Flann O’Brien CONTESTING LEGACIES EDITED BY RUBEN BORG, PAUL FAGAN AND WERNER HUBER First published in 2014 by Cork University Press Youngline Industrial Estate Pouladuff Road, Togher Cork, Ireland © The Contributors 2014 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 publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying in Ireland issued by the Irish Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, 25 Denzille Lane, Dublin 2. The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this Work has been asserted by them in accordance with Copyright and Related Rights Acts 2000 to 2007. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-78205-076-6 Typeset by Tower Books, Ballincollig, County Cork Printed in www.corkuniversitypress.com CONTENTS Acknowledgements vii Textual Note ix Notes on Contributors xi Editors’ introduction 1 RUBEN BORG, PAUL FAGAN, WERNER HUBER PART I: BROADENING THE CANON 1. Coming of the rails: the strange case of ‘John Dufy’s Brother’ 19 KEITH HOPPER 2. Irelands enough and time: Brian O’Nolan’s science fiction 33 JACK FENNELL 3. (Probably posthumous): the frame device in Brian O’Nolan’s short fiction 46 MARION QUIRICI 4. ‘I’ve got you under my skin’: ‘John Duffy’s Brother’, ‘Two in One’ and the confessions of Narcissus 60 PAUL FAGAN 5. Tall tales or ‘petites histoires’: history and the void in ‘The Martyr’s Crown’ and Thirst 76 THIERRY ROBIN PART II: INTER/NATIONAL CONTEXTS 6. In search of Mr Love; or, the internationalist credentials of ‘Myles before Myles’ 95 UTE ANNA MITTERMAIER v vi Contents 7. Myles na gCopaleen: a portrait of the artist as a Joyce scholar 110 JOHN McCOURT 8. ‘A true story’: The Third Policeman and the writing of terror 126 TOM WALKER 9. Myles na gCopaleen, Flann O’Brien and An Béal Bocht: intertextuality and aesthetic play 143 NEIL MURPHY 10. ‘Did you put charcoal adroitly in the vent?’: Brian O’Nolan and pataphysics 156 ONDŘEJ PILNÝ PART III: CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES 11. ‘Banjaxed and bewildered’: Cruiskeen Lawn and the role of science in independent Ireland 169 ALANA GILLESPIE 12. The trial of Jams O’Donnell: An Béal Bocht and the force of law 181 MAEBH LONG 13. Brian O’Nolan: misogynist or ‘ould Mary Anne’? 195 THOMAS JACKSON RICE 14. The murders of Flann O’Brien: death and creation in At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman, An Béal Bocht, and ‘Two in One’ 207 JENNIKA BAINES Bibliography 219 Notes and References 231 Index 269 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Some of the essays collected in this volume have their origins in papers delivered at 100 Myles: The International Flann O’Brien Centenary Conference, which was held at the University of Vienna, 24–27 July 2011. 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 grati- tude to H.E. Ambassador James Brennan and cultural attachés Niamh Neylon and Ian Devine (representing the Embassy of Ireland in Austria) for their continuing encouragement and steady support, as well as to the Rector’s Office, the Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies, the Department of English and American Studies, the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research and the City of Vienna. Special thanks go to Dr Julia Lajta-Novak, Dr Sandra Mayer, Ms Tamara Radak, Ms Ulrike Zillinger and Dr Dieter Fuchs for their help with the organisation of the conference and the preparation of this volume. Finally, the editors are grateful to Jack Fennell for his guidance in Irish language matters, David O’Kane for graciously pro- viding 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. Vienna, January 2014 Ruben Borg Paul Fagan Werner Huber vii TEXTUAL NOTE The following abbreviations are used throughout: Primary ABB Myles na gCopaleen, An Béal Bocht. (Cork: Mercier, 1941, 1999). BM Flann O’Brien (Myles na Gopaleen), 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: Every man’s Library, 2007). MBM Flann O’Brien, Myles Before Myles, John Wyse Jackson (ed.). (Dub lin: 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). Secondary Baines Jennika Baines (ed.), ‘Is it about a bicycle?’: Flann O’Brien in the Twenty-First Century. (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011). Cronin Anthony Cronin, No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O’Brien. (London: Grafton, 1989). Hopper Keith Hopper, Flann O’Brien: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-Modernist, 2nd edn, J. Hillis Miller (foreword). (Cork: Cork University Press, 2009). ix x Textual