Political Satire When We're Through the Looking-Glass
Political Satire When We're Through the Looking-Glass
Do Eimar O'Duffy's satires matter today? Are they "Essentials"?
At long last, here is my second post of a planned triptych about three trilogies Dalkey left “unfinished.” Although, as I joked in my first post, in keeping with the Dalkey spirit, I’m not actually going to finish this off and cover the third . . . (Primarily because the third trilogy—Stig Sæterbaken’s “S-Trilogy” will actually be completed, frustrating my rubric in a pleasant way.)
This time we’ll be talking about two books from the “Cuanduine Trilogy” by the Irish satirist (and sort of economist) Eimar O’Duffy: King Goshawk and the Birds (1926) and The Spacious Adventures of the Man in the Street (1929). If you’re most interested in reading about the books themselves and some thoughts on parody, jump to Part II below.
Otherwise, continue straight on for a bit of publishing background on and overview of the Dalkey Essentials series, what makes an Essential an Essential, some statistics, and, quite possibly, one basis for my personal existential crisis.
Part I: What Are the Criteria?
The Dalkey Essentials series was more or less born out of necessity—and a bit of Dalkey-style ambition.
I believe I’ve written about this here before, but when Will Evans and I first took over Dalkey, one of the biggest problems (which is still a problem) was getting books back into stock. Of the over 900 titles Dalkey published under John O’Brien, almost 300 were out of stock—or a minor burst of interest or two from reaching that point. We had digital files for basically none of these, and, furthermore, although I took copies of everything I could transport from Dalkey’s office library in Normal, IL to Rochester, there are still a significant number of titles that my “archive” is missing—so we don’t even have all the texts to work from.1
Anyway, I had the idea that instead of just restocking all of these backlist titles quietly (e.g., just printing them and keeping the old cover and ISBN), we should select 10-12 each year to be issued as “Essential” Dalkey titles with matching covers—creating a series that readers would want to collect and display—guided by the ambitious, impossible goal of defining the Dalkey aesthetic as best as possible through these specific examples.
As someone who’s read hundreds of Dalkey books and knows at least a little bit about hundreds more, this idea is both self-indulgent (selecting the titles that get to be gassed up via this treatment is a dream come true) and a bit terrifying, since I don’t know all the books. Especially those that came out after I left Dalkey Archive in 2007. So how would I know that I was selecting the “Essentials,” and not just the books I like best from a particular point in my life? Is there a way to quantify the selection process? Apply some statistical analysis to decide what would be best to start with?
So far, we’ve announced or published thirty-nine Essentials across three different “series” designated by the color of their covers: Red, Blue, Orange, and Green.2 These didn’t come out in the intended order, nor are the series equal in terms of number of titles (and the Green one is still ongoing), but it’s a pretty awesome accomplishment to have brought these all out between July 2022 and November 2025.
And to me, a wannabe statistician, the demographics of these first thirty-nine Essentials, and what that says about Dalkey overall, is pretty interesting.
Of these thirty-nine titles, twenty-five were originally written in English (64%), fourteen are in translation. Twenty-four are written by men, fifteen by women (62%-38%). And seventeen are from American writers (44%)—no other country has more than four books. And ten of them are among the top twenty-five best-selling Dalkey titles of all time.3
I stand behind every one of these titles as being an “essential” title for anyone wanting to get a handle on Dalkey’s overall vibe. To be honest, I more or less raced through these first lists, naming the titles off the top of my head, which is why a lot of these (O’Brien, Sorrentino, Stein, Reed, Carson, Huxley, Fosse, Mosley, Barnes) are slam dunks, and will be seen by most as “obvious” Dalkey Classics.
But at this moment, looking back on what we’ve done, and what’s forthcoming, I’m starting to get a bit nervous about what Essentials I might be overlooking.
Here’s where the existential anxiety comes in . . .
Although my goal is to have every single title in the Dalkey catalog permanently available for future generations to discover and enjoy4 these can’t all be Essentials, otherwise the term loses all meaning.
