Frank O'Connor

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O'Connor's place of birth: Cork, Ireland around 1900

Frank O'Connor or his real name Michael Francis O'Donovan (born September 17, 1903 in Cork , † March 10, 1966 in Dublin ) was an Irish writer and author of well-known short stories .

Life

O'Connor grew up in an Ireland-oriented proletarian family. In his autobiography An Only Child , O'Connor describes his childhood and adolescence, during which he lived alone with his mother for a long time due to the war-related absence of his father, who only returned home for brief visits during the First World War he later described as the happiest of his life. After the father's final return from the war, family life was marked by poverty and a tense, conflict-ridden atmosphere between Michael O'Donovon and his father, whose uninhibited drunkenness brought the family to the brink of ruin.

Like Seán O'Faoláin and Liam O'Flaherty , Frank O'Connor belonged to the generation of Irish writers born around 1900, who in their youth witnessed the Irish struggle for independence and the subsequent civil war and reflected it in their works.

O'Connor, who could only attend school until he was 12, joined the Irish Republican Army (IRA) as a young man , fought on the side of the defeated Republicans in the civil war, was arrested and went to prison. His personal experience of these bitter disputes and struggles processed O'Connor especially in his short prose , for example in Guests of the Nation , dt. Guests of the Nation , a story that was known far beyond Ireland.

Just like O'Faoláin or O'Flaherty, Frank O'Connor did not allow himself to be captured by the establishment of the new Irish Free State and remained involved in numerous controversies about the freedom of literature in Ireland in the fight against state and church censorship , the various forms of hostility and put his name on the censorship list forbidden.

After his release, he turned away from the political struggle and devoted himself to literature and the Irish language . He worked as a librarian and directed the Abbey Theater in Dublin from 1937 to 1939 . In 1931 his first volume of short stories, Guests of the Nation , appeared under the pseudonym Frank O'Connor . He also wrote poems, novels, plays and two autobiographies.

Almost all of the works dealt with Ireland, its people and their problems. In several individual stories , he took up larger political events and conflicts, primarily from the Irish struggle for independence, and reflected them in the concrete individual situations of his narrative characters . O'Connor, who lived in the United States in the 1950s, died in Dublin in March 1966.

After his death, his second autobiography, My Father's Son , was published in 1968 by Maurice Sheehy , who had known O'Connor since 1963. A year later, Maurice Sheehy put together a commemorative volume in which friends and colleagues of O'Connor remembered him.

Literary work

In addition to Liam O'Flaherty and Seán O'Faoláin, Frank O'Connor is one of those Irish authors who have succeeded James Joyce in continuing an independent Irish art of storytelling. As the so-called " Irish Renaissance ", your work has found its way into numerous literary historical presentations.

As O'Faoláin once jokingly remarked, Frank O'Connor never actually existed, strictly speaking, since this name was only a pseudonym for Michael O'Donovan and at the same time the cloak for an author critical of the Church, whose entire direction of his writing was from viewpoint the Dublin censors was extremely offensive.

Similar to O'Flaherty and O'Faoláin, Frank O'Connor concentrated much of his literary work on giving literary form to his experiences, which he had gained during his fight in the Civil War on the side of the Republicans. His short story, published in 1931 with the grimly ironic title Guests of the Nation, demonstrates with its harrowing effect what narrative achievements he was capable of: two British hostages, who first make friends with their Irish guards, are then shot by them.

Frank O'Connor's fame is based primarily on his short stories, which have been translated into numerous languages, including his two well-known childhood stories My Oedipus Complex (1950) and The Genius (1955), which have been widely anthologized. He had previously received the honorable assignment from Oxford University Press to edit a collection of contemporary Irish short stories, which appeared in 1957 under the title Modern Irish Short Stories and was reissued posthumously in 1987 as Classic Irish Short Stories . O'Connor presented his own work with his short stories Guests of the Nation and My Oedipus Complex mentioned above.

Compared to his short prose, O'Connor's novels and longer narratives were not granted lasting success, because they lack the conceptual unity that characterizes his best short stories .

Above all with the further development of the narrative technique in his short stories as well as his literary theoretical conceptions, in which the moment of "intense awareness of human loneliness" is in contrast several times as a special generic feature of modern short story the novel is highlighted, made Frank O'Connor Heinz Kosok According However, a significant contribution to the development of superior rank of the Irish short story in world literature. Despite all his empathy, he always keeps a certain distance from his characters and avoids sentimentality.

O'Connor also paved the way for the younger Irish people by raising the issue of interpersonal sexuality , which, despite the threat of censorship by the Catholic Church, for example in My Oedipus Complex, in an indirect or implicitly suggestive but unmistakable form Short stories that are characterized by a “new openness in questions of sexuality” in contrast to the prevailing morals of the Catholic Church in Ireland.

O'Connor's childhood stories have become particularly well-known, often with superficial comedy and sometimes autobiographical features, presenting what is told in a sensitive way from the perspective of a child, for whom the adult world is incomprehensible or puzzling and at the same time frightening . The memory of his own childhood, of the loving mother and the problematic father were at the same time one of the most important sources of inspiration for many of his short stories.

