Opt Lit Engl An3 Sem2 Anghel 2009

UNIVERSITATEA DIN CRAIOVA
FACULTATEA DE LITERE
CATEDRA DE STUDII ANGLO-AMERICANE
PROGRAMA ANALITICA
Titlul cursului: Twentieth Century Irish Fiction

Titularul cursului: Florentina Anghel
An de studii: III, semestrul 2
Specializarea: ID Limb i literatur romn - Limb i literatur englez
TEMATICA
Historical and cultural background
Introduction
Language
Fairies
James Joyce
Dubliners
Crossing chronotopic borders in The Dead
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Stephen's quest of the father as a quest of identity
Depersonalization through individuation in Joyce's A Portrait
Epiphany
Flann OBrien
General aspects of Flann OBriens work
Cultural space and time in The Third Policeman
Seamus Deane
Narrative strategies in Reading in the Dark
The identity problem in Reading in the Dark
Reaching silence in Reading in the Dark
William Trevor
The identity problem in Fools of Fortune
Indulging in suffering. Reshaping love in Fools of Fortune
Bibliografie selectiv
Bahtin, M. Probleme de literatur i estetic. Trans. Nicolae Iliescu. Bucureti: Univers, 1982.
Coste, Didier, Narrative as Communication, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1989
Deane, Seamus, Reading in the Dark, New York, Vintage Books, 1998
Delaney, Frank. The Celts. London: Grafton, 1989.
Durand, Gilbert. Structurile antropologice ale imaginarului, Editura Univers, Bucuresti, 1998
Genette, Grard. Figures I, II, III. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969, 1972.
Narrative Discourse An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. New York: Cornell University
Press, 1987.
Hackney, Blackwell, Amy, and Ryah Hackney. The Everything Irish History & Heritage Book. Avon,
Massachusets: Adams Media, 2004.
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Bucureti: Prietenii Crii, 1993.
Dubliners. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1995.
Kiberd, Declan. 2002. Inventing Ireland. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Lintvelt, Jaap, Incercare de tipologie narativ, Punctul de vedere, trad. Angela Martin, Bucureti,
Univers, 1994
Mahony, Christina Hunt. 1998. Contemporary Irish Literature. New York: St. Martins Press.
Moody, T.W., and F.X. Martin, eds. The Course of Irish History. Lanham. United States and Canada:
Roberts Reinhart Publishers in association with Radio Telefs irean, 2001.
OBrien, Flann. 2002. The Third Policeman. Chicago: Dalkey Archive Press.
Nuallin, Ciarn. 1998. The Early Years of Brian ONolan / Flann OBrien / Myles na gCopaleen.
Dublin: The Lilliput Press.
Trevor, William. Fools of Fortune. London: Penguin Books, 1984.
Evaluare
70% examen final, 30% testari pe parcursul semestrului
Theme 1: Historical and cultural background
Units
Introduction
Language
Fairies
Objectives:
To understand the objectives of the course
To understand the social, historical and cultural context
To be able to describe and later identify in texts the main events in Irelands history
To understand the relation between literature and reality
Time allotted: 2 hours

Bibliography:
Geddes & Grosset. Celtic Mythology. Sotland: David Dale House, 2006.
Hackney Blackwell, Amy, and Ryah Hackney. The Everything Irish History & Heritage Book. Avon,
Hurtley, J.A. Hughes, B., Gonzales, R.M., Praga, I. and Aliaga, E. Diccionario cultural e historico de
Irlanda. Barcelona: Ariel Referencia, 1996.
Jarvie, Gordon (ed). Irish Folk and Fairy Tales. Belfast: The Backstaff Press, 2004.
* Early Irish Myths and Sagas. Translated by Jeffrey Gantz. London: Penguin Books, 1981.
Introduction
Twentieth-century Irish literature is of major importance since it produced some of the
greatest writers, for example James Joyce for prose, William Butler Yeats for poetry, and
Samuel Beckett for drama. Besides its aesthetic qualities, Irish literature is very well
integrated in the social and historical context of the time. It promoted, and still does, the Irish
identity problem and was a means the Irish used to fight for their independence.
The course aims to present the students the well-known representatives of twentieth-
century literature in prose: James Joyce, Flann OBrien, Seamus Deane, William Trevor. The
features and techniques as well as the themes that can be identified in their works are focused
on. At the same time, innovation and novelty support their importance and the fact that they
are the subject of this course. While James Joyce and Flann OBrien are emblematic for the
former half of the twentieth century, Seamus Deane and William Trevor are contemporary
writers. Their belonging to different periods in literature known as modernism (James Joyce
and Flann OBrien) and postmodernism (Seamus Deane and William Trevor) help the
students get accustomed to the features specific to both literary currents.
The above mentioned writers use different techniques to build their characters. James
Joyce follows the evolution of the protagonist from childhood to maturity in a
buildungsroman-like novel, yet the reader is not directed in the understanding of the
characters growth since the author uses the stream-of-consciousness technique and an
internal, subjective, and limited perspective. Flann OBrien is a well known satirist. Seamus
Deane shows how his character grows mature but he chooses to present the protagonists
evolution in a diary-like novel, which means again an internal, subjective and thus limited
perspective. William Trevor prefers a more complex perspective there are more narrators,
both internal and external , yet it remains subjective and limited. Through the techniques that
they use, the above-mentioned authors make the readers be more involved in the reading of
the text and decide upon the meaning(s) of the text.
Furthermore, the works to be studied offer a wide range of themes, general themes that
can be identified in other works belonging to other cultural contexts (meaning other spaces
and other times) such as love, fatherson relationship, the evolution of the artist, fate, etc., and
specific themes reflecting the Irish context and the national identity problem: the conflict
between the Catholics and the Protestants, the conflict between religion and politics, isolation,
exile and self-exile, the quest of identity, Celtic myths, historical determinism. The second
category of themes is illustrative of the relation between art and reality and of the role and
impact art can have upon people and education. These authors works display an intrinsic
synchronicity with the historical and cultural background.
At the end of the course the students should be able to explain the relationship
between literature and reality, which means to identify elements of Irish culture and
civilisation in the studied works. They should be able to summarize the main story in each
work, to characterize the protagonists and to identify the narrative techniques each author
used in his works, to define and explain them. The students have to be able to identify the
themes and subthemes of the novels, to describe them, to include them in one of the above-
mentioned categories and to support their choice with arguments from the text. Eventually, the
students have to write an essay on the techniques the authors used in their works or an opinion
essay starting from one of the themes of the novels studied.
Evaluation test:
1. Who are the main representatives of twentieth century Irish prose?
Answer: The main representatives of twentieth century Irish prose are James Joyce and Flann
OBrien for the former half of the century and William Trevor and Seamus Deane for the
latter half.
2. What are the themes that can be identified in the works to be studied?
Answer:
Questions:
1. What is the perspective from which the stories are told in the novels to be studied?
Answer: Although the authors chose different points of view (external with James Joyce,
internal with Seamus Deane and with William Trevor) the perspective from which the story is
told is subjective and limited.
2. What is the perspective WilliamTrevor chose for his novel?
Answer:
Summary
The course aims to present the students the well-known representatives of twentieth-
century Irish literature in prose: James Joyce, Flann OBrien, Seamus Deane, William
Trevor.
The analysis of the literary works will be focused on specific narrative techniques and
central themes.
A better understanding of the texts will be provided through a contextual approach
meaning the identification of historical and cultural elements mentioned or referred to
in the works studied.

