Flann O’Brien: Gallows Humour ed. by Ruben Borg and Paul Fagan (review)

In a delightful scene in At Swim-Two-Birds, the bodiless Good Fairy informs the devil Pooka that a pulp character is “a woman and a fine one from the point of view of those that have bodies on them.”¹ The repartee illustrates well a pervasive quality of O’Brien’s writing where, at times, flippancy, at times, ominous dissociation from corporeality is the source of much unclassifiable humor. This juncture between largely dysfunctional, abject bodies and unsettling humor is the focus of the latest volume in a series dedicated to Flann O’Brien/Myles na gCopaleen and edited by veteran Flanneurs Ruben Borg and Paul Fagan; reflecting a stage in rapidly diversifying and globalized Flann O’Brien studies after the archival turn, the book testifies to the versatility of O’Brien’s anti-authoritarian writing to accommodate approaches that focus on the interface between literature, on the one hand, and medical science, the law, ecocriticism, New Materialism, or posthuman studies on the other. It is no coincidence that among the most cited theoretical texts we find Jacques Derrida’s “Force of Law” and Walter Benjamin’s essay “Critique of Violence,”² for the collection puts a lot of (bio)political flesh on the metafictional bones of the fabled avant la lettre postmodernist, insisting, as the editors point out, that “the unseemly in [O’Brien’s] humour is always politically charged” (4). The book also addresses the contingencies of the writing with the (however elusive) author’s own finite body, which was riddled with serial debilitating accidents and ill health, as his recently published correspondence reveals;³ Catherine O. Ahearn traces Myles’s “disappearing act[s]” (97) from the comic column Cruiskeen Lawn during its two-decade existence and the jocose cover stories he concocted,⁴ while Noam Schiff examines the interplay of (textual as well as biographic) alcoholism and bodily metamorphoses in a variety of heteronymous pieces and the play Thirst (116).⁵

One of the critical myths revised by this collection concerns O’Brien, the eminently apolitical writer: as a series of rehistoricizing essays show, both the novels and Cruiskeen Lawn are intensely, if covertly, politicized, and their multifaceted games with translation and transliteration also serve as a wry, underhanded critique of the newfangled Irish state’s policies. As Catherine Flynn deftly shows, utilizing a December 1941 installment of the column, a facetious equation of an Irish name with “Ivan Popoff” (26) playfully implodes the foundations of nationalism, substituting universal translatability for the Romantic underpinnings of the imagined community, while smuggling in the name of the then Bulgarian Foreign Minister. The fact that, in December 1941, Bulgaria joined the Axis powers, presumably with a hope of territorial gains, establishes a link of trans-allusive, sardonic equivalence to Ireland’s pro-nativist, pro-Nazi leanings during World War II, driven by territorial revisionism; thus Myles introduces political critique, unpublishable under harsh censorship laws during the war years, through the back door of language games. Another butt of Myles’s ridicule is the muscular masculinity propagated by the Gaelic Athletic Association, as Richard T. Murphy demonstrates; not only does O’Brien join ranks with Irish modernist advocates of “‘insolent indolence’” (63) like Samuel Beckett, but the ideology of the well-made, fit body is played down even in the text’s refusal of narrative closure. In one of the volume’s strongest pieces, Siobhán Purcell examines the “‘disability aesthetic[s]’” (182) of The Third Policeman and Beckett’s Molloy⁶ in their featuring of impaired and prosthetic bodies and, in Murphy’s words, “substitution of debility for ability” (76), exposing the triumphalist Irish and continental discourses of eugenics and degeneracy in the 1930s and 1940s. Astutely, Purcell shows that, in both novels, disability is a common condition of bodies, machines, and prostheses, all ultimately interchangeable by virtue of the hilarious atomic theory which postulates that, due to sustained friction on the rocky roadsteads of...