Flann O'Brien, The Complete Novels (Everyman's Library)
: At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman, The Poor Mouth, The Hard Life, The Dalkey Archive (Everyman's Library, 2008)"Fans of modern Irish literature who like their fiction challenging and unbridled worship the holy trinity of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Flann O'Brien. But O'Brien differs from his fellow possessed countrymen in two important ways: in the first place, unlike Joyce and Beckett, he never left Ireland. Just as important, as anyone familiar with his work will tell you: he did not write under his real name, which was Brian O'Nolan. In fact, O'Nolan was a three-in-one godhead unto himself, an unholy trinity of O'Nolan, the dutiful civil servant; O'Brien, the dark and dazzling novelist; and Myles na gCopaleen, his pseudonym for a popular newspaper column documenting the foibles of life in the Fair Isle.
This new edition of Flann O'Brien's complete novels misleads a bit. While it does include all of his fiction, it also adds a novel, The Poor Mouth, published under the name of Myles, and originally in a strange blend of Gaelic and English ("Gaelish," if you will) as An Beal Bocht. Does this matter? Given that O'Nolan in his many guises - he tried on a number of others during his life (1911-66) - obsesses about identity, about his roles as a writer, as an Irishman, as a Catholic, and more, I think it does. For all the evidence of Flann's raucous fictional blasphemies and Myles's cantankerous ramblings, O'Nolan remains elusive, a man who found in art and artifice a means for submerging his real identity, a writer whose unmediated voice we never hear.
His biographers suggest that O'Nolan had good reasons for hiding behind Flann and Myles. His ideas about church and state in Catholic Ireland, undisguised in fiction or his column, would have threatened his government job. And after his father died, O'Nolan was the main source of income for the younger children among his 11 siblings. To current readers, the wit and wisdom of Myles often seems harmless enough and can be sampled in volumes kept in print by the Dalkey Archive Press, itself named of course for Flann's novel, and which (until now) also kept the fiction alive. In the Myles collections you'll find the often acerbic observations of a man about Dublin, a sarcastic fellow who rides a number of hobbyhorses, including the imbecilities of the justice system, the absurdities of government bureaucracy, and the pomposities of the artistic class. In his pub room chatter and bombast, he also pronounces on the theater, wild inventions, and "The Plain People of Ireland," his often infuriating interlocutors. Myles, who is as funny as S. J. Perelman (who sang his praises), records the language of the ordinary folk and transforms it into lyric poetry, full of wild idioms and syntactical guffaws.
Flann O'Brien, for his part, goes Myles one better. No slouch in terms of extravagant playfulness or obsessional detail, Flann remains further removed from his creations - he is simply the author of four wonderful novels, not a persona in them. And that's important because O'Nolan's larger intention seems clear: he seeks to deny the author his authority. In effect, he wants no part of Flann's books; he wants to discourage us from finding the man in the work. It's an extreme and amazingly comic version of D. H. Lawrence's notion that we should trust the tale and not the teller, for in this case, the teller's not there. He's an invention, just like his narratives. And oh, what narratives - fictions so rich in dazzle and daring that novelists as diverse as Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess, John Updike, Gilbert Sorrentino, and, yes, Joyce himself have celebrated Flann's existential comedies for their audacity and verve.
Flann was born in a whirlwind, so to speak, as author of At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), his first novel, published the same year as Finnegans Wake ("No apostrophe!" Myles was fond of reminding his readers). Here is postmodernism avant le lettre - a novel, like Tristram Shandy, that has no fear, and for the sake of a good laugh, will try just about anything. For starters, it begins three times, four if you count the frame story. The nameless narrator, a student in Dublin, a layabout and aspiring novelist, wallows in his stinky, lice-ridden bedroom, enjoying "the kingdom" of his mind. And so begin his tales: of the Pooka MacPhellimey, a devil of a magician and a wily shape-shifter; of John Furriskey, a man born at age 25 and full of Irish hokum and barroom blather; and of Finn MacCool, the hero of Celtic legend, large of size and grand in strength.
But before we get very far into this dizzying brew of myth, legend, and mirth, the narrator schools us in the reading of fiction: "a satisfactory novel should be a self-evident sham to which the reader could regulate at will the degree of his credulity." And furthermore: "The entire corpus of existing literature should be regarded as a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their characters as required... The modern novel should be largely a work of reference." Be prepared, he seems to be saying, we're headed for a hell of a ride, and Flann delivers a grand pastiche. You hear in this novel a wealth of voices mighty and low: the poetic agony of Keats and Catullus, the archness of Ronald Firbank, the cleverness of Lewis Carroll; but also an assortment of Catholic prudes, Gaelic pseuds, and the popular "pomes" of one Jem Casey. The narratives collide, merge, regroup; and characters invade each others' stories. And if this sounds impossibly prolix and impenetrable, it's not at all. Throughout the novel, the narrator, a postmod in spite of himself, guides us through the multi-dimensional romp, with time-outs for recaps. All of it punctuated with rollicking conversations among the boyos, who discourse on pimples and boils, suicide and death by fire, Homer and blind beggars.
The Third Policeman, Flann's second novel, plunges deeper into the mysteries of identity and the nature of reality. It begins quite conventionally with a confession of murder but quickly crosses into an alternate world, through the looking glass, or in this case, into a house with no roof or walls. The narrator suffers a complete loss of identity - he cannot recall his name or where he comes from - and vaguely remembers killing and robbing a neighbor so that he could fund his researches into the works of the odd scientist and philosopher DeSelby, who believes he can prove the earth is sausage-shaped, that motion is an illusion, and that night is simply an accumulation of dirty air. The narrator meets up with some policeman investigating the murder who have some wacky theories of their own, including the notion that men and their bicycles eventually merge their atoms. These slapstick cops also cherish their odd inventions: a mangle that stretches light and converts it into sound and an elevator to eternity. If the narrator hasn't a clue, we're given a few hints about his sojourn in an endlessly "queer" (a word sprinkled liberally throughout) world, with its goofy characters and absurd dimensions - nudges that eventually add up to a disturbing picture of what's really going on. With Beckett-like genius, the novel ends in repetition: a repeat encounter with the bicycle-obsessed Sergeant Pluck. This macabre fiction, with its Monty Pythonish non sequiturs, weird invented words, and footnotes worthy of Nabokov, never saw print in O'Nolan's lifetime, after being rejected by publishers. Which no doubt explains the turn taken by his later, more accessible Flann books. (The Third Policeman was finally published in 1967 to much acclaim as part of the posthumous revival of Flann's novels.)
