Are your school days out of sight? When you took English, art, and math, what's your favorite Fahrenheit? How sour are the grapes of wrath? Do you need a challenger? Poor disgusting Salinger. Do you love the written word? What happened to the mocking? Our show is just beginning So find a place to sit These questions will be on the test It's time for Sophomore League
Welcome back to Sophomore Lit, where we reread your 10th grade reading list. I'm John McCoy. And with me, and please let me know if I pronounce this correctly, is Kieran Healy. That's right. Karen, will you tell everyone out there about yourself? Sure. My name is, as John said, Karen Healy. I...
I live in North Carolina, where I am a professor of sociology at Duke University. I write about not very literary topics, although I guess sometimes they've been the subject of short stories. I write about the social organization.
human blood and organs of uh of about cultural goods and the moral order in the market but more to the point for this show i was originally uh born raised and educated in ireland and um and it was discussing that that um got us onto the topic of uh of today's show You wrote a fascinating email to me in which you described what the standard text was when you were in...
What do they call high school in Ireland? In secondary school. Maybe you could describe that to the listeners. Yeah, I'm a longtime listener, first time talker of sophomore lit. And one of the things, one of the reasons that I enjoy the... podcast so much is that it kind of I'm interested in the kind of what's shared amongst people
between you and your co-hosts. And I've lived in the United States now for a distressingly long time, since the mid-1990s. I came over here for graduate school. And my two children have gone through high school here. By contrast with many other countries, but especially Ireland, the disaggregated character of the U.S. education system means that while there's a certain amount that people have in common...
They've read the O. Henry story or they know Somerset Maugham or whatever it is. They've all read The Gift of the Magi in high school. And that's the premise of the podcast. My experience and the experience of people like me and certainly people my age was of a much more kind of focused set of readings that essentially everybody read. There were two and still are two main state exams in secondary school.
in Ireland. There was your intermediate certificate and your leaving certificate and there were national exams that you took in seven to nine subjects once when you were 14 or 15 and once when you were 17 or 18 when you were leaving school. And for the English curriculum, there were a set group of texts. They would rotate a little bit. But it was much more fixed than the U.S. case. And so for the younger crowd, the kind of junior high kind of level in the U.S., there was a set.
set anthologies that were written and they were edited in the 1960s by a guy called Augustine Martin, who was a literary critic and professor in Dublin. And and they were called the Exploring English anthologies. And there was one for poetry, one for short form prose like essays and one for short stories. And.
Every Irish schoolchild from 1970 to the end of the first decade of the 21st century went, I think, went through just was taught English literature out of those books. And then there was a corresponding. cycle for your fifth and sixth year of school, your junior and senior year of high school, where you read a Shakespeare play, a classic novel.
a contemporary novel and then again a set anthology also edited by martin of of poetry which you and then the selection chosen from those anthologies rotated on i think a six or seven year cycle so that the teachers wouldn't lose their minds uh from uh from boredom and so So there's this these anthologies were so kind of widespread. Every schoolchild had one. And then later they became a kind of a nostalgia market sort of developed for them.
and Gill, the publishers in Ireland, reissued a couple of them in the 2010s with introductions by well-known Irish authors because they were such a shared... resource and the sort of people I mean it's not a topic that would come up in conversation too much but you know everybody had a play that they did for their leaving search they had stories that they read for their intersearch and they were they were the same for everyone
When I was in high school, we read from a couple of large books. I think they were by the Macmillan Company. One was called. adventures in american literature and what was called adventures in british literature that meant All of the British Isles. So everyone got thrown together into that. And that's one of the reasons why Americans are so confused about what constitutes...
uh, Britain or Great Britain or the UK or England. And, uh, but, uh, what I was going to say is I, I, I am very charmed by this, uh, strong emphasis on literature, because when I was growing up, literature was dealt with with a certain amount of skepticism and distrust. I had a course where the Shakespeare...
that I read had been edited to take out all the sexy parts, where the Chaucer I had read, likewise, took out all the sexy parts. It also wasn't in Middle English. It was in a modern translation. It figures because when my wife and I visited Ireland a while back, people who've listened to the podcast for a long time know we went there right after we had finished reading Ulysses together. And we thought, well, why not go see the sites for Ulysses? I was not expecting the city to be so...
