Irish Short Fiction

Introduction

It is an undisputed fact of literary history that, whereas British writers and readers have always favored the novel over the short story, just the opposite has been the case for their Irish neighbors. Irish short-story writer Frank O’Connor has attributed this distinction to differences between national attitudes toward society. In England, O’Connor says, the intellectual’s attitude toward society is, “It must work,” and in Ireland, it is, “It can’t work.” The implication of O’Connor’s remark, echoed by many critics since the 1963 publication of his well-known book on the short story, The Lonely Voice, is that. In contrast, the novel derives its subject matter from an organized society, and the short story springs from an oral, anecdotal tradition. According to J. H. Delargy, in a frequently cited study of the Gaelic storyteller, ancient Ireland fostered oral literature unrivaled in all of Western Europe, a tradition that has influenced the growth of the modern Irish short story.

Delargy describes Irish storytelling as being centered on a gathering of people around the turf fire of a hospitable house on fall and winter nights. At these meetings, usually called a céilidhe (pronounced “kaylee”), a Gaelic storyteller, known as a seanchaí (pronounced “shanachie”) if they specialized in short supernatural tales told in realistic detail, or a sgéalaí (pronounced “shagaylee”) if they told longer fairy-tale stories focusing on a legendary hero, mesmerized the folk audience.

It is the shorter, realistic seanchas or eachtra (pronounced “achthrah”) rather than the longer, epical fairy tales that have given rise to the Irish literary short story. This type of story, which usually featured supernatural events recounted with realistic detail suggesting an eyewitness account, has been described by late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century German writers as the source of the novelle form, which usually featured a story striking enough to arouse interest in and of itself, without any connection to the society, the times, or the culture.

This view of short prose narrative as a form detached from any cultural background, drawing its interest from the striking nature of the event itself, has always been a central characteristic of short fiction. One of the most important implications of short fiction’s detachment from social context and history, argued early theorists, was that, although the anecdote on which the story was based might be trivial and its matter slight, its manner or way of telling had to be appealing, thus giving the narrator a more important role than in other forms of fiction. The result was a shift in authority for the tale and, thus, a gradual displacement away from strictly formulaic structures of the received story toward techniques of verisimilitude that create credibility. The displacement is from mythic authority to the authority of a single perspective that creates a unifying atmosphere or tone of the experience. It is this focus on a single perspective rather than on an organized social context that has made the Irish short story largely dependent on anecdotes and the galvanizing voice of the storyteller.

Maria Edgeworth

The importance of the anecdote and the voice of the teller to the development of Irish short narrative can be seen most readily in a single work of fiction credited with beginning Irish literature in English—Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, published in 1800. Although usually characterized as a novel, the work is a novella focused more on regional particularities than on the social generalities that held together the heftier English novel. Many critics have noted that the distinctive feature of Castle Rackrent is its imitation of a speaking voice telling a tale. What was new about Castle Rackrent was the colloquial voice of the teller of the story, the trusted retainer Thady Quirk, whose natural flow of talk created an ambiguous mixture of self-deception and self-revelation unmatched in England and not to be equaled in America until Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).

Although ostensibly Castle Rackrent is the history of four generations of the Rackrent family as told by the servant Thady, Edgeworth announces in the preface that her interest is not in epic history but in anecdotal revelation. She notes that although the public’s taste for anecdotes has been ridiculed by critics, such a taste if considered properly, reflects the profound good sense of the times. However, despite Edgeworth’s insistence that her storyteller is an illiterate but honest and innocent old retainer who tells the history of the drunken Sir Patrick, the litigious Sir Murtagh, the fighting Sir Kit, and the slovenly Sir Condy, many readers have always suspected that Thady is artful, shrewd, and calculating. By making Thady such an ambiguous point of view, Edgeworth created a new fiction technique.

William Carleton

Prominent Irish literature critic Declan Kiberd has suggested that the short story has always flourished in countries where a “vibrant oral culture” was challenged by the “onset of a sophisticated literature tradition.” Thus, the short story, says Kiberd, is the natural result of a “fusion” between the folktale and modern literature. William Carleton is the most important Irish mediator between the folktale and the modern realistic story because of his attention to detail and his creation of the teller's personality. His Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1830-1833) is an important early example of the transition from an oral tale to a modern short story. The purpose of the first-person narrator in romantic short fiction, as Carleton and later Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne knew, is to verify the truth of the event being narrated and transform the event from an objective description to an individual perspective.

Critics of Irish fiction generally agree that Carleton’s story “Wildgoose Lodge” (1834), with its focus on the horrified emotions of the narrator, its terse style, and its suggestive detail, is his best, similar to the modern short story later developed by Poe and Hawthorne in America. “Wildgoose Lodge” recounts the revenge murder of an entire family by a Catholic secret society. Although ostensibly merely an eyewitness report by a former member of the society, the structure of the story reflects a self-conscious patterning of reality characteristic of the modern short story. A completed action, treated as if it were an action in process, “Wildgoose Lodge” is a classic example of how romantic short-story writers developed techniques to endow experience with thematic significance without using allegorical methods of symbolic characterization and stylized plot.

What makes “Wildgoose Lodge” a modern story is the heightened perception of the engaged first-person narrator, who is both dramatically involved and self-consciously aware at once. Moreover, the story’s selection of metaphoric detail with the potential for making an implied ironic moral judgment—the atmospheric weather, the ironic church setting, the physically isolated house, and the imagery of the leader as Satanic and his closest followers as fiendish—shift the emphasis in this story from a mere eyewitness account to a tight thematic structure. It is just this shift that signals the beginning of the modern short story most commonly attributed to Poe in the following decade.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

Critic Harold Orel has suggested that by the time Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu appears in the 1850s, the oral tradition “has receded into the background,” for the emphasis of La Fanu’s stories is on a shaped fiction. Although Le Fanu did not create the horror story, says Orel, he developed ways to transform this popular narrative genre into “an artistically finished production, one worthy of the time of serious readers.” In his best-known story, “Green Tea,” first published in 1869 and reprinted in his collection In a Glass Darkly in 1872, Le Fanu blurs the line between the physical and the mental and in his narrator, Dr. Martin Hesselius, a “medical philosopher,” creates a kind of psychoanalytic detective. On hearing the narrative of the Reverend Jennings, who is plagued by the appearance of a hallucinatory monkey, Hesselius seeks to solve the mystery and cure Jennings by applying his own theory about the nature of dual reality. The central focus of Hesselius’s theory is that the natural world is only the expression of the spiritual world.

The monkey is the subject of most of the commentary on the story, with various critics calling it a Freudian animal or a manifestation of schizophrenia and repressed sexual desires and others suggesting that it is open-ended purposely to leave readers mystified and to create a Kafkaesque sense of generalized guilt. Hesselius’s attributing the hallucination of the monkey to the Reverend Jennings’s drinking of green tea is not, most readers suspect, the true cause of the monkey’s appearance. The actual details of the story suggest that the appearance of the creature results from Jennings’s living alone and writing a book on the religious metaphysics of the ancients. Jennings says he was always thinking and writing on the subject and that it thoroughly “infected” him, drawing him into a purely mental world detached from physical reality. Indeed, Jennings’s disease is not a physical one but rather an “artistic” one that can be cured only “critically.” It represents the central problem that dominates the nineteenth-century short story—the blurring of the lines between the psychical and the physical so that the psychical is projected outward and then responded to as if it were real.

