Flann O Brien

Work of Brian O'Nolan, Third Policeman was written between 1939 and 1940 under O'Nolan's Pseudonym as Flann O'Brien, but only to be published one year after writer's death in 1966. O'Brien uses his idiosyncratic avant-garde style to give best examples of Metafiction on different levels in narration, which turns the novel into an absurd reality that exist in a paradoxical infinite china-box. Story is told by a nameless narrator who is in search of a black box in a strange but also familiar reality. As the story progresses, disorienting narration takes the reader into an alternate dimension created by O'Brien and reveals all the elements that constructs this story as a metafiction. Third Policeman as an example of post-modern and avant-garde tradition reflects nearly all the elements of metafiction like: self-conscious characters, frames of narratology, frame-breaking, constructed and reconstructed realities, parody, ontological crisis, epistemological questioning, existential anxiety of characters, paradoxes, contradictions and infinity. O'Brien takes it further and even parodies the parodic approach of the Third Policeman itself and questions the authority of writer and language.

his essay compares how Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) and Australian author Frank Moorhouse’s The Electrical Experience: A Discontinuous Narrative (1974) use beer and soft drink manufacture, respectively, as conceits both for literary production and for the production of ‘character’. In so doing, these texts offer challenging representations of authorial power, class relations and the intersections between literature and commodity culture. The Irish and the Australian authors were born a generation apart, and Moorhouse (b.1938) has never claimed O’Brien as a literary influence,1 but the two authors’ comic visions have certain affinities, most evident in how they draw imaginatively on the beverage industry to explore whether human life itself might be considered a mass product like Guinness or Coca-Cola.

With Flann O'Brien now widely acknowledged as a subversive genius of early post-modernism, Flore Coulouma gives the "question of language" a central position in his literary identity. Tracing O'Brien's philosophy of language to the convoluted structure of his writing, Coulouma demonstrates how his bilingualism and ambiguous relation to language inspired his satirical fiction and chronicles, and develops a series of narrative oppositions: orality and literacy, truth and fiction, authority and legitimacy, native and national language(s). Using such dialectical oppositions to stage O'Brien's literary representation of the diglossic relationship of speakers to their native tongue, this book casts light on O'Brien's own intuitions about the failures and achievements of language, the logic of fiction, the relation between language and knowledge, and the impossibility of a nation cut off from its original tongue finding its linguistic identity.

The 1946 short prose piece "Drink and Time in Dublin" by Myles na gCopaleen, opens withthe question, "Did you go see that picture The Lost Weekend?" As a result, the anonymous speaker associates the story with the screening of the American film The Lost Weekend in Dublin the previous year, 11-18 March 1945.  The date of the narrator gives toward the end of the story "22nd November 1945" (74) as the date of his own 'lost weekend'. The headline "Second Day of Nuremberg Trials: prosecutor Discloses Astonishing Nazi Plans" is prominent on front page of the Irish Times of that same day.  The subtitle to na gCopaleen's story "A Recorded Statement" indicates a type of hybridized journalistic-prose style which contributed to O'Brien/na gCopaleen's short prose aesthetic. As a 'recorded statement,' the story engages in a journalistic account of the reception of the film in Dublin as well as produces a social critiques of post-World War II anxiety in Ireland, mirrored by the anxiety of America related to World War II portrayed in the film. The short story form of "Drink and Time in Dublin" troubles and fictionalizes the journalistic aspects of the 'recorded statement', and vice versa. As a result, na gCopaleen parodies The Lost Weekend to provide a critique of Irish Neutrality as a type of disavowal of the atrocities of World War II. This paper will examine the influence both The Lost Weekend and the headlines of the time had on "Drink and Time in Dublin" as evidenced by The Irish Times coverage of post-war events and the reaction to those events seen in the "Cruiskeen Lawn" columns. Furthermore, drawing on Bahktian theory, it will be argued that "Drink and Time in Dublin" is a type of hybridized journalistic-literary text which actively contests journalism as a type of empirical record by forcing it into a dialogic performance of literary heteroglossia.

Анализируются концепции множественных повторений, производящих бесконечные или квазибесконечные последовательности (литературные фракталы) в романе Флэнна О'Брайена «Третий полицейский». Посредством этих повторов с изменениями, возникающих на различных уровнях текста, автор ведет читателя к пониманию мира главного героя, «мира мертвых и проклятых». - Опубликовано в сборнике: Проблемы модерна и постмодерна. Выпуск IV/ Ред.  А.В. Белобратов. Санкт-Петербург: Петербург. XXI век, 2014, сс.59-67.

This article brings Friedrich Kittler’s media determinism to bear on a selection of works from Brian O’Nolan’s œuvre. It briefly examines Myles na gCopaleen’s play with posthuman hybrids in Cruiskeen Lawn, seeing his vignettes as extravagant, humorous depictions of the ways our bodies and symbolic order are determined by the mechanical. It then maps the movement between typed and handwritten texts in At Swim-Two-Birds, considering the progression between modes of inscription as a commentary on modernity, meaning, and presence. Despite At Swim-Two-Birds’s overt commitment to the typewriter’s mode of impersonal, mechanical assemblage, we find, at the novel’s core, inscriptions that are invested in the personal and immediate, and which are driven by intention. The novel’s modernist detachment and technological investments are underpinned by nostalgic desires, ironically and earnestly presented, for the immediacy and presence of more traditional relations with language and the text. By ...

This paper examines the era of Austerity in Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland through, but not limited to, Samuel Beckett’s “The Lost Ones” and Flann O’Brien’s “John Duffy’s Brother.” Reading the twenty-first century corporate existence in Ireland through these authors applies their unique insights, portrayed through their individual aesthetics, to the human condition within a consistently intensifying constricting and mechanistic world. Beckett’s “The Lost Ones” will be presented as analogous to an overly specialist corporate existence. In the “The Lost Ones”, those within the enclosed cylinder portray a near obsessional need to seek out their own ‘niche.’ As there are more searchers than available niches, this will be equated to the ever narrowing corporate job market resulting in an over saturated competitive professional arena. Much like the corporate context, those in the cylinder are conditioned to desire to climb, and in comparison to the cliché of climbing the corporate ladder, as “the need to climb is too widespread” perpetuating a deplorably restrictive existence. Flann O’Brien’s “John Duffy’s Brother” provides a parodic insight into another aspect of the contemporary corporate existence. The mechanized routine of daily life reflects the demand for an equality unyielding demand for productivity within the Post-Celtic Tiger work force. The psychological break portrayed by the protagonist in O’Brien’s story exposes the negative results of the pressure for continual productivity as “he became possessed of the strange idea that he was a train.” This spell of neurosis experienced by “John Duffy’s Brother” will be examined as a metaphor exposes the daily existence of a work force based on assessment quantifiable outputs contingent on outdated Celtic Tiger expectations, similar to Quiggin’s theories in Zombie Economics, which “continue to govern economic policy within” and era of so-called Austerity.

With its penchant for dissecting rehearsed attitudes and subverting expectations, Flann O’Brien’s writing displays an uncanny knack for comic doubling and self-contradiction. Focusing on the satirical energies and anti-authoritarian temperament invested in his style, Flann O'Brien: Problems with Authority interrogates the author's clowning with linguistic, literary, legal, bureaucratic, political, economic, academic, religious and scientific powers in the sites of the popular, the modern and the traditional.