Joyce crazy as it is like every there are so many monuments to Joyce. There are so many like all of their stores there with big. Pictures of Harold Bloom and Molly Bloom and Stephen Dadalus. Leopold Bloom rather than Harold Bloom. Leopold Bloom. Harold Bloom is a different person entirely. Still literary. And we also went, as I was saying, we went to the Dublin Writers Museum. And there they had a huge collection of Frank O'Connor, who's...
the topic of this episode of his stuff. The thing I remember, of course, is his spectacles because I don't know why we were so, we're so drawn to these. relics personal items yeah the university where i teach has virginia wolf's writing desk for some reason which is a quite nice kind of uh arts and crafts kind of desk but yeah we we admire these relics it's true that like in ireland people you know there's there's a certain amount of uh industrialization of um of of
the Joyce industry, and so on. But it is very much real, and the city is compact enough in Dublin that you can walk around and follow Bloom's... trajectory or you know quite quite quite easily and the and the centrality of literature as well of course is kind of traditionally a fairly large component of Irish people's official Irish culture's self-conception and while you know just because these anthologies were
read by everybody and certainly not all of the people who were made to read the material loved or enjoyed it but they were put together with the you know just like in your case where you had the kind of American literature, the emphasis of the Exploring English anthologies had a very strong British influence, as you can imagine, but also had... a very large representation of Irish writers.
And this was something that was very important to the identity of the state and to the people composing the anthologies. Gus Martin, the editor, I believe he shows up. Under under an assumed name, a version of him shows up in one of the late David Lodge's campus novels, maybe maybe Small World, where he's he's sort of featured as a as a as a too pure or too innocent for this world. Irish academic going to these international conferences where all these cutthroat
And American and English academics are kind of fighting it out on matters of high theory and having affairs with one another and so on. And poor Gus Martin just cannot understand why people are not just focused on the wonders of literature and is completely... oblivious to all of the political stuff. So that was definitely the character of the person who put together these collections. We talked about various authors and we...
Came to light on Frank O'Connor because he's someone I haven't covered yet on the podcast. Someone with whom I was... I don't really know if I've read any of his stuff through until now. I certainly know his name very well because where I live and work in Boston, there is an enormous Irish population. And Boston College, where my wife and I work, has a strong...
connection to Ireland. And it was originally a school for Irish boys school. And so there's there's we have a collection of papers. I think a lot of the Yates papers are there. So I knew the name well, but this is my first time reading it through. I was looking for something short, to be honest, because on this podcast, I've read some rather long novels and it makes it difficult to get these episodes out when you're reading Moby Dick or...
God help us, Ayn Rand. Well, that's the that's one of the pitches for the, you know, again, Ulysses aside, the one of the proud claims of. The Irish literary culture generally is that Irish writers are very solid on short stories. And Frank O'Connor is one of the leading exponents. Now, O'Connor had a really interesting life. I was reading up on him. He is of an earlier generation than I thought he was because I knew his name from...
The fact that he wrote for the New Yorker a lot in the 50s and 60s, that was after he'd actually moved to America for a while. But he was he was involved in the War of Independence. He was, you know, there throughout Ireland during the contentious early years of post. treaty. He was part of the anti-treaty group because he was not happy about how Alan got cut up. An enormously long career. He wrote... He wrote essays. He worked for the Irish National Theatre in Dublin.
So so good on him, I guess. I feel like I should have read him sooner than this. Yeah, he was. So he was from Cork, where I was also from. That's one of the reasons I am also from. That's one of the reasons I picked him as well. Cork is Ireland's second largest city, but in its own mind, the real capital of the country. And yeah, O'Connor is kind of like a transitional figure. He was born in 1903 and he died quite young. He was only 63.
When he died, he died in 1966. But he sort of comes of age right at the birth, just before the birth of the Irish, the modern Irish state in 1922. And so he is in the old IRA. during the War of Independence as a teenager and seize action during the War of Independence. And then, as you said, after the War of Independence, after the treaty was signed, you immediately get the Civil War in classic Irish.
tradition the first thing on the agenda is the split for any new organization and uh and then he yes he was as a cork man he was a rebel uh he was on the anti-treaty side and and then His writing started quite young, and he had both a career in Ireland as somebody who would have known kind of as his elders, the senior people of kind of the... of the eights generation uh george russell a you know people like that and uh and then but also
And I think he got into fights with them. I don't know the details of his biography in great depth. And, of course, there was disagreements over the Abbey Theatre that he was involved in, I think, in the 1930s. And as you said, yeah, then he had a career. in uh in the u.s where he was a successful he he lectured uh taught at u.s universities and and um was published quite a bit in the new yorker and so he had a profile there and i knew that about him like when i
When I was introduced to him, again, as one of these slightly parochial kind of pride in look at these, look at these people we have produced and they're big in America. And and so his yeah, so his career kind of. He lives until the mid-1960s, but it really touches on kind of giants of kind of... turn of the century, turn of the 20th century Irish literature, and then also connects down to people who are still working now.
