Us and Them
74
DOI: 10.1515/abcsj-2016-0019
Us and Them: A Vision of Heroes on the Move in
John McGahern’s Fiction
DANA RADLER
Bucharest University of Economic Studies
Abstract
Current explorations of migration in fiction focus on innovative
perspectives, linking memory and trauma with the concepts of exile and
conflict. Personal memories ask for an understanding of what belonging
and identity represent for the Irish; immigration has hybrid and fertile
links to memory studies, psychology and psychoanalysis (Akhtar), making
the immigrant both love and hate his new territory, while returning to the
past or homeland to reflect and regain emotional balance. From the focus
on ‘the sexy foreigner’ (Beltsiou), we rely on the idea of crisis discussed
by León Grinberg and Rebeca Grinberg, Frank Summers’ examination of
identity, the place of the modern polis and the variations of the narrative
(Phillips), the trans-generational factor (Fitzgerald and Lambkin), the
departure seen as an exile (Murray and Said) and the impact of guilt
(Wills).
Such views support an analysis of McGahern’s writing which
works as a blend of memories and imagination, the writer highlighting
dilemmas, success and failure as ongoing human threads. They are as
diverse as the people met by the novelist in his youth, many of them being
workers, nurses, entrepreneurs, teachers and writers, both young
immigrants in search of a better life and migrants returning to spend their
retirement or holidays home.
Keywords: Irishness, anxiety, exile, conflict, irony, self, guilt, identity,
circularity, existence.
Introduction: traditional and hybrid views
Irish communities have been for over half a century now the heart of deep
changes as a result of economic influences and people’s need to find a
75 Us and Them
more prosperous, stable living, aligning their status and changing religious
options to those of the overseas nations following the post-world war era.
The key to understanding this process needs to start from a preliminary
examination of what migration stands for: it has been defined as “the
geographical mobility of persons who move, either individually, in small
groups, or in large masses and remain in their new environment for a
sufficiently long time to make a home there and carry out the activities of
daily living” (Grinberg and Grinberg 155), while Julia Beltisou highlights
the “exciting narrative of the sexy foreigner,” claiming that it “co-exists
with the painful experiences of unbelonging, non-recognition, struggle,
alienation and trauma” (1). Søren Frank looks at the topic and defines it
from the perspective of a migration literature emerging from the Greek
antiquity and heroes such as Daedalus and Odysseus seen as individual
resilient experiences implying a deep and irreversible transformation. He
examines several contemporary authors, using a departure point defined as
Ansatzpunkt by Erich Auerbach in the early fifties, and draws on the
capacity of migration to act as a ‘synthesizer,’ relying on its ability to
unite sociology and aesthetics (5-6), yet pointing out that fiction based on
migration cannot be looked upon from a post-colonialist standpoint only,
though this brings a valuable insight; instead, he supports a more
comprehensive approach which has to extend beyond the rather euro-
centric and historical context of Western Europe and find equally vibrant
sources and expressions in languages and literatures other than English,
German or French.
In terms of needs, migration has been seen and discussed in the last
decade as a predominantly hybrid trend, linking postcolonial identity
studies with memory studies, and also as a highly expressed psychological
drive, since León Grinberg and Rebeca Grinberg suggest that it relates to
a number of complex manifestations specific to a crisis, while observing
the changes experienced by the migrant, as he becomes gradually more
focused on his new life, and begins to leave behind a series of mental
associations and representations:
[It] triggers different types of anxieties in the person who emigrates:
separation anxiety, persecutory anxiety arising from the confrontation with
the new and the unknown, depressive anxiety over loyalties and values
American, British and Canadian Studies / 76
which give rise to mourning for objects left behind and for the lost parts of
the self, and confusional anxieties arising from failure to discriminate
between the old and the new. (154)
The members of his initial place of departure undergo their own
transformation, and the result is a gradual detachment and increasing
distance, while the departed hero remains attached to the non-human
environment which remains for several years a stable source for his
identity and personal reflection.
In what concerns one’s feelings and their flow in the recently
shaped social and economic circumstances, Grindberg and Grindberg
show that a whole series of confusional anxieties arise in the mind of the
immigrant, placing him in a potentially oedipal triangular case where the
hero faces two different parents, namely the two countries he relates to.
He leads them to a symbolically-built space “evoking ambivalence and
conflict of loyalties” (161), but that needs a highly flexible cultural
toolkit, one able to shift perspective and employ a diversity of tools, such
as the comparative analysis of migratory trajectories and the “continuities
and discontinuities” in fiction (Frank 13).
