{"id":1167,"date":"2014-03-25T08:34:41","date_gmt":"2014-03-25T08:34:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jameslawless.net\/?p=1167"},"modified":"2014-03-25T08:34:41","modified_gmt":"2014-03-25T08:34:41","slug":"new-edition-of-peeling-oranges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jameslawless.net\/?p=1167","title":{"rendered":"New edition of Peeling Oranges"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"peelingfront<\/a>Author’s Preface<\/i><\/p>\n

Peeling Oranges<\/i>: The Provenance of a Novel.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In the nineties I wrote a short story called Diaries<\/i> about Derek Foley, who sifted through the diaries of his late father, a diplomat in Franco\u2019s Spain, and discovered things to question his paternity. I showed the story to Bernard Farrell, the playwright, who praised it and found what he called a mystical quality in it.<\/p>\n

I left the story at that for a number of years, became academic and did an MA. But eventually I went back to the story. Something like an itch or an ache was irritating me. T.S. Eliot described non-creativity in a creative artist as a type of constipation, so maybe it was something like that, something incomplete in the character of Derek Foley who carried uncertainty around with him as he says like a ‘wound’. I had got into the habit of researching by this stage, having just completed a thesis on poetry as communication. I found myself in the newly opened national archive in Dublin researching about Spain and early Irish diplomacy, stuff which had been covered up in the past, particularly about Spain and Ireland\u2019s involvement in the Spanish civil war. Slowly, a bigger story began to unfold, and this character Patrick Foley, the diplomat, the dead guy in my short story, began to resurrect.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/b>While many Irish novels have dealt with many aspects of Irish history, to my knowledge this was the first time that Irish diplomacy in Spain figured as a motif. I kept seeing parallels between two emergent nations\u2014 Ireland and Spain, on their respective turbulent journeys towards democracy: the civil wars, the poverty, the role of religion, the artistic blossoming: Yeats with his theatre, Federico Garc\u00eda Lorca travelling throughout the country with his standup players, with fatal consequences it should be added. Just as things were covered up in Ireland, Franco covered things up too\u2014he always denied any involvement in Guernica or in the killing of Lorca.<\/p>\n

Martha, the protagonist\u2019s mother, was a woman from the Liberties and she knew what poverty was from her social work and she shared that empathy with the Spanish poor. But if this novel is about anything, it is about ideology: how it drives people to behave in certain ways. What holds up their part of the sky, as Patrick Foley wonders about Gear\u00f3id MacSuibhne when he visits him in his squalid cell in Burgos prison. And Patrick himself, with his religious\/sexual contradictions, is even more complex than Gear\u00f3id with his to-the-death republican convictions.<\/p>\n

In contrast to all of this, the protagonist Derek Foley is apolitical, affording him an outsider\u2019s view of things until he is drawn in of course by his love for the supreme ideologue, Sin\u00e9ad N\u00ed Sh\u00failleabh\u00e1in.<\/p>\n

The original title of the novel, before it was changed for what was considered simplification, was Perceiving Oranges<\/i>. This was prompted by Ortega y Gasset’s intriguing line ‘No one has ever seen an orange’. An\u00a0 orange after all is a sphere. So what I was trying to express was that we all have only partial perception of the world; no one has the whole truth\u2014as professed by some religions or ideologies rendering them inflammatory, something Derek observes on his journey north. The hubris of the all seeing eye is really the limited vision of s\u00fail amh\u00e1in<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Derek got more and more apolitical the more Europeanised he was becoming, reflecting a modern Ireland perhaps moving away from its insularity towards the joining of the EEC in 1973, the significant year when the novel ends<\/p>\n

What would Pearse have made of you, Derek? Sin\u00e9ad says, berating him on his return from Spain when he is critical of her narrow nationalism. It was not of Pearse, Derek was thinking, to look ahead with monovision as the 1916 leader had instructed on the ‘r\u00f3d seo romhainn’, but of Picasso and his woman with eyes seeing in many directions simultaneously.<\/p>\n

However despite my nostalgia for the old title, the symbol of the orange remains: His peeling of the oranges to ease his mother’s emphysema also marked Derek’s attempt to peel away the layers of secrecy to get to the truth of his origin. We are covered in seven veils, his mother said, and no one sheds them all.<\/p>\n

Oranges were the inducement given to the children to counter the ideology of British imperialism when Queen Victoria visited Dublin in 1900. <\/b><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/b>Oranges were the only food available to keep Gear\u00f3id alive in the trenches during the civil war in Spain.<\/p>\n

Oranges became a self-fulfilling prophecy in Yeats\u2019 words, indeed as euphemisms for the IRA bombs that blew up the medieval city of Coventry in 1939.<\/p>\n

