[Cici] sang to me like a wren, on and on, memories of startling lucidity, incidents pouring from her … ” (McCann 1995: 112), in a sense comparing the woman to his parents, emphasizing her own particular interest in and respect for telling stories. Although apparently the narrator’s quest for information, a metaphorical recreation of the traditional mythical quest for knowledge and understanding, is successful, Cici warns Conor that memories, no matter whether pertaining to first-hand experiences or not and irrespective of their lucidity, have the inevitable quality of subjectivity, which seriously questions their status as faithful reconstructions of past events:

‘You know what I think?’ she said. ‘I think memory is three-quarters imagination.’

I sat back.

‘And the rest is pure lies’ she said. (McCann 1995: 112, layout original)

Conor apparently accepts this condition of the revelations he is offered; yet his interest in Cici’s narrations does not diminish. He is willing to listen for he has a way of actually cross-examining at least part of what he is being told – he has the photos. Equipped with, on the one hand, the images and, on the other hand, the narratives he has memorized Conor might attempt to re-construct a life-story full of joys and sorrows, illusions and deceptions, moments of frantic movement followed by almost interminable periods of stasis. Departing from either the visual or the verbal realm of knowledge, the protagonist of Songdogs is able to juxtapose its contents against the other medium and thus verify whether his original suppositions were correct or not7  ; this process of comparative re-creation might be said to constitute the novel’s main theme. It portrays a desire to know one’s roots and the extent to which this desire might become the driving force in man.

Irrespective of Conor’s efforts, the central enigma of the story, his mother’s disappearance, remains unsolved. Even the father himself is unable to shed light on her possible destination, although the old man does confess that he is also deeply troubled by Juanita’s painful absence: ‘No, no, you don’t understand. I really miss her. I honestly miss her’ (McCann 1995: 206). Unlike his son, however, Michael adopts a completely different attitude with regard to past events, an attitude which does not bring relief either – he chooses not to remember8 : ‘Ah, Jaysus,’ he said. ‘I remember nothing at all these days’ (McCann 1995: 190) or ‘All I’m looking for is a bit of peace and quiet. Go away. Let me sleep’ (McCann 1995: 191). It is interesting to observe how father and son are driven by exactly opposed desires: the former desires completion through knowledge while the latter seeks comfort through oblivion and whereas Conor’s motivations appear easy to decipher, the old man’s rejection of all that was might cause problems. One way of interpreting it requires a brief digression into the father’s younger days; early in the novel the narrator comments upon Michael’s understanding of photography as preserving past moments without altering them and, consequently, immortalizing the instants the lens captures: “It was something the old man often did – if a moment existed in a photograph, it was held in that particular stasis forever. It was as if by taking a photo he could, at any moment, reinhabit an older life … ” (McCann 1995: 23). Consequently, the father might be said to coincide initially with his son’s idea of recreating the past through still images, which could explain, on the one hand, the great number and the underlying, highly erotic quality of the photos he took of his wife and, on the other hand, his sudden disinterest in past times after these photos, together with all the potentially re-constructible realities they contained, were destroyed. Unable to resurrect history and his memories without the artificial aid of his images, Michael abandons the notion of preserving past moments and, instead, concentrates himself around commonplace, present activities that in no way evoke the painful loss he has suffered.

Conor’s homecoming dramatises the inevitable tension between past and present in yet another way; the figure of Michael is in general idealized in both sub-plot lines, in which he is represented as independent, selfsufficient, resistant and virile: “ … I love him for the gigantic way he walked … ” (McCann 1995: 173). On numerous occasions the protagonist recalls his father purposefully displaying his body to be admired in public, “ … an arm cocked histrionically to show a muscle” (McCann 1995: 164)9 , being highly authoritarian or even despotic. The old man Conor encounters in Mayo has none of these qualities; his body is dry and wrinkled, his hands tremble, he can no longer keep the house ordered. Images of the misery of old age are frequent in Songdogs: “His neck was a sack of sag and his trousers were huge on him” (McCann 1995: 15), “He dribbled egg down the front of his chin this evening at dinner” (McCann 1995: 61) or “A smell filled the room and I knew straight away why he had been trying to send me downstairs” (McCann 1995: 153). Michael’s poor condition is another painful reality the protagonist has to acknowledge – preserved in Conor’s memories and photos as the strong man he once was, Michael is slowly facing imminent death and there is no remedy that could possibly stop the process. The coming to terms with his father’s misery might be said to constitute the other great challenge to the protagonist’s integrity10  and his ability to successfully integrate both past and present into a significant continuum.