Every person from Ireland I've ever met is the first thing they will ask is where you're, which city you're from. And I find that. odd as an American because I don't really have a sense of place the way that I think most people in the world do. I also have this...
name, McCoy, which a lot of people assume I'm Irish. The dirty story is that I'm actually Scotch-Irish, which is... I would have thought, yeah, McCoy is quite... I would have thought it was a Scottish name. More than... Maybe Americans assume... Right. Well, apparently the the my the ancestor who came to America with that name immigrated from Ulster. But. I think two generations before that, they were living in Scotland.
Anyway, so thanks for continuing this lovely tradition of asking people. Of extreme parochialism. I mean, it's really just purely a consequence of, you know, a very small but extremely... culturally dense perhaps in both senses uh landscape uh where and that's one of the things that even though even in the short stories you that we read for for this episode you see hints here and there of kind of um
class divisions within Cork City where the childhood stories of O'Connor are set and lots and lots of small attention to detail of people giving themselves away both in terms of where specifically they are from and then what that says about, you know, what their class background is. So let's get into the stories here. We're going from sort of the. the most comedic to the most, I guess, substantial.
And we're starting with First Confession, which I was trying to look up when these things were published. This got published several times in different versions starting in 1935. The version that it finally ended. up and was revised in 1951. So in some ways, this is the last story of the three that we're reading, the other two being published in 1931. But this is... A memoir of a first confession. Again, nothing that I have a personal connection with, but which I think must ring very...
very familiar to a lot of Irish readers. Yes, it was immediately accessible, even if, you know, when it was read, it was originally read to me. The first time I came across it, I was in... primary school rather than secondary school I think I was 10 in fifth class and our teacher Mr. Buckley read it out to us and at the time we thought it was the funniest thing we'd ever heard I think it was
And again, and the context is both at one remove from the world, at several removes really, from the world that O'Connor describes this, which would have been even then. you know, the child at the time of our grandparents rather than anything directly connected to us. But it was also something that, you know, I was like at an all boys school, an all boys state school, a public school.
which was completely standard at the time, a whole separate girls' school up on the hill, 300 metres away, with an entirely separate world that we were not permitted to know anything of.
And everyone in the class would have made their first confession when they were seven as an antecedent to their first communion. And so this is a kind of comic version of that experience. Jackie, the... protagonist of the story is a little more on his own he gets prepared uh by by the terrible mrs ryan as in the in the run-up to it but then he's kind of sent in by himself we all went down
accompanied by our teachers to take our first confession or to make our first confession. So yes, it's extremely accessible to any Irish person, probably to any Catholic person, but certainly to kind of... Some of my background, it was a sort of somewhat romanticized and already kind of distant in time, but very much an experience that everybody, including yourself, you knew had had. This is pre-Vatican II, so this is like the old school go to a booth. And the humor from the story...
comes from the fact that the woman you mentioned, what's her name again, Bob? Ryan. This is Ryan. Ryan. Ms. Ryan and Jackie's older sister are both getting Jackie ready by... explaining the extreme seriousness of what he's about to do and what the consequences are of doing it wrong, which are various forms of eternal damnation. And Jackie's getting very worked up over this, not knowing how to comport himself, and then kind of running into this.
rather avuncular priest who at first seems kind of frightening, but soon seems to simply be delighted with and amused by Jackie's attempts to... impress him with the severity of his sinful life. Right. The crimes of a lifetime is the phrase. Yeah. And sort of the structure of the story, like it...
It's deceptively sort of straightforward. I think a bunch of things that were certainly lost on me at the time. I mean, I think that all of the... actively malevolent figures in the story are girls or women and the priest turns out to be a good egg uh but um but the the kind of antagonists are His grandmother, who's in from the country, who walks around the house on her bare feet and takes porter, drinks stout, and eats potatoes with her fingers. His evil sister, Nora.
who is older than him and has made her confession and so has more experience of life and terrorizes him. And and then Mrs. Ryan, who is the the sort of well to do woman. She comes, Frank O'Connor mentions that she comes from Montanati, which is the.
the area of cork that's up on the hillside on the south side of the on the north side of the city uh overlooking overlooking the city and so that's where the big houses are and uh and and so she comes and says yeah so you know i'll give any boy half a crown if they can hold their finger in this candle flame for five minutes and and what is five minutes if in comparison to the eternity of burning and so o'connor is very good on he does things like
he says, she did mention the other place, but you could tell that it was hell that had the first, that was first in her heart, which is kind of like the reverse, right? The other place is usually synonym for hell rather than, or the euphemism for hell rather than heaven. And so, yeah, so there's a thread of kind of all of these women and their terrible behaviors of various kinds that are oppressing Jackie. And then the other thing that I probably missed...
when I read it first, was the degree to which Jackie is kind of comically made to... He's feeling sorry for himself a lot in his oppressed state, even though it's clear that he's mostly working himself up into these fits rather than having anything... Really bad happened to him to push him into this state of mind. Well, if you like very dry humor, this is, O'Connor is a master. There were lots of little lines that I highlighted, but one of the ones I liked the best was when...
