorded “Korea” and passages from “Parachutes.” These

recordings, along with the interview conducted during that same visit, appear in the

Special 20th anniversary issue of the Journal (JSSE n° 41, Autumn 2003), dedicated to John

McGahern. Meals together at Ben Forkner’s, Linda Collinge’s and at a traditional Loire

Valley “guinguette” were additional occasions to strengthen ties between the

McGaherns and the members of the Angers Research team. His passage among us was

memorable.

3 The remarkable voice recorded that spring continued to reverberate during the Short

Story Conference held in Cork in 2008. The participants in the Round Table discussion

chaired by Charles May were led consistently to comment upon McGahern’s work and

eventually unanimously agreed that John McGahern had given a particular resonating

Irish voice to the modern Irish short story.


3

4 We were very pleased to entrust Claude Maisonnat, professor of English Literature at

the University of Lyon II, with the guest editorship of this Special McGahern Short

Story Issue. As a specialist of the short story and having published several articles on

John McGahern, he was eminently qualified to undertake this task. We thank him for so

willingly devoting his time to this project and offer you the fruits of his labor.

AUTEURS

EMMANUEL VERNADAKIS

Organisers of the Conference and Guest-Editors of this issue


4

PrefaceJohn McGahern

PREFACE 1

1 These stories grew in the mind and in the many workings of the material, but often

began from as little as the sound of a chainsaw working in the evening, an overheard

conversation about the price of cattle, thistledown floating by the open doors of bars

on Grafton Street on a warm autumn day, an old gold watch spilling out of a sheet

where it had been hidden and forgotten about for years. Others began as different

stories, only to be replaced by something completely unforeseen at the beginning of the

work. The most difficult were drawn directly from life. Unless they were reinvented,

reimagined, and somehow dislocated from their origins, they never seemed to work.

The imagination demands that life be told slant because of its need of distance.

2 Two such stories were ‘The Key’ and ‘The Stoat’. Over the years I rewrote them several

times, but was never satisfied but still would not let them go. I was too attached to the

material. I stubbornly refused to obey the primary rule that if a writer finds himself too

fond of a rhythm or an image or phrase, or even a long passage, he should get rid of it.

When I came to write Memoir, I saw immediately that the central parts of both ‘The Key’

and ‘The Stoat’ were essential to the description of the life we lived with my father in

the barracks, from which they should never have been lifted. No matter what violences

or dislocations were attempted, obdurately what they were.

3 Among its many other obligations fiction has to be believable. Life does have to suffer

such constraint, and much of what takes place is believable only because it happens.

Fiction has to be true to a central vision of life.

4 ‘Creatures of the Earth’ and ‘Love of the World’ are new stories.


5

Introduction1 – The art of Under-Exposure:“Out of the Depths, intothe Depths”2

Claude Maisonnat

1 What better way is there to introduce a collection of essays devoted to the short stories

of John McGahern than to quote his own words about what he was looking for when he

read:

“The story was still important, but I had read so many stories that I knew now thatall stories are essentially the same story in the same way as they are different: theyreflect the laws of life in both its sameness and its endless variations. I nowsearched out those books that acted like mirrors. What they reflected wasdangerously close to my own life and the society that brought me up, as well asasserting their own differences and uniqueness.”3

2 This insight into the arcanes of his own literary creation is all the more valuable to us

as it is one of the rare occasions on which he ventured to cover the ground of aesthetic

principles. Indeed, in his Memoir (2005) John McGahern proves quite reluctant to

mention the subject at all so that, concerning his artistic creed, apart from the rare

reviews of books by Irish writers4that he consented to write, we only have a few

interviews at our disposal, but most important of all three very short reflexive pieces

on his textual practice. The first one is his well-known essay on the image, the second a

short preface written on the occasion of the publication of his revised version of The

Leavetaking (1974/1984) and the third the short preface reprinted here.5 Brevity seems

to be the soul of his ars poetica, but in his case brevity does not mean simplification or

superficiality, quite the opposite in fact.

3 When he wrote the passage quoted above John McGahern did not specifically have in

mind his short stories but books in general, yet the fact remains that his commentary

on writing applies to both genres of which he was a self-conscious practitioner. If some

critics believe that his fame will rest on his novels alone, the present collection of

essays is based on the premise that there is no major difference apart from matters of

space and concentration between the two genres, because they both rely on modalities


6

of writing that emphasise poeticity over narrativity. Intentionally or not, he was

resorting to the opposition put forward by Seymour Chatman6 between story and

discourse, and he clearly states that his vision of creative writing gives pride of place to

texts that assert their uniqueness against a backdrop of differences. However, in a work

of fiction, such an assertion of uniqueness can only be achieved by giving primacy to

the signifier over the signified, by allowing free play to the work of the signifier, in

other words by emphasising what Jakobson called the poetic function of language. All

of them constitute the modalities of writing that create an original voice – that used to

be called style. Elsewhere, coining a phrase of graphic intensity, he called it “inner

formality”7, a phrase that conjures up the image of an organic whole with dynamic

properties, in relation to the writer’s most intimate depths, not to say his unconscious

desires. The critics’ term for John McGahern’s phrase “inner formality” could well be

textuality, and it is, in various ways, the main focus of all the essays presented in this

volume. No attempt has been made at unifying the theoretical biases or methodological

approaches, but all the contributors share the common ambition of shedding some

light on what the texts are made of and the way they function rather than on

contextual or historical matters. In this respect, though the Irishness of John

McGahern’s fiction is part and parcel of his literary identity, it is the universal

dimension of his art that has been emphasized, the better to explore the singularity of

a literary achievement that can now be considered as finite.

4 From the start the academic appreciation of John McGahern’s fiction has always been a

very positive one, and it is daily growing, particularly among French scholars. The

enthusiastic response to this project testifies to the importance of his appeal. The

recognition of his international status has been so wide that a number of proposals had

to be rejected simply because they arrived late in the construction of the project.

Approximately one half of the contributors in this volume represent the French critical

tradition, and the other half the international dimension of his appeal. Obviously, it

must have meant a lot to John McGahern, since he himself, in the preface he wrote in

1983 for his 1974 novel The Leavetaking, acknowledged the role of his translator8 in the

process of revision of the text of the initial English version. The diversity of origin of

the contributions is only matched by the diversity of critical approaches retained so

that the volume covers a wide range of versatile readings emphasizing various aspects

of stylistic choices, patterns of imagery, intertextual connections, to the close reading

of individual stories, not to mention the field of genetic criticism which is now open to

the exploration of scholars all over the world with the availability of the McGahern

archives, courtesy of the James Hardiman Library and the National University of

Ireland, Galway. Special thanks are due to Fergus Fahey who is in charge of the

archives, and who generously granted us permission to reprint some fac simile of his

manuscripts.

5 Coming as it does only three years after his premature death, it was essential that the

volume – offered as a steppingstone for further critical attention – should avoid the

trap of moving reminiscences or hagiographic reviewing. A significant number of

contributors to the volume actually met John McGahern and a few knew him on a more

intimate basis, but all were struck by the profound humanity that is the prerogative of

the truly great. However the reader will find that this knowledge of the writer, far from

the giving in to the lures of the intentional fallacy, does not give up on the

intransigence of critical demands and only serves to further a deeper comprehension of

the texts and their “inner formality”. As a result this volume should be considered as a


7

tribute to the author only in so far as it is the very meticulousness of the critical

attitude of the contributors that constitutes the value of the homage.

6 The common complaint that the short story is a neglected genre seems to be somewhat

exaggerated because, on the one hand writers continue to write them, publishers to

publish them and, on the other, readers go on buying magazines or collections and

critics reviewing them. John McGahern is certainly a case in point to disprove this

received idea, in so far as his output never dried up during the time it took him to write

his six novels. Altogether he penned 37 stories in the course of his career from 1970 to

2006, but critics have to face the fact that the publication history of his stories is

extremely complex, and it does make a difference to the reader which version of the

text he has in hand. He was such a great reviser of his prose that it gives the impression

that it is impossible to imagine that we have access to what could be called a definitive

version of his stories. This need not be a shortcoming, as one of the great qualities of

his stories, which is also the basis for their enduring attraction, is precisely the fact

that they can never be fully explicated, and there always remains a kernel of mystery

which resists analysis. More often than not this silent core around which the story

revolves concerns the unpredictability of human relationships and the vagaries of

desire. Eudora Welty,9another major practitioner of the short story once formulated it

in a way that captures the essence of John McGahern’s art wonderfully:

…the first thing we see about a story is its mystery. And in the best stories, wereturn at the last to see mystery again. Every good story has mystery – not thepuzzle kind, but the mystery of allurement. As we understand the story better, it islikely that the mystery does not necessarily decrease; rather it simply grows morebeautiful.” (May, 164)

7 Given this very important characteristic of John McGahern’s fiction it appears to be

rather reductive and misleading to label him as a downright realist or a chronicler of

rural Ireland, because if the background is invariably faithful to the author’s personal

experience of country life and small town activities, the subtle and involuted textuality

of the stories no less invariably introduces a wedge between representation and

interpretation that invites the reader to question the immediacy of his response.

8 However such textual unreliability has also real critical drawbacks and raises serious

problems that would require almost a book-length study in itself and they can only be

briefly outlined within the space of this introduction. For a start, the titles of the

collections or of individual stories may vary depending on whether the American or the

British edition of the texts is used. The contents of the selections may also be different10

and more problematically the texts themselves can be significantly altered11. On top of

that his Collected Stories (1992) – allegedly a definitive version of the stories – does not

include three late ones: “Creatures of the Earth”, “Love of the World”, and “The White

Boat”.12Today, with the availability of the archives, scholars are entitled to expect the

publishers to provide a new edition of the “really complete” set of stories, possibly with

the relevant information about the textual variants.

9 On the face of it, John McGahern is not famous for his dazzlingly innovative technique

in the handling of the genre, but on closer scrutiny the status of his stories challenges

traditional generic distinctions between novel and short story in a manner that is

certainly central to what one critic has called his “subdued modernity”13. He did not

devote his reflections to a redefinition of the genre – a Sisyphean task14 if ever there

were one – but more usefully he concentrated on modalities of writing likely to

enhance the poeticity of the text. In this respect his textual practices demonstrate


8

clearly that the demands on language which are the hallmark of poetry are similar to

those that John McGahern applies to his short prose fiction and it is easy to trace them

back to his early devotion to Yeats.

10 What is particularly remarkable about his short stories is that even though they are

individual works that can be enjoyed independently, they also weave a discrete

network of cross-references that ultimately creates the impression that they function

as an organic structure, so that beyond the diachronic construction of the stories over a

period of more than 30 years, the reader perceives a synchronicity of themes, imagery,

character relationships, and locations. Because of the overwhelming presence of so

many textual echoes and resonances, the case can certainly be made that the bulk of

his stories constitutes a whole that is halfway between the novel and the short story

cycle. Not only is this a ploy to deal with the question of temporality, and

counterbalance the flight of time in a Proust-like manner, but it also functions on the

principle of the rhizome,15according to which no part is more important than the

whole, and what is of foremost importance is the mode of articulation of the parts

itself. The notion of chronotope16 could come in handy here to account for the fact that

the centre that holds his fiction together is the rural Ireland in the 50’s, to which most

of his protagonists return, as if time passed so slowly that changes were barely

noticeable. Time and space seem to be indissolubly linked, the only changes taking

place inside the heads of the protagonists. For John McGahern it was quite a deliberate

strategy to suggest the presence of the many in the one, on the basis of repetitions and

differences. With him universality is to be found in the local and vice-versa. This he

stated quite unambiguously when he wrote:

Short stories are often rewritten many times after their first publication, novelshardly ever. This obviously has to do with length, economics, the hospitality ofmagazines and anthologies to stories, perhaps even convention: and I believe it tobe, as well, part of the excitement of the novel. The novel has to stand or fall alone.Any single story in a collection of stories can lean on the variety and difference ofthe others, receiving as well as casting light. (Preface to the Second Edition of TheLeavetaking, 5)

11 Thus he acknowledges the fact that places and characters appear in one story and

reappear in another but with a different status, creating the illusion of a world that is

consistently mapped out in spite of the fact that the narrative voices are not the same.

This introduces a major difference with the locations of other famous short story cycles

like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Naipaul’s

Miguel Street or Alice Munro’s Lake Huron, Ontario, without forgetting of course,

Joyce’s Dublin whose influence is made even more pregnant by the fact that John

McGahern chose as the final story of his Collected Stories “The Country Funeral” which is

both an echo of “The Dead” in Dubliners and a final homage to his great predecessor.

The major quality of the dominant chronotope of the tensions generated by the end of

an allegedly stable rural world and the birth of a new Ireland is that it enables him to

suggest the restlessness of the individual in his confrontation with historical changes,

like the slow dying grip of the church over public life. By doing so, he successfully

avoids the trap of the idealisation of an idyllic pastoral past that probably never

existed, as well as the temptation of depression that the feeling of entrapment of the

individual in a world over which he has little mastery could produce. No doubt, renting

the veil of illusions can be a painful process, but it is presented as a necessary step in

the development of the characters, who are now able to become free agents and assume


9

the responsibility of the choices they make. And if there are melancholy strains in the

prose of John McGahern, they are but the mainspring of a new self-awareness in an

undeceived future that the act of creation magnificently sublimates.

12 Not unexpectedly then, the telling of the stories operates on the modes of condensation

and displacement in an endless conversation between texts that seems to generate one

another as in a rhizome. For instance, the chainsaw that Gillespie tells the inquisitive

Mr Boles he never bought in “Why We’re Here” reappears in “The Wine Breath” where

the old priest experiences a revelation of sorts, as he is bathed in the sweet light of

dusk and watches the beech chips flying off, which transports him in a Proustian way to

the day of Michael Bruen’s funeral. The remembrance of this banal event will launch a

chain of thoughts leading him to question the meaning of his vocation. Furthermore,

the same Gillespie turns up again in “Gold Watch” where he rents the narrator’s

father’s meadows.

13 Similarly, the creamery from which the narrator’s father is back at the beginning of

“Wheels” when the son returns to introduce his new wife to the father turns up again

in “The Creamery Manager” in which it plays a more central role in the plot. Thus

throughout the collection a number of very local toponyms (Arigna, Ardcarne, the Gut,

the Quarry, etc.) and patronyms (Moran, Lightfoot, O’Connor, Murphy etc.) circulate to

build up a sense of unity of time and place which eventually constructs the image of a

closed stable world whose pastoral innocence is nevertheless subtly undermined by the

responses of the various characters to their cultural, social and intersubjective

environment.

14 Albanian novelist Ismael Kadaré17, expatiating on the age-old stereotype of the writer as

the master of a fictional empire over which he reigns more or less despotically, once

suggested that a distinction could be made between those who limit themselves to a

limited space and those with larger territorial ambitions, like Faulkner with his

Yoknapatawpha County. He argued that the very image of the empire thus delimited

could be seen as a mirror of his inner self and his desires. Indeed all kinds of

relationships to such a territory could be possible, from protective self-enclosure to

ambitious conquest of neighbouring domains. As far as John McGahern is concerned,

his literary landscape is quite revealing. On the one hand, through the succession of

short stories the reader becomes gradually familiar with a spatial framework whose

elements regularly return: The river Shannon, Cootehall, the Gloria Bog, Killeelan Hill,

etc. Down to the smallest detail – for instance the Bridge bar where the protagonist in

“The Recruiting Officer” has a drink at the end of the story recalls the Bridge bar to

which Beirne and the narrator repair in “Crossing the Line” – a coherent fictional

world is built under the reader’s eyes and it resembles closely the actual Leitrim world

where the author elected to live, and which he also chose to represent in most of his

novels. It is exactly as if the whole sequence of short stories functioned as a novel. Yet

this world is not as self-contained as it might seem. First the Irish world of John

McGahern’s fiction is structured by the opposition between the rural pole of Leitrim

and the urban pole of Dublin. If his protagonists have to travel – not infrequently –

from one to the other, the opposition between them is not of the binary order. Dublin is

not the hell of perdition that country people sometimes make it out to be, it is also the

locus of possible changes. Work is available, opportunities are opened, and progress is

on the way, perhaps at the cost of challenging the strict moral constraints which have

their hold on rural society. Dublin is like a mirror sending back the image of all that is


10

negative in the small villagers’ lives. No wonder that the church-ridden, parochial and

bigoted society of the country is reluctant to face that image. The return of the son in

“Wheels” is one way of highlighting the narrow-mindedness of the father and the

backwardness of his outlook on life. Conversely, the misadventures of the protagonists

who venture to leave the quiet life of small towns provide an illustration of the risks

inherent in the fascination for the – alleged – blandishments of urban life. In a poetic

scene in “Parachutes” that reads like a muffled echo of Joyce’s portrait of Dublin,

Mulvey looking at thistledown floating over Grafton Street wonders where they come

from, in a speech that blurs the limits between the rural and the urban poles: “‘Just old

boring rural Ireland strikes again. Even its principal city has one foot in a manure

heap.’ The discussion had put Mulvey in extraordinary good humour.” (238)

15 The butt of John McGahern’s criticism is of course the self-deception that threatens

those who are too self-confident in what they call their identity. It must be pointed out

however that his irony is not meant to damn those characters who yield to the lures of

self-deception and whom he sees more as victims than culprits, but its purpose is

mostly to open the possibility of redemption for them. Whether they will avail

themselves of the opportunity is quite another story.

16 This two-way mirror game is indeed the main strategy used by John McGahern to

prevent any form of idealisation of Irish life and Irishness, whose contradictions are

therefore exposed to the reader’s eyes. As for those who occasionally foray into foreign

territories like Eva Lindberg18 in “The Beginning of an Idea” or the female protagonist

in “Peaches”, they find that the “other” world, where they thought they would find

peace and quiet, turns out to be even more dangerous for their integrity than the one

they felt they had no option but to leave. Besides, it is probably not innocent that both

characters are female and, most of all, stand as figures of the artist who has to confront

alterity (their own as well as that of the others) in order to achieve a truly creative

status. A particularly dramatic case of the aforementioned threat to integrity is that of

Cunningham and Murphy in “Faith, Hope and Charity” who met their death in Reading,

digging trenches.

17 For all that, John McGahern does not give in to the temptation of falling back upon the

– illusory – safety of the nest. The absence of any form of outrageous jingoism is

remarkable in the fictional world he creates. As a result, there is no flamboyant pride in

the Irish identity, no flaunting of Irishness, no display of the national flag, no

regression into the cradle of the mother tongue. Apart from the conspicuous exception

of The Leavetaking, McGahern rarely resorts to the use of colourful colloquial Gaelic

expressions to assert the pride of the characters in their roots and, when he does it, the

intention seems to be mostly parodic or ironical. Like Gabriel in Joyce’s “The Dead”, he

is reluctant to approve of the Celtic revival as a corner stone of the modern Irish

identity, probably because it has been enlisted in the cause of the nationalist ideology.

18 It is indeed a testimony of the profound humanity of the man that it should be the very

notion of identity that his fiction questions, and this allows us to see in a new light the

theme of the return that haunts his stories. Indeed, if a significant number of

characters are inevitably drawn to return to their birthplace like the protagonist in

“Wheels”, it is probably in “Gold Watch” that the subject is treated with greater insight.

The mother of the narrator’s fiancée represents the old world and traditional values or

conventions, as she objects to a simple marriage. Her daughter says: “She’s not given to

change herself, except to changing other people so that they fit in with her ideas.”


11

(220), and in reaction to her fiancé’s wish to go back to the farm to help with the

haymaking, the young woman exclaims rather condescendingly: “And in the meantime,

have a wonderful time with your father and poor Rose in the nineteenth century at the

bloody hay.” (217) No wonder then that McGahern should make her say:

“’Unfortunately the best part of these visits is always the leaving’, she said as we drove

away.” (212) Consequently, the outcome of such visits is never reintegration into the

world they have left, because they have been too deeply transformed by their self-

imposed exile not to feel out of place. More importantly it is the narrator himself who

unwittingly reveals the truth of the situation when, explaining to his future wife that as

usual he will return to the farm, he uses the ambiguous phrase: “’I suppose I’d prefer to

go home – that’s if you don’t mind.’” (215) For him home19 is not yet the place where he

lives with his fiancée in Dublin, but is still his father’s farm. This speaks volumes and

implies that such a return “home” is not definitive and will be followed by a his return

to his new “home” as if it were necessary to build the new one on the traces of the

former. Returning home as the locus of origin the better to leave it in order to build a

personal home is indeed a metaphor of human life that is as old as the biblical

commandment and the prohibition of incest which Freud saw as the cornerstone of

civilisation. Through the drama of his characters having to cope with this fundamental

question, John McGahern succeeds in challenging the clichés about Irishness and the

problematic fidelity to origins. It is a tribute to the deeply felt psychological dimension

of his art that all the journeys undertaken to and from the characters’ places of origins

can be read as metaphors of the basic paradox that all speaking subjects need to

depend on a representation of their origin the better to lose it and, in the very process

of losing it, construct a new identity based not on mere repetition but on difference,

since difference pre-supposes the existence of an initial image from which to distance

oneself without relinquishing it completely.

19 The problem is more complex than might appear at first glance if we take into account

the fact, as psychoanalysis has shown, that the subject’s origin is an image that is

always already lost, as French novelist Pascal Quignard brilliantly demonstrated in his

book: La Nuit Sexuelle. He argued that all human beings come from a scene from which

they are radically excluded, (a scene which Freud called the Primitive Scene) and that

art was one way for them to attempt a representation of what can basically never be

represented. I would argue that this is precisely what John McGahern does in a

subliminal way through the stories of his characters trying to come to terms with their

vanishing ancestry and shifting allegiances. His fiction clearly explodes the myth of

identity as a stable construct, fixed forever in time and space. It betrays an intimate

conviction that identity is but a series of imaginary identifications which may be

necessary to provide a narcissistic image of the subject so that he should acquire a

minimal sense of existence, but this impermanent self-image ought to be overcome lest

it should hold him prisoner, a state of things which philosophers call alienation. The

case of the old priest in “The Wine Breath” is a very good illustration of this

predicament, as he ends up questioning his vocation, all the while suspecting the

vanity of his whole life, in which his mother played the most crucial and dubious role.

20 In the same way, I wish to put forward that John McGahern’s short stories, with their

emphasis on the social background of the characters, give evidence of the fact that the

imaginary identifications which they accumulate are in fine produced by the

communities that shelter them – family, church, work, traditions etc. – and that may

threaten to hold them prisoners of the false security of their embrace. As a


12

consequence, in order to be real individuals and free agents these characters must take

into account the unpalatable truth that the image that is at the core of their so-called

identity is but a void. And precisely because it is a void, it opens for them the possibility

of a future, as it is dynamic and not static or smothering. In other words, John

McGahern’s characters go through the experience of being sufficiently attached to it to

afford losing it, granted that losing it is also having lost it. But to do so requires some

force of character, and many are those who, like Kennedy in “Crossing the Line”, Moran

in “Hearts of Oak and Bellies of Brass” or the narrator’s father in “The Stoat” to name

but a few, fail to detach themselves from their imaginary identifications and remain

alienated. This does not mean that his outlook on life is necessarily pessimistic because

most of those who react in such a regressive way represent the old generation, the

fathers. Contrary to them the younger generation, mostly consisting of sons, as the

narrators in “Wheels” and “Gold Watch”, are ready to face the uncertainty of the

future. More often than not, these younger men are figures of artists as emblematised

by characters like the narrator and the Mulveys in “Parachutes” or the narrator in

“Crossing the Line”.20 As for McGahern himself, through writing so sagaciously about

such identity games and through circling round the void that is at the heart of his

textual images, he sublimates it by inscribing it in the Letter of the text.

21 Reflexivity is one dimension of John McGahern’s prose that is not frequently brought to

the fore and yet it is central to his art. One of the reasons for this relative neglect is the

reluctance of the author himself to express his views on the subject. Few stories indeed

exhibit an open metafictional bias like “The Beginning of an Idea” or “Parachutes”,

both staging the predicaments of writers or would-be writers. As is the case with all

great artists, John McGahern’s fiction has in fact an inherent self-reflexive quality that

broadens the scope of his stories, and it is mostly accessible through the way he uses

what he calls images. However, in his case, images have very little to do with the

stylistic devices that usually go by that name, they are above all visual scenes endowed

with vivid qualities that make them memorable. They spring from unconscious sources

and they impose themselves upon the artist through the medium of memory. In this

perspective it can be argued that they are not only visual, but what makes them

valuable and artistically effective is that they have a temporal dimension. Because their

appeal is so strong, they are the channel through which a voice can be heard, a voice

that urges the writer to build up a story from the initial scene. To put it even more

bluntly, such images are nothing less than represented affects, which explains their

power to move both writer and readers. They are thus seminal in John McGahern’s

craftsmanship. In the 2006 preface printed here, he does explain how stories like “The

Wine Breath” “The Stoat”, “Parachutes”, “Korea” came to be written. The images that

triggered off the writing of these stories undoubtedly recall the age-old Celtic tradition

of “the vision” but they are not esoteric and make sense only in so far as they are

included in a larger narrative form. The proof of this is brought by John McGahern

himself when he acknowledges the fact that the initial image that served him to find

the idea of a story could eventually disappear from the final narrative. It implies that it

is meaningful not by or in itself but as an incentive. What must be borne in mind is that

such seminal images need not be central to plot or narrative strategy. In the instance of

“The Wine Breath” it was, according to John McGahern, “the sound of a chainsaw” that

impelled him to tell the story of the old priest. The chainsaw episode is a minor

incident in the chain of events, but it turns out to be essential to the interpretation of

the story, and it must be pointed out that the impetus is less of a visual nature than an


13

acoustic one, as if gaze and voice were intricately woven into a verbal construct. The

status of these images is thus complex and problematic. Consequently, a closer look at

the way such images operate textually would seem to be useful, even if the field has

already been explored to a large extent by Denis Sampson.

22 To begin with, the main characteristic of these images is that they are remembered

scenes having deeply affected the narrator figure through the senses, and moved him

to put words on his experience, however inadequate these words may be. It serves as a

reminder to the reader that both texts and human subjects are mainly moved by

affects. Secondly, the most overwhelming feature of John McGahern’s images is their

enigmatic dimension. Readers and characters alike are arrested by what they see and

are at a loss to provide a plausible explanation for their interest in the scene or even for

the scene itself. As a consequence, these images function as grey areas in the narrative,

or spots of textual obscurity that resist meaning and interpretation. To focus on “The

Wine Breath” once again, when the old priest passes Gillespie’s farm he feels suddenly

removed from “the solid world” that was everywhere round him and transported into

another world: “Suddenly, as he was about to rattle the gate loudly to see if this would

penetrate the sawing, he felt himself (bathed as in a dream) in an incredible sweetness

of light.” (178) Whether the scene is an epiphany of sorts remains a moot point in the

light of the end of the story, and the precise meaning that must be attributed to it

ultimately eludes the reader’s grasp, or rather is so plural as to preclude any definitive

interpretation. In other words, images in John McGahern’s prose function much in the

same way as photographic pictures do according to Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida.21

In this essay he opposes the two dimensions of the studium and the punctum. The

studium refers to the mimetic dimension of the picture and of discourse, the attempt to

reproduce reality, whereas the punctum is that irreducible element in the picture that

“pierces” the viewer and the reader, in the sense that it irresistibly draws his attention

to a mysterious spot in the picture that cannot be elucidated, and thus calls for his

immediate involvement through affects and rational thought. My assumption is that

the main reflexive dimension of John McGahern’s fiction is to be found precisely in his

theory of the image. In this respect, it must be remembered that the word ‘theory” is

derived from the Greek theorein which conjoins a root horan meaning to look at

something attentively and a second thea suggesting an image in which something

shows itself. Image and theory are therefore one and the same thing in his artistic

credo, and if images are so central to his art, it is because their appearance in the text is

an event that opens up the possibility of an encounter for characters, readers and

writer alike with the Real of desire. As such, images in John McGahern’s fiction are

really the textual punctum that pierces the more conventional studium of

representation that is the realistic framework on which narrativity is based.

23 The final yet equally significant idiosyncrasy of John McGahern’s use of images that will

be considered to conclude this introduction is the nature of their close association with

the affects that produced them. The most overwhelmingly present of these affects is

melancholy, and it is not giving away a secret to say that the major trauma that he

encountered early in life, and which was to determine many of his conscious or

unconscious decisions, was his mother’s death. There is ample evidence of this in his

Memoir and in his first novel The Barracks in which the detailed account of Elisabeth

Reegan’s slow death by cancer derives from his personal experience. In many ways this

first novel can be considered as the emotional matrix of his literary creations.

However, this death is not the only subject of his fiction and if he could contend that


14

“… all stories are more or less the same story…”22, it is precisely because melancholy is

at the source of all his creation, like the umbilicus of his stories. Indeed, when we come

to think of it, a number of obsessions run through his fictions, but they all boil down to

the trauma of this initial and irrecoverable loss. These melancholy-ridden obsessions

are manifested on the mode of dissemination throughout the stories by the recurrence

of certain images associated with conventional themes like death, funerals, guilt, self-

accusation, self-loathing, gloom, general unhappiness, mourning, uncertainty, etc. It is

of course impossible to list them all here but one example will suffice to illustrate the

point. At the beginning of “The Wine Breath”, the image of the white beech chips, the

sweet light and the sound of Gillespie’s saw that McGahern identified as the origin of

the story does not seem to be related to death, yet because of its mysterious nature, it

was an opportunity to trigger off the old priest’s meditation on Michael Bruen’s funeral

and later on the death of his mother. Textual images operate then much in the manner

described by Freud. If the dreamer is represented by all the protagonists of the dream,

it can be argued that all the melancholy-related images in his fiction represent a way of

coming to terms with the initial trauma on the mode of displacement and

condensation, as if the shadow of the lost object fell on the writer’s unconscious self. In

that sense images constitute a way of reintroducing meaning and coherence into a

scene (in an imaginary way but still) whose contingence is radically unexplainable: Why

did his mother have to die so young? The repetition of more or less directly

melancholy-induced images is thus a way of alleviating the pain, sharing the ache with

the reader, but not by appealing to melodrama or sentimentalism, quite the opposite,

by treating the initial affect, that is by sublimating the core of silence around which

such images are constructed, so as to produce stories out of them. It is a reminder that

what the artist needs is to find suitable metaphors through which his anxieties and his

confusion can be relieved, while at the same time sharing their apotropaic dimension

with his readers. However by doing so, by giving shape to the void that his images

conceals, he comes dangerously close to the truth of the human condition which is that

the self is an illusion and that the human subject is predicated on a void, a situation

which only his relation to language and creation can enable him to endure. Fiction is

John McGahern’s chosen calling to face that predicament as an artist.

24 As the cliché goes, the only consolation left after the death of a great writer is that we can

always turn to the texts themselves, and the series of essays presented here is certainly

meant to show that readers and lovers of literature all over the world will never cease

taking advantage of this possibility. Moreover, it is my guess that if John McGahern

eventually agreed to have his archives made public, it is because he was deeply convinced

that, however useful to the critic these archives may be, the secret of his genius did not lie

buried there waiting to be unearthed, but was made available to anyone ready to

scrutinise the textual surface of his fiction. As a great reader himself, he knew that the

truth of fiction lies partly in the reading itself, seen as an endless quest for a final message

that is bound to remain elusive forever. John McGahern’s “subdued modernity” thus

precludes all flamboyance of style, flashy imagery and cheap rhetorical effects, but relies

on subtle textual games that correspond to a more intimate vision of life and art. If indeed

life is just a flash out of eternal darkness, McGahern’s images that emerge from the

nothingness of the unspeakable to last the space of a transient moment before darkness

closes in again, out of the depths, into the depths, as Bernard McLaverty said suggestively,

they nevertheless manage to throw an oblique ray of light on the human condition and

the crucial role of art. But this light is never a blinding one and, if under-exposure is one


15

way of filtering the violence that pervades McGahern’s fictional world, the narrator’s

comment on Marlow’s tales in Heart of Darkness seems to fit perfectly McGahern’s textual

practice: “… to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside

enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness

of those misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of

moonshine.”23In the end, if McGahern’s images are under-exposed, it is the better to keep

their sense of mystery and capture the reader’s long-lasting attention, and by portraying

ordinary men leading ordinary lives, McGahern’s short stories illustrate the Beckettian

filiation of the writer. For him, as for Beckett, the true heroes of today are those who lead

“lives of quiet desperation” but refuse to yield to the fascination of the death drive, and

who, as a result, have no choice but to say, as the narrator at the end of The Unnamable24:

You must go on.I can't go on.I'll go on.

25 The 16 essays gathered together in this collection could not possibly deal with all the

stories that compose the Collected Stories, but 24 out of the 37 are the objects of more or

less extended commentaries, which provides the reader with a significant coverage of

John McGahern’s production. Great care has been taken to avoid overlapping

commentaries of the short stories, not because the confrontation of different

interpretations of the same text would have been uninteresting, but simply to take into

account as many individual stories as possible. Not on totally arbitrary grounds the

papers have been divided into three groups of almost equal size. The first group (five

essays) tends to focus on general considerations on the origins of the texts and way

their textuality is constructed. The second group (five essays) considers the

intertextual networks that contribute more or less openly to structure the texts of the

stories while the third group (six essays) is a series of close readings of individual

stories examined from a variety of theoretical standpoints ranging from stylistics to

philosophy and psychoanalysis.

26 In his essay entitled “Reinvented, Reimagined and Somehow Dislocated”, a quotation

from McGahern’s 2006 preface, Fergus Fahey surveys the recently opened McGahern

archives and, through his comments on two specific stories “Christmas” and “The

Recruiting Officer”, he shows how the wealth of information now available to the

general public can be put to use from the perspective of a genetic approach, inevitably

closely related to biographical concerns. Liliane Louvel’s essay: “Reading John

McGahern’s ‘Love of the World’” is an account that is not only technical and

theoretical, but also full of empathy and comprehension. With her intimate knowledge

of the author and of his textual practices, she uses the short story “Love of the World”

as a springboard to study how meticulously the author worked on the construction of

the images he chose to focus on, in order to achieve the effect he wanted. The page

references are to a manuscript version sent to her by John McGahern. As for Ellen

McWilliams in “Homesickness in John McGahern’s Short Stories: ‘Wheels’ and ‘A Slip

Up’”, she explores the theme of exile and of the return that is so omnipresent in and

characteristic of McGahern’s fiction in relation to the novel Amongst Women and The

Barracks. She shows how various forms of betrayal, bereavement, humiliation and

failure, etc. can lead to a misleading nostalgia that threatens the treacherous surface of

the pastoral ideal. Pascal Bataillard in “Love and Solitary Enjoyment in ‘My Love, My

Umbrella’: Some of McGahern’s Uses of Dubliners” bridges the gap between the first and

the second sections of this collection by proposing a Lacanian reading both of the short


16

story in general and of the main protagonist’s predicament in particular, by showing

how McGahern’s own reading of Joyce’s short story “A Painful Case” influenced his

writing beyond some by now well-documented thematic resemblances. In his essay:

“‘Fellows like Yourself’: Fathers in John McGahern’s Stories”, Michael Storey uses

biographical evidence from John McGahern’s Memoir as well as from his novels like The

Barracks or Amongst Women in order to trace the recurrent features of all the ferocious

fathers that haunt McGahern’s fiction back to his problematic and often violent

relationship with his own father.

27 In “‘Absence does not Cast a Shadow’: Yeats’s Shadowy Presence in McGahern’s ‘The

Wine Breath’” Bertrand Cardin brings to light the so far unsuspected influence of

William Butler Yeats’s poem: “All Souls’ Night”, and explores in great detail the

intertextual articulations that enrich the interpretive potential of the story within the

context of a Proustian relationship with the priest’s past, mostly in connection with

Michael Bruen’s funeral. This allows him to offer a reading of the short story that

emphasizes its metafictional dimension. Bernice Schrank’s essay: “Legends of the Fall:

John McGahern’s ‘Christmas’ and ‘The Creamery Manager’” chooses to establish

connections between the early story and the later one through the presence of a

network of Biblical references. The religious dimension is examined both from a

sociological angle and an intertextual one, the two being sometimes at variance, the

better to show how the end of all the great metadiscourses and particularly that of

religion can generate feelings of nostalgia and failure because no return to an original

stable world is possible. Recalling the complex textual history of “The Stoat”, which

was revised several times by the author who never found it satisfactory artistically,

probably because it was to close to his own conflict with his father, Danine Farquharson

closely examines the textual variants. In “Violence and Ontological Doubt in ‘The

Stoat’” she argues that the violence that pervades McGahern’s fiction in general, and

“The Stoat” in particular, cannot be satisfactorily integrated into a worldview, a

situation which generates what she calls an “ontological wound”. In this light she

proposes to read the short story as a moral fable, a “stoat/rabbit” allegory. In “Art,

Biography, and Philosophy: Three aspects of John McGahern’s Short Fiction as

Exemplified by ‘Gold Watch’, ‘Like all Other Men’, and ‘The White Boat’”, Michael

Prusse in the wake of his paper on “Korea” delivered at the 2006 Lyon Conference on

Rewriting/reprising in literature, (to be published in 2009 by the Cambridge Scholar

Press), examines the impact of Hemingway’s short stories on McGahern’s short fiction

in terms of circular and chiastic structures that highlight their “quasi-Palladian

quality”. Margaret Lash Carroll in her study entitled: “‘The Road Away Becomes the

Road Back’: Prodigal Sons in the Short Stories of John McGahern” offers a sweeping

survey of the stories, many of which she sees as new versions of the parable of the

prodigal son from Luke’s Gospel shedding some light on the history of the collection as

well as on the archetypal themes of the return which is omnipresent in the fiction of

the author.

28 As for my own article, it offers a close reading of the less studied story “Crossing the

Line” that aims at showing that the role-model figure embodied by Kennedy, the older

teacher is systematically derided by the narrator, thus making more problematic the

process of symbolic filiation that is at the heart of the narrative. Moreover, the

ambivalence of the chain imagery makes it possible to suggest a self-reflexive approach

to the story, the younger man appearing as a potential figure of the artist. Arthur

Broomfield in “The Conversion of William Kirkwood” looks at the troubled relations


17

between Protestants and Catholics in the small rural community that serves as a

background for the plot of the story to unfold. Concentrating on historical, sociological

and ideological notions, he takes issue with the conventional post-colonial position

presenting the Catholic community as the victim of Protestant colonial oppression, and

he reverses the binary opposition by showing, through the individual case of the

protagonist, William Kirkwood, that the situation is more complex than is usually

assumed. Claire Majola-Leblond’s essay: “‘Along the Edges’: Along the Edges of

Meaning…” gives a reading of the short story based on the exploration of the various

forms of limits or edges that can come into play in a literary text, from the

typographical division of the story into two parts to the vexed question of love

understood as an intersubjective game between separateness and togetherness. The

paper submitted by Vanina Jobert-Martini and entitled “Evaluation in ‘High Ground’:

From Ethics to Aesthetics” uses a stylistic approach of the short story based on the

analysis of verbal interaction in conversation analysis as defined by George Yule. Thus,

the references to pragmatics lead her to assess the various ways in which the

characters attempt to monitor the dialogues in a bid to control verbal exchanges and to

expose the ethical problems raised by the various strategies of manipulation. Douglas

Cowie’s analysis of the short story “Korea” which - along similar lines – reads the story

as a rural elegy, focuses on the various manipulations of point of view that contribute

to the building of the tension between father and son as they both try to come to terms

with their perception of death against a background of a vanishing rural world. Josiane

Paccaud-Huguet’s essay: “‘Grave of the Images of Dead Passions and their Days’: ‘The

Country Funeral’ as McGahern’s Poetic Tombeau…” fittingly brings this collection to a

close by offering a literary approach to the text based on the late Lacanian notion of

“varity”, one of those pregnant plays on words conjoining the notion of variety

(diversity) and Verity. She first establishes a parallel between the character Philly Ryan

and Gabriel in Joyce’s “The Dead”, and singles out Uncle Peter, the seemingly cranky

character who makes objects out of matchsticks, to suggest that he might well be a

figure of the artist trying to come to terms with the symptoms of his melancholy,

without having to repeat them on the mode of automaton, but on the contrary by

sharing them with the readers through his idiosyncratic handling of the image.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Badonnel, Patrick, Maisonnat Claude. La Nouvelle Anglo-Saxonne: Initiation à une Lecture

Psychanalytique, Paris: Hachette Supérieur, 1998.

Barthes, Roland: Camera Lucida, Reflections on Photography: New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.

Beckett, Samuel. Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Grove Press, 1994.

Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Fiction in Fiction and Film, Ithaca, New York,

Cornell University Press, 1978.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness and Other Tales, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.


18

Deleuze Gilles, Guattari Félix. Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 1. L'Anti-Œdipe, Paris: Minuit, 1972.

Holquist, Michael. Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World, London, New York : Routledge, 1990.

Joyce, James. Dubliners,Harmondworth: Penguin Classics, 2007.

Kadaré, Ismael. Invitation à l’Atelier de l’Écrivain, Paris: Grasset, 1991.

McGahern, John. Collected Stories, New York: Vintage, 1992.

---. The Barracks, London: Faber and Faber, 1963.

---. The Leavetaking, London: Faber and Faber, 1974/1984.

---. Creatures of the Earth: New and Selected Stories, London: Faber and Faber, 2006.

McLaverty, Bernard. A Time to Dance, Harmondsworth: King Penguin, 1982.

May Charles E. Short Story Theories: Ohio University Press, 1977.

Quignard, Pascal. La Nuit Sexuelle, Paris: Flammarion, 2007.

Sampson, Denis. Outstaring Nature’s Eyes: The Fiction of John McGahern, Washington DC: Catholic

University of America Press, 1993.

AUTEURS

CLAUDE MAISONNAT

Claude Maisonnat is Emeritus professor of contemporary Anglo-saxon literature at the Université

Lumière Lyon 2, France. A Conrad specialist, he has published more than 30 articles on his works

and a book on Lord Jim. Also a specialist of the short story, he has written on contemporary

writers, including Bernard McLaverty, Edna O’Brien, Hemingway, Alice Munro, Antonia Byatt,

Angela Carter, Dylan Thomas, Malcom Lowry, R. Carver, P. Auster, V.S. Naipaul, Olive Senior, etc.

With Patrick Badonnel he has also written a book on the psychoanalytical approach of the short

story, and co-edited a volume on textual reprising.


19

Reinvented, reimagined andsomehow dislocatedFergus Fahey

1 In the preface to Creatures of the Earth: New and Selected Stories John McGahern wrote of

his short stories: “The most difficult were drawn directly from life. Unless they were

reinvented, re-imagined and somehow dislocated from their origins, they never

seemed to work. The imagination demands that life be told slant because of its need of

distance” (Creatures of the Earth, vii). An examination of the drafts of two of John

McGahern’s short stories, “Christmas” and “The Recruiting Officer” illustrate the

process by which the stories were, to use McGahern’s terminology, reinvented, re-

imagined and dislocated from their origins.

2 In the case of “Christmas” one can see the process whereby the story is first ‘dislocated’

from its origins and then ‘re-imagined’. This process was also accompanied by some

radical changes in style. While these experiments with style do not necessarily follow

directly from the dislocating and re-imaging of the story they do in many ways mirror

that process. The John McGahern Archive includes one extremely rare example of

documentary evidence for the origins of one of McGahern’s short stories from a source

other than McGahern’s own autobiographical writings. This comes in the form of a

letter from Tom Jordan, a friend and former teaching colleague of John McGahern. The

letter includes details of Jordan’s last day as a Christian Brother which are re-imagined

in the story “The Recruiting Officer”. “The Recruiting Officer” also includes a passage

which can be traced back to McGahern’s unpublished novel “The End or The Beginning

of Love”.

3 The John McGahern Archive consists primarily of drafts of his published works; it also

includes a small amount of correspondence relating to his career, a number of press

clippings, and transcripts of a number of interviews. The collection includes drafts of

all six of John McGahern’s published novels, of all his published short fiction, and of

both original dramatic work and adaptations of his own work for radio and screen. In

addition, the collection includes drafts of several pieces of non-fiction, including

McGahern’s memoir, and essays and book reviews which have never been published in

collected form. In all, the Archive includes more than 1300 drafts and fragments of John


20

McGahern’s work, of which over 400 relate to short stories. The number of drafts which

survive for each story varies considerably, for example only two handwritten drafts, a

number of handwritten fragments and part of one typescript draft of “The Recruiting

Officer” survive, while at the other extreme over twenty-five drafts and fragments of

“Love of the World” survive.

4 It became evident while processing the collection that it included drafts of a number of

short stories which were never published because they subsequently formed part of full

length novels. Conversely, some works which were published as short stories were at

some point considered potential novels; the cover of a copy book containing a draft of

the short story “Bank Holiday” bears an inscription reading “Bank Holiday: A Novel”.

McGahern himself said in an interview: “when I start writing something, I don't know

whether it's going to be a short story or a novel. After a while I know from the rhythm

of the prose if it's going to be a short story. And if I realise it's going to be a novel I

think ‘oh no, not again’ - that’s the next four years, then” (Dalley). The collection also

includes a complete typescript draft of an unpublished novel “The End or The

Beginning of Love”. The novel which was written by John McGahern while he was

working in Dublin as a national school teacher was completed c.1961, before he began

work on his first published novel The Barracks. “The End or The Beginning of Love”was

accepted for publication by Faber and Faber, however McGahern withdrew it himself

believing that it wasn’t good enough. The collection also includes fragments of even

earlier handwritten drafts of the same work. Elements of this novel were subsequently

incorporated into other novels and short stories including “The Recruiting Officer” and

“The Key”.

5 There are over twenty drafts and partial drafts of the short story “Christmas” in the

John McGahern Archive. These drafts don’t represent a linear progression, they include

a number of “dead-ends”, i.e. instances where McGahern amended or rewrote the story

before discarding the changes and reverting to an earlier draft. For the purposes of

comparison, I shall concentrate primarily on three distinct versions of the story: a

typed draft dating from the early 1960’s or earlier, the first published version of the

story dating from 1968 and the version of the story which appears in John McGahern’s

first short story collection Nightlines published in 1970. All three share the same

essential narrative: a boy in early adolescence works cutting wood with his father (or

foster father), one of their customers is an American woman who has lost her own son.

Knowing he would have to give it to his father, rather than taking money as a

Christmas tip the boy asks the American woman to get him a gift of her own choosing.

She gets him a toy airplane similar to one she had given her own son. The boy is unable

to hide his disappointment with the gift, while the father is enraged when he finds that

the boy turned down money.

6 The three versions can be identified as the first typed draft (which followed at least

three handwritten drafts) entitled “The Aeroplane” (P71/324), the first published

version which appeared in the Irish Press under the title “Christmas”, and the version

which appeared in the Nightlines collection also under the title “Christmas”. In

analyzing the evolution of this story through the drafts in the archive, one can clearly

see the story being stripped-down both in terms of descriptive detail and in terms of

the prose itself to a much-shortened version. In later drafts new elements are added to

the story and the point of view and tone change.


21

7 While in “The Aeroplane” the boy is explicitly described as the man’s son, in The Irish

Press version of the story the two are described as “the man and the boy”, no hint

however is given that their relationship is other than father and son. In the Nightlines

version of the story, which unlike the other two is told in the first person, the boy is an

orphan who was boarded out to “the man” Moran and his wife who apparently have no

children of their own.

8 The opening page of a typescript draft (P71/325) of the story which is very closely

related to “The Aeroplane” (P71/324) includes John McGahern’s address in Clontarf,

Dublin an address at which he ceased to reside in 1965. The typewriter impression and

the size of the paper both strongly suggest that the story was typed at or about the

same time as the original version of “Strandhill, The Sea” which appeared in The New

Yorker in 1963. It seems likely then that John McGahern wrote this version of the story

before he began work on The Dark. It is possible that he began work on it before writing

The Barracks. While it is impossible to give a precise date to the early drafts of the story,

certainly he began work on the story several years before it was first published in 1968.

9 The boy in “The Aeroplane” (P71/324) is named ‘Stevie’ a name given to the

protagonist of another of McGahern’s early stories “Coming into his Kingdom”. Stevie’s

family circumstances resemble McGahern’s own circumstances as a child, as is

illustrated by the following passage from “The Aeroplane”.

…and then when he opened the door and saw his father eating at the table, hissisters and young brother all about, there was just one shock that his mother wasn’tthere. It was easy to realize that she was dead when he was sad or frightened, but itwas almost impossible when he was happy, impossible to understand how she wasdead and he was happy together. (P71/324, 8)

10 On being offered money by Mrs Logan (renamed Mrs. Grey in “Christmas”) Stevie

reflects that it was “what his father expected; for money was better than anything else

to the poor. But he did not want it. He’d have to give it up, and his father would either

hoard it for a little time or spend it on the Christmas.” He imagines his father’s

response “‘In our house there are mouths to feed. Neither money nor Santa Claus

comes down in a shower of rain’”. The father in “The Aeroplane” is conscious of the

financial burden of his family, he also has a tendency to complain about that burden;

“Such children I never saw! If she gave money it’d be more in our line.” Unlike the

father figure in later versions of the story who wanted the money “to pour drink down

his gullet”, the father in “The Aeroplane” isn’t much of a drinker. At one point he offers

Mrs. Logan a glass of whiskey from a bottle kept in the press for special occasions.

While he joins Mrs. Logan in a Christmas toast in this version of the story, the father

figure doesn’t go to the pub on Christmas evening. In this the father figure resembles

somewhat McGahern’s own father who apparently was not much of a drinker either

and also complained of the financial burden his own children were putting on him.

(Memoir 156-157)

11 In the Nightlines version of the story the boy asks Mrs. Grey to give him “What ever

you’d prefer to give me.” Similarly in “The Aeroplane” he says “I’d prefer to leave it to

your choice”. The origins of this sentence are made clear in an earlier handwritten

draft of “The Aeroplane” (P71/319) in which it is explained that: “he’d learnt how to

say [prefer] from a story they’d read in school ‘Bartleby’. And when people asked

Bartleby to do something he’d say I’d prefer not to, and it sounded marvelous, and now

he was saying it.”1 While in the Nightlines version of the story the use of “prefer” is


22

described as “nicely put for a Homeboy”, in “The Aeroplane” he is “nearly drunken

with the notion of how nicely he’d managed to put it. Every thing suddenly seemed

wonderful; the star-filled sky overhead…” This introduces a mood of euphoria and

optimism in Stevie which is related to his hopes for the Christmas present from Mrs.

Grey. While in reading the Nightlines version one is forced to speculate as to what “the

boy” hoped to receive (McKeon), in “The Aeroplane” when asked what he would like to

be given Stevie is initially tempted to ask for a real football or size five football boots

then decides that “left up to herself she might give him something marvelous, a whole

set—ball and boots and togs and the saffron and blue jersey and socks of Roscommon.

Or something even more marvelous and unimaginable than any of these.”2

12 On the journey home Stevie’s imagination runs riot, first imagining himself playing in

the All-Ireland final: “It’s a goal. Oh what a score! What an unbelievable footballer that

man Moran is! Just listen to the crowd roar.” The fantasy of the All-Ireland winning

goal scorer soon evolves into that of Moran “heavyweight champion of the world,

battering contenders to pulp, a racing car outside hotels and a dark girl with a red rose

in her hair, as Carmen Jones the time they’d gone to the Abbey Cinema, and the Girl

was Crazy with love for Stevie Moran.” While this euphoric mood isn’t entirely absent

from the later versions of the story, in the Nightlines version of the story it is reduced to

“…I led the jennet out of the yard, delirious with stupid happiness”, while in the The

Irish Press version of the story “he felt exultant as he drove the jennet home, the

humiliation of the shop wiped away…”

13 “The humiliation of the shop” refers to an incident introduced in The Irish Press version

of the story and maintained in the Nightlines version. In “The Aeroplane”, Stevie

“stopped at Henry’s in the village to get paraffin …”, apparently without incident. In

the later versions of the story, men congregating in the shop mock the boy in a failed

attempt to “get a rise out of him” The earliest drafts of the story to contain this

incident are a handwritten draft P71/329 which is the first draft to bear the title

“Christmas” and a typescript draft P71/330 which is more or less identical to P71/329.

As well as introducing this incident, these drafts also bring a more stripped-down prose

style to the story as illustrated by the following passage:

Then the cart moving again. Last mile to Mounteagle, frozen sky of moon and stars,the thin ice over the potholes of the road catching their light. Close to Mounteaglethe police-man goes by on his lighted bicycle (P71/330, 1)

14 While this “stripped-down” style remains in The Irish Press version of the story, it is

tempered by some embellishment. The above passage becomes in The Irish Press version

of the story:

Ice over the potholes of the road, was catching the first starts. Lights of bicycles, itwas confession night, started to come at him, wavering hesitantly: that he wasn’table to recognise them as they pedaled past in a dark shape behind their lamps…(The Irish Press, 27 April1968)

15 The father in “The Aeroplane” may not be a drinker, Mrs. Logan, at Christmas at least,

is. When she arrives at Stevie’s house “She shows in her arms a huge box covered with

Christmas wrapping and it was obvious, especially from the slurred speech, that she’d

been drinking. In a drunken daze she feebly handed Stevie the box…” Made more drunk

by the whiskey given her by Stevie’s father she unburdens herself:

…how she’d been brought the news of Paul’s death, the shock, what they said, whatthey did, how Mr. Logan’s health broke, how they came to Mounteagle in the hopethat the air of his childhood might make him well again after they’d tried


23

Switzerland and everything. She finally ended in an outburst, ‘this place here isdriving me crazy. It’s the dead and quiet. You need movement about you to forget.You need to have things to do not to think. Oh, I wish I was this Christmas in NewYork. (P71/324, 13)

16 This is followed by the realisation that “This kitchen could have none of the luxury of

dreaming. She didn’t know what absurd urge caused her to bring the aeroplane. She

felt shamed by the way she’d broken down. How could they understand or care.” These

emotions are present below the surface in the later versions of the story: The Irish Press

version of the story makes no mention of her drunkenness, in the Nightlines version she

arrives “smelling of scent and gin”. In both later versions she comes close to tears when

reminded of her own son, she doesn’t however “unburden herself” in the same way she

does in “The Aeroplane. ”

17 The drafts P71/329 and P71/330 represent the most stripped-down versions of the

story. A side-effect of this transformation is that the story is now extremely short, only

three typed pages. The Irish Press version of the story isn’t much longer. Had it been

included in Nightlines in this form it would have been considerably shorter than any

other story in the collection. Another version of the story is contained in a number of

typescript drafts of the story (P71/335-337) and a handwritten fragment (P71/323)

which postdate The Irish Press version of the story. The typescript drafts of this version

bear the title “Each in Their World”. These drafts have a very different tone from

earlier versions of the story, as can be seen in the following extract:

… there was nothing to do but walk beside over the fields to the cartpath round thelake and watch. Watch the way the wheels crunched down the frozen tussocks toleave two lines in the whiteness behind. Watch the way the old jennet swayed withthe shafts between the grass ridges inside the wheeltracks as the cart fell from rutto rut of the path round by the lake. Watch, watch, and watch, and walk in this cold. The lake frozen over, a mirrorfouled by white blotches of the springs and red streaks from the sun impaled on thefirs of Oakport across Nutley’s boathouse. (P71/335, 1)

18 The changes in the text introduced in “Each in Their World” were however discarded

completely and McGahern reverted to the earlier version of the text (P71/334) before

writing the Nightlines version of the story. “Each in Their World” can thus be seen as a

“dead-end” in the evolution of the story.

19 The most obvious difference between the stripped-down version of the story and the

Nightlines version of the story are the addition of what might be considered a prologue

and an epilogue. Added to this, the Nightlines version is narrated by an adult looking

back on an incident from his youth. In the prologue we learn that the boy comes from

“a home” and that he is reasonably content with his life with Moran and his wife. In the

epilogue the boy attends midnight mass (the mass itself doesn’t feature in the earlier

drafts) knowing that he will probably soon be sent back to the home. At mass he finds

common cause with a drunken policeman who attacks the hypocrisy of the

congregation (Whyte, 150-151). On returning home he smashes the airplane to pieces.

The prologue serves to “dislocate the story from its origins”, the boys circumstances

can no longer be seen to resemble McGahern’s, indeed a completely new set of

circumstances has been introduced. One can only speculate as to the extent to which

the epilogue is drawn from McGahern’s own experience.

20 These two new elements in the story are introduced in P71/338, a handwritten draft of

the story. While the narrator is looking back knowingly on the incident which he


24

describes as “a stupid wish on my part, which set off an even more stupid wish in Mrs.

Grey, and what happened has struck me ever since as usual when people look to each

other for their happiness….”, elements of the earlier stripped-down style however still

survive in this version of the story. For example a paragraph which in P71/330 reads:

“The chainsaw starting up in the wood again, he’d saw while there was light. Nojoke to make a living, mouths to feed, a drink or two for some relief, all thisballsing.” (P71/330, 1)

21 becomes:

The chainsaw started up in the wood again; he’d saw while there was light. “No joketo make a living, a drink or two for some relief, all this ballsing. May be better if westayed in bed, conserve our energy, eat less,” (Nightlines 40)

22 While The Irish Press version of the story can be seen to have successfully dislocated the

story from it’s origins by removing many of the details included in “The Aeroplane”,

McGahern then re-imagined the story for the Nightlines collection. This was achieved by

the addition of new details and by changing the style and point of view. In practical

terms this required the addition of a prologue and epilogue to the story.

23 While one can clearly see that even the Nightlines version of “Christmas” owes

something to John McGahern’s own experience, the story “The Recruiting Officer”

draws in part on the experiences of a teaching colleague and friend of McGahern’s, Tom

Jordan. According to Declan Kiberd, while teaching in Belgrove National School,

“because McGahern didn't sing, he swapped classes with a fine teacher named Tom

Jordan, who did.” Writing an obituary for McGahern in The Irish Times Kiberd goes on to

say that:

McGahern remained close to Tom Jordan (who was famous in the school for sayingthe Angelus with his eyes shut tight - on one notorious day, he blessed himself soforcefully that he somehow set a box of matches in his jacket pocket on fire). Afterhis retirement, Jordan went for a holiday with John and Madeline in Co. Leitrimevery year, hoping to convert them to the ways of the righteous, but neversucceeding. But they loved his visits and the tenacity of his conviction. (Kiberd)

24 The John McGahern Archive includes two letters from Tom Jordan addressed to John

McGahern. One of the letters dated 3 December 1968 consists primarily of an account of

Jordan’s last days as a Christian Brother. This information, which may have been

included in the letter at McGahern’s prompting, is incorporated in John McGahern’s

short story “The Recruiting Officer” which was first published in Nightlines. While

Jordan’s account of leaving the Christian Brothers is the only incident in McGahern’s

story that can be documented as having sprung from Jordan’s own experiences, it

seems likely that other incidents – the account of The Brothers going swimming for

example – also have their origins in Jordan’s own recollections of his time as a Christian

Brother.

25 The John McGahern Archive includes just two handwritten drafts, several handwritten

fragments and part of a typescript draft of “The Recruiting Officer”. One of the

handwritten drafts P71/397 relates to the first half of the story, the other P71/398

relates to the second half of the story. As a result it is not possible for a researcher to

analyse the evolution of the story in the same way “Christmas” can be analysed.

However the origins of two passages in the story can be traced to other documents in

the archive. One of these passages has its origins in Tom Jordan’s letter, the other is

related to a passage in McGahern’s unpublished novel “The End or the Beginning of

Love”.


25

26 The central character and narrator of “The Recruiting Officer” is a former Christian

Brother now working as a national school teacher in a rural school. The story takes

place over the course of a school day and also includes a number of flashbacks to the

narrator’s time as Christian Brother. During the school day the school is visited first by

the school’s manager and parish priest Canon Reilly, and later by a Christian Brother.

The priest is there to punish one of the pupils for stealing from the poor box while the

Christian Brother is a recruiting officer for the order.

27 A version of one passage from the story appears in a typescript draft of McGahern’s

unpublished novel “The End or The Beginning of Love” (P71/8) and also in a hand

written draft of the same work (P71/1). As John McGahern was working in Belgrove

National School with Tom Jordan when he wrote the novel, it is certainly possible that

Jordan’s own experience inspired the passage which describes the recruiting officer’s

pitch to the senior boys. In “The Recruiting Officer” the narrator standing outside the

school overhears the recruiting officer’s speech to the boys, though he might just as

well be recalling his own recruitment into the order. In the handwritten draft of “The

End or the Beginning of Love”, the protagonist Jude listens to a similar speech from a

Christian Brother. The Christian Brother’s speech is quoted directly in the handwritten

draft of “The End or The Beginning of Love” and begins:

My dear, honest, God-fearing, Christian boys of Carrick-on-Shannon and district Iwish to take you this beautiful July morning to a lake-shore in Galilee. The sun isshining on the lake as it is shining on your beautiful little lake before the school,only the rays are fiercer, the glint of sky on the water a deeper blue. At the edge ofthe lake a row of palm trees are standing and all about stretch the hot sands. Nowmy dear boys, you will see a small group of bearded fisherman - roughly clothed,ragged, a fierce tired look about their face. Ah! But my dear boys, the heartsbeneath rough appearances are of solid gold, now priceless in the kingdom ofheaven…” (P71/1, 3)

28 In the typescript draft of the novel the speech is described rather than quoted

“Carefully he created his scene: a blazing hot day, golden sands, people listening in the

shade of trees, boats a little way off shore.” (P71/8, 63) In the published version of “The

Recruiting Officer” McGahern reverts to direct speech, however it’s clear that only a

smattering of the speech is being quoted, “‘Hot sands,’ his words drift out. ‘Palm trees,

glittering sea, tired after fishing all the night and washing their nets, tall dark man comes

through the palms down to the water…’” (Nightlines, 163)

29 One of the handwritten fragments of “The Recruiting Officer” describes the narrator’s

dismissal from the Christian Brothers. This passage is not present in any other

handwritten drafts of the story and is paginated a-c (P71/399). The use of letters rather

than numbers as pagination is usually an indication that a passage is to be inserted in a

story or novel. This handwritten fragment is very similar but not identical to the same

section in the published version of the story.

30 In his letter Jordan describes how he left the Christian Brothers in 1945 before taking

his final vows. He writes: “Anyhow I didn’t apply for my final vows and no effort was

made to persuade me. Often the defaulter is summoned to G.H.Q. and talked into

staying on, not in my case.” (P71/1174) In places the details of Jordan’s account of his

dismissal are repeated almost exactly in the short story. For example a passage from

the story reads:


26

Old Cogger showed me the letter. I was to get a suit of clothes, underwear, railwayticket and one pound. It revived me immediately. I told him the underwear I hadwould do and he raised the one pound to five. (Nightlines 166)

31 According to Jordan’s letter:

He showed me the letter. I was to get a suit of clothes, underwear, my ticket homeand £1. I told him the underwear I had would do and he raised the £1 to £5, tellingme to keep it quiet or he would be called to account for it. (P71/1174)

32 In other places details are changed. In the most obvious example of an attempt to

“dislocate” the story from its origins, the source of the narrator’s unease in a café the

day he left the order is changed. According to his letter, Jordan “[w]ent into a café. I’ll

never forget how I started and blushed when the waitress said: Yes Sir? First time

called ‘Sir’. My first contact with…” The ellipsis appears in the actual letter, presumably

Jordan is referring to his first contact with a woman after leaving the order. In the

published version of Nightlines this incident becomes “Though what I remember most

was the shock of the sir when the waiter said ‘thank you, sir,’ as I paid him for the cup

of tea I had on the train.” On the surface a recently “released” Christian Brother’s first

contact with a woman might be considered a more dramatic incident than his first

experience of being called “Sir”. This example illustrates the strength of McGahern’s

ability to “re-imagine” an incident. Rather than focusing on the protagonist’s liberation

from enforced celibacy and his first contact with a woman, McGahern instead focuses

on the experience of being addressed as “sir”, illustrative as it is of the protagonist’s

“first freedom” after years of wearing “the black clothes and white half-collar” and

being “surrounded by the rules of the order in its monastery;” (Nightlines, 151). This has

the effect of drawing the reader’s attention to the more mundane aspects of the

transition from the regimented and institutionalised life of a Christian Brother to the

secular world. The focus on the less obvious point from the original letter also makes

for a better-formed character in the story. In the context of the story, that well-

remembered, if simple, “first freedom” is followed by fear, loneliness and ultimately

regular “infusions of whiskey at the Bridge Bar”. (Nightlines, 167)

33 Examination of the drafts of John McGahern’s novels and short stories provides a great

insight into the writer’s work. The stories “Christmas” and “The Recruiting Officer” are

of interest for different reasons. The large number of drafts of “Christmas” and the fact

that the earliest drafts pre-date the final published version by seven or more years

make the material relating to the story particularly useful for comparison with other

works written by McGahern during the same period. While there are far fewer drafts of

“The Recruiting Officer”, the story includes one of a number of examples in McGahern’s

work where versions of passages from his unpublished first novel appear in later

works. The story also provides a rare example of documentary evidence of the origins

of a passage which was later “reinvented, re-imagined and somehow dislocated”. This

article has looked at the genesis and evolution of two of McGahern’s stories in isolation.

While the task would no doubt be time consuming, a comparative study of the drafts of

several of McGahern’s works would no doubt lead to greater insights into McGahern’s

technique and development as a writer.

34 The John McGahern Archive can be accessed in the Special Collections Reading Room of the

James Hardiman Library. A comprehensive descriptive list of the material is available in the

Reading Room, and a full online version can be accessed on the Library’s website at

www.archives.library.nuigalway.ie/mcgahern


27

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Dalley, Jan. “A walk down the lanes, an acclaimed novelist revisits a troubled childhood for his

first non-fiction work.” London: Financial Times, 24 September 2005: Weekend Magazine, 30.

Jordan, Tom. P71/1174, Letter to John McGahern, 3 December 1968, James Hardiman Library

Archives, NUI Galway.

