Paul and Toby explore human and nonhuman worlds in An Béal Bocht, the politics of Flann O’Brien’s comedy, the history of the International Flann O’Brien Society and Paul’s interest in hoaxes.
Toby: Welcome everyone to another episode of Radio Myles, the podcast poised between the pub and peer review which seeks to intrigue, entertain, and maybe change your perspective on a writer known commonly as Flann O’Brien. I’m your host, Toby Harris, and this podcast is made with the support of Birkbeck College, University of London.
I’m very pleased to have with me today Dr. Paul Fagan, a figure who is absolutely central to Flann O’Brien studies. It’s a real privilege to have him on the podcast. I think together with the other co-founder of the International Flann O’Brien Society, Ruben Borg, he has done more than any other person to develop the field of Flann O’Brien studies over the past decade, although it is far from his only area of study.
Paul is an Irish research postdoctoral fellow at Maynooth University. An elected member of the International James Joyce [00:01:00] Foundation Board of Trustees and a co-founder of the International Flann O’Brien Society. He is the founding general editor of the Parish Review, the open access journal of Flann O’Brien Studies, which is published twice a year by the Open Library of Humanities.
He is a co-editor of Irish Modernism Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities with John Greaney and Tamara Radak. And also Stage Irish: Performance, Identity, Cultural Circulation with Dieter Fuchs and Radak as well. As well as four well received edited volumes on Flann O’Brien from Cork University Press. He is currently finalising a monograph on Irish literary hoaxes and edited collections on Flann O’Brien and the Nonhuman, that’s with Katharine Ebury and John Greany, and Finnegans Wake, Human and Nonhuman Histories, which is with Richard Barlow, as well as developing research projects on representations of nonhuman skin in modernist writing and celibacy in Irish writing 1860s to 1950s.
Paul: Well, thanks, Toby, for this very kind and generous introduction.
Well done on getting through it. I hope the listener got through it as well. It’s yeah, it’s a real honor and a pleasure to be on the [00:02:00] show. Thank you for having me on.
Toby: There’ll be some listeners listening to this podcast because they have indeed never read Flann O’Brien.
You know, we’ve already had several cases about people kind of getting into Flann O’Brien for the first time by listening and then going out and buying the books. So For the benefit of those new listeners, but also, you know, for the benefit of the listeners more generally, can you give us your take on a thumbnail sketch of Flann O’Brien Brian O’Nolan Myles na gCopaleen etc etc etc
Paul: Yeah I mean, there’s a lot to say about O’Nolan. He’s such a multifaceted writer who wrote in so many genres. under lots of, in lots of different media, under the guise of lots of personae and pseudonyms. I’m sure we’ll get into all of this in more detail, we’ll get under the hood on it.
So the biographical author was born Brian O’Nolan, or Brian Ó Nualláin in Straban in County Tyrone in 1911. hE studied nature poetry in Irish at the University College Dublin, where he starts to kind of become Known locally [00:03:00] as part of a group of UCD writers who write in this very absurdist and rambunctious style, for example, in the short lived Dublin Monthly magazine Blather.
And this kind of communal, disruptive, rambunctious spirit starts to spill over into the pages of the Irish Times in the late 1930s in a series of mocking letters to the editor. Under a series of pen names and so on and so forth. However, he’s probably most well known by the two main pseudonyms under which he wrote in what maybe we can call the second phase of his career.
As Flann O’Brien, he wrote what I think are clearly, to my mind, at least two of the funniest and perhaps strangest modernist novels. At Swim-Two-Birds in 1939 and The Third Policeman, which is written in 1940, but first published posthumously in 1967. And then also as Myles na gCopaleen, he wrote the fantastic, and I [00:04:00] suppose fantastical, satirical column Cruiskeen Lawn in the Irish Times from 1940 until his death on April Fool’s Day in 1966.
So this Myles na gCopaleen is also the name under which he published his sole Irish-language novel An Béal Bocht. So I was trying to think about how to do this, and to try and capture what I think is interesting about him in this thumbnail sketch. And one of the things that I’ve had to do over the last decade of the running the society is, you know, schedule a lot of conferences and events for very different audiences.
And I’m always struck at the difficulty of kind of pinning him down or of presenting different O’Nolans to different audiences or pitching them in different ways. And I remember at the 2017 society conference in Salzburg, we had a series of events and one was a live performance by Val O’Donnell, where he did this kind of live stage presentation of the best bits and the set pieces from the Myles na gCopaleen columns, [00:05:00] which were very charming and witty and, you know, full of expertly set of punchlines and groan worthy puns.
And then as another part of the schedule, we have a screening of Kurt Palms film adaptation of At Swim-Two-Birds, which is this very kind of strange and avant-garde film, very Brechtian or Lynchian, very challenging in I think the best kind of way. And what I remember being struck by at the conference was that if you didn’t know that Flann O’Brien and Myles na gCopaleen were pseudonyms for the same author, there’s just literally no way on earth you would assume that these two very different pieces were adapted from the same source.
So I think this, this multifaceted nature of his output is really what’s fascinating about him and it’s one of the main ambitions of the society to cast more critical and scholarly, but perhaps also public light on this kind of fascinating diversity of his writing, even in many genres beyond the novels and columns.
He also wrote some great short stories, in my opinion. [00:06:00] ‘John Duffy’s Brother’ and ‘Two-in-One’ are particularly good. He also had a late career return to novels with The Hard Life and The Dalkey Archive in the 1960s, and he wrote some really interesting plays, teleplays, radio scripts, sitcoms, and so on, which I think can all give us a new point of access to mid century Irish writing and institutional politics, but also tell us more about the author or cast him in a different light.
Toby: I remember those two, the performance of Val O’Donnell and a screening, by Kurt Palm’s At Swim-Two-Birds at that conference. And having the same feeling of how on earth can this be the output of the same person.
