From the Archives: December 12th, 1975

When “At Swim-Two-Birds” was published in 1939 the chief masterpieces of modern, avant-garde writing in English were not quite 20 years old; and the main elements of Flann O’Brien’s book were those of its celebrated predecessors. There was the juxtaposition of ancient myth and contemporary reality in order to reveal something about humanity’s past imaginings and present condition. There was the contrast between the banalities of everyday communication and the now suspect but still powerful resources of poetry. And there was the achievement of a form which rejected the old laws of sequence and consequence in favour of a consequentiality which had its own links and tensions.

Flann O’Brien had placed himself unerringly in the central tradition of that literature and he had done so with a single book.

Like all books, it posed the problem of what the author should do next. This was a problem which both the inclusive and the nihilistic strains in the archetypal masterpieces of modern literature had already created for their authors. Joyce’s mistake of direction after “Ulysses” is notorious: Eliot’s difficulty about finding one after “The Wasteland” [sic] almost equally apparent: in the eight years that followed he wrote only one short poem.

“At Swim-Two-Birds” had been a genuine anti-novel and its author’s delight in flouting the restraints and mocking the conventions of the genre had been extreme. What he had done would in any case have rendered either advance or retreat within the boundaries of prose fiction exceptionally difficult (and a retreat into the plotted and mapped placidities of the ordinary novel might even have been the best thing for him) but there were special factors obtaining in his case which must have made it more so.

In U.C.D.. he had acquired a reputation for extraordinary cleverness and virtuosity. However and wherever acquired such reputations tend to turn men of true originality and capacity into mere wits and measurers of effect, dinner-table virtuosos and creatures of unfulfilled promise; and in Dublin, although there are no dinner tables to speak of, they are especially deleterious because the conditions and atmosphere of U.C.D. are reproduced almost exactly among the more or less literate in the town at large.

In any other society an artist such as Brian O’Nolan had now (as Flann O’Brien) shown himself to be would have had a better chance of escaping such an initial disadvantage as having great things expected of him before he had properly begun represented [sic]. Even here a man of his resources might have dismayed his admirers in unexpected ways, but much now conspired against him.

“At Swim-Two-Birds” had attracted no worthwhile published criticism to speak of; and it turns out that it sold in fact 244 copies in the first six months after publication (a fact which may stand as a comment on all Irish success stories whatever, then or now). When its immediate successor, “The Third Policeman”, was rejected by one or more London publishers in the following year the attractions of other modes of expression for an energetic and ambitious man whose attitude to literary form was, to say the least, provisional and experimental must have been increased.

But even “The Third Policeman”, highly praised though it was on its posthumous appearance 27 years later, shows what a trap his masterpiece and his U.C.D. reputation may have conjoined to create for him. Flann O’Brien’s first novel had been, on the surface at least, a brilliantly resourceful and quick-witted book. To some it may have seemed little more. Alternatively, however, it was the sort of work which could be interpreted as having a “meaning”, which is something that criticism is always inclined to search for. If a book as intricately constructed but apparently as pointless as “At Swim-Two-Birds” is to be more than clever, the argument runs, it must be profound. And whether indeed he was influenced by the desire to show that he had a great deal more to offer than the presumed virtuosity of “At Swim-Two-Birds” or not, “The Third Policeman” seems to betray at the very least an anxiety on its author’s part to show that he could write a work which contained an important inner meaning, which was in fact “profound”. The usual device of those who wish to do that is allegory. “The Third Policeman” is allegory.

Read the original here

Selected by Joe Joyce; email fromthearchives@irishtimes.com