Kiberd, Declan. “Teachings of a Master”. The Irish Times, 1 April 2006.

John Killen (ed.). Dear Mr. McLaverty: The Literary Correspondence of John McGahern and Michael

McLaverty 1959-1980. Belfast: The Linen Hall Library, 2006.

McGahern, John. P71/1, Handwritten draft of part of “The End or The Beginning of Love”

[undated], James Hardiman Library Archives, NUI Galway.

---. P 71/8, Typescript draft of part of “The End or The Beginning of Love” [undated], James

Hardiman Library Archives, NUI Galway.

---. P 71/319 Handwritten draft of part of “Christmas” [undated], James Hardiman Library


---. P 71/319 Handwritten fragments of “Christmas” [undated], James Hardiman Library Archives,

NUI Galway.

---. P 71/324, Typescript draft of “Christmas” bearing the title “The Aeroplane”, [undated], James

Hardiman Library Archives, NUI Galway.

---. P 71/325, Typescript draft of “Christmas” bearing the title “Something For Himself”,

[undated], James Hardiman Library Archives, NUI Galway.

---. P 71/329 Handwritten draft of “Christmas” [undated], James Hardiman Library Archives, NUI

Galway.

---. P 71/330 Typescript draft of “Christmas” [undated], James Hardiman Library Archives, NUI

Galway.

---.“Christmas”, The Irish Press, 27 April 1968.

---. P 71/335 Typescript draft of “Christmas” bearing the title “Each in Their World” [undated],

James Hardiman Library Archives, NUI Galway.

---. P 71/338 Handwritten draft of part of “Christmas” [undated], James Hardiman Library


---. P 71/397 Handwritten draft of part of “The Recruiting Officer” [undated], James Hardiman

Library Archives, NUI Galway.

---. P71/398 Handwritten draft of part of “The Recruiting Officer” [undated], James Hardiman


---. P 71/399 Handwritten fragments of “The Recruiting Officer” [undated], James Hardiman


---. Nightlines. London: Faber and Faber, 1970.

---. Creatures of the Earth: New and Selected Stories. London: Faber and Faber, 2006.


28

McKeon, Belinda. “‘Robins Feeding With the Sparrows’: The Protestant ‘Big House’ in the Fiction

of John McGahern”. Irish University Review: A Journal of Irish Studies. Vol. 35, N°. 1. Ed. Anne

Fogarty, 2006.

Whyte, James. History, Myth, and Ritual in the Fiction of John McGahern: Strategies of Transcendence.

Lewiston, Queenstown, Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2002.

RÉSUMÉS

The John McGahern Archive at The James Hardiman Library, National University of Ireland

Galway includes drafts of all McGahern’s works. The archive includes over twenty drafts of

McGahern’s story “Christmas.” While the essential narrative of the story remains the same, many

details in the earlier drafts of the story which correspond with McGahern’s own biography are

removed in later drafts. Later versions of the story include the addition of details which serve to

distance the story further from McGahern’s own experience. During the course of the story’s

evolution, McGahern experimented with a number of different styles. The origins of certain

passages in the story “The Recruiting Officer” can be traced back to McGahern’s unpublished first

novel “The End or the Beginning of Love”. Other elements of the story can be traced back to a

letter addressed to John McGahern from his friend and teaching colleague Tom Jordan.

AUTEURS

FERGUS FAHEY

Fergus Fahey is an archivist working in The James Hardiman Library at The National University

of Ireland, Galway. He was responsible for processing and listing the John McGahern Archives

that was deposited at the University in 2003. He co-wrote an article in N.U.I. Galway’s recent

publication John McGahern at NUI Galway. He has been responsible for listing a number of

collections in the James Hardiman Library’s Archive, including the papers of Abbey Theatre

actors Arthur Shields and Barry Fitzgerald and the papers of Ruairí Ó Brádaigh a founder

member of the Provisional I.R.A.


29

Reading John McGahern's "Love ofthe world" a fistful of imagesLiliane Louvel

1 Let me start the reading of this story with a personal memory dating back to the time

when I stayed with John and Madeline McGahern in Colgate University, Hamilton, NY.

John McGahern had been invited as visiting professor, a position he had already

occupied several times before. This was well-known territory. I had the privilege of

following one of the phases of his writing the latest of his short stories. One day, he

came and asked me to read one of the drafts of the story. We went through it and we

agreed one of the passages still sounded a bit awkward. He more or less disappeared for

three days. Then he came back with a new draft. The former rather long passage about

Callaghan’s sexual preferences for older women had been very much abridged into the

following:

From a very young age he was drawn to older women: ‘Callaghan doesn’t want thetrouble of schooling them; he likes his breaching done’ was joked to cover suspicionand resentment of any deviation. What pang of pleasure passing them might theybe missing? They too would kill the wildfowl though they had no taste for the darkmeat.

2 Then John McGahern started to explain what kind of work he had been doing. He had

spent some time in the University Library to try and find a suitable word that would

condense into one closely-knit phrase what he had previously developed at greater

length. Thus he had come upon “breach” which articulated three terrains: that of

horses, of agriculture and the earth, and of women. And of course “breach” entails a

violent action of rupture, a disruption of order and of the law, which is what happens in

the story. The polysemy of the word1 enabled McGahern to condense in one sentence

the complex stakes of the story and the crucial role of Callaghan in the final disaster.

Then he further showed me how he decided to express the passage of time using the

flight of birds. I told him I wished my students had been there and heard him as a

validation of what they took as my own erratic developments on the use of metaphors

and other literary devices. Tempus fugit was a phrase borrowed from one of McGahern’s


30

early memories he liked to quote. The inscription figured on a sundial on the wall of

one of the schools he attended and this he illustrated in the short story under scrutiny.

3 I will have occasion to analyze the use of bird images in the course of this paper which

will concentrate on the particular use of images and metaphors as a means of

concentrating the energy of a short story. This double entendre of McGahern’s is also

part and parcel of his use of irony and paradoxes. He was a great one for humour but

could also use scathing irony when he disapproved of his contemporaries. “Love of the

World” bears traces of this.

4 Then I will try to show that a central image condenses the whole story, perhaps true to

one of McGahern’s only texts about his work: “The Image” 2

When I reflect on the image two things from which it cannot be separated come:the rhythm and the vision. The vision, that still and private world which each of uspossesses and which others cannot see, is brought to life in rhythm—rhythm beinglittle more than the instinctive movements of the vision as it comes to life andbegins its search for the image in a kind of grave, grave of the images of deadpassions and their days. Art is an attempt to create a world in which we can live: if not for long or forever,still a world of imagination over which we can reign, and by reign I mean to reflectpurely on our situation though this created world of ours, this Medusa’s mirrorallowing us to see and to celebrate even the totally intolerable.3

5 This fine text written years before “Love of the World” perfectly applies here. The story

holds before the reader’s eyes a Medusa’s mirror in which “the totally intolerable” is

reflected. In this essay he develops one of his favourite ideas, that of the link between

image and imagination and how one strong image often triggers the writing of a story

or a novel. In a public reading he gave at Poitiers University in 1993, he declared that

the image of lorries parked along the Thames gave rise to the writing of Amongst

Women, an image which eventually disappeared from the novel. “Love of the World”

also carries some of McGahern’s own world and particular inner landscape. I will

pinpoint some recurring features which bring cohesion to his work as a whole, making

of each separate story or novel, a part of a very strong œuvre building up a microcosm.

6 Finally, I will try to show that this short story full of silence, sound and fury actually

tackles the question of change, evil changes and good ones, and what they entail and

bring about in people’s lives. The narrator’s final stand takes on a metaphysical and

ethic dimension.

7 To sum up the story, told by one of the villagers: the Harkins return to live in a small

Irish town after the heart attack of the young father of three who was a much admired

football player as well as a guard. The story follows the course of his slow physical and

moral degradation after reaching the climax of his football career. He turns out to be

unable to adapt to change and fails at passing the Sergeant’s Exam. As his wife, Kate,

claims she has a right to work, he becomes more and more violent with her, wrongly

suspecting her of having an affair with a former friend named Callaghan, himself

engaging in drinking bouts and going out with women. His pent-up resentment at her

taking up a job results in his violent throwing her out of the house. It reaches a climax

when he shoots her. As she falls down, her hand remains shut tight for it still contains a

handful of currants. He will then put an end to his life while in jail awaiting his trial.

8 The story is unusual as it deals with quite a long period of time, over ten years actually,

corresponding to the Harkins’ life away from the small town. The time span runs

backwards to the beginnings of Harkin as a football star, then to his marriage to Kate,


31

the birth of their children and then his heart attack and to the slow degradation of the

couple’s relationship ending in her violent death then in his. At the end of the story,

the children are at university and Maggie, Kate’s mother, is chosen as “Personality of

the Year”. All in all, the story must cover something like twenty years, a very long time

for a short story usually dealing with compact events.

Thresholds

9 I remember walking once with John McGahern in the fields behind their house

overlooking a lake. We were discussing his work and the kind of exacting task it was.

Finding the right endings was particularly tough: “the ending is not right” he would

say about the work in progress and it took him a long time and a lot of rewriting to find

the right-sounding ending. This is why his endings sound so true to purpose. “Love of

the World”’s ending is no exception to the rule. It is a particularly fine one. It answers

the question suggested by the title which is full of irony and double entendre as “love of

the world” seems to ask: love of what world? Whose world? When one realizes that the

story, is the story of a human being killing another one, a story of violence…what sort

of a world can one love then? Is it love of the world or love of life? This is the very

lesson Maggie, Kate’s mother, honoured by her small town for her resilience4, ironically

teaches the narrator at the end of the story, reasserting her love of life and her desire

to live. “I was—in life” is her way of explaining what she felt but they are also heart-

rending words uttered by a mother whose daughter met a violent death. She had no

choice and then made the most of it. The presence of the beautiful night and of the

world are there to assert the beauty of being alive in the narrator’s eyes as he utters the

coda of the story:

“What did I do? I did nothing. What else could I do? I was—in life.”She was silent then until we turned in round the lake. Even where I am now it’s stillall very interesting. Sometimes even far, far too interesting. The moon was brighton the lake, turning it into a clear, still sky. The fields above the lake and the darkshapes of the hedges stood out. Maggie sat quietly in the car while I got out to openthe gate. Only a few short years before she would have insisted on getting out andwalking the whole way in on her own. Wild fowl scattered from the reeds along theshore out towards the centre of the lake as soon as the car door opened. Theysquawked and shrieked for a while before turning into a dark silent huddle. Closeby, a white moon rested on the water. There was no wind. The stars in their placeswere clear and fixed. Who would want change since it will come without wanting?Who this night would not want to live? (41, 42)

10 Once one has read the final paragraph of the story, the opening paragraph, as we shall

see, acquires its complete meaning and the reader fully grasps its innuendoes. The

incipit displays an opposition between the acknowledgement of quiet, — the indication

of silence and the tendency of “eyes” to be downcast when violence erupts — and the

evocation of “violent and shocking” events, of the ensuing “shock wave”. It cryptically

announces what is going to happen, as the voice of the narrator sounds proleptic and

ominous. It seems to suggest that although “Nothing much ever happens”, when it

does… that although everything is quiet, when there is noise…:

It is very quiet here. Nothing much ever happens. We have learned to tell the criesof the birds and the animals, the wing beats of the swans crossing the house, thenoises of the different motors that batter about on the roads. Not many people likethis quiet. There’s a constant craving for word of every sound and sighting and any


32

small happening. Then when something violent and shocking happens, nobody willspeak at all after the first shockwave passes into belief. Eyes usually wild for everyscrap of news and any idle word will turn away or search the ground.(1)

11 The incipit deals with general truths about life in that area, the narrator’s voice

affecting to resort to common knowledge using generalizations such as: “it” “we”, “not

many people”, “nobody”, “eyes”, “any idle word”. There is no singular presence but, as

in a chorus, the overall attitude of a community becomes palpable. And after all, “Love

of the World” is the story of such a small community living in a far-off isolated still

rural place such as the part of Ireland J. McGahern chose to live in. The reader feels he

is caught in a sort of paradox, for if he reads about general truths and feels a

dehumanized presence (only eyes and words are evoked without any identifiable

subject), he nevertheless recognizes the outlines of a very particular place in terms of

location and landscape.

“Out of darkness”: Metaphors and images

12 “The image is the basis of all writing; the writer’s business is to pull the image that

moves us out of darkness.”5 In this story images play a crucial role as they are subtly

woven into it and achieve its cohesion. One in particular, to me, remains as the central

image of the story, as I will argue further down.

13 The bird metaphor is a highly developed one and it spreads like a net all over the story.

In the previously-mentioned passage about “breaching” women, an analogy is offered

by the villagers resorting to bird metaphor: “What pang of pleasure passing them

might they be missing? They too would kill the wildfowl though they had no taste for

the dark meat.” Naturally enough, to understand something which is beyond their

grasp, the rural townspeople will resort to the world they know, that of hunting and

fishing which is going to play such a part in the Harkins’ lives too. Towards the end of

the story, the aftermaths of the double drama may be felt:

A silence came down around all that happened. Nobody complained about thenormal quiet. Bird cries were sweet. The wingbeat of the swan crossing the housegave strength. The noise of a recognizable old diesel beating around the roadbrought reassurance. The long light of day crossing the lake seeped us in privilegeand mystery and infinite reflections that nobody wanted to question.Gradually, the sense of quiet weakened. The fact that nothing much was happeningceased to comfort. A craving for change began again. The silence around themurder was broken. All sorts of blame was apportioned as we noticed each yearthat passed across the face of the lake, quickening and gathering speed beforeswinging round again, until crowds of years seemed suddenly in the air above thelake, all gathering for flight.(40)

14 This passage is the passage J. McGahern also worked on in Colgate showing how it was a

means of conflating together the passage of time and the presence of birds. How to

render visible the flight of years if not by using the image of those who can literally fly,

i.e. birds, and above all those wonderful mysterious birds: swans. How to contract in

one metaphor the passage of time, the birdlike years all ready to gather for flight? This

is how one should read “each year that passed across the face of the lake, quickening

and gathering speed before swinging round again.” It required but the replacing of

“birds” by “years” to reach the strength of the metaphor. It also required the minutest

observation of birds’ flight and their movements. This McGahern did beautifully.


33

15 It is remarkable that the same elements: birds, swans, the lake, the noise of motors

“beating around the road” should recur in this extract as in the opening paragraph

after slight modifications such as that of the verbs: “that batter around on the roads”.

This passage can also be considered as the development of what was contained in the

opening paragraph: “Then when something violent and shocking happens, nobody will

speak at all after the first shockwave passes into belief. Eyes usually wild for every

scrap of news and any idle word will turn away or search the ground.” finds its

counterpart in the final passage: “A silence came down around all that happened.

[…] The silence around the murder was broken.” Then “the whole racing wheel” started

again before coming to “a sudden brief stop when Maggie was the astonishing choice

for ‘Personality of the Year’”(40)

16 When Callaghan drives back after the murder he disturbs wild fowl:

he[…] found himself driving out to the lake, parking by the gate. As he got out, hedisturbed wild fowl in the reeds along the shore, and they scattered, shrieking,towards the centre. There was no moon but there were clear reflections on thewater. Never did life seem so mysterious and inhospitable. They might as well all beout there in the middle of the lake with the wild fowl. (37)

17 At the very end of the story, wild fowl reappear: “Wild fowl scattered from the reeds

along the shore out towards the centre of the lake as soon as the car door opened. They

squawked and shrieked for a while before turning into a dark silent huddle”(41), which

provides one more echo of the introductory paragraph. Thus we can see that the bird

imagery is one of the red threads that stitches the story together and creates in the

reader’s mind a powerful visual system he will keep as a kind of identikit of the story. It

works at the macrolevel of the story. Whereas at the microlevel, inscribed in it, as it

were, and very powerful, another image erupts towards the end linked to violence.

18 The central image of the story to me, that which stuck in my mind after first reading it,

is contained in the following passage. It is a very humble and domestic image which

encompasses the whole drama. It textually appears at Kate’s death:

Beforehand she had been eating currants nervously from a glass jar on thesideboard, and she lifted [her son] awkwardly because the currants were still in herhand and she did not want them to scatter. […] As she turned her back, she heard asharp click, but did not turn to see him lift the gun. One hand was reaching for thedoor when she fell, the other closed tight. When it was opened, it held a fistful ofsmall black currants. (35, 36)

19 This is a potent image of holding onto life at the same time as it shows the derision of

those small black currants held tight as a treasure. Held in her hand as a sign of life,

they are then let loose when her fist is forced open after her death. It also moves the

reader with the strength of a trivial and yet potent detail, that of those small black

currants which had been picked up and will never be eaten. But another metaphorical

fist had already been evoked in the story before. Kate’s mother commented upon

Harkin’s character after his first visit to them as Kate’s betrothed: “There’s no use

wishing […] we’ll have to make the best fist of it we can.” (my emphasis). Another sign of

bitter irony, it is also a sign of fate.

20 Image can also serve humour and irony and McGahern had a great sense of both: for

instance the choice of a comparison could serve to pass a scathing remark on his

contemporaries’ flaws. Commenting on Callaghan’s grief at his uncle’s death, the

narrator makes up a comparison allying feelings and the dark clothes worn for

mourning, often out of hypocrisy: “When his uncle died leaving him everything, the


34

plain grief he showed did not look put on like a dark suit for the day.”(26) McGahern’s

humour has often been ignored, a shame really. The narrator uses all kinds of irony

starting with irony of fate when “a young, vigorous man struck down without warning

elicited natural sympathy.” This struck-down young man will also be the agent of the

cruel fate he will bring about on his wife and children. Another instance of bitter irony

is provided when describing one of the football games Harkin plays before his heart

attack: “Mayo lost but Harkin had played his heart out at centrefield.” (7, my emphasis)

21 One of the recurring symbols of McGahern’s is that of life seen as a wheel. “Love of the

World” uses this potent image as well. One of his earliest stories is entitled “Wheels”6

and circular images are a recurrent process structuring most of the work including the

novels7. In “Love of the World” Callaghan experiences the wheel of life and for a time

escapes it: “Lazily, [Callaghan] had believed that one day he’d marry a young woman, a

doctor or a teacher, somebody with work and interests of her own, and take his place

on the second circle of the wheel before being turned out again on the large invisible

turning wheel.”(27) This sounds as an echo of a passage in “Wheels”: “I knew the wheel:

fathers become children to their sons who repay the care they got when they were

young, and on the edge of dying the fathers become young again; but the luck of a

death and a second marriage had released me from the last breaking on this ritual

wheel”8, the image coming as the concluding final “Rustle of the boat through the

bulrushes as we went to Moran’s well for spring water in dry summers, […] all the vivid

sections of the wheel we watched so slowly turn, impatient for the rich whole that

never came but that all the preparations promised.”9

22 “Love of the World”, one of John McGahern’s last stories, is full of the world he

constructed in his other work. Images, as we have seen, but also, people, places,

landscape, sensations…

Recurring features: familiar silhouettes in a familiarlandscape

23 Some of the characters in the short story are familiar to the reader of McGahern’s

works. The presence of Callaghan’s uncle reminds one of The Pornographer which opens

with a visit of the narrator to his uncle in hospital. The narrator’s uncle also plays a

major role in That They May Face the Rising Sun. He is nicknamed the shah. Garda and

Guards, of course are also prominent characters looming large in the work. They count

among the figures of authority, fathers, priests, who often exert some kind of violence.

Their first targets often are women as well as young children: this is the case in The

Barracks, The Dark, “Korea” 10, “The Gold Watch”11, “Wheels”12, among others. This

painful relationship reaches the dimensions of family archetypes. In “Love of the

World”, Harkin is true to character and becomes more and more violent. An incident

which occurred while a guard reveals his brutality:

Harkin was in the newspaper again, but not in the sport pages. He had been with hisfriend Guard McCarthy late one night when their patrol car was called to adisturbance at an itinerant encampment on the outskirts of the town. A huge fire ofcar tyres and burning branches lit up the vans and mobile homes, the cars andmounds of metal scrap. Stones and burning branches were thrown at the garda car.[…] All the itinerant witnesses swore that both guards had jumped from the carwith drawn batons and provoked the assault.(10)


35

24 After the bloody encounter both guards were moved to other districts and Harkin lost

all hope of promotion.

25 The pleasure experienced by the little boy walking by his mother’s side in the short

story reminds one of the same kind of devoted love displayed in The Barracks and in “A

Slip-up”13 for instance. In this story the old man remembers walking by his mother’s

side as he is walking by his wife’s side:

and it brought him the feeling of long ago when he walked round the lake with hismother, potholes and stones of the lane, the boat shapes at intervals in the longlake wall to allow the carts to pass one another when they met, the oilclothshopping bag he carried for her in the glow of chattering as he walked in theshelter of her shadow. 14

26 The soft sounds of the alliteration in “the shelter of her shadow” finely renders the

tenderness of the feeling which may develop between a small boy and his mother. In

“Love of the World” the little boy’s love replaces the father’s lost one: “Kate must have

felt the changes ten years can bring as she walked the curving path through the fields

above the lake and down by the tall trees to the house. It was her son’s hand she now

held instead of Harkin’s, his grip more demanding than ever her husband’s had

been.”(14) And Kate has a particularly close relationship with her son, somewhat along

the lines of the one John McGahern shared with his mother as he describes his walks

with her in Memoir15: “When I was three years old I used to walk a lane like these lanes

to Lisacarn School with my mother.”16

27 The story is strongly anchored in Ireland as onomastics testifies to with such names as

Michael Doherty, Callaghan, McCarthy, and toponyms: Athlone, Achill, County Mayo,

Dublin. “That summer Mayo won the Connacht Championship and beat an Ulster team

to reach the All-Ireland Final against Cork.”(7) This sentence also reflects the narrator’s

strong liking for and deep knowledge of football games, a feature he shared with the

writer and which can be found in several stories too. The Royal Hotel also is a recurring

feature in McGahern’s stories and novels. Life is restricted in a small community where

everyone knows everyone. Thus Callaghan’s former affair with the headmistress of the

school did not remain a secret for long: “but there was nearly always someone

connected with the town who saw them in a hotel or restaurant or bar, and once,

during the long school holiday, together on a London street.”(26) Great attention is

paid to the depiction of life in a small town: “I walked about the empty town, had one

drink in a quiet bar that also sold shoes and boots across from the town clock, until it

was time to take Maggie home”. The activities of this bar are typical of small town pubs

in Ireland, often combining several trades such that of a grocer’s shop or even of a

funeral parlour together with the selling of spirits. It anchors the story in a precise

location, a there and then. Thus the reader may literally “see” the backcloth of the

story onto which the characters are as many silhouetted shadows.

28 The landscape also is the same constantly from story to story, with the exception of the

Dublin stories such as “My Love my Umbrella” or “Parachutes”17. Thus the description

of Maggie and James’s farm by the lake when Kate first takes Harkin to visit his

prospective father and mother-in-law is powerfully rendered with few but very visual

details: “They parked the car at the lake gate to walk the curving path through the

fields above the lake and down to the house in its shelter of trees.”(3)

29 Great attention is also paid to sensations. The sense of hearing is alert: “Blackbirds and

thrushes racketed in the hedges. A robin sang on a thorn”, a phrase repeated further


36

down —“the blackbirds and thrushes racketed. A robin sang.”— as Kate goes to visit her

parents with her little boy. Close attention is paid to minute details such as smells the

narrator takes great care to qualify as accurately as possible using carefully chosen

adjectives and plant names: “Close to the lake she smelled the rank water weed and the

sharp wild mint.” The recurrence of “the old apple tree heavy with green cooking

apples” on Kate’s visit, then as “the old Brambley heavy again with cookers” watched

by the narrator during an important footbal match reminds one of the pear tree Bertha

watches in K. Mansfield’s eponymous story18.

30 Nature is all important and provides easy comparisons to those who live close to it.

When the Harkins are struck by Guard Harkin’s heart attack, they are welcomed back

to town and “concern circled around them” “as if they were garden plants hit with

blight or an early frost.” The comparison chosen stems from a farmer’s concern with

weather hazards.

31 The lakes, the farm, the fields, are important to Kate: “These small fields above the lake

were part of her life. Away from here she often walked them in her mind, and, without

her noticing, this exercise had gradually replaced the earlier exercise of prayer.” This

tendency of some of McGahern’s characters to walk in their minds the fields of their

childhood or absent landscapes, recurs throughout his work. This is the case in “A Slip-

up”, a story in which an old man, waiting for his wife in front of Tesco’s, is so absorbed

in achieving his day’s work on his lost farm that he gets left behind. This is also another

way of illustrating what the guards in The Barracks called their “patrols of the

imagination”, that is writing down in their ledger imaginary patrols to satisfy their

superior and hide the fact they never went out of the barracks. An exercise which

taught the young boy in the novel what fiction (and lying) was like19.

32 But this story could also read as a fable with a moral at the end. Although it is strongly

anchored in a so-called realistic background, it is also a tale of violence and we have

seen20 that McGahern complained of BBC 4 turning it into a thriller. But above all it is a

story about change and life, mystery and bewilderment and metaphysical questions.

Far from formulating a lesson or some kind of teaching, an aim the author would not

have acknowledged, it still repeatedly passes comments on change and what it takes to

try and live as best as possible in this world in which although everything seems to be

quiet, nothing nor anyone is sheltered from violence.

The wheel of change

33 This short story is about change in a dull community where paradoxically “nothing

much ever happens”. Actually it closely studies the slow evolution of people and how

change is felt and brought about. It may be due to ambition, defeat, love, greed,

frustration … Change is due first and foremost to a sea change in Harkin’s feelings who

first reached great fame thanks to his football games before knowing illness, decline

and forgetfulness. Change also conditions Harkin’s and Callaghan’s relationship as

Harkin gradually becomes Callaghan’s rival, not only concerning Kate, but also material

properties:

Once Harkin became involved with the tourists, an involvement that led naturallyto property dealing, he was probably relieved to be able to turn their mutualantipathy into rivalry because of the enormous change in the strength of theirrelative positions over the years.


37

A change had come to Callaghan’s life that made him more vulnerable than he knew.His beloved mother died. His brother married. […] he had to move out into his ownlife ; but what life ? (27, my emphasis)

34 Change also happens in relationships: “Gradually, the children got used to their

changed lives. There were times when they complained that she was not like other

mothers”(24) and it materializes as Kate’s sense of impending change:

‘On Achill it was this bad, but in a different way, and I knew then it couldn’t go on. Iknew something had to happen. What happened was the last thing I wanted orwished, but it did happen. I have the same feeling that something is about to happennow that will change everything. It has to happen.’ (31, my emphasis)

35 These words spoken by Kate are also loaded with a sense of doom and dramatic irony as

what is going to happen will put an end to her life. The strong emphasis put on

“happen” reflected by the numerous repetitions of the word—five times in only two

sentences — shows the urgency of her plea and is endowed with the power of an

incantation. Dramatic events will prove her sense of foreboding true.

36 And change begins to make itself felt as Harkin’s attitude to Kate all of a sudden

changes: “The silent almost unbearable strain in the evenings with Harkin and the

children changed without warning. He became alarmingly friendly.” He offers a kind of

reconciliation she is wary to accept as it is too sudden. “The friendliness increased. Her

nervousness grew intense. She had to force herself to go to the house.” Then she

acknowledges to Callaghan: “I can’t go back. I know everything is about to change. That

is all I know.” And the greatest change of all will be brought about by violent deeds.

37 Change also is made palpable on a larger social level as the country changes little by

little when the foreigners bring new money, habits and expectations:

During the ten years the Harkins had been away, tourism had grown rapidly. therewere now many guest houses, and foreigners had built summer houses by the lakesand were buying and converting old disused dwellings. They were mostly Germansand French, with a scattering of Swiss and Dutch - highly paid factory workers fromindustrial cities, attracted more to the hunting and fishing and cheap propertyprices than to the deserted beauty of the countryside.(12)

38 The arrival of foreigners and their new needs cause Harkin’s further degradation as he

looks after their summer houses to help a local guard who had developed this

“lucrative sideline” to his own work in the garda. Soon Harkin is master of the game

which he expands. But “these tourists did not return their catch to the water. The sport

was in the kill. As well as pheasant, duck, woodcock, pigeon, snipe, they shot songbirds,

thrushes, blackbirds, even larks.” It is perceptible that to the narrator, the killing of

small birds and not only of fowl is wrong. It is actually voiced a little lower down after

the description of the massacre of fish “heads of gutted pike were scattered round

every small shore”: “but everybody disliked the slaughter of the songbirds.” Unwritten

traditional rules which had been respected for ages have been brutally broken by

foreigners described as true vandals. References to old times, old ways of doing things,

suggest a feeling of nostalgia. When the rumour in town implies Kate and Callaghan

sleep together while Harkin has a German woman and others on the side, it is

expressed in terms referring to the country at large: “Old Ireland is coming along at a

great rate. There was a time you lay on the bed you made, but now it’s just the same as

a change of oil or tyres. […] Yes, my dear, old Ireland is certainly coming along.”

39 Another social mutation concerns woman’s work. It is only mentioned at the beginning

as the narrator notes that after the wedding “James told me that Harkin didn’t like his


38

wife working” but then it becomes a major problem when Kate asserts her wish for

autonomy and independence and takes up a job during one of her husband’s trips

abroad. She refuses to drop it, arousing Harkin’s anger. The relationships between men

and women seem to be changing in Ireland, Kate first and foremost, as the Germans or

the French remarked at first that she seemed to be very obedient and true to former

customs: “the tourists congratulated him on having an obedient, old-fashioned wife.”

But then as Kate asserts her own free will and refuses to correspond to this image of old

times, Harkin knows only one punishment for her. Nevertheless, reward will come to a

woman, Maggie, once she has brought up her three grand children and the town

decides to make her “Personality of the Year”. She stands as the wise woman of the

town and humbly delivers a courageous lesson of life.

40 The narrator eventually asserts that although the world seems to be fixed and calm,

“the stars in their places”, change will come inevitably. Consequently it is no use

desiring it for it will come, being part and parcel of human life:

Close by, a white moon rested on the water. There was no wind. The stars in theirplaces were clear and fixed. Who would want change since it will come withoutwanting? Who this night would not want to live? (41, 42)

41 In John McGahern’s obituary, Richard Pine remarked in The Guardian:

That he depicts people who have largely agreed to live lives of “quiet desperation”underlines the fact that he, and a few of his characters, most notably MichaelMoran in Amongst Women, could deal with desperation by absorbing andtransmuting it into something approaching a celebration: “The best of life is lifelived quietly, where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day, wherechange is imperceptible and the precious life is everything.”21

42 Precious life indeed, and fine writing too when it delivers unto the reader’s mind such

images as that of a white moon over a dark lake on a windless night and the memory of

the soft sound of the wings of swans suddenly flying away.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Louvel, Liliane. “The Barracks, Requiem pour un jour ordinaire”, John McGahern, Poitiers: La

Licorne, Special Issue John McGahern, ed. Jean Brihault, Liliane Louvel, Faculté des Lettres et des

Langues, 1995.

---. “Patrols of the Imagination: The Short Stories of John McGahern”, in Journal of the Short Story

in English, Special Issue, The Irish Short Story, Angers: Presses de l’Université d’Angers, Spring 2000.

Mansfield, Katherine. Selected Stories, London: Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1982.

McGahern, John. The Collected Stories, London: Faber and Faber 1992.

---. “The Image: Prologue to a Reading at the Rockefeller University”, in Canadian Journal of Irish

Studies, 17, n° 1, July 1991.

---. “Love of the World”, in Creatures of the Earth, New and Selected Stories, London; Faber and Faber,

2006.


39

---. Amongst Women, London: Faber and Faber, 1990.

---. The Pornographer, London: Faber and Faber, 1979.

---. That They May Face the Rising Sun, London: Faber and Faber, 2002.

---. The Barracks, London: Faber and Faber, 1963.

---. The Dark, London: Faber and Faber, 1965.

---. Memoir, London: Faber and Faber, 2005.

Sampson, Denis. Outstaring Nature’s Eye, The Fiction of John McGahern, Dublin: The Lilliput

Press, 1993.

RÉSUMÉS

This paper focuses on McGahern's particular use of images and metaphors as a means of

concentrating the energy of a short story. This double entendre of McGahern's is also part and

parcel of his use of irony and paradoxes. He was a great one for humour but could also use

scathing irony when he disapproved of his contemporaries. “Love of the World” bears traces of

this. I will try to show that a central image condenses the whole story perhaps true to one of

McGahern's only critical texts about his work: “The Image”. This fine text written years before

“Love of the World” perfectly applies here. It holds under the reader's eyes a Medusa's mirror in

which “the totally intolerable” is reflected. In this text he develops one of his favourite ideas,

that of the link between image and imagination and how one strong image often triggers the

writing of a story or a novel.

AUTEURS

LILIANE LOUVEL

Liliane Louvel is Professor of British literature at the University of Poitiers and specializes in

contemporary British literature and word/image relationship. She has written numerous articles

on this particular subject and published three books on the interrelationship between word and

image: L’Oeil du Texte (Toulouse PUM 1998), The Picture of Dorian Gray, Le double miroir de l'art

(Ellipses, 2000), Texte/image, images à lire et textes à voir (Rennes PUR 2002). She has also edited

three collections of essays on the subject published in EJES, La Licorne and PU Rennes II. She has

organized several conferences on the subject. Her work is currently being translated by Laurence

Petit and will be edited by Karen Jacobs. She has also worked extensively on John McGahern's

novels and short stories and co-edited La Licorne's special issue on John McGahern's work

together with Jean Brihault.


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Homesickness in John McGahern'sshort stories "Wheels" and "A slip-up"Ellen McWilliams

1 In Eavan Boland’s poem “Mise Eire”, a work that represents a transitional moment in

Irish literary feminism, Ireland appears as:

land of the Gulf Stream, the small farm, the scalded memory (7-9)

2 This is a description that resonates powerfully with the pastoral dimensions of the

male-centred tradition strongly associated with writers such as W.B. Yeats and J.M.

Synge, whom Boland seeks to write back to in her work. This landscape, one that is

immediately identifiable as Irish in the popular and literary consciousness, has an

important place in John McGahern’s writing, most particularly in his novels The Dark

(1965), Amongst Women (1990), and That They May Face the Rising Sun (2002). In Amongst

Women, which is perhaps McGahern’s most acclaimed work, the patriarchal Moran

defends the boundaries of his farm as if it were a garrison and the family home a

fortress, and the small farm becomes a backdrop against which Moran’s autocratic

control over his family is exercised, and from which his children must escape in order

to survive. The “small farm”, so often the scene of internecine warfare in Irish

literature and culture, receives an alternative treatment in McGahern’s short stories, in

particular in the stories “Wheels” and “A Slip-up”. This article will investigate how

these stories evince a relationship with the land that has much to say to that explored

in novels such as Amongst Women. These stories return to the landscape of the novel and

are primarily concerned with dramatizing the longing for, and consequences of, escape

from such bleak confinement. The conflict between the need and desire for escape and

a real or imaginary return to home is a central feature of these texts. “Wheels” depicts

a young man’s return from Dublin to his rural home place and his father’s heartbreak

at his son’s refusal to allow him to join him in his new life (although what his father is

not aware of is the extent of his son’s disappointment and loneliness in the city). In


41

dramatic contrast to Amongst Women, the returning son is punished with silence, not

because he has left home, but because he cannot see his way to taking his father with

him. “A Slip-up”, on the other hand, reveals how the memory of farming life haunts an

elderly man who, though he has lived for years in London, remains close to his farm

and native place in his imagination. In this story, the anguish and homesickness of the

main character is vividly conveyed in the way in which the rituals of the farm, the cycle

of living so carefully documented in Amongst Women, is replaced by a daily schedule

punctuated by shopping trips to Tesco’s. These stories respond to the enclosed space of

“Great Meadow” in Amongst Women in ways that productively complicate the

connection with the land so vividly represented in McGahern’s work and mark a new

development in his reading of rural Ireland in the late twentieth century.

3 It is well documented that Irish literature is, in a considerable part, a literature of exile.

The attempt to evade “the nets” of “nationality, language, religion” (A Portrait of the

Artist as a Young Man 22) made famous by writers such as Joyce and Beckett remains

important for more recent Irish writers, who have been compelled to take their place

alongside these formidable forebears in a tradition of literary exile. John McGahern,

like Edna O’Brien and other writers of their generation, suffered the full weight of the

oppressive power of Irish censorship in the 1960s, and was made to leave his post as a

school teacher following the publication of The Dark, a novel that takes a candid but

sensitive view of young male sexuality in rural Ireland. The complicated situation of

the Irish in exile (whether imposed or chosen) is a salient feature of discussions of

Joyce, as Ireland remains forever at the heart of his work. The complex personal and

literary paradigm of exile, laid down by writers such as Joyce, continues to haunt Irish

literature and McGahern’s work shows very Joycean symptoms of a tension between

escape and return, excommunication and reconciliation. His short stories, in particular

“Wheels” and “A Slip-up”, express this most acutely.

4 “Wheels” reconfigures the expected relationship between the exile and those left

behind and “A Slip-up” portrays an imaginative longing for a place that no longer

exists. Both of these situations are explorations of Irish homesickness or nostalgia as

the longed for state is always another place, always out of reach. Such longing is

capable of reaching back into the past, as well as into a projected future, and comes to

dominate the subject’s day-to-day reality. These stories serve, on one level, as a literary

counterpoint to the successful, sometimes melodramatic, packaging of nostalgic

representations of the Irish past associated with the commercial end of the Irish

literary market, but they also lend a new dimension to the representation of home and

land in McGahern’s own work. In Amongst Women, the Moran children’s real home is

suspended somewhere between London and “Great Meadow”, between the meaning of

their new lives and their preoccupation with their previous selves: “On the tides of

Dublin or London they were hardly more than specks of froth but together they were

the aristocratic Morans of Great Meadow, a completed world, Moran’s daughters” (2).

Their instincts for self-preservation mean that they are driven to escape their father’s

shadow; Moran controls the household with a megalomaniacal exactitude: “It was not

so much that she took things from the house – though his racial fear of the poorhouse

or famine was deep – but that she left the house at all. Any constant going out to

another house was a threat. In small things it showed” (68).

5 Moran’s need for absolute control over “small things” is continually displayed in the

way that he micro-manages the life of his family until they find the strength to break


42

free from his hold over them. At the same time, in an apparent reversal of this pattern

in the second half of the novel, the Moran children’s adult lives are punctuated by visits

home as, in spite of their father’s tyrannical hold over the house, they cannot resist the

lure of home and the thrall of his power.

6 The temporal structure of Amongst Women is cyclical. The repeated incantation of the

rosary and the recurrence of very familiar domestic scenes foreground how time moves

in circles, something that is echoed in the perennial round-trips to and from England in

the later stages of the novel. While it seems a source of oppression to the Morans when

they are young, each of the five children being obliged to contribute a decade of the

Rosary (the family is bound together by the very pattern of the sequence of prayers),

later on the rituals of home come to represent a much-needed fortification: “Each time

they came to Great Meadow they grew again into the wholeness of being the unique

and separate Morans” (94). Apart from each other and away from home, they feel

unsure of their positions in the world; home guarantees a security, which, though it

comes at a price, is absolute.

7 “Wheels” depicts another moment of return home, in this case to a small farm in the

West of Ireland, where the narrator’s father and stepmother subsist in a rapidly

disappearing community. Travelling down from Dublin to his native home west of the

River Shannon, he is joined by another returning emigrant on his way back from

working on a London building site. They unexpectedly find themselves on common

ground despite the national difference of their chosen exile; whether Dublin or London,

in this story, the metropolitan centre proves to be the imaginative other of the rural

landscapes of the West.

8 The narrator’s father’s smallholding, signified by the creamery cans attached to the

trailer, and his continued manual labour in old age, contrasts starkly with the citified

failure of his son. In spite of his discomfort, the son’s return is not without its nostalgic

moments, but he can only indulge in them at the end of the visit home, when safely on

the train back to Dublin:

I walked through the open carriages. There was nobody I knew. Through thewindows the fields of stone walls, blue roofs of Carrick, Shannon river. Sing forthem once First Communion Day O River Shannon flowing and a four-leaved shamrockgrowing, silver medal on the blue suit and white ankle socks in new shoes. Thefarther flows the river the muddier the water: the light was brighter on its upperreaches. Rustle of the boat through the bulrushes as we went to Moran’s well forspring water in dry summers, cool of watercress and bitterness of the wild cherriesshaken out of the whitethorn hedge […]. (10-11)

9 Fred Davis, in his study Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia, suggests that

nostalgia offers a means of revisiting and correcting the past:

The proclivity to cultivate appreciative attitudes toward former selves is closelyrelated to nostalgia’s earlier-noted tendency to eliminate from memory or, atminimum, severely to mute the unpleasant, the unhappy, the abrasive, and, most ofall, those lurking shadows of former selves about which we feel shame, guilt, orhumiliation. (37)

10 In this story, however, there is no elimination of such “lurking shadows”, as the

narrator’s other predominant memory is of the small but lethal acts of cruelty that his

father inflicted upon his stepmother in the days before his father regressed into the

infantile role preferred by him in old age. There is no obliteration of the past, no room

to rewrite history, as he recalls Rose’s disappointment at not being able to have


43

children of her own, and is reminded in excruciating detail of the malice that

interrupted the flow of his father’s relationship with his stepmother:

The noise of the blow came, she escaping to the fields, losing herself between thetree trunks till she’d grown cold and come in to sit numbly in a chair over the rakedfire till morning. […] The next day he’d dug the potatoes where the sheets hung onthe line between the two trees above the ridge, scattering clay on the sheets she’dscrubbed white for hours on the wooden scrubbing-board. (7)

11 The exchange between the tearful old man and his son represents a central conflict in

the Irish pastoral tradition, one that we are alerted to at the beginning of the story. The

story opens with the image of “grey concrete and steel and glass in the slow raindrip of

the morning station” (3), an image not so far removed from “the pavements grey” of

Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (29). What follows, however, in contrast to Yeats’s

pastoral dreamscape, is an unflinching look at the realities of subsistence farming in

the West of Ireland. The outrage and petulance of the father at his son’s apparent

reluctance to approve his hopes to live in Dublin is expressed in the terms of a sullen

teenager: “I’d give anything to get out of this dump” (9). References to the father’s

regression recur in the story as he takes up the role of the abandoned child in relation

to his son, while his relationship with his wife is increasingly one of complete

dependence: “He sat there, her huge old child, soaking his feet in water, protesting like

a child. ‘It’s scalding, Rose,’ and she laughed back, ‘Go on, don’t be afraid.’ And when

she knelt on the floor, her grey hair falling low, and dried the feet that dripped above

the lighted water, I was able to go out without being noticed as she opened the bright

razor” (10).

12 The son’s reply to the father’s plea to allow him to be part of his life in Dublin is an

inadequate cliché that clutches at popularized images of his home place: “‘it’s quiet and

beautiful’. The same hollowness came, I was escaping, soothing the conscience as the

music did the office” (9). His father’s dream of a life in the city resonates with Aaron

Santesso’s reading of nostalgia and the idea that: “we can be ‘nostalgic’ for homes we

never had and states we never experienced” (14). Santesso’s expansion of the definition

of nostalgia to include the unknown and the imagined is significant as the true feeling

of homesickness manifest in “Wheels” is that of the father for a life beyond his reach.

13 McGahern’s work shows a sensitive appreciation of rural landscapes in Ireland but is

equally fervent in its commitment to representing the realities of the lives lived there.

The father’s speech in the face of his son’s quiet resistance to his plans is an outpouring

of anger at the place his son haplessly insists on calling “quiet and beautiful”:

“Quiet as a graveyard,” he took up. “And stare at beauty every day and it’ll turnsicker than stray vomit. The barracks shut now, a squad car in its place. Sometimeschildren come to the door with raffle tickets, that’s all. But there’s plenty offunerals, so busy Mrs McGreevy’s coffin last month came out roped on the roof ofthe bread van, and the way they talked about her was certain proof if proof wasneeded that nobody seriously believes in an after-life. They were sure they’d neverhear the edge of her tongue again either in hell or heaven or the duck-arsed in-between. I’d give anything to get out,” he said with passion. (9)

14 The old man’s angry stream of consciousness is a riposte to his son’s refusal of

responsibility, but is also a reply to the vocabulary of an earlier Irish literary tradition –

the work of Synge and Yeats and the Irish Literary Revival, and the “small cabin” and

“bee-loud glade” (28) of Yeats’s vision in the pastoral utopia of “The Lake Isle of

Innisfree”. According to the imaginative paradigm of the Literary Revival, the West of

Ireland came to represent Irishness in its most apparently untouched, native form. In


44

the above diatribe, the disconcertingly comic image of the coffin strapped to the bread

van and the uncontrolled anger of the old man serve to correct this in ways that are

more direct and explicit than the descriptions of the vicissitudes of farm life in Amongst

Women. It has, perhaps, more in common with McGahern’s unflinching representation

of the brutality of rural life in the West of Ireland in his later novel That They May Face

the Rising Sun, in which he depicts the mistreatment of the indentured farm labourers.

“Wheels” portrays the realities of rural poverty in similarly uncompromising ways.

15 According to Davis’s definition of nostalgia, it is an inherently conservative response to

the flux and change of life: “It reassures us of past happiness and accomplishment and,

since these still remain on deposit, as it were, in the bank of our memory, it

simultaneously bestows upon us a certain current worth, however much present

circumstances may obscure it or make it suspect” (34). The relationship between the

father and son depicted in “Wheels” goes against the grain of this definition as the

nostalgic investment on the part of the father is in a place that is as yet unfamiliar to

him and, in the case of the son, it is a painful reminder of failed promise: “all the vivid

sections of the wheel we watched so slowly turn, impatient for the rich whole that

never came but that all the preparations promised” (11).

16 If in “Wheels” the old man’s relationship with his farm is that of an indentured servant,

desperate for escape, “A Slip-up” explores a very different, and even opposite dynamic.

Davis describes the importance of nostalgia to creating and sustaining narratives of

selfhood:

If, as I have maintained, nostalgia is a distinctive way, though only one amongseveral ways we have, of relating our past to our present and future, it follows thatnostalgia (like long-term memory, like reminiscence, like daydreaming) is deeplyimplicated in the sense of who we are, what we are about, and (though possiblywith much less inner clarity) whither we go. In short, nostalgia is one of the means– or, better, one of the more readily accessible psychological lenses – we employ inthe never-ending work of constructing, maintaining, and reconstructing ouridentities. (31)

17 In some ways, “A Slip-up” speculates beyond the ending of “Wheels” to the life of an

elderly Irish man who has left his farm for London. It also illustrates Davis’s point that

daydreaming is an effective medium for the expression of nostalgic sentiment as the

main character, Michael, loses himself in an alternative world long past. The couple’s

address, 37B Ainsworth Road (in Hackney in London’s East End), and Michael’s regular

trips to “The Royal” for a pint of Bass, is suggestive of a respectable but modest

immigrant existence in London. The careful timetable of the couple’s life, that ferries

them from one day to the next, is interrupted by an incident where Michael has a

momentary lapse and is inadvertently left behind at the supermarket. Indeed, the local

Tesco’s – a place of daily pilgrimage – is mentioned on every page, conveying a sense of

the importance of the shopping ritual in the structure of their lives. What his wife,

Agnes, doesn’t realize is that, for Michael, their daily routine is blurred with another:

with his day-to-day work on the farm they left behind. We learn, near the beginning of

the story, that:

Every morning since he retired, except when he was down with that winter flu,Michael walked with Agnes to Tesco’s, and it brought him the feeling of long agowhen he walked round the lake with his mother, potholes and stones of the lane,the boat shapes at intervals in the long lake wall to allow the carts to pass oneanother when they met, the oilcloth shopping bag he carried for her in the glow ofchattering as he walked in the shelter of her shadow. Now it was Agnes who


45

chattered as they walked to Tesco’s, and he’d no longer to listen, any response toher bead of talk had long become nothing but an irritation to her; and so he walkedsafely in the shelter of those dead days, drawing closer to the farm between thelakes that they had lost. (128-29)

18 The two landscapes – the city of London and home in the West of Ireland – merge, as

Michael gives himself up to his homesick fantasy.

19 Michael suffers symptoms of a phenomenon that received much attention from an

earlier generation of Irish writers who warned of the half-life that homesickness of this

kind is capable of creating. George Moore’s short story “Home Sickness”, in his

collection The Untilled Field (1903), depicts a character similarly lifted out of the present

by memories of home. He returns to Ireland from New York and is seduced by the Irish

countryside, but soon discovers that “home” is the place that is always out of reach.

Having returned to his life in New York, he finds, late in life, that the memory of

Ireland comes back to haunt him: “The bar room was forgotten and all that concerned

it, and the things he saw most clearly were the green hillside, and the bog lake and the

rushes about it, and the greater lake in the distance, and behind it the blue lines of

wandering hills” (34). If Moore’s work explores the complexities of perpetual

displacement, his contemporary George Bernard Shaw is more directly damning of

such sentimental attachment to place. John Bull’s Other Island (1904) is particularly

suspicious of the sentiment of the “melancholy Kelt” of the English imagination: “the

dreaming! the dreaming! the torturing, heartscalding never satisfying dreaming […] An

Irishman’s imagination never lets him alone, never convinces him, never satisfies him”

(130). Throughout Shaw’s play, this “dreaming” is shown to damage the capacity of the

characters to function in real life. In “A Slip-up”, Michael faces a similar dilemma; he

steels himself against the city and, as he waits for his wife outside Tesco’s, slightly

dazed by the “brands and bright lights” of the supermarket, he makes an imaginary

return home as a way of denying his present circumstances. The incongruity of the

references to “Tesco’s”, immediately identifiable as a very modern British superbrand,

and the reference to the aristocratic “Sir John Cass” of the school where he worked as a

caretaker, makes his daily interior journey home all the more poignant as he attempts

to retrieve the past through memory:

The farm that they lost when they came to London he’d won back almostcompletely since he retired. He’d been dismayed when he retired as caretaker ofthe Sir John Cass School to find how much the farm had run down in the years he’dbeen a school caretaker. Drains were choked. The fields were full of rushes. Thegarden had gone wild, and the hedges were invading the fields. But he was too old ahand to rush at things. Each day he set himself a single task. The stone wall was hispride, perhaps because it was the beginning. (129)

20 When, one morning, his wife accidentally leaves the supermarket without him, he

continues to reclaim the farm in his mind and the fatigue he feels standing alone

outside the supermarket becomes the tiredness of a man hungry after a day in the

fields. While Michael stands, abandoned like a lost child, clutching his empty shopping

bag, his younger, vital self continues the work that gave his life most meaning.

McGahern successfully modifies Moore and Shaw’s reading of homesickness in an Irish

context. On one level, the old man’s “slip-up” creates tension at home because of the

unspoken fear of senility. At the same time, his interior journey home supports his life

in the present, a life summed up by trips to the supermarket and bottles of Bass drunk

in the same pub at the same time every day. His return to the farm in his mind is a

moment of release that reinvigorates the present – it is only when the co-existence of


46

his two worlds is troubled by the intrusion of the present upon the past that this

equilibrium is disturbed.

21 These stories, in different ways, appeal very directly to the “scalded memory” of Eavan

Boland’s poem. The connection to home, reliant as it is on an attachment to the land, is

of central interest in these texts. They explore respectively the longing for escape and

return that is a perennial anxiety in McGahern’s work. This dynamic has a cyclical

structure in Amongst Women in the characters’ escape from but inevitable retreat to the

home place and the self-contained family unit. “Wheels” and “A Slip-up” dramatize the

two most crucial moments in this cycle, as the first engages with the paradigm of exile

so powerfully associated with the Irish literary tradition, and the second envisions the

loss of the land as a state of bereavement, a moment of finality from which return is

only possible through imaginary reconnection.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Bernard Shaw, George. John Bull’s Other Island. 1904. Ed. John P. Harrington. Modern Irish Drama.

London: Norton, 1991. 119-203.

Boland, Eavan. “Mise Eire”. Eavan Boland: Collected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet, 1995. 102-03.

Davis, Fred. Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York: Macmillan, 1979.

Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916. Ed. Seamus Deane. Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1992.

McGahern, John. Amongst Women. London: Faber and Faber, 1990.

---. John McGahern: The Collected Stories. 1992. London: Faber and Faber, 1993.

Moore, George. “Home Sickness”. The Untilled Field. 1903. Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1990. 23-34.

Santesso, Aaron. A Careful Longing: The Poetics and Problems of Nostalgia. Newark: University of

Delaware Press, 2006.

Yeats, W.B. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”. W.B. Yeats: Selected Poems. Ed. Timothy Webb.

Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991. 28-29.

RÉSUMÉS

This article focuses on two stories by John McGahern, “Wheels” and “A Slip-up”, and investigates

how they relate to the representation of home and place in McGahern’s novel Amongst Women

(1990). It explores how the stories take up some of the most pressing concerns in Amongst

Women in the way that they productively complicate the powerful connection with the land so

vividly rendered in McGahern’s work


47

AUTEURS

ELLEN MCWILLIAMS

Ellen McWilliams is Senior Lecturer in the School of English and Creative Studies at Bath Spa

University. She has research interests in Irish literature and contemporary women’s fiction.


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Love and solitary enjoyment in "mylove, my umbrella": some of JohnMcGahern's uses of DublinersPascal Bataillard

“Reading McGahernAbandon me to despair’s surprise:To the open endings of my days.”

Paul Durcan, Cries of an Irish Caveman, 35.

1 Critics have often remarked on the affinities in method that exist between James Joyce

and John McGahern. Denis Sampson, for instance, observes that experiments with

fictional form in the wake of Dubliners are “the growing tips of McGahern’s art in that

first decade of his career” (Sampson 89). This is precisely the period when Nightlines, his

first collection of short stories – which includes “My Love, My Umbrella” – was

published. I wish, however, to explore this seemingly well-established genealogy, so as

to go beyond certain obvious thematic or structural resemblances by questioning, or

queering, or ‘re-dubling,’ the use of Dubliners as performed by McGahern.

2 To do so, I will focus on “My Love, My Umbrella.” This story will be considered less as

the narrative of “the failure of the love affair” (Dubois §5) than as the realization by the

narrator-protagonist that he succeeded all too well in protecting himself from the

possibility of love, of opening up to the other as well as to himself. The umbrella is here

instrumental, both on the diegetic level – as the spring of the narrator’s triumph and

fall, the symbol of a glorious phallic assumption and the witness of a pitiful

detumescence forecast by the inherent arrogance of the preceding stance – and on the

interpretative level, producing conflicting and ambivalent meanings that the reader is

called to enjoy with a degree of perplexity as well as perversity (the mockery of a

phallic symbol, a regressive womb, a fetish, a dangerous supplement, a prosthetic sex

toy…).

3 Studying the question of love in John McGahern’s fiction would by far exceed the scope

of an article. It would be very tempting to try to find an evolution from the early and

middle works reputed to stage frustration, violence and failure (with the patriarchal


49

figures looming large over The Barracks and Amongst Women that have inspired so much

of the critical work on this author), to the more sedate, reconciled tone of the late

writings (That They May Face the Rising Sun now depicting domestic happiness and

complicity despite the knowledge of the ‘vanity of it all’). Although very neat and

convenient, this vision would be reductive, missing the presence of a polarity present in

McGahern’s fiction as early as in The Barracks, where Elizabeth discreetly embodies a

totally different conception and incarnation of love, not to say a mode of what, since

Lacan, has been called feminine jouissance (S.XX). Conversely, patriarchal violence and a

predatory vision of women are still present in That They May Face the Rising Sun in the

guise of John Quinn, most of the time acting in plain, deliberate abjection.

4 Again, it would be somewhat simplistic to believe that this polarity coincides exactly

with gender differences. As exemplified in many stories, women can be shown to act

just as ruthlessly as men. Towards the close of “The Stoat,” an almost allegorical tale in

this respect, maybe deceivingly so, the narrator’s father is likened to the rabbit

previously hunted down by the stoat on a golf course:

As if all the irons were suddenly being truly struck and were flowing from alldirections to the heart of the green, I saw that my father had started to run like thepoor rabbit. He would have been better off if he could have tried to understandsomething, even though it would get him off nothing (CS 156-57).

5 Having underlined some of the inherent difficulties of this work, I will now try to

examine the mechanics of the power struggle at play in “My Love, My Umbrella” and

the way in which violence is hinged to a degree of perversity, if not perversion. The

opening sentence delineates the contours of the improbable ménage à trois, defining the

habitus that made it possible:

It was the rain, the constant weather of this city, made my love inseparable fromthe umbrella, a black umbrella, white stitching on the seams of the imitationleather over the handle, the metal point bent where it was caught in Mooney’sgrating as we raced for the last bus out of Abbey Street (CS 65).

6 In other words, the presence of the umbrella seems naturally justified by the rain,

offering the couple the modern, urban counterpart of the bough of lovers of old. Its

pragmatic usage, the protection offered against the rain, accounts for its otherwise

incongruous company during sexual intercourse, made constantly manifest, literally

mediating all the more or less assured moves of the male protagonist and similarly

punctuating those of the young woman:

We moved under the umbrella out of the street light, fumbling for certain footingbetween the tree roots.Will you hold the umbrella? She took the imitation leather with the white stitching in her hands (CS 67-68).

7 It is as if the umbrella had created a common space or, rather, a micro-utopia, a place

and time that are nowhere else to be shared, a time freed from history and memory, a

time of pure repetition and enjoyment:

We went to cinemas or sat in pubs, it was the course of our love, and as it alwaysrained we made love under the umbrella beneath the same trees in the same way.They say the continuance of sexuality is due to the penis having no memory, andmine each evening spilt its seed into the mud and decomposing leaves as if it wasalways for the first time (CS 68).

8 However, this timeless bliss is ruptured by the telling of stories, which seem to dwell in

the protagonists’ mind once they have been articulated, generating mixed feelings or


50

downright resentment, introducing or maybe just revealing a division between the

lovers that the umbrella had so far contributed to conceal:

Sometimes we told each other stories. I thought one of the stories she told me verycruel, but I did not tell her (CS 68).

9 It should be noted that the allusion to the stories they tell each other is made

immediately after the mention of semen dropping in humus, which, in the Aristotelian

phrase revived by Roland Barthes, is a particularly clear case of the “post hoc ergo

propter hoc fallacy” (McQuillan 326). The reader is made to sense that ‘story time’ is

going to disturb the lovers’ blissful ignorance of each other. What is more, it is exactly

at the same moment that James Joyce’s words to Grant Richards, his publisher for

Dubliners,are echoed:

I think people might be willing to pay for the special odour of corruption which, I hope,floats over my stories (15 October 1905, SL 79) [emphasis mine].It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories.I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland bypreventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicelypolished looking-glass (23 June 1906, SL 89-90) [emphasis mine].

10 This echo is both very discreet, as if muffled by “the mud and decomposing leaves,” and

quite distinct, that is, once the two texts have been brought together.1 It is remarkable

also that the same epithets used by Joyce to describe the atmosphere of his prose and

times should be applied by historians to the period following World War II. For

instance, Joseph Lee speaks of “the fetid atmosphere of the forties and fifties” (Lee 384)

while Declan Kiberd describes Ireland in those years as a “Quaking Sod” (551-61). For

Siobhán Holland, this simply characterises John McGahern's fiction:

[It] focuses on rural Ireland in the middle of the twentieth century and captures thetorpor with which that period is popularly associated (Holland 186).

11 Joyce and McGahern can be called realists in that they force their readers to view

something unpleasant about themselves, a reality that is obfuscated in and by their

times with their willing participation. One of those realities concerns childhood and its

“forbidden games,” to use René Clément’s famous film title. This is where the first story

told by one of the lovers comes in, the one found “cruel” by the narrator. As a girl, she

teased a neighbour until he lost his mind:

As she grew, feeling the power of her body, she began to provoke him, until oneevening on her way to the well through his fields, where he was pruning awhitethorn hedge with a billhook, she lay in the soft grass and showed him so muchof her body beneath her clothes that he dropped the billhook and seized her. Shestruggled loose and shouted as she ran, ‘I’ll tell my Daddy, you pig’ (CS 69).

12 The man, named Pat Moran, is put to such shame that, possibly drawing the wrong but

unquestioned (and, in this sense, Mora/onic) conclusions, he “soon afterwards sold his

farm and went to England though he’d never known any other life but that of a small

farmer” (CS 69), dissolving – as we may guess from the reading of “Hearts of Oak and

Bellies of Brass” – into the perfect anonymity of being just another ‘Paddy.’2 It is thus

no exaggeration to suggest that the budding girl effectively put him to death – like

Salome, perversely exhibiting the head, not of John the Baptist but of Moran, on a silver

platter by retelling the story with unabashed complacency and unmitigated pleasure:

She’d grown excited in the telling and asked me what I thought of the story. I saidthat I thought life was often that way (CS 69).


51

13 Her story should not be taken as just proleptic of the way she will later exercise her

power over the narrator. Apparently unimpressed by the clear signs of her potential

sovereignty which the latter has been left to glimpse into, the young male misses the

point of her “scrupulous meanness,” as Joyce says (SL 83), reluctant to admit there is

any ‘originality’ in her tale. It is, nevertheless, difficult to decide whether he is simply

endorsing Oscar Wilde’s words, that “life imitates art” (when, asked his opinion of the

story, he argues, that “life was often that way,” CS 89), or whether, unaware of it, he is

simply signing his own death warrant, ironically playing the part of the martyr-

prophet. We should, however, envisage another reading: the male protagonist fails to

read all these signs because it is just inconceivable for him to lose his monopoly of

perverse experiments, not to be the only one introducing that type of initiative. If the

reader could be inclined to think he is just a victim, he or she is made to think better of

it when presented with the narrator’s own tale. Indeed, his own story, falsely

‘impersonal,’ betrays, so to speak, what lies on the other side of the protective

umbrella:

She then asked me if I had any stories in my life. I said I did, but there was one storythat I read in the evening paper that interested me most, since it had indirectly gotto do with us (CS 69).

14 The story appears almost surreal, as odd as the umbrella – standing erect in all its

matter-of-factness between the two lovers – as if partaking of the strange beauty that

Lautréamont saw in “the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and

an umbrella” (Lautréamont 256). It is about highly respectable men who suddenly jump

at each other’s throats and inflict severe wounds upon one another with their

umbrellas. They are brought to court where the judgement borders on casuistry:

The question before the judge: was it a case of common assault or, much moreserious, assault with dangerous weapon with intent to wound? In view of the extentof the injuries inflicted it had not been an easy decision, but eventually he found forcommon assault, since he didn’t want the thousands of peaceable citizens who usedtheir umbrellas properly to feel that when they travelled to and from work theywere carrying dangerous weapons (CS 69).

15 The sentence issued by the judge is meant to reinstate umbrellas into their normal

function (a gesture both normative and normalising), as if indeed they had to be

returned to their emblematic function, indispensable to define a respectable citizen. In

exactly the same way as he has diverted the sexual act from the reproductive ends

sanctioned by society, the narrator has been able to put his umbrella to a totally

different, even deviant, use. This has been possible as long as it was raining – the

permanence of the rain providing the ideal alibi, plausible enough in Dublin it is true,

but so stretched that it ultimately creates a dreamlike, surreal atmosphere. At this

point, we have to acknowledge that everything is still open, that “all sorts of impossible

things” can still happen. Although his lover resents the story, the possibility of love-

making remains, both in the carnal sense and in the sense of bringing love into their

relation:

In the rain we made love again, she the more fierce [emphasis mine], and after theseed spilled she said, ‘Wait,’ and moving on a dying penis, under the unsteadyumbrella in her hands, she trembled towards an inarticulate cry of pleasure (CS 70).

16 It is quite manifest that, up to this moment, the woman’s desire is still whole and raw.

The umbrella is more than ever the pivotal point of her sexual pleasure. What destroys

it all is her dissatisfaction with the narrator’s words, his avowed motives for marriage.


52

His question about the relevance of marriage is brought about by his sense of “habit”

(“we had so fallen into the habit of each other”) so that his question sounds terribly

lame:

‘Would you think we should ever get married?’ ‘Kiss me.’ She leaned across the steelbetween us. ‘Do you think we should?’ I repeated. ‘What would it mean to you?’ sheasked.What I had were longings or fears rather than any meanings (CS 70).

17 The young woman clearly gives the narrator a possibility to remain on the equivocal

level of the flesh but he just prefers to repeat his question. Repetition does not

necessarily herald the infamous ‘death drive’ but it is difficult not to see the question

about “meaning” as the direct interpretation of his reiteration, likely to trigger off a

number of interrogations – ‘what do you mean with this question about marriage?’,

‘what is on your mind?’, ‘are you not, like all other men, “all palaver and what [you] can

get out of [us]?”’ (D 178), to use Lily’s words in “The Dead,” in response to Gabriel

trying to be nice while actually being patronising. For there are here other unpleasant

truths or realities – some of which may be quite obvious by now, some infinitely less so

– that have fuelled agony columns in popular magazines or ‘high-brow’ essays before or

ever since the publication of Nightlines. Love is not just about being ‘nice,’ nor just about

having pleasure or not getting enough, or, to speak like Lacan, “there is no sexual

ratio” (S.XX)…. Unfortunately, Lacan’s words have too often been congealed into a

negative mantra, taken to spell out the absolute exclusion of any possibility for lovers

to ever connect but, and yet, as Joan Copjec points out:

[Lacan] fully acknowledges that sexual encounters happen, that the drive, workingblind, without guide or goal, does occasionally stumble on a satisfying object. Andthough jouissance may be a solitary business in the sense that one only everexperiences one’s own jouissance, this does not mean that this experience is notmade available through the subject’s relation to another. Erotic love does exist(Copjec 71).