Myles's one foray into fiction - The Poor Mouth - was published first in 1942 and translated in 1973. Notable for its simple style and brevity, it's an extended joke on the Irish proclivity for exaggerating the difficulties of life; "putting on the poor mouth," usually reserved for creditors and such, here determines the story of Bonaparte O'Coonassa, a thick-headed lad who lives in a hut with his grandfather ("The-Old-Grey-Fellow") and the pigs in a place where it always rains and potatoes are the only nourishment. Aside from the endless wetness and spuds, some key phrases suggest the parody involved: "We will never see their likes again," the men are wont to say, and so do the sappy Gaelic authors that Myles mocks, as some appended notes point out. Notes also explain some of the obscure puns. But we needn't know Irish or its forgotten exemplars to appreciate the humor. Myles's satire looks remarkably forward to the bathos of Frank McCourt, whose characters also dwell "in the ashes," barefoot and hungry.
Flann's The Hard Life (1961) might be his version of Myles's novel, which after all was subtitled, "A Bad Story About the Hard Life." Flann's very conventional narrative, perhaps a reaction to the utter failure of his first two, nevertheless merits attention for its vicious satire. His main target is Catholicism as represented by the not-so-subtly-named Father Fahrt, a Jesuit given to casuistry, hypocrisy, and whiskey. Though he's not nearly as bad as the farm-bred Christian Brothers who miseducate the narrator's older brother, himself a hustler of the highest order. His later forays into self-publishing and patent medicines form a nice contrast with the quiet life of earnest young Finnbar, another of Flann's clueless narrators. Together, these orphaned brothers live with their half uncle Mr. Collopy, a crotchety fellow with a singular obsession. After his wife dies from unnamed ailments that involves much bed wetting, Collopy begins his quest to establish public restrooms for women in Dublin. Father Fahrt engages the old man in alcohol-fueled banter on doctrine and dogma, and Collopy often gets the better of the righteous priest. But the pious old codger Collopy will not be deterred in his mission, which takes him eventually to an audience with the pope, mischievously arranged by Finnbar's brother. The denouement is outrageous and wicked, with a baffled pontiff and a befuddled Collopy trying to interest Rome in his local struggle. Subtitled "an exegesis in squalor," the novel parodies actual Christian exegesis with knowledge and skill - old-school Catholics take note! But the humor comes bathed in misery and ends, literally, "in a tidal surge of vomit," Finnbar's reaction to a glass of whiskey.
Flann's final novel, The Dalkey Archive (1964), extends his quarrel with God and the Jesuits; but it's also a brilliant final statement on his writerly obsessions. In the spirit of At Swim, he rehearses some of the characters and ideas from The Third Policeman. Another corpulent cop, one Sergeant Fottrell, offers his nutty ideas - his "Mollycule Theory" of bicycles and men merging atoms. And DeSelby shows up in the flesh as a kind of nut-case Spengler who's invented both a way to stop time and talk to the figures from the past, and a virus to exterminate a world in decline. At the novel's center is Mick Shaughnessy, a mild civil servant who, with his best friend Hackett, a "handsome lout" with a wicked sense of humor, joins DeSelby on one of his strange metaphysical journeys. They meet - is it a drug-induced illusion? - no less than St. Augustine himself, a virulent anti-Jesuit who also has no patience with Irish saints ("they'd make you sick with their shamrocks and shenanigans and bullshit"). In a funny joke about Judas, we're also reminded that we're again in Shandyland, the world of the "cock-and-bull story." Slow-witted Mick wants to save the world from DeSelby and join the Trappists, rebuking his beloved, virginal Mary, herself not immune to Hackett's oily charms. But the true core of the book lies elsewhere, for Flann's greatest conceit is a bold revelation: James Joyce isn't dead but living north of Dublin, working in a pub. The author of "silence, exile, and cunning," that famous phrase from Portrait of the Artist, has now himself become "the garrulous, the repatriate, the ingenious." Joyce repudiates his works, claiming to have co-written Dubliners but nothing more. He also wants to become a Jesuit, despite his age, and much to the confusion of Father Cobble, a Jesuit friend of Mick's who wonders if Joyce might like to volunteer to clean the undergarments of the clergy.
And so, in Flann O'Brien's last performance, Mick Shaughnessy notes, "The exile, refugee or runaway has no roots, even in his own country." Which brings us back to the beginning: Brian O'Nolan stayed in Ireland, while Joyce and Beckett enjoyed the admiration of the Continent. Bernard Shaw, also an exile from Eire, "would have rotted if he stayed here," says another character in the book. And no doubt O'Nolan struggled with his own internal exile, a writer estranged from his own work, who assumes different names. This last work also provides a final clue, the probable source of O'Nolan's stunning self-effacement. As the clever Mary puts it: "One must write outside oneself. I'm fed up with writers who put a fictional gloss over their own squabbles and troubles. It's a form of conceit, and usually it's tedious." A comment on the self-obsessed Joyce, to be sure, but also a key to mystery that is Myles na Gopalenn, Flann O'Brien, and Brian O'Nolan, a triumvirate worthy of our admiration and worship: ignore the men, read the work." - Thomas DePietro
Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman
, Dalkey Archive Press, 2002."The title of that first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds is a translation from the Gaelic name of a place where the legendary madman, ‘Sweeney in the trees’, once rested. The reference is inadequate to comprehend what Greene, in his report to the publisher, called ‘the attempt to present, simultaneously as it were, all the literary traditions of Ireland,’ from the Celtic myth of Finn MacCool, ‘a better man than God,’ to the working-class pub talk of 20th-century Dublin.
The unnamed narrator, writing from the author’s own point of view as an undergraduate, spends most of his time lolling in bed or getting drunk on stout with fellow students. He creates a character, a would-be author himself, who is writing his own novel, derived from Irish folklore, cowboy adventures and ‘the plain people of Ireland,’ and who, in turn, commissions another novel, in which the first begetter is to be tortured, tried and executed, thus liberating everyone he has been writing about. At Swim-Two-Birds moved Joyce to commend O’Brien as ‘a real writer with the true comic spirit’. The parodic exaggerations are indeed excruciatingly funny.
In his second novel, the best of five, he founded his imaginative comic originality on his concept of everlasting hell. A Catholic to the end of his days, with Manichaean emphasis on the conflict between light and dark, Brian O’Nolan evidently brought to Flann O’Brien a sense of guilt that no jokes could quite assuage. Mainly because of the wartime paper shortage, Longmans rejected The Third Policeman. O’Brien was humiliated. He hid the manuscript and said he had lost it. When it was found and published after his death it was acclaimed.
In the meantime, in The Dalkey Archive, he cannibalised the ‘lost’ novel, deriding science as an explanation for life in the person of the wonderfully eccentric de Selby, who, in The Third Policeman, defined night as ‘an insanitary condition caused by the accretion of black air’ and human existence as ‘a succession of static experiences each infinitely brief’. Flann sets forth de Selby’s bizarre theories intermittently throughout the novel, with long footnotes on the interpretations of rival academic commentators, who are equally preposterous. But these passages are no less logical than the beliefs of the policemen in hell that there are atomic exchanges between bicyclists and the bicycles they sit on, rendering men part bicycles and bicycles part men, and that it is worth spending years making chests and chests within chests, eventually so small that they are too small to see.
The Poor Mouth, written in Irish and translated into English, is about unrelieved poverty and bad weather in the Gaeltacht of West Ireland. The novel’s animals are kept in a thatched cottage while the family live in a byre, and relief can be gained only in prison. The translator, Patrick C. Power, said the book ‘should have acted as a cauterisation of the wounds inflicted on Gaelic Ireland by its official friends’. The Hard Life, of urban and modern deprivations, is less vigorously fortified by O’Brien’s sardonic humour.
The Third Policeman withstands the closest scrutiny as the chef-d’oeuvre, with damnation inescapable from the opening sentence and hell revealed as eternally circular and almost unbearably absurd.
Warning: There is no magical substance that Flann O’Brien calls ‘omnium,’ with which to create whatever one desires. Repeated rereading of his works may cause advanced dementia." - Patrick Skene Catling
Flann O'Brien, The Poor Mouth: A Bad Story About the Hard Life (Irish Literature Series)
, Dalkey Archive Press, 1996."In The Poor Mouth, Flann O'Brien's delicious parody of Gaelic-language autobiographical peasant narratives, the hero is alone at night on the seashore when he hears a terrible, unrecognizable sound. He is then assailed by "an ancient smell of putridity which set the skin of my nose humming and dancing." He eventually sees a huge black quadruped like a giant hairy seal with legs. He manages to escape and the following day tries to describe the beast to his grandfather, who asks him to sketch it.
The contours of the terrible creature, called the Sea-cat, appear in the text of the novel. It is a map of Ireland turned on its side, the four major peninsulas acting as legs, the bulbous sweep of the northeastern shoreline forming the head. In a footnote, the "editor" of the memoir tells us:
It is not without importance that the Sea-cat and Ireland bear the same shape and that both have all the same bad destiny, hard times and ill-luck attending on them.
The "ancient smell of putridity" that emanates from this half-comic, half-terrifying embodiment of Ireland is not unrelated to the stink of "history's ancient faeces" that, according to the narrator of Samuel Beckett's First Love (written five years after The Poor Mouth, in 1946), largely constitutes "the charm of our country." If Beckett and O'Brien shared a great deal besides their belief that something was rotten in the state of Ireland, the overwhelming difference between them is that Beckett, like most of their literary contemporaries, managed to flee from the Sea-cat. O'Brien, almost alone among the great writers of twentieth-century Ireland, fell into its clutches. He stayed in Ireland and paid a fearful price in frustration and neglect. "It is suicide to be abroad," says Beckett's Maddy Rooney in All That Fall. "But what is it to be at home, Mr. Tyler, what is it to be at home? A lingering dissolution."
Frank O'Connor, writing in 1942 when Irish neutrality in World War II made it in his eyes "a nonentity state entirely divorced from the rest of the world," defined the impossibility of the social novel in Ireland:
Chekhov, the son of a slave, could write as easily of a princess as of a peasant girl or a merchant's daughter. In Ireland, the moment a writer raises his eyes from the slums and cabins, he finds nothing but a vicious and ignorant middle-class, and for aristocracy the remnants of an English garrison, alien in religion and education. From such material he finds it almost impossible to create a picture of life...a realistic literature is clearly impossible. We have, I think reached the end of a period.
The period that had ended was that of a political and artistic revolution. The great ferment of change in the early years of the twentieth century had resulted rather anticlimactically in a small, impoverished state, culturally philistine and sexually repressed, its energies drained by exhaustion and mass emigration. W.B. Yeats died in 1939, a month before the twenty-seven-year-old Brian O'Nolan, using the pseudonym Flann O'Brien, published his astonishing first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds. James Joyce's last work, Finnegans Wake, was published in the same year. Flann O'Brien was born into a culture of lingering, postrevolutionary dissolution. As with Beckett, his genius was to find energy, both comic and grotesque, in that entropy.
O'Brien has long been admired by those who have read him, but his reputation is oddly small when one considers that At Swim-Two-Birds has such a strong claim to be one of the founding texts of literary postmodernism. All the markers of that baggy but indispensable cultural category—the deconstruction of narrative, the replacement of nature by culture, an ahistoric sensibility in which tropes and genres from different eras can be mixed and matched promiscuously, the prominence of pastiche, the notion of language itself as the real author of the work—are openly declared in At Swim.