In their analysis of this phenomenon as a robust and resilient stream
in the mind, the two authors also suggest that “Paranoid anxieties can
develop into true panic when the immigrant confronts the overwhelming
demands that he must meet: loneliness, ignorance of the language, finding
work and a place to live, etc.” (161). They think that the immigrant
endures high stress in his new homeland, and that gradually “guilt takes
different forms varying from the normal to the highly pathological” (162)
in his effort to deal with such alienating stress. The further the new
location and difference in terms of social patterns, economic prospects or
cultural value, the higher and more durable becomes his endeavor to
“adapt to the new conditions, struggling against confusion, and this causes
him to turn again and again to dissociations” (162). The adjustment to the
new place implies painful choices, from the moment the person decides to
relocate his existence elsewhere; and the impact on what is coined as
‘identity’ by cultural contributors suffers equally profound
transformations: “[i]n order to become integrated into the environment
77 Us and Them
where he is received, the immigrant must renounce part of his
individuality, at least temporarily” (162).
What surfaces from recent contributions examining the
psychoanalytical research body is the need to widen the lens of the
approach, to welcome a wider and more systematic, historically and
anthropologically speaking, approach to those undergoing such changes,
as Frank Summers shows when he refers to its needs to “move away from
the monadic theory of the mind, not only because it artificially separates
person from world, but also because it disconnects the patient from a
heritage that can be crucial for the formation of her identity” (2). It is not
only this trans-generational element that often defines migration and
identity studies, but also the process which, as Fitzgerald and Lambkin
suggest, revolves around a complex trajectory: leaving, crossing and
arriving or a ‘basic three-stage structure’ specific to any human journey
(16).
Quoted in Tony Murray’s study on London Irish Fictions:
Narrative, Diaspora and Identity, Edna O’Brien defines the departure as a
separation or exile: “Writers are by nature exiles. Sometimes it’s
voluntary exile. Sometimes you have to leave your own country. But in
order to write about something, whatever it be, there has to be that
rupture, that terrible separation, because it is in that separation that the
depth and profoundness and everything else returns to one” (5). In his
effort to examine the case of Irish writers present on London sites, Murray
defines the framework as being heavily marked by the movement between
the two backgrounds, a movement which impacts the very identity of the
migrant: “migrants move between two sets of subjects who ‘stay put’,
those in their place of origin and those in their place of destination,” and
this finally determines the protagonist to “negotiate the often contested
allegiances of diaspora space that this entails” (12).
The case of Irish immigrants definitely shares similarities with
other migrations, and knows differences as well, depending on
geographical conditions, the opportunities of immigrants to re-visit and re-
connect with their original hometown and the guilt or shame perceived
about the native culture, seen in the new context as retrograde, old-
fashioned and inappropriate for survival and prosperity. In her book
American, British and Canadian Studies / 78
devoted to the study of post-war Irish immigration, Clair Wills suggests
that its representation in fiction followed a strong existentialist and realist
touch, and investigates McGahern’s prose as an example of declared
‘British Palladies’ in which she immediately detects the “frustration and
deprivation of Irish society” in stories about heroes leaving Ireland
behind, taking the experience of abused protagonists close to French
naturalism. In her view, such young and active “would-be modern young
men and women” (106) are deeply connected to and correspondingly
shape the cultural milieu they were extracted from “as characters [meant
to] battle with the poverty of imaginative resources” (106).
Looking at the attractiveness of London sites for newcomers,
Lawrence Philips explains its relatively recent newness, many of these
contemporary metropolitan additions being practically produced in the last
hundred years, since post-war writers were attracted by its “distinctive
fabric and image” (2), observing the variations of the narrative upon the
city in the works of various contemporary writers, particularly the
“convergence between time and space in the city–which encompasses
both the image of the city and its past” (4).
Such views support an analysis of McGahern’s writing in which we
look at how fiction works as a blend of memories and imagination, the
writer being interested in highlighting dilemmas, success and failure as
ongoing threads of the life of his protagonists. They are as diverse as the
people met by the novelist in his youth, many of them being workers,
nurses, entrepreneurs, teachers and writers, both young immigrants in
search of a better life and migrants returning to spend their retirement or
holidays at home.
Migration Topoi: Shaping the Past
In their contributions to immigration studies emerging from psychological
and psychoanalytic work, researchers reviewed by Salman Akhtar brought
to the surface of a human’s mind an interwoven series of concepts playing
a key role in John McGahern’s fiction as well, for instance the waking
screen, discussed by Joseph Kepecs and Joseph Slap, noting the
experience of a fetus perceiving a blurred reality. Bernard Pacella was to