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Anglo-Irish William Trevor – The writer as a Descendant of Gaelic Narrative

Authors

Natia Tolordava

Rubric:Theory of Literature. Textology
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Keywords

Irish short story; Gaelic narrative; The Anthology; Irish Writers

Introduction: Irish short story anthologies often begin with Gaelic narratives of oral culture, as  William Trevor in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories, cites evidence of diversity provided orally .

A "Irish flair" is the tradition that  for storytelling is the "national characteristic". Astute anthologists, however, note the cultural and political limitations of such engagement, as does Sean O'Sullivan, who, in his  „Irish Folktales“ introduction , acknowledges the inevitable element of loss inherent in the practice of once-dynamic oral delivery. Print to translate the meaning and language of contested culture.

In an English print translation of the tales once told by the Irish oral storytellers, O'Sullivan writes, “The narrative gives a faint shadow of the Irishness of life. Voices, with their many modulations, are silent on the printed page; There is no audience; All that remains is the pattern of the narrative and the course of motifs." For O'Sullivan, the condition of telling a tale is its essential element, the effect. It is impossible to transfer the created social relationship between the storyteller, the audience, and the tale from pre-modern to modern times, and it is impossible to repeat the separate relationship between the writer, the book and the reader.  The talebook first published in 1966, was the crowning achievement of the „Irish Folklore“ Commission, for which O'Sullivan served as chief archivist.

            The first organized effort to collect and study surviving oral narratives in Ireland was in the first half of the twentieth century, both those that found their way into printed books and those that survived only on people's memory . The anthology drew on more than a million manuscript pages to obtain a representative sample that includes the following titles: "Animals and Birds," "Kings and Warriors," "Saints and Sinners," "Otherworldly People," "Wizards and Witches," "Historical Characters." " and "The Wise, the Fool and the Mighty". Most of the narratives preserved by the Commission  action between flights of fancy and actual didacticism. They are, as Angela Burke reports, "a valuable repository of practical information", although "their central 'plot' is usually some kind of extraordinary encounter " ("Legends" 1284). This narrative feature derives from the social purpose for which the fairy tales were originally intended, the rural society that produced them, as Burke explains, being "overwhelmingly Catholic with most of its members deriving their morals from the Christian God" and turning to the tales "to fill the void left in Christian discourse or its aging Objections to mediators" (1284). Of the fifty-five narratives anthologized in Irish Folktales, the tale (or legend), "The Hour of Death" is one of the most frequently reproduced as a precursor to Irish short story anthologies. It deals with a religious or supernatural subject, a dramatization of fantastic events in familiar mise-en-scène to appeal, in Burke's words, to "detailed descriptions of surroundings, life, and affairs familiar to the hearers" (1284), while attempting to impart a meaning or teach a lesson by otherworldly methods.

            A wealth of writers and critics in Ireland have similarly judged the short story to be a form of natural representation of a contested culture in prose, due to the form's presumably close connection to local rhythms of thought and conversational speech, as well as its position, fundamentally different from that of the novel, to society's "normality" and the importance of the "little man" . William Trevor offers a subtly complex explanation of the flourishing of the short story in Ireland at the same time as the flourishing of the novel in Victorian England when he notes that "the great Victorian novel fed on the architecture of a wealthy, stratified society in which 'stability at home was the jewel in the imperial crown'". At the same period, as Trevor notes in Ireland, “there was discontent, repressive religion, confusion of two languages and the specter of famine, so we understand uneven literary development as a direct result of uneven social development.

The hand of the story writer is revealed in the clarity and economy on which important details are noted and not stopped. Many of his teachers remember them with the kind of confused passion that later stories often meet; They might be minor characters in fiction. Nostalgia is visible for places and people that have disappeared, but it is also not allowed to have a strong resonance; In his thirty-year publishing career, Trevor has never lacked for an audience. Old Boys (1964), his first novel, was a Book of the Month Club selection and won the Hawthornden Prize in England. The years that followed brought more honors and growing critical acclaim, but it worries me that Trevor's star isn't in a greater ascendancy yet. One reason is that he is neither a flashy writer nor a self-promoter. And he failed to reach his proper audience in this country, partly because English dramatizations of his fiction were rarely performed.

As a writer, he does not belong anywhere. Fiction writers, I think, are even further out. Because society and people are our flesh, man is not really in the midst of society. The great challenge of writing is always to find the universal in the local, the parochial. And for that you need distance. --William Trevor No one has had a keener vision, or a hand at once ironic and gentler, for an individual figure. He sees her in all her minor quirks and tricks—all her hereditary idiosyncrasy, all her weakness and strength, ugliness and beauty, strangeness and charm; And yet it is his essence that he sees him in the general flood of life, engulfed, struggling, or drowning in his relations and contacts. --Henry James, "Turgenev" (1897)

            By the age of seventy-five, William Trevor had written thirty books of fiction, which for their range of effect—philosophical density, precision of style and idiom, variety of character, comic depth, and tragic intensity—were unmatched among contemporary writers. English fiction after the death of Patrick White. Trevor is a precise worker, as befits a sculptor of his early years; His fiction is neither diffuse nor fragmentary, and sometimes seminal, like, say, White's and Faulkner's; And because he doesn't take huge risks and build his literary capital on big, ambitious, and difficult novels like Chariots and Absalom, Absalom!, he probably won't win a Nobel Prize, despite the sizeable extent of his achievements. Trevor has won continuing recognition in Ireland and England, including C.B.E.; But it remains relatively overlooked in the United States, despite being awarded the Bennett Prize by the Hudson Review in 1990 and appearing regularly in the New Yorker and Harper's for several years.

