culture as colloquy: flann o'brien's post modern dialogue with irish tradition

Culture as Colloquy: Flann O'Brien's Postmodern Dialogue with Irish TraditionAuthor(s): Kim McMullenReviewed work(s):Source: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Autumn, 1993), pp. 62-84Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1345981 .

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Culture as Colloquy: Flann O'Brien's Postmodern Dialogue

with Irish Tradition KIM McMULLEN

In 1939, the year Flann O'Brien's exuberantly experimental At Swim-Two-Birds was published, Yeats closed his cold eye, Work in Progress finally appeared in its entirety, and the beginning of World War II provided a covenient closing date for the Modernist revolution, a closure confirmed by the death of Joyce a scant two years later. If, as Robert Alter suggests, Flann O'Brien penned "one of the earliest postmodern novels" (223)-and I think he has-it is perhaps because he suffered his anxiety of influence before the rest of the twentieth century. This is certainly the explanation preferred by the majority of O'Brien's commentators who attribute the percussive formal energy of At Swim-Two- Birds to O'Brien's combat with the great Modernist father.' O'Brien, argues Lorna Sage, shares with postmodernists Nabokov and Borges a "scepticism about Joyce and all that Joyce stands for (except for them, of course, he is more distant-the great modernist, not a treacherous compatriot)" (202). Thomas O'Grady is more emphatic: At Swim-Two-Birds is "a willful 'un-understand- ing,' a 'misreading' [of James Joyce] caused by the 'high anxiety' of the 'belated' writer who refuses to allow his precursor's view of life and letters to stand un- challenged" (205).

However, to reduce At Swim-Two-Bird's flamboyant intertextuality to a struggle with a single literary father is to miss precisely those qualities that make it a pioneering postmodern postcolonial text. Loosely structured as a se- quence of frametales in which an unnamed University College-Dublin student is, himself, writing a novel in which a third novelist, Dermot Trellis, writes a novel which plagiarizes characters from ancient Irish tale cycles and contemporary Westerns and who, in turn, is written about by a fourth novelist, Trellis's "quasi-illusionary" son, At Swim-Two-Birds persistently violates conventional frametale ontology and draws into intertextual colloquy texts framed by the discourses of various ranks and professions, shaped by multiple ideologies, and spanning pre-, post-, and colonial Irish history. None of these discourses is privileged; none has the last word. Early Irish epics are juxtaposed with clip- pings from provincial newspapers; medieval nature lays are sung in chorus with

In addition to Sage and O'Grady, see the following discussions of O'Brien and Joyce, particularly At Swim's intertextual

dialogue with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Bernard Benstock, "The Three Faces of Brian Nolan," Eire-Ireland 3.3 (1968): 51-65; Del Ivan Janik, "Flann (YO'Brien: The Novelist as Critic," Eire-Ireland 4.4 (1969): 64-72; David Powell, "An Annotated Bibliography of Myles Na Gopaleen's (Flann OYBrien's) 'Cruiskeen Lawn' Commentaries on James Joyce," James Joyce Quarterly 9 (1971): 50-62; J.C.C. Mays, "Brian O(Nolan and Joyce on Art and on Life," James Joyce Quarterly 11 (1974): 238-255; Anne Clissman, Flann O'Brien: A Critical Introduction to his Writings, (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1975),

especially 106-120; Ninian Mellamphy, "Aestho-autogamy and the Anarchy of Imagination: Flann O'Brien's Theory of Fiction in At Swim-Two-Birds" The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 4.1 (1978): 8-25; Joseph Browne, "Flann O'Brien: Post Joyce or

Propter Joyce" in James Joyce and his Contemporaries ed. by Diana A. Ben-Merre and Maureen Murphy, (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 113-20.



KIM MCMULLEN I POSTCOLONIAL DIALOGISM 63

the pub jingles of "The Workingman's Poet"; tout's tipsheets engage Christian Brothers temperance tracts in dialogue; advice from pious eighteenth-century English gentlemen vies with twentieth-century pragmatism, while an anony- mous rhetorician lectures on the taxonomy of tropes in the text before us.

At Swim-Two-Birds enters into dialogue not with James Joyce alone, but with a thousand years of Irish tradition at a critical moment of national self-articulation. Tracing the construction of Ireland as a colonized culture inscribed by imperial Britain, David Cairns and Shaun Richards borrow the words of Henry V's resident stage Irishman, MacMorris, to frame a central postcolonial conun- drum: "What ish my nation?" (10). Flann O'Brien's novel suggests that even in an Ireland that had weathered revolution and civil war to seal its independence from Britain with a 1937 constitution, the question had yet to be satisfac- torily answered. At Swim-Two-Birds deconstructs various efforts to inscribe "Ireland" within the literary languages of the Celtic Revival, realism, and Modernism, as well as within the state-subsidized discourse of post-independence cultural nationalism, even as it voices the heteroglossia of mid-twentieth century Ireland. Its postmodern narrative strategies-dizzying intertextuality, interpenetrating frame tales, interanimated discourses, and reflexivity-expose the limits of received definitions to assert an Ireland that "ish" self-conscious, plural, historically-reticulated, and in constant dialogue with its past.

I

By demonstrating that the language of a given culture is really "a set of languages," "each bearing the imprint of a collection of values and a distillation of experience" and all "compet[ing] for ascendancy" (Morson, 5), Mikhail Bakhtin's theories help us to hear the complexity of At Swim-Two-Birds's cultural articulations. Both on a literal level, as the Free State legislated the re- covery of Irish as the national language through a "Gaelicization" of the edu- cation system (Brown, 39), and on a figurative level, through a state-subsidized cultural ethos, independent Ireland sought a unifying discourse by which to call itself into being. But, as Bakhtin might note, "each culturally predominant group strives to legislate its dialect as the language, whereas it is, in reality, only one dialect among many ... [and] that [hegemony] turns other dialects into implicit forms of cultural opposition" (Morson, 5). Official language, centripetal, unitary, attempting to exert a homogenizing and hierarchical influence-in a word, monologic-is in constant tension with decentralizing, heterogeneous centrifugal languages in a struggle that is, necessarily, ideological (Bakhtin, "Discourse," 271-73).

