Conference Review: Palimpsests: The V International Flann O’Brien Conference

Andrew Ferguson, University of Maryland

2011 marked the centennial of the birth of Brian O’Nolan, known more formally under his pen names Flann O’Brien, Myles na gCopaleen, and a host of others, including undoubtedly some yet to be discovered. The First Century of Flann was celebrated with a symposium convened by the International Flann O’Brien Society, with subsequent conferences following every two years. The 2019 event was the fifth of these and the first to be held in O’Nolan’s Dublin—in the O’Brien Centre for Science, even, at his alma mater of University College Dublin (albeit on the suburban Belfield campus rather than among the pubs of his student days, and the O’Brien in question is Irish billionaire Denis, a person rather less worthy of dedicated study).

The chosen theme was Palimpsests, a critical chestnut with a heritage dating back to Thomas de Quincey if not earlier, yet well suited to an author who could hardly put pen to paper (or, as explored excellently in Maebh Long’s (University of Waikato) keynote, finger to typewriter key)F without enveloping himself in personae. But, in what would become a feature of the event, Katherine Ebury’s (University of Sheffield) opening plenary turned away from questions of authorial identity and towards other aspects of layering within O’Brien’s fiction—specifically here the interplay of various genres in The Third Policeman, with Ebury arguing both for crime fiction as the foundation for all the rest, and for O’Brien as a sort of unrecognized intermediary between Edgar Allan Poe and Agatha Christie, channeling the ideas of psychoanalyst Theodor Reik. It was a packed but lively talk, setting the stage for a conference where nearly every paper lit out for unexpected or underexplored corners of O’Nolan’s work and life.

As for the work—and I’ll make apologies up front here to all those I missed; the programming was generally dual-track and I’ve let my bilocation lessons lapse—I took away much from Yuta Imazeki’s (University College Dublin) look at Irish radio and At Swim-Two-Birds, with the headings and the jumble of subjects and layers of narrative exemplary of how early broadcasts would have been received. Scott Eric Hamilton (University College Dublin) provided a cross-section of O’Nolan’s use of zombies, from a few direct mentions in his letters and Cruiskeen Lawn columns, to the uneasy dead in several of the short stories, to the ‘bogus corpses’ raised up by de Selby in The Dalkey Archive. Dieter Fuchs (University of Vienna) started from the mechanism of the bicycle in The Third Policeman, and worked outwards kinetically, as it were, to arrive at the figures of the lemniscate and the Möbius loop for the workings of that curious novel; James Alexander Fraser (Maynooth University) followed with information on how bicycling could have been a ‘treasonous’ activity, as the riding of English-manufactured machines (as they mostly were at the time) could cause the transfer via atomic theory of particles of Englishness into one’s own Irish frame.

About O’Nolan’s life, there were entire panels on his career as a newspaperman, his complicated relations with the Irish language, and the discovery of new archives outside the familiar repositories. Elliott Mills (Trinity College Dublin) dug into the writer’s civil service, considering how the impersonation of various official registers might have paid dividends in his fiction and newspaper writing. And James Bacon (Independent Scholar) took everyone on a tour of all things connecting Brian O’Nolan to the railway system, all while wearing (with permission) his own train driver’s uniform. And there was much about his afterlife as well, from the creative works using O’Brien as a jumping off point—in particular the the brain-bending Flanntasmagoria! multimedia art installation assembled by David, Edward, and Joanna O’Kane that took over the inside of Boston College Ireland—to the considerable scholarship on the translation of his works. A keynote by Erika Mihálysca (Babeș-Bolyai University) and several other panels besides focused on his rendering into other languages, while Yaeli Greenblatt (University of Jerusalem) looked at his rendering into other media, particularly the 2012 graphic novel and 2018 animated film versions of The Poor Mouth. (The screening of the latter proved to be another of the many highlights of the event.)

But in many ways it was a conference in celebration of Maebh Long’s contributions to the field. Her plenary talk brought together the media theory and personal practice strands of the conference, placing both in conversation with the ongoing posthumanist turn in Flann studies. Noting that O’Nolan associated the typewriter primarily with the spontaneous generation of errors and puns, Long visited the contested sites of writing in At Swim-Two-Birds, finding it ultimately to be ‘literature about the cessation of literature’: an unwriting where modernism tips the hand on its own death drive, moving back away from new inscriptive technologies like the typewriter back towards the pen, and ultimately toward nothing at all. It was a pyrotechnic combination of theory and archival work, a model for keynotes. When you factor in also the number of speakers whose talks drew upon her edited version of The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien, and it is evident why a panel of scholars once again recognized Long’s contributions to Flann O’Brien studies with the highest award the Society has to offer.

What’s most exciting, perhaps, is that Long is just one of a number of critics whose works are enabling scholarly investigations into O’Nolan at a depth and intensity unimaginable only a few years earlier. The conference launch reception on the first night at the famed Hodges Figgis bookstore confirmed the rude health of the endeavour: not only was the house packed, but it also saw the announcement of two further O’Brien conferences in 2021 and 2023: the Flanneurs—or is that Mylesians—or perhaps Flannoraks?—will march on. And if this event is any guide they will have in their numbers a host of culturally influential artists; this Dublin conference alone saw readings from Anne Enright and Patrick McCabe, and an interview with the sharply hilarious podcaster, rapper, and fabulist, Blindboy Boatclub.

It has never been a bad time to pick up the works of Brian O’Nolan. But it’s possible also that, 108 years on from his birth, there’s never been a better time to get started.

THE MODERNIST REVIEW