Nora shoves him into the chapel where he's going to give his confessional and says, I hope we'll give you the penitential psalms, you dirty little calfler. And then the next line is, I knew then I was lost, given up to eternal justice. There's a kind of a grand eloquence. That's right. to laugh at the seriousness with which he comes to all this. There is this palpable relief when we realize that the priest is more amused than anything by Jackie. And the priest actually encourages Jackie to be...
Jackie says, you know, sometimes I want to kill my grandmother. He said, I had it all arranged. He said, I had it all arranged to kill my grandmother. And the priest isn't so shocked so much. He's like saying, oh, you don't want to do that. That's too difficult. You don't want to get arrested for that. Yeah, yeah. So what would you do with the body?
Right. So I thought I would cut it up and put it away. So yes, yeah, there's a lot of that. Again, that sort of mixture, that's very characteristic of, I think, of a wide suede of Irish writing. that's funny is, is that sort of dry and, and sort of, yeah, the, the grandiloquence where there's, there's, it's very, it's very verbal.
And it takes a lot of pleasure in kind of the language and then also is quite deadpan. Like there's a bit where he, while he's walking up to the church, he's walking up the hill and... There's this very nice, just very brief kind of description of the sun is flashing through the buildings. And he says that, you know, the language is very sharp. He says something like that. He looks down the hill and he catches glimpses of the river, the River Lee.
in the city flashing through the gaps between the houses like adam's last glimpse of paradise he says as he's about to walk into and again it's everything is backwards right so he's like walking out of he's walking to the church but he's for him he's walking into this sphere of kind of damnation as he's about as he fears he's about to be put to the sword by by the priest i i read a lot of stories about uh catholic childhoods that are very um
The author wants you to know how difficult that was for them. And this... You know, I was worried at first that this was going to be another one, but it turns out to be a very charming and lovely story. Yeah, it's just it's it's sort of slightly it's somewhat romantic. It's very funny. You know, it has some.
Limits to its vision, like I say, the fact that... What's the line? The peak of Jackie's kind of bitterness towards... uh the opposite text where he says oh the hypocrisy of women he says when when he's when his sister walks out of the uh the confessional box in a in a in a in a high state of grace and self-satisfaction and uh he's just this guy and that's the that's the peak of everything for him This reminds me a lot of James Thurber. A lot of James Thurber stories feature...
sort of harried or henpecked men and women who are monsters to them for no good reason. And I don't know what that is about. You know, I think there are other mid-century humorists that... approach the relationship between genders this way. And I don't know, maybe it was. Right. And it's funny because, you know, in O'Connor's own background, his background.
Was very much kind of in the in the kind of Frank McCourt, you know, mold of a of a of an alcoholic, largely absent father who drank all his money and a mother who. just worked constantly to keep body and soul together and her, her, her child kind of going. And I don't think, you know, that, that that's not present in this story, but you know, it's not as if.
O'Connor was short on examples of the fecklessness of men rather than the hypocrisy of women, I think, if he had wanted to deal with it. But instead, he approaches the whole thing a bit like... mentioning McCourt reminds me of when Frank McCourt published Angela's Ashes and came on a book tour to Ireland he was very unsuccessfully he was very unhappily received he appeared on
the Late Late Show, you know, the kind of Tonight Show of Irish television and did his shtick, you know, of kind of the Irish boy make good and nobody liked it. And the reaction was kind of summed up by my father when I... talked when he he pulled me up because i was living in america at the time and he said you know this guy he says he comes over
It's like, we're a modern country now, you know, it's like, we're not, we're not sort of some, he comes over with this, with this story of, you know, the, oh, the, the, the alcoholic father and the sainted mother and the pig in the kitchen and, and all the rest of it. It's just nonsense. He, and, and, and besides my father.
says we had it much worse than that he got to go to america at least when whenever anyone comes from one place and goes to another place and writes about the old place and in a way that confirms a lot of the stereotypes or suspicions or... prejudices of the new place, it can feel a little... It can feel a little bit like they're being performative for someone else. I remember reading Angela's Ashes when it came out because it was everywhere in the States at that point. And I enjoyed it.
