The Suburban Night: On Eavan Boland, Paul Durcan and Thomas McCarthy

Abstract

There is an unexplored world in the ways in which Irish writers from James Joyce onwards have indicted their country for failing to live up to the moral and cultural aspirations embodied in its history. This indictment, rooted in both the psychological make-up and the artistic ambition of the writer, is not simply an expression of the writer’s dissatisfaction at failing to find a significant place for him- or herself in Irish life, although such feelings may have influenced different writers from time to time. Rather it takes the form of a basic imaginative search for self-definition. The writer creates his or her subject by probing the present, constructed as it is out of the coalescing forces in Ireland of social conservatism, cultural nationalism, political violence and religious hegemony. In this vortex, the artistic identity is made, not inherited.

Doubt still sharks

The close suburban night

And all the lights I love

Leave me in the dark.

(Eavan Boland)