[In the following essay, Rogers discusses the role of domesticity in McGahern's prose.]

The reliance—whether unconscious or not—of supposedly essential, self-reliant and self-defined men upon the domestic performances of women is investigated before its consecration within marriage by McGahern's novel The Pornographer and Neil Jordan's film The Miracle. In the former, the protagonist reveals through his profession and his sexual life the pornographic aspects of men's exploitation of women's domesticity, while in the latter Jordan's female protagonist tries to educate her young son to avoid exploiting female performance by entering into a discursive, active relationship with it. Both The Pornographer and The Miracle focus on the need for men to acknowledge the performativity and, consequentially, the political shaping of the most intimate and domestic roles—lover, husband, wife, mother, father. These texts disallow the exploitation of women by men by invalidating the usual excuses for such male self-centeredness: that the male characters are old, set in their ways, basically decent, gruff yet kind-hearted, and so on. In devaluing these characteristics, each author is powerfully devaluating definitions of traditional Irish manhood and establishing a new, positive evaluation of Irish womanhood.

In The Miracle, yet another motherless family is seen through the experience of a young boy.¹ Living with his “widowed” father Sam, Jimmy “James” Coleman spends his days with his friend Rose, making up fantasy pasts and futures for the tourists and locals they see on the beaches at Bray. Jimmy's main conflict with his father is over music; Sam is a saxophonist who plays with the local big band in Bray, and his greatest desire is that his son follow in his footsteps. Jimmy, however, though interested in music, resists, determined vaguely to forge an existence separate from his father's.

In both The Miracle and “Night in Tunisia,” the Jordan short story it is based on, that individuation comes through contact with a forbidden woman: the local girl-gone-wrong in “Night in Tunisia”; and Renee Baker, an American actress starring in the Dublin production of “Destry Rides Again,” in The Miracle, Jordan's switch to a mother-figure for the movie is interesting, offering two diametrically-opposed recuperations to Jimmy and his father where the story offered the father nothing but the bitter realization of old age. Alcoholic Sam, knowing the identity of Renee Baker (she is the long-gone wife whom he has told Jimmy is dead), resents her reappearance in his life, as he has made a career of living in the past and her presence reminds him that he has no life at present. Jimmy, on the other hand, sees Renee as his ticket-of-leave from his position of child-caretaker in his father's boozy household; namely, because a sexual relationship with Renee will transform him into a man. As in The Past, both men need the female performance to give their lives both a future and a meaning. But the desired performance, of course, varies greatly between father—carefully-preserved memory—and son—sexual adventure/initiation.

Both father and son, then, struggle with what they perceive to be their male essence. Sam's music is his essence, and he cannot do anything else but continue to play the old songs of his youth, though the demand for his big-band music is dwindling in the face of rock-and-roll. On one level, Sam's attachment to the music of the thirties and forties has to do with preserving his legacy; he wants to pass the torch by having Jimmy accompany him with his band at the dance-hall, where he can be introduced and publicly acknowledged as Sam's son, a chip off the old block. But on another level, Sam's desperate refusal to move into the musical present is based on his refusal to let go of his Family Era—when his wife was with him.

Again, the woman of the house is crucially necessary to the male's ability to function, to fulfill his essential needs. When his wife left him with the infant Jimmy, she certainly left Sam's performance of life hanging while she did something else; since she left, Sam hasn't tried very hard to perform as parent for Jimmy, as he relegated that to Renee. Since he has been on his own, Sam has only performed for himself, constantly reaffirming his public self-image, which comes from being the spot-lit soloist in the band. Sam has willed his personal life's performance to stop, taking refuge in music, pulling the curtain on any progression of his interests or abilities away from those in his past. He is like the elephant Rose describes at the circus, who remembers so much the weight of the memories crushes the life out of him. The essence of that remembered past is defined by its music, and by the other band members, with whom Sam drinks late into each night, talking about the old days and forgetting briefly about the new, which are defined in part by Jimmy's disdain for his father's lifestyle.

In this way, Sam is different from Moran, who experiences only brief, unconnected realizations of the fact that his role as Father of the House is indeed a role like any other, dependent upon an appreciative audience and cooperative co-stars within the family and the village. Moran's realizations are so negative that the final one, on his deathbed, helps to end his life. For Sam, however, each day is characterized by the same realization of loss over and over; each nightly performance with his band (a surrogate family/audience) is a reminder of the failure of his performance of Family Man and Husband from which the only escape is drunkenness. But while Sam is actually playing, he briefly regains power over his own literal performance and becomes a Musician whose work is appreciated. Sam's saxophone is for him as Moran's farm is to Moran—the one physical proof of his existence and dedication which will outlive him and thus grant him a measure of immortality.

Jimmy is the unappreciative if loving audience for Sam's retrospective monologues and drunken spiels; like the children in Amongst Women, Jimmy is forced to support his father's withdrawal from society, but unlike them (except perhaps for Luke Moran), Jimmy is not in awe of his father. He makes him breakfast, cleans him up, cleans up after him, helps stagger him home, and in general tries to ignore the wifely nature of his caretaking duties to his father. When, in the course of trying to get Sam to leave the bar and return home Jimmy pushes him off balance and Sam falls to the ground, Sam demands an apology in the name of the institution of fatherhood. Jimmy sees fatherhood itself as the gross abuse—Sam's inferior performance of that essential role has soured him on the influence of parents. When his friend Rose's father tells him he blames Jimmy's disgraceful character on Sam, Jimmy agrees. Jimmy also has an audience he depends upon—Rose, with whom he spends his days making up fictional lives and desires for the prosaic people of Bray.

Rose and Jimmy enter the story walking along the boardwalk at Bray, making up a story for an elderly couple—she will acknowledge him as he passes behind her, and they will fall in love. She doesn't turn, but Rose narrates a longing to. Jimmy describes a lonely man in a chip shop as fascinating in his very drabness. They write these choice lines down in Rose's notebook, and continue to speak in the clichés and considered language of fiction, letting the demands of romantic storytelling be their guidelines for expressing emotion and motives—both their own, and those of others. In this way they foreshorten their own agency within their strictly literary “performances.” Romantic love is a completely literary performance, and it satisfies their need for diversion, not for giving of themselves. Jimmy and Rose are not yet engaged in performing the roles of the passionate lovers they mouth through their fictions—more than friends, less than lovers, in a strange state of suspended animation, as Rose sees it.

Jimmy is aware of the constructed, staged nature of sexual being, which he sees as a variety of behaviors—Don Juanism, blustering, pining, secretly surveilling, passionately declaring need. Rose, for her part, is toying with the same role-playing, but unlike Jimmy she recognizes that bringing their wordplay into actual performance is inevitable, that acting out, again, is but a metaphor for performance. She decides to take it upon herself to shape a violent clunk named Jonner who has come to town with the circus into a desirable lover while she goes back and forth between performing her pragmatic, non-romantic self and performing a conventionally-desirable and desiring young woman. Rose is aware of the dangers the entrance into performance entails, reminding Jimmy of the need to be kind to one's creations. Jimmy's indifference to her experimental initiation into performance indicates his lack of understanding of it and his refusal to abandon “himself” for a performance of himself.

Renee's enters this world much like an experienced performer who could serve as Rose's mentor.² She is Sam's deserter wife, traveling each day on the train from Dublin to Bray to recapture some of her past life there. She is aware of Sam's and Jimmy's presence in Bray, but, treating them more as the characters of her imagination than as real people she might encounter, Renee hazards her daily journey and risks abusing them by her sudden return. Jordan does not make clear her reasons for fleeing her roles of wife and mother, but her fond memories of, yet firm reluctance to face, Sam intimate that she is happier having her performances recognized as such; the burden of performing the “natural” (mother and wife) as a matter of course is too great. Constantly reiterating herself as an actress, she strives to avoid any appeals to essence—thus her refusal to meet with Sam, or to reveal her maternity to Jimmy. She accepts performing in “Destry,” but not in the family. This way, her only burden is to an audience which understands that she is not and cannot be who she seems to be. On-stage, a bad performance can be forgotten by its emendation the next night; in the home, bad performance haunts from year to year and manifests itself in a failing family. Thus Renee's tentative willingness to let Jimmy involve himself in her life leaves her sorry for allowing it, for he immediately tries to engage her in the one performance she cannot share with him, and the irony is that Renee is forced to act out the role of Mother fifteen years after she successfully let that curtain drop.

But the consequences of trying to reprise, if briefly, that role of mother are made apparent when Sam goes to Renee to ask her not to tell Jimmy who she is. The setting is telling: Sam interrupts her during rehearsals in Dublin. Previously, she has apologized to the stage manager for being late, and his angry reply that they're all getting used to it makes clear first that her performance is key to the show, to creating its ‘reality,’ and then that she is negligent in her duty to perform, to give the other performers their raison d'être. In this way, she is a distinct, if less mystical, echo of Rene O'Shaugnessy in The Past; the actress who sustains all those around her through her life-giving performance. All the time Renee and Sam are speaking, the performers are seen in the background, out of focus, waiting on Renee to return so they can continue their act. They are dependent on her, she's the star; without her, they are distant, and unfocused, like her family. In their family roles, Renee as the mother is the star to her family, while Sam the father plays a one-man show to himself alone. In fact, Renee refers to both Sam and Jimmy in separate instances as her “public,” which indeed they once were, albeit not the most enthusiastic.