But I guess since I had no skin in the game, I didn't really think of it as like someone airing someone else's dirty laundry. Yeah. And so we and Irish people generally have that exactly that ambivalence that my father had to the large immigrant population, both. You know, happy to take Americans money when they come back and want to tour. And but at the same time, would do not want to sort of be cast in the role of.
Paddywhackery is the phrase that Irish people would use and can get a little annoyed if the Americans expect, you know. Again, the pig in the kitchen and no outdoor plumbing or no indoor plumbing and all the rest of it to still be the way things are. Well, we'll move from that story to another story full of, I think, archetypes of the Irish small town with the majesty of the law, which was also from.
1931. I admit I kind of had to read this through a couple times to kind of let it sink in. I was also reading it late at night, so I think I was falling asleep when I read it the first time. I like it a lot, but part of the game... that O'Connor is playing here is he's going to drag out this long... chit chat for, you know, between this police officer and this old guy.
kind of rambling, going nowhere. And you're, as a reader, you're sort of left to wonder what's, what's, what's actually happening on here. Why, why, why am I being shown this, this scene? You know, it's, it's, it's pleasant enough, but of course. Then with maybe three pages left to go, the plot begins. which is that the police officer is there to get the old man to either pay a fine or come turn himself in to be in prison. Right, he's been arrested. Yeah, be arrested for...
having been disorderly and cause causing bodily harm, severe bodily harm. That's, that's in some ways glossed over. So, you know, it's, it's not even given in actual dialogue. It's given in. That's right. He said that Dan, the person who the police officer of the guard visits, he's paraphrased as...
how he was a respectable old man who had the grave misfortune to open the head of another old man in such a way as to require his removal to hospital. And again, there's that sort of... that that sort of use of language you know that kind of roundabout prolix uh way of uh of getting to things yeah it's and and so that so the you know spoilers for the majesty of the law yes the guard is there to um
to take him to prison or to get him to ask, but he knows that he's not, he knows that Dan isn't going to pay the fine for this assault. And so he's there to, to serve an arrest warrant so that he would go to prison. And the, Yeah. And the big and the slow burn, like the prison is the last word of the story. And that's that's when it finally kind of it's not until the last sentence that he finally gets to the point, so to speak. But the whole the whole.
interaction between the two of them i and maybe this is just my by by by training if not temperament i'm a as a sociologist i really i really like this story and the way that The sort of relations, the social relations between the two men in their roles, you know, as one as a representative of the state and of...
a relatively new, a relatively young state. It would have been, I feel like, I think of the story as being set sometime in the mid 1920s when the Irish state, the Irish free state is just kind of up and running the guard. our police officer is is clearly irish he's clearly a local like one of like dan himself he's not an english uh constable or anything you know and he has to represent the power of the state but he can't do it
in the way that you might expect, or perhaps in the way that sort of an English bailiff or constable might have done it, you know, just a decade earlier if something like this had happened. And so there's this kind of delicate dance plays out where Dan, who is clearly a... You know, a man of some substance in a, again, a slightly romanticized kind of peasant farmer who is, you know.
built like you know an oak tree and and just lives a very simple life but uh but very directly has to be kind of you can't just come and take a man like that to jail is the uh and so that's one part of it that i that i really like and and then and then also their their their characterizations again that the kind of perhaps extremely perverse
But again, maybe very Irish sort of. But well, in general, it's about it's about a kind of culture of honor. Right. That where and I really like the idea that Dan's options are to pay a fine. for having assaulted his neighbor essentially or to go to jail and and he won't pay the fine because that would be like losing and And so what he says instead is that because the fellow's up the hill looking at, he's watching out his window. He's waiting to see what happens. And he says,
Nothing would give him more gratification than for me to pay this fine. But he says, I'll punish him, says Dan. I'll suffer for him. He says, I'll lay on bare boards for him so that neither he or his children will be able to look me in the eye ever again. And so his punishment is really kind of a victory.
and an assertion of his, you know, that he wins. And you get just a glimpse of that really in the last sentence when the kind of curtains twitch in the house of the guy who's been assaulted and the door closes and you know that he's lost. You mentioned the police officer, the agent of justice, who's supposed to be representing the state here, is in some ways...
