Yesterday 16 June 2022 another day was celebrated in Dublin for another book about a day in Dublin...
Thomas McGonigle's two previous novels, The Corpse Dream of N. Petkov (1987) and Going to Patchogue (1992), were reviewed by The New York Times Book Review , the Los Angeles Times , the Chicago Tribune , and The Village Voice Literary Supplement . Given all that early attention, the best thing to do is not to talk at first about Thomas McGonigle's St. Patrick's Day: another day in Dublin , a novel that flaunts a sense of timelessness, but instead to talk about two other artists who exist outside of time: Oscar Peterson and Count Basie.
In 1980, BBC Four broadcast Oscar Peterson: Words and Music , a television show hosted by Peterson during which he performs, hosts performances, and talks about music with legendary jazz guitarist Joe Pass. After Peterson discusses with Pass his experiences playing solo concerts, they discuss the difficulty of playing in a group setting and how no big band has a synched musical phrasing better than Count Basie's big band. The show then goes into a flashback in which Peterson has a head-to-head talk with Count Basie at Festival Hall. After showing off Basie's light touch, the conversation turns to the "musical intimidation" often caused by Art Tatum, who is widely acknowledged to be the greatest jazz pianist to ever exist and who was influential to both Peterson and Count Basie. Peterson recounts how there used to be "great instigations" where, when two pianists were at a bar, people would coax the two to play against each other.
[Art] went straight to the piano and he like just took it apart
literally, just wasted everything on the piano.... And he went through
about ten minutes of something, and just wasted it all and he came
back over and sat down beside me and said, you know, when I get
through you can have it. You know he was a total, he was an eagle,
he was a very proud man, and he should have been. And I don't think
there's a pianist of that era that wasn't influenced by him.
Peterson continues to explain that, for a long time, whenever Tatum entered the room, he would suffer fits of extreme nervousness, and that once Tatum had told him, "If you have to hate me, if that's what's gonna make you get over this, you'll just have to hate me ... and really ... It wasn't a case of really hating him, I needed to ignore him the best I could, if you can ever ignore--death."
That is what the literary culture in America needs to do, ignore death, and acknowledge that contemporary writers who follow in the footsteps of modernist giants need to be studied and read, and not forgotten or brushed to the side.
The literary world is currently in a metaphorical period of "musical intimidation." Since the Irish writer Samuel Beckett, the term modernism is nigh untouchable, and Beckett's use of modernist techniques to approach human nature and psychological realism could be used to argue the end of the literary time period known as modernism, because no one can take it any further. When Beckett sat down with his instrument, to steal Peterson's phrase, he "took it apart literally, just wasted everything," and when he died in 1989, he sat down and said to the world, "when I'm through, you can have it"; however, this does not mean that contemporary writers who follow in his lineage should be ignored. Like modernism, literary realism is a phrase that is hardly mentioned right now; perhaps, this is because the phrase has little meaning, that is, if words have meaning anymore and are not just currency to prompt bestselling interviews.
During an author talk about craft at the 2017 Association of Writers and Writing Programs held in Washington D.C., Ron Charles, editor of Book World at The Washington Post , asked Jennifer Egan, 2011 Pulitzer Prize winner, and Karen Joy Fowler, 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award winner, to talk about the state of fiction, realism in particular. Fowler's response was [because of President Trump] "The final nail in the coffin has been struck." Egan nodded in agreement. One important reason why Thomas McGonigle's novel St. Patrick's Day: another day in Dublin , among his other works, needs to be read, reviewed, and studied is because his novel reflects a literary lineage that is keeping realism in a timeless present that refuses to be laid in a grave.
To say that McGonigle's newest novel, Saint Patrick's Day: another day in Dublin , directly reflects Beckett would be hyperbolic and would shortchange the importance of a contemporary author's using a writing style that has been deemed by many as outdated, because, as is often is the case with art and architecture in America, to be historical is to be wasting space. Before you can trace McGonigle's novels to Beckett, or Faulkner, or Joyce, you must first look back to a French novelist by the name of Marie-Henri Beyle, known by his pen name Stendhal. In 1839, Beyle published a novel called La Chartreuse de Panne (The Charterhouse of Parma) . The novel follows the life and adventures of an Italian nobleman, Fabrice del Dongo, and, while this novel has since been translated multiple times, it has also been turned into an opera, multiple film-adaptations, and a TV series, and it holds great literary significance, since it is considered by many to be a revolutionary work representing a change from the "romantic style" into a more "realistic style" because of his close exploration into human nature and psychology. This is done throughout the novel by Fabrice's comparing his life to various novels and poems he has read, and by the way in which Beyle juxtaposes paradoxes: long passages of straight description with the Battle of Waterloo, where the totality of the battle slowly accumulates amid Fabrice's confusion; wit with fits of melancholy; politics with idealism, with love, with failed dreams.
