COMPASSION AND ACCEPTANCE OF HUMAN ANIMALITY IN A SELECTION OF LIAM O’FLAHERTY’S STORIES

Elena OGLIARI

doi:10.24193/subbphilo.2022.2.08

Authors

Elena OGLIARI University of Milan, elena.ogliari@uniupo.it https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3494-1821

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.24193/subbphilo.2022.2.08

Keywords:

Liam O’Flaherty, animal stories, compassion, existential suffering, human-animal distinction

Abstract

Compassion and Acceptance of Human Animality in a Selection of Liam O’Flaherty’s Stories. Liam O’Flaherty’s numerous stories dealing with animals are generally considered his best artistic efforts. Scholars have highlighted how he humbled anthropocentric pride and even effaced the narrator and the human point of view from them. My contention, however, is that these stories can also be interpreted as O’Flaherty’s literary meditation on the absence of ‘good discontinuities’ between humans and animals, and on the importance of constructing the human/animal encounter on the acceptance of the existence of an interspecies communion. In his stories, humans do not necessarily possess something that animals lack, such as the capability of feeling compassion. Humans often fail to have compassion for other animals or human beings, for they deny that a communion obtains among all the living. These humans are capable of taking delight in another’s suffering and so disrupt both their equilibrium with potentially negative consequences and the present ‘ecological equilibrium’, which has to be restored. Hence, O’Flaherty’s short stories can be seen as earlier literary responses to contemporary works on human/animal ethics and genuine ethe of care (Derrida; Nussbaum; Wolfe), which will be discussed here together with selected empirical studies on the same subject (de Waal; Goetz, Keltner, and Simon-Thomas).

Article history: Received 15 February 2022; Revised 10 May 2022; Accepted 18 May 2022; Available online 30 June 2022; Available print 30 June 2022.

REZUMAT. Compasiune și acceptare a animalității umane în unele povestiri de Liam O’Flaherty. Numeroasele povestiri de Liam O’Flaherty care ai ca subiect animalele sunt îndeobște considerate reușita sa artistică cea mai importantă. Exegeții au evidențiat modul în care el a redus la umilință mândria antropocentrică, ba chiar a șters naratorul și punctul de vedere uman din acestea. Teza mea este, însă, că povestirile în cauză pot fi interpretate și ca meditația literară a lui O’Flaherty despre absența „bunelor discontinuități” dintre oameni și animale, și despre importanța de a construi întâlnirea om-animal pe acceptarea existenței unei comuniuni inter-specii. În povestirile sale, oamenii nu posedă în mod necesar ceva ce animalelor le lipsește, cum ar fi capacitatea de a simți compasiune. Oamenii nu reușesc adesea să simtă compasiune față de animale sau de alte ființe umane, întrucât ei neagă faptul că o comuniune rezultă între toate cele vii. Acești oameni sunt în stare să se bucure de suferința altuia și distrug astfel atât echilibrul lor cu consecințe potențial negative, precum și „echilibrul ecologic” actual, care trebuie reconstruit. Așadar, povestirile lui O’Flaherty pot fi văzute ca prefigurări mai timpurii ale unor lucrări contemporane despre etica om/animal și etica generală a grijii (Derrida, Nussbaum, Wolfe), discutate aici laolaltă cu anumite studii empirice pe același subiect (de Waal, Goetz, Keltner și Simon-Thomas).

Cuvinte-cheie: Liam O’Flaherty, povestiri cu animale, compasiune, suferință existențială, distincția om-animal

Author Biography

Elena OGLIARI, University of Milan, elena.ogliari@uniupo.it

Elena Ogliari holds a PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies from the University of Milan and is now a Junior post-doctoral fellow at the University of Eastern Piedmont, Vercelli. She pursues research interests in Ireland’s geographies of remembrance and has started a project on the definition of national culture and identity in the periodical literature of post-Civil War Ireland. The focus is on the contributions to periodicals made by Liam O’Flaherty, Dorothy Macardle, and Frank O’Connor. Among her recent and forthcoming publications are the monograph Birth of an Independent Ireland (LED, 2020), a journal article on the ideological use of laughter in the revolutionary years (Jeunesse, 2021), and essays on the supernatural and dystopian writings by Macardle and Eimar O’Duffy. Email address: elena.ogliari@uniupo.it.

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