18 The narrator is ultimately punished for no other reason than that his words – his

ready-made discourses and fantasies about men and women, his “longings and fears” –

constitute an unbearable anti-climax or counterpart for the unorthodox love-making

he has induced. The narrator’s evasive answer to her question, following his lame move

towards a certain form of normalisation, does not answer for their desire and certainly

precludes any form of love from then on. Seen from the woman’s perspective, the

fragile scene or screen of their love-making has been punctured beyond repair and all

its efficacy seems to have dissolved and vanished.

19 Before analysing the ending of the story and the male viewpoint, I would like to return

to the ruling of the judge mentioned in the narrator’s moral tale. His decision is meant

above all to defend the existing order – here prevalent views concerning the

destination of common objects – that is to say, ideology in its purest form. This

interpretation gains even more consistency if we compare the nature of this sentence

with another case narrated in Dubliners. In “A Painful Case,” a court has to investigate

into the death of Mrs Sinico years after Mr James Duffy had put an end to their relation

because Mrs Sinico had perceived his meaning, however much “he thought that in her

eyes he would ascend to an angelical stature” (D 107). Indeed, a far more competent

reader of Nietzsche than Duffy, whose bookshelves accommodate The Gay Science and

Thus Spake Zarathustra, Mrs Sinico does not fail to read Duffy’s theories in direct

relation to his symptom, applying Nietzsche to the letter of Duffy’s desire:


53

The unconscious disguise of physiological needs under the cloaks of the objective,ideal, purely spiritual goes frighteningly far – and I have asked myself often enoughwhether, on a grand scale, philosophy has been no more than an interpretation ofthe body and a misunderstanding of the body (Nietzsche 5)3

20 Mrs Sinico could then be seen as the true midwife of Duffy ‘the philosopher,’ helping

him to be born to his desiring body. The truth – that his body is not just a carnal

envelope but the message itself – is yet too shocking, too scandalous for Duffy to

receive. Ironically enough, this is precisely the status of an angel – who is both message

and messenger – to which he aspires:

The end of theses discourses was that one night during which she had shown everysign of unusual excitement, Mrs Sinico caught up his hand passionately and pressedit to her cheek. Mr Duffy was very much surprised. Her interpretation of his words disillusionedhim (D 107).

21 The parallel between Mrs Sinico and the female character of “My Love, My Umbrella” is

striking in that they both administer a painful truth to the male characters, which is no

more than the answer that their verbal and physical questioning is begging for.

22 It is now time to examine the male perspective towards the close of each short story,

first in “A Painful Case” and then in “My Love, My Umbrella.” As regards James Duffy, it

is only several years after he brutally dismissed Mrs Sinico that he incidentally reads

about her death in the newspaper. He does so through the detailed account of the

hearing that follows what no one wishes to call ‘suicide.’ The court examination of the

case goes to grotesque convolutions, reflecting the underlying insistence to exonerate

everyone of any kind of responsibility. For instance, it could seem to be enough to say

and write that the “intemperate” woman’s death “had been probably due to shock and

sudden failure of the heart’s action” (D 110). However, something in this ‘tragic’ death

threatens to accuse each and everyone. Through its construction, the whole newspaper

article strives to duplicate the hearing – pretending to be totally transparent, a pure

mimesis of a question and answers game conducted impersonally – and makes the

verdict even more final by ending with its very words: “No blame attached to anyone”

(D 111).

23 More than anyone else, James Duffy is eager to read about his own innocence so as to

prove its case. He even tries to inflict the “second death” Lacan discusses apropos

Sophocles’ Antigone (S.VII 315-29) on the memory of Mrs Sinico, utterly denying her

very right to have ever existed:

Just God, what an end! Evidently she had been unfit to live, without any strength ofpurpose, an easy prey to habits, one of the wrecks on which civilisation had beenreared. But that she could have sunk so low! Was it possible he had deceived himselfso utterly about her? He remembered her outburst of that night [when she hadcaught his hand and brought about Duffy’s “disillusionment”] and interpreted it ina harsher sense than he had ever done. He had no difficulty in approving of thecourse he had taken (D 111-12).

24 Later in the tale it seems that Duffy is finally caught up by Mrs Sinico and becomes

guilt-ridden, her death calling for a strong revision of his body of doctrines, as well as

for a subjective shift. His interpretive stance, however, comes out undefeated. The last

words of the story (“He felt he was alone,” D 114) underline the fact that he has

resumed his familiar attitude, that of the solitary man excluded from “life’s feast”


54

(D 113) but really feasting on this sense of absolute alienation and blissful feeling of

being the exception.

25 In “My Love, My Umbrella,” the narrator’s attitude is strikingly similar. While the rift is

clearly opening, the narrator first enjoys a feeling of control, deciding himself that time

is ripe for the break-up: “I thought maliciously, and decided to break free from her.

Summer was coming and the world full of possibilities” (CS 71). At this point, the

umbrella seems to play the part of a “transitional object,” in Winnicott’s well-known

words, first concealing the loss, as the narrator even feels “clownishly elated” (CS 71),

but then turning into a painful reminder of her absence. After a period during which

the sense of loss seems to be insuperable, the narrator’s wounds heal, stitched up as

they are in a way reminiscent of the handle of the umbrella. Nothing is more secure

than the previous beliefs to which he can now safely return, “hardened about the

growing absurdity of a man standing under an umbrella” (CS 74), no power can equal

the rage to persist in his obtuse symptom, the wish to restore “his majesty the self:”

…. And I gripped the black umbrella with an almost fierce determination to be as Iwas before, unknowingly happy under the trees, and the umbrella, in the wetevenings that are the normal weather of this city (CS 74).

26 It remains that in spite of the apparent regression to his previous state, the words of

the narrator are infected with the presence of his lost love – lost though never actual–,

with all the ambivalence language is capable of, affirming wholeness and challenging it

at the same time, manifesting loss as well as denying it. It is the ambivalence of

language which contests the inertia of the symptom and courts desire into love, or a

song of love when love is lost, which, momentarily at least, pulls the subject away from

his or her solitary enjoyment. We also should note a major difference between the

young Joyce and the young McGahern. Joyce’s irony towards Duffy ironically mirrors

his character’s sense of aloofness and it will take him the writing of “The Dead” to be

able to relinquish the old garb of the “high priest of imagination.” On the other hand,

the limitations inherent in the protagonists of “My Love, My Umbrella” do not constrict

McGahern’s writing, as if Spinoza’s motto, non ridere, had gone without saying into his

poetics.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Copjec, Joan, Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation, MIT Press, 2004.

Dubois, Dominique, “Incommunicability and Alienation in John McGahern’s “My Love, My

Umbrella”: an Analysis of the Discursive Strategies,” Journal of the Short Story in English, 34,

Spring 2000. Consulted Online: http://jsse.revues.org/index465.html. Connection on 04 March

2009.

Durcan, Paul, Cries of an Irish Caveman, London: Harvill Press, 2001.

Holland, Siobhán, “Marvellous Fathers in the Fiction of John McGahern,” Yearbook of English

Studies 35, Jan. 2005, 186-198.


55

Joyce, James, (1914), Dubliners, London: Penguin, 2000 [D].

---. Selected Letters, ed. Richard Ellmann, London: Faber and Faber, 1975 [SL].

Kiberd, Declan, Inventing Ireland. The Literature of the Modern Nation, London: Jonathan Cape,

1995.

Lacan, Jacques, Séminaire VII. L’éthique de la psychanalyse, Paris: Seuil, 1986 [S.VII].

---. Séminaire XX. Encore, Paris: Seuil, 1975 [S.XX].

Lavin, Mary, Happiness, and Other Stories, London, Constable, 1969.

Lautréamont, Œuvres Complètes, ed. Guy Levis Mano, illustrated by Victor Brauner, Oscar

Dominguez, Max Ernst, Espinoza, René Magritte, André Masson, Joan Miró, Matta Echaunen,

Paalen, Man Ray, Seligmann and Tanguy, introduction by André Breton, Editions GLM, Paris,

1938.

Lee, Joseph, Ireland 1912-1985: Politics and Society, Cambridge University Press, 1989.

McGahern, John, The Barracks, London: Faber and Faber, 1963.

---. “Dubliners,” The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 17:1, July 1991, 31-37.

---. The Collected Stories, London : Faber and Faber, 1992 [CS].

---. That They May Face the Rising Sun, London : Faber and Faber, 2002.

---. Memoir, London : Faber and Faber, 2005.

McQuillan, Martin, The Narrative Reader, London: Routledge, 2000.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, The Gay Science: with a prelude in German rhymes and an

appendix of songs (1882), Translated by Josefine Nauckhoff, Adrian Del Caro, Cambridge

University Press, 2001.

Sampson Dennis, Outstaring Nature’s Eye The Fiction of John McGahern, Washington D.C.: The

Catholic University Press of America, 1993.

Thurston, Luke, Re-inventing the Symptom: Essays on the Final Lacan, New York: Other Press,

2002.

RÉSUMÉS

Critics have often remarked on the affinities in method that exist between James Joyce and John

McGahern. It is necessary, however, to explore this seemingly well-established genealogy, to go

beyond certain obvious thematic or structural resemblances by questioning, or queering, or ‘re-

dubling,’ the use of Dubliners performed by McGahern. This is what a close reading of “My Love,

My Umbrella,” in relation to “A Painful Case,” is meant to produce. On the theoretical level, it

relies in particular on the concept of sinthome, coined by Lacan in his groundbreaking seminar

devoted to Joyce.


56

AUTEURS

PASCAL BATAILLARD

Pascal Bataillard is Maître de conférences (Associate Professor) of contemporary British and Irish

literature at Université Lumière-Lyon 2, France. He is the author of articles on James Joyce but

also on such diverse authors as John McGahern, Raymond Carver, and Ann Radcliffe. He was the

co-editor of a collection of essays (Dubliners, James Joyce. The Dead, John Huston, ed. Pascal

Bataillard and Dominique Sipière, Paris, Ellipses, 2000) and a member of the team supervised by

Jacques Aubert who produced a new translation of Ulysses into French. His current projects are

provisionally entitled Joyce’s Ethicacy and Tinker-ing with Irish Tradition. Joyce, Beckett, & Co.


57

"Fellows like yourself": fathers inJohn McGahern's short stories"Michael L. Storey

1 The publication of John McGahern’s memoir, All Will Be Well, in 2005, the year before the

writer’s death, confirmed what many readers had long suspected: the tyrannical,

moody, abusive father figure that dominates the novels and short stories is modeled

closely on the author’s own father, Frank McGahern. Reegan in The Barracks, Mahoney

in The Dark, Sergeant Moran in The Leavetaking, Michael Moran in Amongst Women, as

well as the fathers in such stories as “Wheels,” “The Key,” “The Stoat,” “Gold Watch,”

and “Sierra Leone,” are all portraits of McGahern’s father. Many of the outward details

of the father figures, such as their occupations as police sergeants or farmers and their

status as widowers or their remarriage after the death of their first wives, have, of

course, been recognized by readers as those of McGahern’s own father. But the memoir

now reveals in elaborate detail that the often detestable behavior of the fictional

fathers, and the attendant emotional and psychological traits, including the most

repugnant, were, in fact, those of Frank McGahern.

2 Commentators have also, of course, found similarities between the fictional lives of

McGahern’s young protagonists and his own life: his upbringing in rural Ireland; the

death of his beloved mother; his interest, for her sake, in the priesthood; his work as a

teacher and dismissal from his school position; his departure for England; and so. These

correspondences between the author and his characters have led critics to refer to

McGahern’s fiction as “semi-autobiographical.” But, having no substantial evidence to

do so, critics have refrained from attributing the bullying, abusive behavior of the

father figures to Frank McGahern.1 Now it is possible to do that and — more

importantly — to explore more deeply the significance of the father figure in

McGahern’s fiction. The following study shows just how closely the fictional fathers in

the short stories are modeled on McGahern’s father, and it attempts to explain

McGahern’s obsession with the father figure in these stories.

3 Factual, public details of the elder McGahern’s life recurrently woven by the author

into the fictional lives of the father figures in his novels and stories include his father’s

involvement as a young man in the War of Independence; his career as a police


58

sergeant in the Garda Siochana and his life in the police barracks at Cootehall, Co.

Roscommon; his occasional, brief visits home to see the family and the occasional

overnight stays and summer holidays spent by the children in the barracks; the death

of his first wife, followed by the children’s move to the barracks; his second marriage;

and, following retirement from the Garda, his second career as a small farmer. Most of

the father figures in his fiction share several of these biographical details. Reegan in

The Barracks, Moran in The Leavetaking, and the fathers in “The Key” and “Oldfashioned”

are police sergeants, while Mahoneyin The Dark, Michael Moran in Amongst Women, and

the fathers in “Wheels,” “Gold Watch,” and “Sierra Leone” are all small farmers.

Reegan, Sergeant Moran, and Michael Morantook part in the War of Independence, as

did the fathers in “Korea” and “Oldfashioned.” Mahoney, Sergeant Moran, and the

fathers in “Coming into His Kingdom,” “The Key,” and “The Stoat” are widowers, while

Reegan, Michael Moran and the fathers in “Wheels,” “Gold Watch,” and “Sierra Leone”

all have remarried after the death of their first wives. The persistence with which

McGahern assigns these public details of his own father to his fictional fathers strongly

suggests that the personal — emotional and psychological —traits that he attributes to

these characters are drawn from his own father as well.

4 Indeed, the father figures possess such similar and complementary personal traits that

they all seem to be the same character, or at the very least different portraits of the

same character. Collectively, they portray a father who is domineering, mean-spirited,

moody, embittered, peevish, suspicious, calculating, secretive, self-pitying, and

verbally, physically and sexually abusive. These fictional fathers also demand love and

respect from their children (or son) and wives and are hurt when they do not receive it.

All of these traits, as we will see, are revealed in the memoir as belonging to Frank

McGahern.

5 In addition to the four novels mentioned in the opening paragraph, eight of the thirty-

four stories portray father figures that closely resemble, in behavior and personality,

McGahern’s own father.2 A reading of the memoir, All Will Be Well, shows that in writing

these stories McGahern not only represented the outward details of occupation, marital

status, living arrangements, and the like, of his father, but that he often recreated

specific events and incidents from his father’s life that illustrate his personality in all of

its complexity — and loathsomeness.

6 Two of The Collected Stories3— “The Stoat” and “The Key” — illustrate the great extent to

which McGahern borrowed incidents from his father’s life. Both stories are taken

nearly whole cloth from incidents in Frank McGahern’s life, and both represent closely

the character of the elder McGahern. “The Stoat” recreates an incident in which

McGahern’s father attempted to remarry, though it changes a few details, combines

and rearranges material and then frames the story with an apparently fictional

incident. The story captures well both his father’s cold calculation in his dealings with

others and his fear of losing control.

7 In the story, the father (curiously, a schoolteacher, not a police sergeant or farmer) has

decided to remarry but seeks approval from his son, the narrator. The request for

approval seems calculated to draw the young man, now living away from home, back

into his father’s life. The son has no objections to his remarrying, telling the father,

“Mother is dead. You should do exactly as you want to.”4 So the father advertises in the

paper: “Teacher, fifty-two. Seeks companionship. View marriage” (CS 154, italics in text).

From a pile of responses, the father selects one from a Miss McCabe, “[a] schoolteacher


59

in her forties. . . . small and frail and nervous” (CS 155). After several months of

courtship, and with the intention of becoming engaged to her, he asks the son to go

with him on holiday to Strandhill to meet Miss McCabe. The son likes her and gives his

approval, but the father becomes concerned that Miss McCabe might not have “her feet

on the ground” and, when he learns that overnight she has suffered a mild heart

attack, he decides to “[c]lear out” (CS 156). Ashamed for his father, the son remains at

Strandhill, despite the risk of running into Miss McCabe and having to explain his

father’s sudden departure. At the end of the story, the son’s thoughts return to the

episode that opens the story. Playing golf, he had come upon a gruesome scene: a stoat

had caught a rabbit and was drinking blood from a wound behind its ear but was scared

off by the narrator’s approach. He brought the dead rabbit back to his father, but after

briefly considering it they rejected the idea of serving it to Miss McCabe for dinner5 He

now thinks, “I saw that my father had started to run like the poor rabbit” (CS 156). The

rabbit-stoat relationship seems to be an ironic analogy for that of the father and Miss

McCabe, with the father beginning as the hunter (stoat) but ultimately becoming the

hunted (rabbit).6

8 In his memoir McGahern reports that, after the death of his mother his father

advertised for a woman: “Young widower, Garda Sergeant, with young family, seek...”7He

notes, however, that the ads were placed as much for a maid as for a wife, and,

although his father received many responses, none proved suitable. Later in the

memoir McGahern recalls that his father continued to look for a wife (no more ads are

mentioned) and came very close to marrying “a Miss McCabe, a small, gentle woman, a

principal of a school . . . probably in her early fifties.” After a period of courtship, the

father took the children (including John, who was 15 at the time) on their annual

holiday to a bungalow at Strandhill, where Miss McCabe was staying at a hotel. As in

the story, the father planned to become “engaged at the end of the holiday,” though

there is no mention of his requesting his son’s approval.8 One morning he got “a

message that Miss McCabe had a ‘turn’ in the seaweed salt baths that morning” and was

being attended by a doctor. He “assumed that the turn was a heart attack.” McGahern

then writes: “The effect was startling. Within an hour he had gathered up the pots and

pans we’d brought, written a letter to Miss McCabe, and packed the whole family

except myself into the small blue Ford. I was left behind to deliver the letter to the

hotel . . . and travel home on the next day’s bus” (AW 192-93).

9 A comparison of the story with the account in the memoir shows that, in addition to

adding the apparently fictional account of the stoat and the rabbit, McGahern made a

few changes in writing the story. Minor changes include Miss McCabe’s age and

occupation (though obviously not her name!) and the father’s occupation. More

significant changes are that, in the story, the father does not write a letter to Miss

McCabe, and the son, older than McGahern was at the time, decides on his own to stay

behind at Strandhill. Furthermore and perhaps of most interest, McGahern leaves out

of the story a scene, recounted in the memoir, in which he delivered his father’s letter

to Miss McCabe. He writes that he took the letter up to her hotel room and stayed while

she read it. The two of them then had a sympathetic exchange in which the boy told

her that he was sorry to bring the news of his father’s departure and that the children

had hoped that she would marry their father. She, in turn, gave him a pound note to

spend on himself, which he did by buying “a raft of comics, ice-creams and chocolate

éclairs.” These pleasures did little, however, to lessen his “strange, uncomfortable

feeling” that he eventually came to recognize “as both unease and shame” (AW 193)—


60

emotions that are felt by the narrator of the story as well. McGahern’s characterization

in the memoir of his father’s recurring attempts to remarry as “both sad and funny”

(AW 192) is captured well in the story, as is the characterization of his father as both

calculating hunter and pursued victim — both stoat and rabbit.

10 The plot of “The Key” (originally entitled “Bomb Box” in Nightlines, 1970) also hews

closely to its real-life incident as McGahern describes it in the memoir. Both story and

memoir demonstrate the father’s proclivity toward self-pity and hypochondria,

accompanied by peevishness, as well as his manipulation of his son’s feelings. In All Will

Be Well McGahern says that his father took to his barracks bed shortly after the aborted

love affair, perhaps “not to be outdone by Miss McCabe.” Ever the hypochondriac and

often filled with self-pity, his father routinely read medical books and stocked the press

with various medications and medical instruments. And he often retreated to his bed in

belief that he had some kind of ailment—“named [or] unnamed.” This time, McGahern

writes, he appeared to be much worse: “His voice was weaker except when he forgot

himself in irritation or anger. His movements were limping and slow when he rose, and

I had to help him the few times he needed to come down the stairs [of the barracks] and

climb back up” (AW 194).

11 The doctor came to see him every day, and the other guards became worried about his

health. The elder McGahern told his son that he probably would not survive the illness

and showed him a metal box that contained money for the funeral expenses, bank

accounts, bonds, insurance policies, his will, and instructions for burial and other

matters. One package in the box “contained mementoes and things of sentimental

value that might be of interest as [the children] got older — [their] mother’s rings and

jewellery, medals and certificates, old photos, old letters.” He told John that the

children would have to leave the barracks after his death, and he instructed his son to

purchase a small farm and house — specifically Paddy Mullaney’s, which “was going

cheap.” McGahern says that he “begged [his father] not to die,” but his father

“counselled [him] gently,” telling him that “we can control neither the day nor the

hour” and that he would be joining the children’s mother and “that the two of them

would watch over [the children] and pray for [them] together” (AW 195-196). He then

gave John a key to the metal box.

12 A little later his father left for the hospital for a more thorough diagnosis, but he was

back in a week, having been found to be “in perfect health.” A couple of days later, he

resumed his barracks routine in his usual peevish and bullying manner. McGahern

writes that he did not know what to do with the key to the metal box, so he “left it on a

small table by his [father’s] side of the bed, and was relieved when next [he] looked to

see that it had disappeared. Not a word was said” (AW 197).

13 “The Key” stays true to the narrative line and most of the details of the incident as

described in the memoir. The fictional father, a police sergeant, imagines that he has an

illness, as McGahern’s father does, after poring over a medical book. Eventually

believing that the illness is terminal, he takes to his bed and calls his son to his side. As

in the real incident, the father shows his son a metal box that contains money, a will,

deeds, and other important papers, and he instructs him to purchase a small farm from

Paddy Mullaney. He then gives the son a key to the box. A conversation ensues between

father and son, similar to the one described in the memoir, in which the son begs his

father not to die. The father, having elicited what he takes to be an expression of his

son’s love for him, consoles the son, saying, “we can’t control our days, we can only


61

pray” (CS 52). The doctor, who has regularly visited the Sergeant in the barracks and is

rather puzzled by the case, agrees to send him to a hospital for a specialist’s opinion.

Within the week the Sergeant is back in the barracks, apparently having been

diagnosed as healthy. But rather than being elated, or even relieved by the news, he

seems almost disappointed and resumes his routines in his usual peevish manner,

without a word about the diagnosis to his family or the other guards. Unable to bring

himself to give the key back to his father, the son attempts to throw it into the river —

perhaps the one significant change in the story — but it lands short of the river, falling

instead into the sedge and nettles. In the characterization of the Sergeant, the story

captures well the elder McGahern’s self-pity, hypochondria, and manipulation of his

son’s feelings. In the memoir, McGahern says he later realized that his father, in

imagining his terminal illness, was “indulg[ing] his fantasy” and must have known that

his son, being only “fifteen years of age and legally a minor,” would not have been

permitted to conduct the transactions his father instructed him to carry out (AW 196).

14 At the other end of the spectrum from these two stories that extensively recreate

specific incidents from the elder McGahern’s life are stories with narratives that rely

less on large incidents from Frank McGahern’s life and more on imagined incidents and

scenes that, nevertheless, incorporate aspects of his behavior and personality.

McGahern, for example, does not relate in the memoir having an experience similar to

the one experienced by Stevie, the adolescent protagonist of “Coming into his

Kingdom,” that results in Stevie’s learning about the sexual facts of life. But Stevie’s

subsequent, vague realization that his father’s nightly fondling of him is a form of

sexual abuse does have an analogue in the memoir. Stevie, whose mother is dead,

thinks:

The whole world was changed, a covering torn away; he’d never be able to seeanything the same again. His father had slept with his mother and done that to her,the same father that slept with him now in the big bed with the broken brass bellsand rubbed his belly at night, saying, “That’s what’s good for you, Stevie. Isn’t thatwhat you like, Stevie?” ever since it happened the first night, the slow labouringvoice explaining how the rubbing eased wind and relaxed you and let you sleep. (CS 21)

15 In the memoir McGahern, using some of the same phrasing, describes similar abusive

behavior by his father, though he is far more explicit about his father’s motives. After

his mother died, his father slept with him:

When my father came late to bed and enquired as he took off his clothes if I wasawake, I nearly always feigned sleep. He never interfered with me in an obviouslysexual way, but he frequently massaged my belly and thighs. As in all other thingsconnected with the family, he asserted that he was doing this for my good: itrelaxed taut muscles, eased wind and helped bring on sleep. In these years, despitemy increasing doctrinal knowledge of what was sinful, I had only the vaguestknowledge of sex or sexual functions, and took him at his word; but as soon as itwas safe to do so, I turned away on some pretext or other, such as suddensleepiness. Looking back, and remembering his tone of voice and the rhythmicmovement of his hand, I suspect he was masturbating. During the beatings [that hisfather gave to him and the other children] there was sometimes the same sexualundertow, but louder, coarser. (AW 200)

16 This passage from the memoir confirms that the elder McGahern did, in fact, engage in

a kind of sexual abuse of John (notwithstanding McGahern’s comment that his father

“never interfered with [him] in an obviously sexual way”) and that the author’s


62

characterization of fictional fathers as sexually abusive (Mahoney also sexually abuses

his son in The Dark) is a trait drawn from life.

17 “Korea” also characterizes the father in ways that resemble Frank McGahern without

using actual incidents from his life to illustrate those traits. There is no mention in the

memoir of the central incident of the story, in which the son overhears the father

excitedly telling a cattle-dealer that neighbors, the Morans, received a $10,000 death

benefit from the U.S. Army after their son, Luke, was killed in Korea. Since his father

has been urging him to emigrate to America, the son naturally assumes that the

father’s motive in doing so is the potential death benefit, should the son join the U.S.

Army and be killed in Korea, or at least a monthly income of $250 like the Morans

received while their son served in the army. Nor does the memoir mention an

experience resembling the one that opens the story, in which the father recalls for his

son an execution he saw while he was an IRA prisoner during the War of Independence.

He had thought that he would be the one to be executed, but he was spared. The son’s

comment following his father’s recollection — “It was new to me to hear him talk about

his own life at all” (CS 55) — does, however, recall McGahern’s remark in the memoir

that his father was “extraordinarily secretive” about his past, including his IRA

experience in the War of Independence. McGahern says that he knew his father “had

fought in the war, but none of the details, since he never spoke about either the war or

his part in the war” (AW 52-53). Had his father specifically told him of witnessing an

execution similar to the one that opens “Korea,” McGahern most certainly would have

included it in the memoir. It is likely also that, had his father advised him to emigrate

to America, he would have mentioned it in the memoir. Nevertheless, despite

(apparently) not being based on specific real-life incidents, “Korea” does seem to

present the brutal, self-serving, and domineering father as an accurate psychological

model of the elder McGahern, and its imagined incidents might represent McGahern’s

own desire to discover the source — perhaps some dark experience in war — of his

father’s brutal, sadistic behavior.

18 “Oldfashioned” also presents a father — a police sergeant and widower living in the

barracks — very much like the elder McGahern, without apparently relying on specific

incidents from his life to create the character. The story differs, however, from the

other stories about fathers and sons in that neither the father nor the father-son

relationship is the primary focus. Rather, as Denis Sampson remarks, the story —which

has the scope without the length of a novel—“place[s] the experience of father and son

. . . in wider social and historical contexts.”9 These wider contexts include Anglo-Irish

society, embodied in the Sinclairs, an elderly married couple who hire the Sergeant’s

son, Johnny, to work in their garden. The Sergeant at first likes the arrangement,

thinking “that some benefit would flow from the association with the Sinclairs.” (CS

260). To his mind such employment would be better for the boy than advanced

education. But he becomes enraged when he learns that Colonel Sinclair has ideas

about sending the boy to Sandhurst to train for a career as a British officer. Being

“most proud of . . . the years [he spent in] the War of Independence when he was the

commander of a small company of men on the run” (CS 258), the Sergeant cannot

tolerate the idea of his son becoming a British officer. His rage is directed as much at

the son for expressing an interest in the idea as at Colonel Sinclair, and he orders him

to stop working for the Anglo-Irish couple. He also denigrates Johnny’s scholarly

success, telling him, “You’ll be like the rest of the country—educated away beyond your


63

intelligence.” In spite of the father’s disdain for education, Johnny wins a scholarship

and goes on to a successful career in making “documentary films about the darker

aspects of Irish life” (CS 268). His success apparently contributes to a lasting rift with

his father.

19 In All Will Be Well McGahern writes of his father’s admiration of Anglo-Irish Protestants:

“My father was greatly impressed by Protestants. He considered them superior in every

way to the general run of his fellow Catholics, less devious, morally more correct, more

honest, better mannered, and much more abstemious” (AW 182-83) — an attitude that

would explain the Sergeant’s initial willingness in “Oldfashioned” to allow his son to

work for the Sinclairs and his expectation that his son would benefit from the

association. But the memoir does not mention any disputes between the elder

McGahern and his Protestant neighbors. Nor does it mention that the father, despite

his years in the IRA, had strong nationalist feelings of the kind that trigger the

Sergeant’s rage at Colonel Sinclair’s suggestion, though the memoir is filled with

examples of his bouts of blind rage over many other matters. The story’s biographical

truth, then, seems restricted mostly to capturing, in the character of the Sergeant, the

elder McGahern’s explosive temperament and his desire to control his son’s life. The

Sergeant’s refusal, at the end of the story, “to get on” (CS 269) with his son does,

however, parallel Frank McGahern’s refusal to get on with his son. Both the fictional

and the real father seem motivated in their refusal in part by the fact that the sons

have chosen careers not approved by the fathers.

20 The final three (of eight) stories presenting father figures resembling Frank McGahern

all contain episodes of the adult son’s return to the father’s small farm to visit with the

father and stepmother — a ritual that, McGahern writes in the memoir, he enacted

regularly. In each story, “Wheels,” “Gold Watch,” and “Sierra Leone,” the son’s return

generally resembles visits by McGahern to his father and stepmother, but the visit is

combined with either imagined incidents or with real incidents that took place in

another context. Most importantly, in these stories, as in the memoir, the son’s return,

intended as a ritual act of reconciliation, has the opposite effect of renewing the father-

son conflict. Although the three stories illustrate several of the elder McGahern’s

repugnant traits, such as his mean-spiritedness and his obsessive need for control, the

most important trait they convey is his absolute refusal, or inability, to reconcile with

the son who very much wants reconciliation.

21 When Jim, the narrator of “Wheels,” arrives for a visit with his father and stepmother,

Rose, his father at first refuses to acknowledge his presence or speak to him but

eventually reveals the reason for his smoldering silence. He had written to his son

about his desire to move to Dublin, suggesting that they might once again live together.

Jim had responded that he would search for a place in Dublin for his father to live but

that he “wanted no room in it.” The father tells him that the letter was like “a right

kick in the teeth,” and the son replies honestly, “I want to live on my own. I didn’t want

you to come thinking differently” (CS 8). The next day, Jim departs, without any

reconciliation.

22 In All Will Be Well McGahern recounts in more detail his father’s idea about moving to

Dublin and explains the perverse calculation behind it. McGahern’s analysis of the

incident focuses on what the memoir stresses throughout: the father’s obsessive need

for dominance and his cold calculation in exercising dominance. Once he lost his role of

police sergeant — a role that gave him power and dominance in the community — the


64

only comparable role his father had left, McGahern writes, was that of “Daddy”: “This

remained his most permanent role, changing subtly with his declining powers and

increasing dependence. With extraordinary assistance from Agnes [his second wife], he

never stopped trying to draw us back within the orbit of Daddy” (AW 241).

23 The real incident differed from the story in that the older McGahern intended that

several of his children, not just John, would live with him and Agnes in Dublin.

He would move to Dublin, away from where he was no longer protected by hisposition of sergeant, away from where he had accumulated enemies and muchdislike. Once he acquired a Dublin property, we would all move in with him and payhim the rent we were now paying landlords. I began gradually to see how attractiveit would be from his point of view. In this one move he’d discomfort and uproot hiswife, rid himself of her relatives and the people he had antagonized as sergeant,and establish himself as Dublin Daddy. (AW 241)

24 McGahern and two of his sisters decided to reject the plan. John wrote a letter to their

father, signed by all three, offering assistance in finding him a place but declining the

offer to live with him. The father did not reply to the letter, and when the two sisters,

Margaret and Monica, visited him, he took to his bed and would not see them (AW 242).

McGahern does not say whether or not his father ever rebuked him over the refusal, as

the father rebukes Jim in “Wheels.” Hence, the climactic scene of the story, in which

the father angrily confronts the son over his refusal to accept the plan, would seem to

be an imaginative variation of the real incident, while the general pattern of the son’s

return to the father in search of reconciliation is true to life, as is the portrait of the

father as calculating, domineering, and petulant.

25 In both “Gold Watch” and “Sierra Leone,” the son’s relationship with the father is

complicated by the son’s relationship with a woman. In “Sierra Leone” the son risks

losing his lover (herself the mistress of an aging politician, who has invited her to

follow him to Sierra Leone) by missing a promised weekend with her. His father has

sent a telegram with an urgent request that the son come to see him on that weekend,

which he does, resulting in the woman’s decision to leave the young man and join the

politician in Sierra Leone. The story seems to be a combination of both imagined and

real incidents. McGahern makes no mention in the memoir of being involved with a

woman who was a mistress of another man, or of losing a lover because of his

relationship with his father, but he does relate a proposal his father made to him that

resembles one made by the father to the son in “Sierra Leone.”

26 When the son arrives, his father explains that he has a plan to circumvent an act being

considered by parliament that would require a good deal of a man’s property be left to

his widow. The father fears that, if his second wife inherits the property, her relatives

will eventually wind up with it. So he proposes transferring his property to the son. But

the son refuses the offer, seeing it as mean-spirited and cruel to the stepmother, Rose,

who has been very loyal to her husband. The father is angry with the son for rejecting

his plan, and next day the son leaves, saying goodbye only to Rose and thereby

foregoing — as in the other stories — any possible reconciliation with the father.

27 McGahern recounts in the memoir a proposal his father made to him that resembles

the one the father makes in “Sierra Leone.” (It appears, however, that his father made

the proposal in a letter rather than during a visit to the farm.) As in the story, the plan

was to circumvent a recent “Act of Parliament [that] had been brought in to prevent

men like him from disinheriting their wives.” McGahern says that he gave his father

“short shrift” and told him that “Agnes should get everything.” He does not, however,


65

describe his father’s response, saying only that “he approached my brother [Frankie]

with more success” (AW 280-81).

28 Of these final three stories, “Gold Watch” seems to contain the least amount of actual

incident from the father’s life, yet it too captures the behavior and personality of the

elder McGahern. In the story the son brings his lover to meet his father and

stepmother, Rose, at their small farm. In the course of the visit, the son asks for his

father’s gold watch, no longer working but considered by the son to be a family

treasure (it had once belonged to his father’s father). The father reluctantly gives it to

him but rejects the offer for a new watch in its place. Meanwhile the son’s lover refuses

to spend more than one night at the father’s home because of an insulting remark the

father made about her age, though not in her presence. A short time later, the lovers

marry without informing the father. Then the son, without his wife, visits the father to

give him a new watch and to tell the father and stepmother about his marriage. The

father rudely accepts the new watch, calling it “ugly” and unnecessary. Later, he

attempts to damage the watch by wearing it while he is hammering stone and sticking

his arm with the watch on it into a barrel of water he is preparing as potato spray.

When the son tells the father about his marriage, the father angrily reveals that he has

already heard about it. Later the son finds the new watch hanging by a fishing line in

the barrel of corrosive spray. Like the protagonists in “Wheels” and “Sierra Leone,”

though with more equanimity, he realizes that his relationship with his father is

irreconcilable.

29 In All Will Be Well McGahern recounts no such incident about a gold watch originally

belonging to his grandfather. In fact, he says that neither his father nor his paternal

grandmother ever mentioned his grandfather (AW 18-19);10 nor is there is any mention

of a gold watch passed down from grandfather to father to son. McGahern does

mention, however, that when he brought his first wife, Annikki Laaksi, a Finnish

woman, to meet his father at the farm, she so disliked him that, like the woman in the

story, she refused to spend more than one night in his house and never returned for

another visit (AW 268). Nevertheless, despite few actual similarities to real events,

“Gold Watch,” like “Korea,” seems to present the father as still another version of

Frank McGahern. The ritual of the son returning home in hopes of reconciling with the

father, enacted twice in the story, suggests that the characterization of the father as

embittered, rude, unforgiving, and entirely unwilling or unable to reconcile with his

son resembles very much McGahern’s father.

30 In addition to accounts of his father’s behavior incorporated into the stories, All Will Be

Well contains passages that comment on the McGaherns’ father-son relationship and

are therefore helpful in understanding the significance of McGahern’s obsession with

the father figure. He writes, for example, of perceiving “a certain primal pattern of the

father and the son” in the fact that he has not “a single memory of [his] father staying

in the bungalow” with the rest of the family, even though his father must have come

often from the barracks to visit them. This primal pattern, he writes, is reinforced by

his earliest memory of his father, in the barracks and in his Garda uniform, cutting off

young John’s “head of curls . . . in spite of [his] frightened protests, made worse by [his]

mother’s and grandmother’s obvious distress” (AW 12). This first memory establishes

his father’s dominance in the relationship.

31 McGahern writes also of an “open or latent sense of conflict that always lay between

[him and his father] at even the best of times.” He says that his sisters attributed this


66

“sense of conflict” to the fact that their father felt “displaced in [their] mother’s

affections and was never able to forgive or come to terms with that hurt” (AW 12-13).

As the eldest of the seven motherless siblings, John eventually came into violent

conflict with his father over the “sudden rages, the beatings, the punishments, the

constant scolding” (AW 170) that the elder McGahern frequently administered to the

children. At first reluctant to confront his father, he became bolder as he grew

“[m]entally and physically” stronger, going so far as to keep a twenty-two rifle loaded

and leaning in the corner of his room. Then one night his father began to beat him for

no apparent reason, though McGahern “suspect[ed] there was something sexual in his

violence” (AW 202). McGahern describes his reaction:

I remember feeling a wild sense of unfairness and a cold rage as I fell [from hisfather’s blow]. I rose and went straight up to him, my hands at my sides, laughing.He hit me. I fell a number of times and each time rose laughing. I had passedbeyond the point of pain and felt a strange cold elation. He was growing uncertain. Ihad passed beyond fear. . . . He and I knew that an extraordinary change had takenplace. (AW 202-203)

32 A short time later McGahern confronted his father as he was beating one of the girls.

When the elder McGahern turned and struck him, the son responded: “Do that again

and you’re finished.” His father “fell back, crying. ‘I reared a son. I reared a son that

would lift a hand to his father. I reared a son.” From that point on, John became his

siblings’ protector: “there would never be uncontested violence in my presence in the

house again” (AW 203).

33 These and other examples in the memoir of the conflict that existed in McGahern’s

relationship with his father obviously account for the frequent father-son conflicts in

the fiction, as well as the characterization of the father figure as explosive, bullying,

and violent. But McGahern also mentions in the memoir another aspect of his father

that complicated their relationship. He writes of his father’s frequent overtures to

“court” him by, among other things, giving him presents and spending time with him.

About these efforts, McGahern says, “I was charmed and delighted by his favour” (AW

87). Nevertheless, his father’s attempts to win him over often became just another

source of conflict. For example, at the end of one of the visits to the barracks, during

which his father was particularly pleasant to him, the elder McGahern invited his son

to live with him. But when young John realized that doing so would deprive him of his

mother’s companionship, he rejected his father’s invitation. The rejection brought “a

look of hatred in his [father’s] eyes” — because, as the son later realized, “he hadn’t got

his way” (AW 116). It is this pattern we find in such stories as “Wheels” and “Sierra

Leone”: the father makes an overture unacceptable to the son; the son rejects it; the

father responds angrily because he has not gotten his way; and the story ends in

unresolved conflict. “Gold Watch” and “Oldfashioned” reverse the pattern: the son

makes at attempt to reconcile with the father, but the father rejects the overture.

34 The theme of failed reconciliation in the fiction between father and son has, of course,

often been examined by critics. What the memoir — in its graphic descriptions of the

elder McGahern’s pathological behavior — might help to answer, however, is the

question of why reconciliation was impossible. It might also suggest an unconscious

process that McGahern pursued in writing fiction in hopes of resolving the conflict

with his father. In the memoir, as in much of the fiction, the father figure dominates

the narrative — often more than the protagonists in the fiction and more than the

author in the memoir. His dominance is so great, in fact, as to make him larger-than-


67

life — a father figure, as Sampson says (of the fictional characters), of “mythic stature

. . ., the Lear of Oakport, the Cronos of Cootehall.”11 Or, to use another literary allusion,

he is like the father figure in Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy”: he must be brought into

existence by the author precisely to be exorcised. Then the child can be free of him.

35 Before the publication of All Will Be Well, it appeared that McGahern had been able to do

just that —free himself of his father’s dominance. In his last novel, That They May Face

the Rising Sun, Joe Ruttledge (McGahern’s alter ego) makes no mention of a father, and

no father presents himself to dominate the narrative, as he does in so much of

McGahern’s other fiction. One of the great pleasures (or relief) in reading that novel—

as it might have been for McGahern in writing it — is the absence of the dominating

father. But in writing the memoir a few years later McGahern was compelled to bring

his father back into his and his readers’ consciousness — and to have to deal once more

with the father’s overwhelming presence. Even his father’s death, as he relates it in the

memoir, did not bring full resolution, though the sentiment expressed at the end of the

following passage conveys a sense of release:

When word of my father’s death reached me, the intensity of the conflictingemotions — grief, loss, relief — took me unawares. I believe the reaction was asmuch for those years in which his life and mine were entangled in a relationshipneither of us wanted as for the man who had just met the death each of us face. Hemade many demands but gave little and always had to dominate. A life from whichthe past was so rigorously shut out had to be a life of darkness. Though I have moreknowledge and experience of him than I have of any other person, I cannot say Ihave fully understood him, and leave him now with God, or whatever truth orillusion or longing for meaning or comfort that word may represent” (AW 288)

36 The many similarities in personality and behavior between McGahern’s fictional

fathers and his real father as described in the memoir would seem to argue for more

extensive autobiographical, even psycho-biographical, interpretations of his fiction, as

is sure to happen. But critics should also heed Patrick Crotty’s warning that “attempts

to read [McGahern’s fiction] as autobiographical are generally confounded” and his

“capacity for imaginative amplification of his [autobiographical] resources is…

considerable.”12 Although these new revelations in the memoir give us a much better

sense of how much McGahern borrowed from the character and behavior of his father

in creating the father figures in his fiction, they are unlikely to gainsay less personal

interpretations of the father figures.13

37 Finally, we might ask: What light does the memoir shed on McGahern’s own sense of his

father’s relationship to the many fictional fathers he created? Or, to rephrase the

question: How conscious was he that he found the model for his fictional fathers in the

life of his own father? There are, unfortunately, just a couple of statements in the

memoir that might help to answer the question, and in one of them McGahern seems

somewhat disingenuous. He says that he sent his father a prepublication copy of The

Barracks, without any expectation that he would read it but because he did not want his

father to think that he “had anything to hide.” He then says, “the characters[in The

Barracks] are all imagined. The sergeant in the novel bears hardly any resemblance to my

father. He is relatively uncomplicated and far more attractive” (AW 260, my italics).14

This is his only comment in the memoir about a specific father in his fiction; he says

nothing about Mahoney, Sergeant Moran, Michael Moran, or any of the fathers in the

short stories. But he does make a remark that might unwittingly reveal his recognition

that his obsession with the domineering, abusive father can be traced back to his own


68

father. During a contentious exchange over his writing career, his fatherasked him,

“What is your aim [in writing]?” McGahern answered simply: “To write well, to write

truly and well about fellowslike yourself” (AW 279, my italics). It is, of course, too late to

know for certain just how much McGahern consciously cast his father figures in the

mold of his own father, but it seems certain that, at the very least on an unconscious

level, they were modeled very closely on Frank McGahern.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Cahalan, James M. Double Vision: Women and Men in Modern and Contemporary Irish Fiction.

Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999.

Crotty, Patrick “‘All Toppers’: Children in the Fiction of John McGahern” in Irish Fiction Since the

1960s: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Great Britain: Colin Smythe,

2005

Kennedy, Eileen. “Sons and Fathers in John McGahern’s Short Stories” in New Irish Writing:

Essays in Memory of Raymond J. Porter. Eds. James D. Brophy and Eamon Grennan. Boston:

Twayne, 1989

McGahern, John. The Collected Stories, New York: Knopf, 1993.

---. Getting Through. London: Quartet Books/Poolbeg Press, 1979.

---. All Will Be Well, New York: Knopf, 2006.

Sampson, Denis. Outstaring Nature’s Eye: The Fiction of John McGahern,Washington, D.C.: The

Catholic University of America Press, 1993.

RÉSUMÉS

John McGahern’s Memoir, All Will Be Well (2006) confirmed what many readers had long

suspected: the tyrannical, moody, abusive father figure that dominates the novels and short

stories is modelled closely on the author’s own father, Frank McGahern. The memoir reveals in

elaborate detail that the often detestable behavior of the fictional fathers and their repugnant

emotional and psychological traits were, in fact, those of McGahern’s own father. Two of the

stories - “The Stoat” and “The Key” – are taken nearly whole cloth from incidents in Frank

McGahern’s life, while other stories mix incidents described in the memoir with apparently

imagined ones to recreate a faithful portrait of Frank McGahern. All Will Be Well also contains

passages that comment on the McGahern’s father-son relationship and are, therefore, helpful in

understanding the significance of McGahern’s obsession with the father figure.


69

AUTEURS

MICHAEL L. STOREY

Michael L. Storey, Ph.D., is the Sister Maura Eichner Professor of English at College of Notre Dame

of Maryland in Baltimore. He is the author of Representing the Troubles in Irish ShortFiction (The

Catholic University of America Press, 2004) as well as articles and reviews on Frank O’Connor,

Sean O’Faolain, Elizabeth Bowen, William Trevor, Bernard MacLaverty, and other Irish writers.


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“Absence does not cast a shadow”:yeats's shadowy presence inMcGahern's “The wine breath”Bertrand Cardin

1 John McGahern’s short story “The Wine Breath” was published for the first time in The

New Yorker on April 4, 19771, then in the collection Getting Through, which came out the

following year2 and finally in The Collected Stories in 1992 3. This is a particular story

insofar as it deals with a priest who is the only character in the diegetic universe.

Furthermore, the text is made up of thoughts, daydreams and memories. Transported

to days lived a long time ago, the priest proves to be in search of lost time in a

Proustian fashion. Yet, the few dialogues in “The Wine Breath”, unlike those in Proust’s

œuvre, are only memories of an earlier time. As a result, the diegesis is particularly

empty; this emptiness is reinforced by the protagonist’s anonymity. Indeed, the priest

is most often laconically referred to by the personal pronoun “he”. This emptiness

highlights the overall melancholy which is at work in the universe of the narrative, all

the more so as the latter is pervaded by death. This melancholy can be accounted for by

the fact that the protagonist drinks too much. As a matter of fact, most analyses of

“The Wine Breath” justify the title of the short story by the main character’s

alcoholism. This explanation may well be true but is not quite satisfying, for it

overlooks an important allusion to “All Souls’ Night”, a poem Yeats wrote in 1920,

which contains the following lines:

[…] A ghost may come;For it is a ghost’s right,His element is so fineBeing sharpened by his death,To drink from the wine-breathWhile our gross palates drink from the whole wine […]4.

2 Much more than the priest’s alcoholism which is nothing but a mere conjecture based

on the fact alluded to in the story that some priests are so fond of whiskey that they

neglect to say mass, “The Wine Breath” is a quotation-title and thus directly refers to

Yeats’s poem. It is surprising that the connection between these two Irish texts has


71

never been mentioned, not even in Neil Corcoran’s essay, After Yeats and Joyce, which

focuses on the immense influence of Yeats’s work on the styles, stances and

preoccupations of those who have succeeded him in the 20th century. On the one hand,

Corcoran mentions Yeats’s influence, but exclusively concerning the big house novel,

on the other, he perceives the traces of Joyce’s bildungsroman, A Portrait of the Artist, in

McGahern’s work, particularly his novels. This paper aims at exploring the intertextual

articulations within McGahern’s story, “The Wine Breath”, in connection with Yeats’s

poem, “All Souls’ Night”, by paying particular attention to the motif of return.

McGahern’s interest in a piece of writing published several decades before “The Wine

Breath” draws attention to the solitary protagonists who, in both texts, conjure up past

episodes of their lives. Their “dreaming back” is mirrored by the circular framework of

the story and the refrains of the poem. With these characteristics, the two texts also

suggest a return to the local Celtic perception of the land in which both of them prove

to be rooted.

3 On a snowy day, the priest in “The Wine Breath” goes to meet some of his parishioners

but turns back: “Making sure that Gillespie hadn’t noticed him at the gate, he turned

back.” (180). To go back home, he uses a particular path: “In order to be certain of

being left alone he went by the circular path.” (181). His physical movement in space is

in keeping with his inner thoughts made of remembrances of lost time, of a return to

his own past which takes into account the cycle of life and death, mirrored by the

significant structure of the chiasmus: “The arrival at the shocking knowledge of birth

and death. His attraction to the priesthood as a way of vanquishing death and avoiding

birth.” (183). Most of the time, circularity corresponds to a strategy of avoidance, of

evasion, a refusal of a linear progression. According to Richard Kearney5, there is a

struggle in McGahern’s fiction between linear and circular structure, between journey

and sterile repetition, expressed thematically in the conflict between imagination – a

vector line which keeps moving forward, irreversibly progresses and implies renewal –

and memory, with its cyclical reassuring ritual: “the Mass he had to repeat every day.”

(185). The priest deliberately chooses the well-known, the familiar – the adjective

“familiar” is repeated three times in the same paragraph (185-186). He resurrects past

things, but also people he formerly knew and loved, particularly his mother. In a

decidedly Proustian fashion, he travels back to his origins, to his mother’s womb. Oddly

enough, as if to confirm himself in his constant backward look, he retrospectively

ponders over his mother’s regression at the end of her life. Indeed, he remembers her

lapse into second childhood and the resumption of her needlework which, like

Penelope, consisted in undoing what she had done: “Then he came home one evening

to find her standing like a child in the middle of the room, surrounded by an enormous

pile of rags. She had taken up from where she’d been interrupted at the herring-bone

skirt and torn up every dress or article of clothing she had ever made.” (184)6. This

quotation opens with a verb which is significant of this constant homecoming, a

characteristic in McGahern’s fiction, as Cornelius Crowley puts it: “any departure is

merely provisional, a setting-out which will, in any case, be followed by a circling

home. Coming home is inevitable.”7. McGahern’s fictional world, like Proust’s, appears

to be irremediably cyclical. Literary critic Denis Sampson associated some of

McGahern’s texts with Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past8, particularly when memory

plays a creative role and surges in an unexpected way in the midst of a very imperfect

life. This rapprochement is notably exemplified by “The Wine Breath” which closely

echoes Proustian motifs. “The Wine Breath” is “an intricate and polished piece of


72

prose”9 which reflects on memory, death, and the recovery of lost images, but also on

art, time, and rituals of return. It depicts the movements of feeling from the many

deaths experienced by the self to the intuitive knowledge of its spiritual essence

through a translation of lost images: “his life had been like any other, except to himself,

and then only in odd visions of it, as a lost life.” (183), but on the evening which the

story depicts, the old priest has an unexpected flash of images from many years before:

“The day set alight in his mind by the light of the white beech, though it had been

nothing more than a funeral he had attended during a dramatic snowfall when a boy,

seemed bathed in the eternal, seemed everything we had been taught and told of the

world of God.” (180). According to Sampson, Proustian memory is associated with

images of death. The memory is interwoven in the protagonist’s mind with that of his

own dead mother: “Ever since his mother’s death he found himself stumbling into these

dead days. Once, crushed mint in the garden had given him back a day he’d spent with

her at the sea in such reality that he had been frightened.” (180).

4 Like the taste of the Proustian madeleine, the scent of mint involuntarily recalls lost

days. McGahern’s descriptive style, moulded with radiant, sensuous reality, deals with

all the versions available of material presence. “The Wine Breath” is composed of a

diegesis narrating the priest’s walk and five intermittent memories. Each transition

period which causes the character, together with the reader, to leave the diegetic

present to slip into a past memory is associated with a particular sense. Indeed, the five

transition periods which are driving forces triggering recollections, correspond to the

five senses: the sight of snow conjures up the memory of Michael Bruen’s funeral (178),

the taste of coffee Michael’s house (181); the sense of feeling is also referred to with

touching the curtains which arouses the memories of his mother’s anxiety (185); in the

same way, the priest feels as if he were hearing Peter Joyce’s voice (186) and smelling

mint (180) which, once again, rekindles a remembered period. These elements generate

what Proust calls “involuntary or instinctive memory” which opens the door to

recollection, to profound reverie from which the character is suddenly roused after a

while. These episodes of daydreaming are implicitly compared to deep sleep since the

return to reality is depicted as an awakening: “when he woke out” (179). As soon as he

wakes “out”, the priest makes sure that he does not go “back to sleep”: “he began to

count the trees” (180); “he turned on the radio” (185); “he took up the battered and

friendly missal” (185). In the narrative, the alternation between diegetic present and

past recollections is quite regular. Indeed, the story is made of 400 lines. And the parts

of the narrative dealing respectively with the past and the present each count

approximately 200 lines. This clear structure mirrors the inner dichotomy of the priest

who is torn between his past and his present. It is also noticeable that in the course of

the narrative, the descriptions of the recollections are longer and longer10. This process

of extension of what Genette called amplitude11 progressively slows down the narrative

and highlights the inanity of the priest’s present life which, compared with his past, is

not so eventful. The recollections or analepses aim at showing the reader that the past

makes it possible to account for the priest’s difficulty in the diegetic present. It is also

interesting to point out that, although the short story is based on alternation between

past and present, the transition from recollection to reality is made without any change

or any significant discontinuity in the narrative style. The return to reality is not

marked by any temporal break, which is a way of making this daydream as real as the

roaring of Gillespie’s saw. In fact, whether it be to narrate the past or the present, the

preterite tense is used. This unchanged tense highlights the fertile imagination of the


73

priest who considers everything as fulfilled. Thus, the sequences of recollections are

never felt as such by the reader as long as they are narrated: the idea that “the

character remembers” works as a connection with what precedes, then the recollection

is read like a flash-back, as a mere chronological device which in no way weakens the

feeling of reality. This absence of any temporal break highlights the fact that the fount

of the recollection is to be found in the past experienced by the character. In a

Proustian fashion once more, the priest has a moment of reminiscence. He is in search

of lost time, transported “beside himself”, into ecstasy, a feeling of extreme pleasure

mirrored by the suspension of the narrative movement. The narrative indeed seems to

stop and suspend as if the narrator himself were gazing contemplatively at the

recollected scenes. This suspension is reinforced by the absence of any human

conversation. This daydream is conveyed by the contents and the nature of the

description. It is no dream but a recollection, hence the clarity and accuracy of some

details. This clear-cut material presence in subjective pictures where verisimilitude

would rather require vague, elusive descriptions of memories is one of the significant

characteristics of McGahern’s style, particularly in his short stories. As a result, the

reader strongly believes in an objective reality, even though the description partakes of

hypothetical objectivity: “it was as if the world of the dead was as available to him as

the world of the living.” (180).

5 The evocation of the availability of the world of the dead is introduced by a

comparative conditional phrase – “as if” – which conveys a hypothetical vision. Is the

hypothesis in the character’s mind? The evocation is not purely subjective. This “as if”

translates the priest’s lack of touch with reality and ushers the reader into unreal,

hypothetical condition. These two words are enough to plunge the reader into

reminiscence and prove that McGahern is not totally absent from the narrative.

Similarly, the following phrase in brackets testifies to the author’s presence: “he felt

himself (bathed as in a dream) in an incredible sweetness of light.” (178). The

comparative conjunction introduces the hallucinatory character of the reverie and

transports the protagonist, together with the reader, three decades earlier, as the

narration states: “He was in another day, the lost day of Michael Bruen’s funeral nearly

thirty years before.” (178). On the following page, the text specifies: “It was the day in

February 1947 that they buried Michael Bruen.” (179), which makes it possible to place

the diegetic present in 1977, that is to say when the story was written and published.

These narrative temporal details can be paralleled with the priest’s raptures which

transport him not only beside himself, but also out of time. Indeed, his visions allow

him to move freely in time “as if he’d suddenly fallen through time.” (180). Here again,

the phrase “as if” suggests the presence of the author who, as for him, is deeply

anchored in precise time. Morever, the priest himself claims to be bathed in the eternal

light of the white beech (180, emphasis mine) and his clerical identity does not fit into

the scheme of time but of eternity: “You are a priest for ever, in the succession of

Melchizedek.”12 Linked to the sacred, which escapes any chronological determination,

the cleric, whose priesthood is indelible, is in line with eternity, unless his reveries are

the foretastes of his own death. When he is depicted as “immersed in time without end”

(187), maybe the narrative implies that the priest enters eternal life. His dream is so

powerful that it becomes reality, as it were. His vision or visitation of the deceased he

used to love may be the sign that he joins them and shares their destinies, death being

regarded as a coming home. In this case, the description of the snow-covered landscape

in his recollection can be interpreted as an allegory of his entry into light:


74

his eyes were caught again by the quality of the light. It was one of those lateOctober days, small white clouds drifting about the sun, and the watery light wasshining down the alder rows to fall on the white chips of the beechwood strewn allabout Gillespie, some inches deep. It was the same white light as the light on snow.As he watched, the light went out on the beech chips (179).

6 The recurrent words, “white” and “light”, echo each other all the more so as they

rhyme and create a mirror effect between present and past on the one hand, and

between present and future on the other, insofar as this extract can be read as the

premonition that the priest’s actual death is imminent. This dazzling whiteness on a

mountain is also reminiscent of Jesus’s Transfiguration. Indeed, in the Gospel according

to Mark, Jesus took Peter, James and John with him, led them up a high mountain and

he was transfigured in their presence: “his clothes became dazzling white, with a

whiteness no bleacher on earth could equal ”13.

7 Nevertheless, concerning the intertextual articulations of “The Wine Breath”, one text

is much more relevant than the Bible or Proust’s work. Indeed, it is no accident that the

short story, which focuses on the availability of the world of the dead, should be

entitled “The Wine Breath” insofar as the expression is taken from a poem by Yeats

which is precisely dedicated to the resurrection of dead days by a living man. Sampson

himself reckons that it is to Yeats that McGahern is most indebted14, but the examples

he gives to illustrate this influence surprisingly never refer to “The Wine Breath”.

Likewise, in other publications, parallels are drawn for instance between McGahern’s

“The Wine Breath” and Joyce’s “The Dead.”15 Connections between “The Wine Breath”

and Yeats’s “All Souls’ Night” are never established, though a comparative reading of

both texts renders the intertextual articulations obvious. Morever, McGahern clearly

sees himself as a successor to Yeats: “The more we read of other literatures, and the

more they were discussed, the more clearly it emerged that not only was Yeats a very

great poet but that almost singlehandedly he had, amazingly, laid down a whole

framework in which an indigenous literature could establish traditions and grow.”16.

8 The framework in which McGahern’s fiction grows is, indeed, a literature shadowed by

the achievements of Yeats. “The Wine Breath” is a direct allusion to “All Souls’ Night”

and is stylistically and thematically indebted to this piece of poetry. As a result, Yeats is

a central presence in McGahern’s story.

9 In this “intense degree of cross-fertilization”17 different kinds of influences can be

spotted. They range from modification to dependency, from admiration to imitation

and can be compared to the influences which are at work in a father-son relationship,

for this is precisely what it amounts to. Indeed, McGahern is at once a case of filiation

with his native culture and affiliation with it through scholarly work, according to the

distinction established by Edward Said: “The filiative scheme belongs to the realms of

nature and of ‘life’ whereas affiliation belongs exclusively to culture and society.”18.

“The Wine Breath” demonstrates a return to origins. The inspiration provided by an

Irish poem for the writing in Ireland of a story on Ireland makes McGahern a parochial

writer in the positive sense of the word, insofar as “Irish literature is […] the scene of

an intertextuality in which Ireland is itself read.”19. If McGahern feels so close to Yeats,

it is because they both know and describe the same places in the northwest of the

Republic of Ireland. More particularly, the counties of Roscommon, Leitrim and Sligo

are familiar places for the two Irish men-of-letters. Both of them are associated with

the same countryside, as McGahern says himself in a conversation with Sampson:


75

I think that there is a peculiar moment in everybody’s growing up or growing downwhen there is that language change. From being marvellous stories, like movies,and marvellous songs, which words always are for me, you suddenly realize thatthese things are about your own life. Literature changes from being books in alibrary to something that concerns you. In fact, it loses some of its exoticism. That’swhen it becomes a more exciting activity, a moral activity. […] If it did happen (forme) with anybody, it was with Yeats, because we used to go to the sea in Sligo. Isuppose Yeats gives me more pleasure than any other writer, and more constantpleasure. To actually see the names like Knocknarea and Queen Maeve’s Grave, andyou know, ‘I stood among a crowd at Drumahair, His heart hung all upon a silkendress’, to actually know that those placenames were places that I knew, like Boyleor Carrick on Shannon20.

10 McGahern’s story and Yeats’s poem are both located in Ireland and this reference point

in the text is of immense importance for it is inseparable from the local Celtic tradition.

The northwest of Ireland and county Sligo in particular are indeed ideal places for all

kinds of Celtic myths and legends: “Sligo seems to have been a locale unusually rich in

fairy lore and tales of hauntings, ghosts and eerie happenings.”21. The unity of place

matches the unity of time. It must be noticed that the diegesis in both texts is set on All

Saints’ Day, more precisely on All Saints’ Night, at midnight as regards the poem, that is

to say at the junction between two days and between two months. This public Christian

holiday vouches for the dogma of the Communion of the Saints which, on the one hand,

unites the living faithful to the saints and martyrs of all times on November 1st and, on

the other, to all the deceased the Roman Catholic Church remembers and prays for,

specifically on All Souls’ Day, on November 2nd. The place and time of the diegesis, that

is All Saints’ Day in Ireland, are in line with the Celtic festival of Samhain which took

place on this very day to celebrate the end of the Celtic year. The tradition of Samhain

is perpetuated in modern times with Halloween, All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day. As

Miranda J. Green puts it in her Dictionary of Celtic Myth and Legend: “It is at the feast of

Samhain on 1 November that the boundary between the earthly and the supernatural

worlds is broken down; spirits and humans can move freely between the two lands”22

McGahern’s story, like Yeats’s poem, are well established in a local tradition and are

quite in keeping with ancestral, popular beliefs. These notions of place and time, what

Bakhtin would call “chronotop”, are here of vital importance for they organize the

major events of the narrative. The unity of place and unity of time are mirrored by the

unity of a single character who fills his loneliness with ghosts. In both texts, place, time

and the character’s loneliness favour the invocation of imaginary creatures. Alone in

both cases, the protagonist only has a virtual exchange with the dead or remembers

past conversations, but the diegesis is devoid of any effective meeting between two

characters. As a result, the diegetic present is particularly silent, as if, in these

recollections, words were pointless, which is as a matter of fact confirmed by the texts:

in the story, the priest, lost in his memories of a snow-covered landscape, which is

particularly quiet, turns off the radio and silences “the disembodied voice on the air.”

(185), not refuting the aphorism in Yeats’s poem: “Words were but wasted breath”. In

both texts, the characters go into raptures and these phases are silent in two ways:

because the protagonists avoid any noise to immerse themselves in their past, as the

verbs both in the story and in the poem testify – “he thought, he remembered” - and

because the interrupted dialogue and action suspend the narrative itself and absorb it

for a while in some kind of voiceless questioning.


76

11 The poem is a magical invocation of the deceased friends23. Yeats invites them to drink

a glass of muscatel. Right from the first lines, he complains about the incomplete

nature of the living man symbolized by his incapacity to drink from the wine breath.

He successively invokes three friends of his: Horton who yearned for death because he

could not turn his thoughts away from the lady he had lost; Florence Emery (Florence

Farr), the actress who left her country for Ceylon where she learned about Buddhism;

Mac Gregor Mathers, whose esoteric meditations had kept him away from his own kind.

In their lifetimes, these three characters were interested in the occult and magic and

did their best to communicate with the beyond. They shared the same mystical

preoccupation, the same pathetic effort to learn from the dead. The poet needs their

help to unravel “the mummy truths”: “Wound in mind’s wandering/As mummies in the

mummy-cloth are wound”. The image of the mummy specifies that this knowledge

escapes time and fits into the scheme of eternity. As for the verb “o win”, it describes

the spiral movement of the soul. Only the blossoming everlasting soul, once purified,

can reach the Truth, which is unattainable by the living. Significantly, this poem acts as

an epilogue to A Vision, in which Yeats keeps seeking this Truth. Yet, does the poet

manage to grasp it? The ghosts do not seem to come up to his expectations. Does it

mean that occultism – or even the system outlined in A Vision – did not enable him to

reach revelation? The reader keeps on wondering about this “marvellous” disclosure.

In the third book of A Vision, “The Soul in Judgment”, Yeats distinguishes between six

different steps from death to reincarnation. The second one, “The Meditation”,

includes three stages: “the Dreaming Back”, which may have been suggested to Yeats

by the noh, where the soul re-enacts the events of its incarnate life and gradually

breaks away from them. The second stage is “the Return”, where the soul

chronologically goes through the same events again with the purpose of grasping them

fully, of exploring their causes and effects. In the third stage, “the Phantasmagoria”,

the soul lives all that man had imagined without doing it.

12 Isn’t this Yeatsian process followed by the priest in McGahern’s story, with his

experience of a meditation in which he is dreaming back and returning to past days?

His mental images are clearly depicted as visions which anticipate the different steps

gone through by a soul in the afterlife. Likewise, it is no accident that the words which

can be picked up in both texts refer either to religion – “God, bell, wine, death, sun,

fish”24 - with variants on eternity (‘never ends’ in the poem, “without end” in the story)

and blessing (“blessed” for Yeats, “beatification” for McGahern), or to visionary

meditation –“thought, vision, ghost”. Yeats’s poem and McGahern’s story are both

steeped in a religious atmosphere in which mortals can penetrate the underworld and,

vice-versa, the spirits of the other world can move freely from the sidhe to the land of

the living. In his elaborate process developed in A Vision, Yeats describes the

transmigration of souls from one life to another until they can escape from the cycle of

rebirths to reach the final blessing. Their different reincarnations make death unreal.

