Hearts Of Oak And Bellies Of Brass by John McGahern, 1970
The magic trick:
A surprising story structure that emphasizes repetition and monotony
We’ve got a fairly bleak weekend in store for you here on SSMT, sorry to say.
A double dose of John McGahern.
Not being a particularly experienced McGahern reader, I can’t say for sure whether these are two bleak McGahern stories or simply two McGahern stories.
“Hearts Of Oak And Bellies Of Brass” takes us inside the dead-end blue-collar daily grime of the Irish working class. We have a narrator recalling his time working there. He seems perhaps a bit more educated or wordy than his coworkers. So we assume, I think, that he will eventually rise above the muck; or perhaps get into a scrape because of his smarts; or maybe just paint a picture of the lifestyle and then leave. It’s a fairly common trope, right? Think the bespeckled war reporter narrator of Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry stories.
So we read on through the monotony of the descriptions expecting such a plot point to show itself. It’s a plot point that never comes.
What we get instead is a kind of clunky (surely, self-consciously so) device in which the narrator goes from describing the present tense into recalling what the job was like during his first day there. Spoiler alert: it’s very similar to the present. Very, very similar. That’s the joke, we think. Then the joke keeps being made for another four pages. OK, that’s the point of the story then.
And it probably is. But it’s almost strange the way the story keeps droning on. Like it knows it’s made its point, technically, but it just wants to keep going; the monotony and the lack of anyone’s potential intelligence or individual personality mattering at all as some kind of plot point or change agent gets rammed home.
And that’s quite a trick on McGahern’s part.
The selection:
“Thanks Marge.” It angered me that there was still the bitterness of irony in my smile, that I was not yet completely my situation; this ambition of mine, in reverse, to annual all the voices in myself.
I sat with the rest of the mixer gang at a trestle table. Behind us the chippies played cards. The enmity glowed sullenly between Galway and Keegan, but Galway ate his rolls and gulped his tea without lifting his head from the racing paper, where he marked his fancies with a stub of a pencil.
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