Placing McGahern and Toibin

We can't possibly gather up all the remaining loose ends from the past few weeks, of course, but as we move away from this early-semester focus on the contemporary Irish novel I do find myself thinking continuously about space (not surprisingly, since this may be the most dominant analytical category in contemporary Irish and Northern Irish literature). To that end, I wonder if any of you thought about any connections between the symbolic power of McGahern's/Moran's Great Meadow and Toibin's/Redmond's Cush? Is there a paper idea in that possible link, I wonder? Both invoke rural Irishness (in different ways, I guess) and both probably gesture towards the restrictions of limited economic possibilities (we'll see this in Friel's play, too); both become sites of reaffirming identity, of finding a kind of sanctity in the idea of home, of creating an antidote to the experience and connotations of the city. Remembering the Montague poem, too, I guess we can expand all of this into that common tension between tradition and modernity/change. But clearly there's ambivalence on both sides of the equation ...

All of this takes me even wider afield, too, to think of the diasporic condition of the Irish, the dominance of emigration and exile in their root condition. Whether it's evidenced in novels like the ones we've just read, in Joyce's Gabriel Conroy who, at the end of the "The Dead," realizes "the time had come for him to set out on his journey westward," to contemporary Irish musical artists like U2 who must, through touring, continuously confront the contrast between home and away, between traditional and international/hybrid notions of Irishness, etc. (lyrically, too, one thinks of "Where the Streets Have No Name": "I want to run / I want to hide / I want to tear down these walls / That hold me inside": that could nearly be a theme song for some of those Moran children!).

Anyway, I just thought I'd toss that out there! I hope you're enjoying Dancing at Lughnasa. Don't forget to have a look at Professor Sweeney's book, Performing the Body in Irish Theatre, if you get a chance (it's available online as an electronic text via the library's website).