Richard Kearney

A Crisis of Imagination
Author(s): Richard Kearney
Source: The Crane Bag, Vol. 3, No. 1, The Question of Tradition (1979), pp. 58-70
Published by: Richard Kearney
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30059491
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 A CRISIS OF IMAGINATION
(An analysis of a counter-tradition in the
Irish novel)

RICHARD KEARNEY

etc. It
With the publication of Ulysses in 1922 itis our purpose here to argue that Joyce
seemed to many that the resources ofprovided
the the possibility of an alternative or
traditional novel had been exhausted. D.H. 'critical' tradition by deconstructing the quest-
structure of the novel, thereby giving rise to at
Lawrence and Viginia Woolf declared it a scan-
least two generations of 'critical' Irish novelists,
dal. F. Scott Fitzgerald offered to jump from
his hotel window to prove his admiration, the first including Beckett and Flann O'Brien,
Hemingway hailed it as a 'Goddam wonderful the second including McGahern, Higgins, Ban-
book'. But no serious writer at the time could ville and Stuart.
afford to ignore it. Joyce challenged the
classical tradition of the novel. Yet novelists I
continued to write traditional novels and are Joyce's first novel The Portrait of an Artist
doing so to this day. Our interest here is to manifests
in- the typical search-structure of the
quire how the Irish novel survived the Joyceantraditional novel. Stephen Dedalus is the
young hero-artist in search of beauty in a
upheaval, how it escaped or registered his
influence. hostile world. Stephen defines beauty in terms
But first we must define what we mean of the Thomistic triad of lntegritas-Consonantia
when we say that Joyce seemed to exhaust -Claritas;
the he declares it to be a transcendental
resources of the traditional novel. From its value only revealed to the creative artist when
emergence in the 17th and 18th century the he has reached a stage of contemplative stasis,
novel exhibited a specific structure of 'quest' what Joyce calls 'epiphany'. Stephen aspires
particular to the modern world of Cartesian towards the condition of a divine Demiurge
subjectivity, bourgeois individualism and Refor-who might transform the dross of everyday
mational emphasis on private spirituality. reality in the 'silver womb of the imagination'.
This structure takes the form of an individual'sLike the 'fabulous artificer' he is named after,
search for value in a degraded world. Hence the Dedalus seeks to forge the conscience of the
conventional pattern of the novel is that Irish of race in the smithy of his soul. But in the
a journey from meaninglessness to meaning, Portrait Stephen's seeking remains a search;
from the insufficiency of the surrounding his aspirations are time and again frustrated
environment to some new vision or value. This by the experience of an ever-deepening es-
quest structure is characterised by an trangement from Irish society. The rupture
experience of fundamental rupture between the between the subjective imagination and the
creative imagination of the hero (the subjectiveobjective world which it is trying to 'forge'
term) and the reality (objective term) which and recreate, is still sufficiently critical to
he or she is trying to explore, cultivate and allow for the quest-structure of the traditional
valorize. It goes hand-in-hand with a psycho- novel. The distance between the factual world
logical preoccupation with the hero's solitary which the hero suffers and the visionary one he
ego as it struggles with an alien world. These desires - i.e. the gap between fact and value -
points have been convincingly argued by such still constitutes the modus operandi of the
diverse critics as Lucien Goldmann, RVn6 narration.
Girard and Georg Lukics.1 Their examples The creative individual's feeling of severance
extend from Cervantes and Goethe to Flaubert from the world he wishes to reach and redeem
is the sine qua non of the traditional novel.
and Dostoevsky. In this tradition we can con-
fidently place the Irish novelists who pre- The Portrait remains a traditional novel to the
ceded Joyce: Edgeworth, Carleton, Sheehan, extent that it is a story of desire and

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journeying. Stephen's pretensions to transmute entered life and his wife, Molly, is unfaith-
the world into art are treated ironically by ful. His alimentary condition (Joyce makes
Joyce himself. The 'sluggish matter of the much of his corporeal infelicities, cf. chapters
earth' proves refractory to his alchemical 5, 6 and 7) is as poor as his sexual (he is a
designs. Though he discovers his vocation as cuckold 'adorer of the adulteress rump') or
artist, Stephen remains in a condition of rest- his social (a Jew in Anti-semitic Dublin). In
less searching shot through with feelings of brief, Bloom feels himself a failure in reality
'loathing and bitterness' for the Dublin squalor and so seeks to recreate himself in art. Or
which 'perishes about his feet'.2 So that for all rather in artifice, for Bloom is portrayed as
his claims 'to be the eternal priest of the imagi- a failed artist, an advertizer. Nevertheless,
nation' who will 'recreate life from life', time and again Bloom fantasizes about him-
Stephen never becomes more than a wilful and self as a great prophet-artist or quasi-divine
egocentric aesthete. His 'non serviam' affords creator - Christlike he writes 'I am A' on the
him a critical power but not a genuinely re- Dollymount sand which may signify either
creative one. The Dublin landscape remains as artist or Alpha or Adonai. Bloom uses fan-
unredeemed as ever. As his friend Lynch ex- tasy to free himself from the 'accumulation
claims: 'What do you mean by prating about of the past'. His primary desire is to achieve
beauty and the imagination in this miserable an aesthetic 'atonement' with an Eternal
god-forsaken land?'3 Son. As Lenihan says of him: 'There's a touch
But already in the Portrait we have a pre- of the artist about old Bloom . . . he's a cul-
sentiment of innovation. Joyce, we begin to tured allroundman'.6 Thus the surface-structure
realize, has inherited the quest-structure of the of the character's (i.e. Bloom's) designs comes
traditional novel only to render it self-conscious: to symbolize the deep-structure of the author's
As the title itself testifies, Joyce intends to (i.e. Joyce's) own aesthetic.
make art objective to itself: Joyce the artist- In similar fashion, Stephen is trying to move
author writes about himself as the artist-hero, beyond the constraints of 'real' filiality to-
Stephen, who in turn writes about himself wards the freedom of a self-generated and ar-
as the artist-manqut (i.e. Stephen's portrayal tistic rapport with the paternal principle.
of himself in his introspective diary and 'dewy- In the opening chapters of Ulysses, Joyce
wet' doggerel). More generally, the artist's portrays Stephen attempting to escape from the
self-portrayal as a Byronic pedant citing oppressive matriarchal conditions which have
Aquinas and Newman as commentaries on his given him birth. Stephen seeks to awake from
own theories of art and beauty, renders the that 'nightmare of history' which Joyce
novel a reflection upon itself. In the Portrait identifies with a servile attachment to the three
the novel as artistic product has already begun mother-figures which have kept him in bon-
to mirror its condition of possibility as artistic dage: 1) his biological mother to whose death-
process, it already tends towards self-represen- -pleas he refused to succumb; 2) mother-church
tation.4 whose Mariolatry he continually blasphemes;
The Portrait ends with Stephen identifying 3) mother-Ireland whom he ridicules in the
himself with Icarus, calling upon his mythical mythological forms of the Sean-Bhean-Bhocht
namesake Daedalus, the 'old father, old arti- milkwoman of the opening chapter, The
ficer', who in turn sought his own created self- Republican Caitlin ni Houlihan or the less
image in his son.5 In Ulysses the search of the euphemistic symbols of the 'Old Gummy
'artist' son (Stephen' for his 'artificer' father Granny' or the 'sow that eats her own farrow'.
(Bloom) and the reciprocal search of the Joyce reinforces this 'son-versus-mother' struc-
father for his surrogate son is brought to its ture by means of a clever introductory leit-
logical and exhaustive conclusion. It is sig- motif or omphallic signifiers: the shaving bowl,
nificant that Stephen and Bloom journey sacrificial bowl, vomiting bowl, the bowl of
towards each other in quest of a surrogate Dublin bay, the hollow tower etc. The sug-
or 'aesthetic' father-son relationship, rather gestion seems to be that before Stephen can
than a 'real' one. Reality has let them down, embark upon his journey towards an eternal
so they look towards art for their salvation. father' he must first transcend his temporal
Bloom's 'real' son, Rudi, died as soon as he filial allegiances; likewise, Bloom, in order to

