The Good of the Novel

by Liam McIlvanney

  *

  In the introduction to this book we quoted Milan Kundera:

  The sole raison d’être of a novel is to discover what only the novel can discover. A novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.

  With no plot to advance or theme to tighten, words exist in That They May Face the Rising Sun to capture the numinous matter of lived experience. What McGahern’s novel knows about the world is already well known. Time, food, being and death are accessible to all. These known segments of existence are introduced to an element of being which is not just being. If life is a sentence for each character, lived out uniquely and within communal codes, it is words that distinguish each life. Functionally, the narrator only exists to register the earthen, implacable nature of reality: the narrator knows of no unknown segment. The experience of being in the world is a condition so miraculous that sentences become inventories or archives of the actual. When Ruttledge enters Patrick Ryan’s house he sees:

  A bowl of sugar, unwashed cups, part of a loaf, a sardine tin, a plate with an eggshell, a half-full bottle of Powers, a bar of soap, butter, an empty packet of Silk Cut, red apples, a pot of marmalade, salt, matches, a brown jug, an open newspaper, a transistor radio, an alarm clock littered the table.

  This list of a sentence contains in one visual screen the mute particles of Ryan’s life, and this particularity is one way the novel captures reality. If the Romantic sublime implies that man can emotionally and linguistically transcend the limits of perception, McGahern’s inspiration and material comes from what is implacably within those limits. The sublime is that which eludes our experience of art, so it is grasped in metaphors that allude to what exists beyond human and empirical experience. The sublime focuses on what is absent, on something more than the mundane. It is a mystery that defeats every effort of sense and imagination to picture it, so it is defined and described only in symbolic terms, which ironically means that it can’t be captured visually.

  McGahern presents Ryan’s table as a study in still life, a frozen tableau that arrests the process of decay, so that even as it is mundane it has a simple mystery that comes from the empirical order of what is present.

  This list of a sentence has a patient fidelity to the quotidian. It relinquishes any ambition to transform or transcend what it registers by abolishing any invasive style – ‘littered’ is loaned to the scene by the narrator – so that we in turn participate in its tactile details, the felt reality of Ryan’s sensory being. It is a scene that would be vandalised by any syntactical or descriptive intrusion beyond ‘littered’. Idyllic in its disorderly composition, the scene asks only that the sentence do no more than contain each mundane item that comprises it. ‘Littered’ does that by going just under the top.

  Life round the lake is a mercilessly egalitarian world – ‘No misters is this part of the world. Nothing but broken-down gentlemen,’ says Jamesie to Ruttledge – so introducing individuals through this repetitive accumulation of singular things is also a style without social hierarchy or moral judgement. The novel pays tribute to this world but is not its tribune. It is a witness, not a judge. It does not try to reconfigure what it represents. Even after these domestic details, Ryan’s private life remains just that, private, despite the solemn accumulation of his particulars. We know as much about him as the novel does. To adopt Kundera’s terms, it would be stylistically unethical for this novel to excavate some unknown segment of Ryan’s existence.

  The good of this novel emerges, then, from McGahern’s often beautiful fusion of ethics and nature, culture and cultivation, in the seasonal passing of time. Not much happens day by day yet the whole is entirely memorable. A serene and composed world, it is suffused by the fear that daily life may decompose. The title, That They May Face the Rising Sun, looks to the resurrection of the body in an eternal life to come, but it also, surely, alludes to a line from the book of Ecclesiastes, ‘nothing new under the sun’, a line Beckett also alludes to at the start of Murphy (‘The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new’), as does Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises. The full biblical quote is:

  What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, ‘Look! This is something new’? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.

  To face each day the fact of the rising sun is also to acknowledge the impossibility of experiencing anything in life as pristinely new. Round the lake lives evolve in a mix of fixity and flux, ritual and repetition, the ordinary and the quotidian. Ruttledge’s name, Rutt-Ledge, incorporates the static and catastrophic, the daily possibility of oblivion. Reality is a constant negotiation between the community’s grounded needs and its founded and unfounded fears.

