Thomas Kilroy, playwright and novelist, provided the critic of Irish fiction with one of those clarifying and organising generalizations which illumine much that one has almost unconsciously accepted, when he wrote [in the Times Literary Supplement, March 17, 1972]:

At the centre of Irish fiction is the anecdote. The distinctive characteristic of our "first novel", Castle Rackrent, that which makes it what it is, is not so much its idea, revolutionary as that may be, as its imitation of a speaking voice engaged in the telling of a tale. The model will be exemplary for the reader who has read widely in Irish fiction: it is a voice heard over and over again, whatever its accent, a voice with a supreme confidence in its own histrionics, one that assumes with its audience a shared ownership of the told tale and all that it implies: a taste for anecdote, an unshakeable belief in the value of human actions, a belief that life may be adequately encapsulated into stories that require no reference, no qualification, beyond their own selves.

This tone of voice, a voice redolent, despite many momentary doubts, of basic social certainties is a tone that sounds recognizably in the anecdotal fiction of William Carleton, in the tales of Somerville and Ross, later in the episodic sequences of Kavanagh's The Green Fool. This is a fiction that has roots in an enclosed oral culture, in the countryman's regard for the tale, for "experience passed on from mouth to mouth and intelligence that comes from afar". It is a fiction that, delighting in objectivity, is undisturbed by the subjective or the psychologically complex, unless they can be embodied in concrete actions.

This Irish tone, unselfconsciously rejoicing in linguistic afflatus, survived the shift in the early twentieth century from the tale of countryside and farm, to the story set in shop, convent, school and presbytery, set in the petit bourgeois world of post-revolutionary Ireland. It survives as the dominant tone of the Irish school of short story writers, in O'Faolain, in O'Connor, in Mary Lavin. So the following opening, from an O'Faolain story, "The Old Master", is entirely characteristic of the mode:

When I was younger, and so, I suppose, in the nature of things, a little more cruel, I once tried to express John Aloysius Gonzaga O'Sullivan geometrically: a parabola of pomposity in a rectangle of gaslight. The quip pleased everybody who knew the reference—it was to his favourite stand, under the portico of the courthouse, his huge bulk wedged into the very tall and slender doorway.

I said gaslight because John Aloysius rarely came to work before the afternoon, when they lit the gas in the dim entrance hall, and its greenish, wateryish light began to hiss high up in the dome. There he would stand, ten times in the afternoon, smoking, or watching the traffic, or gossiping with some idling clerk. He had a sine-cure in the fusty-musty little law library, a room no bigger than a box. He used to say, in his facetious way, that he left it often because he exhausted the air every half hour.

In this we note the slightly garrulous pleasure in the act of telling the tale; the rhythms and syntax ("smoking, or watching the traffic, or gossiping with some idling clerk") are those of a voice preparing for a protracted discourse, welcoming digression and expansion, proffering intimacy. This is a world that has time for anecdote, for the kind of tales in which landscape and milieu can be rendered, almost gratuitously, in passages of sustained rhythmic ease, where they are as much aspects of how the world is, in its timeless permanency, as the narrative events are the objective revelations of the unchanging vagaries of human nature. So, the Irish school of short-story writing, that an unwary critic might too readily assume to be a school of provincial realism, seems to me to have its sources in an oral culture's delight in tale-telling, in anecdote.

But while the Irish short story may have its roots in an oral culture (many of the stories seem written as much for performance as for silent reading in the arm-chair) it also begins to move away from the objectivity of tale, touched as it almost invariably is by romantic subjectivism. So, in O'Connor and O'Faolain we often encounter a central character who is a sensitive outsider in society, or he is an adolescent experiencing anguished dissatisfaction in a provincial environment. And in Mary Lavin, at her best, strangeness of incident suggests a romantic intensification of feeling amidst the small-town banalities, while in her less successful works grotesquerie of character or event hints at gothic moods.

For the young Irish writer beginning to write in the 1960's, especially the writer who chose the Irish provincial world as setting for his work, this narrative tone for an Irish fiction must have seemed inevitable as must a technique of realism tinged with romanticism. As Kilroy further reminds us:

I am attempting here to discuss the experience of writing fiction in modern Ireland. . . . The contemporary Irish writer of fiction must surely be aware that his local heritage differs in kind from that of an English or a French writer. Its difference has to do with the emergence of Irish fiction, both novel and short-story, from a culture which already had its native, long-standing, oral tradition of fictionalizing experience, a mode that has continued to challenge the composition of literary fiction even to the present day.