George Moore

Many critics of the short story have suggested that the modern Irish short story begins in 1903 with the publication of George Moore’s The Untilled Field, thus agreeing with Moore’s own typically immodest assessment that the collection was a “frontier book, between the new and the old style” of fiction. Moore felt that The Untilled Field was his best work, boasting that he wrote the stories to be models for young Irish writers in the future. Indeed, as critics have suggested, the book had a significant effect on the collection of short stories that has become one of the most influential short-story collections in the twentieth century—James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914).

In combining the coarse subject matter of the French naturalists with the polished style of the fin de siècle aesthetes, the stories in The Untilled Field seem unique for their time. However, they still maintain an allegiance to the folktale form and to the importance of the story as a means of understanding reality. Moore’s adherence to the folktale form and the need to understand reality by means of the story can be clearly seen in one of his best-known and most anthologized stories from The Untilled Field—"Julia Cahill’s Curse.” The story-within-the-story, told by a cart driver to the first-person narrator, recounts an event that took place twenty years earlier, when a priest named Father Madden had Julia put out of the parish for what he considered unseemly behavior; in retaliation, Julia put a curse on the parish, prophesying that every year a roof would fall in and a family would go to America. The basic conflict in the tale is between Julia, who, in her dancing and courting, represents free pagan values, and the priest, who, in his desire to restrain her, represents church restrictions.

The conflict between Julia and the priest is clear enough. However, it is the relationship between the teller and the listener that constitutes the structural interest of the story, for what the tale focuses on is an actual event of social reality that has been mythicized by the teller and thus by the village folk, both to explain and to justify the breakdown of Irish parish life in the late nineteenth century. Whereas the folk may believe such a tale literally, the modern listener believes it in a symbolic way. Indeed, what Moore does here is to present a story that is responded to within the story itself as both a literal story of magic and as a symbolic story to account for the breakdown of parish life.

“So on He Fares” (1903) is a more complex treatment of how the story is used to understand a social situation. Moore himself had a high regard for this story, even going so far as to say in his boastful way that it was the best short story ever written. The basic situation is that of the loneliness of a child, Ulick Burke, who chafes against the harsh control of his mother and dreams of his absent father and of running away from home. The story is much like a fairy tale, complete with the evil parent, the absent soldier father, and the child’s need to strike out and make his fortune. When Ulick becomes a man and returns home, he is met by a small boy, the same age as he when he left, whose name is also Ulick Burke.

“So on He Fares” is an interesting experiment with the nature of the story as a projection of desire, in this case, the basic desire of the child to escape his controlled situation. In one sense, it can be read literally. That is, when Ulick returns, he indeed finds a younger brother who has the love that he himself never had from his mother. In another sense, it can be read as a symbolic projection of the child, who throws himself into the river to escape his loneliness and then is reborn into a child the mother loves. Ultimately, it can be read as a projection of a child’s desire to escape and remain home at the same time. It is, thus, a story about a childhood fantasy presented as if it really happened.

Frank O. Connor singles out Moore’s “Home Sickness” (1902) as representative of the direction that the Irish short story would take in the twentieth century, arguing that it has the “absolute purity of the short story as opposed to the tale.” The story seems simple enough. James Bryden, an Irish immigrant who works in a bar in the Bowery, goes back to Ireland “in search of health,” and for a short time, he considers marrying a peasant girl and remaining there. What unifies the story beyond its simple narrative structure is the understated but sustained tone of Bryden’s detachment from the reality of Irish life and his preference to live within a sort of nostalgic reverie, which he is disappointed to find remains unrealized.

Although Bryden longs for the Bowery as he contrasts the “weakness and incompetence” of the people around him with the “modern restlessness and cold energy” of the people in New York, and although he blames the ignorance and primitive nature of the folk who cling to religious authority as his reason for returning to America, the conclusion of the story suggests a more subtle and universal theme by counterpointing a detached dreamlike mood of reverie against Irish village reality. The story is about the unbridgeable gap between restless reality and dreamlike memory.

James Joyce

The most influential modern Irish short-story writer is Joyce, although that influence is based on one slim volume, Dubliners. Joyce’s most famous contribution to the theory and technique of modern short narrative is his notion of the “epiphany,” which he defined in his early novel Steven Hero (1944): “By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phrase of the mind itself. He believed it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.” In a Joyce story, an epiphany is a formulation through metaphor or symbol of some revelatory aspect of human experience, some highly significant aspect of personal reality, usually communicated by a pattern of what otherwise would be seen as trivial details and events. Joyce’s technique transforms the casual into the causal by repeating seemingly trivial details until they are recognized as part of a significant pattern. Two of Joyce’s best-known stories, “Eveline” and “Araby,” end with decisions or revelations that seem unprepared until the reader reflects on the story and perceives the patterned nature of what initially seems only casual detail.

In “Eveline,” the reader must determine how Eveline’s thoughts of leaving in part 1 inevitably lead to her decision to stay in part 2. Most of the story takes place while Eveline is sitting at the window watching the evening “invade” the avenue. Nothing really “happens” in the present in the first part of the story, for her mind is on the past and the future, occupied with contrasting images of familiar/strange, duty/pleasure, earth/sea, entrapment/escape, death/life. It is the counterpoint pattern of these images that prepares the reader for the last section of the story when Eveline stands among the crowds and decides not to leave her father and Ireland.

The problem is understanding how the first part of the story, which focuses primarily on the bleakness of Eveline’s past life at home and thus seems to suggest that she will decide to go with Frank, manages simultaneously to suggest that she will decide to stay. The basic tension is between the known and the unknown. Although Eveline does not have many happy memories of her childhood and family life, at least they are familiar and comfortable. Because these events have already happened, what “used to be” is still present and a part of her. However, life with Frank, because it has not yet happened, is tinged with fear of the unknown, even though it holds the promise of romance and respect. Thus, in the end, when she sets her face to him, passive, like a helpless animal, with no sign of love or farewell or recognition, the reader realizes that her decision to stay is ultimately inexpressible.

What Joyce achieves in one of his most anthologized stories, “Araby,” derives from Anton Chekhov’s experiments with creating symbols out of objects by their role or context, not by their preexisting symbolic meaning. The primary counterpoint throughout the story consists of those images that suggest ordinary reality and those that suggest unknown romance. The result is a kind of realism that is symbolic at the same time, for the boy’s spiritual romanticism is embodied in the realistic objects of his world. This is a story about the ultimate romantic projection, for the boy sees the girl as a religious object, a romantic embodiment of desire. Her name is like a “summons” to all his “foolish blood,” yet it is such a sacred name that he cannot utter it. Her image accompanies him “even in places the most hostile to romance.” Thus, when he visits Araby, a place he fancies the most sympathetic to romance, he seeks a sacred object capable of objectifying all his unutterable desires.

The conversation he overhears causes his realization precisely because of its trivial flirtatious nature, for what the boy discovers is that there is nothing so sacred that it cannot be made profane. To see his holy desire for Mangan’s sister diminished to mere physical desire is to see a parody of himself. The result is the realization that he is driven and derided by vanity and that all is vanity. There is no way for the sacred desires humans store in their ghostly hearts to be actualized and retain their spiritual magic.

“The Dead” is the most subtle example of Joyce’s innovative technique. The first two-thirds of the story reads as if it were a section from a novel, as numerous characters are introduced and the details of the party are reproduced in great detail. It is only in the last third, when Gabriel’s life is transformed, first by his romantic and sexual fantasy about his wife and then by his confrontation with her secret life, that the reader reflects on the first two-thirds of the story and perceives that the earlier concrete details and the trivial remarks are symbolically significant. Thematically, the conflict that reflects the realistic/lyrical split in the story is the difference revealed to both Gabriel and the reader between public life and private life, between life as it is in actual experience and life perceived as desire.

The party portion of “The Dead” reflects Gabriel’s public life; his chief interest is what kind of figure he is going to cut publicly. However, throughout the party period of the story, there are moments—particularly those moments that focus on the past, on music, and on marital union—when reality is not presented as here and now but as a mixture of memory and desire. During their short carriage ride to the hotel, he indulges in his own self-delusion about his relationship with his wife: “Moments of their life together that no one knew of or would ever know of, broke upon and illuminated his memory.”

When Gabriel discovers that Gretta has a secret life that has nothing to do with him, he sees the inadequacy of his public self. Michael Furey, who has been willing to sacrifice his life for the love of another, challenges Gabriel’s smug safety. In the much-discussed lyrical ending of “The Dead,” Gabriel confronts the irony that the dead Michael is more alive than Gabriel is. “Generous tears” fill his eyes because he knows that he has never lived a life of desire, only the untransformed life of the everyday. In the end, awake and alone while his wife sleeps beside him, he loses his egoistic self and imaginatively merges into a mythic lyrical sense of oneness. “The Dead” is not a story that can be understood the way most novels are read—one thing after another—but the way the modern short story must be read, aesthetically patterned in such a way that only the end makes the rest of the story meaningful.

Seumas O’Kelly, James Stephens, Daniel Corkery

One of the most powerful post-Joycean Irish short stories, strikingly modern in its experimental use of a variety of stylistic modes, is Seumas O’Kelly’s “The Weaver’s Grave,” which, while largely unknown among American readers, is appreciated by many Irish critics as a masterpiece of classical perfection. Although the story centers on the seemingly simple situation of two old men helping the weaver’s young widow look for the grave plot of her recently deceased elderly husband, the symbolic structure of the story is elaborately complex. O’Kelly combines techniques of classical drama, poetry, painting, and philosophic discourse to create a story about aging, death, and rebirth that owes much to Joyce, even as it anticipates the fiction of Samuel Beckett.

The most important symbolic elements in the story are the mazelike graveyard, the two grotesque old men, the handsome twin gravediggers, the darkly beautiful widow, and the corpselike old cooper, Malachi Roohan. The thematic center occurs when the widow goes to the ancient cooper’s house to see if he knows the location of her husband’s grave. A mummified figure, the cooper magically seems to come to life momentarily to tell her that she is a dream, that he is a dream, and that all the world is a dream.

When the widow returns to the graveyard, she has an epiphanic realization, a clear insight into something that had been obscure before. “And no sooner had the thing become definite and clear than a sense of the wonder of life came to her.” At the very moment, she becomes aware of the individuality of one of the young gravediggers, they find the grave site. The story ends with the widow and the gravedigger standing across the grave from each other as she thinks that the man framed against the sky is a wonder, a poem, and the whole place swoons before her eyes. “Never was this world so strange, so like the dream that Malachi Roohan had talked about.” The young man springs across the “open black mouth of the weaver’s grave” to her, looks down into it, and asks if she is satisfied. With this tableau, the curtain comes down as she says, in a voice like that of a young girl, “I’m satisfied.” “The Weaver’s Grave” is a masterpiece of narrative structure that focuses on the ultimate realities of death and rebirth occurring simultaneously, much like the mythic immolation and resurrection of the fabled phoenix.

James Stephens is another Irish short story writer who bridges the gap between modernism, introduced by Joyce, and experimentalism, which was pushed to such extremes later on by Beckett. Of Stephens’s two collections of stories, Here Are Ladies (1913) is the best known. Stephens’s most anthologized story, “A Rhinoceros, Some Ladies, and a Horse.” is also his most Beckett-like piece. The protagonist-narrator, a young man who works at a theatrical agency, encounters the rhinoceros, ladies, and horse in separate and seemingly unrelated events in the story. However, the encounters are psychologically related. First, some boys push him into a rhinoceros cage, and the animal falls in love with the young man’s shoes. Second, a great music hall lady comes into the theatrical office and looks at the young man the way the rhinoceros did; he wonders if she is going to smell him down one leg and up the other. Finally, when he is given letters to post, a man asks him to hold his horse, and the horse falls in love with the young man as if the horse had found its long-lost foal. The story ends with an encounter with a woman named Mary and her husband Joseph, a Christian reference further emphasized by the woman’s referring to the protagonist as “Childagrace.” The final comic scene centers on the pronunciation of “bosom” (introduced earlier by the music-hall woman, who tells the boy to “come to my Boozalum, angel,” echoed later by Joseph, who introduces Mary as “the wife of my bosum,” and concludes when Mary calls to the narrator to “come to my boozalum, angel”). The absurd encounters of the narrator and the comic non sequitur dialogue anticipate Beckett’s En attendant Godot (pb. 1952; Waiting for Godot, 1954).

Another frequently anthologized Stephens story, “The Triangle,” is an experiment with combining conventions of the essay with those of story, in which what little plot the story has centers on Mr. and Mrs. Morrissy and the visit of Mrs. Morrissy’s cousin—all of whom create the triangularity of the story’s title. The story moves from the stated platitude “two is company and three is a crowd” through an exploration of how the introduction of the third party creates a plot and counterplot to bring some complication and thus life and story into the previously placid stasis of the Morrissy marriage. The story ends with Stephens’ central thematic statement: “Fluidity is existence, there is no other, and for ever the chief attraction of Paradise must be that there is a serpent in it to keep it lively and wholesome.”

It is an unfortunate fact of literary history that the fiction of Daniel Corkery has been overshadowed by his mentoring of two younger writers, Frank O’Connor and Seán O’Faoláin. It is symbolically appropriate that Corkery’s best-known collection, A Munster Twilight, was published in 1916, the year of the Easter Rising (an insurrection aimed at ending British control of Ireland) since Corkery was a fervent nationalist who aligned himself with all things Irish: Catholicism, the Rising, the Gaelic language, and the Irish countryside. Typical of Corkery’s affirmation of the mystical importance of rural place is his much-admired story, “The Ploughing of Leaca-na-Naomb,” which begins appropriately with the question, “With which shall I begin—man or place?” Echoing the folktale magic of the “old times,” the story centers on the basic conflict between the sacred and the profane use of land and ends with a heroic gesture by the protagonist, who is seen as “the last of an immemorial line.” However, Corkery is one of the last Irish writers to draw from the supernatural world of the old folktellers, for, in the next generation, his two most famous students, O’Connor and O’Faoláin, affirm the Joycean literary story of tight structure and realistic detail.