And that, that incredible multiplicity and of course, Brian O’Nolan himself discusses compartmentalization of the personality. It’s quite a striking feature, isn’t it? And I think it’s what makes Flann O’Brien so interesting sometimes so difficult, as you said, to, to summarize or [00:07:00] present, and seemingly endless in scope.
You can just explore all these different facets, but it probably tells us something more broadly, doesn’t it? He’s almost coming out into the open with the truth, which I think is true of many writers and artists and figures, that they have many lives. They don’t just have one life, one solid persona.
Paul: Yeah, exactly. One is not only not oneself, but one is not only one self with multiple selves within oneself and so on. .
Toby: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So okay. So the excitement is building people are ready.
New listeners are now completely besotted and intrigued.
Paul: My job is done.
Toby: We’re gonna discuss a passage. So if you could read us a passage that you’ve been thinking about recently, we’ll talk about that and, and hopefully shed further light on on the writing.
Paul: So, yeah, great. Thanks, Toby. I’ve decided to read a passage about the Long Dance. from chapter four of An Béal so a caveat here is that I’m reading from Patrick Power’s [00:08:00] English language translation of O’Nolan’s Irish original, and I’m just, I’m going to skip over a couple of bits, so it’s a tiny bit abridged. However I still think this is a good passage to introduce O’Nolan’s absurdist but very sharp-edged gallows humour.
And also his very careful modulation of tone, which I think personally is his best quality as a writer. And maybe it’s a scene in which the two voices that we were kind of sketching out here, the satirist Myles na gCopaleen and the modernist Flann O’Brien come closest together. So the only setup you need here is that we’re on the eternally impoverished Gaeltacht or Irish speaking island of Corca Dorcha off the west coast of Ireland and a feis or sort of a Gaelic festival is being held to parade the Corca Dorchans in front of the various revivalists and ethnographers, who have come from Galway and Dublin from the mainland of the island to see this. So there’s lots of this parading of how truly and [00:09:00] authentically Gaelic everyone and everything is on the island for the benefit of these Gaeilgeoirí.
So you get the picture. Okay, here’s the passage.
When the last word had been said from the platform about Gaelic, the revelry and tumult of the Fesh began. The President presented a silver medal as a prize for him who was most in earnest about Gaelic. Five competitors were entered for that competition. Early in the day, they commenced speaking Gaelic with all their might and without interruption in the stream of talking, while they discursed only about Gaelic.
By afternoon, the sweetness and the sense had almost completely departed from their speech and all that was audible were nonsensical chatterings and rough, inarticulate grunts. At fall of darkness, one man collapsed on the ground. Another fell asleep, but not silent. And a third fellow was born home, stricken by brain [00:10:00] fever, which carried him off to the other life before morning.
Eight more died on the same day from the excess of dancing and scarcity of food. The Dublin gentleman said that no Gaelic dance was as Gaelic as the long dance, and that it was Gaelic according to its length, and truly Gaelic whenever it was truly long. Whatever the length of time needed for the longest long dance, it is certain it was trivial in comparison with the task.
We had in Corkadorka on that day. The dance continued until the dancers drove their lives out through the soles of their feet and eight died during the course of the fesh. Due to both the fatigue caused by the revels and the truly Gaelic famine that was ours always, they could not be suckered when they fell on the rocky dancing floor and upon my soul.
Short was their tarrying on this particular area. Because they went their way to eternity [00:11:00] without more ado. Even though death snatched many fine people from us, the events of the Fesh went on, sturdily and steadily. We were ashamed to be considered not strongly in favour of Gaelic, while the President’s eye was upon us.
Toby: I think it’s a great passage to choose. You have some particular points of interest in this I’m, I’m sure which we’ll, we’ll come on to but I want to draw out how this, this condenses something quite core about the double edged and brutal satire of the novel overall, in which we are taking Irish dancing, and this apparently Gaelic tradition of a Long Dance.
And then we’re setting it in the context of the hungry and you know, impoverished inhabitants of Corca Dorcha without good footwear, without the right, you know, footwear to sustain such a Long Dance. And then what you have is this quite disturbing [00:12:00] scene. of people falling down dead while dancing, and it’s definitely lightened by the obvious humor and jokes and there’s an interesting recurrence of the number eight in this passage throughout, which you might maybe have some light to shed on that, but it is nevertheless, I find it quite disturbing, and I, I was immediately drawn to this passage on studying this novel because It resonates in very dark ways with a whole set of events and, in particular, there was a common occurrence in the, Nazi persecution of the Jews in, you know, in Central Europe and Eastern Europe to also force dances like this for long periods of time. so I, I’m really interested to hear what you have to say about it, because as a passage, it condenses the satire and really makes it clear the kind of satirical movement that’s happening here.
Paul: So thanks, Toby. That’s a really rich setup. I’ll try and pick up on those points in [00:13:00] turn. So in terms of tone, yeah, I agree: it’s a very disturbing, but then strangely comic scene. It’s sort of unsettling in its kind of comic vision, its comic tone and so on. And I think that’s something that’s common across O’Nolan’s writing. It’s a kind of a comic tone that tends to unsettle rather than to comfort . And I know this is a common response to his texts.
I know this from teaching The Third Policeman where I asked students if the book was funny, and they were like, “that was supposed to be funny?”. They found this very horrifying, terrifying, nightmarish in a way, which scenes, which to me were very funny. And I know that when O’Nolan sent his short story, “Two-in-One”, to a French publisher, the publisher said he couldn’t place it because he couldn’t figure out what was the tone. He says, it seems like you’re presenting this as a comedy, but in fact, this is a horror so yes, this scene captures this quality very well, I think. And I think clearly there’s a satirical function to the scene, which is not too hard to sort of [00:14:00] extract from it, right?
It’s targeting these kinds of Irish cultural and institutional identifications of authentic national identity and this obscene attempt to leverage cultural capital out of real enforced suffering by turning poverty and death into this kind of folksy public event.
