Alf MacLochlain, Corpus in the Library: Stories and Novellas, Dalkey Archive Press, 1996.
borrow it here
In this collection of two novellas and seven short stories, Alf MacLochlainn comically reduces life’s problems to the minute details of everyday existence. Socks, shoes, and trousers suggest perplexing difficulties: how best to put them on, the intricacies involved in keeping them on, the physical (as well as psychological) laws related to the interaction of body and clothing. All such speculations come to an absurd, crashing halt as the contemporary mind, filled with an overload of information, attempts but fails to make sense of some of the simplest, though of course complex, mundane facts of daily life.
From Dublin to Central Illinois to Outer Space, MacLochlainn’s stories embody the imaginative spirit of Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien.
Irish author Mac Lochlainn, best known for his surrealist novella Out of Focus, has just published his first collection of fictional works in 19 years, under the title of The Corpus in the Library. Essentially a collection of several stories and two novellas, the work is rather bland in its forced sophistication and much too aware of what constitutes "literature" to make it truly enjoyable. For example, the novella A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Bounty of Nature Enterprise retells the tale of Mutiny on the Bounty in a futuristic, space-age setting, but for all the potential in appropriating a popular text, Mac Lochlainn's story simply tosses together allusions to Captain Cook, Genesis and the like in an attempt at originality. As with most of the tales here, the result is high-quality, writerly work, but of a dry and academic sort. There is one exception: in "Space Invaders," the author examines the notion of personal space. Through sharp characterizations and personal insights, rather than literary allusions, Mac Lochlainn creates a story that is both moving and meditative. In short, The Corpus in the Library is an apt title, not just because Mac Lochlainn was for a long time director of the National Library of Ireland, but because this body of tales is in danger of being asphyxiated by the weight of texts. - Publishers Weekly
Alf MacLochlain, Past Habitual: Stories, Dalkey Archive Press, 2015.
The narrative of Past Habitual roams through experiences both commonplace and formative; childhood play, scarlet fever, a first kiss, befriending a Nazi spy, all under the uneasy canopy of wartime Ireland. Voices move with ease from that of a young child to a German immigrant, IRA member to colloquial chatter, forming a web of interactions that lay out a century’s tensions both thoughtfully and provocatively. Accounts given through newspaper stories, military statements, anecdotes, memories of the dead, and gossip are of questionable factitiousness but nevertheless absorbing. Alf MacLochlainn’s style shifts between traditional prose, poetry, monologue and musical depiction, catching the reader unawares, referencing everything from conkers to anthropometrics, marbles to the IRA, fixing a flat tire to the Holocaust. Both recollection and memoir, fiction and fact,Past Habitual is an engaging and fascinating depiction of Ireland struggling through the effects of both a distant war, and another on her doorstep.
