(réf. Etudes Britanniques Contemporaines
n° 6. Montpellier: Presses universitaires de Montpellier,
1995)
57
One God, one disciple: the case of John McGahern
David Coad
(Université de
Valenciennes)
The
case of Irish novelist and short story writer, John McGahern, is an interesting
amalgam of coterie hype and critical silence, with one Agonistes in the
wilderness seeking converts. McGahern's oeuvre extends over thirty years,
from The Barracks (1963) to the
52page play, The Power of Darkness,
first performed at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in 1991. One would have
thought that thirty years was enough time to become known as an artist or
intellectual; nine interviews are recorded for the 1980s and seven listed
since 1990. There seems to be a marked discrepancy, however, between reviewers'
opinions of McGahern's work on the one hand, and a virtual silence from the
critics on the other. This, I think, deserves attention. Articles on the
Irish author, nearly all emanating from Ireland, are rudimentary, repetitious
and laden with plot summary. In this dearth of critical debate, one monograph
has recently appeared, Denis Sampson's
Outstaring Nature's Eye: The Fiction
of John McGahern (1993) (1). Sampson was the guest editor for
the "Special John McGahern Issue" of The
Canadian Journal of Irish Studies (vol. XVII, N°1, July 1991) which
is the most comprehensive collection of articles on the novelist before the
appearance of Sampson's first book. Sampson continues and prolongs the ecstatic
laudamus te
of fellow novelists rallied to the McGahern cause (John Updike
in the United States, Anthony Burgess, John Fowles and David Lodge in England,
John Banville in Ireland). Still, Sampson's god has been ignored for three
decades by those whose job it is to render praise. Either Sampson, believing
media and sales hype, has chosen to follow a false god (and this would help
explain the lack of critical attention), or there has been gross injustice
concerning "Ireland's most important contemporary novelist"
(2).
_______________
1.
SAMPSON D., Outstaring Nature's Eye:
The Fiction of John McGahern, Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1993.
|
We are
introduced
in
The Barracks to a typically Irish, typically McGahern family
unit. The father is boorish, authoritarian, intellectually impoverished and
inarticulate, suffering from a lack of love and lack of personal recognition.
Reproducing his own family (McGahern lost his mother when he was ten), the
mother (or aunt), is usually dead or dying in a McGahern novel. In
The Barracks, a step-mother has
entered the family. This is the only novel where the (step-)mother occupies
the principal attention. In all his other novels, McGahern has a man or boy
as the principal narrative interest. Elizabeth Reegan, the main character
of The Barracks, suspects cancer
of the breast early in the novel, is diagnosed cancerous, undergoes an operation,
has a couple of heart attacks, and dies. That is what happens in the novel.
The Barracks, however, is not about
cancer or illness. McGahern attempts a psychological portrait of a woman
trapped – trapped into marriage, into a family which is not her own,
into sickness, and finally into a certain, not distant death. Marriage, family,
sickness and foreknowledge of death all restrict and inhibit the ailing Elizabeth
Reegan. The Barracks is about possible
escape routes or exits from an intolerable fate as an Irish
wife/mother/patient.
Several
means of coping with destiny are explored and all rejected as unsatisfactory:
escape to England, escape through memory to one's former healthy life, the
solace offered by the Catholic religion, resignation to one's fate, fighting
against one's fate, escape through the mundane minutiae of living and love.
McGahern sets out to show that none of these survival techniques works. Elizabeth
Reegan at the end of the novel is alienated from her family and environment,
frustrated and engulfed by the futility and "the horrible meaninglessness
of it all" (3), whilst apprehending a "sense of mystery" (211) whatever
that means. As AC. Molloy notes: "[there is] no moment of revelation, no
final insight into the mystery of being" (4). It has all been for
nothing. Life goes on: Reegan still spats with Quirke, the kids still squabble
about whose blind went down first. "You just go out like a light in the end"
(226) is Reegan's sum total of grief. If McGahern's intention is to show
that life in Ireland is bleak, miserable and dark, then he has succeeded
in The Barracks in portraying a
world devoid of imagination, where sterility, hostility and meaninglessness
are the hallmarks of living. The next four novels merely repeat the same
refrain.
When
asked what they think of The Barracks,
readers usually come up with: "It's a bit depressing, isn't it?" This
reaction, devoid of any literary discernment, is understandable. McGahern's
universe is devastatingly dreary, depressingly dank. The void, lack, loss
and emptiness characterize some of his preoccupations. One is struck by the
overwhelming use of negatives in the novel: no, not, never, not anything,
no one etc. A word or idea often
_______________
3.