Morever, as Yeats writes himself in On the Boiler: “death is but passing from one room

into another”25 and the door between the two rooms is obviously wide open, as

confirmed by The Celtic Twilight: “In Ireland this world and the other are not widely

sundered: sometimes, indeed, it seems almost as if our earthly chattels were no more

than the shadows of things beyond.”26. The barriers between the real world and the

supernatural obviously dissolve: “The priest felt as vulnerable as if he had suddenly

woken out of sleep, shaken and somewhat ashamed to have been caught asleep in the

actual day and life, without any protection of walls.” (179). The solitary priest in “The


77

Wine Breath” has visions, revelations generated by the dazzling brightness of the snow

which carries him to that day in 1947 when a neighbour by the name of Michael Bruen

was buried. The snow obstructed the road to such an extent that it caused a lot of

trouble for the cortege to reach the graveyard. The description of the scene illustrates

McGahern’s poetic prose:

All was silent and still there. Slow feet crunched on the snow. Ahead, at the foot ofthe hill, the coffin rode slowly forward on shoulders, its brown varnish and metaltrappings dull in the glittering snow, riding just below the long waste of snow eightor ten feet deep over the whole countryside. The long dark line of mournersfollowing the coffin stretched away towards Oakport Wood in the pathway cutthrough the snow. High on Killeelan Hill the graveyard evergreens rose out of thesnow. The graveyard wall was covered, the narrow path cut up the side of the hillstopping at the little gate deep in the snow. The coffin climbed with painfulslowness, as if it might never reach the gate, often pausing for the bearers to bechanged ; and someone started to pray, the prayer travelling down the whole mile-long line of the mourners as they shuffled behind the coffin in the narrow tunnelcut in the snow.It was the day in February 1947 that they buried Michael Bruen. Never before orsince had he experienced the Mystery in such awesomeness. Now, as he stood at thegate, there was no awe or terror, only the coffin moving slowly towards the darktrees on the hill, the long line of the mourners, and everywhere the blinding whitelight, among the half-buried thorn bushes and beyond Killeelan, on the coveredwaste of Gloria Bog, on the sides of Slieve an Iarainn (178-179).

13 The slow rhythm of the procession is enhanced by the repetition of the adjectives

“long” and “slow” and their derivatives – “slowly”, “slowness”. The adjective “slow”

not only echoes, but also rhymes with “snow”, a word repeated seven times in this

passage. This slowness is in keeping with the circumstances of the funeral which is

recalled by the semantic field of death, with recurrent terms such as “coffin”,

“mourners” or “graveyard”, words which echo the ones that can be picked up in Yeats’s

poem – “death”, “grave”, “end”, “mummies”… This use of echoes and repetitions is

conscious and poetic according to McGahern who, in his conversation with Sampson,

points out:

I have always admired in verse this sort of refrain, ‘Daylight and a candle end’,when that’s repeated at the end of every verse. I have always been fascinated bythat because I actually think it is the truth, and I think that kind of repetition youare talking about in prose, if it’s successful, is the same kind of thing as refrain inverse […]. All that matters to me is style27.

14 This subtle pattern of echoes and repetitions recalls the image of the circle or the

wheel. It must be borne in mind that “Wheels” is the seminal first story of McGahern’s

very first collection, Nightlines28. Twenty years later, in The Collected Stories which

respects the chronology of McGahern’s publications, “Wheels” also opens up the

collection.29 The wheel is the perfect image of a stylistic and structural trait typical of

McGahern’s writing – the circularity of the short stories and the novels, the insistence

on cycles, circles, stylistic and rhetorical devices such as parallels, alliterations,

chiasma – which “The Wine Breath” does not fail to exemplify: “it was out of fear of

death he became a priest, which became in time the fear of life.” (183). The symmetrical

parallel of the antithetical terms – “death” and “life” – is added to the circular

structure of the chiasmus (fear, became / became, fear) which highlights a major motif

in the story. Indeed, the fear of death corresponds to the fear of the future, shown by

the escape into the past. This fear of death is, according to McGahern, characteristic of

the priesthood30. In another short story, “All Sorts of Impossible Things”, for example,


78

somebody tells the priest: “Your collar is the sublimation of timor mortis”31, a Latin

expression of which McGahern is particularly fond, maybe owing to the voicing of the

syllables structured once more on the circularity of the chiasmus (ti-mor/mor-ti).

Interestingly enough, the same stylistic device can also be spotted in two lines already

quoted from Yeats’s poem: “Wound in mind’s pondering/As mummies in the mummy-

cloth are wound.” These serpentine lines establish a circular structure not only within

the very lines through the chiasmus again, but also because the same two lines are

repeated at the beginning and at the end of the verse. Furthermore, “The Great Wheel”

is also the title of the first book in Yeats’s A Vision. The wheel stands for any cyclical

process there: a unique life, in other words, incarnation. McGahern is undoubtedly

highly influenced by these Yeatsian characteristics. By the same token, the words

relating to wine – “glass”, “muscatel”, “palate” – are also recurrent, like the expression

“drink from the whole wine” or the term “ghost” which is a major element in the two

texts32. The ghosts of the dead are invoked in “All Souls’ Night” as well as in “The Wine

Breath” and their presence is friendly, expected, reassuring. Yeats’s invocation of a

“slight companionable ghost” is echoed by the priest’s wish: “He would be glad of a

ghost tonight” (185). This is why the ghost of the mother is invoked. The mother is

clearly depicted as having played a major part in the priest’s life33. Morever, if he

became a priest, it was mostly to submit to her will: “His mother had the vocation for

him.” (183). The mother seals the fate of her son who lives his life by proxy to a certain

extent. His priesthood is no act of personal choice. Here again, this scenario keeps

cropping up in McGahern’s fiction as the sentence, repeated verbatim in another story

“The Creamery Manager”, testifies34. It is also significant that the mother’s death

causes the priest’s total collapse. This is implied in the narrative with the repetition of

the pronoun “nothing” which directly follows the mention of the mother’s death: “ . . .

then she died. There was nothing left but his own life. There had been nothing but that

all along.” (184-185). In order to fill the gap left by her death, the priest invokes his

mother’s ghost and justifies his reaction by interpreting it as something usual: “wasn’t

it natural to turn back to the mother?” (183) His recourse to the past, his retrogression

is accompanied by regression to an early stage in his personal growth. This appeal to

the mother’s ghost is to be spotted within the diegesis and can be considered as intra-

diegetic, whereas extra-diegetically, it is the father’s ghost – Yeats himself – who is

invoked. Indeed, McGahern seems to be in need of an authority who makes him feel

secure, a comrade who shows him the way and ensures him not to be mistaken.

15 Homecoming, circling backwards as well as rituals of return carefully structure the

short story. This can be noticed in stylistic, thematic and literary terms, not only

through McGahern’s return to Yeats’s work (both send their readers back to old Celtic

traditions that are lost in the mists of time), but also in our own reading of texts

published decades ago. Today’s readers are travelling back in an endless movement

which can make them dizzy and intoxicated as if they were also drinking from the wine

breath. It is worth mentioning that wine is associated with blood, Christ’s blood in

particular, and is a symbol of rebirth according to Celtic beliefs. In “The Wine Breath”,

was McGahern’s purpose not to re-read Yeats’s poem, in other words to revive, to

resurrect it to make the poet come back to life, by drawing his inspiration so obviously

from such a piece of poetry?


79

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---. The Collected Stories. London: Faber and Faber, 1992.

---. Memoir. London: Faber and Faber, 2005.

New English Bible (the). Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972.

Proust, Marcel. A la Recherche du temps perdu (1927). Paris: Gallimard, 1954.

---. Remembrance of Things Past. New York: Random House, 1934

Said, Edward. The World, the Text and the Critic. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983.

Sampson, Denis. The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies (special issue John McGahern) vol. 17, N°1,

July 1991.

Yeats, William Butler. Writings on Irish Folklore, Legend and Myth. London: Penguin, 1993.

---. Collected Poems. London: Macmillan, 1989.

---. A Vision (1937). London: Macmillan, 1978.

---. On the Boiler. Dublin: The Cuala Press, 1939.


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---. The Celtic Twilight (1893). London: Penguin, 1984.

NOTES

1. John McGahern, “The Wine Breath”, The New Yorker (4 April 1977) 36-40.

2. John McGahern, “The Wine Breath”, Getting Through, London: Faber and Faber, 1978, 95-106.

3. John McGahern, “The Wine Breath”, The Collected Stories, London: Faber and Faber, 1992,

178-187. All quotations are from this edition and page numbers are given parenthetically in the

text.

4. William Butler Yeats, “All Souls’ Night “ (1920), Collected Poems, London: Macmillan, 1989), 256.

5. Richard Kearney, “A Crisis of Imagination: an analysis of a counter-tradition in the Irish

novel”, The Crane Bag, vol. 3, n°1 (1979) Dublin: Blackwater Press, 1982) 397.

6. Similarly, the priest remembers his neighbour, Michael Bruen, and particularly his

homecoming which cancelled his attempt at self-establishment which leavetaking had enacted.

Indeed, Michael “had been a policeman in Dublin (…) and had come home to where he’d come

from to buy the big Crossna farm.” (181).

7. Cornelius Crowley “Leavetaking and Homecoming in the writing of John McGahern”, Etudes

britanniques contemporaines, N° spécial“John McGahern” (Montpellier: SEAC, 1994) 65.

8. Denis Sampson, “The Lost Image: Some Notes on McGahern and Proust”, The Canadian Journal of

Irish Studies (special issue John McGahern) vol. 17, N°1, July 1991, 57-68.

9. Ibid. 60

10. The recollection of the burial is narrated in 25 lines. The recollection of Michael’s parents

requires 50 lines, that of the priest’s stretches over 71 lines

11. Gérard Genette, Figures III, Paris Seuil, 1972

12. Psalm 110, verse 4.

13. The Gospel according to Mark, 9/3.

14. “It is the poetry of Yeats which is most often echoed in the fiction of McGahern,” Denis

Sampson, “Introducing John McGahern”, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, op. cit., 4.

15. Stéphane Jousni, “Aube ou linceul? Les chemins de neige chez McGahern et Joyce”, Cahiers des

Etudes Irlandaises, n°1, 1997, 97-108.

16. John McGahern, “The Creative Process”, Irish Writers and their Creative Process, Irish Literary

Studies 48, Jacqueline Genet, Wynne Hellegouarc’h eds., (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1996)

107-108.

17. Neil Corcoran, After Yeats and Joyce. Reading Modern Irish Literature (Oxford, Oxford University

Press, 1997) IX

18. Edward Said, The World, the Text and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press,

1983) 20.

19. Neil Corcoran, op. cit., vi.

20. Denis Sampson “A Conversation with John McGahern”, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, op.

cit., 13.

21. William Butler Yeats, Writings on Irish Folklore, Legend and Myth (London: Penguin, 1993) xx.

22. Miranda J. Green, Dictionary of Celtic Myth and Legend (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992) 168.

23. “All Souls Night” is commented upon in an article by Jacqueline Genet, “Yeats et la Mort”,

Etudes Irlandaises, 30-1, (Villeneuve d’Asq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2005, 37-54.

24. Traditionally, the fish is a Christian symbol because the Greek word for fish, “iktus”, stood in

primitive church for Iesu Kristos Theou Uios Soter (Jesus Christ Son of God and Saviour). It was

used as an ideogram.

25. William Butler Yeats, On the Boiler, Dublin: The Cuala Press, 1939.


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26. Writings on Irish folklore, Legend and Myth, op. cit., 131

27. Denis Sampson, “A Conversation with John McGahern”, CJIS, op. cit., 14

28. John McGahern, “Wheels”, Nightlines, (London: Faber and Faber, 1970) 2-13

29. John McGahern “Wheels”, The Collected Stories (London, Faber and Faber, 1992) 3-11

30. Throughout McGahern’s work, the choice of the priesthood is repeatedly motivated by this

fear of death: “I never met a priest yet who wasn’t afraid of death” says Moran at the end of

Amongst Women, and Rose remarks: “Maybe that’s why they become priests”. John McGahern,

Amongst Women (London: Faber and Faber, 1990) 179.

31. John McGahern, “All Sorts of Impossible Things”, The Collected Stories, op. cit., 139.

32. It is no accident if McGahern’s short story “The Wine Breath” also appears in a collection

edited by Joseph Hone entitled Irish Ghost Stories (London: Grafton, 1979) 103-116.

33. In McGahern’s fiction, sons admire and adore their mothers, a characteristic which has its

roots in the very life of the author, as his last book testifies: John McGahern, Memoir (London:

Faber and Faber, 2005).

34. “His mother had the vocation for him”, John McGahern, “The Creamery Manager”, The

Collected Stories, op. cit., 371.

ABSTRACTS

Most analyses of McGahern’s “The Wine Breath” justify the title of the short story by the main

character’s alcoholism. This explanation may well be true but it is not quite satisfying, for it

overlooks an important allusion to Yeats’s poem “All Souls’ Night” which contains the following

lines:

(…) A ghost may come;

For it is a ghost’s right,

His element is so fine

Being sharpened by his death,

To drink from the wine-breath

While our gross palates drink from the whole wine (…)

It is surprising that the connection between these two Irish texts is never underlined, not even in

Neil Corcoran’s essay, After Yeats and Joyce, which focuses on the immense influence of Yeats’s

work on the styles, stances and preoccupations of those who have succeeded him in the 20th

century. This is why this paper explores the intertextual articulations of McGahern’s story in

connection with Yeats’s poem, specifically through the notion of return. McGahern’s interest in a

piece of writing published several decades before “The Wine Breath” calls attention to the

solitary protagonists who, in both texts, call up past episodes of their lives. This “dreaming back”

is mirrored by the circular framework of the story and the refrains of the poem. Thanks to these

characteristics, the two texts also suggest a return to the local Celtic tradition of the land in

which both of them prove to be anchored


82

AUTHORS

BERTRAND CARDIN

Bertrand Cardin is a professor at the Université de Caen, France. He has written a book on father/

son relationships in the contemporary Irish novel, entitled Miroirs de la filiation. Parcours dans huit

romans irlandais contemporains (2005) and co-edited a book on the Famine in Irish literature:

Irlande: Ecritures et réécritures de la Famine (2007). He is also the author of a Ph.D thesis on John

McGahern’s short stories and has published articles about contemporary Irish novelists and short

story writers such as Jennifer Johnston, Edna O’Brien or Joseph O’Connor.


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Legends of the fall: John McGahern's"Christmas" and "The creamerymanager"Bernice Schrank

Introduction: Is This “the Ireland that We Dreamed Of”?

1 A typical John McGahern short story is narrowly local and specifically Irish in its

setting, precisely imagined in its detail, seemingly casual in its plotting, obliquely

resonant in its literary echoes, and surprisingly dark in its metaphysical and social

implications. McGahern frequently focuses on a central character who undergoes a

transforming crisis and is shocked to have his amorphous doubts about life confirmed.

To be sure, McGahern’s characters deal differently with such realizations of

disappointment. Responses run the gamut from incipient despair to stoical resignation,

with many modulations in between.

2 Perhaps the most interesting reactions are found in stories like “Christmas” and “The

Creamery Manager,” discussed in greater detail below, when this painful knowledge

produces a sense of release. Experience having reinforced their intuitive understanding

that life will always undermine their expectations however minimalist they are, these

characters believe they have nothing further to lose, and so they experience

disappointment as an ironic variant of freedom. Whatever the permutations of their

individual responses, McGahern’s characters collectively accept, sometimes grudgingly,

sometimes stoically, sometimes with relief, that they lead (and will continue to lead)

lives of, at best, quiet desperation. (For other general treatments of McGahern’s work

see Brannigan, Grennan, Goarzin, Kiberd, Maher and McKeon.)

3 Despite their focus on the individual sensibility, McGahern’s stories encourage both

metaphysical and social extrapolation. Certainly the cumulative weight in story after

story of so many depleted lives conveys a sense of, if not cosmic emptiness, then at

least of a general cosmic indifference to the human condition. In the face of human

suffering and need, the natural world continues uninterrupted and unmoved. There is


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no sentimentality in McGahern’s short story depictions of Irish rural life lived close to

nature. In “Christmas,” for example, the birds make a “racket,” the lake is frozen, “rose

streaks from the sun” are “impaled on the firs,” and ice fills the potholes, making work

and travel dangerous (24, Collected Stories, my emphasis). There is nothing here that

might be construed as consolation or assurance. The vision that informs McGahern’s

stories is of a fallen world in which innocence is a fragile, temporary state, possibility is

an illusion soon punctured by the reality of limitation, and fulfilment proves to be an

unsustainable fantasy.

4 This dark vision incorporates a social as well as a metaphysical/spiritual dimension.

McGahern plants many of his stories of struggling humanity in the heyday of Eamon de

Valera, for many years Taoiseach (Prime Minister) (1937-48, 1951-54, 1957-59) and then

President of Ireland (1959-73). Indeed, for all the seeming randomness of his plots,

McGahern is a deliberate and subtle chronicler of the frayed seams and badly patched

elbows of the mid-twentieth century Irish social fabric. He is a close observer of the

small malignancies and minor cruelties concealed beneath the veneer of social

propriety. By judicious implication and modulated irony, his stories offer a critique of

the orthodoxies of Irish church and state in the late 1940s and 1950s.

5 As an enduring part of the Irish social landscape McGahern depicts, a conservative

Catholicism provides a framework of rigid belief that in no way undermines or modifies

McGahern’s naturalist metaphysics. In terms of religious practice, McGahern’s priests

are too often inattentive to the needs of individuals under their spiritual care, offering

them little to mitigate the prevailing darkness. Like the church, McGahern treats the

apparatus of state as another defective hierarchical institution. To appreciate fully the

degree to which McGahern’s stories undercut the dominant ideology of mid-twentieth

century Ireland, those stories need to be read against the official government position

in essence promoting rural backwardness as the embodiment of social perfection.

6 The ideology of the Irish government was most clearly and succinctly articulated in a

now famous speech by Eamon de Valera, broadcast on St Patrick's Day in 1943. In it, de

Valera gave voice to his conception of an idealised Ireland:

The Ireland that we dreamed of would be the home of a people who valued materialwealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort,devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit – a land whose countryside would bebright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with thesounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athleticyouths and the laughter of happy maidens, whose firesides would be forums for thewisdom of serene old age. The home, in short, of a people living the life that Goddesires that men should live.... (“On Language & the Irish Nation”)

7 It is widely appreciated that there was a serious discrepancy between those soft and

sentimental words and the harsh reality of Irish rural life during the 1940s and 1950s,

when poverty, disease, depopulation, clerical repression, male domination and cultural

conformity created a world far different from the one projected by de Valera. In

detailing the cultural conservatism, social backwardness, economic stagnation,

bureaucratic insensitivity, and clerical hypocrisies that characterize that time,

McGahern in effect contests and debunks post-revolutionary nationalist ideology.

8 McGahern advances the project of social, political and cultural debunking by his use of

literary echo, hint and suggestion. McGahern is a sly manipulator of the Irish literary

tradition, subtly recalling, either by contrast or by coincidence, the work and also the

outlook of, among others, Yeats, Joyce and Beckett. Particularly in a story like


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“Christmas,” he creates a network of intertextual literary reference and implication

that positionreaders within a heterogeneity of voices and social positions, all of which

diverge substantially from the official truths of the de Valera government and add

further weight to McGahern’s own critique of Irish life even though those voices may

not agree in whole or in part with McGahern’s own views.

9 In this paper, I examine McGahern’s complex narrative practice using two stories from

opposite ends of McGahern’s literary career. “Christmas” was first published in The

Irish Press on 27 April 1968 and later revised and included in McGahern’s first short

story collection, Nightlines (1970). “The Creamery Manager,” one of McGahern’s late

stories, appeared first in The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies (July 1991) and then in The

Collected Stories (1992), his penultimate collection (Descriptive List). A revised version of

“The Creamery Manager” appears in the posthumous Creatures of Earth, but my analysis

uses the earlier, more familiar text. Separated by time, these two stories are

nevertheless connected by their preoccupations with rural Irish life, sullied innocence,

human vulnerabilities, social callousness and cosmic indifference. These commonalities

testify to the strength, durability and persistence of McGahern’s counter-hegemonic

views.

10 I examine McGahern’s portrayal of that fractured rural Irish world in “Christmas” and

“The Creamery Manager” in three separate but related sections. In the first, I take up

the implications of McGahern’s diminution of the sacred. In the second, I explore

McGahern’s depiction of a society straight jacketed by rigid and parochial attitudes and

badly served by its social institutions. In the third, I discuss the adaptations and

adjustments the main characters make to these conditions.

I Interrogating the Sacred

11 Neither “Christmas” nor “The Creamery Manager” provides conventional religious

reassurance. Rather, both stories, in different ways, project a predatory naturalistic

world in which spiritual comfort in the here-and-now and reward and/or punishment

in the hereafter are absent. God may not be dead, but no character in these stories has

heard from Him.

1. So This Is Christmas?

12 “Christmas” is framed by the expectations implicit in its title. Both title and the holiday

to which it refers appear to affirm a purposive universe overseen by a beneficent deity.

By sentimental extension, the title evokes the special place of children in the holiday

celebration, the custom of gift giving, the habit of using lights, and a general hospitality

toward all living creatures. The story, however, does not sustain those holiday

associations; it subverts and denies them. In a series of carefully shaded vignettes,

McGahern plays the traditional expectations of Christmas off against divergent

actualities.

13 In the rural Irish community in which “Christmas” is set, Christmas is a holiday

everyone is expected to observe. Candles are ostentatiously lit in every window, not

only to brighten the night literally and symbolically, but perhaps more importantly, to

signal conformity to prevailing community mores. The lit candles announce that the

holiday is indeed being celebrated. For the same reasons, all attend Midnight Mass.


86

14 For all the public show of piety, there is a pervasive indifference to the sacredness of

the occasion. Preparations for church-going involve Moran, the man who provides a

home for the boy, the story’s central character, in preliminary fortification at the pub,

and he is not alone in that activity. Mullins, the policeman, and Mrs. Grey, the rich

American, also appear well-lit. For the boy, who narrates the story retrospectively, the

burden of attending Midnight Mass cannot as yet be obviated by drink. He has to

endure “hours of boredom” with nothing to relieve him (27). It is clear that he attends

because it is required of him, but he lacks enthusiasm.

15 In terms of understanding McGahern’s religious perspective, the defining event of the

Midnight Mass is not the boy’s initial boredom, but the interaction between the local

representatives of church and state, the priest, who carries the honorific designation of

Monsignor (a title that denotes a slight elevation above the ranks of the clergy and is,

undoubtedly, one of the reasons for the priest being so affronted), and a very drunk

Guard Mullins. Even before the service begins, there are strong indications that the

service will not go as planned. As soon as Guard Mullins arrives, he makes his presence

heard by offering several lewd but amusing comments about the anatomy of the

schoolteacher’s wife. He then falls into a stupor, which is, unfortunately, interrupted by

the opening words of the priest’s annual Christmas sermon. In a drunken haze, Mullins

disrupts the service by shouting out his approval of the Monsignor, “a man after my

own heart” (28), and, for no apparent reason, urging the elimination of hypocrites.

16 His observations may (or may not) be random. In particular, the reader is left to

wonder whether Guard Mullins is merely making an off-the-cuff (or, just as likely given

his state of inebriation, an off-the-wall) remark about hypocrites, or whether, in his

capacity as law enforcer, he has some factual base for providing a warning. Regardless,

another priest might have chosen either to ignore the comments of one so obviously

incapacitated, or to incorporate them somehow into the sermon, especially since

Mullins’s comment about hypocrites, however intended, echoes sentiments often

expressed in the Old and New Testaments (see, for example, Matthew 22:18 and 23:18,

Isaiah 9:17 and 10:6, Job 13:16, 17:8, 27:8 and Proverbs 11.9). This priest does neither.

17 Undeterred by the Christmas message of peace and good will, the priest is rendered

nearly speechless with fury. He ends his sermon almost before it is begun, wishing his

parishioners a happy and holy Christmas in “a voice of acid” (28). For the boy, the

insincerity of the priest’s good wishes is trumped by its speed. It was, the boy notes

happily, “the shortest Midnight Mass the church had ever known” (28). The service has

been abandoned not because it was impossible for it to continue, but because the priest

is affronted by the interruptions of a recalcitrant Mullins. The spoiled Midnight Mass,

like the angry Christmas dinner in Chapter 1 of Joyce’s Portrait, reveals a narrow and

vindictive Catholicism inconsistent with the sentiments of Christmas it ought to

embody. Inasmuch as the priest in McGahern’s story does not practice what he

preaches, nor does he act the role of a true priest, he provides a good example of the

hypocrite Mullins warned against.

18 For the nameless boy whose consciousness is at the center of the story, Midnight Mass

has ceased to be a burden of boredom and becomes, instead, an entertainment. His

amusement is intensified by the drunken Mullins’s parting shot. Having condemned all

hypocrites in his first outburst, Mullins becomes more specific in his second. As the

communicants walk down the aisle, Mullins points to the tax collector and identifies


87

him as “‘the biggest hypocrite in the parish,’” (28), a sentiment that finds considerable

support among the other parishioners.

19 This remark aimed so particularly at the tax collector carries its own Biblical baggage.

Like the practice of hypocrisy, tax collecting is Biblically suspect. Nevertheless, Jesus

accepted the tax collector Matthew as one of his disciples, and Luke 5:27-32 records

that Jesus dined with the tax collector Levi, to the dismay of the Pharisees. Although

the Biblical message regarding tax collectors is equivocal, the drunken Mullins makes

no subtle distinctions. More troubling, his finger-pointing negativity about the local tax

collector is contagious. For the parishioners, the moment created by the Guard’s

outburst provides the occasion for their own expression of ill will toward the man.

20 Later that night, the boy overhears the Morans, the people with whom he lives,

criticizing Mullins’s behaviour. On display here is the same lack of charity the priest

revealed. The Morans’ private criticism, like the more public anger of the priest,

provides ample evidence of a spirit of communal intolerance toward what is, after all,

mostly boorishness. In “Christmas,” McGahern presents a world in which religious

belief and practice are a thin veneer over baser impulses. On Christmas Eve, the holiest

night in the Christian calendar, both church and home are sites of anger and

joylessness. If the holiday has any profound religious meaning, no character in the

story is aware of it. Nevertheless, the destruction of the Christmas spirit has a positive

effect on the boy. His delight about the foreshortened Christmas service is enhanced by

the fact that representatives of church and state have behaved badly. He goes so far as

to think of Guard Mullins as his friend because Mullins is now, like him, somehow

outside the pale of social acceptability. Precisely because the community’s facade of

conventional righteousness collapses, the boy is able to experience this anti-Christmas

as a liberation.

2. Manufacturing Human Perfection: Turning Milk into Butter in “The

Creamery Manager”

21 “The Creamery Manager” is more complex, compressed and impressionistic in its

handling of religious issues than is “Christmas.” McGahern proceeds by indirection and

implication rather than by the straightforward exposure he usesin his treatment of the

Midnight Mass in the earlier story.

a. “The Other Darkness”

22 As he did in “Christmas”, so too in “The Creamery Manager” McGahern intimates that

the universe is a cold, dark, void space. Certainly that is the view of the central

character of this story. Darkness haunts Jimmy McCarron’s imagination in different

forms, but always suggesting the blankness of a universe unlit by divine (or any other)

purpose. Jimmy acknowledges that “sure,” he has “seen evil and around it a stupid,

heartless laughing that echoed darkness” (370). That sense of meaninglessness was

once a worry, but now, at least at one level, Jimmy appears indifferent. “[T]hat other

darkness, all that surrounded life, used to trouble him once, but he had long given up

making anything out of it...and he no longer cared (370). For Jimmy, both the cosmos

and his life are empty. “It was not a pretty picture,” he opines (371). Moreover, there is

nothing in the story that contradicts Jimmy’s understated nihilism.


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b. Same Old, Same Old: “It’ll still go on taking in milk, turning our butter”

23 The story’s interrogation of religious belief is embedded in the specific modalities of

Irish rural life. The existential angst created by Jimmy’s perception of “the other

darkness” works itself out in his defrauding of the local creamery he runs. Taking of

the money has nothing to do with greed or self-aggrandizement. Jimmy uses the money

to bond with others and to create excitement in an otherwise numb and monotonous

life. There is certainly nothing about running a creamery that might be construed as

diverting, although as long as he steals the money, it is rewarding. In a telling remark,

one of the policemen who arrests Jimmy describes the operation of the creamery as

deadening, an endless, repetitive process of turning milk into butter, one that will

continue whether Jimmy is there to manage or not.

24 It is true that the policeman is trying to put a positive spin on Jimmy’s situation and

mitigate the significance of the crime. He feels sorry for Jimmy, and guilt for having

accepted Jimmy’s invitation to go to the Ulster Final so that he personally benefited

from Jimmy’s malfeasance. The money used to pay for that lark was part of the funds

Jimmy embezzled. Despite this special pleading, Guard Casey is undoubtedly correct in

his assessment of the creamery, even though, in a low-key way, the management of a

creamery was (and may still be) important to the local economy. Historically, the

business of the creamery was the subject of government regulation, a source of Dail

policy debate and a focus of lobbying efforts, all indicators that in an economically

underdeveloped country like Ireland in the mid-twentieth century, the manufacture of

butter was a matter of widespread concern, both at the grassroots and in the corridors

of power (Dail Eireann, Dairy Produce Act, Jenkins, Ruth). Whatever its economic

impact on the community and the country, the creamery and the job of managing it do

not engage Jimmy.

25 It is not only the job that depresses him and denies him scope. Other means of

structuring his life are likewise rejected. First, Jimmy declines the priesthood. He

cannot “hand the pain and the joy of his own life into the keeping of an idea, and to will

the idea true” (371). Like Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait, Jimmy perceives the priesthood

as a dead-end. The phrasing “to will the idea true” reinforces the perception that, for

Jimmy, religious belief is an artificial construct imposed on a reality that will not

sustain it. The priesthood is not then a convincing response to “the other darkness.”

26 Next he declines marriage. There was a girl he loved, but she was “too wise to marry

him” (371). Then there was a girl he did not love who he felt obliged to marry because

she told him she was pregnant, but who turned out not to be. That weekend, Jimmy

breaks off the relationship. There do not appear to be any other women in his life. The

promise of sexual and emotional intimacy does not fill the void any more satisfactorily

than the deadening job or the offer of the priesthood. The pattern of Jimmy’s life until

his arrest is to evade conventionally regulated behaviour.

c. Excursions into Criminality

27 In place of the steady comforts of job, church and home, Jimmy opts for the schmoozy

comradery of men in pubs and sporting events. Lacking the resources himself, he dips

into the company’s cash to entertain himself and his ever-changing circle of putative

friends; he gets caught, and he goes to jail. Crime becomes Jimmy’s existential


89

experiment in filling the void. It is intended to reflect what he calls “the whole

shemozzle” (373), the inchoate reality of existence in a Godless universe. He hopes

through crime to find the fulfillment that lawful activities do not provide. Seen another

way, crime becomes the means by which Jimmy attempts to alter his life so that the

thinness of its milk becomes the richness of butter. In this sense, then, Jimmy’s

excursions into criminality are a translation into existential metaphor of his literal job

as creamery manager.

28 But as crimes go, this one is relatively petty, and unlikely to sustain the burden of

meaning Jimmy attributes to it. He knows that “the shareholders would write him off as

a loss against other profits. The old creamery would not cry out with the hurt” (370).

Jimmy’s assurances about the limited damage done ring true, particularly since one of

the arresting officers, Guard Casey, provides similar reassurance. “What’s an old

creamery anyhow?” he wants to know. “It’ll still go on taking in milk, turning our

butter.” (373) The irony of an agent of the law pooh-poohing a crime because it is

insufficiently grand is lost on Casey, but not on the reader. Whatever the unintentional

irony, the crime lacks significant impact. It changes nothing.

29 True, for a time, the money Jimmy embezzles from the creamery creates a glowing

alternative to “the other darkness.” Spending freely, treating people to drinks, he

becomes popular. People call his name, greet him on the street, put their arms around

him, and try to draw him into bars. The money he embezzles creates instant

friendships, momentary happiness, even a sense of belonging. In the end, though,

Jimmy’s effort to turn fallible human nature (milk) into more refined forms (cream,

butter) fails. “He had wanted love,” (370), human connection, some affirmation that

would transform the dark. But, according to Guard Casey, “‘[t]here were too many

spongers around. They took advantage. It’s them that should by rights be in your

place’” (372). The nameless people to whom Jimmy turned to shield him from the other

darkness prove inadequate for the task. Emptiness prevails.

30 Even in the midst of his last pleasurable criminal interlude, the expedition with Guard

Casey and the Sergeant to the Ulster Final, an annual football event, he has a sense that

his life is unreal. “Such was the air of unreality he felt...that he was glad to buy oranges

from a seller moving between seats, to hand the fruit around, to peel the skin away, to

taste the bitter juice” (368). The experience of going to the game with two others, of

enjoying their company and the spectacle of the game, this is a kind of paradisial

moment that Jimmy already knows is unstable. The purchase and eating of the fruit is a

modernized re-enactment of the Fall. He tastes its bitterness as a reminder of what life

really is beneath his efforts to recreate it. There is nothing in either “Christmas” or

“The Creamery Manager” to suggest that life can be happily rearranged, that spiritual

needs can be satisfied, or that the cosmos will divulge meaning.

II Examining Civil Society: Hostility, Neglect,Indifference

31 The corollary of so much spiritual and metaphysical desolation is a social world that

offers little in the way of compensatory support. Civil society does little to make life

tolerable. One of the questions addressed by McGahern’s stories is whether civil society

can, through individual interaction and/or social institutions, address satisfactorily the


90

human need for love, understanding, scope and achievement. The message the stories

send back is a resounding “no.”

1. “Holy Infant so Tender and Mild”: “Christmas” as a Perverse

Nativity Scene

a. Homeboy

32 “Christmas” is a first-person narrative told retrospectively by a boy with no name. He

is both parentless and homeless. He has been raised in a state run Home, presumably

overseen by priests, and remains a ward of the state until he reaches maturity. When

the story opens, he has been sent to live with the Morans, who provide him with food,

clothing and shelter in exchange for his labour. Moran makes his living buying

uncommercial timber cheaply from a nearby sawmill, re-cutting it, and then selling it

as firewood. The boy acts as Moran’s assistant and does most of the heavy carting.

33 When, occasionally, Mrs. Moran asks about life at the Home, he tells her, and “she’d

sigh, ‘you must be very glad to be with us instead,’ and I would tell her, which was true,

that I was” (23). Why life in such a Home should be so unhappy is now well understood.

Life in these church-run, government-funded sanctuaries provided for children in dire

need was appalling. Gross sexual and physical abuse were common. In this

conversation, McGahern alludes to what would in the 1980s and 1990s become a public

scandal. The well-publicized investigations of an independent Commission to Inquire

into Child Abuse, which completed its review in 2003, provide a hindsight gloss for the

exchange between Mrs. Moran and the boy. Both church and state share responsibility

for the crimes committed against these children.

34 In these circumstances, certainly the boy is better served with the Morans than he is at

the Home. There is, however, equivocation in his recollection of life with the Morans.

The qualifying phrase, “which was true,” implies that he is not prepared to give

unqualified approval to the Morans’ hospitality. The meaning of his phrase is made

clearer in his next sentence, when he notes that he typically went to bed before Moran

came back from his routine evening visit to the pub because “they often quarreled

then” (23). The home provided by the Morans falls short of domestic bliss. Nor does

work with Moran offer much in the way of job satisfaction. The work is hard; the

remuneration, small; the atmosphere, bargain basement and Moran’s business

practices somewhat shady. To increase his profits marginally, for example, Moran

arranges the wood on the cart to make “the load look bigger than it was” (24).

35 Shunted from institutional Home to private dwelling, the boy is protected by no

institution or individual. There is no mechanism in place to oversee his welfare. He is

simply abandoned to whatever the fates put in his way. The Christmas setting is

McGahern’s way of underlining the social failure at the heart of this story.

b. Redneck Vox Populi

36 The Morans fall short of perfection, but they are better than other members of the

community, who subject the boy to further punishment. When, as part of the Christmas

Eve delivery to Mrs. Grey, the boy has to pick up paraffin from Murphy’s shop, he

encounters the locals, not for the first time. They are a tight-knit group of bullies who

take advantage of the boy’s marginality and vulnerability.


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They used to trouble me at first. I supposed it little different from going into a shopin a strange country without its language, but they learned they couldn’t take a riseout of me, that was their phrase. They used to lob tomatoes at the back of my headin the hope of some reaction, but they left me mostly alone when they saw nonewas coming. (24-5)

37 They not only pointedly exclude him, these louts try to intimidate him by making him

the butt of their jokes.

38 The men in Murphy’s shop function as a kind of Greek chorus, revealing the

undisguised attitudes of the larger community. The description of Murphy with his

“limp black hair falling across the bloated face” (25), suggests coarseness and

dissipation. The men gather in Murphy’s shop to pass time. Their conversation is crude,

with an undertow of violence; their efforts at humour, puerile; their behaviour, rough.

Instead of applauding the efforts of the boy, who is working late on Christmas Eve while

they sit around doing nothing at all, they scapegoat him for not responding to their

jibes: “‘He never moved a muscle, the little fucker. Those homeboys are a bad piece of

work’” (25). The boy’s lack of standing in the community only encourages them to

continue his victimization.

c. The Happiness of Horses

39 McGahern emphasizes the plight of the boy by contrasting his suffering with the pure

pleasure available to the old jennet, Moran’s workhorse. Early in the story McGahern

describes the jennet’s elemental enjoyment of fire. “The jennet squealed, a very human

squeal, any time a fire of branches was lit, and ran, about the only time he did run, to

stand in rigid contentment with his nostrils in the thick of the wood smoke” (23). At the

end of the story, when the boy burns the toy plane in a state of profound

disillusionment, McGahern returns to the old jennet. Oblivious to the boy’s suffering,

the jennet wants to enjoy once again the pleasures of the fire. The welcome and release

the boy could not find by the exertion of his cleverness is available effortlessly to the

dumb animal.

2. Who is the Real Criminal: No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

40 The same jaundiced view of society diagnosed in “Christmas” reoccurs in “The

Creamery Manager.” Jimmy’s crime is not solely an individual act, but implicates the

community, which encouraged his profligacy and shared in the fraudulently acquired

spoils. He loves the popularity, the recognition, the sense of belonging that nothing else

in his world but the distribution of money and the purchase of free drinks provides.

The crowd plays to his weakness, uses his generosity to their own advantage and then

does not reciprocate. “[W]henever he was known to be flush all the monies he had

loaned out to others would flow back as soon as he called, but whenever he was seen to

be in desperate need, nothing worthwhile was ever given back” (371). Even when

money is returned, the sums are never equivalent to what he spent. Jimmy defrauds

more than the business; he tries to defraud himself by pretending that those who

benefit from his generosity are worthy of it.

41 It is not just that the various debts are never repaid, it is that when he is arrested the

community, with the exception of Guard Casey, turns its collective back on him. The

Sergeant, who spent a wonderful Sunday in Clones with Jimmy, will now not speak to


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him. Even more painful is the refusal of the creamery employees to acknowledge his

existence once the police arrive. Jimmy remembers the effort he made when he first

became creamery manager to learn the names of the men who drove the creamery

trucks. The men were appreciative. “The rough, childish faces would look up in a glow

of pleasure at the recognition when he shouted out their names” (366). Yet when the

police come, nobody wants to know him. “No one looked up, but he could see them

observing him in their mirrors” (366). He is reduced to a reflection on glass. When

Jimmy had money, however ill-begotten, the whole world was his friend; now that he is

in trouble, no one wants to know him. In McGahern’s rural Ireland, the old Aesopian

adage that no act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted is ironically reversed

to show that no good deed goes unpunished. Both “Christmas and “The Creamery

Manager” share this harsh view of communal failure.

III Adjusting to Reality: Desiring Escape, RealizingConfinement

42 Despite significant differences of outlook and methodology, McGahern is deeply

indebted to James Joyce. The most obvious nod in the Joycean direction in the two

stories I examine here involves McGahern’s exfoliations of the related concepts of

imprisonment and escape. Both Joyce and McGahern agree that the multiple

constraints of life in Ireland generate an urgent need to escape; they differ on

strategies of withdrawal and on desired outcomes. Whereas Stephen’s response, like

Joyce’s, is to embrace flight and exile, McGahern’s characters discover that physical

flight is either impossible or unlikely to produce the desired liberation and autonomy.

Unlike Joyce, McGahern spent most of his life in the same countryside in which he set

so many of his stories.

43 McGahern’s stories are written against the buoyancy and hope of Stephen Dedalus’s

declaration of independence at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In full

rhetorical flight, Stephen announces his intention to soar beyond the inhibiting nets of

Irish nationality, language and religion. In contrast, at the end of McGahern’s

“Christmas,” the nameless boy burns the toy plane, symbolically obliterating any

chance of following Stephen’s trajectory. In “The Creamery Manager,” Jimmy finds

release in the confines of his cell. For McGahern there is no effective exit strategy.

McGahern’s characters remain in place in rural Ireland. Their exile is internal. In the

absence of alternatives, they escape into their outlaw consciousness, careful observers,

unrelenting critics of themselves and of those around them, and, as with the boy in

“Christmas,” articulate recorders exposing the deformations of the status quo. The boy

and Jimmy find relief as criminals of perception. Show and tell are their weapons.

1. The Snare of Christmas Gift Giving

44 In “Christmas”, McGahern gives narrative form to the interconnected motifs of

entrapment and flight through the practice of Christmas gift giving. There are three

Christmas gifts in the story: the sweater, the pound note and the toy airplane. Each one

in a different way reinforces the boy’s wish to escape from his present circumstances,

and each illustrates the impossibility of his doing so. In the weeks leading up to

Christmas, after his work with Moran is done for the day, the boy sits with Mrs. Moran


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in front of the fire. He listens to the radio while she knits him a sweater for Christmas.

This is a nice, practical, uninspiring gift that goes along with the Wellingtons, overcoat

and cap with flaps that the Morans previously provided. The boy does not value this

gift orthe cold, dark work-weary life that makes it necessary.

45 Then there is the anticipated gift of a pound note from Mrs. Grey, a wealthy American

who lives in one of the neighbourhood’s great houses. The boy regularly delivers

kindling to her. As he prepares to make the last delivery of wood before Christmas,

Moran tells the boy to expect a good tip for his efforts. Moran points out that “We could

use money for the Christmas” (24, my emphasis), thereby appropriating for himself

what was to be the boy’s reward. The boy does not contradict, but thinks to himself

that Moran will use the money “to pour drink down his gullet” (24), a crude but

undoubtedly accurate assessment. More desirable than the sweater, this gift is

nevertheless made problematic by the boy’s knowledge Moran will be its sole

beneficiary, and gives added urgency to the boy’s desire to free himself from the

Morans and embrace another life.

46 The trip to Mrs. Grey’s home is arduous. The boy picks up a tin of paraffin for her at

Murphy’s store, enduring the abuse of the hangers-on, he pushes on through the night

on a badly rutted road, he arrives long after dark, he stacks the wood, he knocks at the

door, and, when Mrs. Grey answers, he reminds her that the delivery is the last load

before Christmas. Mrs. Grey responds as expected by holding out a pound note, which

the boy declines to accept:

‘You must have something’...‘I don’t want money.’‘Then what would you like me to give you for Christmas?’‘Whatever you’d prefer to give me.’ (26)

47 The boy does not specify what gift he wants, in part because he does not know exactly

what he wants, and in part because he suspects that by not specifying he will get more.

Both longing and greed motivate him. In his mind, he has anticipated and rehearsed

this encounter with Mrs. Grey, and he has scripted the dialogue, down to his selection

of the word “prefer,” which he regards as “well put for a homeboy” (26). His intentions

are threefold: (1) to escape from the shadow of the Home; (2) to escape from his dead-

end life with the Morans; and (3) to improve his life socially and economically by some

undefined relationship with Mrs. Grey, what he means when he says he is “playing for

higher stakes” (26). Naive and inexperienced, he leaves it up to Mrs. Grey to figure out

what is appropriate. Mrs. Grey agrees to give the matter some thought, a promise that

leaves the boy “delirious with stupid happiness,” “stupid” because he assumes that

Mrs. Grey is capable of understanding his need to escape and that she has the

intelligence and sensitivity to figure out what, in those circumstances, might constitute

a suitable gift (26).

48 The last gift, provided by Mrs. Grey in lieu of the pound note, is, however, the least

satisfactory of the three. Mrs. Grey arrives at the Morans’ house on Christmas Eve with

an expensive toy airplane for the boy. The toy plane, she thinks, will delight him

because model planes always delighted her son, who received one every Christmas. It

does not seem to occur to her that there is no basis for equating the desires of her son

at Christmas with the more enduring needs of this nameless, homeless boy.

49 For Mrs. Grey, the gift of the toy plane has little to do with the boy at all. Mrs. Grey’s

son was a pilot whose real plane was shot down over Italy during World War II. Clearly,


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Mrs. Grey’s gift to the boy of the kind of plane that would have delighted her son is

invested with her own deep emotional needs, signaled by the tears she sheds when she

delivers the gift. At some level, she would like to use the boy for her own sentimental

gratification, hoping to see in his delight a reminder of the way her son would have

reacted to the gift. To the boy, the toy plane is a parody of his desire to fly beyond the

snares that bind him to the Morans.

50 The boy is beside himself with tears of rage and frustration at being given such a

useless gift. Like the boy in Joyce’s “Araby,” this boy’s eyes burn “with anguish and

anger” at what he now sees as the stupidity of entrusting to another the task of

authoring his own life. When, moreover, it becomes clear to Moran that the boy refused

the pound note, and, subsequently gives offense to Moran’s best customer by spurning

her next offering, his situation is immeasurably altered for the worse. Moran intends to

rid himself of a child he now regards as undesirable. Given what the boy knows about

Moran, Mrs. Grey and the rest of the community, leave-taking has no horrors for him.

51 Despite all his miscalculations, the boy is not defeated. At the very least, he is no longer

possessed of false dreams of salvation. Escape to another life, he now understands, is an

unrealizable fantasy. As he burns the toy plane in the final moments of the story he

senses a transformation in himself. He “felt a new life had already started to grow out

of the ashes, out of the stupidity of human wishes” (28). Neither religious nor social

norms any longer constrain him. Having rejected the priest, the Morans, and Mrs. Grey,

he embraces the anarchy represented by Guard Mullins, who he now thinks of as a

friend. With greater verbal skill than that demonstrated by Mullins at Midnight Mass,

the boy uses the act of narration to give form to the role as disrupter of the social

order. He looks forward with a certain glee to the fact that he “might well cause

trouble” (23). The story is his pay-back.

2. Cell Life

52 McGahern’s concern with entrapment and escape in “Christmas” continues in “The

Creamery Manager.” If anything, McGahern’s treatment is more ironic and intense in

“The Creamery Manager” than it was in “Christmas.” Jimmy is literally as well as

metaphorically imprisoned. Yet after the initial embarrassment of his arrest, Jimmy

welcomes jail time as a way of releasing him from his otherwise formless and empty

life. Confinement is his release. “He had been afraid of his own fear and was spreading

the taint everywhere. Now that what he had feared most had happened he was no

longer afraid. His own life seemed to be happening as satisfactorily as if he were free

again among people” (373). The elimination of fear, which is part of the overall

simplification and reduction of his life, brings with it a sense of safety, stability and

finality that he finds reassuring. He no longer has to hold stage center; the

kaleidoscopic shifts of mood, place and activity are finished; he has no one he needs to

impress, and no one on whom he needs to rely.

53 Confinement to a cell offers Jimmy a concrete realization of what he regards as the

existential condition. Life, he comes to appreciate, is inherently limiting, a kind of trap:

“Coming into the world was, he was sure now, not unlike getting into this poor cell”

(370) Limitation, failure, entombment in flesh, these are what Jimmy now sees as the

underlying truth of the human condition. Life has always been a cell; it is just that

humans are clever at disguising the truth.


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54 In place of the frenetic activity of his fraudulent life as creamery manager, he

experiences the stripped-down version as apprehended criminal as an opportunity for

contemplative understanding. The narrative moves from a recounting of Jimmy’s

indulgences with the embezzled money to a more detached and philosophical

assessment of his life and of life in general. The transition is from the profoundly

unfulfilling life to a resigned acceptance that borders on satisfaction. Guard Casey

releases him temporarily from the cell, offers him the simple pleasures of wholesome

food, the warmth of a fire, the comfort of a surrogate family, consolation, conversation

and the possibility of friendship: “‘There’s no need to go in there [the cell] yet, Jimmy.

You can sit here for a while in front of the fire’” (372). Despite the decency of Guard

Casey, Jimmy rejects further contact. “He liked the guard, but he did not want to draw

any closer” (373). Faced with the opportunity to continue socializing with the

sympathetic Guard Casey, Jimmy opts to return to his cell. The decision is Jimmy’s. The

story that began with his loss of freedom ends with him achieving a deeper

understanding of the human condition and thereby regaining a measure of personal

autonomy.

55 Obviously, that autonomy is circumscribed. On the one hand it is an enforced

divestiture of Jimmy’s embezzled life, however painful; on the other, it is a willing

acceptance of what is real, however narrow. As Jimmy now knows, life is inherently

limiting. In seeking to return to the cell in the last moments of the story, Jimmy accepts

the human condition of isolation, separation, distance. Striving ceases. In place of the

turmoil of his previous life, the cell brings him a welcome peace.

56 Jimmy’s life before his arrest was a long and doomed effort to escape the burden of

consciousness of “the other darkness.” In an act of narrative compression and

expansion, McGahern allows the prison cell that Jimmy enters at the end to morph into

a monastic cell, simple cellular life, a womb and a tomb. Jimmy voluntarily choosing

cell life is simultaneously a vision of shrinking outer life, and an expanded inner

understanding.

57 The continuities of theme that connect “Christmas” to “The Creamery Manager” reflect

a strain of stoicism that shapes McGahern’s narrative practice. His view of the world is

bleak; his characters are fallible. He records the loneliness of the man in the crowd and

the desperation at the heart of what is called happiness. In these and other stories,

McGahern describes the interior journey the self is forced to make to separate and

liberate itself from the snares of a conservative religion and a rigid society, both of

which lack the capacity to respond adequately to the needs of the individual. He

eschews large dramatic gestures and catastrophes. What he offers instead are

temperate ironies, cool understatements, and the evidence of characters with the

courage to endure despite the fullness of their knowledge of life’s deficiencies. The

nameless boy in “Christmas” and Jimmy in “The Creamery Manager” are disillusioned,

but they are undefeated.


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BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Brannigan, John. “Introduction: The ‘Whole World’ of John McGahern.” in Irish University Review

35 (2005): vii-x

“Dail Eireann – Volume 124 – 21 February, 1951 Ceisteanna – Questions. Oral Answers. – Danish

Butter. 28 Cec. 2007. http://historical-http://historicaldebates.oireachthas.ie/D/0124/D.

0124.195102210030.html

“Dairy Produce Act, 1924 (Regulations Under Part III) (Amendment) Order 1955. Statutory

Instrument No. 165/1955. Irish Statute Book.” 28 Dec. 2007. http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/

1955/en/si/0165.html

“Descriptive List for The John McGahern Papers. P. 71. 2.4 ‘Christmas’” James Hardiman Library.

National University of Ireland, Galway. The John McGahern Papers. 28 Dec. 2007.

http://archives.library.nuigalway.ie/cgi-bin/full_list_framed.cgi?P71

“Descriptive List for The John McGahern Papers. P. 71 2.33 ‘The Creamery Manager’” James

Hardiman Library. National University of Ireland, Galway. The John McGahern Papers. 28 Dec.

2007.

http://smeagol.library.nuigalway.ie/cgi-bin/FramedList.cgi? P 71.

Goarzin, Anne. “‘A Crack in the Concrete’: Objects in the Works of John McGahern.” in Irish

University Review 35 (2005): 28-41.

Grennan, Eamon. “‘Only What Happens’: Mulling Over McGahern.” in Irish University Review 35

(2005): 13-27.

Jenkins, William. “Restructuring of Irish Dairy Co-operatives Since 1950 An Example From County

Tipperary.” Irish Geography 29 (1996): 38-48.

Kiberd, Declan. “Fallen Nobility: The World of John McGahern.” in Irish University Review 35

(2005): 164-73.

Maher, Eamon. “The Irish Novel in Crisis? The Example of John McGahern.” in Irish University

Review 35 (2005): 58-71.

McGahern, John. “Christmas.” The Collected Stories. London: Faber and Faber. 1992. 23-28.

---. “The Creamery Manager.” The Collected Stories. London: Faber and Faber. 1992. 366-373.


of John McGahern.” in Irish University Review 35 (2005): 72-89.

“On Language & the Irish Nation - Eamon de Valera. Extract from Eamon de Valera’s Speech to

the Nation, broadcast on Radio Eireann, March 17th, 1943.” Tamilnation.org 29 Dec. 2007.

http://www.tamilnation.org/ideology/valera.htm

Ruth, Bart. “Eisenhower Fellowship Report. 2005 Fellow to Belgium, Germany, Northern Ireland

and the Republic of Ireland. ‘Ulster Farmers Union,’ ‘Irish Farmers Association,’ “Irish Creamery

Milk Suppliers Association (ICMSA)’.” 28 Dec. 2007.

http://bartruth.com/pb/wp_c4a2fad6/wp_c4a2fad6.html


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RÉSUMÉS

This paper examines the continuities of theme and meaning that unite McGahern’s early story

“Christmas” and his much later story “The Creamery Manager”. Both reveal a strain of stoicicism

that informs McGahern’s entire narrative practice. These and many of McGahern’s other stories

record the social and metaphysical loneliness of the man in the crowd, and the desperation at the

heart of what is called happiness. Typically, McGahern contextualizes and localizes this

existential unease within a mid-twentieth century rural Irish society which is both socially

conservative and religiously oppressive. The stories are controlled and compact; they avoid large

dramatic gestures and catastrophes. In their place, McGahern offers temperate ironies, cool

understatements, and low-keyed evidence of characters who have the ability to endure and

survive, despite the fullness of their knowledge of life’s defects and deficiencies

AUTEURS

BERNICE SCHRANK

Bernice Schrank is a professor of English language and literature at Memorial University of

Newfoundland. She has published extensively in the areas of Irish drama, autobiography and

fiction as well as in the areas of twentieth-century American literature and popular culture


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Violence and ontological doubt in"The stoat"Danine Farquharson

1 “The Stoat” has a fascinating textual history. Originally published as the fifth short

story in John McGahern’s 1978 collection Getting Through, it was substantially revised

for inclusion in the 1992 Collected Stories. Over a decade later, the story is deleted from

2006’s Creatures of the Earth – the “new and selected” collection put together just before

the author’s death. A possible reason for removing “The Stoat” from the last collection

is articulated in McGahern’s preface to Creatures: “there were two particular stories I

rewrote several times, but I was never satisfied with them […] I was too attached to the

material. […] central parts of both these stories were essential to the description of the

life we lived with my father in the barracks, from which they should never have been

lifted” (vii).1 That McGahern was dissatisfied with the story is obvious and literary

critics seem to agree with McGahern’s verdict. There is no sustained critical attention

to the story: Denis Sampson, David Malcolm and Eamon Maher grant “The Stoat” but

brief mention in their book-length studies of McGahern.2 But such dissatisfaction, both

authorial and critical, makes “The Stoat” all the more intriguing given the conventional

wisdom that all of McGahern’s writing can be read as an “organic whole” (Sampson,

Outstaring xi). Sometimes those elements of a whole that do not seem to fit are most

revealing. The following analysis of “The Stoat” (after an obligatory plot summary)

shall outline dominant themes in McGahern criticism that are relevant to the story,

then detail some of the revisions McGahern made toward the Collected Stories version,

then offer a close textual reading of the stoat/rabbit allegory – all by way of presenting

“The Stoat” as a beguiling but peculiar story that nonetheless performs an important

role in the organic whole of McGahern’s fictional opus.

2 “The Stoat” opens with the protagonist golfing. In the middle of a stroke, he hears

crying in the rough grass and upon investigating finds a rabbit freshly and mortally

wounded by a stoat. The protagonist observes blood “pumping out on the sand” and so

he finishes the kill (Collected Stories 152). He then concludes the hole, but gives up the

game and heads to the rented cottage where he and his father are staying. This violent


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preface leads into the plot of the father seeking a second wife (one Miss McCabe) and

the failure of that quest. The plotline is notably autobiographical.

3 In Memoir, McGahern tells of his father “sporadically trying to get himself married”:

[. . .] we were drawn into some of these adventures because of his insistence that hewas marrying for our good. It took him several years. Much of what took place wasboth sad and funny. The closest he came to marrying at this time was to a MissMcCabe, a small, gentle woman, a principal of a school” (180)

4 The failed engagement in “The Stoat” closely follows McGahern’s recollection of this

similar moment in his life. When marriage seems inevitable, McGahern and his siblings

meet Miss McCabe several times and she plans “to spend the holidays with [them] at

Strandhill” (Memoir 180). The family rents their usual bungalow but Miss McCabe stays

at the Golf Links Hotel. One day a porter comes from the hotel with a message that

“Miss McCabe had a ‘turn’ in the seaweed salt baths that morning. She had been seen

by a doctor and was resting in a bedroom.” “My father”, continues McGahern,

“assumed that the turn was a heart attack. The effect was startling” (181). Just as in

“The Stoat”, McGahern’s father abandons any idea of marrying Miss McCabe, packs

everything and leaves the son to close up the bungalow. McGahern visits Miss McCabe,

apologizes, but is left with “a strange, uncomfortable feeling [...] recognized now as

both unease and shame” (Memoir 182). The location, the names, the golfing, the

bungalow, the hotel porter, and the father’s reactions are all maintained from life into

fiction. “The Stoat” adds an uncle to the mix: a successful Dublin doctor who serves as a

parallel or surrogate father to the young protagonist (also studying to be a doctor).3

That detail is the only significant plot addition to the biographical tale – except the

rabbit and the stoat. However, what is far more interesting to me than the closeness of

the short story to the lived life is the way in which McGahern fictionalizes this episode.

Critical perspectives

5 Many eminent critics of John McGahern’s work comment that his œuvre moves toward

a single, coherent, unified whole. Richard Lloyd suggests that McGahern’s work is “a

continuum of characters and themes” (6), Declan Kiberd notes that McGahern’s novels

“read as a single, longer novel, a continuum of characters and themes” (6), and most

persuasively Denis Sampson argues, “his work is an organic whole” (Outstaring xi). The

repeated use of Roscommon and Leitrim settings, the violent fathers and complicated

sons, and the hallmark realism coupled with symbolist gestures and fable elements

(Grennan 18-19) provide ample evidence that each fictional world of John McGahern is

part of one world being created and recreated. However, a key factor in all discussions

of the wholeness of McGahern’s work is an organicism: the movement, the rhythmic

changes, the repetitions with subtle modification. Indeed, McGahern is well known as a

reviser of his own fiction: “He is like a Renaissance painter, constantly working on the

same canvas, polishing and improving it as he gains in experience and confidence”

(Maher, “Crisis” 63). Not surprisingly then, a third commonality in much McGahern

criticism (after the wholeness and the revision) is the element of tension in his work.

Grennan sees one significant tension between a kind of nihilism “towards

acknowledging ‘the ferocious ruthlessness of life’” and “towards some benevolent,

positive belief in the goodness of things” (16); Sampson continuously works with what

he rightly sees as McGahern’s drama of opposites: “yearning and loss, desire and defeat,

beginnings and endings, departures and returns” (“The Rich Whole” 27) culminating in


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a “fusion of frailty and hardness” (Outstaring xiv); and, McKeon notes “a tension

between desire and resentment, which, in the fiction, is a stumbling block to the

achievement of a certain ‘calm’ or ‘stillness’” (78). Thus, a critical view emerges of an

artist struggling with the “general conditions of being, with how life is lived and has to

be lived” (Crotty 42). McGahern is a writer “searching for ways of perceiving the

spiritual essence in everyday experience” (Maher, “Crisis” 61), but one who will never

be able to achieve absolute clarity or completeness. McGahern’s “vision of life’s

essential movements” cannot “be understood by human intelligence or [be] explained

in terms of socio-historical formations” (Sampson, “Open” 136) and so the “grail of the

‘rich whole’ will constantly evade him” (Maher, “Crisis” 61).

6 The ontological questions that inform John McGahern’s fiction, the “quest for an

indefinable (some)thing, an explication of people’s fundamentally unfulfilled condition

and of life itself” (Goarzin 30), cannot be fully answered any better than the tensions

can be resolved. As Belinda McKeon recognizes in her work on his novels, “the action

that breaks through again and again to render impossible this stillness is always an

action of anger or violence” (78). Because violence pervades the life and the fiction of

John McGahern,4 I contend that the violence with which “The Stoat” begins cannot be

successfully integrated into any worldview, any perception of being that is complete or

whole. The shock of the killing, the rupture of the rabbit’s body, the spilling of blood

into the sand, all create an ontological wound that needs to be healed, but that cannot

be satisfactorily eradicated. This inability to fully close the wounds of violence is

replicated in the protagonist’s attempt to read the human world and human

relationships in terms of an animal fable or allegory. The stoat/rabbit tale does not fit

perfectly the young man’s relationship with his father nor does it fit the father’s sadly

comic relationship with Miss McCabe. In the end, the protagonist is lost, displaced and

not at home in any sense. Just as his naïve recourse to the natural world of predator/

prey fails to answer his ontological questions, so he fails to fit into any of the human

worlds presented: the golf course, the world of Dublin doctors, or the world of his

father.

7 This mis-fit or displaced character is precisely another running concern of McGahern's

that interests critics. In his discussion of Getting Through, the collection of short stories

that has the first version of “The Stoat”, Denis Sampson notes that estrangement is a

key motif in the collection, most notably articulated in “The Beginning of an Idea,” and

that estrangement is “from oneself due to excess self-consciousness and guilt”

(Outstaring 165). Focusing on children in McGahern’s fiction, Patrick Crotty finds a

similar trend: “His writing tends to seek out the inadequate, the mis- and dis-placed,

people whose unease in their particular circumstances is emblematic of a more general

dilemma. An inability to fit unselfconsciously the situations in which they find

themselves” (44). Further, Eamon Grennan sees a “sense of belonging” as “everywhere

one of the poles of his and his characters’ imaginations” (25). What connects all these

observations of not belonging is the element of self-consciousness. Sampson’s analysis

of “The Beginning of an Idea” and other short stories hits upon what is a vital aspect of

my reading to follow: “the central consciousness in all his fictions is an aspect of the

artist, in each case endeavoring to match material and angle of vision in a different

way” (“Introducing” 7). The protagonist of “The Stoat” is an artist manqué, attempting

to “match material” from his life to an “angle of vision” embodied by the rabbit and the


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stoat, but that attempt fails to provide any “rich” wholeness of perception or

interpretation.

8 Finally, and perhaps most importantly for my interpretation of “The Stoat,” critics also

agree that style and structure are more important in understanding McGahern’s fiction

than plot or characterization. Taking their cue from McGahern himself, critics note

that McGahern is reluctant to discuss any particular theme but steers conversations

toward “aesthetic and procedural priorities” (Crotty 42). McGahern’s now canonical

contemplation of writing in “The Image” is worth quoting at length here:

When I reflect on the image two things from which it cannot be separated come:the rhythm and the vision. The vision, that still and private world which each of uspossesses and which others cannot see, is brought to life in rhythm – rhythm beinglittle more than the instinctive movements of the vision as it comes to life andbegins its search for the image in a kind of grave, grave of images of dead passionsand their days. (12)

9 Image, rhythm, vision: these elements of fiction are far more interesting to McGahern

and many of his critics than action, plot, character. He is more concerned with “the

quality of writing” than any plot or setting distinctions (Maher, “Crisis” 69).

Remarkably, “The Stoat” has an arresting image of a rabbit being stalked by the

predatory stoat and that image is conspicuously repeated at the end of the story. After

looking at the textual history of “The Stoat” to highlight the organics of the story’s

production, my reading will focus on this repeated image of violence in terms of an

ontology that leaves both narrator and reader in a position of doubt and dislocation.5

Textual Variants

10 “The Stoat” dramatically changes between its publication in Getting Through (1978) and

its altered form in Collected Stories (1998). The complete details of the variants, the

“trimming and repunctuation,” must wait for the inevitable variorum edition of

McGahern’s work (Miller 19). However, I will consider four major sets of revisions. The

most obvious change, clear from the first sentence of the story, is a shift from third-

person narration in Getting Through to first person narration in the later version. 6 “A

long-legged student in a turtleneck was following a two-iron he had struck” (GT 58)

becomes “I was following a two-iron I had struck” (CS 152). The shift in narrative point

of view pulls the tale into the personal and private and away from the potential

distancing effects of third-person narration. While shifts in narrative perspective

internal to McGahern’s early novel The Dark are seen as signaling a “lack of persistence

in the narrator’s way of seeing and thinking” (van der Ziel 104), the external change in

“The Stoat” brings the story into the realm of self-consciousness that above-mentioned

critics note. In spite of his namelessness, the “I” in the story is the central

consciousness struggling to make sense of the world. Another result, among many, of

the revised narrative point of view is a diminishing of characterization detail. The CS

version has no description of the protagonist’s turtleneck and he is only identified as a

medical student later in the story. The deletion of the detail of his “long legs” is

matched by a similar deletion about the stoat. In the first paragraph of the GT version,

the stoat is described as having a “long grey body” and in the CS version the stoat is

merely “grey” (152). By and large the revised story relies less on explicit physical

descriptions, less on expository detail than on the allegorical image of the rabbit and

the stoat. By removing both instances of “long” in the first paragraph – instances that


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would have clearly linked the protagonist to the stoat – McGahern subtracts any

definitive association of the narrator with the predatory stoat. As I will discuss later,

the ambiguity around the allegorical associations of the animals and the human

characters is fundamental to the ontological doubt in “The Stoat”.

