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I
Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) is the epitome of post-revival Irish fiction not only on account of its comical phraseology and its assemblage of anachronistic characters “borrowed” from a wide range of incongruous cultural and historical contexts, but also because of its ingenious dismantling of the conventional rules of narrative fiction in such a way as to reveal - as the author claims - that a good novel ought to be, at bottom, a “self-evident sham”.
This dimension of the work, reflecting a host of literary problems arising from the recent history of modern Irish literature but also reflecting a set of much wider problematics in modern literature as a whole, ensures its entitlement to the name of “metafiction” - even if, at the date when it was written, no such term and no such concept for a characteristically modern (or, more properly, postmodern) form of fiction-writing existed.
The Irish problems at issue concerned the attempt of the founders of the literary revival to “revive” the spirit of ancient Irish literature, replete with heroic characters, epic events, and interpolated poems. To that end Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats translated Irish legend and folklore and made literary versions of them. In reality, however, the revival could not actually breathe life back into these ancient forms, notwithstanding the Yeats’s question - posed in “The Statues”:
When Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side
What stalked through the Post Office? [...] |
It is true, of course, that Patrick Pearse had allowed himself to be inspired by the heroic death of Cuchulain in 1916, and that the Irish sculptor Oliver Sheppard has produced a monument to Pearse, now in the Post Office, showing the dying Cuchulain tied to a rock; but Cuchulain actually walking in Dublin would have made a most peculiar site.* In fact, it was O’Brien’s distinction to bring the ancient Irish hero Finn MacCool “back alive” into modern Ireland - or, at least, into a modern Irish novel where the characters enjoy as much autonomy of existence as the author and, indeed, set about belaying the author of the novel in which they themselves appear.
In doing so, he engages in a brilliant celebration of the cultural wealth bestowed on modern Ireland by the revival writers but he also displays a profound disillusion with the idealism of their movement. Flann O’Brien belonged to the generation for whom Irish independence in the form of the Free State (and later, after 1949, the Irish Republic) was an established fact; and, with it, the less attractive fact that the new state was dominated by a petty-bourgeois and clerical mentality which made a laughable comparison with the high ideals of its founders.
Moreover, O’Brien (in his real character as Brian O’Nolan) was a civil servant, having accepted a “sit”, or ‘situation’ (i.e., job) in the modern state whereas James Joyce in a previous generation had chosen instead to “fly the nets” of language, religion and nationality which he saw as the chief enemies of the individual spirit.
That compromise, together with an innate conservatism which ensured that O’Brien never really challenged the belief-system of his family or society, meant he stood to the older writer in a perpetual relation of inferiority, occasioning a severe case of what Harold Bloom has called “the anxiety of influence”.
The Irish critic Seamus Deane has applied the term to Flann O’Brien and the proof of it in O’Brien’s writings is the continual denial that anything he attempted in the way of experiemental (albeit farcical) innovation had “to do with that man Joyce” - as he told Ethel Mannin in a letter which reveals the pathetic side in his attitude towards the question of his own literary status and the significance of his ingenious way of writing [see below].
II
The life of Flann was extraordinary in the sense that he had more than one of them, just as his famous novel has more than one beginning. Born in Strabane in the North of Ireland, he was the son of a Customs & Excise officer who was a Gaelic League enthusiast and refused to let his children use English in the home. Registered at christening “Brian Nolan”, he was “Briain Ua Nuaillain” and “Brian O’Nolan” at school. In his literary life he was “Flann O’Brien” while in “Cruiskeen Lawn” (his famous Irish Times column) he was “Myles Na Gopaleen” - a name derived from a character in a play by Dion Boucicault, the master of the sentimental Irish melodrama).
The characteristic humour of the writer, with its immediate and implacable engagement with words, sentences and styles as if these were implicitly the subject matter of all fiction, can be said to have stemmed from the fact that he was brought up in a mono-lingual Irish-revival family, speaking Irish (Gaelic) only in the home until quite advanced in boyhood. Ever after his sense of language was conditioned by an awareness of its comical provisionality - that it was never quite the right language, and perhaps even that there was no such thing as the right language.
At the same time, there is a considerable element of implied social and political satire in the ironic formula of a Flann O'Brien novel. A great deal of the humour of his books depends on the marshalling of malapropisms and inflated phraseology, clichés (shown to be such) and various forms of stylistic chicanery that reveals a radical instability of style and usage.
What is revealed thereby is an intrinsic contradiction between the ideal conception of an independent nation-state and the vulgar reality of its embodiment in Free-State Ireland.
Again and again in At Swim-Two-Birds the impossibility of producing “high-class” literature in circumstances of personal and domestic squalor of a kind immanently connected with the life of the Irish petty-bourgeoisie is broached. O’Brien’s narrator is a student much like Stephen Dedalus except that he is the guest of his oafish uncle and, himself, fundamentally torn between the life of racing-tickets and that of literature.
He is, in other words, a vulgar counterpart of James Joyce’s autobiographical hero who, lacking none of the talent of the other possesses none of his nobility of spirit either. Ironically, the unnamed narrator of At Swim-Two-Birds is virtually a case-type of the form of “spiritual paralysis” that Joyce defined in Dubliners in his lack of energy, his will-lessness, and his ultimate submission to authority. (The young man finally passes his Arts exams.)
At the same time he is a character of such comic oddity, as are each of the assembly of characters spawned in the course of his prime literary venture - a “Catholic” morality-tale purportedly written by his creation Trellis which goes badly wrong when the characters in it rebel against the author - that his moral failure is redeemed by a new kind of mordant hilarity in a writing process that Flann O’Brien elsewhere described in The Hard Life (1967) as “an exegesis of squalor”.
Likewise, the version of native Irish culture promulgated in At Swim-Two-Birds promises to import nobility into the novel but finally devolves into a round of plebian encounters in which the strange eloquence of ancient Irish poetry as represented by the songs of Sweeney (Suibhne) is beaten in competition by the poetical might of the pub-balladeer Jem Casey whose “Pint of Plain is Your Only Man” is one of the paradoxical glories of the novel.
At Swim-Two-Birds is to be savoured as a proof of the elasticity of modern Irish writing, its share in a rich literary heritage and its brilliant explosion of the normal parameters of realist fiction under pressure from the counter-factual urgings of the Irish literary revival. At the same time it is a text which exhibits the uproarious character of a bull in a literary china-shop (to borrow Graham Greene’s comparison), demonstrating the freedom and vitality of the Irish narrative imagination in a profoundly subversive, irreverent and self-eviscerating way: in fact, the perfect combination of traditional Irish culture and Irish literary anarchy. |