• 1  All subsequent references will be to this edition: Frank O’Connor, The Lonely Voice: A Study of th (...)
• 2  There are 17 collections and anthologies of short stories by O’Connor (1903-1966), published betwe (...)
• 3  Frank O’Connor, Bones of Contention (London: Macmillan, 1936).
• 4  “Seanchai is applied as a rule to a person, man or woman, who makes a specialty of local tales, fa (...)

1The critical fame surrounding Frank O’Connor’s ground-breaking study of the short story The Lonely Voice (1962)1 has somewhat overshadowed his other achievements as novelist (The Saint and Mary Kate, 1932, Dutch Interior, 1940), translator of Old and Middle Irish poetry, modern Irish poet and some-time playwright, literary historian (The Backward Look, 1967) or short-story writer2. O’Connor turned his attention to short fiction in the mid-1920s, probably because of his early exposure to oral storytelling in his native Co. Cork. His grandmother was an Irish-speaking peasant storyteller, and, as a young Republican during the Irish Civil war (1922-1923), he lived with a farmer’s family in an Irish-speaking village outside Macroom, Co. Cork, and came to know the celebrated Tailor of Gougane Barra, whose tales were recorded in Eric Cross’s The Tailor and Ansty (1970). As to The Lonely Voice itself, it might very well be seen as the late outcome of O’Connor’s life-long involvement in short-story writing, both as practitioner and as reader of Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, Leskov, Babel, Kipling, Maupassant, Mansfield, Coppard, Lawrence, Anderson, Hemingway, all of whom come under critical scrutiny in The Lonely Voice. More interestingly still, the evolution of the genre, as charted by O’Connor himself, from “primitive” storytelling (33, 45) to elaborate art-form, from public performance to the privacy of the modern short story with its “intense awareness of human loneliness” (19), can also be traced in his second short story collection, Bones of Contention3. In most stories in this collection, not only does O’Connor’s sense of narrative seem to have been deeply affected by his early familiarity with the Irish storyteller tradition, but he casts himself in the role of the seanachie (the Irish for ‘a tradition bearer’)4 − a modern seanachie, aware that writing has transformed traditional oral storytelling structures and that, conversely, the written word has to be recharged with an oral narrative impulse. All the stories in Bones of Contention work under that double strain and achieve a variety of transitional modes, which will be examined from three different standpoints in the following article.

• 5  Walter Benjamin, “L’œuvre d’art à l’ère de sa reproductibilité technique”, Essais 2: 1935-1940 (Pa (...)
• 6  “The Majesty of the Law”, My Oedipus Complex and Other Stories (London: Penguin Books, 1969), firs (...)

2Among the orality structures this latter-day seanachie tries to revive, there is, to begin with, the context of oral performance −the place, time and experience shared by both teller and audience. The popular voice of the West of Ireland’s village communities –their language, social codes, belief system− is ostensibly posited as prior to writing, as the live material whose transitoriness writing attempts to commit to memory and permanence. Oral communication is prominent, even though its “aura”5, its ritual function, the “hic et nunc” of original utterance, are definitively lost. What O’Connor seeks to preserve, or rather to retrieve in writing, is the subject-matter of collective experience: local events −sensational crimes preferably− as well as the highly polarised world of orality which finds its way into structures of ambiguity and duplicity, as the second part will show. A peculiar feature of oral storytelling in those early stories is the inclusion of some set pieces of Irish oral narrative, known as “runs”. “Runs” were incomprehensible ritual items, in which the verbal material −rhythm, sounds, syntactic parallels− was much more important than meaning, which was secondary and unclear. “Runs”, the third part argues, go through a series of transformations as the stories evolve, within the same collection, from tradition to modernity. Three stories will mainly come under consideration: “The Majesty of the Law”, “Peasants”, “In the Train”, and some brief reference will be made to “Orpheus and His Lute” from the same collection6.

• 7  Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London; New York: Methuen, 1982) (...)

4Not only are the local events around which the stories centre typical of community life, they are also dramatised, turned into public oral performances, thus illustrating the proximity that O’Connor detects, in The Lonely Voice, between drama and storytelling. The extratextual context shared in oral tradition by teller and audience, “the entire human, existential setting in which the real, spoken word always occurs”7, is re-established  thanks to the emphasis laid on place and time, custom and body language. Place and time in all three stories jointly define the context of the oral performance. This is done in “The Majesty of the Law” in the conventional description that opens the story, and much less conventionally in “In the Train”, where a group of villagers journey by train from Dublin to Farrenchreesht, their homeplace. As the hours go by, the villagers move from compartment to compartment, so that the setting and the groups of characters change in each of the three sections as they would in the successive scenes of a play; and yet, unity of place (the train), time (the journey) and action (Helena’s crime) is altogether preserved, as in classical drama. In each section, talk is foregrounded – talk about the village, the country customs, the neighbours, human relations, and hints at the future that awaits the murderess: though she has been officially cleared of the charges against her thanks to the false evidence given by the villagers at the Dublin Criminal Courts, she will be outlawed once back in Farrenchreesht. The narrative insists on the body language, the facial expressions and vocal inflections of each character, registering dramatically the non-verbal signs of verbal communication:

• 8  To Frank O’Connor, in The Lonely Voice and elsewhere in his criticism, the short story should ring (...)