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seek out his 'eternal son' must relinquish his 'mothers of memory', towards the liberating
temporal paternal bonds, i.e. to the living power of creative imagination. Through an art
Molly and the dead but remembered Rudi. that transcends history they aspire to a con-
Art, the novel suggests, will serve as the 'eternal dition of consubstantiality.
spirit' to unite them as father and son in a new But the hope for such an unadulterated
and recreative communion, beyond both the aesthetic communion is exposed as an illusion
oppressive transience of history and the in the final 'Ithaca' Ichapter. Here Stephen-
sexual-maternal constraints of nature. Haines, Telemachus and Bloom-Ulysses reach their
in the very first chapter of Ulysses, already journey's end (Eccles St.,/Ithaca) only to find
provides us with a key to this structure: 'the it is a cul de sac. This episode is intended to
father and the son idea. The son (Stephen- demonstrate the impossibility of communi-
Telemachus-Hamlet) striving to be atoned with cation between Stephen and Bloom. The sheer
the father'.7 Here again the content of the encyclopaedic abstruseness of their dialogue -
novel reflects its underlying authorial structure. what Joyce referred to as the 'dry rocks' of
This crucial attempt to discover in art a 'mathematical catechism' - belies the dream
supernatural and supra-historical rapport be- of an exclusively aesthetic alliance. The auto-
tween father and son finds its most explicit creative imagination proves to be sterile, de-
articulation in the celebrated scene in the void of all genuine creativity, all intimacy and
National Library (chapter 9). Here the trajec-
life. And so memory reasserts itself at last
tories of Stephen and Bloom briefly converge.when the chimes of St. George's bell at half
Stephen poses the problem of how Shakespeare past two makes Stephen remember the mother
sought to recreate himself by 'writing he andthought himself rid of and makes Bloom
reading the book himself'. Just as God wasrecall
the the dead. The 'Ithaca' chapter concludes
original artist who 'wrote the folio of this with an acknowledgement of the futility of any
world', so too Shakespeare, and after him artistic creation which censures history. The
Joyce-Stephen, sought to become a divine point seems to be that the only valid form of
artist by creating an artistic world in whichimagination is one which incorporates memory,
he could find 'as actual what was within his opening itself to the fluxile temporality of
world as possible'. Thus Stephen demonstrateshistory as it does in the soliloquy of Molly.
that the Godlike artist compounded of father Bloom reaches towards such an intuition,
and son and ghost is 'all in all, the father of
accepting his past in a spirit of equanimity:
his own grandfather' and of everyone else, If it was it was. He bore no hate', He curls
but most importantly, 'himself his own father'
up at Molly's feet, a 'childman weary, the man-
i.e. a self-creation from nothing.8 Indeed child in the womb'. Similarly, Stephen assents
Shakespeare's desire for a spiritual, self- to the temporal reality he had previously
generative mediation between father and son scorned; the agrees to meet Molly, he will
finds its closest parallel in the theologicallearn to trust in what 'he must come to in-
Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost whicheluctably'.9 Stephen and Bloom cannot com-
in itself constitutes a creative principle abovemune without Molly, Magna Mater and Anima
and beyond the female or historical principle.Mundi, the collective unconscious and life-
In order to mutually recreate each other asgiving flesh to the skeleton of Ithaca. As
'artistic' father and son, Bloom and Stephen Joyce himself put it in a letter to Val6ry
must pass beyond memory - that 'agenbite Larbaud (Letters, 175): 'Ithaca is alien. Pene-
of inwit' which obsessively binds them to thelope the last word'. The world of creation
procreative principle - towards imagination. cannot ignore the world of procreatio; art
Only imagination can accede to a creatio ex which excludes history cuts its own throat.10a
nihilo. It is Stephen's culpabilizing memory In Molly's soliloquy the fertile chaos of the
which keeps him chained to mother-church, 'here, the now' coincides with the structuring
mother-Ireland and his 'real' mother, just principle
as of art. Joyce's stream of conscious-
it is Bloom's paranoid memory which feeds ness technique may be interpreted as either a
his obsession with an unfaithful wife and de-formless welling up of inchoate images and im-
ceased son. Stephen and Bloom must then sur- pressions from the memory or as an artistic
pass time and history, those oppressive rendition of a mind shaping a new vision of the