I think the satire is not too hard to access. But I agree with you, there’s something that exceeds this satirical, moral, propositional framework in the scene, it’s very extra, you know, it doesn’t need to go that hard, but it does, and so on. And I think if, if I think about where this comes from, it’s because there’s this very absurd decorum of the event, which means that nobody can stop even as the bodies are collapsing around them. And I think this is something that’s essential to O’Nolan’s comic tone, to the politics of his gallows humor, his sort of identification with comedy as the correct political approach to [00:15:00] suffering and injustice rather than tragedy. So rather than an impulse towards tragedy which nobilizes it, he shows, he displays how obscene and how grotesque it is and confronts you with it and this is unsettling as well as comic. And yeah, and to pick up on the point you were saying about the Nazi comparison, I don’t have anything directly to add to that direct comparison. But it’s very interesting to me. It resonates with the reason why I’ve been thinking about this, this excerpt recently, because I’m working on a chapter, which is for a book called Ethical Crossroads in Modernism.
And my chapter is about analyzing the representation of apocalypse in An Béal Bocht and the way I’ve sort of gone about the approach I’ve taken to this is to read An Béal Bocht through Julia Kristeva’s concept of the laughing or carnivalesque apocalypse. In her book, Powers of Horror, Kristeva writes at length about the [00:16:00] concept of abjection. So she thinks about abjection as this kind of subjective horror that we suffer, that we experience when we’re confronted by something that defies known boundaries, or troubles categories and categorization in such a way that causes our whole system of meaning to break down.
Or like, you know, the difference between self and others starts to collapse . So, you know, things like like a zombie, who is, let’s say, both dead and alive, and neither dead nor alive. It can’t be categorized. It defies boundaries. It produces this subjective horror of abjection in us.
So in this context Kristeva becomes fascinated with the work of the French writer, Céline, who writes about a series of These very violent, post Holocaust, post World War, apocalyptic scenarios [00:17:00] in this very unsentimental, almost seemingly nihilistic style. But what strikes Kristeva is how the tone of these books pairs horror of objection with what she calls a kind of piercing laughter. his writing is what she calls a laughing, godless apocalypse. This is an apocalypse without a function, you know, it’s not a fulfillment of a historical narrative, it’s not a purging, you know, a purging of society to start again. It’s just an eternal, circular suffering with no glory and no odes, but which is rendered comic. And that’s what she finds so interesting about it. It’s scenes of violence, blood and death, human beings caught kind of flush with their animality but treated with this comic tone. And what Kristeva finds interesting, what Kristeva argues, is that this [00:18:00] opens up a different kind of ethical approach to apocalyptic writing, right?
Where for Kristeva, apocalyptic writing is very ideological. It’s very much about identifying what’s degenerate and wrong and purging society of this degeneracy so it can start again. And many modernists… writers are complicit in this, if you think about a number of modernist writers who supported fascism and things like this.
And what she says is that in order to be ethical, you need to not buy into the myth of the apocalypse, but to laugh at it in this kind of godless way. And I think maybe this, or at least what I’m trying to work through is how this scene of the Long Dance is doing something similar, right? We were just talking about how I think it rejects a tragic view and, in order to foreground the politics of a comic representation of grotesque obscenity, but there’s also an ethical component to this. What I think is very important for appreciating O’Nolan’s writing [00:19:00] is that he treats the comic very seriously. You know, he thinks about the comic as a political mode, an aesthetic mode, but also an ethical mode. And across An Béal Bocht, there is this kind of, identification with the abject or the other within all the scenes of the Irish as animals and so on.
And so I think that it would be interesting to extend this way of thinking about it and put it back into this perhaps fascist context and particularly where a number of critics have argued that, you know, fascism and modernist writing have a lot more in common than people think. They’re both about thinking about modernity as being kind of a time of degeneration and some radical break has to happen to restore a connection to tradition and so on and so forth.
So it would be really interesting to expand it to this context if you have any thoughts about that, Toby.
Toby: It’s the reason why this connection comes to mind is [00:20:00] much later than this, well actually not that much later, just five or six years later, Brian O’Nolan as a civil servant writes this unpublished essay, “The Pathology of Revivalism”, and he talks about the Irish language.
And he says “I suppose it would be possible to eliminate the English language if you had enough guns and rope to do so.” So he directly makes this comparison, this uncomfortable comparison between cultural nationalism and the kind of genocidal politics that had, you know, taken hold of, of so much of Europe at that time.
And so I end up now reading this text in that light.
Paul: Yeah, and he does write quite a lot about the fascist tendencies in the Irish language movement and in Irish politics at the time. I know you’ve written about this very well. Your research is excellent on this. Also, I’m sorry, I just wanted to pull up.
Kristeva’s description of the laughing apocalypse because I think it’s what it was what caught my attention and made me think about this. She describes the laughing apocalypse as quote, “music, [00:21:00] rhythm, rigadoon, without end, for no reason.” And I think that’s could be a perfect, perfect summary of the Long Dance.
And the without end also makes me wonder about what you brought up about the idea of the recurring figure of the eight, because obviously eight is a symbol of infinity. In An Béal Bocht, they’re always talking about how ” our likes will not be seen again”, and we’re at the end of the world, the end of Corca Dorcha, the end of a tradition, the end of a way of living, the end of a language. But this never comes, they’re just trapped in this perpetual suffering, this eternal suffering. And this is something about this, it’s a godless apocalypse with no end, which is rendered comic through O’Nolan’s tone and style, I think.
Toby: That’s a, that’s a wonderful reading of the significance of the of the number eight there as a miniature emblem of the the amazing formal tendency of [00:22:00] O’Nolan’s work to construct these worlds that are continuous and infinitely repeating within themselves.