While they are arguing over whether she should reveal her identity to Jimmy, the scene cuts to Jimmy above and beyond them, in the balcony, watching; now Renee becomes fuzzy and indistinct while Jimmy is thrown into sharp focus. When Jimmy visits her afterward in her dressing room, Renee is seated at her lighted makeup mirror, wearing her stage makeup, which heightens her identity as a performer; it is like Jimmy is talking to a star rather than a person. When Jimmy confronts her, she tries to remove Sam to his performance self, The Musician, as well, by stating that Sam was just a musician and that she has known a lot of musicians in her time.

Sam and Jimmy, her family, are the show she walked out on before its run was over, and as a result the show folded; Renee tries to blur the sharpness of her regret by distancing the players. Jordan signals this checkmate and Renee's lack of any easy way out of the return to this threesome—herself, Sam and Jimmy—by holding a long shot on the sign over the stage of “Destry” that says “Welcome to Bottleneck.”

Renee knows she should look no further into Jimmy's life, because indeed she does not know him or his father any longer, but she, like Jimmy, cannot help herself. Her grip on her role of mother is loosening as she toys with actually being his mother again. When Jimmy tries to kiss her in the Hall of Mirrors in the funhouse where they take refuge in a storm, Renee sees Sam standing at the door. When Jimmy asks her what's wrong, Renee responds by saying she has to go to rehearsal. Renee tries to remind herself that Jimmy's secret should remain so, if only because she is not willing to go back into rehearsals for the role of Sam's wife and Jimmy's mother.

Jimmy has decided he must make love to Renee to uncover the secret he still believes is hers. This corresponds to Rose's determination to “humanize” Jonner the elephant trainer by “giving herself to him,” enduring his blundering attentions for the sake of his redemption. Will it hurt? Yes, but she hopes to gain Jonner's humanity through her sacrifice. Jimmy is uncertain whether he wants to go through the pain of becoming human, but steels himself to it. Again, it is the woman's act of giving which humanizes the man; it is painful but necessary to her task of endowing the male with a performance of manhood.

Jimmy invites Renee home, and she goes with him, looking around the old house as though within a dream. He tries to kiss her again, then tries to take off her blouse (reclaiming his once rightful, now forbidden, place at his mother's breast) and when she resists, he throws her out. Jimmy storms back to the kitchen and finds Renee's purse. He dumps it out onto the floor, and finds a picture of his parents, Renee in sunglasses, laughing. When Sam arrives, later, enough time has passed for Jimmy to have made up his story, which is that he actually knew all along that Renee was his mother, but couldn't help trying to possess her. When Sam tells Jimmy he just didn't have the nerve to tell him the truth about Renee, Jimmy responds by saying that if Sam had told him who Renee was everything would have been different.

Looking ahead to The Crying Game, there is an echo here of Fergus reproaching Dil for not telling him “who she was,” and falling back on the idea that things would have been different if he had known—that he would not have fallen in love with her.³ More importantly, Jimmy has taken refuge in the literary potential of his “story,” translating his shock into the more appealing idea that, through dramatic foreshadowing, he knew all along, but was driven by fate to fulfill his Greek-tragic destiny. He has gotten into this habit in part from his association with Rose, whom, as he says earlier, will always give reasons for things, giving everything a history and a linear beginning-middle-end structure and the comfort such structure entails. But, more tellingly, his fiction is an attempt to perform an alternative reality, to enable himself to cope with his new understanding of his own identity. But he is unable to give himself this gift of performance, because he is unused to recognizing alternative selves as anything but fictions on paper. So he turns to Renee, making her tell the story of how she was performing onstage when she met Sam, how they endured a stormy relationship, how she left to save herself by creating a public identity. Renee knew Sam must have made up some story to explain her absence, but that she felt she had truly died when she found out Jimmy thought she was dead.