In his excellent history of Ireland since 1922, Terence Brown describes a society which, to use Bakhtin's terms, grows more insistently unitary, centripetal, and monologic in the three decades following the treaty. While "much of the cultural flowering of earlier years [1890-1920] had been the product of an invig- orating clash between representatives of Anglo-Ireland ... and an emergent nationalist Ireland at a time when it had seemed to sensitive and imaginative



64 NOVEL I FALL 1993

individuals that an independent future would require complex accomodations of Irish diversity ... ," after independence "[t]he social homogeneity of the twenty-six counties no longer demanded such imaginatively comprehensive vi- sions" (Brown ,17). Initially, the nationalist myth of an "Irish Ireland" seemed to offer a centrifugal challenge to the monologic rule of imperial Britain by shaping a collective identity essential to the struggle for independence. Figured most potently in the image of a rural Irish-speaking "peasantry" culturally in- violate after centuries of colonization and defended by Cuchulain-like patriots, the discourse of "Irish Ireland" narrowed into monologism as its oppositional function disappeared with independence. For, as Seamus Deane has observed generally, insurgent nationalisms often defy the universalizing force of colonial domination by "attempt[ing] to create a version of history for themselves in which their intrinsic essence has always manifested itself, thereby producing readings of the past that are as monolothic as that which they are trying to supplant" ("Introduction," 9). After 1922, the Free State faltered at the challenge of constructing a heterogeneous culture, articulating instead an official and "highly prescriptive sense of Irish identity" (Brown, 51) based upon "the values of the farmers--familism and Catholicism" (Cairns and Richards, 115) and figured in the rapidly petrifying image of "Irish Ireland," Gaelic-speaking, rural, agricultural, pious, chaste and Catholic. Eamon DeValera displays the official poster-children of Eire in a much-quoted St. Patrick's Day speech of 1943:

That Ireland which we dreamed of would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis of right living, of a people who were satisfied with frugal comfort and devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit; a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with sounds of industry, the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths, the laughter of comely maidens; whose firesides would be the forums of the wisdom of serene old age. (DeValera cited in Carlson, 9; see also Brown ,113 and Cairn & Roberts, 133)

As Cairns and Richards observe, "what was essentially a literary trope became a cornerstone of cultural and economic policy" (133), as the image of "Irish Ireland" was essentialized, offered not as an alternative construction to colonial inscription but rather as a transcendent category of being, natural, eternal, without source or historical referant (see Brown, 139-42). To demur from the official image-and there were many to demur-was not, therefore, to engage in ideological discussion, but to defy nature and defile the sacred. Such monologic rule suppressed the historically-positioned and ideologically-bound quality of its formulations even as it muted alternative voices-a suppression that continued into the 1960s according to Fintan O'Toole: "'Ireland' was a single, imaginable entity [whose] ... dominant cultural and political orthodoxy [was] Gaelic, Catholic and nationalist ... Those who were not a part of it- urban workers, Northern Protestants, the stream of emigrants that flowed




unabated to England and America, women ... could therefore be ignored or dismissed or deferred" (11).

The most notorious agent of post-independence cultural prescription--assert- ing both literally and symbolically the monologic rule-was, of course, the Censorship of Publications Act of 1929 (a corollary of the Censorship of Film Act of 1923 and the 1925 law banning divorce). Framed to "protect" athletic youths and comely maidens from publications "in general tendency indecent or obscene" (cited in Carlson, 3) and thus presumably irrelevant to questions of "Irishness," censorship became a mechanism for guarding the borders of the nation-and the boundaries of national identity-from both internal and external challenge. Moral purity became the marker of national purity-itself defined as "racial purity"-in an equation that not only "closed Ireland off from much of the modern world" (Carlson, 9), but also foreclosed discussion of that pressing postcolonial question "What ish my nation?" by sealing a confederacy of the Catholic Church, the proponents of a "pure" Irish Ireland, and the State, as an early (1913) editorial of the Irish Vigilance Association portends:

The fight is not against the liberty of the Press, nor against Literature properly so called ... it is a fight against a bad Press--against papers that fill their columns, issue after issue, with vile, filthy, immoral matter, unfit to be read by our Irish men and women ... which sully by their presence the sanctity and purity of our Irish homes. ... [T]he evil publications ... are not the product of Irish brains, nor the output of Irish hands. They are foreign to every ideal and aspiration of the clean-minded Celt, and mostly inspired by hatred of the Catholic Faith and Christian morality. (cited by Adams, 16)

A supreme act of what Brown has labelled "cultural protectionism," censorship attempted to close the borders of a monologic, monocular Irish culture (as Joyce foresaw when he cast the Citizen as Cyclops).

This increasingly isolated, xenophobic, and essentialized Ireland was the narrow green field onto which Flann O'Brien's generation emerged, the first to achieve adulthood in the Free State. Paradoxically, and perhaps inevitably, they sought wider cultural horizons. As Niall Sheridan, O'Brien's University College Dublin classmate in 1930, recalls: "The scars left by the Civil War which followed the [Anglo-Irish] Treaty were still raw, and the new generation of students ... were equally concerned about the cultural identity of the new state and its place in the wider intellectual context of Europe" (32). The intellectual and professional elite of the new nation, O'Brien and his classmates "felt uncomfortable, for it was they who were most irked by the Catholic tri- umphalism, the pious philistinism, the Puritan morality and the peasant or petit bourgeois outlook of the new state" according to O'Brien's biographer Anthony Cronin (48). Inevitably, yet another Irish turf battle emerged in the decades that followed, waged this time over the boundaries of cultural identity. It was a classic "neo-colonial plight," according to Seamus Deane, taking "the customary form of a battle between provincialism and cosmopolitanism, inwardness and outgoingness, native traditions and foreign importations" (Short




History, 203). The monologia of cultural protectionism was challenged by an in- ternationalist Modernism that would fly above national boundaries, even as such realists as Frank O'Connor and Sean O'Faolain remained at home to campaign to salvage Irish people and customs from the mists of nationalist hagiog- raphy. But, as I shall argue, while At Swim-Two-Birds intertextually scruti- nizes each of these positions, it embraces none of them. Instead, O'Brien's novel contemplates Irish culture as a system of languages competing for ascendancy; its parodies explore the parameters of various constructions of the Irish even as it celebrates the rich cacophony of a nation emerging from colonial domination. Neither a cosmopolitan repudiation of native traditions nor a provincial regur- gitation of them, At Swim-Two-Birds's postmodern doubleness begins to locate the paradoxical "self-irony" that Terry Eagleton has argued is vital to any nationalist perspective that seeks to avoid reproducing the totalizing impulses it has struggled to abolish (see "Nationalism: Irony and Commitment").

II

At Swim-Two-Birds's most overt subversion of monologic discourse eavesdrops on a brigade of "cultural protectionists" in action, in a scene which slyly echoes "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" and which broadens Joyce's satire of Irish politics to scrutinize the politics of Irishness. O'Brien's committee plans a ceilidhe, a quintessential Irish celebration to welcome that quintessential Irishman-"an exile home from the foreign clime" (192)-with an obligatory red carpet, the regulation "friendly Irish welcome, cead mile ftiilte" (193), and a doggedly literal recitation of provincial stereotypes. When a lone cosmopolitan meekly proposes "one old-time waltz ... It's as Irish as any of them, nothing foreign about the old-time waltz" (189), the committee rallies its cultural de- fenses: "Nothing wrong with it, of course, Mr. Connors, nothing actually wrong with it ... But after all, a Ceilidhe is not the place for it, that's all. A Ceilidhe is a Ceilidhe. I mean, we have our own. We have plenty of our own dances without crossing the road to borrow what we can't wear.... Leave the waltz to the jazz-boys ... The Gaelic League is opposed to the old-time waltz ... So are the clergy" (189-91). Trifling pleasures are exposed as coercive ideological agents as the assembly silences the waltz's sole advocate and votes to close the program to dangers from abroad. In turn, O'Brien's short scene farcically exposes the dangers of cultural protectionism at home: exercised unselfcritically, it cal- cifies into self-parody and becomes the agent of isolationism, xenophobia, and reactionary morality.

As At Swim-Two-Birds's parody implies, there was an "obvious rejoinder" to the protectionist's insistence that "the true, essential Irish reality is the Gaelic": "since the seventh century ... frequent invasions have produced a com- posite civilization or indeed a mosaic" (Brown, 44). This view de-essentializes "Irishness" by restoring a historical perspective upon a culture shaped by Gaelic, Christian monastic, Norse, Norman, British, European and American contributions, not to mention diversities in class, gender, and religion. O'Brien recognizes a mechanism in the dialogic novel to release many of these voices




from monologic rule into mutual interrogation, for as Ken Hirschkop observes, through its dialogism, "[t]he novel (or more precisely Bakhtin's novel) seeks to subvert the monological's claim to be timeless, authorless, sacred and natural; and precisely, to the extent that its project is subversive, it will do this by revealing language to be temporal, authored, prosaic, and historical" (76). This is precisely At Swim-Two-Birds's challenge to official constructions of the Irish, for it shapes an open, encyclopedic text which articulates Ireland as a dialogic mosaic, embedding "some thirty-six different styles and forty-two ex- tracts" (Clissman, 86) in its 316 pages. Its parodic destabilizations and comic multiplicity release a centrifugal force that persistently unsettles emerging orthodoxy.

Central to its campaign to declare the borders of "Ireland" open, At Swim challenges another major antagonist of protectionist monologia throughout the 1930's and 1940's-the fictional realism of writers like O'Faolain, O'Connor, and Liam O'Flaherty. Attempting to recover from idealization some of the historical specificity of contemporary Irish life, O'Faolain founded The Bell in 1940 in explicit rejection of "'the old symbolic words. They are as dead as Brian Boru, Granuaile, the Shan van Vocht ...'" and with an avowed mission to recover "'Life before any abstraction'" (cited by Cairns and Richards, 137). In the spirit of Irish pluralism, (The Bell sought submissions from "'Gentile or Jew, Protestant or Catholic, priest or layman, Big House or Small House'" [Cairns and Richards, 137]) and sometimes in defiance of Irish censorship, O'Faolain, O'Flaherty, O'Connor, and others mounted a vigorous dissent from the protectionist attitudes parodied in At Swim-Two-Birds. On the face of it, therefore, it would seem perverse that At Swim's most sustained satire should be aimed at author Dermot Trellis, whose realist aesthetic and crusading didacticism echoe the work of the very writers we might expect O'Brien to embrace as allies. But in his portrait of Trellis's particular type of Irish artist, O'Brien locates the same dangerous monologic tendencies he mistrusts in chauvinistic nationalism. Thus the parody of realism and the anti-mimetic strategies sometimes dismissed by critics of postmodern narratives as aesthetic solipsism or "blank parody" take on an explicitly critical function in At Swim-Two-Birds.

Certainly the "unvarnished portrait" painted by Irish realism in the 1930's and 40's "registered a social reality that flew in the face of nationalistic self- congratulation" (Brown, 122), for it revealed that the athletic youths and comely maidens of the authorized national biography were deeply disillu- sioned or spiritually impoverished or emotionally isolated. Yet paradoxically, as correctives to idealizations, these narratives became "dependent on the cir- cumstances they were designed to combat" according to Deane, so that "[t]here is something dated both about the issues and about the forms in which they were engaged" (Short History, 217). Moreover, these fictional correctives remain limited, reactionary, and monologic, failing to discover the liberating multiplicity sought in The Bell editorial, precisely because of their chosen narrative strategies. Proposing, in the name of realism, a unified vision to "correct" the official view, such mimetic fiction was unable to initiate a more intensive critique of the cultural construction of the Irish to the extent that it claimed a sin-




gle privileged position from which the author viewed the world and an au- thoritative discourse with which he or she spoke it. In failing to expose the necessarily historically-situated position of the author and the necessarily value-laden quality of any discourse-particularly one engaged in inscribing a portrait of a people--it eschewed the dialogic narrative strategy that is in- strumental to At Swim's efforts to destabilize monologic cultural discourse. O'Brien, speaking pseudonymously as Myles na Gopaleen, complains in an Irish Times column about a "peasant" sketch by Frank O'Connor: "Literary man enters cottage, examines country folk, 'tries' them on various topics, then writes shiny piece for The Bell." But, laments Myles, we see the scene filtered only through O'Connor's perspective, a vantage point that claims empirical authority:

Mr. O'Connor's is a clinical attitude. He tries to suggest that his relationship with these people is that of a scientist examining his specimens ... I think the specimens have analytic powers at least as good as Mr. O'Connor's ... since the specimens are at home in their own kitchen ... with judgment unimpaired by superciliousness. What was said after Mr. O'Connor left? ... Having read the [O'Connor] book, why cannot the reader read the Other Book?" (Cuttings, 107-8)

At Swim-Two-Birds undermines such realist discourse, which seeks to re- place an essentialized nationalist myth with a new image "empirically" authorized, in its parody of the fiction of Dermot Trellis. Trellis is the protagonist of the UCD student's novel on the second level of At Swim's frametale, and he himself is writing a novel (level 3) which, like the realism of the thirties and forties, depends for its end on the very conditions it is intended to expose. While Trellis wants his "salutary book to be read by all. He realizes that purely a moralizing tract would not reach the public. Therefore he is putting plenty of smut into his book" (47). Significantly, Trellis's plan yokes mimesis to moral conservatism and naive Zolaesque naturalism:

It appeared to him that a great and a daring book-a green book-was the crying need of the hour--a book that would show the terrible cancer of sin in its true light and act as a clarion-call to torn humanity ... all children were born clean and innocent.... They grew up to be polluted by their foul environment and transformed-was not the word a feeble one!-into bawds and criminals and harpies.... he would present two examples of humanity-a man of great depravity and a woman of unprecedented virtue. They meet. The woman is corrupted, eventually ravished and done to death in a back lane. Presented in its own milieu, in the timeless conflict of grime and beauty, gold and black, sin and grace, the tale would be a moving and a salutary one. (48-49)

To maintain his moral and aesthetic rule, Trellis "compel[s] all his characters to live with him in the Red Swan Hotel so that he can keep an eye on them and see that there is no boozing" (47). O'Brien thus literalizes the pose of the realist narrator as reporter by violating frametale ontology to permit novelist and




characters to occupy the same level of "reality." In doing so, he interrogates the central artifice of literary realism. While the realist may pose as a disinter- ested observer of a scene which shares his or her ontological frame, nonetheless the realist obviously creates (and thus controls and authorizes) the fictional characters and their world. Trellis's artifice is masked by the pretense of lin- guistic neutrality and authorial impartiality, so that his creations seem authorless, timeless, and natural phenomena upon which he simply reports. However, O'Brien exposes the self-contradictory and potentially coercive implications of this aesthetic by revealing that Trellis is duped by his own artifice: he is so taken with the beauty of one of his own characters that he forgets her fictiveness and rapes her. The result of this literal/literary violation is a "quasi-illusory son"-and if we hear blasphemous echoes of the Virgin Birth, so much the better. Orlick, in turn, exposes the wizard behind the mimetic cur- tain by authoring a courtroom drama in which Trellis is charged with aesthetic inconsistency and autocratic tyranny by his own exploited characters. A cow, appearing "in a work entitled-pleonastically, indeed-The Closed Cloister," complains: "I was engaged to discharge my natural functions in a field. My milking was not attended to with regularity.... On six occasions during the cur- rency of the work referred to, I was left without attention for very long periods" (294-95).

At first glance, Trellis might seem less a realist than a proponent of the intertextuality that animates At Swim-Two-Birds itself, for he freely borrows characters from earlier literature to use in his own novel: "FINN MACCOOL, a legendary character [from the epic fenian cycle was] hired by Trellis on account of the former's venerable appearance and experience, to act as [the heroine's] father and chastise her for her transgressions against the moral law" (85). The choice of Finn might seem capricious since his cameo role requires simply the expression of paternal concern, but Trellis reads only books with green covers, and since the Irish Text Society's translations of early manuscripts are bound in that hue, his selection of patriarchs becomes inevitable. However it is a mag- nificent piece of miscasting: the lusty old hero eludes Trellis's control to assault the very "daughter" he has been hired to protect. Another of O'Brien's parodies of cultural protectionism, Trellis's preoccupation with green books and Celtic heroes parallels a myopic obsession with a pure Gaelic past just as his moralizing echoes the ultimately ineffectual sexual prudery of the censorship laws.

More pointedly, O'Brien criticizes Trellis-and realism generally-for a univocal aesthetic which silences the critical potentials of intertextuality. Bakhtin argues that "the language of the novel is a system of languages that mutually and ideologically interanimate each other" ("Prehistory," 47), so that a given character's language, in the dialogic text, becomes itself the object of narrative scrutiny, "simultaneously represented and representing" ("Prehistory," 45). In Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, for example, "the author repre- sents Onegin's 'language' (a period-bound language associated with a particular world view) as an image that speaks and that is therefore preconditioned." Entering into dialogue with this language, observes Bakhtin, the text




"polemicizes with [it], argues with it, agrees with it, ... interrogates it, eavesdrops on it, but also ridicules it, parodically exaggerates it ... " ("Prehistory," 46).

Had Trellis engaged the dialogic potential of the novel genre which Bakhtin describes, he might have read beyond the green covers of the fenian cycle to recognize-and critically interrogate--the gap between his own bourgeois morality and an early Irish ethos that celebrated as part of Finn's hero- ism "rummaging generous women" (18-19) and spending "Lammas morning with girdled girls at far-from-simple chess-play" (16). But Trellis decontextualizes his borrowed characters from the complex system of cultural, ideological, and aesthetic relations within which they were inscribed in the prior text, effec- tively disengaging their utterances from their particular world view. Instead, Trellis demands that they surrender their discourses to the master's voice-un- til of course O'Brien's narrative, with its ontological rupture of the frame of Trellis's novel, releases them and their attendant world views into dialogic re- bellion against his monologic rule. "Trellis's powers are suspended when he falls asleep," reports Peggy to her intended assailant Furriskey (85), and when thus freed "they arrange to lead virtuous lives, to simulate the immoral ac- tions, thoughts and words which Trellis demands of them on pain of the sever- est penalties" (86). Bakhtin would exclude Trellis's polemic text from his discussion of the novel as a dialogic genre, and indeed Patricia Waugh has identified such monologic rule as Trellis's with realism in general: "The [dialogic] conflict of languages and voices is apparently resolved in realistic fiction through their subordination to the dominant 'voice' of the omniscient, godlike narrator" (6). And that is precisely O'Brien's complaint.

By underwriting the sedition of Trellis's characters, At Swim-Two-Birds un- leashes the dialogic interanimation of languages as Bakhtin describes it: "[a character's] speech is not simply transcribed, but represented by authorial discourse." The speaking person "is always, to one degree or another, an ideologue, and his words are always ideologemes;" the novel itself becomes "a dialogized representation of an ideologically freighted discourse" ("Discourse," 333). With Trellis asleep, Peggy and Furriskey embark upon an independent bourgeois narrative to counter Trellis's sensationalist text, and its discourse, in turn, offers O'Brien the opportunity to interrogate the ideology of novels of manners in ironic relation to Ireland's emerging middle classes: "Tea was stirred and bread was buttered swiftly and trisected; ... The accidental gong of a cream- jug and a milk-plate was the signal for a resumption of light conversation" (216). But the gentility of this benign exchange on violinists is immediately, and pointedly, betrayed by a fascination with violence that emerges as soon as the speakers open their mouths: "The biggest ruffian of the lot [of fiddlers], of course, was our old friend Nero.... When the city of Rome, continued Furriskey, the holy city and the centre and the heart of the Catholic world was a mass of flames, with people roasting there in the streets by the God Almighty dozen, here is my man as cool as you please in his palace with his fiddle at his jaw" (221).



KIM MCMUULEN I POSTCOLONIAL DIALOGISM 71

Another of Trellis's characters, Shanahan, has been borrowed from a pulp western, and he too capitalizes on his nocturnal freedom to narrate the story of a daredevil cattle raid in a creole of American cowboy and Dublin "cornerboy": "Be damned to the lot of us, I roared, flaying the nags and bashing the buck- board across the prairie, passing out lorries and trams and sending poor so-and- so's on bicycles scuttling down side-lanes ... " (77). The incongruous mix of cowboy/cornerboy slang hints at one unanticipated result of the Irish censorship of serious literature: provincial libraries filled with "'an Irish stew of imported westerns, sloppy romances, blood-and-murders bearing the nihil obstat of fifty- two vigilantes" as a County Clare librarian has reported (cited by Carlson, 12; see also O'Toole, 85). More significantly, Shanahan's tale can be read as a loose Americanized retelling of the twelfth-century Irish epic Tain Bo Cualnge, and his discourse reinvigorates the old tale with a folk energy drained from the early Irish cycles by their status as "high art" during the Celtic Revival, even as his lively creole reminds us of mass emigrations across the Western Sea and the creative potential of Irish-American cross-fertilization. At the same time, however, O'Brien's parody also highlights the gratuitous violence and motive- less vengeance of tales of high adventure whatever their epoch and warns of the potential for trivialization in mass culture's conscription of the classics.

III

While Robert Alter hails At Swim-Two-Birds as one of the first postmodern narratives, he nonetheless dismisses its seriousness and value, for its "novelistic self-consciousness has gone slack because fiction is everywhere and there is no longer any quixotic tension between what is fictional and what is real" (224). More recently, Fredric Jameson has criticized postmodernism generally for its reliance on "blank parody" which has surrendered its critical function. For Jameson, such "pastiche" "is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique style ... but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without parody's ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which what is being imitated is rather comic" (114). Yet as I have been arguing, O'Brien's text releases a collective and at times subversive interrogation of the discursive construction of Irish culture without invoking a "norm" or a "real," by initiating an interanimated dialogue among the various discourses vying for ascendancy. The "tension" between the literary text and its social realm may remain implicit-and may require a broader knowledge of the extra-literary context than many non-Irish readers can easily supply-but At Swim's comic intertextuality emphasizes the constructed and necessarily relational status of any attempt to articulate "Irishness" at a time when virtually the entire nation was undertaking that task with extraordinary self-consciousness. As each discourse is dialogically engaged in At Swim-Two-Birds, it is exposed not as a "transparent" representation of a prior reality, but as a system of rules marking various borders of Irish possibility, as these rules themselves function within a system of ideological and social relations.




