Ireland Through the Looking Glass: Flann O’Brien, Myles na gCopaleen and Irish Cultural Debate (review)

In her examination of Flann O’Brien’s oeuvre, Carol Taaffe contends that disassociating O’Brien’s work from contemporary social Irish values renders opaque the extent to which the author’s political position was ambivalent. And yet, much of the criticism one finds while conducting a survey of the work on O’Brien in the last forty years does just that. (There is even a Mylesian moment in this literary history: forty years of O’Brien studies involves three substantial critics named Keith, an oddity that no doubt would have delighted the columnist.)

Flann O’Brien is touted as the third in the line-up of Irish modernist heavy-weights— the other two being Joyce and Beckett—in M. Keith Booker’s Flann O’Brien, Bakhtin and Menippean Satire (1995). Critical studies like Booker’s largely focus on O’Brien’s work within a formalist, new critical lens, and while they position the author’s fiction among international literary trends, for Taaffe, they unmoor his authorial practices from Irish context. Taaffe charges her historical-cultural study of O’Brien with a simple goal: that of exploring the author’s works, and how they both shaped and were shaped by Irish cultural politics. In the course of doing so, she undertakes other, ancillary examinations. One such thread is her assertion that O’Brien’s literary acts often correspond to contemporary social Irish values, but his literary experiments distract readers from noticing. According to Taaffe, as a civil servant Brian O’Nolan had much invested in the new Ireland and embodied some of the nation’s claustrophobic values. However, O’Nolan uses the guise of Myles to mock these same, newstate values.

Published the same year as Booker’s study, Keith Hopper’s Flann O’Brien: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Postmodernist (1995) emphasizes the subversive and formalist nature of O’Brien’s humor according to its folksy Irish myth and post-structural literary habits. Taaffe believes that Hopper’s study is chiefly responsible for categorizing O’Brien into two types: “Myles of Dublin lore and hismore academic counterpart, the post-modernist Flann O’Brien.”Taaffe asks readers to examine O’Brien’s works according to the equivocal nature that they set down. She admits that his innovative fiction helps align him with modernist and postmodernist techniques, but along with this identity, O’Brien wrote as Myles. the journalist, whose character depicts an insularity entirely of a piece with that of Emergency Dublin. A second subsidiary claim highlights O’Brien’s linguistic shift as his career proceeded; he went from predominantly using Irish to English in his newspaper columns. For Taaffe, this is an underappreciated indicator of “the importance of reception” to the writer. Taaffe’s third interpretive thread—her analysis of O’Brien’s preoccupation with the author and his role–may have as much to do with the Irish writer’s position in the 1930s and 1940s as it did with literary modernism. The writer’s position that the comic writer O’Brien occupied was undoubtedly in debt to Joyce, but it was also a career in anxiety of Joyce’s influence—a contention that O’Brien might find unsettling, but which is necessary to understand fully the context for his work.

Taaffe points out early how O’Brien knowingly undermined the cult of the author. Through his multiple pseudonyms and extensive body of writing, he can be classified in many different ways so that the difficulty in conceptualizing him as, for instance, a spokesman for literary modernism or a commentator on popular journalism makes him a curious case. Taaffe uses a thorough examination of O’Brien’s college years at UCD in the 1930s to the present culture in which At Swim-Two-Birds was created; O’Brien’s comic masterpiece, she observes, reflects “his dependence on a receptive local audience...