© Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica “MIXING MEMORY AND DESIRE”: FORM, IDEOLOGY, AND SEAN O’FAOLAIN’S POST-REVOLUTIONARY IRELAND*

This essay considers Sean O’Faolain’s intense interest in memory in his short stories on post-revolutionary Ireland. Neutral in classical storytelling, which anticipated the Irish short story, memory is ideological in O’Faolain’s writing since it is fraught with a desire for little narratives on national identity as an alternative to the hegemonic notion of an Irish Ireland. This yearning is first articulated as a nostalgia for a unified nation in the context of a postlapsarian Ireland where normalization leads to the vulgarization of national identity. However, it gradually shifts to a problematics of memory when boredom is the governing principle of the national life, and ultimately becomes a parable of the dilemma of a modern write