Flann O'Brien article by Irish author Paul R. Hyde. Flann O'Brien: The Third Policeman, At Swim Two Birds.

Flann O'Brien

"We in this country had a bad time through the centuries when England did not like us. But words choke in the pen when one comes to describe what happened to us when the English discovered that we were rather interesting peepul ek'tully, that we were nice, witty, brave, fearfully seltic and fiery, lovable, strong, lazy, boozy, impulsive, hospitable, decent, and so on till you weaken." Myles na Gopaleen (alias Flann O'Brien alias Brian O'Nolan)

"A mean life may have a tragic cast to it, and vice versa. Flann O'Brien was dour, suspicious, argumentative ... petty-minded, careless of his own talent ... This misanthrope and likely misogynist was also the author of one of the most admired and widely read comic novels of the century, At Swim-Two-Birds, and a fictional masterpiece, The Third Policeman..." John Banville

Joyce said he had the true comic spirit and, as always, Joyce was right. Hard- drinking, hard-working, fierce penman and fierce scholar, his daily Cruiskeen Lawn column in The Irish Times, written in English, Irish, German, French and Latin as the fit took him, was a masterpiece of satire, sarcasm, ferocious wit, manic inventiveness and surreal humour which sought out verbal sloth, pompousness and pretension, humbuggery - all the mental short-circuitry required from the law-abiding taxpayer. Some say he raised the ancient custom of begrudgery almost to an art form.

O'Brien's literary masterpieces are At Swim Two Birds and The Third Policeman - neither of which had any success in his lifetime but which are now translated into many languages and are read and studied across the globe. Both are 'anti-novels' which knock the stuffing out of literary categories. Both are complex and linguistically rich parodies, both medieval and modern in form and provenance, both scholarly and scurrilous. Although these books were written in Hiberno-English, the informing imagination is essentially Gaelic, ie. medieval in its consistent refusal to acknowledge any substantive distinction between the subjective and the objective. Behind his mastery of language, both demotic and arcane, lies a metaphysical scepticism about language itself - language which announces 'what it is all about' and which feigns to describe to us 'how it really is'. Language is a social, not a spiritual medium and therefore is always suspect unless used subversively.

The Third Policeman, an absurdist parable of an impossible hell and a parody of the murder story, is narrated by a man who is already dead. At Swim Two Birds cannot be placed in any category yet invented for it subverts literary realism and fantasy, plays games with the distinctions and structures of narrative and compounds the quotidian and the mythic. The comic spirit of these works undermines 'reality' as a futile fiction invented by a deranged demon intent on mockery and madness. O'Brien's was a comic and surreal world of steam trains and bicycles, eternities of porter and seven day whiskey, theological banter and molecular theory, doggerel verses, a catechism of clichés and pseudo-intellectual chit-chat.

It is probable that Flann O'Brien remains without equal as a humorist in the English language. As a satirist he stands close to Swift, although very different from the Great Dean who believed that Man was capable of reason although often a stranger to this faculty.

O'Brien's respect was strictly confined to three institutions: the Family, the Church, the Whiskey. In the Free State of the 30s and 40s, he was peculiarly out of place; perhaps his true home was on the margins of a medieval illuminated manuscript - one of those manic/devilish faces, crying-laughing-mocking. With calculated self-deflation, Flann O'Brien chose April Fools' Day, 1966, on which to join The Good & The Dead.

Further reading:

No Laughing Matter; The Life & Times of Brian O'Nolan by Anthony Cronin. 1989.
The Irish Comic Tradition by Vivian Mercier. 1962.
Celtic Revivals by Seamus Deane. Faber & Faber, 1985.
Flann O'Brien: A Critical Introduction by Anne Clissman. 1975.