"Rising Again": Revision, Trauma, and Frank O'Connor's "Guests of the Nation"

Abstract

"Rising Again":Revision, Trauma, and Frank O'Connor's "Guests of the Nation" Paul Delaney "Even a reader well acquainted with Frank O'Connor's short stories may be surprised by an unfamiliar collection," Michael Steinman remarked thirty years ago, in an exhaustive study of O'Connor's practice that focused upon the writer's habit of worrying and reworking stories that had already been published. "Here, for instance, is the familiar text of a cherished story, looking slightly foreign. The title and basic outlines are the same, but details and characters are reshaped or deleted. It begins or ends differently; its plot takes an unexpected turn."1 Seven short stories were chosen to illustrate the point ("The Genius," "First Confession," "Judas," "Orpheus and His Lute," "The Cornet-Player Who Betrayed Ireland," "The Little Mother," and "A Set of Variations"), with Stein-man detailing the many changes O'Connor made to different versions of those stories, as copies were published in magazine and book form on both sides of the Atlantic. The changes identified were variously cosmetic and significant, and were interpreted as evidence of O'Connor's fastidiousness as a creative writer. A late interview was cited in support, where O'Connor sought to equate his proclivity for revision with his desire for perfectionism in art. "I go back to my stories even after publication and read and re-read them until I sense what's wrong," he explained to the poet Michael Longley in 1963. "Once I know a story is as perfect as I can make it I never look at it again."2 O'Connor's tendency to return to published work, and to revise stories that were often already well-known, has frequently been understood in this light. It has also been parsed with reference to an extensive interview he gave in 1957, where O'Connor linked his commitment to revision with his fascination with the oral and the aural possibilities of literary fiction. "I notice particularly the cadence of [people's] voices, the sort of phrases they'll use, and that's what I am all the time trying to hear in my head, how people word things," he [End Page 35] commented to Anthony Whittier in the Paris Review. "I cannot pass a story as finished unless I connect it myself, unless I know how everybody in it spoke. … If I use the right phrase and the reader hears the phrase in his head, he sees the individual."3 Sometimes, it has been argued, O'Connor overworked his stories in this quest for precision. Reflecting on the changes he made to one of his most accomplished works, "Guests of the Nation," for instance, William Tomory lamented that O'Connor wrote "a curious flatness" into later copies of the story, cutting away at the invention and undoing the idiomatic daring of the earlier versions. "The ruthless pruning of Cockney dialect and Irish brogue is taken too far," Tomory complained, as he documented changes to more than one hundred lines of the story and connected this to O'Connor's persistent attempt "to enhance the phrasing and achieve a narrative voice that suited him." Even as Tomory bewailed O'Connor's apparent inability to let the work go, he sought to make sense of these revisions in terms of the writer's long-standing ambition to capture the sound of voice in print, suggesting that "the story in its various versions illustrates what was to be the primary technical struggle and achievement for O'Connor: the shaping of the narratorial voice in his short fiction."4 The multiple versions of the story enact, and consequently enrich, one of the central concerns of "Guests of the Nation." From the outset, it is important to note that this concern is mediated through an interiorized first-person narrative—told from an indeterminate space, for an unspecified reason, to an undefined audience—and that it reflects back on an incident that happened sometime in the past and that has continued to haunt the narrator's consciousness. ________ At least four versions of the story were published over the course of O'Connor's career. Three of these will be...