“The Eyes of The Dead” - A Short Story by Daniel Corkery - 1917 - Brief Observations On Irish Literature

Irish Short Story Month VIII

For the last seven years I have dedicated much of my March posting to the Irish Short Story.  Through this I was lead to read many great works and meet a lot of wonderful people.  Thís year I am  devoting parts of March and April to Irish Short Stories. 

In any international literary shootout The Reading Life stands with the Irish.  This year I am devoting a lot of time to classical European works trying to increase the depth and width of my reading.    It is my strong belief that understanding with any depth the literature of one country requires you have a basis for comparison through diverse reading and study.  In the past I have generalized about what I saw in the 100s of Irish literary works I have read and I do not see how one can do that without at least a bit of Multiculturalsm.  Reading Indian and Filipino short stories has made me a better reader, I hope, of Irish literature.  

I have done Q and A sessions with nearly 100 Irish writers and I hope to do many more.   If anything is of lasting value on The Reading Life it is the Q and A sessions.  

Daniel Corkery (1878 to 1964-Cork, Ireland) was a teacher at several schools. At the close of his career he was Professor of English at University College Cork where Frank O'Connor and Sean O'Faolain were among his students.  He was active in the Irish language revival movement.   He was also a playwright, wrote a novel, and some cultural works but he is mostly read now for the short stories he wrote about the lives of people in Cork.   He published several collections of short stories in his life. I have previously read and posted on two of his stories, "The Priest" and "The Awaking", both, as is this story, included in his collection, A Munster Twilight.  Today’s story, “The Eyes of The Dead” is also included.

Ireland’s proximity to the sea is one of the oldest and deepest influences on Irish Literature.  One of the ways we see this is manifested in “The Eyes of The Dead”.  Work was hard to find in Cork.  Many young men went to sea.  The hope  being you would be away from Ireland, sometimes for years, then return home with enough with enough money to stay in Cork.  As we learn in the story, almost every Cork family has a son, father, husband or brother who has gone to sea.  In “The Eyes of The Dead” a young man has returned after three years.  He has an amazing story to tell.  His ship sank and he was the only survivor.  Everyone wants to hear his story.  He is back living with his parents, he has become very quiet, lost in thoughts.  Then a mysterious strange shows up at the house, who is also a ship wreck survivor.  The question increasingly becomes is the son a ghost or is the other man.

Corkery does a very good job creating the atmosphere of the times.  

Here is hoping I get to feature him again next year for ISSM IX.

Mel u