Special Issue on John McGahern || McGahern and the Homeric Moment

Canadian Journal of Irish StudiesCanadian Association of Irish Studies

McGahern and the Homeric MomentAuthor(s): Paolo VivanteSource: The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 17, No. 1, Special Issue on John McGahern(Jul., 1991), pp. 53-56Published by: Canadian Journal of Irish StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25512853 .

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McGahern and the Homeric Moment

PAOLO VIVANTE

John McGahern's lecture on An tOileanach/The Islandman identifies the

poetic qualities of narrative which capture the essential features ofthe passage

of time in a concrete representation of life. The concrete immediacy which

is a definitive feature of Homer's vital images is similar to O'Crohan's

narrative and to many passages in McGahern's stories.

La conference de John McGahern sur An Toileanachljhe Islandman identifie

les qualites de la narration qui capturent les traits essentiels du temps qui passe

dans une representation concrete de la vie. Le caractere immecliat et concret

qui est un trait definitif des images vitales d'Homere est semblable a la

narration d'O'Crohan et aplusieurs passages des recits de McGahern.

In his lecture on Thomas O Crohan's An tOileanach, John McGahern expounds the writer's style. The chief point is O Crohan's concreteness in presenting a picture of life on the Blasket Islands. McGahern writes:

The island is simply there as a human habitation, a bare foundation of

earth upon which people live and move. The scenery is there insofar as it

furnishes the necessary frame and sustenance for life. Places are seen in their

essential outline, which is inseparable from their use and function. Sometimes

a place is seen as friendly to whatever action happens to be afoot, more often

it is hostile. Always place and action are inseparable. One cannot subsist

without the other. There are no idle stretches .... A strand is there to be

crossed, a sea to be fished, a town to be reached, a shore to be gained, walked

upon, lived upon. These are all near and concrete realities, but so stripped down to their essentials because ofthe necessities of the action as to seem free

of all local characteristics (Islandman 8).

We are given a similar impression of concreteness as regards the treatment of

life or of history:

The basic unit of time throughout the book is that day . .. the strange

sense of timelessness that the book has, of being outside time, comes from the

day, a single day breaking continually over the scene and the action.... To

plan ahead is as useless as to look back in regret . . . Motives are of no

importance. . . . what happens is all. ... If the strong sense of the day, the

endlessly recurring day, gives to the work its timeless quality, this is deepened still more by the fact that people and place seem to stand outside history

(Islandman 9).

Many of these considerations might apply to Homer, though in quite a different

perspective: O Crohan looks at human activities as ways of survival and livelihood, Homer highlights any act or state of being as a vital moment of existence. There is a basic similarity, however, albeit a negative one. It consists in the lack of

adventicious information. Narrative details, historical and geographical background,



54 Canadian Journal of Irish Studies

any account of ulterior motivations or purposes tend to recede or be played down.

What matters is the concrete presence of things. Let us look at this type of representation and try to elicit its broadest poetical

implications. On its strength, we are drawn to the concrete essence of things. However great the narrative interest may be, Homer never lets us forget the native

energy that is intrinsic to any act A heart that beats, a foot that steps out, a hand that

touches, eyes that see, knees quickened into motion: such things take their pertinent

place and position, no matter what the narrative direction or purpose might be. The

vantage-ground appears for what it is. It needs no justification, no praise or blame. It seems more important than any reason adduced for its presence. Life is thus

displayed in its natural resilience from instance to instance. God and hero, man and

beast, a wave or a breath of wind?all things, great and small, share in the same

bounty of existence.

We are thus tuned to a sense of truth. For this mode of representation can

neither indulge in fastidious realism nor aspire to any transcendental vision. What is presented to our view can neither be belittled nor magnified. It exists insofar as

it occupies its portion of existence in relation to anything else. We have both the

glory of any full-blown individual moment and the irony of relativity. How can we recover this sense of concrete immediacy in these days of abstract

thinking? A song or a poem may do so, on the spur of melody or rhythm. We may recapture it ourselves in the grace of a moment's lucidity. But how can it be rendered and sustained in history or fiction, in narrating the lives of people in their times and

places? The grand scale of Homer's sympathetic objectivity lies beyond our reach.

Human experience has become an abstraction. We seem to have lost the sense of vital existence in what we do or say. Where is that fullness of time that combines in one whole sensation both daylight and the business of living, both our work and the hour that hovers about it? In Homer?or in O Crohan?each act is part of the

day; but we tend to abstract the one from the other, we speak of "natural time" or

"chronological time" or "human time" as different categories. On the other hand any occurrence is still what it is, both a parcel of the day or night and an element in our human experience. We get up and sunlight pierces through the window. Even so common a thing may give us pause.

Conceptualizing hardly helps us here. A modern writer may recover

imaginatively the wholeness of time, albeit fitfully, albeit in fragmentary occasions and not in the pervasive harmony of day after day. Let any event take its consistence, let its moment grow and open up and we shall not only have a narrative fact, but a central occasion reverberating far and wide, setting astir a whole field of associations. Past and future will then seem to converge into a living present, in the wake of memories or hopes. The warmth of the realization itself will then compensate for the lack of objective scale. Even a shadow will have its aura of suggestion, with an

intimacy which Homer could hardly conceive.