Paul: Yeah, I mean, we, of course, we see it in The Third Policeman where he’s in this circular hell. But it also happens in An Béal Bocht, right? Where he, at the end, he meets his father, who’s just finishing a jail term, and he’s going in to do the same jail term. There’s this cyclical quality to the overall book as well.
Toby: I’m tempted to leave it there, but I need to, I need to ask you another question about, about this passage, Paul. So I’m, I’m sorry about that. You shouldn’t have chosen such a, such an important and interesting passage.
Paul: I, I apologize to you when the listeners… ,
Toby: I want to talk about how , so firstly we need to highlight that we are reading from the the Power translation of this text published in 1973. The original and therefore, the text available for the first, you know, quarter decade of its existence was, was an Irish.
We won’t, that’s for a future episode to talk about the different iterations and mutations of [00:23:00] that edition. So, the language context is, is, it can sometimes be a bit distracting because in a sense it is this dominant context, but it’s definitely worth acknowledging. I think the way to make this accessible to listeners is of course to read the English translation.
And in fact I think this, my personal opinion I qualify that as only my personal opinion, is that a passage you read is where… Power does great justice, I think, to the Irish original. So, but I didn’t necessarily want to ask about about the translation, but rather about the immediate context in which this is a feis in which a visiting Gaeilgeoir, the President, the Uachtarán, has come to preside and, prior to this passage, he gives this incredible and ridiculous speech, which is all about the the Gaelicness of speaking in Gaelic about Gaelic matters. And it’s just this endlessly recursive loop that’s really, really funny. to, to read. The feis is being held in this [00:24:00] fictional Gaeltacht region, Corca Dorcha, because that’s where Gaelic is still spoken, of course, that’s where Irish is still spoken, that’s the idea, but then if we look at how the, how the feis proceeds and it’s, it’s been devised by characters in the novel as a means to bring money into the, into the area, it’s a kind of devious plan, but then look at what happens, look at how that event proceeds. When we turn to the the actual native inhabitants of the Gaeltacht region, of this fictional Gaeltacht region, they are not called upon to speak, but are called on to dance, an activity which, of course, does not require speaking, and indeed dance to death, you know, dance until they are, as the text says a few times, they have no skin left on their feet.
So that’s, I, I think this is one of the areas where as an Irish-language novel being read by many of these people who had learned Irish and visited the Gaeltacht, you know, a new generation, I guess, post independence and, you know, post revival, people who’d learned Irish for [00:25:00] the first time. That’s a pretty cutting satirical point and interesting. And I wondered if you had anything to comment on that.
Paul: That’s very interesting. That’s very rich. I have nothing to add really to what you identify as the, as the target of the satire and the context and so on. But I am interested in the point you bring up about how only the Gaeilgeoirs speak and the, the native, the local Corca Dorchans don’t speak. They only dance. And I think this plays on a theme or a thread that works throughout the novel, which is about the humanity or otherwise of the Islanders, right?
And I’m not going to start talking about Jacques Derrida and so on now, but you know, he has this very interesting lecture called The Animal That Therefore I Am, and he talks about how the the, the way in which we distinguish between what we call human and what the human calls animal or nonhuman depends on who, [00:26:00] what we believe speech to be and clothing and so on and so forth.
So he says, you know, we, we have this very kind of self fulfilling definition of speech. Which is that which humans do, and any other forms of communication don’t count as speech, therefore they just belong to this other category of the animal. And as many other people have pointed out, this logic also helps, you know, also underpins many racist and sexist and ableist views, which consider certain humans or human ways of speaking to be less than human.
And so in the book, this gets played out. In a number of ways, where the, where the Corcadorchans are associated with the animal, with not speaking, and so on and so forth, and you get this, for example, in the scene with the pig, where, where the inspector comes around to the house, where they’re going to get money for every [00:27:00] English speaking child in the house.
And they concoct this plan to dress up the pigs in clothes. And they say, well, they’re speaking something, and it might as well be English, as far as we know. And the inspector comes and sees the pigs wearing the clothes, and hears them speak, and says, okay, here’s the money. And then we find out the inverse of that, where the pig escapes in the suit.
And the sort of ethnographer or a Gaeilgeoir records his speech into a gramophone and says, you know, this is this is the best example of Gaelic speech we’ve ever seen and he knows that the best Gaelic is indecipherable so he’s very pleased with this pig’s speech and he brings it to the continent and gets a degree and awards and so on for the myths and the language that he captured.
So yeah, maybe what you see here is a manifestation of the way in which the novel satirizes this idea of. of the Corca Dorchans as less than human, [00:28:00] speaking in a minor language that’s native to them without clothing, as opposed to the more fully human humans from the mainland who can sort of analyze it, interpret it, and so on.
But as with the Long Dance, the novel goes beyond this kind of simple satire because it confuses these coordinates all the time by having animals in clothing speaking, naked humans compared to the grunting of animals. And then you have maybe what I think is kind of the most fascinating scene of the novel where Sitric joins the seals and becomes a seal and escapes the sort of binary of Corca Dorcha and the mainland and rather than, you know, identifying with the logic that says you’re only human if you conform to this kind of major language criteria, kind of identifies with the animal, identifies with the abject, sort of escapes all this.
Toby: He’s a hirsute seal. He’s not just a seal, right? He, as you said …
Paul: he’s a hirsute [00:29:00] seal, yes. Yeah, and that’s what also caught my attention about that, because you mentioned that the skin of their feet is gone, and there’s a lot of confusion between human and animal skin, or it’s shown that they’re, they’re the same, right?
That’s why their plan with the state inspector works, because he says there’s no difference between the skin of a child and the skin of a pig and This is something that comes up across O’Nolan’s writing, like in ‘Two in One’ where the taxidermist murderer skins his victim and puts on his skin . There’s something abject about this. Like, what I’m trying to get at is that O’Nolan is satirizing these dominant, whether it’s colonial or Irish cultural or just humanist ideas that marginalize and other, the Irish speaker, the animals, so on and so forth. But he doesn’t just satirize it, he complicates it, he confuses it in ways that are absurd and comic. But again, I think have a political and ethical component to them.
