The Man in the Hat

Flann O'Brien was the best-known pen name of the Irish comic writer Brian O'Nolan. After early years spent as a dazzling wit in Dublin magazines, he published his first novel At Swim-Two-Birds with Longman's in 1939. The book was a fabulous montage of literature and life, uproarious but demanding; the author later blamed Nazi Germany for the war that had distracted the world's attention from it. The follow-up, the surreally astonishing The Third Policeman, was rejected by Longman's, and not published till a year after O'Nolan's death in 1966. Stung by this reversal of fortune, O'Nolan retreated into other work: primarily his day job as a civil servant (from 1935 to 1953) and his other day job as a comic newspaper columnist for the Irish Times (1940–1966). The latter generated Cruiskeen Lawn, a continuous serial of wit, pedantry and satire, which was initially written in Irish but gradually settled in the English language. Within a few years, O'Nolan's new guise Myles na gCopaleen had become one of Dublin's best-known, though imaginary, characters. The column inspired O'Nolan to pen a novella in Irish: An Béal Bocht, an affectionate satire of wide-eyed peasant memoirs from the Irish-speaking West, was received with interest in 1941 but only translated, as The Poor Mouth, after its author's death. O'Nolan wrote a few plays in the 1940s—the longest, Faustus Kelly, ran for a fortnight at the Abbey Theatre—but otherwise his literary career was becalmed for nearly two decades. In 1960 At Swim-Two-Birds was republished, into an era in which its metafictional pyrotechnics might more easily appear as vital harbingers, and the experience stirred a weary, whiskey-sodden O'Nolan to write two more novels. The Hard Life (1961) and The Dalkey Archive (1964), less audacious than the works of his youth, gave him a late career as a contemporary novelist before his early demise.

It was not immediately evident that literary criticism should have much to say about Flann O'Brien. Arguably only three major novels existed; the creative energies seemed to have been poured into Cruiskeen Lawn (which indeed was Irish for "the full little jug"). This was a writer five years younger than Samuel Beckett, but dead before Beckett took the Nobel Prize; there was no comparably extensive body of fiction and drama for existentialists and post-structuralists to start skirmishing over. One of Flann O'Brien's primary critical fates was to be recollected as a local character—the man in the hat with the book at the end of the bar. This is unsurprising, not only because the relatively small world of literary Dublin tended to generate such memoirs of liquor and letters, but because Myles had made himself such a public character, a regular dose of local colour, even while often inveighing against displays of stereotypical Irishness. Some of the essays by O'Nolan's old acquaintances remain among the most insightful writing about him, illuminating what the writer himself called his careful "compartmentation of personality". But when Keith Hopper came to write on Flann O'Brien in the 1990s, he found this body of reminiscence "folksy and anecdotal", "often lacking in critical rigour" (16). An alternative body of work had coalesced: European critics, sometimes cognizant of Parisian theory, had worked to situate At Swim-Two-Birds alongside postwar experimental fiction. An impatient Hopper found this work in turn too decontextualized; but at least the early work had been granted something like its proper status alongside Pale Fire or Borges' Labyrinths. Flann O'Brien had been situated as a (perhaps proleptic or precursor) postmodernist, whose play with narrative levels booked him a transitional place in such periodizing narratives...