Flann O’Brien: Gallows Humour

By Cork University Press

The essays collected in this volume draw unprecedented critical attention to the centrality of politics in Flann O’Brien’s art. The organising theme of Gallows humour focuses these inquiries onto key encounters between the body and the law, between death and the comic spirit in the author’s canon. These innovative analyses explore the place of biopolitics in O’Brien’s modernist experimentation and popular writing through reflections on his handling of the thematics of violence, justice, capital punishment, eugenics, prosthetics, skin, prostitution, syphilis, rape, reproduction, illness, auto-immune deficiency, abjection, drinking, Gaelic games and masculinist nationalism across a diverse range of genres, intertexts, contexts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cork University Press
• Release date: Oct 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781782054238

Book preview

Flann O’Brien

GALLOWS HUMOUR

Flann O’Brien

GALLOWS HUMOUR

EDITED BY

Ruben Borg and Paul Fagan

First published in 2020 by

Cork University Press

Boole Library

University College Cork

Cork

T12 ND89

Ireland

© Contributors 2020

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020934773

Distribution in the USA: Longleaf Services, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording or otherwise, without either the prior written permission of the publishers or a licence permitting restricted copying in Ireland issued by the Irish Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd., 25 Denzille Lane, Dublin 2.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978–1-78205–421-4

Printed in Poland by BZ Graf

Print origination and design by Carrigboy Typesetting Services

www.carrigboy.com

Cover Image: ‘Metamorphoses’, 2015, David O’Kane.

Courtesy of the artist and Cavanacor Gallery. © David O’Kane 2020.

www.corkuniversitypress.com

Contents

Acknowledgements

List of abbreviations

Notes on contributors

Editors’ introduction

RUBEN BORG AND PAUL FAGAN

PART I. Body Politics

1. Everybody Here Is under Arrest: Translation and politics in Cruiskeen Lawn

CATHERINE FLYNN

2. ‘nothing in the world would save me from the gallows’: O’Nolan and the death penalty

KATHERINE EBURY

3. Carnival and Class Consciousness: Bakhtin and the Free State in At Swim-Two-Birds

CONOR DOWLING

4. Spare-Time Physical Activities: Cruiskeen Lawn, the GAA and the Irish modernist body

RICHARD T. MURPHY

5. The Soft Misogyny of Good Intentions: The Mother and Child Scheme, Cruiskeen Lawn and The Hard Life

ALANA GILLESPIE

PART II: Failing Bodies

6. ‘Where you bin, bud?’ Myles na gCopaleen’s disappearing act

CATHERINE O. AHEARN

7. ‘the situation had become deplorably fluid’: Alcohol, alchemy and Brian O’Nolan’s metamorphoses

NOAM SCHIFF

8. ‘the tattered cloak of his perished skin’: The body as costume in ‘Two in One’, At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman

YAELI GREENBLATT

9. ‘Veni, V.D., Vici’: Flann O’Brien, sexual health and the literature of exhaustion

LLOYD (MEADHBH) HOUSTON

10. Abject Bodies: Brian O’Nolan and immunology

MAEBH LONG

PART III: Bodies of Writing

11. Reading the Regional Body: Disability, prosthetics and Irish literary tradition in The Third Policeman and Molloy

SIOBHǺN PURCELL

12. Law and Violence in Ferguson’s Congal, Yeats’s The Herne’s Egg and O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds

MICHAEL MCATEER

13. ‘sprakin sea Djoytsch?’ Brian Ó Nualláin’s Bhark i bPrágrais

TOBIAS HARRIS

14. Flann O’Brien, the Absurd and the Authenticity of Death

DANIEL CURRAN

15. ‘the essential inherent interior essence’: The Third Policeman and early modern ontologies

EINAT ADAR

16. Origin, Iterability and Violence in The Third Policeman

ELLIOTT MILLS

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to express their sincere gratitude to the contributors for all their ingenuity, hard work and good-natured patience throughout the process, as well as to Louis de Paor, Julia Hartinger, Ondrej Pilný, and the many colleagues in the Flann O’Brien community who pitched in with their help and time throughout the process of putting this book together. Special thanks are reserved for David O’Kane for graciously providing the collection’s artwork, as well as to Alison Burns of Studio 10 for the cover design, Josette Prichard of Carrigboy for typesetting, Gloria Greenwood for proofreading, Lisa Scholey for indexing, Aonghus Meaney for his eagle eye in copy-editing the script and to Maria O’Donovan and Mike Collins at Cork University Press for their work in bringing this volume to fruition.

AUGUST 2020

RUBEN BORG

PAUL FAGAN

List of abbreviations

Notes on contributors

EINAT ADAR is a lecturer in English Literature at the University of South Bohemia. Her research interests include Samuel Beckett, Irish modernism and philosophy. Her work has been published in the essay collection Tradition and Modernity: New Essays in Irish Studies, which she also co-edited, and the journals Partial Answers and Estudios Irlandeses. She is the co-editor of Beckett and Technology, forthcoming in 2021 from Edinburgh University Press.

