The Dark

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Sam, I must admit I did start That They May Face the Rising Sun (a fact which I’d forgotten until you mentioned the book) and found it very slow going. Much has been written," he says, "about the collusion of church and state to bring about an Irish society that was childish, repressive and sectarian, and this narrative hardly suggests otherwise.

John McGahern’s The Dark and the Formative Spaces of Irish John McGahern’s The Dark and the Formative Spaces of Irish

While state-sanctioned national culture does unite populations, Bourdieu insists that the manufacture of homogenizing norms “fosters both the monopolization of the universal by the few and the dispossession of all others, who are, in a way, mutilated in their humanity. Michael Moran is an Old Irish Republican whose life was transformed by his days of glory as a guerrilla leader in the Irish War of Independence. It just so happened that the attempt to banish women from public life was considered the most convenient strategy for reducing the impulses of sexual temptation, in theory chastening the morals of Irish men. I guess one could read the book as a straightforward story of Irish adolescence, however, it is more interesting when the reader pays attention to the complexities; there is a lot more there that will reward the careful and thoughtful reader.

Beginning in 2015, the government of the Republic of Ireland has officially adopted a more inclusive view of Irish gender and, in legitimating Irish queerness, has necessarily added to the recognized categories of what it means to be culturally Irish. Against a background evoked with quiet mastery, McGahern explores with precision and tenderness a human situation, superficially very ordinary, but inwardly an agony of longing and despair.

The Dark (McGahern novel) - Wikipedia

The protagonist is motherless, he suffers verbal, physical and sexual abuse at the hands of his tyrannical father, and his future looks bleak. We know that this particular configuration does not sufficiently describe the conditions of lived experience for a massive cross-section of any human population, yet it is a structure that has long been privileged—often at the expense of households and families that do not fit such a description. The son gets a scholarship (“there wasn’t much rejoicing”) which gives Mahoney the opportunity to adopt his best stance: the bully-as-victim or, as we might now say, passive-aggressive.

Patrick Crotty categorizes The Dark as a “literature of protest” in his 2005 essay, which traces the plight of children across McGahern’s oeuvre using the term to describe the protagonist’s experience of oppressions both localized and systemic. The ideal Ireland that we would have, the Ireland that we dreamed of, would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit—a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths and the laughter of happy maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age. Of course, a critical inspection quickly reveals that both state ideology and social norms are inherent in determining the structure and nature of household ideologies. As with McGahern's previous novel, this work treats the subject of death by cancer – the protagonist's aunt in this case is dying in hospital – as well as visits to rural Ireland.

The Dark - John McGahern - Google Books The Dark - John McGahern - Google Books

De Valera’s rhetorical strategy, therefore, creates parallel references to cultural production in both economic and biological modes.

In real life his mother died of breast cancer at a young age, and in all his books you’ll find the mother figure has usually died, too. But, one of his many mysteries was that he would never let go of a relationship no matter how bad it was. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. By turns neglectful, brutal and complaining, he "organises the troops" into a miserable little posse, eventually finding a new wife to help him cope. The structure and appearance of the family appears self-evident, but that self-evident quality is in fact an orthodoxy that, when codified in the language of the state (or the modern state’s predecessor, the Church) contributes to the unification of culture and the privileging of a dominant, “legitimate” cultural hegemony.