All the symbols, oranges, lilies, poppies, badges, flags or symbolic actions were, as Martha relates to Derek in a rare revealing moment, the provenance of future directions in life.<\/p>\n

And what of the old Liberties, alas decimated now, with motorways ploughing through what were once lanes redolent with their labyrinthine mysteries? Brendan Behan considered anyone who lived beyond Dolphin\u2019s Barn a culchie. Martha\u2019s mother, who sojourned temporarily in Aughavanagh Road, couldn\u2019t wait to get back to the Liberties because of loneliness<\/p>\n

Liberties folk were in the main people who Martha claims, contradictorily to Derek\u2019s chagrin (because of her own reticence), wore their hearts on their sleeves; they were not afraid to express emotions\u2014the humour and the sadness of life, which in our more sophisticated age are perhaps more nuanced now. Such open qualities were exemplified in Martha’s Huguenot friend, Mrs Chaigneau.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/b>The suburb is represented by Rathfarnham in the novel, perhaps unfairly represented as a cold place to Martha and Derek, but that had more to do with her circumstances than the place itself. The flight to the suburbs, the phenomenon of the fifties where the suburb was seen as the panacea of all ills, a subject in itself and which is the central preoccupation of a later novel The Avenue<\/i>. But to Martha and to Derek, Rathfarnham represented a place of great trauma and a place that could not be called home to them.<\/p>\n

Of course the jolt for Martha was triggered not merely by an internal migration but by a very real emigration\u2014exile to Madrid away from the smell of the Guinness hops and the bakery smells from Jacobs. Exile: a form of dismemberment, according to Patrick, quoting Colmcille. Martha, however, witnessed the same poverty as she did in the Dublin tenements and heard the universal cry of want in the Madrid streets.<\/p>\n

But what of Patrick Foley and the world of diplomacy? What was hidden in those archives that de Valera for so many years did not want us to see? He censored the media coverage of the War years to ensure our neutrality, another policy he shared with Franco, despite overtures from Hitler. Things were covered up to keep emotions down.<\/p>\n

What is a diplomat? Derek tried to find out through Patrick\u2019s diaries? From the Greek diplomas,<\/i> the keeping of documents. Patrick, when seeking refuge in the Pyrenees during the Spanish Civil War, had time to reflect on his\u00a0 role. Early Irish diplomacy was seen on the European stage as simply an adjunct to British colonial policy. But by recognising the Franco regime before Britain\u2014and this was crucial\u2014it meant Ireland was now perceived as an independent state. This had huge national and international significance: In 1939 Patrick Foley was instructed to return to Madrid to attend Franco\u2019s victory\u00a0 march. This was taken to mean in diplomatic circles that Ireland recognised the dictatorship, something which Britain had not done. The outcome of such action was that Ireland was now seen as an autonomous state on the international stage.<\/p>\n

However the hub of the novel is the discovery of Patrick\u2019s impotence. Hence the quest for paternity which brings Derek on his own adventure to Spain and to Northern Ireland through all the variations of orange to discover in the thick web of history and religion and ideology, who his real father was.<\/b><\/p>\n

And of course along the way there was Love.<\/p>\n

I like to think of Peeling Oranges<\/i> as a love story first and foremost, and the quest is not so much for paternity but rather for maternal love initially, which coloured the way Derek looked upon love later as an adult, and his confusion with Sin\u00e9ad was compounded, as we have already said, by her ideology. The bullying incident in boarding school clarifies what Derek felt all along: the lack of love; that his mother did not love him is evident as he seems to be unable to stand up for himself when she packed him away rather mercilessly to boarding school because his prying into her past was appearing to get out of hand.<\/p>\n

Sin\u00e9ad, the love of Derek\u2019s life, the childhood sweetheart, the remembrance of her as the little breastless kid on the Dublin beach, and now suddenly before his eyes transformed from that chrysalis to the university student endowed, as Derek suddenly realises, with all the curves and bumps of womanhood.<\/p>\n

But how could he crack that nationalist shell that cocooned Sin\u00e9ad so tightly in her single-minded purpose? It is the core dilemma of the novel: Is ideology stronger than love? And it is only towards the end of the story that we get some clue to the answer.<\/b><\/p>\n

Myth and mythmaking are essential parts of storytelling. Someone said the artist should never lose out on a good story for the sake of truth. Perhaps the word accuracy or fact should have been the word used, for the artist is always true or at least striving for a higher truth, a poetic truth, a verisimilitude which strips away the bare facts which sometime can overpower us and blind us in our vision like Dickens\u2019 character Mr. Gradgrind in Hard Times<\/i>. \u2018Now what I want is facts… Facts alone are wanted in life.\u2019\u00a0 Or Shakespeare\u2019s Shylock in the Merchant of Venice <\/i>demanding the letter of the law but failing to show mercy.<\/p>\n