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world; it is probably both at once. In the final whether the indentification of imagination and
soliloquy, we may say that imagination which reality is to be read as an aestheticization of the
seeks to lead the mind beyond reality and mem- world - raising chaos to the level of the im-
ory which seeks to lead the mind back to agination - or a mundanization of art - re-
reality become one and the same. The distance ducing imagination to chaos?12 In brief, if
between the seeker and the sought disappears. Joyce has genuinely identified the language
Thus the linearity of the search-structure so and structure of art with the language and
indispensable to the traditional novel vanishes structure of everyday reality, how is it feasible
altogether. Molly's mind moves in circles; it to continue writing?
allows for no journey from one point to
another. Her epilogue is therefore almost a II
sort of anti-novel. For once the two poles of The fact is, however, that the majority of Irish
the journey - the subjective pole of the or- writers continued in the classical tradition of
dering imagination and the objective pole of the novel as quest, unchallenged by the Joycean
disordering reality - are superimposed, the problematic. In this tradition of Irish novelists
novel would appear to forfeit its very raison figure such celebrated authors as Liam
d Vtre.10a O'Flaherty, Sean O'Faolain, Kate O'Brietx,
In Finnegans Wake the Joycean identi- Jennifer Johnston, Edna O'Brien, Bryan Mc-
fication of imagination which seeks to trans- Mahon or James Plunkett. These writers con-
mute history into art, and memory which form to the structural requirements of the
seeks to bring fiction back to the regenerative traditional novel unflustered by Joyce's critical
reality which gives birth to it, is exploited to innovations, or in bold spite of them. Never-
the full. As in Ulysses the quest structure theless, several Irish novelists did preoccupy
becomes a self-destructive parody of itself. themselves with the Joycean critique. One
Dream and facticity, language as signifier could cite here Beckett and Flann O'Brien in
and world as signified, myth and gossip, mimic the first post-Joycean generation and
each other to the point of identity. A meaning- McGahern, Higgins, Banville and Stuart in the
less 'collideorscape' of 'undivided reawlity' second. These writers feel that they can no
finally becomes indistinguishable from an longer take the novel for granted; they feel
'epiphanized' world of artistic 'scriptsigns'. compelled to interrogate its very possibility.
With Joyce writing becomes the content Consequently, their writing becomes self-
of writing, self-reflective. The novel is thus critical, worrying away self-consciously at the
transformed from the traditional narrative of fundamental literary tensions, tensions between
quest into the narrative of question, or more imagination and memory, narration and his-
accurately of self-questioning in so far as it tory. In short, the Joycean shift from the novel
interrogates its own conditions of possibility. as quest to the novel as question gives rise
This movement from traditional to 'critical' here to a new 'critical' tradition, which we
narratiVe structures is accompanied by a sur-might term a counter-tradition. The distinction
between the two traditions is by no means
passing of the 'egology' of the classical novel
which expressed itself in the hero's psycho- absolute - several of the 'critical' novelists
logical exploration of himself and his world,often make use of the very traditional struc-
towards an 'ecology' wherein the life-worldtures they are questioning - but it is signifi-
assimilates the hero to itself. To say that Joycecant nonetheless.
invented an 'ecological' structure for the novel The first generation of 'critical' Irish
novelists, Beckett and Flann O'Brien, con-
is to say that in his writings the language of the
world shapes the author quite as much as the sidered Joyce's identification of imagination
author shapes the language of the world.11and reality as a victory of the former over the
And so the question arises as to whether the latter. Writing becomes problematical in that
Joycean dispensation with the traditional the novelist falls victim of his own fiction,
bereft of all life-giving experience. In these
rupture between the subjective language of the
creative author and the objective language ofnovels the imagination reigns supreme; all
the 'fullblooded' world has not rendered the external reality is only a figment of its colon-
novel impossible? Or more particularly, izing creativity. The subsequent attempt to

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write expresses itself as a desire to trace writing imagination - 'that insane barrel-organ that
back to its genesis in reality. But everything always keeps the wrong tune'.16 Beckett
the writer writes is writing; there is no exit seems to believe, with Proust, that the imagin-
from the creative self. And even if we imagine ation cannot create without projecting its pre-
imagination dead we are still only imagining judices onto the world. It dismisses as an in-
that it is so. Writing conveys the creator's truder whoever and whatever cannot be fitted
efforts to jump out of his own skin, or like into its preconceived pattern. 'But the essence
Pygmalion to breath life into his marble sculp- of any new experience is contained precisely
tures. Imagination's 'eye of prey' reduces all in [that] mysterious element that the vigilant
it consumes to itself and cannot, it seems, do will reject as an anachronism'.17 No amount
otherwise. The only possibility of writing a of imaginative manipulation can recreate a
novel, therefore, is to write about the im- genuine experience of the real world. All
possibility of writing. fiction is in some sense voluntary, an inter-
Beckett first expressed his preoccupation polation, a lie. For this reason it is forever
with this problematic in his critical reading of exposed to the 'inevitable gangrene of Roman-
Proust. This is Beckett's only sizeable theor- ticism'. There would seem to be an incorrigible
etical work and it is reasonable to expect that divide between the will of the creative artist
some of his own attitudes towards writing and the richness of reality. Art is the 'dream
should find expression here. Beckett distin- of a madman' and can find no solace outside
guishes very sharply between Proust's 'in- of itself or within itself. As Beckett concludes:
voluntary memory' which gives access to a 'Reality whether approached imaginatively or
'revelation of reality' on the one hand, and empirically, remains a surface, hermetic. Im-
voluntary memory or 'imagination' which im- agination, applied a priori to what is absent,
pedes such revelation by imposing its own is exercised in vacuo and cannot tolerate the
habitual fictions, on the other. 'Voluntary limits of the real'.17a
memory', Beckett claims, 'is of no value as an This auto-critique of the writing process is
instrument of evocation and provides an image evidenced in most of Beckett's novels. But I
as far-removed from the real as the myth of shall confine my remarks to the trilogy (1947-
imagination'.13 Involuntary memory, on the 49). In the first of these, Molloy, Beckett
contrary, moves beyond the 'boredom' of portrays the novelist-narrator in a futile
our capricious inventions, brings us face-to- quest for an identifiable 'self' beyond the
face with the real 'suffering of being'. Here flux of words. If a stable ego can be found,
the notion of what we 'should see has not had then a traditional plot or search-structure
time to interfere its prism between the eye could be established with a beginning and an
and its object'. Whereas the images which end. But the narrative of Molloy undermines
Habit chooses 'are as arbitrary as those chosen this hope as it continually turns back upon
by imagination and are equally remote from itself, frustrating all possibility of a chrono-
reality', involuntary memory is a 'mystic logical sequence. More exactly, the end is the
experience' or 'sacred action' beyond the writer writing the beginning; and the beginning,
jurisdiction of the self-projecting subjective on the other hand - Molloy at home in his
'will'.14 Just as Swann decomposes the reality mother's room - is in fact its end. There is
of others in the acid of his fantasizing ego, no journey or progression possible; the stasis
so too the fiction-writer runs the risk of re- of the contemplative creator has frozen his
ducing the otherness of reality to his own world. The invention of an identifiable ego
solipsistic world. 'Art is the apotheosis of sol- proves equally impossible; Beckett creates
itude', Beckett acknowledges: 'There is no Molloy who in turn creates a pseudo-self,
communication because there are no vehicles Malone, who in turn reduplicates himself in a
of communication'.15 Like Swann, the fiction- gamut of pseudo-personalities ('vice-existers').
writer (particularly after Joyce) comes to theIn the incarcerated world of the imagination
realization that the 'art which he had for so there are as many selves as there are images of
long believed the one ideal and inviolate the self.18
element in a corruptible world [is] as unreal In the second novel of the trilogy, Malone
and sterile as the construction of a demented Dies, one notices that the distinction between