These themes and techniques were later employed by James Joyce, most notably in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses , both of which might well be two of the most written about Irish novels of all time.
Instead of tarrying over what has already been said about these works, a few specific comparisons can be made between McGonigle's Saint Patrick's Day: another day in Dublin and Joyce's works. This may seem merely verbose on my part at first, but there is a clear intention by the author to reflect the Irish legend. McGonigle told Dr. Miriam Nyhan in an interview on Glucksman Ireland House NYU Radio Hour (early 2017) that, "Joyce is ever present in this book, as he is present in every single person concerning Ireland;" therefore, to ignore Joyce's influence, would be tantamount to skimming the first couple of paragraphs and calling it quits.
Saint Patrick's Day tells the story of one 'Tom McGonigle' and follows him as he wakes up on St. Patrick's Day, journeys through various drinking establishments, and interacts with the characters he meets along the way; so, what you get is a psychologically close rendering of a single man existing after the death of his father, as he drinks away his bequeathed inheritance. This sort of psychological dabbling is reminiscent of the technique used by Joyce to portray Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . The major difference is that, in Portrait , Dedalus has both a spiritual and an artistic awakening, while, in St. Patrick's Day: another day in Dublin , 'McGonigle' does not, even though both characters use literature to directly interact with their past and present (much as Fabrice del Dongo does).
The seeming lack of an awakening by 'Tom McGonigle' in St. Patrick's Day affects the reader in much the same way that waiting for the arrival of Godot in Samuel Beckett's 1953 play Waiting for Godot affects its readers/audiences. By the end, the reader is unsure if he has already been there, or if he is there, or if he will ever come.
Another direct correlation between Joyce and McGonigle is the experimentation with layout and font. In Joyce's Ulysses , this can be seen in Episode Seven: "Aeolus," which takes place at the Freeman newspaper offices. This section begins with the headline: IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS. The purpose behind Joyce's using this visual tactic in his writing has been discussed at length: possible intentions of parodying the emptiness of journalism, juxtaposing Bloom with Dedalus; political allegory; and it has even been considered a possible admission of admiration of the newspaper Scissors and Paste which ran in Dublin from 1899-1906. Whatever the reason may be, it cannot be argued that the change in text, in terms of font style and size, is hard to miss.
The same can be said fof the way the McGonigle changes his font. One font size or style might be employed in the exact manner as Joyce, to give headlines, while another is used to recall a written poem, another for a letter, another purely for emphasis. In each instance, the change in font is doing something the words are not. While this might be a challenge for readers as they get used to the mechanics of the novel, much as with the complicated style of Joyce's writing, McGonigle's style can be perceived in the same light, when boiled down: the plot of both "Aeolus" and St. Patrick's Day can be read straightforwardly as though this technique were not employed. This visual style, however, creates a meta-fictional atmosphere as well, the reader having to acknowledge someone outside the narrative crafting the story. The biggest difference between the two is, while the headline style in Ulysses can create confusion or, at the very least, make the textual meaning harder to discern, the font size and style changes in St. Patrick's Day make the passages easier to follow; also, the variety of uses of this visual technique seems to say to the rest of the literary world a reiteration of what Art Tatum said to Oscar Peterson, "... when I'm done you can have it."
In his foreword to his book Re Joyce (1965), Anthony Burgess addresses an issue that is centric not only to Joyce, McGonigle, and academia, but also to the American public: "My book does not pretend to scholarship, only to a desire to help the average reader who wants to know Joyce's work but has been scared off by the professors. The appearance of difficulty is part of Joyce's big joke; the profundities are always expressed in good round Dublin terms; Joyce's heroes are humble men." Difficulty and Joyce's intentions, such as the headlines previously discussed, have been argued about constantly and this quotation is brought up, not to dispute intentions, but to argue that while Joyce's heroes might have been humble men, it can be argued that Joyce, himself, was not so humble. Part of the difficulty with Ulysses is that it operates on one level as a biography and on another as fiction. There is a mythic quality about Joyce that is caused by the details of his life mixing with creativity. The same could be said about McGonigle's work. The presence of biographical facts and fiction in a text written with stream of consciousness as a primary style complicates the text in a way that may make his novel seem more complex to the average reader than it actually is. While this may be a way to make a myth out of a man, it should not scare away potential readers.
