In 1984 Arlen House held a seminar in Limerick to mark the tenth
anniversary of Kate O'Brien's death, Arising from the success of this
event, the Kate O'Brien Committee was formed and it was decided to
hold an annual literary weekend in Limerick in honour of the city's
most famous deceased author.
The theme of the twenty fourth Kate O'Brien Weekend is the transforming
power of money.
A note on the theme "The transforming power of money"
The theme this year draws its inspiration from Without my Cloak
by Kate O’Brien where the life and fate of the central character is
altered by the change in his fortune and whose new-found wealth gives
him entry into higher social circles and separates him from his origins.
Writers as diverse as Marx and Shakespeare have played with the theme
and commented on it.
In Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, Timon says
Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold?.....
Thus much of this of this will make black white, foul fair, Wrong
right, base noble, old young, coward valiant,...
This yellow slave Will knot and break religions, bless the accursed;"
It is said that Timon of Athens was the favourite play
of Karl Marx. In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844
he quotes the above lines and asserts that Shakespeare "excellently
depicts the real nature of money". He characterises it as "the visible
divinity – the transformation of all human and natural properties
into their contraries, the universal confounding and distorting of
things: impossibilities are soldered together by it". This pessimistic
view will be countered this weekend with arguments as to the benign
and possibly redemptive power of money from the State and from private
philanthropy.