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the hero-narrator and Beckett himself has is a dream, all a dream . .. I don't know, that's
virtually disappeared. Malone frequently all words, never wake, all words, there's nothing
intrudes into his own story, commenting upon else, you must go on, that's all I know ... Ill
the activity of writing itself. One often findsgo on, you must say words, as long as there
such self-critical asides as 'What a misfortune,are any, until they find me, until they say me,
the pencil must have slipped from my fingers'strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, per-
or 'What tedium' or 'this is awful'. Malone haps it's done already, perhaps they have said
the ailing author rails against the fallacious-
me already, perhaps they have carried me to
the threshold of my story, before the door
ness of all fiction, against that 'whole sorry
that opens on my story, that would surprise
business, I mean the business of Malone (since
that is what I am called now)'. Like his mal-
me, if it opens, never know, in the silence you
content progenitors, Murphy and Molloy, don't know, you must go on, I can't go on,
Malone tries desperately to find an outlet I'll go on'.21 The Unnameable suggests that
from his insular imaginings. But Malone can- perhaps the impotence of fiction is in fact its
not disentangle himself from his creations omnipotence, the very basis of its inability to
any more than Beckett can dissociate himself reach beyond itself towards a revelation of
from Malone. Contemplating the proximity reality. The only world the imaginative writer
of his death, Malone literally becomes Beckett knows is the one that exists inside his own
himself pondering all the fictive characters head; he is the victim of his own voice. As in
he has assassinated in his novels: 'Let us leave Joyce, writing proves a concern of content as
these morbid matters and get on with that of well as for form. Indeed Beckett's statement
my demise, in two or three days if I remem- about Joyce can be accurately applied to him-
ber rightly. Then it will be all over with the self: 'His writing is not about something, it
Murphy's Merciers, Molloys, Morans and is that something itself.'22 All distance or
Malones, unless it goes on beyond the grave'.l9 difference between the subjective and ob-
The ultimate fear is that even death cannot
jective poles of the quest have utterly dis-
save the imagination from itself.20 appeared; the novel as traditionally known is
The creative writer, Beckett suggests,impossible.
is In the last of his dialogues with
George Duthuit published in Transitions
trapped in an inferno of self-generating fiction.
in 1949, Beckett resolves to make a stoical
Malone compares himself to Prometheus tor-
virtue of necessity. If the failure to write
tured by the vulture of language. The novelist's
cannot be overcome, it can at least be em-
only salvation is, therefore, to reach beyond
braced: 'To be an artist is to fail, as no other
speech to silence. 'All these Murphys, Molloys
and Malones do not fool me. They have made dare fail, that failure is his world and to shrink
me waste my time, suffer for nothing, speak from it desertion . . . I know that all that is
of them when, in order to stop speakingrequiredI now . . is to make of this submission,
should have spoken of me and me alone'. The this admission, this fidelity to failure, a new
Beckettian writer writes in order to absolve term of revelation, and of the act which un-
himself from the obligation of writing. able
He to act, obliged to act, he makes, an ex-
writes in order to stop writing, in order to pressive
de- act, even if only of itself, of its im-
possibility, of its obligation'.
part from the labyrinth of self-representation.
But reality cannot be reached through fiction;Flann O'Brien shares Beckett's attitude
for as long as the novelist writes he is con-
to the novel as a questioning of its own im-
demned to write about himself alone. possibility. Joyce called O'Brien a 'real writer,
In The Unameable the only subject is lan-with the true comic spirit' and there can be
guage itself, but a langauge whose very artifice no doubt that this writer inherited the master's
severs all dialogue with what is other thandeconstructive approach to the traditional
itself. Beckett's fictive characters are finally novel. At Swim-Two-Birds, published in 1939,
exposed as nothing more than inner voices. is a self-parody from beginning to end. As with
In the conclusion to the book, and indeed tothe Beckett trilogy, the novel here becomes its
the trilogy as a whole, these voices becomeown self-representation, a novel about novel-
autonomous and ultimately assimilate narrator,writing. The opening paragraph is illustrative
author and world to themselves: 'Perhaps itof this critical self-reflection: 'Having placed

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in my mouth sufficient bread for three min- conclusion of the novel, Sarah the maid dis-
utes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual covers that Furriskey and his friends are but
perception and retired in to the privacy of inventions of her master Trellis: 'It happened
my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant, that these same pages were those of the
preoccupied expression. I reflected on the master's novel'. Trellis, like Malone, seems to
subject of my sparetime literary activities. have become a victim of his own inner voices
One beginning and one ending for a book - 'Was Trellis mad? ... Was he a victim of
was a thing I did not agree with. A good book hard-to-explain hallucinations?' Indeed at this
may have three openings entirely dissimilar point we begin to realize that Trellis himself
and interrelated only in the prescience of the is but a fictional creation of another author,
author, or for that matter one hundred times Flann O'Brien who is himself a fictional crea-
as many endings'. The author having thus tion - a pseudonym - of Brian O'Nolan. We
included himself in his own novel then proceeds understand, in retrospect, that the admoni-
to comment upon the 'examples of three tory notice which prefaced the novel is perhaps
separate openings', directing the reader with the a critical comment on this solipsism of writing:
obtrusive editorial headings - 'First opening', 'All the characters represented in this book,
'Second opening', 'Third opening', etc. including the first person singular, are entirely
At Swim-Two-Birds is as much a mimicry fictitious and bear no relation to any person
of the conventions of the novel as is Ulysses living and dead'.
or The Unnameable. The traditional quest- Flann O'Brien takes Joyce's identification
structure is ridiculed in the aimless wanderings of imagination and reality that writing hence-
of such mythic figures as Finn McCool, forth appears all imagination and no reality.
Sweeney or Pooka MacPhellimey. Ulysses Despite all his efforts, the author cannot make
and the self-same Finn had served a similarly contact with the outside world. The real con-
iconoclastic function for Joyce. By means of geals into the imaginary like Midas' food into
such protean mythic everymen these authors gold. The search-structure is impossible, for the
also succeed in undermining the egological sought is identical with the searcher from the
i.e. bourgeois foundations of the novel. The very outset. In At-Swim-Two-Birds the snake
various permutating characters slide into of fiction curls up and swallow its own tail.
each other, self-ellide, and ultimately expose
themselves for what they are - expendable III