The Dublin landscape through which the student narrator wanders in the autobiographical fragments on level one of the novel is a world already substantially written, most obviously by A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and scrutiny of its borders allows At Swim to interrogate O'Brien's own historical epoch. The "found documents" which intrude gratuitously into the student's au- tobiography reveal the conflicted discursive fields within which the text of self could be written in Dublin in the thirties, and intertextual juxtapositions and parodic exaggerations force each discourse to reveal its social significance, its "ideologemes." These range from the breezy opportunism and somewhat desperate materialism of Verney Wright, British Turf Correspondent whose tipsheet the student receives (" ... there will be a GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY to all who act 'pronto' and give their bookmaker the shock of his life. To all my friends forwarding 6d. and two S.A.E.'s I will present this THREE-STAR CAST-IRON PLUNGER and we will have the win of our lives and all the bad luck forgotten" [15]), to the quiet devotionalism based in class privilege of eighteenth-century English poet William Cowper, whose "description of how a day may be spent" is embedded in At Swim exactly as it appeared in a 1766 letter to his cousin2 ("As to amusements, I mean what the world calls such, we have none; ... We breakfast commonly between eight and nine; till eleven, we read either the Scripture, or the sermons of some faithful preacher ... at eleven, we at- tend divine service ... and from twelve to three we separate and amuse ourselves as we please" [790]). By including two texts of British origin in the general Irish colloquy, At Swim pointedly acknowledges the lingering effects of British colonial rule, particularly in eighteenth-century traces. More slyly, the tout's tipsheet ironically exposes Ireland's inevitable-if precarious-economic interdependence on Britain, despite the Free State's protectionist tariffs and cries of Irish self-sufficiency, while the dialogic comparison of these two texts underlines lingering class disparities in post-independence Ireland.

As a portrait of an artist, O'Brien's student stands in pointed contrast to Trellis and more significantly to Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, for he himself acknowledges that his utterances are already necessarily historically positioned, so that he can can claim no autonomous, much less superior, position for the literary creator. For example, his solemn attempts to encode his first taste of porter demonstrate his recognition that the discourse by which he inscribes this emblematic moment will locate him in a symbolic social landscape which-given the stereotype of the drunken Paddy-is significantly over-de- termined. He first considers the drink through the grim sensationalism of folk wisdom, possibly gleaned from his bourgeois uncle: "[T]hose who became ad- dicted to stimulants in youth ... met with death at the end by a drunkard's fall, expiring ingloriously at the stair-bottom in a welter of blood and puke" (27). He next turns to a Christian Brothers temperance tract which masks its melodrama with quasi-scientific jargon: "... many inebriates suffer from a peculiar form of consumption called alcoholic phthisis-many, many cases of which are, alas, to be found in our hospitals, where the unhappy victims await the slow but sure

2 See William Cowper, "Letter to Mrs. Cowper at the Park House, Hertford, October 20, 1766" in Eighteenth-Century Prose edited by Louis Bredvold, Robert Root, George Sherburn. (New York: The Ronald Press, 1932), 789-90.




march of an early death" (28). When he decides that appeal to "personal experience [is] ... the only satisfactory means to the resolution of [his] doubts" (28), it may seem that he has embraced a naive empiricism, but he inevitably pauses again to view the symbolic drink through his self-conscious pose as a "literary" man versed in Milton and Keats: "Who are my future cronies, where our mad carousals? What neat repast shall feast us light and choice of Attic taste with wine whence we may rise to hear the lute well touched or artful voice warble immortal notes or Tuscan air?" (29). Finally, in conscious deference to his drink- ing partner, a farmboy turned scholar who punctuates his own quaff with a belch, the student's pronouncement is convivial, class-conscious, and in the ver- nacular: "You can't beat a good pint" (29).

Such self-conscious intertextuality permeates the student's various composi- tions, and its critical implications become most acute at the discursive junctions of various conflicted aspects of Irish culture. The xenophobic provincialism of the ceilidhe's musical program is emphasized when the student invents a coun- ternarrative in which a heterogeneous troupe of Irishmen borrowed from a mosaic of texts-westerns, fenian tale cycles, medieval legends, working class poetry, and fairytales-sing an international medley of folk, popular and classical songs:

They sang Home on the Range and the pick of the old cowboy airs, the ever- green favourites of the bunkhouse and prairie ... the old come-all-ye's, the age- less minstrelsy of the native-land, a sob in their voice as the last note died; they rendered ... glees and round-songs and riddle-me-raddies, Tipperary and Nellie Deane and The Shade of the Old Apple Tree ... Cuban love-songs ... moonsweet madrigals and selections from the best and the finest of the Italian operas ... two hundred and forty-two (242) songs by Schubert in the original German ... a chorus from Fidelio ... a long excerpt from a Mass by Bach ... (186-87).

Similarly, Shanahan's Irish-American cattle rustling saga is juxtaposed with the bardic rendering of ancient fenian exploits by Finn MacCool himself:

No man is taken [into the ranks of the fianna] till a black hole is hollowed in the world to the depth of his two oxters and he put into it to gaze from it with his lonely head and nothing to him but his shield and a stick of hazel. Then must nine warriors fly their spears at him, one with the other and together. If he be spear-holed past his shield, or spear-killed, he is not taken for want of shield- skill. (20-21)

Impressed with Finn's stature as a hero of old Ireland-and a subsequent nationalist icon-Shanahan nonetheless disdains epic discourse as irrelevant to an increasingly urban and modern working-class population:

You can't beat if, of course ... the real old stuff of the native land ... that brought scholars to our shore when your men on the other side were on the fiat of their




bellies before the calf of gold with a sheepskin around their man. It's the stuff that put our country where she stands to-day, Mr. Furriskey ... But the man in the street, where does he come in? By God he doesn't come in at all as far as I can see.105-6)

O'Brien's point isn't simply that the icons of romantic Ireland are with O'Grady, Yeats, and Pearse in the grave. Rather he seeks to expose the values implicit within the epic images by which the Celtic Revivalists of the 1880's-like the later cultural protectionists-sought to represent the Irish to themselves. To construct a heroic Irish essence, Revivalists mined such ancient texts as the Tain Bo Cualnge and Silva Gadelica for figures that could lend epic stature and cultural coherence to the struggle for independence, yet in inventing this singular and unitary "Celtic" past, they buried the heterogeneous character of Irish history. O'Brien begins its restoration by engaging "the real old stuff of the native land" in a comic dialogue which undermines Revialism's high seriousness and highlights its excess. As Bakhtin observes of such tactics: "Parodic-travestying literature introduces the permanent corrective of laughter, of a critique on the one-sided seriousness of the lofty direct word, the corrective of reality that is always richer, more fundamental and more importantly too contradictory and heteroglot to be fit into a high and straightforward genre" ("Prehistory," 55).