This is a book that begins by questioning why a book should have just one opening, and proceeds to give us three. It is a book by a man (Brian O'Nolan) who invents an author (Flann O'Brien) who is writing a book about an unnamed student narrator who is writing a book about a man (Dermot Trellis) who is writing a book. The narrator openly declares that "a satisfactory novel should be a self-evident sham" and that "the modern novel should be largely a work of reference," since virtually all characters have already been invented. Its governing caprice is that fictional characters do in fact already exist, have independent lives, and are capable of revolting against the author who seeks to deploy them. The novel is a treasure house of brilliant pastiches of everything from Gaelic sagas and Irish folkloric narratives to the Bible, Victorian encyclopedias, scholasticism, pub poets, cowboy novels, and trashy thrillers.
Yet—and this may account for his relative critical neglect—O'Brien does not sit easily with postmodern theory. His ideas and idioms cannot be explained, as such theory would like to suggest, as responses to the conditions of "late capitalism." O'Brien was not responding to the completion of the project of modern industrial society, but to its failure. He lived and worked in a largely agricultural country struggling to impose an ideal of cultural and economic self-sufficiency that cut it off from the mainstream of capitalist development. He poses a critical dilemma that can be resolved only by seeing his dazzling novels as paradoxical products of the conditions of mid-twentieth-century Ireland. What made those conditions so strangely fruitful was the collapse of any notion that a novel could be a direct representation of the society in which it was written.
For the reasons that Frank O'Connor outlined, the realistic social novel or play was not an option in Ireland—O'Connor himself took refuge in what he saw as the essentially private world of the short story. Yet if post- revolutionary Irish literature could not produce a Chekhov or a Turgenev, there was one nineteenth-century Russian writer whose example was genuinely useful. Ivan Goncharov's eponymous hero Oblomov, whom we meet in the novel's first sentence "lying in bed one morning," is the great pioneer of "serene unconcern" and the joys of not leaving one's bedroom:
When he was at home—and he was almost always at home—he lay down all the time, and always in the same room, the room in which we have found him and which served him as a bedroom, study and reception-room.
Beckett read and greatly admired Goncharov's novel—his lover Peggy Guggenheim actually called Beckett "Oblomov"—and his indolent narrators bear the mark. In his first novel, Murphy, published in 1938, a year before At Swim-Two-Birds, the protagonist is announced as having "eaten, drunk, slept, and put his clothes on and off" in the same squalid room. In At Swim, the narrator finds that his bedroom "contained most of the things I deemed essential for existence" and is "accustomed to stretch myself for many hours upon my bed, thinking and smoking there."
O'Brien's leading characters are even more deeply devoted than Beckett's to the pleasures of adopting a prone position in their bedrooms. "What is wrong with most people," says the dilettante intellectual Byrne in At Swim-Two-Birds, "is that they do not spend sufficient time in bed"—a version of Blaise Pascal's statement, used as an epigraph for the late, minor O'Brien novel The Hard Life, that all the trouble of the world comes from not staying alone in one's room. But what does one do in bed? In a peculiar triumph for the puritanical literary censorship that deformed Irish culture during his lifetime, the bedroom in O'Brien is the locus not of sex, but of writing. Secret and unbridled instincts are played out not in the flesh, but in the word.
Like Goncharov, Flann O'Brien was a government official of relatively conservative disposition. If, indeed, the new Irish state had either the inclination or the capacity to foster an official intellectual, O'Brien might have been ideal material. He was born in 1911 into a Catholic family in the town of Strabane, in what is now Northern Ireland. The family was devoted to the Gaelic language, whose revival was to be the major cultural ambition of the Irish state. Gaelic was O'Brien's first language, even after the family moved in his early childhood to Dublin. He wrote it superbly. As well as being a parody of the peasant narratives that were officially promoted by the state as exemplars of the native culture, The Poor Mouth is also the best comic novel ever written in Gaelic. It was also as a Gaelic-language contributor that O'Brien, under the second pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen (later Myles na Gopaleen), initially wrote his famous Cruiskeen Lawn column for The Irish Times.
O'Brien was, furthermore, steeped in Gaelic legend and folklore. Mythic figures from the Gaelic sagas, Finn MacCool and the mad king Sweeny, are featured in At Swim-Two-Birds, and the medieval poem The Voyage of Maeldoon may be the template for The Third Policeman. O'Brien ought to have been a treasured mainstream figure in nationalist Ireland, a dazzling writer, working within the state apparatus, who could synthesize Gaelic and English, ancient lore and contemporary modernism.
Yet he was an extraordinarily marginal figure. His journalistic alter ego, Myles na Gopaleen, was celebrated in intellectual circles, but both his official and literary careers were disastrous. A combination of his gradually deepening alcoholism and his habit of making derogatory remarks about senior politicians in his newspaper columns led to his forced retirement from the civil service in 1953. (He departed, recalled a colleague, "in a final fanfare of fucks.") More significantly, Irish literary culture, constrained by censorship, had little place for his staggeringly original novels.
O'Brien was deeply disillusioned by the philistinism of the official nationalist culture. The Gaelic-language revival is unmercifully burlesqued in The Poor Mouth. A German scholar receives a Ph.D. in Berlin for his recordings of what he thinks is a native speaker, but is in fact a pig. The tendency of Gaelic writers to give themselves flowery pen names is parodied in the noms de plume of the writers the narrator encounters, among them the Bandy Ulsterman, the Sod of Turf, the Gluttonous Rabbit, and Popeye the Sailor. The urban Gaelic-language enthusiasts who arrive in the narrator's village are repelled by the natives because
1. The tempest of the countryside was too tempestuous.
2. The putridity of the countryside was too putrid.
3. The poverty of the countryside was too poor.
4. The Gaelicism of the countryside was too Gaelic.
5. The tradition of the countryside was too traditional.
The puritanism and narrowness of the official culture meant not just that O'Brien could not embrace it, but that it could not embrace him. His scorn for the purists who saw in Gaelic and in traditional customs a barrier against modernity was boundless. "I do not think," he wrote, "that there is any real ground for regarding Irish dancing as a sovereign spiritual and nationalistic prophylactic." He was too utterly Irish to be easily appreciated abroad and too contemptuous of official forms of Irishness to be comfortably placed at home.