When George O'Brian reviewed Saint Patrick's Day for The Dublin Review of Books , Issue 87, he spent much of his time reflecting upon the lines from T.S. Eliot's poem "Burnt Norton." The lines go as follows: "Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past. / If all time is eternally present/All time is unredeemable." O'Brian used these lines to try to explain how the text operates in terms of setting and tense, and O'Brian does explain his point that the character 'Tom McGonigle' is constantly crossing between realms of time and place. O'Brian explains his point exhaustively, but he misses the big picture: a timeless present also describes the literary heritage that McGonigle's novel is consistently referring back to and existing presently in.
McGonigle has claimed the novel is as much fiction as Joyce's work was, that most of the experience is made up and some is real, that all the experience is real and some is made up, and while these claims may seem to be an aloof and dismissive comment about his writing, they, in actuality, explain much about the tense of the book and, perhaps, McGonigle's intentions behind his use of a timeless present tense. In a letter (February 2017), McGonigle responded to a question concerning the direct connection to the Irish writers/monoliths, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. He stated that,
Certain writers are always at the shoulder as it is with Beckett,
Celine, Bernhard, Thomas Wolfe ... but one doesn't write to refute,
to ... more in the way why repeat what has been done ... it seemed
to me I have always been interested in what is happening right now
as opposed to what is going to happen ... so for me that sentence
right in front of me sends me to the next sentence ... I heard the
business about what is happening right now from Nicholas Mosley the
son of Sir Oswald who is a very prolific novelist and whom I
interviewed for Newsday
.
McGonigle's interview with Nicholas Mosley was published on the 5th of January 1992, and in it Mosley explained to McGonigle that there are two types of books, those about what happens next and those about what happens on the page. To reiterate the basic plot of St. Patrick's Day , the novel is about a man waking up as the St. Patrick's Day parade is ending, who then travels from pub to pub, and does a walkabout through Dublin; however, while this may seem straightforward, McGonigle infuses the text with a recollection of all the years that 'Tom McGonigle' traveled back and forth to Dublin, which creates a timeless-present tense that often demands the reader's full attention.
This technique is reminiscent of not only A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man but also Faulkner's use of stream of consciousness. McGonigle stated that he sees his work in conversation with Faulkner in terms of place, place as an anchor for the writer:
I think Faulkner has always been there ... It's like he never
really left the homeplace ... and so while I was in Dublin I was
really still in Patchogue ... which would lead a French reader to
Jacque Rigaut and discovering as I did he had invented LORD
PATCHOGUE after being on Long Island in the 1920s and seeing those
signs and saying the word Patchogue as a French person might 60
miles to no way out ... (Letter, February 2017)
This might also lead a reader to Stendhal, as previously mentioned, and while McGonigle was referring to Faulkner as a writer of the local, what McGonigle doesn't express is how his novel reflects the passage of time, or lack thereof, that exists in Faulkner's writing. His novel shares the confusion of a timeless present that Faulkner uses in his novel The Sound and the Fury , which follows different members of the Compson family: Benjy, Quentin, Jason IV, Caddy, along with the Compsons' long time caretaker, Dilsey. The first section which centers on the narrative of Benjy is notably told in stream of consciousness, because Benjy is mentally handicapped and timelines merge in his head. Events are often told not in chronological order, and oftentimes this section is described as non-linear or non-chronological, but it would be more apt to say that Benjy exists in a timeless present that folds in on itself and, at the same time, constantly expands, much as in the way McGonigle portrays time and space in St. Patrick's Day: another day in Dublin . While Benjy's perspective is written the way it is to reflect his mental handicap, 'Tom McGonigle' has something much like the same handicap; perhaps, this similarity reflects a shift in realism brought about by Beckett's perception of human nature, and that while Benjy has a mental handicap recognizable by doctors and by the people he interacts with, 'Tom' is handicapped by being human, that is to say that perhaps it is human nature to be alone and fragmented from reality. Another connection between the two works of fiction is the use of inheritance, father to son, Jason IV inheriting the Compson farm and becoming patriarch and 'Tom McGonigle' inheriting his father's money earned from working forty-nine years at the American Can Company. It can be argued that both sons fail with their charges; the farm falls to rot and ruin, while 'Tom' manages only to get across Dublin on his late father's dime, episodic perhaps, but not the most epic use of coin.
Even with its lineage of literary giants, even with its winning the Notre Dame Review Book Prize, there is an important question that needs to be asked concerning McGonigle's newest novel. Why were McGonigle's other novels reviewed by such sources as the New York Times Book Review and the Chicago Tribune , while this book has received little to no critical credit in America? (The only exception being the American Book Review , which has recently published "Portrait of McGonigle," by Jane Rosenberg Laforge in its November/December issue, currently available online.)
