Critique of Cultural Aspects from Multiple Perspectives [612041]

Critique of Cultural Aspects from Multiple Perspectives

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MIGRATION, IDENTITY AND CHANGE FOR YOUNG HEROES
IN JOHN MCGAHERN’S FICTION

Dana RADLER1

Abstract

Torn between traditions, the sense of belonging to local communities and the urge to find a better living, young adult migrants are in John McGahern’ s prose both heroes and victims.
The purpose of this paper is to explore the connections and layers of their family environment and past, and of a fragile route to individual success and failure. Both male
and female characters feel rather confined when pl aced in urban sites, and their education
limits employment opportunities, while the degraded and degrading human topoi are
bitterly scrutinized in a blend of tragic and comedy. Examples taken from the collections of
short stories and novels attest that protagonists oscillate between physical and mental departures and arrivals, easy gain and shallow feelings that imprint characters a perceptible change and low self -confidence, despite a vibrant and apparently friendly
urban fabric .

Keywords : identity, diasp ora, Irishness, emigration, London.

1. Irish migration, diaspora and identity

The importance of memory in cultural studies in the last few decades is tributary to
several elements, part of our past and identities: the impact of world wars, the
geographical spread of migrants, an increased alienation and a re- found sense of
community and belonging in a traditional society, such as the Irish one, facing multiple changes and accumulations.

This paper aims at exploring the complex connections and layers of Jo hn
McGahern’s prose when analysed through the framework of memory, migration
and Irish studies connected to diasporic discourse. Valuable insights into this topic
were provided by Paul Ricoeur, Homi Bhabha, and Donald Ake nson (in Fitzgerald
and Lambkin, 2008: 224- 251). Irishness is about a world contained to itself, as well
as defined in opposition to otherness (Englishness): ‘civilized miracle’ versus a
complete ‘boredom’, or a ‘looped’ identity (Ricoeur, 1992: 28). In Oneself as
Another , Ricoeur declares:

1 Dana Radler, The Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Romania,
[anonimizat] .

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Literary narratives and life histories, far from being mutually exclusive, are
complementary, despite, or even because of their contrast. This dialectic reminds us that the narrative part is part of life before being exiled from life into writing; it
returns to life along the multiple paths of appropriation and at the price of
unavoidable tensions just mentioned. (Ricoeur, 1992: 163)

As Ellen McWilliams suggests in her study, the outline of the area revolves around the concepts of “exile”, “emigration” and “diaspora” as initially defined by
international relations theorists (2013: 8), taking characters in contemporary fiction
act as rake villains, prisoners of patriarchy, factors of irreverence and demystifiers
of traditional identity.

The analysis of representations of emigrants in modern Irish writing indicates that
“the majority of the London Irish were concentrated in the unskilled and lowest
paid sectors of the economy” (Murray, 2012: 23). This view is enriched and
complemented by Tom Herron’s intr oductory remarks, when he constructively
notes that London needs to be seen as a complementary site for Irish writing, in
addition to iconic places scattered across the homeland: “London is a place, an
idea, a signifier, a nexus, an imagined and actual com munity” that “has in fact
played as large a role in the Irish literary imagination as any city or place on the
island” ( Herron, 2013: 5), while McWilliams brings into the discussion feminine
voices in the fictional universe, since Irish authors placed emph asis on a
diverse range of experiences of the Irish woman emigrant and capture her at
different moments – on the verge of departure, looking back at the homeland,
reconnecting with home by return or through memory, and more often than not
engage with the same in ways that demonstrate keen a socio -historical specificity .
(McWilliams, 2013: 3)

The theme is productive in fiction both in terms of content and aesthetics, as
Yvonne O’Keefe and Claudia Reese note in their introductory observations to New
Voices, Inherited Lines , pointing the connections with social relationships and
feminine or masculine identities: “At the heart of many of these constructions of the Irish family are questions of power and agency, as well as issues of class,
gender, ethnicitie s and sexualities” (O’ Keefe and Reese, 2013: 1). For Clair W ills,
visiting and re -visiting immigration experience is essentially connected to a new
kind of fictional naturalism meant to suggest the detachment of young heroes from a patriarchal and archaic s ociety:
protagonists are would- be modern young men and women, who are beset by the
anachronism or the belatedness of post -war Irish society – it is as though the
impulse to move into a newer, more modern phase of civilisation is continually dragged back wards, or not allowed to develop in the first place . (Wills, 2015: 106).

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In terms of statistics for the decades under question, the late 60s when the author
left his homeland, worked and studied in London, and then moved for several years
to Finland, Franc e and Spain, demographic studies of the post -war era indicate a
general noteworthy decline of population, many Irish leaving their homeland to
work in Britain, with London as a first choice, as Delaney suggests:

Undoubtedly the majority of Irish migrants to Britain were from an agricultural
background (. . .) Three -quarters of the decline in the 1960s may be accounted for
by natural wastage, but the remainder can be attributed to the fact that twice as
many people left the agricultural labour force as ent ered it . (Delaney, 2000: 235).

According to Herron, the novelist and his younger brother and sisters “were among
these 600,000 emigrants” (2013: 64) pursuing education and a better life than at
home. Yet for the writer, emigration was to go one step fart her than his siblings,
because of the ban of his second novel, The Dark, in 1965, when he was refused to
continue working as a teacher in Ireland.

2. Emigrant heroes and urban topoi: between high expectations
and sheer realism

Irishness is for McGahern a very down -to-earth perspective, a sharp eye for details
and well -defined relationships for the people included in the local community, but
also a different sense of distance and belonging. For those in Leitrim, the area he spent many years in, the other pl aces located at about thirty miles around seem to
be the borders of people’s universe, and what is mostly valued is the news part of
each small community as proved in the appetite of the loca ls for freshly -delivered
news:
though I have written only about a small area, less than thirty miles, it would
nevertheless be considered enormous by the local people. (. . .) It is each single,
enclosed locality that matters, and everything that happens within it is of
passionate interest to those who live there . (Mc Gahern , 2013: 24)

For McGahern, one of the few negative perspectives of early adulthood spent in
Britain transpires through the experience of unqualified workers on London
construction sites, namely the description of men consuming their health in a
difficult working environment, yet being consumed, in their turn, by a false
perception of gratification and love. In “Hearts of Oaks and Bellies of Brass”, young men are pleased to count their money on the pay- day while a relatively aged
woman, Kathleen, tries to lure them to her place. Her face is flushed by alcohol and
her presence is nothing but a revolt against the senses to the voice of the novelist rejecting her excitement: “Only for her practised old hands it would have been
impossible to raise desire, and if it was evil when it happened, the pumping of the

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tension of the instinct into her glycerined hole, then nothing was so extraordinarily
ordinary as this evil” (1992: 37). The metaphoric title of this short story reveals the harsh condition of Irish im migrants living and working in the mid -sixties Britain
through such paradoxically -depicted personae: once young, strong and frank, the
Irish have turned their oak- wooded nature into a machinery devoured by the
English capitalist society suggested by “belli es of brass”, alluringly echoed by the
ironic reference to the metallic badges they wore: “We each had a thin brass medal
on which our number was stamped, a hole in the medal for hanging it in the nail in
the hut at night.” (1992: 36)

Men’s boredom, paral leled by their acknowledged lack of hope for coming years is
labelled unequivocally by their daily routine: “pork chops, pints of beer, and a
good od ride before you sleep” (1992: 32). The characters in the story are not of the
same age, but their percepti ons are rather similar; the young nameless main
character, as often the case in McGahern’s stories, does not want to reveal his
difference, though he is exposed to speak it out in a short dialogue about
Shakespeare: “Do you think Shakespeare’s all he’s bum ped up to be?” followed by
an evasive reaction: “I told him that I didn’t know if Shakespeare was all that he
was bumped up to be, but people said so, and it was people who did all the
bumping out or down” (1992: 34).