I go back and forth on what the ideal number should be, with 100 as the minimum and 150 as the max. If it’s the former, we’re halfway to our goal; one-third of the way if is the latter. Like with the Baseball Hall of Fame, I’m an inclusive, “Big Hall” sort of guy. So 150 is probably the most realistic—and allows for a true blend of established classics, under-appreciated titles one or another Dalkey editor absolutely believed in, and great books representing all the various literary scenes and traditions Dalkey has encompassed to date. (This assumes a purity of list free from the demands of agents and estates. Grant me that for this post—the truth is never as gratifying as the conceit.)
How to identify these 150 titles—knowing every list is incomplete and debatable—is a huge challenge. Ideally, I would read all 960 or so books, weigh their various literary qualities in my mind, incorporate some backstories (why did this book get made?), assess a book’s potential to be seen as a “classic” in the current moment, and spit out a list of the 150 most eligible titles. Become an AI in other words.
With infinite time—to live and to read—maybe that’s possible. But probably not. Heuristics must be employed. Ones that are most likely to capture the majority of “Potential Essentials” without driving me to deeper depths of logographic madness.
Maybe there’s a data-driven way to make these decisions . . .
When I first got back in touch with John in 2019, after not speaking since the “Salzburg Incident,”5 one of the things I helped him out with was updating and completing the monthly sales reports I had done religiously from 2000-2006. I was obsessed with these (as was John), and still am. As a result, I have a lot of data on how books from Dalkey have sold, year over year, dating back to 1992 when the Lila-Wallace Foundation (I believe it was them and not Mellon, but forgive me if I’m flipping the two) insisted its grantees present concrete sales data instead of vague sales estimates if they wanted additional funding.
As a result, I have an incredibly rich set of sales data for Dalkey titles—both year-over-year and life-to-date—that could be mined to make editorial reprint decisions . . . which is tempting! Get the most desired books back into print as soon as possible—and if they have big sales potential, lean into that by putting them into the Essentials series and letting the marketing team leverage this.
One down and dirty heuristic would be to focus on life-to-date sales for all the books. I mean, hey, the books that sold the most are likely to be ones most associated with Dalkey Archive, thus are the most “essential” to one’s conception of the press.
That’s a fine rule of thumb, but one that overvalues older books—titles that came out at a different time, in a different sales environment—over newer ones, or ones with modest print runs. Hell, by this LTD metric, until Fosse won the Nobel Prize, his books wouldn’t have even sniffed the list of most-Essential Essentials. Yet his Trilogy was the fifth Essential published, which was mighty prescient, coming out as it did in September 2022—a year before he received the Nobel.
In other words, an Essential can not be defined by its LTD sales alone. Otherwise, the Complete Fiction of W. M. Spackman would be more likely to be an essential than Impressions of Africa by Raymond Roussel. (I’m sure someone out there would argue for this, but that person is not me.)
What about more of a “Moneyball” approach? One that focuses on the sales velocity of various titles—looking at how fast the book has been selling, or was until the stock ran out—to identify the books that could’ve become “Essential” based on the number of readers who love these titles and associate them with the press. This allows you to key in on books that had modest print runs, but struck a nerve and seemingly have more future value in terms of sales potential.6
This is ideal for picking out the priority order for getting books back into stock, generally, but just because something sells, is it an Essential? For a press as iconoclastic and anti-bestseller as Dalkey Archive . . . I don’t think so. The mission isn’t just to make the books people most want to buy available forever, but to impact and shape this corner of the literary scene by highlighting titles that readers should know about, and then give them the necessary tools with which to approach and appreciate those books.
I’ve never really used sales, in a vacuum, to determine much of anything. Although the past is a great predictor of the future (which is why so many of us are in dire straits about Trump 2.0), sales are wedded to serendipity and chance (and TikTok?) and as such are not as reliable as one might hope.
And again, the Essentials are meant to represent an aesthetic, not a way of maximizing profit like a neo-con CEO.
Statistics and data can still be a bit of a help though. Especially if you believe, like I do, like John did, that there are incredible books to be found in all corners of the world. Works of genius, books that deserve as large of an audience as possible, but may never achieve sales success because the press runs its marketing department on a shoestring, or because readers veer away from a book from Georgia by an author with a complicated name, or simply because they are the sort of books that will only ever appeal to a distinctive group of readers. Sales are not equal to a book’s value, as the Essentials series will demonstrate over its life.
Ignoring the sales for the moment, there is something incredibly valuable about the database I’ve constructed with bibliographic data on every title Dalkey’s published to date. I have these broken down by literary series (American, British, Estonian, Scholarly, etc.) which, at the moment, I think is a good guide to figuring out where to put my reading efforts.
Which is what this’s all about: How to seek out potential Essentials without reading everything. For example, if approximately 12-15% of all titles will become Essentials, there must be a couple Korean titles that qualify. Something from Georgia. Definitely a couple, three Swiss books. Being able to hone in on those series and evaluate them assuages my anxiety to some degree, giving my reading habits a bit more direction, but still doesn’t really answer the question as to “what makes an Essential an Essential?” Although, like pornography, you know it when you read it, and I think the explanations as to why Book X is given the Essential treatment should be treated on a case-by-case basis.
So expect a lot more pieces that just take up the Essentials one-by-one and highlight what makes them great . . .
Before transitioning into my evaluation of whether Eimar O’Duffy deserves the Essential treatment, I do have a request:
If there are titles that you believe I should be reading and evaluating, please let me know. Again, there are 960-some books to consider and life is short. I want to find the gems, I want the reputation of Dalkey 2.0 (or 3.0 or whatever) to rest upon the knowledge that it is platforming the true best of the best via this series—and creating a sort of Dalkey-centric reading guide to some of the most amazing works from around the world to ever have been written.
I take this all too seriously . . . maybe . . . but anyway, let’s talk about Eimar O’Duffy.
Part II: Capitalism Sucks
To date, there are three Essentials by two Irish authors that have been published: At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien, and Langrishe, Go Down by Aidan Higgins. Scenes from a Receding Past by Higgins is hands down an Essential, as is Killoyle by Roger Boylan. And Cadenza by Ralph Cusack. And, if we apply the 15% measure, at least three more. Three seems too small though, especially given the emphasis in the Dalkey catalog on American, British, and Irish literature. Which is one of the reasons O’Duffy caught my eye (aside from the fact that it’s another unfinished trilogy): Could he be an Essential author?
Until I brought his two books back from my trip to Normal, IL after John died and put them on my shelf, I didn’t know Eimar O’Duffy existed. Until I read him, what I knew of O’Duffy was what was written on the back cover of the books.7
To be fair, almost no one knows of Eimar O’Duffy. (My friend Josh Glenn does, having serialized all of King Goshawk and the Birds on his HILOBROW website. Mentioning this here because Josh is great and in case any of you would like to read some/all of this book before purchasing it.) In trying to actually do research for this post, I read the Eimar O’Duffy biography by Robert Hogan that Bucknell University Press published in 1972. (Fun fact: Bucknell University Press was founded in 1968, so this was one of their earliest books.) Here’s how it opens:
Eimar Ultan O’Duffy is virtually a forgotten writer. In 1946, eleven years after his death, Vivian Mercier wrote an appreciative essay on his work in The Bell, and that essay is the only critical comment of any length on O’Duffy which I have been able to discover. In it, Mercier remarked:
“The late Eimar O’Duffy, modern Ireland’s only prose satirist, was neither hanged nor drowned; he was simply ignored.”
[Kevin Gildea’s excellent piece on Dalkey’s reissues for the Irish Times also opens with this bit—it’s impossible to resist! Gildea’s review is really interesting and informs a lot of this particular post. Definitely worth reading.]
What I find most entertaining—and most Irish?—about Hogan’s biography is just how down he is on his subject’s works. This isn’t one of those fawning, “here’s an underappreciated genius” sort of bios. Instead, it’s loaded with throwaway lines like this one:
O’Duffy’s [poems] have no other merit than to illustrate that his fluency with words and his satiric bent were present from the very first.
Is that a compliment?
Or, about Printer’s Errors, which O’Duffy referred to as a “jeu d’espirit”:
A jeu d’espirit, I take it, is a work of no particular thematic significance, but of some claim to charm, playfulness, and inventiveness. It exists not merely to entertain, but to entertain delightfully. However, one man’s jeu is often another man’s peu, and it is quite impossible to prove to somebody that he should be charmed when he is not.
The book ends with Hogan more or less shitting on the third volume of the “Cuanduine Trilogy,” Asses in Clover (“rambling and ineffectual”), arguing that only the two first books in the trilogy are worth reading. And maybe O’Duffy’s earlier, flawed yet interesting, book, The Wasted Island.
Not promising for a potential Essential!
I haven’t read O’Duffy’s other books and don’t intend to (Hogan even turned me off of Asses), but he’s absolutely right about the two Dalkey volumes.
In terms of why this is an unfinished Dalkey trilogy, when John decided to do O’Duffy, the third volume was currently available as, in John’s words, a “small print, cheap paperback, very ugly cover” from Jon Carpenter Publishing. (Given the general dislike for 2016-2020 Dalkey covers, that last comment is kind of funny.) And, as always seemed to be the case with John, he did have a particular reason or rationale for wanting to publish a particular book. There’s one email in which—after describing a frustrating doctor’s appointment in very Larry David-like ways, which was John’s stock in trade for email entertaining—he says, “You might confuse [O’Duffy] with O'Brien and Joyce, and one can see what exactly they lifted from him,” then follows that up with:
O'Duffey [sic]: there is one legit reprint (ASSES), but small print, cheap paperback, very ugly cover; others are xeroxed copies that cost too much: they have to be reset: a section I was looking at last night in prep to send to you are invented newspaper items, including a made-up book review, he also has a full-page newspaper ad, and newspaper headlines-----all pre-Joyce. One novel is a “real” novel: his Uprising novel: he was opposed to the post-office revolution though was on the side of the dissidents: he said the Easter Uprising would result in a disaster. His novel was written afterwards. It doesn't work. He was a satirist, not a realist.
I don’t know if it’s quite accurate to claim that the newspaper headlines found in King Goshawk pre-dated or influenced Joyce, but there is something compelling, something so Dalkey about wanting to unearth the predecessor to the Recognized Great, filling in the gaps that connect the emphasis on form found in Greek drama, in Tristram Shandy and Don Quixote, and can be traced through Flann O’Brien, Sorrentino, Barth, etc. Tracing that line is really essential to Dalkey, in which case . . . maybe this is an Essential?
King Goshawk and the Birds is basically a speculative novel, set in a future in which capitalism has restructured the world to the detriment of most and benefit of a few, including King Goshawk, who, from his “Palace of Manhattan” declares that he’s taking over all the songbirds of the world to solely be enjoyed by the Queen.
This move doesn’t win the King universal acclaim, especially not from The Philosopher, who, in a very Flann O’Brien turn, travels to the afterlife/heavens to get Cuchulain to return to earth and save us all. Cuchulain does—taking the body of grocery clerk Robert Emmett Aloysius O’Kennedy (see volume 2)—and bristles under the extremely capitalist absurdities of modern life, allowing O’Duffy to start to present his egalitarian, socialist perspective.
“Fellow,” said Cuchulain, “what are you doing?”
The bird-catcher cocked an impertinent eye, and, tapping the breast of his tunic, said: “See my livery? Then hold your lip.”
Cuchulain, mindful of his geasa, put constraint upon his wrath. Then, laying a hand upon the bird-catcher’s shoulder, he said: “Friend, I have asked you a civil question: I want a civil answer,” fixing him with a look so persuasive that the bird-catcher made haste to propitiate him, saying: “No offence, boss. I’m gathering birds for King Goshawk.”
“Why?” asked Cuchulain.
“They’re his birds, boss. The robins, thrushes, and blackbirds, that is. I take no others, as you see.”
“How are they his?” asked Cuchulain.
“He’s bought ’em,” said the bird-catcher.
“Is that any reason why you should gather them for him?” asked Cuchulain.
“I do what I’m paid for,” said the bird-catcher.
“Vile slave,” said Cuchulain, “why do you not do what you will to do, and get paid for that?”
“Now, God help you, sir, for a poor innocent,” said the bird-catcher. “Wouldn’t we all do that if we could? But we can’t. Personally I’d like to carve wooden toys for children—I carve ’em for my own kids in my spare time: cows and donkeys and crocodiles and things, you know, all done with a penknife—amatoorish, of course, but the kids like ’em. But bless you, how could my penknife compete with the Toy Trust?—I mean if it came to business. And if I went into one of the Trust’s factories, I’d just have to stand seven hours a day feeding lumps of beech wood into a damned machine. No thank you. Not for me. The open road for this child. Now just stand aside, sir, if you please, for this job is piece-work.”
King Goshawk and the Birds has some really funny bits to it, generally premised on the idea of a mythical hero finding themselves in today’s world and questioning the dominant structure. Strength and power are no longer as relevant as employee exploitation and being conniving enough to rise to power.
A lot of it is politically based—O’Duffy was a member of the Irish Volunteers, and although he was sent by Eoin MacNeill to try and abort the Easter Uprising and fell away from the movement, he was an Irish nationalist most of his life. He also wrote very socialist (and/or very rational and humane) books of economics. Althoguh King Goshawk is hard to quote, this bit feels particularly relevant to the moment:
On the day of the declaration they went down to see the results, which were posted up as follows:
Victor: BLATHERO . . . 29,439
Moral Victor: BLITHERO . . . 121“What does that mean?” asked Cuanduine [Ed Note: Cuchulain’s progeny] of the Philosopher.
“In the old days,” said the Philosopher, “it was the custom after an election for the defeated party to claim a moral victory, and on the strength of it to commence a civil war. To obviate this we have arranged that there shall be no defeated party in an election. The candidate who gets most votes gets the seat and the salary, the other gets the moral victory and the glory.”
And then this bit about the two British papers that report on Cuanduine’s activities:
These events in Ireland were recorded in one half of the English newspapers as follows:
“Renewed political and sectarian strife appears to be breaking out in Ireland as a result of the speeches of a man named Cooney, evidently a Bolshevik, who claims descent from some legendary hero. Our readers will recollect that the island passed out of British control some twenty or thirty years ago. England is fortunate in having rid herself of these turbulent subjects.”
The other half of the newspapers reported the matter in these terms:
“Claiming descent from the old Celtic divinities, a Bolshevik agitator named Considine has been creating fresh religious and political discord in the Emerald Isle. British intervention appears to be called for.”
One half of the Press of England was in those days owned by Lord Mammoth, and the other half by Lord Cumbersome. These two potentates had bought up all their smaller rivals, and would have bought up one another if they could: for though both were staunch upholders of the principles of competitive civilisation, they knew better than to allow any competition against themselves if they could help it. Being unable to buy each other up, they hated each other with notable intensity, and directed their newspapers to take opposite standpoints on all topics. Thus a Government which happened to be supported by Lord Mammoth’s papers was certain to be denounced collectively and individually by Lord Cumbersome’s as the most incompetent cabal that had ever guided the Empire to destruction; if Lord Cumbersome were to advocate a policy of peace and retrenchment, Lord Mammoth’s organs would brand as a traitor anybody who might suggest that England’s safety could be secured without the immediate conquest of the whole world; and if Lord Mammoth proposed the remission of a penny from the milk tax, Lord Cumbersome would insist that without the imposition of another twopence the Budget could not be balanced. A very bitter controversy raged one time between one of Lord Cumbersome’s pet scientists who wrote that vegetables should be very lightly cooked in order to preserve their vitamines, and one of Lord Mammoth’s special hygienic experts who argued that they should be given a prolonged boiling in acid to destroy the germs that infest them. Nay more, Lord Mammoth’s humourists could not make a harmless jest about mothers-in-law, without the Cumbersome satirists denouncing the bad taste and pointlessness of such allusions, and maintaining that in jokes about bad cheese alone could the good old Anglo-Saxon type of humour be preserved as the precious heritage of their imperial race.
As spot on as this might be given the state of today’s world, the second volume, The Spacious Adventures of the Man on the Street is probably more cutting and more in line with O’Duffy’s anti-capitalist vibe.
In this volume, the aforementioned Robert Emmett Aloysius O’Kennedy has returned to his body (once inhabited by the Irish mythic god Cuchulain) and is trying to explain to his boss why he’s been so fucking weird as of late.
The tale he tells is Gulliver’s Travels meets Philip K. Dick: After Cuchulain kicks out his spirit, Aloysius traverses the universe and ends up at a planet in which the inhabitants physically resemble humans—except their eyes, which cover their whole head and allow for total range of vision—but have a wildly different society in which everyone shares everything, and homelessness simply indicates a region where there’s an opportunity to put more people to work building houses for those that don’t have them.