In Flann O'Brien's book, Finn MacCool-the object of much antiquarian sym- bol-mongering-actively resists iconization: "Finn that is twisted and tram- pled and tortured for the weaving of a story-teller's book-web. Who but a book- poet would dishonour the God-big Finn for the sake of a gap-worded story? ... [T]here has been ill-usage to the men of Erin from the book-poets of the world ..." (24). Such ill-usage is latent within epic discourse itself, which At Swim- Two-Birds deflates by indulging to the point of self-betrayal: "Finn Mac Cool was a legendary hero of old Ireland.... Each of his thighs was as thick as a horse's belly, narrowing to a calf as thick as the belly of a foal. Three fifties of fosterlings could engage with handball against the wideness of his backside, which was large enough to halt the march of men through a mountain-pass" (10).

IV

However vigorously O'Brien parodies the heroic language of the Revival, he never fully breaks with the heritage upon which various manifestations of official Ireland erected their icons of national identity, for his is not the "inverted sow neurosis" of Irish Modernism, "wherein the farrow eat their dam" (314-15). Rather, O'Brien's postmodern strategy allows an equivocal position which neither embraces nor rejects the "real old stuff of the native land." Critic Richard Kearney formulates the "crisis" of twentieth-century Irish culture as a clash between "revivalism and modernism"-between those who "seek to revive the past" and those who "choose to rewrite or repudiate it alto- gether" (10). A "cultural orthodoxy" in which the present becomes "'a rational continuation of the past'" (11), the revivalist "ideology of identity" (12) can be




recognized both in the Celtic Revival and in the Free State's later program of cultural protectionism. In contrast, Modernism "affirms a radical break with tradition and endorses a practice of cultural self-reflection where inherited concepts of identity are subject to question" (12); it "turn[s] its back on the political agenda of national revival ... [to] espouse an aesthetic 'revolution of the word'" (Kearney, 13).

Given Kearney's emphasis on demythologization and formal experiment, At Swim-Two-Birds might seem unequivocally Modem and, indeed, Kearney cred- its O'Brien's deconstruction of "inherited narratives of both classical realism and cultural revivalism" as a legacy from Joyce (85). But Kearney's simple opposition of Modernism and revivalism-reenactment of tradition or repudiation of it-finally fails to find a place for the complex equivocation of O'Brien's treatment of the various texts and traditions At Swim intertextually scruti- nizes. Kearney reads At Swim's parodic dialogue with mythic and legendary texts as simple rejection: "The traditional quest-structure is ridiculed in the aimless wanderings of such Irish legendary heroes as Finn McCool, Sweeney, or the pseudo-bardic Pooka" (85). More troublesome, he attributes to At Swim what he has identified as the ahistorical rebellions of Modernism: "In Flann O'Brien's fiction the imagination ... reigns supreme; history is no more than a figment of the narrator's own comic designs.... In At Swim-Two-Birds the snake of fiction curls up and swallows its own tail" (84, 86).

However, far from such solipsism, At Swim-Two-Birds's dialogism explicitly engages prior inscriptions of Irish identity in a scrutiny that is necessarily historicized and political, exposing the "authored, prosaic, and historical" basis of the Celtic Revivalists' romantic antiquarianism and the cultural protectionists' essentialism. Therefore, to Kearney's "either/or" opposition of revivalist reenactment or Modernist rejection we must add a third category of postmodern "both/and" to adequately account for a text which both values and interrogates tradition, and which deploys formal innovation as an agent of ideological critique. Ironically, for example, many of the passages with which At Swim parodies Revivalism's heroic discourse are, at the same time, legitimate translations of the Silva Gadelica, an Irish tale cycle dating from the fifth century and originally translated for the Irish Text Society by Standish O'Grady. Compare the passage quoted above, outlining admission requirements for the fianna, with O'Grady's version:4

No man was taken [into the fiannal till in the ground a large hole had been made (such as to reach the fold of his belt) and he put into it ... Then must nine warriors, having nine spears, with a ten furrow's width betwixt them and

3 To be fair to Kearney's argument, I must acknowledge that he himself recognizes the limitations of his binary opposition in a footnote that identifies a "third narrative tendency" that "may be termed postmodern, to the extent that it borrows freely from the idioms of both modernity and tradition, one moment endorsing a deconstruction of tradition, another reinventing and rewriting the stories of the past ..." (14). However Kearney's analysis is dominated by the original binary opposition and, more important for my own discussion, he never identifies this "third narrative tendency" at work in Flann O'Brien's fictions.

4 I owe this observation to Holly King, "Convenient Fictions: Novel within the Novel in the Works of Lessing, Gide, and O'Brien." (Diss. University of California, Los Angleles, 1975), 61-162. King refers to the same passages in O'Grady and O'Brien, but her interpretation of this intertextual reference differs substantially from my own.




him, assail him and in concert let fly at him. If past that guard of his he were hurt then, he was not received into Fianship. (Silva Gadelica, 100)

O'Brien's present tense rendering is a vigorous acknowledgement of the vitality and continued energy of the Gaelic inheritance, and it differs little from the "lofty direct words" of O'Grady's authorized translation. Such passages are "hardly parodies at all," according to J.C.C. Mays (254), yet juxtaposed with more contemporary discourses in At Swim and narrated by the bombastic "Mr. Storybook," Finn MacCool, they can seem antiquated, overblown, and self-parodic-a comic deflation of Revivalist attempts to recover the heroic past.

At Swim both problematizes and celebrates its cultural inheritance through a parodic strategy that is distinctly postmodern. As theorist Linda Hutcheon argues, such parody diverges from the "ridiculing imitation of the standard ... definitions [of parody] that are rooted in eighteenth-century theories of wit ..." (26). Refusing to occupy a position superior to the prior text or tradition, postmodern parody both "incorporates and challenges that which it parodies" (11), "paradoxically enact[ing] both change and cultural continuity" (26). Thus, asserts Hutcheon, "it is precisely parody-that seemingly introverted formal- ism-that paradoxically brings about a direct confrontation with the problem of the relation of the aesthetic ... to a discursive world of socially defined meaning systems (past and present)-in other words, to the political and the historical" (22). Rather than curling up to swallow its own tale, postmodern fiction such as At Swim-Two-Birds both evokes and challenges its cultural inheritance though energetic dialogism and, as Bakhtin observes, "it is for the same reason [that] novels are never in danger of becoming a mere aimless verbal play. The novel, being a dialogized representation of an ideologically freighted discourse ... is of all verbal genres the one least susceptible to aestheticism as such" ("Discourse," 333).