A clearly depreciative and gloomy ton e in assessing a man’s identity is displayed
in The End or the Beginning of Love
2, the unpublished manuscript describing the
life of Irish emigrants in London. Although the names of the main characters
change from other stories with a similar topic, McGahe rn conveys his realism and
keen judgement, though some of the opinions seem to reflect rather the view
expressed by the English vis -a-vis Irishmen working and living with them in the
1960s “Most of the Irish over here are the lowest of the low; they’re the dregs of
the country. You’d be ashamed of them; you don’t know what they are like”
(Sampson, 2012: 61). This point of view supports Brah’s vision about the identity
of the emigrant as inexorably linked to the narrative flow when he declares that the
“iden tity of the diasporic imagined community” in fiction is “constituted within the
crucible of the materiality of everyday life; in the everyday stories we tell ourselves
individually and collectively” ( Brah, 1996: 183).

The topoi of vicious human background present on London building sites around
the 1950s -1960s is satirized in “Faith, Hope and Charity” where two careless
workers, Cunningham and Murphy, cause their own death because of sheer
working negligence. Their naïve described behaviour consists of spending money
lavishly each summer on women “again and again, in childish hope that somehow
the next time they will find the root of all knowledge, and the equally childish
desire for revenge since it cannot be found” (1992: 146); and their inability to

2 See details in http://archives.library.nuigalway.ie/cgi -bin/FramedList.cgi?P71

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enjoy pleasure and reject facile Eros makes them gradually become “full of hatred”
and decrease the self -protection to the point of imminent danger:

they grew careless and their greed for money grew in order to make an even bigger
splash this summer than bef ore. Little by little the spaces between the metal bars
lengthened. They felt invulnerable: no matter how careless they were the bad
accident was bound to happen elsewhere . (1992: 146)

The development of the story reasserts that characters blend together in a mix of
comedy and tragedy: Joe Cunningham’s family decides to bring his body home for
the funeral, and then the priest calls them for support to raise the money needed to
pay for the transport of the deceased; his idea to organize a dance and collect ion is
agreed by and a small band is i nvited to play:

Faith, Hope and Charity were three old bachelor brothers, the Cryans, who played
at local functions. They had been known as ‘Faith, Hope and Charity’ for so long
that nobody now knew how their name be gan. Faith played the fiddle. Hope beat
out the rhythm on the drums. Charity was strapped into an old accordion that was
said to have come from America . (1992: 150)
The end shows the postman and the teacher engaged in a lively chat while the
collection i s completed and the dance is about to start on the music played by the
Faith, Hope and Charity. The combination of a funeral with a dance party suggests the ambivalent yet pragmatic role of the Church mixed with that of the local band,
in what may be seen a blend of devotion and hint to Celtic pagan rites still present
until the early 20
th century.
Cunningham’s sad end is illuminated by the name of the band playing at his
funeral: his life was far from any faith, hope and charity, but the liveliness of the
three old bachelors, as well as the postman nodding to the teacher in front of
“empty crates of stout” that locals start to disappear when the three brothers go into
“right old playing form” (1992: 150) makes the collection show that the burial
becomes a “splash” for the deceased, but that this is, perhaps, what he might have
wished for.

For several characters in The Leavetaking, most of whom are relatively young, life
in London is all about a safe job, sexual freedom, and intellectual opportunities:
“We were not worried. We were young. A jazz record was put on the gramophone.
The glasses were filled again. We began to dance.” ( McGahern, 2009: 141) while
older individuals, the urban space implies the very distinction between the green, mild and generous fi elds in rural Ireland and the busy, rather selfish, though
prosperous world of work from England.

