ESSAYS: FLANN O'BRIEN 1922 - 1966: 'Is It About a Bicycle?': Flann O'Brien in the Twenty-first CenturyEdited by Jennika Baines Four Courts Press, 175pp, €45
IN 1951 THE DUBLIN literary magazine
Envoy
devoted an issue to its patron saint and presiding deity, James Joyce. In a magnificently rambunctious editorial entitled “A Bash in the Tunnel”, guest editor Brian Nolan – aka Brian O’Nolan (or Ó Nualláin), aka Flann O’Brien, aka Myles na gCopaleen – sketched a rather cantankerous portrait of Joyce as an egotistical iconoclast: “James Joyce was an artist. He has said so himself. His was a case of Ars gratia Artist ”. Although he admired Joyce intensely, Nolan remained sceptical of what he saw as Joyce’s tyrannical vision of authorship and his inaccessibility to the ordinary reader. “Perhaps the true fascination of Joyce lies in his secretiveness, his ambiguity (his polyguity perhaps?) his leg-pulling, his dishonesties, his technical skill, his attraction for Americans. His works are a garden in which some of us may play.”
Throughout his career, O'Nolan, who was born a century ago this October, engaged critically and creatively with Joyce's legacy, both in his novels and in his Cruiskeen Lawn column, which ran in The Irish Timesfrom 1940 to 1966. In retrospect, this anxiety of influence did O'Nolan no favours; in 1939 Seán Ó Faoláin complained that Flann O'Brien's debut novel, At Swim-Two-Birds, had "a general odour of spilt Joyce all over it", and this notion of O'Brien as a "poor man's Joyce" has dogged his critical reception ever since.
In her introduction to Flann O'Brien in the Twenty-first Century, Jennika Baines notes that despite a recent surge in his popular reputation, O'Brien "has not yet become canonised. Even his most well known works, At Swim-Two-Birdsand The Third Policeman, often fail to appear on 20th-century Irish literature syllabi. These supposedly comic novels are often not regarded as serious or weighty enough to sit alongside major contemporary works". As a consequence "there remains no journal entirely devoted to O'Brien, no regular conference, no centre dedicated to him at his alma mater, University College Dublin".
The essays in the book she has edited tangentially address the issue of canonicity by focusing on the relatively "undiscovered texts of O'Brien's oeuvre", including Cruiskeen Lawn (increasingly regarded by some critics as his magnum opus). Jon Day outlines the bibliographic problems faced in any proper assessment of Cruiskeen Lawn: the sheer volume of text – about three million words over the 26 years – as well as its typographical and spatial subversions. (Myles frequently transgressed the boundaries of his column in order to comment on neighbouring items.) Unsurprisingly, then, decontextualised anthologies of Cruiskeen Lawn fail to capture the energy and ingenuity of this "accumulated masterwork". However, Day concludes with the tantalising prospect of a technologically generated "Wiki-Lawn": using the searchable digitised archive of The Irish Times, Cruiskeen Lawn can be "once again read in context, as a living and dynamic column".
In related essays Carol Taaffe explores how Cruiskeen Lawn “quickly established itself as both the balm and the bane of the local intelligentsia” – a comic and dialectical “clash between the corduroys and the Plain People of Ireland”, with the PPI acting as “a kind of safety valve for the erudite Mylesian persona”, while Joseph Brooker examines the “existence and character of a peculiarly Mylesian voice”, and contrasts this with Flann O’Brien’s ability to “abnegate this voice in his fiction” – “tales told by idiot savants rather than orchestrated by maestros”.
O'Nolan's Irish-language writings are also addressed: Adrian Naughton re-examines O'Nolan's MA thesis on Irish nature poetry (Nádúir-fhilíocht na Gaedhilge, UCD, 1934), and demonstrates how Flann O'Brien's experimental fiction "is indebted to certain theories of TS Eliot and Ezra Pound" – Eliot's insistence on "impersonality"; Pound's imagist concern with describing the thing-in-itself – while typically revolting against their modernist excesses. Similarly, in his discussion of An Béal Bocht(1941), Richard T Murphy argues that although the satire exposes and denounces "Revival pieties", it remains equally suspicious of realist or modernist alternatives.
All of O'Brien's novels, with the exception of The Dalkey Archive(1964), are reconsidered here: Kimberly Bohman-Kalaja analyses At Swim-Two-Birdsfrom the perspective of game theory and shows how the novel "reveals itself as a complex and rigidly structured game that O'Brien plays with his readers"; Samuel Whybrow reviews The Third Policeman(completed 1940, first published 1967) as "an absurd science fiction novel"; and Baines reads The Hard Life(1961) as "an insecure, imperfect novel about the insecurities and imperfections of writing a novel about Dublin".
Finally, Amy Nejezchleb evaluates O’Nolan’s RTÉ scripts, which included one radio series, five TV programmes and two TV series (all of which will be published for the first time next year by Dalkey Archive Press, under the editorship of Daniel Jernigan). This is a fascinating and under-researched topic, although Nejezchleb surely overstates the case in seeing these works as a corrective to the misogynistic tendencies identified in O’Nolan’s earlier writings.
The volume as a whole, which opens with a short foreword by the brother, Micheál Ó Nualláin, is bookended by Frank McNally of The Irish Times, who joins the ranks of those Flanneurs who have always regarded O'Nolan as the vital third part in the Holy Trinity of modern Irish writers: alongside Joyce the Father, and Beckett the Son, O'Nolan remains the Holy Ghost in the machine.
Overall, the book is a welcome contribution to the growing body of O’Nolan scholarship, even if a certain academic tone – or “Americanese”, as Myles would have it – creeps in sometimes, which seems slightly tin-eared to the nuances of O’Nolan’s exuberant language. With international conferences being held as far afield as Singapore and Vienna this summer to mark the centenary of his birth, and with several scholarly publications already in the pipeline, the traditional view of O’Nolan as a lesser Joyce seems set to change. Flann O’Brien’s works are a garden in which all of us may play.
More Myles
* Mylesday, a celebration of O’Brien/na gCopaleen/O’Nolan, is being held at the Palace Bar, Fleet Street, D2, next Friday, (2-6pm), the anniversary of his death, in 1966; mylesday.wordpress.com.
* Flann100, a conference, takes place at Trinity College Dublin on October 14-15th, marking the centenary of the writer’s birth, on October 5th. Speakers include Fintan O’Toole, Keith Hopper, Louis de Paor and Joseph Brooker; flann100.wordpress.com.
Keith Hopper teaches literature and film studies for Oxford University's department for continuing education. He is the author of Flann O'Brien: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-modernist (revised edition 2009), and editor with Neil Murphy of a Flann O'Brien centenary issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction(Dalkey Archive Press, autumn 2011)