Seán O’Faoláin, Frank O’Connor, Liam O’Flaherty

Seán O’Faoláin has argued that the short story thrives best within a romantic framework; the more organized and established a country is, O’Faoláin claims, the less likely that the short story will flourish there. Although Ireland, a country that stubbornly sticks to its folk roots, has been a most hospitable place for the short-story form, O’Faoláin seems to have constantly fought against the romanticism of the short story, yearning for the realism of the novel. Thus, his stories reveal a continual battle between his cultural predilection for the short story (with its roots in the folk and its focus on the odd and romantic slant) and his conviction that realism is the most privileged artistic convention.

O’Faoláin’s eight separate collections of stories span the period from 1932 to 1976. In the thirteen-hundred-page single volume of his collected short stories, O’Faoláin experiments with a wide range of generic types and language styles: from the romantic, dreamlike narrative “Fugue” and the allegorical satire “The Man Who Invented Sin” to the social comedy “The Faithful Wife” and to the domestic comedy “Childybawn.”

“Fugue,” an early O’Faoláin story, shows his self-conscious experimentation with narrative style. Although the plot focuses on a young Irish rebel trying to escape British soldiers, the heart of the story is his lyrically romantic encounter with a country girl. As the title suggests, what holds the story together is not a linear plot but rather the polyphonic counterpoint of the threat of violence and death with the desire for a quiet rural life.

In “The Man Who Invented Sin,” the focus is on the temporary escape of two young nuns and two young priests from the restrictions of the Catholic Church while on a summer program in the country to learn Irish. The idyllic retreat, filled with singing and dancing, is broken up by the local curate, who forces them back into religious reality like the serpent in the Garden of Eden. More than twenty years later, the story's narrator meets the curate, who recalls the incident and laughs that he had to frighten the young innocents. As he walks away, the narrator sees his elongated shadow trailing behind him like a tail.

O’Faoláin’s comic stories range from his domestic satire on the stereotype of the Irish male’s relationship with his mother in “Childybawn” to the sophisticated satire of the Irish woman’s relationship with the Catholic Church in “The Faithless Wife.” In the first story, a man forgoes marriage to stay home to care for his mother, only to find out that she wishes he had married years ago, for he has limited her secret gambling and drinking. In the second, in the witty language and style of an Oscar Wilde comedy, a man pursues a young married woman, trying to break down the “formidable chastity” of the Irish woman. However, when her husband, a bore who reminds her of an unemptied ashtray, has a stroke, she refuses to leave him. The story ends with the man giving up on her and lamenting that Irishwomen are awful liars without a grain of romance in them.

O’Faoláin’s stories reside uneasily between the romanticism to which he was born and the realism for which he yearned. His basic technique might be called “poetic realism,” a kind of prose in which objects and events seem to be presented objectively but yet are transformed by the unity of the form itself into meaningful metaphors. O’Faoláin is a craftsman with an accurate vision of his country and its people; however, he is a self-conscious imitator of more famous precursors, never quite able to find a distinctive voice that manifests his individual talent.

Although Frank O’Connor wrote poems, plays, novels, travel books, and literary criticism, his place in twentieth-century literature is most assured by his work in the short-story genre. Of the nearly one hundred short stories he published in collections beginning with the 1931 Guests of the Nation, the best known are “Guests of the Nation,” “The Drunkard,” “My Oedipus Complex,” and “Judas.” The first, published when O’Connor was a young man, is the stark and violent story about two British soldiers reluctantly executed by Irish rebels, whereas the other three are comic stories about a child’s relationship with his parents and a young man’s romantic love.

One of O’Connor’s best-known books is his study of the short-story genre, The Lonely Voice, in which he argues that, as opposed to the novel, the short story takes as its primary subject the experiences of what he calls a “submerged population group,” such as the peasants of Ivan Turgenev and Chekhov and the townsfolk of Sherwood Anderson and Joyce. Although most critics agree that O’Connor never perfected the short story to the degree that Joyce did, O’Connor’s profound understanding of the secret of the short story’s inherent difference from the novel, as well as his ability to capture what he called “the Irish middle-class Catholic way of life” in delightful comic vignettes, has assured him a permanent place in the history of twentieth-century Irish literature.

Although the speaker in “Judas,” one of O’Connor’s best-known stories, is older than the young boy in Joyce’s “Araby,” the conflict between the two stories is the same—the tension between a romanticized view of a young woman and a more realistic view. However, whereas the voice in Joyce’s story is serious, the voice of O’Connor’s young man is comically self-deprecating. One’s first reaction may be that the Judas of the story is the boy himself, for Jerry thinks he has somehow betrayed his mother. The conventional reference to the crowing of the cock after his sleepless night also suggests this. However, neither the action nor the story's imagery indicates that the protagonist is the Judas betrayer. The real Judas in the story is the mother.

The mother, by instilling an image of her own goodness and purity in the son, betrays him into believing that all women, except the “bad women” he reads about in books, are like her. Thus, he feels guilty about his thoughts about “good girl” Kitty Doherty, thinking that she is “pure indeed.” When Jerry finally confronts Kitty and hears her talk in “cold blood about 'spooning' with fellows all over the house," he feels "like a man who'd lived all his life in a dungeon getting into the sunlight for the first time." Thus, resurrected from guilt, he goes home singing "as if a stone had been lifted" from his heart. The mother's image has not been completely banished; he faces the silent reproach of her waiting in darkness, worrying about him. His cruel retort to her whimpering question expresses his anger at being betrayed now that he feels he is a stranger to her.

Jerry, then, is the ironic suffering Jesus Christ, deceived by the mother into thinking that all women are pure. The final image in the story completes the terms of the ironic Mary-Christ parallel. When Jerry goes to the mother's room and sees her sitting in bed under the Sacred Heart lamp, he bursts out crying, and she spreads her arms to hold him in the classic tableau of the Pieta. "All she could do was to try and comfort me for the way I'd hurt her, to make up to me for the nature she'd given me."

Liam O'Flaherty is usually described as a naturalist, like Émile Zola and Theodore Dreiser, a writer who depicts the futile efforts of human beings in conflict with nature. In such stories as "Spring Sowing," which appeared in his collection of the same name in 1924, despite the lyrical love between the young Irish farm couple, their labor is menial and ultimately deadening, for they are controlled by the bleak landscape where they must spend their entire lives. Several of O’Flaherty’s stories, such as “The Cow’s Death” and “The Rockfish,” are poetic and primitive, depicting the natural cycle of animal life as simultaneously beautiful and frightening.

Because of their Irish subject matter, two favorites with critics are “Going into Exile” and “The Two Lovely Beasts.” The first falls into an Irish literary tradition of stories about young people leaving home for better prospects in America. “Going into Exile” focuses on a party on the night before the departure of a son and daughter in which, although little is said, much is felt about the loss of the children. The stoic restraint is broken only at the end when the cabin is filled with bitter wailing, and the mother is left staring down an empty road. “The Two Lovely Beasts,” from the collection The Two Lovely Beasts and Other Stories (1948), has been a favorite O’Flaherty story because it has been interpreted as an apparent attack on capitalism. Almost allegorical in its depiction of one man who gradually begins to acquire more and more wealth while his family suffers and his neighbors scorn him, the story is ultimately morally ambiguous, for even as the ambitious man is ruthless, his enemies seem stupid and malicious.