McGahern and the Homeric Moment 55

The stories of John McGahern offer many instances of so recovering or

recomposing a concrete experience of time. Consider "Swallows." It is hardly a

story in the ordinary sense. Rather than a plot, we have a momentary situation; rather than narrative facts, we have the suggestion of incidents. The two main

characters meet through the chance of their respective jobs; and it is as if two parallel lives had now got in touch with each other. One of them plays old tunes on his violin,

evoking the echo of past experiences; the music brings them closer, there is a

common touch; from now on they will meet again. The present moment thus seems

to expand, not in the facile and artificial way of a flash-back but through the natural

radiation of immediate perceptions. Reality seems then a dream of other times and, vice versa, other times powerfully flow into present reality. The tide "Swallows"

is perhaps due to this sense of recurrence that supplants the narrative interest.

Certain outstanding passages convey more sharply the concrete significance of an occasion. In "All Sorts of Impossible Things" we find a man who insists to

have, there and then, the answer to his love and offer of marriage. Here is part of

the scene:

Her face was flushed with resentment. "Goodbye then." He steeled himself

to turn away. Twice he almost paused but no voice calling him back came.

At the open iron gate above the stream he did pause. "If I cross it here it is the

end. Anything is better than the anguish of uncertainty. If I cross here I cannot

turn back even if she should want." He counted till ten, and looked back, but

her back was turned, walking slowly uphill to the house. As she passed

through the gate he felt a tearing that broke as a cry (GT 41 -42).

This moment of decision is made dramatically real by the iron gate, the hill, the

stream, the house. All at once the scenery and the time of day are gathered into the wave of emotion, and the evocation makes it possible for us to live up to the actual

experience. This effect would not have been possible if the author had attempted to describe the situation or to narrate more thoroughly this love relation.

Here is a similar passage from "Doorways." A man extricates himself from a

lady friend who, capriciously, does not want him to go:

"I can't not go," I said, "but what I'll do is get the next bus back. I'll be back

within an hour. Maybe we'll go out for a drink then," and pressing her arm

climbed on the bus. As soon as I paid the conductor I looked back, but already the bus had changed gear to climb the hill and I could not see through the rain and misted windows whether she was still standing there or gone back into the

hotel, and I stirred uneasily in the sense that I had left some hurt behind. Yet

what she had demanded had been unreasonable, but far more insistently than

reason or the grinding of the bus came, "If you had loved her you would have

stayed"; but all life turns away from its own eventual hopelessness, leaving insomnia and its night to lovers and the dying (GT 88),

Again the scenery gathers into the experience, as if through a natural magnetism. The mist, the rain, the old bus and its familiar route are now stirred through and

through by a critical juncture. The parting of these friends appears at first casual, wilful, frivolous; a moment later it is tinged with a shadow of gloom, as if untold



56 Canadian Journal of Irish Studies

consequences lay ahead. The change of atmosphere brings a change in the aspects of the surrounding space which remains, of course, what it is and yet is now seen

in a different and more penetrating perspective. Here is inner tension and, on the other hand, the indifference of things; but we realize a superior irony whereby the two run into one another.

In many different ways McGahern returns to such moments of sobering and yet vital realization. In "Along the Edges" for instance:

The restaurant was just beginning to fill. The blindman was playing the piano at its end, his white stick leaning against the dark varnish. They ate in

tenseness and mostly silence, the piano thumping indifferently away. She had never looked so beautiful; it was like an old tune, now that he was about to lose

her. It was as if this evening was an echo of a darker evening and was uniting with it to try to break him" (GT 112).

Or again in "Doorways":

. . . and we began to read, but the tension between us increased rather than

lessened, whether from me or from her or from us both. I saw the white tinsel

from the sea thistie, the old church, the slopes of Knocknarea, the endless

pounding of the ocean mingled with bird and distant child cries, the sun hot on the old stones, the very day in its suspension, and thought if there was not

this tension between us, if only we could touch or kiss we could have all this

and more, the whole day, sea and sky and far beyond (GT 85).

In such passages, the rich sensible world extends outside us far away but it is not ignored; it is implicitly called to witness our most intimate moments that, after all, can only emerge in its midst. As a result the irony of existence is made palpable. Things lean towards us and forthwith resume their indifferent stance. It is as if the time of nature lingered for a while before pursuing again its infinite course. There is a mysterious unison in such moments. As Tennyson puts it:

Love took up the glass of Time, and turn'd it in his glowing hands; Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands. Love took up the harp of

Life, and smote on all the chords with might; Smote the chord of Self, that,

trembling, pass'd in music out of sight.

WORKS CITED

McGahern, John. Getting Through. London: Faber and Faber, 1978. _. "The Islandman/An tOileanach." The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies,

XIII: 1 (June 1987): 7-15



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Special Issue on John McGahern || McGahern and the Homeric Moment