Communal “Oenness” to an Irreducible Outside: The Inoperative Community in Edna O’Brien’s Short Fiction

Abstract

Together with James Joyce, Edna O’Brien is one of the twentieth-century Irish writers who best exemplify the emotional complexities that usually arise between the artist and his/her national community. Comparing her self- imposed exile in London to Joyce’s voluntary exile from Ireland, O’Brien has claimed that living away from her native place has been essential for her “self-protection,” as it has guaranteed her finding of the necessary “silence and privacy” to write ( “Lit Chat with Edna O’Brien”). Her ambivalent relationship to the Ireland of her youth is clearly epitomized in the sentence which closes her autobiographical book Mother Ireland: “I live out of Ireland because something in me warns me that I might stop if I lived there, that I might cease to feel what it has meant to have such a heritage” (Mother 89). This necessity to leave the homeland behind while maintaining alive one’s “heritage” is glaringly apparent in O’Brien’s fiction. Her self-imposed exile allows her to explore, with the necessary emotional detachment, the collective consciousness of a whole conservative community she cannot commune with.