Different faces of death

Facing death, Moran is alone : man is always alone to die, noone will ever be able to die for him: la solitude appelle la hantise de la mort et la hantise de la mort referme la solitude (Edgar Morin L'Homme et la Mort p.278). Death is enhanced in the novel since it is situated at its very end, as it is often the case in realistic novels. Yet, this death is heralded in the book through several signs which prepare the reader to this foreseeable end. Indeed, isolation, darkness, old age and its monotony are heralds of death and prominent symbolic elements of the book : Jankelevitch, an expert on death, wrote:

Quand la grande mort finale vient à se produire, elle était depuis longtemps annoncée par les innombrables petites morts de la quotidienneté, par la succession des minuscules trépas qui sont le présage de cette grande mort : la chute des cheveux, le blanchissement des tempes, le déchaussement des dents sont autant de morts en miniature et ces morts en miniature sont autant de signes avant-coureurs de la mort générale (La Mort p.237).

Isolation

Nous ne sommes pas nés pour notre particulier mais pour le public, wrote Montaigne in Les Essais (I (1580) "de la solitude" Poche Paris 1972 p.35). He meant that man must not remain alone but take part in collective decisions and be a member of a community. It is not the case concerning Moran who continuously isolates himself, which is often done deliberately : He stood apart on the platform (63) or he sat looking out at the people that passed by without acknowledging them or being acknowledged (128) ; he's "away from people" (130), which underlines his misanthropic mood, but sometimes he is excluded against his will : Everyone in the field except Moran saw them kiss (165), or when females discuss in the house : Moran began to feel out of it and grew bored (79). He is physically amongst women but not mentally. He who always wants to be in the middle of a circle is sometimes excluded (he felt "outside their circle" (77)) and says something unpleasant so that the others stop talking, which reinforce Moran's authority and re-integrates him within the circle. The masculine space seems to be condemned to seclusion and isolation. Michael is also put apart : his schoolfellows (...) ignored him (119). Luke is apart too, breaking any relationship with his family and with his country, being in love with an English girl. Still considering his family as the extension of himself, Moran isolates his own family too : they had been brought up to keep the outside at an iron distance (172) and Mona is the only one who can bridge the gap between the family and the community : she became the most reliable link with the outside world (169) ; without her, they would live in total autarcy.

Women are always sociable whereas men are lonely, isolated wild beings. Great Meadow is seen as an isolated area because it is surrounded with doors and barriers. The obstacles represented by the Irish hills and the very insularity of the place are reinforced by Moran enclosing his fields, putting barbed wires and felling trees to replace broken stakes which will become new enclosures (81). He gives vent to his inner violence in this activity. Hammering this fence is so associated with his character that the girls find him thanks to the sound of the hammer : they found Moran by the sound of malleting (80). With tools, he recovers the power he is always afraid of losing with his family. He does not tolerate anything from the outside. For example, he is not warm when he welcomes his future sons-in-law. Women are the only ones who are a window to the outside world. For example, Nell Morahan drives Michael to the other side of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. Opening this breach, she is opposed to Moran. Her freedom is symbolized by her car that she leaves to her family when she flies back to the States, a way of transmitting freedom to a conservative society. Likewise, Nell, unlike Moran, does not hesitate to spend a lot of money and to offer gifts to Michael. Whereas Rose and Moran stare at the sea from the car - a warm, covered cell - Nell and Michael walk on the beach, and make love on the dunes, in the open air. Both generations are attached to this island but this attachment is shown differently : the first generation is isolationist. The foreigner is an "immigrant", whereas the second generation is more open-minded and tries to get rid of the stifling atmosphere of the parents'house. The outside is the unknown. It is impossible to visualize a space different from theirs : they tried to imagine what kind of space enclosed Luke in England during the same hour, but they weren't able to imagine it. It was too much like facing darkness (35). This "somewhere" is unimaginable because of the absence of familiar structures. Remember the text itself with its circular aspect recalls the shape of an island and has something isolationist too. It is cut from the outside, as it were. Eventually, Moran reluctantly realises that it is necessary to be open on the outside. His feeling of seclusion, of separateness is doomed to failure. On the last Monaghan Day with McQuaid, Moran is aware that his authority has collapsed since even his former soldier does not respect him any longer. He feels as a loser, leaving the door open behind him, the evidence that he no longer strives to isolate his house : he closed the door without shutting the iron gate at the road or the small wooden gate leaning against the boxwood (22). Some other signs reflect this change of attitude : Moran gradually neglects his enclosures : the hedges are not so thick as before, the walls are collapsing : he went from field to field, no longer kept as well as they once were, the hedges ragged, stones fallen from the walls (130). This insularity is less and less claustrophobic ; we already mentioned claustrophobia before, a word which is to be found p.174 and this atmosphere is so stifling that it may be why people leave doors and windows open : the door continuously open (22) is evoked concerning the farmhouse of Rose's mother. Besides, one of the first thing Michael does to gain independence is to open the window : as soon as he got to his room he moved the bed so that it stood against the door and unlatched the window (121). Indeed, the insular character is particularly Moran who is very often lonely. He is this man conjured up by McQuaid and himself, "one man marching alone through the night" (14). Moran is this lonely widower who remarried not to be alone - he would be alone. That he could not stand (22) - but who, actually, soon realises that a wife does not prevent him from feeling lonely. Moran is very often described sitting alone near the fire, brooding :

