John McGahern's mother's unflinching devotion to religion "may have had something to do with his decision to have a traditional funeral Mass, concluding with a decade of the rosary at his graveside in Aughawillan cemetery", an international seminar on the writer was told in Carrick-on-Shannon yesterday.
Dr Eamon Maher, of the Institute of Technology Tallaght, continued, "we may never know the exact motivation for the particular arrangements that he put in place for his funeral service, but we can say with certainty that John McGahern's attitude to religion was characterised by respect more than bitterness". He found it interesting "to see the change in atmosphere between the first novels and McGahern's last one in terms of how they present religion".
In That They May Face the Rising Sun, "most of the inhabitants of the lakeside community still go to Mass, but for somewhat dubious reasons . . . Joe, a former seminarian, replies that he'd like to go but that he doesn't believe, which elicits the following retort: 'None of us believes and we go. That's no bar.'" The novel was described as "ecological not only in terms of its vision in form too. It composes what we might call the literary equivalent of an ecosystem," by Dr James Whyte of Presentation College, Headford, Co Galway, at the seminar.
"In animating his lakeside community, McGahern has brought a whole world to life," he said. "In a supreme act of imaginative sympathy, human life is placed in the broader community of nature as McGahern attempts to give voice to animal, plant and inanimate nature."
He continued "irony, mimicry and parody abound and rarely is any comment of any importance allowed to stand alone without a counterbalancing statement - or an undermining act of mimicry".
Ultimately, "if we must classify it, I think it belongs to the comic mode", said Dr Whyte. "Yet, there is no denying its elegiac tone. It has been described, with justification, as a lament for the passing of a phase in the life of rural Ireland."
The seminar was told that in France, John McGahern's work was on the syllabus for secondary school teachers, while there had been four PhDs on his work and a large number of masters' theses.
Prof Sylvie Mikowski, of the University of Reims, said she had done her PhD on the writer and noted that, in her conversations with him, he had "a very special way of avoiding giving a straight answer." He had told her his job was to write stories, hers and that of other relevant academics was to explain them. She discovered that behind the facade of the simple countryman was "an extremely refined and cultured man of letters". When she had asked him about being an Irish writer he had replied that it wasn't complicated, he was Irish.
She asked him about points of comparison between his novel The Dark and James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and he pretended he had not read the latter. He told her the writer he admired most was Tomas Ó Criomhthain, author of The Islandman.