To better understand Irish literature, students should have minimal knowledge of the
historical evolution of the country and of the twentieth-century social, economic and cultural
context. The origin of the Irish people goes back to the Celts who established in Ireland a
century before Christ. Although they were not the first inhabitants, the fact that they resisted
any influence and that they absorbed the other migrants and their culture for nearly one
thousand years made them coherently build a solid cultural core the heritage that the Irish
boast with nowadays.
Other migrants such as the Vikings, the 8th century, and the Scots, contributed to the
economic and cultural evolution of the country while also spoiling the harmony of the
community. The Scots brought their respect for education, order and beautiful buildings in
Ulster. The Vikings spread around Ireland and contributed to the rise of towns and
commercial centres. In the 9th century, when the Vikings decided to settle down, they founded
Dublin (840), which they later developed by carefully planning it in the 10th century, and other
settlements.
The course of Irish history was changed by the Norman conquest (the twelfth century),
also known as the Anglo-Norman conquest as few of the incomers who got to Ireland were
of Norman ancestry, most of them were more related to the Kingdom of England through
family links.
The first English settlers arrived in Ireland in the twelfth century and settled their first
colony near Dublin. They eventually colonized only part of the country and being less
numerous and not dominated by the kingdom, the colonists developed different strategies of
survival from adopting Gaelic customs and names to mingling with the Gaelic population and
to maintaining their control over areas of importance, such as Dublin. A new wave of settlers
of Puritan religion reinforced Englands control over Ireland in the 16th century. The new
colonists chose to enforce religious discrimination and they repudiated both Irish of Catholic
religion and English of Catholic religion who belonged to the first wave of English colonists.
An important event was the battle that took place on 15 August, 1598, in which the
Irish were victorious. It may be described as the Irish victory which the clever English had
later turned into defeat (Trevor 20). According to Hayes McCoy the above mentioned battle,
one of the most important in Ulster, was begun by some of the Ulster lords in 1593 and joined
by Hugh ONeil, earl of Tyrone: Until 1597, the English merely marched into the Irish
territories and left garrisons in castles or roughly constructed forts. ONeils great victory at
the Yellow Ford, north of Armagh, in 1598 made them more cautious (Hayes-McCoy 149).
ONeil submitted in 1603, the Battle of Kinsale, which meant the end of the old Irish world
(Hayes-McCoy 151).
The rebellion in 1641 brought the Ulster Irish and the Old English together in what
they called the Confederate Catholics. The Catholic English joined the movement for their
protection against the new settlers and their greed. The war resulted in the defeat of the
Confederate Catholics, while in England the Civil war led to Cromwells victory. These two
events followed by the confiscations of the 1960s had as a result the degradation of the Old
English who became Irish to both Irish and English.
An improvement of the situation of the Catholic Irish is related to Daniel OConnell
and his fight for Catholic emancipation in the 1820s. He succeeded a mass movement by
involving the Church and by inaugurating the Catholic rent of 1 penny. According to the
law, Catholics could not sit in parliament, but they were not forbidden to candidate. Daniel
OConnell announced his candidature for the well-known Clare elections (1828) and was
elected. The British government introduced a Catholic emancipation bill as a result of the
elections and it became a law in 1829. Unhappily, the next campaign known as the
campaign for the repeal of the union between Ireland and Britain Daniel OConnell initiated
failed with the calling off of the meeting planned for 8 October 1843.
A further step was set by the fight of the Land League whose president was Charles
Stewart Parnell supported by the Fenian organisation. As a result of the movement that
wanted peasant ownership the Land Act of 1881 diminished the interest of the landlords in the
land. In 1885 the British government established a system to make the peasants purchase their
land with the help of the state. This success determined Parnell and his supporters to begin the
fight for home rule. Parnell died in 1891 without succeeding in his attempt. Two more
rebellions (the Easter Rising in 1916 and the Anglo-Irish War 1919-1921) and bloodshed were
needed for the treaty signed in December 1921 between the British and the Irish.
Language
A countrys national identity is related to its national language. The fact that the native
Irish aristocracy abandoned their language had a long-term effect on the use of Irish. First,
people chose to use English in legal, commercial and administrative life. When English
became the language used in literature and in church, the Irish was associated with poverty
and ignorance. Therefore the Irish taught their children English at home in order to protect
them, which explains why at the beginning of the twentieth century one percent of the
population spoke only Irish. The areas were the language was still spoken were in the western
and south-western side of the country.
Fairies
One of the most known and feared fairies in Ireland is phooka/puca, a word whose
etymology is supposed to be Scandinavian and that may mean nature spirit. It can have a
variety of forms and is a mischief fairy that appears at night. Puca can appear as a small
goblin, a dark horse, an eagle or a black goat.
According to Irish legends there are fairies whose children are stunted or deformed
creatures or who do not have children at all. These fairies replace the souls of their children
with souls taken from human children. The human children whose souls have been replaced
become mean and destructive, they enjoy their families problems, sing at night, can
(ex)change parts of their bodies. They are called changelings. A changeling can also be an
actual fairy child or a senile fairy disguised as a child. Irrespective of the category that they
belong to, changelings generally bring evil and misfortune in the house.
Evaluation test:
3. What was the effect of the 1641 war waged by the Confederate Catholics?
Answer: The war in 1640 during which the Old English fought with the Irish resulted in the
defeat of the Confederate Catholics and the degradation of the Old English.
4. What was Parnells contribution to the Irish fight for independence?
Answer:
Questions:
1. What are the two movements that Daniel OConnell inaugurated?
Answer: Daniel OConnell succeeded in getting elected during the Clare elections (1828)
which made the British government pass the Catholic emancipation bill. He also initiated the
campaign for the repeal of the union between Ireland and Britain.
2. What is the importance of the fact that the Irish aristocracy chose to speak English instead
of Irish?
Answer:
Summary
Waves of migrants partly contributed to the development of the Irish communities
while destroying the harmony of their cultural development and the peace of the
country.
The English colonized Ireland twice, the latter wave bringing war, the loss of their
ownership and of their language.
The Irish fought for their independence along centuries: The War of the Confederate
Catholics, political fights in the British parliament, the Catholic Association, the
Repeal Association, the National League, the Fenian Organisation, etc.
At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century one percent of the
population spoke only Irish.
Among the well- known Irish fairies the puca and the changeling can be mentioned.
Theme 2: James Joyce
Units
Biographical notes
Dubliners
Time and Space in The Dead
A Portrait of the Artist: Stephen's Quest of the Father as a Quest of Identity
Depersonalization through Individuation in Joyce's A Portrait
Epiphany
Objectives:
To identify the narrative techniques the author uses
To summarize the events of the works
To describe the main characters
To explain the main characters evolution
To identify cultural elements in the works
Bibliography:
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Bucureti: Prietenii Crii, 1993.
Dubliners. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1995.
Ulysses. New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1961.
Bahtin, M. Probleme de literatur i estetic. Trans. Nicolae Iliescu. Bucureti: Univers, 1982.
Bergson, Henri. Eseu asupra datelor imediate ale contiinei. Trans. Horia Lazr. Cluj-Napoca:
Editura Dacia, 1993.
Gndirea i micarea. Trans. Ingrid Ilinca. Iai: Polirom, 1995.
Mind Energy: Lectures and Essays (1919). Trans. H. Wildon Car. London: Macmillan, 1920.
Cotru, Liviu. The Scythe of Time. Cluj-Napoca: Editura Napoca Star, 1999.
Durand, Gilbert. Structurile antropologice ale imaginarului, Editura Univers, Bucuresti, 1998
Genette, Grard. Figures I, II, III. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969, 1972.
Narrative Discourse An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. New York: Cornell University
Press, 1987.
Narrative Discourse Revisited. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. New York: Cornell University Press,
1988.
Tennyson, Alfred. Crossing the Bar in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Fifth edition,
vol.2, Abrams M.H. (ed). New York and London: W.W.Noton & Company, 1986, 1215.
Yeats, William Butler. Death in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Fifth edition, vol.2,
Abrams M.H. (ed). New York and London: W.W.Noton & Company, 1986, 2193.
JAMES JOYCE
(1882-1940)
Biographical notes
Born in a Catholic family in Rathgar, a southern suburb of Dublin, on February 2,
1882, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was the greatest twentieth century prose writer.
Joyces father, John Stanislaus, had come from a family of merchants from Cork, yet he
claimed the descent from the clan of Galway and kept a coat of arms of the Galway Joyces
that later on James Joyce took care of. There is no evidence of a direct relationship of the two
families. In a similar way, Joyces mother claims relationship with Daniel OConnell, but the
relationship cannot be verified. (Ellmann 9-11) John Stanislaus wanted to move his family
farther from his wifes relatives and closer to water, and he enjoyed giving parties every
Sunday: May Joyce played the piano and John sang different songs and ballads.
May Joyce was helped to bring her children up by Mrs. Hearn Conway, Dante in A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, who was well-educated, both religious and nationalist,
and acted as a governess. John Stanislaus wanted to offer his elder son the highest education
and sent him to study at Clongowes Wood College, considered the best school in Ireland and
run by the Jesuit order. Joyces memories from the period he spent at Clongowes are different
from Stephens. As Ellmann notes, Joyce told his friend Frank Budgen You allude to me as a
Catholic. Now, for the sake of precision and to get the correct contour on me, you ought to
allude to me as a Jesuit. (in Ellmann 27) Joyce spoke warmly of his experience at Clongowes
and his brother remembers him as being happy there. What he remained with after the years at
the Jesuit school seems to be related to his way of thinking: I have learnt to arrange things in
such a way that they become easy to survey and to judge. (in Ellmann 27)
Parnell played an important part in Joyces life both materially and spiritually.
Whenever he came home on holidays his father and John Kelly spoke about Parnell. Although
friends and supporters of Parnell, they were not treated with courtesy by the politician. Joyce
fancied himself as Parnell in real life, as Stephen did in A Portrait. The Irish hero lost his
strength under the pressure of his close political associates (Davitt, Gladstone, Catholic
bishops and Healy) and his defeat was seen as his betrayal, and the word betrayal became a
central one in Joyces view of his countrymen. (Ellmann 32) Parnells fall and death brought
a financial decline in the family. Jamess anger made him write his first poem Et Tu, Healy
which his father printed and distributed to his friends.
Joyce had to study at home for a period, then he was sent to the Christian Brothers
school, which he does not mention in A Portrait, and eventually to Belvedere College without
fees starting with 1993. The next two years James Joyce succeeded in winning the exhibitions
which brought to him 20 for only one year in 1984 and 20 for three years in 1985. At that
time he already had three models which coexisted in his mind despite their dissimilarity:
Parnell, Lucifer and Ulysses. Meanwhile he began to patronize local prostitutes, which is in
opposition with his being chosen Prefect of the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary at school,
an honour that was meant to recognize his academic achievements and his moral character.
The period at Belvedere College is also scattered with bad behaviour and disobedience, as
James Joyce showed interest in languages and not religion. Professor William Magennis of
University College, Dublin, who read the papers for English composition remarked Joyces
work and considered him publishable. (Ellmann 57)
As a university student Joyce continued to show his interest in literature, in Italian and
French and in aesthetics. He praised Ibsen, DAnnunzio, Dante, Giordano Bruno, Cavalcanti
Thomas Aquinas and followed them in either formal aspect of the work or ideas. As his
critical essays and political writings demonstrate, literature was above politics for him, which
made him spiritually and later concretely cross Irelands borders and criticize his
contemporaries literary works.
He debuted with a volume of love poetry Chamber Music which he published in 1907
and which was received with some critical acclaim from Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats
who noticed the delicacy and emotion of the poets temperament. Joyce confessed that he
wrote Chamber Music as a protest against himself. (Ellmann 154-155) James Joyces name
remains for his prose writings: Dubliners a collection of fifteen stories published in 1914; A
Portrait of the Artist as a Yong Man a rewriting of Stephen Hero, published in serials in The
Egoist (1914-1915) and as a book in 1916; Ulysses published in serials in The Little Review
(1918-1920) and as a books in 1922 in France, and Finnegans Wake that was written over a
period of 17 years and published in 1939, a year before James Joyces death.
Evaluation test:
1. What are the schools that James Joyce graduated from?
Answer: James Joyce studied at Clongowes Wood College, at the Jesuit Belvedere College
and at the University College in Dublin.
2. Who are the personalities that influenced him?
Answer:
Questions:
1. How did Parnells death affect the Joyce family?
Answer: James father was a paid canvasser for Parnell. When Parnell lost its power and
position, a financial and social decline of the Joyces was registered
2. What was James relation with his family?
Answer:
Summary
James Joyce was born in Dublin 1882, he was of Catholic religion and his father was
a paid canvasser for Parnell.
Joyce studied at Clongowes Wood College, at the Jesuit Belvedere College and at the
University College in Dublin. His university experience marked him a lot.
Joyces interest in Modern thought and art and in Ibsens works made him gain local
notoriety as a dangerously radical thinker.
He published Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and
Finnegans Wake.
Dubliners
Dubliners is a collection of stories about people who are too timid and conformist to
see things as they really are. The stories are case histories, all pointing to Joyce diagnosis of
moral paralysis. The stories in Dubliners deliberately employ musical effects and imagery
with a precisely calculated effect. Another device is the use of repeated motifs in the action.
The same action or relationship recurs in different forms at various points in the plot. Thus
Gabriel, in The Dead, is rebuffed by Lily at the beginning, by Miss Ivors in the middle, and
at the end by his own wife. Another repeated motif is mourning. In addition to the examples
already referred to, Gabriel, in his after dinner speech, mourns the passing of old-fashioned
hospitable virtues, and the guests discuss the great singers of a bygone era. Complementing
this is the idea of the anticipation of death expressed in the idea of going West, and the talk
about monks who sleep in their coffins. They link it with previous stories, in which thoughts
of the dead and dying repeatedly occur.
Joyces use of symbols in his stories is exactly what Pound required: images of
everyday objects, occurring naturally in the action of the stories. The only fantastic images are
reproductions of the characters own fantasies, like the childs dream of the dead priest in
The Sisters. The authors imagination works entirely upon these present things to endow
them with extra-significance. What is new about Joyces practice is the intensity and
consistency of his use of this device.
Another point about the symbolism used in this work is its explicitness. There is
nothing vague about the correspondence between the image and its meaning. Its interpretation
is clear, although various symbolism devices are employed.
One such device is the use of personal names, such as that of Gabriel, the central
character of The Dead. In Hebrew mythology the angel Gabriel is the prince of fire and the
angel of death, showing this characters attachment to warmth and his dull, compromising
existence. Much of the symbolism in the story is of this kind, as for example the symbol of
the goose. The wild goose is the conventional Irish symbol for the man who, refusing to
surrender his freedom, flees abroad. Gabriel is a tame goose: his ventures abroad take the
form of holiday cycling trips with friends. To refer again to common idiom, his goose is
cooked and he is called to carve it. Colour symbolism is also involved in the image of the
cooked goose, which has lost its whiteness and become well browned, and the white snow
outside is opposed to the cosy interior.
Other significant correspondences are created in the course of the narrative. Thus
Gabriel tells a family anecdote about a horse so conditioned to working at a mill that it could
not trot out proudly with the quality, walking round and round in a circle instead. Additional
symbolism arises from the detail that it was King Billys statue symbol of the English
yoke that the horse walked round, and from Gabriels insistence that the mill belonged to a
glue-boiler (boiling down the bone of dead horses). As he tells this story himself walking in a
circle, he presents a parable of his own enslavement.
In addition to such analogies there is a metaphoric pattern, which polarizes contrasting
moral attitudes living death versus life in death. The inhabitants of the warm, brown, cosy
world are still alive, but at the cost of spiritual death. The pure uncompromising world of
snow has begun to melt. Those, like Michael Furey, who belong to that world are dead, but
Michael (the highest angel) will always live in the memory of Gabriels wife. There is a lot to
be said for staying alive physically, and the guests are not condemned in Joyces presentation
of them. They are presented with sympathy and affection.
Evaluation test:
1. What is the main theme of the volume Dubliners?
Answer: Dubliners is a volume of short stories presenting aspects of the everyday life in
Dublin and having ordinary people as characters. The theme of the volume is moral
paralysis: the characters are too conformist and spiritually dead.
2. How does Joyce use symbolism in Dubliners?
Answer:
Questions:
1. What is the metaphoric pattern in Dubliners?
Answer: The metaphoric pattern polarizes contrasting moral attitudes living death versus
life in death. The inhabitants of the warm, brown, cosy world are still alive, but at the cost of
spiritual death.
2. Explain the symbol of the goose in the short story The Dead?
Answer:
Summary
Dubliners is a collection of stories about people who are too timid and conformist to
see things as they really are. The stories are case histories, all pointing to Joyce
diagnosis of moral paralysis. The stories in Dubliners deliberately employ
musical effects and imagery with a precisely calculated effect. Another device is the
use of repeated motifs in the action.
Joyces use of symbols in his stories is exactly what Pound required: images of
everyday objects, occurring naturally in the action of the stories. The only fantastic
images are reproductions of the characters own fantasies.
Another point about the symbolism used in this work is its explicitness. There is
nothing vague about the correspondence between the image and its meaning. Its
interpretation is clear, although various symbolist devices are employed.
Time and Space in The Dead