Of his three important works, At Swim met with the enthusiastic approval of Graham Greene and James Joyce—it was the last novel he ever read—but got largely puzzled reviews, sold poorly, and was swallowed up by the outbreak of World War II. The Poor Mouth was published in Gaelic, a language with few readers, and was appreciated largely as a brilliant in-joke. And The Third Policeman was rejected in 1940 by O'Brien's publishers, Longman's, who explained that they wanted him to become less fantastic and instead he had become more so. Humiliated, O'Brien put about the story that the manuscript of the novel had been lost. This was, at least metaphorically, true: the novel was not published until 1967, after O'Brien's death, by which time he had cannibalized it for the vastly inferior novel The Dalkey Archive. O'Brien's reputation as a novelist is thus largely posthumous, and it has remained somewhat cultish, at least until one of the characters in the American TV series Lost was seen to read The Third Policeman and baffled viewers caught on to the notion that the book might contain the key to the drama.
Yet if the conditions of post- revolutionary Ireland doomed O'Brien to neglect, they also forced him into fabulous invention. Sometimes, to take the most direct example, O'Brien's jokes are a direct burlesque of the official censorship that disallowed any mention of sex. In The Poor Mouth, the funniest of the absurdly florid names given to the miserable peasant characters is Macsamailliún Uí Phíonasa (Maximillian O'Penisa). The joke (rather lost in translation) is that the Latin word "penis" would be banned if it appeared in an English text but can be smuggled into a Gaelic one. In At Swim-Two-Birds, the narrator mentions student societies at his university: "Some were devoted to English letters, some to Irish letters, and some to the study and advancement of the French language"—the final comic circumlocution arising from the inadmissibility of "French letters," the colloquial term for condoms, which were also banned in Ireland.
There is, in The Third Policeman, a parody of the kind of trashy sex scene that would undoubtedly have fallen foul of the censors, were it not for the fact that the object of desire is not a woman but a bicycle. The narrator slavers over
the perfect proportion of its parts... Notwithstanding the sturdy cross-bar it seemed ineffably female and fastidious... I passed my hand with unintended tenderness—sensuously, indeed—across the saddle... How desirable her seat was, how charming the invitation of her slim encircling handle-arms, how unaccountably competent and reassuring her pump resting warmly against her rear thigh!
Because he believes that people and objects exchange molecules and so infiltrate each other in the most intimate ways, the police sergeant in The Third Policeman, like the censors and priests who were obsessed with maintaining Ireland's supposed purity, is driven to distraction "trying to regulate the people of this parish" and in particular the unnatural congress between them and their bicycles.
The banning of almost every serious Irish contemporary novel also created the strange literary culture in which O'Brien reveled, one in which officially approved reading was narrowed to theological reflections, Gaelic sagas, and peasant narratives while the thirst for contemporary stories was slaked by imported cowboy stories and cheap crime thrillers. O'Brien's humor often derives from the absurd conjunctions implicit in this unlikely mix.
More importantly, O'Brien's novels draw their dark energy from the sexual repression that lay behind the censorship. They are remarkable for the almost complete absence of either the nuclear family or healthy sexuality. O'Brien's biographer Anthony Cronin notes of his student days that most of his friends "regarded him as a natural celibate, even a kind of anchorite...the cells of whose hermitage were the pubs, from which women were for the most part debarred." Although O'Brien did marry and have children, his alcoholism ensured that he retained his monastic devotion to the all-male society of the pub and his novels are male-centered to the point of misogyny. The savant De Selby, to whose works the narrator of The Third Policeman is devoted, is afflicted by a complete inability to distinguish women from men, referring even to his own mother as "a very distinguished gentleman."
In O'Brien's work, fathers and mothers are almost entirely absent. The narrator in At Swim-Two-Birds lives with his uncle, as do the protagonists of The Hard Life, which begins with the death of the narrator's mother. In The Third Policeman, the narrator is orphaned and finds a dangerous father substitute in the manipulative villain John Diveney. In The Poor Mouth, the narrator Bonaparte O'Coonassa's main relationship is with his grandfather, the Old-Grey-Fellow—he meets his father just once, in a chance encounter in prison.
Sexuality, where it exists in the novels, is expressed only in dark and violent fantasies. In At Swim-Two-Birds, where literary characters are treated as real, the author Dermot Trellis has created the virginal Sheila Lamont but has then raped her "and [she] died indirectly from the effects of the assault." The narrator and his friend Kelly, meanwhile, stalk the streets "following matrons, accosting strangers, representing to married ladies that we were their friends, and gratuitously molesting members of the public." In spite of their importunities, they never actually have any kind of sexual relationship with women.
Instead of being merely desolate, however, this absence of family and sexual fulfilment is linked to O'Brien's great conceit in At Swim—that of literary creation as a form of parthenogenesis. Writing is sex for an all-male, sex-averse society. Its children are conceived without all the bother and awkwardness of having to deal with women. In the bedroom that is the world of his narrators, congress with oneself generates the only life that is available—the life of words and stories.
In O'Brien's novels, real sexual reproduction is a source of utter befuddlement. In The Poor Mouth, the narrator's father is so astounded by his son's birth ("he was a quiet fellow and did not understand very accurately the ways of life") that he almost dies of fright. In The Third Policeman, the policeman Pluck refuses to use the word "pregnancy" and resorts to the contorted circumlocution of a woman being in "a very advanced state of sexuality." Writing, on this analogy, is a very primitive state of sexuality, one in which conception, gestation, and birth can all take place in the head.
That O'Brien's inventions were a response to Irish conditions is evident from the extraordinary parallels between his work and that of Beckett—a writer of very different background, temperament, and linguistic approach—with whom he shared little except his nationality. The common influence of Oblomov on their narrators' habits is just one similarity. Both parody scientific and academic discourse—there are passages in At Swim-Two-Birds that directly prefigure Lucky's stream of high-sounding nonsense in Waiting for Godot. Both use footnotes as a comic metafictional device to disrupt and subvert the narrative—O'Brien in The Third Policeman, where the narrator's increasingly long footnotes on De Selby threaten to devour the text; Beckett, three years later, in Watt. Both not merely write in two languages, but deliberately create an English prose that feels like it has been translated from another tongue. The narrator of At Swim-Two-Birds, for example, describes the act of drinking with his friends with a comically convoluted awkwardness:
The three of us were occupied in putting glasses of stout into the interior of our bodies and expressing by fine disputation the resulting sense of physical and mental well-being.
Both are tormented and fascinated by the notion of dead words, in O'Brien's case leading to one of the running features of his newspaper column, The Catechism of Cliché.
In response to the prevailing puritanism and its utter distrust of the body, both Beckett and O'Brien were concerned with the Cartesian duality of mind and body. In Murphy, the protagonist "felt himself split in two, a body and a mind. They had intercourse apparently, otherwise he could not have known that they had anything in common." He is haunted by the way "the mental experience was cut off from the physical experience." In O'Brien's The Dalkey Archive, the mad sage De Selby dismisses Descartes: "Cogito ergo sum? He might as well have written inepsias scripsi ergo sum and prove the same point." ("I write ineptly, hence I exist.") Both Beckett and O'Brien satirize Descartes, but in O'Brien there is a more agonized tussle between mind and body.
On the one hand, O'Brien sees fiction itself as the great riposte to the notion that thinking proves existence. He explodes the cogito by taking it literally—the characters that he thinks up are posited as real, preexisting people (a note on the title page of The Hard Life warns us that "all the persons in this book are real and none is fictitious even in part") who can themselves invent more characters who are just as real. If the mind, rather than the body, determines existence, then there is no boundary between the fictive inventions of an author and the reality of living people.
On the other hand, however, this comic inflation of Descartes to the point at which he is thoroughly exploded does not prevent O'Brien's imagination from being deeply troubled by the mystery of the self. If the mind can work outward, generating invented characters who in turn invent others, can it not also work inward? Is the self of the author really godlike, or is it just another unstable fiction behind which lurks another personality? The multiple names of the author (Brian O'Nolan, Flann O'Brien, Myles na Gopaleen, and other guises including Brother Barnabas, Stephen Blakesley, and George Knowall) seem to express a deeper unease.
The image of a self behind the self recurs in O'Brien. It is comically absurd in The Third Policeman in De Selby's experiments with infinitely regressing mirrors. The savant, struck by the thought that a reflection shows one's face not as it is but as it was a tiny fraction of a second before, constructs a series of parallel mirrors in which he sees an image of himself as a twelve-year-old boy. More generally, though, the self-behind-the-self haunts the dark, Gothic side of O'Brien's writing. In The Third Policeman, the narrator comes face-to-face with the man he has murdered, Old Mathers. He is terrified by the man's eyes, and by the thought that they are mere fronts for an almost endless series of eyes behind them:
But the eyes were horrible. Looking at them I got the feeling that they were not genuine eyes at all but mechanical dummies animated by electricity or the like, with a tiny pinhole in the centre of the "pupil" through which the real eye gazed out secretively and with great coldness. Such a conception, possibly with no foundation at all in fact, disturbed me agonizingly and gave rise in my mind to interminable speculations as to the colour and quality of the real eye and as to whether, indeed, it was real at all or merely another dummy with its pinhole on the same plane as the first one so that the real eye, possibly behind thousands of these absurd disguises, gazed out through a barrel of serried peep-holes.
Likewise, in O'Brien's macabre story "Two In One," published in The Bell magazine in 1954, a young taxidermist murders his master and disposes of the body, retaining only the skin. He then has the idea of making his crime a perfect one by assuming both the skin and the identity of his dead employer. The ruse rebounds on him, however, when the police investigate his own disappearance and he ends up being hanged for his own murder.
This notion of infinite regression is one way out of the stasis of an Irish history that has reached a kind of conclusion (an independent state) but no fulfilment. If time dissolves, so does history. As O'Brien noted in a letter, giving his own simplistic version of Einstein,
The idea is that time is a great flat motionless sea. Time does not pass; it is we who pass. With this concept as basic, fantastic but coherent situations can be easily devised, and in effect the whole universe torn up in a monstrous comic debauch.
If time is meaningless, the most blissful state imaginable is that in which it is most fully suspended—sleep. This is one of the things that distinguishes O'Brien most thoroughly from Beckett. In Beckett, the state that the characters most truly desire is death. In O'Brien it is sleep. Death is not an option—since the characters do not exist except as endlessly recycled literary tropes, they can never really be killed off. The narrator of The Third Policeman realizes that since he has no name (which is to say no actual identity), "I cannot die." Having neither life nor death, the best O'Brien's characters can hope for is that in-between world of sleep, a condition that has the great advantage of rendering the despised body redundant. "When a man sleeps," says Byrne in At Swim-Two-Birds,
he is steeped and lost in a limp toneless happiness: awake he is restless, tortured by his body and the illusion of existence. Why have men spent the centuries seeking to overcome the awakened body? Put it to sleep, that is a better way. Let it serve only to turn the sleeping soul over, to change the blood-stream and thus make possible a deeper and more refined sleep.
In The Third Policeman, the narrator's one great comfort in the endless doom of the afterlife, in which he will forever be arriving in a demented Irish village ruled by policemen who are both godlike and fatuous, is sleep. His hero, the savant De Selby, suffers from narcolepsy, and regularly falls asleep in public. He himself reflects happily on
the immeasurable boon of sleep, more particularly on my own gift of sleeping opportunely. Several times I had gone asleep when my brain could no longer bear the situations it was faced with.
