John McGahern and the commemoration of traditional rural Ireland

Eamon Maher

Issue 379, vol.95, Autumn 2006

An admirer of Tomas 0 Criomhthain’s commemoration of the disappearing culture of the Blasket Islands, McGahern’s novels offer us a lens through which we can view a vanishing Ireland. Aware that the civilization which he had known was in terminal decline, he set himself to capture its sights, sounds and smells, its characters and way of life, all that was central to the development of a community. Nor did he flinch from commemorating the “downside” of this conservative, rural society : interfering clerics, sexual abuse in the home, poverty, lack of socialising outlets, emigration.

It may have been rapidly obsolescing, but this traditional culture did have a completeness about it : it gave a rhythm to life, and the rhythm lent awareness – an awareness which could accomplish important mediations. In his own memoir, McGahern records : “in certain rare moments over the years, while walking in these lanes, I have come into an extraordinary sense of security, a deep peace, in which I feel that I can live forever. I suspect it is no more than the actual lane and the lost lane becoming one for a moment in an intensity of feeling, but without the usual attendants of pain and loss”. But to some of his characters, the vision of the “seer” is granted only when life is on the point of being snatched from them. There is the farmer (Moran) towards the end of his life who “had never realized when in the midst of confident life what an amazing glory he was part of”. We learn that the dying Elizabeth Reegan’s appreciation of nature and the passing seasons is mirrored by her love of the Rosary and the church services which were like the language of her youth : they have a permanence that is lacking in human life, a power to lift her above the perfidious earth. She is struck with inexpressible awe at the splendour of the ordinary; and even though in her present predicament this functions partly as a coping mechanism, she endeavours to soak in the different signs of quotidian existence.

A totally detached observer, however, could never have succeeded in making us feel sad (on finishing That They May Face The Rising Sun) to be leaving behind a community with whom we have shared some time. On the contrary, McGahern commemorates in a manner that gives flesh to what he holds dear, that brings his readers into an intimate relationship with the lost world’s characters. “What is permanent is the spirit or personality in language, the style, and that’s what lasts”. The emotion needs to be rendered in the style.

Eamon Maher teaches English literature at the Institute of Technology, Tallaght, Dublin 24.