As with great Menippean satires, Spacious Adventures of the Man in the Street works by presenting a society that is absurd and unbelievable in a way that reflects and distends the perceived injustices of the reader’s world.
For example, a huge section of this book is about how the Ratheans (the inhabitants of this distant planet) only eat one fruit for their whole life. They don’t need much food to survive, so they can wait until they’re “of age,” but at that moment they need to commit to the one fruit that will satiate them forever. They’re not allowed to deviate and try other fruits, the idea of formally changing to a different fruit is unheard of, etc. Very Irish Catholic of them.
Their schools are deemed by our narrator to be “inefficient” (the whole of Rathé is inefficient in modern economics terms) because students choose what they want to study, there are “no lessons and no punishments,” which, in the eyes of the narrator, must lead to chaos, since, as a kid, he wouldn’t have read anything, and would’ve caused a ruckus. But Rathean children, “Caning would be wasted on them. They do their work without it.”
The main plot of this book—aside from simply flitting from topic to topic, presenting a “utopic” vision of how society could function to highlight our own shortcomings—is the economic revolution Aloysius tries to stir up. He’s bothered by the fact that everyone is entitled to the same size house and comfortable existence, despite the job they’re assigned. He’s bothered that no one tries to accumulate wealth, but instead sees the value in everyone having enough. He sees this as all backward and foolish, focusing on the “inefficiencies” that a modern capitalist system would address.
But for the most part, the Ratheans won’t have it. They see Aloysius’s/our system as broken and stupid, and . . . they have a point. From a debate between Aloysius and a Rathean named Yasint:
“No doubt you have better machinery that we have, but we are not discussing machinery. The function of an economic system is not the production of machinery, but the sustenance of mankind. Any system which fails to do that stands condemned as unfit for human use.”
And, as I alluded to above:
“I don’t understand you,” said Yasint stupidly. “Surely unemployment and poverty cannot exist together?”
“Get along,” says I. “How do you make that out?”
“They are mutually exclusive,” says he. “If a portion of the community is unemployed, it can only mean that everybody’s wants are satisfied. If any portion is in want, it means that there is so much work to be done as will satisfy it.”
And, because this ties into the final turn of this piece, here’s a bit as to why there’s “very little Crime in Rathé”:
The real deterrent from crime in Rathé (where I will admit that it is so rare that the Law Courts are nearly always closed) is the influence of the theatre and the comic press. Mr. Gallagher: I mean it. You can gain some idea of the big part comedy plays in the lives of these people when I tell you that in the town of Bulnid, which though nearly as large as Dublin in area, has less than thirty thousand inhabitants, there are nine theatres. These are quite small, but they are much better designed both for comfort and for seeing and hearing than any theatres in our world.
I generally dislike these sorts of Gulliver’s Travels set-ups in which an imaginary world is created just to be picked apart. It can feel a little easy, a little fish in a barrel, sometimes a little straw man, and only works if the targets—mindsets, institutions, morals—are still operating today. A satire that enacts an actual change in the world will no longer be satire.
Which, sigh, brings us to the bit that’s fueled my procrastination.
It’s really hard to do anything write this post one week after Trump’s reelection. The systems—dictatorial and greed-based—that O’Duffy so successfully lampoons are the ones that America just enthusiastically voted back into power. We don’t live in a society like the Rathean people from Spacious Adventures who reject any and all ideas of gathering wealth and power for personal gain and at the expense of others—quite the opposite. It’s true that the genii escaped Pandora’s Box back in Reagan times, but we’ve enabled something that’s totally untethered from social good and has no guardrails. Instead of society banding together—like in Spacious Adventures—to reject the selfish, the craven, the bad faith actors, we’ve enabled them. Given mandate. Welcomed the imbalance between haves and have nots into our lives in an unprecedented matter.
I’m not a political pundit—I generally try and steer away from politics—and have no desire to dissect what went wrong (wrong in my opinion at least), but the election only reinforced the central question I asked myself as I read these books: What is the point of satire in a world in which the parody of the thing is the thing itself? Does satire have a lasting value?
Again, did a little research for this post (humblebrag, since I usually just write these things out of ignorance, whiskey, and a bit of hubris) and found a few interesting things about parody and satire that might be relevant to parsing this question.
The first is this Will Self essay that came out after the Charlie Hebdo attack and asks, “What’s the point of satire?” I’m not going to break down the whole thing (although you should read it), but here’s the conclusion:
The paradox is this—if satire aims at the moral reform of a given society it can only be effective within that particular society, and, furthermore, only if there's a commonly accepted ethical hierarchy to begin with. A satire that demands of the entire world that it observe the same secularist values as the French state is a form of imperialism like any other. Satire can be employed as a tactical weapon, aimed at a particular group in society in relation to a given objectionable practice—but like all tactical weapons it must be very well targeted indeed. A satire that aims to afflict the comfortable in other societies requires the same sort of commitment to nation-building as an invasion of another country that's predicated on replacing one detestable regime with another more acceptable one. The problem for satire is thus that while we live in a globalized world so far as media is concerned, we don't when it comes to morality. Nor, I venture to suggest, will we ever.
In some ways, this encapsulates my fears going into the O’Duffy. A satire of British-Irish relations in the 1920s is so specific, so tied to particular moral and social situations that a lot of it wouldn’t apply today. And yet, it does. Maybe it’s because the group under attack is still the ones in power, maybe it’s the power of O’Duffy’s socialist-infused approach to the world. Maybe it’s simply that the books are good. But nothing feels out of place or time. With slight tweaks, this book could be written today and apply, very roman à clef style, to our present situation.
In which case would it even be satire? Is appointing someone to run the Environmental Protection Agency who wants to use the position to maximize economic gain—not always in line with saving the environment—something that can be satirized? And the “ministry of efficiency”?
With its fake newspaper headlines and shots taken at industrialists who overpromise and underdeliver and monomaniacal “kings,” maybe O’Duffy’s approach doesn’t just encapsulate Joyce and Flann O’Brien, but extends to The Onion. Which—and I had no idea this happened—filed an amicus with the Supreme Court in defense of parody.
Back in 2016, when Facebook was still a thing, Anthony Novak created a page parodying the Parma, OH (it’s always Ohio) Police Department. Wikipedia provides a decent summary of what happened:
In March 2016, Parma, Ohio, resident Anthony Novak created a page on Facebook mimicking that of the Parma Police Department, except with their slogan of "We know crime" changed to "We no crime" in the "About" section. He did so anonymously from his phone while waiting for a bus, to express his criticism of the department's policies. Posts on the page included job postings that discouraged applications by members of minorities and an offer of "free abortions for teenagers provided by police in the Wal-Mart parking lot." Novak took the page down after about 12 hours, during which time 10 people reported it to the police via 9-1-1.
Novak went to jail for a few days as a result and then sued—a suit that wound its way through the Trump-inflected judicial system that granted Parma the right to prosecute Novak, despite his Facebook page obviously being a joke.8 Novak tried to get the Supreme Court (a notoriously unfunny group of mostly awful, corrupt humans ripe for satire) to take this up as a First Amendment case.
As part of the build up to the Supreme Court taking this up9 The Onion wrote and filed an amicus. The whole piece is brilliant—a satire of the form, an explanation of how parody works, a valid argument—and, like so many things, worth reading in full, but here’s a little taste for you that relates to O’Duffy, or at least Ireland:
Here’s another example: Assume that you are reading what appears to be a boring economics paper about the Irish overpopulation crisis of the eighteenth century, and yet, strangely enough, it seems to advocate for solving the dilemma by cooking and eating babies. That seems a bit cruel—until you realize that you in fact are reading A Modest Proposal. To be clear, The Onion is not trying to compare itself to Jonathan Swift; its writers are far more talented, and their output will be read long after that hack Swift’s has been lost to the sands of time. Still, The Onion and its writers share with Swift the common goal of replicating a form precisely in order to critique it from within. [. . .]
Importantly, parody provides functionality and value to a writer or a social commentator that might not be possible by, say, simply stating a critique outright and avoiding all the confusion of readers mistaking it for the real deal. One of parody’s most powerful capacities is rhetorical: It gives people the ability to mimic the voice of a serious authority—whether that’s the dry news-speak of the Associated Press or the legalese of a court’s majority opinion—and thereby kneecap the authority from within. Parodists can take apart an authoritarian’s cult of personality, point out the rhetorical tricks that politicians use to mislead their constituents, and even undercut a government institution’s real-world attempts at propaganda.