III. A gaze that wants it all

The previous sections of the paper have made reference to the concept of the gaze, understood as a particular way of looking that presupposes and mirrors the workings of desire around the figure involved in that act of looking, the voyeur. In McCann’s novel the gaze does not only have the function of facilitating a recreation of the past, however; it might be argued that the concept can also be applied to analysing the figure of Michael and, in particular, his obsession with photography that ultimately caused Juanita’s disappearance.

It has been stated above that Michael’s interest in taking photos is directly connected with his belief in actually immortalising past moments using a camera. It has to be added that from the very moment Conor’s father met his future wife in rural Mexico, an unspoken pact was established between the two: “She wasn’t performing for the camera – she was performing for him. She never asked to see the prints. There wasn’t an ounce of vanity in her poses” (McCann 1995: 38). Thus, from the outset Juanita allows the camera and, more importantly, the man behind it, to capture images of herself, of her body, as if she were giving it away, offering it to the stranger from remote Ireland. Also, beginning with the first photos the highly erotic character of the images predominates: “Some of the shots were hazy beneath mosquito nets, so they took on a Victorian attitude of lounge and lust … ” (McCann 1995: 59) or “He still makes a temple from her body … ” (McCann 1995: 141). There is no opposition to the ambience of the photos on the part of Juanita as long as their highly intimate content remains within the family, between the cameraman and his model; yet, towards the end of the novel Conor admits that while the family was still living together in Mayo his father collected the erotic images of Juanita (and some nude photos of other women he had taken earlier) in two consecutive editions that he first attempted to sell in Ireland (the album was banned) and then abroad, primarily in France. Although Juanita never openly opposed the idea, the way young Conor remembers her afterwards and her decision to burn both the first edition of the book and the entire darkroom where the second one was stored strongly imply disagreement, frustration and rage on her part. Her final act of abandoning Mayo might also be interpreted as a direct consequence of seeing her nude photos become public.

Why did Michael take all these photos or, more importantly, why did he have them published living in a small rural community of Catholic background whose reaction – social stigmatisation – was fairly easy to predict? In order to answer both questions Michael’s initial attitude towards the past must be recalled yet again; by taking photos he believed to be forever preserving the instances that constituted his experiences and the persons that populated them. Surrounded by his images, he would simply never forget. A similar explanation might be given with regards to photographing his young and attractive wife – each erotic image taken would comprise an ever-lasting testimony of her beauty, the freshness of her skin, the perfect contours of her limbs. The narrator comments: “It was as if he [Michael] believed that something that was has the power to be what is” (McCann 1995: 23, italics original). Taking nude or partially exposed photos of Juanita signified possessing her beauty forever, guarding it against change and the horror of old age; it might be concluded that the intimate images were supposed to constitute Michael’s private, easily-accessible artificial memory, a surrogate for man’s imperfect ability to recall.

Michael’s was a gaze that possessed; unlike Conor, who through the act of looking recreated and assigned new meanings to particular signifiers, his father trapped possibly variable meanings within the stillness of Polaroid paper. The latter’s gaze might be said to challenge the passage of time, to rebel against a progressive understanding of temporality, to defy the uniqueness of each given moment; the narrator thus comments:

He [Michael] wanted a memorial of some sort, en epitaph for himself, a package of light to emerge and print itself indelibly on his life, to say: I was once great, look at these great photos I took, look how perfect they are, look how I once lived, I was alive! (McCann 1995: 171, italics original).

By defying the past in this way Michael wanted to achieve immortality, understood by him as the ever-lasting existence of an essential part of his persona11 ; despotic as he was, however, Conor’s father believed that others, above all his wife, would actually share his particular attitude towards the past and acknowledge his photo albums as something more than just nude images. The protagonist himself acknowledges such a possibility and states: “ … maybe he truly believed that it [the album] would reinvent things, maybe he thought it was a gesture of love – that she [Juanita] could look at the pages and remember herself” (McCann 1995: 171). The protagonist himself acknowledges such a possibility and states: “ … maybe he truly believed that it [the album] would reinvent things, maybe he thought it was a gesture of love – that she [Juanita] could look at the pages and remember herself” (McCann 1995: 171). The problem is, Conor’s mother cannot view the album in the way Michael would like her to; her idea of the past and her notion of identity must have been completely different from his, and the drama in Songdogs is provoked precisely by the incompatibility of their respective views. Although Michael’s intentions might have been partially noble (if one accepts his commitment to immortalizing Juanita’s beauty for her), his supposing that she would appreciate the album was infinitely mistaken; unable to sense an important discrepancy with regards to the notions of, on the one hand, intimacy and, on the other hand, the relation between present and past, Michael commits a sacrilege that his wife will neither comprehend nor forget. The most intimate of offerings she could ever make, the unconditional surrender of her body to the cold lens of the camera, a surrogate for Michael’s own eye, becomes perverted and publicly exposed; the photos, instead of communicating sensual closeness and private devotion, satisfy vulgar desires of Mayo’s inhabitants, anonymous strangers who in no way partake of the original, intense significance of the images.

It is also interesting to emphasize again the highly erotic character of the photos – they are in fact the only allusions to the sexual in the novel. None of the three plot lines includes any mention of sexual relations, with the exception of a fragment included in Cici’s narrative about her brief (and not explicit in the least) adventure with Juanita while the three of them were living in a watch tower in Wyoming. In Songdogs sensuality understood in terms of physical desire or contact is somehow displaced – not by the characters, but by the narration itself; all that denotes sexuality within the text is removed from its usual set of references and re-distributed, so that it functions exclusively within and through the photos. Michael’s desire for Juanita, and other women as well12 , is translated entirely into the realm of the visual – in his adolescence, instead of courting women, Michael takes photos of them. During the Spanish Civil War episode he accompanies the Fascist army and portrays with morbid detail, but also perfect reserve, how the soldiers satisfied their carnal desires with prostitutes. Although explicitly present, the sexual is always one step removed from Michael; it is always a theme, an element that is observed, but never actually embraced. It could be stated that his possible desire is satisfied through looking at the desire of others – if such a reading is accepted then Michael is the prototypical voyeur, one whose satisfaction depends on a guarantee of distance between the desired object and himself, rather than proximity and physical contact.

One of the most significant difficulties that emerge while a nation’s literature is being discussed, any nation’s literature, is whether the body of literary works in question reflects the national experience, the “-ness”, as in Irishness in the present case, of a given culture. Although a great number of themes and motifs present in fiction are considered universal, and thus not restricted to any given national or temporal frame, there is nevertheless a strong pressure on writers, especially the young ones, to somehow embrace realities proper to their own immediate surroundings and echo a set of conditions that is not easily found outside their social group, their era, their nation.

This problem is particularly visible in the case of Irish writing and, even more importantly, in Irish prose. A number of critics have observed the slightly undeveloped (in the sense of not innovative, traditionalist) character of Irish narrative writing in the late 19th and early 20th century, with the obvious exceptions of Joyce and later Beckett. Christina Hunt Mahony observes:

… Irish men and women who have chosen to write not poetry or plays, but to use prose as their medium of artistic expression, have worked in a tradition that has been considered less developed and certainly one that has been less touted (Mahony 1998: 18).

The fundamental reason given to somehow explain this awkward condition of Irish prose is the country’s history, the centuries-long English occupation, which inevitably affected all the domains of Irish life, including its artistic and literary production. Being a colonial entity meant that Ireland was forced to accept elements of English culture as its models and continuously juxtapose its own achievements against foreign patterns that often had very little in common with Irish reality; for a long time ‘Irish’ meant inferior only because it was directly opposed to ‘English’, the label that embodied the dominant culture. Also, as Mahony points out, the Irish literary tradition has been more likely to embrace poetry or drama as its preferred means of expression, mostly due to their primal dependence on the highly expressive character of particular words, on their aesthetic charge and on the rhythmic quality inherent in the two modes of writing.

Prose writing does not depend so much on such a careful selection of vocabulary and novel writing least of all; while in a short story the principle of economy of language introduced into literary study by E. A. Poe and later fully acknowledged by other great shortstory writers and scholars alike, such as Julio Cortázar or José María Pozuelo, preserves its validity until the present day, a novelist, working with much more extensive material, may be permitted a more laissez-faire attitude towards the language employed – its impact depends rather on an elaborated structure and a gradual, and complete, development of its inner tensions. The latter is certainly true of McCann’s Songdogs; as has been pointed out in the previous section, the novel is static and apparently predictable in terms of narrative events. Action or movement, understood literally as spatial displacement, are scarce, which does not, on the other hand, imply monotony or simplicity in the work’s construction. In fact, it is precisely the structure of the novel that might be regarded as McCann’s greatest achievement – the writer manages to mingle the three plot lines and continuously divert the sub-narratives so that the informative gaps that punctured the texture of the three stories, their initial incompleteness, can eventually be filled with meanings retrieved from the incursions into the numerous mini-narrations embedded in the larger plot lines. Reading McCann’s novel obliges the reader to engage in a difficult process of active re-enactment, not only of the novel’s reality (realities), but also of its very structure; accustomed to linear time and the logical cause-effect chain, McCann’s readers find themselves in an apparently chaotic narrative framework that almost frivolously rejects both chronology and causality in favour of a more personal, experimental, mode of constructing a literary reality.

Thus, from this perspective, reading Songdogs implies a labour of active reconstruction; interestingly, the same task is also the principal theme of the novel, which in a way places both the reader and the protagonist in a similar position. McCann’s work constitutes an account of Conor’s efforts aimed at disentangling his family history and structuring it properly so that it can become a revelatory experience, a personal epiphany; wandering the world without a clearly defined destination, the protagonist revives the stories his parents left him and, simultaneously, constructs his own identity. Songdogs dramatises the experience of an interior vacuum, an internal hollowness that does not allow an individual to know its precedence and, consequently, its ultimate destiny. In this respect, past and future are not two clearly defined, separate temporal frames that could function independently from one another, which Michael is desperately and fruitlessly trying to demonstrate – they constitute two extremes of a continuum and their successful reconciliation, the coming to terms with one’s past in order to embrace a better future, can only be achieved in present time, an elusive meeting point where tradition collides with prospect. In his book that investigates Irish culture (and writing in particular), Robert Welch makes the following comment: “Irish culture is preoccupied by continuity” (Welch 1993: 5); although Welch’s argument is centred around the concepts of activity, understood by the scholar as change and innovation, as opposed to inertia, an apparently un-productive state of exploiting the already existing models and patterns, the critic readily recognises the importance of continuity with regards to the temporal. A present meditation on one’s possible projects is impossible without taking into account one’s past experiences and their implications; advances and progress, efforts aimed at constructing a better, more efficient or more complete tomorrow are bound to fail if no heed is paid to that which made the advances possible in the first place – the past. Apart from portraying the process of past reconstruction, which would ultimately affirm the novel as representative of an Irish experience (as pointed out in the initial paragraphs of the paper), Songdogs engages yet another issue involved in the re-enactment of history – the authenticity of the sources. As has been observed, Conor has at his disposal two sets of evidence: the verbal, constituted by the stories told to him by his parents and later Cici, and the visual, the collection of photographs taken by both his father and himself. In the course of a comparative exploration of the two registers he is able to construct an apparently complete and logical recreation of his parents’ life; the term “apparently” must be emphasized because although Conor is satisfied with his labour – almost all the informative gaps have been filled with plausible content – there is no possibility of objectively proving the fidelity of the story he possesses. Are memories, the memories of others’ memories and still images enough to reconstruct a life? Is it sufficient to order the images and align a number of mini-narratives in order to recover the original, master plot? Although Conor appears to second an affirmative answer, Cici’s warning, “memory is three quarters imagination and the rest is pure lies”, looms above his efforts, challenging their authenticity.

