Stories of a Changeless Rural Ireland: Walter Macken’s Short Fiction

Stories of a Changeless Rural Ireland: Walter Macken’s Short Fiction Although Walter Macken’s short stories are now all but forgotten, they were very successful on both sides of the Atlantic when they first appeared. Stories about the fishing and farming communities on the Galway coast were published in numerous magazines, newspapers and anthologies both in Ireland and the U.S. These were collected in the collections God Made Sunday (1951) and The Green Hills (1962). Macken’s stories in these collections tell of the day-to-day life in the village communities and of the amusing, tragic or revelatory incidents that puncture the commonplace. Unlike O’Connor’s ‘lonely voice’ stories, his stories are rooted in the rural communities which remain remarkably untouched by the progress of modernity elsewhere. In my paper, I propose to analyse Macken’s staging of the community, in terms of (a) narrative voice, (b) communal chorus and norms, and (c) the relation between protagonist and the community. In the second part of my paper, I will contrast Macken’s rural stories with the stories posthumously gathered in City of the Tribes (1997), which are all set in 1940s Galway. These darker stories bear witness to Ireland’s violent struggle and are closer in tone to O’Connor’s stories of disillusionment, loneliness and alienation. The difference in theme corresponds in a difference in narrative style and voice, which makes for an interesting comparison with the majority of Macken’s stories about a communal values in a changeless rural Ireland.status: publishe