  What McGahern’s purged lyricism does is make sentences foray into the ineffable, that part of individual and collective identity where silence reigns and language disguises what is said. Around the lake news is the main means of exchange, a customised account of events that briefly enriches the speaker. Yet all the talk of news is scored by the ‘tension in the call between the need to be heard and the fear of being heard’. It is from between fixity and flux, sound and silence, woman and man; between generations; between culture and cultivation, nature and the human; between the auditable, mute reality of daily life in its seasonal rhythms and the unfathomable otherness of death – it is from the space between Rutt and Ledge that McGahern discovers, in Kundera’s term, those known and unknown segments that only the novel can know. Life is a sentence lived quietly, tactfully, in a daily embrace of the despotism of that repetitive fact. It is an exercise in restraint. Jamesie tells Kate, ‘Right or wrong, Kate? There’s nothing right or wrong in this world. Only what happens.’ Every sentence, in other words, has to go just under the top so as to respect the horizon of what is.

  When something does eventually happen, the tone is pitch-perfect, the sound of each sentence an audible actor in the momentary dramas punctuating life round the lake:

  Late in the day they heard a heavy motor come slowly in round the shore and turn uphill towards the house.

  The strain of this sentence, in both senses of that word, enacts the engine’s distress. For in this short sonorous clump of heavy extended vowel sounds – late, day, heard, hea-vy, mo-tor, slow-ly, round, shore, hill, towards, house: no word here can be hurried – we have travelled miles. This is lyricism as a form of precision, a lyricism where cadences combine to enact time, distance and even a mechanical condition. Within any given day, there are repeated encounters with an other-worldliness that we could call grace or the sacred, that element in being which is not just being. So too within a given sentence there can be orchestrated occasions of lyrical precision:

  Patrick Ryan’s re-emergence into this slow mindlessness was like the eruptions of air that occur in the wheaten light of mown meadows in a heatwave.

  This sentence is composed, its lyrical strain and precise stillness offering an exquisite alliance of the aural and the visual. The aural impact is a rhythmic combination of sonic peaks and troughs – the clipped syllables of ‘re-emergence’ and ‘wheaten’ swiftly descend into the deeper vowels sounds of ‘slow’ and ‘mown’ and ‘meadows’. The syllabic parity and kinetic contrast between ‘slow mindlessness’ and ‘eruptions of air’ lifts this sentence, and Ryan’s existence, into the poetic, so that the condition of being looks itself like a cloth that veils another mystery of being. ‘I’m only interested,’ McGahern has said, ‘in poetry, which occurs more often in verse than in prose.’ Attending to the music of what happens in the moment of Ryan’s re-emergence – the ‘wheaten light’, ‘mown meadows’, ‘heatwave’ – infuses his being with something more than being, a grace drawn from nature. These luminous and precise images of air in motion, light and the colour of grain, the two wrapped together in an earthen warmth, establish layers of his existence that have been, in Kunde
ra’s formulation, hitherto unknown.

  Style here has an ambitious purchase on known and unknown segments of reality. It aspires to inhabit the stillness in the muteness of things and objects, in each life round the lake. Silence itself is an aspect of this style. Style tries to establish the complexity of the concrete, to show how consciousness is grasped, amplified and best understood when it is mediated through what is actual, even if that is just a tin of sardines. In other words, words can become facts. It does not pay to ask if the experience of Ryan’s re-emergence is true or not, because what style does here is reveal that hitherto unknown segment of Ryan’s existence which is more than just existence.

