Sean O’Faolain and De Valera’s ‘Dreary Eden’

François Sablayrolles (1)

1 3L.AM - Langues, Littératures, Linguistique des Universités d'Angers et du Mans

Arguably one of the most prominent intellectuals of his time, Sean O’Faolain was also one of the most irreverent and provocative who tackled head on the totems of what he called “De Valera’s dreary Eden”. In his youth, however, O’Faolain had been profoundly affected by the brutality of the British repression of the 1916 Rising and was swept along by the wave of idealism that led him to join the ranks of the Anti-Treaty armed resistance movement. But his hopes were dashed by the emergence in the 1920s and 1930s of a morally repressive as well as ideologically and politically conservative Ireland. O’Faolain’s choice to return to live in Ireland and to confront the power of the Censorship Board which had already banned his first collection of short stories Midsummer Night Madness (1932), bears witness to his engagement and to his conception of writing, whether it be fiction, biography, or essay, as an act of resistance. This paper proposes to examine how, by providing an outlet to bypass the Censor, his biographies of Constance Markievicz, Eamon de Valera and Daniel O’Connell, enabled O’Faolain to challenge the dominant nationalist discourse and to promote an alternative reading of modern Ireland’s history and identity. O’Faolain’s experiments in biography and fiction gave rise to numerous mutually enriching stylistic exchanges. This essay will study how the presence of the grotesque, of irony, but also of caricature, allow for the construction of an irreverent, and at times subversive discourse designed to push icons “off their pedestal”. While the satirical dimension of O’Faolain’s work contributes to the emergence of a singular biographic voice and point of view, it also affects the objectivity of the biographical figures portrayed and the social commentaries expounded. This paper will therefore propose an assessment of O’Faolain’s alternative discourse and of the merit of his theses.

Mots clés: Sean O’Faolain; Irish-Ireland; Revisionism; Historiography; Biography; Irish Historical Studies

Domaines: Littératures; Histoire; Sciences de l'Homme et Société

François Sablayrolles. Sean O’Faolain and De Valera’s ‘Dreary Eden’. 2018. ⟨hal-02995515⟩