Let’s start with the James Joyce issue, and get it out of the way. Flann O’Brien—or Brian O’Nolan as he was known in private life—had either the good luck or misfortune to release his most famous novel At Swim-Two-Birds at almost the same moment that Mr. Joyce was unleashing his Finnegans Wake on the world. Given O'Brien’s experimental approach to narrative and his Irish origins, he inevitably got l abelled as a follower, or perhaps imitator of the author of Ulysses . As the poor man's Joyce, O’Brien found his novel branded as the book you could read for more of the same after you had finished Finnegans Wake . And since few got to the end of the Wake , and even fewer wanted more of the same, At Swim-Two-Birds turned into the great Irish masterpiece that almost no one read.
This is unfortunate, but also unfair. O'Brien may be a trickster like Joyce, but he knows different tricks. His humor is more forthright, his means of expression less oblique, his experimentation more playful. If you want to compare him to an Irish master, the more obvious connection is with Samuel Beckett, whose sensibility and absurdism in works such as Waiting for Godot and Molloy , is very much akin to O’Brien's. But Beckett's great works were still in the future, long after he read At Swim-Two-Birds in 1939, and in this instance O'Brien must be considered the initiator, not the imitator.
In truth, O'Brien's influence leapfrogged Joyce's. If Joyce shaped the modernist agenda for fiction in the middle decades of the 20th century, Flann O'Brien anticipated the postmodernist revolt that began in the 1960s, and continues to cast a long (albeit now shrinking) shadow over our current literary culture. I am not surprised that Donald Barthelme's syllabus for modern fiction starts with two works by O’Brien— At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman —or that O’Brien’s influence has been traced in Italo Calvino, John Barth, John Fowles, Gilbert Sorrentino, Paul Auster and other acknowledged masters of postmodernist techniques.
Here we have all the familiar devices, although they were hardly quite so familiar in the 1930s when O’Brien wrote his book. We have the meta-narrative conceit pushed to an extreme—we even get a novel inside a novel inside another novel inside still another novel. We have the fractured structure that continues to inspire leading novelists today (for example Underworld , NW , 2666 , Cloud Atlas ). There are no chapter headings in At Swim-Two-Birds , only different stories battling for supremacy and control of the book. "A good book," O’Brien declares on the opening page, "may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings."
Above all, O’Brien delivers the "death of the author" almost 30 years before Roland Barthes published the obituary in his famous 1967 essay . And what assault on a writer could get more brutal than the one featured in At Swim-Two-Birds ? A group of conspiring characters decide to exact revenge on the novelist who puts them through their paces. They create their own counter- narrative in which the poor scribbler is battered and bruised, slashed with a razor, poked in the eye, thrown out the window, and has the ceiling collapse on him. Then he is put on trial for his crimes against the personages in his book, with an almost certain execution in his future. Face it, Barthes gave us a mercy killing by comparison.
Other writers, poets and bards appear in these pages, and even if they don't need to fear the death penalty, they have plenty of woes of their own. No one since Marcus Aurelius has made more out of a fatalistic worldview than the Irish—I am especially fond of the motto of County Mayo, where my wife’s grandmother was born: Dia is Muire Linn , which roughly translates as "God and Mary help us!" (I doubt that slogan would get by the focus group nowadays). Certainly O’Brien stays true to this dispirited spirit of his native soil. The main narrator in At Swim-Two-Birds is a disaffected Irish student who rarely leaves his bedroom, and engages in frequent sarcastic repartee with his uncle, who is also his landlord. During several long stretches, O'Brien interposes a much different story about the cursed Irish king and bard Sweeny, based on a legendary medieval figure, whose tale is also echoed in the work of T. S. Eliot and Seamus Heaney. In O'Brien’s version, Sweeny loses his home, his friends and feasts, and even his sanity. Turned into a bird (or perhaps hallucinating this metamorphosis), the mad king roosts in trees, and consoles himself with the highly stylized poetry that, in his downcast state, serves as his main form of communication.
It is bad living without a house, Peerless Christ, it is a piteous life! a filling of green-tufted fine cresses a drink of cold water from a clear rill…
Another subplot deals with the good-natured banter and rivalry of a working class devil, Pooka MacPhellimey, and an invisible Good Fairy, who battle for the soul of one of O'Brien’s stray characters. This peculiar diversion captures O'Brien at his best, with its spry give-and-take and absurdist pretexts providing a sly contrast to the typical Faustian narratives and theological solemnity of other stories of damnation and salvation.
Not everything hits the mark in these pages. The Sweeny interludes quickly wear out their welcome, and other disparate fragments, such as the interpolated passages from an antiquated reference book, will test the patience of even the most tolerant readers. But the dialogue is nonpareil, good enough to put on the stage alongside Beckett, the humor as dry as it comes, and the loquacious narrators will remind you of slightly off-kilter and amusing pub mates after the second round of beers. Indeed, most of At Swim-Two-Birds still captivates today, and retains a freshness all the more surprising when one considers how many of the attitudes and techniques showcased here were worked, and indeed often over-worked, by later authors.
Ted Gioia's latest book is The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire .