Modern Mass Media and the Artist's Self-Disintegration in Fergus by Brian Moore

Abstract

Brian Moore (1921 –1999) was born in Northern Ireland. He immigrated to Canada in 1948, where he was a reporter for the Montreal Gazette. He later moved to settle in the United States. Moore’s fame springs from writing about exiled individuals. Fergus (1970) is one of his poignant novels that focus on delineating the artist –hero struggle with the mass media in self exile in the States .Moore believes that modern mass media can either be a means of creation or a weapon of self- destruction in any artist’s life , whether an actor ,a painter or a writer . In his novel Fergus , he focuses on delineating rather the negative impact of the life of publicity and mass media on the hero , who is a writer of an Irish descent like himself . He adopts the technique of presenting a hallucinatory kind of reality in which the actual world of the hero is inhabited by visiting ghosts of dead people from his past life in Ireland. Moore’s purpose in using this method is to highlight the readers understanding of true nature of the sacrifices that an artist makes for achieving his dream of living a celebrity figure in a place like America. Yet, Fergus’s predicament as an artist in exile is intertwined with Moore’s personal crises in Ireland .The novel becomes a medium for filtering his passion and nostalgia for his parents’ world, despite its stagnation and conflicting realities.