11 Another elemental change is related to the uncle. In Getting Through, the uncle appears

more than once and at greater length. For example, the uncle and protagonist have a

long walk and conversation where the young man asks: “You don’t like my father

much?” (GT 64), and the uncle offers a view of the father – “I find him dull” (64) – that is

only hinted at in the revised version. Further, the uncle’s affection for the protagonist

is obvious in the first edition: “You know, if your father does succeed in getting himself

hitched, you’ll be able to spend more time here. I’d like that” (GT 64). Equally explicit is

the protagonist’s returned affections: “He’d like that too. With his uncle everything

seemed open” (GT 64). No such obviousness of their mutual admiration remains in the

revised story. Additionally, the use of the uncle in the original version includes a scene

that clearly constructs the protagonist as an artist-figure. After the debacle of the

father running away from Miss McCabe, the protagonist notes that he and his uncle will

have “good talk for several days, and there was the story of the stoat and the rabbit”

(GT 68). In Getting Through, the animal allegory provides the protagonist with valuable

narrative fodder for conversation with his uncle; the protagonist can partake in

storytelling and mockery of the father. All of this detail is removed from the revised

story in Collected Stories. The removal of such details makes the second version

minimalist in comparison: it is far more subtle and far more ambiguous as a result.

12 The general removal of detail has another significance related to the rabbit and the

stoat. There is an entire conversation between the young man and his father about

feeding the dead rabbit to Miss McCabe in the first tale that is completely gone in the

second. The son is presented as slightly perverse in Getting Through as he proposes to

“skin and cook” the rabbit for Miss McCabe. The narrator describes the young student

as having “no anxieties regarding Miss McCabe and the dinner; she would come even if

a cow’s head were in question, since by coming to the cottage to dinner she was

drawing closer to the dream of her future life, of what she hoped to become” (GT 60).

This passage is deleted in Collected Stories, removing the characterization of the son as

cold and arguably cruel in his association of Miss McCabe as a predatory animal

stalking a man for marriage. Again, the allegorical correspondences are far more

ambiguous in the revised story.

13 Finally, the rabbit and stoat element is also revised in two different but equally

significant ways. The son’s approach and reaction to the dying rabbit in both second

paragraphs is different, and the third paragraph of both stories (which remain word for

word the same in both versions) is italicized when repeated at the end of the GT version

but left in regular font in CS. This second paragraph describes the son’s movement

toward the “crying” he hears “in the rough grass above the fairway” (GT 58 and CS 152).

The “wet slick of blood behind its ear” and “the body trembling in a rigidity of terror”

remain the same. Also unchanged is the protagonist’s realization that “never before did

I [he] hold such terror in his hands.” However, what happens next is different. The

change is emblematic of the nature of McGahern’s revisions to the story and worth

considering at length. Here is the passage in the original story:

Holding it up by the hind legs he killed it with one stroke, but when he turned itover he could find no mark other than where the vein had been cut. He took therabbit down with him, picking his way more cautiously through the long grass than


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when he had climbed. He left the rabbit beside the clubs while he chipped and holedout, but as he crossed from the green to the tee he saw the stoat cross the fairwaybehind him. After watching two simple shots fade away into the rough, he knew hehad lost his concentration, and decided to finish for the morning. As he made hisway back to the cottage his father rented every August in Strandhill, he twiceglimpsed the stoat behind him, following the rabbit still, though it was dead. (GT 58)

14 In this version, there is no doubt that the protagonist kills the rabbit (perhaps out of

mercy). His lack of concentration results in giving up the golf and returning to the

father, with the stoat both tracking the rabbit-prey and following the young man. As

the protagonist then offers to skin and cook the rabbit for dinner, he is clearly

presented as predator in the original story. Here is the revised segment of that second

paragraph in Collected Stories:

I stilled it with a single stroke. I took the rabbit down with the bag of clubs and leftit on the edge of the green while I played out the hole. Then as I crossed to the nexttee I saw the stoat cross the fairway following me still. After watching two simpleshots fade away into the rough, I gave up for the day. As I made my way back to thecottage my father rented every August, twice I saw the stoat, following the rabbitstill, though it was dead. (152).

15 The difference between “he killed it with one stroke” and “I stilled it with a single

stroke” is profound in its myriad implications. Firstly, “still” is an ambiguous word

implying either that the protagonist calms the trembling rabbit or that he kills the

rabbit. The ambiguity then extends to the word “stroke” – meaning either a blow from

the golf club or a caress. The result of the revision is a sexualization of the violence that

is absent in the original story. Secondly, the repeated use of “stilled” increases the

choric effect of the word “still” in this opening section of the story – is it used four

times in the revision and the cumulative effect is one of both persistence (the stoat is

following him “still”) and deathly calm – to still a life. That choric “still” connects this

image to McGahern’s discussion of images with both the first person narrator bringing

the reader into a “still and private world” and an image whose rhythm is undoubtedly

marked by death and the “grave” (“The Image” 12). The revision is more in tune with

what so many critics see as McGahern’s use of repetition as ritual.7

16 The intensifying ambiguity in the revision extends to the fable-like allegory of the

rabbit and the stoat. In Collected Stories, the narrator/protagonist appears to be both

predator (as he kills the rabbit) and prey (as the stoat follows him). The narrator

competes with the stoat for the rabbit, but he also gives up the golf and leaves for the

cottage to escape the death scene. The paragraph that follows this scene is, as I

mentioned, the same in both versions with one exception. The last paragraph in the

Getting Through version, immediately following the son’s thought that “there was the

story of the stoat and the rabbit” (68), is italicized – unambiguously signalling how the

young man will tell the tale. The Collected Stories version contains no italics, no such

obvious signal as to how to read the final paragraph. The changes made to the rabbit

and the stoat scenes are vital not only because they are emblematic of the wholesale

style of revision to “The Stoat” but also because the rabbit/stoat allegory is the

mechanism through which the story needs to be interpreted. The reading to follow of

“The Stoat” as it appears in Collected Stories will use the rabbit and the stoat as entry

into a John McGahern short story about violence, displacement, questions of being, and

the inability of story and metaphor to adequately answer those questions.


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The Stoat and the Rabbit8

17 The assertion that “so many of McGahern’s stories have a solidly realistic

superstructure on a scaffolding composed of what can only be described as moral fable”

(Grennan 18) is a good place to begin a close reading of “The Stoat.” If the story can be

seen as an animal fable or allegory, then Declan Kiberd’s observation about That They

May Face the Rising Sun is pertinent: “Nature is a beautiful foreground which creates –

long before it reflects – the human mood” (166). While the description of the dying

rabbit in the opening paragraphs of “The Stoat” is far from “beautiful,” it does reflect –

and support – the “human mood.” The mood created in the first few paragraphs is

dominated by violence. The rhythmic repetition of words such as “follow” and “still,”

in addition to “blood” and “terror” amplified by the choric repetition of entire

sentences and images, furnish the predator/prey association that the narrator/

protagonist will attempt to use to better understand his relationship with his father

(and all relationships in the story). Interestingly, the narrator’s use of the animal world

to illuminate the world of human beings fails to adequately explain the father’s

behaviour. As a result of this failed ontological quest, the narrator begins and ends the

story in the same position: displaced, alone, and lost as to his future. Tom Paulin closes

in on this idea in his review of Getting Through: “McGahern constantly circles and

returns” to a “haunting sense of absence, a feeling that something is wrong and missing

in the lives of characters. This Chekhovian sense of absence becomes a means of

exploring the theme of failure” (70). McGahern’s revisions make the Collected Stories

version one in which the reader must “follow” an increasingly symbolic tale and end

with much the same feelings of abandonment and absence as the narrator. “The Stoat”

is an animal fable, full of violence and loss, suggesting “that human beings ‘know

nothing’” (Miller 19).

18 “The Stoat” opens with the narrator golfing: “following a two-iron I had struck just

short of the green when I heard crying high in the rough grass above the fairway”

(152). The word “crying” was “screaming” in the first edition of the story, and this

change to a more indefinite word signals doubt and ambiguity. While a scream is

undeniably terrible, a cry indicates many things (a child can cry, a rabbit can cry, an

adult can cry). Also signified in the first sentence is the narrator’s isolation. He is

golfing alone, which is unusual, and he is using a two-iron. The two-iron is a rarely used

golf club; indeed, many golfers give up their two-irons and rely more on a five-wood.

The use of golf terminology at the outset could additionally alienate readers unfamiliar

with the language of the fairway.9 The first sentence displaces the setting and the

reader from any immediately recognizable location. The main character is also set

apart, as the rising pitch of the crying draws him off the calm, manicured green of the

golf course into the “rough grass.”

19 The next sentence foreshadows the failure of the narrator to make sense of the death

scene in which he is about to partake. The “light of the water from the inlet was

blinding” (152) and references to seeing and sight and blindness will punctuate the

entire story. At this moment, he is blind and that lack of (in)sight will remain. He does

“not see the rabbit at once” and only spots the stoat when he is standing “over” the

dying rabbit. The final sentence of this first paragraph removes the narrator from the

banal setting of the golf course (with its semblance of calm contemplation) not only

into the rough grass but into the violent allegory of predator and prey: “I was standing


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over the rabbit when I saw the grey body of the stoat slithering away like a snake in the

long grass” (152). The snake simile is prosaic and a first clue to the narrator’s immature

attempt to interpret the world in a meaningful or figurative way. The grisly death of

the rabbit follows.

20 The narrator shifts from a follower of action to an actor in the drama of death in the

second paragraph. “The rabbit still did not move, but its crying ceased. I saw the wet

slick of blood behind its ear, the blood pumping out on the sand” (152). Sound imagery

is replaced by visual; these two sentences colour the banal green and grey of the first

paragraph with the running, pumping blood. Only later is it revealed that the narrator

is a medical student (suggesting a schooled fascination with the functioning of a body

or the body’s death throe). However at this moment, his stooping down to pick up the

rabbit is remarkable for the nature of his involvement – he kills the rabbit: “I stilled it

with a single stroke.” Even though that sentence can be interpreted as a caress to calm

or a stroke to still the trembling body, more likely it is a connection between a golf

“stroke” and the blow to the rabbit: both undeniably violent acts. The narrator could be

killing the rabbit out of mercy, but he is here clearly linked to the predatory stoat. It

comes as no surprise, then, that the father is introduced in the same paragraph.

However, there is no consistent correspondence between animals and human

characters in this story. The narrator will variously depict the father as both rabbit and

pathetic stoat, and Miss McCabe as both predator and prey. Human beings cannot be

explained by simple one-to-one animal allegories despite the narrator’s desire to use

the rabbit and the stoat relationship as paradigmatic. Even he is described as both: the

stoat follows him “still” and the stoat follows “the rabbit still, though it was dead”

(152). With the stoat following the narrator and the rabbit, it is easy to read the

narrator as prey to be stalked. But his killing of the rabbit marks the narrator as violent

like the stoat, no matter whether he kills out of mercy or not. The haunting spectre of

the predatory slaughter is the mood for the entire story to follow, and the third

paragraph – which is repeated word for word in the final lines of the story – offers the

image through which to see that deathly mood. It is as if the narrator already views his

father’s search for a second wife as a stoat-like stalking of vulnerable prey. The action

to follow, however, proves the narrator’s vision to be, while not entirely blind, sadly

inadequate.

21 Because of its reiteration at the end of “The Stoat” the third paragraph bears quoting in

full.

All night the rabbit must have raced from warren to warren, the stoat on its tail.Plumper rabbits had crossed the stoat’s path but it would not be deflected; it hadmarked down this one rabbit to kill. No matter how fast the rabbit raced, the stoatwas still on its trail, and at last the rabbit sat down in terror and waited for thestoat to slither up and cut the vein behind the ear. I heard it crying as the stoat wasdrinking its blood. (152)

22 McGahern’s own contemplations in “The Image” highlight the importance of rhythm

and vision. The rhythm of this passage is active: the animals race, slither and drink. But

one of those emblematic McGahern tensions is also at work: the race and the hunt are

set against the word “still” and the cessation of activity as the rabbit sits and waits. The

use of that oft repeated word “still” signifies the marked determination of the stoat,

and echoes back to the earlier lines where “still” indicated calm. The rhythm and vision

of this all-important image is jarring: difficult to unpack, impossible to discern.


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23 I confess an indulgence at this point in my reading: the first version of this passage

includes one phrase that is eliminated in the Collected Stories edition. In Getting Through,

the third person narrator makes it clear in the first sentence of this paragraph that the

whole image is a product of the protagonist’s imagination. “All night the rabbit must

have raced from warren to warren, he thought” (italics mine, 59). In the first edition of

the story, the vision of this recurring image is undeniably part of the son’s attempt to

characterize and interpret the world. In the revised version, the image of the hunt is

undoubtedly a vision of some kind, but it is not clear to whom the vision belongs. Even

though the revised story is told in the first person and, by extension, this paragraph

belongs to the world view (as embryonic as it may be) of the narrator, the effect in the

revision is alienating or – to put a more positive spin on it – more symbolic. Whichever

version is read, the effect of this image is to highlight that the stoat will succeed in its

stalking and that the stoat feeds on the blood of its victim. When these animal

behaviours are awkwardly transposed onto the narrator’s human relationships, the

father becomes vampiric (sucking the life blood out of all those around him), but he

also becomes a rabbit running from the possibility of marrying Miss McCabe: “I saw

that my father had started to run like the poor rabbit” (156). The narrator is not

sophisticated enough to understand the impoverishment of his own metaphors or the

inadequacies of any metaphor to fully explain the world.

24 But what of the rabbit? How does it behave? It races “from warren to warren” as if no

dwelling is safe from the hunting stoat. Eventually the rabbit just sits down as if in

surrender to the inevitability of its death. That the rabbit “waited for the stoat to

slither up and cut the vein”, suggests obedience to the mastery of the predator.

However, the rabbit could be giving up – like the narrator gives up the golf game in the

opening sentences – the rabbit could have lost its concentration and become

hypnotized by the relentless pursuit of the stoat.10 Even while racing from warren to

warren seeking sanctuary (just as the father runs away from Miss McCabe and the

narrator is displaced from any home), the rabbit is different from all human characters

in the story: it dies. The narrator and his father and his uncle and Miss McCabe will all

die eventually – just as assuredly as the rabbit is caught by the stoat. But the fear and

“terror” the rabbit is deemed to experience by the narrator is transmuted into the

timor mortis of the father. One might ask why the story is titled “The Stoat” and not

“The Rabbit” for all the running away and fear in the characters. In order to answer

that question, the father needs to be explored further.

25 The father is introduced reading “the death notices” in the paper, solidifying his

association with dying. After “he had exhausted the news and studied the ads for

teachers, he’d pore over the death notices again” (152): behaviour akin to the stoat’s

measured stalking of its prey and devouring of the blood. The father is not explicitly

violent in this story, but his language is vicious in describing the women who answer

his ad for companionship: “such a collection of wrecks and battleaxes” (154). He might

feed on notices of death, but he also fears potential harm from a battleaxe. The father is

depicted as uneasily akin to both the stoat and the rabbit. When the father comments

on a colleague who has died, the son offers a symbolic gesture: “I held up the rabbit by

way of answer” (153). The father is speaking of dead associates, he is ritualistically

reading the obituaries and the son “by way of answer” holds up the dead rabbit. Is the

son saying that everyone dies? Does the gesture say that the son can be both harbinger

and agent of death? The rabbit does not actually answer for the deaths described and


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the deaths implied (the mother has died and the father is closing in on his own); rather,

the slain rabbit is a kind of response, though paltry and derisory. The son is soon after

linked to the rabbit when he says: “I just brought it. The crying gave me a fright” (153).

The son is the only character to openly admit to fear, analogous to the trembling

rabbit’s terror. The son, too, suffers from a fear of death but not his own.

26 He is both physically and ontologically ill at ease. Words and images associated with

home, belonging, displacement and wandering occur throughout “The Stoat.” The

narrator is first described as “following” something, as if on the trail of important

information, and what he finds is a dying rabbit. The rabbit is then imagined to have

been racing from warren to warren (from home to home) before its final breath. Racing

becomes “wandering” (a word suggesting lack of direction) in two passages. First, when

trying to decipher his father’s question “Would you take it very much to heart if I

decided to marry again?” (153), the narrator describes his father’s motivation “as some

wandering whim” (italics mine, 153) until he reads the textual evidence of the

newspaper advertisement for a mate. Second, the narrator admits to his own lack of

knowledge of the world of emotions when he comments “I had no idea that so much

unfulfilled longing wandered around in the world” (italics mine, 154) when attempting

to assess the “huge pile” of responses the ad generates. Even though “wandering”

describes the longing of other people, the narrator’s repetition of the word speaks to

his own dislocation as well. The lynchpin of this association comes when he offers the

lengthiest of descriptions of women replying to his father’s call: “a woman who had left

at twenty years of age to work at Fords of Dagenham who wanted to come home” (154).

His frustrated desire to understand both these women and his father is manifest in his

feelings of strangeness when meeting Miss McCabe: “They seemed to have reached

some vague, timid understanding that if the holiday went well they’d become engaged

before they returned to their schools in September. At their age, or any age, I thought

their formality strange, and I an even stranger chaperon” (153). He does not

understand them or their behaviour and he clearly feels out of place in the reversed

role of chaperon. He cannot figure out Miss McCabe any better than he can

comprehend the other women: “there was something about her – a waif-like sense of

decency – that was at once appealing and troubling” (155). He can only fall back on

more inadequately figurative language: “she was like a girl, in love with being in love a

whole life long without ever settling on any single demanding presence until this late

backward glance fell on my bereft but seeking father” (155). Miss McCabe cannot settle,

the father runs like the rabbit from her not being “near rooted enough” (156) and by

the end of the story the narrator joins this pack of wandering creatures seeking a

home.

27 Home is the problem for the narrator of “The Stoat” for it is the place of the father’s

“single demanding presence.” The narrator admits to feeling “no pressure to go home

for Easter [spending] it with [his] uncle in Dublin” (154), but Dublin is no more home

than the cottage or the golf course. When the father is set to abandon Miss McCabe and

the failed pursuit for a wife, the narrator asks: “Where’ll you go to?” and the father

replies, “Home, of course. What are you going to do?” (157). The narrator has no clear

answer (just as the rabbit is no answer earlier in the story): “I’ll stay here a while

longer. I might go to Dublin in a few days” (157). He is trying to negotiate different

worlds of family, school and solitude, past, present and future, and ends up at home in

none. He longs to understand his ontological position and in looking for a language to

do so, all the narrator can imagine is the rabbit and the stoat allegory and that is


108

obviously incapable of full revelation. The final pages of “The Stoat” contain one more

repetition (other than the last paragraph) that speaks profoundly to the narrator’s

ontological doubt.

28 The father learns of Miss McCabe’s “mild turn during the night,” decides she is “not

near rooted enough” and tells his son that the only thing to do is “clear out” (156). The

narrator’s response to being left holding a metaphorical dead rabbit once again is

another unwieldy simile:

As if all the irons were suddenly being struck and were flowing from all directionsto the heart of the green, I saw that my father had started to run like the poorrabbit. He would have been better off if he could have tried to understandsomething, even though it would get him off nothing. Miss McCabe was not alone inher situation” (156-7).

29 Eamon Grennan notes McGahern’s narrative prose can contain “a kind of wilful

awkwardness, as if the nature of the observation were frayed, had unfinished aspects,

loose threads” (15), and these few lines are certainly awkward. The metaphor of the

irons being struck is repeated very soon after with a slight alteration that is revealing.

As his father’s car goes “out of sight” the narrator has “the clear vision again of

hundreds of irons being all cleanly struck and flowing from every direction into the

very heart of the green” (italics mine, 157). Yet, there is no clarity in this vision; what

the hundreds of irons mean, why they flow from every direction, and the significance

of the heart of the green is an entirely personal and private matter for the narrator.

The desire for clarity is certainly here; the narrator wants to understand but his prosaic

metaphor fails him, just as his father fails to “understand something” (157). Miss

McCabe is not alone in her situation of being abandoned as the narrator is left at the

end of the story with little help in seeing the world “cleanly.”

30 Even though the narrator revises slightly the image of the irons being struck and

flowing from every direction (another representation of upheaval), he nonetheless

returns to the opening image of the rabbit and the stoat. All that he is left with, in

terms of language as a means of understanding his position in the world, is a recycled

image. The repetition of this image is not that strange, for we do go back to stock

phrases or used narratives to cope with something unexpected or unintelligible.

However, the narrator returns “home” to an image of the violent kill, signifying the

inevitability of his failure to close the wounds of the past. He reopens the vein in the

rabbit’s neck, and the crying does not cease as the stoat drinks the blood again. The

turmoil of the rabbit and the stoat’s relationship does in fact set the mood of the

human relationships in the story, and that mood is disturbing in its violence and

dislocation. Because the narrator is not at home in this world, the world remains

strange in his struggling visions. The fictional settings of John McGahern’s stories may

be “intimate worlds, structured by ritual acts, repeated conversations, and familiar

gestures” (Brannigan vii), but “The Stoat” – which has all of these elements – is an

intimate world of disorder that is structured by violent rituals and repeated images.

The familiar gesture of repetition, however, results in a defamiliarization of both

reader and narrator. By the end of the story, none of us are “near rooted enough.”


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BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Brannigan, John. “Introduction: The ‘Whole World’ of John McGahern.” Irish University Review 35.1

(Spring/Summer 2005): vii-x

Crotty, Patrick. “‘All Topers’: Children in the Fiction of John McGahern.” Irish University Review

35.1 (Spring/Summer 2005): 42-57.

Grennan, Eamon. “‘Only What Happens’: Mulling Over McGahern.” Irish University Review 35.1

(Spring/Summer 2005): 13-27.

Goarzin, Anne. “‘A Crack in the Concrete’: Objects in the Works of John McGahern.” Irish

University Review 35.1 (Spring/Summer 2005): 28-41.

Holland, Siobhán. “Marvellous Fathers in the Fiction of John McGahern.” Yearbook of English

Studies 35 (2005): 186-98.

“Irish Stoat.” http://doon.mayo-ireland.ie/istoat.html.

Kiberd, Declan. “Fallen Nobility: The World of John McGahern.” Irish University Review 35.1

(Spring/Summer 2005): 164-74.

Lloyd, Richard Burr. “Home Sickness: John McGahern’s Irish Quartet.” Diss. University of Nebraska,

1995.

Maher, Eamon. “The Irish Novel in Crisis? The Example of John McGahern.” Irish University Review

35.1 (Spring/Summer 2005): 58-71.

---. John McGahern: From the Local to the Universal. Dublin: The Liffey Press, 2003.

Malcolm, David. Understanding John McGahern. Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina Press, 2007.

McGahern, John. Memoir. London: Faber and Faber, 2005.

---. “Preface.” Creatures of the Earth: New and Selected Stories. London: Faber and Faber, 2006: vii-viii

---. “The Stoat.” Getting Through. London: Faber and Faber 1978: 58-6.

---. “The Stoat.” Collected Stories. London: Faber and Faber, 1992: 152-57.

---. “The Image.” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 17.1 (July 1991): 12.


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1-11.

---. “‘Open to the World’: A Reading of John McGahern’s That They May Face the Rising Sun.” Irish

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RÉSUMÉS

This paper first considers textual variations of John McGahern’s short story “The Stoat” from its

original publication in Getting Through to the revised version in Collected Stories. Then, by

focusing on a repeated passage on a rabbit and a stoat, the author reads their story as a narrative

of dislocation and doubt. The narrator attempts to make sense of his relationships with others

(mostly his father) and his place in the world through an allegorical animal tale. The inadequacy

of that imaginative allegory to provide an understanding of the world is due not only to the

narrator’s youth and inexperience, but also to the violence in the allegorical narrative. The world

of violence cannot be made completely whole.

AUTEURS

DANINE FARQUHARSON

Danine Farquharson is Associate Professor of Irish Literature at Memorial University in St John’s,

Newfoundland, Canada. She is co-editor of Shadows of the Gunmen: Violence and Culture in Modern

Ireland (Cork UP, 2008) and has published and presented papers on Roddy Doyle, Robert McLiam

Wilson, Edna O’Brien, Neil Jordan and Liam O’Flaherty.


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Art, biography, and philosophythree aspects of John McGahern'sshort fiction as exemplified by "Goldwatch", "Like all other men", and"The white boat"Michael C. Prusse

1 It is quite likely that John McGahern will remain better known for his longer fiction

than for his short stories. After all, it was his second novel, The Dark (1965), which first

turned him into a celebrity. The cause was the notorious scene that depicts a priest’s

sexual advances towards a teenage boy. The church, which controlled the educational

system in Ireland at the time, saw to it that the young writer who dared to blacken the

reputation of her servants was dismissed from his position as a schoolteacher and thus

McGahern became a victim of Irish censorship and, at the same time, he achieved fame.

Amongst Women (1990), arguably his best novel, further contributed to the novelist’s

reputation since it was shortlisted for the 1990 Booker Prize. Although the book did not

win, its author was praised for “the relentless accuracy of his prose, and the graceful

portrayal of his characters” (Callil/Tóibín 114). Despite this public acknowledgement of

the longer texts it is the carefully crafted short stories, their prose exhibiting the same

quality of timeless beauty as his novels, that probably best display McGahern’s

masterful command of language and also underline his focus on ever recurring themes.

As these narratives create an intimate Irish cosmos that nevertheless achieves

universal appeal it may well be that the stories will eventually turn out to be the

author’s true masterpieces.

2 McGahern’s writings are characterised by circular structures and pervasive themes;

these qualities have been observed by a number of critics such as Betrand Cardin (1995:

178), Carmen Callil and Colm Tóibín (114), Penelope Fitzgerald (21) or Edward T.

Wheeler (15). The author focuses on seasons and seasonal farm work as well as on the

circle of life in order to underline the circularity of human affairs. In a similar vein as


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William Faulkner and his Yoknapatawpha County the Irish author conceives and

regularly revisits familiar settings; he reiterates constellations and situations, and he

even avails himself of the same recurrent names (cf. Lloyd, 1987; Prusse 2001: 136). The

three short narratives selected for this study portray typical moments in McGahern’s

fictional universe: “Like All Other Men” relates the awkward affair between a man and

a woman set in a drab and rainy Dublin; in “Gold Watch” there is a more successful

encounter between a man and a woman but the story revisits the problematic

relationship between patriarchs and their sons; last but not least, “The White Boat”

recounts a life in exile, enriched with numerous contemplations of experiences past

and present. Taken together the three stories exemplify what is postulated as three

central aspects of the author’s fiction, namely art, biography and philosophy. Simply

lumping these three stories under the respective headings of art, biography and

philosophy, however, would be untrue and unfair to the author’s creative imagination.

The point must certainly be made that all three narratives stem to some extent from

the author’s biography; all of them are extremely well constructed (and hence artistic),

and allude to numerous other literary texts; and finally, all the stories contain or hint

at contemplations on life and thus may, to some extent, be called philosophical.

3 In fact it will be the construction of the three stories that will provide the fundamental

common link between all of them. There are a number of parallels that can be

established between two out of the three but the artist’s deliberate architectural

shaping of his prose is an essential element in all the narratives under discussion and a

trademark of McGahern’s prose in general. The author is clearly, as I have shown in a

paper given at the Rewriting/Reprising Conference in Lyon (2006), also a very literary

writer. His short story, “Korea” for instance, is evidently modelled on Ernest

Hemingway’s “Indian Camp” (cf. Prusse 2006). Furthermore, the Irish writer may well

have been influenced by Hemingway’s preference for chiastic arrangements and, while

not as dedicated or elaborate in making use of these constructions as the American

writer, he nevertheless employs a similar technique of a deceptively simple prose

characterized by frequent verbal repetitions in all three stories under discussion,

invariably framing central moments in those stories by means of a short chiasmus. My

brief analysis, “Symmetry Matters: John McGahern’s ‘Korea’ as Hypertext of Ernest

Hemingway’s ‘Indian Camp’,” demonstrates that the writer attempted to imitate the

chiastic arrangements that can be found in many of Hemingway’s short stories. The

main example there shows a rather detailed construction that is almost chiastic as a

whole but a true chiasmus only at its very core. While it cannot be established whether

McGahern was fully cognizant of Hemingway’s style and whether he later became at all

familiar with the argument of Max Nänny’s 1997 article that first outlined the

American author’s technique of framing paragraphs and whole stories by means of

arranging words in a certain order, it is nevertheless remarkable how akin McGahern’s

prose constructions are to those by Hemingway.

4 Apart from utilizing the chiasmus as a means of shaping his fiction McGahern, both in

his novels and his short stories, betrays a constant awareness of man’s mortality and

regards life, as several critics have pointed out, very much like Thomas Mann in The

Magic Mountain (1924) or Vladimir Nabokov in Speak, Memory (1947), as a brief crack of

light between looming walls of darkness (cf. Prusse 2001: 136). This particular

perception again refers to a circular process as day and night follow each other and

provide a further cycle. The interplay of light and darkness is another common element

that links the three stories under discussion and it is, in general, a recurrent feature in


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McGahern’s fiction. Already in his first novel, The Barracks (1963), the ritual lighting of a

lamp provides a frame for the whole narrative when the boy inquires of his mother and

his father, respectively, whether it is time to light the lamp yet (7/232). The

significance of light with regard to the writer’s understanding of human lives can be

further corroborated with a quotation from Memoir (2005) where he states:

Wegrow into an understanding of the world gradually. Much of what we come toknow is far from comforting, that each day brings us closer to the inevitable hourwhen all will be darkness again, but even that knowledge is power and allunderstanding is joy, even in the face of dread, and cannot be taken from us untileverything is. (36)

5 In Memoir McGahern thus appears to elucidate on (and possibly to soften) what a

number of critics have described as his bleakness, “his vision of the lives of quiet

desperation, which are lived out” in Ireland (Deane 223). The themes inherent in the

stories under discussion also resound in McGahern’s novels but, arguably, they find

their most poignant expression in his short fiction. Denis Sampson even singled out

“Gold Watch” as a key narrative in the author’s œuvre, containing “the essence of his

technique,” and selected a quotation from it for the title of his monograph on

McGahern, Outstaring Nature’s Eye (xiv). The story is, as mentioned above, a variation on

the theme of coming home to a father who is a family tyrant: exhibiting a number of

weaknesses, this patriarchal figure is, in many facets, strongly reminiscent of

McGahern’s own father. The narrative could thus be said to conform most closely to the

terms of autobiography but for the fact that McGahern himself was firm and outspoken

in his criticism of autobiographical writing and, from a general point of view,

considered its quality to be questionable (Gonzales 20). He regularly emphasised that

the artist’s inspiration might be taken from real life but that it had to grow and be

formed before acquiring and deserving the label of art (McGahern 1998). By focusing on

the “bitter generational estrangement” between father and son McGahern’s “Gold

Watch” reiterates an archetypal pattern that is established as early as “Wheels”, the

very first narrative in his first volume of short stories, Nightlines (cf. Sampson 89).

6 In “Gold Watch” the first person narrator encounters an acquaintance from university

days in Grafton Street in Dublin and falls in love with her. They move in together and

then first visit her family in Kilkenny, a visit that goes passably well. His partner is less

convinced, uttering a characteristic McGahern quip, namely that “the best part of these

visits is always the leaving” (212). Predictably the visit to the narrator’s father and his

stepmother, Rose, is far less amiable and eventually it is only the son on his own who

sticks to the annual visits in the haymaking season. During one of those stays he comes

across an old gold watch, which he remembers from his boyhood, and he claims it,

somewhat guiltily, as his heirloom. When the narrator and his partner decide to get

married he chooses not to inform his father and Rose; they pay him back by keeping

the information from him that they will no longer cut the hay themselves but have

leased their meadows to another farmer. The narrator thus travels in vain to their

countryside farm. Since his wife is pregnant he is aware of this being his last

haymaking holiday. He makes his father a gift of an expensive, modern gold watch as a

replacement for his heirloom and then discovers that his father has immersed the new

watch in the barrel, in which he prepares the poison to spray the potatoes. The key

symbol at the heart of the story is, of course, the working of time – in favour of the

narrator since he is young while his father is getting on in life – and how the father

attempts to stop time by poisoning its symbol, the watch. The means of his attack on


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the timepiece moreover alludes to the poison that is corroding the last strings between

father and son; the narrative then ends in an open-ended manner with the narrator’s

musing on “time that did not have to run to any conclusion” (225).

7 The first and last visit of the narrator’s partner, “a far worse disaster than I could have

envisaged,” is extremely carefully set down in prose and the small paragraph that

describes the couple’s arrival at the farm encapsulates all of the writer’s art :

I saw him watch us as I got out of the car to open the iron gate under the yew, butinstead of coming out to greet us he withdrew into the shadows of the hallway. Itwas my stepmother, Rose, who came out to the car when we both got out and wereopening the small garden gate. (213, italics mine)

8 If arranged in space the core of the story – the father’s barring himself in his home,

simultaneously making social intercourse difficult – is spelled out in the chiastic

arrangement of the vocabulary in this particular paragraph:

1 got out … to open the iron gate2 coming outhe withdrew into the shadows of the hallwaycame out

1 got out and were opening the small garden gate

9 While the son and his partner move towards the father, even open the gate themselves,

the old man actively steps back and hides in the dark corridor of the house. The

chiasmus frames the sentence that contains the central action which contains the

essence of the story, namely the father’s active withdrawal into the symbolic shadows,

thus consciously cutting the communication between himself and his son as well as the

latter’s future wife and their prospective children. The painful relationship between

father and son is utterly revealed and the disastrous ending of the visit (caused by the

parent’s rude remarks) and of the whole narrative is clearly foreshadowed. The figure

of the father in “Gold Watch” can actually also be read as a preliminary sketch of

Moran in Amongst Women since the narrator’s father, very much like Moran in the

novel, is just as adept at manipulation, for instance by making use of “silence and

politeness like a single weapon” (214).

10 The significance of light and darkness in “Gold Watch” has already been alluded to

above in the context of the father’s retreating into the shadows. Although the moment

of final awareness that the protagonist moves towards is mediated by the moonlight, it

is set in the contrasting dark during the night, another typical aspect of McGahern’s

fiction (cf. for instance the narrator’s epiphany which occurs in the darkness of the

lavatory in “Korea”). Here are the narrator’s thoughts as he contemplates the watch in

its barrel of poison:

I stood in that moonlit silence as if waiting for some word or truth, but none came,none ever came; and I grew amused at that part of myself that still expectedsomething, standing like a fool out there in all the moonlit silence, when only whatwas increased or diminished as it changed, became only what is, becoming againwhat was even faster than the small second hand endlessly circling in the poison.(225; italics mine)

11 The pattern of the repetitions can again be perceived as chiastic if the text is

represented as below and the semantic analogies of “waiting for some word or truth”

and “expected something” are rated as equivalents:

moonlit silence

2 waiting for some word or truth

1.

1.


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but none came, none ever came; and I grew amused at that part of myselfthat still

2 expected something 1 moonlit silence

12 Yearnings and unfulfilled expectations belong to the existential emotional state that

haunts the inhabitants of McGahern’s fictional universe but it is uncommon that a

protagonist becomes actually aware of and indeed perceives the irony of this mode of

behaviour. The quotation ends with the telling symbol of time, “the small second hand

[of the watch] endlessly circling”, and thus McGahern brilliantly illustrates the message

of that last phrase with the circular positioning of the words in the first part of the

paragraph. It also relates back to a previous statement by the protagonist’s father who,

on receiving the watch, rhetorically asks: “What use have I for time here any more?”

(223). The chiastic constructions continue right towards the end of the story; in the last

paragraph there is another one:

Before going into the house this last night to my room, I drew the watch up again outof the barrel by the line and listened to it tick, now purely amused by the expectationit renewed – that if I continued to listen to the ticking some word or truth mightcome. And when I finally lowered the watch back down into the poison, I did it socarefully that no ripple or splash disturbed the quiet, and time, hardly surprisingly,was still running; time that did not have to run to any conclusion. (225; italics mine)

13 In this excerpt the chiasmus is not a mere repetition of words but includes semantic

opposites (“drew up” and “lowererd … back down”). In the last two lines the pattern is

one of simple repetition, emphasizing McGahern’s insistence on the impact of the

passing of time on human lives and relations, functioning in a similar mode as the

concluding couplet in a Shakespearean sonnet. The specific construction of this

paragraph as outlined above may well provide an explanation for the poetic quality of

McGahern’s prose that has been noted by a number of critics, for instance by Fitzgerald

(21) or Joel Conarroe (9). In the article that outlines his discovery of chiastic

constructions in Hemingway’s prose Nänny comments that it is impossible to say

whether the American writer consciously created the chiasmus or whether it was his

poetic inspiration that guided him unconsciously towards placing the words in those

particular positions (1997: 173; 1998: 183-184). This conclusion may just as well be

transferred to the question regarding the degree of deliberation with which McGahern

created his prose in this particular fashion. Illustrating his conception of the short

story but without commenting on particular constructions the author stated in an

interview that he gave in 1993 that the short story “has a very, very strict rhythm, and

every word counts in it” (Louvel 28).

14 “Gold Watch” is also an interesting case regarding its publication history. First

published in The New Yorker (17 March 1980), the story was, as both Sampson and David

Malcolm have noted, first printed in book form in the American edition of Getting

Through (1980), but for obvious reasons could not be included in the eponymous British

edition (1978) – in Britain it was only published in book form in 1985, namely in

McGahern’s later story collection High Ground (Sampson 162; Malcolm 232).

Furthermore, Malcolm stresses the fact that since the “story could fit equally well into

two volumes of short fiction” this “is a sign of the persistence with which McGahern

returns to the same locales and themes” (232).

15 “Like All Other Men”, though containing autobiographical elements such as an early

ambition to become a priest that is later thwarted, is an exercise in thematic and


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structural symmetry and hence one of the more “artistic” narratives. Sampson reads

the construction of the narrative as “an intellectual arrangement, an ironic diagram”

(205) while Malcolm understands it as “a story about male alienation” (231). Michael

Duggan, who renounced priesthood because he lost his faith, has become a teacher of

Latin and history in a country school. He travels to Dublin for the weekend where he

meets Susan Spillane, a nurse by profession at a dance; after dancing, a few drinks and

dinner they later spend the night together. In the course of getting dressed in the

morning she reveals to him that she cannot see him again because she is about to join

an Order and intends to spend the rest of her life in a convent.

16 Michael, rather innocent and immensely pleased at finding a woman that appears to be

everything he has dreamed of, should have been warned: Susan reacts to a story he

tells her not with the laughter he expects but with the remark that it is “not hard to

give the wrong signals in this world” (274). When the disappointed lover walks through

Dublin he observes the river and the streets, and he notices how the scenery stretches

“out in the emptiness after she had gone” (280). It is with a certain irony regarding

their situation that he quotes the famous adage by Mary, Queen of Scots, “In my end is

my beginning” (280). Susan leaves to become a nun and their lovemaking was her

renunciation of the physical world in favour of the spiritual. The man, by contrast, then

reverses the word order of the quotation, “In my beginning is my end” (280). This

reversal rings rather hopelessly and is matched by his awareness in the last sentence of

the story that whatever he will focus on, “it could only take him to the next day and the

next” (280).

17 According to McGahern’s papers at the National University of Ireland in Galway, the

narrative was originally entitled “An End or a Beginning,” which the author next

amended to “In My End” before settling on “Like All Other Men.” The final version

carries, of course, as Sampson has remarked, echoes of the story of Samson and Delilah,

who at last gives in to the request of his treacherous beloved and informs her that “if I

be shaven, then my strength will go from me, and I shall become weak, and be like any

other man” (Judges, 16: 17). Michael Duggan is similarly afflicted – even though he does

not lose his hair: “Once his sudden hope of marrying evaporates, he is left, like Samson,

without his strength and purpose” (Sampson, 205). When the protagonist muses on his

fate his thoughts have been shaped yet again by means of chiastic structuring:

The river out beyond the Custom House, the straight quays, seemed to stretch out inthe emptiness after she had gone. In my end is my beginning, he recalled. In mybeginning is my end, his and hers, mine and thine. It seemed to stretch out, complete asthe emptiness, endless as a wedding ring. (280; italics mine)1 seemed to stretch out … the emptiness2 my end is 3 my beginninghe recalled3 my beginning 2 is my end1 seemed to stretch out … the emptiness

18 This is a further and particularly pleasing instance of McGahern’s master

craftsmanship since the words are placed in a circular position and thus symbolically

form what the last two words of the paragraph refer to, namely a wedding ring.

Moreover, as the narrator appears to imply, Michael Duggan’s feelings of desolation

could easily be matched by the analogous desolation of a marriage when two people no

longer have anything to say to each other.


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19 The thematic symmetry, a refugee from the seminary learning about love in a brief

encounter with a refugee from the ordinary world, intent on seeking shelter in a

convent is actually mirrored on the textual level. Many repetitions and further (almost)

chiastic arrangements, such as the following one, illustrate what is happening within

the short story:

‘Have you slept with anyone before?’ he asked.‘Yes, with one person.’‘Were you in love with him?’Yes.’‘Are you still in love with him?’‘No. Not at all.’‘I never have.’‘I know.’ (276; italics mine)

20 This quotation shows how carefully McGahern shapes his dialogues. The whole

exchange is framed by Michael’s question and statement regarding sexual intercourse,

beginning and ending with ‘have’. It is followed by a double assertion which is itself

framed by Michael’s raising of the question of ‘love’. The twice positively affirmed is

then vehemently negated, the two ‘yes’ being counterbalanced by ‘no’ and ‘not’. The

ensuing paragraph confirms that the sample above is not the result of coincidence but

part of McGahern’s elaborate construction of prose. “It was her turn to want to change

the direction of the conversation. A silence fell that wasn’t a silence. They were unsure,

their minds working furiously behind the silence to find some safe way to turn” (277, my

italics). The silence, an important part in the training of nuns and priests, is here at the

centre of their conversation, repeated three times and being framed by the word

“turn” which illustrates what he has done and what she is planning to do: he turned

away from the church while she, in turn, will join an Order.

21 “Like All Other Men” is concerned with the passing of time that flies at the beginning –

“Time raced” (273) – and ends with the philosophical contemplation of life as an

eternity of suffering, “no matter how eagerly he found himself walking in any direction

it could only take him to the next day and the next” (280). The narrative is also

characterised by a subtle approach to light and darkness, as Paul Gueguen observes.

Making use of one of his favourite devices, McGahern illustrates his philosophical

contemplation of life as a flash of light in the darkness. Remarking on the gloomy

atmosphere of the story, Gueguen points out that Michael has lost the divine light and

hence stumbles blindly through life and Dublin whereas Susan is striving towards the

light and thus takes the lead in their encounter (193). Her confidence is evident, as

Gueguen notes on the same page, when McGahern describes her as standing “free of

everything around her, secure in her own light” (278). Michael, lacking in confidence

and nervous about his first sexual encounter, switches off the light, undresses and gets

into bed; and yet, he cannot stay in the dark because Susan reproaches him: she wants

“to see what I am doing” (275). In this narrative, again, the contrast of light and

darkness contributes to McGahern’s vision of life in circular motion.

22 In his third novel, A Girl in the Head (1967), the Anglo-Irish novelist J.G. Farrell portrays

an old man who calls himself Count Boris Sladerewsky and pretends to be an

impoverished, anglicized Polish nobleman, but who turns out to be, in fact, the Irish

impostor Mick Slattery from Limerick. Boris grows old in a very undignified manner in

the English seaside resort of Maidenhair Bay. One of his escapades involves making love


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to an under-age teenager in a boat; when he climaxes, Boris quotes the following lines

from John Webster’s revenge tragedy The White Devil:

My soul, like to a ship in a black storm, Is driven I know not whither. (140)

23 Richard Farnham, the protagonist of McGahern’s long short story “The White Boat”, by

contrast, is the opposite of Boris, both with regard to dignity and maturity. And yet,

both of them have a few things in common: apart from the significant role of a boat in

the two narratives this refers to the fact that both of them live in exile – Boris/Mick as

an Irishman among Britons; Richard as an Englishman in Ireland, in Limerick to be

more precise – and both of them have a lesson to learn. In Mick’s case this concerns

accepting his age and learning to act accordingly; in Richard’s case it is a matter of

addressing the relationship to his wife – and he realises, as the last lines of the story

indicate, that this will be “a kind of work he had never even attempted with any

seriousness in the whole of his life up to now” (372).

24 “The White Boat” is a philosophical narrative, contemplating life and, in particular,

aging. Richard is aware of the new generation that will take over what once was his

world: “He did not mind being pushed out on to the margins of this world. It was in the

nature of things, and in many ways he was delighted with his new freedoms” (369). The

protagonist thus perceives himself as part of a natural cycle – a significant aspect of

McGahern’s fictional worlds. The white boat that Richard builds provides an escape for

a certain amount of time and provides him with the space and time that he needs to

meditate on his past, present and future, only to realise that his most important task

awaits him at home, namely to get to know his wife properly and to live with her in the

time that his retirement from business affords him. While the intertextual allusions to

Farrell may be coincidental there are a number of clear links to McGahern’s own

textual universe. As in “Eddie Mac” and “The Conversion of William Kirkwood” the

narrative offers an outsider’s perspective on a closely-knit Irish world. Like the

protagonist of “The Conversion of William Kirkwood”, Richard assimilates successfully

into Irish society but does not have to face the same cost that Kirkwood is confronted

with: people that matter to the latter, namely his foster child, Lucy, and her mother,

Annie May Moran, will be forced out of his home once his new Irish wife comes to live

there. Richard who has no major issues with his Irish environment realises that he has

to put an effort into making the relationship to his wife work. Richard’s status as an

outsider permits McGahern to include observations on Irish customs such as people’s

reluctance “to say goodbye, as if it echoed too close for comfort each final parting”

(370). With regard to father figures (cf. “Gold Watch”) the story contains a striking and

rather unflattering portrayal of a Garda sergeant that resembles to the recurrent and

well-known character that is partly based on McGahern’s father.

25 The notion that a journey on a river may mirror a person’s development has long been

established in narrative fiction. A well-known example in this respect is Mark Twain’s

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. While young Huckleberry grows into maturity in the

course of his journey down the Mississippi in the company of Jim, a runaway slave,

Richard Farnham travels up the Shannon on his own from Limerick and since he is

already at an advanced age, he is not growing more mature but nevertheless the

journey advances him since he ends it when a revelation dawns upon him, namely that

he is needed at home and has to begin the arduous task of reacquainting himself with

his wife. His departure from home, almost an escape on his boat, only leads him back


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home again and thus provides a further example of the circular movements in

McGahern’s fiction. The white boat that Richard Farnham builds may be an allusion to

J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954-55). There it is Frodo Baggins who is offered a

passage on the White Ship that transports the Elves out of Middle Earth to the mystical

Aman. By contrast to Frodo, who escapes the world where he has suffered so much,

Richard’s passage on his boat is a short one, unaccompanied by suffering and guiding

the protagonist towards accepting his task that lies before him and from which he is

not allowed to sail away.

26 The flooded fields that his boats traverses at the beginning of the narrative may

symbolise the unlimited possibilities that retirement appears to grant to Farnham – his

sticking to the riverbed may be read as a comment on his character. The white boat as

such conveys a notion of freedom that is matched by Richard’s white hair and yet, as

the season during which the voyage is undertaken is winter, this indicates that time is

running out and death is not that far off. In “The White Boat” McGahern also reasserts

his particular perception of life as a flash of light when he has Richard reflect on his

decision to convert to Catholicism which he does, merely, to be able to marry Mary Pat

Meehan: “For years we grow towards the light, become part of that light for a time, and

then the light fails. The child and the old often have more sense of the glory of that

light than those in the flower or pulse of their life” (353). This growing towards the

light only to be confronted with failure in the end is reminiscent of the mushrooms

crowding towards a keyhole in Derek Mahon’s poem “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford”

(1975). The train of thought is picked up again at a later point in the story when

Richard Farnham reflects on the human condition: “We are born in night and travel

through an uncertain day to reach another night” (369). In “The White Boat” light and

darkness also play a central role with regard to another symbolic presence in the story:

the bridge close to the place where the boat is anchored. The bridge links the two

halves of the Irish town on the river (which bears a strong resemblance to the

description of Cootehall in Memoir), and as such may refer to the aspects of his life that

Richard has to join.

27 Apart from the rather philosophical outlook on life – a flash in the darkness – it is

evident in “The White Boat” that McGahern also uses chiastic constructions when

describing the bridge: “The drinkers crossing the bridge to Henry’s had seen itlit up

against the dark quay wall and saw itin darkness when they crossed back to their homes

after midnight” (344; italics mine). If represented in space the chiastic construction of

this becomes evident and yet again shows how much effort McGahern put into

conceiving the architectural dimensions of his prose:

1 crossing the bridge2 had seen it lit up against the dark quay wall 2 saw it in darkness1 crossed back

28 What is particularly striking here is how the boat is at the heart of this construction,

underlining the symbolic significance of the white boat, and how its textual positioning

mirrors the way it is closely observed by the people going to the pub and coming back.

The focal positioning of “lit” ahead of the words “dark” and “darkness” moreover

underlines once more McGahern’s perception of human existence as a brief flash of

light in the night.


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29 The significance of the bridge is also established in the following quotation, which

consists of numerous repetitions that are not strictly governed by a chiastic order.

What is immediately noticeable, however, is the relevance of silence and noise, another

contrast that infuses the narrative with meaning.

The first bell for Second Mass rang just before eleven. Voices and cars started tocross the bridge and gradually turned into a steady stream. When a number of carscrossed the bridge together they made a hollow sound. Most of the voices were onbicycles. All the cars and voices had ceased when the second bell rang out close to aquarter to twelve. One car driven very fast suddenly disturbed the settling silence.The silence of the village was intense. No dog barked, no cock crowed, a single cowmooed somewhere. He began to make sandwiches. After a long time, motorsstarting up around the church broke the silence; came closer; crossed the bridge.The voices followed. They sounded more animated now than the voices on theirway to Mass. (366-367)

30 Richard has to find a voice to bridge the silence between his wife and himself; and it is

the silence he notices when alone on the boat that helps to bring the awareness of the

necessity of talking to his wife – again symbolically underlined by the bridge that links

two separate entities. As with the other symbolic themes this particular opposition is

introduced into the story at an earlier point when the omniscient narrator observes a

scene in the dayroom at the barracks where there is silence while the guards are

waiting for a phone call – the noise of the telephone mirroring the earlier noisy

cheerfulness of the chatting policemen (346).

31 When he needs some provisions the protagonist of the story encounters in the person

of Luke, the shopkeeper, someone who exhibits a similar kind of stoicism as Michael

Duggan in “Like All Other Men”. Luke regards life with equanimity, even serenity: “The

same day has to be put round somehow, no matter what” (348). Another parallel

between these two stories lies in the deep convictions that the protagonists share:

Richard Farnham’s pronouncement on “Culture, manners, gentleness … Their time is

never gone” (356) is an unconscious echo of Michael Duggan in “Like All Other Men”

who proclaims: “I believe in honour, decency, affection, in pleasure” (277). These rather

simple philosophical contemplations find their strongest expression in the discovery

that the protagonist makes when considering his temporary home: “Here on this quay

by this river there was such richness of water and light and stone and church and tree

and people and all they reflected of life that he felt he could continue looking on them

forever” (371).

32 As a result of these considerations “The White Boat” emerges as a narrative that

deserves more attention than the brief sentence that Malcolm spares for it in his

survey of McGahern’s short fiction. The critic lumped it together with “Creatures of the

Earth” and declared that both texts dealt with familiar topics, namely “death, coming

to terms with age, and the intersection of modern and traditional Ireland” (233).

33 The three stories discussed in this article illustrate that the three themes provided in

its title are most certainly of relevance in McGahern’s oeuvre. “Gold Watch” ends on an

inconclusive note but implies that the son will break with his father; there is a tiny sign

of hope in the happiness that the son has found in Dublin and the approaching birth of

his own child. “Like All Other Men” appears to end in a rather bleak fashion: Michael

Duggan realises the emptiness of life at moments of despair; whether his despair should

be as eternal as he perceives it to be is a question left to the reader to contemplate. Last

but not least “The White Boat” is the most optimistic of the three narratives since it


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ends with Richard realising that he needs to work on his relationship with his wife – a

perception that provides hope for McGahern’s characters and leaves the picture less

bleak than in the previous stories. It is an impression that clashes with an earlier

assessment by Cardin, who – to be fair – had not read “The White Boat” and argues that

the typical protagonist in McGahern’s short stories “ne progresse pas, mais revient

toujours au point de départ” (1995: 184). Richard Farnham returns to his point of

departure too – his home – but he clearly arrives there in a different state from the one

he set out in, as a more advanced person. The same assessment might be made about

McGahern’s own biography, which started out in the Leitrim and Roscommon

countryside but later took him to cultural centres such as London, Helsinki, Paris and

New York. And yet he always returned to his native roots, the environment he grew up

in, and eventually settled down in, namely on Foxfield, his farm in Co. Leitrim. His

Memoir, the account of his childhood and growing up, is also in the form of a circle as

the critic Stanley van der Ziel has pointed out, a circle that confirms the status of

McGahern’s last publication “as a deliberately shaped work of art” (467).

34 It is particularly striking how the Irish writer utilizes the chiasmus as a stylistic tool to

shape his prose in all three stories and thus, on the textual level, actually stresses the

circular themes and symbols of his narrative fiction. McGahern thus can be said to be

close to Hemingway in creating prose architecture (Nänny 1997: 158). Like the

American author the Irishman conceives his texts as “poetic structurations” of “quasi-

Palladian quality” that are hidden beneath the “seemingly simple, realistic prose”

(Nänny 1997: 158). As if aware of such considerations McGahern himself readily

admitted that his focus when writing was on the weighing of words:

You know that each words has a different weight, and what always fascinated me,even if you change a small word in a sentence, is that all the other words demand tobe rearranged. And somehow, that can’t be faked. Part of it is technique, but it’s notall technique, otherwise it could be faked but it can’t be faked, because it actuallyneeds, as Flaubert said, ‘a strong feeling and clear thinking in order to find the rightwords’ …. (Louvel 26)

35 The function of this covert highlighting of certain words and phrases is most probably

to shape a device that allows the author to “articulate an important concern or theme”

and hence may provide “an interpretative clue to the understanding of a story”

(Nänny 1998: 174). The short story as a genre is often perceived as poetry in prose. An

awareness of the construction and the careful positioning of the words in the short

fiction of both Hemingway and McGahern may certainly help to substantiate this claim.

The fact that the thematic circularity of much of McGahern’s short fiction is also

mirrored on the textual level marks him out as a master of his craft who indeed

successfully blends art, biography and philosophy.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Callil, Carmen and Colm Tóibín. The Modern Library: The Two Hundred Best Novels in English

Since 1950. London: Picador, 2000.


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Cardin, Bertrand. “Figures of Silence: Ellipses and Eclipses in John McGahern’s Collected Stories.”

Journal of the Short Story in English, (40), 2003 Spring, 57-68.

---. “Un aspect du temps: le cycle dans les nouvelles de John McGahern.” La Licorne (Poitiers,

France), (32), 1995, 179-186.

Conarroe, Joel. “Strong Women, Dreamy Men.” The New York Times Book Review, 8 February

1987, 9.

Deane, Seamus. A Short History of Irish Literature. Notre Dame (IN): University of Notre Dame

Press, 2004.

Farrell, J. G. A Girl in the Head (1967), London: Fontana, 1982.

Fitzgerald, Penelope. “The Great Importance of Small Things.” The Times Literary Supplement, 9

October 1992, 21.

Gueguen, Paul. “‘Like All Other Men’: Hantise et nostalgie de l’ordre.” La Licorne (Poitiers,

France), (32), 1995, 187-94.

Gonzales Casademont, Rosa. “An Interview with John McGahern.” The European English

Messenger. 4, 1 (1995): 17-23.

Lloyd, Richard Burr. “The Symbolic Mass: Thematic Resolution in the Irish Novels of John

McGahern.” Emporia State Research Studies, (36), Fall 1987, 5-23.

Louvel, Liliane, Gilles Ménégaldo and Claudine Verley. “Entretien avec John McGahern, 17

Novembre 1993.” La Licorne (Poitiers, France), (32), 1995, 25-31.

McGahern, John. Amongst Women. London: Faber and Faber, 1990.

---. The Barracks. London: Faber and Faber, 1963.

---. The Dark. London: Faber and Faber, 1965.

---. “Gold Watch.” The Collected Stories. London: Faber and Faber, 1992, 211-225.

---.“Korea.” The Collected Stories. London: Faber and Faber, 1992, 54-58.

---. “Letter to Michael Prusse.” 20 November 1998.

---. “Like All Other Men.” The Collected Stories. London: Faber and Faber, 1992, 272-280.

---. “Wheels.” The Collected Stories. London: Faber and Faber, 1992, 3-11.

---. “The White Boat.” In New Writing 6. A.S. Byatt and Peter Porter, eds. London: Vintage, 1997,

342-372.

---. Memoir, London, Faber and Faber, 2005.

---. The John McGahern Papers. James Hardiman Library, National University of Ireland, Galway.

http://smeagol.library.nuigalway.ie/cgi-bin/FramedList.cgi?P71 [accessed on 14 March 2008]

Malcolm, David. “John McGahern”, Dictionary of Literary Biography: British and Irish Short-Fiction

Writers, 1945-2000,Vol. 319, ed. Cheryl Alexander Malcolm and David Malcolm, Detroit, Thomson

Gale, 2006, 222-234.

Nänny, Max. “Hemingway’s Architecture of Prose: Chiastic Patterns and Their Narrative

Functions.” North Dakota Quarterly 64.3 (Summer 1997), 157-176

---. “Hemingway’s Use of Chiastic Centering as an Interpretative Clue.” North Dakota Quarterly 65.3

(Summer 1998), 174-185.


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Prusse, Michael C. “Symmetry Matters: John McGahern’s ‘Korea’ as Hypertext of Ernest

Hemingway’s ‘Indian Camp’.” Georges Letissier (ed.) Rewritting/Reprising, Newcastle: Cambridge

Scholars, 2009, 22-39.

---. “John McGahern.” Dictionary of Literary Biography: British Novelists Since 1960 (Fourth Series), Vol.

231, ed. Merritt Moseley; Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2001, 135-145.

Sampson, Denis. Outstaring Nature’s Eye: The Fiction of John McGahern, Washington DC: The Catholic

University of America Press, 1993.

van der Ziel Stanley, “John McGahern, Memoir”, Irish University Review 35.2 (2005), 463-469.

Webster, John. The White Devil. (1612) London: Ernest Benn, 1966.

RÉSUMÉS

McGahern’s short stories exhibit similar qualities as his novels. Three aspects are perceived as

recurring, namely art, biography and philosophy. The stories selected to analyse these aspects in

more detail are “Gold Watch”, “Like All Other Men” and “The White Boat”. The first text, for

instance, is a revealing example of how the writer exploited episodes and characters from his

own range of experience without simply creating autobiography but something new and artistic:

a fictional narrative. All three stories are fundamentally linked by means of their artistic

construction. The author architecturally shapes his prose to form a series of chiastic structures

that frame decisive moments in these narratives and thus underline the circularity of his themes.

It is this focus on form that characterises McGahern’s deceptively simple prose and contributes

to the notion that his short stories are indeed poetry in prose

AUTEURS

MICHAEL C. PRUSSE

Michael C. Prusse is Professor and Head of the Faculty of Languages at the Zurich University of

Teacher Education, where he teaches ELT Methodology, Children’s Literature and Literatures of

the English-speaking world. He has published a number of articles on twentieth-century

literature and on the teaching of literature both at tertiary and at secondary level.


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"The road away becomes the roadback": prodigal sons in the shortstories of John McGahernMargaret Lasch Carroll

1 By John McGahern’s death, his short stories1 appeared in four collections: Nightlines

(1970), Getting Through (1978), High Ground (1985), and The Collected Stories (1992). The

stories within and between volumes find a connectivity through repeating places,

images, situations – structural devices Denis Sampson calls “refrains” (Sampson, “Lost

Image” 65), and especially in the central consciousness developing from naïve

innocence to mature middle age.2 The journey of the collective protagonist forms a

circular route away from and then back to the ancestral home, and the archetypal

implications of the journey fraught with indecision are deepened when analyzed in

terms of the parable of the Prodigal Son in the Gospel of Luke.

2 Luke’s story concerns a younger son who leaves home and journeys “into a far country,

and there wastes his substance with riotous living” (Luke 15). After exhausting his

resources, he returns home welcomed by his father and resented by his older brother.

McGahern’s protagonists follow a similar path, progressively rejecting their stagnant

rural homes for urban independence only to find alienation and emptiness. They

ultimately rediscover the virtues of love, family, and rural tradition in his later short

stories, moving from the parable’s thematic impulses of conflict to co-existence to

control to community.

3 In his critical study Prodigal Sons:A Study in Authorship and Authority, David Wyatt

discusses this allegory as one of returning, but with the return only having meaning in

relation to the journey. While the older son in the Bible story represses the desire to

leave and forfeits the chance to “author” his own story, the prodigal son, through his

departure and return, has a story to tell that includes the older brother’s experience

and more. The older brother, in essence, will always remain a boy because his identity

will forever be overshadowed by the father’s. One’s self-recognition, Wyatt explains,

can occur only through asserting a “fundamental doubleness” between father and son.

And this doubleness can only occur when a child tests himself away from the home that


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has been his only context for self-knowledge. To mature, he thus must leave.

Separation in McGahern’s world causes continuous trauma for his overbearing fathers.

Father/son conflicts of a particularly brutal nature, as many scholars have noted, are

consequently frequent in the author’s fiction. McGahern’s stories offer studies of Luke’s

father and both brothers, the one who leaves and the one who stays behind.

4 The parable of the Prodigal Son, then, in McGahern’s short stories applies to human

maturation made possible by protagonists’ departures and emigrations, and

McGahern’s early and middle stories concern children in repressive and stagnant

situations and young adults who have left home. Full selfhood is achieved when

departures evolve into home comings. Eventually, Wyatt says, in each life there is a

turn, the moment when each of us, as the author of his own life, “makes an

accommodation with authority and ceases wrestling with his role as son” (Wyatt xiii-

xv). Such moments occur in the later stories where McGahern’s characters who have

taken their independence to the limit take the turn leading back to community through

conventional married life or through re-emersion into the original rural society

revitalized by the changed perceptions of the returned native son. We see the

homecoming developed most profoundly in McGahern’s final short story, a new

addition to his Collected Stories, “The Country Funeral”

5 McGahern did not publish any more short stories in his lifetime. After his death,

however, a posthumous collection of short stories quietly appeared in Great Britain and

Ireland in the autumn of 2006, at once a second edition of his 1992 Collected Stories and

something new altogether. Entitled Creatures of the Earth, this final collection omitted

seven stories from the 1992 collection, revised a few, rearranged the order, and added

two new stories. Most certainly Creatures reflects McGahern’s relentless concern with

revision. As explained in an essay written early in his career, “The Image,” McGahern

stated that his quest as a writer was to find the ever elusive words that would express

the one truth that explains our being. The quest endured until the weeks before the

author died. Joseph O’Connor writes in the Guardian review, “[He] came back to these

magnificent stories in the last season of his life,” the collection serving as “a fascinating

self-critique.”

6 If the stories published in McGahern’s first four collections offer a collective study of

Luke’s parable through the progress of the author’s heroes, how is his vision altered by

this final edition? A discussion of the prodigal motif in Nightlines, Getting Through, High

Ground, and The Collected Stories offers a thematic context for an analysis of Creatures of

the Earth.

Nightlines: Conflicts

7 The earliest collection, Nightlines, published in 1970, contains twelve short stories set

primarily in and around the small rural towns of Leitrim and Roscommon. The dark

tone bespeaks a fallen world. Several stories concern young protagonists enacting

themes of lost innocence – “Coming Into His Kingdom,” “Christmas,” and “Strandhill,

the Sea” – and in “The Key” and “Korea,” father/son conflicts take center stage as sons

realize the price exacted on their lives by manipulating fathers. In all five early stories,

young protagonists come to see the restrictions imposed on their lives establishing the

prodigal need for escape. These young protagonists, James Whyte writes, “have become

aware of a discrepancy between their desires and the possibility of fulfilling these


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desires within the social order” (Whyte 46). The social order in the childhood stories of

Nightlines is dominated by McGahern’s signature fathers, often veterans of the Irish War

of Independence and/or members of the Garda Siochana, representing, according to

Whyte, the “authority of the patriarchal society” (Whyte 143). They emerge, in a

departure from Luke’s more benign father, as jealous forces attempting to stymie their

sons’ growth at every turn.

8 While most of the stories focus on innocent boys awakening to the restrictions of their

fallen rural world, Nightlines also looks ahead to urban and foreign life with three

stories. The despondency follows the prodigal characters who leave the farm for cities

and foreign lands as the aimless lives in the Dublin of “Wheels” and “My Love, My

Umbrella” reveal: shallow pub raillery in the former is loveless sex in the latter. In

“Hearts of Oak and Bellies of Brass,” the relationships of the Irish men on an English

work site sizzle with anger and violence. In the Spain of “Peaches,” sexual violence

threatens to supplant the limbo of a couple’s failing love and the menacing father

figure reappears, according to Jacques Sohier, as the fascist leader against whom the

narrator backs down (Sohier 45).

