Ageing is a worldwide phenomenon but it is also a sociopolitical identity that varies according to different cultures and, with predictions that by 2030 one in five people resident in Ireland will be aged fifty or over, the study of ageing in Ireland is growing apace. 1 However, as we will see, Irish literary gerontology has been slower to develop and, given recent demographic shifts and the growing cultural visibility of older people, age is arguably a missing category in Irish literary criticism, as once was the case for class, gender and race. This study, investigating the advantages of looking afresh at a range of familiar and not so familiar Irish texts through a gerontological lens, is intended as an early intervention in the field rather than a comprehensive survey, and aims to provide stimulus for further discussion. This introduction will look first at general theories of gerontology , then at literary gerontology , before going on to discuss ageing in the Irish context.
Gerontology and Its Challenges
The fact that gerontology has been gaining in importance since the 1970s is scarcely surprising since most of us, at least in the more affluent western societies like Ireland , are living longer, giving us all a stake in understanding the specific problems of ageing. Age studies , looking at the implications of age differences across the whole of the life course with particular emphasis on age-based discrimination, have also been developing rapidly and seeking best practice for promoting intergenerational understanding . 2 We in the west live in a highly age-specific culture where, from the moment we enter primary school, we are conditioned to be evaluated, and to evaluate others, according to age and these labels, as Jan Baars has pointed out, are often highly arbitrary: ‘Adult persons are transformed into aged or older bodies at a particular chronometric age without any evidence that such changes are actually taking place at that age.’ 3 Age-related generalizations are popular because the complexity of ageing identities is so difficult to comprehend. Moreover, we live in a culture that rewards youth and penalizes old age. Thomas Cole has highlighted the extent to which a liberal capitalist culture contributes to ageism by esteeming only those who are productive in terms of power, money and success and he argues that the ideological and psychological pressures to master old age have generated an unhelpful gerontophobia in the west. 4 Chris Phillipson agrees that, because its priorities relegate social concerns and individual needs behind the quest for profits, ‘as a social system capitalism can have a disastrous impact on the lives of older people’. 5 In the final chapter of her husband’s The Life Cycle Completed (1982), Joan Erikson argues that western society is not the best culture in which to grow old because it is unable to find a central role for older people: ‘Lacking a culturally viable ideal of old age, our civilization does not truly harbor a concept of the whole of life. As a result, our society does not truly know how to integrate elders into its primary patterns and conventions or into its vital functioning.’ 6 The relevance of the notion of a whole life vision has increasingly been questioned in view of the fragmentation of postmodern societies in which, in the absence of traditional frameworks, the onus is on individuals to shape their own ageing experience. Nonetheless, as we will see, some notion of harmony and integration over the course of a life remains vital for successful ageing.
In the context of diseases of the mind such as Alzheimer’s and dementia , John Swinton identifies a particular problem in western liberal cultures that isolate the intellect, reason, memory and learning capability as the core constituents of the human personality: ‘Thus there is an explicit and implicit negative cultural bias toward diseases which involve deterioration in intellect, rationality, autonomy, and freedom, those facets of human beings that Western cultures have chosen to value over and above others.’ 7 Cognition and memory are seen as crucial to the designation of social personhood and Swinton argues that living in such a society becomes a significant problem for people with dementia who risk not only social exclusion but also being regarded as no longer fully human.
In humanistic gerontology , concerned with the philosophical meaning of later life experience, ageing has often been seen as a time of getting back to essentials, a journey towards a more authentic self. As Henri Nouwen and W.J. Gaffney commented in their study, Aging: The Fulfillment of Life: ‘When hope grows we slowly see that we are worth not only what we achieve but what we are, that what life might lose in use, it may win in meaning.’ 8 The eight stages of ageing famously drawn up in ego psychologist Erik Erikson’s The Life Cycle Completed have been influential in this respect. Employing a Hegelian model in which successful resolution of the central crisis of each life stage involves a synthesis of two dialectical qualities, Erikson delineates the first seven stages moving from infancy to middle adulthood, while the eighth stage, which he labelled maturity, spans the years from sixty-five till death . This stage involves a tension between the thesis integrity (awareness of life’s wholeness) and the antithesis despair (horror at life’s fragmentation) leading to, if all goes well, a synthesis in wisdom, self-acceptance and a sense of fulfillment. Expanding on Erikson’s stages, Lars Tornstam employs the term gerotranscendence to suggest the serenity, the desire for solitude and meditation, and increased attentiveness to the world around us that may come with age: ‘The gerotranscendent individual … typically experiences a redefinition of the self and of relationships to others and a new understanding of fundamental, existential questions.’ 9 Unlike Erikson’s end-stopped integration, gerotranscendence in Tornstam is an open-ended process. Raymond Tallis argues that ageing provides the opportunity for creating the story one wants for one’s life as compared with ‘the traditional, largely unchosen narratives of ambition, development and personal advancement; and the biological imperatives of survival, reproduction and child-rearing’. 10 Time, he argues, may even operate differently, with less emphasis on the constraints of clock time, more on an intensification of the moment, as our awareness of the transience of life deepens our appreciation of it.
The positive view of ageing in Erikson, Tornstam and Tallis has been challenged by other gerontologists and in fact Erikson’s own account became more nuanced when, as a result of her observations of her husband in his nineties, Joan Erikson added a ninth stage covering advanced old age when loss of capacities may command all one’s attention, emphasizing that the ageing process is only partly controllable and that to promote positive ageing in terms of health and self-reliance may result in a superficial optimism not borne out by the facts. 11 Several writers have questioned Erikson’s notion that a ‘life review’ , a term introduced by Robert Butler in 1963, necessarily leads to integration and a more accurate understanding of life-long conflicts. The life review was intended to provide a therapeutic opportunity for the older person to explore the meaning of his/her life through autobiographical reminiscence, thereby allowing for the possibility of personal transformation while also countering the impersonality of data collection and demographic monitoring. Butler describes the life review as a ‘naturally occurring, universal mental process characterized by the progressive return to consciousness of past experiences, and particularly, the resurgence of unresolved conflicts; simultaneously, and normally, these reviewed experiences and conflicts can be surveyed and integrated.’ 12 The difficulty is that reviewing one’s life may produce not integration and transcendence but a new sense of instability and uncertainty around identity, and Betty Friedan has suggested that integration of one’s past life is not necessarily the answer since it cuts off the possibility of future change and development. 13 In his discussion of life narratives, Jan Baars also chooses to emphasise reflection as on-going and always liable to re-evaluation over completion and integration. 14 Nevertheless in providing a bridge between gerontology and literature, the notion of a life review or narrative has played an important function.
These conflicting arguments around old age echo the debate between Freud , who regarded old age as akin to castration and argued that adult development is fixed in middle age with no possibility of further change, 15 and Jung who emphasized the special developmental tasks of old age and suggested that ageing is a time of potential for growth and self-realisation, when one gains a new sense of freedom from society’s constraints and becomes less conformist: ‘The afternoon of life is just as full of meaning as the morning; only, its meaning and purpose are different.’ 16 The danger of limiting the complexities of the ageing experience to such positive-negative polarities is evident and, as discussed below, literature may do much to bring nuance to the debate.
Similarly polarising attitudes to ag...