The Silence of the Postmemory Generation in John McGahern’s Short Stories

Abstract

This essay argues that McGahern embodies a tension between nostalgia and anti-nostalgia through the silence of characters of a postmemory generation. Although McGahern neither pushes the limit of his works to the realm of political emancipation, nor pursues therapeutic working-through of trauma, he is an artist whose quest for postmemorial dynamics functions both anti-nostalgically as a traumatic symptom of the authoritative post-independence state, and nostalgically as an aesthetic strategy to reinvent the past. First, he describes silence as generational, representing both the space for a tentative truce between the generations and the means by which the postmemory generation can establish its critical identity. Second, McGahern's silence enables his postmemory-generation characters to reinvent the past. On the one hand, the silence reveals intragenerational memory war among members of the later generation as they form different versions of the past. On the other, the silence serves as a creative space for reflective nostalgia to reimagine, and cope with, the trauma of the past.