Whispered Presences in Sean O'Faolain's Stories

When Sean O'Faolain describes as name chosen for journal of Irish literature he edited, he brushes aside word Bell as unimportant. In first issue he says, Any other equally spare and hard and simple word would have done; any word with a minimum of associations (5). Later he continues, All our symbols have to be created afresh, and tire only way to create a living symbol is to take a naked thing and clothe it with new life, new association, new meaning, and with all of vigour of life we live Here and Now (5-6). He might just as well, editor's note, be striking keynote for modern Irish short fiction (including his own) by depicting building of something powerful from something spare, or from unadorned details characterizing Irish short story since George Moore. What sharply distinguishes O'Faolain's writing, however, is not his creation of large worlds from spare materials, but his location of these spare materials characters' memories, dimly perceived personal and national histories characters must reconstruct if they are to establish identities. In a sense, O'Faolain's stories are hymns to ambiguity, and to human potential to create when faced with ambiguity. Perhaps best way to illustrate O'Faolain's desire to portray this ambiguity is through story, How to Write a Short Story. The main character here is clearly modeled after Frank O'Connor: Morgan Myles is a local librarian, he has a long, ballooning Gaelic head, he writes poetry but is turning to short stories, and he is fiercely interested Maupassant.(1) In story he talks with a man, named who describes to him a painful boyhood experience of a homoerotic love affair. As Frank describes experience to Morgan, it seems confusing and centerless. Hang it Frank, says Morgan, there's no story at all this! (1198). Still he pursues, looking for the detail, until Frank tells him how innocent he was - an petit ange - throughout affair. The phrase strikes a chord Morgan: I've got it! An idyll! Looking out dreamily over fields from that dusty dormer window. That's it, that's ticket. Did you ever read that wonderful story by Maupassant - it's called - An Idyll - about two young peasants meeting a train, a poor, hungry young fellow who has just left home, and a girl with her first baby. He looked so famished that she took pity on him like a mother, opened her blouse and gave him her breast. When he finished he said, 'That was my first meal three days.' Frank! arc me most beautiful story ever heard my whole life. You think so? doctor said morosely. I think he was going through hell that year. At elghteen? On threshold of manhood? In love with a child of twelve? That is, if you will allow that a youth of eighteen may suffer as much from love as a man twenty years older. To me astonishing thing is that he did so well all that year at his studies and at sports. Killing pain of it, suppose? Or trying to? But What went on poor devil between? (1200) And that, the between - chaos, seemingly un-poetic - is source O'Faolain wants to tap, a source he claims, through (somewhat) gentle mockery of this story, that O'Connor does not tap.(2) In another O'Faolain story, a character refers to Keats, speaking of the marvellous thing Keats once said about greatest quality any human being can possess - power to live wonder and uncertainty and mystery and doubt without ever trying to reach fact and reason (Marmalade 1240). For O'Faolain, withholding center, telling detail, does fictional justice to murky, painful, in between moments of life, leaving imagination with task of ordering those moments. O'Faolain voices his belief imagination's task flatly Love's Young Dream, when narrator says: had wanted to know what there is to know; to possess life and be its master. …