It is a significant part of this postmodern equivocation, that the Flann O'Brien who was born into that first, critical and cosmopolitan, post-independence generation was also paradoxically more familiar with Irish traditions than many of the Revivalists who embraced them or the Modernists who re- jected them. Born "Brian O'Nuallain" in 1911 into a family of ardent cultural nationalists where "no English at all was spoken" (Cronin, 9), whose vacations were spent in the Gaeltacht and who sang Irish folksongs in the parlor, Brian himself became an accomplished student of old and middle Irish, completing a Masters thesis on "Nature in Irish Poetry" at University College (Cronin, pas- sim). All of these voices are drawn into the colloquy of At Swim-Two-Birds, not with a conservator's didacticism nor a "blank parodist's" frivolity but with a comic mimicry that provokes both a continuity with and a critical distancing from the past.

We can easily see this postmodern equivocation at work in another of O'Brien's contributions to the articulation of Irish cultural identity-his 1941 novel An Bdal Bocht, published in Irish under the pseudonym Myles na Gopaleen and translated The Poor Mouth (1973). As Terence Brown observes, An B~al Bocht parodies such popular "western island" novels as Tombs O'Criomthainn's Am t-Oilednach for reinforcing the DeValeran myth of an




Irish Eden populated by a noble, if impoverished, peasantry whose very isola- tion has kept them pure. But simultaneously, An Beal Bocht reintroduces an increasingly cosmopolitan urban population to the Irish language through a so- phisticated satire that implicitly acknowledges that Ireland had outgrown the Gaelic League's iconization of "rural impoverishment and deprivation and ... a semiartificial folk culture that many Irish people found embarrassing" (Brown, 148). Far from a rejection of traditional folk narrative or a satire of rural poverty, An Beal Bocht challenges the ideological conscription of these images into a singular, petrified national biography of the Irish and simultaneously restores the Irish language to contemporary relevance.

This same doubleness permeates At Swim-Two-Birds, for the Irish cultural richness it embodies demands a narrative strategy that refuses both to privilege a singular perspective on the past or to relax its scrutiny of the ideological parameters of any invocation of it. At Swim-Two-Birds's parodies interrogate inherited narratives to forestall their ossification into crippling cultural stereotypes. Yet these parodic citations simultaneously refigure the past, by in- troducing the modern reader to a traditional text such as the Silva Gadelica or Buile Suibhne that might otherwise have remained unknown, untranslated, or passe. Moreover, it recontextualizes these narratives by bringing them into dialogue with the critical needs and conditions of the present. "Culture" thus becomes an on-going process, as the Irish past is engaged in continual, critical and self-conscious, colloquy.

It is in this context that O'Brien's dialogue with Modernism-and with Joyce in particular--develops added dimension. At Swim-Two-Birds's most profound challenge to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man engages what Hutcheon describes as a pervasive postmodern program-"to work toward a public discourse that would overtly eschew modernist aestheticism and hermeticism and its attendant political self-marginalization" (23). As At Swim introduces each new Joycean allusion, it deconstructs the very possibility of transcending one's cultural inheritance to achieve the aesthetic independence Stephen Dedalus seeks when he vows to "forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race" (Portrait, 253). If Stephen Dedalus's name rings with symbolic (and symbolically "unIrish") portent, O'Brien's protagonist remains unnamed. If Portrait opens with a highly symbolic rendering of the developing artistic consciousness, At Swim begins with nonchalant reflexivity: "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 ... Examples of three separate openings-the first:" (9). If Portrait concludes with a ringing vow that offers closure to the text's destabilizing ironies, At Swim's "Conclusion, ultimate, of the book" is perhaps the most gratuitous intertextual inclusion of all.

At Swim rewrites Portrait to subvert any Modernist desire to transcend nets of nation, language, and Church in order to discover an eternal value in art. It de- mythologizes the exile of the heroic artist by demonstrating the degree to which the cultural horizons of its own artist protagonists are already written, and it articulates a postmodern aesthetic that stands in self-conscious defiance



78 NOVEL FALL 1993

of Stephen's own program. The Dedalean artist commands the world to "mean" through a process of revelation: "This supreme quality [quiditas] is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination ... The in- stant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure ..." (Portrait, 213). Through the artist's priestly revelation of immanence, Stephen desires to illuminate the world by the word. While Joyce might ironize Stephen's pretensions to the aesthetic priesthood, O'Brien's student artist mocks his own pretensions: "My dim room rang with the iron of fine words ... concerning my own work, affording an insight as to its aesthetic, its daemon, its argument, its sorrow, and its joy, its darkness, its sun-twinkle clear- ness" (32). More important, the student's self-ironizing aesthetic-obviously a reflexive reference to At Swim-Two-Birds itself-subverts the Modernist desire to escape the nightmare of history in a transcendent unitary vision:

The novel, in the hands of an unscrupulous writer, could be despotic ... 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 ... Characters should be interchange- able 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 ... The modern novel should be largely a work of reference. (32-33)

Like postmodernism generally, At Swim-Two-Birds's "self-evident sham" acknowledges that "'[t]here can be no simple opposition to culture, no transcendent perspective or language, no singular secure self-definition, for all find their meaning only within a social framework'" (Charles Russell cited by Hutcheon, 51). At Swim dethrones the Modern artist, returning his or her voice to the general cultural colloquy, as when poets Casey and Sweeney join the cowboys, naavies, fairies and pookas in "the delights of colloquy and harmonized talk contrapuntal in character" (185). Such democratization of cultural construction, coupled with the dialogic interanimation of discourse, asserts the necessarily relational and historically-positioned status of any formulation of "the uncreated conscience of [the] race" and develops a "public discourse" that moves beyond Modernism's "political self-marginalization" as well as Revivalism's heroic essentialism and the Free State's cultural protectionism.

V

Given Ireland's history as a colonized island on the fringes of Europe, one senses in At Swim-Two-Bird's postmodern strategies a particular postcolonial trajec- tory which overthrows the monologism inherited from imperialism to open a dynamic cultural colloquy that begins to engage Irish diversity. As Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin have suggested generally of postcolonial texts:




In pushing the colonial world to the margins of experience the 'centre' pushed consciousness beyond the point at which monocentrism in all spheres of thought could be accepted without question. In other words the alienating process which initially served to relegate the post-colonial world to the 'margin' turned upon itself and acted to push that world ... into a position from which all experience could be viewed as uncentred, pluralistic, and multifarious.... The impetus towards decentring and pluralism has always been present in the history of European thought and has reached its latest development in post- structuralism. But the situation of marginalized societies and cultures enabled them to come to this position much earlier and more directly ... (12)

Moreover, if Terry Eagleton is correct in his assertion that "all oppositional politics ... move under the sign of irony" since they "exist to bring about the material conditions that will spell their own demise, and so always have some peculiar self-destruct device built into them" (26), then the exhuberant anti- narrative of At Swim-Two-Birds might be seen as a strategy for reintroducing an ironic note into Irish culture at a time when that tone-and its "self-destruct" (or at least self-critical) force--was dampened by the monologism of the Free State. At Swim-Two-Birds's narratologic innovations can thus be seen to open postcolonial Irish culture to its multiple inheritance without relaxing the self- critical irony which inhibits the petrifaction-and potential tyranny--of cultural forms. Whether the Irish followed O'Brien's lead in terms of greater cultural self-consciousness, increased heteroglossia, or fuller acknowledgement of historicity, remains problematic, although Fintan O'Toole asserts that "[s]lowly but inexorably, through the sixties and seventies, those assumptions [that "'Ireland' was a single, imaginable entity"] became untenable" (11) and a "cultural instability" emerged "in which it had become impossible to think of Ireland as a unifying concept that would underlie and overhang every social and cultural phenomenon, in which there were many competing and conflicting Irelands on the same island" (12).