Toby: The reason given for why the dance goes on even though “death snatched many fine people from us” is that “we were ashamed to be considered not strongly in favor of Gaelic while the president’s eye was upon us”. So you’re imputing again, we’re complicating that it’s not a simple relationship.
These apparently subhuman Gaeltacht, Irish speakers are in fact regarding the, the, the Uachtarán regarding them, and therefore feeling, experiencing a feeling, and that’s part of what’s driving this this situation, which I, I really love as a detail just in respect to, to what you mentioned there with the Derrida essay
Paul: yeah, it’s also what locks them into this behavior, why they can’t stop the dance, even though they’re falling and collapsing everywhere, is that they’re under this gaze, right?
That they, and that, you know, that their poverty is both real and lived and also staged and performed for [00:31:00] this gaze. And as you say, they’re, they think they’re they’re pulling a fast one on the Gaeilgeoirs. They’re going to take their money and, and, you know, play up the. whatever they want, whatever they imagine to be for their benefit, But they’re not in control of this because it’s also making their performed suffering real.
Toby: And, and if any, if anyone is completely despondent about this passage, maybe having listened to it or thought about it in detail for the first time, it’s good, it’s good to note that the main character Bónapárt does get his revenge where the, his accomplice, the old grey man throws a rock at the back of the head of the character named Eight Men who is dancing too fiercely. He appears to die or at least be near death and the our protagonist Bónapárt is able to steal a couple of naggins of whiskey from him.
So it’s kind of twisted. That happens in there. Yeah, I like the idea of [00:32:00] a figure with a name representing eternity and take him out of a rock to the back of the head. But anyway, we’ll, we’ll move on. So my next question for you, Paul, is you’re, you’re very, very well known as you know, a really key figure, as I mentioned over the past ten years, in Flann O’Brien studies.
So I’m sure people are going to be quite interested as to where your personal interest in Flann O’Brien began and what your first personal encounter with this writer was.
Paul: Well, yeah, I mean, my first encounter with Flann O’Brien was as a teenager where I picked up my mother’s copy of At Swim-Two-Birds that was in the house in Athlone, where I grew up in the Midlands of Ireland.
And, you know, it just was one of those moments. It was like when I saw the cover of David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane, or I don’t know, watched my first Hitchcock movie or whatever it was. It’s I read At Swim-Two-Birds, and I realized, oh, like art and culture and humor can be so much different from what I’m used to [00:33:00] in the Irish Midlands and it made me fascinated with Flann O’Brien. It opened my mind, I think, to a different kind of humour and stuff. That was probably formative for me. And it probably set me on my path to you know becoming an Irish modernist scholar, whatever. I mean, I read Flann O’Brien before I read Joyce and I’m sure he was the path to that too. It’s always personal. It was in the home. My mum is a great reader. She influenced me a lot in these kinds of ways. And then also, I guess maybe it’s of interest that it was in Athlone that I first read Flann O’Brien because Athlone has lots of connections with him.
So, you know, it’s close to the site of Snámh Dá Éan which gives the title to At Swim-Two-Birds. And it’s very close to the Midlands area of Tullamore, where the O’Nolans lived for a time. And where I think Anthony Cronin speculated that the – the afterworld parish of The Third Policeman, very flat and everybody speaks in these dull tautologies on and [00:34:00] on and on – is based on the O’Nolans’ time in the Midlands.
And as being someone from the Irish Midlands that resonates with me, it makes sense to me. And of course Athlone was the center of Irish radio broadcasting with Radio Athlone, which was broadcast all across Europe. And O’Nolan’s connection to the radio is something I know you’ve explored a lot.
In your own, in this podcast and in the Radio Myles workshop and so on. So Athlone is connected there. And he does mention Athlone a lot in the columns. Sometimes I have had, I’ve harboured like a notion to write a little article for like the Athlone Historical Society or something on all of the references to Athlone in Cruiskeen Lawn and Blather and so on, but maybe that’s a retirement project .
So yeah, I mean, and that’s, that’s also something that caught my imagination as a teenager, something so experimental, so funny so engaging was also something local and tangible and it resonated with me in my experiences of the Irish Midlands and so on.
So yeah, [00:35:00] that’s how I got into him. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Toby: That’s really wonderful. And yeah, indeed, the rest is, is history, a decade of history, in fact. So what, can you explain for the benefit of someone who may not have even heard of it before, is the International Flann O’Brien Society and its journal, The Parish Review? How can, how can listeners get involved in it? Where did it come from? And how can we engage with it?
Paul: Well, the first thing maybe I’d like to point out is that it is something that O’Nolan wrote about or kind of seemed to want in his own life, even if it was tongue in cheek. There’s a, a December 1944 instalment of Cruiskeen Lawn where Myles na gCopaleen writes, he sort of laments this is quoting from that here,
“How well the crowd in this town [meaning Dublin] would never think of forming a Myles na gCopaleen society. It’d be such a fine tribute to an old man, and with a statue in College Green, my back turned to Trinity. I may have the figure to wear a stone [00:36:00] beard and stone frock coat”
and so on. So, you know, I think sometimes people wonder, but I don’t think he would have been opposed to the idea of a scholarly society dedicated to his writing, and I think he would have quite liked it.
But in all events, we set it up in 2011. So 2011 was the centenary of O’Nolan’s birth. And myself and Werner Huber at the University of Vienna and my friend and colleague Ruben Borg, we decided we would hold an international conference, which we did. It was called 100 Myles.
And I think originally we thought it might be a, you know, small event, a little workshop, a two day event. But we were absolutely blown away by the response. I think we had over a hundred speakers and performers and writers and attendees at the conference. And what became very evident to us is that there was this very, like, emergent and engaged community of people who read O’Nolan’s works, both in a [00:37:00] critical and a research sense, but also in a personal sense.
But it was very dispersed, right? There was there was no networks for encounters, there were no platforms for centralizing the information, for exchanging information and research on the author. So we said, okay, so we’ve, we’re gonna, let’s, we gotta step in, if not us, then who, and let’s set this up. So we set up the International Flann O’Brien Society, and its main goals were to set up a regular conference series, which we have done.
It’s a biennial conference, which we’ve had in Vienna, Rome, Prague, Salzburg, Dublin, Boston, just recently in Cluj, in Romania, and to set up a journal, which we’ve also done, which is the Parish Review: Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies, which is an open access journal published by the Open Library of Humanities.
And the conferences have been very successful and it’s brought together a lot of people sharing really brilliant and fascinating work. And they’ve led to a series of books published by Cork University Press.
And what’s been very important to us is
having very low barriers to participation, so we don’t charge membership fees at all, we never have done. The journal is free, so there’s no charge to publish for the, no charge for the author and no charge for the reader. Fully peer reviewed and indexed, but, and hosted by the Open Library of Humanities, and yeah, I mean, I think this has led to a very convivial and communal nature of the society that I’m very proud of and pleased with, and I think it’s a really wonderful community to work in.
It’s full of brilliant, but also very warm and generous and kind researchers and scholars doing great work. And anybody who’s interested in
knowing more about Flann O’Brien, I think you can join the Society at no cost. You can attend our conferences and our readings and [00:39:00] screenings. You can read the journal by going to the Parish Review homepage at the Open Library of Humanities.
And I hope it will tell you more about the author, but also some of these contexts and concepts that he’s dealing with.
Toby: I think listeners will probably be wondering: Paul sounds like he knows a lot about Flann O’Brien. what should I read when I dive into Paul Fagan’s own corpus of material?
You recently edited acting out from Cork University Press, which is a turn to the stage and broadcast works at Brian O’Nolan. For this volume you contributed two chapters and the introduction. And I happen to think your overture is actually one of the best and strongest recent pieces of work about O’Nolan as a whole, as well as a really good introduction. You pick up on a comment that O’Nolan makes, perhaps a revealing comment, in a late article about himself called ‘De Me’ in 1964. And right at the end of that, he talks about how ‘I am referred to locally as a Dublin gutty. I do not deserve this classification, although I sometimes condone it by acting the part, but there is definite confusion here between Persona and imago‘ or imago, I should say.
This kicks off this discussion of this theme that we’ve circled around a lot: what is the dynamic of how is it possible to assume such a remarkable number of personalities and have this continuous conflict? So to quote from your own introduction, you write:
‘As he assumes a remarkable variety of personae before distinct audiences in a vast array of cultural sites, O’Nolan explores the comic and aesthetic pleasures of masked performance, yet his work also interrogates the potential of performance and simulation not only to express but to produce identity, and the power of illusion not only to represent but to shape reality itself.’
So I wondered if [00:41:00] we could talk about this as you put it, nexus of disguise and disclosure of simulation and authenticity of persona and imago in O’Nolan and amongst maybe even amongst his collaborators, if we have time, I’m not sure.
Paul: I mean, well, first Toby, that’s very, you know, much too kind and generous of you to say this. I’m really pleased that you enjoyed the introduction. That’s very nice. It’s very encouraging for me to hear. Thank you., I guess what he’s playing with here is Carl Jung’s psychoanalytical archetype of the persona. So Jung says the persona is this mask that we wear socially and publicly, which is designed to make a definite impression upon others and to conceal the true nature of the individual. And we all have these personas in our interactions with other people. And Jung says, by contrast, the imago is this kind of unconscious image that we use to understand the other.
So we’re all interacting with each other, putting on personas [00:42:00] to conceal ourselves, and for social gain, and to make a certain kind of impression. And then we receive the other person’s persona as an imago, as this kind of fixed archetype. And what O’Nolan is saying here is that I sometimes play the part of the Dublin Gutty.
But that’s, but how dare people imagine that’s who I am, you know, that they’re, they’re confusing the persona I’m putting on with an archetype, a stereotype, an image. And so I think this really sets up what’s very interesting in O’Nolan’s writing in a lot of ways is that he’s always playing with, for comic purposes, but I think also reflecting on the relationship perhaps between self and performance, right?
I mean, do we have. an authentic self that we either share or conceal through our presentation to the world, or does the performance produce the self, you know? Does the wearer wear the mask or does the mask [00:43:00] wear us? And I think in this way, O’Nolan is very interested in this kind of performance of the idea of performance, the simulation, the fake creates reality.
And this is a theme, you know, this is a perennial theme. You see it perhaps in Hamlet, right, where he feigns madness and then his actions lead to everybody dying. Sorry, spoiler for Hamlet there, or, you know, it’s a theme in Alfred Hitchcock’s movies where, you know, Kim Novak in Vertigo or Cary Grant in North by Northwest. assumes a persona that, that creates them and they can’t, there’s no person to go back to afterwards. I think O’Nolan does this a lot and sometimes in really fascinating ways. For example, ‘John Duffy’s Brother’, this story where he, John Duffy’s brother comes to believe that he’s a train and he goes into the office and he’s, you know, all choo choo, I’m a train, blah, blah, blah. And his colleagues are laughing at him. And then when he comes [00:44:00] home, he has a break and he realizes that he’s not a train. And then it becomes this very, like, existentially anxious story about whether people believed him when he said he was a train or not, whether he’s going to be brought to the madhouse or it will be passed off as a joke.