9 The characters continue to struggle as they search for meaning and purpose away from

the claustrophobic rural homes of their birth. As they join the throngs in the rapidly

growing cities and on the emigrant ships, the author suggests that the leavetaking

alone does not satisfy the underlying search for selfhood.

10 And if the protagonists didn’t leave home? If struggles follow them anyway would they

be better off wrestling in the familiar? Three stories interspersed throughout Nightlines

leave us with a solid, no. McGahern deftly offers glimpses of the prodigal’s older

brother in “Why We’re Here,” “Lavin,” and “The Recruiting Officer.” Older characters

exist in a vapid sparsely populated world where time is measured by jibes and trickery,

a world characterized by mistrust and rudeness, selfishness and mockery. Indeed Boles

and Gillespie in “Why We’re Here,” represent a distilled picture of McGahern’s version

of the parable’s older brother: their boredom so intense they purposely annoy each

other for a bit of action, sniffing continuously around each other – the animal imagery

significant – ever ready to attack. Lavin is an old pervert who never left home and

whose sexual energies never found a healthy release. The final thematic impression is

made with “The Recruiting Officer,” where we glimpse the stagnant and lonely life of a

rural teacher who passively watches the parish priest beat a schoolboy for theft and

later the Christian Brother charm the class of boys into believing they have vocations.

The subtle horror of this story is that the teacher lived with the same fears and lures

that he witnesses in his classroom and knows their limitations. Yet at this end of his

life, living alone above a pub bored with his teaching, he allows the same manipulation

to be repeated on his watch. The rural Catholic Church assumes the patriarchal role

here and remains iron fisted. Imagination and kindness have been, to return to Joyce,

paralyzed.

Getting Through: co-existence

11 Stories from McGahern’s second collection, Getting Through (1978) follow the population

wave of the 60s and 70s to the city, and are about farm boys, now young adults, in

cities, both Irish and foreign. Whyte discusses the unease in these urban transplants

who “have broken free of the restrictions of family, community, church, and


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nationality but … find that in doing so, they have forfeited a sense of belonging and

identity (Whyte 46), and Sampson notes their simultaneous need to belong somewhere

again: “They are aware of the pain of dislocation and … wish to recover a seamless re-

rooting of the self” (Sampson, “Introducing” 65). Many critics explore the urban

protagonist’s search for meaning in terms of sexual relationships, most of which fail.3These characters live among throngs of city dwellers, and we see them in pubs and

restaurants, parties and parks. But, while independent, these are not especially fulfilled

young men and woman. Amid the crowds and the bustle, they are alienated and

aimless.

12 If Nightlines depicts the fallen nature of the Irish country side and reveals why the

McGahern protagonist must leave, Getting Through questions what the protagonists

find. The early stories in the second collection reveal a greater world that is confusing,

barren, loveless, and even violent. David Malcolm says the collection is dominated by

motifs of death. Indeed the collection opens and closes with funerals: “Literal deaths

and deaths of the soul, deaths of intelligence and the emotions, intimations of

mortality, the withering of dreams and prospects pervade the stories: all one can do is

get through ”(Malcolm 69). In “The Beginning of an Idea,” Eva’s life goes from bad to

worse as she leaves an unsatisfying relationship with a married man in a city in her

native country for a solitary life in Spain where she is raped by Spanish police for

attempting to help a young guard acquire contraceptives. The very conditions in

Nightlines force an elderly couple in “A Slip Up” to sell their farm for a life in a London

apartment, yet their unhappy displacement is evident when the man can’t find his way

home through the maze of streets. “Hearts of Oak and Bellies of Brass” is revisited in

“Faith, Hope, and Charity.” Two Irish immigrants live lives dominated by machinery

and concrete on an English road site, lives where their inability to use their real names

bespeaks their lost identities as does the concrete the lifelessness of their existence.

13 Yet four stories reassert the rural claustrophobia of Nightlines, thus validating the

decision to leave,by again pausing on the lives of the protagonists who remain. In “All

Sorts of Impossible Things,” “Wine Breath,” “Swallows,” and “Sierra Leone,” we revisit

the prodigal’s older brother. In this collection, unlike in Nightlines, the older brothers

realize the consequences of their choices. James Sharkey in “All Sorts of Impossible

Things” denies the passing of time by avoiding marriage and covering his balding head.

When his friend Tom Lennon dies of heart failure, Sharkey has a spasm of desire to

make a life: “instead of prayer he now felt a wild longing to throw his hat away and

walk round the world bareheaded, find some girl …go to the sea … take the boat for the

island… hold her in one long embrace all night between the hotel sheets” (Collected

Stories 145). The final sentence explains the title of the story and reminds us that for

Sharkey, it is too late: “And until he calmed ... his mind raced with desire for all sorts of

impossible things.” In “Wine Breath” and “Swallows” both the country priest and the

barracks guard nearing the end of their lives have epiphanies about their unlived lives

and their lost possibilities.

14 It’s the desperate search for these possibilities for a full life, and ultimate failure of the

protagonist to take the chance, that the collection closes with “Sierra Leone” seems to

sever the urban male protagonist’s ties with his rural roots, the country home

populated by the recurring gruff controlling father and timid anxious stepmother, but

leaves him adrift in a Dublin where his lover severs ties with him because of his

inability to commit. In another recurring pattern, his lover moves further afield from


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Dublin, by leaving Ireland altogether for Sierra Leone with an older married man. The

story ends with the ironic death of his stepmother, Rose, and the protagonist’s

reluctant duty to his aging father. The author leaves this son dreaming of his own

escape beyond Dublin to Sierra Leone. Interestingly, the collection closes not only with

the recognition of the dead end for the parable’s older brother, but with the admission

that little promise awaits the prodigal traveler. “Sierra Leone” also serves as a prequel

to the opening story, “The Beginning of An Idea.” As such, the move for the female

protagonist to Sierra Leone does not bode well for a future of fulfillment that she, and

all the McGahern protagonists desire.

15 Getting Through closes with a tentative affirmation of the prodigal’s break with a

stagnant rural life and repressive parental control, but the journey, as the final story

suggests, has not yet offered the traveler any rewards.

High Ground: Control

16 Just as Nightlines reveals dark shameful hidden truths of the suffocating and provincial

childhood years, and Getting Through suggests the journey out and liberation from the

dark, High Ground, published in 1985, presents arrival and openness and understanding.

This collection finds a larger cast of characters and protagonists more in control of

their own lives, more aware of broader realities, simply happier. Whyte notices “an

increased concern with the possibility of reconnecting with a community of shared

values, customs, and manners” (Whyte 46). In terms of the parable, the prodigal’s

journey appears to have been a wise choice.

17 McGahern first reminds us, however, of the uncertainty of any departure with more

protagonists who have succeeded in making the break with their rural family roots

only to struggle in finding adult relationships. Three of the first four short stories

continue the exploration of this theme: “Parachutes,” “A Ballad,” and “Like All Other

Men.” In “Parachutes,” a young man wanders aimlessly around Dublin mourning a lost

relationship in the company of like drifters all of whom remain as isolated together as

they are apart. His only tie to the group seems to be the money he has to buy the next

round of drinks.

18 There is sign of change, however, at the end of “Parachutes,” when the despair of the

McGahern protagonist is perhaps greatest: he glances out the pub door and sees

thistledown floating in the air and is imaginatively called back to both love and nature,

and thus hope. Eamon Maher says, “There is a hint he is on his way to recovery from

the failed affair thanks to his heightened perception of beauty in the ordinary material

world of which, up until then, he was largely unaware” (Maher 89). Earlier in the story,

his observations were of lifeless stone steps, iron railings, and milk bottles. By story’s

end, he sees life sprouting from the dung heap in the dancing thistledown, and he has

begun “to learn the world all over again” (Collected Stories 232).

19 This change paves the way for the shift in focus of High Ground to another kind of

protagonist, a prodigal son well into his journey of discovery – one where the conflicts

are not between father and son, country and city or the religious and the secular, but

within the newly liberated protagonist over the very choices liberation brings. In the

stories “Crossing the Line” and “High Ground,” we meet young protagonists who not

only have made the break with the strictures of their rural childhoods but who seem to

have both the will and opportunity to launch their independent lives, who have the


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promise of love within their grasp, yet who are suddenly struck with the realization of

what their independence costs others. Indeed, what is lost in the gaining. For young

Moran in “High Ground,” the sheer exaltation of a world of multiple possibilities –

including an offer to be school principal – is colored by the understanding that his

success would come at the dismissal of the old master, a mentor who inspired the boy

to go on to the university which ironically has put him in his present position. With a

transformed protagonist comes a transformed father figure in the benign old master.

Sampson suggests that in High Ground McGahern “sees the desolation of older

generations” (Sampson, Outstaring 189) with greater compassion. That the master is

clearly in his dotage doesn’t make the young man’s choice any easier. McGahern’s

implication here, as in other writing, is that the larger reality is of time itself and the

unavoidable and epic conflict between youth and old age, the reality so painfully

depicted in the father/son conflicts of the earlier stories, and so poignantly expressed

with young Moran and the Master.

20 High Ground contains three other stories that capture the breath of change in 20 th

century Ireland, and in so doing reflect on a social level the author’s own epiphany

about what is lost amid the positive aspects of gaining national selfhood. Whyte

suggests that the yearning for the past is directly related to the protagonist’s readiness

for a return to participation in society: “in McGahern’s more recent work this

possibility of a return to community is repeatedly explored and there is a growing

interest in and nostalgia for a world of fixed manners and customs” (Whyte 51). In a

departure from the narrow precise focus of most of McGahern’s stories,

“Oldfashioned,” “Eddie Mac,” and “The Conversion of William Kirkwood” address

directly the cost to Irish culture of independence from Great Britain and offer a

retrospective and perhaps more mature gaze at Ireland via the declining Anglo/Irish

Ascendancy. In these stories, Ireland itself emerges as the prodigal son, and the

Ascendancy takes on the roll of the prodigal’s father left behind. McGahern traces in a

very nostalgic tone the decline of the Ascendancy in the tradition of the Anglo/Irish Big

House novels. The author introduces his readers to the Sinclairs in “Old Fashioned” and

the Kirkwoods in “Eddie Mac” and “The Conversion of William Kirkwood” who, amid

their financial decline, continue to value education, hard work, and the courtly virtues

of courtesy, generosity, loyalty, and kindness. As Ireland’s independence renders the

political control of this class null and void, so too are their social traditions and genteel

ways rendered increasingly obsolete. While cheering Ireland’s political coming of age,

McGahern does not hide his belief that in the transition, Ireland also seems to lose.

21 In “Old Fashioned,” it is young Johnny who loses and, in an interesting double

treatment of the parable, the story also plays on an individual level where both the

Sinclairs and the boy’s father emerge as different perspectives of the parable’s father,

and Johnny is cast as both sons. He is the younger prodigal who yearns to escape

another in a long line of McGahern’s repressive fathers: his life with his father is bound

by the police barracks and potato fields; when asked about his future, his aspirations

are equally bound by what he will be “let do.” He is also the older brother who wants to

stay home, home defined by the Sinclairs, remnants of a past way of life that embodies

custom, order, and courtesy. It is the Anglo/Irish Sinclairs who recognize the spark of

intelligence and curiosity in him simply from the way he arranged a basket of apples,

and with that they offer him their library and their company. What defines the

Sinclairs as the father the prodigal leaves behind rather than the father of the return is

their offer to Johnny of a position in a British military school. It is not surprising that


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this offer incurs the wrath of the boy’s father, himself a veteran of the Irish War of

Independence. While the loss of the Sinclairs is a personal tragedy for Johnny,

McGahern suggests that despite their courtly virtues, the Sinclairs were themselves

blinded by that old British arrogance, and just didn’t see how their kind offer of a leg

up in life via the British army also meant the compromise of Johnny’s Irish identity, an

identity only recently hard won. The appeal of the Sinclairs, however, foreshadows the

virtues of community life that the returning prodigal will eventually be drawn to.

22 “Eddie Mac” and “The Conversion of William Kirkwood” offer us a different definition

of the parable’s characters. Eddie Mac is our prodigal son who flees from the

restrictions of servitude in the Big House of the Kirkwoods. Continuously offering his

readers new angles on the same story, McGahern here gives us a prodigal rogue in

Eddie, one who lacks, as Sampson says, all “moral principle” (Sampson, Outstaring 199).

His departure includes stealing from the Kirkwoods and leaving a pregnant Annie Mae

in his wake.

23 In both Kirkwood stories, we have the declining Ascendancy Kirkwoods who bring all

the chivalrous virtues to their Irish environs. But unlike the Sinclairs’ story, this

narrative is also about the Irishizing of William Kirkwood. Kirkwood then is the

prodigal son in the second story in the series, and sympathetic beside Eddie’s villainy.

Out of kindness and loyalty, even as his house is room by room boarded up, William

Kirkwood kept on the housekeeper, Annie May, and her illegitimate daughter, Lucy,

long after he needed servants. The three happily have their meals in the kitchen

together, and William even takes on the tutoring of young Lucy. His ease with his

makeshift family is apparent in the opening scene of the story: “He smiled with pure

affection on the girl as she tidied all her books into her leather satchel, and after the

three had tea and buttered bread together she came into his arms to kiss him

goodnight with the same naturalness as on every night since she had been a small child

and he had read her stories” (Collected Stories 332). It is through this tutoring that

William is introduced to Catholicism and discovers that he is drawn to its history and

rituals, and decides to convert.

24 His conversion breaks down barriers between the community and him and ends his

isolation. Community participation opens the possibility of even greater fulfillment in

marriage to the educated, intelligent, and handsome daughter of a prominent Catholic

family, a woman brimming with humor and energy who promises to open up the locked

rooms of the Kirkwood manor. By story’s end, William has remained true to himself

and still found both love and community. He emerges as the returned prodigal, his

journey complete without physically leaving Oakport. The story is a crowning

affirmation of Irish social life since it is celebrated through the eyes of a member of the

Protestant Ascendancy. But here, too, new possibilities bring the dilemma of choice as

William realizes his life with Annie May and Lucy cannot continue after his marriage.

The closing scene is haunting as William rocks alone in the dark thinking “whether

there was anyway his marriage could take place without bringing suffering to two

people who had been a great part of his life, who had done nothing themselves to

deserve being driven out into a world they were hardly prepared for” (Collected Stories

349). McGahern’s sympathies clearly include the marginalized Annie Mae and Lucy.

25 “Oldfashioned,” “Eddie Mac,” and “The Conversion of William Kirkwood” are

remarkable in their treatment of Luke’s parable. McGahern finds multiple ways to cast

parts in the story to shed light on complicated personal and social dynamics. He also


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offers various perspectives for understanding the parts. His angry fathers play out as

contemptible in some stories and sympathetic in others while the prodigal himself

changes from prisoner to victimizer. At this stage in the author’s thematic progression,

McGahern finds himself both taking a final nostalgic look back at what the prodigal

traveler is leaving behind and anticipating what the homecoming will bring.

26 High Ground concludes then with both a swan song to the traditions of the Ascendancy,

and thus the parable’s father, and the promise of the future for the McGahern

protagonist and for Ireland itself. Two of the final three stories in the collection offer a

chance at a full life and love through marriage to the recurring prodigal protagonist

who in earlier stories has cut the tether to father and farm but had yet to find

fulfillment. Sampson discusses marriage as a reentry into society: it “balances needs of

the outsider with limits of social laws, communal laws” (Sampson, Outstaring 202).

“Gold Watch”4 presents a young professional man and woman who have both broken

away from domineering families, hers in a small country town, his a replay of the cruel

farmer father bent on subverting the natural flow of time by making his son feel guilty

for leaving home and the heavy farm work to him. The father’s broken gold watch

signifies his denial of time, and the son’s taking and fixing the watch symbolizes his

concerted effort to make his own life. By the end of the story, the son’s break with his

father is complete; there will be no more weekends west to help with the hay. The

moment in the prodigal’s journey when he stops looking backward suggests he can look

forward, preparing him to return and receive the virtues inherent in community life.

The father/son relationship in “Gold Watch,” according to Whyte, could thus be said

“to chart a movement toward liberation for the son, at the price of a bitter [and we

might add, final] alienating battle against an ‘ogre’ of a father figure” (Whyte 165). Here

finally McGahern offers us a happy portrayal of hard won independence, love, and city

life.

27 “Bank Holiday” smoothes the rough edges of departure without the loss of

independence and love. A man well into his middle years, who has spent the weekends

and holidays of his young adulthood taking the train from Dublin west, finds himself

alone after his parents’ death. No longer with expectations of life’s greater possibilities,

serendipity brings him together with an American woman on a bank holiday in Dublin.

Their one day becomes a week and then a month and then a commitment to each other.

By the end of High Ground the prospects look good.

The Collected Stories: Community

28 The Collected Stories, published in 1992, essentially gathered Nightlines, Getting Through,

and High Ground together and added two new stories. It is worth pausing for a moment

to discuss this volume. The slight differences to the earlier collections involved

renaming “Bomb Box,” “The Key,” and rewriting “The Stoat” from a different point

view. These changes to McGahern’s overarching prodigal theme are slight.

29 “Sierra Leone” was moved from the Getting Through batch of stories to the end of the

High Ground stories. (See illustration.) And “Gold Watch” was moved from the end to the

beginning of the High Ground Stories, moves which do slightly shift McGahern’s

thematic emphasis. Not only do all of McGahern’s stories form as Maher calls “a rich

whole” (Maher 63), their sequencing informs the collective theme. The new placement

of “Gold Watch” enacts the moment of true liberation from father and farm earlier in


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the collective journey and perhaps suggests a failure in the love relationship of that

story with the succeeding “Parachutes,” “A Ballad,” and “Like All Other Men.” These

failures leave the protagonist furthest from home, “in a far country” his substance

“wasted” as Luke narrates in the parable, and thus poised to most deeply know himself

allowing for the subsequent broader perspective which emerges as the sympathetic

retrospectives in “Oldfashioned,” “Eddie Mac,” “Crossing the Line,” “High Ground,” and

“The Conversion of William Kirkwood.”

30 By moving “Sierra Leone” towards the end of The Collected Stories, McGahern reminds us

ultimately of rural bankruptcy despite the difficulties of the prodigal journey; the

virtues of community can only be realized after leaving and after self-discovery: in

other words in homecoming, not in staying home. What emerges in these few

sequencing changes is a more direct thematic path toward the return of the traveler. It

is indeed in homecoming that McGahern offers a more positive reframing of rural

customs leading to the stark reminder in the penultimate story, a new addition entitled

“The Creamery Manager,” that community is perhaps all we have to protect us from

our more natural solitary human condition: an outlaw in a cell. The thematic direction

of this volume concludes with an exploration of the consummate value of familial and

social bonds with “The Country Funeral,” a beautiful celebration of community set back

in the Leitrim-Roscommon world that Sampson rightly claims is “the anchor of

[McGahern’s] imagination, to which he always returns, because as he said, it is real”

(Sampson, Outstaring 11). The seed for the prodigal’s return begins in Getting Through

with the communal kindness of “Faith, Hope, and Charity,” continues with the floating

thistledown catching the despondent hero’s eye at the end of “Parachutes,” and is

explored in the Sinclair/Kirkwood stories. “Inevitably,” Whyte says, “the road becomes

circular and in the words of Elizabeth Reegan, ‘the road away becomes the road back’”

(Whyte 44).

31 “The Country Funeral,” published for the first time in his Collected Stories in 1992, finds

solace in the simplicity of the day to day lives of the rural Irish and in the pattern the

lives of these people have formed over generations. McGahern celebrates these lives for

merely carrying on in the shadow of uncertainty, lives glued together by family,

community, customs, traditions, and especially courtesy. This beautiful celebration of

home and roots that Philly Ryan finds in Gloria Bog contrasts to the cement city of his

fractured family in Dublin, and the isolation of the desert hotel room in Tehran where

Philly lives most of the year working for an oil company. Philly’s wondrous response to

Gloria Bog when he first drives up to his uncle’s house belies his homecoming – he sees

“acres of pale sedge … all lit up giving back much of the [moon] light it was receiving,

so that the places that were covered with heather melted into a soft blackness … the

scattered shadows of the small birches … soft and dark” (Collected Stories 393) – and

measures the changes that have taken place in the prodigal traveler when contrasted to

his older brother, the narrator of “The Recruiting Officer” who describes the same

place as “the empty waste of wheat-coloured sedge and stunted birch of Gloria Bog”

(Collected Stories 107). The call back to the west of Ireland to attend his uncle’s funeral

opens Philly’s eyes and fills his heart. So much so that be buys the farm and finds his

home.

32 “The Country Funeral” acts as a coda to The Collected Stories in that it concludes the

prodigal’s journey and recapitulates the prodigal story. Philly is the composite

McGahern protagonist: he spent childhood summers in the country with an ornery


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uncle, experienced the impersonal aimlessness of urban life, moved beyond the Irish

shores as an isolated itinerant on the oil rigs, and returns to the west of Ireland for a

funeral finding in the process his home. Philly is of course the prodigal son. And what

rounds out the parable is the warm welcome the traveling son receives from his father:

Luke writes, “when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion,

and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him…. the father said to his servants, bring

forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand and shoes on his feet:

and bring hither the fatted calf and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry: for this my son

was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. And they began to be merry”

(Luke 15). In “The Country Funeral,” the many gracious and generous neighbors in

Gloria Bog take on the role of the welcoming father, and it is through their traditional

Irish display of hospitality that Philly is embraced by the community. Of the Cullens,

McGahern writes, “They’d seen [Philly] coming from the road and Jim Cullen went out

to meet him before he reached the door … Without asking him, Mrs. Cullen poured him

a glass of whiskey and a chair was pulled out for him at the table … They then offered

him a bed” (Collected Stories 395).

Creatures of the Earth: Chaos

33 What does Creatures of the Earth do to this paradigm? Several stories are omitted from

the Nightlines and Getting Through collections, the High Ground Stories are rearranged

with “Sierra Leone,” already having been moved from the Getting Through stories to the

High Ground stories, moving again up the sequence of the High Ground stories, and “The

Creamery Manager,” one of the new concluding stories of the Collected Stories, moving

into the middle of the High Ground stories. And while Creatures leaves “The Country

Funeral” as not only the collection’s conclusion, but the conclusion of McGahern’s life

work, he plants two sobering new stories between the lovely “Bank Holiday” and the

celebratory “Country Funeral.”

34 The three stories omitted from the Nightlines group – ‘Coming In His Kingdom,”

“Lavin,” and “The Key,” are stories of lost innocence whose themes are examined in

other stories in that group. The same can be said for the omissions from the Getting

Through stories: “The Stoat,” “Doorways,” Along the Edge,” and The Beginning of an

Idea.” None of the stories from his third collection, High Ground, are eliminated,

however, and Creatures includes the two additions to The Collected Stories plus two

previously uncollected stories. The elimination of stories from Nightlines and Getting

Through and the addition of stories to the High Ground end do have a thematic effect.

With the elimination, earlier themes are condensed and perhaps even minimized and

with the addition of later stories, later themes are given more weight. There is a shift in

the balance, resulting in a deeper treatment of the final arc of the prodigal’s journey,

the homecoming.

35 While TheCollected Stories does very little to the sequencing of the High Ground volume,

Creatures does a minor reshuffling. The stories are re-clustered in significant ways to

become what O’Connor calls “tributaries of one another working out implications.” The

rearranging brings the three stories with the broader historical perspective together –

“Old Fashioned,” “Eddie Mac,” and “The Conversion of William Kirkwood” –

intensifying both McGahern’s nostalgia for a society built on courtesy, culture, and


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tradition in a Yeatsian reaction to the modern tide and his anticipation of the

prodigal’s return.

36 This change pushes “Crossing the Line,” “High Ground,” and “Like All Other Men” up

with “Gold Watch,” “Parachutes,” and “A Ballad,” all stories which play out versions,

both positive and negative, of the young male protagonist as he experiences his

independence. “Gold Watch,” “Parachutes,” and “A Ballad” examine the protagonist at

the bend in the prodigal’s circular road; “Crossing the Line,” “High Ground,” and “Like

All Other Men” examine the bitter sweetness for protagonists who have taken control

of their lives.

37 The following two stories, “Sierra Leone” and “The Creamery Manager” appear in new

positions to emphasize the focus of the two groups of stories they separate. “Sierra

Leone” reinforces the personal tragedy of failing to leave – the leaving having been

explored in the six previous stories – and “Creamery Manager” emerges as the allegory

of the independent life pointing to the reconsideration of social participation. Coming

as they do, after the “Crossing the Line” group, the author seems to suggest two things:

first, despite the doubts of the characters of the “Crossing” group, they risk having the

life of the “Sierra Leone” protagonist if they don’t spread their wings, yet, second,

spreading their wings can result in the predicament of the creamery manager. We

sense McGahern himself struggling with the two contrary forces of community and

independence represented by the two brothers in Luke’s parable. It’s at this point,

perhaps the tipping point, that the author allows a broader perspective in the Sinclair/

Kirkwood stories that concern the shifting social weight from the Anglo Irish

Ascendancy to the native Irish. While these stories reveal a nostalgia for the customs,

courtesy, and culture of the Ascendancy thrown out with the bath water of British

oppression, the rearrangement of the stories in Creatures place a greater emphasis on

these stories as an anticipation for the prodigal son and resolve McGahern’s struggle:

independence doesn’t preclude community; it can exist within the community, but only

after independence has been achieved. This is perhaps the parable’s ultimate truth.

38 Creatures ends with the quietly hopeful “Bank Holiday” and the triumphant “The

Country Funeral.” Sandwiched between these stories of hope are the two new stories

“Creatures of the Earth” and “Love of the World,” stories which can do nothing short of

stun the reader. They are perhaps the darkest and even most nihilistic narratives in

McGahern’s entire oeuvre.

39 The story that gives the collection its title, “Creatures of the Earth,” appears to follow

the tenor of “Bank Holiday” in its evocation of a happy marriage and family, and lives

both cultured and comfortable, lived amid a solid community. But the story takes a

disturbing turn when happenstance brings the family cat in the path of two vagrants

who for no reason other than a vague resentment of the apparent wealth of the cat’s

owners, stuff the cat into a bag with bricks and toss it into the harbor. This event is

echoed in the brief conversations the protagonist, now a widow, has with a man while

taking her daily walks. As “good mornings” extend into brief exchanges, she becomes

increasingly unsettled by the violence suggested in his comments, including,

significantly, his tale of drowning a dog, until she changes the route of her walks to

avoid him. This point in the story coincides with the drowning of the woman’s cat,

whose disappearance saddens her deeply, the cause for which she never discovers. In

his review of Creatures in Scotland’s Sunday Herald, Alan Taylor writes of the title story,

“As is often the case in [McGahern’s] stories, ‘Creatures of he Earth’ seems ruminatively


135

aimless and then – as in the best stories – comes something truly, casually, evilly

shocking, something to make you gasp in disgust.”

40 “Love of the World” is a more overtly violent and disturbing story of spousal abuse and

murder. A lovely young woman, beloved by parents and friends, marries the town

football hero turned guarda and has three healthy children in rapid succession. Again,

this could be a promising follow up to “Bank Holiday,” until the guarda husband is

injured on duty, an injury that ends his football game and his police career. He becomes

increasingly controlling and promiscuous until an act of violence sends his wife

running from their house. Despite newer divorce laws, she looses custody of her

children and after an evening visit with them is shot in the back by her husband. Again,

Taylor writes, “What is remarkable about this story is the quiet way in which it unfolds

towards the inevitable but unpredictable tragedy and the compassion McGahern brings

to its telling and the sorrow one feels he must have felt at the denial of youthful

promise.”

41 These stories are the most pessimistic in McGahern’s canon. What connects the two

stories is a world view without fairness, without generosity, without compassion – the

antithesis of that in the Gloria Bog of “The Country Funeral” – and a sense that

essentially, the human condition at its most natural is violent and selfish. In the Times

Literary Supplement, Karl Miller writes of their tone, “Authority is gone. Priest and

doctor are disbelieved.‘Mere anarchy’ assumes the evil force of human meanness

polluting a beautifully rendered cliffscape.”

42 Coming as these stories do, in his last collection, and placed where they are, stories

twenty seven and twenty eight of twenty nine, changes the way we assess McGahern’s

overall thematic vision. The concluding story in the prodigal journey is the home

coming, and as already discussed, “The Country Funeral” is certainly a celebration of

exactly that. However, the life affirming momentum begun with High Ground and

continued with “The Country Funeral,” is completely stalled in Creatures. The events in

“Creatures of the Earth” and “Love of the World” are devoid of meaning, the

protagonists’ hapless victims in a cruel world, love and community safeguarding them

from nothing. Following these stories, the impact of “Country Funeral” is severely

compromised. That McGahern still chose this story to conclude his short fiction is

telling, but the warning that all purposes could vanish in a moment now informs that

final homecoming. These stories imply that community, love, generosity, all the marks

of a civilized people, are indeed precariously laid veneers. Looking back, this nihilism

has emerged now and then: from the early “Why We’re Here” and “Hearts of Oak,” to

the middle “The Beginning of An Idea,’ to the later “Eddie Mac,” we witness man’s

inhumanity to man (and it usually is men). Before Creatures, however, one could

interpret those glimpses as McGahern’s assertions that we validate our own insecure

existence by harming others, and that as the McGahern hero is transformed by self

knowledge and re-emersion into his community – as the prodigal’s journey away

becomes the road home – these glimpses are recast in the affirmative as the boundless

virtues of both home and humanity.

43 The stories “Creatures of the Earth” and “Love of the World” change all that. Even if

one will argue that these stories were written in the mid-90s before the vision of love,

nature, community, and happiness of That They May Face the Rising Sun, that McGahern

resurrected them for his last publication and placed them as the penultimate two

stories, makes the title of his one play, The Power of Darkness, linger longer than before.


136

NIGHTLINES GETTING

THROUGH

HIGH

GROUND

COL.

STORIES

CREATURES OF THE

EARTH

Wheels

Why we’re H.

Coming Into omitted

Christmas

Hearts of Oak

Standhill

Bomb Box The Key omitted

Korea

Lavin

My Move My

Peaches omitted

Ecruiting Off.

Begin. of an I omitted

A Slip up

All Sorts of I

Faith, Hope,

The Stoat Pt of view re. omitted

Doorways omitted

Wine Breath

Along the Ed omitted

Swallows

Sierra Leone Gold Watch

Parachutes

A Ballad

Old Fashion. Crossing the


137

Like All Oth. High Ground

Eddie Mac Like All Oth.

Crossing the Sierra Leone

High Ground Creamery M.

Gold Watch Sierra Leone Old Fashion.

Convers. W K Eddie Mac

Bank Holiday

Creamery M. Bank Holiday

Country Fune Creature of . ..

Love of the W

Country Fune

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

The King James Bible. In The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. Expanded edition. Vol. 1. Ed.

Maynard Mack. New York: W.W.Norton, 1995. 1125-1126.

Maher, Eamon. John McGahern: From the Local to the Universal. Dublin: Liffey Press, 2003.

Malcolm, David. Understanding John McGahern. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007.

McGahern, John. The Collected Stories of John Mc Gahern. London: Faber and Faber, 1998.

---. “The Image.” The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies: Special Issue on John McGahern, 17.1 (July

1991): 12.

Miller, Karl. “Dark, Delightful Country Things: John McGahern’s Austere Eloquence.” Rev. of

Creatures of the Earth. Times Literary Supplement, 8 Dec. 2006.

O’Connor, Joseph. “Approaching the Silence.” Rev. of Creatures of the Earth. The Guardian, 32 Dec.

2006.

Pernot-Deschamps, Maguy. “Loss and Failure in High Ground.” Journal of the Short Story in English,

34 (Spring 2000): 31-39.

Sampson, Denis. “Introducing John McGahern.” The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies: Special Issue on

John McGahern, 17.1 (July 1991): 1-11.


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---. “The Lost Image: Some Notes on McGahern and Proust.” The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies:

Special Issue on John McGahern, 17.1 (July 1991): 57-68.

---. Outstaring Nature’s Eye. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 1993.

---. “The ‘Rich Whole’: John McGahern’s Collected Stories as Autobiography.” Journal of the Short

Story in English, 34 (Spring 2000): 21-30.

Sohier, Jacques. “Desire as Slip-Up in the Short Story ‘Peaches’ by John McGahern.” Journal of the

Short Story in English, 34 (Spring 2000): 41-52.

Taylor, Alan. “A Life of Consequence.” Rev. of Creatures of the Earth. Sunday Herald (Scotland), 31

Dec. 2006.

Whyte, James. History, Myth, and Ritual in the Fiction of John McGahern: Strategies of Transcendence.

Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon Press, 2002.

Wyatt, David M. Prodigal Sons: A Study in Authorship and Authority. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press, 1980.

RÉSUMÉS

This article is an analysis of John McGahern’s short fiction as a retelling of the parable of the

Prodigal Son in the Gospel of Luke. The case is made that the entire body of short fiction forms

one connected work and that the journey of the central protagonist forms a circular route away

from and than back to the ancestral home. The archetypal implications of the journey fraught

with indecision are deepened when analyzed in terms of the parable. I take into consideration

the four volumes of short stories published during McGahern’s life – Nightlines, Getting Through,

High Ground, and The Collected Stories – and conclude with an extended discussion of his

posthumous collection, Creatures of the Earth, and the effect it has on our understanding of his

work

AUTEURS

MARGARET LASCH CARROLL

Margaret Lasch Carroll earned her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland after completing her

dissertation on the novels of John McGahern. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the

Albany College of Pharmacy in Albany, New York, and has presented papers on McGahern, Alice

McDermott, and letters from an American sailor stationed in Derry, Ireland during WWI. Her

article on McGahern’s That They May Face the Rising Sun appeared in 2007 in Estudios Irlandeses.


139

"Getting the knack of the chains":the issue of transmission in"Crossing the line"Claude Maisonnat

1 Initially published in the August 01, 1983 issue of The New Yorker before inclusion in

John McGahern’s first volume of short stories entitled High Ground (1985), this

particular story has elicited only a modest critical interest and academic attention,

possibly because of the lack of drama inherent in the theme chosen – a young teacher

discovers his first job - and the low-keyed tone of the narration. Yet, beyond its obvious

biographical dimension – after all McGahern, following in the footsteps of his mother,

did become a national teacher too1 - it evinces all the qualities that grant its author the

literary status he deservedly enjoys.

2 The phrase chosen by the author as a title occurs in the text in a very specific and

widely documented context, that of a seven-months unrest on the question of salaries

during the 1946 teachers’ strike. Kennedy the narrator’s would-be mentor, has crossed

the picket line regularly in order to keep the school open, when all his colleagues

supported the strike action; an attitude for which he had to suffer unpleasant

consequences that he claims to have withstood with unflinching determination.

However there are more lines involved in the story than the mere picket line crossed

daily by Kennedy would seem to indicate. The title is felicitously polysemic in that it

suggests other possibilities of interpretation not only of the phrase itself, but most of

all, of the whole story, the main point being that they can be contradictory and

therefore problematise the import of the text. When he deliberately strayed from the

straight and narrow path of solidarity, Kennedy was immediately turned into

something of a social outcast; his transgression was of an ideological, not to say moral

order in the eyes of his colleagues and it was felt to be a form of betrayal.

3 But Kennedy’s moral quandary is not the real subject of the story, it must be seen as the

backcloth against which the narrator’s experience must be assessed. The title already

gives the reader a clue. Owing to the choice of the –ing form with its nominalising

impact which conveniently eschews identifying the subject associated with the


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predicate, the crossing of the line cannot not be specifically attributed to Kennedy, an

option which the text, however, perfidiously seems to confirm at the diegetic level, but

which is far from being the only option. On top of that even though the presence of the

definite article “the” would seem to refer to a particular event in the past it simply

conceals the fact that this event cannot be accurately located in time. As a result, the

question that is raised is twofold: Who crosses a line? And if it is the unidentified

narrator, what line is being crossed? There’s no need to have an in-depth insight into

the text to realise that the young man straight out of training college who takes up his

first job is crossing the shadow line that separates youth from maturity, innocence

from experience precisely because of his association with a mentor in the guise of

Kennedy, he is confronted to his dilemma, as it were by proxy. What side would he have

been on, had he been a teacher at the time?

4 In fact, the real subject of the short story is that of problematic symbolic transmission.

Received values and ideals are submitted to radical questioning and it turns out that it

is the young man’s desire to become a teacher that is at stake, as well as the surfacing

of his deeper desire to become a writer. The aim of this paper is thus to highlight the

reflexive dimension of the text and to show that, ultimately, the line that the young

man, much in the way McGahern himself did, is the line that separates the teacher from

the writer. The condition required to make the transformation possible is, of course, a

clear awareness of the fact that the chains of routine, cynicism and material comfort –

in short all those chains that shackle Kennedy - can be metaphorically reversed into the

liberating chains of the signifier, so that recounting the experience of his teaching

début is like coming to terms with the feeling of guilt that such a radical change could

entail. By being a writer crossing out a line that is no longer up to his poetic demands

and by creating a work of art out of the tale of his transformation, he thereby crosses

victoriously the finishing line of the race he embarked on, perhaps without fully

recognising it at the start, in order to become a fully-fledged writer.

5 As usual with McGahern, the narrative strategy is deceptively simple. The incipit is a

gem of evasiveness that sets the tone but requires some decoding

A few of the last leaves from the almond saplings that stood at intervals along thepavement were being scattered about under the lamps as he met me off the late busfrom the city. He was a big man, prematurely bald, and I could feel his powerfultread by my side as we crossed the street to a Victorian cottage, and old vine aboveits doorway as whimsical here in the very middle of the town as a patch of thyme orlavender.‘The house is tied to the school’, he explained. ‘That’s why it’s not been bulldozed.We don’t have any rent to pay.’ (295)

6 This is a remarkably terse but dense opening that introduces the main issues of the

narrative but cleverly blurs their perception. It purports to describe a beginning: the

arrival of the young man to the town where he will start his career as a teacher, but the

context is systematically associated with the idea of the end of something. The “last

leaves” of autumn lie on the pavement, the young man leaves the late bus and the city

for a new position, the cottage that should have been pulled down as the town

modernised itself is decorated with an “old vine”. The tenant Kennedy, is “prematurely

bald” i.e. old before his age. What is implied here is that the world the young man is

about to become part of looks towards the past rather than the future; hardly an

auspicious welcome for a beginning. It suggests that this beginning could well become

the end of the young man if he allowed himself to fall into the steps of his self-


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appointed guide. Besides, the reader is given an important clue in the next paragraph.

If the house is “tied” to the school it could well be that Kennedy is also tied to it, bound

hands and feet to the institution and its sense of security which he seems to value

above all else. The price he has to pay for that even though he ironically claims that he

has no “rent to pay”, is loss of freedom and self-integrity, which he seems to relinquish

easily to enjoy the blandishments of material comfort.

7 Significantly, the end of the short story makes it clear that it is by no means certain

that the young man will heed his elder’s advice (stay permanently at the school, marry

Eileen O’Reilley and take up surveying). Even if the young man is a first person narrator

he is remarkably silent throughout the narrative, mostly responding to Kennedy’s

speeches, but rarely asserting himself, as if he were held in awe by Kennedy’s presence

and discourse or dared not contradict him. There is a remarkable lack of enthusiasm on

his part to benefit from Kennedy’s advice and practical help. At any rate the very last

sentence of the short story provides yet another illustration of McGahern’s scathing

irony because the phrase “the knack of the chains” which Kennedy uses to convince the

young narrator that he should in fact do what he himself did, can be turned against

him. This is indeed an open ended narrative as we will know neither the text of his

verbal answer to Kennedy’s offer nor the choice the young man finally made, unless the

biographical subtext suggests that the young man like McGahern gave up teaching and

became a writer. In this perspective the story could be seen as a paradoxical

autobiography.

8 As a matter of fact the whole of the story shows that Kennedy has the knack of making

do with the chains he has wound around himself and which paralyse him. The irony is

that he unwittingly sees himself as a convict tied to his chain and it is extremely

doubtful whether the young man will avail himself of the opportunities so

complacently offered by his senior colleague. On the contrary, if we construe the chains

as an avatar of the signifying chain, “the knack of the chains” metaphorically refers to

the art of writing, an art whose liberating qualities Kennedy would never be able to

master, so caught up is he in climbing the social ladder and keeping up with the Jones

9 To do so we will first focus our attention on the ambiguous role model that Kennedy

insists on offering the young man, before examining the equivocal response of the

narrator, which could be interpreted as the emergence of a writer’s voice.

A dubious role model

10 The mature man who meets the yet untried young teacher at the bus station late one

evening can easily fall into the category of the forbidding father figures that people

McGahern’s short stories, not to mention his Memoir. From the very moment of his

entrance on the diegetic scene he is presented as a forceful presence both physically

and through his discourse. The narrator is immediately struck by his “powerful tread”

(295), the respect shown to the “big man by [his] side” (296), and he prudently assumes

a deferential attitude towards “…this excited, forceful man.” (299) who seems to

exercise his authority over him so naturally that he is reduced to silence: “No one had

ever spoken to me like this before. I did not know what to say.” (299)

11 Similarly, when the young man is introduced into the family circle of his Principal, the

former realises that he is faced with an unmistakable patriarchal figure who lords it


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over every one in the house. He runs everything, decides for his children and his wife,

and even speaks in their place. So overbearing is his presence that his son is greatly

embarrassed in front of the newcomer. Oliver, the son who resembles his mother2 is but

“a frail presence beside his father.” (295) The narrator does not fail to perceive the

“discomfiture” of the son when his father tells the tale of the early days of his

marriage. The reaction of the son, as noticed by the narrator, is proof enough of

Kennedy’s unchallenged ascendancy over his family: “Their son sat there, shamed and

fascinated, unable to cry stop, or tear himself away.” (299) In the same way, when the

father boasts of the successful scholarly achievements of the son and insists on his

sexual appetite, it makes the “…son writhe with unease on the sofa.” (299)

12 As could be expected, the patriarchal control also operates upon the female part of the

household. Not only does Kennedy run the family in an authoritarian way but his

relation to females is one of instrumentalisation in favour of domination and sexual

gratification. Women and girls are considered not so much as individual subjects with a

desire of their own as they are viewed as objects that he can dispose of at his will, as the

use of the ambivalent word “materials” illustrates. On seeing Kennedy’s wife for the

first time, the narrator gathers the impression that “There was something about her of

materials faded in the sun” (295). As for his daughters, whom he refers to as: “These

two great lumps…” (295), they are not merely expensive appendages to the family, as

their education requires money, but they are also available for the sexual satisfaction of

future husbands who will discharge him of his responsibility towards then: “He spoke

about his daughters as if he looked upon them already as other men’s future gardens.”

(295) Even Eileen O’Reilly, the enticing blonde secretary of the surveyor’s office where

he does an extra job to improve the usual fare, is the object of his paternalistic

concerns: he would like the young man to marry her as if he could dispose of her future

as he does for his daughters’. In short, Kennedy is really a man of his time, to the extent

that he is an active member of the two main groups of oppression that dominate the

society of the 50’s in Ireland: family and church.

13 Under the pretence of playing the role of the benevolent elder who patronises a

younger colleague by lavishing advice on him, Kennedy, on close scrutiny, appears to

be a machiavellian narcissistic father figure who is bent on submitting the narrator to

his plans as if it was a way to vindicate his choice or atone for the lack of solidarity he

showed during the strike. As a result, from the beginning he framed his relationship

with the younger man on the father-son pattern. This situation sheds some light on one

of the main themes of the story, that of symbolic filiation. As a surrogate father he

expects submission, approval and obedience from the young man, and for him giving

advice is a way of asserting his power. When he warns the narrator that the

Archdeacon makes it a point that all his teachers should be partial to porridge, it is but

a way of suggesting that he pulls the strings from behind the scene, and is partly

responsible for his appointment, as the conversation with the old priest makes it clear.

During the meal the Archdeacon asks him: “’Does he [Kennedy] find you all right?’ ‘I

think so, Father.’ ‘That’s good enough for me, then.’” (297)

14 Any questioning of Kennedy’s authority is felt to be a threat to his ideal self-image and

it leads him to over-react to quite banal situations. When he discovers that the narrator

has already joined the union before coming to the town, he admits grudgingly: “‘That’s

your own business, of course. I never found it much use’, he said irritably.” (296) Such

overreactions border on the verge of paranoia, as happens when hearing that the


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young man has met Owen Beirne, a union leader. His attitude of mean revenge consists

in refusing to accompany him to the school or talk with him during the mid-morning

break in the playground. That he can’t get over his vexation at being ignored by his

colleagues, in the street or at Mass, is also illustrated by the too readily bandied and, as

it turns out, unfounded accusation “’I suppose plenty of dirt was fired in my direction.’”

(303)

15 On the contrary, anything that can bolster up his narcissistic reflection is used. Thus he

takes great pride in the fact he alone refused to join the strikers, and successfully

resisted the social pressure such a decision entailed, as if the mere fact that he was the

only one in the town to do so increased his merit, justified the choice, and completed

the flattering vision he has of himself. Thus, he conceitedly blows his own trumpet

when he claims that he has no fear of inspectors who allegedly would not dare to

control him, as he feels so certain that he is very good at his job, in strict opposition to

Beirne whose story of Deasy’s3 death, even if he admits that things have now changed,

testifies to their alleged daunting power: “Full-grown men trembled in front of them at

these annual inspections. Women were often in tears.” (301-302)

16 His, possibly unconscious, ambition is that the young man should follow in his

footsteps, become the Principal of the school, take up surveying, etc., as though it were

necessary to reproduce the same pattern in order to prove the truth of his

commitments. In a way it is but a form of unacknowledged male bonding. His wife does

point out the young man’s status as a potential figure of the double when she claims:

“’You were just like he was twenty-one years ago. Your first school. Straight from the

training college. Starting out,’…” (298) The same holds water for his boast of the sexual

power and gratification that he enjoys and which are denied to the priests who employ

him. For him teaching boils down to sticking to a job in order to make enough money to

live.

17 The next feature that jeopardises Kennedy’s self promoted idealised image is of course

the selfishness inherent in any narcissistic position. Indeed, self-indulgence is his

unabashed motto as he is obsessed with money to the extent that it can gratify all his

desires. Money is for him the key to personal achievement. He is proud that he can tell

the young man that: “‘…his son will make more in a few years than you and I will ever

make in a whole bloody lifetime of teaching. (295) So convinced is he that money is the

solution to all problems that he is ready to give up his surveying job in favour of the

narrator. But what is most striking is his propensity to indulge his fantasies of a

successful man as he betrays the truth of his desire during his conversation with the

young man after the Mass where he has been overtly ostracised:

“That summer we’ll buy the car? We could buy it now but we decided to wait till wecan do it right. It’ll be no second hand. That summer we’ll take the first holidaysince we were married. We’ll drive all round Ireland, staying in the best hotels.We’ll not spare or stint on anything. We’ll have wine, prawns, smoked salmon, soleor lobster or sirloin or lamb, anything on the menu we feel like no matter what theprice.” (305)

18 The insistence on the list of delicacies he promises himself to enjoy shows how far the

satisfactions of the flesh and of the ego matter. The key to his life is material success

supposed to bring happiness. Let us not forget that we are in the early days of the

consumer society. Altogether, when looked at closely, this picture of a successful man

who wants to pass himself off as an enviable model is far from flattering. In fact, the

reader discovers that the subtle way in which textuality works in the short story


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almost4 amounts to a systematic deconstruction of the benevolent father figure. To

hammer it in, the next stage in the demonstration consists in exposing the deficiencies

of the teacher

The clockwatcher’s predicament

19 John McGahern drew on his personal experience when he began teaching at a school in

Athboy to provide the setting and context of the short story, as he once explained in an

interview given to JSSE in May 20035, even if he takes great care to mention that the

real man at the school had little to do with Kennedy. Only direct first-hand experience

could lead to such a perceptive insight into the probing of what it is to be a teacher. In

an earlier story: “The Recruiting Officer”, he had already come up with a striking

description of a certain category of teachers that he called the “clockwatchers” because

they were so unhappy doing their job that they always kept an eye on the clock in the

hope that the end of their ordeal was in sight. Remembering his days at college the

narrator, now an older man, recalls the questions of one of the professors:

‘Will you be an absorbed teacher? Will your work be like a game? Or will you be aclockwatcher?’ Jordan the Professor of Education, asked, more years ago than I careto remember, after a lecture. It was his custom to select one student to walk withhim through the corridor, gleaming with wax and the white marble busts of saintsand philosophers on their pedestal along the walls.” (106)

20 Kennedy readily falls into this category if we are to believe his endless deprecatory

comments on an exacting profession that is not adequately recognised or remunerated.

Hardly has he met the narrator than he complains of his insufficient salary and advises

him to consider another better-paid career: “If I was in your boots now I’d do

something like dentistry or engineering, even if I had to scrape the money.” (300)

Incidentally this is an echo of what he had said earlier about his son: “…once he’s

qualified he’ll make more in a few years than you and I will ever make in a whole

bloody lifetime of teaching.” (295) The underlying irony is of course that this piece of

“sound” advice comes too late for the young man to think of another career and is thus

null and void. His contempt for the job is endless for it does not deserve the efforts you

put in it, and he expresses it clearly through his lexical choices. For instance, voicing

his hatred of private tuition by exclaiming: “Every hour of private tuition going round

the place I took, and that’s the lousiest of all teaching jobs, face to face for a whole hour

with a well-heeled dunce.” (304) is but a way of complaining that for him in general

teaching is a lousy job. Once more, ironically because obliquely, the text hints that

according to him teaching is a violent form of relationship between pupil and master

by associating it frequently to the adjective “bloody” which is employed as a mild form

of slang in ordinary conversation, even if it was still considered rude at the time and

remained metaphorical, but which in the context of the story reverts to hisinitially

forceful meaning, as if the teacher/pupil relationship was a fight to death. Thus he

speaks of “a bloody lifetime of teaching” (295), of “A bloody miracle to have any sort of

job” (300), not to mention the fact that for him the position is hell. No wonder then that

when the narrator, answering one of his questions, tells him about the ideals of his

vocation he launches in a diatribe that deprecates both the young man and the career:

’What made you take up teaching?’ he asked. ’I know the hours are good enough,and there’s the long holidays, but what’s the hell good is it without money?’‘I don’t know why,’ I answered. “Some notion of service… of doing good.’


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‘It’s easy to see that you’re young. Teaching is a lousy, tiring old job, and it getsworse as you get older. A new bunch comes at you year after year. They stay thesame but you start to go down. You’ll not get thanked for service in this world.’(300)

21 There is an element of contradiction6 in the fact that Kennedy urges the young man to

take up the job and start a teaching career, when at the same time he does his best to

depreciate the task. In fact through the dialogue between the two men, Kennedy

speaking most of the time, McGahern allows the reader to get an understanding of the

deeper nature of the vocation. Indeed, if the role of schooling and education is crucial

both for the child and for society, the fact remains, as sociologists have noted, that

school is one of the main groups of oppression of the individual. Society needs to

channel the uncharted life force, the primal energy which keeps the children alive and

eager to grow. This is discreetly alluded to in the remark of the young teacher referring

to the children “milling about them in the playground or in his comment: “The time

had already gone several minutes past lunchtime. The children were whirling about us

on the concrete in loud abandonment, for them the minutes of play stolen from the

school day were pure sweetness.” (300) It is one of the functions devolved on schooling:

education as a mode of civilising the untamed in man, shored up by the acquisition of

knowledge which is meant to be a mode of symbolic transmission whose purpose is to

reconcile the individual and society, enabling them to co-exist for the mutual benefit of

both.

22 However, to reduce education to that, as it seems it is the case for Kennedy, would be a

serious mistake and it is the role of the narrator in the short story to point out that the

privileges, inherent in the function, how few they may be cannot be separated from the

duties. The presence of the narrator as an intra-diegetic character serves as a reminder

– to Kennedy and to the reader – that the ethics of teaching require more than just

doling out knowledge or keeping the small community in order. The attributions of the

true pedagogue also consist in not giving up on the delicate task of structuring the

minds of children in such a way that they find pleasure and fulfilment in the very act of

curbing their baser human instincts so that they can open up to the demands and

constraint of community life and eventually bloom in a society where they will find

their proper place and whose continuation they are meant to ensure on their own

terms. In short, the ethics of teaching lie not only in maintaining order in class and

offering knowledge to young heads, although these may be prerequisites, but it is to do

so in such a way that the small individual becomes aware by himself of the necessity of

both, which therefore will not be felt as constraints but as instruments of liberation. In

this perspective the process of transmission concerns not only knowledge and rules,

but most of all transmission of “being”. That is the reason why the role-model

dimension of the teacher is so important and why he has to come to terms with his

narcissistic impulses. If Kennedy has lost sight of these fundamental aspects of the job,

McGahern has clearly not, as the beautiful following passage in his Memoir conveniently

reminds us:

The school I was teaching in was well run. The teachers got on well with oneanother, and most of the children came from homes where learning was valued.Teaching is always hard work, to bend young minds from their animal instincts andinterest them in combinations of words and numbers and histories; but it has itspleasures – seeing the work take root and grow, encouraging the weaker childrenso that they grow in trust and confidence, seeing them all emerge as individuals. I


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liked the eight-year-old boys I taught, and I believe most of them grew to trust andlike me. (Memoirs, 242)

23 In the end, with this portrait of Kennedy, McGahern sketches the disastrous image of a

teacher defeated by the weight of the responsibilities that the function requires,

because he has given up on his own desire and given way to the lure of selfish

enjoyment. Through such a discourse it becomes apparent that he indulges in the

fantasy of unbounded jouissance7 that is a perverse form of the death drive. The litany

of treats that he promises himself for the coming summer can be read as an aspect of

this threat of jouissance. The new car, the wine, prawns, smoked salmon, sole, lobster,

sirloin, lamb, expresses his satisfaction for the just reward of long years of arduous

labour, but subliminally they take the form of an open list to which new items can

endlessly be added. Therefore, he narrator’s perception of the truth of the situation

appears to be extremely lucid when he remarks: “I was beginning to think that people

grow less spiritual the older they become, contrary to what I thought. It was as if some

desire to plunge their arms up to the elbow into the streaming entrails of the world

grew more fierce the closer they got to leaving.” (305) Kennedy is shown to have lost

the ability to sublimate appetites and lusts that is the hallmark of culture. He has

relinquished the desire to share and to promote solidarity, on which civilisation is

founded and which Slavoj Zizek summarizes in this way: “Sublimation is equated with

desexualisation, i.e., with the displacement of libidinal cathexis from the “brute” object

alleged to satisfy some basic drive to an “elevated”, “cultivated” form of satisfaction.”

(Zizek, 83)8 In this light Kennedy’s obsessive talks about his own sexual powers take on

a new dimension.

24 As such he is a potentially threatening model for his younger colleague and it is worth

looking closely, now, at the latter’s response to his mentor’s influence.

Problematising symbolic filiation and the emergenceof a voice

25 It is significant that at no point in the story we are given any hint about the narrator’s

origins, his mother and specifically his father, as if it were a deliberate attempt at

opening a vacant diegetic space that Kennedy could occupy. He is thus given the role of

surrogate father to the young man. As a consequence, because the older man is at the

same time his superior - his Principal - and a likely father figure, the younger man is

torn between two antagonistic attitudes: on the one hand one of caution and respect in

order to safeguard his job and his future and, on the other hand, the necessity of

asserting himself as a full-grown man and a competent colleague. Their relationship is

biased from the start because of this situation and it comes as no surprise that in the

course of the story, he moves from a circumspect, polite, reserved attitude to a gradual

distancing from the demands of Kennedy’s devouring ego.

26 From the outset the narrator is confronted to adults (mostly older men) who cast him

up in the part of a son figure. It all starts with Kennedy who gives him practical help in

order to have a successful interview with the archdeacon whose favourite fad is to test

the trustworthiness of his new teachers. To do so Kennedy warns him that he makes

them swallow a large bowl of porridge. He seems to sympathise and adds: “I hope you

like porridge. Whether you do or not, you better bolt it back like a man and say it was

great” (295) The ambiguity of the word “like” in “like a man” is betrayed shortly after


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when he rubs it in by saying: “ The one thing you have to remember is to address

yourself like a boy to the stirabout.” (297). He saw the narrator as a young boy in need

of help and when he had said “like a man” he had meant “pretend to be a man” because

you are not yet one.

27 As for the Archdeacon he openly calls him “son” when the young man responds quite

evasively to his query on the functions of the heart: “You’ll never be convicted on that

answer son, but it has one main business.” (297) Conversely, the situation compels him

to call the Archdeacon “Father” throughout their conversation and, if it is a well-

known social code, it does not prevent McGahern from availing himself of the

possibility of adding a symbolic meaning to a perfectly banal form of address in a

catholic community.

28 This infantilising process is pursued even further on when the rite of initiation

performed by the old priest in order to introduce him symbolically to his new function

boils down to a sort of quiz. The irony is that the quiz reveals self-centeredness9 of the

Archdeacon instead of actually assessing the truth of the younger man’s vocation. The

purpose of the first question about William Bulfin’s book Rambles in Erinn, is less meant

to check the knowledge of the young man, as it is to enable the priest to reminisce

about his past and his tour of Ireland on bicycle. Indeed the only thing the trip had

taught him was that the west was: “... – a fine dramatic part of the country, but no fit

place at all to live, no depth of soil.” (296), as if the soil mattered more to him than the

people who lived there, as indeed the young man did not so long ago. The second

question is a non-verbal one; the priest wants to know whether the young man drinks

or not,10 and therefore raises the whiskey bottle to pour him a glass which the latter

knows better than to accept. As for the third question about the business of the heart it

is simply meant to be a springboard for the old man to justify his own drinking habits.

Eventually the last one is a trick question; by showing him the trick painting the old

man has an unfair advantage over the narrator that shows him who really is in control.

Altogether the young man appears to have been, like any student, submitted to an

exam which, fortunately for him, he passed successfully.

29 Yet, for all his desire to comply with the requirements of the two men who rule the

institution that is going to employ him, the young man stubbornly stands his ground

and refuses to be subservient and to fall into line too easily. When Kennedy wants him

to side with him against the union members and ostracize Owen Beirne he answers:

“‘He seemed very decent to me,’ I refused to give way.” (303) Proof of his independence

of mind is made textually explicit when he resorts to the same phrase to take his

distance from Beirne as well as from Kennedy. When the former warns him that

because of his association with the Principal he might find himself blackballed, he

exclaims: “ I don’t mind”. Significantly when the latter tells him that he was

blackballed because he was in the wrong company, the answer is the same. That he

should give one and the same answer to the two rival father figures testifies to his

moral strength and independence of mind. He resists the “all or nothing” logic which

can only end up in open conflict, and asserts his own personality and choices. By

refusing any form of allegiance he keeps his freedom, which does not prevent him from

having opinions of his own. In this respect he greatly differs from his Principal who, in

spite of the fact that he read The Independent actually lost this independence to be

symbolically tied to the school and the priests.


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30 Furthermore, his difference with Kennedy is also revealed when he voices his

conception of teaching. How sketchy it may seem, it nevertheless compares favourably

with Kennedy’s. When Kennedy wants to know why he took up teaching he replies: “‘I

don’t know why,’ [….] ‘some notion of service … of doing good.’” (300) It is far more

idealistic and promising than Kennedy’s pragmatic insistence on security and money,

and he recoils before the vision of himself as another Kennedy: “Sometimes I shivered

at the premonition that days like this might be a great part of the rest of my life: I had

dreamed once that through teaching I would help make the world a better place.” (299)

31 The process of transmission, which the short story illustrates, makes it clear that the

events take place at a moment when times are changing. Kennedy and the priest look

towards the past. The dotty old priest has nostalgic memories of the days he was

ordained and cycled round Ireland, when Kennedy regrets the good old days of his

early married life. Both look back to a world where things seemed simpler and try to

maintain the illusion that the old order was synonymous with a stable identity that

they would like to maintain. Doesn’t the Archdeacon exclaim: “I dislike changes.” (297)

However, Beirne’s story of his father and of the tragic misadventures of a fearsome

inspector testify that this was never the case, that conflict was always already present.

In this light, the young man represents the future of the institution and he means his

own future to remain open. That is the reason why he refuses to assent to or dismiss

Kennedy’s proposal in the concluding paragraph, so that the future remains entirely

his own. With the transferring of the surveying job into his hands and the promise of a

beautiful wife, with undoubtedly many children and happiness ever after, Kennedy

promises him a fairy tale life, but the young man probably realises that there is a price

to pay for it: the abdication of all intellectual pursuits.

32 In this respect McGahern’s use of the acronym INTO that refers to the Union of

Teachers is far from being innocent, as it is clear that the simple acronym is also a

preposition that encapsulates the problematic of transmission that is at the heart of the

story. The alternative left to the young man is clear. Either he opts for integration into

the system, safety and the safe materialistic philosophy of Kennedy or he chooses to

launch into the more adventurous life of a poet.

33 Indeed, contrary to Kennedy who does not seem to have any book in the house the

young man is regularly associated with books. First by the Archdeacon who discovers

that he knows about Rambles in Erinn, then by Owen Beirne who engages with him in a

literary discussion: “He wanted to know what poets my generation was reading. He

seemed unimpressed by the names I mentioned. His own favourite was Horace.

‘Sometimes I translate him for fun, as a kind of discipline. I always feel good in spirits

afterwards.’” (302) Decidedly, in spite of the drinking problem, Beirne seems to offer a

more convincing model to the young man because the spirit11 of culture and beauty has

not disappeared from his world. As a result, it is the ironical import of Kennedy’s

criticism which gives us a clue: “’Every penny he has goes on booze or books and some

of the books are far from edifying, by all accounts.’” (303) This is the kind of derogatory

remark that Kennedy – a man who presumably prefers to read account books as his

critical statement ironically seems to imply –would make if he ever were to read the

book entitled The Pornographer, (1979) by a new young writer called McGahern. The

autobiographical undercurrent that runs through the text confirms that the young

narrator is truly a double for McGahern himself if we bear in mind that, like the young

narrator, he comes form the West, and the old priest’s words seem to echo the very


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incipit of Memoir: “The soil in Leitrim is poor, in places no more than an inch deep.

Underneath is daub, a blue-grey modelling clay, or channel, a compacted gravel.

Neither can absorb the heavy rainfall.” (Memoir, 1)

34 In this light it seems only fair to assume that the young man in the story who refuses to

pledge allegiance to both the conservatism of Kennedy and the professional militancy

of Beirne will choose a third way which is the way of artistic creation, and turn into a

writer. To be a writer he needs to retain his freedom of thought and must throw off the

heavy chains of conformity and convention that constantly threaten the creative urge.

This is precisely what Kennedy was unable to do, shackled as he was by his strictly

materialistic outlook on life. The text of the short story, much like the trick painting

the narrator is shown at the beginning of the story and which has the function of a

“mise-en-abyme”, says it clearly through another set of images. “…[T]he heavy iron

gates of the presbytery” (296) inevitably suggest the image of a prison, and the chains

on which Kennedy insists loudly: “ I must have walked half the fields within miles of

this town with the chains.” (304), conjure up the status of a convict. If Kennedy

managed to cope with his mediocrity: “There’s nothing to it once you get the knack of

the chains” (305) in order to enjoy material success, it is essential that the young man

should refuse the (tempting?) offer of the chain to become a true artist. But, when all is

said and done, I think we can offer an optimistic interpretation of the story because if

Kennedy crossed the line of social solidarity (and his guilt may serve to explain why he

tried to atone for it by being relatively12 generous with the young man), and if the latter

refused to toe the line of conformity, he nonetheless did cross the bridge to the other

side (gave up teaching and took up writing) so that he could enjoy the freedom of the

artist.

35 The image of the chain could then be endowed with two antagonistic meanings. On the

one hand it is ironical, as it locates Kennedy on the side of surveying, that is applying

an abstract map on reality that precludes imagination and fancy, and on the other it is

positive as it may suggest that the signifying chain, as the only medium available to the

writer, is also the instrument of the freedom of creation and there’s no disputing that

John McGahern made the most of such freedom. After all, the various chains and lines

that kept cropping up in the narrative turn out to be the metaphorical representation

of the writer’s craft, so that the

36 short story is obliquely endowed with a significant reflexive dimension that illustrates

the author’s elevated conception of his art.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Byatt, A. S., Peter Porter, eds. New Writing 6, London: Vintage, 1997.

Dor, Joel. Le Père et sa Fonction en Psychanalyse, Paris : Point-Hors Ligne, 1989.

Joyce, James. Ulysses, Oxford: Oxford World’s Classic, 1998 (1922).


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Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-60. Trans. Dennis Porter.

London: Routledge, 1992.

McGahern, John. The Collected Stories, New York: Vintage International, 1994.

---. Memoir, London: Faber and Faber, 2005.

---. The Pornographer, London: Faber and Faber, 1979.

---. The Leavetaking, London: Faber and Faber, 1974/1984.

Zizek, Slavoj. Looking Awry, London/Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991.

RÉSUMÉS

The aim of this paper is to show that beneath the surface of the familiar small town world that is

represented as the background of the arrival of young teacher to take up his job, and in spite of

the subdued tone of the narrative, two major issues are dealt with through the omnipresent issue

of symbolic filiation. The first one concerns the duties and privileges of the teaching profession

as they are distorted by the young man’s would-be mentor Kennedy, who becomes the butt of

McGahern’s satirical intention. Thanks to the ambivalence of the chain imagery introduced in

the very title, the story can also be read as the dramatisation of McGahern’s decision to quit the

profession and become a writer

AUTEURS

CLAUDE MAISONNAT

Claude Maisonnat is Emeritus professor of contemporary Anglo-saxon literature at the Université

Lumière Lyon 2, France. A Conrad specialist, he has published more than 30 articles on his works

and a book on Lord Jim. Also a specialist of the short story, he has written on contemporary

writers, including Bernard McLaverty, Edna O’Brien, Hemingway, Alice Munro, Antonia Byatt,

Angela Carter, Dylan Thomas, Malcom Lowry, R. Carver, P. Auster, V.S. Naipaul, Olive Senior, etc.