What makes the favorite anthology piece, “The Fairy Goose,” a morally complex parable, is its combination of comic and tragic tone and its thematic combination of the sacred and the profane. Although there is something comically absurd about transforming a goose into a sacred object with ribbons around its neck, at the same time, there is something innocent and touching about the way O’Flaherty personalizes the goose as an embodiment of charm, innocence, and dignity. Moreover, although there is something foolish about the extreme reaction of the priest to the goose, at the same time, there is something violent and vicious about this reaction as well.

Part of the power of O’Flaherty’s satire is that Mrs. Wiggins has exploited the goose for her own profit, but she has done no more than the Catholic Church itself. Although the priest’s battle with his competition, the goose and the older woman, is comic, its result is, if not tragic, at least pathetic. The goose’s death by stoning is a terrible indictment of the Church as a purveyor of fear and hate. Although the men who kill the goose take the advice of the priest to fear God, they are unable to love their neighbors. Their wives claim that the only time in the village's history there was peace and harmony was when they accepted the sacred nature of the goose. O’Flaherty’s satire on the routing of the innocent religion of love by the avaricious religion of jealousy is given the authority of folktale.

Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Lavin, Edna O’Brien

Of the seventy-nine stories in The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen (1981), published from the 1920s through the 1940s, less than ten percent center on Ireland. Instead, Bowen’s best-known stories dramatize psychological states that hover between reality and hallucination. Such stories as “The Happy Autumn Fields” move so smoothly back and forth between the past and the present that distinctions between those two realms are meaningless. In “Her Table Spread,” the real social world of the drawing room is invaded by romantic fantasy to such an extent that the relative reality of the two worlds is brought into question.

Bowen’s most anthologized story, “The Demon Lover,” is a striking example of her fascination with a realm of reality that seems neither wholly phenomenal nor wholly hallucinatory. While some critics call the story a ghost tale, others argue it is a story of psychological delusion. The problem centers on the mysterious letter the protagonist, Mrs. Drover, finds in her boarded-up London home when she visits it from the countryside, where the family has retreated to escape the bombings during World War II. The letter is from a man that Mrs. Drover knew twenty-five years before, who was reported missing during World War I but bears the current day's date. The letter reminds her of her promise to him and tells her to expect him on this day, as they had arranged. The story uses the old legend of the demon lover, which usually focuses on a young woman’s promise to love her young man forever and await his return from battle. However, a few years after he is reported dead or missing, she meets and plans to marry another man. Usually, on the wedding day, the lost lover returns, sometimes as a rotting corpse, and carries the young bride away to join him in death.

Mrs. Drover is an example of a common short-fiction protagonist whose life is so safe and comfortable that she must be invaded by some basic irrational force. Although her feelings for the soldier were not passionate, and she seemed relieved when he left, she did indeed make an “unnatural promise” that cut her apart from the rest of humanity. Bowen’s treatment of the demon lover myth largely depends on the residue of the past in the boarded-up house: a yellow smoke stain on the fireplace, a ring left by a vase on a table, the bruise in the wallpaper where the doorknob hit it, claw marks left by the piano on the parquet floor. These “traces” metaphorically bring the letter into existence, making a past promise a present reality. Bowen does not resolve the reader’s uncertainty about the nature of Mrs. Drover’s visitation, for what matters is the story’s theme of the past’s claim on the present.

Although Mary Lavin was born in Massachusetts, she lived in Ireland from age ten until her death in Dublin in 1996. Her first collection, Tales from Bective Bridge (1942), was well received, garnering awards and prizes. She continued publishing short stories up through the 1960s. One of her early stories, “Sarah,” is still a reader favorite because it so economically and confidently explores a typical plight of young Irish womanhood. Sarah is a hard worker but has a bad reputation because she has had three sons out of wedlock. When she gets pregnant with a fourth child, this time by a married man for whom she works, her brothers throw her and the baby out. The story ends when the baby’s father, who has denied any involvement with Sarah, is told that she and the baby have been found dead in a ditch by the side of the road. What makes the moral issues of the story complex and ambiguous is the fact that the wronged wife is maliciously responsible for Sarah’s death. The story juxtaposes the two women—the respectable wife who holds back from life and the scorned Sarah who embraces it. Although social respectability triumphs over immorality in the story, it does so at the terrible price of loss of humanness.

Lavin’s best-known story, published some forty years after “Sarah,” is “The Great Wave,” a harrowing tale about a terrible storm in which all the inhabitants of a small island, except two young fishermen, are killed in a giant tidal wave. The story is recalled by one of the young men, who is now a bishop on his way to the island many years later. Lavin’s description of the wave gives the story its power, which descends on the boys like a great green wall of water as if the whole sea has been stood up on its edge. The natural world takes on a mythic power in the story as if the wave signals the world’s end.

Although best known for her Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue (1986) and other novels, Edna O’Brien is the author of half a dozen short-story collections that have augmented her reputation as an Irish writer who has not been afraid to present Irish women as sexual human beings, who often find themselves caught in romantic fantasies. An early story by O’Brien, “Irish Revel,” from her first collection, The Love Object (1968), and a late story, “Lantern Slides,” from the book of the same name published in 1990, both of which are anthology favorites, are good examples of her typical themes and her stylistic range.

“Irish Revel” centers on Mary, a seventeen-year-old village girl invited to her first party in town. However, she arrives in her best clothes and discovers she has been invited to be a serving maid. Her head is filled with romantic fantasies about life in town, and she is surprised that so many people there are coarse and vulgar. When the men get drunk and start quarreling, and one clumsily advances toward her, Mary loses all illusions about town life. Slipping out of the hotel before dawn, she goes home but has not given up her romantic hope for a handsome young man. The story ends with lines that echo the famous lyrical ending of Joyce’s “The Dead”: “Frost was general all over Ireland . . . frost on the stony fields and all the slime and ugliness of the world.”

O’Brien’s “Lantern Slides,” the title story of a collection, is also a tribute to “The Dead,” for it recounts a contemporary Dublin party in which many characters tell their own stories of love and disappointment. As in Joyce’s story, the focus here is on the ghostly nature of the past, in which all have experienced the loss of romantic fantasies. However, the power of desire has such a hold on the characters that chivalric romance seems a reachable, yet not quite attainable, grail-like goal. When the estranged husband of one of the women arrives, everyone hopes it is the wandering Odysseus who returned home in search of his Penelope. “You could feel the longing in the room, you could touch it—a hundred lantern slides ran through their minds. . . . It was like a spell. . . . It was as if life were just beginning.”

Brian Friel, John McGahern, William Trevor

Some socially minded critics have criticized Brian Friel for writing stories in which the conflicts are more personal than political and the past more romantic than rebellious. His collection The Saucer of Larks (1962) is his most important collection; “Foundry House” is his best-known story, primarily because the dramatic oppositions in the story derive from Irish history and reflect a clearly defined class distinction that once was known as the “Big House” system, in which English Protestants lived in the large manor homes while Irish Catholic peasants were dependant on them. Friel symbolizes the difference between the dying old way and the competent new industrial world by making the “Big House” family aging and sterile and Joe, the working-class protagonist, a radio-television repairman. When Joe is called to the house to show the family how to play a tape recording from one of the daughters, the infirm father calls him “boy,” as in the old days. However, when Joe returns home, he can only say they are a great, grand family.