People generally define their existence by considering the spatial and temporal
coordinates which they transformed into instruments helping them to measure their life and
coordinate their actions. Both time and space owe their importance to man who, by inventing
them, minimized and limited himself.
Mans mind, yet, refused to stay in line and, after investigations, scientists discovered
that time and space are relative notions and even that they can be represented through one
another. If one can accept temporal relativity, it is much more fascinating to understand spatial
relativity, mainly possible because of pathological experiences such as hypersensitivity to
spaces (Cotru, 42). Chronotopic studies in literature are related to Bakhtin who published a
study on space and time Forms of Time and Chronotope. He introduced the concept of
chronotope defined as the essential connection between the temporal and spatial relations.
Bakhtin sustained the indissoluble character of space and time, time being seen as the fourth
dimension of space (294). Thus, time is condensed, becomes visible while space becomes
more intense and enters the movement of time, of the subject, of history (294); they are
understood and rendered through one another (294).
Besides Bakhtins theory I would also mention Bergsons philosophy of a durative
time, measuring the intensity with which people live their life events and a past-present
simultaneity that he promotes in relation with an implicit spatial simultaneity (1995).
Investigations of mans psyche showed that mans perception of things is relative in both
intensity (time) and form (space). Such theories reflected in a literary work lead to various
time-space interrelations analysed in such works as Genettes Narrative Discourse (1988).
This study aims at bringing evidence to sustain spatial and temporal relativity
restricted to James Joyces short story The Dead published in his volume Dubliners. As we
deal with time and space, a contextualization of the short story is more than welcome, if we
consider the revolutionary theories in philosophy, psychology and literary theory at the
beginning of the twentieth century. I mention the contextualization for the sake of a theory of
synchronicity, since a work of art is more or less determined by the time when it was written.
Joyces work suggests his being informed about aesthetics and philosophy starting from Plato
and Aristotle to his contemporaries.
The title of the short story, The Dead, is a violation of peoples ability to perceive
reality, as it suggests a state beyond human existence, therefore beyond temporal and spatial
boundaries. However, the characters in the story act within chronotopic limits being presented
in a very common situation: the Misses Mokans annual dance in the dark, gaunt house on
Ushers Island, the upper part of which they had rented from Mr. Fulham, the corn-factor on
the ground floor (Joyce, 1995: 122).
Joyce uses spatial units, enclosures contained in other, larger enclosures, attempting
boundlessness. The main space is the house of Gabriels aunts, representing a higher position
on the vertical axis: the guests have to go upstairs where the party takes place. While what is
represented in space is generally perceived as a quantity, the aunts house suggests a
qualitative perception of space (Cotru, 44): the ground floor, being closer to the streets of
Dublin, may suggest an ordinary perception of the Anglo Irish cohabitation at the end of the
19th century, somehow dissimulated by a pragmatic adjustment for survival. By going upstairs,
Joyces characters acquire freedom within a highly spiritual space: they can freely talk
about their condition, promote their tradition, revive Irish customs by creating a space within
a space, an oasis of Irishness. They actually attempt a syntopy (Cotru, 40), simultaneity of
spaces which paradoxically is supposed to mean a denial of their contemporary spatial
context, although their space is part of this contemporary space. They mentally revive a past
creating a contemporary simultaneity. Similarly, temporal sequences are self-contained while
the house artificially suggests separation between present the ground floor, Gabriels
contemporary Dublin, and past upstairs, Irish customs revived within an Anglo-Irish
cohabitation.
The space that the characters create is not isolated because they make it interfere with
elements of contemporary cohabitation. The conversation between Miss Ivors and Gabriel
stands for a dialogue between free Ireland, space suggested by Miss Ivors invitation to an
excursion to the Aran Isles and by her mentioning other places with old Irish resonance like
Connacht, where Gabriels wife is from. Her almost aggressive plead for preserving Irish
customs and language, for promoting Irish history is made visible through the large
brooch which was fixed in front of her collar and which bore on it an Irish motto (130).
Miss Ivors effort to revive the past deepens her into the present as she wouldnt have worn
the brooch, had the British not conquered Ireland. The effect is twofold: on the one hand it
encloses past and present, Irish and Anglo-Irish spaces making them all interdependent and
simultaneous; on the other hand it sharpens the discrepancy between a pure past/free Ireland
and the contemporary Anglo-Irish Ireland.
The dialogue brings several glimpses of the outside present into the inside present:
when Miss Ivors calls Gabriel a West Briton (130); when Gabriel admits to himself that he
writes a column in The Daily Express (131) (a British newspaper); when Gabriel states that
Irish is not his language (132) and culminates with Gabriels words: O, to tell you the truth,
Im sick of my country sick of it! (132). Another moment that relates the present with the
past is Gabriels speech in which he describes the past as a more spacious age because of
the great names of the singers and of the qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly
humour (142). The present is described as a less spacious age (142) because the new
generation lack all those qualities and names. He sees their gathering as a revival of the past
tradition and the people present there cherish the memory of the dead (142).
The Dead in the title, which apparently refers to the fact that the guests used to
mention dead people in their conversations making the latter be always present at their
gatherings, may also be a metaphor for the past and present fusion, for the Irish space
vertically and horizontally coexisting with the Anglo-Irish space. Since the story is presented
from Gabriels perspective, Joyce also reveals the map of his protagonists psyche, torn
between the Irish tradition and the European openness. Gabriels speech doubled by his
thoughts and attitude emphasizes the uselessness of his aunts effort to revive the dead past.
The story is structured into more complementary plans. A parallel chronotopic matrix
is related to Gabriels wife and their relationship. Gabriel is never close to his wife at the
party, he even admires her and notices her being caught in by the Irish spirit of the party,
which he does not share. The physical distance between them spatially marks their difference
in opinions and attitude. When they get closer, it is obvious for him that they are not
compatible since she seems absent, turned on the past, while he belongs to the present and
projects his future plans outside Ireland, in Europe. Their marriage is an almost metaphoric
coexistence of different spaces and times: she is more domestic and related to a dead past and
space, Gabriel is expansive and oriented towards outer spaces.
Gabriels investigation of her chronotopic limits turns out to be painful: he finds out
the love story that marked her youth and that she could not forget; the memory of the young
fellow who died because he had waited in the rain to see her is more present than Gabriel is.
He actually gets aware of her living too much and too intensely in the past with a dead person
while he becomes almost absent. He is also fascinated by peoples tendency to ignore the now
and here for the sake of a then and there, which implicitly supposes a past-present
synchronicity and a here-there syntopy.
The time of the short story combines the Greek and the Hebrew paradigms, namely the
cyclic time and the linear time. Within the Hebrew linearity according to which time meant a
linear succession of instants (Cotru, 48), we can speak about a chronology of events: the
guests come to party, they sing and dance and eat at the party, they leave the party. To disrupt
the possible boredom of such a monotonous process, Joyce also implied a cyclic
representation of time, the Greek paradigm, rendered through recurrence or eternal present.
The entire event organized by Misses Morkan is repeated every year, Gabriel has to deliver
the speech and cut the goose: It is not the first time that we have been recipients or
perhaps, I had better say, the victims of the hospitality of certain good ladies. He made a
circle in the air with his arm and paused (Joyce, 1995: 141). This routine determines him not
to believe in freedom and entraps him in an endless cyclic movement similar to that of the
horse that he laughs at in his joke.
James Joyces temporal models were illustrated in his portrait, realized by Brncui,
and representing a vertical line and a spiral, meaning coexistence of two fundamental time
paradigms the Greek and the Hebrew , which implies coexistence of spaces, too.
Evaluation test:
1. What is the significance of the house where the party takes place?
Answer: The main space is the house of Gabriels aunts, representing a higher position on the
vertical axis, suggesting a qualitative perception of space (Cotru, 44): they can freely talk
about their condition, promote their tradition, revive Irish customs by creating a space within
a space, an oasis of Irishness while the ground floor, being closer to the streets of Dublin,
may suggest an ordinary perception of the Anglo-Irish cohabitation at the end of the 19 th
century.
2. Explain the relation between the Irish and the English in spatial terms.
Answer:
Questions:
1. Why does Miss Ivors invite Gabriel to visit the Aran Isles?
Answer: Mrs Ivors who is a nationalist invites Gabriel to visit the Aran Isles because they
represent an oasis of Irishness where Irish is still spoken and the Irish tradition is preserved.
2. What is the relation between past and present according to Gabriel?
Answer:
Summary
Joyce uses spatial units, enclosures contained in other, larger enclosures, attempting
boundlessness. The main space is the house of Gabriels aunts, representing a higher
position on the vertical axis, suggesting a qualitative perception of space (Cotru,
44): they can freely talk about their condition, promote their tradition, revive Irish
customs by creating a space within a space, an oasis of Irishness while the ground
floor, being closer to the streets of Dublin, may suggest an ordinary perception of the
Anglo-Irish cohabitation at the end of the 19th century.
The story is structured on more complementary planes. A parallel chronotopic matrix
is related to Gabriels wife and their relationship. Their marriage is an almost
metaphoric coexistence of different spaces and times: she is more domestic and
related to a dead past and space, Gabriel is expansive and oriented towards outer
spaces.
The time of the short story combines the Greek and the Hebrew paradigms, namely the
cyclic time and the linear time.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Stephen's quest of the father as a quest of
identity
Being a novel with a predominant masculine presence A Portrait raises the patriarchal
problem reflected in the relation father-son and engaging the sons identity in an endless quest
of the appropriate father. The process of psychological maturing follows a spiral circuit
implying on the one hand a slow progress and on the other hand the reiteration of what might
suggest the finding of Stephens bearings in himself or the opening towards himself. As the
relation father-son evolves from the biological level to the spiritual one, implying the
degradation of the relationship between Stephen and his father, the individuation of the hero
draws an ascendant line from the concrete to the abstract, from the exterior to the interior.
The quest of the father, which automatically becomes the quest of his identity, makes
Stephen experience a series of cycles similar to initiations. During each cycle the hero finds a
father and he also escapes his fathers influence through a fall. This perspective supposes
the reinterpretation of Icarus myth which acquires positive meanings if we take into account
the evolution towards the status of the artist. The archetype of the father is linked to height
and power and to the sovereign domination.
At the end of the fourth chapter Stephen realises that life has a sinuous evolution and it
cannot be complete unless all the stages are gone over: To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to
recreate life out of life! The last stage stands for rebirth, for the perpetuance of the artistic
personality in creation preceded by the other stages which suppose the leap and the fall until
the character gets lost and tries to find himself again in another cycle. The same stages are
crossed by the hero several times during the quest first of his biological father and later of his
imaginary father, Daedalus. The quest implies cycles in spheres like history, religion and art.
Each level of the artistic becoming supposes the assumption of an identity in accordance with
the heros chosen father.
Confusion is echoed by his rejection of the religious father embodied by Father Dolan
who unfairly punished him or by Father Arnall who vividly pictured a terrifying hell and a
threatening God. Although he had been led toward church since he was a child, Stephen
couldnt embrace it as he was disappointed by the churchmen. Simon encouraged his son to
follow this way but the first contradiction appeared when Parnell died being a victim of the
church. On the other hand Stephen's artistic maturity is constantly denied by the priests and he
is forced to remain a son. This attitude expresses the fathers fear of not being replaced by
their sons.
Evaluation test:
3. What is the relationship between Stephen and his father?
Answer: The relation father-son evolves from the biological level to the spiritual one,
implying the degradation of the relationship between Stephen and his father.
4. What is the archetype of the father?
Answer:
Questions:
1. How does Stephen change his identities?
Answer: Stephen changes his identities while changing his spiritual fathers (Simon, God,
Parnell, uncle Charles, Dedalus), and identifies himself with their sons.
2. Who are Stephens spiritual fathers?
Answer:
Summary
The quest of the father, which automatically becomes the quest of his identity, makes
Stephen experience a series of cycles similar to initiations. During each cycle the hero
finds a father and he also escapes his father's influence through a "fall". Stephen
changes his identities while changing his spiritual fathers (Simon, God, Parnell, uncle
Charles, Dedalus), and identifies himself with their sons. This perspective supposes
the reinterpretation of Icarus' myth which acquires positive meanings if we take into
account the evolution towards the status of the artist.
Depersonalization through individuation in Joyce's A Portrait