I don't know that I would consider him not forceful enough. It's more like he's being very gentle and very kind and very, you know, it's such a gentlemanly thing that he actually leaves it. to Dan to go ahead and turn himself in. He says, okay, you'll show up, won't you? And he says, I know the warden. He's a good guy. Tell him, you mentioned my name and he'll make you as comfortable as if you were at home.
And so Dan gets to like say goodbye to the people around him who wish him well as he ends up traveling to his own imprisonment. All this is to say that the title has this extreme irony to it, which... I find fascinating because when I was trying to find information about this story, I was tight. I typed in O'Connor, the majesty of the law. And it turns out that Sandra Sandra Day O'Connor, the former Supreme.
court judge, wrote a memoir that she entitled The Majesty of the Law. And I... find that very strange that she would that she must have been thinking of this this story and sharing the same last name or something i wonder yeah what is the i should have i should have checked i mean there's the there's the because anytime the only I wonder if it's originally in Shakespeare or something, because the only two turns of phrase that I know involving this are exactly...
extremely ironic that there's this one in this story and then there's the the line about you know the law and its majesty prohibits or forbids but rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges and uh and so it is a little funny to see To see Senator O'Connor kind of just embracing this, it's like, do you do realize what's going on? Because like the, it's not just, because as you say, it's not, it's not just a matter of kind of the sort of gentlemanliness of the guard, of the policeman.
is not just a matter of his kind of native kindness. It's really an expression of his lack of the limits to his authority as an agent of the state. And the way that... that authority that he has and that he is there to exercise and he does in a sense ultimately kind of exercise he does dan does go to jail he does go to prison but it but the state is being
subverted or co-opted into this much more local game of of of honor and decency and local conflict in a way that the sergeant is well aware that he is being that that that that is what is happening i feel like he's you know and and and all their whole interaction the big long drawn out part where if you haven't read the story before you're you're thinking what is what is the point of this you you get little versions of the kind of
peasant hospitality you know where you're kind of insulted you know you're not he's offering him some food he makes him a cup of tea and a slice of bread but then it's clear that he knows that the guard is coming has he had he was aware in advance that the guard was coming because he's baked the bread um he also gives him um he also gives him a shot of pachin uh and of moonshine and and that also was a kind of expression of
Who has the authority here? Because because Puccino is illegal and and they have a conversation that dances around that. And and it just sort of becomes they find common ground and kind of reminiscing about how the secrets of the past, including how to make the best liquor, but also.
cure diseases and and what have you are being lost in the current age but it's very much a kind of you know expression of he can he will he will not only have a drink of this in front of the guard, he'll serve him one and get the guard to say that it was good. I do like the discussion of whiskey distillery. I found it fascinating that he talks at one point about how they could make it out of heather. And I do know that, you know, with like scotch that you...
use peat, but you use that mostly as a flavoring agent. You aren't actually... Literally distilling. I don't know what you're going to distill out of Heather, but I like that as a line because it leaves me as a... as a reader wondering whether this is some sort of an inside joke that he's having, whether he honestly believes this, whether we're supposed to honestly believe this. I don't know. They're definitely making it out of potatoes.
So one thing that this story has, which it shares with the final story that we're going to read, is it's an examination of how... civility and camaraderie intersects with duty and with sometimes the, you know, things that are extreme that we don't think can. It's hard to imagine dealing with them in a civil way. The last story was, sorry. Guests of the Nation. Guests of the Nations. is a story that takes place during the War of Independence, and it's about some...
Irish soldiers who have been charged with watching over two English, captured English soldiers. And it's it's it's kind of. unclear exactly how they got there. They said that they were handed on to them by the Second Brigade, which is... Of the, what is it called? The Irish. The IRA. Yeah. Well, the thing, the thing is the, these, these guys seem to have deserted.
their posts and and been picked up and am i wrong with that is that the what oh the the two english the two english yeah i guess it's a little unclear right um I have to go back and look at the text to see if it's implied that they really did desert or whether they were just... When he says they were handed on, he means that the 2nd Brigade of the IRA...
Already had them as as captives and then they pass them along to just keep it to keep them at this farmhouse and be guarded over. The narrator and and his his friend are soldiers who are. They're sort of what you might expect out of civilians that have become soldiers.
quickly or, you know, by happenstance. It's not that they aren't committed to their cause. It's just that they have no military training and they're just kind of... barely there as soldiers you know they're there in the first place so they spend a lot of time chatting with their with their their um captives and it at first it doesn't even seem like they are uh
actually prisoners at all that they're they they pass the time uh you know friendly enough and uh the narrator the Bonaparte, the Frank O'Connor character, is himself unaware or at least just not thinking about why it is this is happening and what's going to inevitably happen at the end. Like he's sort of surprised to find that, to be told that by Jeremiah Donovan, the kind of commanding officer, that they're probably going to get executed.
O'Connor writes in all these stories with a lot of dialect humor, but this is the first time we get him. doing English dialect humor. And one of the things that I find amusing is that the character is referred to as Hawkins. all the way through, even not in the dialogue. They seem to be speaking in, I don't know, Cockney. Right, and the only word, it's almost like the only word that the...
They're drawn in an interesting way because on the one hand, yeah, there are these two English soldiers, Belcher and Hawkins, and Belcher is fairly quiet. And Hawkins is very loquacious and argumentative. And both Belcher and Hawkins, when they speak, you know... Their dialogue, the word chum kind of keeps coming up. Yes, chum, no chum. I would do that chum. That sort of...
Which would ring very heavily in an Irish ear, but it reads almost like a parodic Englishness in the context of these Irish lads that they're... that they're hanging around with. At the same time, sorry, at the same time, as characters, O'Connor kind of makes it clear, like you said, that... The IRA men are not, they're young fellas, like they're teenagers. The O'Connor character and his friend, Noble, are very young.
And he says almost right away that the English, Hawkins in particular, made them look like fools. Because when they showed that they knew the area better than... than the two Irish guards did, that they knew some of the locals, they had gone to dances with them, that Hawkins had learned how to set dance. He said he learned the Waltz of Limerick and others. These are like... uh set irish dances uh you know danced in groups uh and at um uh you know on an evening out or whatever the session and uh
And so he says that. And so it's clear that sort of the English guys are maybe a little more sophisticated. And then he also does a kind of a little, I thought, a sort of like reversal of a stereotype is also going on where... The way Hawkins is drawn, he describes him as having a deplorable tongue.
you know a terrible man who never does a stroke of work but who was a fright to argue with and he would constantly draw you in and and you know get you stuck into into arguments and that's very much a kind of that's the way that Irish people get portrayed in English literature A lot of the time as somebody who is sort of somewhat disreputable, clearly intelligent and very loquacious, but also not to be trusted. And and and so I like that way that he sort of plays with that, that it's the.
It's the English guy who is the somewhat more sophisticated, but also kind of he out he out talks them, which is which is not what you might expect. Well, in a lot of stories where you have. antagonists stuck together for some reason, whether they're not actively in conflict, but they're stuck with one another. There's always a moment in like a...
Hollywood film where someone will say, like, we're not that different, you and I. And I think that there is this kind of a way that the English characters here are... engaged in a sort of a blending of cultures, you know, and to the extent that at the end when they realize that things are not going to go well for them.
is it Hawkins who, who, who basically says, I'll, I'll come fight for you. That's right. He does. Yeah. He says, it doesn't matter to me. I'm, I'm, I'm done. I can, I can just be on your side now. Like that, that's like, that's possible. You know, when I was reading it through, they struck me as sort of like a highly comedic. pairing, like a Laurel and Hardy pairing, or even more like a Vladimir and Estragon pairing from Waiting for Godot. But that's actually later than the story.
But, you know, another towering work of Irish literature there, these kinds of... comedic, these droll comedic characters who are going to find themselves suddenly in a terrible situation. Which, you know, actually reminds me of another O'Connor, Flannery O'Connor, when she writes like a good man is hard to find, which is a comedy for the first.
12 or so pages until it turns into an absolute horror show at the end of that, that there's there's this kind of an interesting move by O'Connor here to. to, to take something that's, that's funny, that, that seems to be like a, just an observation of, of, of, of dialogue of, of the, this kind of these. strange bedfellows that war make. And you think it's going to be maybe just a kind of a comedic memoir. And then it turns out not that at all. Right. Quite grim. Very grim. And...
And again, right, given the context, even his own background as somebody who fought in the War of Independence, who, you know, the and who was writing at a period of, you know, when kind of Irish nationalism.
And the memory of both the War of Independence and the subsequent Civil War were extremely strong in people's minds. Again, going back to my own kind of school... age reading of this like the the characterization this was definitely when i read it you know when i was 12 or 13 this was definitely a much more complex characterization of uh of english soldiers and irish you know rebels than you might have
I might have been raised on, let's say. And yeah, and the fact that it just gets steadily grimmer and that the that the the clear kind of slightly absurd, faintly comic. camaraderie that gets established in the first couple of pages of the story just gets overwhelmed by this repeated assertion of duty as... The thing that's going to drive the outcome to the point where they shoot the two with some difficulty and awkwardness.