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The urban world has a different texture and a different kind of pace; it is mostly the
space of characters in search of liveliness, change and restlessness. Such characters
enjoy meeting each other briefly, going out to dance or film, making love,
separating from each other, in search of another exciting experience. They live on
higher or smaller earnings, but by sharing the same type of space, they render it a
general feeling of fragmentation and lack of depth. Most of them do not stop to take a deep breath or reflect on their own doings and feelings, but when they do it,
it takes them to a different layer of perception, as in The Pornographer :

The next day I put aside for what I liked doing best. I did nothing, the nothing of
walking crowded streets in the heart of the city, looking at faces, going into chance
bars to rest, eating lunch and dinner alone in cheap, crowded restaurants .
(McGahern, 2009: 62)

Sampson too thinks that it is the very time of his early youth and days spent at St.
Patrick’s College which allowed the writer to come across a universe he had never
thought of in the small places he had lived in his childhood:

This impassioned discover y of modern art, and the strength he drew from it, was
not restricted to books, for he also began to go out into the city on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons and on Sunday to dancehalls and matches at Croke Park with
friends, certainly, but also to the Gate Theatre and to the cinema. The private and
solitary experience of reading, intensified by friendship in St. Pat’s, opened out to
the public culture of the city . (2012: 27)

Yet moving out of it from the relatively calm life in the small towns of Aughawi llan, Carrick, or Drogheda, is not to take place without its toll: the young
protagonist recurrently present in his prose takes this not only as an opening, and
joy to the pleasures of the mind and of the world, but also as a form of long -term
departure, determining him to return home after his second marriage with
Madeleine:

This summer [of 1954, when his father remarried] also introduced McGahern to
the experience of the exile. He will later show deep sympathy for people uprooted
against their will, and the effort to accomplish a reorientation in estrangement will
engage him deeply in his fiction. (. . .) The city came to represent in McGahern’s
fiction the other place, the place of uncertainty, where so many emigrants had to
invent a new life, although still deeply attached to the original home in various
parts of rural Ireland.” (Sampson, 2012: 31)

This ambivalent feeling related to the city, and a deeper need to return to his
homeland, among the people he liked and whom he relates to comes up with a fresh sense of humour in Memoir , when the novelist mentions the profound love

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and deception perceived by a young man on the building site he was working on in
1954:

During a break from work a man was reading aloud from one of these newspapers.
Another we t summer in Ireland was turning into a disaster and prayers were being
offered in all the churches for the rains to cease. A yo ung Clare man was in our
gang. ‘May it never stop’, he said without a trace of hum our when the reading
finished. ‘ May they all ha ve to climb trees. May it rise higher than it did for fukken
Noah! ’ (McGahern, 2005: 210- 1)
In Irish Writing London, Volume 2, Tom Herron notes the differentiation of status
between female and male Irish migrants, linking that to what Freud had called a
reduction of self -esteem and great loss of ego and deriving from their different
social routes:

Male characters, used to the open Irish countryside and without training in
domesticity, are more often than not confined to a particular stratum of London’s
social and economic life; a lack of education consigns the majority of them to hard
labouring jobs in which there is little opportunity for advancement. Indeed, male
characters seemed shamed by the very fact that they had to emigrate. (Herron,
2013: 66)

On the other hand, the above -mentioned challenge is not worthy a battle, and that is
reflected evocatively by Ingolsby in “Stran dhill, the Sea:” “Never feel you have to
know anything because you happen to teach. Never let them bully you with their
assumption s of what you should be. Say you don’t know, that it can be discovered
in books, if they’re interested.” (McGahern, 1992 : 41)

McGahern’s young Irish men working in London are often boisterous, loud in
voice and action, proud of their maleness, and using r ough language and frankness
mixed with what they think is a must for ceremonial circumstances: “I don’t know
and I don’t care what the king of the monkeys wears but we who are Irish should
always be tidy when we sit down to tea,” says Murphy in “Hearts of Oak and
Bellies of Brass” (1992: 30). This rhetoric hides the misery of hard work and low
pay, and the young main character reflecting on his year of experience on the
London building sites is absorbed completely by the image of the banknotes he
loves coun ting on the pay- day:

I love to count in money the hours of my own and precious life . I sell the hours and
I get money. The money allows me to sell more hours. If I saved money I could buy
the hours of some similar bastard and live like a royal incubus, w hich would suit
me much better than the way I am now, though apparently even as I am now suits me well enough, since I do not want to die . (1992: 37)