5However, the central element of this public oral performance is indeed the speaking voice8, the characters’ and the narrator’s. In the three stories, dialogue predominates by far over narration, even though, structurally, the narrator’s voice is the enunciative frame encompassing all other utterances. The prominence granted to dialogue allows the peculiarities of oral speech to develop: the Hiberno-English vernacular, with its specific turns of phrase, idioms and proverbs, the impossible place-names, the value-code and inherited assumptions of the villagers, and, above all, the dramatization of the agonistic potential of oral utterance:

• 9  Brian Boru was a High King of Ireland in the eleventh century, who put an end to Viking domination
• 10  Speaking about Leskov in The Lonely Voice, O’Connor mentions “the popular taste for excess” and fo (...)

7The narrator retells both what the rumour said publicly and what was said to him privately; he parodies the style of genealogical litany, jocularly mixing biblical and Irish history, Moses and Brian Boru9. O’Connor thus recasts the art of the seanachie in a modern mode by transforming oral storytelling structures, by enacting on the page the context of oral speech, by converting the non-verbal signs into verbal ones, which may account for the excess in writing, partly due to the amount of non-verbal matter recaptured in it10. But he also brings innuendoes and subtleties into the narrator’s voice to suggest a meaning beyond the storyline, thus developing implicitness and polysemy, so peculiar to modern short story writing.

• 11  Ong, Orality and Literacy, 43-44.

8Ong argues that “residually oral cultures strike literates as extraordinarily agonistic in their verbal performance and indeed in their lifestyle. Writing fosters abstractions that disengage knowledge from the arena where human beings struggle with one another. By keeping knowledge embedded in the human lifeworld, orality situates knowledge within a context of struggle.”11 In oral cultures a request for information is commonly interpreted interactively as agonistic, and, instead of being really answered, is frequently parried:

• 13  Delargy mentions the “ coru catha ” (“ preparing for battle ”) and the “ culaidh ghaisge ” (“ batt (...)
• 14  J. M. Synge was fascinated by the formulaic run with which an old storyteller from the Aran Island (...)
• 15  “In an oral culture, you have to do your thinking in mnemonic patterns. (...) Your thought must co (...)

13An interesting case of an orality-structure adapted to short-story writing by O’Connor is the traditional “run”. Runs in the Irish oral tradition were resting-places for the storyteller. They were semi-obscure, elaborate embellishments meant to impress the listener13. They were characterised by a bombastic series of alliterating adjectives, by formulaic or parallel constructions14, and were recited at greater speed than the narrative proper. They were probably part of the mnemonic patterns and formulas shaped for ready oral occurrence which an oral culture uses to retrieve articulated thought15.

• 16  “and if they were, their supporters...”, in the last but one sentence, echoes Synge’s example in n (...)

15This is the closest to the run in the Gaelic tradition that can be found in the collection. It goes on in this style not merely for two paragraphs as here, but for three pages, with very few marks of punctuation, florid imagery, innumerable sound effects, and formulaic turns of phrase16.

• 17  See The Lonely Voice about “the old rhetorical device of the mock-heroic” in Chekhov’s “Death of a (...)
• 18  For a standard definition of “vignette”, see Martin Gray, A Dictionary of Literary Terms (Harlow: (...)
• 19  Ezra Pound, “ A Retrospect ”, in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, ed. (London: Faber & F (...)

18With its abundance of visual images and its mock-heroic tone17, the scene suddenly brings to life an odd set of characters with their peculiarities of dress and manner; and along with them, their Western environment rushes into the picture, so strong is the organic continuity between the peasants and their natural habitat. The result is a poetic vignette18, on the borderline between drama (action) and poetry (diction), between the traditional run and the modernist image, “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time”19.

• 20  O’Connor repeatedly refers in The Lonely Voice to Pascal’s “the eternal silence of those infinite (...)
• 21  Frank O’Connor, The Lonely Voice 18, 20, 39, 41, 42, 43.

19All of the stories in Bones of Contention are to some degree steeped in orality. From its title onwards, the collection spells out the agonistic impulse in oral culture as well as the antagonisms in contemporary Ireland at large between popular tradition and official institutions, between authority structures and the individual. At one end of a wide spectrum of transitional modes, some stories, such as “Orpheus and His Lute”, are closest to the public, ancient, art of oral storytelling, to its taste for verbal excess and dramatic invention, to its context and style of delivery (the “runs”); at the other end others, like “In the Train”, herald in the more private and elliptical art of the modern short story, “the silence of those infinite spaces” within the individual consciousness20. By cleverly poising his narrators as mediators between oral speech and written narrative, and by paring down orality structures in order to fit them into the economy of the short story, O’Connor manages to redeem in writing the waning away of a cultural icon, the old Irish tradition of oral storytelling. Ultimately, orality becomes in his early stories a strategic device to recuperate the indigenous voices of those “submerged population groups” which, as he will argue some decades later in The Lonely Voice, have become the hallmark of the modern short story21.