A comparative reading of his autobiography An Only Child reveals in a very revealing way the diverse and sovereign form in which O'Connor was able as an author to process and shape his own experiences and experiences with his creative imagination. Above all, his stories about the young Larry Delaney, which unfortunately were never put together in a cycle, demonstrate O'Connor's artistic ability to elevate the material of his prose, which is often based on a banal episode or anecdote, to the level of a masterfully structured and linguistically brilliantly formulated narrative.

With his concentration or focus on Irish characters , especially in his short prose, O'Connor, as Kosok explains in his remarks on the Irish short story , “not only influenced the Irish consciousness of national identity [sic] , but also through translation into numerous languages decisively shaped the international image of Ireland. "

In his short prose, O'Connor uses a marked vernacular or colloquial style , as Sherwood Anderson had previously revived in American literature with his story cycle Winesburg, Ohio (1919) following Mark Twain . This orientation of O'Connor to a rather unpretentious, colloquial style is in line with his tendency, influenced by Turgenev and Chekhov , to choose the subjects of his stories primarily from everyday life. He endeavors to meet his own demands for clarity of language and manageability of the plot as well as for a renunciation of symbolist experiments.

In his creative writing courses , which he held as a prominent author and practitioner at the invitation of various American universities, he rigorously confronted the participants in his writing courses with these demands. If someone violated these rules of the game, he was excluded from further participation. At the same time, O'Connor warned - like Anderson before - against the commercial plot story with its mechanically running plot and the focus on surprising punchlines.

Honor

Works

Translator: Elisabeth Schnack

  • Bridal night.
  • Don Juan's temptation.
  • Irish childhood.
  • My Oedipus Complex .
  • Master tales. (Includes, among other things, Bridal Night; Small pit in the moor. )
  • The long road to Ummera. Eleven master tales from Ireland. Diogenes, 1959
  • The trip to Dublin.
  • An independent woman.
  • An impossible marriage.
  • He has his pants on. stories
  • And fish on Fridays. Stories. Diogenes, Zurich 1958 (hardcover) and dtv, Munich 1963, etc. (with 7 ore.); all later TB editions in Diogenes with 12 stories, series: detebe classics 20170 or Diogenes: The literary paperback 22918
  • Don Juan's temptation. Eleven stories. Diogenes, 1994 (besides the cover story: Public Opinion; The Future Before Eyes; A Minority; The Miracle; The Ugly Duckling; The Stepmother; Prohibited Route; The Long Road to Ummera; The Idealist; Jumbo's Wife)

literature

  • Michael Frank. Studies on Frank O'Connor: With a bibliography of his writing . Ed. Maurice Sheehy. Gill & Macmillan, Dublin and Knopf, NY 1969 (memorial volume)
  • Frank O'Connor , In: International Biographical Archive. 17/1966 of April 18, 1966, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely available)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Frank O'Connor: An Only Child . Knopf Verlag , New York 1961, pp. 148, 20, 153 and p. 148.
  2. ^ Frank O'Connor: An Only Child . Knopf Verlag, New York 1961, p. 31f., 38 and p. 178.
  3. ↑ the information from Heinz Kosok: History of Anglo-Irish literature . Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-503-03004-2 , pp. 189 and 192.
  4. ↑ the information from Heinz Kosok: History of Anglo-Irish literature . Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-503-03004-2 , pp. 189f.
  5. ↑ See Michael Hanke: Frank O'Connor: The Genius. In: Raimund Borgmeier (Ed.): English Short Stories from Thomas Hardy to Graham Swift , Reclam-Verlag, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-15-017509-7 , pp. 172-180, here s. 172 f.
  6. ↑ the information from Heinz Kosok: History of Anglo-Irish literature . Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-503-03004-2 , pp. 189f. as well as in Heinz Kosok: The Irish Short Story. In: Arno Löffler, Eberhard Späth (Hrsg.): History of the English short story . Francke, Tübingen 2005, ISBN 3-8252-2662-X , pp. 255ff
  7. ↑ more precisely Heinz Kosok: The Irish short story. In: Arno Löffler, Eberhard Späth (Hrsg.): History of the English short story . Francke, Tübingen 2005, ISBN 3-8252-2662-X , p. 268f.
  8. ↑ See Michael Hanke: Frank O'Connor: The Genius. In: Raimund Borgmeier (Ed.): English Short Stories from Thomas Hardy to Graham Swift , Reclam-Verlag, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-15-017509-7 , pp. 172-180, here s. 173 f. See also Heinz Kosok: The Irish Short Story. In: Arno Löffler, Eberhard Späth (Hrsg.): History of the English short story . Francke, Tübingen 2005, ISBN 3-8252-2662-X , p. 260
  9. ↑ Heinz Kosok: The Irish short story. In: Arno Löffler, Eberhard Späth (Hrsg.): History of the English short story . Francke, Tübingen 2005, ISBN 3-8252-2662-X , p. 260
personal data
SURNAME O'Connor, Frank
ALTERNATIVE NAMES O'Connor O'Donovan, Michael Francis (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Irish writer
DATE OF BIRTH 17th September 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Cork
DATE OF DEATH March 10, 1966
Place of death Dublin