"The Big River" - A Short Story by Desmond Hogan - 2017 - An Irish Short Story Month XIii Post

 Irish Short Story Month XI

Today's Story, "The Big River" is included in the most recent collection of short stories by Desmond Hogan, The History of Magpies.

Shauna Gilligan's Highly Illuminating Introduction to  Desmond Hogan

http://rereadinglives.blogspot.com/2012/06/desmond-hogan-irelands-most-famous.html

I have been reading Desmond Hogan for 12  years now.  I take his work very seriously.  I was first introduced to his work by Shauna Gilligan, PhD, author of Happiness Comes From Nowhere.  Through her kindness I met Hogan in May of 2003, at the office of Lilliput Press.  We spoke of two authors for whom we share great admiration, Nathaneal West and Zora Hurston, among other things.

"We were here when the Christians first came to Ireland and we will be here when they leave" - A proverb of Irish Travellers 

A considerable portion of the work of Desmond Hogan focuses on Irish Travellers.  Irish travellers have an ancient history.   They Are  acknowledged as an ethnic group.

Travellers play an important part in "The Big River", numerous suicides mostly by hanging are alluded to in the story,

"‘Shannon Crotty was my cousin. He hung himself. His wife Ethlinn Flavin from Knocknaheeny in Cork hung herself before him. Her brother Besty hung himself in between them. A lot of Travellers are hanging themselves now. One man because he had cancer. A girl because she was pregnant and did not want her father to know it."

(Amusingly in the Comedy TV series Derry Girls Travellers are depicted as dangerous and terrifying.)

Hogan makes extensive use of colour and references to historical-cultural entities in "The Big River" which I find fascinating:

"In their trailer the newly weds had a picture of two elephants kissing, horns wrapped around one another’s trunks: a photograph of Santa Claus presenting a cup for hurling to Shannon as a child, in a black bow tie; the dead Hunger Striker Martin Hurson with miner’s locks, white shirt, white tie, smile reserved for weddings; a statue of Saint Patrick with ashen hair and peach lips; a parrot with flaked red head; a pair of beige polka-dot wellingtons; a donkey and four Edwardian children, boy in young Edward VIII cap, clinging to a little girl’s waist on top of the donkey"

I hope to post on other stories by Desmond Hogan during ISSM XIII.

Mel Ulm

The Leaves on Grey by Desmond Hogan (1980, reissued by Lilliput Press with an author after word 2014)

I have continually expressed my great admiration for the work of Desmond Hogan.  I have previously posted on his first novel,now a classic, The Ikon Maker, his Farewell to Prague, and his collection of travel articles and  thoughts on writers that matter to him, The Edge of the City:  A Scrapbook 1976 to 1991, as well as a number of his marvelous short stories.  

The prose of The Leaves on Grey is simply exquisite.  One could start any where in the novel and encounter transcendent phrases and sentences to be treasured.   Set in the 1940s in Ireland, it is, among many other things the story of the deepening relationship of two young men, Seam and Liam.  They bond through their mutual love and sexual obsession over the same woman.  I am not inclined to summarize the plot of this work for my own reasons.  It is a story about Ireland in the 1940s, of college in Dublin, of love and sex, about the all powerful city of Dublin.  

Here is the publisher's excellent description:

‘To seek the beginning is to go back a long time ago, when the town in which I am writing was a little different and trees hung at the end of the town, trees hung obsessively, many trees, much green at the end of the street come summer, come the arrival of leaves and sun and buttercup blaze.’

It is the late 1940s, and Sean and Liam, middle-class boys in a small West of Ireland town, share a powerful bond of love and rivalry: each long for the same women. At university together in Dublin, Sean and Liam’s burgeoning sexuality leads them to a deeper, almost mystical level of involvement. They befriend Christine, rich, vulnerable and desperate for affection, and Sarah, glamorous, spoiled, intoxicating; her body is a seductive bridge between the pair, which they ultimately cross with painful and profound consequences.

The Leaves on Grey is the story of Ireland, ‘maker of wounds, tormentor of youth, ultimately breaker of all that was sensitive and enriched by sun, rain, wind’. Sean and Liam, and the men and women who become part of their lives, are both the creators and victims of their birthright.

This sensitive, passionate story is Desmond Hogan’s second novel, originally published in 1980. It is reissued here with a new afterword by the author.

‘Lost innocence, the young and the bright and the beautiful shining and dancing before dusk, is the theme ... Hardly new material, but to it Mr Hogan – one of the most talented writers lately to come out of Ireland or anywhere else – brings a light so brilliant that almost every word dazzles.’ – JANICE ELLIOTT, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

‘Desmond Hogan establishes himself among the best novelists with The Leaves on Grey. He has a lot to say, which he does with elegance and maturity ... his language is succinct and utterly fresh. He wishes fiction to be a moral force, and his could be.’ – MYRNA BLUMBERG, THE TIMES

I will for sure read this work at least once more and will attempt another post on it then.  It is a wonderful book and I loved it.  My short post just reflects my own mental state right now.