CATHERINE O. AHEARN received her PhD from Boston University’s Editorial Institute with a dissertation that focused on Myles na gCopaleen’s Cruiskeen Lawn. She is the creator and coordinator of the open-access resource Cruiskeen Catalogued, the first consolidated record of the column’s publication from 1940 to 1966. Ahearn currently works as the head of content at the Knowledge Futures Group, a not-for-profit consortium building and supporting open infrastructure and publications to make knowledge accessible to all.

RUBEN BORG is an Alon Fellow (2008—11) and Head of the Department of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has published widely on modernism and has contributed chapters to collaborative volumes on Deleuze, Beckett and posthumanism. He is the author of The Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida (2007) and of Fantasies of Self-Mourning: Modernism, the Posthuman and the Finite (2019), and co-editor, with Paul Fagan and Werner Huber, of Flann O’Brien: Contesting Legacies (listed in the Irish Times top ten non-fiction books of 2014) and with Fagan and John McCourt of Flann O’Brien: Problems with Authority (2017). His current project is a study of emotions in the work of James Joyce.

DANIEL CURRAN’S research focuses on the fields of Irish literature, modernism and philosophy. He recently successfully defended his PhD thesis on atrocity and modern memory in James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, which was completed under the supervision of Prof. Emer Nolan at Maynooth University. His work was previously funded by the John and Pat Hume Scholarship and the Irish Research Council.

CONOR DOWLING is an Irish Research Council scholar and PhD candidate at the English Department at Maynooth University and is currently working on Irish modernism and revolutionary disillusionment in the Free State. His thesis is titled ‘Carnivals of Reactions? Irish Modernist Novelists and the Free State Counter-Revolution’. He has previously been a recipient of Maynooth University’s John and Pat Hume Scholarship and is a graduate of Maynooth’s Irish Literature and Culture programme.

KATHERINE EBURY is Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature at the University of Sheffield. Her research interests include life-writing, modernism, psychoanalysis, literature and science, animal studies, and law and literature. Her first monograph, Modernism and Cosmology, appeared in 2014, and she is the co-editor (with James Alexander Fraser) of Joyce’s Non-Fiction Writings: Outside His Jurisfiction, which was published by Palgrave in 2018. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Irish Studies Review, Joyce Studies Annual, Journal of Modern Literature and Society and Animals. She has published on Flann O’Brien and science writing in Flann O’Brien: Problems with Authority (2017). She has just completed an AHRC-funded project on the death penalty, literature and psychoanalysis in the period from 1900 to 1950.

PAUL FAGAN is a Senior Scientist at the University of Salzburg and a co-founder of the University of Vienna Irish Studies and Cultural Theories Summer School. He is co-founder of the International Flann O’Brien Society and general editor of The Parish Review: Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies, which is published by the Open Library of Humanities. Fagan co-edited Flann O’Brien: Contesting Legacies (2014) with Ruben Borg and Werner Huber and Flann O’Brien: Problems with Authority (2017) with Borg and John McCourt. He is currently readying the edited volumes Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities (with John Greaney and Tamara Radak), Flann O’Brien: Acting Out (with Dieter Fuchs), Stage Irish (with Fuchs and Radak) and Flann O’Brien and the Nonhuman (with Greaney and Katherine Ebury) for publication, as well as a monograph on the Irish literary hoax.

CATHERINE FLYNN is Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley, where she works on Irish modernist literature and culture in a European avantgarde context and on critical theory. Her award-winning book James Joyce and the Matter of Paris (Cambridge University Press, 2019) considers Joyce’s reconception of fiction and aesthetics within the context of Paris and French urban writing. She is co-editor with Richard Brown of ‘Joycean Avant-Gardes’, a special issue of James Joyce Quarterly (2017). She is currently at work on an edited volume for Cambridge University Press titled New Joyce Studies: Twenty-First Century Critical Revisions. She is also working on a book about Brian O’Nolan/Flann O’Brien/Myles na gCopaleen and the young Irish state.

ALANA GILLESPIE is a lecturer at the English Department and affiliated researcher with the Institute for Cultural Inquiry at Utrecht University, where she earned a PhD for her thesis on Brian O’Nolan’s comic critique of tropes of tradition and modernity in independent Ireland. She contributed articles on the Irish controversy about science in Cruiskeen Lawn to Flann O’Brien: Contesting Legacies (2014) and on O’Nolan’s deconstructions of cultural nationalism and Catholic tradition to Flann O’Brien: Problems with Authority (2017). Gillespie is completing a monograph on the subject of comedy and cultural remembrance in O’Nolan’s work and is working on bringing an animated adaptation of Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green to the screen.

