Existential insideness and outsideness in Frank O’Connor’s Guests of the Nation: A geo-literary approach

This paper aims to evaluate the validity of an approach that combines the theoretical and epistemological tools of Literary Studies and Geography to explore the concepts of existential insideness and existential outsideness in literary texts. These concepts refer to the attitudes of individuals towards territorial otherness; they are the nuances of the existential condition in relation to the geographic-humanistic concepts of rootedness and displacement. The most desirable condition is the existential insideness characteristic of those who attain rootedness in a place, “perhaps the most important and unrecognised need of the human soul” (Weil 1990: 49). However, one is not always shielded from tensions: destabilising episodes of uprooting can occur in which a person can no longer discern the symbologies of a place and, consequently, its meaning, and thus feels out of place (Seamon and Sowers 2008; Tuan 1974). This is the case with the characters in the stories collected by Frank O’Connor in Guests of the Nation (1931), whose moral and individual crises brought about by direct involvement in the Irish War of Independence and the Civil War (1919-1923) result in a painful sense of confusion and estrangement from the territory of Southern Ireland, whereas, previously, there existed a strong rootedness with the land that was expressed, above all, in the characters’ communion with nature. In the narratives of O’Connor, a veteran of both conflicts, rootedness and the need to externalise that belonging recur together, while displacement in one’s own homeland results in a spasmodic but fruitless quest for the psychological stability that a connection to a place can provide.