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  ‘Will you look at the men? They’re more like a crowd of women …’ That image ended McGahern’s previous novel, Amongst Women, as the three daughters of the deceased patriarch Moran stride away from their father’s grave. Mary Robinson was elected president of the Republic of Ireland in the same year, 1990, so the image seemed, in retrospect, prophetic, a harbinger of dramatic political change to come. By 2002 and the publication of That They May Face the Rising Sun, dramatic social change had arrived. McGahern’s novel was published during a period of unprecedented economic transition – the era of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ – that fundamentally transformed the Irish social landscape. As Dublin prospered, rural Ireland often seemed to function as a satellite sector for the city’s insatiable growth. The rage for acquisitive advancement crushed many traditional values organised around the communal, and it accelerated the collapse of the Catholic church. If one is being celebratory, Ireland was at last matching, even surpassing European levels of prosperity. If one is being judgemental, the country lost the run of itself, because that boom has now emphatically gone. But what is undeniably true is that during the twelve-year incubation of That They May Face the Rising Sun, Ireland’s self-definition was that of a creative, cool, entrepreneurial European state with a dash of Celtic colour added – about as far from the lake as conceivable. Diversity became the norm, with economic migrants bringing multiculturalism in their wake. In this context, McGahern’s novel seems just that little more subversive. Even the title gathers together values and priorities that precede and outlast any economic boom. Some aspect of this provincial rural vision prompted that rock-star ovation in multicultural Dublin, but was it just nostalgia, the backward look longing for a time when communities were knowable and social harmony meant religious, maybe even ethnic homogeneity? Is it even fair to ask if McGahern’s vision of life round the lake can cope with twenty-first century realities?

  This novel’s composed stillness does not derive from the category of the singular. In Joe Ruttledge, we have the fusion and occasional confusions of a man who is, Patrick Ryan thinks, sometimes like a woman: ‘That pair in there are different. They never seem to go against one another. There are times when you wonder whether they are man or woman at all.’ Ruttledge is a man who constantly blends two ways of being. A writer who trained to be a priest, his speech is unconsciously liturgical, full of delayed repetitions that discover a sacral realm in the quotidian. At Monaghan Day, the county’s major cattle auction, Ruttledge commends his parish priest’s work as a farmer: ‘If his black gear hasn’t a place in the cattle market it hasn’t a place anywhere else either. It either belongs to life or it doesn’t.’ Kate’s speech is oracular: ‘When someone falls like Johnny, it guarantees suffering.’ ‘I think people are sexual until they die.’ What little this painter utters always combines some version of the visual and the aesthetic: ‘The past and present are all the same in the mind … they are just pictures.’ Through these two sensibilities – writer and painter, the conversational and oracular, the once aspirant priest and the still aspirant artist – McGahern implicitly deciphers the elusiveness of reality around the lake. Patrick Ryan presses Kate on her painting:

  ‘Do you think will you ever make that drawing you do pay?’

  ‘I don’t think so, Patrick.’

  ‘Why do you keep at it then girl?’

  ‘It brings what I see closer.’

  Closer is not necessarily better. Kate says to Patrick, ‘You have an interesting face but you know that yourself. I don’t think I ever got it right.’ What Patrick Ryan knows is that the precision of Kate’s ‘right’ is inimical to this place of blurred boundaries. The face registers human uniqueness, but in one of the novel’s comic interludes, Patrick tells Johnny, the holidaying emigrant, of the Ruttledges’ attempt to assimilate.

  You know yourself that you have to be born into land … Everything round the place are treated like royals. There’s a black cat in there with white paws that’d nearly get up on its hind legs and order his breakfast. You’d not get thanked now if you got caught hitting it a dart of a kick on the quiet. The cattle come up to the back of the house and boo in like a trade union if the grass isn’t up to standard.… They even got to like the sheep. There’s no more stupid animal on God’s earth. There’s an old Shorthorn they milk for the house that would nearly sit in an armchair and put specs on to read the Observer. The bees nearly ate the arse off me an hour ago. She draws all that she sees. She even did a drawing of me … You wouldn’t know if I was man or beast … Another thing that brought them here was the quiet. Will you listen to the fucken quiet for a minute and see in the name of God if it wouldn’t drive you mad.