YAELI GREENBLATT is a Hoffmann fellow and PhD candidate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research interests include the materiality of the modernist image, typography, illustrations and graphic novels. Her articles and reviews have appeared in The Parish Review, European Joyce Studies, James Joyce Quarterly and James Joyce Supplement. Yaeli founded and runs the Jerusalem Finnegans Wake Reading Group.

TOBIAS HARRIS is a PhD candidate at Birkbeck College, University of London. His research interests are in Irish and European modernism, with a focus on avant-garde groupings, periodicals and newspaper publication practices. His thesis is entitled ‘Dublin’s Dadaist: Brian O’Nolan, the European Avant-Garde and Irish Cultural Production’. Harris has published in Modernist Cultures and the James Joyce Broadsheet and is the winner of the ‘Best Essay-Length Study on a Brian O’Nolan Theme (2015—16)’ prize for an essay on O’Nolan and Karl Kraus published in The Parish Review: Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies.

LLOYD (MEADHBH) HOUSTON is Hertford College — Faculty of English DPhil Scholar in Irish Literature in English at the University of Oxford. Their thesis explores Irish modernism and the politics of sexual health. Other research interests include literature and obscenity, queer modernisms and the social history of medicine. Their work has appeared in the Review of English Studies, The Library, The Parish Review: Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies and the Irish Studies Review, where they were awarded the 2017 British Association of Irish Studies Essay Prize, and has been featured in the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian and on the Modernist Podcast.

MAEBH LONG is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Waikato. Her areas of interest include modernist and contemporary literature and culture in Ireland, Britain and Oceania, as well as literary theory and continental philosophy. She has published widely on Brian O’Nolan/Flann O’Brien, including two award-winning works — Assembling Flann O’Brien (2014) and The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien (2018). She is in the early stages of a new monograph, The Poetics of Immunology, and is co-investigator of the Oceanic Modernism project, which reads post-1960s independence and Indigenous rights literature from the Pacific as a form of modernism.

MICHAEL MCATEER is habilitated Associate Professor of English at the Department of English Literatures and Cultures, Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest. He has published widely on modern Irish literature, including the books Standish O’Grady, Æ and Yeats: History, Politics, Culture (Irish Academic Press, 2002), Yeats and European Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Excess in Modern Irish Writing (Palgrave, 2020). He has also edited the volume Silence in Modern Irish Literature (Brill, 2017) and his most recent publications include ‘Ireland, Modernism and Imperialism in Standish O’Grady’s The Queen of the World’ (Review of English Studies, 2019).

ELLIOTT MILLS is a PhD candidate at Trinity College Dublin, carrying out his research with an Irish Research Council postgraduate scholarship. He has been the holder of a Trinity Long Room Hub Early Career Research Residency 2019–20. His thesis, supervised by Dr Tom Walker and Dr Sam Slote, focuses on the workings of different forms and levels of mediation which function within, and exert influence upon, the works and writerly personae of Brian O’Nolan.

RICHARD T. MURPHY is an Associate Professor of Modern British and Irish Literature at the University of South Carolina Upstate. He has published articles on Flann O’Brien, Francis Stuart, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Brinsley MacNamara.

DAVID O’KANE is an Irish artist whose work is included in numerous public collections such as the Kunsthalle der Sparkasse, the Zabludowicz collection, Busan Museum of Art and universities such as Yale, Stanford, Princeton and Boston College. His short film Babble, which stages a multilingual conversation between Flann O’Brien, Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges, won an e v + a open award (2008) from Hou Hanru, and a still from his animated artwork Dieselbe Noman adorned the inaugural issue of The Parish Review: Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies (Summer 2012), while his work can also be seen on the covers for Flann O’Brien: Plays and Teleplays (2013), Flann O’Brien: Contesting Legacies (2014) and Flann O’Brien: Problems with Authority (2017). O’Kane has been awarded residencies at the British School at Rome (2009), the Stiftung Starke in Berlin (2010–13) and the Fire Station Artists Studios in Dublin (2014–17). In 2019, together with his parents, Edward and Joanna O’Kane, he held exhibitions inspired by Flann O’Brien’s literature at Boston College Ireland, the Irish embassy in Berlin and Boston College’s John J. Burns Library. He is represented by Gallery Baton, Cavanacor Gallery and the Josef Filipp Galerie.

SIOBHÁN PURCELL’S research primarily focuses on representations of disability, impairment and decadence in Irish literature. In 2016 she completed her PhD thesis on the subject of disability in Beckett’s prose, poetry and translations (1928–45). This work was supervised by Dr Adrian Paterson at NUI Galway and was funded by the Irish Research Council. Her work has been published in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, Breac, Dublin James Joyce Journal and the James Joyce Literary Supplement. She is currently expanding her research to include a number of Irish authors. In addition to present work on Brian O’Nolan, she has forthcoming articles on James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Lucia Joyce and Lynda Radley.

NOAM SCHIFF is an adjunct professor at Bar Ilan University and a clinical psychologist in training. Her interests include Irish modernism, medieval literature and the interconnection between the medieval and modern literary traditions. Schiff’s research focuses on the role of hell in modern Irish fiction. She has recently received her doctorate from Brandeis University.

Editors’ introduction

RUBEN BORG & PAUL FAGAN

The description of the Gaelic feis in Chapter 4 of An Béal Bocht is perhaps the ideal place to begin a book on the over-determined linkages between Brian O’Nolan’s body politics and his unforgivingly macabre comic inspiration. The episode intensifies the satirical tone established earlier in the novel, targeting the provincialism of revivalist attitudes and the identification of authentic Gaelicness with exaggerated misery. The chapter’s narrative structure is familiar too: born to abject poverty and general backwardness, the residents of Corca Dhorcha never seek to rise above their station, but submit themselves fully, and oftentimes for the benefit of the ethnographer’s fascinated gaze, to the stereotypes that fix their condition. In other words, it is an implicit premise of the satire of An Béal Bocht that the misery it portrays is both lived and staged – and that even absolute hopelessness can be reworked into a mannerism, or an amusing refrain. Chapter 4 presents this tension between lived and staged misery more overtly than any other in the book. But it is also exemplary in denying the reader any clear ideological or rhetorical purchase on that theme. The spoofing of political speeches is memorable, but really quite harmless and par for the course.

Gaels! he said, it delights my Gaelic heart to be here today speaking Gaelic with you at this Gaelic feis in the centre of the Gaeltacht. May I state that I am a Gael. (CN, 440)

What follows the speeches is a more savage and more disconcerting brand of irony – trained not at political posturing but at a forced display of popular sentiment, genuine hunger mixed in with paraded poverty. There is nothing clever in the shame and the frenzy of the Long Dance, no government inspector to fleece this time round and no linguist from the continent to dupe. Simply, the stage is overrun by death.

The dance continued until the dancers drove their lives out through the soles of their feet and eight died during the course of the feis. Due to both the fatigue caused by the revels and the truly Gaelic famine that was ours always, they could not be succoured when they fell on the rocky dancing floor and, upon my soul, short was their tarrying on this particular area because they wended their way to eternity without more ado.

Even though death snatched many fine people from us, the events of the feis went on sturdily and steadily, we were ashamed to be considered not strongly in favour of Gaelic while the President’s eye was upon us. (CN, 442–3)

If we single out this episode as an example of gallows humour in O’Nolan, it is not because the serial death of Corkadoraghans is especially funny, but rather, because it brings home the importance of tone in modulating different moral and political attitudes to the body, or to death-on-display. The body is often posed as a strange spectacle in O’Nolan’s work, and its representation in this manner is typically bound up with acts of moral judgement, as in the resolutions of The Third Policeman or ‘Two in One’. But here the picture plainly exceeds the moral framework. The obscenity of turning poverty and death into a folksy public event – the body an exhibition of famine and fatigue, a broken thing that won’t stop dancing – flouts any expected correspondence between art and proper measure or poetic justice. Nor can the scene be played for a cheap laugh. Yet the strain it puts on decorum is already profoundly comic, and immediately political.

Death and laughter

One of the best-known examples of gallows humour is an apocryphal story from the last moments of William Palmer’s life. The scene is a public hanging at Stafford prison in mid-June 1856, the culmination of one of the most controversial trials of the nineteenth century. A rabble of 30,000 watches on as the infamous Rugeley Poisoner is prodded towards the scaffold. We see him eyeing the trapdoor as he steps forward gingerly; he takes one more hesitant step, then turns to the hangman: ‘Are you sure it’s safe?’

Familiar as they are, the mechanics of the joke resist a simple summary. Many of the traditional elements of comedy are on display: an improbable lightness of touch; a failure to acknowledge the authority of the law, or to grasp the reality of one’s material limitations; the introduction of a bizarre or inappropriate detail into a serious situation; the half-expected, but still abrupt frustration of a tense narrative build-up. If it is customary to associate the laughable with the incongruous and the unseemly, or with a loss of proper form, then surely gallows humour is the brand of comedy that pushes the formula to its extreme application, testing it against the most serious, most consequential themes.

In this case, we may certainly agree that the joke capitalises on the incongruity between the dying man’s last words and the broader context in which those words are spoken. But it is not immediately clear whether the punch line has the effect of sharpening the pain of the situation, or of dulling it – whether we are amused by the murderer’s discomfort or by his ability to rise above his fate, if only for one minute. Is it a matter of denying death the satisfaction of seriousness, or of indulging, shamelessly and against all sensibility, in a grotesque pleasure?

Readers will recognise the prominence of the grotesque and the unseemly in O’Nolan’s work, but also the inability of any single theory of humour to explain the irresistible coincidence of death and laughter. From the climactic torture sequence in At Swim-Two-Birds to the absurd scenes from an execution in The Third Policeman, from the ‘destructive blow on the skull’ (CN, 425) brought down upon the schoolchildren of Corca Dhorcha to the extravagant potboiler scenario of ‘Two in One’, O’Nolan’s comic genius unsettles far more than it consoles. At stake is not a softening of taboo themes, or an amelioration of traumatic experience, but the careful calibration of a discourse about the body and its discontents; or, more precisely, a political and aesthetic prioritisation of comedy over tragedy as the appropriate genre for writing about disease and mortality, gruesome violence and corporal punishment ....

In the disproportionate attention it affords these themes, O’Nolan’s humour distinctly recalls the related genres of the Juvenalian satire, the carnivalesque, or the Swiftian grotesque; yet, what distinguishes his body politics is an inimitable tendency to play on expectations of tonal correctness. For instance, we might consider how the almost cartoonish mass death at the feis is offset by Bónapárt Ó Cúnasa’s jarringly detached report of the loss of his wife and infant son:

One day, while playing on the sward in front of the door with Leonardo when he was a year and a day old, I noticed some indisposition come suddenly upon him and that he was not far from eternity. His little face was grey and a destructive cough attacked his throat. I grew terrified when I could not calm the creature. I left him down on the grass and ran in to find my wife. What do you think but that I found her stretched out, cold in death on the rushes, her mouth wide open while the pigs snorted around her. When I reached Leonardo again in the place I had left him, he was also lifeless. He had returned whence he had come. Here then is some evidence for you of the life of the Gaelic paupers in Corkadoragha. (CN, 462)

With its dehumanising rhetoric of ‘evidence’ and its absence of ‘any expression of personal grief or loss’,¹ the narration appears to withhold any coherent affective or rhetorical vantage point from which to access the narrated events. We recognise variations on this strategy elsewhere in the writer’s work: for instance, in The Third Policeman, where the stark brutality of the murder of old Mathers plainly clashes with the pretzel logic and the fanciful metaphysical paradoxes that carry the rest of the plot; or in At Swim-Two-Birds, where the chaotic, irrepressible humour is set off its axis in a sudden closing image of suicide. Starker still is the satire of Irish fascist organisations Ailtirí na hAiséirghe and Glún na Buaidhe enacted in the spectacle of a brutal domestic stabbing in the Irish-language playlet An Scian. It is the premise of this book that the unseemly in O’Nolan’s humour is always politically charged – that the grotesque and the morbid are key to understanding his interest in the tension not only between the comic and the tragic, but also between public and private life.

The Third Policeman reflects the same thematic concerns in its treatment of disability and infirmity. Its plot hinges on an irrational, maladaptive relation to the law and the odd gesture of futile resistance to its authority. But its distinctive comic character, irreducible to any single episode, is captured in the broad strokes of a false and unconvincing universe – an off-kilter experience of one’s own body, of its material limitations, of its mobility and its passions woven into the very texture of The Parish. When the nameless de Selby scholar learns he is to be jailed and hanged for the murder of Old Mathers, his response is to exclaim, in a tone that could be shock or righteous indignation, ‘Is this all a joke for entertainment purposes?’ (CN, 308). Later, as he awaits the hour of his execution, that note is replaced by waves of quiet despair and even occasional lyricism. But it is the absurd civility of the conversation with Sergeant Pluck, the officer in charge of readying the gallows, that defines the tenor of the scene.

The Sergeant still kept his eye on the end of five miles away but moved slightly in his monumental standing. Then he spoke to me.

‘I think,’ he said, ‘we will go out and have a look at it, it is a great thing to do what is necessary before it becomes essential and unavoidable.’

The sounds he put on these words were startling and too strange. Each word seemed to rest on a tiny cushion and was soft and far away from every other word. When he had stopped speaking there was a warm enchanted silence as if the last note of some music too fascinating almost for comprehension had receded and disappeared long before its absence was truly noticed. (CN, 364)

The incongruity thematised in this passage succeeds somehow in being palpable and abstract at one and the same time. A general malaise seems to infect the air itself. The discord between the sound of the words (startling and strange, but also soft and distant, leading to an enchanted silence) and the sensible, mock-paternal wisdom they convey is reinforced by the sergeant’s courtesy and the falseness of the developing situation.

He then moved out of the house before me to the yard, I behind him spellbound with no thought of any kind in my head. Soon the two of us had mounted a ladder with staid unhurrying steps and found ourselves high beside the sailing gable of the barrack, the two of us on the lofty scaffold, I the victim and he my hangman. I looked blankly and carefully everywhere, seeing for a time no difference between any different things, inspecting methodically every corner of the same unchanging sameness. Nearby I could hear his voice murmuring again:

‘It is a fine day in any case,’ he was saying. (CN, 364)

There is little here of the traditional comedian’s craft, no set-up and punch line, but an increasing sense of a dark horizon closing in, a sinister setting distorting the dialogue, misshaping the mise-en-scène. Dread takes on a spatial, almost sculptural quality. And surely enough, as the false and the unconvincing encroach upon the scenery, a reference to death – to its ‘mechanics’ – helps put a name to the vague note of atmospheric evil.