Supposing that myths represent depersonalized dreams1 and ones dreams are the most
personal and involuntary manifestations of ones unconscious, Joyces work shows an
extremely complex method of deliberately becoming impersonal. A simple analysis of his
work (A Portrait) makes the reader approach it as a buildungsroman, which is a traditional
way of presenting the novel. Yet, other critics chose concepts like metamorphosis or
transformation, seen as partly deliberate or, anyway, dependant upon the main character.
Attempting an interdisciplinary analysis, namely psychological and archetypal, one may
confer more value to the text by plunging into its latent meanings. I prefer Jungs term
individuation meaning psychological growing up which refers to the discovery of those
aspects that make one different from the others, therefore unique.
Following the line of the psychological portrait, Joyce seeks to make both reader and
Stephen understand the investigation of the unconscious depths by using concrete elements
which are to be deciphered. The text becomes a puzzle for the hero, for the reader and,
unexpectedly, for the writer himself who needed ten years to create the image of a moving
consciousness. The book is much closer to an intriguing dream because it avoids the positivist
explicit concatenation cause-effect, despite its being classified as a realist piece of literature
due to Joyces decision to use real names and stories. Apparently simple in the beginning
because of its language and apparently complex in the end because of the way in which
Stephen uses some theories to explain his feelings and thoughts, the work turns out to be
fragmentary, dense and hermetic in the beginning and explicit and limited in the end,
limited since it offers an answer to the initial problems.
Stephen's individuation could be considered successful because in the end he seems a
well-balanced individual aware of his unconscious. Yet, considering his deliberate exile /
isolation and his need to project the unconscious element in some external inherited forms
1
C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, New York, Pantheon, 1959
called archetypes, the process of psychological maturation (individuation) may be perceived
as a failure unless one takes into consideration the fact that the character is an artist in
formation. For Jung projection is an unconscious automatic process whereby a content that is
unconscious to the subject transfers itself to an object so that it seems to belong to that object.
The projection ceases the moment it becomes conscious, that is to say when it is seen as
belonging to the subject.2 Stephen seen as an artist would mean that he wants to share his
experience, which could be done by translating his unconscious element that has become
conscious into some forms people can understand and interpret. The great artist is a person
who possesses the primordial vision, a special sensibility to archetypal patterns and a gift
for speaking in primordial images that enable him or her to transmit experiences of the inner
world through art.3 Thus, Joyces complexity leads to parallel approaches - psychological
and archetypal - applied to the same work in order to reveal his opinion about the process of
creation, depersonalization.
In A Portrait Joyce defies Bachelards theory concerning the becoming of water by
presenting a reversed process, the water euphemization. A metaphor for Stephens psychic
becoming, euphemization echoes the steps from physical suffering to awareness. Internal
water appears as watery eyes and tears in the first chapter suggesting the heros weakness,
then dew the purest water - in the last chapter. The dew overwhelms the artist not only
through its purity and perfection but also through its sweet firmness. Nothing in Stephen
resists it. Furthermore, he tries to prolong this unity with the divine mediated by the dew, as
awakening means fall: His soul was waking slowly fearing to awake wholly.
In between the two hypotheses of the internal water, several projections in external
water forms support Stephen's individuation. Thus they become metaphors for the way
Stephen perceives society. Cold and dirty, limited by the walls of the ditch, doomed to
continue backwardness, to acute opaqueness completed by its fluidlessness, always marked by
human touch - implying the social element - the water in which Stephen is baptized
embodies all his fears.
The other form of the external water is the sea seen at night and represents the dark
and cold water as the epiphany of death for Stephen who notices that the relation water-death
confirms his transience. The sea he saw did not mirror him, it was the sea whose darkness
makes it an eternal and immense danger, the image of the unplaited death seducing its victims
in whispers: Parnell's death becomes the epiphany of Stephen's death.
2
Idem, p.60
3
C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, New York, Harcourt, 1933, -- in A Handbook of Critical
Approaches to Literature, 3d edition., New York, Oxford UP, 1992, p.168
The doubleness of water also appears in the episode with the Icarian flight, echoing the
cosmogony of the Bible mythology according to which the sky was made by separating it
from the waters through land. The mirroring of the sky in the water sustains its aquatic origin
and creates the illusion of the unlimited depth of the sea. "A prophecy of the end he had been
born to serve", Stephen's name, Dedalus, implies death/"end" - it is not physical death but an
exhaustible flowing of the creative personality into the work until it disappears behind or
beyond the text once it is finished. This means both "auctorial death" and reaching the end the
artist was born to serve. The water presented in this paragraph is seen at day time as the sea-
water in the epiphany with the girl.
Dew is not the water of death unlike the other forms of water which were connected to
material - concrete death or spiritual - abstract death. Stephen's fusion with celestial water
represents the last step in his artistic becoming after an optimistic refusal to protect himself in
the dark water of the beginning of the novel. The hero's successful individuation is supported
by the water euphemization as a way towards creative impersonality.
Evaluation test:
1. What is the meaning of individuation?
Answer: Individuation is defined as the process of psychological maturation. It covers the
evolution of an individual in relation with aspects of his existence or persons that he fears.
Stephens individuation is presented in relation with water. As a child he got sick after having
been pushed into a ditch with dirty water and he developed aquaphobia. The hypotheses of
water change from dirty water to pure water along the novel, which demonstrates his ability
to overcome his fears.
2. What are the hypotheses of water?
Answer:
Questions:
1. What is the meaning of the sea seen at night?
Answer: The sea seen at night is the dark and cold water that suggests the epiphany of death
for Stephen who notices that the relation water-death confirms his transience.
2. What is the prophecy suggested by Stephens name?
Answer:
Summary
Stephen's individuation could be considered successful because in the end he seems a
well-balanced individual aware of his unconscious. Yet, considering his deliberate
exile / isolation and his need to project the unconscious element in some external
"inherited forms" called archetypes, the process of psychological maturation
(individuation) may be perceived as a failure unless one takes into consideration the
fact that the character is an artist in formation. The great artist is a person who
possesses the "primordial vision", a special sensibility to archetypal patterns and a
gift for speaking in primordial images that enable him or her to transmit experiences
of the "inner world" through art.4 Thus, Joyce's complexity leads to parallel
approaches - psychological and archetypal - applied to the same work in order to
reveal his opinion about the process of creation, depersonalization.
Epiphany
The paradox of Joyces epiphany would be the fact that any thing which is around the
artist, any repressed or forgotten monet that he has lived, any moment that he is to live may
represent sources for epiphanies and yet, he shouldnt wait for them, he shouldnt wait for the
epiphany to happen but to look for it.
The concept of epiphany as Joyce sees it does not correspond to the religious meaning it
has in dictionaries: 1. a Christian festival which takes place on the 6 th of January
commemorating a manifestation of Christ to the Magi; 2. an appearance or manifestation
especially of a deity; 3. in literature a) a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the
reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or
commonplace occurrence or experience; b) a literary piece of work presenting such a
moment. With Dan Grigorescu epiphany refers to the legend of the Holy Ghost coming over
Christs head, during the mystery of baptism.
According to M.Kain Joyces epiphanies are not insights because the latter contains the
commentaries of the narrator while with Joyce the epiphanies are some sketches which are not
commented on. These epiphanies are generally introduced by He was sitting/ standing
implying spiritual activity only. According to Dan Grigorescu Joyces epiphanies were some
sketches observing some ordinary moments the narrator wasnt going to transform into pieces
of literature: communication is produced by mentioning the most insignificant gesture, the
fragments of some objects which simultaneously turn up. In fact it is a sort of prose
anticipating the American behaviourism, echoes of naturalism, of narrative poem in prose.
Joyces epiphanies may be classified as: epiphanies of the surroundings, epiphanies of
the history, epiphanies of the disgust characterized by ambiguities, figures of speech,
4
C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, New York, Harcourt, 1933, -- in A Handbook of Critical
Approaches to Literature, 3d edition., New York, Oxford UP, 1992, p.168
exploitation of the phonological level of language. They belong to the subjective world
manifesting themselves as dream and visions.
Evaluation test:
1. What is the definition of Joyces epiphanies according to M.Kain?
Answer: M.Kain states that Joyces epiphanies are sketches which are not commented on.
2. Mention a possible classification of Joyces epiphanies.
Answer:
Questions:
1. What is the meaning of the word epiphany?
Answer: Epiphany names a Christian festival which takes place on the 6th of January
commemorating a manifestation of Christ to the Magi.
2. How does Dan Grigorescu define Joyces epiphany?
Answer:
Summary
Epiphany has a religious meaning.
Joyces epiphany is a literary text inspired by common life.
Joyce used to keep a booknote of epiphanies which he later published in his works.
The use of epiphanies in literary texts represents a narrative technique that helps the
work continue but renders it fragmentary.
Theme 3 Flann OBrien
Units
Cultural space and time in The Third Policeman
Objectives:
Allotted time: 3 hours

Bibliography:
Donoghue, Denis. 2002. Introduction in The Third Policeman. Flann OBrien. Chicago:
Dalkey Archive Press.
Genette, Gerard. 1987. Narrative Discourse An Essay in Method. trad. Jane E. Lewin. New
York: Cornell University Press.
Imhof, Rdiger. 2002. The Modern Irish Novel. Dublin: Wolfhound Press.
Joyce, James. 1993. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Bucureti: Prietenii Crii.
Joyce, James. 1961. Ulysses. New York: Vintage Books, Random House.
Kiberd,Declan. 2002. Inventing Ireland. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press.
Mahony, Christina Hunt. 1998. Contemporary Irish Literature. New York: St. Martins Press.
OBrien, Flann. 2002. The Third Policeman. Chicago: Dalkey Archive Press.
Nuallin, Ciarn. 1998. The Early Years of Brian ONolan / Flann OBrien / Myles na
gCopaleen. Dublin: The Lilliput Press.
FLANN OBRIEN
(1911-1966)
Attempting a contextualization of Flann OBriens work, one cannot ignore the

particular setting Ireland offered at the beginning of the twentieth century. Irelands identity
problem is reflected in literature as the image of a highly undermined authority, which
reminds of William Butler Yeats masks and impersonality derived from an ever-changing
personality related to each work he created, which also reminds of James Joyces artist,
Stephen Dedalus, transgressing national boundaries, of Samuel Becketts The Unnamable and
other such unnamed characters, including the protagonist of Seamus Deanes Reading in the
Dark, a storyteller himself. Within such a context, giving the impression of being subjected to
a continuous process of re-creation or re-invention, Flann OBrien gets an intermediary
position in his evolution from Brian Nuallin (in Irish) or Brian ONolan (in English) to
Flann OBrien the pseudonym he used for two novels written in English: At Swim-Two-
Birds (1939) and The Third Policeman (1940) , to Myles na Copaleen the name OBrien
used to sign a comic column in The Irish Times and Myles na gCopaleen associated with
An Bal Bocht (The Poor Mouth, 1941).
Analysing how Flann OBrien invented himself while inventing Ireland, Declan
Kiberd notices the writers discomfort with his identity: Amidst all this chopping and
changing, one thing is clear: he never had the gall to sail under the colours of Brian ONolan.
(Kiberd 500) In a similar commentary, Anne Clissman states that the writers masks could
provide Brian ONolan with a safety: it was almost as if, by putting Myles na gCopaleen
forward, prepared to take on and conquer the world, Brian ONolan could retire to an
impregnable and safe position. (Clissman 3 quoted in Kiberd 500) However, the name Brian
ONolan remains attached to the writers public interventions interrupting speakers and
making the audience, or the mob as his brother says (Nuallin 92), laugh: Brian
progressed as a speaker in the society. I dont remember being present when he was speaking
formally but it appears that he was a comic speaker (93). Brian ONolan was thus
characterized as a debating genius, the best impromptu speaker the society knew in those
days (P.J.Donovan quoted in Nuallin 93), as the best humorous speaker of [the] time
(R.N.Coake cited in Nuallin 93), and received the medal for impromptu debate in 1932.
The same humorous genius can be identified in OBriens novels which, due to
contextualization and to the associations with aspects of real life in Ireland, have been
considered satires. Declan Kiberd dedicated a whole chapter in his book Inventing Ireland
to the anlysis of An Bal Bocht (The Poor Mouth), the novel OBrien published in Irish.
Firstly, Kiberd focuses on the language OBrien uses as a means of attack: The jocular and
exaggerated language, which was once the object of the dramatists satire, has now become a
method, by which other more fitting targets are attacked. Among the new targets are Irishmen
() who abjectly conform to English stereotypes of the neighbouring island. (498) On
further reading, the central target of OBriens satire is revealed: In depicting the realities of
poverty in the west of Ireland, An Bal Bocht is not only a send-up of the scenic landscape,
Gothic ruins and romantic music of Boucicaults glamorized country-side; it is, even more
urgently, an attack on the Dublin revivalists of the twentieth century who would idealize the
saintly simplicity of the western life, only by ignoring the awful poverty on which it was
based. (498)
Furthermore, in an attempt to demonstrate that features of the Manippean satire can be
identified in OBriens work, Keith Booker technically explained and illustrated with
examples mainly taken from At Swim-Two-Birds as provided by Bakhtin in Problems of
Dostoevskys Poetics.
However, Ciarn Nuallin (1998:107) attempts to convince the readers that his
brothers novels are not satires, but pieces of natural exuberance fun for the sake of fun
like the playfulness of a puppy! He presents his brother as a humorous writer who used to
make fun of deep analysis of his contemporaries works, especially of James Joyces, and
invites the reader not to spoil OBriens work by explaining it:
I have seen articles running to a couple of thousand words of tortuous terminology to explain
something, when an authors flash of humour has already lit up the sky like a flash of
lightning! It occurs to me to question the right of the blind to be tutoring those who can see
perfectly. ( Nuallin, 1998:107)
Despite its somehow declared playfulness, OBriens work mocks at its creators
authority just like the characters undermining their creators authority (Mahony, 1998:20) in
the multilayered At Swim-Two-Birds. However, reaching its independence through
publication, his work has to endure the readers scrutiny.
Evaluation test:
1. What can suggest the use of more pseudonyms?
Answer: The use of more pseudonyms can reveal OBriens masks or different personalities in
relation with the genre he approaches or can provide him a sense of safety.
2. Mention several major features of OBriens novels.
Answer:
Questions:
1. What are the novels OBrien wrote?
Answer: Flann OBrien wrote three novels: An Bal Bocht, At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third
Policeman.
2. What is Flann OBriens attitude towards the analysis of his contemporaries works?
Answer:
Summary
Flann OBrien is an Irish writer who published fiction in both Irish (An Bal Bocht)
and English (At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman).
He used different pseudonyms, being well known for his assumed masked: Myles na
gCopaleen, Myles na Copaleen, Brian Nuallin, Brian ONolan, Flann OBrien.
He is mainly known as a comic columnist and as a satirist.
Cultural Space and Time in The Third Policeman
Published at a turning point in the evolution of literature and literary criticism, Flann
OBriens novel The Third Policeman is perceived as an extremely dense work in both
meaning and form, a valuable synchronic work, although haunted by successful
contemporaries like James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Indebted to scientific theories such as
the atomic theory and relativity, pseudoscientific theories dragging the novel to psychology
and literary criticism and to the Irish tradition in literature, Flann OBrien created a fantastic
work whose unnamed protagonist challenges normality.
The novel covers the evolution of the protagonist from birth to the beginning of the
second cycle in his life after death. The action is set in twentieth century Ireland and the
protagonist, who is the narrator, is a representative of the common Irishman experiencing
predestined failure (Kiberd, 2002:511) without understanding it.
The narrator is born somewhere in Ireland and his parents leave him and their
business, he is sent to a boarding school and when he returns home, having a wooden leg and
a stolen book he wants to write about, he finds John Divney who is ruling the business. The
narrator works on his project, while Diveny spends the money. Eventually, when the
protagonist wants to publish his book, they decide to kill an old man, Mathers, who has a
black box with money. Divney and the protagonist kill Mathers and Divney disappears with
the box while the narrator is burying the corpse. The two become very close friends, but
three years later Divney decides upon telling the narrator where the black box is. This
moment marks the beginning of a quest which, despite the frustrating spatial and temporal
ambiguity, reveals a fundamental aspect of the Irish cultural background.
As Denis Donoghue (2002:ix) states, Flann OBrien succeeded in creating a novel that
presents a vision of the world in terms of a single intellectual pattern. Although The Third
Policeman can be considered a strange novel, it also rebuilds twentieth century Irishness
through allusions to the authors contemporaries or well-known Irish predecessors. On the
very first page the author satirizes the Irish family: the father is a heavy drinker talking
politics and about Parnell on weekends and denigrating his own country; the mother does the
housework, drinks tea and sings. The Irish family he outlines is a surrogate of Stephen
Dedalus family in A Portrait as much as it is the prototype of the Irish family in general.
Other Irish writers are echoed in the novel, which helps OBrien recreate both Irish
space and culture: Jonathan Swifts Gullivers Treavels is suggested several times: de Selby
with his books on roads and journeys, hallucinations, names etc. is the ridiculed philosophus
gloriosus, according to Donoghue (2002:ix), a philosopher reminding of the scholars in the
Academy of Lagado. The reader can identify descriptions of places similar to Lilliput and
Brobdingnag:
We were now going through a country full of fine enduring trees where it was always five
oclock in the afternoon. It was a soft corner of the worlds, free from inquisitions and
disputations and very soothing and sleepening on the mind. There was no animal there that
was higher that a mans thumb and no noise superior to that which the Sergeant was making
with his nose, an unusual brand of music like wind in the chimney. (OBrien, 2002:80-81)
In The Third Policeman the bicycle acquires an essential position as a character and as
a cultural element at the same time. The atomic theory presented by Sergeant Pluck
demonstrates how a mans personality can be transferred to his bicycle, which eventually
gives the Sergeant the right to treat bicycles as if they were human beings. Ciarn Nuallin
extends the importance of the bicycle in the family to a general presence in Ireland:
The bicycle was very popular in the country in the twenties. There can scarcely have been a
farmer who did not have one, even if he had a pony and trap as well. The traffic on the road to
Mass would include scores of bicycles, with straight-backed farmers dressed up in their blue
suits. Many of these bicycles were of Irish manufacture Pierce or Lucanta; they seemed like
tanks compared to bicycles of other makes because of their weight and the thickness of their
frames. ( Nullin, 1998:38-39)
Irelands space is also echoed through an association of Becketts work with the
bicycles populating OBriens novel. Gilhaney who tries to find his bicycle, stolen by the
Sergeant, is a discreet allusion to Molloy and his bicycle, while the protagonist himself seems
to be a version of Molloy, with his wooden leg, going on a guest and meeting the policemen.
Samuel Becketts absurd theatre can be a model for the absurd conversations between
the policemen and the narrator while the latters complementarity with Joe, his soul,
resembles the one between characters like Vladimir and Estragon. For example, although both
the protagonist and Joe know that the former has no watch, he insists on having lost it:
would I ever know the value of the money I could never spend, know how
handsome could have been my volume on de Selby? Would I ever see John Divney again?
Where was he now? Where was my watch?
You have no watch.
That was true. (OBrien, 2002:112)
To complete the gallery of characters in Irish literature, the author created John
Divney, the narrators friend, who took over the farm and the public house, killed the narrator
and lived happily with the latters money, and who represents the Irish traitor.
Flann OBrien claims originality as a result of having created an already dead
character that is telling the story without knowing that he is dead. However, his novels
originality also lies in the comic perspective upon the tragic life in Ireland. Poverty, lack of
identity, fight for survival, common and artistic quests are the vehicles that make the novel
unfold in the open fields of a paralyzed country which he reconstructs parodying well-known
Irish novels. In a tragic and comic way, Flan OBrien, just like the protagonist, did not leave
to see his work published.
Evaluation test:
1. What is the similarity between Flann OBriens novel and James Joyces A Portrait?
Answer: Flann OBrien satirizes the Irish family in James Joyces novel.
2. Mention several references to the Irish cultural context that can be identified in Flann
OBriens novel.
Answer:
Questions:
1. What does the bicycle remind of?
Answer: The bicycle in Flann OBriens novel reminds of Samuel Becketts prose.
2. What is John Divneys role in the novel?
Answer:
Summary
Flann OBrien fictional space is a puzzle where pieces of Irish culture and civilization
meet.
Contemporary Irish writers and well known predecessors (e.g. J. Swift) are reminded
via representative aspects of their works.
Irish cultural elements such as the informer, poverty and corruption are referred to.
Theme 4 Seamus Deane
Units
Narrative strategies
The identity problem
Reaching silence
Objectives:
Allotted time: 6 hours