Trevor tells stories, offering fictional "realities" in a clear, matter-of-fact style. It does not burden the reader with philosophical speculations or specific political viewpoints or arguments. That's why it deserves the approval of literary award committees and critics. The best example of this is a number of volumes published by literary critics in different years about his works. Michael W. Thomas "Worlds of Their Own: A Host of Trevor's Obsessives". Published in The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies in 1999; In the same year, Ian Sansom's essay, "New Fiction: Reading Trevor." Richard Bonoccorso's published letters on Trevor in 1996 and 1997. Also of significant importance is the 1993 Kristin Morrison's William Trevor; Suzanne Paulson's William Trevor: A Study of the Short Fiction; and 1999 This year, Dolores MacKenna's “William Trevor, The Writer and His Work.” There is a fascinating parallel between William Trevor's profession of creating fiction and the obsessive activities of his many fictional characters who are also creators of fiction. Trevor is not alone among novelists in writing about what he does, often assigning his characters to invent something of their own clever plot. , characters and situations in storytelling and invention.

Since so many of Trevor's characters are consciously or unconsciously engaged in "covering up," keeping "secrets," as Robert E. Rhodes does assert that the artist's gaze on this parental condition is recorded with tenacity and painful honesty. The circumstances in which this marriage survived were the poor economic and cultural conditions of provincial Ireland in the Thirties and Forties at the time of Trevor's formation; The Happy Truth marriage reflected the repressed, decorated life of the time with few but intensely imagined escapes such as cinema, reading and religion. Trevor's characters reveal their inner lives in a plain, endlessly drawn and ambiguous style, and this may also reflect an aspect of the wider culture absorbed in childhood. Many Catholics and Protestants of Trevor's class spent their lives in isolated villages and towns: the limitations and sublimations of his characters and their search for a modus vivendi are Irish history. Trevor reveals here that his own world was not a rising, Anglo-Irish world in decline. Although Trevor has said that from an early age he has always loved detective fiction and elements of suspense and detection, of course his traits are the characteristic plot, The desire to acknowledge and settle the mystery is the impetus that takes him beyond general fiction. "It's almost like a stress in you. It goes on, gnawing and gnawing, making you growl, a very curious way, I want to know." And, of course, while it's all about you dressing in colors, drawing a line here and a line, creating something that's further and further away from the original. The truth is, man as created is a completely different person—man in his own right” (Stout 142). The analogy with the painter is one that he used repeatedly, the process sometimes associated with bringing the figure into sharper focus, as in a photograph; Even as the former sculptor uses analogies by building and cutting his material to discover what the potential is, he is driven by curiosity, the need to see more clearly, to allow the essential truth to reveal itself.

            "I'm a short story writer who writes novels, not someone else's way around" (Stout 143). The first explanation he offers seems almost a matter of convenience at work. "A novel is like a cathedral, and you can't. Really carry in your imagination the form that the temple should take. I like the hint, the shadow, of the new story. I like the whole business of making a point, because even though a story doesn't have to have a plot, it has to have a point." But this sense of coherence or unity appeals to him, the inherent unity in one person's life, as he refers to the story as a portrait. "By isolating the encounter and Then by isolating an incident in the past you try to create a present life" Although his novels, especially the earlier ones, are populated by a large number of characters, a kind of makeshift society. For example, a boarding house or a hospital, it is the interest of the individual life that is his imagination, not the community. His preference for the story The work, rather than the novel, can be related, then, to being free from processing the surfaces of realism when those surfaces represent “nonsense.” These statements suggest that although he is motivated by curiosity and is a skilled observer, “useless information Mation's forced accumulator, this is the discovery of order in its material, the exclusion of nonsense, this is its goal. The story allows him to discover the order more easily or quickly; It satisfies the need to work "instinctively" and is more inclined to trust instinctive, "essential" art.

            Conclusion: Beckett and Trevor may have little in common,only the place of birth - Ireland and their time living in Dublin, but Trevor's essay reveals a special love for Beckett and a trope from Wilde, Yeats and Joyce. Love and respect Beckett, unlike others, has given up his image as a writer. The reclusive Beckett was like other artists Trevor admires, Henry Moore and Thomas Hardy; He wanted to be unknown except for his writing and avoided all "external display". Given the opportunity to prepare a book on Irish writing, he chose the subject of landscape, although he is quick to say that it is not "academic research" but simply "a writer's journey, a tour of places that other writers have felt affection for, or known admiration or anxiety" (A Writer's Ireland). The book is mostly composed of photographs and long quotes from the writers, with predictable connecting comments; There is less to see in Trevor’s narrative the writer's Ireland, but this invisibility is entirely characteristic. The main thing is that all the writers felt love for this place and as those comments in the tours, "it is love... that makes you know what you can never do". His choice for this is "Landscape in Literature". The book, and its emphasis on "love" of place as inspiration, suggests that the realist writer, a disciple of Joyce who wrote The Dubliners, should also be considered a romantic. This last sentence really echoes Keats's sentence: "I am convinced of nothing but the imagination of the purity and truth of the heart's love." Keats is reminded of his ability to make characters disappear into him, his perception of his "negative possibilities", what has been called his style's "systematic self-displacement", capacious , "ambiguous" tone. that John Banville praised.

 

References:

MACKENNA, DOLORES. William Trevor: The Writer and His Work. Dublin: New Island Books, 1999.

STOUT, MIRA. "The Art of Fiction, CVIII: William Trevor." Paris Review 110 (1989) :

TREVOR, WILLIAM. The Old Boys. London: Penguin, 1966.

The Stories of William Trevor. London: Penguin, 1983.

A Writer's Ireland: Landscape in Literature. New York: Viking, 1984.

 

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