His finest moment of bliss is "a full and simple sleep. Compared with this sleep, death is a restive thing, peace is a clamour and darkness a burst of light."
For O'Brien, in the soporific culture of mid-twentieth-century Ireland, the novel itself is a kind of sleep, a way of being neither dead nor alive and thus of drawing energy from entropy. But in that sleep, what dreams may come? In Ulysses, James Joyce's alter ego Stephen Daedalus called history "a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." For O'Brien, there is nothing to awaken to, no escape from history's dull culmination. There is only the recurrent nightmare of lingering dissolution, broken by dreams of pure, glorious invention." - Fintan O'Toole
Flann O' Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (Irish Literature Series)
, Dalkey Archive Press, 1998."Truth is an odd number, even numerals are the province of the devil class, and there is safety in a triad. These are some of the essential wisdoms in the world of Flann O'Brien, the Irish writer who is often said to form, along with Samuel Beckett and James Joyce, "the holy trinity of modern Irish literature." O'Brien—whose real name was Brian O'Nolan—briefly flickered just as bright as his Irish contemporaries, but he has never received commensurate acclaim or much of a following—though readership did pick up in 2005, when his second novel, The Third Policeman, made a cameo appearance on an episode of Lost, before an audience of 31 million viewers. (One of the show's producers said, somewhat ominously, that the book was chosen "very specifically for a reason"; in the two days following the episode, the book sold 10,000 copies.) Better late than never, O'Brien's five novels have at last been collected into a single volume, just published by Everyman's Library.
O'Brien's lack of readership is particularly surprising since of the holy Irish trinity, he is by far the funniest. His masterpiece, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), has the singular distinction of being consistently laugh-out-loud funny, even on a second or third read, even 70 years after its publication. Many readers today regard Ulysses or the Molloy trilogy in a daze of stultification or with mild terror at the novels' calculated efforts to frustrate narrative convention. Yet it would take a reader of calcified heart to read O'Brien's best work without laughing his face off.
There may be safety in a triad, but to lump O'Brien with Joyce and Beckett is to miss the playfulness, black humor, and deranged whimsy that characterize his style. As Martin Amis has written, "there is only one event in Ulysses: the meeting between Bloom and Stephen." One could go further with Beckett's novels and say that there is rarely any event whatsoever to be found. There is much exhibition of genius, eerily beautiful descriptive passages, and startling inquiries into the workings of the mind and the heart, but there is also a determined de-emphasis on anything like traditional storytelling.
The opposite is true of At Swim-Two-Birds, which features such a profusion of stories that a reader happily loses track of where each one begins and ends. To describe the plot as succinctly as possible: A university student endeavors to write a novel about an author—Dermot Trellis—who is himself trying to write a novel. O'Brien's novel begins four times, in four different ways, and contains at least as many endings. The rationale for this rampant metastasis of tales lies in a peculiar theory proposed by his nameless narrator, an indolent fellow prone to idle musings, who has just discovered the pleasures of Irish porter:
A satisfactory novel should be a self-evident sham to which the reader could regulate at will the degree of his credulity... Characters should be interchangeable as between one book and another. The entire corpus of existing literature should be regarded as a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their characters as required, creating only when they failed to find a suitable existing puppet.
O'Brien himself seems to share this theory, which might seem to promise a descent into a daunting realm of disorientation. But to bear with him is to be swept into a peculiar landscape in which a coming-of-age story set in modern Dublin, a fairy tale set in the Middle Ages, and an absurdist allegory about the frustrations of writing complement one another with a persuasive internal logic.
To keep Trellis company, O'Brien reaches deep into the limbo of Irish literature and pulls out such characters as Finn MacCool, a legendary hero of old Ireland whose gargantuan proportions are exalted for pages on end in purple, mock-heroic encomiums ("the chest to him was wider than the poles of a good chariot, coming now out, now in, and pastured from chin to navel with meadows of black man-hair and meated with layers of fine man-meat the better to hide his bones and fashion the semblance of his twin bubs"); Pooka MacPhellimey, a devil who engages in heated scholarly debate with an invisible fairy; and the cursed Mad King Sweeny, who sprouts feathers on his back and is forced to hop across Ireland from tree to tree for the remainder of his days, naked. He lives on leaf dew and watercress, and laments his sorrow through the recitation of increasingly batty lyric poetry:
The thorntop that is not gentle
has reduced me, has pierced me,
it has brought me near death
the brown thorn-bush
O'Brien's author Trellis follows the same dictum, plucking for his own novels characters from other books. What's more, Trellis makes his characters live with him in an inn, where they serve him as indentured servants: "There is a cowboy in Room 13 and Mr McCool, a hero of old Ireland, is on the floor above. The cellar is full of leprechauns." In revenge for their poor treatment, the characters turn the tables on Trellis by writing their own story about him. Over the course of their tale, Trellis is granted innumerable boils on his back; a ceiling falls on his head; and he is changed "by a miracle of magic into a great whore of a buck rat with a black pointed snout and a scaly tail and a dirty rat-coloured coat full of ticks and terrible vermin." What might sound like slapstick is made strange—and hilarious—by an elaboration of detail so excessive that there is no choice but to surrender to its madness.
O'Brien doesn't just borrow familiar characters from the canon, however. He also quotes paragraphs, and even entire stories, verbatim. Mad Sweeny's legend and the poems he recites, for instance, are translated nearly word-for-word from the 17th-century Gaelic legend, Buile Suibhne (The Frenzy of Sweeney). But O'Brien's genius is such that it's nearly impossible to determine when he is quoting and when he is inventing. The old texts are echoed by, and bleed into, his own fictions—the same way that Dorothy's Kansas creeps into the fantasy world of The Wizard of Oz and the garden animals resurface in Alice's dream of Wonderland. The effect is to make every digressive flight of fancy feel necessary and exhilarating, no matter how preposterous its premise.
