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Death and Dying in the Modern Irish Novel: Studies in Form and Meaning from James Joyce to Anne Enright by Bridget English A major thesis presented as full requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English National University of Ireland, Maynooth School of English, Media and Theatre Studies, Faculty of Arts, Celtic Studies & Philosophy 28th February 2014 Head of Department: Dr. Emer Nolan Supervisors: Dr. Conor McCarthy and Professor Joe Cleary Summary This dissertation examines how the modern Irish novel negotiates shifting cultural conceptions of death and dying across the twentieth century. Analyzing a cross-section of important novels — James Joyce’s Ulysses, Kate O’Brien’s The Ante-Room, Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies, John McGahern’s The Barracks and Anne Enright’s The Gathering — my study will argue that the Irish novel has long grappled with the meaning of life and death in a world where religious and secular conceptions of the nature of life and death have continually intersected and conflictually coexisted. Though sometimes viewed as a wholly secular form, the novel in the Irish context has struggled to reconcile Catholic views of life and death that stress the importance of a “good death” and the rewards of eternity with secular worldviews that stress the importance of personal fulfillment in this life and that see death as a final and absolute ending. The novel genre may be secular in its general tendency, but it is also a dialogic form that puts antagonistic conceptions of death and dying into contention with each other, and it is the conflict between these colliding conceptions of death that lends modern Irish narrative fiction much of its interest. The story of death and dying in the Irish novel is not simply one of declining Catholicism and rising secularism. This study shows that while Irish Catholic notions of death and dying were always challenged by alternative secular value systems, these secular value systems have also struggled to find meaningful alternatives to religious notions of death. Death and Dying in the Modern Irish Novel is part of a wider body of criticism that deal with the meaning and function of death in the modern novel such as Garrett Stewart’s Death Sentences: Style of Dying in British Fiction and Frederick Hoffman’s The Mortal No: Death and the Modern Imagination. This study makes a distinctive contribution to this scholarship by focusing on the specific way that death shapes the structure, form and development of the Irish novel and how these novelistic depictions interrogate existing cultural attitudes towards death and dying. Table of Contents Acknowledgements ................................................................................................... i Introduction: ............................................................................................................ 1 Chapter One: Death and Narrative Regeneration: James Joyce’s Ulysses ................................ 37 Chapter Two: The Eve of All Souls and the Death of Desire: Kate O’Brien’s The Ante-Room ....................................................................................................... 92 Chapter Three: Deathbed Confessions and Unraveling Narration: Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies ............................................................................................................ 141 Chapter Four: Ritual and Denial in a World Stripped of Illusion: John McGahern’s The Barracks .......................................................................................................... 190 Chapter Five: Death without Resurrection and the Modern Wake: Anne Enright’s The Gathering ........................................................................................................ 237 Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 286 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 294 Acknowledgements Firstly, I would like to gratefully acknowledge the research funding provided by the John and Pat Hume Scholarship at NUIM. The School of English, Media and Theatre Studies at NUIM provided a lively and collegial environment for my research. I would especially like to thank Professor Chris Morash, who was Head of School when I entered the PhD, and Dr. Emer Nolan, the current Head of School, for their advice and support. I am deeply indebted to my supervisors, Joe Cleary and Conor McCarthy, for their rigorous attention to my work. Their time, guidance and critical acumen were invaluable to the completion of this study. From them I have learned a great deal. I feel fortunate to have benefited from the expertise of many colleagues in the Department of English. Thanks to all the lecturers and especially to Oona Frawley for her support as a teaching mentor, her editing help and her encouragement, kindness and generosity. Thanks to Michael Cronin for his proofreading help and feedback, and to Luke Gibbons, Sinéad Kennedy, Moynagh Sullivan and Íde Corley for their advice and helpful suggestions. I would also like to acknowledge Amanda Bent and Tracy O’Flaherty for their practical support. Lastly, I’m extremely grateful to Margaret Kelleher for her guidance and encouragement. Many thanks to Eoghan Smith and Bernadette Treahy for proofreading and providing valuble feedback on various chapter drafts. i I am thankful to An Foras Feasa for providing a research space that fostered a friendly and supportive environment among postgraduate students. Much gratitude is owed to my fellow postgraduate students and friends in the Department of English, Media and Theatre Studies at NUIM. I would like particularly to acknowledge Theresa Harney, Claire Brophy, Sonia Howell, Maggie O’Neill, Ciara Gallagher, Alan Carmody, Sarah Byrne, Siobhan O’Donnell, Deirdre Quinn, Declan Kavanagh, Mary O’Byrne, Brenda O’Connell, Mark Tyndall, Eleanor O’Leary, Gráinne ni Bhreitiún, Barbara Strahan and Ronan Doherty. The friends and colleagues I have met at conferences have contributed many interesting ideas and suggestions. I’m particularly grateful to John Dillon, Claudia Luppino, Joanne McEntee, Michaela Markova, Teresa Wray, Lauren Clark and Andrew Maguire for their kindness and friendship. I am especially appreciative for the support and encouragement of all of my friends and family in Chicago, New York and elsewhere. Much gratitude is owed to Kamili Posey, Abby Lindquist, Julia Porter, Joan Janis, Bob, Maureen and Mary Soldat, Rita Peters, Mary Ellen Regan, Phyllis Crane and the Peters and Hyland families. My sister, Colleen, has generously provided practical help, feedback, friendly skepticism and lively debates about death. Particular thanks to my parents, Patrick and Kathleen, who instilled in me a love of learning and a passion for books and whose love and support are unfailing. ii Introduction I. In a now famous interview hosted by Marian Finucane and broadcast on RTÉ radio on Saturday April 12, 2008, Nuala O’Faolain related to the listening public that she was dying of lung cancer and revealed that she had refused chemotherapy. The reason for this was that as soon as she knew she was going to die, “the goodness went from [her] life.”1 The Irish public listened in rapt attention as O’Faolain declared that there was no religious consolation to be had for her because she did not believe in God or an afterlife. This rawly emotional interview was significant, in part, because it publically voiced one woman’s private fears and emotions about dying and also because O’Faolain was relating a very harrowing account of a secular life and death to a once famously Catholic nation. Even more importantly, she was giving voice in public to what is commonly a very private or at most familial experience, and the powerful reactions the interview provoked revealed the extent to which modern Irish society generally silences and marginalizes the voices of the dying.2 Perhaps the most shocking part of the interview was O’Faolain’s brutal honesty about her unmitigated despair and the lack of solace she derived from the idea of God or 1 Nuala O’Faolain, “The Saturday Interviews.” Interviewed by Marian Finucane. RTÉ. The Irish Independent. 13 April 2008. Transcript. http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/nuala-o-faolain-interview-i-dont-want- more-time-as-soon-as-i-heard-i-was-goingto-die-the-goodness-went-from-life- 26437188.html. 2 For a classic account of the invisibility of death in modern society see Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death. Trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), 87-106. For a recent work on death in the modern Irish context, which also comments on O’Faolain’s dying interview, see John Waters, Beyond Consolation: Or How We Became Too Clever for God…And Our Own Good (London: Continuum International Publishing, 2010), 1-47. 1 from the promise of an afterlife. O’Faolain was not only making her private death public and declaring the wholly secular nature of her encounter with her end, she was also expressing her sense of her death as inconsolable tragedy. In her view, the pleasures, memories and wisdom that she had accumulated over her lifetime would all disappear without a trace at her passing, with nothing whatsoever surviving after. The interview was brutally honest and utterly uncompromising in its sense of the finality of death, and left in its wake many questions about how the Irish people now make sense of death in an increasingly secular

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