Moran sat alone in the room (...) Maggie was (...) startled to find him alone when she came in (...) He sat on alone until all unease was lost in a luxury of self-absorption (55-56).

"The man marching alone through the night" is pondering over his own human condition, his family in the night heralding his death. The night is the time of important events in the family : love act, Christmas party, celebrations, but also arguments take place in the night. There is a constant connection, a perpetual movement between light and darkness in McG's fiction which is particularly dark as the titles of his books indicate : The Dark, the Power of Darkness or Nightlines. Darkness is close to death : Thanatos, which means "death" in Greek is the son of the Night. Darkness is a messenger of death. We already mentioned the similar attitudes of Moran and Mrs Reynolds who both withdraw into the dark to watch others. Darkness is a secret, reassuring refuge that allows the character to feel better at ease than in the light. It is satisfying for it gives a regenerating space of loneliness and of individual freedom. Darkness is a refuge that seems to be more securing than home: the light was beginning to fail but he did not want to go into the house (129). Dark areas are intimate places where the unconscious appears and is liberated. It was relief and peace when the light began to fail (167). It is like going back to the protection of the dark womb of the mother. Furthermore, sex belongs to the night for Moran's generation, whereas his children have sex in the day-time, on the beach or while they make hay and these love scenes are described more accurately maybe to lay emphasis on the liberalisation of this generation's morality. Nevertheless, Nell and Michael have sex together for the first time in the dark, as if death and sex were closely connected (and I remind you that in many languages, they are : "petite mort" for example in French), as if the sexual act could find its expression and its blooming only in the dark : before she reached the yew tree at the gate she turned up a disused lane and switched off the lights. Already his hand was moving between her thighs as she drove (103). Obscurity allows to connive at sex, to close one's eyes on sin and sin, because of its link with death, is precisely darkness. St Paul says :

It is far on in the night ; day is near. Let us therefore throw off the deeds of darkness and put on our armour as soldiers of the light. Let us behave with decency as befits the day (Rm13/12).

Sex and darkness go together. Anything else can be done in the light and the religious education of the first generation is too strong to have sex in the day-time : Though they were alone they did not embrace or kiss. That belonged to darkness and the night (56). Besides, woman has the night with her. Feminine night conjures up death and love and, oddly enough, maybe night is reassuring for men, as we have just seen, BECAUSE it is feminine whereas night is a source of anguish for women : McQuaid says about his wife : she gets afraid on her own in the house at night (21). The darkness of the outside, that is the nightfall, is also perceptible in Moran's mood. Moran is a dark character - he was dozing in darkness (92).

