“Problems with Authority”: The Second International Flann O’Brien Conference, University of Rome III, Rome, Italy, 19–21 June 2013

Writing under his nom de plume Myles na gCopaleen in the Irish Times, Brian O’Nolan regularly concocted elaborate chronicles and genealogies to baffle the most ardent of “biografiends” (FW 55.06). Indeed, one column traced his aristocratic lineage back to the figure of T. Coplinius Miles—that “stalwart hero of pre-Imperial Rome” who, alongside his uncles Romulus and Remus, was subsequently “deified under the Emperors.”¹ If the homophony of “stalwart” and “stale wart” erodes the foundations of Myles’s extravagant genealogy, this proleptic pun also gestures towards the stale, spent atmosphere of O’Nolan’s later novel The Hard Life, where Rome features once again in a rather tenuous subplot.² For when the moral crusader, Mr. Collopy, swallows a quack medical treatment that makes him swell to a colossal twenty-nine stone, he seeks an audience with the ultimate ecclesiastical authority, hoping that Pope Pius X might miraculously “restore him to the proper weight” (120). Unsurprisingly, this task falls outside the Pontiff’s jurisdiction, and Mr. Collopy soon meets a tragic end, as the floor of a concert-hall balcony collapses under the strain of his morbid bulk. The ruined colonnades of the Eternal City provided the ideal backdrop, then, for “The Second International Flann O’Brien Conference” last June, which brought together “Flanneurs” and “Mylesians” from seventeen countries to discuss his writings’ vexed relationship with authority.

Organized by John McCourt (University of Rome III), Paul Fagan (University of Vienna), and Ruben Borg (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), the conference was supported by the Irish Embassy in Rome, the Irish Literature Exchange, and the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Foreign Cultures at the University of Rome III. Three days of wide-ranging parallel panels were combined with a vigorous program of performances, readings, and screenings. These ranged from an evening of poetry recitals by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh, and Aifric Mac Aodha within the resplendent grounds of St. Isidores College to Julian Gough’s reading of “The iHole,” which was shortlisted for the BBC International Short Story Award in 2012. A personal highlight came in the form of a dramatic reading of “John Duffy’s Brother” by Mikel Murfi (Intermission, Butcher Boy) and Mark O’Halloran (Adam and Paul, Garage), which was followed by a screening of their 2006 adaptation.³ Murfi spoke eloquently about the film’s misé-en-scene and the difficulties of editing the first-person narrative for Michael Gambon’s voice-over role, while O’Halloran described his realization of the bodily movements and mental anguish of a protagonist who, temporarily at least, believes himself to be a train.

The opening morning began with a number of archival approaches to O’Nolan’s writings. In his keynote address, Dirk van Hulle examined the marginalia in O’Nolan’s personal copy of the Odyssey Press edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses to discuss models of enactive cognition in The Third Policeman through the image of the parallax,⁴ while Catherine Ahearn spoke of the problems of producing an authoritative copy-text that might resolve the variations between the short stories “For Ireland Home and Beauty” and “The Martyr’s Crown.”⁵ In the same panel, my paper on music read At Swim-Two-Birds as an anti-fugue that wreaks havoc with the traditional procedures of imitative counterpoint,⁶ whereas Ian Ó Caoimh spoke persuasively about the links between The Third Policeman and the Irish language detective novels that O’Nolan’s brother Ciarán Ó Nualláin wrote for An Gúm in the early 1940s.⁷ More significantly, Ó Caoimh meticulously challenged the account of family visits to the Gaeltacht in Anthony Cronin’s deeply flawed biography, highlighting the disparities between Ó Nualláin’s playful register in Óige an Dearthár i. Myles na gCopaleen and Cronin’s idealized translation.⁸ Unfortunately, this parallel format meant that I missed a session on O’Brien and theatricality, but a number of participants commented upon the strength of Kerry Wendt’s paper, which read the...