I urge anyone interested in Irish Literature, Culture, History, or politics to study the webpage of Lilliput Publishers.

http://www.lilliputpress.ie/index.html

Mel u

The Edge of The City - A Scrapbook 1976 to 1991 by Desmond Hogan (2012, Lilliput Press)

The literary world seems in two camps on Desmond Hogan, people who have never read or even heard of him and his readers who see him as an artist and a seer of first level  importance.   I have posted on around twenty of his amazing short stories and his classic first novel, The Ikon Maker.  In some of my posts I have tried to provide an account of what I see in his work, the nature of his artistry, his use of history, and his prose style.  Desmond Hogan gives voice to the marginalized, the lost both as individuals and as cultures. From him I have come to better understand, I hope, Irish history.  He is a very Irish writer and like many another you can feel the love and hate in his relationship to his birth country.  In the author's preface to Edge of The City A Scrapbook 1976 to 1991 Hogan says when he journeyed to San Francisco in 1976 he never really went back to Dublin.  I think you could also just as truly say he never left.

Edge of The City A Scrapbook 1976 to 1991 is a collection of articles Hogan wrote from  1976 to 1991 for various Irish and English magazines, journals, and newspapers.  Most of the articles are about places Hogan visited.  About five are about writers he admires.  Hogan is acutely observant.  I read with particular interest his long account of his time in Guatemala as I have been there also. The highlands are exquisite.  Gautemala has gone through terrible times horrible general poverty and bloody dictatorships.  Hogan senses well  pain.  He is an outsider and he sees the world through outside far from the center eyes. He knows Euro-Disney is not nirvana.  There are several very interesting articles on places in Ireland, on Russia, Yemen, Spain and Israel among others.  I really liked his articles on the USA locales of New Orleans and his journey down The Elvis Prseley Highway.  He sees the sharecropper's son where others see only Elvis, the King.  

I read this book slowly, on and off for six months.  It helped me understand his short stories. 

I greatly enjoyed and learned from Edge of The City A Scrapbook 1976 to 1991.  

It is available on Amazon and from Lilliput Press.  Liiliput Press is Ireland's leading independent publisher.  Their webpage is a wonderful resource about Irish Literature and history.

I will be reading on in Hogan the rest of my life. I strongly urge flat a comprehensive complete edition of his short stories be published soon. 

Mel u

"The House of Mourning" by Desmond Hogan A look at page one and two after reading "Death of the Author" by Roland Barthes

 " in the name of a humanism hypocritically turned champion of the reader’s rights. Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature. We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favour of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author." - Roland Barthes.

Shauna Gilligan Lead Article for The Reading Life Desmond Hogon Project

 

http://rereadinglives.blogspot.com/2012/06/desmond-hogan-irelands-most-famous.html

I have been reading Desmond Hogan for two years now.  I take his work very seriously.  I was first introduced to his work by Shauna Gilligan, PhD, author of Happiness Comes From Nowhere.  Through her kindness I met Hogan in May of last year, at the office of Lilliput Press.  We spoke of two authors for whom we share great admiration, Nathaneal West and Zora Hurston, among other things.  

Recently I read two very historically important articles partially devoted to the primacy of the reader 

over the writer. Roland Barthes in "The Death of the Author" set off a war still being fought in the academy.   Susan Sontag, I have previously ponderd where Hogan would fall in her tripartite analyses of serious art, was some what a disciple of French deconstructivists and her classic essay "Against Iterpretation" can be seen as an expansion of the ideas of Barthes.  I have said over and over I am treating Hogan's work as found objects, as a reader I am not interested in him as a person.  This is not a slight but my highest mark of respect.  I also will at times treat his corpus as a single object.  In the school of literary analyses of Barthes and Sontag, the most philistine of blunders are to search for a meaning, to try to discern the author's intent or to reverse engineer his stories as autobiography,  to see a real difference in form and content.  Of course literary overriding theories cannot be, nor need they be, evaluated as true or false but as useful or not.  If we follow Sontag, and repudiate the interpretation of the stories of Hogan, as I think we should, what can someone who writes about them or teaches them have to offer us? I will arrogantly try begin to partially answer that question.

In this post, I will, mostly for me, look at the use if nouns in page one of Hogan's "The House of Mourning".  I think we can see how this, and others of his stories, work to invoke lives and lived worlds.

Here are nouns, proper and common on the first page of this thirteen page story.  I will attempt to comment on how I think they function in the mechanics and structure  of "The House of Mourning". I think images in Hogan's work invoke picture in our act of reading and force us to make often deep and far reaching cultural connections.  

Hadrian's Wall- this is the first proper noun in the story.  As I pondered why, I thought of a colonial invasion that destroyed an ancient culture but spared Ireland.  I quickly learned from other proper nouns on page one this was a set in Ireland story.  You must reflect at this point that the Roman militaristic culture that destroyed a tribal society helped create a mentality in England that would colonize and rob for centuries another tribal society, Ireland.  The wall was designed to keep out barbarians an

Irish Place Names-  I think these serve to geo-locate the stories and may carry a cultural weight I am not fully deified upon - Shannon Estuary, the Shannon near a holy river.  Limerick City- a place now one of the biggest strongholds of the Irish language.  Traveller Boys- I have talked a good bit about how I see the references to Travellers function in Hogan's stories.  

Animals- The Mink - I did a bit of research on the mink in Ireland.  I saw there are serious controversies about mink farming, minks eating salmon eggs, and the rights of an ancient animal to run free.  

geese- clearly meant to invoke freedom, the ancient flight of the Geese.

Arabian Horses- I think this is meant to give us a sense of wild beauty, perhaps that can be controlled by the Irish and it brings to mind Galway Horse Markets

Out of Ireland Geographic references

Barbados -  in Irish history this brings up the transportation of the Irish to work as slaves on British plantations.  

Canada-  an image of a better life?  An emigrants home that is not America?  

