“Accursed Time”: Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition and John McGahern’s That They May Face the Rising Sun

Abstract

Abstract: This article analyses the connecting threads between the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze – as they appear in his 1968 text Difference and Repetition, which is one of Deleuze’s major solo works (along with The Logic of Sense) prior to his famous, anti-Oedipal collaborations with Felix Guattari – and the final novel written by John McGahern, That They May Face the Rising Sun (2002). It shall be argued that Deleuze’s conceptualisations of temporality and humanity’s relationship with its physical surroundings find their perfect literary realisations in the pages of McGahern’s That They May Face as he attempts to provide a vision of contemporary Ireland’s transcending of James Joyce’s nightmare of history and the deadening habit of what Samuel Beckett’s character Pozzo calls “accursed time”. Shakespeare, Proust, Joyce, and Beckett are the four literary authors who most unite Deleuze and McGahern in shared enthusiasm and they shall be considered as mediating presences between McGahern and Deleuze throughout the course of the article. It shall be argued that a Deleuzian vision lies at the heart of contemporary Irish literature and that That They May Face the Rising Sun represents a primary textual example of this literary strand.