A CONFERENCE to mark the centenary of writer Brian O'Nolan's birth got under way last night in Vienna with an art exhibition, film-screening, and a new adaptation of material from his long-running Irish Timescolumn.
The four-day event is entitled 100 Myles in tribute to his newspaper pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen. Academics from the US, Israel, Turkey and many parts of Europe are attending the conference hosted by the centre of Irish studies at the University of Vienna.
The curator of last night's exhibition, Kevin Atherton, said O'Nolan's ideas continued to be a big influence on the visual arts. As an art student in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Atherton discovered O'Nolan's cult debut novel At Swim-Two-Birds,written under the pseudonym Flann O'Brien.
Deranged scientist/philosopher De Selby, who first featured in the follow-up book The Third Policeman, was clearly also an inspiration for some of last night's exhibits, one of which was based on his theory that the phenomenon known as night is caused by accumulations of naturally occurring "black air".
The conference's film programme began with David O'Kane's Babble(2008), a 30-minute piece that imagines Flann O'Brien in a tri-lingual conversation with writers Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges.
Later Liverpool-based academics Gerry Smyth and David Llewellyn rounded off the evening in Charlie P's Irish pub performing a new stage version of The Brother, based on excerpts of Myles's column Cruiskeen Lawn.
At least one former graduate of the University of Vienna featured prominently in his work. The Nobel laureate Erwin Schroedinger was part of a generation of physicists whose radical ideas fed into the pseudoscience of O’Nolan’s comic creations. When Eamon de Valera invited him to Ireland in 1940 to run the Institute of Advanced Studies, Schroedinger was to have an even more direct effect on the writer. Hearing the Austrian had dismissed any logical basis for belief in a first cause, O’Nolan also noted a theory advanced by one of the institute’s Irish academics, arguing that two separate missionaries had brought Christianity to Ireland before being confused as one man, St Patrick. In the guise of Myles na gCopaleen, O’Nolan warned that such scholars risked making Ireland a laughing stock by trying to prove that there were “two St Patricks and no God”.
The conference continues today with a formal opening ceremony.