Or, when she realized her part had been definitively written out of Jimmy's life. Performance is life; for Renee, Jimmy represents a remainder of her past performance of wife and mother in Bray, and if he does not acknowledge that, by acknowledging her, then Renee loses some of her own life performance. This is why she seeks Jimmy out, especially after he first rejects her. It is not that Renee is dependent on the men she gives performance to, but that she must have her performance credited; for Sam to have erased her from Jimmy's life is to deny what she has given to both of them—a part of herself. This is what she feels Jimmy has a right to know—that although she did not perform traditional motherhood, she is still able to contribute to his development and sense of self. Again, in this way she is much like the disappeared yet powerful Rene of The Past. But Renee Baker has to fight to have her performance, her enablement of her son, her audiences, and her fellow-performers, recognized and valued. Unlike Una, Renee unmakes her husband when she realizes he will never acknowledge her acting ability (acting again as Jordan's metaphor for performance). And unlike Renee O'Shaughnessy, Renee Baker will not let her performance be skewed toward a holy triangle of men in which she is reduced to passive spirit.

Jimmy falls asleep in a church after his interview with Renee, and when he wakes in the morning, he finds himself watched over by an elephant; circus animals run about freely as he walks to find Rose, who is standing still as animal tumult runs around her. She has stolen Jonner's keys while copulating and freed all the circus animals. Rose had claimed earlier that her aim was higher than Jimmy's, since he desired sex and she desired to free the animals. Rose can thus supply even animals with the opportunity to fulfill their essential natures, and Jimmy honors her achievement as they walk together. Rose relates her sex story as a scene from a novel, and the film closes on their good-natured argument about whether her hair was spread on the hay like a fan (Jimmy) or a seashell (Rose). Finally Jimmy must concede that it is Rose's hair, to describe as she will.

This concession is important, in that it reaffirms first that life is a constructed performance, and as susceptible to literary form and drama as any book because it is iterated in the same way by actual people that it is by books. Each person's partner(s) demand(s) an iteration of romantic or domestic behaviors that are supplied to the last detail by social norms. However, it also reaffirms that each person is in control of both the details of their performance and the interpretation of those details, as well as larger events. While the plot is affected by outside forces which cannot be averted or dictated to, each life can be made and remade endlessly by those writing/living it. Jimmy's journey into adulthood goes from seeing fiction as completely removed from “real life,” and trying to throw over that fictional existence for “real” experience (during which time he sees less of Rose), to incorporating the two concepts of “real” and “constructed,” thus dethroning the drive for essence.

Jimmy's renewed closeness to Rose indicates that his continued involvement with “female” performance, uncertainty, constant rewriting and change will prevent him from continuing his effort to replicate or regain his lost relationship with his mother. Jimmy is allowed to rewrite his mother, not into his past, as someone dead to him, but into his present, as someone who supplied him with an understanding of performance and the real power of fictions. Unlike the narrator of The Past, Jimmy is able to accept the performance his mother gives him, and Renee is not lost in the mists of impersonal history, but permeates the possibilities of Jimmy's future. Sam, hopelessly moored in a past as fictional as any of Jimmy's and Rose's stories, refuses to allow Renee's performance to enable his own future, since he needs her to remain with him, constantly reaffirming his “essence” (music/musician) through her performance (singer). When Renee leaves the stage, Sam draws the curtain, even on Jimmy to a certain extent, and the divide between father and son is definite. This time, the lost mother reclaims her son.

Ireland wanking is Ireland free.

—The Pornographer

Michael O'Shaughnessy, James Vance, Old Mahoney, Moran and Sam Coleman are all given confidence and social importance by their roles as fathers. All five men strive to erase the original necessity of women to their current roles, reducing their wives to props, most of whom have long faded from memory. Rather than recognize their own function as props in others’ lives (usually their own fathers’) before their enablement, these men focus on rewriting their histories to show how they were always true to a self they always knew.

As if to illustrate the performative nature of male essence, in 1979, McGahern, hitherto praised for depicting the traditional rural Irish lifestyle so desperately enthroned in modern Ireland, published The Pornographer. There was immediate critical outcry against its vulgarity in Ireland, and immediate critical wonder at its currency in England and America.⁴ Nominally the story of a young man who writes hack soft-core for a living who finally finds true love after a series of uncaring, shallow relationships by marrying a woman from the country and going to settle on his parents’ farm, The Pornographer produces exactly the opposite story, a backlash against the enforced patriarchal nature of domesticity of Irish society.

The Pornographer's unnamed male protagonist defies women to shape his life or offer him a role in their own performance. An orphan, he has left his family, which consists of his aunt and uncle, to go to Dublin where he lives and works alone in his barren apartment. Though his parent's farmhouse still waits for him, kept righteously in the family by his aunt and uncle despite the many offers they receive for it, the protagonist refuses to visit the country. His aunt is terminally ill with cancer, and is hospitalized frequently in Dublin. His uncle goes down to see her, and so the protagonist is kept in closer contact with his relatives’ guileless lifestyle than he would like; although he loves his aunt and uncle, he cannot but see them as snares set up by the domestic world. He feels guilty about his unwillingness to see his aunt, and is fearful of his uncle's tentative attempts to reclaim him for the farm. He has begun an affair with an unnamed older woman in which he is casual on commitment yet insistent on sexual relations, and sees this indeterminacy as a bid for freedom.⁵ His older lover is a sheltered woman, a virgin when they meet, who tries to uphold the same liberated lifestyle as the protagonist but cannot. She lives in a boarding house and is anxious for a family of her own. She is also a travel writer, for a magazine called Waterways, and here McGahern points up the social textuality of their relationship by allowing both the protagonist and his lover to write stories from both ends of the social spectrum that intertwine and comment on each other.

The protagonist writes a regular series about the sexual adventures of Mavis and Colonel Grimshaw for his publisher Maloney. We read the different episodes of this text several times, which follow a predictable pattern in different exotic locales. It is low-end pornography, replete with phrases like “iron-hard rod,” “I want to see that gorgeous soft mound on high,” and “Harder, hurt me, do anything you want with me, I'm crazy for it” (McGahern 1979, 23). When he is done, the writer comments: “I am tired and flushed as I get up from the typewriter. Nothing ever holds together unless it is mixed with some of one's own blood. I am not able to read what I've written. Will others be inflamed by the reading, if there is flesh to inflame, as I was by the poor writing? Is my flush the flesh of others, are my words to be their worlds?” (Ibid., 24).

His lover's writing is not built for shock, yet she is just as invested in the world she creates for her readers, since they might really live in it if they go on the boat trips she writes about. She takes the protagonist on one of her trips, an evaluation of a pleasure cruise on the Shannon, and he tells her, “I was thinking how well you work. That you make notes, write everything down. It's not that usual. You'd be surprised how many try to get by on that old amateurish flair” (89). It is one of the very few moments in which both parties are equal to each other, brought together in mutual craftsworkship. Shortly after the trip, she discovers she is pregnant and wants to be married; just after this, the protagonist, reeling with shock and denial toward the product of his sexual “freedom,” writes up a pornographic account of their trip on the Shannon with Mavis and the Colonel taking their roles. The protagonist uses whole sets of dialogue from both the actual trip and his lover's story, interspersing it with sex and then, importantly, commenting on it with sex:

‘Have you ever gone in for the girls, Michael?’ the Colonel slapped [the boat's keeper] on the knee.

‘Not in any serious way … it's all right for the rich. But my generation, seeing the hardship our parents had to go through, decided to stay clear. Maybe we were as well off. Anyhow we hadn't the worry.’

‘No wonder the country is in such a poor state … An old boy like that, drinking all round the country, laughing at women, boasting he'd escaped—escaped from what?’

(158, 159–160)

Suddenly the licentious Colonel sounds like an Irish moralist, and the crude boatsman voices the opinions of the liberal left. The Colonel trusses Michael up and Mavis rapes him; they leave him sleeping it off and Mavis says, “He'll think he was dreaming. Doesn't the whole country look as if it's wetdreaming its life away. He'll want to be no exception. He's a prime example of your true, conforming citizen” (161). This mighty didactic pornography is the voice of the female lover whispering doubts into the protagonist's mind; he realizes the emptiness of his random promiscuity. Yet he also realizes the equal emptiness of obeying form and convention without emotional commitment. His “sleazy” writing ends up as a comment on her wholesome, natural picture of life on the Shannon, seemingly so easy to obtain yet based in the purity and unreality of another, fictional world.

The female lover's role is a complex one: while, despite her brave foray into unmarried sex, she does not seek an enabling resistance to the status quo; her insistence on marriage and homemaking are the spurs to the male protagonist's first realizations that he is as mired in emotion-deadening inaction as his lover is trapped in emotion-deadening conformity. He is “plagued by images” of the pre-planned domestic life waiting for him: “There was a semidetached house … raspberry canes that needed cutting back … the narrow kitchen … the back garden, the formica-topped breakfast table, the radio, the clock, the whirring fridge … proudly, stretching towards the line and beaming benediction on the whole setup, she'd hang out her brand-washed flags as good as any” (103). The female lover's offer of traditional life is negative, but then again it's not so negative as the male lover's offer of the even more traditional ultimatum that she abort the baby or get out of his life. The female lover's insistence on marriage is primarily an insistence on involving the male lover in the consequences of their mutual action; she forces him to acknowledge his own double-standard. She cannot break out of the cycle of safe conformity which, to her in her understandably panicked state as a low-income, middle-aged, unwed, suddenly-pregnant Irish woman, offers her her only chance to make good her losses. This will be up to the nurse, the male protagonist's second lover, whom I shall return to later. For now, the importance of the first female lover is her shattering of the male lover's complacence. She offers no enabling resistive performance, but she prepares him for the lifesaving resistance which the nurse will later offer him.