European- an older deeper culture than the English? 

Common nouns

Little girls- is this meant to invoke innocence with them on Pogo Sticks?  This is, to me, a very ambiguous reference.  For now I will let it stand for itself.

There are a lot of what might call catalogues of debris in Hogan's stories and there is an important set of common nouns devoted to this.  

Ladies Sling Shoes, statues of herons and a life  size plastic statue of a horse are among the trash.

So we begin page one with a reference to Hadrian's Wall, heavily frought with associations and end it with references to kitsch statues and shoes designed to mishape the natural carriage of a woman.

I will do similar posts on more pages.  In the next post on this story I will ponder what we can use from Sontag's "Against Iterpretation".  I might also ponder if her claims make sense if pressed or should we just,which is not a criticism, see how they can help us in our reading of Hogan.

Of course in treating stories as do those in the Barthes tradition do, as found objects we do assume they are in English, the words have common associations, a human wrote them etc so we are already interpreting when we start.  

Upon completion of my posts on this story, I will combine my posts into one and perhaps draw some conclusions on the ideas of Barthes and Sontag.  After all they are dead.  Sontag knows she is sort of rhetorically protected from challenges as to question her is to do the forbidden by the saints of modern literary studies, act of finding a meaning in what she says.  

Page two

Continuing on with this project here are some of the nouns from page two.  Latter on in this post I will talk a bit about how i am trying to apply the methods of Eric Auerbach to this story, how I am attempting to delve into the mechanics of this story.  I accept much of the import of the notion of the death of the author.  This does not mean we cannot attempt to see creative methods and values in the story, only that that is our source.   I have talked before about the many seemingly off cultural references in the corpus of Hogan.  Learning from Edward Said and Auerbach I think we can see how Hogan's method deviates but derives from deeply cultured methods of European masters from Homer to Proust.  

North Limerick - closer geo locating

Sulky - Irish horse tradition

Tittuping Scarlett - a description of a horse, 

Mushrooms- earth food

Cinereous mare's tale- description of a woman hair as if it were from a horse

Place references-  Kerry, North Shannon

Druids- ancient Ireland - half myth half real

St Patrick

Richard Edwards- music star who disappeared 

Welsh Ladies' house.  Closed in reference

Marlene Dietrich - androngeounes dominating German actress.    

P

 

 

A Farewell to Prague by Desmond Hogan (1995, republished 2013 by Dalkey Archives, 2013). My Meeting With Desmond Hogan

On May 2nd of this year I had the great honor of meeting Desmond Hogan.  Shauna Gilligan, PhD, invited me to a reading at his publisher, Lilliput Press in Dublin.   Shauna and I were early so I took a seat in the lovely public area.  I was the only one there when a man knocked on the door.  It was Hogan and I let him in and introduced myself.   I was deeply moved when he profusely thanked me for my posts on his amazing short stories.   We talked as if we had known each other for years. He was currently reading Zora Hurston and we talked about her life in Florida.  I asked him if he had read Nathaniel West and it turned out Des knew the power of West  well. It is hard to describe the reading only to say it was amazing.   To me it was as if Des was an ancient poet reading from depths of pain and insight most cannot close to fathom. 

I have posted on a number of Hogan's short stories and his beautiful first novel, The Ikon Maker.   I anticipate posting on and reading Hogan the rest of my life.  I have copies of about twenty short stories I still have not read. 

Farewell to Prague is considered by some his best work to date.  It is very different from The Ikon Maker and is similar to some of the short stories.   

I am under the weather so I will not be doing a long post on this work.  I am sorry my health makes it hard right now to do justice to this great book. It is a dark work, full of pain, death saturated.   In it the central character roams Germany, Prague, Northern California and Alabama, among other places.

I will read this book again soon and endorse it as among the greatest works I have ever read.   I think Nathaniel West would be proud to have his work compared to Hogan.  I know I am proud to have met and conversed with Desmond Hogan. 

Mel u

The Ikon Maker by Desmond Hogan (1976, republished 2013 with an epilogue, 146 pages)

I hold Desmond Hogan in very high esteem.  I have done about twenty posts on his short stories.  The Ikon Maker is his first novel.   For the work of a young man, twenty six, it is amazing for its profound insights and the beauty of the prose.  I read it twice.   Once in a kindle edition and once in a traditional book.  

I think most readers of this novel will before they begin think it is a coming out story of a young Galway man.  It is this but it is much more.  It is the story of a woman who loses her husband and her son.

You should read The Ikon Maker as soon as you can.

Please excuse this short post, I am a bit under the weather.

 an excellent post on The Ikon Maker from Shaunna Gilligan , PhD

Mel u 

"Kennedy" by Desmond Hogan (2012-in Best European Fiction 2012)

March 1 to April 28

Cruelty, Murder, Travellers and Dandies in

"Kennedy" by Desmond Hogan

Shuana Gilligan's Introductory Post on Desmond Hogan

My Prior Posts on Desmond Hogan

"By turning to violence, to murder, they create a history, the create a style for themselves.  They become ikons as ancient as Calvary" from "Kennedy"

"Disguise is part of the psychology of the dandy, who wants to wear his sunglasses even though there is no glare.  Being released from any mental restraint, he can be utterly free and accordingly infinitely cruel".  from The Face of Another by Kobe Abe 

"For instance, there is the kind of seriousness whose trademark is anguish, cruelty, derangement. . Think of Bosch, Sade, Rimbaud, Jarry, Kafka, Artaud, think of most of the important works of art of the 20th century, that is, art whose goal is not that of creating harmonies but of overstraining the medium and introducing more and more violent, and unresolvable, subject-matter. . . . Clearly, different standards apply here than to traditional high culture. Something is good not because it is achieved, but because another kind of truth about the human situation, another experience of what it is to be human - in short, another valid sensibility -- is being revealed."  "Notes on Camp" by Susan Sontag.

