The Irish novel in crisis? The example of John McGahern.

Given the rapid rate of social and economic change in Ireland in the past few decades, it would be logical to expect that the novel form should have undergone, and be undergoing, serious upheaval. However, that is not really the case generally speaking, and certainly not if your focus is John McGahern. Certain authors have experimented with different approaches in terms of narrative (John Banville, Patrick McCabe, Colum McCann, Jennifer Johnston, and Roddy Doyle for example) but one does not get the impression that Irish writers are all that keen to abandon completely the traditional novel form. John McGahern is seen by many commentators as a realist, which is a fair assessment of most of his fictional writings and, yet, as we will see, he has also experimented with form, though never to the extent of other novelists. Maurice Harmon points to an interesting evolution in the Irish novel of the twentieth century:

 
   Perhaps understandably the Irish novel since the fifties has not 
   been concerned specifically with Irish society. The kind of 
   political and social engagements to be found at the height of 
   O'Faolain's career in the forties, in a host of articles and 
   editorials, is almost completely absent from the writings of 
   Aidan Higgins, John McGahern or Edna O'Brien. (1) 

Instead of concentrating on social issues, novelists like McGahern tended to focus on what Harmon refers to as 'the private graph of feeling within the individual person'. (2) This does not, however, prevent him from capturing the preoccupations and concerns of Irish society at a time of flux. An interesting example of what can happen to the novel during a period of turbulence is provided by France. During the 1950s, after the trauma of World War II, we see the emergence there of the New Novel. Characterized by a fragmented style and non-linear narrative, the new novelists called into question the traditional pact between reader and writer. This form of writing enjoyed much success with talented exponents such as Claude Simon, Michel Butor, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Samuel Beckett, Marguerite Duras, and Nathalie Sarraute. The latter, in her famous essay, L'ere du soupcon, (3) noted how the novel risked disappearing altogether because of the distrust with regard to its efficacy that had taken hold of both the reader and the writer. Gone were the days when the realist and naturalist novelists would minutely describe how their characters were dressed, the environment in which they lived, their ancestors and revenue, in the belief that such things told us what people were like. In the intervening period there had been Freud and Jung: the recesses of the human mind were shown to be extremely complex and impervious to logical representation. The idea of the novel was clearly in crisis in France at this time. In his essay, 'What is an Author?', Michel Foucault showed how the idea of an author, which we tend to take for granted, as a timeless, irreducible category, is really a 'function' of discourse which has changed in the course of history. He ends his essay with the provocative lines:

 
   All discourses, whatever their status, form, value, and whatever 
   the treatment to which they will be subjected, would then develop 
   in the anonymity of a murmur. We would no longer hear the 
   questions that have been rehashed for so long: 'Who really spoke? 
   Is it really he and not someone else? With what authenticity or 
   originality ...' Instead, there would be other questions, like 
   these: 'What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where 
   has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate 
   it for himself?' ... And behind all these questions, we would hear 
   hardly anything but the stirring of an indifference: 'What 
   difference does it make who is speaking?' (4) 

You may be thinking that we have strayed a long way from the Irish novel but really the crisis described by Foucault and by other critics such as Barthes (5) is relevant to the context in which I wish to treat of McGahern. He is an author who has long bemoaned the fact that post-Independence Ireland was an amorphous society, (6) a situation that rendered the progress of the novel problematic. There were other factors at work also. The twentieth century saw Ireland shedding the shackles of centuries of colonial rule in the attempt to forge a new identity. The Anglo-Irish Protestant aristocracy was one of the first casualties of the break with British rule. The native Catholic bourgeois class replaced them and the negative side of this abrupt upheaval is well summed up by Maurice Harmon: