Essays on John McGahern by Derek Hand;Eamon Maher;

Author:Derek Hand;Eamon Maher;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Vearsa

Chapter 7

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‘The purity of feeling […] [of] the remembered “I”’: Remembrance, Atonement and Celebration in John McGahern’s The Leavetaking

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Claudia Luppino

In loving memory of Hugh Garvey

The Leavetaking (1974; 1984)1 belongs to the most experimental phase of John McGahern’s career, a phase during which he attempted to find adequate stylistic means to convey his poetic vision. This search sometimes resulted in clumsy sentence structures, not fully convincing characters and uncertain internal divisions. And yet this struggle at the level of language and syntax reflected and translated a philosophical and aesthetic quest for meaning and purpose in life.2 The works of this period are often overlooked by critics, or dismissed as flawed and transitional. McGahern himself was aware of the difficulties he encountered, and conscious of the limits of what he attempted, but he also saw this experimental moment as a necessary step to attain a serene style and an accomplished vision. His writing process was slow and meticulous, and numerous drafts were produced before his novels and short stories were finally published, in a strenuous search for accuracy and beauty. The Leavetaking, however, is unique, in that the substantial revisions that affected the narrative resulted in a second, revised edition, some ten years after the novel’s first appearance.

The publication of Memoir in 2005,3 shortly before McGahern’s death, brought new attention to The Leavetaking, for the way in which it retrieved and recycled, as it were, language and imagery from that early novel. The section devoted to his mother’s death when he was a young boy, in particular, is reproduced almost word for word. A plausible explanation for this is that writing down the story of that primal and irreversible loss, and the feelings that accompanied him then and in the years that followed, must certainly have been an exacting process, hence the recourse, in Memoir, to the same sentences he had painfully forged for The Leavetaking. As the numerous episodes, characters and phrases from other novels and short stories that reappear on the pages of his memoir confirm and highlight, interesting links and porous borders exist between the fictional universe and the real-life experience of this writer. The Leavetaking, however, features in Memoir more extensively and more explicitly than any other of his fictions, and in connection to that crucial watershed that the circumstances of Susan McGahern’s premature death represented for her son as a person and as an artist. The entanglement of grief and guilt, of memory and imagination that The Leavetaking stages in embryo would soon emerge as the pattern underpinning McGahern’s entire work, and as the quintessential kernel of his poetic vision.

This chapter reassesses the importance of The Leavetaking and casts a light on the different reasons why it deserves new critical attention. Paul Ricoeur’s theories about memory and forgetting are deployed alongside those non- fictional writings in which McGahern expressed his conception of the role of art and described the mechanisms of his creative process, to show the prominent place and the crucial role of The Leavetaking in the panorama of his works and along the path of his aesthetic evolution.

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