Maloney, the protagonist's boss at the pornographic press, tells him repeatedly that he cannot get away with not marrying the woman, as this would be an escape from just punishment of his sins. The sins in questions are unlawful intercourse, possible abortion, and deserting the in-utero family he has helped to create. To Maloney, mimicking society's spokesmen, the protagonist's knowledge of his lover's pregnancy is equal to assuming responsibility for having a family: “You've sullied the Shannon and you're still out there laughing, back at square one, ready to start all over again. You need a lecture, all right. You need several lectures” (163). Later, when the pregnant lover leaves for London, Maloney tells the protagonist, “‘You're our true Renaissance man, a true sophist. Inflaming people and fathering children which you later disown. Let me tell you this … we're not letting you off the hook. You've lowered the moral average all around. And you're making us all feel good’” (249–250). Maloney's good-natured yet real resentment of the protagonist's “escape” from marriage springs in part from the fact that Maloney himself was married because he got his lover pregnant.

Although he is tempted to take the safe route by such social pressures, as well as by his lover's tenderness toward him, the male protagonist cannot finally commit to marriage simply because of the social security it offers. Though he would like to have love and even a family, he cannot just walk into a performance tailor-made and impatiently held out by the state. The protagonist's final refusal to share the performance of home and hearth his lover desires causes her to at last go to London, where she will have the baby without him at the home of an expatriate Irish family, the Kavanaghs.

Even as the expecting lover's letters implore him to visit her and claim his child, and report the ire of the Kavanaghs toward his unnatural behavior, the protagonist meets another woman, an unnamed nurse from the hospital where his aunt is being treated for her incurable cancer. On their first date, the nurse asks him if he would like to be married, and to his startled return of the question answers, “Of course I would. To have my own husband and child and house and garden and saucepans and pets. All that.” She adds that she would not marry “a boring man” (174). The protagonist is wary, hearing her name exactly the material incentives for marriage that he despises. But he finds that she is different; she is not a virgin, she uses birth control, and she will not confuse sex with love.

The nurse's responsible, consciously political resistance to the very powerful coercion of the Irish state to remain chaste and to marry and stop working contributes to the protagonist's growing realization that his promiscuity was really not much of a resistance at all. In fact, he was playing into the hands of the status quo first by keeping sex outside marriage risky for women (he did not use contraception), and then by blaming and ostracizing the woman because of her pregnancy. The sexual responsibility shown by the nurse reflects badly on the protagonist's essentializing of sex as a universal, apolitical need which must be gratified. In fact, the protagonist is forced to realize that, scandalous occupation aside, he has actually been approximating the essential Irish farmer in his sexual rutting and his objectification of women.

After a few dates with the nurse, the protagonist sees his former lover in London, who still offers him marriage. He comes back frightened off women and the commitment they represent, and avoids the nurse, who confronts him with his irresponsibility—not in the usual way, emphasizing his social duty to marry her, but on the level of emotional integrity. He made a promise to be honest to her and she demands he keep it, not because it is his role in society to prop her up, but because he is an adult who ought to keep the promises he makes. In fact, the nurse engages the protagonist in his first adult relationship, helping him make the crucial break from the cyclical fate of marrying because he can do nothing else (evidenced by Michael and James in The Past). He agrees to fulfill his promise and his integrity and tells her about the woman in London who is having his baby. Her objective reaction to his situation forces him to see it through to the end, and also signals the beginning of his ability to feel real emotions other than fear and guilt—namely, tenderness and a longing for the nurse which is not purely sexual. Her refusal to allow the protagonist to slip into his old role of casual lover, he-who-feels-nothing, enables her to protect the independence of her own identity-performance in the relationship and challenges him to reconsider the validity of his own.

