Monuments of Unageing Embarrassment: Brinsley MacNamara and the Bildungsroman in the Irish Free State

About two-thirds of the way through the 1929 novel The Various Lives of Marcus Igoe by Brinsley MacNamara (the pseudonym of John Weldon, 1890-1963), the eponymous hero hits upon a scheme of monumental spite. To memorialize his victory over the small-minded villagers of Garradrimna who have ever thwarted him, he determines that he will erect a statue—of Marcus Igoe. "He felt quite certain they would never be able to stand it," the narrator tells us, "this brilliant notion of putting up a monument to himself."¹ Although the statue would both immortalize him and mortify his neighbors, Marcus eventually decides his victory would be a Pyrrhic one, because a timeless statue would impoverish the subjective variousness his battle against the town's conformity had produced. He asks of the monument, "would it be only a part of himself, or which side of him would be uppermost when the thing was done?" (VL 185). Marcus must not only decide between the permanence of a monolith and the variety of his many sides; he also must concede that a finished statue—like the achieved selfhood sought by the protagonist of a would-be bildungsroman such as Various Lives—would snuff out "the many future lives he would yet live in various stages" (VL 236).

Readers familiar with the MacNamara of Valley of the Squinting Windows (1918) would sympathize with a character's wish to transcend the oppressive stasis represented by Garradrimna, the fictional setting of both novels. A scabrous exposure of the spiritual, social, and emotional meanness of small-town Ireland, Valley is often adduced as one of the earliest correctives both to Revivalist idealizations of the Irish Volk and the nineteenth-century Irish fiction of the comic and the quaint. Rather than pious peasants and rakish gentry, Valley reflects the stunted lives, gossipy resentments, and, in John Cronin's words, "endemic bitchery" of the midlands.² That bitchery drove the townspeople of Delvin, County Westmeath, who were fooled neither by the town's fictionalized name, Garradrimna, nor the pen name "Oliver Blyth," to burn the book and to boycott the school where Weldon's father was a teacher. Michael McDonnell is one of many critics who claim MacNamara did for the Irish small town what Joyce did for the city, and surely MacNamara would have endorsed the faith in the power of realistic fiction to catalyze social evolution—a faith nowhere more evident than in Joyce's warning to his printer that failure to publish Dubliners would "retard the course of civilization in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking glass."³

The Garradrimna of The Various Lives of Marcus Igoe remains the same spiteful place, complete with the constant surveillance of the "squinting windows," but the protagonist's struggle against the town has become a structural given, announced at the novel's beginning and consistent throughout, rather than emerging over the course of the narrative as the result of the oppressive particularities of Irish life as exposed by a diagnostic realism. The first chapter declares that Marcus Igoe's "mood of combat with the life around him" is "permanently fixed" (VL 8), and all of the loosely connected plot lines that follow commence, unfold, and resolve as failed skirmishes against the town. But the comic grandiosity of Marcus's monumental gesture—his very name puns on the phrase "mark as I go"—combined with the several other fantastical attempts to achieve "a memorial, an enshrinement" of his "ultimate triumph over Garradrimna" (VL 198) signals MacNamara's departure from the genre of "avenging realism"—the term John Wilson Foster uses to characterize MacNamara's fiction in the Cambridge Companion to Irish Literature in an incisive chapter that nevertheless omits mention of The Various Lives of Marcus Igoe.

Various Lives instead anticipates the experimental metafiction of Samuel Beckett and Flann O'Brien; it, too, explores the problem of constructing a narrative frame in which to represent a variable life. Moreover, through its oblique references to the contemporary...