Sean O’Faolain

1900-1991

Life and works

• 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 self-

analysis 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.

•

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 down-at-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.