Note RCF Neil Murphy and Keith Hopper (eds), Flann O’Brien: Centenary Essays, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 31, no. 3, Fall 2011. (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2011). Taaffe Carol Taaffe, Ireland Through the Looking-Glass: Flann O’Brien, Myles na gCopaleen and Irish Cultural Debate. (Cork: Cork University Press, 2008). NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS JENNIKA BAINES earned a PhD from University College Dublin for her thesis titled Flann O’Brien and the Catholic Absurd. She is the editor of ‘Is it about a bicycle?’: Flann O’Brien in the Twenty-First Century (2011) and is the acquisitions editor for the Irish Studies series at Syracuse University Press. RUBEN BORG is Associate Professor at the University of Tromsø and senior lecturer in English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His work has appeared in numerous journals including Journal of Modern Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Poetics Today and Narrative. He is an associate editor of Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas and co-editor of The Parish Review, the official journal of the International Flann O’Brien Society. His book The Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida was published by Continuum in 2007 and he is currently working on a second book titled Fantasies of Self- Mourning: The Posthuman and the Problem of Genre. PAUL FAGAN is a lecturer and researcher at the University of Vienna. He is the co-founder and co-president of the International Flann O’Brien Society, chief editor of the International Flann O’Brien Society Brian O’Nolan Bibliography and co-editor of the official society journal The Parish Review. His primary areas of research are Irish Studies, Modernism and Discourse Analysis and he has published articles in these fields in Joyce Studies in Italy, with book chapters forthcoming in edited collections from Syracuse University Press, Manchester University Press and Rodopi. JACK FENNELL is a researcher at the University of Limerick. His research interests are Irish literature, science fiction and cultural xi xii Notes on Contributors studies. Fennell has published essays on Irish dystopian literature, the aesthetics of comic-book justice and the politics of monsters and monstrous communities, as well as contributing informal articles to The James Joyce Literary Supplement and The Parish Review. He recently contributed five original translations of Brian O’Nolan’s early Irish- language short stories to The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien (2013) and a translation of O’Nolan’s unpublished Irish-language stage play, An Scian to Flann O’Brien: Plays and Teleplays (2013). Fennell is also the author of the monograph Irish Science Fiction, forthcoming from Liverpool University Press. ALANA GILLESPIE is an affiliated researcher with the Institute for Cultural Inquiry at Utrecht University, where she earned a PhD for her thesis on Brian O’Nolan’s comic critique of tropes of tradition and modernity in independent Ireland. In addition to a number of forthcoming articles on Brian O’Nolan, Gillespie is currently completing a monograph on the subject of comedy and cultural remembrance in O’Nolan’s work. KEITH HOPPER teaches Literature and Film Studies at Oxford University’s Department for Continuing Education and is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Irish Studies at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, London. He is the author of Flann O’Brien: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-Modernist (rev. edn, 2009); general editor of the twelve-volume Ireland into Film series (2001–07); and co-editor (with Neil Murphy) of The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien (2013). He is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and is currently completing a book on the writer and filmmaker, Neil Jordan. WERNER HUBER is Professor of English Literature and Irish Studies at the University of Vienna and has recently co-edited Contemporary Irish Film (2011). He is a director of EFACIS: The European Association of Centres and Associations of Irish Studies and general editor of its ‘Irish Studies in Europe’ series (published by WVT Trier). MAEBH LONG is Lecturer in Literature at the School of Language, Arts and Media at the University of the South Pacific. She is the author of Assembling Flann O’Brien (2014), a monograph of theoretical engagements with Flann O’Brien/Myles na gCopaleen/Brian O’Nolan.