Flann O’Brien: Teaching Material (ENG507C2)

Flann O’Brien presents the case of a writer of immense talent and acknowledged genius two of whose books are unique examples of modernist writing in Ireland, and who remained unsure throughout his own life about the seriousness and significance of his own writing. The great success that he enjoyed in a small coterie with At Swim-Two-Birds when it appeared in 1939 was soon overshadowed by the events of World War II, and the novel with which he quickly followed it, The Third Policeman, failed to find a publisher, causing him great personal embarrassment and putting him to the trouble of pretending that the manuscript was ‘lost’.

In correspondence with English and American writers, O’Brien spoke of what he had written and planned to write in consistently self-denigratory terms. To Ethel Mannin, he wrote of At Swim-Two Birds, for instance: ‘It is a belly-laugh or high-class literary pretentious slush depending on how you look at it. Some people say it is harder on the head than the worst whiskey, so do not hesitate to burn the book if you think that’s the right thing to do.’ (Letter, 12 July 1939). To William Saroyan, the American playwright, he wrote similarly: ‘I guess it is a bum book anyhow. I am writing a very funny book now about bicycles and policemen and I think it will be perhaps good and early a little money quietly.’ (25 Sept. 1939). The new book of which he speaks here is The Third Policeman. Rejected by Longmans as ‘unduly fantastical’ in 1940, it was eventually published in 1967.

O’Brien’s literary anxiety was inseparable from the conditions of his own life but also those of the young state in which he grew to maturity. Brought up at first in Strabane, Co. Tyrone, as the son of an excise (customs) officer who was a dedicated member of the Gaelic League and an Irish-only speaker in the home, he was - so to speak - born in the fissure between Irish and English culture and society - a fact reflected in the complex question of his ‘real’ name. Formally registered at baptism as Brian Nolan, he was known as Brian O’Nolan or Briain Ó Nualláin respectively in Irish and English contexts during his lifetime and, largely because his civil service job required such anonymity, wrote under the name of Flann O’Brien by which he is universally known today.

According to his brother Ciaran, the first words of English that O’Brien’ spoke were addressed in anger to his father and took the form of an archaic imprecation, ‘Have at thee, varlet ...’, which he had picked up from comics books - his first introduction to the language since Irish was the language of the home. From such beginnings, it is clear that his relationship with language was never going to be simple. Educated by Christian Brothers and then the Holy Ghost Fathers at Blackrock College - where Eamon de Valera and Archbishop John McQuaid had been pupils and teachers - he proceeded to UCD and distinguished himself brilliantly as a speaker in the Literary and Historical Society (L&H), where James Joyce had previously spoken.

After graduation O’Brien went on to write an MA dissertation on ‘Nature Poetry in Irish’ and was profoundly well-versed in the medieval traditions of Irish writing. On taking a post in the Department of Finance, he began to work on his first novel, At Swim-Two Birds (1939), an innovative and playful writing that combines strands of Irish legend with contemporary scenes of student life and binds the two together in a ‘Chinese box’ of nested narratives centrally concerning a novelist called Trellis - the creation of the student - who seduces one of own characters and is mauled by the rest in a vendetta organised by her indignant brother before being released from torment when a skivvy (housemaid) accidentally burns the manuscript.

For some critics, this self-reflexive narrative, unusually supplied with several beginnings and several endings on the bais that a any modern novel ought to be a ‘self-evident sham’, anticipates the ‘meta-fictional’ methods of the French nouveau roman and post-modernist writing. This may be so (though no question of influence has ever been suggested); but it is also in a sense an exact representation of the condition of modern Irish society, in which characters from the ancient past such as Finn Mac Cool and the Pooka Furriskey were released into the modern world by the authors of the literary revival - W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and others. In that sense, the novel embodies in a jocose fashion an exact literary correlate of the claims of Irish separatism in the revolutionary period.

The real Ireland in which O’Brien lived, however, was a depressing place in which the promise of the revolutionary period had trickled out and been replaced by a heavy carapace of dull pietism and pretend-revivalism. The reasons for disillusionment were real enough; as Seamus Deane has said:

‘The fake nation, with its inflated rhetoric of origin and authenticity, had given way to the fake state, with its deflated rhetoric of bureaucratic dinginess. In the passage from the fantasy of one to the realism of the other, the entity called Ireland had somehow failed to appear.’ (Cited in Roy Foster, reviewing Strange Country, in The Times, 24 June, 1997.)

In ‘‘Cruiskeen Lawn’’, a column that O’Brien wrote for The Irish Times during the 1940s and afterwards, he remorseless whipped the petty-bourgeois pretensions of the new Irish national élite and especially their pretense of reviving the Irish language. Some of the column takes the form of a dictionary of clichés; other parts are given over to facetious repartee between Myself and The Plain People of Ireland. In this context we are asked: ‘What is the sole and true badge of nationhood?’ - ‘The national language’. And: ‘With what also would it be idle to seek to revive the national language’ - ‘Our distinctive national culture’. (The ‘plain people of Ireland’ is a phrase coined in Patrick Pearse’s 1916 Proclamation.)

Anthony Cronin (No Laughing Matter) has written about the peculiar situation of the Irish intelligentsia during the post-revolutionary period; now they admired James Joyce but were unable to emulate his rebellion against ‘family, religion, nationality’ since these things were not only part of the system of ideals on which the state was founded but also their best guarantee of jobs in the new regime. In addition, O’Brien himself was conservative in social and religious thinking and was a great deal better at pointing up the idiocy of contemporary society than formulating a social and political vision of his own. In his column, he was all too often a reactionary, warning ‘Paddy’ against the dangers of modernisation.

The immensely long delay between the period of his first fame, with At Swim-To-Birds, and the appearance of a second novel The Dalkey Archive (1965) served to embitter him further. In fact The Dalkey Archive is a spoofed version of the ‘Third Policeman’ manuscript, which only came to publication in the year after his death. His latter years were marked by advancing alcoholism. Yet when when we read the opening of The Third Policeman we realise the extraordinary force of moral criticism that O’Brien brought to bear on Irish society through his uniquely satirical handling of Hiberno-English language:

‘[...] I was born a long time ago. My father was a strong farmer and my mother owned a public house. We all lived in the public house but it was not a strong house at all and was closed most of the day because my father was out at work on the farm and my mother was always in the kitchen and for some reason the customers never came until it was nearly bed-time; and well after it at Christmas-time and on other unusual days like that. I never saw my mother outside the kitchen in my life and never saw a customer during the day and even at night I never saw more than two or three together. But then I was in bed part of the time and it is possible that things happened differently with my mother and with the customers late at night. My father I do not remember well but he was a strong man and did not talk much except on Saturdays when he would mention Parnell with the customers and say that Ireland was a queer country. My mother I can recall perfectly. Her face was always red and sore-looking from bending at the fire; she spent her life making tea to pass the time and singing snatches of old songs to pass the meantime. I knew her well but my father and I were strangers and did not converse much; often indeed when I would be studying in the kitchen at night I could hear him through the thin door to the shop talking there from his seat under the oil-lamp for hours on end to Mick the sheepdog. Always it was only the drone of his voice I heard, never the separate bits of words. He was a man who understood all dogs thoroughly and treated them like human beings. My mother owned a cat but it was a foreign outdoor animal and, was rarely seen and my mother never took any notice of it. We were happy enough in a queer separate way.’ (The Third Policeman, Penguin Edn. 1986, p.2.)

This is clearly an account of a deeply troubled (even ‘dysfunctional’) rural Irish family whose emotional life is based on a marriage-match between a pub and a farm and whose economic practice is ignominious and demeaning. (What is his mother actually doing with those ‘customers’?) The true grimness and obscenity of the situation is both hidden by the apparent idiocy of the autobiographical narrative and at the same time unscored by it.

The narrator’s language is obviously inept; but, more than that, it is also the register of a culture tragedy that consists in the loss of one language and the failure to assimilate another. This has moral implications also. Just as in the novel, the very reason why the narrator is a murderer serving an eternal sentence in a kind of hell that consists in a continual repetition of the event for which he is condemned, so the cause of the crime itself is a radical deficiency of sensitivity to other people and the natural world itself which finds its primary expression in a broken language.

In this way, the comical language of At Swim-Two-Birds - which measured the gaps between cultural fantasy and modern reality in Ireland - gives way to a tragic register of the predicament of a country which has been scarred by cultural colonialism (that is, the imposition of the English language) but also bruised by its own moral turpitude and the inability to find a form of sensibility which brings humanity back into national life along with national independence.

Viewed in this light, O’Brien’s novel can be viewed as an allegory of Irish national failure, measured against the extraordinary dream of selfhood that was engendered by the literary revival. But, with the excess of imagination that his his hall-mark and his passport to literary immortality, Flann O’Brien provides in The Third Policeman the richest assortment of literary inventions, intellectual wise-cracks, back-answers, jokes and wierd contrivances to be found between the covers of any European novel.

But there is another dimension to the novel, and perhaps a more important one. Through the character of De Selby, the insane philosopher to whose theories of time, light, language and related matters the unnamed narrator sacrifices his own sanity, O’Brien constructs a critique of the scientific world-view which takes as its point of departure Einstein’s theory of relativity and the related atomic theory of matter, hilariously figured as ‘Omnium’ in the novel.

For Flann O’Brien, the chief product of all that was a kind of anti-theological confusion for which the practical equivalent was the ‘hell-bomb’ that was produced by scientists who developed nuclear energy by the light of Einstein’s epoch-making formula E=mc². An obituary on Einstein written by O’Brien for the Irish Times in 1955 makes this abundantly clear. Yet some of the most hilarious business of the novel is based on just this idea: for instance, the idea that a bicycle through use will acquire the gender and personality of its owner.

It remains, then, for the reader to establish the relationship between hilarity and earnestness (or comedy and tragedy) in The Third Policeman. It is first necessary to ask ourselves what the eponymous ‘third policeman’ actually represents? Secular power or divine authority? God or devil? Such matters were not entirely clear in contemporary Ireland where the law had - for instance - summarily executed 72 republicans held prisoner by the Free State in 1923, and where capital punishment was still an active institution.

As a further guide in this matter, it should be remembered also that the fate which threatens the unnamed (or even nameless) narrator was a grim reality for other men such as Corporal McCabe, a soldier who killed his wife in a so-called crime of passion and was executed by hanging in Dublin in 10 Dec. 1926. What preserves his memory today is the curious fact that Samuel Beckett set his story “Dante and the Lobster”, on that very day.

At the conclusion of the story, the leading lady immerses the lobster of the title in a pot of boiling water with the remark, “God help us, it's a quick death”, to which the narrator brielfy adds the final words: ‘it is not’. Something of that grimness attaches to Flann O’Brien’s account of a place or state of punishment prepared for murderers by a literary Irishman, combining the fears of Catholic conscience with the ingenuity of a post-Einsteinian world.

From from such a standpoint, The Third Policeman appears in its proper character as a truly chilling novel. As the title of the American edition declares, Hell is a place that ‘goes round and round’, and in that sense it is the greatest and most serious of Flann O’Brien’s writings, though in another sense the most playful and hilarious also.