By Sophie Gallaher
In a lecture from January 1997, Jacques Derrida declared that “it is to death that hospitality destines itself,” a theory that Frank O’Connor’s short story “Guests of the Nation” corroborates (Derrida 360). First published in 1931, O’Connor’s story reconfirms, and then upends, literary traditions of Irish hospitality. Set during the Irish War of Independence, O’Connor stresses the conflict between Irish hospitality and the formation of a nation. “Guests of the Nation” distorts boundaries between guest, hostage, and host, as the “guests” of the story are, ultimately, colonial powers, and their ejection comes with the sacrifice of Irish hospitality. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, life under the Irish Free State was tempestuous with fears that civil war would break out again. In 1932, Fianna Fáil won the election, and years of political and economic crisis continued (Neary and Gráda 250). O’Connor aims to remind his 1931 audience, in a time of political instability in the inter-war years, of the violent and painful history of Irish resistance. To do so, O’Connor points to the moral dilemma of anti-colonial movements in Ireland. O’Connor does not criticise Irish resistance itself, but rather understands the reality of violent rebellion on the individual Irishman.
Hospitality, which is at the centre of O’Connor’s story, is a theme prominent within the Irish literary tradition. James Joyce’s seminal 1914 story “The Dead” similarly emphasises Irish hospitality. Here, one of Joyce’s characters declares in a speech at a party, “I feel more strongly with every recurring year that our country has no tradition which does it so much honour and which it should guard so jealously as that of its hospitality” (428). O’Connor’s story, however, problematises “the tradition of genuine warm-hearted courteous Irish hospitality” as the Irish become holders of hostages, perpetrators of violence, and, eventually, murderers (Joyce 428). Within “Guests of the Nation,” colonial violence is implicit, while Irish violence, and the Irish Republican Army’s (IRA) violence, is explicit. Paradoxically, the Irish lose their sense of hospitality even as they fight for nationhood. O’Connor blurs the lines between guest and hostage, as well as English and Irish, as he attempts to reveal Irish sympathy and reemphasise its traditions of cordiality.
O’Connor’s narrator, Bonaparte, is used to present the complicated morality of fierce resistance. He confuses the status of the Englishmen in his custody; at the start of the story, he comments upon how they treat the Englishmen like “one of [their] own” (3). Similarly, the members of the IRA that previously held the men “seeing as they were such decent fellows… couldn’t well ignore the two Englishmen, but invited them in and were hail-fellows-well-met with them” (4). Englishman Belcher was even taught the Irish dances “The Walls of Limerick” and “The Siege of Ennis.” While the political context initially stunts the exchange of hospitality, as “[Belcher] could not return the compliment, because [the IRA] at that time did not dance foreign dances on principle,” this quickly dissolves (4). Belcher, in a return of hospitality, shows graciousness to the unnamed Old Woman and makes her “his friend for life” (4). The exchange of hospitality forms the narrator’s confusion at the distinction between hostage and guest, as well as guest and host.
O’Connor draws on the etymological relationship between words to emphasise how his hosts and hostages are interchangeable. “Hostile,” “hostility,” “hostage,” “hospitable,” and “hospitality” share the same roots, deriving from hostis and hospes (Storey 257). Thus, as O’Connor plays with doubles, as seen in Belcher and ‘Awkins and Bonaparte and Noble, so too does he play with the linguistic patterns, and juxtapositions, of the word “host” versus “guest” and “hostage.”
Structurally, the story uses pronouns in a way which means it is often unclear which “he” O’Connor intends to describe. As such, he emphasises the men’s comradery in the opening passages of the text with immediate mirroring. Bonaparte remarks, “for we had picked up some of their curious expressions” (3) in an odd reversal of power; Irishmen, the hosts, have become like Englishmen, the hostages. In a sense, it is the Englishmen who become the regulators of hospitality even as hostages. Later, Bonaparte describes how “you could have planted [the Englishmen] in any untended spot from this to Claregalway and they’d have stayed put and flourished like a native weed” (3). Here, the men move from being “guests,” or hostages, to being a part of the nation as their routine grows. The simile of “native weed” both implies natural growth and destructive imposition. As colonial powers, the Englishmen slowly dominate the narrative space of the story, the psyche of Bonaparte, and the Irish land. Not only are the Englishmen well-suited to Irish life, but they also understand aspects of agrarian Ireland that the native Irish do not. Bonaparte describes how “‘Awkins made us look right fools when he displayed he knew the countryside as well as we did and something more” (3). Here, the Englishmen start a process of power reversal, leading to the hosts becoming subservient to their “guests” (Attridge 284).
