Angela's Ashes Review
...Studies | Date: September 22, 2002 | Author: Levy, Eric P.
Since publication in 1996, Angela's Ashes, by Frank McCourt, has already elicited substantial critical response. Brief notice of three such evaluations will indicate the range of reception. Peter Lenz approaches the memoir in terms of relevant motifs in the Irish literary tradition, with particular emphasis on 'the macabre, the grotesque, the tragicomical, [and]...the theme of the exile'. (1) He also investigates the 'resemblance' of narrative technique in McCourt's memoir 'to the Irish Oral Tradition and to how the seanchai, the oral story-teller, tried to drag the listener in to make him part of the story'. (2) In contrast, George O'Brien focuses, not on similarities between Angela's Ashes and preceding tradition, but on the ways in which the memoir exposes defects in the culture which it concerns. Paying particular attention to 'the twin powers of utterance and finality', O'Brien goes beyond a mere inventory of deficiencies to clarify their cumulative impact: 'From the sustained manner in which every area of Irish social life is revealed to be inadequate, repressive, discriminatory, and essentially inhumane, there emerges an exhaustive view of a humiliating collective failure.' (3) His reading examines both the damage caused by dysfunctions and the rehabilitation achieved by 'the work of recuperation.' (4)
In a contrary approach, Fred Robinson emphasizes not the negative features in the culture of Limerick, the Irish setting of most of the memoir, but the positive ones, especially the 'commercial and industrial culture of change'. (5) According to Robinson, Angela's Ashes pits two cultural attitudes against each other. One concerns a conviction of 'doom', and derives from 'colonialism, poverty, insularity, and the Roman Catholic church'. (6) The other concerns 'a culture of the modem,...
View Full Essay