Bibliography:
Barthes, Roland, 1988, The Death of the Author, in Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: A Reader,
Macmillan Education LTD
Coste Didier, Narrative as Communication, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1989
Deane Seamus, Reading in the Dark, New York, Vintage Books, 1998
Fogarty, Anne. Remapping Nationalism: The Politics of Space in Joyces Dubliners in
C.A.P.E.S./Agrgation Anglais, Dubliners, James Joyce; The Dead. John Huston, Pascal
Bataillard and Dominique Sipire (eds). Paris: Ellipses, 2000.
Freud Sigmund, 1990, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, New York, WW.Norton & Company, Ltd.
Freud Sigmund, 1972, Creative writers and day-dreaming in Lodge David (ed), 20th Century
Criticism, London, Longman, p. 36-42
Genette Grard, Narrative Discourse An Essay in Method, trad. Jane E. Lewin, New York, Ithaca ,
Cornell University Press, 1987
Genette Grard, Narrative Discourse Revisited, trad. Jane E. Lewin, New York, Ithaca, Cornell
University Press, 1988
Hackney Blackwell, Amy, and Ryah Hackney. The Everything Irish History & Heritage Book. Avon,
Harte Liam, 2000, History Lessons : Postcolonialism and Seamus Deanes Reading in the Dark , in
Irish University Review, special issue Contemporary Irish Fiction, Anthony Roche (ed), vol.
30, no 1, p. 149-162
Joyce James, A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man, Bucuresti, Prietenii Cartii , 1993
Lintvelt Jaap, Incercare de tipologie narativ, Punctul de vedere, trad. Angela Martin, Bucureti,
Univers, 1994
Trilling Lionel, 1972, Freud and Literature in Lodge David (ed), 20th Century Criticism, London,
Longman, p. 276-290
*** Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, Gramercy Books, New
York, 1986
Ricoeur Paul, Oneself as Another, trad. Kathleen Blamey, Chicago and London, The University of
Chicago Press, 1992
SEAMUS DEANE
(1940 - )
Born in Derry in Northern Ireland in 1940, Seamus Deane was educated at Queens
University in Belfast and earned his doctorate at Cambridge University. He taught literature at
University College Dublin for many years but he currently teaches at the University of Notre
Dame. As a poet, he published Gradual Wars (1972), Rumours (1977), History Lessons
(1983), Selected Poems (1988). His first novel, Reading in the Dark, appeared in 1996 and
was followed by Wizard (1999). He contributed to literary criticism and also promoted the
image of Ireland in non fiction works: A Short History of Irish Literature (1986); Strange
Country (1999); Future Crossings. Literature between Philosophy and Cultural Studies
(2000); The Irish: A Short History (2003).
Narrative strategies Reading in the Dark

On the edge of diary, fairy tale, social and cultural document, Seamus Deanes
unnamed narrator confesses the complexity of Irishness. Written at the end of the twentieth
century, Reading in the Dark pays its tribute to a century of impressive narrative innovations
deliberate fragmentariness and ambiguity, intertextuality, complex point of view, the
identity issue insisting upon impersonality, repetition and self-reflectiveness.
First of all it announces itself as a self-discovery, self-revelation, an illumination of the
unknown (dark) paratextually promised in the title. Reading, a half-creative process, implies
the decoding of a given text; in the dark annihilates the given text, which simply leads to:
reading equals a creative process. Reading, and not creating or imagining or dreaming,
reveals the authors awareness of his being a product of the intermingling of social, cultural
and historical events. Reading becomes creating as it suggests the exploration of the abyssal
depth beyond the textual surface of the narrators life, of the novels world. Therefore, the title
stands for a metaphorical reflection of the novel.
Reading in the Dark is a work merging the form of a diary, as dated entries
chronologically arranged lure the reader into a confessional work, and that of a novel, as
every entry has a title and the body is structured in chapters. Both titles and dates seem to
avoid their immediate tasks as most of the titles lack artistic depth while the dates betray a
retrospective selection of events closely connected to each other, which stands against the idea
of diary (a daily record, esp. of the writers own experiences, observations, attitudes, etc.)
(Webster, 1994: 399).
The ambiguous form that Seamus Deane gave to his novel supports the ambiguity of
perspective and of content. The ambiguity of perspective is an outcome of the first person
narrative, the use of an internal narrator who reveals his most intimate thoughts, fears and
feelings. Although at the beginning fragmentariness makes the novel look like a diary, reading
on to its end reveals a deliberate retrospective selection of the only events that could have
assured its coherence and unity. For example Disappearances, a subchapter referring to an
innocent response to a clowns performance at the circus (Everyone was laughing and
clapping but I felt uneasy. How could they all be so sure?) may be connected to the field
where birds disappear and to the mysterious disappearance of McIlhenny. All the characters
know something about McIlhennys disappearance and Eddies death, they all had contributed
to them, but they pretend not to know anything.
Despite the chronological unfolding of the events imposed by the diary-form of the
novel there are frequent internal and external analepses meant to unpuzzle the forest of
mysteries and secrets overwhelming the reader. Grandfathers story about Eddie, the
narrators uncle, is an external analepsis, as it goes back to a moment before the first
narrative. Besides, the impression of fragmentariness given by the anisochronies is reinforced
by stories within stories and the oscillation between fantasy and reality.
Repeated titles of diary-entries invite the reader to retrospective associations of events,
which makes it easier to follow the evolution of each character. They are treated both as
individuals (separate entities), which contributes to the mysterious atmosphere and
fragmentariness based on the lack of communication, and as a family united by their own
secrets. Repetition is much more complex and it takes different forms: one and the same story
told twice in Eddie November 1947 (8) and Haunted December 1953 (168) becomes almost
unrecognizable standing for evidence of the impact of six years on the narrators soul, mind,
information, way of seeing things. Differences induce awareness of the protagonists
metamorphosis from a prisoner of magic to a mature person initiated in what life in post-war
Ireland meant. While the former story sounds like a fairy tale with unnamed characters
strangely wrapped in legendary magic, the latter despite some elements of exorcism and
superstition outlining peoples mentality seems well anchored in reality, the characters have
names and belong to the narrators social context.
Seamus Deane tried to foster the personality of the most impersonal I. The writing I is
the Unknown, the Unnamed and probably the Unnamable, the Other who can find or figure
out a meaning in the dark. I stands for the sensitive and creative personality of an author who
uses his life to foster an almost fantastic story. Although the author makes his narrator
elucidate mysteries and illuminate the dark gaps, he cannot give a name to the product and the
creator of all these. The intimate I telling such a touching story with tenderness is deliberately
impersonalized by being given no name. Seamus Deane goes further than James Joyce who
used a prophetic name for his character.
The narrator can also be seen as a manipulator who feeds the readers imagination
with sequences of his real life and tries to lure him into a world of darkness where logic and
reason have been sucked into a great whirlpool of flames.(5) The reader becomes the
prisoner of a diary-like novel whose most important parts are missing. He is therefore invited
to find a meaning in the dark gaps that do not fail to deepen between the diarys entries. The
narrator gives the impression that he himself is caught in the same trap and tries to figure out
a meaning for himself and for the reader. Yet, the mechanism of the narrators imagination
trying to create order, to solve the mysteries and the feuds by practicing his storytelling is
revealed to the reader in the subchapter entitled Reading in the Dark.
The dark atmosphere, characterizing the novel in point of setting and inner life,
deepens with each new entry in the boys diary. The confessional tone of the book heavy with
sadness reveals the impact of the bitterness of the unspoken secrets on a boy who can read
them in the dark. His ability to understand and keep the grown-ups secrets unexpectedly
leads to aloofness and rejection on behalf of his confessors. Inheritor of sadness and bad
social relations within an Irish post-war context the narrator makes his characters die and bury
their secrets with them. His writing/telling the story of his life comes as a therapy helping him
to escape the ghost that separates him from the others and unload the burden of his sadness.
Evaluation test:
1. What is the structure of the novel?
Answer: Reading in the Dark has the form of a diary, yet it is structured into chapters and
sections, and each section has a title.
2. What is the point of view of the novel?
Answer:
Questions:
1. What is the role of repetition?
Answer: Deane uses repeated titles of diary-entries that invite the reader to retrospective
associations of events, which makes it easier to follow the evolution of each character. The
author also repeats stories.
2. Give an example of repetition in the novel?
Answer:
Summary
Reading in the Dark is a work merging the form of a diary, as dated entries
chronologically arranged announce a confessional work, and that of a novel, as every
entry has a title and the body is structured in chapters.
The ambiguous form is an outcome of the first person narrative, the use of an internal
narrator who reveals his most intimate thoughts, fears and feelings.
Despite the chronological unfolding of the events imposed by the diary-form of the
novel, there are frequent internal and external analepses meant to unpuzzle the
mysteries and secrets.
Repeated titles of diary-entries invite the reader to retrospective associations of
events, which makes it easier to follow the evolution of each character. The author
also repeats stories.
Seamus Deane tried to foster the personality of the most impersonal I. The writing I is
the Unknown, the Unnamed and probably the Unnamable, the Other who can find
or figure out a meaning in the dark. It can also stand for the Irish person on the quest
of identity.
The identity problem Reading in the Dark