"In a recent personal statement relating to the inclusion of his story ‘Kennedy’ in Best European Fiction 2012, Hogan declared his writing “is an attempt to describe people without country, without family, who are themselves.” At a Stinging Fly showcase reading in which Hogan read (as part of Dalkey Book Festival, 15 June 2012), Irish poet Dave Lordan introduced Hogan as “one of the most important writers” in Ireland and referred to him as an “archivist of the underdog.” In describing the voiceless, essentially Hogan’s writing performs what Victor Shklovsky famously assigned to art in “Art as Technique” whereby it

“exists that one may recover the sensation of life…the technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’.”   Shauna Gilligan 

"Kennedy" (appearing in Best European Fiction 2012) can take us deeply into the importance of the work of Hogan.  One of the reasons I used quotes from Kobe Abe, a Japanese master of the literature of cruelty and Susan Sontag, whose world of extreme refinement and culture was very far from that of the people in "Kennedy" is to get people to see that Hogan is very much an inter-textual writer, whose work is squarely in very old deep literary traditions.  Everyone of his stories has historical echoes.  

I do not plan to explicate the plot of this story.  What I want to do is to look at all the incidents of violence and cruelty and to talk about an insight I think I have gained into the  Hogan stories I have read by reading a recent article on travelers in Irish culture.  This might be a longish somewhat rambling post but I hope those into Hogan will read it and let me know their thoughts.  

Here are some of the incidents of violence and cruelty in "Kennedy"-

It opens with a 19 year old Limerick boy being forced to dig his own grave prior to being murdered because gangsters thought he was a police informer.  He is wearing a shirt with attack helicopters on it, tools of imperialism used for terrorizing civilian populations.  We hear he is murdered.  We then are reminded that Saint Sebastian was found murdered in a sewer, just like the boy from Limerick probably will be.  We are reminded of the story from the bible of Nebuchadnezzar having three men flung into a furnace because they will not bow before a golden image of him.  From this we have an image of Christ being tortured by Roman soldiers.  We begin to wonder, is the Limerick boy, clearly a petty criminal really Jesus or perhaps it is the other way a round.   I do not think in the religious and classical mythology images Hogan often uses he is suggesting the marginalized people in his story are like ancient Greek heroes or even Jesus but rather he is suggesting these figure were in fact like thugs, boys with wasted lives, he is somehow saying power and masculinity resides in cruelty and government power rests in murder.    He is not canonizing the Limerick boy at all.  

From here we hear a boy in jail say he would rather be in Auschwitz than a Limerick jail.  We learn he was molested sexually by Black as well as Polish guards.  We need to maybe stop a second and ask why do the guards have the ethnic identity they do?  Is it somehow symbolic of the invasion some would say destruction of Irish culture by outsiders, just as the Romans destroyed many cultures.  

Going on (and all this in under 15 pages) we hear of Jehovah's Witnesses attacked by a mob as a priest cheered on.  We meet a man whose face looks like it was kicked in by a stallion.  We learn of the incredible cruelty of The Christian brothers whose schools have a reputations as places were boys are sexually molested by the brothers.  We learn of a man killed when a statue of a Greek boxer from classical days falls on him.  We are given an account of brutality in prison and molestation at an industrial school.  

All of the government institutions allegedly meant to help people really foster violence and are run by sadists and homosexual rapists.  

I think this story is somehow saying we need to overturn these institutions, we need to stop wearing attack helicopter T-shirts made by slave laborers somewhere in the third world.   

On another topic, but one closely related to the issues of violence, I have spoken about a good bit, that of why the narrator often mingles with Travellers and often does in fact have sex with young traveller men.  I should note there is little joy in these couplings, it is just relief and the will to power.  Recently I read a very interesting article in a new online journal about Irish culture, Breac:  A Digital Journal of Irish Culure, "Erotic Deterrotorializations in the the Traveller Fiction of Liam O'Flaherty and Eilis Ni Dhuibhne"  by Adam Lawrence that helped me to understand this a bit.  Everything is beginning to come  together, you have to see that the narrator in the stories is often a Dandy (see my post here for why this is so important).  You have to understand what Shuana Gilligan is talking about when she talks about how homelessness is one of the basic themes  of Hogan, the Dandy is a hero without a culture in which his heroism matters.  These stories also develop themes that go deep into western culture, that of masculinity and how it always has to be defined against women and non-masculine males.  This is part of why there is so much male on male eroticism in Hogan's stories.  It is why the encounters are joyless.  the stories are also about how culture and societies  come from murder and cruelty.  Hogan is using his often beautiful images to force us to see this, this is in part why his stories are not straightforward narrations.  Some of the truths in these stories cannot be told in school, you have to figure them out for yourself.  This is also tied in with all of the not taught in school references in his stories, things some autodidact might know but the school masters won't.  Here is what Lawrence basically says about the role of travellers as figures in Irish literature and society that relate direclty to the stories of Hogan and what I have wondered about what we are to make of the use of Travellers in the stories and why the narrator has sex with so many of them, with him always as the active participant.  Lawrence says on the one hand Traveller men seem hyper-masculine, very into bare knuckle boxing, wild horses and living a seemingly free life style.  Also Travellers historically married very young, starting at about 14.  This in a culture where the average marriage age is higher than most first world countries and in a culture where sex outside of marriage was very much a sin.  This meant that Travellers were somehow a sub-group the Irish fixated on sexually.  A fourteen year old Traveller boy or girl was often married and sexually experienced 10 years earlier than many non-travellers.  On the other hand, Travelers were viewed as rootless, near criminals, with no sense of responsibility so on this hand they were viewed as not having masculine characteristics, somehow the traveller men, especially the younger ones seemed liked they were almost like loose women so why not take them sexually if you want. So Traveller men were seen both as hyper-masculine and as effeminate and childish.  Thus Irish masculinity, which stands in for the western culture (that is another reason for all the cultural references in the stories of Hogan) defines itself in contrast to Travellers.  This is much as the English once defined themselves in contrast to the Irish (Declan Kiberd, Franz Fanon and Edward Said helped me understand this) just as white Americans in the old south defined themselves in contrast to African Americans.  In one of the questions I have asked almost all those who have done Q and A sessions I talked about how the English viewed the Irish as very skilled at telling stories, preforming, writing poetry and such while seeing them as inferior and barbaric and I asked people if this is an accurate perception.  I also think in a sense the Traveller is the  stage Irishman for the Irish, and I think this is part of why Hogan uses him so much.  He is trying to get people to see the beam in their own eye.  

