Rhythms of the Political: Peadar O'Donnell's Rural Fiction

In Peadar O'Donnell's last novel Proud Island, the author says of one character that "Susan Duffy . . . was a puzzle to people who liked to see life whole."¹ This description could also be applied to many of the most interesting characters in his fiction, who are defined by troubled relationships to their homeland, and perhaps it captures the challenge of reading O'Donnell as well. In the shift from an individual to a community—from "Susan Duffy" to "people"—this single sentence embodies what may well be the primary issue in O'Donnell's work: the struggle between individual desires and communal patterns. The sentence also explicitly addresses an attitude toward tradition, summed up in the phrase "people who liked to see life whole," that is the elusive source of the energy in O'Donnell's prose—an intermittently yearning and satirical approach to group identity. O'Donnell's reputation as a literary figure is inextricable from his growing reputation as a political figure, as both a nationalist and a socialist—roles in which he forcefully expressed his solidarity with nation and class. But terms like "nationalist" and "socialist," while they aptly describe parts of O'Donnell's nonliterary life, at best can only obliquely reveal the considerable power of his fiction.

Peadar O'Donnell is a writer of place—Donegal—and he knows and loves that place in ways that complement his life of public activism.² Like more famous writers of the Irish Renaissance, most relevantly John Millington Synge, O'Donnell captures in great detail the world that was passing at the beginning of the twentieth century. His knowledge of that part of the world was an insider's: born in western Donegal in 1893, his careers in early life included teaching, trade union organizing, and being a soldier. Peter Hegarty's thorough and readable 1999 study Peadar O'Donnell provides a rich recreation of his life and place, especially the social history of the part of the county called the Rosses and the political movements that provided the framework for all of O'Donnell's various careers.³ O'Donnell was active in the IRA, spent most of 1922 through 1924 in Irish jails, and became an ardent socialist. Storm, the first of his seven novels, appeared in 1925. In 1940 he founded The Bell, with Sean O'Faolain; O'Donnell served as editor 1946 to 1954. He remained active in Irish and global politics up until his death in 1986, achieving a sort of celebrity status late in life.⁴ Recent years have seen three very substantial monographs devoted to O'Donnell, which have provided more thorough treatments of his literary, personal, and political activities.⁵

O'Donnell's fiction portrays the lives of the rural villagers of Donegal, and much of the strength of this fiction seems to come from its nuanced representation of the relationship between tradition and change. O'Donnell's novels create a rhythmic alternation between the two human states of powerlessness and power. Many critics, in describing the strengths of O'Donnell's fiction, have praised his skill in rendering rural life by employing the literary categories of "realism" and "character." In The Irish Novel: A Critical History, James M. Cahalan discusses O'Donnell under the heading of "Exposé of Ireland: Realists, 1920–55"; more particularly, Cahalan sees O'Donnell as the successor to Liam O'Flaherty, and sees in him a writer who succeeds in portraying both the politics of class and the powerful natural forces in the West of Ireland.⁶ As an example of critics' appreciation of O'Donnell's skill at creating character, Alexander G. Gonzalez writes of some of O'Donnell's most memorable portraits: "The everyday quality of their lives is better rendered, I believe, than by any other rural Irish novelist, past or present. Islanders and The Big Windows are...