MCGAHERN J., The Barracks, London:
Faber and Faber, 1991, p.204. All references to the novel are to this
edition.
|
repeated
is "nothing." Over 130 occurrences of the word are to be found in 230 pares.
The Barracks is therefore predominantly
about nothing. For over 200 pages, Elizabeth Reegan fights with the "refusal
to admit she knew nothing and was nothing in herself."
(211)
One
word which crops up under the pen of Sampson, and others, is
existentialist to describe Elizabeth
Reegan's plight. It sounds plausible to theorize about this cancerous woman's
ontological and epistemological aporia. Without turning to the philosophy
of Kierkegaard or Sartre, critics find a (watered-down) version of existentialism
in The Barracks. If this philosophy
has something to do with the individual and systems, with intentionality,
being and absurdity, with the nature and significance of choice, with the
role of extreme experiences and with the nature of communication, then Elizabeth
Reegan's plight should/must be existentialist.
Now,
I think one should be careful about using philosophical terms for a writer
who is as unphilosophical as McGahern. What Sampson means by "existentialist"
could be rephrased in the critic's own words as "this absurd reality of human
experience" (5). Existentialism may lead to, but it is not synonymous
with, absurdism. There is little point bringing Camus into a discussion of
McGahern, as Sampson does, given the former's unintellectual interest in
the French writer, as revealed in an interview with Patrick Godon: "I like
his travel writing very much .... I wouldn't read Camus for his
ideas"'.
Other
questionable terms in critics', especially Sampson's, discussion of
The Barracks are "metaphysical"
and "religious." In the chapter devoted to this novel, Sampson purports that
McGahern's poetic [?] realism alludes to an "ultimate reality" that is "personal
and metaphysical rather than social" (7). Again Sampson uses philosophical
language to describe the main character's "quest." We need to ask ourselves,
however, is this sort of language appropriate? When we read this chain of
"profound" questions on page 85: "What was it all about? Where was she going?
What was she doing? What was it all about?" are we not struck by trite
clichés, repetition, and mock "existential[ist]"
discourse?
A
little further, Sampson speaks of Elizabeth's "examination of a religious
sense of ultimate reality becom[ing] a central part of her effort to understand
suffering and death" (8). It
_______________
5.
SAMPSON, op. cit., p. 34. |
60
is
difficult to know what the word "religious" is doing in this sentence, or
what the critic means by "ultimate reality." If religious means pious, devout
and concerning religion, these aspects of human behaviour have very little
to do with Elizabeth. Her conception and understanding of Catholicism is
puerile and therefore wanting. In a sentence, worthy of Hemingway, McGahern
tries to engage our pity: "[Elizabeth's and Reegan's] lives were flowing
apart and she was alone and he was alone and it was somehow sad and weepycreepy"
(116). The use of this colloquial word (absent from the
OED) at the end of the sentence
trivialises what is already without much interest. How can we possibly use
the word "tragic" or "existentialist" or "metaphysical" for something
weepycreepy?
(9)
An
annoying habit of Sampson is to blow this domestic drama out of all proportion
by bringing into the debate writers of distinction who sit uneasily with
McGahern. In this one essay on The
Barracks, we find: "[Elizabeth and Reegan] both struggle with Beckettian
dilemmas"; "[Elizabeth's] freedom takes on Proustian implications";
"[Elizabeth's] mystical sense of an overwhelming beauty in nature [is] like
Gertrude Morel['s] in D.H. Lawrence's
Sons and
Lovers"; there is an
"ambivalence of King
Lear"; there are echoes of "certain poems of Yeats regarding death"
(10). Rather than namedropping and running to the "greats" to find
forced, exaggerated parallels, it would have been more helpful to show the
specificity of McGahern. What is the particular achievement of McGahern in
The Barracks
then?
It
must be said that McGahern's attempt at a psychological portrait of a woman
afflicted by cancer tends to fail in The
Barracks. Despite the two hundred pages, we never feel as though we know
the main character because there isn't much to know. It is true that we see
a woman ground into a daily routine, dissatisfied with her lot, afloat in
a world of smallminded, petty, snivelling people. But such is the lot of
millions of people. McGahern fails to conceive a character with knowable,
identifiable characteristics. Everything about Elizabeth Reegan is banal
and profoundly uninteresting. The same can be said for her nihilist
exlover, Halliday. He is such a sketchily presented, minor, cardboardlike
creation that his oft repeated "cry" which stays in Elizabeth's memory: "What
the hell is all this living and dying about anyway, Elizabeth?" (85), is
hardly proof of an "existential" crisis.