Myth of course has two meanings: the myth of old stories, the old legends which Martha relates to Derek as a minatory tale in the story of Labhras Loingseach and the king who had horse\u2019s ears. However, to the annoyance of the mother it didn\u2019t\u00a0 have the desired effect as we shall see.<\/p>\n

But then there is the other kind of myth: the dangerous modern myths that we try to convince ourselves are true. The myth of history. The way we paint the world with our own colours so that Derek, when he becomes a history lecturer, actually delivers a lecture entitled \u2018The function of myth in history\u2019. He poses the question: What happens when myth is broken down?<\/p>\n

The Irish language, which features strongly in the novel, could perhaps be saved if it had been stripped of its ideological baggage, as Derek observed while he spoke it freely on a Spanish beach. But it was all tied up with Sin\u00e9ad and the nationalist cause of Pearse\u2019s vision of ‘\u00c9ire ghaelach, \u00c9ire saor’.<\/p>\n

One is made to wonder sometimes if Sin\u00e9ad saw Derek as a human being at all. Did she notice the love light in his eyes, or was he for her just a concept, a comma in a theory? And so the recurring question: did love win out, or ideology? As Derek listened to the sound of Sunday church bells, he concluded that even bells had their rhetoric. So one is left to speculate on the outcome, until at the eleventh hour a new player entered the fray.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

James Lawless<\/p>\n

February, 2014<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Questions for Book Clubs<\/b><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

1.<\/b>\u00a0How did you\u00a0experience<\/b>\u00a0the book? Were you engaged immediately, or did it take you a while to\u00a0“get into it”? How did you feel reading it\u2014amused,\u00a0sad, disturbed, confused, bored…?<\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

2.<\/b>\u00a0Describe the main\u00a0characters<\/b>\u2014personality traits, motivations, inner qualities.
\n\u2022\u00a0Why do characters do what they do?
\n\u2022\u00a0Are their actions justified?
\n\u2022\u00a0Describe the dynamics between characters
\n(in a marriage, family, or friendship).
\n\u2022\u00a0How has the past shaped their lives?
\n\u2022\u00a0Do you admire or disapprove of them?
\n\u2022\u00a0Do they remind you of people you know?<\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

3.<\/b>\u00a0Do the main\u00a0characters change<\/b>\u00a0by the end of\u00a0the book? Do they grow or mature? Do they learn something about themselves and how the world works?<\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

4.<\/b>\u00a0Is the\u00a0plot<\/b>\u00a0engaging\u2014does the story interest you? Is this a plot-driven book: a fast-paced page-turner? Or does the story unfold slowly with a focus on character development? Were you surprised by the plot’s complications? Or did you find it predictable, even formulaic?<\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

5.<\/b>\u00a0Talk about the book’s\u00a0structure<\/b>. Is it a continuous story…or interlocking short stories? Does the time-line more forward chronologically…or back and forth between past and present? Does the author use a single viewpoint or shifting viewpoints? Why might the author have choosen to tell the story the way he or she did\u2014and what difference does it make in the way you read or understand it?<\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

6.<\/b>\u00a0What main ideas\u2014themes<\/b>\u2014does the author explore? (Consider the title, often a clue to a theme.) Does the author use\u00a0symbols<\/b>\u00a0to reinforce the main ideas? (See our free LitCourses on both\u00a0Symbol<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Theme<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

7.<\/b>\u00a0What\u00a0passages<\/b>\u00a0strike you as insightful, even profound? Perhaps a bit of dialog that’s funny or poignant or that encapsulates a character? Maybe there’s a particular comment that states the book’s thematic concerns?<\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

8.<\/b>\u00a0Is the\u00a0ending<\/b>\u00a0satisfying? If so, why? If not, why not…and how would you change it?<\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

9.\u00a0<\/b>If you could ask the\u00a0author<\/b>\u00a0a question, what would you ask? Have you read other books by the same author? If so how does this book compare. If not, does this book inspire you to read others?<\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

10.<\/b>\u00a0Has this novel\u00a0changed you<\/b>\u2014broadened your perspective? Have you learned something new or been exposed to different ideas about people or a certain part of the world?<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution).<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Author’s Preface Peeling Oranges: The Provenance of a Novel.   In the nineties I wrote a short story called Diaries about Derek Foley, who sifted through the diaries of his late father, a diplomat in Franco\u2019s Spain, and discovered things…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jameslawless.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jameslawless.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jameslawless.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jameslawless.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jameslawless.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1167"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jameslawless.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1171,"href":"https:\/\/jameslawless.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1167\/revisions\/1171"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jameslawless.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jameslawless.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jameslawless.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}