John McGahern's work has dominated the Irish literary landscape for almost forty years. First rendered famous by his first novel The Barracks, the writer then underwent the painful process of censorship and self-imposed exile after the banning of The Dark. If the following novels, The Leavetaking, The Pornographer and Amongst Women have aroused increasing interest in his work and attracted praise and controversy, the three collections of short stories, Nightlines(1970), Getting Through (1978)..

Louvel, Liliane

OpenEdition

 Journal of the Short Story in English
Les Cahiers de la nouvelle 
34 | Spring 2000
Notes on the Irish and Irish-North-American short
story
Introduction
Liliane Louvel
Édition électronique
URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/515
ISSN : 1969-6108
Éditeur
Presses universitaires d'Angers
Édition imprimée
Date de publication : 1 mars 2000
ISSN : 0294-04442
 
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Introduction
Liliane Louvel
1 John McGahern's work has dominated the Irish literary landscape for almost forty years.
First rendered famous by his first novel The Barracks,  the writer then underwent the
painful process of censorship and self-imposed exile after the banning of The Dark. If the
following  novels,  The  Leavetaking,  The  Pornographer and Amongst  Women have  aroused
increasing interest in his work and attracted praise and controversy, the three collections
of short stories, Nightlines(1970), Getting Through (1978) and High Ground (1985), together
with the stories  published separately,  have definitely ensured McGahern's  place as  a
master of the genre, a stylist and a poet. The shape of the short story has enabled the
writer to build up patiently a microcosm through a microcosmic form and to refine his
manner "increasingly experimental and conscious of its own patterns as poetic fiction" to
quote Denis Sampson.
2 This is what the following contributions explore. D. Sampson tries to capture the essence
of "the rich whole" quoted in "Wheels", the seminal first story of McGahern's very first
collection Nightlines:  "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."(CS
10-11).  Sampson  grants  memory  a  creative  role  especially  when  it  surges  in  an
unexpected  way  in  the  midst  of  a  very  imperfect  life.  Marcel  Proust's  influence  is
recognizable  in  McGahern's  work  and  acknowledged  by  the  writer  himself.  Many
instances of the power of the past recaptured through the emergence of a "lost image", a
process similar to M. Proust's "lost time" can be found in the short stories. The priest in
"The Wine Breath" experiences such a surge of the past when the light on the snow calls
up a past episode of his life: "It was the evening light on snow. The gate on which he had
his hand vanished, the alders, Gillespie's formidable bulk, the roaring of the saw. He was
in another day, the lost day of Michael Bruen's funeral nearly thirty years before. All was
silent and still there." (CS 178)
3 Although conceived as separate units, the short stories are all connected and links can be
traced between them. This is what Denis Sampson, Maguy Pernot-Deschamps and Liliane
Louvel analyze in their essays. Although each story is of course complete and forms a rich
Introduction
Journal of the Short Story in English, 34 | 2008
1
whole unto itself it is connected to its neighbours in a subtle pattern of repetitions and
echoes.  Toponyms,  onomatics,  historical  references,  all  build  up  the  portrait  of  a
community,  that  of  Irish  society  in  the  middle  of  the  twentieth  century.  If  the
Roscommon-Leitrim countryside is the locus of many stories some of them also depict
city life either in Dublin and London. M. Pernot-Deschamps confronts the ideals of the
different generations, and the failure of the dreams of the older generation which entails
a  feeling of  loss  for  the children of  the Free State  and later  the Republic.  The gaps
between ideals and reality provoke a general sense of failure. The church is unable to
provide a suitable model and the school as well as the political system cut poor figures:
the politicians are opportunists, the teachers hopeless.
4 The  failure  of  the  dream extends  to  the  few  remaining  members  of  the  Protestant
ascendancy who have lost their status.  "Old Fashioned" and "The Conversion of John
Kirkwood" show the Sinclairs and the Kirkwoods in a state of decline and the famous Big
House is deteriorated. The younger generation is disillusioned too. Lost is the sense of
purpose that drove their fathers and they are failures in their private relationships. This
leads to conflicts and bitterness.
5 John  McGahern's  short  stories  mainly  explore  two  types  of  conflictual  relationships
which the five papers identify and analyze: the confrontation between fathers and sons,
and that  between men and women.  Resentment,  misunderstanding and hatred often
govern the rebellious sons in front of the father-figure driven by "bouts of fury"; this is
what M. Pernot-Deschamps sees in terms of patriarchy. Brought back by traditions such
as haymaking, the son has to regain his place in his father's house and submit to his
whims.  "Gold  Watch",  "Wheels",  "Korea"  stage  in  a  poignant  way  the  difficult
relationships between fathers and sons. 
6 What D. Sampson sees as "a drama of opposites" is central to McGahern's work: yearning
and loss, desire and defeat,  beginnings and endings, departures and returns, city and
country form antithetical couples on a mode which also characterizes the relationships
between fathers and sons, men and women. The "loss of certainties about love and the
loss of traditional values" M. Pernot-Deschamps evokes, is minutely explored by Jacques
Sohier and Dominique Dubois in their studies of "Peaches" and "My Love, My Umbrella".
7 In  his  Lacanian  interpretation  of  "Peaches",  J.  Sohier  sees  desire  as  a  slip-up  and
consequently studies the "slipping away of desire from the main character".  In what
could be called "scenes from conjugal life", the couple's problematic relationship reveals
that the man, a writer, apparently enjoying being instead of trying to acquire possessions
or doing, is actually "rotting away" as much as the carcass of a shark stranded on the
nearby beach.  Symbolism is  structurally  active in this  story located in Spain,  a  very
distant country from the usual McGahernian landscape. The confrontation between the
