The Literary Comic Genius of Flann O'Brien:
Flann O'Brien is one of my literary mentors (along with Jorge Luis Borges, Mark Twain, James Joyce, and Flannery O'Connor, among others). That O'Brien's novels are for readers who prefer adding a smile or even a laugh to their "deep" thoughts becomes obvious to anyone who opens one of his books. His work sometimes straddles the modernist/postmodernist divide, and as one reader said about one of his novels: "It is also one of the few satires that doesn't succeed by denigrating us and one of the few post-modern works that does succeed by making us howl with laughter."
"That's a real writer, with the true comic spirit. A really funny book."
James Joyce on Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds.
Note: The
following is a combination of Amazon descriptions and
my own
observations about Flann O’Brien’s work.
A Master Storyteller of the Hilarities of
Multidimensionality
Flann O’Brien, along with
Joyce and Beckett, has been described as part of the holy trinity of modern
Irish literature. I describe him as a master storyteller of the phenomenological
and ontological hilarities of multidimensionality. His five novels, which are a
monument to his inspired lunacy and genius, include At Swim-Two Birds and his last novel, The Third Policeman.
Flann O’Brien
Flann O'Brien’s real name
was Brian O'Nolan, and he also wrote under another pen name: Myles na Gopaleen.
Born in 1911 in County Tyrone, he was a resident of Dublin who graduated from
University College while editing a magazine called Blather). He joined the Civil Service, in which he eventually
attained a senior position. O’Brien wrote throughout his life, which ended in
Dublin on April Fool’s Day, 1966.
The
Third Policeman
A comic trip through hell
in Ireland, as told by a murderer, The Third Policeman is an inspired
bit of confusing and brilliantly warped storytelling from O’Brien’s lovably
demented pen. The narrator of The Third Policeman, who has forgotten his
name, is a student of philosophy who has botched a robbery and committed murder.
He wanders into a surreal hell where he encounters such oddities as the ghost
of his victim, three policeman who experiment with space and time, and his own
soul (who is named “Joe”). Some readers have favorably compared The Third Policeman to such twentieth
century masterpieces as Thomas Pynchon’s
Gravity’s Rainbow, William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, Elias
Canetti’s Auto-da-Fe, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years
of Solitude.
At Swim-Two-Birds
At Swim-Two-Birds (which one critic called
“the funniest novel of the twentieth century”) is an exuberant literary send-up in which the novel’s narrator is writing a
novel about another man writing a novel, in a Celtic knot of interlocking
stories. The riotous cast of characters includes figures “stolen” from Gaelic
legends, along with assorted students, fairies, ordinary Dubliners, and cowboys,
some of whom try to break free of their author’s control and destroy him.
His
Other Novels
The Poor Mouth, a bleakly hilarious portrait of peasants in a
village dominated by pigs, potatoes, and endless rain, is a giddy parody aimed
at those who would romanticize Gaelic culture. A naïve young orphan narrates
the deadpan farce The Hard Life, and The Dalkey Archive is an
outrageous satiric fantasy featuring a mad scientist who uses relativity to age
his whiskey, a policeman who believes men can turn into bicycles, and an
elderly, bar-tending James Joyce.
