'All toppers': children in the fiction of John McGahern.(Critical Essay)

John McGahern's first two books were considered at the time of their publication to belong to a literature of protest, to be concerned most fundamentally with exposing the cruelties and privations of Irish rural life at mid-century. Despite their 'un-novelistic' narrowness of focus, The Barracks and The Dark were interpreted as outcries against social conditions in the Irish Republic in general, and against the temporal power of the Roman Catholic Church in particular. The controversy that erupted in early 1966 following the revelation of the author's dismissal from his position as a primary schoolteacher in Clontarf the previous year buttressed the view of him as a rebel artist, though McGahern himself was persistent in his repudiation of any intention beyond the purely aesthetic in his writing. It must be acknowledged that the pitilessly clear-eyed apprehension of the inadequacies and hypocrisies of Catholic Ireland in both works--particularly The Dark, with its vivid scenes of family violence and its suggestion of a clerical disposition towards sexual abuse (in chapter twelve)--gave a degree of plausibility to the belief that McGahern was motivated in his early fiction to challenge the pieties and perhaps even the power of the near totalitarian church-state system in which he himself, in his capacity as a teacher in a Catholic primary school, was unhappily implicated. Moreover, the references to Reegan's past as an IRA fighter in The Barracks seemed to adumbrate a glancing critique of the failed promise of the southern Irish state.

As four further novels and three volumes of shorter fiction have succeeded The Barracks and The Dark, however, it has become clear that McGahern has never been in more than a very secondary sense a political writer and that such social commentaries as his work provides are marginal to his main purpose. His primary thematic interest is metaphysical. '[A]ll human life is essentially in the same fix', he observes in his autobiographical essay, 'The Solitary Reader', (1) and his novels and stories are concerned with the general conditions of being, with how life is lived and has to be lived. (In saying this it is only fair to point out that in interviews the author is notably reluctant to make concessions towards any thematic generalizations about his work, preferring to draw attention to his aesthetic and procedural priorities). (2) The historical, geographical, and cultural contingencies of McGahern's writing--its Irish details--function as intimately known, paradigmatic instances of those conditions. McGahern emerges from the full range of his fiction as a writer powerfully engaged with process, with the cyclical rhythms of birth, growth, copulation, and death, and with the sometimes fierce clashes of will that serve the instincts for sex and survival. The essentials of his fictional vision are highlighted alike by the title and narrative of 'Wheels', the opening story in his first collection, Nightlines, which focuses on the turn brought about by time in the power battle between a son and his ageing father. Indeed the wheel would become the central motif of the subsequent fiction, developed in the imagery of many of the stories as well as in the variously cyclical, seasonal narrative structures of the novels.

McGahern is not, however, a deterministic or reductive writer. His concern is as much with the resistance of consciousness to the accidental, material 'givens' of human life, those foundations without which it could not exist but in terms of which it is never wholly to be understood, as with the brute facts of bodily development and dissolution. He is celebrated for the mimetic power and empirical precision of his evocations of Irish rural and small town experience, and it might justly be observed that his fictional touch falters only when (in stories like 'Peaches' and 'The Beginning of an Idea', or over long stretches of both versions of the second half of The Leavetaking), he attempts to get his writing to breathe a purer serene than the claustrophobia of Irish life in the fifties and sixties. That They May Face the Rising Sun might seem to present an exception to this general rule, given that its unfaltering authorial touch serves a reposeful and celebratory atmosphere and a late twentieth-century chronology, but even here McGahern is concerned with characters who had their formative years in the heyday of the church-state consensus. The mature artist, as George Moore famously observed, 'takes the material closest to hand', (3) and McGahern's preference for settings of which he had direct experience in childhood and the early years of adulthood is less a limitation than an earnest of his commitment to an ideal of representational authenticity. (In interviews he characteristically speaks of style as a matter of accuracy, of getting things 'right', of fictional procedure as the discovery of appropriate modes of expression for precedent realities). (4) It is a strikingly old-fashioned ideal, perhaps, evincing as it does a faith in the naturalist aesthetics that have been problematized over and over again in twentieth-century writing--not least by the work of McGahern's compatriot and near-contemporary John Banville--but it is no less creatively enabling an ideal for that. (5)

It is arguable that almost all of the extensions of McGahern's fictional world beyond the immediate domestic circumstances of the author's childhood are based on experiences in the earlier part of his life. Thus the Moroneys, the Protestant family who made their library available to him when he was a boy, and of whom he writes with gratitude in 'The Solitary Reader', appear to serve as models for the Anglo-Irish throughout the fiction. Two stints as a labourer in England--in 1954, when he spent the summer after graduating from teacher training college working on a London building site, and again twelve years later, at the other end of the teaching career which had given him the materials of most of the Dublin stories--provide an obvious source for the depiction of the lives of Irish navvies in the precisely brutal 'Hearts of Oak and Bellies of Brass' and in 'Faith, Hope and Charity'. Indeed, the concern with the fortunes of the Irish in England in more recent decades--as sketched in Amongst Women in relation to the emigrant lives of Luke, Maggie, and Michael and, with memorable pathos, in the portrayal of the near extinction of Johnny's personality by the contingencies of his transplanted, bachelor existence in That They May Face the Rising Sun--probably had its origins in this pair of early, relatively brief sojourns. (6) If the biographical grounds of the fiction are less than expansive, McGahern's capacity for imaginative amplification of his resources is so considerable that the novels and stories together offer a richer and more various social portraiture than his occasional pronouncements on Irish class ...