With Patrick Badonnel he has also written a book on the psychoanalytical approach of the short

story, and co-edited a volume on textual reprising.


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"The conversion of WilliamKirkwood"Arthur Broomfield

1 McGahern’s short story “The Conversion of William Kirkwood” (1992, 331-349) is

interesting from a theoretical studies point of view as it responds, especially, to post-

colonial reading before going on to seriously critique such an approach. Yet even, then

the assumptions that post-colonial studies brings to a text, especially in the Irish

situation, are subverted. “Conversion” asks pertinent questions as to who are the

colonialists/imperialists, and who is the subaltern? In his response to these questions

in “Conversion” McGahern rejects the stereotypical: he locates the story in post 1922

Ireland, the Ireland that he knows, his Ireland. Because he comes from the gene pool

that constructed the ideology of post 1922 Ireland – rural, lower middle class, Catholic –

his subversion of that ideology is all the more remarkable; out of the quarrel with

himself he makes art. But “Conversion” refuses to allow itself to be limited to a post-

colonialist approach. Even as it subverts the assumptions read into modern Ireland, the

text of the story is subverting these subversions. The demands of the text compel us to

engage in the performative act of reading, where the text itself is read closely, rather

than being read through external events that coincide with the period. It is thus

released from any presuppositions the reader may bring to the text, language is freed

from the tyranny of fixed meaning.

2 The story tells of the conversion to Catholicism of an isolated, cultured Protestant

farmer and amateur astronomer, William Kirkwood. The early moves towards

Catholicism begin with him enlisting in the wartime local defence unit, where he

displays a natural ability to lead that causes him, after conversion, to arranging to

marry a local Catholic nurse, Mary Kennedy.

3 A post-colonial reading of the “Conversion of William Kirkwood” would see Kirkwood

as a remnant of pre-colonised Ireland, the anachronism that unsettles the colonialists

self-satisfied, homogeneous, cultural identity. He is the other to the Roman Catholic

colonisers of Ireland, whose lifestyle and culture marks him as inferior to the

progressive, industrious culture of the new coloniser. He has “become a mild figure of

fun out watching the stars at night.” (McGahern 1992, 334). His father had been


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dispossessed of his wealth “the pick of the Kirkwood cattle.” (332) by the burgeoning

colonisers, through Eddie Mac, the herdsman, who sold them and absconded with the

proceeds of the sale. Kirkwood’s cultural identity, his Protestant religion, is even

sneered at by schoolboys well-indoctrinated in the superiority of the dominant culture

“he doesn’t even go to his own church.” (335) (because, we read, his own church is

closed). So colonisation has reduced William from the “position that the Kirkwoods had

held for generations.” (336) to subordination to the Catholic coloniser. He is “poorer

than some Catholics already on the rise” (333-334). He is not just different, though

equality of difference is not tolerated by the coloniser, cultural identity needs to be

homogenous “[o]nly for you being a Protestant there’d not be the slightest difference

now between you and the rest of us.” (338) His culture, because it is different, is not

acceptable in a homogenous society. That which distinguishes Kirkwood as being

different must first be branded inferior before being destroyed. Its destruction is

confirmed and celebrated in William’s engagement to Mary Kennedy. The ensuing get

together becomes “more of a political celebration than a family evening” (348).

4 The irony of the story, as a post-colonialist reading shows, is that the imposed cultural

identity of the coloniser, though believed by them to be superior is, in fact, greatly

inferior to the culture of the Kirkwoods, which it displaces. Where Kirkwood is

interested in astronomy, has a library with “many books” and an “insatiable appetite

for theological speculation” (340), the colonialists appear to be incapable of rising

above Maslow’s primary stage on the hierarchy of needs. They are the foot soldiers in

the local defence force where he, with ease, assumes the role of commanding officer.

Even the schoolmaster’s home is noted for its “absence of books”.(344) William’s zeal

for learning is unmatched by Canon Glynn who has “never seen much good come from

all this (theological) probing.” (340).

5 A post-colonialist reading of “The Conversion of William Kirkwood” can be further

justified through William’s involvement as an officer in the local defence force. His

knowledge of the colonised people is being used to serve the colonialists interests, for

William is a “crack marksman (and) can read field maps at a glance.” (334). In addition

his grandfather, Colonel Darby, had followed in a long family tradition, “the Darbys had

been British officers far back and once William Kirkwood put on uniform it was as if

they gathered to claim him.” (334). William’s knowledge of leadership and military

matters is being used to train a defence force that is hostile to the interest and

preservation of his cultural identity. The most telling example of the appropriating of

his knowledge in the service of a hostile cause can be seen in the following extract:

On certain Sunday mornings the force assembled in full dress at the hall, marchedthrough the village to the church, where they stood on guard in front of the altarduring the sung Mass, presenting arms before and after the consecration. CaptainKirkwood marched his men through the village on these Sundays, but at the churchdoor turned over his command to the school-teacher, Lieutenant McLoughlin, andremained outside until Mass had ended. Now that he had become such a part of thepeople it was felt that such a pointed difference was a little sad. (337-338)

6 The force, through standing guard in front of the altar during Mass is clearly seen to be

not just identified with the culture of the colonialist but the defender of its essence, its

belief system. The hostility of that belief system to William’s crystallises when he, at

the church door, turns over command to the Catholic, Lieutenant McLoughlin. He

cannot be, or be allowed to be, part of the system that is hostile to his own; his

“command” of the force has created a defence force that is at the key moment


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expropriated from his control. Now an embarrassment, no longer useful to the

colonialist cause, his services are arbitrarily dispensed with. We can say that his

knowledge, once employed to defend his people, is now used to subjugate them. His

expertise has created what colonial powers need most, a disciplined military force that

will carry out its orders without question. “Men who had joined for the free army boots

and uniform… got an immediate shock. The clipped commands demanded instant

compliance. A cold eye searched out every small disorder of dress or stance or

movement.” (334). Here too we see the representation of total control in the

misappropriation of the sacred texts, and their misuse as an instrument of political and

military control, not dissimilar to Moran’s appropriation of the Rosary in Amongst

Women (1990). No dissenting voice is raised or can be tolerated, hence William’s

exclusion from his command. His cultural identity is driven to the marginalized

outside, it is the other; “colonialism has become nature itself” (Ashcroft et al 57), and

that which it cannot tolerate is subordinated to the unnatural.

7 McGahern has given us a text that reverses the stereotypical depiction of Irish

Protestants being the acquisitive colonialists, repressors of Catholic Irish culture;

instead it sees them as the “old ascendancy (whose tradition goes) far back”

(McGahern, 1992, 334). They are the victims of a totalising Roman Catholic imperialism.

“It is our day now” (339) the new convert stresses. He succeeds in accomplishing the

reversal by refusing to resort to the handed down histories of the past, those “verbal

fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found.”(White, 1985, 82) [italics

original]. He, instead locates the story within the time span of his memory and sees it

through his perceptions of an Ireland that he experiences directly.

8 If we look beyond the text of the story, to the political events that chronologically

parallel the period, we will see plenty of evidence of the new state’s re-colonisation by

acquisitive Catholicism. The Cosgrave government established “diplomatic relations

with the Vatican in 1930” (Lee 1989, 170); Mr. Sean T. O’Kelly, a leading Fianna Fáil

member and later President of Ireland, is quoted as saying “the Fianna Fáil policy (is)

the policy of Pope Pius XI.” (170). The Fianna Fáil newspaper, “The Irish Press”, even

envisaged “the conversion of the Anglo Irish” (170). Perhaps the most telling evidence

of colonisation is the infamous Dunbar-Harrison case of 1930-31. Ostensibly Letitia

Dunbar-Harrison’s appointment as County Librarian in County Mayo was overturned

because her knowledge of Irish was inadequate. However, “Miss Dunbar-Harrison

suffered from the dual stigma of being a Protestant and a graduate of Trinity College,

Dublin.” (163) while the eventual appointee, Miss Ellen Burke, though equally

handicapped in her knowledge of Irish, she “neglected to take the elementary

precaution of passing her Irish test.” (162), and had been rejected by two different

boards, was pushed into the job through the prominent intervention of the Catholic

cleric, Dean E.A. Dalton, of Tuam. These events, and this rhetoric, all pointed to the

sanctification of Roman Catholic authority in Ireland through the triumphalist

Eucharistic Congress of June 1932. Involved in it were the full resources of the state,

including the military; the President Eamon DeValera, reminded “the Papal Legate in

his feline way, that he was a loyal son of Rome.” (177).

9 It is tempting to read “Conversion” through the historical events of the period in which

it is set, to see William Kirkwood representing the subaltern who is forced into

conversion by the political weight and cultural unity of the burgeoning ruling powers.

Subaltern groups “are always subject to the activity of ruling groups.” (Gramsci 1971,


154

55). The parallels between Kirkwood’s predicament and O’Kelly’s declaration of

subservience to the policy of Pope Pius XI are obvious. Pius XI’s policy would have

included the infamous Ne Temere decree, under which the other than Catholic partner

to a marriage is compelled to sign a pre-nuptial document permitting his/her

offsprings to be brought up in the Catholic religion. “[T]he only reason a Protestant was

ever known to turn was in order to marry.” (McGahern, 1992, 338-339). It is Garda

Sergeant Moran who first raises the matter of William’s religious difference and,

implicitly, his conversion, “[n]ow you’re in with everybody. Only for your being a

Protestant.” (338), and Lieutenant McLoughlin who raises the possibility of his

marriage: “[e]verything has gone wonderfully well and it would complete the picture if

we were to see you married.” (342). And we can see the triumphalism.

10 Of the Eucharistic Congress represented in the “political celebration” (348) that marks

the announcement of William and Mary Kennedy’s marriage, as we can relate the

victimisation of Letetia Dunbar-Harrison to the displacement of William, as

commanding officer, by Lt. McLoughlin in the church incident.

11 To read “Conversion” thus however, is to privilege the historical events of the time

over the text of the story and in so doing to limit our reading of the text to the

judgement of the narrators’ of the historical events. It is, in Derrida’s words, to go

outside the text of the story to the perception of reality in the privileged “thing”, the

actual “truth” to which the text, being its poor imitation, must refer. But the truth, and

the only conditions under which the term “truth” can be definitely used, is that

language/text is privileged over the perception of thing. Therefore, to talk of language

representing thing is one of, if not the, great misnomer of literary theory. It is a

position that essentially argues for the perception being the certain thing, the stable

power against which language must readjust, must correct itself. Therefore language is

reduced to a subordinate relationship to the perception of the “certain” thing and its

inherent will to freedom that is its essence, is dominated by a theoretical approach –

that when challenged, cannot itself go beyond the textual – that represses its text to

compliance with an idea believed to be beyond it.

12 For McGahern to position a cultured Protestant as the subaltern is in itself subversive

of the post-colonialist approach to Irish studies which normally sees the oppressed

Irish as the victims of British colonialism. Having set up a radical opposition on which

his approach is based, by situating the Protestant as the victim, he then proceeds to

undermine the ground on which that opposition is built. A passive reading of the story

will squeeze the narrative towards compliance with the “thing” the parallel history of

the time. Kirkwood will be shown to be the victim of the Roman Catholic colonialist

oppressor, to which he is forced to conform through conversion and marriage. His

culture mocked and denigrated, economically and socially marginalized, he provides a

satisfying base from which to justify such a theoretical reading.

13 It is only when one challenges the philosophical presupposition that privileges thing

over word, and the ideological implications that distort the text, in such a theoretical

approach that one is free to engage with the text through the performative act of

reading. Such a reading will open the text, through a concentration on its language, to

its numerous possibilities and will see that it challenges all positions.

14 Close reading of the text will show that William Kirkwood is not forced to convert to

Catholicism, he is the first to announce his intention to the stunned and embarrassed

Moran and McLoughlin. “Actually… I’m seriously considering becoming a Catholic, but


155

not, I’m afraid, in the interests of conformity.” (338). He is even aware of that which

provoked his initial interest: “[h]elping Lucy with her school exercises.” (339) is his

response to McLoughlin’s tentative probe. William presents himself as the self-assured

man who has come to the decision to convert of his own volition. He is in command of

the situation. Throughout the process of conversion, it is he who pushes his facilitator

to exasperation. Canon Glynn “soon began to be worn out by his pupil’s seemingly

insatiable appetite for theological speculation.” (340). Canon Glynn, on the other hand,

is not at all the acquisitive proselytiser – “[w]e cannot know God or Truth. It is shut

away from our eyes.” (340), and would prefer to talk about his Shorthorn cattle than

theology. Even William’s intended assimilation into the dominant ethnic group,

through marriage to Mary Kennedy, is negotiated after his conversion, It thus avoids

the humiliation of the Ne Temere process. Alas, William Kirkwood is in command of his

situation only in so far as he is in command of the defence force which he turns over to

McLoughlin at the church door. Kirkwood’s search for the truth is as unfulfilled as is

his authority over his troops. The colonised cannot be entrusted either with power or

knowledge.

15 The irony of his “[n]ot if one is convinced of the truth” (339) is found out in Canon

Glynn’s “[w]e cannot know….Truth” (340). The exchange reduces the narrative to its

core irreducible, language itself, language as referent. William’s efforts to represent the

stable thing “truth” in language that refers to an external idea, can be seen to break

down within the text because such an imagined perception cannot be universally

perceived. His perception is “the truth” in lower case, while Canon Glynn’s is “Truth”

in higher case, which, like the other of language, we cannot know. Both men perceive

different things in “the truth” and “Truth”, both are speaking of different things; hence

their different representations of unstable, external ideas in words. Both try to invest

meaning into word that, in its originary state, is “present” only as an empty

configuration. The origin was “never constituted except reciprocally by a non origin,

the trace.” (Derrida 1974, 61). Both try to represent, to give presence or meaning to a

word, an empty configuration, that in its originary state is unconstituted in terms of

meaning (but, perhaps, not in terms of shape, or form). The referent, therefore, cannot

be the perception of an unstable entity outside the text because that entity cannot be

universally perceived as stable, it is the word itself that both Kirkwood and Glynn

mould and represent in the image of their different perceptions, the word which defers

to different perceptions, the word which defers to thing, and frustrated by the

unfulfilled exercise refers back to itself to engage with the process of liberating itself

from subordination to the thing. Therefore, within the text, the referent is unreliable

because once it is broken from the assumed stability of perception, now shown to be

unstable, it is moving towards its originary state, the free ‘unconstituted’, word in

which no perception of stable thing can be represented because no such thing can be

clearly perceived. Neither Kirkwood or Glynn can justify the truth of a referential thing

outside the text – both are in disagreement – consequently the textual referent within

the story cannot prove the stability of the thing (truth). The word is prior to and

privileged over the perceived thing that seeks to re-present it, to reduce word to name.

Name, it is presupposed, will articulate the perception of thing. Yet we see with

William’s “the truth” and the Canon’s “Truth” two different perceptions of the thing

truth seeking representation in two different sets of terms now reduced to names to

accommodate that which cannot be conclusively and independently proved to exist

beyond our perceptions, perceptions that William and the Canon show to be variable.


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Hence it is the originary, unconstituted terms that are shown to be prior to the thing.

The terms that are being appropriated by the perception of thing, and reduced to

names, will stand as representations of perceptions and mark the violation of the free

word. In the process of appropriation the empty vessels, the words, through naming,

are reduced to complicity with the perception of the thing. But because perception is

variable (William sees it as “the truth”, the Canon sees it as “Truth” that is “shut away

from our eyes” (McGahern 1992, 340) the perceived thing cannot be proffered as a

stable referent. The active reader will thus retreat from the illusion of stability in the

thing, to the word itself which, as void, will now be identified as privileged over the

perception of thing. In “Conversion” the word is not an optional substitute for the

thing, it does not stand in its absence, it does not represent the absent thing. The story

cannot be told, or that telling be challenged, without using words. William or the Canon

cannot talk about their perceptions of the thing, truth, in any way other than through

words. The thing “Truth” is “shut away from our eyes”; the Canon admonishes

William’s insistence and stresses the privileged state of word over thing.

16 The notion of re-presentation is again challenged through the undermining of the title

term “Conversion” by William’s use of “perversity” in “[i]t seems almost a perversity”

(331). The reading that represents Kirkwood, instead of being the victim of Roman

Catholic colonialism /imperialism, as having freely arrived at the decision to convert of

his own free will is now put into question by the inclusion of the word “perversity”. It is

that word, as Derrida says that “dismantle(s) the metaphysical and rhetorical

structures which are at work in the text.”, (Derrida 1982, 256). Every reading is a

misreading; the reading of “Conversion” that justifies the application of Post-Colonial

theory, and the reading that renounces it, are misreadings because they both attempt

to appropriate the text in their own cause, i.e.the reduction of the text to saturable

meaning, whereas they are mere strands of interpretation that will, in turn, be

subverted by the performative act of reading. The latter may be a higher quality

reading because it relates more closely to the text, but in each case the claim to unity is

disrupted by the refusal of the word to submit to its appropriation by the perception of

stable thing. Both readings are “metaphysical structures”, because both ignore the

unresolvable contradiction that lies in the to convert/to pervert conundrum. Because

pervert may be read as a pun on convert we can neither fully accept nor fully reject the

colonial subjugation of Kirkwood in a Post-Colonial reading. Where he says it is “almost

a perversity” can he possibly mean that Lucy’s claim to be no good at maths can be

perverse? His accusation cannot be justified by the order of commentary of the

narrative. In Freudian terms it seems to be a slip of the tongue. “The ideas which

transfer their intensities to each other stand in the loosest mutual relations…. In

particular we find associations based on homonyms and verbal similarities treated as

equal in value to the rest.” (Freud, 1976, 755). In this slip William’s distinguishing

feature, his self-assurance, is seemingly questioned. It subverts his claims of being

“convinced of the truth” (McGahern 1992, 339) and queries his decision to convert

having been arrived at freely. It reveals, beneath or behind that over stressed self-

assurance, a disgust with the idea of converting to Catholicism – to convert is to

pervert. William, in the slip, is confronting his greatest fear.

17 We can also treat the verbal similarities in both terms as parts of the chain of signifiers

that undo the implications of binary opposition in them and instead release them into

the system of differences. From this perspective we again see language being reinstated

in its primary position over thing. The things “to convert” and “to pervert” are losing


157

the certain identity that fuels the wonder and embarrassment William’s intention to

convert awakens. They are now words whose complexity is enhanced because of the

certainty of their existence, that attention is drawn towards because of the new

context, compared to the Freud reading, in which we find them. They are now words –

of which there is no doubt – but words grown tired of being represented as the binarist

things con- and pervert; con-version can be a confidence trick that perverts. They have

now moved towards the process of proclaiming themselves free words and by so doing

case doubt on the supposed certainty of those things. To be “convinced of the truth”, as

William claims he is, is shown to be doubly ironic. His conscious self-assured decision to

convert, and his unconscious disgust towards the prospect, are both seen to be based

on the flawed concept that things are fixed entities that are re-presented by words

rather than the reverse. Our perception of things is constantly in flux, either waxing or

waning in confidence, depending on its relation to the thetic moment. But the word

itself does not enjoy any stability other than in its instability. It is “fixed” in its refusal

to grant to the thing the assuredness of absolute reality. It is the thing, not the word,

that is iterable because the word is privileged over the thing. On the chain of signifiers

words are divested of the fixed association to things or “meaning”, we invest in them.

“Meaning” is shaken free, as apples are shaken off a tree; yet the tree and the word

remain to grow more apples and to be reinvested with new “meanings”, changed

perceptions. Understanding the chain of signifiers proposes “the representation of a

different relation to natural objects…. the linguistic network does not represent

something real posited in advance.” (Kristeva 1984, 126) but rather, in focusing on

words certain existence over doubt of the existence of “something real”, as we do when

reading the text of “Conversion”, helps us towards asking the questions of that

relationship to natural objects, the relationship of language to “ourselves”

18 “Conversion” in playing with, or indulging theoretical readings, defers to the notion of

the external referent, then, unsatisfied by the exercise, refers back to that which is

privileged, its own text. In questioning the “what is” it shakes all perceptions of

“sness”, save that in which it asks the questions, language itself.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Ashhcroft Bill et al. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 1995.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press,

1974.

Lee, J.J. Ireland, 1912-1985. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

McGahern, John. The Collected Stories. London: Faber and Faber, 1992.

---. Amongst Women. London: Faber and Faber, London, 1990.


158

RÉSUMÉS

This essay explores the position of Protestants in post-independence Ireland, as seen through

McGahern’s story of a Protestant bachelor landowner who decides to convert to Catholicism. The

essay reads McGahern as reversing the stereotypical assumptions of the relationship between

Protestant and Catholic that sees the Protestant as the colonial oppressor and the Catholic as the

victim. Despite his cultural isolation Kirkwood resists both the imposition of Catholic culture and

dismisses the label of victim. It shows McGahern to be sympathetic to the plight of Protestants,

who, through Kirkwood, are seen to be loyal, serious thinkers, with a sense of duty and argues

that they are the independent minded Irish.

AUTEURS

ARTHUR BROOMFIELD

Arthur Broomfield has had papers and essays published on a number of Irish writers including

Beckett, Maria Edgeworth and the Romantic-age poet, Mrs Eliza Ryan. He is a regular contributor

at international literary conferences. Dr Broomfield is a graduate of The National University of

Ireland, Maynooth. He was awarded his Ph.D. degree by Mary Immaculate College, University of

Limerick. He writes poetry and has been published. Dr Broomfield teaches English with Couny

Offaly V.E.C.


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"Along the edges": along the edgesof meaningClaire Majola-Leblond

1 Nightlines, Getting Through, “Doorways”, “Crossing the Line”, “Along the Edges”1…

McGahern’s titles repeatedly and rather enigmatically at first, focus on lines, borders,

limits, thresholds, eventually offering a precious invitation to metaphorical reading.

2 Crossing the line into the text, the reader, puzzled by the title, is further struck by the

clear dividing of the short-story into two separate parts, emphasized by the use of

capital letters: EVENING and MORNING. The chronology appears somewhat unusual, so

does the privileged point of observation chosen, peripheral rather than central. Yet,

evening and morning are soon to be interpreted as the edges of day in a narrative that

tells about breaking up and coming together, the edges of love. “Along the edges” may

therefore be considered as an invitation to a mimetic exploration of the hazardous

ridge between separateness and togetherness.

EVENING, the dark edge of love

3 “Evening” opens on what looks like play before one is led into reading it as tension:

‘I must go now.’ She tried to rise from the bed. ‘Stay.’ His arms about her pale shoulders held her back as she pressed upwards withher hands. ‘Let me kiss you there once more.’‘Don’t be silly,’ she laughed and fell back into his arms. ‘I have to go.’ Her bodytrembled with low laughter as he went beneath the sheet to kiss her; and then theystretched full length against one another, kissing over and back on the mouth, in alast grasping embrace.‘I wish I could eat and drink you.’ ‘Then I’d be gone.’ She pushed him loose with herpalms. They both rose and dressed quickly.‘I’ll leave you home. It’s too late for you to go alone.’ Lately she had seemed toassert their separateness after each lovemaking.‘All right. I don’t mind,’ she said, a seeming challenge in her eyes.‘Besides I want to.’ He leaned to kiss her on the side of the throat as she drew on herjacket. They stole down the stairs, and outside he held the door firmly until the


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catch clicked quietly behind them. The fading moonlight was weak on the leaves ofthe single laurel in the front garden, and he grew uneasy at the apparent reluctancewith which she seemed to give him her gloved hand on the pavement, with the wayshe hurried, their separate footsteps loud in the silence of the sleeping suburbs.(188)

4 Tension first centres on the female character: “I must go” vs. “she tried to”, before

drawing the male character “his arms […] held her back” into an ambivalent

choreography of love and possession, she falling “back into his arms” before pushing

“him loose with her palms”. Her answer to his devouring desire: “Then I’d be gone”

sounds like an ironic assertion of independence and a verbal act of “separateness”,

translating tension on to the level of speech and perspective. The man, (vampire-like:

“he leaned to kiss her on the side of the throat”), perceives the woman’s antagonistic

desire, although acknowledging it fully remains difficult: “she had seemed to assert

their separateness” or further on “[…] the apparent2 reluctance with which she seemed

to give him her gloved hand”. What he does eventually acknowledge is the reality of his

motivation for seeing her home after the provocative “All right. I don’t mind”; “It’s too

late for you to go alone” changes into “Besides, I want to”. Yet, the difficulty of parting

seems to be engrained in the very texture of the narrative voice, in this alliteration in /

s/ to be found in the last sentence of the opening section: “their separate footsteps loud

in the silence of the sleeping suburbs”. The lingering nature of the sound “speaks” this

very edge between togetherness and separateness along which we, together with the

character, stand.

5 Indeed, the narrator seems reluctant to cross over the edge. His voice blends with the

male character’s, hesitating between narrative assertion and free indirect speech as

shown by the use of the contracted form: “They’d met just after broken love affairs, and

had drifted casually into going out together” (188), leaving the reader at a loss when it

comes to identifying the speaker or evaluating the degree of awareness. “There comes a

point in all living things when they must change or die, and maybe they had passed

that point already without noticing. He had already lost her while longing to draw

closer.” (189) is, rather unexpectedly, immediately followed by: ”‘When will we meet

again?’ he asked her as usual at the gate before she went in.” There seems to be some

kind of logical breach here; awareness does not seem to alter behaviour. Yet, the

exchange which follows:

‘When do you want?’‘Saturday, at eight, outside the Metropole.’‘Saturday - at eight, then,’ she agreed. (189)

6 in spite of, or rather because of, its extreme politeness reveals a deeply agonistic

relation. The question is answered by a question, which itself sounds like a backfire of

the “Besides, I want to” of the preceding exchange. This somewhat intuitive

interpretation is confirmed by the ironic narrator, who surreptitiously manages to shift

the anchor of the perspective from the male reflector to the female character.

There was no need to seek for more. His anxiety had been groundless. Wednesdaysand Saturdays were always given. No matter how hard the week was, he had alwaysSaturdays and Wednesdays to look forward to: he could lean upon their sensualease and luxury as reliably as upon a drug. Now that Saturday was once morepromised his life was perfectly arranged. With all the casualness of the self-satisfiedmale, he kissed her good night and it caused her to look sharply at him before shewent in, but he noticed nothing. He waited until he heard the latch click and thenwent whistling home through the empty silent streets just beginning to grow light.


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7 Jean-Jacques Lecercle, in The Philosophy of Nonsense, asks what he calls “a simple

question”:

Since, more often than not, the surface of conversation is agonistic rather thanirenic, why did Grice and Habermas choose a deep structure which is irenic? Whycan we not replace the Cooperative Principle by a principle of verbal struggle […]?[…] Although our verbal exchanges are not collections of desultory remarks, andcan therefore be said to conform to a rational plan, this is not due to the fact thatwe make efforts towards verbal cooperation, but that each speaker has his or herown strategy and goal. So that a Principle of Struggle (PS) can be formulated, as afirst approximation in the following manner – and like the CP it will be a generalprinciple, which we can expect all participants to abide by: make yourconversational contribution such as is required by your strategy, at the stage atwhich it occurs, and by the goal towards which you are moving, which is to defeatyour opponent and drive him or her off the battlefield. […] The principle of struggle- do not expose your position; adapt you verbal weapons to your strategy and to thecontext; never forget that your goal is to achieve recognition, to place yourself – isthe mirror image of the cooperative principle. (76-80)3

8 Indeed, most conversational exchanges from then on seem to be governed by a

Principle of Struggle rather than any Cooperative Principle; as the narrator of

“Doorways” has it “An edge had crept into the talk.” (168). Along the same lines, the

Politeness Principle seems to have been replaced by a Selfishness Principle4, in what

both characters deem a survival strategy.

‘I suppose I should pay my respects and let the pair of you away.’‘Don’t put yourself out.’‘It’ll be a pleasure,’ but then his anger broke before he opened the door. ‘If that’s allour going out means to you we might as well forget the whole thing.’‘What do you mean?’ she asked.‘We might as well break the whole thing off,’ he said less certainly.‘That can be easily arranged.’[…]‘I hope you have a nice evening,’ he said as they boarded the bus.‘That’s what we intend.’ Her lovely face was unflinching, but Margaret waved. Hewatched them take a seat together on the lower deck and waited to see if theywould look back, but they did not. (191)

9 His paradoxical strategy is to vent his anger in order to maintain the link; but her

desire to be free of him is thereby ironically strengthened, and when some time later,

the relationship is re-established as cooperative, it is only achieved to be eventually

destroyed.

‘I’m sorry about the ridiculous fuss I made a few weeks back,’ he said openly.‘It’s all right. It’s all over now.’‘Do you think you’ll be able to come back with me this evening?’For a wild sensual moment he hoped everything would suddenly be as it had beenbefore.‘Is it for- the usual?’ she asked slowly.‘I suppose.’‘No.’ She shook her head. (193)

10 “-the usual” sounds as an ironically destructive echo of “sensual”. Yet, the breaking up

is not violent; the narrator settles along the edge of the male perspective, along the

edge of frustration, where the sharp reality of “what is” is still softened by the resilient

hope in “what might be” and the hopeless longing for “what might have been”.

Awareness stands on the double edge of dream and memory.


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‘Is there no hope, no hope at all, that it might change?’ […]We assemble a love as we assemble our life and grow so absorbed in the assemblingthat we wake in terror at the knowledge that all that we have built is terminal, that,in our pain, we must undo it again. There had been that moment too that might have been grasped, and had not […]He thought he saw that moment, as well that moment now as any other: an eveningin O’Connell street, a Saturday evening like any other […] (194)

11 The tone is gentle; the parting desperately polite:

‘Ring me sometime,’ she said as she got on the bus outside.‘Right, then.’ He waved and knew neither of them would. (194)

12 The waving that she, agonistically, had refused earlier, he, cooperatively, performs

here; yet, ironically, cooperation fails… taking us on the very edge of the cliff. The final

musing comments stand as a puzzling invitation to interpretation:

They had played at a game of life, and had not fallen, and were now as indifferent asone another, outside the memory of pleasure, as if they were both already dead toone another. If they were not together in the evening how could they ever havebeen so in the morning…And if she had come to him instead of leaving him, those limbs would never reachwhomever they were going to… And why should we wish the darkness harm, it isour element; or curse the darkness because we are doomed to love in it, and die…And those that move along the edges can see it so until they fall. (194)

13 The rhythm of the text, the suspension points, narrative discourse slipping into Free

Indirect Thought and vice versa, hypotheses, direct address… deny the reader the

satisfaction of stable evaluation, eventually questioning the very notion of

involvement. The characters, and particularly the male reflector of the story stay on

the edge of life: “Exams should be held in winter, he thought tiredly, for he seemed to

be looking at the people walking past him, sitting on benches or on the grass as if

through plate glass.” (190); on the edge of love and awareness: “he began to feel that by

now there should be more than this sensual ease” (189) is followed a few lines later by:

“he could lean upon their sensual ease and luxury as reliably as upon a drug”. “Now

that he was about to lose her she had never looked so beautiful.” (192) precedes: “But I

love you. And I thought – when things are more settled- we might be married.”(193).

The narrator stays on the edge of narration; the story begins in medias res, the

characters’ names are not given, perspectives are blurred in a strategy to force the

reader to remain along the edge too. “Moving along the edges” might be a way not to

fall; yet, falling is falling… in love. The desire to step over the edge is absent from the

text; the fall is not the object of desire, it is not even perceived as a process, only as the

almost unexpected result of instinctive behaviour:

Through the sensual caresses, laughter, evenings of pleasure, the instinct had beenbeginning to assemble a dream, a hope; soon little by little, without knowing, hewould have woken to find that he had fallen in love. (193)

14 The Other is irrelevant. It is even discarded by a supposedly omnipotent Self, in an

ambiguously possessive movement of longing (partly genuine, partly self-reassuring,

partly illusory):

And if she had come to him instead of leaving him, those limbs would never reachwhomever they were going to… (194)

15 What matters here, in the dark textual night separating “evening” from “morning”, is

the edging of the reader’s awareness that, in Lacan’s famous words, “man’s desire is the

desire of the Other”.


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MORNING, the bright edge of love?

16 The beginning of this second part is as puzzling as the opening of the short story, if not

more so; it can even be considered narratively agonistic… Although it is entitled

MORNING, it takes place in the evening, even late at night; the decor is the same as in

the first part, “Bernardo’s” and the blind piano player is there too; yet, no explicit

connection is made. “The man” remains as anonymous as the “he” in the first part; so

does “the blonde woman”. The reader, who is prone to make connections, is soon lost

in conjectures, left with unanswered questions and nothing but hypotheses. Does the

scene take place on the same evening? On another evening? Are “the man” and “he”

the same person? But is it really important we should know for sure? The refusal of any

stable deictic anchor must eventually be considered as part of the narrator’s strategy to

invite us to experience radical Otherness.

17 In the text-world5, the relationships between the characters once more seem to be

governed by a Principle of Struggle, to the point of gratuitous violence:

[…] without warning she leaned across the table and placed the burning tip of thecigarette against the back of the man’s hand.‘What did you do that for?’ he asked angrily.‘I felt like it. I suppose I should be sorry.’‘No,’ he changed.’ Not if you come home with me.’‘To sleep with you?’ she parodied‘That would be best of all but it’s not important. We can spend the morningtogether,’ he said eagerly.‘All right.’ She nodded.They were both uneasy after the agreement. They had left one level and had notentered any other. (195)

18 The conversational edge is sharp, but, contrary to what happens in the first part of the

short story, it opens on to the intermediary space between individuals. The two main

characters accept to explore the territory in-between edges, the territory of otherness.

The blind man, who goes almost unnoticed as an element of the background in

EVENING, is here a primary object of concern, and a subject of conversation; so is

Marion, even if the points of view disagree:

They stood a while in conversation there before the star went in and the blondewoman turned back towards the man.‘It always makes me uncomfortable. Being part of the couple, leaving the singleperson alone,’ he said.‘The single person is usually glad to be left alone.’‘I know that but it doesn’t stop the feeling.’ He had the same feeling passinghospitals late at night. (196)

19 The emerging relationship, neither selfish nor exclusive, displays a new capacity to

take into account the third party, and conversation reverses back to the more

traditional rules of cooperation. The aim is not to assert oneself, but to listen to the

Other, an Other who is no longer perceived as a threat to the individual’s integrity but

as a promise.

What hung between them might be brutal and powerful, but it was as frail as theflesh out of which it grew, for any endurance. They had chosen one another becauseof the empty night, and the wrong words might betray them early, making onehateful to the other; but even the right words, if there were right words, had notthe power to force it. It had to grow or wither like a plant or flower. What they


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needed most was patience, luck, and that twice-difficult thing, to be lucky in oneanother, and at the same time, and to be able to wait for that time. (196)

20 Their gestures sketch the harmonious lines of reciprocal love: “She pulled him towards

her”(197) is mirrored in “He drew her towards him” (198). They no longer stand, as

their earlier counterparts on the hazardous edge of love; they have somehow fallen…

on new territory, where they stand, edge to edge. Love-making, as moving along the

other’s edge…:

‘Wait,’ she said softly, and her arms leaned heavily round his shoulders, as if shehad forgotten him, and was going over her life to see if she could gather it into thisone place. Suddenly she felt him trembling. (197)

21 Love-making, as discovering and accepting the other’s sometimes sharp edge:

[…] ‘That must sound pretty poor stuff.’‘No. It sounds true.’That hard as porcelain singleness of women, seeming sometimes to take pleasure incruelty was a part of the beauty. (197)

22 The characters’ keen awareness and know/ledge of each other lead to a humorous

renewal of vision:

When they rose and washed in the flat in all its daylight, it seemed as if it was notonly a new day but the beginning of a new life. The pictures, the plates, the table inits solidity seemed to have been set askew by the accidental night, to want newshapes, to look comical in their old places. The books on the wall seemed to belongto an old relative to whom one did not even owe a responsibility of affection. Gailyone could pick or discard among them, choosing only those useful to the new. For,like a plant, the old outer leaves would have to lie withered for new green shoots topush upwards at the heart. (198)

23 “Seem”, which worked in EVENING as a marker of distance, illusion and challenge is

here the sign of a luminous change of perspective. In the same way, the dark overtones

of “separateness” have been transfigured:

They had come from four separate people, two men and two women, lying togetherin two separate nights; and those two nights were joined in the night they had left,had grown into the morning. (198)

24 There is no need now for narratorial distance and the agonistic dissonance that was

sometimes to be heard between the narrator’s and the characters’ voices in the first

part has been silenced by the blending of perspectives. Clear-sightedness is no longer

an issue in the text-world and the narrator’s words echo the characters’ in prose edging

into ironic music:

‘Maybe we’ll begin to learn a little more about one another then.’‘As long as we know it’ll be more of nothing. We know hardly anything now and wemay never be as well off.’They would have to know that they could know nothing to go through the low door oflove, the door that was the same doorway between the self and the othereverywhere.‘Well, anyhow we have to face the day,’ she said, dispelling it in one movement; andthey took one another’s hands as they went to meet the day, the day alreadyfollowing them, and all about them. (199)

25 Yet, looking over the edge of the page, one cannot but think that, if “morning” follows

“evening”, “evening” follows “morning”…


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The two-edged (s)word of fiction; dividing to relate

26 The two-part division of this text remains problematic to both reader and re-reader. Is

it to be considered as a clear divide or rather as an interface? The narrative voice has

the same inflexions on both sides of the textual border, the same affection for

assonance and alliteration; textual echoes are so numerous that linear reading gives

way to a more complex back and forth movement, which can eventually lead to the

intimate conviction that the male character is the same and that both parts are

chronologically distant, allowing for psychological maturing. On the one hand, “ ‘Even

coming from the races you look very beautiful,’ he said by way of appeasement.” (192)

is a pragmatic use of the compliment which is reiterated in the second part: “‘It doesn’t

make her so to me,’ the man said doggedly, ‘though I think you are beautiful.’” (195) in

the same sort of antagonistic context. On the other hand, “If they were not together in

the evening how could they ever have been so in the morning …”(194) sounds like a

bitter, resentful earlier version of the now hopeful and clear-sighted: “She stood as she

was, belonging to the morning, as they both hoped to belong to the evening. They could

not possess the morning, no more than they could disagree with it or go against its

joy.” (198) Yet, there is no basking in the nirvana of secure happiness for the reader,

constantly reminded of the transient nature of joy: “and they took one another’s hands

as they went to meet the day, the day already following them […]” (199)

27 The reading experience we are facing is not the familiar reassuring movement that

takes us from distress and conflict to a cathartic purging of emotions. It maintains us

on the edge of discerning what Henri Cartier‑Bresson called the “decisive moment”;

indeed the text works like two incisive snapshots of the exact moment of change in a

love relationship that mirror each other, following a principle of inversion. One can be

interpreted as the photographic negative of the other, never allowing us to forget that

what seems light on the negative will turn out to be dark and reciprocally.

“Composition must be one of our constant preoccupations”, the photographer explains,

“but at the moment of shooting it can stem only from our intuition, for we are out to

capture the fugitive moment, and all the interrelationships involved are on the move.

[…] photography […] fixes forever the precise and transitory moment.”

(Cartier‑Bresson, Introduction to The Decisive Moment). So much can be said of

McGahern’s writing6.

28 The narrative choice which is made to divide in order to articulate and relate is also a

way to explore to the full the polyphonic dimension of narration, moving along the

edges of voice. Not only does voice refer to the narrator’s or the characters’ in this text;

one can also perceive that of the author, in the recurrent use of gnomic present and

direct address. An author who chooses to avail himself of Jakobson’s conative function

to make himself heard along the edges of his work. This privileged dialogue with the

reader shatters the border between fiction and non-fiction, turning what is

traditionally-and more often than not rightly- held a sacred hedge into no more than

an edge…inviting the reader along the edges of radical otherness, taking him “through

[….] the door […] between the self and the other […]” (199) towards his own Otherness.

Like the Word of God, McGahern’s “word” in this short story is quick and powerful and

sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and

spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of

the heart. ( Hebrews, 4,12)


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29 Yet, no matter how sharp the word, how keen the awareness, know-ledge will forever

“move along the edges” (194) That [We]May Face the Rising Sun…

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Cartier-Bresson, Henri. The Decisive Moment. Paris: Editions Verve. New York: Simon and Schuster,

1952. Reproduced in Simon CHERPITEL, Moments in Time, Our World efotobook, http://

efotobooks.com/cartier-bresson/cartier-bresson.html

Gavins, Joanna. Text World Theory, An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. Philosophy of Nonsense. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.

Macey, David. The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory. London: Penguin Books, 2001.

McGahern, John. Nightlines. London: Faber and Faber, 1970.

---. Getting Through. London: Faber and Faber, 1978.

---. The Collected Stories. London: Faber and Faber, 1992.

---.That They May Face the rising Sun. London: Faber and Faber, 2002

Simpson, Paul. Stylistics, a Resource Book for Students. London and New York: Routledge, 2000

RÉSUMÉS

This paper is an invitation to read John McGahern’s short story “Along the Eges” as a mimetic

exploration of a hazardous ridge between separateness and togetherness. The narrator settles

along the edge of perspective, denying the reader the stability of interpretation. The experience

is that of radical Otherness, dark and dazzling

AUTEURS

CLAIRE MAJOLA-LEBLOND

Claire Majola-Leblond is Maître de Conférences at Lyon3 University, France, where she teaches

Irish literature, discourse analysis and a course on contemporary short stories. She wrote a thesis

on point of view in Dylan Thomas’s short stories. She has written articles on J.M. Synge, B.

McLaverty, W. Trevor and is currently working on women Irish writers.


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"Korea" by John McGahernDouglas Cowie

1 Midway through a public reading at Colgate University in New York State in 1996, John

McGahern announced that, because someone had requested it of him, he would now

read his short story, “Korea.” A hushed anticipation rippled across the audience: a

master was about to read a masterpiece. In that same semester, McGahern taught an

Irish literature course at Colgate. He’d tried to insist that the course be titled “Irish

Poetry”, despite the fact that the course syllabus was almost exclusively novels and

stories. To McGahern, poetry was less about form or genre than it was about how the

language was used, how the rhythms and imagery of the written word combined to

make a work of art. In this sense, one can read “Korea” not only as a short story, but

also as poetry of the highest order.

2 “Korea” is a kind of rural elegy, or a softly-chanted lament to the subtle but significant

changes in relationships between father and son on one level, and between rural

Ireland and the world outside its borders on another. Superficially it is the story of a

fisherman and potato farmer father and his teenaged son performing the routines of

their common working life for the final time. The story is set on a single day sometime

during the years of the war from which it takes its name (that is to say, sometime after

1950 and before 1953), and is narrated by the son from the vantage point of several

years later. This point-of-view is crucial to the drama of the story, which hinges both

on the position of the son relative to his father and the son’s emotional insight as an

older man.

3 The story begins with a question from the son: “‘You saw an execution then too, didn’t

you?’, I asked my father, and he started to tell as he rowed.'”1 This opening sentence

contains all the crucial elements of the story: a question; the narrator and his father,

directly next to each other in the grammar of the sentence; the father telling as he

rows, in other words, as he works. Father and son are working together for the final

time, it transpires; the commercial fishing is dying out, and the son will soon leave

either to further education or more profitable work. The idea of asking and telling are

both important here; as it moves forward the story becomes a narrative of what father

and son do and do not tell each other as much as it is about other concerns.


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4 The father relates the story of the execution, in 1919, of two prisoners “in Mountjoy as

reprisals.” After being captured “in an ambush” the father witnessed the shooting of “a

man in his early thirties, and what was little more than a boy, sixteen or seventeen.”

The boy is the same age as the narrator at the time in which the story takes place; the

man is possibly the same age as the narrator at the time he is narrating. Although the

story’s opening sentence says that the father told the story, it is related secondhand, by

the narrator. This choice is not mere convenience, but a nuance of narrative technique.

The story of the execution could easily have been written in the father’s direct words.

That the son relates the story suggests that it is an anecdote that he has heard before,

perhaps more than once. It is a story that he has absorbed. The “didn’t you” at the end

of the opening question suggests as much. He is asking, at a time of civil war on the

Korean Peninsula, to be told again of a time of war much closer to home, and he relates

the scene in great detail, which implies that he knows this story well.

5 The younger man was “[…] weeping. They blindfolded the boy, but the man refused the

blindfold. When the officer shouted, the boy clicked to attention, but the man stayed as

he was, chewing very slowly. He had his hands in his pockets.” (54) The repetition of

the word “blindfold”, albeit in slightly different forms, and the fact that the boy has his

eyes covered and the man doesn’t, emphasises that these two prisoners stand on

opposite sides of a divide. One has crossed into a cynical adulthood, wherein he faces

even his own execution with his eyes open and a nonchalant chew, his hands pocketed.

The other, still a youth, plays soldier to the end, snapping to attention despite his tears,

despite his blindfold. The two not only face their respective deaths, but also die, in

harshly contrasting manner. The boy tears at his chest, “as if to pluck out the bullets,

and the buttons of the tunic began to fly into the air before he pitched forward on his

face.” Again, youth fights in vain to the last, with a violence that is an absurd imitation

of the violence of war itself. On the other hand, the older man “heeled quietly over on

his back: it must have been because of the hands in the pockets.” (54) Experience

pitches over, facing upwards, his eyes presumably still open. The man’s death, or

rather, his act of dying, is not an imitation, but a mockery of the passions and causes

that send men to kill each other, and in this particular case, of men who execute “as

reprisals.” It is a mockery of meaningless revenge. The sense of meaninglessness is

underscored by the ironic commentary that follows the caesura of the colon: “it must

have been because his hands were in his pockets.” This phrase also marks the first

instance in which the narrator passes commentary upon the events, speculating,

possibly in echo of his father’s telling, on the mundane reason behind the difference in

the direction in which each prisoner fell. In the next paragraph the narrator relates

that after they fell, the officer killed the boy with a single shot, “but he pumped five

bullets in rapid succession into the man, as if to pay him back for not coming to

attention.” (54) Again, a note of commentary finds its way into the telling, and again it

serves both as a contrast to the manner in which each prisoner died, and as an ironic

statement. The youth, flailing and clutching at unreachable bullets, receives a quick

and simple insurance dispatchment; the cynical older man, keeling over with his hands

in his pockets, receives a postmortem hail of bullets that may be the officer’s only

means of expressing his frustration or hatred, but mean even less to the dead man than

his execution seemed to.

6 From this moment the focus on the execution story begins to move from retelling to

discussion between father and son. The narrator now quotes his father directly as he


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tells of his honeymoon “years after.” The father relates that, looking down to the sea

with his new wife, he “‘saw the furze pods bursting, and the way they burst in all

directions seemed shocking like the buttons when he started to tear at his tunic’”

(54-55). Here the execution—and by extension, the war—is linked to nature, and more

specifically, to the landscape of Ireland. The exploding furze (or gorse) pods, which

might usually be seen as beautiful or at the very least unextraordinary, are perverted

through association with the buttons of the boy’s tunic into something so “shocking”

that “‘I couldn’t get it out of my mind all day. It destroyed the day’” (55). These are the

words of a man haunted by the executions he witnessed more than thirty years

previously: it haunted him years later on his honeymoon, and it haunts him now as he

retells the story. The repetition of “day” underscores this feeling, and indeed, the

father will later make explicit that more than just one day was destroyed by the

memory.

7 The first indication of the father’s continuing pain, and particularly his discomfort at

talking about the execution comes when the son suggests that the boy might have

“‘stood to attention because he felt that he might still get off if he obeyed the rules?’”

The father dismisses this idea as naïve:

“Sounds a bit highfalutin’ to me. Comes from going to school too long,” he saidaggressively, and I was silent. It was new to me to hear him talk about his own lifeat all. Before, if I asked him about the war, he’d draw fingers across his eyes as if totear a spider web away, but it was my last summer with him on the river, and itseemed to make him want to talk, to give of himself before it ended. (55)

8 This paragraph marks the first turning point in the story. The father speaks with open

antagonism towards his son, directly moving him to silence, as implied by the syntax:

the father speaks “aggressively,” and the narrator immediately notes, in the same

sentence, that he fell silent. At the same time, however, the father has just opened up

about a subject that he normally avoids. The spider web simile again connects the war

to an image of nature. Here the spider web is the memory of war, or of an event within

the war. The gesture is that of a man removing an invisible blindfold, one that (if it

actually existed), would only obscure the vision, not obstruct it entirely. The father is

neither the blindfolded boy, nor the open-eyed cynic, but rather someone inbetween.

The son, on the receiving end of this act of “[giving] of himself,” in other words,

sharing a type of communion with his father, is making the first movements out of

innocence as well.

9 But for the moment father and son have lapsed into silence, and get on with their work.

Descriptions of people undertaking manual labor of various kinds is a particular

McGahern forte, and the two paragraphs that mark the silence describe the details of

eel fishing in a straightforward manner that despite—or rather, because of—its

simplicity creates a ritualistic and meditative tone. The narrator describes the two

miles of line that he must haul in hand over hand, and then states: “We were the last to

fish this freshwater for a living.” (55) The simple declarative, which ends the

paragraph, places the two men in an important context: the work that they undertake

is a way of living that will die with them, or when they stop doing it. This work, this

ritual, this culture has become unviable, as is made explicit later in the story, in the

face of economic reality.

10 For now, however, father and son work together, the father rowing while son hauls in

the fish. “As the eels came in over the side I cut them loose with a knife into a wire

cage, where they slid over each other in their own oil, the twisted eel hook in their


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mouths.” The eels, which will be sent to market in London, are separated from the

other fish, which will be sold locally or given away. While the son pulls in the line, the

focus is solely on the details of the work: the hooks, the types of fish, the procedure.

Halfway through the job, however, father and son switch roles. “After a mile he took

my place in the stern and I rowed.” (55) Although this is a simple declarative sentence

in the middle of a fairly long descriptive paragraph, it marks a couple of important, if

subtle, shifts. First, no longer concentrating on the minutiae of collecting their catch,

the narrator broadens his perspective and describes the river. The description serves to

emphasize a sense of isolation:

People hadn’t woken yet, and the early morning cold and mist were on the river.Outside of the slow ripple of the oars and the threshing of the fish on the linebeaded with running drops of water as it came in, the river was dead silent, exceptfor the occasional lowing of cattle on the banks. (55)

11 Father and son are the sole source of activity. Paradoxically, the narrator notes that the

river is “dead silent”, but does so in the middle of a sentence that describes nothing but

sounds. In actual fact, the river is not silent. The sound, however, is generated entirely

by the work of the two protagonists, apart from the cows, who unlike the two humans,

speak.

12 The point about speaking isn’t an idle or frivolous one; the second shift marked by the

change of roles in the boat is a shift in the conversation. Previously, while the father

rowed, the son asked questions. As noted, the story began with a question. Following

the execution story, he asks two more. From this moment in the story, however, the

son rows, and the father will begin to speak in questions. The first is, “Have you any

idea what you’ll do after this summer?” (55) It seems a natural and straightforward

enough question, and is answered as such by the son, without any remark. They discuss

the son’s exams, and they effect they’ll have on his future, through two further

questions and answers. But when son answers father’s question about how good he

thinks the exam results will be with a rhetorical question of his own, the tone shifts yet

again:

‘I think they’ll be all right, but there’s no use counting chickens, is there?’‘No,’ he said, but there was something calculating in the face; it made me watchfulof him as I rowed the last stretch of the line. (56)

13 The narrator only notes “something calculating” 2 in his father’s face. This moment of

vagueness is important in a story so carefully and richly detailed. It is a moment of both

recognition and uncertainty. The son notes “something” that makes him wary without

being able to place quite what that something is. A note of danger has crept into the

narrative, subtly but noticeably heightening the tension that began to rise with the

father’s aggressive, “Sounds a bit highfalutin’ to me.” Again the conversation gives way

to the details of work. As they finish the first stage of their day’s work, the rest of their

world begins to awake. “The day had come, the distant noises of the farms and the first

flies on the river.” The father tries to restart the conversation by commenting on the

haul of fish, but his comment passes without remark from the son, who only passes

information outside of the narrative:

‘We’ll have enough for a consignment tomorrow,’ he said.Each week we sent the live eels to Billingsgate in London. (56)

14 The implied silence creates a brief awkward moment; a one-sentence paragraph is

followed immediately by the father’s second attempt to restart the conversation. The

same character speaks twice in quick succession, and the slight formal jarring reflects


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the awkward tension that is rising between the protagonists. The reference to

Billingsgate also serves to widen the perspective of the story, tying this isolated rural

life to a wider context and also reinforcing the previous statement that they are the last

to make their living in this way.

15 Father restarts for the second time with a question that cuts directly to what is on his

mind, although he states it in an awkward torrent of words: “But say, say even if you do

well, you wouldn’t think of throwing this country up altogether and going to America?”

(56) This marks the most words the father has spoken outside of the execution story.

The awkward repetition of “say” coupled with the opening “but” betray the father’s

hesitancy at asking the question, the calculation of his facial expression replaced by the

anxiety of his words. Indeed, the narrator describes his father’s question as “words

fumbled for.” The rest of the dialogue will proceed through questions from both

characters. The son’s questions—“Why America?”, “Who’d pay the fare?”, “Why should

you scrape for me to go to America if I can get a job here?”—are those of the “watchful”

young man, caught off guard by his father’s behavior. The father speaks in a mixture of

question and statement that serves to underscore his uneasiness. He is not in fact a

man speaking what is on his mind. Rather, he is a man speaking around what is on his

mind, protecting both himself and his son from the bursting furze pod shock of the

truth behind what he is saying. Continuing to fumble for words, he speaks of America

as “the land of opportunity” and “a big, expanding country,” comparing it to an Ireland

that is a “poky place” with “no room for ambition.” The son stays on guard, and notes it

bluntly, albeit not to his father. Again, this story is more about what these two

protagonists do not say to each other than it is about what they do say. In his role as

narrator, the son says, “I was wary of the big words. They were not in his own voice.”

(56) In his role as son he remains silent on the subject of wariness and asks instead,

“Who’d pay the fare?”

16 But if the words are not the father’s own, the question to ask is, whose are they. Just as

the son, in narrating the execution story, chooses words that seem to belong to his

father, here the father is choosing words that belong to someone else. He describes

America using cliché, and his comments on Ireland sound rehashed from pub

conversation. In imploring his son to go off to America, he is to some degree telling

someone else’s story, as will become starkly clear. The conversation ends with another

verbose statement from the father, although this one is more controlled than his

opening salvo. “‘I feel I’d be giving you a chance I never got. I fought for this country.

And now they want to take away even the licence to fish. Will you think about it

anyhow?’” All the elements of the story are tied together in this statement.The father

ends with a question, again betraying a degree of uncertainty. He expresses his natural

desire as a parent to provide for his child. He also refers explicitly to the beginning of

the story, to the fact that he fought for Ireland. In light of what is to come, the fact that

he says that he fought for “this country” is significant. Finally, the father captures the

frustration of being caught in the economic reality of a way of life that is changing

beyond his control, and despite the fact that years ago he fought in a war that was in

part about preserving that way of life. Indeed, the very thing that the father fought

against—England—is the cause of this change. Towards the end of the following

paragraph, the narrator notes that the fishing license application had been opposed by

the tourist board. “They said we impoverished the coarse fishing for tourists—the

tourists who came every summer from Liverpool and Birmingham in increasing


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numbers to sit in aluminium deck-chair on the riverbank and fish with rods.” (56-57).

Whereas father and son are intrinsically linked to the river, fishing on the water, the

tourists’ outsider status is reinforced by their “aluminium deck-chairs” in which they

sit “on the riverbank”, in other words, not on the river itself, “and fish with rods”

rather than with lines in the water, which they must pull in hand over hand, as father

and son do.

17 If there is a thinly-disguised contempt for the English tourists, however, the narrator

expresses little romance about the work from which the tourists are driving him.

Before he comments on the tourists, the morning gives way to day and the story moves

into a third phase. Father works in the potato field while son “replaced hooks on the

line and dug worms” (56). The protagonists are physically separate for the first time in

the story. As he works, the narrator registers the ambivalence he feels about the task.

He feels the “… pain of doing things for the last time as well as the boredom the

knowledge brings that soon there’ll be no need to do them, that they could be

discarded almost now. The guilt of leaving came: I was discarding his life to assume my

own.” (56) Again McGahern employs repetition—of “discard”—to provide emphasis.

The narrator first registers the pain of doing a routine that he will never do again, but

this quickly moves to boredom, and the first use of discard underscores that sense of

boredom—the work hardly matters today, it could be thrown away now. The second

use, however, is associated with guilt. Whereas the first use of the word was in a passive

construction, the grammar here is active, employing the gerund form — “I was

discarding”— and the direct object is “his life.” Discarding work creates boredom;

discarding his father’s life, turning his back not only on a job or routine, but a whole

way of living, engenders guilt. For when the son leaves, the father’s livelihood will end:

“a man to row the boat would eat into the decreasing profits of the fishing.” With the

morning work finished and the separation of labor, the tension that had been building

in the boat dissipates. Although he told his father he would think about America, he

apparently gives it no further thought whatsoever. Instead he thinks only of the

boredom, and the guilt of the fact that by turning his back on that boredom, he is also

abandoning his father to a tenuous living.

18 The climax to the story comes as an ambush. As he walks to the lavatory, where they

store the bait worms, the son observes his father talking to a cattle dealer friend. He

assumes they’re “talking about the price of cattle” (57) until, as he steps into the

lavatory, “the word Moran came, and I carefully opened the door to listen. It was my

father’s voice. He was excited.” (57) Outside of dialogue these are the shortest two

sentences in the story, and the rhythmic rupture underscores the schism that the

father’s words will create. It becomes immediately clear why the name Moran gives the

narrator pause. The “excited” father again speaks in a torrent of words, arranged in

two separate but consecutive paragraphs:

‘I know. I heard the exact sum. They got ten thousand dollars when Luke was killed.Every American soldier’s life is insured to the tune of ten thousand dollars.’‘I heard they get two hundred and fifty dollars a month each for Michael and Samwhile they’re serving,’ he said. (57)

19 The last time the father spoke it was of America as well, but it was of America as “the

land of opportunity,” and the America that would give his son “the chance I never got.”

Now America is a country in need of soldiers “to the tune of ten thousand dollars.” It is

the America fighting a war in the country that gives the story its title. It is a country

that will pay “two hundred and fifty dollars a month” to the families who send their


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Irish boys away to fight. The father has told Farrell directly what he could only talk

around when discussing it with his son. When Farrell responds it becomes clear that he

and the father were discussing livestock prices after all. “‘They’re buying cattle left and

right,’ Farrell’s voice came as I closed the door and stood in the darkness, in the smell

of shit and piss and the warm fleshy smell of worms crawling in too little clay.” The

cloacal stench—shit piss, worms—mixing with the clay places the son firmly in a grave.

And yet, the lavatory is simultaneously a safe haven that protects him from the full

impact of what he has heard. Here the narrator’s point of view becomes important. At

the exact moment of climax of the story, the older man narrates the death of his

childhood from the vantage of maturity, marking it with a degree of understatement.

“The shock I felt was the shock I was to feel later when I made some social blunder, the

splintering of a self-esteem and the need to crawl into a lavatory to think.” (57) That he

relates it to an emotion he “was to feel later” suggests not only that he has left

childhood behind, but also that in that moment he does not have the emotional

equipment to understand exactly what he feels. But he registers a shock and

embarrassment that becomes associated with “the need to crawl into the lavatory to

think.” As noted, while he told his father he would think about what had been said

about America, he has to this point given it no thought. Now he begins to think, and it

is that thinking that pulls the blindfold of his youth from his eyes.

20 He relates the American military funeral of Luke Moran matter-of-factly, but it must

have been a strange event in this village. Indeed, the images jar against each other

when presented in this straightforward manner. “Luke Moran’s body had come from

Korea in a leaden casket, had crossed the stone bridge to the slow funeral bell with the

big cars from the embassy behind, the coffin draped in the Stars and Stripes.” It reads

almost as an invasion. The narrator notes “the clay” thrown into the grave. This is the

third use of “clay” in half a page; the previous two were associated with the worms

crawling in the latrine. The point of relating the funeral is not, however, to mourn Luke

Moran, but rather, to symbolize the thought process that leads to the son’s explicit self-

revelation: “He’d scrape the fare, I’d be conscripted there, each month he’d get so many

dollars while I served, and he’d get ten thousand if I was killed.” (57) He tells himself in

a simple, unemotional declarative exactly the same thing that his father told Farrell in

“excited” simple declaratives. It is the same thing that neither father nor son will

discuss directly or simply with each other. The narrator completes the thought in the

next paragraph, also composed of a single sentence. “In the darkness of the lavatory

between the boxes of crawling worms before we set the night line for the eels I knew

my youth had ended.” The story began at morning with the narrator telling his father’s

story of an execution, of a violent end to youth, or a youth. As it moves towards night,

he tells his own story, of the end of his own youth. The violence is purely emotional.

21 In the beginning of the story, the father rowed and the son hauled in the fishing lines,

cutting the eels from their hooks. Now the story has moved from morning, through day

to evening, and the positions are reversed. “I rowed as he let out the night line, his

fingers baiting each twisted hook so beautifully that it seemed a single movement.” The

beauty of the father’s fingers, performing their task for the final time, contrasts with

the bats that make “ugly whirls overhead.” The dialogue takes the shape of a

combination of questions from the father and repetitions from the son. Once again,

they only talk around the subject, although the tone is charged by what the son has

overheard, and the fact that the father remains oblivious to his son’s newfound insight.


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The father asks if his son has thought about America, and upon receiving the reply that

he has, asks if he’s “decided to take the chance” (58). The son replies that he won’t be

going, to which the father responds: “You won’t be able to say I didn’t give you the

chance when you come to nothing in this fool of a country. It’ll be your own funeral.”

(58) Enclosed in the dark and damp, reeking latrine, and recalling the funeral of Luke

Moran, the son has just held his own funeral for his childhood. The unsubtle but not

inelegant irony is emphasized by the son’s echoing response. “‘It’ll be my own funeral,’

I answered, and asked after a long silence, ‘As you grow older, do you find your own

days in the war and jails coming much back to you?’” (58) Repetition, silence, war—

again, several elements of the story come together in a simple and graceful manner.

The son betrays that he knows his father’s intentions in sending him to America by

subtly linking “my own funeral” with “your own days in the war.”

22 At this point the story has begun to rewind. Father and son are back on the river, and

their conversation has moved not from executions and the 1919 rebellion to America,

but from America to executions and the 1919 war. The father’s final speech ties

together the things he’s said from the beginning of the story, and across it.

“I do. And I don’t want to talk about them. Talking about the execution disturbedme no end, those cursed buttons bursting into the air. And the most I think is that ifI’d conducted my own wars, and let the fool of a country fend for itself, I’d be muchbetter off today. I don’t want to talk about it.”

23 The bursting buttons have ruined another day. Yet the father now, rather than simply

refusing to speak further—although he very clearly does that as well, both beginning

and ending his speech by saying he doesn’t want to talk about it—opens his personal

feelings as well. What he fails to realize however is that his “own wars” are inextricable

from the wars of “the fool of a country.” He has after all been conducting a war with his

son across the course of the day, and that war is being conducted in part because of

what the country has been doing to “fend for itself,” taking the foreign tourists’ pounds

to the cost of his own fishing license. Had he not fought in 1919, there might not be an

Ireland to fend for at all. Nor does he acknowledge the hypocrisy of fighting his own

war by trying to send his son to war in a foreign country on behalf of a foreign country.

That all these pressures can be borne out in a few straightforward sentences is

testament to the construction of the story as a whole. Its various repetitions and

images reverberate across each other, within sentences, across paragraphs and from

the opening sentence to the final words.

24 The end of the story completes the son’s transition from blindfolded youth to open-

eyed adulthood. Following the father’s speech, he relates that “I knew this silence was

fixed for ever as I rowed in silence till he asked, ‘Do you think, will it be much good

tonight?’” (58) Father now defers to the son’s knowledge, and it is worth repeating that

the son is rowing the boat. As in the morning, it is father who, with a question, breaks

the silence, but there is a qualitative difference in the evening. The silence that falls

here—in other words, the silence about the wars, both the Irish war that they’ve

spoken about directly and the personal war about which they’ve only spoken indirectly

—is “fixed for ever.” Furthermore, the narrator states that he knows this—a blindfold

has been removed, and while he may not have yet moved, as his father has, to the

cynicism of facing an execution with his hands in his pockets, he now faces his life with

his eyes open.


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25 That knowledge — or maturity — allows the story to end with a paradoxical calm

intensity. As throughout the story, this tone is achieved through the combination of

repetition, and the juxtaposition of simple, yet direct declaratives. In answer to his

father’s query about the potential of the fishing, the narrator replies, “It’s too calm.”

The calm makes the father nervous:

“Unless the night wind gets up,” he said anxiously.“Unless the night wind,” I repeated. (58)

26 This is the last time the two protagonists speak in the story. Although they speak—

almost—identical words, one line is infused with anxiety, marked by the hanging

preposition and the adverb that colors the speech indicator. The son’s repetition is

more succinct and rhythmically regular. It is, indeed, calm, and reflects the state of

composure—albeit a state of composure informed by lingering shock—that the son has

reached. The final paragraph encapsulates the tension of this new composure—indeed,

the tension and intensity of adulthood—through the juxtaposition of two sentences.

Each sentence carries an image of their last night of work on the river together. One,

however, also contains an image of youth, while the other carries the burden of

adulthood. “As the boat moved through the calm water and the line slipped through his

fingers over the side I’d never felt so close to him before, not even when he’d carried

me on his shoulders above the laughing crowd to the Final.” (58) A story about the

death of childhood ends with a nostalgic image of childhood, father and son linked in

the innocence, excitement and anticipation of attending a sporting event. This moment

was previously the closest he’d felt to his father, but today has changed that. Linked in

innocence in his childhood, the son now feels closer to his father than ever before

because, his youth ended, they are now linked in maturity, and the contradictions,

complexities, and knowledge that maturity brings.