experiments of the author. Such deconstruction The second generation of novelists in the
'critical' tradition, Higgins, McGahern, Stuart
of the 'individuated' characterization of the
and Banville etc., wrote for the most part in
traditional novel together with the recurrence
of conspicuous editorial interruptions inthe
thesixties and seventies, fifty odd years
after Joyce. We will confine our remarks to
text, reminds the reader that he is witnessing
just two samples from this generation: Mc-
not a story but the problematic creation (and
Gahern's Leavetaking and Stuart's Hole in the
destruction) of a story. We are not permitted
Head. The subjects of the two novels are
to forget that character and plot are but pure
figments devoid of all rapport with the 'creative
real psyches' - Stuart's writer Shane and
McGahern's teacher-rebel Moran - seeking to
world. Indeed Trellis, the writer, is so attracted
by one of his own female creations thatwrest he some imaginative order from the brutal
ravishes her and produces a son of the 'quasi-reality which oppresses them. Like the first
generation of 'critical' novels, these are self-
illusory sort'. But the 'literary' son conspires
with the other characters and together theyreflective
re- works in that they deal, both struc-
turally and thematically, with the specific
volt against their author by writing an alterna-
problematic of creativity. Here the Joycean
tive fiction in which he is arrested, tortured
and put on trial. Rather than cohere inidentity
a of imagination and reality is diag-
nosed as a surfeit of the Reality or Memory
plausible sequence of events, the diverse charac-
principle. These novels, however, indicate
ters turn against their creator - Trellis/Flann
O'Brien - and transform him also into a that the journey is still possible, that the writer
can escape from the circularity of time and
fiction. The attempt to reach reality via fiction
seems to constitute an infinite regress. At memory
the which turns the creative imagination

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back on itself. In short, whereas the first gen- Leavetaking shows how the exorcising of the
eration of critical novelists (Beckett and Flann obsessions of our past - 'the confused child's
O'Brien) write against the dictatorship of the world of guilty dreaming' - constitutes a
imagination, this second generation writes long and tortuous struggle. Moran's most un-
against the anarchy of history. settling discovery is that we can only love
a) What interests us particularly in Mc- in others what we have already known in our
Gahern's novel is the persistent attempt to past. He becomes keenly aware of this when
break out of the circular time of memory faced with the irreducible otherness of his
toward the linear quest-time of imagination. lover's existence: 'She began to tell me her
The hero, Patrick Moran, articulates this dil- life. I finger her words like worn coins as I
emma at a crucial point in the novel: 'Two
remember her voice in the little cafe. I try to
worlds: the world of the schoolroom in this
animate them by turning them into my own
day, the world of memory becoming imag-
life, I garland them with memory, embellish
ination, but this last day in the classroom
them with what we know ... and if that sea-
will one day be nothing but a memory beforechange happened to your coinage, my love,
its total obliteration, the completed circle'.23what may become of mine?'27 The seachange
Later he renders this liberating process from the
referred to here is that same shaping power
oppressive past even more explicit when he uses of our history that reduces all that is other
this image of 'the long withdrawing tide of
and new and strange to its own 'shadow'.
memory becoming imagination'.4 The shadowAlthough Moran has taken leave of his adored
of the past, McGahern explains, conditions usmother and feared father, of Irish Catholic-
as sea-storms condition coastline trees: 'A ism and education, fleeing from Dublin to
shadow was to fall forever on the self of my London,
life he still finds himself unable to shuffle
from the morning of that room, shape off it as
the insularizing coil of this past in order
the salt and wind shape the trees the tea lord
to encounter the reality of the woman he loves.
planted as shelter against the sea, for inItthe
is she, in the final analysis, who teaches him
evenings they do not sway as other trees theinfinal lesson of liberation by showing him
the cooling sea, their high branches stripped
in her own struggle (i.e. to free herself from
of bark and whitened, and in .the full leafthe past) a mirror-image of his. She describes
of summer they still wear that plumage, herofefforts to 'psychoanalytically' transform
bones'.25 At other pivotal junctures duringher obsessive memories into the freedom
the course of the narrative, McGahern reit- of imagination: 'As the relationship with
erates this image of the shadow of memory Roberto her first lover was a living or acting
(the sea-storm) which shapes life (the trees)
out of what I had felt for my father, it was
and progressively explicates its meaning. 'Part
weak enough to come first to the surface.
of that shpaing led to the schoolroom of this
The stone falling in the water throws out
day', Moran reflects at the end of the first
circles, it was the outer circle, the beginning
section: and he adds 'but by evening the of life
the journey from circle to inner circle,
down to the stone in the mud in the river ...
would have made its last break with the shad-
ow, and would be free to grow without warpThough the inward reliving of the life and
in its own light.'26 So ends the first seeing half why and how the defences and blocks
of the novel, where it began, with Moran on into being was really a perverse way of
came
the point of departure from the conservative acquiring a natural upbringing, it was as much a
Catholic school in Howth, ruminating onsubstitute the for it as an artificial limb is for a
crippling power of the past, trying to 'turn lost limb, but without that artificial limb I
memory into imagination' by giving narrat- would never have been able to walk into my
ive form to the absurd history that has 'shaped'own life'.28 'And did you come to the stone
him. in the mud?' Moran interjects, 'Yes, circle
But the novel does not end there. The cancer by slow circle, so hard to see simply because
of the past is too resilient to be healed by a it has all the time been under my nose'.
single decision of the imagination. The cloy- McGahern suggest that by recounting and
ing circularity of time perpetually threatens thereby communicatively reliving one's past,
all creative initiative. The second part of the one can redeem it. The enclosure of memory