Seamus Deanes Reading in the Dark deals with Irelands postcolonial problems and
presents them from a childs perspective. A mixture of magic and reality, this work succeeds
in defining the Irish social and cultural space in contrast with the colonists aggressive attempt
to impose their culture and laws. Although the action is placed after World War II (1945-
1971), the novel in its entirety takes the reader back to the Irish cultural revival of the late
nineteenth century, which may also be seen as a return to innocence. With Anne Fogarty, the
Irish revival was a movement seeking to fuse culture and politics: It aimed to foster the
burgeoning energies of nationalism and awaken a spirit of national pride by re-evoking the
archetypal, memorial landscapes of the Celtic past and by re-inventing romanticized images
of the primal purity of the countryside of the West of Ireland (Fogarty 80).
The unnamed narrator helplessly witnessing the evolution of a common Irish family
encapsulates in his apparently ingenuous story all the aspects necessary to offer a thorough
description of his contemporary historical and political context. Thus, the novel intermingles
cultural elements (fairy tales, myths, religion, legends, superstitions, language) with social
elements (family, social problems, social gatherings) with historical elements (World War II,
the British colonisation, the Irish fight for independence) and with the maneuvering within the
community in order to gain control and power (Websters 1113).
Depicting an evolution from childhood to maturity, Reading in the Dark introduces the
reader into the realm of Celtic fairy tales, myths and legends, creating the image of an
innocence violated by external (social and historical) intrusions. Therefore, most of the
cultural elements aimed at defining the Irish identity become metaphors for the alteration of
the cultural identity. For example, the changelings, human children whose souls have been
taken over by fairies, may stand for the Irish who have lost their tradition and culture. The
legend with the people haunted because of having broken a moral law encodes the Irishs
reluctance to the British-Irish collaboration. The metaphor of the Field of the Disappeared
suggests a spiritual involution since the field appears as a magic island where the souls of
the Irish are taken, where the Irish tradition and culture are buried.
Seamus Deane mentions the changelings twice: at the beginning of the novel in
Disappearances and in Katies story.
In Disappearances the author establishes the major difference between Celticism and
Christianity: the souls of the changelings (which are fairies souls) would go into the fairy
mounds and not to heaven, purgatory or hell: People with green eyes were close to fairies,
we were told; they were just here for a little while, looking for a human child they could take
away. If we ever met anyone with one green and one brown eye we were to cross ourselves,
for that was a human child that had been taken over by the fairies. The brown eye was the
sign that it had been human. When it died, it would go into the fairy mounds that lay behind
the Donegal mountains, not to heaven or purgatory or hell like the rest of us. These strange
destinations excited me, especially when a priest came to the house of a dying person to give
the last rites, the sacrament of Extreme Unction. That was to stop the person going to hell.
(Deane 5)
The changellings mentioned above may be related to the children in Katies story
about two orphans who lived away down in the southern part of Donegal(5) where they still
spoke Irish. Donegal stands in opposition with Derry where the old Irish was no longer
spoken. The childrens uncle hired a woman called Brigid to take care of them. In response to
the first restriction Brigid imposed on the children, they switched the colour of their hair.
Brigids next intervention made them switch their voices and the story continues until the two
children die, being taken by their dead parents. In this terrifying story pagan and Christian
symbols face each other within a fight where nobody wins: symbols of Irishness, the
changelings pass away letting themselves be last seen in a green light by the Christian priest
who was powerless and eventually fell on his knees, while the children were disappearing; the
green light can stand for Irishness as it is one of the colours on the Irish flag.
Brigid, the woman who took care of the children, has a symbolic name, that of the
Celtic goddess who was incorporated into Christian religious beliefs. As Amy Hackney
Blackwell and Ryan Hackney state in the book The Everything Irish History and Heritage
Book, Brigid was Daghdhas (Good God) daughter and she had two sisters with the same
name. They were goddesses of fertility and patrons of poets, one was associated with
craftsmanship and the last one with healing. Later, Brigid transformed into the Christian St.
Bride or St. Brigid. (Hackney 27) Brigid in Katies story could speak the old Irish that the
children spoke and also English, the language spoken in Derry, bridging the past and the
present. The evolution of the character is spatially traced from Donegal to Derry, from Celtic
tradition to Christianity. She is the voice that echoes the traditional calls of a Celtic Ireland,
but her voice is absorbed, silenced and isolated by the indifference of the Irish. She stops
telling the story and thus becomes one of them.
Another metaphor describing the ever-present Irishness is a stone cashel called
Grianan whose ancient burial site is believed to belong to the Neolithic Period (1700 BC). An
old story advises people not to whisper a secret within the walls of the fort because everyone
will know it since there is a secret passage that echoes what is told and seems to never stop
(Deane 68). Thus, the Irish transmit their Celtic myths and legends in time, from generation to
generation, and in space, all over Ireland, forever, which helps them preserve their tradition.
The Field of the Disappeared, a place where the souls of the people from
neighbourhood who had disappeared gather several times a year on special days like St.
Brigids Day, on the festival of Samhain, on Christmas Day, emerged from the mists of Celtic
mythology and Christianity. Its a place where the souls mourn their fate and all those who
dare to enter the field will share the same destiny and suffer the same pain. The days when the
souls gather refer to both Celtic and Christian religions: St. Brigids Day can be connected to
both Celticism and Christianity because of the Celtic goddess Brigid and because of Brigid of
Kildare who converted to Christianity and advanced Christianity in Ireland. She is also called
the Mary of the Gael. Belonging to both religions, Brigid is a beloved Irish Saint and is
celebrated on February 1, the same day being dedicated to the Irish fertility goddess Brigid, a
pagan-Christian combo as Amy Hackney and Ryan Hackney call it (49-51). The festival of
Samhain is a Celtic celebration similar to modern Halloween and it used to mark the end of
summer: This is the day that tombs opened and ghosts walked about with gods and
goddesses (Hackney 29). The last celebration mentioned is a Christian one, the day when
Jesus Christ was born, and it creates equilibrium, actually showing that Irishness is defined by
both Celtic and Christian elements.
What emphasizes most the alterity of the Irish identity is the fact that Irish is no longer
spoken in Ireland. First, in Katies story it is mentioned that the two children still spoke Irish,
but an Irish that was so old that many other Irish speakers couldnt follow it.(Deane 63).
Brigid had been brought up in Donegal and could speak the same old Irish; she went to Derry
(Northern Ireland) later. Thus, Donegal seems to be an oasis of Irishness where the magic of
the fairies realm get more fascinating due to the old Irish spoken there. But there are stories
that should be told in Irish, as the narrator wants to tell us towards the end of the novel when
he writes all the story in Irish and reads it to his father, pretending that it was an essay for
school. Speaking Irish is not something real or contemporary for the protagonists father, nice
but still dead: I read it all outright in Irish to him. It was an essay we had been assigned in
school, I told him, on local history. He just nodded and smiled and said it sounded wonderful.
[] My father tapped me on the shoulder and said he liked to hear the language spoken in the
house. (Deane 203). The narrators mother knew no Irish, yet she tried to understand
fragments of poems and songs, she felt the need to be told an Irish poem, which shows the
longing for the lost Irish Identity, and the irreversible evolution of history.
Despite the cultural wisdom arising from the pagan-Christian combo (Hackney 49-
51) in folk literature, social life and history reveal a more traumatic BritishIrish cohabitation.
Historical events, such as the world wars and postcolonization, are echoed in social life: in
families, in groups of children, in the community, in religion. The reader can identify three
categories of people: the Irish, the English colonists and the informers. Within a rough
religious association the Irish are Catholic and the English are Protestant. Yet, the idea of
conversion and the idea of old English colonists, whose status is a kind of Irish-English,
appear in the novel.
The perspective upon society and history comes from inside an Irish family involved
in the IRA movement. The first thing that stirs the childs curiosity is his uncles
disappearance mysteriously talked about at the beginning of the novel. The secret of Eddies
disappearance follow him all along the novel and affects the characters behaviour and
relationships. He eventually finds out that his uncle was executed by his own people at his
grandfathers order because they thought he was an informer. Later, Crazy Joe, who only
pretended insanity, told the IRA members who the real informer was. Some of the characters
had to live with the burden of their mistake which remained a secret. The narrators maternal
grandfather, his mother, he and Crazy Joe seem to be the only people who knew the truth. The
narrators father knew that his brother was an informer, while the rest of the people had not
been informed at all about the reason for Eddies disappearance.
Besides violence, the effort to gain control and power meant to impose Protestant
celebrations despite the reduced number of the Protestant English in Derry. Some of the
celebrations were simply defiant as they celebrated the death of an Irish hero or the defeat of a
Catholic/ an Irish attack:
It was a city of bonfires. The Protestant had more than we had. They had the twelfth of July,
when they celebrated the triumph of Protestant armies at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690; then
they had the twelfth of August when they celebrated the liberation of the city from a besieging
Catholic army in 1689; then they had the burning of Lundys effigy on the eighteenth of
December. Lundy had been a traitor who had tried to open the gates of the city to the Catholic
enemy. We had only the fifteenth of August bonfires; it was a church festival but we made it
into a political one as well, to answer the fires of the twelfth. But our celebrations were not
official, like the Protestant ones. The police would sometimes make us put out fires or try to
stop us collecting old car tyres or chopping down trees in preparation. Fire was what I loved to
hear of and to see. (Deane 31)
The boy sees the difference between them and us as a religious difference
between the Protestants and the Catholics, which is a rough identification. This identification,
as well as the reasons for which the Protestants celebrated, is far from referring to Gaelic Irish
aspirations and identity. The Catholic community were prevented from their only church
festival celebrated on the fifteenth of August, which shows that the main task of the police
was to preserve the Protestant order and interest. The last sentence of the above excerpt shows
the childs indifference to the reasons for which the fires were made: Fire was what I loved
to hear of and to see. (Deane 31) as he couldnt simply identify with either the Catholics or
the Protestants.
Evaluation test:
1. What is the possible meaning for the use of the changelings in the novel?
Answer: The changelings are human children whose souls have been taken over by fairies,
and they may stand for the Irish who have lost their tradition and culture.
2. What is the symbolic meaning of the name Brigid?
Answer:
Questions:
1. Explain the metaphor of the Field of the Disappeared?
Answer: The metaphor of the Field of the Disappeared suggests a spiritual involution since
the field appears as a magic island where the souls of the Irish are taken, where the Irish
tradition and culture are buried.
2. What happens if someone whispers a secret in Grianan?
Answer:
Summary
To present the identity problem the author had to intermingle cultural elements (fairy
tales, myths, religion, legends, superstitions, language) with social elements (family,
social problems, social gatherings) with historical elements (World War II, the British
colonisation, the Irish fight for independence) and with the maneuvering within the
community in order to gain control and power.
The narrator refers to the changelings, the cashel Grianan, the Field of the
Disapeared, uses characters with symbolic names Brigid, mentions celebrations for
Protestants and for Catholics, and events that reveal the conflict between the
Protestantants and the Catholics.
Silence in Reading in the Dark