_______________
9.
Cf. SAMPSON, op. cit., p. 35
(footnote): "A case might be made
for seeing [The Barracks] as a
'modern tragedy'."
|
61
If
we compare The Barracks with another
novel where cancer is a subject of attention, Solzhenitsyn's
Cancer Ward, we are struck in the
latter novel by many personal and personalised case-histories of cancer.
The Russian novelist is able to capture one character's perception and fight
with cancer in half a page, whereas McGahern is unable to elicit our interest
in his character's cancer in over 200 pages. We believe in Kostoglotov, Rusanov
and Ludmila Afanasyevna in a way that makes McGahern's patient no more than
a flat, "unrounded" type: the Irish housewife. Michael J. Toolan identifies
the same problem in this comment on McGahern: "There is little sense of a
consistent expansion of theme or vision, a growing depth to the character
analysis, or any general advance from a bleak pessimism of mood"
(11).
One
of the main criticisms to be made of The
Barracks is the perfect marriage of form and content. Given McGahern
wants to insist on the run of the mill, dreary, depressing nature of Irish
society in the 1950s, but when the prose is itself so flat, deadpan and dreary,
there is hardly any pleasure in reading. McGahern's style has hardly altered
in thirty years. There is always the same monotonous, paratactic, uninventive
string of non-periodic sentences, often bordering on cheap melodrama, or
Barbara Cartland-type sentimental romance, as in the following: "She had
loved him, still loved him, and would love him till she died, but how was
she to tell him so?" (192) Not only is the prose lacking in imagination and
inventiveness, but the punctuation is unhelpful and often obstructive. McGahern
consistently breaks simple rules of sentence construction with no apparent
purpose. One of his favourite lapses is to punctuate with commas where full
stops are normally required. For example: "She had never served God much,
she had served herself all her life, but weren't the people who were serving
God serving their lives too, there was a notion that nobody went to heaven
or hell except they wanted to, she'd read it in a newspaper"(122). Five separate
thoughts are strung together with ill-fitting commas before we are allowed
to breathe thanks to one full stop at the end of the "sentence." McGahern's
punctuation on the whole is erratic, annoying, and
personal.
An
unsatisfactory quality of The Barracks
is the fact that there is so little, if any, change or development in
the main character. Elizabeth Reegan seems just as blighted, run down and
uninspired in chapter 1 as she does on her deathbed at the end. Reegan's
daily routine and fights with the establishment become tedious, as they most
probably are. The one thing that happens in the novel is telling his superior,
Quirke, where to go. This tends to become the climax, turning Elizabeth's
death into an anticlimactic accident. There is no
_______________
11.
TOOLAN M. J., "John McGahern: The Historian and the Pornographer,"
Canadian Journal of Irish Studies,
7. 2, 1981, p. 39.
|
62
hope
in a world of facts, penury, emotional cripples and victims of the system.
The "withering constriction" (12) not only describes Irish society,
but it can also allude to a mediocre talent, a depressingly dismal view of
the world where hope is non-existent.
The
reason for the relative silence of critics, as opposed to reviewers, is that
McGahern's art is minor. His fictional creations simply cannot stand under
the weight of "serious" critical discussion. McGahern is
not Beckett, Proust, D.H. Lawrence,
Yeats or Shakespeare. If only readers were to look at the aesthetic, artistic
and poetic void in The Barracks,
instead of inventing Dostoyevsky-type philosophical discourse, or treating
the novel as a sociological / historical document on the way they lived
in Ireland in the 1950s, then perhaps it might be evident that John McGahern
is not "Ireland's most important
contemporary novelist." Nor is he "a complex novelist" (13) as James
Cahalan pretends. Accolades such as "the leading novelist of his generation"
(14) are misleading, exaggerated sales hype, as is any mention of
Joyce in the same sentence, other than to describe country of
birth.
If
McGahern is such an important, skilled artist, as some critics avow, how
do we explain the absence of his name from recent works on Irish literature
published in
_______________
|
(réf. Etudes Britanniques Contemporaines
n° 6. Montpellier: Presses universitaires de Montpellier,
1995)