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which reduces all that is other than itself ing seems an echo of the rise and fall of the
to itself, gives way to the creative imagination, seas as we drift to sleep; and I would pray for
begins to journey towards the other. The no- the boat of our sleep to reach its morning,
tion of a psychoanalytical transformation of and see that morning lengthen to an evening
memory into imagination serves here as a meta- of calm weather that comes through night and
phor and model of the activity of writing: sleep again to morning after morning until we
a creative retelling of one's past by communi- meet the first death'.30 The next morning
cating it to others i.e. the readers. The close they intend to take the boat from Dublin for
parallels between the lives of Moran and the a new life in England. But the journey is still
author, McGahern, would seem to further only an intention, a prayer. Structure-wise
confirm this reading. Of utmost significance, the wheel has come full circle: Moran is back in
however, is that the novel's theme of imagin- Howth, Ireland, determined to leave but
ation versus memory is perfectly embodied in not yet left, as he was in the beginning. The
the novel's structure of linearity versus circu- struggle between linear and circular structure,
larity. between journey and sterile repetition, ex-
In order to recount one's past creatively pressed thematically in the conflict between
one must struggle against time. What we live imagination and memory, remains for Mc-
now is already swallowed up in the belly of Gahern a struggle, a crisis, a problem of writing.
the past. McGahern asks whether the imagin- b) Francis Stuart takes the title of Hole in
ative activity of retelling our lives is sufficient the Head from the legend of a certain primi-
to escape the circle of history. Moran even tive tribe who believed that by perforating
admits to a nightmarish fear that 'once upon a the skull of young children they opened them
time we had crawled out of the sea and were to the influence of good and evil spirits, thus
making a circular journey back towards the extending their range of knowledge. The hole in
original darkness'. (The notion of memory the head is Stuart's metaphor for the imagina-
as oppressor recurs here in the image of the tion. The novel details the crisis of the creative
sea.) Moran's lover, an American divorcee, psyche, of the writer, in a contemporary
returns with him to Ireland. She must witness Ireland let loose upon the modern tide of
the forces of the past which have maimed him mental and political derangement.
in order to enable him to achieve a final leave- Terrorism and psychosis are for Stuart
taking. Just as he had helped her to make the two fundamental symptoms of a broken and
final break with her American homeland and estranged imagination. Barnaby Shane, hero
her father who enslaved her, so she will help of the novel, is, significantly, a writer trying to
him to take his leave of Mother church, Mother come to terms with both these forms of dis-
Ireland and his own revered mother whose dark order. Shane is haunted by the failure to write
influence had prevented him from loving any creatively, to translate the unruliness of his
other woman until then. We cannot but remark society into some coherent fiction: 'If only
here the similarity with Daedalus' revolt against I could think of anything but the one rather
the same three 'mothers of memory'. hopeless subject - my failure to become
By thus releasing each other from the ob- the kind of writer I had dreamed of being'.31
sessive memories which plagued them, Moran And yet despite the unwieldiness of his sur-
and his lover open the possibility of a new rounding world, Shane refuses to relinquish
journey against the sea-storm of the past. his conviction that 'nothing of any moment
They reach towards the new creativity - child- could happen outside of my own imagin-
birth/writing - in spite of the circularity of ation'.32 He flatly denies his psychiatrist's 'dist-
time which closes in the noose of death. The inction between exterior and interior reality'.
final passage is a fine attestation of this ambgig-
But such a denial runs the risk of identifying
uity of fatalism and defiance: 'What are youcreative vision and madness.
thinking, love' 'Nothing much. Something In general, Stuart seems to suggest that
quite silly in fact. I was thinking that if insanity
I occurs whenever imagination becomes
happen to conceive tonight it would be a veryindistinguishable from reality, no longer cap-
quiet child. The odour of lovemaking rises, able of discriminating its own fantasies from
fact. 'What is dream-within-dream', the author
redolent of slime and fish, and our very breath-

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asks at one point, 'what plain dream, what ful passions than the more sober research wor-
drug-induced hallucination, and what the real-
ker in the literary field'.36 Later, significantly,
ity at the heart of imagination?' Or again, Shane will dismiss the convention of 'medium-
'Oh my contradictory yearnings, my confusing mix-fiction' precisely because it lacks all
fantasies! The mad shuffling between dream 'energy' and 'obsession'.37 Shane's young
and reality'.33 During the course of the novel, lover, Claudia, claims that she has been com-
Shane has a relationship with his muse Emily mitted to the Kye sanitorium because like the
Bronte, fellow legatee of the troubled Celtic writer, 'her imagination runs away with her
psyche and former inhabitant of this divided, too'.38 To the Reverend Mother's declar-
schizophrenic Ulster (much of the story unfolds ation that Claudia has a 'distorted imagination',
in Belbury/Belfast). Stuart infers that Emily, Shane replies that the 'very valuable [arej
like the writer-hero himself, was another driven to fantasy by their psychology'.
perturbed imagination prone to her own The difference between the psychotic and the
violent and psychotic obsessions. On the basis writer is merely one of degree. Whereas the
of her own past experience, Emily warns that former confounds imagination and reality
unless the writer strives patiently towards without knowing that it is doing so, the lat-
artistic order, his creative energy will degen- ter differentiates between them. As Shane puts
erate into hysteria: 'There's always just one it: 'Imaginative people can resolve inner ten-
more of anything that we're obsessed and sions that keep less gifted ones behind asy-
exhausted by'. She too knew on a deeper lum walls'.4g This attempt of the creative
level of reality than my poor fancies, that mind to wrest aesthetic form from the form-
the imagination, once aroused to this intensity, lessness of the reality principle is also a central
wanted to roam further and further. 'One theme for other 'critical' novelists such as
day you'll transform these passions into a leg-
Aidan Higgins and John Banville.41
end, but meanwhile bear them in patience andStuart's point seems to be that the imagin-
silence'.34 Shane frequently identifies with
ation is a well-spring of creative energy
Heathcliff's (Branwell's) dementia, and on
which, if thwarted, expresses itself as mental
key occasions argues that there is a very thin
derangement or terrorism: 'A flood of energy
dividing line between aesthetic and patho- with nowhere to go except into fighting or
logical fictions. 'Hallucinations?', he asks,
clowning, apart from an occasional one of
'optical, auditory illusions? The tilt of an axis
you who tries his hand at fiction or poesie ...
shifts and a new reality comes into focus'.35fulfilment denied results in violence, yes,
The creative mind often seems inseparable but only when fulfilment is desired fiercely
from the insanity it intends to sublimate. enough. Then you have the terrorist, or more
The dilemma is conveyed by the very in- rarely, the imaginative artist'.42 Stuart's writing
stability and disjointedness of Stuart's own is a plea for the aesthetic expression of im-
narrative structures. The uneven, irregular agination in a world dominated by the
quality of the novel's style, its disruption of
'reality principle' of the politicians. He ob-
normal temporal and egological schemas, per- serves that 'even a fairly successful writer
ranks well below even a minor politician
fectly embodies the crisis of the novel's charac-
ters. Folly as content echoes and epitomizes in both parts of this island',43 and proceeds
folly as form. But Stuart's whole effort is toto advocate the need for a 'new mythology'.
show that there is method in this madness,But at for the author, Shane, as for Stuart, his
both levels. Shane is surely speaking the mind
author, there remains little hope for the crea-
of his author when he remarks that 'Drugs tive principle. If it survives at all, it will only
alone could not have induced in me a state do so as the esoteric sanctum of a small minor-
in which the puzzle of Emily Bronte could ity of seers: 'The new myths, if there be any,
have become clear. They played a part but in order
it to redeem will deal with events of utter
obscurity'. The relative obscurity of Stuart's
required an imaginative, not to say unbalanced
temperament like mine, which at the same own
timework is perhaps indicative of a certain
felt very close to the subject, to bafely solve it.
despair, the symptom of a modern Irish imagin-
A fiction writer with guilt and obsession
ation in straits.
of his own knows more about secret and shame-

