Amongst Women

Amongst Women, class notes I talked about the difference between teaching and writing, and gave my formula for writing any kind of expository unit, from short paper up to many-volume work. It is: "A person might think that x. But in fact y. And therefore z." When writing papers, remember that first you describe and elucidate (which includes getting its shape right), then you interpret. The first questions are 'what have we got here?' (which fancy language will call "structure"); 'what does it add up to?' (which fancy language will call "theme"). And the very first thing to do is be careful to SEE THROUGH THE WORDS TO THE 'REALITY'--e.g., Moran's motivations, as in the Protestant business 163-4. And then you have to ask why the author will have presented that reality in that way. The strategy of McGahern himself is singularly appropriate for demonstrating the x,y,z argument, since over and over again we find ourselves surprised by how he explains things, but then learn something from it. The really great novelist leaves you feeling that you've learned a lot but you haven't really gotten to the bottom of it, that he 'outruns you', and you keep trying to capture the essence, saying good stuff but never quite getting there. This is why O'Brien isn't quite the top of the first class: she feels 'exhaustible' in a way that McGahern doesn't. The crucial question, to elicit what is going on: how is it, when the house is, as Mark felt, like a war area (135), and everybody tiptoes about as they do on 79-80, that everyone else's reaction is the exact opposite of Luke's, in particular, that the girls are so invested in their membership in this household and family which has been so extraordinarily oppressive: it is to answer that question that McGahern writes this book, painting his picture so as to make it completely credible that the women (again, especially) would be like that, would "become Daddy" as they do at the end, and to explain modern Ireland thereby. [in a nutshell, I argued in 1994 that 178 is his theme and 147 theirs, and the intersection of these two themes is the dynamic core, with all the rich irony which shows up at the very end: it is magnificently comic, really, and amounts to Moran's in fact being used by the family he thinks he uses (just as he came to feel himself used by the fields he thought he owned, as on 130). To put it in more traditional thematic terms, it is basically a book about the costs of war, an exposition of the generation which achieved independence, what that war did to them and how that generation becomes part of the past (though its patriarchal ideology still much present in the minds of those who follow and were shaped by it). Note, in this regard, Tim Pat Coogan saying (in his book on Michael Collins) 424-5; and O hEithir (in The Begrudger's Guide to Irish Politics) saying that we still live out the legacy of the Civil War. The class that took the Free State over was the strong farmers, the civil servants, the gombeen men and bigger businessmen and bankers and doctors etc., i.e., what passed for a bourgeoisie (see Moran's resentments on 88): the small farmers and those who had more to lose than to gain from a transition to peacetime put their trust in Fianna Fáil

in hopes that somehow the semi-fascist Free State apparatus (with all its repression and social backwardness) would be eased, but in effect were betrayed and bought off as De Valera moved more and more to become like those he replaced. Hence what we feel here as continuation of the pervasive sense of betrayal in Irish life which existed before, back through the centuries of victimization by Informers since 1798 and maybe before that. Moran's bitterness and resentment on 79-80 do have reasons, though there is enormous pathos too in the way the war took over a promising young boy who liked mathematics and did nothing for him but unfit him for the farmer's life which he had no talent for anyway. Constructing some security out of nothing, in recreating a military regimen in a family of which he can be king, fools no one around ( see the response of the village on 173 which just punctures the balloon of superiority he's spent a lifetime building) but at least gives those within it a still point within the emptiness, even if that point is itself more an absence than a presence, a self-absorption like a black hole. The rendering of this sense (which may well culminate in Moran's "shut up" at the prayers on his deathbed), is accomplished through the chain that leads to that wonderful mysterious paragraph on 183 (and tie that in with the fields chain, 130 and 178-9, and its climax 182--part of that too, I think, is the long diagonal handle on the door at 153: the outside world does exist, but entirely without meaning. i.e., remember Moran's feeling at the wedding, the book's deeper theme: the gap between our scaling of importances and the empty existence of things: 39, 45-6.]) [This chain I went through in class at the end]. Now here are notes, some of them a little more spelled out and essayistic, from when I taught the class in 1994: some of them you might find helpful to think about. context: Tom Barry, in Younger, The Irish Civil War (a good history of it) 13-14, 112-14, 125-6 on becoming a killer, 492ff really gives the flavor of the Civil War (on the executions of Mellowes etc.), 519 Barry continues to lead the resistance after De Valera founds Fianna Faill. the drive, 57; 78: if you look at a map, note that they live on the train line between Carrick and Boyle This guy is the master, implacable, magisterial, "classical" (but for something I have a question about, see 89: does he mean this? doesn't he know?)--In a sense it is monomaniacally a demo of 'what the structure of war does to people, how that commitment to victory and no compromise truncates the richness of interpersonal relations, where there is room for oneself and others in the same world' (for the way he ties it stylistically see p. 69) (and in this sense is a metaphor for Ireland, as we would expect)--and the magisterial sense is nowhere greater than in the fact that he just won't lower himself to deal in plot suspense, see 73). But on a level one down from that, note Toibin's point in TLS, the secret life of the Irish family [ex. 49]. (note his response to their having done the haying, 84, and the doubleness of it, how it means everything to the girls, 85) [Note the separateness which they can read as superiority, 2, 63] (makes a good pair with Doyle, that family as it has come to be--and Joe O'Connor would have been good too, from inside punk). see for his stylistic perfection 48, the