There are lots of other wonderful points to ponder and images to marvel at in this story.  The Dandy is a identified as a camp figure by many, rightly so, but is also central to the modern literature of cruelty and anguish.  The dandy roasts his hot dog on his jeweled walking stick in the fire of Nebuchadnezzar and revels in the garbage dumps in the back alleys of Dublin.    

I see the short stories of Hogan as world class cultural treasures.  I know I have made assertions in this post that some may not agree with or even take offense at which is OK it just means we care deeply about what we read.  

Author Data

Desmond Hogan was born in Ballinasloe, East Galway, in December 1950 and currently lives in south-west Ireland. He has published five novels: The Ikon Maker (1976), The Leaves on Grey (1980), A Curious Street (1984), A New Shirt (1986) and A Farewell to Prague (1995), as well as four books of stories: The Diamonds at the Bottom of the Sea (1979), Children of Lir (1981), The Mourning Thief (1987) and Lebanon Lodge (1988), published in the USA in 1989 under the title A Link with the River. His travel writings, The Edge of the City, appeared in 1993. In 1971 he won the Hennessy Award, and in 1977 the Rooney Prize for Literature. He won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1980 and was awarded a DAAD Fellowship in Berlin in 1991. In 1989 he was writer-in-residence at the University of Alabama, and in 1997 taught at the University of California, San Diego.

Larks' Eggs and Other Stories by Desmond Hogan can be purchased from Lilliput Press, the premier publisher of quality Irish Literature and history.

Mel u

"Pictures" by Desmond Hogan

"Pictures" by Desmond Hogan  (2005)

March 1 to March 31

The Reading Life Desmond Hogan Project

Shuana Gilligan's Introductory Post on Desmond Hogan

Happiness Comes From Nowhere, Shauna Gilligan's marvelous debut novel, can be found here. 

My Prior Posts on Desmond Hogan

If you are interested in being featured on ISSM3, please contact me

I first heard of Desmond Hogan through an article about him in the online edition of The Manchester Guardian.   The Manchester Guardian has the best literary section of any online paper in the world, in my opinion.   When I saw that they had an article about an Irish writer of course I read it and I was really intrigued by what it said about Desmond Hogan (1950, County Galway, Ireland).   I felt a small personal connection with him when I read he often swims up to two hours a day, partially for exercise and partially to have a time to himself to think.   I have been doing pretty much the same thing for a long time.   I also discovered he had a strong interest in Gypsies and by coincidence maybe a decade ago I got very interested in Gypsies after reading a great book Bury Me Standing by Isabel Fonseca.   I ended up reading all of the books I could find in English on Gypsies.

Before I bought his collection I consulted with Shauna Gilligan who has given me much good advise regarding Irish literature, and she strongly endorsed his work.  After reading only two or three of the stories in Lark's Eggs and Other Short Stories I became, and still very firmly am, convinced that the short stories in this collection were world class literary treasures.  I have written a number of posts on his stories, some simply commenting on a story and others attempt to deconstruct his works and explore various leitmotifs in his work. I take his work very seriously and probably, not sure how to say this so I will just say it, some of my posts on Hogan are probably among the hardest to understand by casual readers of any on my blog.  I wrote these posts for myself to increase my understanding and for others who feel about Hogan as I do not to convince those who do not feel as I do or more likely have not read his work.  

In a post on Juan Luis Borges I said I saw him  as belonging  to  the tradition of literature with cosmic ambition:  the Bible, The Iliad, The Divine Comedy, Ulysses..works that strive to convey complete universes, containing everything.  I think it is useful to see Hogan in this same tradition with the qualification that he is trying to convey the complete world of the inhabitants of his stories, their history, their culture, their way of being in the world.  He is also, I think, recreating mythic structures among the debris and detritus of the times of his stories.   I think for sure that is part, though far from all, what is behind the many references to Irish Travelers and Gypsies in his stories.     I also think that the stories of Hogan are very inter-textual, they reverberate off the walls of the literary culture of the world.  

