Sean O’Faolain
1900-1991
Life and works
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Fought in the War of Independence.
During the Civil War was on the side of the IRA.
Author of short stories, criticism, historical works.
Mainly a journalist. Founder of the Influential Irish
periodical The Bell.
– Many Irish intellectuals contributed.
– Was an organ to attack Irish provincialism.
• Travel writing:
– A Summer in Italy (1949)
– South to Sicily ( American title An Autumn in Italy) (1953)
– Many articles in Holiday magazine.
A Summer in Italy and South to Sicily
• Sean O'Faolain defined A Summer in Italy and
South to Sicily "two chatty books on Italy" and felt
he was wasting time over them while he should
have been busy writing fiction.
• Among the best things Sean O'Faolain wrote.
• Books brimming with delight at what he saw and
experienced and full of perceptive observations
on Italy, its people and life in general.
• One may not learn much about Italy, while one
may learn a lot about the author and his attitude
to Ireland.
A Summer in Italy
• Written on commission
• In 1947 Graham Greene invited him “to share in and to
describe the life-ways and the traditions of one of the
most civilised countries in history” (Vive Moi 334) .
• What is recounted as a single trip is based on several
visits to the country.
• Canonized itinerary: from Turin to Genoa, the Riviera,
Florence, Siena, Rome and Venice.
• In South to Sicily the rest of Italy.
• Books full of love for Italy and stereotypes.
The persona of the traveller
• O'Faolain's adopts the persona of a casual, leisurely
traveller. The flâneur.
• “The systematic traveller, unlike the casual traveller,
has, I believe, more to record than to remember. The
casual wanderer stays here, ambles there for each
moment's pleasure, and afterwards when people ask
him 'What did you do?' he cannot reply. The things that
made him happy are too little, too evanescent, too
personal to be named. (SI, 24-25)
• "a lazy traveller who idles the days away"(SI, 112).
• Often, however, under the guidance of a companion
• He refuses to "see the sights" as a professional
tourist and lets himself live the experience.
• "Cities are not museums"
Topographical and Chronological
Structure
• Travelogue moves from one stage to the other of his
wanderings without too strict a chronology, focusing now
on his actual visit, now on his emotions or memories, now
on Ireland.
• A collage of impressions, memories, musings and
quotations.
• Wanders from one geographic centre to another without
too much attention to chronological or spatial order.
• Dialectics between external adventures and internal
growth.
• Follows an "inner trajectory" rather than focus on
"external accidents
A Symbolic Voyage
• . “One travels inside oneself. It is all done with
mirrors” ( South to Sicily).
• Travel writing as autobiography.
• The description of places often triggesr selfanalysis and self-revelation.
• He refuses to "see the sights" as a professional
tourist and lets himself live the experience.
"Cities are not museums"
Love for Italy
• O’Faolain seems to be totally enthralled with
the country he is visiting and at times wishes
he would never leave it, yet the unexpressed
desire to be back in Ireland, the nostos, is
always lurking
An Irish perspective
• Daughter Julia O'Faolain said that her father saw Italy, indeed the
world, through “a pair of green glasses
• Pendulum swing between the fascination of otherness and
thoughts of self and home.
• Enchanted though he is with the “colour blazing” in Italian
landscape and architecture, he has to confess that “whenever the
clouds occluded the ruthless sun I felt my senses at once leap in
whatever part of me irrevocably belongs to this island of dark
green brooding under a sky that is one vast pearl”'
• The theme of nostos (homecoming, as in The Odyssey) is always
present.
• A visit to Italy becomes an occasion for testing one's identity and
discovering one's Irishness even while one succumbs to the charms
of the country and its cities.
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Point of view
• O’Faolain’s Italy described from the point of
view of the Benjaminian flâneur.
• Models: The Odyssey and Joyce’s Ulysses
• A changing panorama seen from multiple
perspectives.
Indifference to major problems
• Posture of indifference to major problems and
of insistence on being happy and relaxed.
• “Italy isn't our responsibility. Isn't that why we
came here?" (SI, 1949: 64)
• Expresses political and social opinions through
the persona of an occasional travel
companion, Jock.