Brooding in the dark, he lets darkness penetrate within his mind : the light was dimming (...) he sat morosely in the chair, not wishing to speak at all, just watching the light disappear (...) "he's gone", he brooded (124-125). The darkness of mind is melancholy (ety. "black bile"), sadness and monotony. Nietzsche mentions the spirit of the evening melancholy, "this devil of dusk" (Also Sprach Zarathustra). Melancholy is an open door on despair, depression. It longs for eternity, for the unlimited. Time, death, any limit is a source of anguish for the melancholy character who shuts himself in silence, loneliness and cuts himself from others. Sadness is his only company. Melancholy and darkness are connected in the episode about Christmas : "the melancholy sounds of the instruments" are mentioned (100), and a bit further, you can read : there were no lights (...) they found the big house in darkness (100). Today, we do not speak much of melancholy but rather about pessimism which also introduces a negative notion. Melancholy comes from the Greek "melagkholia", that is "black humour" and pessimism from the Latin "pessimus", the superlative of "malus", which means "bad". It amounts to say that what is black is bad and this notion is deeply anchored in our culture : darkness suits bad people, criminals and their evil actions. Melancholy is negative, a sign of death. It is always moving downwards : decline, despair, depression, degradation, all terms with negative prefixes : Moran is depressed because he is declining. He regrets his life, would like to have a new chance, notably when he sees his daughters working : he could be seen looking often at their heads bent over the lamplit pages in what looked close to melancholy and sunken reflection (74). He feels bitter and nostalgic about his own youth and the fact that because of war, he has not been able to study as he would have liked to : Moran had been a guerrilla fighter from the time he was little more than a boy (163). I remind you of his bitter remarks against his country, notably at the beginning, in his conversation with McQuaid. Moral grief is omnipresent in McG's characters of the first generation. It stems from a representation of what life could have been, which makes the characters bitter, passive, annihilated, tired of everything. The Irish socio-economic situation remains disappointing. the Irish man has not seen the achievement of his hopes. Bitter, brooding, he has lost his taste for life. Gnawed by what could have been and has not been, his heart is filled with rancour, bitterness and he is unable to forget. Existence may be bearable only for those who do not remember, which is not the case of the Irish who, according to G.B.Shaw, never manage to forget. There is a real dichotomy between old dreams, former hopes and present reality. Moran's grief probably results from this antagonism between representation and reality, two phenomena which, inversely, when they are in keeping with one another, generate pleasure. When reality does not tally with my representation, man is unhappy. The melancholy of the mcgahernian character is due to an accumulation of aborted dreams : Moran's questions are bitter and remain unanswered : "What did we get for it ? (...) What was it all for ?" (5). This is why "the humdrum of his life" (28) is spent in a gloomy, monotonous way. Moran speaks "gloomily" (74), the evenings in Great Meadow are qualified as "dull" (95), Moran's task as "slow and monotonous" (107). Monotony was defined by Baudelaire as "cet avant-goût du néant" and this notion of void or emptiness is the major theme of McG's general philosophy. We know that Moran is ill. This illness encloses the novel : he is qualified as a "sick old man" (6) and "the illness" is mentioned (178), but we do not know what he really suffers from. The revival of Monaghan Day is a means of thwarting this "slow decline" (177) but girls fail since he dies all the same.

Anyway, various details announcing death or symbolically representing it are noticeable throughout the book : silence and loneliness are obviouly connected to death as we saw before, or the mentioning of the Franciscan habit right from the beginning of the novel, but other signs are also to be picked up in the narrator's similes or metaphors. For example, the silent rows of parked cars <were> funereal along the sidewalk (113) or As great a pall would fall on the conversation when Luke's name came up (142). These implicit comparisons highlight the general melancholy tone of the character that can be the narrator's too. For many writers consider that it is because they are melancholy that they write. They communicate very little verbally and their only way of expression is writing. As Montaigne has it : C'est une humeur mélancolique (...) qui m'a mis premièrement en tête cette rêverie de me mêler d'écrire (Essais II ch.8 p.11) and who is the broken-hearted teenager who has not started writing ? Suffering seems to be necessary to write. By catharsis, the writer inevitably transmits/conveys his melancholy to his characters and the fact that Moran writes at the end of his life may be symptomatic of his depression. Moran has given death to others. McQuaid remembers : Then I fired (18). Moran also probably shot men to death during the war ; he kills a bird (7), which is another way of regaining the power he is losing on his family.

Likewise, the fact that "there was no music" (42) makes his wedding rather resemble a funeral. On this very day, when Moran gets up, he has got the feeling of a death : "it's the end of one life" (39). By the same token, the presence of the yew at the entrance to Great Meadow is also a portent of death. In the Celtic world, the yew is a funeral tree. Moreover, it is a perennial and that is why it is often planted in cemeteries. It is all the more connected with death as the yew has venimous fruit : some of Caesar's soldiers committed suicide by eating the fruit of the yew. It is evoked p.3 : "the poisonous yew tree". We said that melancholy was partly due to the unachievement of dreams and hopes ; it may have a spiritual reason too : the melancholy man feels lonely, abandoned by everyone including God. Religion has become a fount of disappointment. Maybe faith was illusive, some kind of utopia : la mélancolie n'est que de la ferveur retombée, says A.Gide in Les Nourritures Terrestres and the characters' approaches of religion may be interesting to clarify.