There are several keys questions to help us understand the stories of Hogan.  To me one of the biggest questions concerns the nature of the narrator.  Why do so many of the stories feature a male narrator, a youngish man, very cultured in the way of an autodidact, with all sorts of odd not taught in school knowledge.  He is not a Traveller but he often lives among them and he spend a good bit of time telling young Traveller men stories about Art and History despite the fact that they are not interested.  Is he with Travellers just because is he somehow metaphorically or spiritually homeless?  It would be easy to say that and it is not wrong to do that.   But I think it limits our understanding of these stories.  We need to ponder how the narrator is used to reconstruct the world he is in and from.  We almost must accept and deal with the fact that the narrator often talks of having sex with young Traveller men.  I think there is an artistic reason why the narrator is often a Gay man and I think understanding it goes deeply into these stories.  I will try to talk about it.  

 First I think one needs to talk about the concept of the dandy as detailed in Declan Kiberd's great book, Inventing Ireland:  The Literature of the Modern Nation as set out in his chapter "Elizabeth Bowen:   The Dandy in Revolt".  Susan Sontag talks a bit about concept of the Dandy, in her land mark essay "Notes on Camp" and I think that if this is understood correctly it helps us understand why a number of the narrators in these stories are gay.  These will help us understand two of the "big questions" readers might have on the stories:   why so many references to Irish travelers and why so much gay sex.   If  you look in detail, there are more gay male narrators in the stories that center on travelers than the other stories.   This allows us to see into the structure of the stories without stooping to biographical analyses of an author of whom we know nothing, which is what it means to treat the stories as found objects.  I know it is more fashionable or common place to treat stories as social commentaries or treat them as political documents but to go deeper as the stories of Hogan demand, we must move away from this. 

I will first explain what Kiberd means when he talks about the tragedy of the dandy.  This is also directly related to all of the seeming only cultural references to thinks not taught in school and the narrator's conversations with young Traveler men about arcane historical matters in which they have no interest and which we can only speculate as to whether or not the narrator knows he is talking to no one.  I realize many may not know what I am talking about at this point (or perhaps I am like the narrator talking to no one who is listening) but I  will proceed on in the hopes some will be interested.  (There is world wide interest in the stories of Hogan-I base this by the visitors that come to my blog drawn by the Hogan posts, not just in Ireland.) 

The best way to explain the concept of the Dandy is to quote a bit from Kiberd.

To the cynicism of the modern undergraduate, he would infinitely prefer the desperate composure of the dandy...Traditionally, the dandy has been the stuff of comedy, especially in the brilliant Anglo-Irish example of Oscar Wilde..the .dandy’s perennial problem: how to maintain an aristocratic hauteur and decorum in the absence of any available court at which to rehearse and play out such gestures...The dandy’s craving for oblivion is “not a resignation but a heroic passion”, in fact the only form of heroism still practicable in the absence of a courtly backdrop. A hero thus becomes someone who knows, and says, and lives the truth that traditional heroism is no longer possible.

Kiberd brilliantly invokes Walter Benjamin's concept of the dandy as a hero without work:

Nobody at Danielstown, least of all Mr. Montmorency, is capable of answering that. When asked what the British soldiers are dying for, he insists that “our side is no side” – “rather scared, rather isolated, not expressing anything except tenacity to something that isn’t there – that never was there. And deprived of heroism by this wet kind of smother of commiseration”. Nothing is left to such a man but beautiful manners and a perfect stylization of every gesture, for here indeed is Walter Benjamin’s essential dandy, “a Hercules with no work”.

From  Walter Benjamin:

nonchalance is combined with the utmost exertion of energy . . . There is a special constellation in which greatness and indolence meet in human beings too . . . But the high seas beckon to him in vain, for his life is under an ill star. Modernism turns out to be his doom. The hero was not provided for in it; it has no use for his type. It makes him fast in the secure harbour forever and abandons him to everlasting idleness. In this, his last embodiment, the hero appears as a dandy . . 

Related closely to the idea that of the dandy and with Hogan as a writer in the tradition of Borges is part of the cultural or literary reason the narrators are gay.  Of course it is also just a story about a man who liked Gay sex which is fine but that is far from all it is.  Using another text, Edmund White in his brilliant collection of essays Art and Letters talks about how Gay males have to create themselves, they have no built in societal role models.  The narrator of Hogan's stories is creating himself as he tells his story.   He is anchoring himself in a world in which he seems to have no home.    To be Gay is inherently more creative than to be straight as you create yourself or you are destroyed by the society the narrator wants little part off.    The narrator also does not work thus exemplifying Walter Benjamin's notion of a dandy as a hero without work. 

I want now to make a few observation on "Pictures".  It is not my intention to tell the plot of this story or explicate the action, just to make some observations.  I have talked a good bit this month about the notion that the weak or missing Irish father is one of the dominant themes of modern Irish literature, some including Kiberd say it is the dominant theme.  Looking at "Pictures" which is about a visit of the narrator and his father to the National Galleries and I do not see a weak or missing father at all. He seems a strong figure and a real force in his son's life.  The father in this story is not weak or missing.  

I want to do something a bit different and then close this way to long post.

I want to look at one paragraph to see how it fits in with my remarks.   In this paragraph we have the great American writer Mark Twain, we have hat from Manila and a history of an Irish regiment (or maybe English).

