Flann O’Brien problems with authority 00 FOB.indd 1 31/05/2017 12:52 00 FOB.indd 2 31/05/2017 12:52 Flann O’Brien problems with authority edited by Ruben Borg, Paul Fagan and John McCourt 00 FOB.indd 3 31/05/2017 12:52 First published in 2017 by Cork University Press Youngline Industrial Estate Pouladuff Road, Togher Cork T12 HT6V Ireland © 2017 [to come] All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording or otherwise, without either the prior written permission of the publishers or a licence permitting restricted copying in Ireland issued by the Irish Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd., 25 Denzille Lane, Dublin 2. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-1-78205-????-0 Printed in ??? by ???? Print origination & design by Carrigboy Typesetting Services, www.carrigboy.com www.corkuniversitypress.com 00 FOB.indd 4 31/05/2017 12:52 for Werner 00 FOB.indd 5 31/05/2017 12:52 00 FOB.indd 6 31/05/2017 12:52 Contents Acknowledgements ix Textual note x Notes on contributors xi Editors’ introduction Ruben Borg, Paul Fagan, John McCourt 1 Part I. ‘neither popular nor profitable’: O’Nolan vs. The Plain People 1. ‘irreverence moving towards the blasphemous’: Brian O’Nolan, Blather and Irish popular culture Carol Taaffe 21 2. ‘No more drunk, truculent, witty, celtic, dark, desperate, amorous paddies!’: Brian O’Nolan and the Irish stereotype Maebh Long 34 3. Lamhd láftar and bad language: bilingual cognition in Cruiskeen Lawn Maria Kager 54 4. ‘the half-said thing’: Cruiskeen Lawn, Japan and the Second World War Catherine Flynn 71 5. Physical comedy and the comedy of physics in The Third Policeman, The Dalkey Archive and Cruiskeen Lawn Katherine Ebury 87 vii 00 FOB.indd 7 31/05/2017 12:52 viii Flann O’Brien –Problems with Authority Part II. Mixed inks: O’Nolan vs. his peers 6. ‘widening out the mind’: Flann O’Brien’s ‘wide mind’ between Joyce’s ‘mental life’ and Beckett’s ‘deep within’ Dirk Van Hulle 105 7. Phwat’s in a nam?: Brian O’Nolan as a Late Revivalist Ronan Crowley 119 8. Fantastic economies: Flann O’Brien and James Stephens R.W. Maslen 136 9. The ideal and the ironic: incongruous Irelands in An Béal Bocht, No Laughing Matter and Ciarán Ó Nualláin’s Óige an Dearthár Ian Ó Caoimh 152 10. More ‘gravid’ than gravitas: Collopy, Fahrt and the Pope in Rome John McCourt 169 Part III. Gross impieties: O’Nolan vs. the sacred texts 11. ‘a scholar manqué’?: further notes on Brian Ó Nualláin’s engagement with Early Irish literature Louis de Paor 189 12. In defence of ‘gap-worded’ stories: Brian O’Nolan on authority, reading and writing Alana Gillespie 204 13. Reading Flann with Paul: modernism and the trope of conversion Ruben Borg 219 14. The Dalkey Archive: a Menippean satire against authority Dieter Fuchs 230 15. ‘walking forever on falling ground’: closure, hypertext and the textures of possibility in The Third Policeman Tamara Radak 242 Endnotes 255 Bibliography 298 Index 315 00 FOB.indd 8 31/05/2017 12:52 Acknowledgements portion of the essays collected in this volume have their origins in papers A delivered at Problems with Authority: The II International Flann O’Brien Conference, which was held at the Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature, e Culture Straniere, Università Roma Tre, from 19–21 June 2013. Neither the conference itself nor this edited collection would have been possible without the generous support of various individuals and institutions. The editors would like to express their sincere gratitude to His Excellency Mr Patrick Hennessy, Irish Ambassador to Italy, to Amal Kaoua, cultural attaché, and to the staff of the Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature, e Culture Straniere. We are particularly grateful to David O’Kane for graciously providing the collection’s artwork and to Maria O’Donovan and Mike Collins at Cork University Press for their work in bringing this volume to fruition. November 2016 Ruben Borg Paul Fagan John McCourt ix 00 FOB.indd 9 31/05/2017 12:52 Textual note The following abbreviations are used throughout: ABB Myles na gCopaleen, An Béal Bocht (Cork: Mercier, 1999) AW Flann O’Brien, Flann O’Brien at War: Myles na gCopaleen 1940–1945, John Wyse Jackson (ed.) (London: Duckworth, 1999) BM Flann O’Brien, The Best of Myles, Kevin O’Nolan (ed.) (London: Harper Perennial, 2007) CL Myles na gCopaleen/Gopaleen, ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’, The Irish Times CN Flann O’Brien, The Complete Novels: At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman, The Poor Mouth, The Hard Life, The Dalkey Archive, Keith Donohue (introd.) (New York, NY: Everyman’s Library, 2007) FC Flann O’Brien, Further Cuttings from Cruiskeen Lawn (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2000) MAD Flann O’Brien, Myles Away from Dublin: Being a Selection from the Column Written for The Nationalist and Leinster