Lessons in Lunacy: Mental Illness in Liam O'Flaherty's Famine

Well before contemporary writers helped popularize the idea, the Irish had been marked as a people prone to mental illness. Nancy Scheper-Hughes's infamous anthropological examination of family and community in County Kerry, Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland (1977), merely articulated, loudly, what others had been mumbling for years. Her rendering of a ruptured society in western Ireland, which closely traced the local fragmentation caused by the Famine and the mass emigrations that followed, suggests a period of heightened anxiety that traumatized many an individual mind as it dissolved ties between the aged and young, men and women, even parents and their infants.¹ Republished in 2001 for a new audience, Scheper-Hughes's study joins such popular fare as Patrick McCabe's novels The Butcher Boy (1993) and The Dead School (1995) in implicating rural mores and rapid social change as a way of explaining the high rates of Irish mental illness.

Both fictional and academic accounts owe much to precedents set by earlier twentieth-century writers, including James Joyce, whose analysis of the Irish condition provided powerful formulations with which later generations would be forced to wrestle. The Dublin streets of Ulysses (1922), for instance, introduced the memorable madmen Dennis Breen and Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, while George Moore peopled the towns of The Untilled Field (1903) with a ménage of unbalanced characters. Moore's acclaimed short stories provided Irish society with another set of influential archetypes, among them the delusional Biddy M'Hale, convinced that the hallucinations she experiences in church are of divine origin; the senile Granny Kirwin, whose traumatic relocation by family members has wiped out all memories save that of her marriage day; and the isolated, Joycean clerk, Edward Dempsey, whose pathological obsession with an unknown woman unhinges his mind and leads to his death.

Liam O'Flaherty's Famine, published in 1937, provides a reasoned response to those who would question whether this modern fascination with the insane owes its origins to any historically veridical, specifically Irish experience. Famine combines sociological analysis with the dynamism of fiction to render a painfully realistic, unsoftened portrait of an Irish community dying a maddeningly slow death. Paul A. Doyle, while admitting to the occasional characterization that "jars the verisimilitude of the story," lauds the novel as O'Flaherty's greatest, an objectively narrated work of "epic grandeur" filled with realistic scenes that "sear the memory" while somehow avoiding the pitfall of melodrama.² Indeed, O'Flaherty's intense and realistic tale effects two related projects. It successfully recreates a period of heightened public anxiety concerning the specter of mental illness, a period loosely framed by the decade preceding the Great Famine and the decade following Famine's publication. The novel also provides a coherent, occasionally didactic rationale for the mid-nineteenth-century rise in mental illness by accurately relating the complex of material, social, and psychological pressures that together incubated and grew that very condition so feared by the masses.³

The author's own anxieties about the disabled mind likely sprung, in part, from a traumatic event experienced on the frontlines of World War I. In September, 1917, O'Flaherty was caught in a bombardment of artillery fire at Langemarch and severely injured. Though he eventually emerged from the resulting coma with a mended body and a very useful pension, he also carried away with him a psychological diagnosis that would shape both his own temperament and the narrative tone he would routinely adopt as a writer. Patrick F. Sheeran claims that the label of "melancholia acuta" O'Flaherty received at his discharge proved all too appropriate, naming what Sheeran considers "a major psychological fact both of the man and his work." This fear of total madness, he maintains, grew from a paralyzing force into a productive one, providing a therapeutic impetus for many of O'Flaherty's ostensibly fictional creations.⁴

One of the more successful of these creations was O'Flaherty's bestselling The Informer (1925), which indicates clearly that a preoccupation with the distressed [End Page 93...