We have the two boys listening to the history, one with a sluttish "Jean Harlow face".  Harlow was an androgynous sexual figure of the 1930s American movies.  Why the other has a Neptune Belly and ant legs is up for grabs.  We also have Napoleon brought into the mix.  Oliver St John Gogarty was an Irish writer, politician and medical doctor specializing in diseases of the throat and ears (Yes Googled him!).  There is a world in this paragraph and "Pictures" is simply full of this from start to finish.  We also have Hogan's wonderful use of colors and his descriptive adjectives, things I have not yet spoken about

"My father and I had a swim and afterwards a man with a malacca cane, in a linen Mark Twain suit and a Manila straw hat, who had been watching us, told us the history of the Forty Foot. Two boys listened intently to the lesson, one with a sluttish Jean Harlow face, the other with a Neptune belly and ant legs. The Forty Foot was called after the Forty Foot Regiment stationed in the laMartello tower built during the Napoleonic Wars. Twenty Men. Forty Feet. At the beginning of the century Oliver St John Gogarty used to frequently swim between the Forty Foot and Bullock Harbour in Dalkey where monks had lived." 

I will be posting more on Hogan in April.  As I have said before and will say again, I consider his short stories to be world class treasures.

Author Bio (from Lilliput Press)

Desmond Hogan was born in Ballinasloe, East Galway, in December 1950 and currently lives in south-west Ireland. He has published five novels: The Ikon Maker (1976), The Leaves on Grey (1980), A Curious Street (1984), A New Shirt (1986) and A Farewell to Prague (1995), as well as four books of stories: The Diamonds at the Bottom of the Sea (1979), Children of Lir (1981), The Mourning Thief (1987) and Lebanon Lodge (1988), published in the USA in 1989 under the title A Link with the River. His travel writings, The Edge of the City, appeared in 1993. In 1971 he won the Hennessy Award, and in 1977 the Rooney Prize for Literature. He won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1980 and was awarded a DAAD Fellowship in Berlin in 1991. In 1989 he was writer-in-residence at the University of Alabama, and in 1997 taught at the University of California, San Diego.


Larks' Eggs and Other Stories by Desmond Hogan can be purchased from Lilliput Press, a premier source for quality books from and about Ireland.

Happiness Comes From Nowhere, Shauna Gilligan's marvelous debut novel, can be found here. 

Mel u

"Players" by Desmond Hogan

"Players" by Desmond Hogan (2006, 22 pages)

Cohosted by Shauna Gilligan of
Happiness Comes From Nowhere.

Resources for Participants in Irish Short Story Month-Please consider joining us-March 1 to March 31

My Prior Posts on Desmond Hogan

"The dandy’s craving for oblivion is “not a resignation but a heroic passion”, in fact the only form of heroism still practicable in the absence of a courtly backdrop. A hero thus becomes someone who knows, and says, and lives the truth that traditional heroism is no longer possible."  Daniel Kiberd

So far I have read and posted on thirty of the thirty six short stories in Larks' Eggs and Other Stories by Desmond Hogan as well as a story from a recent issue of The Stinging Fly, Ireland's premier literary journal.   I am firmly convinced now that these stories are world class cultural treasures of the highest order.   I am approaching his work using a literary concept of the long ago, as found objects.  In most cases I am treating the short stories individually but I have no hesitation now to generalize about the stories as I did find them all together.   Hogan has written a large number of short stories and hopefully will write many more.  I have as of now access to only the thirty-six in Larks' Eggs and Other Stories, the one in The Stinging Fly and two additional stories in other anthologies I own.

In a post on Juan Luis Borges I said I saw him  as belonging  to  the tradition of literature with cosmic ambition:  the Bible, The Iliad, The Divine Comedy, Ulysses..works that strive to convey complete universes, containing everything.  I think it is useful to see Hogan in this same tradition with the qualification that he is trying to convey the complete world of the inhabitants of his stories, their history, their culture, their way of being in the world.  He is also, I think, recreating mythic structures among the debris and detritus of the times of his stories.   I think for sure that is part, though far from all, what is behind the many references to Irish Travelers and Gypsies in his stories.    In my posts on the remaining six stories in the collection (I did not post on the stories in order) I will not really attempt to convey the plot action, even though the events in "Players" are quite fascinating but will instead try to look at one particular think that strikes me in a story.  I also think that the stories of Hogan are very inter-textual, they reverberate off the walls of the literary culture of the world.   

Today I want to talk about the concept of the dandy as detailed in Declan Kiberd's great book, Inventing Ireland:  The Literature of the Modern Nation as set out in his chapter "Elizabeth Bowen:   The Dandy in Revolt".  Susan Sontag talks a bit about concept of the Dandy, in her land mark essay "Notes on Camp" and I think that if this is understood correctly it helps us understand why a number of the narrators in these stories are gay.  These will help us understand two of the "big questions" readers might have on the stories:   why so many references to Irish travelers and why so much gay sex.   If  you look in detail, there are more gay male narrators in the stories that center on travelers than the other stories.   This allows us to see into the structure of the stories without stooping to biographical analyses of an author of whom we know nothing, which is what it means to treat the stories as found objects.  I know it is more fashionable or common place to treat stories as social commentaries or treat them as political documents but to go deeper as the stories of Hogan demand, we must move away from this. 