But there are limits to O'Brien's heterogloss enterprise: for all of its intertextual exuberance, we can surely tax O'Brien's own text with a failure to engage more broadly and directly the range of conflicting Irish voices. While no novel can achieve complete intertextual inclusiveness, some of O'Brien's omissions are striking: there are, for example, no Northern voices nor explicitly Anglo-Irish voices heard in At Swim-Two-Birds, and women-except as objects of narration-are significantly absent.5 Equally troubling, At Swim's critical dialogism fails at important moments, as when the racism of the cowboys is voiced without challenge or counterclaim. And, while At Swim parodies the puritanism and monologia of cultural protectionism, it does not confront the issue of censorship directly and avoids any explicitly political confrontations.

Brendan P. O Hehir objects much more categorically than I do to such absences, accusing O'Brien of xenophobia and sexism: "Outside the small island that was Flann O'Brien's sensibility lay all that was other to him-all that was not Irish, Catholic, and male" (212). In a text that seems to celebrate plurality as vigorously as At Suwim-Two-Birds, such omissions are indeed significant, and perhaps one can read them as the limiting blindness that is the underside of O'Brien's insight. I hope, at any rate, that I have demonstrated that O'Brien's text releases the very kind of deconstructive critique that animates

O Hehir's analysis, so that while O'Brien's self-critique falls short of exposing fully the ideological limitations of his own text, its very dialogic strategies necessarily sponsor the critical dismantling of any utterance--including his own.




Opposed in narrative strategy to stable or monologic articulations, liberated with laughter from pedantry and illusion, At Swim-Two-Birds nevertheless asserts the generative, decentering, potential of postmodern narrative for a di- verse people still seeking their voices years after emerging from the muted at- mosphere of colonial domination.

Thus it seems fitting that at the decentered center of At Swim-Two-Birds we find the legendary Sweeny-a postmodern postcolonial anti-hero to rival the Revivalist's Cuchulain and the Modernist's Dedalus. The protagonist of the Buile Suibhne, a thirteenth-century Irish text, Sweeny is a "native" whose dis- orientation and resuscitation-both through the power of the word--embody Ireland's struggle for cultural survival.6 O'Brien happens early upon the figure which Fintan O'Toole identifies as an emblem of the new openness of Irish culture in the 1980s (13), for as Seamus Heaney writes in the introduction of his own 1984 translation of Buile Suibhne, Sweeney Astray:

... the literary imagination which fastened upon him as an image was clearly in the grip of a tension between the newly dominant Christian ethos and the older, recalcitrant Celtic temperament ... insofar as Sweeney is also a figure of the artist, displaced, guilty, assuaging himself by his utterance, it is possible to read the work as an aspect of the quarrel between free creative imagination and the constraints of religious, political, and domestic obligation. ("Introduction," unnumbered)

Through a translation labelled both parodic (Clissman, 129) and "serious and accurate" (Wiippling, 60), O'Brien introduces Sweeny's legend into At Swim-Two-Birds as one of Finn MacCool's "spare time literary activities." As Heaney suggests, it locates a key moment of cultural contact-that of Celt and Christian--in a long history of such encounters, and illustrates the centrality of discourse to colonial power relations. The clash occurs as St. Ronan is "out in the matin-hours taping out the wall-steads of a new sun-bright church and ringing his bell in the morning" (90)-that is, as he literally marks terrain previously animated by Celtic spirituality for occupation by the Church. Enraged by "the clack of the clergyman's bell," Sweeny attempts to overpower him by "snatch[ing] the beauteous light-lined psalter from the cleric and put[ting] it in the lake" (90). He intends the same fate for Ronan, but is interrupted by a call to arms which he, a good Celtic warrior-king, immediately answers.

By drowning the psalter, Sweeny challenges the emblem of the priest's Christian devotion and earthly authority. If the Word is God, language becomes monologic and absolute, its repository the unchanging, because scripted, holy text. In his attempted logocide, the Celtic Sweeny whose culture is oral, desires to submerge the authority upon which the Church's subsequent occupation of the Irish landscape is to be built-the Word. In turn, Ronan invokes the power of that Word to condemn Sweeny to madness and exile by uttering a "melodious lay" that "will banish thee to branches" and "put thee on a par

6 O'Brien's text anglicizes Suibhme as "Sweeny" while most other writers prefer "Sweeney." I will honor O'Brien's choice throughout my own text.




with fowls" (92). Maddened through this clash of cultures, exiled by and within language, Sweeny flies across Ireland, singing intensely beautiful lyrics that rehearse the spirituality of the land itself as an alternative to Christian psalmody. It is a wild terrain, bountiful and harsh, not yet bounded by the Church:

There was a time when I preferred to the tinkle of neighbour bells [from the monastery] the voice of the blackbird from the crag and the belling of a stag in a storm.

There was a time when I preferred the yapping of the wolves to the voice of a cleric melling and megling within. (126-27)

Ironically, it is only in his resistance to the authority of the Christian word that Sweeny is driven to reclaim the topography of Ireland in his native tongue. And, in yet another twist to this complex and equivocal convergence of cultures, Sweeny's ephemeral (because oral) lyrics are preserved by a self-ap- pointed scribe-the literate Christian Moling-and Sweeny's own words become textbound. Deeply paradoxical, the legend does not so much surrender Celtic to Christian discourse as it creates a mosaic of the two, dialogically revealing points of conflict, congruence, and interanimation-a mise en abym of At Swim-Two-Birds itself, and of Irish culture.

However emblematic Sweeny's tale is for O'Brien's postmodern enterprise, it is not installed as a master discourse. It too is deconstructed-by that quintessential "man in the street" Shanahan, who initiates yet another intertextual dialogue by countering Sweeny's medieval nature lyrics with "pomes written by a man that is one of ourselves and written down for ourselves to read" (106)-Jem Casey, Poet of the Pick, the Working Man's Poet:

When food is scarce and your larder bare And no rashers grease your pan, When hunger grows as your meals are rare- A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN. (108)

"That pome," crows Lamont, "is a pome that'll be heard wherever the Irish race is wont to gather, it'll live as long as there's a hard root of an Irishman left ..." (109). And O'Brien thus succeeds in parodying Sweeny, Casey, the di- mensions of working class taste, the pretensions of antiquarianism, medieval lyricism, cultural protectionism, the bibulous stereotype of the Irish, and any text-working class or Revivalist, Christian or Celtic, modern or postmodern, narrative or critical-which presumes to claim the last word on "the Irish."




Works Cited

Adams, Michael. Censorship: the Irish Experience. University of Alabama Press, 1968.

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culture as colloquy: flann o'brien's post modern dialogue with irish tradition

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