Assembling Flann O'Brien

Maebh Long

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781441190208
• eBook ISBN: 9781441113351
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Winner of the International Flann O'Brien Society Award for Best Book-Length Study 2014 Flann O'Brien - also known as Brian O'Nolan or Myles na gCopaleen - is now widely recognised as one of the foremost of Ireland's modern authors. Assembling Flann O'Brien explores the author's innovative and experimental work by reading him in relation to some of the 20th century's most important theorists, including Derrida, Agamben, Freud, Lacan and Žižek. Assembling Flann O'Brien offers a detailed study of O'Brien's five major novels – including At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman – as well as his plays, short stories, journalistic output and unpublished archival material. The book presents new theoretical perspectives on his works, exploring his compelling engagements with questions of the proper name, the archive, law, and desire, and the problems of identity, language, sexuality and censorship which acutely troubled Ireland's new state. Combining a wide range of contemporary theory with a sensitivity to the cultural and political context in which the author wrote, Maebh Long opens up entirely new aspects of Flann O'Brien's writings, and explores the ingenious and the problematic within his oeuvre.

1

Fragments of palimpsests

That At Swim-Two-Birds is a fragmented text is a generally accepted truism – Keith M. Booker employs its ‘complex, multistylistic collage of fragments from a variety of different cultural domains’¹ to support a Bakhtinian reading of polyphony and Menippean satire, David Cohen calls its ‘disruptive and fragmentary quality’² exemplary of postmodernism, while for Joshua D. Esty, At Swim-Two-Birds shows O’Brien to be ‘the inventor of a wilfully fragmentary postcolonial form’.³ Joseph Brooker reads it as ‘a collection of fragments, disjointed almost by design . . . open to chance and contingency’,⁴ while for Dennell Downum its fragments position it as a late modernist text eschewing ‘Joycean notions of artistic genius and unity, openly embracing instead an aesthetic based on literary borrowings and fragmentation’.⁵ For Peter Childs, the fragments of At Swim-Two-Birds make it the perfect text with which to conclude his Routledge guide to Modernism, as its interlocking units see the

omniscient perspective of the realist text . . . broken up into fragments as narrative styles, from literary history and life, are juxtaposed with each other. . . . Published in the year the war began, At Swim-Two-Birds can serve as one marker of the end of the Modernist revolution. . . . Through formal and linguistic experimentation the Modernists had overturned previous modes of representation, thereby laying the foundations for postmodernist writers to undermine the very categories of “character,” “representation,” “reality” and even “literature.”⁶

The fragments that At Swim-Two-Birds has shored against its ruins share with Eliot’s The Waste Land a radical aesthetics, structural experimentation, unconventional chronology, scepticism towards a coherent identity, varied quotation and allusion, uncertain narrative frames, contaminated planes of reality and a tendency to do everybody in different voices. But while the fragments of Eliot’s poem may be understood as the splintering and piecemeal reassembling of society, O’Brien’s novel presents the fragments of a whole that never existed. This is not to argue that Eliot presumes that English pre-war society was a closed, ordered monad, but that for O’Nolan modern Irish society was always already a collection of fragments, and as such his particles pertain to the absence of a pre-existing totalized, independent unit. For Eliot, fragments represent a modern dissolution; O’Brien’s fragments more radically point to the permanent absence of any form of meaningful identity or totality. Irish society was being assembled from reactions to colonialism, the propaganda of revivalism, the strictures of Catholicism, the vibrancy of international modernism and the values of Victorianism, and O’Nolan and his friends were themselves caught between despising the ‘Catholic triumphalism, the pious philistinism, the Puritan morality and the peasant or petit bourgeois outlook of the new state’⁷ and being unable to shake themselves free of Catholicism or Ireland. There was no stable whole from which modern Ireland had come, and the past(s) it was drawing upon to create an identity were – arguably – diverse fictions.

The fragments of At Swim-Two-Birds are and are not colloquial fragments; they are not the shards produced by the rupturing of a pre-existing totality, as while they are the result of extensive editing and abridging, the earliest draft does not represent a stable, composite, completed whole. Rather, the fragmentation found in At Swim-Two-Birds is a plural speech of dissymmetry and irreversibility. It is a non-progressive series of beginnings that never present a secure foundation as there is always something that came before. It is a non-linear series of endings that never offer closure as there is always something more to come. Each fragment is both wholly independent as it functions as a separate aside, and absolutely part of a whole, as it is a section in a larger work. It is the fragmentation of a work in progress, where process is privileged over product, as there can be no static result. Thus, vignettes take precedent over plot, and narrative is a disordered series of snapshots. Contexts, spaces, temporality, genres, frames, form, themes, references, quotations all become contaminated, revealing not a homogeneous mess, but a deep interconnectedness, paradoxicality and philosophical complexity to the ‘story-teller’s book web’ (AS 19) and to Ireland itself. Thus the mode of fragmentation that O’Brien uses in At Swim-Two-Birds can be seen to be a modernist reworking of the German Romantic Fragment.

