Author:

Keywords:

Irish short story cycle, George Moore, Narrative of community, The Untilled Field

Abstract:

George Moore’s The Untilled Field (1903) is generally considered a precursor of James Joyce’s paradigmatic short story cycle Dubliners (1914). Moore himself called The Untilled Field “a landmark in Anglo-Irish literature, a new departure” in his preface to the 1914 edition and “a frontier book, between the new and the old style” in a letter to Edmund Gosse. Moreover, while writing The Untilled Field, he stated that “the book is a perfect unity” and expressed his hope that it would “not be reviewed as a collection of short stories”. Although some critics claim that the work lacks unity in comparison with Dubliners, others find that Moore’s book does possess a “loose progressive argument”. In this paper, I will argue that The Untilled Field can indeed be considered a short story cycle, in fact bridging an earlier tradition of regional cycles (so-called narratives of community) and Joyce’s anti-narrative of community. I hope to demonstrate this by analysing how Moore takes elements from Jane Barlow’s Irish Idylls (1892), but at the same time refashions them, thereby prefiguring Dubliners. As opposed to the cycles of Irish mythology and the framed tale collections by other nineteenth-century Irish authors, both Barlow’s Irish Idylls and Moore’s The Untilled Field are unified by “internal linking” instead of “external framing”. Irish Idylls is a collection of short stories unified by a shared, though varying, set of characters, as well as by setting and theme. The same goes for The Untilled Field, although the latter covers different themes and settings, and includes several protagonists. Barlow’s Irish Idylls does not only participate in the Anglo-Irish tradition of informing the outside world about Irish life, but can also be considered part of a regional tradition of cycles which Sandra A. Zagarell has called narratives of community. She defines the genre as grouping together works which “take as their subject the life of a community […] and portray the minute and quite ordinary processes through which the community maintains itself as an entity”. Zagarell mentions Irish Idylls as an example. With The Untilled Field, as I hope to demonstrate, Moore both harks back to this tradition and alters it. Moore’s book shares with Barlow’s a focus on the ordinary yet typical aspects of the life of a (rural) community. Moreover, the contrast between community life and the modern world typical of the genre comes to the fore in both works. On the other hand, Moore’s severe critique of “Irish Renaissance constructions of ‘Irishness’” contrasts sharply with Barlow’s idyllic stories set in the village of Lisconnel. Moore, then, does not provide his readers with a romanticized image of Irish peasant life: for instance, he attacks the repressive power of the village clergy, sheds light on the unfairness of poverty and gives a new interpretation to the theme of exile. In addition, he does not limit himself to Irish rural life but also includes urban settings. Similarly, he looks at the Irish peasantry as well as at the middle class. In this way, as I hope to show, with The Untilled Field, Moore at the same time inscribed himself in the tradition of the narrative of community and paved the way for Joyce’s anti-narrative of community, Dubliners.