The case of John McGahern is exemplary. His first published novel The Barracks (1963) manages its fiction in a narrative tone recognisably within the tradition I have been identifying. The prose is reflective, expansive, open syntactically and rhythmically to accumulation of event, deed, detail of milieu and to narrative comment. It is a prose untroubled by doubts as to the value of its own movements and procedures as it confidently renders the way things are in the provincial milieu that is so intimately known. So The Barracks opens:

Mrs Regan darned an old woollen sock as the February night came on, her head bent, catching the threads on the needle by the light of the fire, the daylight gone without her noticing. A boy of twelve and two dark-haired girls were close about her at the fire. They'd grown uneasy, in the way children can indoors in the failing light. The bright golds and scarlets of the religious pictures on the wall had faded, their glass glittered now in the sudden flashes of firelight, and as it deepened the dusk turned reddish from the Sacred Heart lamp that burned before the small wickerwork crib of Bethlehem on the mantel-piece.

Tone and strategy here are not so distant from the idioms and rhythms of story-telling. One notes in particular the conversationally-managed movement away from particulars to sociable generality ("They'd grown uneasy, in the way children can") establishing an audience that is allowed to contribute its knowledge to the narration before the narrator returns with ease to the details of a specific world.

Some of McGahern's best writing is in this assured conventional mode. The implicit, uncomplicated belief in the value of recounting allows for extended passages in which the novelist possesses his world, characters in their settings, landscapes and actions, with the unselfconscious confidence of a story-teller absorbed with his material. In passage after passage in his three novels McGahern concentrates on the particularities of the Leitrim, Roscommon border-country (passages which, extracted from their context, read remarkably like the openings of Irish shortstories).

It started to rain as he gulped his meal, the first drops loud on the pane, and it was raining steadily by the time they were on their way to the field.

Between the lone ash trees, their stripped branches pale as human limbs in the rain, Ma-honey worked. The long rows of the potatoes stretched to the stone wall, the rows washed on the top by the rain, gleaming white and pink and candle-yellow against the black acres of clay; and they had set to work without any hope of picking them all. Their clothes started to grow heavy with rain. The wind numbed the side of their faces, great lumps of clay held together by dead stalks gathered about their boots.

As with the conventional Irish short stories, those of O'Connor and O'Faolain, this objectivity in McGahern is somewhat disturbed by romanticism, for in his three novels the central character is a sensitive adolescent or young man whose feelings in the midst of a constricted provincial environment are the central points of interest. But the traditional temper, tones and techniques in McGahern's fictions are disturbed in a further much more important way; McGahern is aware of an urban and fragmented culture encroaching upon the stable, provincial, rural world upon which in Ireland the anecdotal, orally-based tale ultimately depends. When the earlier writers took account, as they did occasionally, of the modern urban world it was without any real sense that the encounter with novel experience might require significant aesthetic innovations. They continued indeed to write as if literary modernism had nothing to teach them. McGahern does not.

It is evident even in his most conservative novel The Barracks that McGahern, while confident and skilled in portraying the provincial world he knows, recognises a need for modern Irish fiction to meet more stringent demands. It must be attentive to the recent major social changes in the country, in an art that more appropriately reflects the complex psychological currents that stir in its turbulent waters. So McGahern is consciously experimental in his work, welcoming the resonance of image and symbol to the enclosed worlds of rural and small-town Ireland, taking his protagonists away from their childhood farms and fields to the confused cultural settings of modern Dublin and London.

McGahern, as symbolist, is absorbed by the potency of ritual, particularly by the Catholic rituals associated with death, with burial and with Holy Week. In his three novels, imagery drawn from these various rites is employed to ground his fiction in a deeper sense of the way things are, than was the case in traditional Irish short stories and novels. The imagery serves to imply a metaphysical dimension to experience, unknowable except in the mysterious patterns that ritual reveals in life itself, inducing in the participants of ritual an emotional awareness of metaphysical depth. Memory and meaning, myth and mystery, passion and pattern, seem controllable for the protagonists of the novels and for the author himself only through the mediation of rite and symbol.

Before the post-office the people knelt in the dry dust of the road for Benediction. The humeral veil was laid on the priest's shoulders, the tiny bell tinkled in the open day, the host was raised and all heads bowed, utter silence except for the bell and some donkey braying in the distance. Kneeling in the dust among the huddled crowd it was hard to fight back tears. This was the way your life was, you belonged to these people as they to you, you were linked together. One day that Sacred Host would be your burden to uphold for them while the bell rang, but it was still impossible to join in the singing as the procession resumed its way, only listen to the shuffle of boots through the dust. Wash me ye waters, streaming from His side, it was strange, all strange and the candles burning against the yew trees in the day.

Such moments, however, run grave tonal risks, dependent as they usually are in the novels on the imagery of a specific church and tradition. For the novelist, writing out of a culture where these images are almost unconsciously understood, must uneasily recognise that in the wider world, where he will most probably find his readers, these familiar properties will suggest not the mystery of ultimate things but the curiosity of the primitive, the exotic. So at times in McGahern's works one senses that the descriptions of rite and custom operate less as symbols than as passages of local colour. There is a note of explanatory insecurity in these passages, a tendency to tonal uncertainty.

