Eimar O’Duffy and the Lesson of the Masters to Imagine Ireland’s Utopias into Reality

This article examines the dystopic and utopic writings of Eimar O’Duffy in light of theoretical ideas about literature and spatiality as well as the particular socio-political circumstances of post-revolutionary Ireland. The focus is on O’Duffy’s “Cuanduine trilogy”, which comprises the novels King Goshawk and the Birds (1926, republished in 2017), The Spacious Adventures of the Man in the Street (1928/2018), and Asses in Clover (1933/2003). The recent republications of the novels are due, arguably, to their capability of shedding light on the religious sectarianism that has informed much of the modern Irish nationalist thinking. Indeed, the trilogy tackles an issue that is still crucial in Ireland, where, as many scholars observe (Elliott 2007, 2009; Fischer 2016; Ruane 2021), political identity has often taken a sectarian route both in the North, with its one-religion ghettoes, and in the Republican South. Bearing this in mind, I read O’Duffy’s trilogy as a sardonic exposure of the fragile Free State, which sought self-definition through non-negotiable absolutes of homeland and Catholicism. The author, formerly a militant nationalist, here conjures worlds reminiscent of his own, in which religion has overthrown science and led to the creation of ethnocentric, religiously-defined communities. This bleak scenario points to O’Duffy’s dissatisfaction with the everyday realities of the Free State and his apprehension about claims that group identity lies in differences. First, I argue that O’Duffy was suggesting that, in both his actual and fictitious worlds, identity was more diverse than the essentialisations upheld by authorities would make people believe. Second, I contend that his increasing experimentations with voice and genres served to articulate alternative images of Ireland, in which the retrieval of its mythical heritage and history of rebellions unexpectedly fosters the emergence of a new community characterised by fluidity and hybridity. O’Duffy’s Ireland is a utopia that pitches itself not only against the ‘colonial’ nation of the past, but also the Irish-Irelander, Catholic model of his century