If you love The Onion you might not love O’Duffy and vice-versa, but the idea of taking shots at the ones in power using the ability to mimic them, to make the reader/viewer believe that something could be true, to “tell a joke with a straight face,” is something that both O’Duffy and The Onion do time and again in ways that, as you reflect on them, are thought-provoking critiques.
And since the New York Times, Washington Post, etc., won’t cover Trump with the gravity necessary to the situation, choosing to instead normalize the circus and sane-wash it all, I think satire is going to make a comeback à la the Bush Jr. years.
Does satire last? Only if the target never changes (e.g., cops being corrupt, people in power being unconcerned with fixing the ills of its constituents), is never corrected or improved upon.
Should O’Duffy’s books be Dalkey Essentials? We’ll see.
The digital file thing is key because, for worse, the majority of these books don’t require, at this moment, a print run of more than a few hundred. (Not to mention, we’d like the ability to make ebook versions available.) Getting these books back in stock in any form other than a short digital print run would be quite costly. Not only for the initial printing costs, but, given their sales velocity (or lack thereof) Ingram would charge us an astronomical sum to store all the new copies. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Dalkey was paying almost $60,000 annually in “excess inventory” charges at the time of John’s passing. In terms of maximizing revenue, printing and inventory are the two trickiest things to navigate, yet the true key to financial success.
For whatever reason, Bookshop.org is missing Time Must Have a Stop by Aldous Huxley (Orange Series).
Of the remaining fifteen best-sellers, seven have been reissued in the past three years, or are about to be. In other words, seventeen of the twenty-five best-selling titles (based on life-to-date net sales) have been reissued in the past handful of years.
This is the mission statement of Dalkey Archive Press.
Back in 2009, we were both invited to a Salzburg Global Seminar for a special session on translation. It was a wonderful experience staying in the palace where the real-life Von Trapps of Sound of Music fame lived, having long brainstorming meetings with many of the most influential and interesting publishers, translators, critics, editors, and cultural organization officials in the world. Truly magical and incredibly inspiring.
Anyway, everyone from the seminar was put on a group mailing list, and we were told repeatedly that if you hit “reply,” you’re replying to the whole group and not the individual who sent the message.
Fast forward a month or so, and a Dalkey employee who attended with John sent out an email to the group that begin: “It was great meeting all of you at the seminar . . .” before proceeding to present the recently released volume—which is now out of stock—Translation in Practice. Totally nice, totally logical.
Then John replied. Thinking his response was going to just his employee, forgetting the crucial instruction that every reply would be a “reply all.”
“Nice email, but you should’ve started it: Nice to meet some of you, but most of you are morons.”
To which, after a couple days, numerous conversations, and dozens of best possible responses, I finally emailed the now silent group with the message: “Thanks!”
[Sidenote: This is why Quim Monzo’s book is A Thousand Morons and not, say, A Thousand Idiots.]
For example, you could have the following:
Book A: 0 copies in stock, total print run of 3,800, 3,414 net sales LTD, sales of 4 copies per year over the last 5 years the book was in stock
Book B: 60 copies in stock, total print run of 1,750, 1,600 net sales LTD, sales of 125 copies per year over the last 5 years.
Book B is, from a data analysis point of view, likely to be the smarter bet if you’re looking to capture sales momentum and the attention of readers. As is the shortcoming with all data-based decision-making, this eliminates the current cultural context.
“Eimar Ultan O’Duffy (1893-1935) was born in Dublin. Both a participant in and, beginning with the publication of his first novel in 1919, a critic of the Irish nationalist movement in the first decades of the twentieth century, O’Duffy devoted much of his prolific fiction writing to the satirizing of modern Irish culture.”
I’m reminded now of one of the dictates of J. R. Bob Dobbs, the salesman/prophet of the Church of the Sub-Genius: “Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.”
They didn’t, unfortunately. Especially unfortunate because as damaging to free speech, the written word, and logic that it might have been, a majority opinion written by Clarence Thomas would’ve been, unintentionally, one of the funniest things ever.