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Flann O'Brien: At
Swim-Two-Birds
In a letter to an agent Irish
modernist Flann O'Brien characterized his novel At Swim-Two-Birds as a "very
queer affair, unbearably queer perhaps." There was little need for such
hedging. At Swim-Two-Birds is
O'Brien's masterpiece; readers now lament he couldn't maintain this high pitch
of "queerness" throughout his career. The novel is "unbearable" only in the sense of
ticklish or hair-raising or improbable. It is zany in ways both breathtaking and deadpan. O'Brien's zaniness is a world unto
itself.
I'm still awaiting the biography
I've ordered from Amazon (Anthony Cronin's Life and Times of Flann O'Brien). I suspect I’ll learn something there of
the origins of the O’Brien’s style. The life of a writer, his life as reading and his social
life, go quite a ways toward explaining his particular struggle with words, his
response to the words that came before him and his modulation of the words
spoken round him. It seems clear that at least part of O'Brien's zaniness
arises from a high pedantry unhinged by the atmosphere of Dublin pubs. The man
who wrote At Swim-Two-Birds obviously frequented a society
where the order of the day was learned conversation: show, debate, witty
disagreement. The novel is almost a reference work of the varieties of such
conversation: it couldn't have been written had the writer not shared many a
pint with the best and the not-so-best of Dublin society.
Ingenious and perverse as the novel
is, only inattentive readers are liable to get lost. O'Brien gives more signposts in this work than many a modernist
writer has given. One is duly
warned besides: the narrator informs us on page one that he doesn't see why a
book needs to have one beginning and one ending. Here are the work's opening words:
Having
placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my
powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes
and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. I reflected on the
subject of my spare-time literary activities. One beginning and one ending for a
book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book 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.
This
paragraph is followed by three different openings to the work being written by
the narrator.
The narrator himself, as we gather
soon enough, is a highly sophisticated but suspiciously idle university student
who lives with his moralizing uncle. He spends his time drinking port with
friends, skipping classes, perusing his manuscript, and recovering from
hangovers. The novel he's writing deals with an eccentric recluse named Dermott
Trellis who is himself writing a didactic novel meant to illustrate the
corrupting power of vice. But Trellis' labors as a novelist are subject to the
literary notions of the writer who created him, namely our friend the narrator.
These notions are expounded as follows:
[A]
satisfactory novel should be a self-evident sham to which the reader could
regulate at will the degree of his credulity. It was undemocratic to compel
characters to be uniformly good or bad or poor or rich. Each should be allowed
a private life, self-determination and a decent standard of living. This would
make for self-respect, contentment and better service. It would be incorrect to
say that it would lead to chaos. Characters should be interchangeable as
between one book and another. The entire corpus of existing literature should
be regarded as a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their characters
as required, creating only when they failed to find a suitable existing puppet.
Here we have
two of the three theoretical bases from which the shenanigans of this book spring
forth. First, one notices the bizarre implication that characters are in some
respect employees of the writer, that they are alive as other citizens are alive
and that they thus should be treated according to certain democratic
principles. Second, one has the prescriptive assertion that writers should draw
their characters from existing literature, not creating new characters unless
it is necessary. Thus, for example, a writer shouldn't write a modern novel
with a protagonist similar to Cervantes' Don Quixote, but rather should simply
"employ" the real Don Quixote in his book, thus providing gainful
employment for the character created by Cervantes and avoiding the creation of
a new being who will only compete weakly with the Don for available posts. The
Don, after all, is waiting out there in "limbo," and is willing to
work for his bread, if only he were hired.
These two principles of novelistic
creation are to be linked with a third notion, one which answers the question:
What actually happens when a writer creates a new character? What is the
precise nature of that creation? The answer is to be found in the narrator's
theory of aestho-autogamy. Will I define aestho-autogamy
here? I will not.
One should note certain subtleties
in the narrator's presentation of his theories. It is implied that novelistic
characters who are provided with a good standard of living will provide good
"service" in the novel being written. Also, it is said that
"discerning authors" can choose their characters from existing
literature. But what happens if the author in question does not provide a good
standard of living to the characters he employs? In fact, Dermott Trellis does
not. And what happens if the author is not exactly discerning in his choice of
characters? Dermott Trellis hopes to write a didactic novel set in modern
Dublin, but the characters he chooses are not exactly appropriate to his plan.