  This is a subtle comic mockery of the Ruttledges’ attempt to distinguish Patrick through art. Like the priest at the cattle fair, Patrick already is, in both senses of the word, distinguished by his relationship to the totality of his environment, whether that is the bees atein’ the arse off him, the newly unionised cattle, or the fucken quiet. In a context where cultivation and commerce mingle across the seasons, the priest’s religion and Patrick’s unsentimental being both emerge from this elaborate fusion of man and beast.

  What brings Patrick closer is not his distinguished face – there are no gentlemen here – but Ruttledge’s slow accumulation of their first meeting. Patrick denies Ruttledge’s account of that meeting with ‘I disremember lad … I disremember that as well.’ Similarly Bill Evans’ anguish is overwhelming when pressed by Ruttledge about his early days with the Christian brothers – ‘Stop torturing me!’ And anguish awaits too when Bill Evans moves beyond the immediacy of the day to imagine the future:

  He was no longer living from moment to moment: from blow to blow, pleasure to pleasure, refusing to look forward or back: he was now living these bus rides on Thursday in the mind as well. The seeds of calamity were sown.

  In this community, illegitimate memories are not suppressed, they are obliterated, made unborn, ‘disremembered’. Only events participating in the liturgical rhythm of seasonal communal life experienced from day to day are sanctioned. And this public memory of seasonal events can, the novel insists, be brought closer. As Patrick and Ruttledge work on an unfinished, possibly unfinishable shed, Patrick demands to know what Ruttledge is staring at.

  At how the rafters frame the sky. How the squares of light are more interesting than the open sky. They make it look more human by reducing the sky and then the whole sky grows out from that small space.

  The utility and fertility of scale – the whole sky growing from that small space – distils the vastness surrounding their existence, reducing it to little tableaux of light to humanise its overwhelming immensity. This is the sense in which McGahern’s provincialism is aesthetically defiant: the framed square is more interesting than the open sky. The intensity and complexity of human significance is neither derived from nor transformed by this framing perspective, but the perspective seems to delay time in order to accommodate time. What happens around the frame of the lake is 18,000 pages of ‘news that stays news’, to use Ezra Pound’s definition of literature, when it is reduced to the manageable frame of the novel we read. Or as Jamesie, forever addicted to news, puts it, ‘I may not have travelled far but I know the whole world.’ Distilling experience until it fits this minimalist frame makes it more p
otent, the process of reduction magnifying individual segments of existence so that even a sardine tin has its place.

  This sense of time is minute. It never seeks to recapture some richer segment of meaning beneath the immediate surface of the everyday. In this McGahern’s register is sharply different from his near neighbour and contemporary Seamus Heaney. In shape and structure, Heaney’s famous bog poems are like little arrows or spears that plummet into and puncture the ground they explore. They produce a sense of time that circumvents the sectarian realities of the North by recourse to several different levels of experience. The bog poems’ archaeological recovery of human and political history dreams of a fabulous sense of full and immediate presence. Time is at once immemorial and perennial and the gap between self and other is obliterated. Beneath surface events, deep in the bog, there resides a richer, residual meaning that can mediate and make whole again a divisive present.

  McGahern’s version of time is horizontal, repetitive and, ultimately, a register of bleak and lonely experience. Bogs, lakes, animals – the raw ingredients of Heaney’s world are here, but that vertiginous sense of historical depth is not. ‘How can time be gathered in and kissed?’ the novel asks directly for the one and only time. ‘There is only flesh’ is the answer. The Shah is adept at ‘turning each day into the same day, making even Sunday into all other Sundays’. There is no rift between experience and meaning because meaning in McGahern’s world is never premature or already inscribed by some mythic sense of time that each has no choice but to inherit. Each day time is pixillated and minute. The consolation of any mythic realm of meaning is everywhere absent. Experience is ordered minute by minute, day by day by the lake, the dominant liturgical space around which life and death unfold.