Chapter 10 - Sex, Dissent and Irish Fiction: Reading John McGahern

Summary

This chapter focuses on the early fiction of John McGahern, whose first major novel, The Barracks, was published in 1963, the year of Larkin’s ‘Annus Mirabilis’. Reading from this novel and from The Dark, 1965, with overviews too of The Leavetaking and The Pornographer, written in the 1970s, it analyses the transitional energy of Irish writing against the strictures of church and state and the policing of marital, sexual and personal relationships in Ireland. It reads McGahern’s depictions of sexuality and Irish Catholicism in relation to his Irish, British and European contempararies and antecedents. Drawing upon Dáil debates about the ‘outrage’ of McGahern’s controversial first novel as well as editorial discussions that the author himself had with his publishers Faber and Faber, the chapter offers an insight into his relationship with Catholic Ireland and the vestiges of the Irish state’s culture of censorship in the 1960s. In particular, the chapter focusses on his 1979 novel The Pornographer, McGahern’s ‘most experimental novel’, as partially motivated by the settling of scores from the previous decade, but also his ‘fullest novelistic treatment of the sexual instinct and its impact on man’.