Times, Carlow, under the name of George Knowall, Martin Green (ed.) (London: Granada, 1985) MBM Flann O’Brien, Myles Before Myles, John Wyse Jackson (ed.) (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2012) PT Flann O’Brien, Plays and Teleplays, Daniel Keith Jernigan (ed.) (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2013) SF Flann O’Brien, The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien, Neil Murphy and Keith Hopper (eds), Jack Fennell (trans.) (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2013) SP Flann O’Brien, Stories and Plays, Claud Cockburn (introd. and ed.) (London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon, 1973) x 00 FOB.indd 10 31/05/2017 12:52 Notes on contributors Ruben Borg is an Alon Fellow (2008–11) and Head of the Department of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has published articles in Journal of Modern Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Poetics Today, Joyce Studies Annual and Narrative and has contributed chapters to collaborative volumes on Deleuze and Literature, on Deleuze and Beckett and on Posthumanism. He is the author of The Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida and co-editor, with Paul Fagan and Werner Huber, of Flann O’Brien: Contesting Legacies (listed in the Irish Times top ten non-fiction books of 2014). He is currently working on a book titled Fantasies of Self-Mourning: Modernism, the Posthuman and the Problem of Genre. Ronan Crowley is fwo [pegasus]2 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Antwerp. He received his PhD in English from the University at Buffalo in 2014 for a dissertation on transatlantic copyright regimes, genetic criticism and Irish modernism. He is currently writing a book on the composition of Ulysses. Louis de Paor is Director of the Centre for Irish Studies at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His published works include Faoin mBlaoisc Bheag Sin (1991), a study of the short fiction of Máirtín Ó Cadhain, critical editions of the poems of Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Liam S. Gógan and Michael Davitt, and a bilingual anthology of twentieth-century poetry in Irish, Leabhar na hAthghabhála: Poems of Repossession (2016). He has been a Visiting Professor at Boston College, New York University and the University of California, Berkeley and is currently working on a monograph on the Irish language element in the work of Flann O’Brien. Katherine Ebury is lecturer in modern literature at the University of Sheffield. Her first monograph,Modernism and Cosmology, appeared with Palgrave in 2014 and she is the editor, with James Fraser, of Outside His xi 00 FOB.indd 11 31/05/2017 12:52 xii Flann O’Brien –Problems with Authority Jurisfiction: James Joyce’s Nonfiction Writings (forthcoming with Palgrave). Her articles have appeared in journals such as Irish Studies Review, Joyce Studies Annual and Society and Animals, and she is the guest editor of a special issue of Humanities on Joyce, animals and the nonhuman. She is currently working on a second book project on literary responses to capital punishment in the twentieth century, particularly in late modernism. Paul Fagan is a lecturer in cultural studies and modernism at the University of Vienna and a Senior Scientist at Salzburg University. He is the co-founder and president of the International Flann O’Brien Society, as well as co-founder and series editor of the peer-reviewed society journal The Parish Review. He is the co-editor, with Ruben Borg and Werner Huber, of Flann O’Brien: Contesting Legacies, which was listed in the Irish Times top ten non-fiction books of 2014. He is currently working on the edited volumes Flann O’Brien: Gallows Humour (with Ruben Borg) and Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities (with John Greaney and Tamara Radak), and is completing a monograph titled Positions of Distrust: The Literary Hoax and the Irish Tradition. Catherine Flynn is Assistant Professor of English at UC Berkeley. She received her PhD from Yale University and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Introduction to the Humanities Program. Her book project, James Joyce, Walter Benjamin and the Matter of Paris, considers Joyce and Benjamin’s radical rejections of the conventions of fiction and theory within a context of urban writing that ranges from nineteenth-century realist fiction to twentieth-century avant-garde works. Flynn is co-editor, with Richard Brown, of a special issue of James Joyce Quarterly on ‘Joycean Avant-Gardes’. She has also published articles on Joyce, Benjamin, Brecht, Kafka, De Stijl, surrealism and Marxist literary criticism, and is currently at work with David Wheatley on a scholarly edition of Cruiskeen Lawn. Dieter Fuchs is full-time lecturer at the Department of English and American Studies of the University of Vienna.