self and the other, the disappearance of desire or its "aphanisis" (to speak in the language
of J. Lacan), illustrated by the mind-boggling sentence: "what might be the desire of a
man without desire", the political issue raised by the conflict of power in the diegesis
between the man and the father-figure of the magistrate, the sadistic tendencies of the
characters leading to the abolition of the other and to a master-slave type of relationship,
all culminate in the disappearance of the subject pushed to flight. Symbolism organizes
the story and has to be deciphered by the reader. J. Sohier shows how a coherent series
can be traced between the stinking shark and the stinking sterile writer. The peaches of
the title actually represent a symbolical rape when the magistrate forcefully pushes them
down the woman's front pocket. The gash still showing below the woman's eye, a scar
Introduction
Journal of the Short Story in English, 34 | 2008
2
from a former accident due to her husband's inadequate driving, may also be seen as a
"murderous acting-out  on a  narcissistic  woman" as  Sohier  phrases  it.  Water  lavishly
gushing out or on the contrary being strictly measured also effectively figures desire,
"the most potent figure of all" being earth hankering after water. 
8 Dominique Dubois also chose to explore the difficulties of communication between lovers
and the failure of desire in another short story "My Love, My Umbrella", by resorting to
the findings of pragmatics, particularly Grice's theory, and his maxims of conversational
behaviour. D. Dubois thus concentrates on the characters' utterances and silences. He
examines the different discursive strategies used in "My Love, My Umbrella", a love story
complete  with encounter,  fulfillment  and breaking apart.  The homodiegetic  narrator
remains nameless which is also the case of his partner. In "Peaches", as well, the two
protagonists  were  just  called  "the  man"  and  "the  woman"  thus  acquiring  a  generic
quality. Concerning "My Love, My Umbrella", D. Dubois sees this absence of naming as a
proof  of  the characters'  inability to share personal  feelings and ideas.  The failure of
communication  reflects  the  characters'  incapacity  to  love,  their  alienation  and  the
meaninglessness of their lives. D. Dubois shows that the failure of the relationship was
already encapsulated in the beginning of the short story when in the characters' first
exchanges the woman was reluctant to answer the young man's eagerness and constantly
flouted  the  maxims  of  conversation  as  defined  by  Grice.  She  refuses  to  engage  in
conversation and either  merely  repeats  the  narrator's  words  or  provides  inadequate
replies  refusing  to  keep  the  conversation  going.  The  narrator's  inadequacy  and
reluctance to engage in any form of social commitment, in this case marriage, brings the
relationship  to  an  end.  Indirect  comment  is  passed  on  the  characters'  failure  at
interpersonal relationship by dint of a conversation overheard in a pub: "Now we both
listened.[the poet] was saying[…] it was the quality of the love that mattered and not the
accident." (CS 66-67). Another indirect comment is provided by the lyrics of the well-
known song "The Man I Love" which picture the portrait of a man totally antithetical to
the narrator. The two characters are unable to evoke personal topics; they let their bodies
achieve a relationship which turns out to be too frustrating and incomplete to go on.
Indirection is a strategy characteristic of McGahern's work and finally, it is through the
telling of two stories that the two characters eventually confront their own ill-assortment
and inability to understand one another as they each fail to react to the other's story in
the expected way. Again in this story, the reader's quest for meaning has to follow the
path  of  symbolism.  The  rain  and  the  umbrella  are  phallic  symbols  and  reflect  the
narrator's own inadequacy. D.  Dubois recalls that the umbrella stands for a timorous
refusal to any form of fecundity and also for escapism. Thus, through the manipulation of
dialogues, diegetic situations and symbolism, McGahern manages to picture a doomed-
from-the-start story and the impotency of a pathetic narrator. 
9 McGahern's constant preoccupation with human relationships and the power game his
characters are engaged in is carefully analyzed by all contributors. Subtle strategies of
evasion  are  traceable  in  dialogues,  silence,  body  language  when  characters  find
themselves in the midst of conflicts, personal contradictions leading to deadends. The
writer listens to the world and records it, recapturing its fragrance thanks to a fine poetic
shape. This is what L. Louvel tries to show in taking up McGahern's only piece of criticism
"the Image" and by showing how the work of memory fuels imagination rendered in its
turn by powerful images which structure the text. The image is linked to the rhythm and
to the voice as, according to L. Louvel, the short stories truly are the work of a story
Introduction
Journal of the Short Story in English, 34 | 2008
3
teller. Thus the voice gives the text its flesh; one only has to read aloud McGahern's text
to hear a very particular voice. 
10 The short story being a form conditioned by its length has to resort to all sorts of tricks to
be able to say more thanks to less; hence the careful use of stylistic and rhetoric devices
such as chiasma, alliterations, parallels as well as that of metaphors, metonymies and
symbolism, a trait acknowledged by all the contributors. McGahern's short stories testify
to a mastery of this problematic genre which thus justifies and rewards all research work.
In truly McGahernian fashion, let us end as we began, with the image of the wheel which
opened up the first collection. Not only is it the perfect image of a stylistic and structural
trait typical of McGahern's "manner"—the circularity of the short stories and the novels,
the insistence on cycles, circles and repetition erected to the level of metaphysics— but it
also shows what a collection is, i.e., a whole represented by its exterior circle, made up of
smaller  parts,  its  spokes,  eventually  mixed  up  all  together  as  the  wheel  turns  and
progresses forward by slightly replacing the same by the other. 
AUTEURS
LILIANE LOUVEL
Introduction
Journal of the Short Story in English, 34 | 2008
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