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The voice of the character places an ironic stress on “life,” and that puts it in
antithesis to what the character would like his life to stand for: selling hours of work and getting money is not what he aims at, but he needs to survive, and that
makes him feel trapped; his adulthood is not the dream he had left with from
Ireland to the world of opportunity a nd success he is placed in; his fate goes round
a perverse circle of being consumed by labour for a minimal gain. Young and deprived of good prospects in their homeland, Irish men like the young hero above
spend their days around the cement mixer, pints of beer and coupling with old and
unattractive women. No beauty of landscape, no calm, the space is crowded with a
dense but vain series of objects and actions.

McGahern’s characters find this space incapable of responding their individual
needs, and although they understand the pressure of working in an urban
environment, they have taken a firm decision against a place they are not intimately
related to: “’ What do you find wrong with England?’ ‘ Nothing but it’s not my
country and I never feel it’s quite re al or that my life there is real. That has its
pleasant side as well. You never feel responsible or fully involved in anything that happens. It’s like being present and at the same time a real part of you is happily
absent.’” (McGahern, 2002: 25), “England never changes much. They have a set
way of doing everything there. It’s all more or less alphabetical in England” (2002: 83), “Anyhow all the priests in England are sociable. They are not directly
connected to God like the crowd here” (2002: 86).
The com plex nature of urban life spent in the city of Dublin for most of the year,
while the summer is usually spent at home, in old rural areas, takes a new turn into
“Sierra Leone” where the name is a puzzling challenge, but which McGahern clarifies simply: “Sierra Leone is elsewhere, and the point is that it is always much
easier to deal with something that is elsewhere than in the life that’s around you”
(Collinge and Vernadakis, 2003: 9). In Lasch Carroll’s view, this story “seems to
sever the urban male prot agonist’s ties with his rural roots, the country home
populated by the recurring gruff controlling father and timid anxious stepmother,
but leaves him adrift in a Dublin where his lover severs ties with him because of
his inability to commit” ( Carroll, 2008: 4).

3. Departed heroes and regained sons

According to Sampson, it is likely for Nuala O’Faolain, another Irish writer of the
time, to have been one of the women met by McGahern, whom he used to draw the
character in this short story, possibly “Sierra Leone” as well. That double -sided
reality is on the one hand a love story between Geraldine McCreedy, the wife of a
popular politician, and the young male character who grows aware of the thinness
of a love story despite his focus on the beautiful woman he f eels attracted to,
describing the confinement to the urban space they shared: “We were in the

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condemned cell waiting for reprieve or execution, except that this time the whole
world was the cell. There was nothing we could do. The withering would happen as
simply as the turning on or off of a light bulb” ( McGahern, 1992: 318). The
beginning of their meeting is marked by the narrative shift, from the description of her beauty and his physical attraction to thoughts about the temporary nature of
their joy: “W e had struggled towards the best years; now they waited for us, and all
was to be laid waste as we were about to enter into them” ( ibid.). The perspective
gets closer to that of a sailor navigating unknown water, and his freedom opens the door to both plea sure and danger. The short references to the time of the Cuban
crisis and the doings of the military in the Pentagon only act as pinpoints for the
distance between the two lovers and the rest of the world.

The nameless male character has a short moral im pulse, discussing with Geraldine
their affair taken for a betrayal, but she simply enjoys their time spent together; he
is however, perfectly aware on their t emporary furtive relationship:
Our easy thieving that was hardly loving, anxiety curbed by cauti on, appetite so
luxuriously satisfied that it could not give way to the dreaming that draws us close
to danger, was wearing itself naturally away when a different relationship was
made alarmingly possible . (McGahern , 1992: 322)

