Writing violence: John McGahern and Flannery O’Connor

This chapter looks in close detail at two stories, written by authors of very different background: ‘The Beginning of an Idea’ by John McGahern, a chronicler of mid to late 20th century rural Ireland, and ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ by Flannery O’Connor, a chronicler of the American South. The chapter traces what correspondence there might arise between these writers from Catholic backgrounds, and the impact faith has on their comprehension of male violence - rape in the Mc Gahern story, and murder in O’Connor’s. The chapter emphasizes what, spiritually and socially, connects and disconnects both authors, and shows how the two stories, diverse in style and approach, but sharing an underlying sense of brutality, illustrate their respective authors’ interest in human inclination for violence and evil.

The lived narrative versus the learned narrative

John McGahern, in his fiction and memoir, follows an ancient bardic tradition exemplified in our time by the poets Seamus Heaney and Sorley MacLean. This chapter takes a more personal approach to make connections between the author’s childhood in a small place on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, and the early years of John McGahern, Seamus Heaney and Sorley MacLean, a Scottish poet. The chapter examines the author’s own formation as a journalist and novelist – a journey greatly influenced by McGahern and by the strong Irish and Scottish tradition of Breton Island - alongside that of the three writers. It explores the relationship between growing up on an island and a sense of isolation and inferiority that might go with it, and the impact that this kind of life might have had on McGahern’s, Heaney’s and MacSorley’s work and personality.

Love and sex: McGahern’s personal and detached reflections

While social scientists provide description and explanation of the institutions, discourses and long-term processes of social change that structure culture, McGahern gives his readers a sense of what it was like to live in Catholic Ireland in the latter half of the twentieth century. He reveals the ways in which people were constrained by their culture but also the ways that they constructed themselves and negotiated cultural mores. His work delves into their ways of being and representing themselves, their strategies of action and performance of identity. The Pornographer provides key insights into the shift from rural to urban society and the decline in the importance of the Catholic Church in everyday life. This chapter explores how McGahern reveals what it was like to make love and have sex in Ireland during the shift from a Catholic culture of self-denial to a modern urban, cosmopolitan culture of self-fulfilment and self-indulgence. It also examines the gap between the critical reflection of the novelist and the lack of critical reflection and insight into this clash of cultures in his own life, as revealed in Memoir.

Introduction

This chapter gives the readers a brief introduction to, or an overview of, McGahern’s literary output and his constant pursuit of exactitude and precision of style in his writing. It outlines the aims and purpose of the essay collection and offers the editors’ rationale for the publication of the collection and for the inclusion of the chosen essays, which display a diversity of perspectives, interpretations and critical approaches. The chapter summarises the main achievements of each essay, but above all it addresses matters of authority and vision in McGahern’s fiction, as well as the reasons for the sustained interest in, and appreciation for, his work.

John McGahern

This very short chapter works as a sort of homage to McGahern the generous friend, writer and interviewee. Taking as a starting point an interview conducted by Melvyn Bragg for the then newly-formed BBC2, in 1966, the chapter throws light on those early years when McGahern was merely a newcomer. It gives glimpses into McGahern’s personality, as well as the interest and respect he invoked in others, but mostly it offers memories of moments, places, people, phrases uttered – all of which bring alive both McGahern the writer and the man at the beginning of his writing life.

Inside McGahern’s workshop

Another personal piece, this chapter traces the artistic beginnings and formation of the poet, Paula Meehan, former Chair of Irish Poetry, seen through the prism of a creative writing workshop delivered by John McGahern at the beginning of Meehan’s career, in Galway of 1979. The chapter brings closer McGahern the teacher and the mentor, contemplating his writing habits, his thoughts on the act of writing and on the accompanying solitude. The chapter considers McGahern’s views on the art of fiction and shows how passionately he emphasised, and tried to convey, the importance of working hard at writing, rewriting and starting again, being ruthless with oneself in order to ‘master the material’.

Learning to love the world: the educational vision of John McGahern1

Policy documents on education tend to envisage the activity of learning in terms of the acquisition of skills. Yet, this notion implies that individuals are composed of discrete accomplishments detached from the core of their personalities, and in some way this does violence to the unity of the human person and to the integrity of education as a practice. Properly speaking, education is identity constitutive. From the point of view of philosophy of education, this chapter considers the ways in which McGahern articulates how the experience of learning came to shape his sensibility and his very identity. The discussion focuses on Memoir, essays from the collection Love of the World and interviews, to show how these reveal richly textured insights into the nature of education, and that what we learn comes to constitute the core of our personalities, and thus forms part of our very identities.

John McGahern’s ‘Oldfashioned’ and Anglo-Irish culture

In the short story ‘Oldfashioned’, McGahern repeats many of the tropes found in twentieth-century literary works about the Anglo-Irish. What makes this story unique, however, is that McGahern’s treatment of the Anglo-Irish is closer to that of writers from Anglo-Irish Anglican backgrounds than it is to writers from his own Catholic Nationalist background. Whereas twentieth-century Catholic Nationalist writers often subtly mock the Anglo-Irish for being out-of-touch, snobbish, and psychologically compromised by their ‘Britishness’, McGahern suggests that Anglo-Irish Anglicans are often gracious, aesthetically-minded, intellectual, and less gossipy and venally materialistic than Irish Catholics. This chapter argues that, in this, McGahern demonstrates openness to all traditions on the island and a freedom from the narrow-gauge republican perspective common to his father’s generation.

‘What was it all for?’1 John McGahern’s critique of Irish republican nationalism: an ethical reading

John McGahern’s work reflects profound scepticism concerning 1916 and the legacy of the Irish War of Independence, as well as a subversive attitude towards the original spirit of revolution. The early novels – The Barracks, and Amongst Women, with their post-revolutionary figures represented by characters like Reegan and Moran, might be said to be still in the throes of the founding revolutionary event, while in That They May Face the Rising Sun, McGahern’s last novel, the critique of republicanism focuses on the ‘new’ modern day republican activist, depicted by the character of Jimmy Joe McKiernan. Using Levinas, who defines ethics as critique, the primacy of ethics being the experience of the encounter with the Other, this chapter examines the tensions surrounding McKiernan’s place in the local community where political violence is seen to be both tolerated and condemned.

Hand-rails to the past: McGahern and the memory of the Irish revolution

This chapter looks at the way McGahern represents the memory of the Irish revolution in Amongst Women, That They May Face the Rising Sun, and in his autobiographical writings. The disillusioned and often bitter reflections of his protagonists partly reflect his own family’s experience, but also echo a strong reaction among writers and ex-activists in the 1920s and 1930s, whose responses and regrets are traced through the writings of people such as P.S. O’Hegarty, Desmond Ryan, Ernie O’Malley and Bulmer Hobson, as well as private letters and reflections. It is suggested that McGahern is in a sense channelling a powerful theme in the history of independent Ireland, that of living with the memory of violence by means of evasion and suppression, and that this lends his fiction a historical dimension which has not been fully appreciated.