Purpose
• Escape, as he wrote to his daughter: "I was also trying to
get rid of bloody Ireland through Italy, and bloody
religion….”
• Ireland is “puritanical. Priest-ridden, bigoted, isolationist,
nationalistic, mentally starved by Church and Censorship”
(Vive Moi!, 334).
• Italy, or rather his idea of it, represents instead lack of
inhibitions, open-mindedness, flexibility, a non-sectarian
religiosity and the ability to conciliate sexuality with
morality.
• Through the heteroootype of an extrovert Italy he confirms
implicitly the autostereotype of a narrow-minded Ireland.
Italy an unreal place
• Like Dickens, O'Faolain has no aspiration to being a guide or being
informative historically, artistically or sociologically.
• His Italy is the dream of an incurable romantic, a "fairy precinct" (SI,
125), "an object of delight" (SI, 173)
• “We come to Rome less to see a city than to verify an ideal one.
We have all been here before, many times since childhood”
(Summer in Italy, 157).
• "[T]he feeling of irreality troubles us all over Italy, and reaches its
climax in Venice whose beauty must sometime strike even the most
cycloid amongst us as having been arranged for our brief joy--an
'exhalation from the deep' which will vanish as soon as we leave it"
(SI 134).
• All English words are too frail for Italian life, art and, which is more
to the point, Italian passion" (SS, 33
Italy a construction
SOF recreated Italy for his own needs,
constructing and deconstructing it, making it
into an anti-Ireland, into a workbench for his
fiction, into a testing ground for received values,
into a mirror of his own self and of the
Romantic and ironic persona he had shaped for
himself.
People
• "The first time we see Italy we are too
charmed by the pure picturesqueness of it to
think or ask beyond it. Then imperceptibly we
begin to get interested in the people.[ …We
can't evade it! The people are the axle of the
whole question." (SI, 222).
• Like Dickens, creates many unforgettable
characters.
Stereotypes
• “I know no other race that, in equal circumstances, has this power
to convey to us their joyous sense of the splendour of life.”
• "The Italians have a gift for enjoying life" (SI, 60)
• "The Italian's main principle of life [is] the pursuit of happiness" (SS
52).
• , "Italians love to row, with terrific passion, but it is one of the
charms of their nature that they blow it off quickly and when it is
done it is done and laughter shines as gaily as before" (SI 183)
• "the people are as cheerful as sandboys"(SI, 64) in spite of the
harsh conditions; Italian poverty appears to him as "cheerful downat-heelness" (SI. 57)
• The nature of Italy is “so exuberant, so excitingly prodigal, so
running-over, so lavish, so unrestrained.”
Between Modern and Ancient ( Sean
O’Faolain)
• Sean O’Faolain mocks suggestions that “the
search for the ‘real’ Rome […] should be
directed at red, raw […] bleeding life; it should
be conducted among the cafés of the Via
Nazionale” (Summer in Italy 134)
• Entertains a “sly intimation that there is, in
fact, no way past the mirages of romantic
Rome towards the refreshing oasis of the
‘real’” (op. cit. 135)
Religion
• Italy's sophisticated and non sectarian
Catholicism vs the fundamentalism of Ireland.
• It was the old jumble all over again; here the
catacombs; there the Ardeatine Caves, where
hundreds of Italians were murdered by the
Germans; beyond, a night club; here, a modern
villa; there Cardnial Wiseman’s little church
looming against the sky, while the ancient
cypresses whispered and a prowling police car
hummed out under the arch where one of
Mussolini’s aces had lived”( Sean O’Faolain,
Summer in Italy 157)
Venice
• “a dream floating on a dream, and we floating
and walking through it for ever, as blissful as
hashish-eaters” (171).
Modern Italy
• Travellers "press on to that city whose 'name
is like a spell'" [Florence] but "One is not
greeted by the famous campanile, or the
tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, but by the
chimneys of far-flung industrial suburbs. …
A meta-travel book
• “You cannot read Rome without footnotes.”
• "The reading of books about Rome in Rome is
a pleasant sentimental occupation”,( Summer
in Italy 124-25.
• Many quotations from other writers.
• His texts are almost a dialogue between
himself and other visitors, especially literary
visitors of the past.