"Reading Flann O'Brien" by Gilbert Sorrentino
The first ever article from CONTEXT Magazine.
For me, the first issue of CONTEXT Magazine was a revelation. I had recently started working at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, North Carolina, was only a couple years removed from undergrad, and thus had a bit of a chip on my shoulder about people reading “mainstream fiction,” and was desperate to meet people interested in the weird fiction I had become obsessed with thanks in large part to my time at Schuler Books & Music in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
I did eventually become friends with Greg Beech, bonding over, of all things, Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino, and the—at that time—recent reissue of The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien.
Honestly, I don’t remember if CONTEXT played a role in bringing us together, but we did set aside all new arrivals from Dalkey Archive so that we could pick them over before they got shelved, and, coincidentally, the first article to ever appear in CONTEXT—setting the tone for the ensuing 24 issues—was by Gilbert Sorrentino on Flann O’Brien.
Before getting to that, here’s a quick rundown of what else was in the inaugural issue:
R. M. Berry on “Reading Beckett’s Fiction”
Brian Lennon on “Reading Diane Williams”
Joseph Tabbi on “Reading David Markson”
John Barth, “‘The Parallels!’—Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges”
Ford Madox Ford, “Chaucer the Story Teller” from The March of Literature
Flann O’Brien from At Swim-Two-Birds
Henry James from The Art of Fiction
Etienne Gilson from The Arts of the Beautiful
Viktor Shklovsky, “The Novel as Parody” from Theory of Prose (Sher translation)
William Carlos Williams from Spring and All
Curtis White, “Saving Private Ryan: Don’t Try to Do No Thinkin’!”
Anne Burke, “Reviewing the Reviewers”
Martin Riker, “Review of Literary Magazines” (Marty reviewed McSweeney’s)
Michael Bérubé, “Days Off”
John Kulka, “The Polish Complex”
Editors’ Picks: Gerald Howard on “Stephen Amidon’s The New City” and Robert Dreesen on “Michael Faber’s Under the Skin”
University and Bookstore Advisors for CONTEXT
Reading Guides (which includes lists for “Literary Worlds All Students Should Have Read,” “Most Influential Critical Books of the Twentieth Century,” “Most Influential Novels of the Twentieth Century,” “The Twentieth Century Novels Students Most Like, “The Pre-Twentieth Century Novels that Most Influenced the Twentieth Century Novel,” and “Novels That Will Be Considered the Most Important Literary Works of the Twentieth Century in the Year 2100.”
Booksellers (every store that had agreed to stock CONTEXT for interested patrons)
and this ad:
which was very much an homage to Apple’s slogan of the time:
but, to be fair, is still a solid slogan and something I wish more readers did?
Anyway, at some point soon, I’ll run some of those lists—to see how they play in 2025—along with “Anne Burke’s” articles. (There is a larger series on the horizon that these pieces ties into.)
But for now, let’s bring together two foundational Dalkey authors in one essay.
“Reading Flann O’Brien” by Gilbert Sorrentino
Flann O’Brien is one of the half-dozen or so greatest comic writers in the English language of this or any other century, the equal of such geniuses of comedy as Sterne, Joyce, Beckett, Waugh, and Firbank. His mastery of comedic prose, its nuances, tropes, and subversions, is of such high degree that the merest gesture of his stylistic hand can turn a sentence or phrase from its course as sober conveyor of information to sabotager and ridiculer of that same information. Done the right way (and O’Brien invariably does it the right way), such writing can virtually collapse referential material and transform it into brilliant constellations of devastating hilarity. Little can stand before comedy of such purity, comedy so intensely focused and authoritative that it rises above ideology, factionalism, religion, and the bloated niceties of propaganda and “right thinking.” