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• Title: Citation and Spectrality in Flann O'brien's at Swim-Two-Birds (Critical Essay)
• Author : Irish University Review: a journal of Irish Studies
• Release Date : January 22, 2006
• Genre: Reference,Books,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 371 KB

Description

A bird-man is a chimera, as much the inheritor of humanity's propensity to fall as of the avian gift of flight. In his exuberantly experimental 1939 novel, At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O'Brien borrows the flighty Sweeny (his preferred spelling) from the medieval Irish saga, Buile Suibhne, and repeatedly brings him crashing down to earth. The first bedraggled appearance of the mad poet announces that he is no longer in the realm of romantic legend. O'Brien's Sweeny has been transliterated into the vocabulary of a realistic novel, with the result that aspects which seemed glorious in Buile Suibhne, such as his poetic creativity and his mysterious growth of feathers, have become negligible, 'inaudible', and 'shabby', while much greater attention is paid to the agonizing details of his physical suffering. And yet, diminished though he initially seems, Sweeny's influence utterly pervades the novel, lending it both a title (Swim-Two-Birds is a place name in Buile Suibhne) and a model of creation and suffering that is reiterated in the lives of many of its characters. Much of the recent critical discourse concerning At Swim-Two-Birds has focused on the question of what theoretical and generic frames should be applied to analysis of O'Brien's work. Because of the novel's freewheeling dialogue and carnivalesque tone, Bakhtin is frequently invoked, most notably in M. Keith Booker's book-length study, Flann O'Brien, Bakhtin, and Menippean Satire. (1) Declan Kiberd refers in passing to At Swim-Two-Birds as a 'masterpiece of Irish modernism', (2) while others find post-structural theory, and a postmodern frame of reference, more relevant. Thus Monique Gallagher argues that although O'Brien's narrator is largely 'a parody of the modernist artificer', the novel itself 'foreshadows, in the restlessness of its form, the destabilizing energies and hermeneutical uncertainties of the postmodern novel'. (3) Neil Murphy insists that At Swim-Two-Birds does not just foreshadow things to come, but 'is already a postmodern text', citing its 'systematic flaunting of artifice' and 'overt metaleptic practices'. (4) In his own recent work, Booker seems to agree, noting that while his earlier Bakhtinian reading 'sounded to me like a good argument at the time', At Swim-Two-Birds is probably best read within the context of postmodernism. (5) Interestingly, Booker also argues against a postcolonial analysis of the novel, suggesting that because the text's 'radical undecidability' makes it impossible to decipher any clear, anticolonial political position, it is fruitless to try to 'force [the novel] into a postcolonial mold that just doesn't fit'. This formulation seems to me unnecessarily to narrow the purview of postcolonial inquiry, which need not limit itself to merely identifying and applauding approved political messages. Eibhlin Evans, for instance, has recently undertaken an illuminating analysis of O'Brien's engagement with the 'self-creation and identity-formation' of the Irish subject in the post-independence Ireland of the late 1930s, (6) surely an area of postcolonial interest despite O'Brien's rejection of the new state's tendency toward monological nationalism.

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