The Poetics of Place in George Moore and John McGahern

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

The Poetics of Place in George Moore and John McGahern Eamon Maher Introduction This essay seeks to sketch out the way in which two, what might be called ‘canonical’, Irish writers, George Moore (1852–1933) and John McGahern (1934–2006), reveal comparable, though contrasting, sensibility to place. What is offered is a close textual reading of one short story by each author. There is no desire to suggest a direct influence by one on the other. George Moore was a prominent fin de siècle writer who died just a year before John McGahern’s birth. McGahern started publishing in the 1960s and continued until his death in 2006, by which time he was accepted as ‘the foremost prose writer now in Ireland’ by no less an authority than Declan Kiberd.1 Moore was the son of a Catholic landlord, who was also a member of parliament. This privileged background allowed him to indulge his burgeoning interest in art by spending a few years in Paris. While there he became friendly with some of the main Impressionist painters of the time, most notably Manet, Renoir and Degas, as well as with a plethora of literary figures, including Édouard Dujardin (the writer credited with first employing the stream of consciousness technique) and Théophile Gautier. Moore also befriended the most notable Naturalist writer of the nineteenth century, Émile Zola, for whom he did invaluable work by ensuring that English translations of his work were available in the Anglo-Saxon world.2 He would meet a number of the artistic luminaries who congregated regularlyintheNouvellesAthènes,whichisdescribedlovinglyinConfessions of a Young Man: What is the ‘Nouvelles Athènes’? He who would know anything of my life must know something of the academy of the fine arts. Not the official stupidity you read of in the daily papers, but the real French academy, the café. The ‘Nouvelles Athènes’ is a café on the Place Pigalle. Ah! The morning idlenesses and the long evenings when life was but a summer illusion, the grey moonlight on the Place where we Studies • volume 109 • number 436 400 used to stand on the pavements, the shutters clanging up behind us, loath to separate, thinking of what we had left said, and how much better we might have enforced our arguments.3 Moore’s sensitivity to place is well conveyed in these lines, which express something of the excitement of café culture in the Paris of the 1870s. He has the particular gift of transporting the reader to the unique atmosphere of that particular café, letting them experience the smoke curling about the figures crouched around a table, hear the writers and artists animatedly propounding their latest theories, smell the scent of wine and absinthe on their breath, sense the excitement of being at the epicentre of world culture at this time. Moore was very much a cosmopolitan figure, someone who was more comfortable in Paris or London than he was in his native Mayo. That said, he was also sensitive to the beauty of the area in which he spent his formative years, a sensitivity that is most apparent in a novel such as The Lake (1905), in which he depicts the obsession of the young parish priest Oliver Gogarty with a local teacher Nora Glynn, who has become pregnant outside of wedlock. When she refuses to follow the path he suggests, he denounces her from the pulpit, thus prompting her departure from the area. Afterwards, he regrets his action and undergoes a catharsis that sees him turn his back on the priesthood and move abroad to make a new life for himself. The opening lines of the novel reveal a lyrical, almost pantheistic fascination with nature as he contemplates Lake Carra: It was one of those enticing days at the beginning of May when white clouds are drawn about the earth like curtains. The lake lay like a mirror that somebody had breathed upon, the brown islands showing through the mist faintly, with gray shadows falling into the water, blurred at the edges. The ducks were talking in the reeds, the reeds themselves were talking, and the water lapping softly about the smooth limestone shingle. But there...