The Irish stereotypes of the alcoholic husband and the shamed and embarrassed wife form the basis of Friel’s “The Diviner.” When Nelly Devenny is freed from her alcoholic husband by his death, after a suitable period of mourning, she remarries a respectable retired man from the west of Ireland, who is drowned in a lake three months later. After the frogmen fail to find the body, a diviner is brought in, who, like a priest, can smell out the truth, which is two whisky bottles in the dead man’s pocket. Nelly’s final wail is not so much for the dead husband as it is for the respectability she had almost gained but which now is lost once again.

There are no sentimental images of the emerald isle in John McGahern’s stories in his best-known collection Nightlines, published in 1970; many are darkly pessimistic. Moreover, it is not the speaking “voice” of the Irish storyteller that dominates his stories but the stylized tone of modern minimalism. Typical of the Joycean tradition, McGahern’s stories are both realistic and lyrical. Typical of that tradition, McGahern is not interested in confronting his characters with social abstractions but rather the universal challenges of guilt, responsibility, commitment, and death.

McGahern’s best-known story, “The Beginning of an Idea,” opens with the first sentences of Eva Lindberg’s notebook, which describe how Chekhov was carried home to Moscow on an ice wagon with the word “Oysters” chalked on the side. Because the lines haunt her, she gives up her work as a theater director and her affair with a married man to go to Spain to write an imaginary biography of Chekhov. However, once there, she finds she cannot write. When a local police officer she befriends entraps her into having sex, she packs up and leaves, feeling rage about her own foolishness. On the train, she has the bitter taste of oysters in her mouth, and when a wagon passes, she has a sudden desire to look and see if the word Oysters is chalked on it.

William Trevor is the most respected Irish short-story writer of the twenty-first century. Trevor has said that having been born Irish, he observes the world through “Irish sensibilities” and takes an Irish way of doing things for granted. However, as a writer, he knows he has to “stand back” so far that he is “beyond the pale, outside the society he comments upon to get a better view of it.” The result is that while most of Trevor’s stories are not specifically Irish, even those centered in Ireland transcend limitations of time and place. Stories from such collections as The Ballroom of Romance, and Other Stories (1972), Angels at the Ritz, and Other Stories (1975), and Beyond the Pale, and Other Stories (1982) have been republished in The Stories of William Trevor, published in 1983.

One of Trevor’s most famous stories, “Beyond the Pale,” is a powerful example of his treatment of an Irish theme. When two British couples make an annual visit to County Antrim, north of Belfast, there seems to be no sign of the so-called Troubles, violent skirmishes involving the Irish Republican Army. However, trouble in this story is submerged beneath the calm surface. The narrator, Milly, is having an affair with Dekko, whose wife, Cynthia, devours all the information she can find about Irish history and society. After a young man commits suicide at the hotel, Cynthia tells the others the story he told her before he died—a romantic fairy tale of two children who fall in love and live an idyll one summer at the hotel where the two British couples come for their own idyll. However, the young girl, becoming involved with political terrorism, is killed, after which the boy kills himself in despair. Cynthia uses the story, which everyone thinks she has invented, to represent all those put beyond the pale by violence and deception, ultimately relating it to her husband's deception. Thus, although the story is an Irish parable in which romantic children grow into murdering riffraff, it is also a story of the deceiving British, who try to ignore their responsibility for the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

Trevor also juxtaposes Irish and British values in “Autumn Sunshine,” this time in the person of an elderly Protestant cleric whose daughter has brought back a young man from England, who identifies with the Irish and wishes to align himself with rebels in the south. However, the cleric recognizes that the young man espouses the Irish cause only because it is one way the status quo in his own country can be damaged. Such men, the cleric thinks, deal out death and chaos, “announcing that their conscience insisted on it.”

“Death in Jerusalem,” which Trevor chose for his edition of The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories (1989), focuses on Father Paul, an Irish priest who has gone to America to become successful in the church and society, and his brother Francis, who has stayed home to care for their aging mother. When Father Paul finally convinces Francis to accompany him on a tour of Jerusalem, Francis is distressed that the actuality of what he sees does not match the idealized images of holy places he has in his imagination. The Via Dolorosa, for example, does not compare to his imaginative notion of Christ’s final journey; he closes his eyes and tries to visualize it as he has seen it in his mind’s eye. When Father Paul receives a telegram that their mother has died, he holds off telling his brother until he sees more of the Holy Land. However, Francis says Jerusalem does not feel as Jerusalem should; saying he will always hate the Holy Land, he insists on going home immediately. The story ends with an image of the priest, who does not look and act as observers think he should, smoking and drinking alone.

Trevor is a master of the Irish short story not because he writes about Ireland and the Irish but because he has a fine artistic ability, like his most famous predecessor, Joyce, to write about trivial, everyday experiences in such a way that they resonate with universal significance. Trevor’s stories seem to have deceptively simple realistic surfaces until one begins to probe more deeply to discover how tightly built and powerfully realized they are. In Trevor's short fiction, the mere stuff of the world is transformed into artistic significance. Trevor has said that the artist “attempts to extract an essence from the truth by turning it into what John Updike has called 'fiction's shapely lies.'"

Other Irish Short-Story Writers, 1960-2000

In addition to O'Brien, McGahern, and Trevor, several other Irish writers have excelled in the short story since the 1960s. The most frequently anthologized contemporary Irish stories range from the relatively simple "The Poteen Maker" by Michael McLaverty, "The Ring" by Bryan McMahon, and "Secrets" by Bernard McLaverty, to the more sophisticated "All Looks Yellow to the Jaundiced Eye" by William Plunkett, "An Occasion of Sin" by John Montague, and "Diamonds at the Bottom of the Sea" by Desmond Hogan.

Michael McLaverty's popular story "The Poteen Maker" (Collected Short Stories of Michael McLaverty, 1978) is a relatively simple tale about a country school teacher. The central event, as recalled by a former student, deals with the teacher’s demonstrating the process of distillation. Only years later, the narrator realizes that the teacher is making poteen, a kind of Irish moonshine. The story simply and economically presents a nostalgic reminiscence reflecting the Irish fondness for drink and the camaraderie a “wee drop” encourages. Bryan MacMahon’s “The Ring,” from The End of the World, and Other Stories (1978), is a brief pastoral parable about an elderly Irish widow who, having lost her wedding ring while harvesting hay, doggedly spends an entire week searching for it. The narrator, the old woman’s grandson, who has always thought of her as “main hard,” is struck by the one time he sees her express emotion, crying “like the rain” when she finds the ring. Bernard McLaverty’s “Secrets,” from his 1977 collection of the same name, is a somewhat more complex story about a young man’s relationship with his maiden aunt. As a boy, he read a batch of her love letters from a young soldier who later became a priest. Years later, when he goes to visit her deathbed, he recalls her as his childhood teller of tales and weeps that she might forgive him.