And here you have this kind of anxiety of, like, I guess the train is what is his true self, but he’s relieved that they take it for, you know, that as a performance. Or you have ‘Two-in-One’ where, where the taxidermist murders his boss and puts on his skin and then walks around in the boss’s skin, hailing people. And then he’s, you know, starts giving out about himself because he’s become the boss and he’s like, Oh, you know, Murphy is the murderer and Kelly is the boss. He’s like that Murphy, you know, he’s such a layabout, he’s such a, such a useless article or whatever. And, you know, he becomes Kelly, you know, he becomes the other person. He can’t take off the skin, he can’t take off [00:45:00] the persona. And I think this is a really a theme across O’Nolan’s writing that We see in the plays, but also in the novels, you know, the way in which the De Selby scholar interacts with the policeman trying to conceal his intentions, but falling afoul of them and so on.
Toby: This idea of trading identities and breaking down the distinction between what’s in and what’s performed is realized quite dramatically in work as Maebh Long has written about where O’Nolan and his friends, the two Nialls, Niall Sheridan and Niall Montgomery, appear to write articles in each other’s names or maybe pretending to be someone else that’s unclear who’s written it, really taking great pleasure in how much they might confuse people about who is who and who’s writing what and the group of friends were extremely fond of, of hoaxes, you know, of, of literary hoaxes, all kinds of hoaxes really. [00:46:00] I’ve already spoken about some fantastic examples of those in the podcast and ones that spring to mind are… stories of meeting with James Joyce’s father, which you know, they profess to to tell to the early biographers of Joyce that may well have been completely made up. Maybe not, you know, one of the joys of the hoax is that we don’t always know. You’ve, your exploring this for the project that I mentioned in the introduction. Could you give me three examples of maybe, oh, they could be small, they could be big, but certainly hoaxes you’ve encountered that you really love.
Paul: Well, brilliant. Thanks, Toby, for the opportunity to talk about this. One of my great loves, which is hoaxing. Maybe. So just first it’s worth jumping back to the point you made because I think it’s a really important one about the collaborative nature of his work. I think that’s also something that we have that that’s new in the way we see O’Nolan, right?
He was very often thought of – the counter to the narrative of him as the failed writer is [00:47:00] him as the lonely pioneer, the lonely innovator. He’s in this kind of cultural wasteland of mid-century Ireland, and he alone is creating these fantastical, innovative novels.
This view has really been overturned in the last years, and in Acting Out as well, because we see increasingly how collaborative his writing is. Like you say Montgomery also wrote a number of the Cruiskeen Lawn columns that are attributed to Myles na gCopaleen and as you say, there’s a certain kind of slipperiness under these names that we can’t always connect to the biographical figure of Brian O’Nolan, but which also show How collaborative his project is and how in, in embedded it is in his social circles and networks and these different institutions of Dublin at the time and so on: the Civil Service and the theater, the newspaper, so on. So that is a point worth emphasizing I think so, yes. Thanks a million for the chance to talk about hoaxes, this is one of my favorite things to think about and to talk about.
So [00:48:00] one, one hoax that I really enjoy, it’s like a kind of a classic hoax, is Jonathan Swift’s Predictions For The Year 1708. So at that time there’s an astrologer called John Partridge, and he publishes a popular almanac of astrological predictions called Merlinus Liberatus, and Swift decides this guy’s a phony, he’s a hack, and Swift writes his own predictions for the year 1708 under the pseudonym of Isaac Bickerstaff Esquire.
And so it’s full almanac. It’s a full almanac of astrological predictions. But the very first of Bickerstaff sort of, I guess, divinations, which he arrives at by consulting the star of John Partridge’s nativity is that Partridge, the almanac maker, will infallibly die upon the 29th of March next of 11 at night of a raging fever.
And so, of course, Partridge [00:49:00] protests this, you know, he says: it’s ridiculous, I’m not going to die, whoever this Isaac Bickerstaff is, is a phony he’s a fraud, he’s one of my political enemies, he’s jealous, whatever. But then the punchline comes when on the 30th of March Swift arranges to have circulated a document which is called ‘The Accomplishment of the first of Mr. Bickerstaff’s predictions being an account of the death of Mr. Partridge, the almanac maker’, and so this is presented as a letter to a person of honor and it’s a person saying, ‘I was at Partridge’s deathbed last night, the 29th, and he admitted that he was a fraud and a phony and that astrology is quackery used to fool people, and then he died just as Bickerstaff predicted.
And so, of course, it didn’t matter then that Partridge continued to protest in print that he hadn’t died because, well, the rumor got out and People believed it, people were in on the joke, and it just kind of [00:50:00] got circulated like there’s even a sort of a story that he got the, the name his, his name of Merlinus Liberatus for his almanac was taken away from him because it was believed in the registry to have died, and there’s all stories about people having these mock funerals for him and coffin makers turning up at his wife’s door and this type of thing.
So I think this is very interesting. I mean, it’s a funny hoax. And then the next, like, I guess, God, there’s so much I could say about this that I won’t, but one of the funny things is that then Partridge kind of becomes completely paranoid and he spends a lot of the next years, like, trying to identify who is Bickerstaff.
And he has all of these, like, revelations where he, like, accuses different people, but always the wrong person, right? So he’s, like, he never, it takes him ages to figure out that it’s Swift. And so he’s the sort of, like becomes paranoid. He’s accusing everybody trying to convince people that he hasn’t died and stuff like this.
And yeah, it’s a very interesting hoax for me for in a number of ways. Like, first of all, one of the main things in the project I [00:51:00] want to think about is how people think about hoaxing as just this fixed form, you know, it’s this transhistorical strategy. It’s always the same in all times and periods. And what I’ve found in my research is that this is really not true.
You know, it’s this, it’s, it changes in response to different political moments and cultural moments. And this is especially because it’s this parasitical genre, right? You enter into a dominant voice or a genre and you speak in its own terms in order to expose. that it’s the, it’s authority is, is not earned, that it’s in bad faith that we shouldn’t trust it and so on.
So it’s constantly changing as it, as it goes into these different forms. And one of the things I found is that you know, normally people think about this and they’re like, oh, you know, Swift is the wit, and he outwitted this kind of dolt Partridge and made fun of him and so on, and he won this little April Fool’s Day joke.