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 Conclusion
NOTES
All representatives of the 'critical' tradition of
the Irish novel articulate a common crisis of
imagination. This crisis has been brought about1. G. Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel, 1971,
Merlin, London; Rene Girard, Mensonge
by Joyce's confection of the norms of art and
Romantique et Viriti Romanesque, 1961,
of reality. Traditional novel-writing was only Grasset, Paris; Lucien Goldmann, Pour une
possible when these two poles were kept Sociologie du Roman, 1964, Gallimard, Paris.
distinct. Otherwise there was no journey to See for example Goldmann's statement that the
narrate, no distance for the creative world novel ' is the transposition on the literary plane
of the everyday life in the individualistic
to travel through, no transcendent value for it
society created by market production' p.7.
to travel towards. Once the subject and object 2. The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
became identical in language there is no further 1960, Penguin. London, pp. 178-80.
need for language (for communication), 3. ibid., p. 221.
because language is now everything (Finnegans4. See S.L. Goldberg, Joyce, 1962, Oliver and
Boyd, Edinburgh. 'For the Portrait, more than
Wake). If one were content with this an autobiographical novel, or even a study of
identification of subjective and objective artistic alienation, is that peculiar twentieth-
poles, of the aesthetic and reality principles, century phenomenon: a work of art which is at
there would be no possibility or need of further once a representative fable. . .a kind of demons-
tration of its own significance as a work of art. .
writing. Molly's soliliquoy would be the last
[the artist] expresses the external world as he
word, the end of the traditional novel. Most understands it and at the same time expresses
subsequent Irish writers seem to have success- the very form of his understanding'. p. 51-2.
fully ignored the crisis inaugurated by Joyce. 5. But as Goldberg remarks Joyce 'could not
They continued to produce the traditional dramatize more of the deeper vision to which
Stephen is groping than is embodied in this
novel as if it had never died. Others, however, groping itself. Hence the need for a sequel,
rallied to the challenge and experienced the Ulysses'. p. 62.
crisis of identity only to emerge from it in one 6. Ulysses, 1937, London, pp. 231-2.
of two ways. Firstly, there was the way of 7. ibid., p. 20. Mulligan reinforces this motif
when he calls Stephen 'Japhet in search of a
the first generation which interpreted the father' (p. 29). The centrality of this father-
Joycean identification as an imperialism of fic- son atonement structure was first pointed out
tion over fact and subsequently sought to to me by Seamus Deane.
make the journey of writing possible by saving 8. It is in this context that we must interpret
Stephen's search for the secret 'signature of
fact from the jaws of fiction. Secondly, there
things' (Boehme) and the 'form of forms'
was the way of the second generation which (Aristotle/Aquinas) which will serve as the
interpreted the stalemate as a surrender of divine-artistic Word of creation. See also
memory to the order of creative imagi- the Dalkey meditation in Chapter III.
9. The 'light' extinguished in Bella Cohen's re-
nation. What both movements of this counter-
tradition of the Irish novel share in common appears in Molly's bedroom window as 'a vis-
ible luminous sign', a sort of Dantesque
is a preoccupation with the possibility of vision, at the end of the chapter. See W.Y.
writing itself. Whether the imagination at Tindall, A Reader's Guide to James Joyce,
issue in this 'critical' tradition emerges as 1959, Thames and Hudson, London, p. 220.
oppressor or oppressed, it is at all times funda-10. Molly's unequivocal affirmation of reality is an
answer to Stephen's sponsorship of life-exclud-
mentally problematic, an imagination in ing art: 'In woman's womb word is made
crisis which no longer takes writing for granted flesh but in the spirit of the maker all flesh
but makes it the very theme of writing. that passes becomes the word that does not
pass away'.
10a Indeed, this conclusion was cogently pre-
figured in the 'Oxen of the Sun' episode (ch.
14) where the fecundity of Mrs. Beaufoy-
Purefoy's child's nine-month embryonic devel-
opment is contrasted with the sterility of the
nine-part chronological parody of the styles
of novel and prose writing from Sterne and
Swift to Carlyle and Dickens and the final
decay of literature in American confusion
and Billy Sunday. 'Agendath is a wasteland'