Although Songdogs does not include any direct reference to New Historicist ideas, Cici’s commentary cited above does recall the ideas of Michel Foucault and other scholars who, in general, opposed 18th and 19th-century historiography and proposed a more subjective, less essentialist understanding of history. Instead of considering it ultimately true and stable, the New Historicists argued the existence of multiple histories, personal narratives that disclosed a subjective reading of past events. In his investigation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Brook Thomas explains: “ … no history can possibly relate the past as it really was because our histories will always be influenced by our present perspective” (Thomas 1989: 239). One’s ideology, experiences, social circumstance and the language one employs are all factors that influence one’s perception of the world, and any subsequent re-construction of that world will be highly affected by these factors. As has been pointed out, however, Conor pays little heed to Cici’s words – he wants to believe the stories because through them he constructs his own identity; without a credible history he would forever remain suspended in a personal void of ignorance. Conscious of the possible fallacies inherent in trusting memories, especially those of others, he is willing to sacrifice fidelity in exchange for an identity. McCann’s protagonist might be said to embody one of mankind’s most profound dramas – its ultimate dislocation, a removal from any social context accompanied by a desperate longing to belong, to attach oneself. Fortunate enough to produce a credible history for himself, Conor encounters inner peace; particular emphasis should be placed on the word ‘produce’, however, as it dramatises the artificial character of history, and thus identity, which no longer constitute intrinsic qualities of the human condition. Instead of being taken for granted, they must be forged out of stories, memories or images and the very process of elaborating one’s history, and also identity, comprises one of the greatest tests modern man undergoes.

The act of reading fiction presupposes a pact between the reader and the narrator, or the text13 ; although nobody doubts the essentially fictional, not real, character of both the protagonists and the events described, disbelief is temporarily suspended in order to take pleasure from reading. In Songdogs, the said pact is duplicated; in the first place, the reader agrees to accept the existence of a fictional persona named Conor who has a fictional father named Michael and that they share a fictional family history around which a series of fictional events is constructed. In the second place, the very nature of these events and their supposed relations are seriously doubted from within the narrative. Once the initial pact has been made, which in technical terms implies a temporal coming-into-being of a fictional reality that constitutes the novel’s setting and its three plot lines, the truthfulness and objectivity of these very elements become questioned and, consequently, the second pact is necessary: the reader is asked to give credence to Conor’s efforts at re-creating his parents’ past and the story he eventually reconstructs. In this respect, the novel exposes from within the primary condition of any work of fiction – the ephemeral quality of the “truth” it supposedly contains. Whether a work of fiction, be it a novel, a short story or a film, is based on authentic testimonies of first-hand witnesses or highly detailed personal narratives, its fictional character remains constant; no story is more true than another one. Any imagined narrative is as fictional as a heavily documented historical novel – none of them ever actually happened. While the former might be pretty straightforward about its own fictionality, the latter simply constitutes a version, an artistic recreation of particular events based on persons or facts taken from real life. On the other hand, the nature of the pact between a reader and a text suspends these conditions and consequently allows the readers to immerse themselves in the reality proposed by a work of fiction. In Songdogs, this immersion is twofold: in the first place, the text offers the surface story with its three plot lines and its two principal characters, witnessing their painful encounter and the slow reconciliation; in the second place, the act of reading organises the three plots into a logical continuum and allows an exploration of different fictional realities not included in the surface plot line. Moreover, the character of Juanita, the absent persona reconstructed exclusively on the basis of stories, images and memories, can only be accessed via the sub plot lines.

Songdogs is a novel about looking, observing and re-constructing through scattered snapshots of anonymous places, private moments, and people’s faces. It constitutes a meditation on the modes in which history, be it personal or more universal, can be enacted and made one’s own; simultaneously, it clearly separates the notion of history from the category of objectivity, considering them both ultimately opposed – there is no such thing as an essentially true, global history. Instead, the past constitutes an amalgam of impressions, voices or visions that might coincide or not in their treatment of particular events or persons, producing a kaleidoscopic image of what once was considered a monolith. Memory, McCann appears to be saying, is a useful tool on a personal level – it might serve the purpose of satisfactorily reconstructing history. For it to be successful, however, one condition has to be met: the version produced is not to be contrasted against any other version, in which case discrepancies are bound to appear. History is thus a fundamentally private concept and any attempt at sharing it presupposes sacrifice – compromise with regards to past events often implies edition and re-elaboration of a new version, more or less different from its originals. In the end, plurality and universality with regards to experience appear to be the two major tensions whose complex interplay and development comprise the mode of McCann’s Songdogs.