Suffice it to say that these characters lead a life of their own from the
start, and that they devise various means of slipping out from under their
author's control (for one, they drug him) so that they need devote the least
possible amount of time to fulfilling the plans of his plot, which they find to
be either irrelevant or sordid.
To sum up, for those who might have
gotten lost: The narrator is a young man writing a novel about a feeble-headed
and reclusive would-be author named Trellis whose characters (a hilarious and
motley bunch) rebel against their own author. This rebellion is only possible
on the basis of the narrator's own literary theories.
Such a plot may not sound promising
to some. It may sound like something the French would be likely to force upon
the world. But the goal here is not avant-garde frisson, but rather comic
delight. O'Brien's mastery of different generic modes and of the lingo of
different classes and types makes for some of the most hilarious pages of
dialogue I've read: gems of crackbrained juxtaposition. As I've hinted, the
crucial problem with Trellis as author is that he's taken his characters from
widely different genres of writing, and is intending to get them to work
together toward his own novelistic ends. So we have Slug and Shorty, two
characters from American Western fiction now forced to make it as cowpunchers
in Dublin. Steer must be brought in to oblige, ranches must be set up, and
cattle rustlers must appear as well. Here is an excerpt from the beginning of
the Dublin cowboy section:
One day
Tracy sent for me and gave me orders and said it was one of his own cowboy
books. Two days later I was cow-punching down by the river in Ringsend with
Shorty Andrews and Slug Willard, the toughest pair of boyos you'd meet in a
day's walk. Rounding up steers, you know, and branding, and breaking in colts
in the corral with lassoes on our saddle-horns and pistols at our hips. (O the
real thing. Was there any drink to be had?) There certainly was. At night we
would gather in the bunkhouse with our porter and all our orders, cigarettes
and plenty there on the chiffonier to be taken and no questions asked,
school-marms and saloon-girls and little black maids skivvying there in the
galley. (That was the place to be, now.) After a while be damned but in would
walk a musicianer with a fiddle or a pipes in the hollow of his arm and there
he would sit and play Ave Maria to bring the tears to your eyes. Then the boys
would take up an old come-all-ye, the real old stuff, you know, Phil the
Fluter's Ball or the Darling Girl from Clare, a bloody lovely thing.
Aside from
the cowboys, Trellis makes use of a Good Fairy, and a devil high up in the
ranks of evil spirits, and a legendary Irish hero named Finn MacCool. The mad
King Sweeney from Irish lore becomes an important figure in the book's thematic
construction, though it is not Trellis who brings him in, but rather old Finn.
Along with these characters there is a more banal cast, namely Antony and
Sheila Lamont, Paul Shanahan, John Furriskey, and Peggy. These more banal
characters continue their plodding and plotting next to the others, the zigzag
movement of the work leading up to what will eventually become the spectral (or
is it?) trial of Dermott Trellis, certainly an almost benchmark study in flawed
legal proceedings.
At Swim-Two-Birds is not without its
theological-numerological meditations, not without its parodic translations of
ancient Irish poetry, not without its lengthy quotations from contemporary
Jesuitical encyclopedic works. One can learn from it the chemical names of
cream of tartar and plaster of Paris, one can learn the correct way to wind a
gramophone or read a gas meter, one can learn the cause of the Trojan war.
There are not a few writers who've learned from O'Brien some of the structural
and stylistic principles of their own works, among them Gilbert Sorrentino
being noteworthy. But nowhere have I come across a style so serious and so
funny at the same time. It reminds one of Tristram Shandy, but not quite. It
reminds one of Raymond Queneau, but it is stronger. I myself feel I've less of
a readerly future to look forward to because, alas, I've already read At
Swim-Two-Birds. This is to say that the novel is good enough to make me
somewhat envious of those who haven't yet gotten to it. Yes, it is that good.
Eric Mader-Lin,
October, 2000
Order
it direct from Amazon.com.
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