In a sense, he is dependent upon the affection of the women he is with to give him something to reject—he sees their “unwanted” love as a concrete example of the social forces pushing them together. Now he cannot reject the “other.” If the new relationship fails, he will have only himself to blame. In this spirit, he goes to London one last time when the baby is born, refuses to marry his ex-lover and is beaten up by Mr. Kavanagh. On his return to Ireland, he finds that his aunt has died. The first event closes his feelings of responsibility toward his ex-lover, the second allows him to feel grief where grief is called for.

This emotionalism spurs him to new awareness of the beauty of domestic materials when they function as tools in a happy relationship. When he goes into his uncle's home before his aunt's funeral, he sees domesticity in quite a new light:

It was a big slated nineteenth-century farmhouse, five front windows and a solid hall door looking confidently down on the road … It was very warm in the kitchen, and the first thing he did was to shake down the Stanley and pile in more coal. Blue and whit mugs hung from hooks on the deal dresser, and an oilcloth in blue and white squares covered the big deal table. Wedding and baptismal photos, even one ordination group, hung with the religious pictures around the tall walls. I found it very lovely.

(233)

His uncle offers him the farmhouse again, and now the protagonist decides to take it. When he tells Maloney he is going to quit his job, marry his new lover, and move into his family's house in the country, he states that “There comes a time when you either run amok completely or try to make a go of it … I'm going to try to make a go of it” (250–251). Ironically, he has realized that his former Don Juanism was as programmatic as marriage itself, with its ages-old rules and demands. Ireland wanking is not necessarily Ireland free. He has decided to pursue a real relationship with the nurse, whom he plans to marry. The nurse's refusal to provide a purely sexual identity for the protagonist forces him first to admit to his lack of purpose, almost a lack of personhood, and then to create his own role in the world of adult relationships. He will be a father and a husband, but these roles will be self-fashioned, and not completely dependent upon a woman's ability to keep fueling his own sense of who he is.

He first realizes this when he is visiting his aunt for the last time: “And the dark-haired girl [the nurse], and the woman with child in London, the dying woman I was standing beside … what of them? The answer was in the vulgarity of the question. What of yourself?” (203). The protagonist discovers what none of McGahern's male characters before him has understood, that to be satisfying, one's identity must offer something to the performances around it which help to define it—his performance of husband and father and lover must give as much to the female's domestic performances as it take from it. This reciprocal relationship allows for the shaking off of adolescent preoccupations with parents and the domesticity they represent, as well as an eliding of the stagnance of state-prescribed domesticity.

“THERE IS PURE REACTION WITHOUT REFLECTION”: CRITICAL TAKES

Karlheinz Schwartz's comment from his article “John McGahern's Point of View” is not made on critical reactions to McGahern's texts—it describes the pornographer's lifestyle—but it serves to define their general nature (Schwartz 1984, 108). I will focus perforce on reaction to McGahern's novels, as contemporary critical reception of The Miracle was overwhelmingly limited to plot-retellings and movie blurbs, and later critics of Jordan's works have been equally disinclined to make substantial comment on the text of the movie. Therefore, I am limited to examining critical responses to McGahern.

Those who admired The Pornographer did so on the basis of either deprecating Irish ignorance and prudery or applauding happy escapes from domesticity, while those who disliked the book based their dislike on the negativity of McGahern's “vision.”⁶ Shaun O'Connell's article “Door Into the Light: John McGahern's Ireland” and Michael J. Toolan's “John McGahern: The Historian and the Pornographer” are two examples of negative reaction; despite the fact that O'Connell likes the novels.

As O'Connell reads The Pornographer, he makes constant reference to “the moist valleys of Roscommon,” intimately and immediately associating Ireland with the first female lover, both as fundamentally pornographic women who problematize male action: “Josephine [see note] comes to represent something deeply, darkly Irish to her 30-year-old lover … John Updike was right to note ‘the hero's deadly coldness, and Josephine's credible, vital humanity,’ but he misses some of her threat … she comes to stand for Irish conformity” (O'Connell 1984, 265).

Irish conformity, of course, being the prudishly domestic—in accordance with the “national character.” The protagonist's conformity to the promiscuity which demands “the refusal of emotional commitment [leading] to entropy” is not a factor in O'Connell's reading, which relies upon a dichotomy between good women and bad (Prescott 1979, 108). Josephine, the first lover, is a bad woman because she threatens her man with a conformity rooted deep in her Irish “nature.” The nurse, however, is a good woman, for “the glory that the pornographer holds in the nurse's body is the promise of renewal through love and sex” (O'Connell 1984, 267).