Reading in the Dark seems to have been written to show how silence can encompass
everything becoming a means of life for a family, a necessity in the logic of narrative
economy, the goal of life in a Freudian meaning, the openness of the novel itself. Although
silence has been considered another form of death or attribute of death, Seamus Deane makes
it an inexhaustible source of communication and imagination, the dark where the process of
dying turns into a birth into death since only there, free of any constraint, the narrators
imagination can give birth to his story, live through his storytelling and die as an everyday
ego. This also means the end of his quests and uncertainties because of shaping them as a text.
Within a theoretical frame generated by Didier Costes work Narrative as
Communication there are two drives that make silence an inherent presence in the narrative.
Coste states that every narrative [] has at least one textual beginning and one textual end
(on the narrational plane); most narratives also have beginnings and endings on the plane of
the narrated and on the plane of story (Coste, 1989:246). According to Raymond Russel the
author should provide a link between a beginning and an ending that cannot be identical but
should have an air of family resemblance (Coste, 1989:246). There is a common logic that
Coste thinks about implying a causal etiological and teleological orientation of all narratives
(1989:247), thus silence becomes a logical end of the story.
Another drive refers to the narratives that employ characters whose evolution has to
reach a point where their problems are solved, has to reach silence, otherwise the story may
fail, becoming tedious. Knowing when to stop is part of the artistry. The authors choices are
somehow restricted by the narrative itself, therefore rhetorical, moral and aesthetic constraints
can determine the way in which the characters can reach silence.
In Seamus Deanes novel the whole story is born out of silence and shadow, the
shadow develops within magic, mystery, darkness and silence to end in death and silence. In
the first section with a symbolic positive title Stairs (On the stairs, there was a clear, plain
silence.), since it implies the idea of ascendance, mother and son are separated by a shadow
that only the mother can see.
Seamus Deane creates suspense and magic on the background of which he wants to
build a childs personality and identity. Both silence and shadow are good incentives for a
child who wants to discover his identity. They may also mean freedom since his story seems
to be forged out of nothing, in the dark, therefore it seems to be the fruit of a resourceful
imagination that shapes its own way and erects its own obstacles, such as the obsessive
disappearances that the character has to deal with. Despite his mothers warning according to
which the investigation of the shadow would bring something bad to him, the boy chooses the
darkness, that is to stay by his mother and try to understand and help her as a proof of his love
for her and for his father.
The reader is introduced to the cause, the birth of the reason for which the novel
should happen, that is the existence of a shadow in the life of the boys mother. The existence
of the shadow encapsulated in silence was revealed by the first words related to its existence
and betraying his mothers fears. Hadnt she told anything about the shadow, it wouldnt have
appeared in the boys life and, of course, the novel wouldnt have been written. He was
challenged to look for something unknown where there shouldnt have been anything.
Absurdity and frustration hardens the boys childhood by making him see darkness by the
window. The existence of her secret could be heard in the silence.
Seamus Deane succeeded in veiling everything in silence, outer and inner life: silence
is cause, is setting, is goal. The author avoids the description of the setting because events and
characters seem to rise out of silence: when the police came because they had found out about
the pistol the boy was still in the silence. Objects seemed to be floating, free of gravity, all
over the room.(Deane, 1998:30) Describing his fathers family the protagonist states: So
broken was my fathers family that it felt to me like a catastrophe you could live with only if
you kept it quiet, let it die down of its own accord like a dangerous fire A long, silent
feud (At other times it seemed to be as cunning and articulate as a labyrinth, closely
designed, with someone sobbing at the end of it.) (Deane1998:42) The son wanted to punish
his father for not telling him about the problems his family had with the police by destroying
his roses, the only colour in his life. He reduced them to silence: Walking on that concreted
patch where the bushes had been was like walking on hot ground below which voices and
roses were burning, burning. (Deane, 1998:111) Love for his mother and father means
silence: I hated having to love her then for it meant I couldnt say or ask anything
(Deane, 1998:134) Everybody who knew the secret of Eddies death was dead or in exile or
silenced one way or the other. (Deane, 1998:217)
The son who feels the need to communicate is reduced to silence by a kind of
community law, which makes voices, and words burn everybody, as his mother felt when she
had a breakdown and couldnt speak to release her soul. The son chooses to communicate by
using other means: he destroyed his fathers roses and told him that he knew why, his father
not telling him the truth about their family had spoiled the boys childhood and innocence. He
reads his father the story of the secrets of their family in Irish pretending he was reading an
essay for school, which turned out to be a test because he found out that his father didnt
know all the secrets while his mother knew them and reacted. He felt relieved because he had
told his father the secrets that he knew.
For the sake of his love for both his parents, the boy, now an adolescent chooses
silence, but it seems to be too late for his mother who feels haunted by her sons presence and
paralyzed by shame. When he makes his choice, the narrator becomes the shadow: Now the
haunting meant something new to me now I had become the shadow (Deane, 1998:228),
which is the logical end of the story. What comes after this moment is a diving of events and
people into silence: sergeant Burke who is the representative of the police and who brought
them suffering dies; father dies (innocently lay) before his retirement without knowing
the secret, mother retires into her bedroom in silence. Thus, the third stage in the evolution of
the events is reaching silence, which turned out to be either physical death or spiritual death
(mother, son, Crazy Joe). Besides the fact that by reaching silence in the end of the novel the
author succeeds in finding/establishing the link with the beginning, the structure of the novel
also reveals a teleological orientation, the fact that the novel is designed so as to move
towards certain goals of self realization, here silence or death.
The other perspective upon the internal economy of the text is closely connected to the
first since, at least in Reading in the Dark, all the characters find a solution to their problems
and/or die. Thus, the reader may assume that some characters death (Una, Eddie, Fathers
sisters) contribute to the creation of an atmosphere of suspense and suffering and have a
traumatic effect upon the other characters meant to carry on the story until they themselves
find their end in death, in silence or in shadow. The cyclic structure of the novel as shown
above may be translated into a successful achievement of the goal of life, according to Freuds
theory in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The major instinctual drive which he called the
death-instinct stands for those conservative instincts which give the deceptive appearance of
being forces towards change and progress while they are seeking to reach the goal of life,
that is the initial state from which the living entity has departed, therefore death. Thus, the
conservative instincts impel towards repetition, the restoration of an earlier state of things
(Freud, 1990:52).
Evaluation test:
1. What makes silence be a logical ending of the story?
Answer: According to Didier Costes work Narrative as Communication there are two drives
that make silence an inherent presence in the narrative. Coste states that every narrative
[] has at least one textual beginning and one textual end (on the narrational plane)
(Coste, 1989:246). According to Raymond Russel the author should provide a link between a
beginning and an ending that cannot be identical but should have an air of family
resemblance (Coste, 1989:246). There is a common logic that Coste thinks about implying a
causal etiological and teleological orientation of all narratives (1989:247), in our case
silence becomes a logical end of the story. The novel begins by mentioning the existence of a
secret which implies silence, and ends with the young boy who has learned that silence is a
form of protection.
2. Why is it important to know when to finish the writing of a novel?
Answer:
Questions:
1. Explain why silence is important for the family.
Answer: There are two major reasons for which silence is important for the family: the
narrator, his mother and his grand father chose to keep the secret of Eddies death in order
not to make the narrators father suffer; people teach their children to be silent in order to
protect them from the problems they can encounter in the community if they speak.
2. Explain why the narrator destroys his fathers roses.
Answer:
Summary
Reading in the Dark seems to have been written to show how silence can encompass
everything becoming a means of life for a family, a necessity in the logic of narrative
economy, the goal of life in a Freudian meaning, the openness of the novel itself.
Seamus Deane makes silence an inexhaustible source of communication and
imagination, the dark where the process of dying turns into a birth into death since
only there, free of any constraint, the narrators imagination can give birth to his
story, live through his storytelling and die as an everyday ego. This also means the
end of his quests and uncertainties because of shaping them as a text.
Silence thus is a technique favouring creation, mystery and suspense and turning the
novel into a puzzle. It can be seen as a means of protection of the fathers feelings and
of the family. Silence meaning lack of communication affects the relationships within
the family and leads to aloofness. Silence can be eventually interpreted as love since
the narrator chooses to bear the burden of the secret for the sake of both his parents.
Theme 5 William Trevor
Units
Reshaping love in Fools of Fortune
Objectives
Bibliography:
Belfiore Elizabeth, Tragic Pleasures: Aristotle on Plot and Emotion, Princeton, Princeton
University Press, 1992.
Greimas Algirdas and Fontanille Jacques, Semiotica pasiunilor, Bucureti, Scripta, 1997.
Hackney Blackwell, Amy, and Ryah Hackney. The Everything Irish History & Heritage Book.
Avon, Massachusets: Adams Media, 2004.
Hayes McCoy, G.A. The Tudor Conquest:1543-1603 in The Course of Irish History. Moody,
T.W., and F.X. Martin, eds. Lanham. United States and Canada: Roberts Reinhart
Publishers in association with Radio Telefs irean, 2001.
Lynch, Patrick. The Irish Free State and the Republic of Ireland: 1921-66 in The Course of
Irish History. Moody, T.W., and F.X. Martin, eds. Lanham. United States and Canada:
Morley David and Kevin Robins. Spaces of Identity. Global Media, Electronic Landscapes
and Cultural Boundaries. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.
Tissari Helli, LOVEscapes. Changes in prototypical senses and cognitive metaphors since
1500, Helsinki, Socit Nophilologique, 2003.
Trevor, William. Fools of Fortune. London: Penguin Books, 1984.
WILLIAM TREVOR
(1928 - )
William Trevor Cox, born in County Cork, Ireland, in 1928, has been a full time writer
since 1970, although he initially worked as a sculptor. He graduated from Trinity College,
Dublin, with a degree in history. He worked in wood, clay and metal and exhibited in Dublin
and in several places in England. He started writing prose in 1958 and two years later he
abandoned sculpture as his work had become too abstract. Both themes and the form of his
literary works echo his education and experience in sculpting. He was awarded Hawthornden
Prize for Literature (1964) for The Old Boys and in 1965 he published The Boarding House;
Royal Society of Literature for Angels at the Ritz and Other Stories (1975); Whitebread
Award for The Children of Dynmouth (1976), Fools of Fortune (1983) and Felicias Journey
(1994); Allied Irish Banks Prize for fiction (1976); Post Book of the Year Award for The
Silence in the Garden (1988). His last novel is The Story of Lucy Gault (2002).