They shoot the two English soldiers out on the bog and bury them and then come back and both have kind of very different but extremely distressed. reactions to what happens. And then he just kind of ends by saying, yeah, and everything and anything that happened to me after that, I never thought about it the same way again. Right. Well, there's another wonderful line at the end where he says, it is so strange what you feel at such moments and not to be written afterwards.
He literally does not. That's the end. There's two more sentences after that. That's right. You're right. That it's something like you have this thing happens to you and you can't talk about it. You can't explain it or you can't get across what... what it meant or what it was and he doesn't try and yeah for the sort of literary yeah i thought that that was that is very striking the way that he just refuses he shows you this and then he doesn't try to
make sense of it in some kind of uh elegant way or you know there's no there's no closure as we would say uh there's there's just this thing that happened and it leaves this huge wound It's a hard critique of the whole concept of duty. The reason that these two guys have to get shot is because the English have captured and killed some Irish soldiers. And so this has to be done. retaliation and it's very clear
to the narrator that this is going to do nothing. This is going to do nothing to advance the cause of the war or to bring those other soldiers back or whatever. And these two... English soldiers are, you know, from the way they're presented, I don't. see them as a particular threat either. Like they probably, even when they were not caught, were not the most threatening of soldiers. Yeah, there's two places where
two key moments where the, the idea of duty is explicitly addressed. Like one where, where it's kind of the, and the, the, the character in both cases is, is Jeremiah Donovan, who's the, the, the commander who. the O'Connor's figure, the Bonaparte character clearly doesn't like at all. And, and it's Donovan who's constantly talking about his doing his duty or doing that, that it's her duty to do things.
And first O'Connor says something like, I hadn't noticed before how people who talk a lot about duty find it much of a trouble to them. Like he was kind of saying, Donovan wants to shoot these men. And like he doesn't, you know, he's describing in terms of duty a thing that he actually wants to do, which is which seems to be antithetical to the idea of duty. It should it should involve some sort of.
I would rather not do this, but it's my, but it's my duty. He doesn't see that. And then, and then at the, at the moment of crisis out on the bog, the Donovan actually kind of asks for.
expiation sort of he says you understand that we're only doing our duty he wants to be forgiven by the people he's about to shoot and and but belcher just says i never could make out what duty was myself um and he's and he actually says yeah he says like if if you mean if you mean i think you're good lads i think you're good lads you know he gives him he gives him kind of their forgiveness but not quite and and and then yeah and then they shoot him okay well
So that's the hard ending of the story. Any final thoughts you want to have on O'Connor? these works together or on your experience reading these? Yeah, I went back and looked. I bought the Nostalgia Exploring English a couple of years ago. I went back and looked at it to read these stories. And I realized I hadn't, when I suggested them, I hadn't.
that's how ingrained it is i suggested these three stories and these are the three that are in the anthology that um from from o'connor and uh and i do think they give these three very different sort of cuts into You know, Irish identity and the Irish temperament, for whatever that means, in the first half.
or the first third of the 20th century. In each case, you have kind of, to varying degrees, you know, you have the state, you have the church, and then you have kind of social relations between the people who are kind of making their way amongst these. overarching um overarching forces uh and um and you do get a sense of um you know through a they're not sort of
They're not sort of direct realism. They're not trying to be documentary. One of them is romantic and deliberately funny. One of them is sort of a stage piece that's... you know really really drawing out a particular moment uh and but and then the third one is is the one i think that bears directly probably on o'connor's own personal experience it's based the guests of the nation is based on a real seems to be based on real events uh an english
an English major called Jeffrey Lee Compton-Smith, who was shot by the IRA in West Cork, one of like 70 or 80 people under those circumstances. And so he's a very good introduction. If you want to get a sense of... you know the ireland of that time uh you know a century ago now you know o'connor is a good a good place uh a good place to begin and i was just surprised by rereading them for the first time in a long time i was surprised by just how many kind of
Little moments of language like the, I wouldn't shoot a pal when Hawkins is begging for his life. Or I lie and bear boards for him. You know, I'll punish him in the majesty of the law or the... You know, hanging is an awful death in first confession. Just how many of those phrases were just, oh, yeah, I remembered all of those. They came back immediately. And it really is something that, you know.
We were all made to read them as kids, and they're in there somewhere still. Thanks again, the guest host. Kieran Healy. He has a website at kieranhealy.org. If you have an idea for a book, a story, a poem, or other reading to cover on a future episode, Or if you have a suggestion for a guest host, or if you just like to say hi, you can write me at sophomore.literature at gmail.com. The Sophomore Lit theme song is by Malcolm Nygaard.
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