It is in his collection of short-stories, Nightlines (1970), that we see McGahern attempting to resolve this problem. In this volume McGahern seeks to write short-stories exploiting symbolist possibilities without depending on the traditional metaphors of church and religion. He seeks symbols within the physical properties of his fictional environments, in event and deed. So the symbolism is unobtrusive, tonally contained within the movements of narration, without any sense of the insecurity occasioned when, as in the novels, more explicit symbolism is attempted.

McGahern's short-stories, like his novels, occupy a middle ground between the conservative traditionalist mode and modernist experiment. Where O'Connor and O'Faolain wrote their tales of enclosed provincial worlds, McGahern also senses that a short-story must in part depend on such hermetic self-sufficiency. But the social conditions that allowed the earlier writers to explore a stable, self-confident Irish world no longer obtain. So McGahern writes of artificially self-contained worlds. He sets a story in a railway carriage, in a school, on a London-Irish building site, in a guest-house, in a police-station, on a boat in the middle of a lake, in an isolated house on the Mediterranean. In most of them a sensitive central character, so familiar from Irish fiction in general and from McGahern's novels in particular, suffers in an unpleasing milieu. In "Wheels" an adult returns to the pain of his provincial origins. In "Coming into his Kingdom" a child experiences the discomforts of sexual awakening. In "Hearts of Oak and Bellies of Brass" the narrator struggles to anaesthetise his cultural and emotional awareness with back-breaking labour; in "Strandhill, the Sea" the narrator is a troubled kleptomaniac; in "Lavin" he is an adolescent discovering homosexual feelings and sexual disgust; in "My Love, My Umbrella" he is a young Dubliner enduring the agonies of an unrequited passion, in "The Recruiting Officer" an alcoholic, failed Christian brother, eccentric and tired rebel.

In Nightlines the tone of traditional Irish short-storytelling is not entirely forsaken either. At moments, in fact, one suspects the author's nerves fail him in his literary experimentalism and he falls back on familiar, proved techniques. So in "Wheels", at the opening of the collection, we encounter a very curious blend of prose-impressionism with a structure reminiscent of a much more direct and anecdotal kind of short story.

Grey concrete and steel and glass in the slow raindrip of the morning station, three porters pushing an empty trolley up the platform to a stack of grey mail-bags, the loose wheels rattling, and nothing but wait and watch and listen, and I listened to the story they were telling. (my italics)

Elsewhere the anecdotal Irish speaking voice is heard quite clearly, as in so many discursive Irish tales.

There was no reason this life shouldn't have gone on for long but a stupid wish on my part, which set off an even more stupid wish in Mrs Grey, and what happened has struck me ever since as usual when people look to each other for their happiness or whatever it is called. Mrs Grey was Moran's best customer. She'd come from America and built the huge house on top of Mounteagle after her son had been killed in aerial combat over Italy. ("Christmas")

McGahern's short-stories are most interesting when these tones and techniques are avoided, when the processes of his prose combine an unsentimental apprehension of the physical world with symbolist resonance and where he manages to generate the symbolic charge of his tales without dependence on the dynamism of a traditional religious or cultural symbol system. In his novels the rituals of the Church provided that charge; in Nightlines McGahern turns to imagery of wheel, river, sea. The wheels of the first tale are the wheels of a train bearing a man back through his past across the Shannon and also the "ritual wheel", the repetition of a life in the shape of a story that had as much reason to go on as stop. And the collection ends with a character, who has recognised that life "is all a wheel", contemplating the Shannon as it flows to the sea. [In Two Decades of Irish Writing, 1975] Roger Garfitt has suggested that "McGahern sometimes seems more Buddhist than Catholic" and sees the imagery of the Wheel as possibly owing something to that tradition. But, if this is so it functions in a much less obtrusive way than does the Catholic imagery of the novels.

It is in the detailed interrelationship of the facts of McGahern's stories, the blend of event, physical milieu and meaning that McGahern's symbolism is least obtrusive and, I think, most effective. Each story employs one or two central images which, as Henri D. Paratte remarks [in The Irish Novel in Our Time, edited by M. Harmon and P. Rafroidi, 1976], "offer a symbolic frame to his vision of reality". That vision is austerely metaphysical but reductively so as the human world of desire and meaning is set against images which suggest iron physical law, machine-like inevitability, cruelty, decay, the ritual wheel which breaks all backs as it turns. The world of these stories is a world of chainsaws, hooks, chains, ice, flame, shovels, metal, shot, coffin-wood, bait, mallets, chisels, rusting tools, iron-bolts, whips with metal tips, glass inseminating plungers, knives, pumps, concrete lavatories, ticking clocks.

