As wood s lot reminds me, yesterday (5th October) was Brian O’Nolan/Myles na gCopaleen/Flann O’Brien’s birthday. From the wonderful links wood s lot has gathered together to celebrate the occasion, I’d recommend Joseph O’Neill’s The Last Laugh, for the Atlantic earlier this year:
The author pseudonymously known as Flann O’Brien (1911–1966) is the shadowy and indeed overshadowed hero of modern Irish fiction, the bronze medalist on a podium otherwise occupied by Joyce (gold) and Beckett (silver). Flann O’Brien’s relative inferiority is as much a matter of style as of substance. The top two were glamorously exilic, highly photogenic, eminently stern of artistic purpose. By contrast, Brian O’Nolan (the fellow behind the pseudonym) stayed put in Dublin, and very seedily so. In pictures he looks like yer man without qualities: a hat, a coat, a blur of dark little features. And except perhaps in the matter of drinking, sternness of purpose was precisely the quality he lacked: if his ambition was to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race, he never mentioned it. “I can’t go on, I’ll go on,” the protagonist in Beckett’s The Unnamable famously asserts. When Brian O’Nolan couldn’t go on, he didn’t.
That, at least, is how the story goes. As Anthony Cronin, O’Nolan’s relentlessly perceptive biographer, points out, O’Nolan was merely in his mid-30s when he became saddled (by himself, among others) with “the legend of early, unfulfilled brilliance [and] the all too easily sustained judgement of alcoholic decline.” Over time, this legend grew into a Dublin version of the parable of the prodigal son, only with a sadder ending.
[..]
O’Nolan’s liquid sense of reality, so helpful in his writing, was mirrored to an unfortunate degree in his own life, where he was prone to damaging confusions. Just as de Selby suffers from an inability to distinguish between men and women [in The Dalkey Archive], O’Nolan suffered from an inability to distinguish between fame and artistic success (he moaned, not entirely facetiously, “Gone With the Wind keeps me awake at night sometimes— I mean, the quantity of potatoes earned by the talented lady novelist”). The limited impact of At Swim-Two-Birds led O’Nolan to dismiss it as a “bum book,” and when The Third Policeman failed to find a home (too “fantastic,” in the judgment of his publisher), he concluded that this book, too, was worthless. Rather than be humiliated in the eyes of Dublin, O’Nolan took to claiming that the manuscript had been lost (variously, in a tramcar, a hotel, a train). It hadn’t. It was published posthumously in 1967 and gained, in addition to canonical status, a small if peculiarly intense following. Rather bizarrely, the novel recently found a substantial new audience after a paperback copy made a two-second appearance on the cult TV drama Lost.
Brian O’Nolan would have appreciated this kind of success. He referred to The Third Policeman (and to his other fiction) as stuff written to make you laugh. He would have regarded it as terrible pose to place the book somewhere between the pataphysics of Alfred Jarry (the scientist of imaginary solutions) and the metaphysics of Martin Heidegger (the analyst of the hermeneutics of facticity). A Catholic and, in the persona of Myles na Gopaleen, an enemy of pretension and cant, he undermined most claims to importance—his own most assiduously of all. This creates a Flann O’Brien–worthy conundrum: How can we credit him with being a literary or philosophical radical if he had no intention of being one?
There is a two-part answer. First, O’Nolan couldn’t help himself: his comic instinct drew him helplessly into the profoundest theoretical concerns and, once there, to an amazing prescience. Take the Atomic Theory: respectable philosophers of the mind now hold that all matter, and therefore every bicycle, involves consciousness (seriously: it’s called panpsychism). Second, he wasn’t who he pretended to be. He wanted us to see through Brian O’Nolan and his hard-boiled Dublin dismissiveness, to see beyond the local legend of wasted talent. He wanted us to see Flann O’Brien: Why, otherwise, would he have bothered with him at all? And what we see, when we simply read the books, is that Flann O’Brien did not shrink from his genius.
See also, The Brother.
First posted: Monday, October 6th, 2008.
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