John McGahern's Photographic Eye

This article explores the parallels in John McGahern's imagination between the art of the photographer and his practice as a novelist. In his introduction to a collection of historical photographs, he writes: they document a society in a time and place, and all the images are picked with care. That he chose to focus on a poor cottage, a barefoot woman in a doorway, two girls in their Sunday finery, is significant, but more telling of the eye which he brought to his craft is the angle of the house, the broom next to the doorway, the placing of the birdcage and wheel. My starting point is the quote above, which evokes the techniques and concerns that characterize McGahern's own work as a novelist. Here I take into consideration what is significant in intimate (and almost photographic) reconstructions of the domestic lives of his characters that McGahern presents, and argue that his depictions of everyday life function as synecdoches of historical circumstances and of wider social and economic forces. Like the photographs that McGahern describes, his novels document a society in a time and place owing to their attention to the details of daily life. My analysis will lead me to emphasize the social and historical consciousness that permeates McGahern's work.