The framing images of each McGahern story contain within them accumulations of detail and fact which further serve to symbolise the writer's ambiguous, metaphysically bleak vision of reality, though they do so without any suggestion of overt symbolist technique. It is only on a close examination of these works that a reader realizes how far he is here from the direct, unselfconscious discourse of the traditional tale-taller, how much he is in the hands of a skilled, very self-conscious imagist. For in McGahern the moments of traditional tone distract from the modernist techniques.

"Hearts of Oak and Bellies of Brass" is a sketch of life on a building site in a London summer. The workers are Irish and the central character is a countryman who has sold his sensitivity for the dulled, unfeeling security of life as a wage-slave, which anaesthetises pain and fear of death:

I love to count out in money the hours of my one and precious life. I sell the hours and I get money. The money allows me to sell more hours. If I saved money I could buy the hours of some similar bastard and live like a royal incubus, which would suit me much better than as I am now, though apparently even as I am now suits me well enough, since I do not want to die.

His ambition is, as he puts it, "to annul all the votes in myself ". This he does in accommodating himself to the regular, monotonous violence of the building site, its gratuitously violent language, the sexual animality, the sudden eruptions of physical force. Through the story, imagery of machines plays a crucial role in establishing a sense of monotonous dehumanization. A steel hopper, metal buckets, a brass medal bearing a worker's number, the "back of the hopper bright as beaten silver in the sun" and, centrally, the sharp, silver blade of a shovel, serve as metaphors of a dangerous physical violence, a dehumanised instinctual energy in the story. The movements of the shovels further suggest the sexual drives that find release only in violence of tongue and in prostitution.

The familiar tirade would continue, predictable as the drive and throw of their shovels . . .

The hooter went. The offered breasts withdrew.

A window slammed. "The last round", someone said.

The mixer started. The shovels drove and threw: gravel, sand, gravel; gravel, sand, gravel, cement.

The wheel of labour turns in this tale. It is sensitivity and human hope that are broken by its mechanical, grinding revolutions.

As the hopper came down again he shouted in the same time, "Shovel or shite; shite or burst", and the shovels mechanically drove and threw . . . It'd go on as this all day.

The longest piece in the collection is "Peaches". It is also the story where the texture of the narrative is most dense with symbolic intimations of the kind I have been identifying. The plot is fairly straightforward. A moderately successful novelist is living in a rented Spanish villa with his Northern European wife. The relationship is in crisis. Creativity is at low-ebb. Neurosis and tension dominate the conversational exchanges, while the smell of a decaying shark on the beach, referred to at various points in the work, suggests the decay of marital compatibility. But there are many other details which embody the story's meanings. The relationship is as infertile as the man's (throughout they are "He", "She") imaginative powers. So there are frequent functionally ironic images of containers being filled to overflowing with liquid. A swimming pool is filled by a pump—"the three started to watch in the simple fascination of water filling the empty pool", water is poured into clay jars, a wine glass is filled "to the brim from the Soberano bottle", peaches in an orchard are sprayed by a "machine on metal wheels". This latter image resonates with another important image complex in the tale—that of machines as artificial and uncreative. The pool is filled by a pump; the woman is obsessed with the possibility of machines replacing people, electric light seems a poor substitute for the religious-sexual mystery of candle-flame, a Vespa scooter is dangerous, risky. The movement of the story in this world of significant patterns of detail can be readily studied in the passage where the couple make love. Section VIII of the piece begins with the image of the decomposing shark; the couple take a swim and in the sea they move to sexual union. But afterwards their lovemaking on the clinical "white sheet of the bed" is crude, acquisitive. Instead of the imagery of sea where they "let the waves loll over them" the man postpones his orgasm by "trying to make up what each gallon cost of the load of water that had been put in the pool that morning". Then he "held her close for her to pump him until she came". The fraught tension of their infertile, uncreative sexual coupling is then suggested in the tense dialogue with its syntactic bluntness:

"Why do you want?"

"Our relationship would get much better. But how would it do you good".

The conversation and the section end with the machines, the reductive images of sterility, danger, of cold metaphysical austerity, that are the frightening equivalents of the rotting shark, the ripe peaches proffered as tokens of lust at the story's climax.

"We'll be happy", the man said.

Later, as he got the Vespa out of the garage, he heard the clean taps of her typewriter come from the upstairs room.

The economical skill of passages such as this in Nightlines, with their subtle blend of image, dialogue and action suggest the degree to which McGahern has moved away from the expansive, anecdotal mode of much Irish fiction to tautly economical stories as metaphysically resonant as his novels, but without their overt traditional symbolism and techniques.