Imaginary presidents, minstrel boys and dental hygienists are just some of the characters that populate the inventive worlds of Alf MacLochlainn’s short story collection. Titles such as “Why did I volunteer to kill the kittens?” draw the reader into the 12 stories, with MacLochlainn’s discursive style veering between whimsy and more serious subjects. In one story we hear about the demolition of a beloved gnome house; in the next we are in the world of a young pupil from an industrial school, meeting “wicked spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of souls”. Fans of Flann O’Brien will enjoy the absurdity of some of the situations, though the writing is less funny and more autobiographical. This is MacLochlainn’s third book. His debut, the novella Out of Focus, was published in the 1980s. - Sarah Gilmartin
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/past-habitual-by-alf-maclochlainn-1.2222496
The narrative of Past Habitual roams through experiences both commonplace and formative; childhood play, scarlet fever, a first kiss, befriending a Nazi spy, all under the uneasy canopy of wartime Ireland. Voices move with ease from that of a young child to a German immigrant. IRA member to colloquial chatter, forming a web of interactions that lay out a century ‘s tensions both thoughtfully and provocatively. Accounts given through newspaper stories , military statements, anecdotes, memories of the dead, and gossip are of questionable factitiousness but nevertheless absorbing. Alf MacLochlainn’s style shifts between traditional prose, poetry, monologue and musical depiction, catching the reader unawares, referencing everything from conkers to anthropometrics, marbles to the IRA, fixing a flat tire to the Holocaust. Both recollection and memoir, fiction and fact, Past Habitual is an engaging and fascinating depiction of Ireland struggling through the effects of both a distant war, and another on her doorstep. - Charlie Byrne
charliebyrne.com/past-habitual-by-alf-maclochlainn/
A short story collection can be a curious beast, for the reader who may have a defined expectation about structure and form and for the reviewer who endeavours to capture the encounter with a writer who embraces and defies form as it pleases him. Having emerged from Past Habitual, the newly released collection of stories by Irish writer Alf MacLochlainn, the most helpful advice I can offer is: prepare to encounter narratives that will, at times, ramble and diverge into detailed accounts of practical matters: the treatment of scarlet fever, the options for constructing toilet facilities, the systemic way to approach the assessment of a corpse, the history and development of the stereoscope and more, but if one surrenders to the voices of the narrators, imagining a story recounted over a pint, such excursions prove remarkably compelling and, more often than not, fall imaginatively within the broader arc of the story unfolding around it.
That is not to say that each of the twelve stories in Past Habitual follows the same formula – far from it. There are more traditional stories – “A stitch in time”, Demolition of a gnome-house”, “Why dd I volunteer to kill the kittens?” – that explore with a striking sensitivity, a budding love affair, a boy’s creation of a cardboard house in the garden as a symbolic retreat from the tensions inside his real house, a young man’s clumsy effort to impress his girlfriend and it’s disastrous outcome. His narratives are, however, frequently more complicated and sometimes very experimental in form and varied in style. Yet his keen ear and eye for the tenderness and brutality of human interaction surfaces throughout.
My preference often favoured the more unconventional narratives such as “Dot-and-carry-on” in which the segments of the story are offered as a series of linked dots connecting scenes like a child’s drawing activity as the narrator ties together key events in his personal and family history reaching back to the Easter Week rising and forward to a curious encounter with a Nazi spy living in the officially neutral Ireland during the Second World War. “Imagined monologues at a college function yield some explanation of the survival of the fittest” is, as the title suggests, a flow of conversational fragments that captures latent biases and prejudices that were not uncommon among mid-century intellectuals.
Born in Dublin in 1926, MacLochlainn was a career librarian. He has published a previous story collection and a novella. His stories extend a broad sweep across 20th century Ireland, from the Easter Rising, through the Second World War, to the political upheavals that have marked more recent times. Some stories are set against the backdrop of WWII, while others explore the role of memory in shaping and distorting the communal folklore within which pivotal events are recorded, remembered and passed on. As the sergeant instructing officers on the careful and appropriate use of a newly arrived shredder in one the most wonderfully inventive stories warns:
“without that evidential support, Guard, are we not entirely dependent on memory? And memory can be so fallible, can it not? – Or perhaps in some cases I should call it imagination…”
In Past Habitual, MacLochlainn skillfully blends remembrances, facts and imagination to offer a collection that surprises, challenges and delights. This recent release from Dalkey Archive Press is part of their Irish Literature Series. - roughghosts.com/2015/07/16/ireland-in-the-imperfect-tense-past-habitual-stories-by-alf-maclochlainn/
The collection’s primary strength is its variety of well-developed narrative voices. Characters include a modern-day civil servant in search of a heraldry expert, a member of a boarding school marching band, and a reporter writing about Easter Week, 1916; while the speakers vary in age, time period, and connection to the country, they relate to one another through elements of Ireland’s politics, culture, or history.