On the subject of hospitality, Derrida theorises that “to be hospitable is to let oneself be overtaken [… and] to be surprised, in a fashion almost violent, violated and raped, stolen” (361). In O’Connor’s story, it is the overexertion of the guest, or, here, hostage, that leads to the Irish loss of hospitality. For Derrida, “hospitality is the deconstruction of the at-home,” a concept that O’Connor demonstrates physically and physiologically (Derrida 364). The Irishmen kill their “chums” and therefore sacrifice an integral part of their Irish identity: their hospitality. While the Irishmen are the hosts, they are both the ones dominated, colonially, and the dominators, as the explicit murderers in the story.
O’Connor draws Irish attention to the painful sacrifice Irish resistance made for liberation, the sacrifice of its valued hospitality, in order to stress the psychological impact of violent nationalism. Bonaparte feels conflicted upon Donovan’s orders to kill the Englishmen, and though he expresses that “in those days disunion between brothers seemed to me an awful crime” he nonetheless emphasises, “I knew better after” (7). The story is a confessional narrative: Bonaparte reflects on an experience that meant, “anything that ever happened [to him] after [he] never felt the same about again” (12). Writing on “Guests of the Nation,” Eugene O’Brien argues that “the right to take life is a central factor in the creation of a nation” (121). O’Connor’s story echoes its political environment as he attempts to warn his nation of the dangers of “certain ghosts” which permeate the skin of the Irish Free State (O’Brien 116). Jeremiah Donovan, the character organising the murders of the Englishmen, is named in a purposeful echo of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, the Fenian leader of many Irish revolutionary organisations. Donovan, his name chosen as a warning, is the character with the least sympathy towards the English and the strongest sense of nationalism. The real O’Donovan Rossa was known for his extreme tactics as he pushed for the use of dynamite against the British (Maume). In “Guests of the Nation”, the character Donovan’s ruling ends with death, and the eternal presence of grief and regret, within the heart of the Irish.
Derrida compares death to a guest as it “also bear[s] the figure of visitation without invitation, or of haunting-well- or ill-come, coming for good or ill” (360). The Englishmen leave the story as permanent guests of the nation, endlessly breaking down boundaries of the “at-home.” In an ominous confirmation of Derridean theories of hospitality, Bonaparte describes the bog as “their last earthly bed” (9). Even as the Irishmen attempt to give their “chums” a respectful death, offering last words and lending handkerchiefs, they break long-held traditions of hospitality. Even in a revolt against the colonial English, they lose more of themselves. O’Connor’s story calls on the Irish to reflect on the reality of their radical independence movements, in a time when life felt on the precipice of another, and suggests a more sympathetic understanding of the “enemy.” His story ends in grief of the English “chums” and of the State of Ireland.
Works Cited
Attridge, Derek. “Hospitality.” The Work of Literature. Oxford, 2015, pp. 280-305. Oxford Academic, https://doi-org.proxy3.library.mcgill.ca/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198733195.003.0011. Accessed 10 Feb. 2024.
Derrida, Jacques. “Hospitality.” Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar. Routledge, 2002, pp. 358-420.
Joyce, James. “The Dead.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, 10th Edition, edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al., W.W. Norton & Company, 2018, pp. 411-440.
Maume, Patrick. “O, Donovan Rossa, Jeremiah.” Dictionary of Irish Biography, 2023, https://www.dib.ie/biography/odonovan-rossa-jeremiah-a6719. Accessed 18 Feb. 2024.
Neary, J. Peter, and Cormac Ó. Gráda. “Protection, Economic War and Structural Change: The 1930s in Ireland.” Irish Historical Studies, vol. 27, no. 107, 1991, pp. 250-66. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30006540. Accessed 15 Feb. 2024.
O’Brien, Eugene. “Guests of a Nation; Geists of a Nation.” New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua, vol. 11, no. 3, 2007, pp. 114-30. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20558189. Accessed 8 Feb. 2024.
O’Connor, Frank. “Guests of the Nation.” Collected Stories. New York: Knopf, 1981.
Storey, Michael L. “The Guests of Frank O’Connor and Albert Camus.” Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 23, no. 3, 1986, pp. 250-62. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40246643. Accessed 8 Feb. 2024.