Parts of this conversation came to me from different parts of the compass as the Sergeant moved about at his tasks, now right, now left and now aloft on a ladder to fix the hang-rope on the summit of the scaffold. He seemed to dominate the half of the world that was behind my back with his presence – his movements and his noises – filling it up with himself to the last farthest corner. The other half of the world which lay in front of me was beautifully given a shape of sharpness or roundness that was faultlessly suitable to its nature. But the half behind me was black and evil and composed of nothing at all except the menacing policeman who was patiently and politely arranging the mechanics of my death. (CN, 364–5)

It is the absurd disjunction between the sergeant’s grim work and his patience and politeness that determines the humour of the scene. If the word ‘patiently’ suggests care, but also a degree of precision, a willingness to allow one’s work to be affected by slow time, ‘politely’ connotes decorum and good form, the manner of the politic itself. The point, of course, is that here both patience and politeness are grotesquely misplaced. The manners of the hangman express neither civility nor kindness; the work is meticulous, but administered in the name of a haphazard justice that has lost its mooring in reason.

An important correlative of this scene is O’Nolan’s treatment of the body as passive matter, a lifeless object laid open to public scrutiny and bureaucratic arrogation. On this score, a comparison with the casual conflation of famine and folk-dancing in An Béal Bocht is instructive. In both novels, characters are given to bursts of energy and spells of frantic activity, but their movement lacks all spontaneity. Whereas in An Béal Bocht the bodies are spurred on by shame as the dance continues well past the point of fatigue (‘we were ashamed to be considered not strongly in favour of Gaelic while the President’s eye was upon us’), in The Third Policeman they are moved – twisted into demented transformations – by a circular plot and a punishing, otherworldly intelligence. Though time and space extend unpredictably, the one-legged narrator’s physical limitations are constantly on display. Above all, the body is imagined as a site of moral confusion and vulnerability – its pain, its desire, its fears subject to the manipulations of an obtuse legal authority.

Impolite bodies

Central to any considerations of tone, of grotesque politeness and of the body as a site of political and ideological debate is the changing status of women in twentieth-century Ireland and the inscription of female bodies with particular ideological and religious codes. While critics have observed, with justification, the conspicuous absence of fleshed-out female characters and the marginalisation of female bodily experience across O’Nolan’s writing, an inescapable component of its focus on the body’s displeasures is a carousel of mock-juvenile, prurient, flippant and abject attitudes towards the mechanics of sexuality, pregnancy and venereal disease.² Widely noted is the conceit of ‘aestho-autogamy’ in At Swim-Two-Birds, which removes the female body from the process of reproduction; but also that novel’s handling of rape, a discomfiting plot twist the violence of which is scarcely mitigated by the ontological absurdity of the narrative situation. The scene’s metaleptic conceit plays up a jokey awareness that Sheila Lamont is no more than a plot device, cast according to type to accommodate a seduction plot; yet, ultimately, this facetiousness only intensifies the sense of a cartoonish or gauche treatment of female sexuality and embarrassment in dealing with the reality of the female body.

You did not inform me, he remarked politely, as to the sex of Miss Lamont.

As a matter of fact, said the Good Fairy, she is a woman.

That is very satisfactory, said the Pooka.

She is suffering at the moment, said the Good Fairy with the shadow of a slight frown on the texture of his voice, from a very old complaint. I refer now to pregnancy. [...]

Did you tell me that this Miss Lamont was a man?

I did not, said the Good Fairy. She is a woman and a fine one from the point of view of those that have bodies on them.

That is very satisfactory, said the Pooka. (CN, 109)

Though the colloquy makes a point of affirming Miss Lamont’s sexual identity, its effect is rather to deflect attention from the irreducibly material dimension of embodied experience, to de-realise, if you will, the facticity of the body as sexualised matter. The tone leaves us suspended between parody and prudishness – between a display of sexual indifference and a persistent nervousness in contemplating reproductive realities. The same anxieties inform the caustic humour of The Hard Life, in which the light surface-level teasing of Collopy’s ill-conceived social activism on behalf of women’s public toilets belies an apparently darker underlying ‘attitude echoed by all the other (male) characters’, that ‘the only role for a woman in this novel is that of a cartoon grotesque who harbours a threat of sexual degradation, if not outright disease’.³

Consider also the political allegory of ‘The Martyr’s Crown’, in which female sexuality and childbirth are deployed towards a carnivalesque travesty of the moralising binaries of martyrdom and prostitution that organise twentieth-century Irish cultural nationalism.⁴ Frank O’Connor notes the story’s play on the hackneyed ‘Resistance theme of the woman who, to protect her hunted men, pretends to be a prostitute’, but distinguishes O’Nolan as ‘the first writer to have treated it as farce’.⁵ The story’s punch line, with its inversion of the clichéd concept of ‘dying for Ireland’, shows once more the complicity of death and humour in the oeuvre’s more overtly political narratives. This trope is developed even more explicitly in the vaudeville set piece of Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green in which two bees, lamenting the boredom of their ‘all-male company’, discuss the pleasure of stinging, which is ‘unbearably nice’ and ‘rather charming’ not despite but because of its promise of a certain death (PT, 170–2).⁶ Again, the absurdity of self-sacrifice leads not to tears, but to laughter:

BASIL: ‘O Death, where is thy sting’. (All laugh.) (PT, 175)

The satire of masculinist Irish nationalism is rendered explicit in the bee’s insistence ‘that to die from giving our sting is to become a martyr’, welcomed by ‘beautiful choirs [...] and the soft music of harps’ to ‘a better land’ where ‘every bee will have a queen to himself’ (PT, 172, 178–9); yet, the bees’ subsequent suicide by mutual stinging is noteworthy also for its unmistakable homoerotic subtext. With bathos, O’Nolan’s art blends nuanced comic touches and sharp political jabs with crude jokes about excretion, penetration, decay. We observe a strange blend of conservative politics and modernist attention to material processes as his writing plays up the body as a site of violent distortion, of accelerated change, of excessive production and unruly materiality, of resistance to representation.

Body politics

This book draws unprecedented critical attention to the centrality of biopolitics to O’Nolan’s modernist experimentation and popular writing. The essays collected here address his handling of the thematics of violence, mob passions, justice, capital punishment, prosthetics, skin, gender, prostitution, syphilis, rape, reproduction, illness, autoimmune deficiency, abjection, drinking, Gaelic games and nationalism across a diverse range of genres, intertexts, contexts. The organising theme of ‘gallows humour’ focuses these enquiries onto key encounters between the body and the authority of the state, tracing the comic handling of death or disease in overlooked columns, short stories, plays and non-fiction.

Catherine Flynn opens the volume with an exhaustive reading of a single instalment of Cruiskeen Lawn in which Myles employs the Irish language as a veil behind which to write covertly about obscure intersections of local and international politics. Nimbly combining typographical play, punning, translation, transliteration and literary allusion, the column circumnavigates press censorship to provocatively compare Ireland with Bulgaria within the geopolitics of the Second World War and to draw out the fascist, eugenicist rhetoric implicit in Irish nationalist discourse. If the early Cruiskeen Lawn’s density of multilingual reference, allusion and formal play is more characteristic of modernist writing than the daily paper, it is also, as Flynn expertly demonstrates, a neglected site of creative representation of an Ireland and Europe torn asunder by war, reporting state atrocities and contested issues of body politics with a characteristic gallows humour.

Picking up this theme, Katherine Ebury examines O’Nolan’s changing attitudes to capital punishment through a study of scenes of execution in Cruiskeen Lawn, ‘Two in One’ and The Third Policeman. Deftly blending Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida’s theoretical deconstructions of the logic of the death penalty with a historicist recovery of the politics and poetics of capital punishment in the Irish Free State, Ebury casts new critical light on the centrality of the gallows to O’Nolan’s aesthetic and political vision. By distinguishing the imaginative stances he occupies as he performs the roles of judge, hangman and condemned man, the essay traces the ambivalence of O’Nolan’s shifting portrayal of capital punishment as sometimes just and sometimes nonsensical, as his authorial personae variously support and critique state-sanctioned violence.

Conor Dowling reconsiders the class politics of At Swim-Two-Birds through Boris Groys’s and Slavoj Žižek’s ‘dark’ readings of Mikhail Bakhtin, which imagine the carnivalesque less as a means of liberation than of ‘the process by which one authority replaces another through the temporary institution of madness in society’ (p. 54). Tracing the tension between avantgarde innovation and class conservatism in O’Nolan’s writing, Dowling argues that in the novel’s gargantuan violence and attack on secure subjectivity, we see a text of its time, both positioning itself in resistance to ‘official’ certainties and troubled by the looming anarchy, even ‘madness’ of the mob in the Irish Free State.

Richard T. Murphy explores the clash between popular nationalist sentiment and the post-colonial intelligentsia by documenting the interactions between two staples of mid-century Irish public life: the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) and Cruiskeen Lawn. In unprecedented detail, Murphy traces Myles’s satire of the bureaucratic discourse that the GAA shared with other arms of the state. With increasing acerbity, O’Nolan deconstructs the GAA’s nationalist ideal of bodily transformation from emaciated famine survivor to ruddy hurling midfielder, exposing its rhetorical conflation of the athletic male body with the soil of the land.