Through tone and syntax, MacLochlainn manages to make every narrator an authentic-sounding person with distinctive internal patterns. The narrator of “Daisy Daisy” reveals himself to be sensitive and slightly inarticulate from his first sentence, saying, “I try to pretend to myself that I can keep them all at arm’s length, it has nothing to do with me, they are just old acquaintances, but it doesn’t really hold up.” This casual, conversational language remains consistent throughout the story, providing a meticulous and subtle outline of the speaker’s inner life. The radically different narrator of “Demolition of a gnome house” uses equally distinctive language. An intuitive child, he starts his narration with the simple statement, “There was always an envelope.” The envelope signifies money, and the rest of the story unfolds in a progression of similarly uninformed but perceptive statements appropriate to the character.
Aided by this narrator-specific language, many of the the stories develop a strong and appealing sense of intimacy. Small domestic moments—a first kiss, a first kill—become even more vivid and moving than their thundering historical backgrounds. In “Demolition of a gnome house,” the young narrator’s careful sense of duty and anxiety about his family’s monetary troubles becomes deeply touching; the narrator of “Why did I volunteer to kill the kittens” describes his admiration of an early girlfriend with equal sensitivity and detail.
Even so, the stories remain slightly inadequate, slightly bereft of an extra jolt of surprise or significance. The author seems to want to create stories with Joycean epiphanies, but the stories are slightly flat: “Daisy Daisy,” for one, describes a town’s reaction to a girl’s unplanned pregnancy, and while it captures the characters and culture with sufficient clarity, it conveys no lingering sense of importance, newness, or depth. The story attempts to introduce an additional thematic dimension by way of a symbol—feces as fertilizer—but fails to make the connection seem universalizing or especially intricate. Other stories make similar bids at meaning but end up mired in overstatement and melodrama: The otherwise-strong “Demolition of a gnome house” ends with a slightly absurd description of a boy’s collapsed mud castle. MacLochlainn writes, “The solid universe lies uncharitable before me and I stand up to the full height of a seven-year-old boy. Through the tears streaming from my eyes I can barely see the collapsing gnome-house as it falls in ruins in the dust about my feet.” The author tries to imbue a childhood event with tragic significance but veers too far towards the theatrical, turning a supposedly weighty and sorrowful moment into an unintentionally flimsy and comedic one.
Other writing strategies pose similar problems. MacLochlainn toys endlessly with format, including quasi-poetic fragments from a paper shredder, a variety of fonts, and paragraphs titled “DOT no. 1.” Most bizarrely, he prefaces “The minstrel boy” with an onomatopoetic stream-of-consciousness. Lines range from “DOOM-bang FIFING PIPING” to “Out from the shadow of the stand BOOM BANG.” The section almost seems like a nod to the “Sirens” section of “Ulysses,” in which James Joyce precedes a section about music with an lyric version of an orchestra warming up. The technique, though, doesn’t work as well for MacLochlainn as it does for Joyce. As is true for most of the other format experiments, it proves to be inoffensive but unnecessary. “The minstrel boy” would lose nothing if the section were taken out, just as the fancy fonts add nothing to “Dot-and-carry-on.”
The collection, taken as a whole, evidences extensive literary knowledge and intense ambition. “Past Habitual” clearly involves emotion and research and time; the author cares deeply about his technique and his subject matter, and it shows. Still, the entire project might have been much more successful had MacLochlainn resigned himself to simpler goals. Clean style and thematic impact are undervalued here, and the result is an interesting but rather muddled product. - Charlotte L. R. Anrig
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2015/4/14/alf-maclochlainn-past-habitual/
Alf MacLochlain, Out of Focus, Dalkey Archive Press, 1985.