The son’s return home is a lso an opportunity for the father to discuss the ownership
of their farm with his son, and his intention is to sell the place to him so that his second wife and her relatives would not be able to get anything after his death. The
son’s disinterest and disa ppointment over such issues express his resentment and
critical view in a question followed by an answer unfolding the difficulty of family
life and uncertain love: “Where were we to go from there, our pleasure now its
grinning head? And it would be over a nd not over. I had gone home instead, a
grotesquerie of other homegoings, and it too was over now” (McGahern,
1992: 326). The juxtaposition of issues about truth and consistency is replicated
towards the end of the story through direct reflections and rheto rical questions
addressed to the self, in the attempt to clear intentions and determine following
actions when the young man realizes, one evening later, that Geraldine would not
come to the usual meeting place:

Before any pain of her absence could begin to hang about the opening and closing
doors as the early evening drinkers bustled in, I got up and left; and yet her
absence was certainly less painful than the responsibility of a life together. But
what then of love? Love flies out the window, I heard t hem say. ( McGahern ,
1992:328)

They perceive their separation as they part “as easily as two leaves sent spinning apart by any sudden gust” (McGahern, 1992: 329). Once again the vision of life
like a dream turns into a universal and memorable pattern: “All things begin in
dreams, and it must be wonderful to have your mind full of a whole country like

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Sierra Leone before you go there and risk discovering that it might be your life”
(ibid.).

McGahern’s use of apparently misleading titles is to be noted in Th e Collected
Stories collection. “Korea” has no connection to Asia, but describes the deceitful
behaviour of a father. While his son attempts to restore a relationship through a
discussion about war memories (which the father used to reject), the father’s m ind
is simply set on persuading his son to leave for America as a soldier, perfectly
aware of the solid monthly income and the value of the life insurance; in a similar
way, “Sierra Leone” describes altering relationships, in a changed, modernized
Irish so ciety where a father makes plan to disinherit his second wife, while his son
looks with increasing hostility to his stepmother; the son’s affair with Geraldine is
interrupted when her husband’s work takes him to Sierra Leone.

4. Conclusions

McGahern’s hero es do not perceive their departure to Dublin or London as an
exile; yet the impact of living far from their traditional community, green pastures
and rivers and strong family relationships bring them often on the edge of despair.
Financial gain helps them to have a better standard of living compared to previous
generations, but the psychological changes incurred by such a change fluctuate
between joy and difficult adjustment, even if they enjoy the lack of religious and
family restrictions compared to the h omeland of their childhood.

What connects and re -connects Irish fictional emigrants presented in McGahern’s
stories and individuals living away from their home is the writer’s ability to encapsulate the Irish l’ineffable in a prose operating along realist representations
and existentialist tou ches, as openly declared by Sam pson in his introduction to
Young John McGahern speaking about acknowledging an “anguished voice that
searched relentlessly for meaning and calm in bew ildering personal
circumstances” , which re -sets the critic’s own perception: “It was this recognition
that drew me searching for an appropriate way of appreciating the work and for an
understanding of the literary traditions and models in which he had found
inspiration and clarified his own place” ( Sampson, 2012: vii).

McGahern’s unique ability to present the reality of young adults living in Dublin
and London is far from being a solely gloomy and alienated picture, its complexity
is directly highlighted by the confession of his first day in England, an intellectual
reverence to his great predecessors, close to a believer’s fervour:
Religious feeling does not die easily. When I walked off the boat at Holystead to the waiting London train – and thought of Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, all the great
English writers I had read and studied – I felt awe, as if I was stepping on to
sacred ground. (McGahern, 2005: 213).

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References and bibliography

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Collinge, L. and E. Vernadakis. 2003. John McGahern – b. 1934. In Journal of
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Delaney, E. 2000. Demography, State and Society: Irish Migration to Britain,
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The A uthor
Dana Radler has recently completed a PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies at the
University of Bucharest with a monography on Jo hn McGahern’s works, after an MA
(2004) in International Relations at the same university.
She authored articles on global issues and political studies, as well as cultural theories,
identity and gender as constructs or de -constructs of modern societies , and was a joint
editor of Global Issues Special Interest Group Newsletter of IATEFL (International
Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language) until 2015. She currently
teaches Business English at the Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Department of
Modern Languages and Business Communication.