I will first explain what Kiberd means when he talks about the tragedy of the dandy.  This is also directly related to all of the seeming only cultural references to thinks not taught in school and the narrator's conversations with young Traveler men about arcane historical matters in which they have no interest and which we can only speculate as to whether or not the narrator knows he is talking to no one.  I realize many may not know what I am talking about at this point (or perhaps I am like the narrator talking to no one who is listening) but I  will proceed on in the hopes some will be interested.  (There is world wide interest in the stories of Hogan-I base this by the visitors that come to my blog drawn by the Hogan posts, not just in Ireland.) 

The best way to explain the concept of the Dandy is to quote a bit from Kiberd.

To the cynicism of the modern undergraduate, he would infinitely prefer the desperate composure of the dandy...Traditionally, the dandy has been the stuff of comedy, especially in the brilliant Anglo-Irish example of Oscar Wilde..the .dandy’s perennial problem: how to maintain an aristocratic hauteur and decorum in the absence of any available court at which to rehearse and play out such gestures...The dandy’s craving for oblivion is “not a resignation but a heroic passion”, in fact the only form of heroism still practicable in the absence of a courtly backdrop. A hero thus becomes someone who knows, and says, and lives the truth that traditional heroism is no longer possible.

Kiberd brilliantly invokes Walter Benjamin's concept of the dandy as a hero without work:

Nobody at Danielstown, least of all Mr. Montmorency, is capable of answering that. When asked what the British soldiers are dying for, he insists that “our side is no side” – “rather scared, rather isolated, not expressing anything except tenacity to something that isn’t there – that never was there. And deprived of heroism by this wet kind of smother of commiseration”. Nothing is left to such a man but beautiful manners and a perfect stylization of every gesture, for here indeed is Walter Benjamin’s essential dandy, “a Hercules with no work”.

From  Walter Benjamin:

nonchalance is combined with the utmost exertion of energy . . . There is a special constellation in which greatness and indolence meet in human beings too . . . But the high seas beckon to him in vain, for his life is under an ill star. Modernism turns out to be his doom. The hero was not provided for in it; it has no use for his type. It makes him fast in the secure harbour forever and abandons him to everlasting idleness. In this, his last embodiment, the hero appears as a dandy . . 

it is the dandy’s tragedy to be able to play every part except his or her own, to become a martyr to performance.

In "Players" a traveling group of Shakespearean actors come once a year to a small Irish town.   There behavior is unconventional but that is accepted as they are actor.  I should note I am not trying to "prove I am right".  I am not a scholar or an academic.  This is not meant as a claim of modesty it just explains in part why I feel I can just assert things and if others see my point great and if someone wants to respond all the more wonderful it just means I do not plans to quote a lot of Hogan to prove my point.  (It is there, I think, in my prior posts.) Now think back to the prominent figure in the Hogan corpus, that of the narrator of a story who lives with or frequents the haunts of Irish travelers, he also may, and is often gay.  I think this narrator is for sure a kind of dandy and once we understand what is in the quotes I made use of we are a good way into understanding these stories.   Much of  the meaning of Hogan's narrators and the wanderings in his stories and the arcane historical data is made partially clear in this last quote I will make use of from Kiberd.   It firmly located the stories at the heart of the Irish literary experience and also illustrates Shauna Gilligan's very illuminating thesis that the one of the core themes of the stories of Hogan is homelessness, real and metaphysical.

Yet, in that very disavowal of a native background or identity, she becomes a voice for all those uprooted, dispossessed Irish, from the Gaelic earls who fled in 1607, through the rapparees and exiled Fenians of later centuries, down to the Joyce and Beckett who had to put themselves at a distance from Ireland in order to convince themselves that the place had ever existed. For the dandy’s tragedy turns out to have been the story of the bards who woke up to find themselves wandering spailpíní, and of gentry who were reborn as tramps. All such nomads know the truth of Wilde’s aphorism: that the first duty in life was to adopt a pose, a style, a way of being in the world. (Declain Kiberd)

I know I have not at all explicated the very interesting plot of "Players".   The last line is of the story sent me a shudder of recognition.  I may return to this and other of Hogan's stories at some point but for the net few posts I will be kind making points with the stories rather than about them.

But anyway Mr Mahaffy’s life’s work had become irrelevant in Sheona Barrett’s town. A few years before, on a New Year’s Eve, when snow was falling, screens lit up all over the town with their own snow to mark the first transmission by Irish television. (from "Players")

(Mr.Mahaffey was a traveling theatrical player.)  

Author Data

Desmond Hogan was born in Ballinasloe, East Galway, in December 1950 and currently lives in south-west Ireland. He has published five novels: The Ikon Maker (1976), The Leaves on Grey (1980), A Curious Street (1984), A New Shirt (1986) and A Farewell to Prague (1995), as well as four books of stories: The Diamonds at the Bottom of the Sea (1979), Children of Lir (1981), The Mourning Thief (1987) and Lebanon Lodge (1988), published in the USA in 1989 under the title A Link with the River. His travel writings, The Edge of the City, appeared in 1993. In 1971 he won the Hennessy Award, and in 1977 the Rooney Prize for Literature. He won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1980 and was awarded a DAAD Fellowship in Berlin in 1991. In 1989 he was writer-in-residence at the University of Alabama, and in 1997 taught at the University of California, San Diego.

Larks' Eggs and Other Stories by Desmond Hogan can be purchased from Lilliput Press, the premier source for quality books from and about Ireland.

Happiness Comes From Nowhere, Shauna Gilligan's marvelous debut novel, can be found here. 

I will be posting more on the short stories of Desmond Hogan during Irish Short Story Month, March 1 to March 31.

Mel u