The anonymous narrator in Alf MacLochlainn's?"Out of Focus"?has more than blurred vision when he looks at the world around him as he recuperates from his many minor accidents. His visual perception or skewed perspective is a working out of the author's theory taken from William Molyneux's statement in 1692 "that an object may be seen in two places yet not seen double." / Whether he is on his bed looking through the crystal of his watch, or in a hospital bathtub peering into the overflow opening, or sitting on a chaise lounge with an empty barrel of a ballpoint pen or ring from a beer can to his eye, or back in his bed looking through a gauze bandage, this very accident-prone hero/victim manages to see inside what appears to be real-life scenes going on outside. / And when he is not playing the voyeur, his mind runs on zany inventions (natural/non-natural bust supports and shot-proof crystal eye protectors, for example) and pseudo-pedantic discussions about optics, clocks and cycling designs. / Although everything about this novel is original--plot, style, illustrations--it tips its hat in passing to some of those who have gone before: Beckett's Malone Dies and Molloy, and the narrators of "At Swim-Two-Birds" and "Cadenza."
Alf MacLochlainn, who died on December 8th, 2018 in Galway, aged 92, was a former director of the National Library of Ireland and University Librarian at NUI Galway. He wrote fiction and poetry and published widely, in Irish and English, on history, film, music, typography, and even papermaking.
Born in Dublin, on July 30th, 2018, he graduated from University College Dublin in 1947 with a BA in French and Irish and an MA in Irish the following year. In 1949 he became a librarian at the National Library and in 1976 he was appointed its director. In 1982 he became university librarian at NUI Galway, serving until 1991 when he retired. He held several prestigious positions, including a Library of Congress Fellowship, and he was the inaugural holder of the visiting chair of Irish studies at Burns Library, Boston College. He was a trustee of the Chester Beatty Library and chair of the James Joyce Institute of Ireland.
Scholar-librarian
MacLochlainn, the quintessential scholar-librarian, could truly be described as fear ioldánach. He had a distinguished career as a professional librarian, who also published in that field and in related areas such as bibliography. He wrote many academic articles and book chapters on a wide range of topics relating to Irish history. He co-edited The Emigrant Experience and Letters of an Irish Patriot: William Paul Dowling in Tasmania, a work of history which is also an exploration of his own family background. His writings in literary and film criticism are substantial and are scattered over many journals and periodicals.
As a writer of stories and novellas his reputation is at present confined to a relatively small coterie of admirers, but this is expanding. He published three volumes of fiction: Out of Focus, The Corpus in the Library, and Past Habitual. He fits into a rich Irish surreal tradition of Sterne (insofar as he was Irish), Fr Prout, Joyce, Beckett, Flann O’Brien, and perhaps the venerable lexicographer Fr Dinneen, for what one might call his Dinneenseanchas. Indeed, one might consider as part of this tradition the Brehon Laws, which include a stunningly comprehensive legal meditation on, of all things, dogs’ excrement. The objects MacLochlainn focuses on in his fiction are frequently the small change of everyday life. He presents a wondrous postmodern pot-pourri of, for instance, the effects of second World War on Rathmines (up to now, ignored), and the tyranny of the decimal system.
His final book, Past Habitual, has a heroically meticulous description of mending a puncture. In these stories past habitual is also past imperfect. Claims to truth are hard to sustain, “knowledge” is always in inverted commas, always more-or-less accidental and haphazard, randomly assembled from an odd volume of an encyclopaedia, even from that most unlikely source of enlightenment, the shredder. In the author’s quirky angle of vision objects and events are “out of focus”. There are very few right angles in his way of looking at things but many acute and, in its strictly geometrical sense, obtuse ones.
Mastery of styles
MacLochlainn’s fiction showcases his impressive word-hoard and mastery of several styles and registers; he comically exploits various technical and vocational lingos, such as heraldic language, but also marshals the comic mode for serious purposes, as in The Minstrel Boy, which is about the Artane Boys’ Band and sexual predation. John Banville once observed that he “writes a very fine prose . . . the finest style I have encountered in any Irish writer in recent years”.
He was a witty and engaging conversationalist, stimulating and indeed challenging, and often delightfully cross-grained. He was a socialist who was involved in many progressive causes. In 2007 he was given a long-service award by the Labour Party. He was a close friend of President Michael D Higgins who, at his funeral, delivered a beautifully pitched tribute. -
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