Sean O'Faolain: The Silhouetted Figure of the Biographer
Résumé
The Silhouetted Figure of the Biographer
Arguably one of the most prominent intellectuals of his time, O’Faolain was in his youth swept along by the wave of revolutionary idealism that led him to join the ranks of the Anti- Treaty resistance movement. 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 Ireland to confront the power of the Censorship Board which had banned his first collection of short stories, Midsummer Night Madness (1932), testifies to his conception of writing, whether it be fiction, biography, or essay, as an act of resistance.
While O’Faolain’s realist aesthetic in fiction questioned idealised representations of Ireland, his interest in historical biographies – he wrote highly popular biographies of Constance Markievicz, Daniel O’Connell, Hugh O’Neill and Eamon de Valera – aimed to challenge the dominant nationalist historiography, thereby joining in the academic “revisionist” movement that was emerging at the time under the influence of T. W. Moody and R. D. Edwards.
If O’Faolain’s versions of Irish history had a significant impact in Ireland and were praised by historians of his time, some intellectuals noted a certain literary stamp that bore witness to his style as a writer of fiction but which sits uneasily with history writing. The historian F. S. L. Lyons, for example remarked upon the overwhelming presence of the “biographic voice” in O’Faolain’s biographies.
While O’Faolain often commented on the self-referential – sometimes even autobiographic – dimension of his fiction, this paper will explore the limit between biography, autobiography and memory. It will examine how the biographer’s presence materialises in his work and questions the value of these biographies as history writing.
After having established the coexistence of the “stylistic” presence of the biographer, and of his presence as a “witness” of historical events, I will study to what extent O’Faolain’s technique and voice tend to sculpt the biographic figures in his own image, leading to the emergence of a form of veiled, shadowy self-portrait. This will lead me to study the specificity of the “relationship” the biographer entertains with his characters, showing how much it owes to the New English Biography.
While the presence of memory and of the biographic ‘voice’ may be seen as encroaching on the scientific rigour and objectivity required of history writing, they nonetheless contribute to renewing and revising the tradition of historical biographies in Ireland at the beginning of the 20th century.