Flann O’Brien: Problems with Authority ed. by Ruben Borg, Paul Fagan, and John McCourt (review)

Originating in the second International Flann O’Brien Conference organized in 2013 in Rome, the volume edited by Ruben Borg, Paul Fagan, and John McCourt, and dedicated to the memory of one of the most active promoters of the globalization of Flann O’Brien studies, Werner Huber, reflects the archival and historical turn that has taken place in the rapidly diversifying discipline. One small but telling sign of this is the fact that the mercurial author is now consistently referred to as Brian O’Nolan—the civilian name that he never used in any of his fiction, plays, or journalism; the writer who goes under the changed name looks very different from his portrait as a young postmodernist. Against the critical construction of O’Brien as something of a cultural accident who wrote “books [that] did not come from the world, [but] . . . became the world; in the beginning was the word, but there was often nothing except the word and its hollow echoes,” these essays speak about a writer in, and of, his time, and moreover, a popular writer of socially performative work, responding in ambiguous ways to the cultural-political realities of post-Independence Ireland and displaying many of the symptoms of the Irish cultural field in the 1940s and 1950s.¹

The volume opens with Carol Taaffe’s polemical essay that bids us to take the long-standing thesis that O’Brien had all his life been a coterie taste, with “a grain of salo,”² presenting the case for a success-oriented professional writer whose career veered “from post-Joycean experimentalism to television comedy, advertising, and the exploitation of a literary brand” and whose activity as a columnist reflects the “populist” values of post-Independence Ireland, a peculiar blend of progressive democratic ethos and conservative anti-intellectualism (33). Not for him the disdain for the philistine who had presumably never given “a fart in [his] corduroys for any form of art whatsoever”³: the particular corduroys O’Brien was at daggers with were worn by the Dublin artistic and intellectual class, not the “Plain People of Ireland.”⁴ Taaffe claims that critics favored his early novels to the “throwaway work” (24) to which he dedicated most of his creative energies for over twenty-six years and overlooked the fact that his magazine articles present in concentrated form the most disruptive “flannobrienesque” narrative strategies, including collaborative authorship. Maebh Long’s sobering look at O’Brien’s exploitation of the stage Irish stereotype comes to similar conclusions: “[It is a] sustained performance of the post-independence search for national identity” (34). The works walk the tightrope between undercutting and adopting the old-new stereotypes—eternal revenants, which turn the corrective versions that ought to supersede them into tomorrow’s jaded clichés almost by default. In an analysis as sophisticated as it is unsparing, Long indicates how O’Brien’s plays from the 1930s and 1940s blunt the political edge of the earlier riotous bilingual carnival and, with a “troubling slippage between accent and brogue, individual and type” (44), become subservient to the cliché.

The same bilingual carnival of accents comes under the neurolinguistically informed gaze of Maria Kager, who shows how the bilingual’s enhanced metalinguistic awareness energizes the practice by Myles na gCopaleen (another of O’Brien’s pseudonyms) of phonetically rendering a variety of accents and idioms, as well as his lifelong preoccupation with hackneyed language use—one of the column’s recurring features being “The Catechism of Cliché” (70). Kager also saliently points out the fact that O’Brien’s “mother” tongue, Irish, was not his parents’ “mother” tongue but an acquired speech, which inevitably colored the writer’s process of learning the language and his Gaelic writing (56).

Ian Ó Caoimh’s fascinating archaeology of Cruiskeen Lawn and O’Brien’s biographies demonstrates that not only did the author not seek to fly by the...