John McGahern and the Imagination of Tradition by Stanley van der Ziel

Abstract

Reviewed by: John McGahern and the Imagination of Tradition by Stanley van der Ziel Robert Finnigan John McGahern and the Imagination of Tradition, by Stanley van der Ziel, pp. 320. Cork: Cork University Press, 2015. Distributed by Longleaf Services Chapel Hill, NC, $45.00. Rising to prominence in the 1960s with the publication of The Barracks (1963) and The Dark (1965), John McGahern has, Stanley van der Ziel writes, traditionally been regarded as a chronicler of "the lives of farmers, teachers, schoolboys and policeman in the Irish midlands in the twentieth century." McGahern is also, he notes, an author able to depict "a recognisable culture at a specific moment in history" and one whose "identity as a writer is inseparable from that of the reader." There is already a considerable body of McGahern criticism—Eamon Maher's John McGahern: From the Local to the Universal (2003), Dermot McCarthy's John McGahern and the Art of Memory (2010), and Richard Robinson's John McGahern and Modernism (2016), for example—all of which provide close readings of McGahern's novels and expose his dialectical construction of relationships between tradition and modernity. Van der Ziel's study—released in time to mark the tenth anniversary of McGahern's death—is likewise an authoritative and comprehensive reading of several of McGahern's short stories and novels. This is an illuminating monograph that offers a substantial and thought-provoking assessment of his literary imagination. Like Frank Shovlin's Touchstones: [End Page 150] John McGahern's Classical Style (2016), this study owes much of its originality to the fact that it moves beyond the tendency to foreground the extent to which McGahern's fiction draws its inspiration from real-life events and settings. Invoking the sentiment found of McGahern's comment, "I don't think you can be a writer without being a reader first," van der Ziel outlines the aim of his study, that of reading McGahern "as a self-aware novelist of ideas." Expanding upon this assertion, he discusses McGahern's reading of Sons and Lovers: "In his assimilation of Lawrence we can clearly see at work a process which operates more generally throughout McGahern"s fiction … the basic outlines of biographical events are fused with apposite, illuminating literary allusions which are just as deeply grafted in the writers consciousness." Van der Ziel clarifies, however, that, that the purpose of his book is not simply to identify quotes from and allusions to classic books and authors. Instead, it will isolate some of the major ideas McGahern took from his most eminent predecessors, and demonstrate his fictional oeuvre can be read as a sustained critical commentary on the various literary traditions within which it operates. Van der Ziel adopts a chronological approach and presents a series of case studies that begin with Shakespeare and conclude with Beckett. Each chapter examines the main ideas McGahern borrowed and adopted from "the Irish, English and European authors whom he most admired." Of the seven chapters included, "The Limits of Realism," which offers a reading of McGahern's engagement with the legacy of William Wordsworth and the Romantic tradition is especially noteworthy. So, too, is "A Modernist Mindset II: After Yeats and Joyce," an analysis of the "scrupulous meanness" of Joyce's style, Yeats's use of placenames as a way of giving the local a universal resonance and his consideration of McGahern"s appreciation of wider aspects of Irish Modernism is a particular highlight. In a remarkable chapter, "An Augustan Sensibility," van der Ziel focuses on Enlightenment principles of moral thought as conceived by Hume and Burke, and demonstrates how McGahern draws on "a veritable intertextual web" of influences including Goldsmith's "The Deserted Village" and Jane Austen's novels in his portrayal of rural communities. According to van der Ziel, McGahern was particularly attracted to the emphasis Austen's novels place on the importance of localized culture, her portrayal of social manners, and her characters' behavior. For McGahern, "books like Austen's novels … might provide the modern writer with a conception of good manners even while living in the midst of a society urgently in need of some." Van der Ziel compares Austen' s descriptions with that...