27 The final sentence of the story relays this idea sharply, and with a mind-numbing

intensity. “Each move he made I watched as closely as if I too had to prepare myself for

murder.” (58) In the opening of the story, a naïve boy asked his father to retell a story

of execution. Here, at its conclusion, the idea of execution is repeated. It is at once less

real in a physical sense and more real in an emotional sense. The son has averted his

own military execution by refusing to go to America. On the other hand, he now shares

burden of knowledge of death—“I too”—and whatever ideas he may have had about the

execution, which his father dismissed as “highfalutin’”, have vanished. A death of this

sort, whether in Mountjoy in 1919 as reprisal, or in the 1950s in Korea as an American

soldier, is a murder in which all sides are complicit. The death of youth and innocence,

which cannot be described as murder, since it is inevitable, is likewise a death in which

all sides conspire.

28 “Korea” is a superficially simple story that reveals its unstated depths upon close

reading. It is a masterpiece of economical storytelling, and exhibits the careful use of

diction and subtle imagery that made John McGahern one of the outstanding artists of

the short story form in the 20th Century.


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BIBLIOGRAPHIE

McGahern, John. The Collected Stories, New York: Vintage International, 1994

RÉSUMÉS

This essay considers “Korea” as a work of narrative poetry. Both the story’s imagery and its many

repetitions work to create an elegiac tone that conveys the intertwining themes of death. The

death of the narrator’s youth and the death of rural Ireland become inextricably linked through

the patterns of the working day, the story of the execution, and the memory of Luke Moran’s

funeral. McGahern’s subtle manipulation of point of view and the physical locations of his

protagonists creates shifts in the structural tension of the story, and lend extra force to its

thematic concerns

AUTEURS

DOUGLAS COWIE

Douglas Cowie is a fiction writer and Lecturer in the Department of English at Royal Holloway,

University of London. He is the author of a novel, Owen Noone and the Marauder (2005), and several

short stories.


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Evaluation in "High ground": fromethics to aestheticsVanina Jobert-Martini

1 “High Ground” is at the same time the title of the short story, the last words of the text,

and the title of the collection in which the short story was originally published in 1985.

It refers to a dominant geographical position which is specified in the concluding

paragraph: “And we’re very high up here. We’re practically at the source of the

Shannon.” (315)1

2 Such a privileged position, the old school master claims, has a beneficial influence on

the brains of the inhabitants. This vantage point offers a specific perspective and

encourages an evaluative attitude. The story is full of unqualified judgements and

evaluations made by the three main characters: the young teacher who is also the first

person narrator, the middle-aged politician and the old headmaster. McGahern’s

realistic prose relies on recurring types of characters to portray social groups and

situations of conflict and “High Ground” could appear as a prototypical McGahernian

story reflecting the personal sympathies of the author, aiming at passing them onto the

reader; and, consequently lacking in originality when compared to other short-stories

by the same author.

3 However, we may notice that the writing is balanced between conversation, narrative

statements and silence and that doubt is more and more strongly suggested as we read

on. Underneath the flat surface of declarations, chasms may be gaping, threatening to

engulf character, narrator and reader.

4 After only two paragraphs introducing the first person narrator, the author defines one

of the main topics of the story, i.e. school, by including the narrator in a group:

The Brothers’ Building Fund Dance had been held the night before. A big marqueehad been set up in the grounds behind the monastery. Most of the people I hadgone to school with were there, awkward in their new estate, and nearly all theBrothers who had taught us: Joseph, Francis, Benedictus, Martin. They stood in ablack line beneath the low canvas and waited for their old pupils to go up to them.(306)


178

5 Within a few sentences, two groups – pupils and teachers – appear as forming part of a

community. A sense of hierarchy conditions the attitudes of those involved and the

pupils do not feel entirely free until the Brothers have gone. Although the principal of

the school is at the top of the hierarchy, this has not prevented the narrator from

establishing a personal relation with him:

Master Leddy was the Principal of the school. He had been the principal as long as Icould remember. He had taught me, many before me. I had called to see him justthree days before. (309)

6 The world of school becomes more and more inclusive as we learn that the narrator is a

qualified teacher and that the senator is so worried about the quality of the teaching

his sons receive at the local school that he has decided to do something about it. As a

matter of fact, the McGahern reader is quite familiar with this world since it is

omnipresent. We are used to reading about young people anxiously waiting for exam

results, promising youths opting for the security of a teaching job instead of choosing

to go to university, a mother weakened by cancer who is determined to go on teaching

as long as she can, and a teacher sacked because he married a foreigner outside the

Catholic church. Even though boredom is sometimes mentioned, especially on the

teacher’s side,2this world is usually associated with very positive notions such as

security, joy of learning, intellectual stimulation, good results, growing confidence,

admiration for the teacher, here expressed by the narrator when reflecting about the

headmaster: “He had shone like a clear star. I was in love with what I hardly dared to

hope I might become.” (312)

7 In such a context, the subject of evaluation naturally crops up. The reader guesses that

the senator congratulates the narrator about a scholarly achievement when the words

“I applied for the grant” appear in the conversation and this interpretation is

confirmed by the headmaster who praises one of his star pupils: “It’s a very nice thing

to see old pupils coming back. Though not many of them bring me laurels like yourself,

still, it’s a very nice thing.” (311)

8 The headmaster has the same attitude at the pub, when talking to much older former

pupils and he seems perfectly at ease in the role of the judge in which he seems to have

retained full authority as is underlined by the repetition of the same paralinguistic

vocal feature.3 Sometimes he judges an individual: “You were a topper Johnny, you

were a topper at the maths,” I heard the Master’s voice. It was full of authority”.4 (314)

9 And sometimes a whole group with the same confidence:

“It was no trouble. Ye had the brains. There are people in this part of the countrydigging ditches who could have been engineers or doctors or judges or philosophershad they been given the opportunity. But the opportunity was lacking. That was allthat was lacking. ” The master spoke again with great authority. (315)

10 Throughout the story, the headmaster sticks to his institutional role without being

aware that this very role is called into question by someone else’s evaluation. The

politician too establishes a link between education and one’s position in society, and

uses similar words and phrases but his opinion differs and his evaluation of the

institution – which becomes that of the headmaster—is quite harsh:

“I’ll be plain. I have three sons. They go to that school. They have nothing to fallback on but whatever education they get. And with the education they are gettingat the school up there, all they’ll ever be fit for is to dig ditches. Now, I’ve never dugditches, but even at my age I’d take off my coat and go down into a ditch rather


179

than ever have to watch my sons dig. The whole school is a shambles. Someonedescribed it lately as one big bear garden.” (309)

11 The father is as confident and definite in his evaluation as the headmaster. The last two

sentences suggest that even within the school, the authority of the headmaster is no

longer recognised or respected and this contrasts with the sense of hierarchy present

in the ceremony described at the beginning of the story, as if the image shown did not

correspond to the reality of school life any longer. Ditches come to symbolise

degradation and by their opposite situation on the vertical line, stand in contrast with

other notions such as “high ground” or “toppers”.

12 It soon becomes clear for the reader that the politician aims at replacing the

inadequate headmaster by someone he considers better suited to the job i.e. the young

teacher. The politician pursues a personal goal – ensuring his sons’ future – and he

considers that this can only be achieved by replacing the headmaster of the local

school. The young teacher could thus become an instrument in his plan. The idea that

school is the only way out corresponds both to McGahern’s personal experience and to

a historical and social reality. In this respect, fiction is used here to refer to experience.

Nevertheless, this general context essentially provides the backdrop to the story and

what is foregrounded in the narrative is the way in which interpersonal relationships

based on evaluation come into play.

13 The characters are prone to express their feelings, which creates patterns of

relationships involving oppositions and kinship, distance and proximity as the

firstwords of the narrator about the senator show: “I disliked him, having

unconsciously, perhaps picked up my people’s dislike”. (307)

14 Opposition is strongly asserted and the senator’s interference is clearly perceived by

the narrator as an unfortunate intrusion at a time when he wished to be alone. The

reasons for these unfriendly feelings are developed in a paragraph levelling accusations

of dishonesty at the senator. He is described as a ruthless speculator who got married

to enter the local council,and is ready to do anything to further his own interests. The

narrator condemns him on the grounds of immorality. This character recalls many

others in the works of McGahern and stands for a new category of people who came to

occupy political functions without having proved particularly dedicated to serving the

country. Their accession to power was especially resented by ex-soldiers who felt

deprived of the social recognition they considered they were entitled to.5 McGahern is

often very ironical about the way such people came into power. “Bank Holiday”

features one of them:

“What is the Minister like?”“He’s all right. An opportunist, I suppose. He has energy, certainly, and the terribleIrish gift of familiarity. He first came to the fore by putting parallel bars on the backof a lorry. He did handstands and somersaults before and after speeches, to thedelight of the small towns and villages. Miss democracy thought he was wonderfuland voted him in top of the poll. He’s more statesmanlike now of course”. (361)

15 Whether it be in the Collected Stories or in the novels, no political figure is ever treated

in a positive way, and, because of prior knowledge, the reader is all the more ready to

share the narrator’s opinion about Senator Reegan. The latter is also used to chronicle

the shift of power from the clergy to the politicians especially in the appointment of

teachers. As a matter of fact, the figure of the headmaster is as much an archetype as

that of the politician. Maher comments:


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Leddy is an identifiably local character with no aspiration towards self-promotion.He is ignorant of the machinations of Reegan and the other parents of children inhis school and lives in a type of time warp. He has charm in abundance, but no selfdiscipline – how many men like him can be found scattered across the country eventoday? However there is a sense in which they are a dying breed in a society thathas embraced technological innovation and material prosperity in the last fewdecades. Sentiment no longer influences decisions as it did in the 1940s and 1950s.(Maher, 2003, 87)

16 By passing a mild judgement on the character, Maher seems to adopt the author’s point

of view and share his affection for the prototypical character. As he points out, the

hostility is not reciprocal and the senator proves sarcastic when forced by the narrator

to consider the consequences of his actions for the headmaster:

The very worst that could happen to him is that he’d be forced to take earlyretirement, which would probably add years to his life. He’d just have that bit lessof a pension with which to drink himself into an early grave. (313)

17 It is clear that the headmaster is at the end of his tether and that strength and power

are on the side of the politician who will have his way as he always has. The third party

is precisely the young teacher who becomes involved in the matter against his will by

the politician’s offer to become head of the school and the story includes two

conversations: one between Reegan and the teacher, and the other one taking place

between the headmaster and his former pupil. As regards the structure of the text, the

second conversation is inserted into the first one by means of a narrative flashback

about the visit the narrator had paid the headmaster three days before. This visit is

thus granted a central position in the story. Most of the action in “High Ground” is in

fact verbal interaction that can be analysed along the lines of conversation analysis.

Yule remarks:

In order to make sense of what is said in an interaction, we have to look at variousfactors which relate to social distance and closeness. Some of these factors areestablished prior to interaction and hence are largely external factors. Theytypically involve the relative status of the participants, based on social values suchas age and power. (Yule, 1996, 59)

18 Assessing distance and closeness, and reflecting on social values clearly involves

evaluations on the part of the participants. What is striking in “High Ground” is that

the teacher and the senator do not view the relationship in the same way. The distance

between the senator and the young teacher is objectified in space and explicitly

referred to in the deixis of the first address before it is commented upon in the

narrative: “ ‘Hi there! Hi! Do you hear me young Moran!’ The voice came with startling

clarity over the water, was taken up by the fields across the lake, echoed back.” (307)

19 The man starting the conversation is in a superior position because of his social status –

which will be defined by the narrator – and because he intrudes on the other’s solitary

meditation. He repeats his call for want of an answer and eventually asks Moran to

come closer: “’Since the mountain cannot come to Mahomet, Mahomet will have to

come to the mountain. Row over here a minute. I want to have a word with you.’” (307)

20 This attempt at reducing distance between the individuals exemplifies the next point in

Yule’s analysis:

However there are other factors, such as amount of imposition or degree offriendliness, which are often negotiated during an interaction. These are internal tothe interaction and can result in the initial social distance changing and beingmarked as less or more, during its course. (Yule 1996, 59)


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21 The senator’s way of addressing Moran is blunt and goes against the rules of politeness6

because he directly imposes something on his interlocutor without the slightest

apology for doing so. His address is a Face Threatening Act7 against Moran’s negative

face8 taking the form of a bald on record9. The demand is hardly softened by the biblical

reference which barely qualifies as a mitigating device. Not surprisingly, this face

threatening act is met by a silence attributed to Moran and indicating awkwardness.

Moran reluctantly obeys without explicitly (i.e. linguistically) granting the request: “I

rowed slowly, watching each oar-splash slip away from the boat in the mirror of the

water.” (307)

22 The inclusion of long narrative passages amounting to silence between the characters

creates a heavy atmosphere leaving the reader in no doubt about Moran’s negative

feelings towards Reegan. Even when Moran has come as close as possible to Reegan, the

latter retains a dominant position preventing physical contact:

The senator had seated himself on the wall as I was rowing in and his shoes hungsix or eight feet above the boat. “It’s not the first time I’ve had to congratulate you, though I’m too high up here toshake your hand.” (308)

23 After such a long approach, the conversation between the two men actually starts.

Reegan asks direct personal questions and Moran answers cautiously. Moran’s silence

and his vague answers do not deter Reegan from making his point i.e. a proposal to

Moran: “’And what I’m looking to know is – if you were offered a very good job, would

you be likely to take it?’” (308)

24 This proposal is the hinge of the short story. It is the expression of Reegan’s

desire and it is made plain that the latter expects a positive answer. The proposal can

thus be considered as a first part to be followed by a second i.e. an acceptance

(preferred) or a refusal (dispreferred). The answer is delayed throughout the story.

Yule explains:

The delay in acceptance […] is one type of indication that not all first partsnecessarily receive the kind of second parts the speaker might anticipate. Delay inresponse symbolically marks potential unavailability of the immediate (i.e.normally automatic) expected answer. Delay represents distance between what isexpected and what is provided. Delay is always interpreted as meaningful. (Yule,1996, 78)

25 Delay is explicitly requested several times by Moran and the narrative comments and

paralinguistic features allow us to interpret the demand as a face saving act to avoid a

blunt refusal:

“I don’t see why you want my word at this stage,” I said evasively, hoping to slipaway from it all. (309-310)“I’ll have to think about it.” (313)“I’ll have to think about it.” I was anxious to turn away from any directconfrontation. (313)‘I know that but I still have to think about it’ (313)

26 It is only at the end of the long and tense conversation that Reegan finally adopts a

more polite attitude taking into account Moran’s negative face: “Naturally you have to

consider everything”. (313) However, this polite remark, which amounts to accepting

the delay requested by Moran, is immediately followed by another proposal, another

first part to be followed by a second:


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“Why don’t you drop over to my place tomorrow night? You’ll have a chance tomeet my lads and herself has been saying for a long time that she’d like meet you.Come about nine, everything will be out of the way by then”. (313)

27 Reegan obviously aims at creating some intimacy by introducing Moran into the family

circle. It sounds as if the senator had understood that Moran was more sentimental

than he was and tried to find ways around his diffidence, by making him meet the sons,

put at risk by the attitude of the headmaster. A new strategy seems to be at work.

Although this would be most unlikely in everyday conversation, no answer is given in

the short story and Moran simply goes away, as slowly as he had come to meet Reegan

on the bank. In spite of the senator’s determination, the conversation does not reach its

aim and the interaction is in vain. Although Moran’s refusal to co-operate is blatant

and should be deciphered as a Face Threatening Act by his interlocutor, Reegan doesn’t

seem to care at all and stands his ground by not letting go. This failure of the verbal

interaction shows that the characters are poles apart and do not share the same values.

What is at stake between Moran and Reegan is the fate of the school’s headmaster. Yule

explains:

The basic assumption, from the perspective of politeness, is that face is typically atrisk when the self needs to accomplish something involving other. The greatest riskappears to be when the other is put in a difficult position. (1996, 67)

28 In the conversation we have described, Moran’s face is at risk because the headmaster

is put in a difficult position by Reegan. The thoughts of the narrator are communicated

to the reader in terms of evaluation: The very idea of replacing him was shocking. (309)

And the same idea is expressed in the conversation: “I can’t do that”. (309)

29 The core of the opposition between the two men is revealed in the speech items

framing the flashback about the visit paid to the Headmaster:

“What’ll happen to the master? What will he do?”“What I’m more concerned about is what my children will do if he stays,” he burstout again. “But you don’t have to concern yourself about it. It’ll be taken care of”.(310)

30 The same question is repeated after two pages devoted to the visit: “Do you mean the

Master’ll be on the road then?” (313)

31 Moran’s interrogation raises the question of morality. How is one supposed to behave

when someone else is involved? The headmaster’s words: “Loyalty is a fine quality. A

very fine quality.” (311) become particularly relevant in the context in which Moran

remembers them and are echoed by Reegan’s declaration: “To hell with gratitude.

Gratitude doesn’t matter a dam.” (313) Because Moran and Reegan share opposite views

(revealed by dialogue and narrative), the situation should be clear-cut provided Moran

were ready to refuse Reegan’s proposal. Yet, the weight of silence indicates a more

complex dilemma.

32 The conversation between Moran and Reegan seems suspended while Moran

remembers the visit he paid to the master and this flashback contains important

information regarding the narrator’s state of mind and his appreciation of what the

master has become. It is obvious that the headmaster is not in good shape:

He was just rising, having taken all his meals of the day in bed, and was shaving anddressing upstairs, one time calling down for a towel, and again for a launderedshirt. (310)

33 Or,


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All the time he seemed to lag behind my snail’s pace, sometimes standing becausehe was out of breath, tapping at the road with the cane. Even when the walk slowedto a virtual standstill it seemed to be still far too energetic for him. (311)

34 The physical decline lends credibility to Reegan’s claim that the headmaster is no

longer fit for the job, and Moran himself is ill at ease with what he cannot fail to notice:

I walked, stooping by his side, restraining myself within the slow walk,embarrassed, ashamed, confused. I had once looked to him in pure infatuation,would rush to his defence against every careless whisper.[…] It seemed horriblenow that I might come to this. (312)

35 The urge to defend the master clearly belongs to the past and the fact that the narrator

foresees his own future through a comparison with Leddy’s present derelict state

indicates that he could very well occupy the same position. It is as if Moran had

contemplated Reegan’s proposal with terror beforehand. He is also shocked by the

master’s lack of self-discipline regarding alcohol to the point of voicing his disapproval:

“How can he know what he knows and still do what he does, I say to the sudden silence

before turning away.” (312)

36 What is unbearable for Moran is that he cannot but acknowledge the accuracy of

Reegan’s judgement on the master but this remains unsaid even though it is made

obvious to the reader who establishes connections between the conversation and the

narrator’s thoughts. Moran is actually caught between conflicting imperatives: being

aware of reality and yet remaining loyal to someone who once opened the world to

him. Unable to cope, Moran turns away from the master when he leaves him at the pub

and never answers Reegan’s proposals, choosing silence as a way out. How is the reader

supposed to react? What kind of evaluation is he meant to make?

37 The control of sympathy is mostly dependent on the question of narrative point of view

and the reader naturally tends to follow the first person narrator and reflector in his

evaluations, all the more so if the latter sounds reasonable enough and tends to draw

the reader’s sympathy because of his own engaging nature or behaviour. McGahern’s

heroes, though not devoid of failings, are no unpalatable figures and Moran is no

exception. His characterisation is positive in many ways: he is praised for his

intelligence, he disapproves of dishonesty, which makes us think that he is honest, he

cares about people, since he still visits his old master, is able to enjoy a dance as well as

work on a roof with his father. As a result, the reader does not question his evaluations

of the politician or of the declining headmaster. We can even share his disarray when

faced with old age or a most embarrassing proposal because we have most probably

experienced similar situations and reacted in similar ways. For all these reasons,

closeness may be assumed between narrator and reader and yet we cannot help feeling

estranged, deprived, and uncomfortable. These feelings are attributable to a lack of

information about Moran’s decision. The proposal put to him by Reegan creates, as

already explained, the expectation of an answer (a second part) so that the reader

comes to share the senator’s impatience and frustration when deprived of it. From a

stylistic perspective, fiction involves interaction between the narrator and the reader.

In this respect, Moran’s silence, interpreted as a face threatening act towards Reegan, is

also to be construed as a face threatening act towards the reader.

38 However, the short story does not end with the conversation and fictional interaction

continues. On the last page, Moran’s role changes. He gives up the “narrative floor” to

become an eavesdropper:


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I let the bucket softly down in the dust and stood in the shadow of the church wallto listen. I recognised the Master’s slurred voice at once, and then voices of some ofthe men who worked the sawmill in the wood. (314)

39 It is as if the narrator retreated before the end of the story but remained the reflector,

thereby casting the reader in a similar position, that of someone overhearing a

conversation. Apart from reporting clauses, the only sentence attributable to the

narrator is purely descriptive and entirely devoid of evaluation: “There was a lull again

in the voices in which a coin fell and seemed to roll across the floor.” (315)

40 Hence the reader bears entire responsibility for any kind of evaluation of the

conversation taking place in the pub after hours. We can notice that the last words are

left to the headmaster, the object of a previous conversation, which in itself

strengthens his position in the story. These last words are the answer given by the

headmaster to the question put to him by one of his former pupils: “If you had to pick

one thing, Master, what would you put those brains down to?”(315) The second part is

deffered by an interruption and an incident, which make it all the more prominent:

Well the people with the brains mostly stayed here. They had to. They had nochoice. They didn’t go to the cities. So the brains was passed on to the nextgeneration. Then, there’s the trees. There’s the water. And we are high up here.We’re practically at the source of the Shannon. If I had to pick one thing more thananother, I’d put it down to that. I’d attribute it to the high ground. (315)

41 The rules of English intonation tell us that, in this last sentence, in direct speech, the

nuclear stress of the utterance is on “high ground”. We have already mentioned the

fact that the last words, “high ground”, take us back to the title of the story, thereby

creating circularity inside the short story, and to the title of the collection, granting the

story prominent place in the volume. The notion of end-focus10 can be extended from

the last words of a sentence to the last paragraph of a text which is expected to convey

important information, what Leech & Short (2007, 179) call “the principle of climax”11.

Yet, at first sight, the reader’s expectations are once more frustrated. These words do

not make sense if we try to be rational. There is no logic in them: the environment has

no impact whatsoever on genetics or on intelligence and the explanation given by the

headmaster is seriously flawed. We could discount it as nonsense uttered after too

much drinking, strengthening the senator’s evaluation. The attitude expected from the

reader would then be either cruel amusement at so stupid an answer or pity for the

headmaster who is totally unaware of what is awaiting him. The absence of the

narrator could then be interpreted as a final withdrawal of support. Nevertheless, it is

possible to suggest another interpretation, more in keeping with the notion of end-

focus. In spite of the very simple and naive wording, the last lines of the short story

seem to take on a poetic quality that runs against the idea of a harsh judgement passed

on the speaker. The repetition of syntactic structures and lexical items creates a

specific rhythm and the general message conveyed is praise, praise of the people and

the environment. A fusion between the different elements is brought about, as if people

and the environment were part of a whole and so tightly connected that they were no

longer discrete. The idea that the aim of writing is praising is paramount for McGahern.

In The Barracks, Elizabeth Reegan makes several attempts at writing a letter and

appears as a figure of the author struggling to find the right words:

She’d have to write about herself too: her relationship with Reegan at odd momentsnow, her heart gone weak, the cancer, the futility of her life and the life about her,her growing indifference. That was the truth she’d have to tell. Things get worseand worse and more frightening. But who’d want to come to a house where times


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got worse and no one was happy? And on the cold page it did not seem true and shecrossed it out and wrote, everything gets stranger and more strange. But whatcould that mean to the person she was writing to – stranger and more strange,sheer inarticulacy with a faint touch of craziness. So she crossed it out too andwrote: Things get better and better, more beautiful, and she smiled at the page thatwas too disfigured now to send to anyone now. Her words had reached praised ofsomething at last and it did not appear more false or true than any of the otherthings she’d written and crossed out. (187)

42 In this passage, the character begins by assessing her own writing in terms of truth i.e.

relation with the reality of experience and meaning. The words “inarticulacy” and

“craziness” could apply to the headmaster’s declaration. She then moves to another

type of evaluation which is no longer based on truth and reality but on aesthetics.

Because the headmaster’s words are the conclusion of the short story, they necessarily

sound true to the author but their truth is poetical and the implication is that though

certainly a poor teacher and headmaster, Leddy retains an essential quality, the

capacity to praise the world. In that respect, he supersedes the tentative narrator who

once praised him but remains silent in front of the senator. Leddy, the old headmaster,

thus becomes a figure of the artist who has created his own world in which he can reign

as McGahern explains in The Image:

Art is an attempt to create a world in which we can live: if not for long or forever,still a world of the imagination over which we can reign, and by reign I mean toreflect purely on our situation through this created world of ours, this Medusa’smirror, allowing us to see and to celebrate even the totally intolerable. (12)

43 Like the narrator, the reader thus moves away from confident down to earth

evaluations to frustration and uncertainty. He is finally forced to listen to the

headmaster and form his own judgement about the characters. As is often the case in

McGahern’s short stories, “High Ground” is open-ended and therefore upsetting for the

reader. He is first made to expect a piece of realistic writing foregrounding social

issues, psychological insight and moral evaluations but he is finally led, through

metafictional hints, to look beyond realism and ethics towards aesthetics and to revise

his own judgements. This is what Bataillard (1995) called John McGahern’s “subdued

modernity”. At the end of “High Ground”, we are encouraged to go beyond the issue

debated between the characters and to question the roles of all the participants. We

turn from a kind of evaluation that we would produce about real people to a more

poetic appraisal. Reading a literary text is in itself a process of evaluation that

according to Stockwell leads us from interpretation to reading:

Interpretation is what readers do as soon as (perhaps even partly before) they beginto move through a text. Their general sense of the impact of the experience couldrange over many different impressions and senses, some of which are refined orrejected. It is this later, more analytical process that produces a reading. Someinterpretations (especially those rejected early) can be simply wrong: mistakes,errors, miscues that are demonstrably not supported by any textual evidence at all.Readings, however, are the process of arriving at a sense of the text that ispersonally acceptable. These are likely to combine individual factors as well asfeatures that are common to the reader’s interpretative community. (Stockwell,2002, 8)


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BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Bataillard, Pascal. “John McGahern’s Subdued Modernity” in Etudes Britanniques Contemporaines,

Janvier 1995, 85-100.

Brown, Gillian. Listening to Spoken English. London: Longman, second edition, 1990.

Brown, Penelope, Levinson Stephen. Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Brihault Jean, Louvel Liliane (eds). John McGahern. La Licorne, Poitiers: UFR Langues et littérature,

1994.

Culpeper, Jonathan. Language and Characterisation. London: Pearson Longman, 2001.

Jobert-Martini Vanina. Les Structures temporelles dans les romans et les nouvelles de John McGahern,

écrivain irlandais. Lille : ANRT, 2007.

Leech, Geoffrey, Short, Michael. Style in Fiction. London: Pearson Longman, second edition, 2007.

Maher, Eamon. John McGahern – From the Local to the Universal. Dublin: The Liffey Press, 2003.

McGahern, John. The Collected Stories. London: Faber and Faber, 1992.

---. The Barracks. London: Faber and Faber, 1963.

---. The Leavetaking. London: Faber and Faber, 1974.

---. Amongst Women. London: Faber and Faber, 1990.

---. The Image in The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, vol. 17, n° 1, July 1991, p. 12.

Simpson, Paul. Stylistics. London: Routledge, 2004.

Stockwell, Peter. An Introduction to Cognitive Poetics. London: Routledge, 2002.

Yule, George. Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

RÉSUMÉS

The McGahern reader tends to approach “High Ground” as a prototypical story depicting a

familiar universe. The Irish rural context in which school plays a crucial role gives rise to many,

sometimes conflicting, evaluations and the reader is encouraged, through the handling of point

of view, to side with the reflector, who happens to be a young teacher. However, conversation

analysis leads us to qualify our judgements and to recognise truth in the words of the unpalatable

politician. The silence of the young teacher both reveals and creates embarrassment. The end of

the short story offers no solution but suggests a new perspective that has less to do with ethics

and more with aesthetics.

AUTEURS

VANINA JOBERT-MARTINI

Vanina Jobert-Martini is Senior Lecturer in Irish Studies in the English Department of the

University Jean Moulin – Lyon 3. She wrote her PhD on John McGahern’s prose fiction in which


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she explores time as a thematic as well as a formal device. Her main areas of research are modern

Irish Literature and stylistics.


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"Grave of the images of deadpassions and their days": "Thecountry funeral" as McGahern'spoetic tombeauJosiane Paccaud-Huguet

1 When John McGahern’s Collected Stories were published in 1992, it was immediately

recognized that the addition of “The Country Funeral”, the new novella which rounded

out the “rich whole” was “somewhat like the placing of “The Dead” at the end of James

Joyce’s Dubliners” (Sampson, 25).1 The closing image of “The Dead” looks backward over

space and time: from present to past, from Dublin, over the bog of Allen and farther to

the West:

[snow] was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills,falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into thedark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonelychurchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on thecrooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barrenthorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through theuniverse and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living andthe dead. (D, 213-14)

2 To a certain extent, McGahern’s story completes the cycle: the main character, Philly

Ryan, is like Gabriel Conroy a figure of the prodigal son whose homecoming involves

the revelation that he is not the self-sufficient figure he thought he was.2 Unlike his

fictional cousin, however, he does make the journey to Gloria Bog overlooked by the

churchyard on Killeelan Hill in Western Ireland.

3 After months spent working at the oil-fields in the Middle-East, Philly returns to Dublin

where he stays with his mother and his legless brother Fonsie whose life is confined to

the wheelchair: an apt emblem of the “hemiplegia of the will” which Joyce meant to

cure by handing out to his countrymen the “nicely polished looking-glass” of his

fiction. Likewise, the narrator of “The Recruiting Officer” suffers from “a total paralysis

of the will”, the result of a feeling that “any one thing in this life is almost as


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worthwhile doing as any other” (100): the phrase perfectly encapsulates the existential

melancholy which is the dominant mood of this volume. The same story mentions a

Miss Martin who “lived with her brother across the empty waste of wheat-coloured

sedge and stunted birch of the Gloria Bog. Her brother made toys from used

matchsticks in the winter nights.” (107). By returning to Gloria Bog and to the man who

made toys from used matchsticks as a possible figure of the artist, “The Country

Funeral”, as we shall see, revisits the symptom.

4 The news of their uncle Peter’s death sets the three Ryan brothers (Philly, Fonsie and

John who is a schoolteacher) on a trip to Gloria Bog whose image suddenly floods

Philly’s mind “and shut[s] out the day with amazing brightness” (377) in contrast to the

“grey dull light” of the city’s pavement: Philly is aware that if his homecoming breaks

the monotony for a few days, still he does not belong (375). Like the young blonde

woman painting her toenails red on her doorstep, indifferent to her own child in the

motionless pram next to her (376), it seems that the good fairy Modernity has left

ambivalent fingerprints on the urban landscape of Dublin – signs of both emancipation

and reification of human ties. The story itself follows the wheel-pattern of a journey

from city to country – the place where “they honour the dead” and where “people still

mean something” (404) – and then back to the city, with a promise of return to Gloria

Bog. As he drives back to town with his brothers, Philly announces his decision to take

in at Peter’s farm. Does this rehabilitation of older forms of the socially symbolic pact

mean that the Irish symptom is incurable after all, that the same patterns will just

repeat themselves mechanically? As Fonsie sarcastically observes of Philly, “The burly

block of exasperation would always come and go from the oil fields. Now he would go

out to bloody Gloria Bog instead.” (408) The decision to take in at the farm, however, is

not just the decision to buy it: there is a subjective implication here, which seems to

give new momentum to the wheeling movement, as a wave of energy rises in Philly

who drives with “the blind dominating passion of someone in thrall to a single idea”

(405).

5 In many ways, “The Country Funeral” can be read as a reflection on the ethical

implications of the artist’s gesture of going through the symptom whose inertia

ultimately seems to be reversed back to life, a gesture raising the wheel to the dignity

of a rich symbol radiating beyond the local frame: what is simply needed is a hand that

gives the impetus. Looking at the narrative structure, it is not too difficult to see that

the story’s own rhythm is the effect of a whole system of repetition-with-variations.

Leaning on the Lacanian notion of varity, a coinage foregrounding the idea that the

artist is the one able to introduce variety, to give play to some deeply hidden truth/

verity locked in the symptom which rules the blind repetitions of our lives, this essay

will explore the relation between melancholy and the “lost image” which according to

McGahern all art strives for. In his famous development on “The Image” which he

conceived of as a prologue to a reading, McGahern writes about the irretrievable image

which is the cause of the artist’s desire to write:

…, that still and private universe which each of us possesses but which otherscannot see, is brought to life in rhythm. By rhythm I think of the dynamic quality ofthe vision, its instinctive, its individual movements; and this struggle towards thesingle image, the image on which our whole life took its most complete expressiononce, in a kind of grave, grave of the images of dead passions and their days. […]Image after image flows involuntarily now […] straining towards the one image thatwill never come, the lost image. (“The Image”, 10)


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6 Clearly enough, the image in this case is not a question of representation, it is part of

our oblivious memory which is sometimes accidentally revived. Here the vision, to

which William Wordsworth once gave the name of spot of time, drives a hole in the

familiar fabric of the reality we live wrapped in. It may however be the source of a new

poetic creation binding together language, affect and memory. As McGahern observes

in “The Image”, the Muse:

… under whose whim we reign in return for a lifetime of availability, may grant usthe absurd crown of Style, the revelation in language of the unique world wepossess as we struggle for what may be no more than a yard of lead piping we sawin terror or in laughter once.

7 The enigmatic piece of lead piping, some left-over of what McGahern elsewhere calls

the “dunghill” of human experience, is a possible wink to the letter picked from a heap

of litter by the hen of Finnegan’s Wake. It is also a human artefact, the possible

remainder of some violent scene, whether actual or imagined: of a traumatic encounter

with the shapeless real glimpsed in joy or terror, like the knowledge of one’s own

death.

8 In “The Wine Breath” for example, the young protagonist who is a priest goes through

a “memorial epiphany” (Beja, 69) which has little to do with a religious revelation:

Suddenly, as he was about to rattle the gate loudly […], he felt himself (bathed as ina dream) in an incredible sweetness of light. It was the evening light on snow […] Hewas in another day, the lost day of Michael Bruen’s funeral nearly thirty yearsbefore. […] High on Killeelan Hill the graveyard evergreens rose out of the snow. […]Never before or since had he expected the Mystery in such awesomeness. He didnot know how long he had stood in that lost day, in that white light, probably for nomore than a moment. He could not have stood the intensity for any longer – whenhe woke out of it the grey light of the alders had reasserted itself. (178)

9 Even though the moment of vision leaves the priest, “purged of all tiredness, eager to

begin life again” (180), it would certainly be a mistake to interpret the scene in terms of

the recovery of faith, as Claude Maisonnat notes.3 The vision, “light as the air in all the

clarity of light” (185) is closer to Joyce’s secular epiphanies which, according to the

famous words borrowed from Aquinas, endow in a flash any odd object with integritas,

consonantia, claritas.4 What is it that triggered the moment here? A little something in

surplus, a trivial detail indeed: the snow-like beech chips milling out of the saw-chain

of the young priest’s neighbour. In McGahern’s fiction technological objects (a saw, a

car, an aeroplane) are often associated with a violence done to the natural rhythms of

life. The litter falling from the cut wood reminds the priest of his own death as if it

were his own body undergoing mutilation and dissemination – or, in psychoanalytical

terms, castration:

Never before though had he noticed anything like the beech chips. There was thejoy of holding what had eluded him so long […] part of a greater knowledge, andwhat did the beech chips do but turn back to his own death? (183)

10 If we bear in mind the post-Joycean equivalence between letter and litter, we can infer

the relevance of the lost image to the ethics of writing. McGahern once compared books

to coffins of words enclosing a loss, as if the dead wood of the coffin-word, the material

part of the signifier, awaited the reader’s breath to flame into being.5 If “The Country

Funeral” takes us “as close as John McGahern has come to the elusive lost image”

(Sampson, 25), it has to be an engraved image, a memorial of “dead passions” confined

to the grave by letters, literally a tombeau. The example that comes to mind is


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Mallarmé’s “Tombeau d’Anatole” dedicated to the beloved son whose death and

impossible mourning are associated with the obsessively recurring image of sun/son-

set in Anatolia. As explained by François Regnault in his introduction to Jo Attié’s

Mallarmé le livre, the difference between the poet and the neurotic subject is the way in

which the former elaborates upon the symptom whose underlying fantasy appears as it

were in the open air:6 In this case it is not the highlands of Anatolia but Gloria Bog – a

rather enigmatic placename, a kind of oxymoron which combines sublime radiance

with the death-in-life of the bog. Its pulsing image which recurs a dozen times in “The

Country Funeral”, is surely part of “that still and private universe”, the fantasy to

which the symptom is knotted, which has no shape until it is “brought to life in

rhythm” on the fictional stage.

11 We must differentiate at this point the diegetic from the meta-diegetic levels as far as

the impact of melancholy is concerned. What seems to paralyse McGahern’s people,

whether in town or in country, is a sense of shapelessness. In “Why we’re here”, the

narrator comments upon Sinclair who suffers from “the melancholy” (13):

‘No reason why we’re here, Mr Boles, why we were born. What do we know?Nothing, Mr Boles. Simply nothing. […] Try to see some make or shape in thenothing we know.’ (14)

12 This “nothing” is, literally, the absence of a cause to human life. In “Wheels”, the main

character sees his useless life “in the shape of a story that had as much reason to go on

as to stop” (10), the father being nothing but “the body that had started my journey to

nowhere” (6) – one of the questions raised by McGahern’s art being how to get a human

story started and how to keep it going. The same mood affects the young priest in “The

Wine Breath”, whose mother, he feels, had given him a life he had not wanted. She had

the vocation for him, and he embraced the priesthood as “a way of vanquishing death

and avoiding birth” (183). His mother’s death has left him forever stumbling into the

“dead days”. A smell of crushed mint is enough to give him back a day when he went to

the sea with her:

… it was as if the world of the dead was as available to him as the world of theliving. It was also humiliating for him to realize that she must have been themainspring of his days. Now that the mainspring was broken, the hands wereweakly falling here and falling there. (179)

13 The story perfectly enacts the famous Freudian image of the shadow of the lost object,

here the maternal object, looming over the melancholy subject for whom the wheel of

time has stopped. Death has become his silent partner, the passage from loss to lack

which itself sets desire and time into motion is impossible. The young priest desires…

precisely nothing: “being a man he had no choice, he was doomed to die; and being

dead he’d miss nothing, being nothing.” (178)

14 One may of course suggest here an autobiographical reference to the fact that the

author lost his mother at the age of ten, a loss which is often felt as abandonment by

the parent figure. But this would be missing the essential point, the artist being the one

who makes use of the materials of his life not for self-expression, but rather as simple

materials7 “to mark the passage of a life spent searching in new ways for that “lost

image” in which the vital self is anchored” (Sampson 16), then to be shared by the

reader. In other words, the artist does not give up on the knowledge of the real

enclosed in the lost image which (s)he attempts to shape out. Unlike Philly who like the


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poet welcomes the bright vision of Gloria Bog, his brother John significantly turns his

back on the melancholy landscape:

… what met his eyes across the waste of pale sedge and heather was the rich darkwaiting evergreens inside the black wall of Killeelan where they had buried Peterbeside his father and mother only a few hours before. The colour of laughter isblack. How dark is the end of all life. Yet others carried the burden in the bright dayon the hill. His shoulders shuddered slightly in revulsion and he wished himselfback in the semi-detached suburbs with rosebeds outside in the garden. (402)

15 In-between the culture of death and its denial in the modern city where “the whole

thing is swept under the carpet” (385), the artist interposes the screen of fiction which

performs the role of Medusa’s mirror, both reflecting and keeping at bay that

“nothing”.

16 But why Killeelan Hill and Gloria Bog? Like Mallarmé’s Tombeau d’Anatole which

associates the death of the son with the sunset setting fire to the landscape,8 such

poetic nameplaces are like ciphers which condensate the fantasy in which the

melancholy symptom is rooted: the intolerable idea of a parent figure wishing death for

its own child. Fathers and mothers in McGahern’s stories are seldom loving figures and

“The Country Funeral” is no exception. The name of Gloria bog is reminiscent of painful

memories to Fonsie who during the summer holidays would feel rejected by Uncle

Peter, “worse than useless”:

There were times I felt if he got a chance he’d throw me into a bog hole the way hedrowned the black whippet that started eating the eggs. (377)Every time I caught Peter looking at me I knew he was thinking that there wasnothing wrong with me that a big stone and a rope and a good bog hole couldn’tsolve. (386)

17 The three boys’ mother, married to an unreliable father, is not a figure of tenderness

either: with her “remarkably erect” posture and her “steely voice” (376), she is not

ready to give up to the pressure which Peter tries to put on her and her children. More

than this, she seems eager to compel her children to suffer the resentment of Uncle

Peter who himself derives great enjoyment whenever she scolds him (380). The

summers were peaceful only when the grandmother was still alive, but looking forward

to the moment when she would rejoin her parents on Killeelan Hill:

Often before she came in she’d look across the wide acres of the bog, the stuntedbirch trees, the faint blue of the heather, the white puffs of cotton trembling inevery wind to the green slopes of Killeelan and walled evergreens high on the hilland say, ‘I suppose it won’t be long till I’m with the rest of them there.’ (380)

18 It won’t be long, till she belongs too.

19 Clearly, then, Killeelan Hill is the place indexed by the mother’s death wish – both for

herself and for others. Back to the city, Fonsie relates how he watched the funeral

procession from his wheelchair, and was afraid lest the coffin should fall off the

shoulders and roll back down the hill. The mother evokes the funeral of Johnny Whelan

whose name evokes, by metonymy, Fonsie on his wheelchair – a kind of coffin too:

Once it did fall off. Old Johnny Whelan’s coffin rolled halfway down the hill andbroke open. They had to tie the boards together with the ropes they use forlowering into the grave. Some said the Whelans were drunk, others said they weretoo weak with hunger to carry to coffin. (408)

20 Philly suddenly remembers how Mary Whelan, the wild black-haired girl, had once

challenged him to fight on the bog road, another image of aggressivity between the

sexes. Not surprisingly, the images of Gloria Bog which turn up in “The Country


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Funeral” are frequently associated with a violence muffled by the sublime undertones

of the landscape with its “stunted birch trees” on which the shadow of the object

hovers:

Without any warning, suddenly, they were out of the screen of small trees into theopen bog. A low red sun west of Killeelan was spilling over the sedge and darkheather. Long shadows stretched out from the small birches scattered all over thebog. […] ‘Just look at the bog. On evenings like this I used to think it was on fire.Other times the sedge looked like gold. I remember it well. (389)

21 The bog, then is the image whose pulsing beat brings us closest to the irretrievable, the

intolerable image ciphered in the letters of Killeelan Hill, a name evoking a murderous

wish. We need to turn to another story, “Chrismas”, to understand why the bog can be

the “grave of the images of dead passions and their days”, in relation to the son’s

passion – including in its religious sense.

22 On first reading, “Christmas” belongs to the now well-known genre of the anti-

Chrismas story (Louvel, 71). It is about wishes, but strange wishes indeed as the

narrator warns:

A stupid wish on my part, which set off an even more stupid wish on Mrs Grey’s,and what happened has struck me ever since as usual when people look to eachother for their happiness or whatever it is called. (23-24)

23 Mrs Grey, a rich woman in the neighbourhood, who has lost a son in aerial combat over

Italy is clearly a surrogate mother figure to the narrator who regularly delivers wood at

her home. At Christmas time she offers him an aeroplane toy which for mysterious

reasons, he rejects in a gesture of rage. He wanted a gift from her, but certainly not that

one: clearly, the aeroplane places him in the symbolic position of the sacrificial son.

Once she has left, he takes the toy and a box of matches to the stable. But the jennet in

the Christmas stable has an idiosyncrasy, he enjoys the smell of smoke and this

enjoyment makes it very communicative, nearly human:

I gathered dry straw in a heap, and as I lit it and the smoke rose the jennet gave hishuman squeal until I untied him and he was able to put his nostrils in the thick ofthe smoke. […] I put the blue and white toy against the wall and started to kick.With each kick I gave a new sweetness was injected into my blood. For such a prettytoy it took few kicks to reduce it to shapelessness, and then, in the last flames of thestraw, I flattened it on the stable floor, the jennet already nosing me to put morestraw on the dying fire.As I quietened I felt glad that I’d torn up the unopened letter in the train that I wassupposed to have given Moran. I felt a new life had already started to grow out ofthe ashes, out of the stupidity of human wishes. (28)

24 The scene of course revisits the familiar, peaceful image of the Christmas stable, but it

also takes us beyond the Freudian pleasure principle: the three details of the boy

keeping the letter for private use, the ambivalent jouissance of his kicks and the jennet’s

joy at the dying fire clearly point in the direction of the death-drive. The sense of relief,

the possibility of “a new life” out of that enjoyment beyond words, also indicates that

we are close to the lost primal scene of artistic creation.

25 In “The Country Funeral”, the fundamental fantasy buried under the layers of the

images flowing toward the lost image nearly comes in the open air of Gloria Bog during

the night of Peter’s wake, when Fonsie signals to Philly that he wants to go outside to

relieve himself:

It was a clear moonlit night without a murmur of wind, and the acres of pale sedgewere all lit up, giving back much of the light it was receiving, so that the places that


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were covered with heather melted into a soft blackness and the scattered shadowsof the small birches were soft and dark on the cold sedge. High up and far off theycould see an aeroplane and soon they picked it out by the pulsing of its little whitenightlight as it crossed their stretch of sky. The tall evergreens within the palestone wall on the top of Killeelan were dark and gathered together against themoonlight. As if to give something back to his brother for accompanying him in thenight, Fonsie said as he was relieving himself on the shadowed corner of the house,‘Mother remembers seeing the first car in this place. She says she was ten […] (393)

26 To which Fonsie adds that Uncle Peter, who would spend his evenings making

matchstick toys to kill time because he disliked TV, never wanted to drive a car: he

noticed that many who drove cars had died. The passage is truly a “dream of death”:

the free associations, condensations and displacements (the airplane over the bog, the

mother, cars, death by driving, the soft darkness, the scattered shadows of the small

birches), unmistakably recall the image of the lost scene of a young man’s death in

aerial combat: Gloria Bog and its glorious radiance and soft shadows at sunset

dominated by Killeelan Hill, is the screen memory set up against the intolerable, the

mirror/shield for confrontation with Medusa’s head – art being “this created world of

ours, this Medusa’s mirror, allowing us to see and to celebrate even the totally

intolerable.”

27 There now remains to be seen the question of the artist’s role in recovering what has

been lost with modernity and the violence of its technological objects: the

acknowledgement of death, punctuated by symbolic rituals like a wake and a funeral

which are different from the rich gifts and rounds of celebration at the pub which seem

to blind Philly “to the fact that it is not generally light but shadow that we cast” (375).

If the socially symbolic fiction of the country funeral crowns the Collected Stories, its

position at the close of the volume also draws a parallel with the ethics of writing, a

specific mode of knotting together the three registers of the symbolic, the imaginary

and the real, the “intolerable” which we all have to face. Here as in most of the stories,

the dialogic exchange among the characters is truly symptomatic, shared between

angry, resentful silences betraying some “darkness seething within” whose dark flow

sometimes bursts out “like released water” (385). Gradually a new discursive economy

appears, making room for silence and containment, pointing to another value of

communal speech. As the three brothers enter Peter’s house everybody stands up and

comes towards them to shake hands with the set phrase, “I’m sorry for your trouble”

(382). John, the careful listener who knows to keep his silence and drinks less than the

others, gets on “famously” with the people gathering for the wake (389). When the

moment of thanking Peter’s kindly neighbours, Philly reaches “far back to his mother

or uncle for the right thing to say” (395). Which is less a question of politeness than of

relief, when signifiers are just there to confirm a sense of belonging.

28 The wake also brings to the foreground the questions of narrative and memory,

essential to McGahern’s art as secular religion. In “The Image”, McGahern insists on the

religious nature of art which also relies on formal patterns, among which a certain,

repetitive use of speech and motifs which aim less at personal expression, than as

commonly shared symbol, in the Greek sense of the material symbolon. The grotesque,

philistine figure of the priest is clearly left out of the ritual9 which begins in Peter’s

house, ruled by “some hidden signal or law” (384). The secular rite requires human care

represented by the kind neighbour’s wife, Mrs Cullen who regulates the flow of the

visitors, so that someone will always be by Peter’s side on his last day in the house:


195

All through evening and night people kept coming to the house while others whohad come earlier quietly left. First they shook hands with the three brothers, thenwent to the upper room, knelt by the bed. When new people came in to the roomand knelt by the bed they left their chairs and returned to the front room wherethey were offered food and drink and joined in the free, unceasing talk andlaughter. Almost all the talk was of the dead man. Much of it was in the form ofstories. All of them showed the dead man winning out in life and the few times hehad been forced to concede defeat it had been with stubbornness or wit. Nosurrender here, were his great words. (391)

29 The repetition of markers of temporality is crucial here to indicate the value of the

ritual movement to weave continuity where death has ripped up the fabric, and where

the act of story-telling places a veil, a useful fiction over an absence. The symbolic

function of the wake to bind together temporarily what has been severed is never more

visible than in one of the story’s most poetic passages:

It was as if the house had been sundered into two distinct and separate elements,and yet each reflected and measured the other as much as the earth and the sky. Inthe upper room there was silence, the people there keeping vigil by the body whereit lay in the stillness and awe of the last change; while in the lower room that lifewas being resurrected with more vividness than it could ever have had in the longdays and years it could have been given. Though all the clocks in the house had nowbeen silenced everybody seemed to know at once it was midnight and all themourners knelt except Fonsie and two very old women. The two rooms were joinedas the Rosary was recited but as soon as the prayers ended each room took on againits separate entity. (392)

30 It ultimately belongs to the “rough, unfinished” Philly to respond to the mystery

encountered on top of Killeelan Hill, and to take up the thread that has just been cut.

No mystical encounter with the divinity here, but a simple acceptance of what is, met at

the moment of encounter with a gaze which is subjectless but not inhuman:

‘I felt something I never felt when we left the coffin on the edge of the grave. Arabbit hopped out of the briars a few yards off. He sat there and looked at us as if hedidn’t know what was going on before he bolted off. You could see the bog and allthe shut houses next to Peter’s below us. … Everybody gathered around, and thepriest started to speak of the dead and the Mystery of the Resurrection. (405)

31 Philly goes back alone to sleep in Peter’s house where he finds the old parchment deeds

tied with legal ribbon which he takes next morning to the solicitor. The latter, who has

inherited his practice from his grandfather and father finds out that the place is in

Philly’s grandfather’s name, and that the document was drawn by his own grandfather

(399). This leap backward to the last generation but one is a leap over the trauma of

modernity, like a darning thread which joins the two sides together again without

denying the rent in the fabric.

32 Can Philly’s decision to take in at Peter’s farm be interpreted only in terms of the

ultimate acknowledgement of the fact of death at the outset of the burial.10 The

assertion that he is going to takein at the farm clearly binds him to the life energy and

to the motif of hands, recurrent in the story whose tone is set by the opening image of

Fonsie’s “huge hands” gripping his wheelchair, repeated by the protruding detail of the

dead man’s hands:

The room was empty. A clock somewhere had not been stopped. He looked very oldand still in the bed. They would not have known him. His hands were enormous onthe white sheet, the beads a thin dark trickle through the locked fingers […] Thethree brothers blessed themselves, and after a pause John and Philly touched the


196

huge rough hands clasped together on the sheet. They were very cold. Fonsie didnot touch the hands. (383)

33 It is as if the thin dark trickle locked in the cold fingers awaited the possibility to flow

again through an act of transmission and revival entrusted to Philly who speaks “as if

he was already in possession of his dead uncle’s knowledge and presence.” (386). The

question will be to see what makes of him a potential figure of creative transmission,

out of a reversal of the deadly inertia locked in the symptom.

34 What did Uncle Peter do with his hands? He would spend his evenings making toys out

of matchsticks which he would give to the children of the neighbourhood:

He was always looking for matches. Even in town on Saturdays you’d see himpicking them up from the bar floor. He could do anything with them. The childrenloved the animals he’d give them. Seldom they broke them. Though our crowd aregrown we still have several he made in the house. He never liked TV. That’s whatyou’d find him at on any winter’s night if you wandered in on your ceilidh. He couldnearly make those matches talk. (392)

35 Two things to be noted here: like the letter/litter or the yard of lead piping, the

matches picked up from the bar floor are the spoils, the trivial bits and pieces on the

dunghill from which the artist picks his material to shape figures so lively that “he

could nearly make these matches talk”:

From the top of the drawer a horse had been made from matchsticks and mountedon a rough board was taken down. The thin lines of the matchsticks were cunninglyspliced and glued together to suggest the shape of a straining horse in the motionof ploughing or mowing. A pig […] several sheep that were subtly different from oneanother … a tired old collie, all made from the same curved and spliced matchsticks.(392)

36 The curved and spliced matchsticks here are not used to set fire as in “Christmas” but

as humble remainders diverted from their primary use, not for money but “out of some

primary need” (405). What we recognize here is the impulse toward sublimation which

diverts the energy of the death-drive, raising the handcrafted object to the dignity of

the thing, or rather the nothing, the void which is thus enclosed and outlined according

to Lacan’s famous formula. Philly thinks of Peter sitting alone at night making the

shapes of animals out of matchsticks, “of those same hands now in the coffin before the

high altar of Cootehall Church” (396). Now his turn has come:

On a whim he went and took down some of the matchstick figures that they hadlooked at the night before – a few of the sheep, a little pig, the dray-horse and cart,a delicate greyhound on a board with its neck straining out from the bent knees likea snake’s as if to pick a turning rabbit or hare from the ground. He moved themhere and there on the table with his finger as he drank when, putting his glassdown, his arm leaned on the slender suggestion of a horse, which crumpled and fellapart. Almost covertly he gathered the remains of the figure, the cart and scatteredmatches, and put them in his pocket to dispose of later. (396)

37 The matchsticks are the poet’s letters awaiting to be disposed of – to be destroyed or

composed into a new whole by a careful hand.

38 Like Mallarmé’s “signifiant fermé et caché, qui habite le commun”,11 the humble

materials of common language commemorate and engrave the shattering encounter

laid to rest in the elusive lost image. They cannot respond to the question of “Why

we’re here” – I am referring to the title of one of the stories in the volume – but they do

try to make us see “some make or shape in the nothing we know” (14).


197

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Attié, Jo. Mallarmé le Livre, Nice: Editions du Losange, 2007.

Aubert, Jacques. The Aesthetics of James Joyce, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,

Baltimore and London, 1992.

Beja, Morris. Epiphany in the Modern Novel, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971.

Joyce, James. Dubliners, New York: The Modern Library, 1969.

Louvel, Liliane. “The Writer’s Field: Patrols of the Imagination”: John McGahern’s Short Stories”,

Journal of the Short Story in English, 34, Spring 2000, pp. 65-85.

McGahern, John. The Collected Stories, London, Faber and Faber, 1992.

---. “Dubliners.” The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 17:1 (July 1991): 31-37.

---. “The Image: Prologue to a Reading.” The Honest Ulsterman, 8 (1968): 10.

Maisonnat, Claude. “L’envers du visible ou la chute de l’objet dans “The Wine Breath”.

Communication au Congrès de la SAES (2007).

Sampson, Denis. “The Rich Whole: John McGahern’s Collected Stories as Autobiography”, Journal

of the Short Story in English, Volume 34, Spring 2000 (http://jsse.revues.org/index257.html)

RÉSUMÉS

This paper first examines the symbolic filiation between the character of Gabriel in “The Dead”

and the figure of Philly Ryan in the short story. Both characters go through the sobering

experience of shedding the idealised self-images which helped them to go through life so far.

However, Philly actually returns to the Gloria Bog to start a new life by taking in at Peter’s farm.

Then it makes the point that the image of Uncle Peter and his matchsticks could well be

interpreted as a reflexive comment on the ethics of writing, if we agree to see it as one of

McGahern’s successful “lost images”, to the extent that they enable him to come to terms with

the repetition of the symptoms of his melancholy by displacing them through a succession of

images endowed with a poetic quality.

AUTEURS

JOSIANE PACCAUD-HUGUET

Josiane Paccaud-Huguet is Professor of Modern English Literature and Literary theory at

Université Lumière-Lyon 2. Her latest publications include a chapter, “Psychoanalysis after

Freud” in Patricia Waugh’s Literary Theory and Criticism, An Oxford Guide (2006). She has edited a

voume on the critical reception of Conrad in France (Conrad in France, Columbia University Press,

2008). She is currently working on a book on the modernist “Moment of Vision”.


198

Bibliography


199

John MacGahern: A Bibliography

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

BIBLIOGRAPHY1

Short Stories by John McGahern

“The Creamery Manager”, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, July 1991, p. 25-30.

“Creatures of the Earth”, La Licorne, 32,1995, p.221-232.

The Collected Stories, London: Faber and Faber, 1985.

The Collected Stories, New york: Knopf,1993.

High ground, London: Faber and Faber, 1985.

High ground, New York: Viking, 1987.

Getting Through, London: Faber and Faber, 1978.

Getting Through,Nex York, Harper aand Row, 1980.

Nightlines, London: Faber and Faber, 1970.

Nightlines, boston: Little and Brown, 1971.

Creatures of the Earth:New and Selected Stories, London: Faber and Faber, 2006.

“Sinclair”, Listener, London, 18Novemeber 1971, p.690-692.


200

Full-length studies

Cardin, Bertrand. Lectures d'un texte étoilé: “Corée” de John McGahern , Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009.

Goarzin, Anne. John Mc Gahern - Reflets d’Irlande, Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2002.

Maher, Eamon. John McGahern: From the Local to the Universal. Dublin: Liffey Press, 2003.

Malcom, David. Understanding John McGahern, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007.

Sampson, Denis. Outstaring Nature’s Eyes, The Fiction of John McGahern, Dublin: the Lilliput Press,

1993.

Collections of essays

L. Louvel, G. Menegaldo, C.Verley eds. John Mc Gahern, Poitiers, La Licorne, Hors-série, 1994.

Numéro Spécial “John McGahern”, Etudes Britanniques Contemporaines, Université Paul Valéry,

1995.

Dissertations

Cardin, Bertrand. Les Nouvelles de John McGahern. Une Œuvre Autour de la Thématique du vide,

Université de Caen, 1993.

Goarzin, Anne. Représentations du Même dans les Romans de John McGahern, Rennes, 1998.

Jobert-Martini, Vanina. Les Structures Temporelles dans les Romans et les Nouvelles de John

McGahern, Ecrivain Irlandais. Lille ANRT, 2007.

Lloyd, Richard Burr. “Home Sickness: John McGahern’s Irish Quartet” Dissertation, University of

Nebraska, 1995.

Articles

Brannigan, John. “Introduction: ‘The Whole’ World’ of John McGahern”, Irish University Review, 35

2005.

Brown, Terence. “John McGahern’s Nightlines: Tone, Technique and Symbolism”, in Patrick

Rafroidi and Brown, eds., The Irish Short Story (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; Atlantic Highlands/

NJ.: Humanities Press 1979), pp. 289-301.

Cardin, Bertrand. “Figures of Silence: Ellipses and Eclipses in John McGahern’s Collected Stories”,

Journal of the Short Story in English (40) Spring 2003.

---. “Un aspect du Temps: le Cycle dans les Nouvelles de John McGahern” La Licorne, Poitiers, 32

1995.

Coad, David. “One God, one Disciple: The Case of John McGahern” in Etudes Britanniques

Contempoaines, N° 6, Presses Universitaires de Montpellier, 1995.

Crowley, Cornelius. “Leavetaking and Homecoming in the Writing of John McGahern”, Etudes

Britanniques Contemporaines, N° Spécial “John McGahern” Montpellier: SEAC 1995.

Crotty, Patrick. “All Topers’: Children in the Fiction of John McGahern”, Irish University Review

35.1 Spring/Summer 2005.


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Dubois, Dominique. “Incommunicability and Alienation in John McGahern’s ‘My Love my

Umbrella’: An Analysis of the Discursive Strategies”, in Journal of the Short Story in English, N° 34,

Presses de l’Université d’Angers, 2000.

Goarzin, Anne. “‘A Crack in the Concrete’: Objects in the Works of John McGahern”, Irish

University Review 35 2005.

Gonzales Casademont, Rosa. “An interview with John McGahern”, The European English Messenger,

41 1995.

Grennan, Eamon. “Only What Happens’ Mulling Over McGahern”, Irish University Review, 35.1

(Spring/Summer 2005.

Gueguen, Paul. “Like All Other Men’: Hantise et Nostalgie de l’Ordre”, La Licorne, Brihault Louvel

eds 1995.

Holland, Siobhan. “Marvellous Fathers in the Fiction of John McGahern”, Yearbook of English

Studies 35 2005.

Jobert-Martini, Vanina. “Like All Other Men” de John McGahern: Temporalité et Métaphores

Spatiales”, Bulletin de la Société de Stylistique Anglaise, n° 30, 2008.

---. “I know English, I like foreigners, I hate Spanish scum’: Défamiliarisation et Mimésis dans

‘Peaches’ de John McGahern”, (Forthcoming).

Jousni, Stéphane. “Aube ou Linceul? Les Chemins de Neige chez McGahern et Joyce”, Université

de Caen: Cahier d’Etudes Irlandaises, n° 1 1997.

Kennedy, Eileen. “Sons and Fathers in John McGahern’s Short Stories” in New Irish Writing: Essays

in Memory of Raymond J. Porter, James D. Brophy and Eamon Grennan eds. Syracuse University

Press, 1999.

Kiberd, Declan. “Fallen Nobility: The World of John McGahern” Irish University Review 35 2005.

Louvel, Liliane. “The Writer’s Field: Patrols of the Imagination” John McGahern’s Short Stories”,

in Journal of the Short Story in English, n 34 Spring 2000.

---. “John McGahern: ‘Like All Other Men’ ou la Vanité et la Poursuite du Vent”, Lille, Etudes

Irlandaises, n° 21-2, 1996.

---. John McGahern: La Manière Noire, Poitiers: La Licorne n° 32 1995.

Maher, Eamon. “The Irish Novel in Crisis? The Example of John McGahern”, Irish University Review

35, Spring/Summer 2005.

Maisonnat, Claude. “Flux et Desir dans ‘A Slip-up’” in Journal of the Short Story in English, n° 30,

Presses de l’Université d’Angers, Spring 1998.

---. “L’Etrange Musique du Texte dans ’Swallows ‘ de John McGahern” in Etudes Britanniques

Contemporaines, Montpellier, Presses Universitaires de la Mediterranée, n° 32, June 2007.

---. “Problematic Creation in John McGahern’s ‘The Beginning of an Idea’” in Etudes Britanniques

Contemporaines, Université de Montpellier, 1995.

---. “L’Envers du Visible ou la Chute de l’Objet dans ‘The Wine Breath’” paper read a the 2007

SAES Conference in Avignon (Forthcoming).

McKeon, Belinda. “’Robins Feeding With the Sparrows’: The Protestant ‘Big House’ in the Fiction

of John McGahern”. Irish University Review 35 2005.


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Pernot-Deschamps, Maguy. “Loss and Failure in High Ground” in Journal of the Short Story in

English, n° 34 Spring 2000.

Prusse, Michael C. “Symmetry Matters: John McGahern’s ‘Korea’ as Hypertext of Ernest

Hemingway’s Indian Camp’” Forthcoming at The Cambridge Scholar Press, 2009.

Quinn, A. “Varieties of Disenchantment: Narrative Techniques in John McGahern’s Short Stories”,

Presses de l’Université d’Angers, Journal of the Short Story in English, n° 13 Autumn 1989.

Tosser, Yvon. “Théorie de l’Image, Sensibilité Absurde et Aspects de la Pratique Textuelle dans

Nightlines” Cahiers du Centre d’Etudes Irlandaises, n°4, Université de Rennes, 1979.

Sampson, Denis. “Introducing John McGahern” The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies: Special Issue

on John McGahern, 17.1 (July 1991.

---. “The ‘ Rich Whole ‘: John McGahern’s Collected Stories as Autobiography” in Journal of the

Short Story in English, n° 34 Spring 2005.

---. “The Lost Image: Some Notes on McGahern and Proust” The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies,

Special Issue on John McGahern, 17.1 July 19991.

---. “A conversation with John, McGahern” in The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies XVII: i July 1991.

Sohier, Jacques. “Desire as Slip-Up in the Short Story ‘Peaches’ by John McGahern” in Journal of

the Short Story in English, n° 34 (Spring) 2000.

Whyte, James “History, Myth and Ritual in the Fiction of John McGahern: Strategies of

Transcendance” Lewison, NY: Edwin Mellon Press 2002.

Van de Ziel, Stanley. “John McGahern, Memoir”, Irish University Review, 35. 2 2005.

---. “’All this Talk and Struggle’: John McGahern’s The Dark”, Irish University Review 35.1 Spring /

Summer 2005.

O’Connell, Shaun. “Door into the Light: John McGahern’s Ireland”, The Massachussetts Review Inc.

1984.

Also worthy of note:

For its 20th anniversary The Journal of the Short Story in English N° 41 (Autumn 2003) put out an

issue dedicated to John McGahern. It contains 17 interviews of short story writers (including one

of John McGahern) and a Compact Disc on which he reads “Korea” and “Parachutes.”


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