Book Review: Flann O’Brien: Contesting Legacies
Laura Ryan, University of Manchester
Ruben Borg, Paul Fagan and Werner Huber (eds.), Flann O’Brien: Contesting Legacies (Cork: Cork University Press, 2014)
Few 20th-century authors have experienced a critical renaissance as spectacular as Brian O’Nolan, who wrote under several pseudonyms during his life (Myles na gCopaleen, George Knowall, Brother Barnabus, Count O’Blather) but is best-known as Flann O’Brien, the nom de plume under which he composed his two most famous works: At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) and The Third Policemen (1967). A proliferation of O’Nolan scholarship since 2000 has considered the Strabane-born author as variously a late modernist and an early postmodernist and aimed to widen the contexts within which he has been considered. Yet the tendency within modernist studies and Irish literary studies to compare O’Nolan (largely unfavourably) with his exiled compatriots James Joyce and Samuel Beckett and to consider him a provincial author and a wasted talent has to some extent endured.
This impressive and wide-ranging collection, edited by Ruben Borg (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Paul Fagan (University of Vienna) and Werner Huber (University of Vienna), looks to challenge these rather limiting views and sets out to address O’Nolan’s ‘polymorphic legacy’. Arising from 100 Myles: The International Flann O’Brien Centenary Conference which took place in 2011 at the University of Vienna, the essays which make up Contesting Legacies offer new perspectives and contexts for O’Nolan’s best-known works as well as casting new critical light upon his Irish-language novel An Béal Bocht (1941) and ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’, the column he wrote (as Myles na gCopaleen) for The Irish Times from 1940 until his death in 1966. Importantly, many of the essays featured focus upon little-known short stories and theatrical pieces including ‘John Duffy’s Brother’ (1940), ‘Two in One’ (1954) and Thirst (1942).
Divided into three parts of roughly equal length, the first section of the volume, entitled ‘Broadening the Canon’, contains essays which examine O’Nolan’s ‘minor’ texts alongside the major novels. Keith Hopper (University of Oxford), author of the seminal Flann O’Brien: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-Modernist (1995), opens the collection with an essay exploring the anxieties and ‘submerged intertextual elements’ at the heart of ‘John Duffy’s Brother’, a story in which the protagonist inexplicably metamorphoses into a train. Reading the 1940 story alongside Joyce’s ‘A Painful Case’ and John Keats’ ‘Upon First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, Hopper suggests how aspects of O’Nolan’s work easily dismissed as merely comical or nonsensical in fact bear upon some key under-recognised strands which recur in his work. Particular attention here is paid to how the train imagery in ‘John Duffy’s Brother’ reveals artistic, religious and sexual anxieties; the word ‘steamer’, Hopper informs us, ‘was also a colloquial Irish term, at the time of the story’s composition, for a male homosexual’.
Marion Quirici (University of Buffalo) goes on to explore how O’Nolan’s metafictional framing functions in his short fiction, observing that ‘[t]he self-reflexive devices that draw attention to the frame also highlight the inevitable loss of authorial control’ and ultimately concluding that for this author ‘[t]hat which interrupts the alleged wholeness of a story is, ultimately, constitutive of the story itself. The mediation is the message.’ Co-editor Paul Fagan also considers O’Nolan’s metafictional strategies in an intriguing essay which draws in Maurice Blanchot’s reading of the myth of Narcissus to consider the narcissistic trope – the self as mise-en-abyme – in ‘John Duffy’s brother’ and ‘Two in One’ (a wonderfully grotesque tale in which a man murders his boss, wears his skin to cover up his crime and is finally arrested for his own murder).
In the second part of the collection, dealing with ‘Inter/National Contexts’, Ute Anna Mittermaier (University of Applied Sciences Technikum Vienna) begins with an enjoyable essay considering O’Nolan’s pseudonymous Irish Times letters. Most often considered an apolitical jester, Mittermaier questions whether letters signed ‘Oscar Love’ (particularly those commenting upon the Spanish Civil War) might have ‘stemmed from O’Nolan’s pen’. John McCourt’s entertaining essay – ‘Myles na gCopaleen: a portrait of the artist as a Joyce scholar’ – stands out in this section. Addressing O’Nolan’s complex relationship with (and to) Joyce, which has long been a tricky knot to untangle for O’Nolan scholars, McCourt (Università Roma Tre) positions O’Nolan as ‘a Joyce reader/promoter/critic/defender/survivor’ who strove to rescue his compatriot from misguided American critics and reclaim him for Ireland. Acknowledging the ‘curiously ambiguous mixture of disdain and admiration for Joyce’s writings’ in his ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ column, McCourt conjectures that much of the contempt for Joyce in this column in fact came from his close friend Niall Montgomery, who often wrote here under O’Nolan’s Myles na gCopaleen pseudonym. At least one such instance of ‘Joyce-bashing’ from ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ merits inclusion here, if only for comic value: ‘What would you think of a man who entered a restaurant, sat down, suddenly whipped up the tablecloth and blew his nose in it? You would not like it – not if you owned the restaurant. That is what Joyce did with our beloved tongue that Shakespeare and Milton spoke.’
Tom Walker’s essay delves into the historical context of The Third Policeman, revealing its indebtedness to ‘the writing of terror’; multiple violent crimes, including the 1929 murder of Timothy O’Sullivan, are posited as probable source material for the novel. This context of Irish terror, Walker (Trinity College Dublin) suggests, brings new significance to the prominent bicycle imagery in the novel. Examinations of republican life-writing by Dan Breen and Ernie O’Malley as well as Frank O’Connor’s contemporary narratives of IRA terror demonstrate that ‘The Third Policeman was being written into a context in which the bicycle was associated with the cultural revival, revolutionary violence and ongoing IRA activity’. Having served as ‘a vehicle for Irish emancipation’ during the War of independence, during the IRA’s campaign the bicycle became ‘an instrument of war’ which ‘enabled violence’.
This middle section, though it contains some of the strongest essays in the volume, might have given more space to the international contexts which formed and responded to O’Nolan’s work. We know, for example (and the editors remind us), that O’Nolan was praised by Jorge Luis Borges and Anthony Burgess; recent scholarship has considered O’Nolan alongside Borges and Burgess as well as Paul McGinley and Georges Perec (amongst others). Yet in Contesting Legacies, only the essay by Ondřej Pilnŷ (Charles University) is specifically concerned with an international context, namely the striking parallels between the French symbolist writer Alfred Jarry’s pataphysics (his science of imaginary solutions) and O’Nolan’s fascination with science. The editors, perhaps foreseeing such a criticism, argue that ‘the critic’s task is not to liberate O’Nolan’s writing from “Gaelic hardship” to position it in “international prosperity”, but rather to explore a body of work that uniquely tests the old lines between stay-at-home conservatism and international experimentalism.’ As adroit and even-handed as this line of argument may be, one feels that the international context deserved more consideration here, especially since one of the volume’s key professed aims is to challenge the idea of O’Nolan as a provincial figure who was ‘not bottled for export’.
The final section, entitled ‘Critical Perspectives’, features essays exploring O’Nolan’s views on science, his gender politics and the law. Thomas Jackson Rice (University of South Carolina) explores the overwhelmingly male and masculine worlds represented in O’Nolan’s work, specifically in The Third Policeman and The Dalkey Archive (1964) and the ‘homoerotic motifs’ often ‘hidden in plain sight’ in these works. Like Hopper, Rice highlights usage of ‘queer’ to denote the relationship between the unnamed narrator of The Third Policeman and his partner in crime, John Divney. In one of the denser but no less stimulating essays here, Maebh Long (University of Waikato) considers the ‘force of law’ in An Béal Bocht, reading O’Nolan’s Irish-language novel as one in which Gaelic-speakers sit outside of the political realm as dehumanised ‘vermin’ and embodiments of Giorgio Agamben’s ‘bare life’.
As always in an edited collection, some essays stand out more than others: Walker’s adroit and fascinating essay will perhaps be a favourite for those most familiar with O’Nolan’s ‘masterpiece’, The Third Policeman. Yet some of the most successful essays here (Hopper’s persuasive offering comes to mind) shift the focus to those of O’Nolan’s works which have (too) long remained unknown to all but the most dedicated ‘Flanneurs’; those yet to enjoy the train-metamorphosis of ‘John Duffy’s Brother’ or the brilliantly bizarre murderous exploits of ‘Two in One’ will surely be convinced to broaden their own reading of O’Nolan.
One of the key problems this collection self-consciously addresses (and in many ways the most interesting aspect of the whole exercise) is signalled in the editors’ introduction: ‘How’, they ask, ‘can we be faithful to a legacy that continually undermines its own reception as a single body of work?’ How, in other words, can literary scholars negotiate the question of O’Nolan’s legacy when he himself was suspicious of ‘the very concept of literary afterlife’? Quite rightly, there are no straightforward answers to these questions; there is no neat, orderly way to account for the life and work of a man who consciously evaded neatness and orderliness.
Necessarily, then, this collection represents not a definitive statement on how O’Nolan and his work should be viewed and interpreted, but a series of provocations which signal possible future avenues of enquiry for O’Nolan studies. Much like O’Nolan’s work itself – which, as Hopper notes, often takes the form of an ‘open-ended text, which invites the reader to participate in the construction of meaning but which resists any single or absolute interpretation’ – this volume opens the door for further considerations of his complex, multivalent and multivocal legacy. Undoubtedly much more work remains to be done, but Contesting Legacies suggests that the editors are probably right to look to the future with ‘unqualified optimism’. One wonders what O’Nolan himself – who often scorned literary scholars and scholarship – would make of a volume like this or of the international conferences his work now fuels. He would be placated at least in part, we might hazard, that Contesting Legacies – though rigorous – is infused with the wonderfully odd, imaginative humour which continues to draw us to his work.
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