What might explain this phenomenon of lost interest in McGonigle's work is its heritage of realism and immigration. To borrow from McGonigle's own work on the novel, realism is "soiled," and Saint Patrick's Day is rooted in a long line of literary realism, and the novel tries to claim nothing else. It seems to be an immigrant itself, and publishing is only important or congratulatory dependent upon the place you have originated; Irish heritage and the Irish-American experience has long been covered in earlier decades, but in this new century it is considered somewhat passe, is overlooked, and perhaps this is a continuance of a populace's ignorance of Irish tradition.
The problem with reviews of McGonigle's newest novel is that although some of them might admit there is something going on with his use of time and tradition, they do not fully explain its use. In a blurb, Nuala Ni' Dhomnaill states "[McGonigle] puts a certain period of Dublin literary history before our eyes with freshness and honesty. Not only that but by his skillful use of modernist techniques he gives the 'Irish novel' a long outstanding and much deserved kick up the arse into the 21st century."
Saint Patrick's Day uses modernist techniques, techniques influenced greatly by the Irish writers Joyce and Beckett, but it was published in a time that is very much post-Joyce and very much post-Beckett. This is the 21st century, the literary period wherein an overcrowded AWP hall of two hundred plus aspiring writers, editors, professors, reviewers, journalists and publishers give thunderous applause to the sound of "the last nail in the coffin [of realism]." There are no more rules. Perhaps that is the problem with McGonigle's book. Saint Patrick's Day has rules and a lineage and it owns these things. Unlike Egan and Fowler, two very contemporary writers, who would like to shove realism over a cliff, claiming that experimentation, such as a section of a novel's being entirely told from the perspective of a PowerPoint presentation, is the preferred way to write. They forget, however, that this experiment, too, could be argued to have roots in psychological realism, that because of the increasing proximity of technology in our lives, a perspective from technology might be the mutation of Stendhal's depiction of the battle of Waterloo.
The only differences between McGonigle's claims and Fowler's are that, currently, historical roots are only important in certain circumstances, and describing how your novel is like others one hundred and two hundred years ago does not excite the current readership of America as much as does throwing up your fist and claiming a mode of writing to be dead. McGonigle foresaw this as an issue when his article, "A Writing Life", was published in 2002 in The Notre Dame Review :
You can go to Google.com and plug in my name which I share with a
lawyer and a priest; you can read excerpts from those reviews both
by me and about the books. Google only goes back a few years and as
the kids say, who cares about the old shit, anyway
.
Joyce is still revered; Beckett is still revered; Faulkner is still revered, but contemporary writers who follow in their footsteps are not. Realism is viewed as soiled and has been viewed as stanch, stiff necked, and outdated for some time now, but the fault cannot be put on the shoulders of McGonigle, but rather the short sightedness of American critics, popular authors, and reviewers.
While McGonigle might disapprove of labels being put on his novels, or himself as an author, there is an importance to his biography. As he told Dr. Miriam Nyhan during the interview on Glucksman Ireland House NYU Radio Hour, his grandparents were shipped out of Ireland to go to work when they were twelve, and their--and perhaps his--identity might be described as that of Irish extraction. He went to Beloit College and then in 1964 studied abroad at University College, Dublin. This is important, both because of the time when Saint Patrick's Day was published and who the novel is about. The elephant in the room is the unspoken truth that Thomas McGonigle is a white, American-born male writing about a white, American-born male, who is having an identity crisis while abroad in another country. This is not something new for McGonigle to write about, nor is this new writing territory for Irish-American writers. McGonigle's novel, Going to Patchogue , published by Dalkey Archive Press in 1992, concerns a similar protagonist and motif; however, that novel was praised for its use of stream of consciousness and its ability, while using various modernist techniques, to stick together a cohesive reading experience. Saint Patrick's Day has not received such praise, nor has it had the critical success that his earlier novels have had. Saint Patrick's Day: another day in Dublin was published by Notre Dame Press in 2016, the year of a presidential election in which U.S. presidential debates often concerned immigration, and immigrant experiences (stories, poems, memoirs, and novels) took the literary world by storm. It might be argued that part of the reason Saint Patrick's Day has been overlooked is because it has been taken at surface level, and that it was published at time when an immigrant novel written by a white, American-born male is seen by many as politically incorrect and counter-intuitive to the cause, almost superfluous. This could not be further from the truth, though white-male is the least trendy of contemporary sub-cultures. The exploration of self in immigrant texts often contemplates and complicates issues of human nature, but also, specifically, contemplates and complicates issues of identity. In his critical essay, "Joyce's Merrimanic Heroine: Molly vs. Bloom in Midnight Court," James A. W. Heffernan argues that "conspicuous by its absence from this multicultural stew [in Ulysses] is anything explicitly Gaelic, anciently Irish." This is wrong. The themes of problematic identities (national and religious and writer/bard) are explicitly represented in Joyce's text, and these themes, while not exclusively Gaelic, are "explicitly Gaelic, anciently Irish." That is why they can be traced in Joyce's work, and in Beckett's work, and in McGonigle's work. On page three of his novel, McGonigle writes,
The Americans came dressed in white socks and London Fog raincoats.
I lost my white socks and kept the J.C. Penney raincoat which was
soiled down the right front side with dried red paint after
brushing against wet posters in the anarchist office in Glasgow
where I had visited: Americans never wore soiled clothing being
afraid of getting run over by a truck ...
Perhaps, to be an American abroad is now viewed in the same light as realism--soiled, because the American readership is so hyper-politicized with agendas that historicism seemingly has little value anymore. The fear of being run over by a truck has now been replaced with a literary "musical intimidation" of the twentieth century.
Saint Patrick's Day: another day in Dublin should be read because of the company it keeps in a timeless present: Faulkner; Beckett; Joyce; Beyle; also, two other French authors I have not mentioned yet, Marcel Proust and Louis-Ferdinand Celine. The last two, although it is regrettable they come so late in this argument, will, perhaps, bring us closer to a conclusion and a better understanding of the importance of what McGonigle's latest novel is representing by its existence in 2017. Certain similarities can be drawn between the influences of St. Patrick's Day that have been already mentioned and the writing of Louis-Ferdinand Celine, if one can forget for a moment Celine's anti-Semitism and think only of his fiction, specifically his first novel Journey to the End of the Night .
Celine, McGonigle, and Joyce share not only the mythic quality of a work of fiction's being both creative and biographic but also a dark, dry humor, and a yearning to render on the page a character's chaotic subconscious attempting to find a kind of order in the physical world, creating characters less idealistic, in the romantic sense, and more realistic. The last two are also represented in the works of Beckett and Proust.
Marcel Proust's tour de force A la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past orIn Search of Lost Time ) tells the autobiography of an unnamed (except for a single "Marcel"), first-person narrator often with stream of consciousness narration. The closest allusions to McGonigle's work can be drawn near the end of Swann s Way when the narrator envisions visiting different places, but his failing health makes elaborate travel impossible, so instead he walks in the Champs-Elysees. One might compare this to the way that 'Tom McGonigle' walks about Dublin, going from pub to pub, because he fails to come to grips with the past and the present. His failing health is a failing psychological health preventing him from fully existing in the present, which keeps him from moving fully into the present, or on into the future. Going back to the very end of Swann's Way , we see the narrator expressing grief about the fleeting nature of places, physical places that no longer exist where they used to, creating a lamentation about the passing of time and the decay of the present, which directly correlates to the timeless present that McGonigle exists in.
Madison Smartt Bell said of McGonigle's first book, The Corpse Dream of N. Petkov , "Here's a fine effort to capture disappearing history--history that vanishes by being forgotten ..." This essay is, in part, an effort to capture a disappearing history, an effort to capture the importance of a literary lineage that is vanishing, not because it is being forgotten, but because award-winning authors and critics are consciously refuting its validity as a contemporary means of fiction.
Thomas McGonigle's newest novel, St. Patrick's Day: another day in Dublin , represents, then, not only a lineage of realism, but also a tangible proof that great contemporary novels can be written while still honoring the past. This novel's existence in today's literary marketplace represents a timeless present that deserves to be read, studied, and reviewed, another display of why the American readership needs to get over its fear of "musical intimidation."
Thomas McGonigle
Thomas McGonigle was born in 1944 in Patchogue, Long Island. Throughout his life, he has lived in Brooklyn, New York; Dublin, Ireland; Sofia, Bulgaria; Douglas, Arizona; and Manhattan, his current home. McGonigle has written extensively on the topic of Ireland and Irish writers, and is the founder and editor of Adrift (The American Irish Cultural Project). He holds degrees from University College, Dublin, Beloit College, Columbia University, and Hollins College, where he earned an M.A. in English in 1970. McGonigle writes regularly for periodicals like The Guardian, The Washington Post , the Chicago Tribune , and the Los Angeles Times . His prose and poetry have been published in Poetry Ireland, Bomb, The Gorey Detail, Broadsheet , and Screw , among others. McGonigle's latest novel, St. Patrick's Day: another day in Dublin , described as a musing "on death, sex, lost love, and Irish immigrant history" by Notre Dame Press, was the winner of the 2016 Notre Dame Review Book Prize.
--I. L. S.