Can we really choose how to live? Shall we believe in faith/fortune and accept the idea
that our identity is moulded or blunted by the context within which we live? Fools of Fortune
raises the problem of choice as well as that of futility. It makes us wonder how much the
national, cultural and social context affects ones decisions and why the Irish sometimes
choose to escape their country and themselves. As D. Morley and K. Robins state in Space of
Identity the foreigners, the strangers are not only among us, but also inside us, which leads
to a sense of existential unease (25) and alienation: What has been alienated in the
construction of our identities comes back to haunt our imagination and disturb our peace of
mind (25). The Irishs split identity is the result of a continuous process of rejection
assimilation of the intruder (the British).
The beginning of the first chapter, entitled Willie, informs the reader about the
narrators intention to take him about one hundred years back, to a moment when there were
intensive fights for Irelands independence. Willie, who is the narrator in the first chapter, is a
descendant of a mixed family (Anna Woodcombe who was English and her Irish husband
William Quinton Willies great-grandparents) who lived in Co.Cork. Two generations later
the daughter of an English colonel, a poor relation of the Woodcombes (Trevor 1) married a
Quinton and had three children. The boy, the above-mentioned Willie, made history repeat by
marrying his cousin, an English woman related to the Woodcombes. Such a complicated
genealogy, meaning the interrelation of different cultures, intermingled with the Irish British
conflict and eventually led to a symbolic descendant: a daughter, Imelda, with a mental illness
that isolated her from the community, a daughter who seems to have been the recipient of all
the misfortunes that had attended her family.
The evolution of such a family as presented by William Trevor represents the essence
of the marriage between Ireland and Britain by pointing out how it affected the characters
social and cultural identity. The smallest social unit that marked Willies identity was his
family: his parents (the English mother and the Irish father) made him different, the persons
living with them (aunt Pansy, aunt Fitzeustace, Father Kilgarriff, Josephine, Mr. Derenzy)
created a community where tolerance was established. Thus, Kilneagh becomes the Edenic
space that could be shared by people belonging to different cultures, nations, professions, and
an oasis of peacefulness. Yet, Willie can remember slips revealing his relatives hidden,
repressed identity.
In order to adapt Willie to the place where he lived he had to be taught Irish history.
His first contact with Irish history was a result of the lessons Father Kilgarriff gave him.
Being informed about historical events from an Irish perspective, Willies personality was
moulded so as to embrace the idea of Irish freedom and sympathize with the Irish people.
Father Kilgarriffs lessons were continued by Evie Quinton who spoke about the English
occupation and about how the Irish helped the English to do now what they were done during
the Ulster war (Trevor 21), by fighting in a war which was not theirs. Willies mother, Evie
Quinton, spoke less about her English origin, but whenever she did she showed dignity. The
way in which she talked showed her understanding of the Irish problem and that she did not
consider herself the enemy but implied that she shared the Irish faith and would like to
expunge the injustice.
Later, after her husband and her daughters died killed by sergeant Rudkin, she could
not find power to continue to soberly live her live and eventually committed suicide. She was
not angry because of the war itself, as she could not understand the reasons for it. However,
she could not understand why an Englishman destroyed their family, how could such a person
continue to talk to people and have his own business, how could the others buy his products.
She would have probably liked the same Irish for whom her husband was killed to punish him
by isolating him. As the novel reveals, the Quintons were to continue to suffer, not because of
how they were, but merely because they had English origins and sympathized with the Irish
people.
Willies father did not forget his Irish origin and tried to keep himself informed about
the Irish problem and even to help the Irish revolutionary movement. Therefore, he received
back to his mill a former employee, Doyle, who had returned from the World War I and who,
despite his Irish nationality, turned out to be an informer. This demonstrates Doyles
alienation, a result of the displacement of his national framework (Morley 34). Mr Quinton
also used to read the Irish Times, which shows his interest in and sympathy with the Irish
cause. Later, he got involved in the Irish movement by inviting the revolutionary head,
Michael Collins, to his home and by helping him with money, exposing his family to violence
and death. The episode refers to the Civil War which lasted until May 1923 and which was the
effect of the Anglo-Irish Treaty signed on 6 December 1921. It didnt take long to the Black
and Tans to arrive at Kilneagh and destroy both the family and the house. Father and
daughters were shot, Willie experienced everything as if it were a nightmare in which strong
sensations intermingled with elements of the family history and images of the dead.
The way in which events unrolled for the Quintons emphasizes the fact that
Everything in Ireland was unsettled and on the edge. Although the Quintons were
Protestants and had more English roots, they had helped the Irish since 1797 (Trevor 28)
and eventually were punished by the English as they were considered traitors to our class and
to the Anglo-Irish tradition (Trevor 28). On the other hand, Irishmen like Doyle, who was
among the few returned from the war, betrayed their own nation and people, informing the
British about the revolutionary movement. Both situations suggest an alienation of identities
either determined by the social and economical context or by more intimate scopes, as the
love story in this novel wants to reveal. The Quintons chose to share the Irish fate, neglecting
the fact that their mixed origin made them more vulnerable.
Willies life changed radically: he was brought up by Josephine as his mother chose to
drink and refused to overcome the tragedy, not even for the sake of her child. He had to attend
a Protestant school, which made him share the social life of the British minority. As evidence
of the reiteration of history, he fell in love with his British cousin. Marriages between cousins
within the Protestant community was a local habit which helped them preserve their tradition
but also affected their psyche and the capacity of integration into the larger Anglo-Irish
community. The continuity of the misfortunes was stimulated but Evies suicide. He also felt
guilty of her suicide because he left her alone in Cork and went to Kilneagh that afternoon.
The impact of his mothers death was much greater than his love for Marianne and he left
Ireland.
At this point, William Trevor chose to change the narrator with Marianne who decided
to go to Ireland and live her life at Kilneagh. Marianne means a new perspective upon things
since her problems are more personal and domestic than those concerning Irelands fight for
independence, which might explain Evies attitude to her sons education and her interest in
preparing him for his life in Ireland. As women and mothers, both Evie and Marianne choose
their families first and repress their cultural identity. Mariannes choice was disapproved by
her British parents who refused to visit her in Ireland. Therefore, she had to redefine herself in
the middle of the ruins of an Anglo-Irish family and create a sane environment for her
daughter in the absence of the latters father. On the other hand she tried to transmit the Irish
tradition and culture to Imelda, with the help of Willies friends and aunts: And Imeldas
mother replied by speaking of Irish martyrs and Irish battles, and of the Easter Rising that
years ago had taken place (Trevor 164).
Mariannes bitterness and anger flew over Imeldas fragile soul and mind and instead
of helping her to integrate in the community that her mother considered right for her, she
isolated herself in her own world with her father as an Irish hero or as the boy in the
photograph in one town after another. Marianne wanted her daughter to be brought up as an
Anglo-Irish girl in Ireland, with her parents around, which made her refuse her parents offer
to give the child for adoption: To have my child brought up as someone elses? To have
forgotten her existence? (Trevor 165).
Because of Willies unexpected departure, he and Marianne did not have the chance to
get married, which hardened the position of the child in the Irish community. She was
accepted at a Catholic church, although she was a Protestant, people loved her. Only one
colleague kept on addressing her by ugly words and rejected her. The Irish people did not
forget what the Quintons had done for them for centuries. In spite of the tolerant environment
Imelda could enjoy at Kilneagh and in the community, she was very much affected by
everything she had heard about her birth and life, uncertain information about an absent father
who could have justified their life at Kilneagh. Imelda has the most shattered identity and
apparently the most acute sense of not belonging to the place indulged by her mothers
bitterness and a series of secrets that she happened to find out.
Imelda becomes a symbol of Ireland itself, repeatedly invaded by the British and
abandoned by the Irish, a country whose lost bearings lead to a cultural psychosis, to
identity disorder. The girls curative power so useful for the others and useless for herself
implies a complete surrender of identity and thus of the rejection of the others (Kristeva in
Morley 25). Her complete alienation and uprootedness/displacement suggest a non-
referential (placeless and timeless) sense of identity (Morley 39) and an oasis of peacefulness
for both the Irish and the British who visit her and try to help her.
Willie, Marianne and Imelda, the last standing for Ireland, are creatures of the
shadows, alienated as they have lost their sense of belongingness/of identity and open as
borderlessness mutilated their ability to respond to both internal (Irish) and external (British)
stimuli and made them accept everybody, irrespective of nation/culture, religion, social
group/class.
Evaluation test:
1. How would you describe Kilneagh?
Answer: Kilneach is the place where Quinton family lived: his parents (the English mother
and the Irish father) and the persons living with them (aunt Pansy, aunt Fitzeustace, Father
Kilgarriff, Josephine, Mr. Derenzy) created a community where tolerance was established.
Thus, Kilneagh becomes the Edenic space that could be shared by people belonging to
different cultures, nations, professions, and an oasis of peacefulness.
2. What happened because of the Quintons involvement in the civil war?
Answer:
Questions:
1. What determined Mrs Quinton to commit suicide?
Answer: Because of the British soldiers attack Mrs Quinton lost her daughters and her
husband. She could not recover and started drinking, neglecting her son Willie. When Willie
left for a visit to Kilneach, his mother committed suicide.
2. What can Imelda represent within the given context?
Answer:
Summary
The novel Fools of Fortune has 6 chapters and more points of view. Each chapter has
the name of one of the characters: Willie, Marianne and Imelda, from whose
perspective the story is told. There are three narrators: an external narrator who
begins the novel and also speaks in the chapters dedicated to Imelda, two internal
narrators: Willie and Marianne. They either repeat the story from a different
perspective or complete it.
The novel presents aspects of the life of an Anglo-Irish family in a troubled period of
fights between the Irish (roughly seen as Catholic) and the British (the Protestants).
This mixed family cannot identify with either of the above mentioned categories and
its members are rejected by both.
Reshaping love in Fools of Fortune
Assuming that love is emotion and relationship within its very basic meaning, we also
realize that the way in which love evolves is determined by the context in which the two
partners live. They cannot be decontextualized as human beings are social and unfold their
life and emotions in relation with the time, space and community in which they live.
Moreover, the relationship follows certain political rules as Elizabeth Belfiore states: Thus it
appears that human beings are political animals because they are living things whose nature
is to function within a community through the philia relationships of family and polis. They
are political in the same way they are philial: because they engage in mutual duties that
maintain the cooperative relationships of people who contribute to a common function
(1992: 78).
The characters involved in William Trevors novel experience such terrifying moments
that their ability to love and share their feelings and emotions is paralyzed. The main pattern
the author follows shows how a character that lost a beloved person becomes unable to
engage in a reciprocal emotional relationship, choosing to indulge in suffering. The novel is
thus mainly built on the physical or emotional absence of one partner and reflects the other
partners thoughts, emotions, suffering determined by this absence. Thus they waste their life
and their partners life.
The novel begins by focusing on the concept of family love. Kilneagh is a place where
people love each other in a friendly way while each of the characters has his/her own love-
story. However, they are perceived as a great family as they share the same space and are
engaged in mutual duties in order to maintain the domain and themselves as a family. Besides
his relatives, Aunt Pansy and Aunt Fitzeustace, Mr Quinton who is the owner of the domain
allows other persons to be part of the family and live with them: Father Kilgariff, their maid
(Josephine), the mill manager (Mr Derenzy), and other people working there.
When Josephine is accepted to be a member of the family, both she and the Quintons
are tolerant to each other. Since Josephine is not a kinship, her belonging to the Quintons and
her involvement in the familys business are restricted to her maid duty. Therefore, when the
narrator states that his mother made Josephine feel at home, he actually means familiar
with the environment, comfortable with their relationships and with herself for having chosen
to be there; his mother puts Josephine in the right place to function efficiently within the
institution called family. After Mr. Quintons death and his wifes indulgence in drinking,
Josephine is the one who brings Willie up, she is a mother to him.
In a similar way they must have familiarized father Kilgarriff who acts as a teacher
to Willie. Father Kilgarriffs love story that led to his unfrocking and perhaps to his being at
Kilneagh fascinated the young man who shortly presents the other employees love stories,
which makes them overstep the boundaries of the domain where they live together. Another
element that makes those strangers feel at home with the Quintons is that their sins are
forgiven there, Kilneagh being an example of tolerance and lenience, a place that gives people
another chance, as it generally happens with families.
However, there is a hierarchy within this family: a nucleus formed by Mr. and Mrs.
Quinton and their three children, whose authority is unquestionable; the Aunts, who are direct
relatives; and the other people brought there to help the Quintons with different works and
who have become members of the family. As Elizabeth Belfiore states, family relationships
imply both philia and political relationships.
Despite the harmony that seems to govern this family, its existence and evolution are
determined by the conflict between Ireland and England. While readers might expect
internal/domestic conflicts based on intercultural misunderstandings, Trevor depicts a happy
family enjoying a beautiful, sane and apparently safe spatial context. When Mrs Quinton
remains with her son Willie in a ruined house, instead of directing her love, and I refer here to
family love, towards her son who needs her, she chooses to drink and wonder why the soldier
who destroyed their family is not punished for this, why the members of their community
accept him. Thinking too much of the dead, she neglects the living, indulging herself in
suffering and making her sons life miserable. It is a continuous love of the absent, these
characters turning into a self-victimizing type who are not able to move on and thus they miss
their chance of being happy.
Later on, when Willie meets his English cousin, Marianne, with whom he falls in love,
family love turns into sexual love. She seems to feel the same for him, but they have to live in
different countries until she chooses to move to Ireland for him. Because of her choice, her
parents decide to simply abandon her, they refuse to talk to her or visit her, preventing her
from enjoying family love. Their choice is actually determined by their community,
mentalities, the shame that such a marriage has brought to them. They care more about the
way in which their community perceive them than they do about their daughter. It might have
been, although debatable, a rational vs. emotional choice, which leads to self-victimization
again and to indulging in suffering.
Both Marianne and her parents suffer because of their choices. While the formers
choice is determined by sexual love and family love, at the same time, since she is pregnant
and wants to have her family, trying to obey the social rules, her parents submit to another
hierarchy of the social structures in which the community comes first. The attitude of the
British is different from what Marianne knows about Kilneagh. Although the parents invoke
morality, their gesture may be qualified as a political one: the colonizers who do not want to
intermingle with the colonized. The solution they suggest (they asked Marianne to give her
child to another family and lie about her status) defies morality.
Mariannes parents choose to preserve their position in the British community, they
choose between body and soul revealing an outwards interest that is more powerful than their
feelings. Algirdas J.Greimas and Jacques Fontanille speak about the degradation of the
theories of passions in relationship with economic politics. Actually politics and needs replace
passions and desires. The pragmatic dimension affects and/or determines the body that
determines the soul, when we refer to passions, or the spirit, when we refer to needs (Greimas,
1997: 80).
In the economy of the narrative William Trevor succeeds in rendering the dominant
pragmatic feature of the British in opposition with the passion characterizing the Irish. By
administrating their lives with their soul, the Irish choose to suffer since they seem not to be
aware of their interests within the context and are not able to adjust and survive. Unadaptable
wanderers, they indulge in suffering: Mrs. Quintons mind tries to understand why the
community does not punish a criminal and she neglects her son; Willie leaves the country
overwhelmed by his feelings and refuses to draw things back to what they used to be, refuses
to live together with his new family. Paradoxically, selfishness can define both categories.
Unlike the above mentioned categories, Marianne is the bridge between the British
pragmatics and the Irish passion. Her love for Willie and her daughter makes her migrate to
Kilneagh and reconstruct a surrogate Quinton family. The only positive connotation of her
choice is that she makes life go on in Kilneagh, otherwise she shares the almost absurd Irish
indulging in suffering.
Therefore, the third example of destroyed family love appears when Marianne comes
to Kilneagh to have her child and live a happy family life with her cousin-lover. The latter has
chosen to leave the country and although he himself had suffered because of his mothers
indifference to his needs, he stays away from his family, preventing his lover and his daughter
from enjoying their life.
In the above-mentioned examples the reader can notice that love comes second for
certain characters, either after other loves (Willies love for his mother and her death
determine him to leave the country) or because of certain external, community mentalities. In
both cases we deal with the absence of reciprocity, the lack of mutual engagement, therefore
unbalanced love. Family (love) is more like an institution similar to the Irish-British
relationship where the two, although in opposition, are not complementary.
Willies first experience involving sexuality is related to an almost strange character,
his teacher at the Protestant school. While he is a child unable to understand and distinguish,
Miss Halliwell turns out to be immature from a psychological perspective and an immoral
person. She cannot distinguish or choose between friendly love (philia) and sexual love (eros)
simply harassing the boy. While his attention and love are clearly directed towards his mother
(storge family love) and his cousin (combination of familyfriendship and sexual love),
both of them lacking reciprocity at the moment, he is assaulted by Mrs Halliwells love, a
mixture of maternal and sexual love. Her love turns into hatred projected on Marianne and
sends a letter in which she condemns the love that brought together Willie and Marianne and
led to Imeldas birth. Miss Halliwell voices the mentalities of the community in which
Protestants and Catholics reject mixed marriages.
A similar experience marks Marianne during her stay in Austria. Her supposed
German teacher is a pervert. With his wifes agreement he harasses the young girls who come
for a short period to his house to learn the language. Although a very short episode in
Mariannes life, this experience seems to be an appalling alternative to the time spent in
Kilneagh. It eventually leads to a much more embellished image of the Irish place and of
Willies love.
What brings them all back is the almost Edenic place, Kilneagh, that they all love.
Although it is a ruin, they do not leave it, and even Willie who lived his happiest and his
saddest moments there cannot stay far from it forever. Eventually they transform the place
into a legend since what makes it survives is love.
Evaluation test:
1. What is the relation between love and suffering in Fools of Fortune?
Answer: Although most of the characters love somebody and could live happily together,
there are external factors that either hinder them from being together or make them sacrifice
the people they love. For example Mr Quinton gets involved in the Irish movement exposing
his family to a risk, and indeed they pay for his gesture; Mrs Quinton, who suffers because of
her daughters and husbands death, chooses to commit suicide instead of loving and helping
her son.
2. Explain what family love means in the novel?
Answer:
Questions:
1. What do characters feel for Kilneagh?
Answer: Kilneagh is the almost Edenic place that they all love. Although it is a ruin, they do
not leave it, and even Willie who lived his happiest and his saddest moments there cannot stay
far from it forever. Eventually they transform the place into a legend since what makes it
survive is love.
2. What kind of love do Willie and Marianne share for each other?
Answer:
Summary
One of the central themes of the novel is love that eventually survives, although the
characters fools of fortune cannot enjoy it. The happy and harmonious life in
Kilneagh, the domain where Willie was born and brought up, where Marianne will
raise her daughter, ceases when the British soldiers kill Mr Quinton and his daughters
and burn the house. The other characters, marked by the event and unable to recover
from it, will miss the chance to live their lives happily: Mrs Quinton dies and Willie
chooses the self-exile. Although Willie suffered because of his mothers absence, he
does not make his daughters life better. The other characters that remain at Kilneagh
live in the shadow of the same event and cannot enjoy life properly: Marianne and
Imelda suffer because Willie does not return, but they do not leave Kilneagh.
Evaluation
Evaluation consists of: an essay (15%), homework (answer the questions at the end of each
unit: 15%) and a written test (70%).
Essay themes (examples):

1. Which is your favourite work of the ones studied above? (Give arguments)
2. Characterize Willie Quinton focusing on his Anglo-Irish identity.
3. Do you agree with Gabriel Conroys attitude towards Irish culture and language?
(Give arguments)
Test Paper
Answer the following questions without exceeding a paragraph for each answer:
1. Why is Daniel OConnell an important name in Irish history?

2. What is the influence of symbolism on Dubliners?
3. What is the meaning of the title The Dead?
4. What is the relationship between Stephen and his biological father in A Portrait of
the Artist?
5. What is the meaning of Joyces epiphany?
6. Identify the repetitions used in the novel and the impact they have on the reader in
Reading in the Dark.
7. What was the secret of the family in Reading in the Dark?
8. Why does the narrator write and read the story in Irish in Reading in the Dark?
9. What is the narrative point of view in Fools of Fortune?
10. Comment on identity and uprootedness with Imelda.

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UNIVERSITATEA DIN CRAIOVA

Titlul cursului: Twentieth Century Irish Fiction

Time allotted: 2 hours

Historical and cultural background

Time allotted: 6 hours

Time and Space in The Dead

Depersonalization through individuation in Joyce's A Portrait

Allotted time: 3 hours

General aspects of Flann OBriens work

Attempting a contextualization of Flann OBriens work, one cannot ignore the

Allotted time: 6 hours

Narrative strategies Reading in the Dark

The identity problem Reading in the Dark

Silence in Reading in the Dark

Time allotted: 4 hours

The identity problem in Fools of Fortune

Essay themes (examples):

1. Why is Daniel OConnell an important name in Irish history?

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