way the point of view shift leaves alone what he doesn't want to talk about (cf this with 72, what happens that we don't know? anything?, that Rose can come down bright: she has won, in essence, which he almost casually says 73); or 61 and 63 where Moran is pinned. I think the dominant feeling reading it is anxiety--oh God when is this guy Moran going to explode? (So since he never does, it's a book about tension and about how sad it is that such tension can be the dominant thing in life.) [Rose even feels this on 58] Especially we fear that Rose's closeness with the children will make him feel that he is insufficiently the center of everyone's life. We know they survive, though only just (see the shotgun and the p. 8 remark) from the opening: but we don't know the terms of the survival, how much is lost (I can't find but think I remember that he encouraged the cows to eat the flowers, in light of 64 that would be a lot). I bet you could count the subordinate clauses in this book on the fingers of one hand. reflections: cf O'Brien, whose essential strategy is to give as the norm her heroine's interior responsive almost stream-of-consciousness poetic organic flow of life and to let it at climactic points interconnect with external events in such a way as to give a poignant contrast (e.g. 178-9 from "You cried" and then 181 as her father beats her)--but this basic strategy also permits cool observation by the sponge narrator which expands into set-piece comedy where she hardly figures, as in the wake-frog etc scenes I mentioned. McGahern's norm is the incisive summarizing 'full-explanation' 'revelation where it is as if nothing more needs to be said because we're let in on the secret' kind of reporting of what is going on in people (absolutely no sense of mystery, of the oceanic, just our being let in on the way people deep in their hearts act out the motivations that their histories and situations make in them), [a stupendous example is 46, Rose and the girls mastered and mastering; another is Moran pinned with the remark on 61--there is NO MYSTERY here, so little that the others around can hardly believe it (see Rose 60): he is simply explained by an awesome egocenricity] which is allowed to interpenetrate with external events which are (like O'Brien) sharply and distinctively observed for their anthropology: people play their motives virtually politically within their social opportunities, where in O'Brien people have their conduct virtually pressed out of them by their passions in ways which are molded by social opportunities (the most complex and tragic instance of which is the girl's finding the only vessel ito which to pour her fears and wishes being her 'vocation'). Yet in a way they're alike (note the decription of him as high-strung 51): that oceanic, center of the world feeling dominates both books--in hers, the point is that it is something you learn to integrate with the rest of life so as to be satisfied and yet functional, and the tragedy is that what happens to the girl prevents that integration; in his, the point is that too early and

full a union with opportunity (being the kind of master that a successful soldier is) can, in someone who needs it too much (and we have the same sort of sense from him we do from the girl, of a perhaps more profound than normal sensibility wasted and brought low), embitter and truncate as the rest of life falls short. There are social consequences for both, and the only difference is that we focus more on those others who suffer those consequences in his book--the girl will become as painful a person as he, to herelf and others, surely, but we don't see it happen. As to dynamic, strategy, what each is up to: the question in Pagan is 'will this sensitive impulsiveness find a way not to be destroyed by the out of control rural Irish culture' (answer, no); here the question is 'will the depth of his egocentricity in fact be able to destroy all the lives which surround him, or is there some life-affirming germ which can hold out and at least preserve the others from his isolation' (answer, part of each, since they survive but at what we feel as cost). (In fact, the doubleness of the family is very much the point.) So, the example of his style: The multiple points of view, deep inside each one in turn, magisterial: we learn inside Rose then Moran: first example 23 then 26-7, the wild discrepancy between the way she loks at him and he at her; then 36-7 the different motives at the wren-dance; then we turn to the different universe of the intricicies of the children 38.; the wedding night, the sounds and the girls scared (switch in point of view perfect). The funny thing about Rose's vision of her future 30 is that it isn't really squelched, as we suspect. you think something terrible is going to happen to Rose but it doesn't. I think this is to keep Moran isolated, so entirely inside his own head and the dynamics of his misery that he doesn't even have that catastrophic effect on people around him which manages, for bad miserable people, to project some of their suffering outside themselves. Mostly, people hardly even know how Moran is feeling, the intricacies of resentment and bitterness which explain him: the perfect example is the wren-dance 36-7. But the question about the book is, is Rose too good to be true? Does McGahern just cop out with her, not invest her with enough interest to get her multi-dimensional? I think it's ok, but it can be asked (that is, it would have to be if you insist on thinking of people having the kind of life in them that O'Brien's people have). a parallel question could be is he too hard on Moran? See 63 where we are let in on how Moran has tied Maggie to him but is thinking about Luke and his only motivation is to have everyone center on him. The kids on the other hand live in constant terror, see 39-40 (and cf how the father sprayed shaving cream all over in O'Brien), because so little will set him off--and it does it because he is so governed by the sense of not getting his just deserts in life that everything that goes wrong is like a nail

in his coffin, something to resent justifiably because it's 'just another example' of his deprivation. the "good as a play" social dynamics of not holding the reception in the hotel but at Bradys house 38--how Moran manipulates things within the context of social expectations (and cf the signals sent by not shaving Return to class page