But [00:52:00] in truth, there’s a lot of political context to this because Partridge was actually a very politically engaged person, and his almanac was actually front for a sort of seditionist propaganda. So, you know, if he’s predicting that the king will die, you know, it’s sort of part, it’s part of a call to assassinate the king and stuff like this.
So, you know, there’s a political dimension to this that gets lost. But I also like how you know, Swift uses the hoax to create this kind of afterlife of infamy for Partridge, right? He was always, always. remembered as the guy who got who got duped by Swift and there’s no amount of research anyone will do that will ever change that.
So the hoax I think has this interesting thing about falsifying the record in order to create an alternative. afterlife for someone’s enemies. That’s very much in the Swiftian [00:53:00] mode. Another one I, and this, you know, this goes through Macpherson with the Ossian scandal, and then you have sort of Irish 19th century periodicals.
We’ve kind of conservative wits like McGinn and Mahoney, making fun of the Irish antiquarian and revivalist. project by making these false Irish ballads and myths and back translating them and what may be the funniest one is Father Proust talks about Thomas Moore’s melodies and he basically says Thomas Moore is a fraud.
He plagiarized all of these melodies from older sources and I’m going to prove it. And what Mahoney, whose pseudonym is Father Proust, does is he back-translates Moore’s. Irish melodies into French and Latin and German and Old English and things like this, and then presents them as the originals and presents Moore’s as the fake.
So again, you have this falsifying the archive, [00:54:00] this anti-archive, and so on. And this goes up through people like James Clarence Mangan up to the modernist era. And maybe that’s just one more example. I think it’s interesting. Samuel Beckett has this very funny hoax, but also very fascinating hoax, I think. So Beckett really at the start of his career, he’s just come back from Paris. where he’s with Joyce he has been a lecturer in Paris in 1930, he returns to Trinity College where he’s a lecturer, and he has to give a lecture to the Modern Language Society, and as his subject he chooses Concentrism, and he says, Concentrism is this really fascinating philosophical and poetic manifesto from this very obscure poet philosopher Jean Duchat from Toulouse, and he opens with a letter which describes how he’s come into possession of Duchat’s papers and his testimonies and his writing and so on.
And then he goes on to talk about the life of the inventor of Concentrism up to his suicide, his [00:55:00] manifesto that he’d left behind, and so on. And of course, as I think you can probably anticipate, this whole movement and Duchat was completely invented by Beckett from whole cloth. There’s no such poet as him.
There’s no such philosophy. And he presents it. To the gathered Trinity scholarship scholars as something authentic. So yeah, so what you have here is like the hoax as something that has a political component. It’s about inhabiting the false persona of a dominant voice or genre in order to undermine it and perhaps to test people’s trust in certain voices and genres and forms of performed authenticity.
And it’s also about creating these anti-archives: to falsify or to disrupt or trouble sort of dominant narratives that are based on the authenticity of old sources and I think Irish revivalism, you know, would be ripe for something like this. [00:56:00] And I think all of these aspects, this kind of strange afterlife, and this anti-archival impulse turn up across Flann O’Brien’s writing, right?
One of my favorite Cruiskeen Lawn columns is one that begins: ‘Wanted wife, copper faced, any length, capable of being bent.’ Right, so of course, Myles says he’s read this typo in a recent paper, and he says, obviously, wife is a misprint for wire, and he makes fun out of this. But then he kind of drops the pretense completely, and he says:
‘To be honest, for a change, I invented this advertisement out of my head. It does not appear in any paper, but if the reader thinks that any special merit attaches to notices of this kind because they’ve actually appeared in print. What is to stop me from having them inserted and then quoting them? Nothing except the prohibitive cost.’
So I think this is, you know, I think this is where O’Brien, what we’ve been talking about with O’Brien’s personae [00:57:00] and performance and this difference between the inner and the outer and the simulation and this history of hoax writing comes together because you know, he has this sleight of hand where he presents himself as this kind of disinterested or fatigued prankster who pulls the rug out from under his own joke and he sort of pulls the rug out from under even his own authority to speak the truth to command credulity but also turns his readers into kind of paranoid readers right because this kind of sabotage isn’t just contained in his column or in the pages of the Irish Times because you know what’s to stop anybody from having anything printed anywhere and quoting it or something to us as fact, except for, as he says, the prohibitive cost of doing this .
Toby: So as my final question, I wanted to give you a chance to give our listeners a sense of how they can engage with, with your work personally and with the International Flann O’Brien Society and its activities. So yeah, where can we go to, to find out more?
Paul: So I think [00:58:00] the best, the best home for us is at the Parish Review homepage which is with the, the journal’s homepage at the Open Library of Humanities which maybe we can give a link in the notes . So that’s where you get all of the latest news on the Society’s activities. There’s a news tab there, for example, where news about the Society Awards for best book and best article, or about upcoming calls for papers, or events, or conferences, or special issues of the journal that are coming up, or just our various activities are there.
There you can also sign up for our mailing list, where we share that same stuff into your… inbox and we have accounts on Facebook and Twitter and all of the social media and so on and you can get in touch with us on any of those and like I say membership is open and free to anybody. So, and it’s not, we primarily work, we’re an academic society we work towards having these conferences and [00:59:00] books and journals but we’re really open to everybody, anybody with an interest in O’Nolan or this period, or these genres is really welcome to join and come to the events and to submit any observations or writing or research you have on Brian O’Nolan to the journal.
We’re very pleased to, to, to receive submissions and to, and to publish it. . So if any of this work sounds exciting to you, you know: write an article for the journal, write a submission to the 2025 conference we’ll buy you a pint, we’ll see you there, you’re very welcome everybody.
Toby: What a wonderful way to finish with such an open invitation to participate. Paul Fagan, thank you so much for being on the podcast.
Paul: Toby, it’s been a real pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.