Patrick Boyle’s story, “All Looks Yellow to the Jaundiced Eye,” from his 1971 collection of the same name, is an unsettling experimental story about a series of violent acts committed by a man who seemingly goes berserk for no apparent reason. The story explores the nature of unmotivated violence as presaged by an unarticulated sense of impending disaster. The day begins with mysterious portents sensed in the patterns of the flight of birds and the drumming of a rabbit’s foot. Although the protagonist tries to remain calm, he seems driven to vicious behavior, wringing the necks of chickens, smashing the head of his dog, and finally strangling his wife before shooting himself. It is a chilling story that makes no effort to provide psychological motivation for the man’s behavior but rather suggests how such behavior is always a horrible human possibility.

John Montague’s “An Occasion for Sin,” from his Death of a Chieftain, and Other Stories (1964), is a powerful story about Irish attitudes toward sexuality, told in an understated way from the perspective of a young French woman who has moved to the Dublin area with her new husband. While exploring the area, she found a small beach south of the city, which she visits for sunbathing. What complicates this simple pleasure is the summer arrival of several clerical students who come to sunbathe on the beach and become friendly with the young woman. Although her conversations with the men are completely innocent, her Irish husband tells her she must be careful, for she might be classed as an “occasion for sin.” Although she tries to ignore this warning, she discovers the basic truth of it when the young men begin to ask her about marriage because, as they say, “It’s well known that French women think about nothing but love.” She knows that she will probably not visit the beach the following summer.

Desmond Hogan’s “Diamonds at the Bottom of the Sea,” from his collection of the same name published in 1979, is a delicate love story about a man who, after living alone for many years, meets an old love who has lived in America. After the death of her husband, she returns to Ireland, and they both discover how little of their old love has died. The man seems dazed by this turn of events as if it were all a dream. Indeed, the story is like an embodiment of a daydream fantasy of first love regained, aging forestalled, and old hopes rekindled. “Can’t you see,” the woman tells him, “it’s the intense moments of youth. They won’t leave, try as you will.”

The main development of the Irish short story, from its roots in the rich folklore of the Irish people to its post-Joycean modernism, has been one in which the old local color conventions and stereotypes of Ireland and its people have been replaced with an image of Ireland as a modern European country. Although many tourists may bemoan the loss of the rural images, lamenting that Ireland and its literature are losing their distinctiveness, the fact is, most of those stereotypes arose from the biting poverty of many of the people, the harshness of British rule, and the despair and hopelessness that spawned the stereotypes of Irish immigration and drinking. The people of the new Ireland, for a time the shining star of economic development in the European Union, are not sorry to see those myths laid to rest. The short story will always be a powerful literary form for Irish writers, but it will probably never again be a form that perpetuates the old local color legends of the Emerald Isle.

The Irish Short Story in the Twenty-first Century

Since Irish literature has been largely filled with pub crawling, immigration, poverty, and Catholic guilt, one might well ask what will happen to the Irish short story in the twenty-first century. Perhaps a little of the old and some of the new, for while the cities and the suburbs of Dublin, Galway, and Cork may have become globalized, out in the country, folks still like a bit of craic (fun).

John B. Keane

John B. Keane's stories are probably the best example of the old-fashioned Irish comic tales about rural folk. ”Fred Rimble” in The Teapots Are Out, and Other Eccentric Tales from Ireland (2001), one of his last collections, is prototypical. The story is about a man whose mother is such a complaining hypochondriac that to distract her, he invents a man named Fred Rimble, who lost an ear to an electric potato peeler. The mother becomes so interested in Fred’s mishap that she feels better, so every time she complains about some new ailment, Fred suffers another disaster, and hearing about it makes her better again. As the mother’s complaints grow more demanding, Fred’s tragedies grow more severe. When she calls for the parish priest, the son, in desperation, tells her that Fred has died. Inevitably, the mother starts complaining again, and the poor son, at his wit’s end, goes to the pub in a downcast state, lamenting to a neighbor that he has just killed the best friend he ever had.

Roddy Doyle

Roddy Doyle wrote the eight stories in The Deportees (2008) to suit a plot pattern—someone born in Ireland meets an immigrant. Doyle does not pretend the stories are anything other than simple and predictable illustrative fables by a ventriloquist who knows how to put amusing dialogue in the mouths of Irish puppets. The longest and, for Doyle fans, the most entertaining piece is the title story, featuring the central character of the novel The Commitments (1987), Jimmy Rabbitte. In a story peppered with song lyrics and lots of “feck” and “shite,” Jimmy puts together a new “hardest working band,” this time made up of immigrants. The band’s name is The Deportees, and they sing Woody Guthrie songs. The remaining stories are patterns of predictability. “New Boy” is about a polite, mild-mannered African refugee who comes face to fist with some Dublin school bullies. The challenge, of course, is not to battle but to blend. The story “57 Percent Irish” is a playful bit of nonsense about a guy who comes up with a true test of Irishness by having applicants react to such things as Riverdance, “Danny Boy,” and Robbie Keane’s goal against Germany in the 2002 World Cup.

Bernard MacLaverty

The first story in Bernard MacLaverty’s collection (2006) is an emblematic introit that epitomizes many of the horrors of Northern Ireland since Bloody Friday when twenty-two bombs set by the Irish Republican Army exploded in Belfast. Metaphorically titled “On the Roundabout,” to suggest the never-ending dizzying circularity of sectarian violence in the north, the story takes place soon after the beginnings of the so-called Troubles in the early 1970s. A man driving into a traffic circle with his family rescues a young man being savagely beaten by two laughing assailants. That’s all that happens, but in its restrained elegance, the story epitomizes the deep-seated hatred that crippled the country for years. In “A Trusted Neighbor,” a Protestant police officer seems like a friend to his Catholic neighbor until the reader learns that the police officer is setting up the neighbor for a vicious attack. “The Trojan Sofa” is a comic tour-de-force told from the point of view of an eleven-year-old boy whose Catholic father sews the boy up in a sofa, which the father then sells to a British major, whom the father plans to loot—a robbery his father justifies by saying that the wrong done to Ireland by the British is so great that anything done in retaliation is honorable.

Gerard Donovan

When Ireland joined the European Union, a booming economy and a youthful population gave the country its greatest success story. Gerard Donovan, who grew up in Galway, is well aware of the social and cultural effects of this success. As a result, the characters in his Young Irelanders (2008) seem much like John Cheever’s American suburbanites. “Archeologists” juxtaposes the new Ireland of shopping centers and housing tracts with the old Ireland that lies just beneath the surface. A couple hired by a company to look for artifacts before development begins to discover the bones of a female child—a young Irelander—and find their own relationship torn between old and new expectations. Several stories deal with couples whose marriages are threatened by changing values in a country where people no longer fear the wrath of the village priest. The most Cheever-like story, with echoes of “The Swimmer,” is “Country of the Grand,” in which a man makes a tortured symbolic journey through his past.

William Trevor

Ireland’s greatest short-story writer, William Trevor, has published two new collections in the new century. The twelve stories in A Bit on the Side (2004) reaffirm that Trevor has a profound understanding of the complexity of what makes people do what they do and an unerring ability to use language to suggest that intimate intricacy. “Big Bucks” seems at first glance to be a traditional Irish emigration story: A young man goes to the United States to get work while the young woman waits for him to send for her. However, Trevor’s stories are never that simple, for more is involved than mere displacement. In “Sitting with the Dead,” a woman whose cold and uncaring husband has just died must entertain two professional comforters, to whom she spills her secret hatred for the man. However, the plot is not that straightforward, and they know that the dead they have been sitting with is the widow.