Alana Gillespie closes this section on appropriations of the body in political discourse by investigating O’Nolan’s journalistic engagement with one of the defining crises of 1950s Irish civic life, Noël Browne’s Mother and Child Scheme. Approaching this issue through the lens of ‘sociological institutionalism’, Gillespie draws out the tension between O’Nolan’s aggressive polemical style in Cruiskeen Lawn and the indirect satire of The Hard Life to reveal a cautious, not to say cagey, involvement in the political controversy at the heart of the affair – the question of who has the right, responsibility or power to influence social change with regard to bodily autonomy.

Failing bodies

Turning from the black humour with which O’Nolan approaches networks of state violence and institutional oppression, the volume’s second section zooms in on the materiality of the Mylesian body itself as it is atomised or breaks down owing to external assaults, ‘bad’ habits and illness. Drawing on detailed archival work, Catherine O. Ahearn offers extraordinary insight into the life of the man behind Myles na gCopaleen, tracing his many disappearances from the paper’s pages throughout the column’s run due to financial concerns, censorship, contentious collaborations with editors and friends, and the bodily effects of illness, physical injury, alcoholism and, ultimately, his death in 1966. These disappearances afford a glimpse into the gains and losses of O’Nolan’s journalism as it intersects with questions about shared authorial personae, the value of his work, his private life as a public Dubliner and his afterlife in republication and critical analysis.

Such a focus on the biographical in O’Nolan studies has tended to pathologise the author’s alcoholism through the overworked coordinates of ‘wasted talent’ and ‘diminishing returns’.⁷ Noam Schiff productively returns this dimension of O’Nolan’s literary output to the thematic, cultural critical and philosophical dimensions of his art by noting the ways in which it recurrently ties the topos of a self transformed through drink to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Following the Ovidian precedent, the inebriated conversions staged in O’Nolan’s work are of a dual nature: they both carry moral significance and function as an agent for the physical, hallucinatory transformation of fictional subjects and the ideological delimitations of ‘reality’. Focusing on overlooked works from the margins of the canon (Thirst and The Dalkey Archive, but more originally still ‘The Trade in Dublin’, ‘De Me’, ‘The Poultry Business’, ‘Donabate’, ‘Drink and Time in Dublin’), Schiff shows the thematic significance of after-hours drinking to O’Nolan’s deconstructions of ‘biographical and realist models of spatiality, temporality, physicality and legal subjectivity’ (p. 118).

Beginning with the extreme literalisation of the skin suit in ‘Two in One’, Yaeli Greenblatt explores the depiction of bodies as inorganic or foreign objects in At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman, testing the notion of the body as a costume one wears, inhabits and operates. Focusing on depictions of skin, eyes and teeth, she shows O’Nolan’s narratives to be populated by variations on the animated doll or mechanised automaton. The works return time and again to images of synthetic, damaged or absent teeth, to lifeless eyes and to skin that is a detachable encasement – motifs which Greenblatt reads through the Freudian Uncanny and Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection.

Noting the ironised rhetoric of sexual health that permeates O’Nolan’s early writing, Lloyd (Meadhbh) Houston explores the re-emergence of the topic of venereal disease in a performatively ‘exhausted’ or ‘used-up’ manner in Cruiskeen Lawn, The Hard Life and Slattery’s Sago Saga. Houston asks why, in the midst of an apparent moment of social liberalisation in Ireland, O’Nolan retreats into the cultural and political paralysis of turn-of-the-century Dublin through the discourses of sexual health and venereal disease that had policed the boundaries of Irish gendered, sexual, racial and national identity. The essay examines the stakes of these themes for the shift in both the form and the content of O’Nolan’s aesthetic vision in his waning years, in which Irish modernism itself comes to be understood as a literature of exhaustion.

Maebh Long examines the treatment of the body, illness and medicine across O’Nolan’s oeuvre, moving from the discourse of bodily disfigurement and disgust to the concepts of immunity and the autoimmune. Donna Haraway has argued that the immune system is a boundary line drawn between ‘self’ and ‘other’, a division which facilitates modernity’s biopolitical control.⁸ The binaries of internality and externality, defence and offence, are embedded in the very notion of the immune system as barrier, a protection of integrity and individuality. But with the introduction of the autoimmune, and a deeper conceptualisation of a barricade which occupies both sides at once, the opposition falters. The body has the destructive capacity to turn on itself and immunise itself against itself. With close attention to At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman and ‘Two in One’, Long’s essay explores the relation between bodily integrity and self-destruction, noting the ways in which medicine and a discourse of protection/exposure operates to disturb the notion of the human.

Bodies of writing

The volume’s final section interrogates the historical, aesthetic and philosophical influences that inform O’Nolan’s representations of material processes. These six essays read the body politics and gallows humour of O’Nolan’s corpus in medieval, Enlightenment and modernist comparative contexts by carefully sorting through his palimpsestic texts to