Again, female enablement is female virtue, and while O'Connell notes this enablement he does not unpack its consequences, namely the possibility of new male and female performances of domesticity made possible by male adaptation of female resistance performances. Instead, women are only positive forces when subjugating themselves to traditional men and goals, and O'Connell continues to locate regressive tendencies of chaos and failure in feminized, pornographic, modern Ireland: “Failed reporter, failed lover, cynic, dandy, aesthete, Maloney's mutability embodies modern Ireland's openness” (Ibid., 266). Thus O'Connell reduces the plot to that of canny man resisting evil woman until right woman comes along, and his reading amounts to a negation at best and an overlooking at worst of what power it is that “right” woman possesses which can rescue a man from himself.

Toolan's negative reading of The Pornographer is based on his rejection of what he sees as McGahern's failure to live up to his commitment to “the healing and transcendent power of love,” apparently promised by the “happy” ending of McGahern's earlier novel The Leavetaking, the story of marriage based on reciprocal need for parent-figure spouses (Toolan 1981, 30). Toolan sums up those arguments when he asks why, “in opposition to the bright, vital … optimism of The Leavetaking … of the possibility of liberation from an imprisoning past, McGahern will compulsively return to a dark, bleak world of narrow expectations and stunted hopes … in which frustrated impulses are not only accepted, but actually structure and shape the lives of the protagonists” (my italics—Ibid., 40). Toolan resists exactly the definition of performance, the idea that formal iteration of social norms dictates what actions and resistances can/will be made by those whose pasts, presents, and futures are iterated within/by those norms. Insisting instead on the humanist tradition of self-determination by unified individuals, Toolan cannot understand why McGahern “undertakes a willful perversion of his fictional [sic] gifts … to damningly evoke the sterility and perversion, the deadliness and bestiality, of the lives of the characters in the fiction” (40–41). In assigning sterility, perversion, deadliness and bestiality only to “characters in the fiction,” Toolan rejects the same application of fiction to actual life. Thus the idea that human lives are as much the products of state tinkering as fictional lives are the products of authorial tinkering is “inhuman”—and the shaping influence of modern nationalism, underlined by performative resistance, is elided.

It is important that marriage is still validated by McGahern's texts—in The Pornographer as well as in Amongst Women and the other texts that will be discussed below. Because the institution is strongly associated with negative traditions of oppressed women and unselfconscious men does not necessarily mean that it must be abandoned, but that it must be revolutionized. While Jordan will move away from traditional marital relations in the works studied below, McGahern will keep his characters working within it. However, Jordan will continue to focus on parent-child relationships, even outside of a traditional story line, as we shall see in the discussion of The Dream of a Beast below. This reflects the individual differences between the authors as well as a political difference; for while Jordan finds himself hampered by traditional structures, both literally (the novel) and figuratively (heterosexual courtship and marriage narratives), because they are shaped by traditional representations of gender roles, McGahern finds the traditional channels of representation offering a more and more compelling way into the subtext of surface normality. In Jordan, male characters seeking relief from abnormality in their lives by turning to relationships with women are duly surprised when those relationships overturn all the usual definitions of normal. In McGahern, this realization is not always so strong, but it is there, not only for the men who seek traditional relationships but for the women who think they can provide them.

Notes

1. The screenplay of The Miracle is currently unavailable in the US; I would have quoted from the movie directly but as Miramax, which holds copyright on The Miracle, has strict policies banning the use of the text without authorial consent, I have had to rely on paraphrase of the dialogue.

2. Jordan seems to use these two names to represent stereotypes of Irish and non-Irish. The name “Rene(e)” is repeated from The Past, where is it described as not Irish-sounding (50–51); so also the exotic American Renee shares the name. “Jimmy” is the typically “Irish” name, used by Fergus when he wants to blend in as a “Pat,” and by Jimmy Coleman when he is not trying to impress Renee with his maturity (when he uses “James”).

3. Neil Jordan. 1993. The Crying Game. In The Neil Jordan Reader. New York: Routledge, 237–238.

4. See John Naughton (1979), Peter Prescott (1979), and Karlheinz Schwartz (1984) for reactions which focus on the currentness of the plot. See Tom Paulin (1980), Shaun O'Connell (1984), and Toolan (1981) for negative reactions to the subject matter.

5. In the earliest edition of The Pornographer, the lover is given the name Josephine. I am using the more definitive later edition, in which the namelessness of all the main characters is uniform and pertinent. Later critics cited in this chapter sometimes refer to the lover by this name.

6. Naughton (1979), Prescott (1979), O'Neill (1979) and Mano (1980) all give the book positive reviews, and, with the exception of O'Neill, matter-of-factly revile what they are content to see as “typical” Irish backwardness as they do so.