The Pornographer by John McGahern

First published: 1979

Type of work: Satiric morality

Time of work: The 1970’s

Locale: Dublin, provincial Ireland, and London

Principal Characters:

• “I”, the anonymous narrator and protagonist, the pornographer of the title
• Josephlne, the narrator’s mistress and the mother of his illegitimate child
• Maloney, a publisher, the narrator’s employer
• Mary O’Doherty, the narrator’s cancer-stricken aunt

The Novel

In The Pornographer, John McGahern tells the story of one man’s encounter with the duplicitous moral nature of the world. This man, the novel’s narrator and eponym, is at once cynical and naive: He desires that his emotional life possess an uncomplicated simplicity and directness which every aspect of his emotional experience teaches him is impossible. Much of the novel’s skill is devoted to a cumulative and rather merciless detailing of the combination of blindness and insight which makes up the narrator’s moral position. The more his insights fuel his hunger for simplicity, the more he finds himself trapped in the situation which refuses to be simplified.

This situation is itself one of stark simplicity. Pleased by the quality of his sexual relations with Josephine, whom he has casually picked up at a dance, the narrator soon finds that Josephine is pregnant. Despite the narrator’s obdurate and repeated refusals to meet the situation with traditional, respectable solutions, Josephine naively keeps hoping for the best, even to the extent of jettisoning her Dublin business career and emigrating to England. Even the arrival of the child means nothing to its hard-hearted father, however, and in any case, by this time he has found another girl whom he prefers. Josephine is left to drift out of his life.

The bleakness of this tale, persuasively communicated by McGahern’s typically spare and intense style, is offset by the other major claim on the narrator’s emotional energy: his dying aunt. Here the narrator, while consistent in his behavior, reveals an alternative nature to the one elicited by the affair with Josephine. If in matters of love the narrator is dogmatic, in the face of death he is nothing if not compliant. As far as he seems to be aware, there is no relationship between the two areas of his experience. He refuses to take conventional responsibility for the complex character of his own moral nature. The quality of mercy which he extends to his aunt is precisely what he withholds from his relationship with Josephine. His willingness to attend to Aunt Mary throughout her dying days makes a provocative contrast to the abandonment of his mistress and their infant son. Such a glaring contrast, however, firmly reinforces the novel’s premise that the basis of morality is freedom of choice.

One of the numerous quiet pleasures provided by The Pornographer is the manner in which it intertwines the two areas of the protagonist’s emotional demands. The event-centered plot comprising the Josephine material is expertly contextualized and preserved from sensationalist treatment by the condition-centered material pertaining to Aunt Mary’s travail. Ultimately, the narrator, obliged to choose so that his own life may proceed, opts for condition rather than event: His aunt’s significance derives less from her individual circumstances, which no longer contain any life-enabling power, than from the way of life she represents, and which the reader finds embodied in perhaps the novel’s most lifelike character, her brother. Rooted, traditional, materialistic, this way of life attracts the narrator by its apparent definitiveness, to the extent that he even contemplates settling down in his native place with Josephine’s successor.

In any event, nothing quite so conclusive takes place, and the novel closes on an appropriately open-ended note. Such an outcome is fitting because it shows the narrator prepared, as a matter of choice, to embrace the unpredictable, multiform character of experience, rather than continue in the defensive, simplistic, and bitterly rationalistic style of his affair with Josephine. He has learned, it seems, that simplicity in the moral sphere is the idiom of pornography, production of which may be an avocation but should not be confused with the reality of the common mortal lot.

The Characters

A peculiar characteristic of The Pornographer is that its main characters are somewhat flat and repetitive, while its minor characters are colorful and diverting. The protagonist’s conversational style, for example, will probably strike the reader as taciturn, and his conversational range seems decidedly limited, particularly in view of the fact that he earns his living through words. Maloney, on the other hand—the narrator’s employer and to some degree his mentor also—is a most exuberant conversationalist. Similarly, the narrator’s uncle has an attractive interest in the life of things in the world around him which seems quite lacking in his introspective and somewhat alienated nephew.

Such contrasts, however, do not betoken a facile method of characterization, a method wholly dependent on labeling characters with elementary differences; on the contrary, they hint at the heavily muffled satire detectable beneath the plangent strains of moral parable which superficially inform the novel’s narrative tone. The minor characters, including the nurse who replaces Josephine, are immune from the moral entanglements which consume the narrator, his aunt, and his mistress. This freedom gives them an appetite for going about their business, which is conspicuously lacking in the case of the lovers and which is obviously impossible in Aunt Mary’s case. Both Maloney and the narrator’s uncle have the effect of both highlighting and diminishing the magnitude of the narrator’s dilemma, offering through their different approaches means of putting the dilemma in perspective which the narrator himself cannot provide.

Yet, with the arbitrary exception of Maloney, all the characters are united in either total or virtual anonymity. This tactic contributes to the parablelike effect of the narrative and makes the characters a combination of the individuated and the generic. It also has the effect of depersonalizing the central situation between the narrator and Josephine, as though they were merely instruments of their active or passive wills, functioning much as characters in works of pornography typically might. Thus, as The Pornographer satirically proposes, complex and apparently intractable situations strip their participants of individuality, while conversely, it seems, superficial characters lead lives of moral ease. Such propositions are not, however, intended as verdicts on the way people are; rather, they should be considered as evidence of the manner in which this novel’s mode of characterization contributes to its overall preoccupation with the inescapably problematic nature of moral conduct.

Critical Context

In this, his fourth novel, John McGahern significantly extends his artistic and intellectual range. An overture to this development may be discerned in his collection of short stories, Getting Through (1978), particularly in the area of sexual bleakness and the alienation which this author seems to believe is endemic to urban life. The sophistication of The Pornographer, and its successful—if, on occasion, somewhat tentative—combination of the humanly individual and the conceptually abstract mark a decisive step forward in his development. It is particularly agreeable to find some venomously satiric sociological observations here, McGahern’s work having hitherto been marked to an undue degree by passivity and stoicism.

These observations are also significant in the context of this novel’s place in contemporary Irish fiction. It is difficult to think of another novel besides The Pornographer which addresses so directly some of the recent changes in Irish society. Conflict between metropolitan isolation and rural gregariousness, between the license of individual self-satisfaction and the obligations of family solidarity, between the responsibilities implicit in sexual ethics and personal freedom—all these issues have been very much in the foreground of public debate in contemporary Ireland. It is not the least important aspect of The Pornographer that it has successfully struck such a resonant sociological chord, though it should not be heard above this novel’s subtle orchestration of less timebound themes.

Bibliography

Adams, Alice. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXXXI (December 2, 1979), p. 14.

O’Neill, Catherine. Review in The New Republic. CLXXXI (December 15, 1979), p. 39.

Prescott, P. S. Review in Newsweek. XCIV (November 5, 1979), p. 107.

Updike, John. Review in The New Yorker. LV (December 24, 1979), p. 95.

Wiehe, Janet. Review in Library Journal. CIV (December 15, 1979), p. 2665.