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 as Bloom comments. Already Joyce seems to be 27. ibid., p. 120.
suggesting that the principle of artistic creation 28. ibid., p. 132-3.
must not ignore or despise the principle of 29. ibid., p. 159.
gestatory creation. 30. ibid., p. 195.
11. See Robert Scholes, Structuralism in Literat- 31. Francis Stuart, A Hole in the Head 1977,
ure, 1974, Yale U.P., p. 183-4. Keefe and O'Brien, London, p.36.
12. For an example of the first reading - that 32. ibid., p. 34; also p. 143: 'The abiding presence
Ulysses constitutes an aesthicization of reality of my muse with me could only be intimated
- see Stephen Heath's article 'Ambiviolences' in the quality of my imagiantion. No need of
in Tel Quel 1972, Paris. For the alternative facts to support it'.
reading see Goldberg, op cit, pp. 98-9, 108-14; 33. ibid., p. 21. Nor does Stuart consider the dec-
or Scholes, op cit. p. 188-9. line of creative imagination to be a unique
13. S. Beckett, Proust 1931, Grove Press, N.Y. p. 4. feature of the Irish psyche: 'All over the
14. ibid., p. 19-23. globe a tiny invisible fungus is annulling the
15. ibid., p. 47: 'Even on the rare occasions when nucleic acids which, as we now know, are the
word and gesture happen to be valid express- basis of the imagination' (p. 89). But for
ions of personality (i.e. the ego) they lose their the most part Stuart writes as an Irish novelist
significance on their passage through the catar- concerned with the particular crisis of the
act of the personality that is opposed to them. imagination in Irish society.
Either we speak and act for ourselves - in 34. ibid., p. 91
which case speech and action are distorted and 35. ibid., p. 116.
emptied of their meaning by an intelligence 36. ibid., p. 82. Cf. Black List - Section H where
that is not ours, or else we speak and act for Stuart discusses the element of 'criminality
others in which we speak and act a lie'. . . 'We in the immensely imaginative psyche'. Also cf.
are alone. We cannot know and cannot be his interview with Ronan Sheehan in The Crane
known'. p. 49. Bag, Vol. 3, No. I, 1979.
16. ibid., p. 50 37. ibid., p. 124.
17. ibid., p. 54. 38. ibid., p. 143.
17a. ibid., p. 56. 39. ibid., p. 149.
18. See R. N. Coe, Beckett, 1964, Oliver and Bond, 40. ibid., p. 150.
London, p. 59f. 41. In Aidan Higgins' Balcony Of Europe, we find
19. See A. Alvarez, Beckett, 1973, Fontana Modern the same 'critical' attempt to wrest imaginative
Masters, pp. 62-7, 110-22. form from the vortex of memory, the circular-
20. This particular fear is admirably expressed in ity of a recurring past. Indeed, the problem of
the title of one of Beckett's late works Imagin- transforming the 'sameness' of history into
ation Dead Imagine, 1956, Calder and Boyars, the 'otherness' and 'newness' of creative imag-
London. The narration takes the form, signif- ination is even more acute for Higgins than for
cantly, of a monologue, in which the narrator McGahern or Stuart. There is in Higgins a cert-
finds himself trapped inside a plain, white ain stoical fatalism before time as an eternal
rotunda which reduces the outside world to recurrence of the same. Note, for example,
a hot, white light that comes and goes. This the epigraphs to tnis work: 1) We go on loving
rotunda is the imagination itself, and Beckett's those we have loved in other forms. . . Noth-
point seems to be that even death ('imaginat- ing changes. Everything is transformed' (Leduc)
ion dead') is no panacea to the solipsism of ii) 'Man is born as he dies' (Barnes). iii) 'When
fiction which simply goes on imagining. Imagin- consciously awake, I find myself. . .set in rel-
ation is the 'eye of prey' which converts all ation to a world which, though its constants
exterior life to its own currency, which reduces change, remains one and ever the same'
the multi-faceted world to its own point of (Husserl). iv) 'Nothing is granted to me,
view, and for the writer there is no other: 'No everything has to be earned, not only the
trace anywhere of life, you say, pah, no present and the future, but the past too...
difficulty there, imagination not dead yet, yes, hardest work' (Kafka) v) I begin to see things
dead, good, imagination dead imagine...world double - doubled in history, world history,
still proof against ending tumult. Rediscovered personal history' (Yeats) vi) 'Consider the past;
miraculously after what absence in perfect such great changes of political supremacies.
voids it is no longer the same, from this point Thou mayest forsesee also the things which will
of view, but there is no other'.(ibid., p. 7, II). be, for they will certainly be of like form...'
21. Alvarez, op. cit., p. 67. (Aurelius). These epigraphs are of essential
22. Quoted A. Reid, An Approach to the Plays of significance not only for their explication of
Samuel Beckett, 1968, Dolmen, Dublin, p.52. the central themes of the novel i.e. the attempt
23. John McGahern, The Leavetaking 1977, to rescue imagination from memory, but also
Quartet Books, London, p. 35. in that they render the novel 'self-reflective':
24. ibid., p. 45. the epigraphs turn the writing back on itself,
25. ibid., p. 71. they mirror the attempt of the novel itself to
26 ibid., p. 71. write back itself, against time. In Higgins too

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 the creative process (i.e. to paint or summer's day, a day like any other day, a day
imaginatively retell one's life) becomes like today. Nothing essential has changed, yet
objective to itself, an image of itself. Several all has changed. ..Soon it will be dark. No tidal
parallels with the Leavetaking are obvious and flats, rocks, reeks of ammonia, kelpy wastes,
point to Joyce as a common source. Firstly, sulphuric acid stench of fouled eggs. Pouring
both novels - like Ulysses - begin in Ireland matter, pouring waste. Vergiss mein nicht. .
with the death of the hero's mother. Secondly, The light begins to go. The light is going.
both - again like Ulysses - register this death Are you asleep? Answer me'. Higgins' novel
as a sort of liberation which enables the hero to ends thus with an address to the reader.
embark on a journey (London in the Memory can only be transformed into imagin-
Leavetaking, Andalusia and Spain in Balcony of ation.
Europe). Thirdly, this journey is concomitant John Banville, as we suggested, is also
with freedom from the Irish nation, church etc. representative of the 'critical' tradition (i.e.
- the 'mothers of memory' - and a freedom aesthetic versus reality principle) as is amply
for a new partner beyondthe matriarchal pale demonstrated by the opening and concluding
(Moran's American divorcee, Dan's paragraphs of his third novel Birchwood (1973
Jewish-American wife, Stephen' s Secker and Warburg, London) p. 3: 'I am,
Jewish-outsider-father-figure Bloom). Fourthly, therefore I think. That seems inescapable.
McGahern's rebel-hero, Moran and Higgins In this lawless house I spend the nights poring
painter-hero, Aidan, like Joyce's hero, Stephen, over my memories, fingering them, like an
portray in quasi-autobiographical manner the impotent casanova his old love-letters, sniff-
crisis of their authors' 'creative imagination'. ing the dusty scent of violents. Some of these
Lastly, both these novels share the same memories are in a language which I do not
complex circular time/space scheme as Ulysses, understand, the ones that could be headed,
each returning to conclude in the time and the beginning of the old life. They tell the story
place they had begun: Leavetaking - which I intend to copy here, all of it, if not
its
- meaning. . .; 'This world. I feel that if
Howth/time of departure; Balcony of Europe
Ireland/Autumn; Ulysses - Eccles I could understand it I might then begin to
St./daybreak. But Higgins, like Joyce andunderstand the creatures who inhabit it. But I
McGahern, challenges this structure of do not understand it. I find the world always
repetitive circularity. In Balcony of Europe the odd, but odder still, I suppose, is the fact that
normal chronology of season and year is altered I find it so, for what are the eternal verities
i.e. Part 1: Autumn 1961 - Part II: Spring 1963 by which I measure these temporal abberat-
- Part III: Winter 1962 - Part IV: Summer ions? Intimations abound, but they are felt
1963 - Part V: Autumn 1963. Moreover we only, and words fail to transfix them. Anyway,
may say that Higgins' work evinces the same some secrets are not to be disclosed under pain
ambiguous mixture of defiance and fatalism of who knows what retribution, and whereof
witnessed in McGahern, a defiant fatalism I cannot speak, thereof I must be the silent'.
before the importunity of the reality principle, 42. Stuart. op. cit.. p. 185.
before that confusion which inhibits movement 43. ibid., p. 196. See also Stuart's article 'The Writer
and speech, which makes all quest impossible. and Politics' in The Crane Bag, Vol. 1, No. 1,
The concluding sentences are illustrative of this 1977.
tone: 'It is late evening of the same long

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