Fragments

As Friedrich Schlegel famously pronounced, and as O’Nolan would have no doubt agreed: ‘It is equally fatal for the mind to have a system and to have none. It will simply have to decide to combine the two’.⁸ The German Romantic work was the hyphenation of poetry and philosophy, system and non-system, reason and chaos, the playful and the earnest, the objective and the subjective, the real and the ideal. Schlegel argued that of necessity the world cannot be presented in logical, rational arguments – ‘Verily, it would fare badly with you if . . . the whole world were ever to become wholly comprehensible in earnest’⁹ – and as a result the work must reflect this chaotic excess. But while espousing the paradoxical, the romantic work must also be what Derrida termed a poetico-literary performativity or contaminated performative/constative, that is, a work which describes/critiques itself as it presents itself, that is, always, in ‘artist reflection and beautiful self-mirroring . . . simultaneously poetry and the poetry of poetry’.¹⁰ In performing what it describes and reflecting on itself, the romantic, ironic work was not simply a production, but an enactment of production, a reflexive autoproduction or autopoiesis. However, the reflexivity or self-consciousness of the romantic work operates through a concave lens – it does not tend towards a single point, but diverges out in excess. In other words, the text does not circle in on itself in a closed loop, but expands outwards in each reading. As such, while At Swim-Two-Birds is a work that is deliberately, chaotically resistant to clear exposition, it is also a text that theorizes on what a work should be – offering manifestoes, explanations, commentaries and exegeses. But the formula that this ‘self-evident sham’ (AS 25) proffers does not enable the reader to plumb the depths of the text and rationalize it to the point of completing any necessary critical elucidation. Instead, it emphasizes the complexity that is to come, showing the task of the reader not to be the solving of a logical puzzle, but its extension.

In his manifesto, the student narrator complains that the novel overly apes realism and is, therefore, ‘inferior to the play inasmuch as it lack[s] the outward accidents of illusion, frequently inducing the reader to be outwitted in a shabby fashion and caused to experience a real concern for the fortunes of illusory characters’ (AS 25). So the narrator writes novel-as-Brechtian-play, with the fragments providing the appropriate Verfremdungseffekt. The fragments explaining tropes employed and describing particular foodstuffs, denials, chuckles, tones, noises, exclamations and so on operate in order to provide not only an interpretative exegesis of an action, and thereby satisfy the German Romantic wish for a fragmentary work to contain self-reflection, but also stage directions whose undercutting of novelistic conventions shatters the effects of realism.

The perfect Romantic work was a work of fragments, so much so that the fragment became ‘the romantic genre par excellence’.¹¹ It was, however, the perfect genre because a fragment is ostensibly not a genre at all; a fragment can be any length, style or structure. The fragment is thus a form of multiplicity and contamination, or, like the Good Fairy, a formless form, a ‘form that, being all forms – that is, at the limit, being none at all – does not realise the whole, but signifies it by suspending it, even breaking it’.¹² Comprising discrete sections, a fragmentary text is a cacophony, a plural speech of dissymmetry and irreversibility without unifying core or centralizing structure. To write in fragments is to write so that ‘the continuity of the movement of writing might let interruption as meaning, and rupture as form, intervene fundamentally’.¹³ At Swim-Two-Birds is thus a stately pleasure dome which contains the interruption of Coleridge’s fevered writing by the man from Porlock, rather than explaining it in the preface. It is the form of a delimited limitlessness where the lines between generic distinctions, stylistic conventions and narrative frames break down. The stylistic mutability of the fragmentary text resonates throughout At Swim-Two-Birds – Clissman notes thirty-six different styles within the text¹⁴ – as we move from the alliteration and assonance of Middle Irish verse – ‘The arms to him were like the necks of beasts, ball swollen with their bunched-up brawnstrings and blood-veins’ (AS 14–15) – to the self-consciously formal – ‘my dim room rang with the iron of fine words and the names of great Russian masters were articulated with fastidious intonation’ (AS 24). We step between Bildungsroman, Western, courtroom drama, mythological saga, fairy tale, modernism, naturalism and realism, in a text comprising extracts, quotations, myths, dialogues, high and low artistic forms. Sweeping throughout the text is the shape-shifting man-bird Sweeny, whose form is never clear: a man wholly transformed into a bird, or a man with the powers of a bird? His is a text of different fragments, different dates and different sources, a text reused and rewritten throughout At Swim-Two-Birds. At Swim-Two-Birds is not merely a novel of intertextual connections, but a novel of fragments that interrogate and question form and genre. These differing styles and voices, be they representative of a post-modern refusal of metanarratives, a post-colonial rejection of imperial decree, a Marxist denunciation of capitalist commodity fetish or a Bakhtinian polyphony, are collected through the open, non-hierarchical form of the fragment. This is not to argue that At Swim-Two-Birds is non-judgemental and non-partisan, but rather that the refusal of a fragmentary text to absolutely or finally position itself enables O’Brien – and Myles in Cruiskeen Lawn – to be judgemental and partisan from all sides. As Anthony Cronin wrote, accidentally elucidating the fragmentary: ‘Myles na gCopaleen will usually be found on several sides of a question at once’.¹⁵

Echoing the name under which various sections of Finnegans Wake were first published, At Swim-Two-Birds is referred to as a ‘work in progress’ by the majority of critics.¹⁶ A work in constant progress it undeniably is, both for O’Nolan, who wrote fragments and showed them to Niall Sheridan, and for the narrator, who wrote fragments and showed them to Brinsley. For the German Romantics, a work written in fragments always took this form, as discrete units were constantly shaped into a protean, chimerical whole: ‘work in progress henceforth becomes the infinite truth of the [fragmentary] work’.¹⁷ As the totality that the fragments created was always open and changing, what was prioritized was not the creation of a static finished artefact, but instead the act of production – poiesis – itself. The German Romantics emphasized the process rather than the product, as neither the act of writing nor of reading generates a permanent, unchanging object. This privileging of process rather than product is performed with increasing hyperbole in At Swim-Two-Birds and throughout the Cruiskeen Lawn. Within the relative realism of the narrator’s autobiographical fragments it means that the narrator doesn’t enjoy re-reading his work, unless it is to garner praise from his friends: ‘My literary or spare-time compositions, written not infrequently with animation and enjoyment, I always found tedious of subsequent perusal. This sense of tedium is so deeply seated in the texture of my mind that I can rarely suffer myself to endure the pain of it’ (AS 60). As his year meanders, so too does his text, until it ends – at the level of the Trellis saga – quite arbitrarily, in a way that perfectly performs the process/product hierarchy: Teresa burns Trellis’s manuscript, and the work is unworked.

The trope of a writing that produces not product but immediate effect is taken to greater extreme in the torture of Trellis, where persecution and writing about that persecution become identical; writing is the production not of text but of manifest effects, and as such writing has immediate physical and ontological implications. Writing is radically performative rather than constative, that is, productive rather than descriptive, as it is a series of stage directions that create the action described, and which are thereby subject to temporal progression. The act of writing becomes an act of directing that has immediate effect; should writing cease, or focus on a different event/character, the subject of the former passage may rest during what appears to function as ‘real’ time. Furthermore, once written, events cannot be re-read. Hence, when Orlick takes a break from writing and leaves the room, Shanahan, Lamont and Furriskey are troubled by the delay, as they feel that it will allow Trellis momentary respite – ‘Gentlemen, said Shanahan, we’re taking all the good out of it by giving him a rest, we’re letting him get his wind. Now that’s a mistake’ (AS 181). So they take up the pen, and beginning where Orlick ceased, subject Trellis to prosaic and unliterary torture until he returns. To prevent Orlick from discovering their actions, they write: ‘the Pooka worked more magic till himself and Trellis found themselves again in the air in their own bodies, just as they had been a quarter of an hour before that, none the worse for their trying ordeals’ (AS 183). As the characters have been thus repositioned, Orlick is unable to discern the events of the preceding period and continues writing. In a phantasmagorical mode of literary creativity, and as a manifestation of the ‘work in progress’, this writing creates not just words on a page but ‘living’ characters and ‘real’ events that are materialized in the act of writing.¹⁸

The most important characteristic of the fragment is its paradoxical status of incomplete completion. The romantic fragment is not an unfinished work or a section torn from a totalized whole, but a deliberate form simultaneously sovereign while calling to an indeterminate completion. As...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Fragments of palimpsests
• 2 Driven to repeat
• 3 Ireland on trial
• 4 A hard life for women
• 5 Archival fantasies
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright