The late writer John McGahern was last night described as "a real Tory anarchist" but at the same time the deepest and most sympathetic recorder of a rural world.
Prof Declan Kiberd told an international seminar on the writer - which began in Carrick- on-Shannon, Co Leitrim, last night - that although McGahern had been deeply hurt by the apologists for the values of rural Ireland in the 20th century, he emerged as that world's most tender chronicler.
"McGahern recognised the link between the warmth and the narrowness," said Prof Kiberd, professor of Anglo-Irish literature and drama at UCD. "He wished to celebrate the intensity of a shared emotion but without the shadow side of terror and fear."
Speaking on the theme John McGahern: the Novel and the Story, Prof Kiberd said the writer never really abandoned that rural world, even when the provocation might have made that abandonment understandable. While censorship left him with the reputation of a dissident, "his underlying aim was to affirm - and, in affirming, examine - the values of that world which had so cruelly repressed his work".
Although McGahern won acclaim as a short story writer, he may finally be remembered for the novels Amongst Womenand That They May Face the Rising Sun. Prof Kiberd said Amongst Womendealt with a tough man who wishes to live in the world of epic militarism, "but is in fact doomed to live out his days in something more like the world of the modern novel, a world dominated by women and by feminine values".
That They May Face the Rising Sunwas an astonishing work which throws the death-of-rural-Ireland thesis into question with its suggestion a tradition will live in the lament for its passing.
"His works can, therefore, be ranked with those of Swift, Edgeworth, Beckett, Flann O'Brien and Mairtín Ó Cadháin - written in a genre which has elements of epic, poetry, short story and novel but ultimately rooted in a tradition which is as much oral as writerly," Prof Kiberd said.