This intermingling of pub banter and poetic lays—of high and low speechifying—creates a peculiar vision of Ireland, in which the boundaries between myth and reality are collapsed. At the same time, this blending of the epic and the mundane propels O'Brien—celebrator of the Gaelic language and folk traditions though he was—well beyond national boundaries. It is also the main source of the book's humor: Pub confabulation is treated as lyric poetry, and vice versa. In his technique and execution, O'Brien is indebted less to Joyce and Beckett than Laurence Sterne, whose Tristram Shandy followed much the same pattern: stories upon stories, for the simple purposes of humor and delight. He is clever, and deadly cynical, but there is none of the calculated showiness that marks much of what it now considered "postmodern" literature. In fact, many of the novel's funniest riffs ridicule the pomposity of academic scholarship. One can't look for a moral at the end of O'Brien's stories for a simple reason: His stories never end. This is a book that could easily go on forever, hopping from melodious disputation to spirited colloquy, and story to story, like Mad Sweeny leaping among the trees of Erin.
But its fate, and O'Brien's, was not to loop on uninterrupted. Six months after publication, the London warehouse in which the books were stored was bombed during the Blitz, and all remaining copies were destroyed. The next year the publisher, Longmans Green, turned down O'Brien's second novel, The Third Policeman. A murder mystery, it is nonetheless as sui generis as its predecessor, set in a foreign land too odd to be reality, yet eerily too familiar for pure fantasy. And though nearly as funny as At Swim Two Birds, the novel is underpinned by a frightening, nihilistic despair. Longmans' rejection must have cast O'Brien into his own despair, since he never showed the book to another publisher. (The novel was published only after his death, when it was discovered in his house.) The disappointment put O'Brien off writing novels for 20 years, during which he pursued a successful career as a columnist for the Irish Times under the Gaelic pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen.
Although his late books, which include one written in Gaelic, are pale shadows of the first two, his final novel, The Dalkey Archive (1964), provides a fitting coda. Much of the book is cannibalized from The Third Policeman, and numerous conversations recall those held by the narrator and his friends in At Swim-Two-Birds—some even take place in the same pubs. Characters are once again plucked from the limbo of Irish literature. They include James Joyce, who resurfaces as a doddering bartender in the dingy fishing town of Skerries. Joyce once called O'Brien "a real writer, with the true comic spirit," but like Trellis, he is treated ungently; one of O'Brien's characters goes so far as to curse Finnegans Wake, "and all that line of incoherent trash."
It's not a throwaway line—the notion of coherence speaks to one of the crucial qualities of O'Brien's work. Where Joyce's late narratives fracture and any semblance of plot dissolves in Beckett, O'Brien is the drunk at the end of the bar with a long tale for every comer. His juxtapositions and digressions are not capricious. Instead they create a sense of rooted familiarity, a whimsical landscape in which the most absurd things happen—but always, it seems, for a reason.
Taken together, his corpus could be read as a repeating cycle. It is possible to flip to nearly any point of the 787-page collection and feel oddly at home. O'Brien remained true to the maxim in At Swim-Two-Birds: His characters—especially the pub-dwellers—are often interchangeable between one book and another, and the entire body of his work can be regarded as a limbo from which he draws the same figures over and over. This is not a deficiency—far from it. In his novels, O'Brien managed to create a prismatic world that is both a prison and a hall of mirrors, in which his beloved Ireland appears in fetid squalor and misery at one moment, and the next is burnished with the epic grandeur of antiquity. It's tempting to imagine O'Brien himself still living there among all his characters—reclining in his body-warmed bed, endlessly weaving his "honeyed discourse" into "a story-teller's book-web," and laughing all the while." - Nathaniel Rich
Read more
Flann O'Brien, The Hard Life
, Dalkey Archive Press, 1996."O'Brien's 1961 novel is a sober but satirical tale about two Irish orphans growing up at the turn of the century amid the squalor of working-class Dublin.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title." - Publishers Weekly
"This 1961 comic novel relates the lives of two orphaned Dublin brothers sent to live with their fiery uncle. "The conversation is a delight," said LJ 's reviewer, "it seems no Irishman can be dull when talking - and the atmosphere of a lower-middle-class family, with its cheerless, shabby, restricted way of life, is well done" - Library Journal
Flann O'Brien, The Dalkey Archive
, Dalkey Archive, 2006."Hailed as 'the best comic fantasy since Tristram Shandy' upon its publication in 1964, The Dalkey Archive is Flann O'Brien's fifth and final novel; or rather (as O'Brien wrote to his editor), "The book is not meant to be a novel or anything of the kind but a study in derision, various writers with their styles, and sundry modes, attitudes and cults being the rats in the cage." Among the targets of O'Brien's derision are religiosity, intellectual abstractions, J. W. Dunne's and Albert Einstein's views on time and relativity, and the lives and works of Saint Augustine and James Joyce, both of whom have speaking parts in the novel. Bewildering? Yes, but as O'Brien insists, "a measure of bewilderment is part of the job of literature."
Set in the late 1940s in the village of Dalkey (some twelve miles south of Dublin), The Dalkey Archive also includes in its cast the mad scientist De Selby (featured in O'Brien's novel The Third Policeman), the magniloquent Sergeant Fottrell (whose "molly-cule theory" holds that a man can turn into a bicycle), and the local da Vinci, a looderamawn named Teague McGettigan. Doing his damnedest to find order in this metaphysical chaos is Mick Shaughnessy, who - with the aid of strong drink, his friend Hackett, and Mary, the young woman for whom they both compete - undergoes a crisis of faith both sublime and ridiculous."
Flann O'Brien, The Best of Myles (Irish Literature Series)
, Dalkey Archive Press, 1999."Though best known for his fine novels, Irish writer O'Brien also wrote under the name Myles na Gopaleen a newspaper column in the Irish Times called "Cruiskeen Lawn" for more than 30 years. This 1968 volume collects the best of those pieces. O'Brien leans on many Irish clich?s (poverty, boozing, etc.) but uses them often with great humor." - Library Journal
