Irish Fiction - Into The Modern

Into The Modern

George Moore (1852–1933) spent much of his early career in Paris and was one of the first writers to use the techniques of the French realist novelists in English. His novels were often controversial. A Drama in Muslin (1886) was banned from public libraries because it dealt with lesbianism. Esther Waters (1894), the book that finally established his reputation as a novelist in the tradition of Zola, had as its subject extramarital sex and illegitimacy, and The Brook Kerith (1916) imagined a Christ who did not die on the cross but who was nursed back to health and then travelled to India to study mysticism. Moore was involved in the setting up of the Abbey Theatre and wrote several volumes of memoirs. His short stories helped popularise the form among Irish authors and he can be seen as one of the precursors of the most famous Irish novelist of the 20th century, James Joyce.

Joyce (1882–1941) is often regarded as the father of the literary genre "stream of consciousness" which is best exemplified in his famous work, Ulysses. Joyce also wrote Finnegans Wake, Dubliners, and the semi-autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ulysses, often considered to be the greatest novel of the 20th century, is the story of a day in the life of a city, Dublin. Told in a dazzling array of styles, it was a landmark book in the development of literary modernism. If Ulysses is the story of a day, Finnegans Wake is a night epic, partaking in the logic of dreams and written in an invented language which parodies English, Irish and Latin and is called Joycespeak, deemed virtually unreadable at the time of its release, it became a cult classic with the emergence of the beat generation, particularly William S. Burroughs, in the 1950s and 1960s.

Joyce's high modernism had its influence on coming generations of Irish novelists, most notably Samuel Beckett (1906–1989), Brian O'Nolan (1912–1966), who published as both Flann O'Brien and Myles na Gopaleen, and Aidan Higgins (born 1927). Beckett, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, is one of the great figures in 20th-century world literature. Perhaps best known for his plays, he wrote many works of fiction and his trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, written, like Waiting for Godot, in the period between 1947 and 1949, is perhaps the greatest of all second generation modernist fiction.

O'Nolan was bilingual and his fiction clearly shows the mark of the native tradition, particularly in the imaginative quality of his storytelling and the biting edge of his satire. These traits are especially evident in At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), which was highly praised by Joyce, in An Béal Bocht (1941), written in Gaelic, and in The Third Policeman, published in 1967, after his death.

Cathal Ó Sándair (1922–1996), one of the most prolific Irish language authors, produced over one hundred novels, many of them westerns featuring cowboys and gun fights. Born in Weston Super Mare, England to an English father and Irish mother. His first novel appeared in 1943 and featured Réics Carló, the most famous Irish language detective. Ó Sándair is reputed to have published 160 books and sold more than 500,000 copies.

The big house novel prospered into the 20th century, and Aidan Higgins' first novel Langrishe, Go Down is an experimental example of the genre. Higgins later fiction tended towards greater disjunction and experimentation. He has also published short stories and several volumes of memoirs.

More conventional exponents of the big house novel include Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973), whose novels and short stories include Encounters (1923), The Last September (1929), and The Death of the Heart (1938) and Molly Keane (1904–1996) (writing as M.J. Farrell), author of Young Entry (1928), Conversation Piece (1932), Devoted Ladies (1934), Full House (1935), and The Loving Without Tears (1951) among others.

Francis Stuart (1902–2000) started his literary life as a protégé of W. B. Yeats and married Isuelt, daughter of Maude Gonne. He published his first novel, Women and God in 1931. Stuart was a prolific novelist, but many of his books are now long out of print. He went to work in Germany in the late 1930s, and declined to leave with the outbreak of the Second World War. During the war, he broadcast anti-British talks on German radio. The controversy surrounding these actions was to stay with Stuart until his death. However, his finest and most enduring novel, Black List, Section H (1971), is a barely fictionalised account of those years.

With the rise of the Irish Free State and the Republic of Ireland, the terms of the 'national question' shifted. The issue of land ownership had been more or less resolved and the real question now was how to build a nation state. Inevitably, novelists from the so-called lower social classes began to dominate. Frequently, these authors wrote of the narrow, circumscribed lives of the lower-middle classes and small farmers. Exponents of this style range from Brinsley MacNamara (1890–1963) (real name John Weldon), whose 1918 The Valley of the Squinting Windows could be said to have created the genre, to John McGahern (born 1934), whose first novel, The Dark (1965), a portrayal of child abuse in a rural community, cost him his job as a teacher.

Brian Moore (1921–1999) was born in Belfast but became a citizen of Canada in 1953. He wrote a series of scrupulously written novels examining the Catholic conscience in the modern world.

In the 1960s, Ann Moray returned to her Irish roots in Rising of the Lark (1964), A Fair Stream of Silver (1965), and Gervase (1970), as well as by turning to traditional Irish song in her concerts.

The short story has also proven popular with Irish fiction writers. Well known short story writers include Frank O'Connor (1903–1966) and Sean O'Faolain (1900–1991).