The Subjective Real in William Trevor’s “Justina’s Priest”
Eugene O'Brien
Autumn 2014
As a genre, the short story is one which can be seen as neither/nor or both/and: it does not have the length and scope of a novel, nor does it have the intense yet disciplined formal structure of a poem, and it is for this reason that it is, perhaps, the most under-examined of all literary genres. Despite the fact that it has been practiced by some of the greatest writers in world literature—Chekov, Maupassant, Faulkner, Steinbeck and Hemingway—as well as a significant number of Irish writers—O’Faolain, O’Connor, Joyce, Banville and McGahern—it remains an elusive genre. Studies seldom focus on a single story, as there does not seem to be sufficient material in one story to carry the weight of sustained analysis. In this article, that trend will be reversed, as the focus here is on a single short story by William Trevor, entitled “Justina’s Priest,” from his 2005 collection A Bit on the Side, a collection which Paul Delaney has termed “masterful” (183). The title is part of an ongoing trope of Trevor’s fiction in that “women’s names provide the titles for several of his novels and many of his short stories” (Fitzgerald-Hoyt 143). The reason for the choice of this story is that it offers a fictive and complex perspective on the socio-cultural demise of the influence of the Catholic Church in Ireland. This is a topic that has been the subject of a significant amount of comment, but the fluctuations and consequences of the hegemonic power of this institution have never, I would contend, been dealt with so subtly as in this story.