Trevor’s stories are not cultural examinations of either the old Ireland of legend or the new Ireland of the European Union but rather profoundly wise explorations of individual, yet universal, secrets and mysteries of the heart. Even when Trevor writes a story with a social or historical context, it is levered on the personal. In “Justina’s Priest,” the loosening hold of the Catholic Church on modern Ireland is revealed in one old priest’s clinging to the simple-minded devotion of one young woman. In “The Dancing-Master’s Music,” the history of peasant Ireland’s dreadful dependence on England’s Big House mastery is suggested by a young scullery maid’s romantic memory of distant music.

As in all great short stories, from Chekhov to Carver, there is a mystery and not a little menace in the stories of Trevor, secrets so tangled and inexplicable that efforts to explain them with the language of psychology, sociology, or history are either futile or absurd. A classic example in another Trevor collection, Cheating at Canasta (2007), is “The Dressmaker’s Child,” in which Cahill, a nineteen-year-old Irishman, takes a couple of young Spanish tourists, seeking a blessing on their marriage to a statue that was once thought to shed miraculous tears. On the way back, a young female child runs out in the road and into his car. Cahill does not stop. When the child’s body is found in a quarry half a mile from her home, the mother, a dressmaker who has borne the child out of wedlock, begins to stalk Cahill, hinting that she saw him hit the girl. Cahill imagines that he walked back to the site of the accident and carried the body of the child to the quarry, but he knows that it was the mother who had done this. Cahill, afraid, without knowing what he fears, cannot dismiss the connection between him and the dressmaker. The story suggests that it is possible that death and guilt, as well as birth and love, can unite two people.

Colm Tóibín

Mothers and Sons (2006), novelist Colm Tóibín’s first collection of stories, suffers from the calculated way Tóibín developed the book. Realizing that some of his older stories—such as “A Song,” (2004) about a young man who hears his mother, who abandoned him as a child, sing, and “A Priest in the Family,” about an older mother whose son, a priest, is accused of abusing a young man—shared a common theme of mother-son relationships, he added the mother angle to two unfinished sketches—”The Name of the Game” and “The Use of Reason”—and made a book. The novella “The Long Winter,” occupying one-third of the book, is the best story here, and not just because of its length. In a rural village in the Pyrenees in Spain, it focuses on a young man whose mother has disappeared in a snowstorm. Based on a true story told to Tóibín by a man who sold him a house in Spain, the tale has the formal control of folktale, ballad, and myth. Tóibín, his own best critic, has called this his most powerful piece, recognizing that its purity of line and clarity of emotion place it in a different realm than the other stories. Tonally flawless and emotionally compelling, “The Long Winter,” a perfect example of James’s “beautiful and blest nouvelle,” is a story that the master would have approved.

Claire Keegan

When Claire Keegan’s first collection of stories, Antarctica, appeared in Ireland in 2000, she won several awards and promisingly was placed in the rarified company of John McGahern. Her second collection, Walk the Blue Field (2007), in which one story is subtitled “after McGahern,” fulfills that promise. Although Keegan is a young woman of the new Ireland, perhaps because she was raised on a farm in Wicklow, her stories have the legendary lilt of country life that makes them sound more mythic than modern. Her combination of the lyrical style and subject of Turgenev with the economy and restraint of Chekhov is a classic example of what makes the short story such an irresistible form. “Parting Gift” is, in some ways, a traditional story of a young woman preparing to emigrate from Ireland to America, receiving laconic and mundane advice in preparation for her first real journey. What makes the story haunting is a shameful secret that is known but cannot be named. The title story also harbors a secret. At a wedding celebration in which the bride seems more than usually uncertain and the parents more than usually apprehensive, it is the priest who hides the most painful reservation of all. “Foster,” which won the second Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award in 2009, has been called a “quintessentially Irish story.” It might well be called a quintessential Keegan story, dealing, as it does, with a broken rural family in an Ireland that seems to be disappearing quickly but is still haunted by a guilt-ridden past. Similarly, Keegan's 2022 short story "So Late in the Day," published in The New Yorker, is made up of three tales of three complicated relationships between men and women. This work inspired her short story collection So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men (2023).

Anne Enright

Anne Enright, another winner of the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award, creates stories that seem on the opposite end of the spectrum from those of Keegan. In Enright’s city-suburb world, women are not, like Keegan’s, victims of rural prejudices but rather victims of the modern world. Yesterday’s Weather (2008) unites stories from her first collection, The Portable Virgin (1991), with new stories. In “Until the Girl Died,” Enright writes from the point of view of a woman whose husband has had an affair with a woman, who—”silly twit”—is killed driving on the wrong side of the road in Italy; however, the wife is not nearly as sanguine as her tone would suggest. In the title story, the central character is a woman whose holiday and hopes seem to be trampled by an indifferent husband and a crying child but who still manages a languid smile at this “baby business.” The mother in “Caravan” is similarly caught between torment and joy at her children, who are little animals, as well as her pride. The world of the women in Enright’s new stories are not just the women of Ireland; they are the middle-class women the world over—muddled and mystified by dreams, diapers, sex, and silly men. Examples of these include "The Hotel" and "Solstice," two short stories published in The New Yorker in 2017.

The short story in Ireland in the first decades of the twenty-first century is as healthy and sound as ever. Some writers pay obeisance to that country’s legendary past, and others look to the new world of immigrants and the middle-class suburbs. Among these twenty-first-century writers is Nuala Ní Chonchúir, whose short story collections began in 2004 with The Wind Across the Grass, and continued with many more, including Mother America (2012), Joyride to Jupiter (2017), and A Little Unsteadily Into Light (2022). Other notable authors include Ita Daly, Edna O'Brien, and Billy O'Callaghan.

Bibliography

Armie, Madalina. The Irish Short Story at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century: Tradition, Society and Modernity. Routledge, 2023. 

del Campo, Mercedes. Voices from the Margins: Gender and the Everyday in Women’s Pre- and Post-Agreement Troubles Short Fiction. Peter Lang, 2021. 

D'hoker, Elke, and Stephanie Eggermont. The Irish Short Story: Traditions and Trends. P. Lang, 2015.

Ingman, Heather. A History of the Irish Short Story. Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Keegan, Claire. "So Late in the Day." The New Yorker, 21 Feb. 2022, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/02/28/fiction-claire-keegan-so-late-in-the-day. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Kilroy, James, ed. The Irish Short Story: A Critical History. Boston: Twayne, 1984.

Malcolm, Cheryl Alexander, and David Malcolm, eds. A Companion to the British and Irish Short Story. Wiley-Blackwell, 2008.

Martin, Augustine, ed. The Genius of Irish Prose. Dublin: Mercier Press, 1985.

Orel, Harold. The Victorian Short Story. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Rafroidi, Patrick, ed. The Irish Short Story. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979.

Thompson, Richard J. Everlasting Voices: Aspects of the Modern Irish Short Story. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1989.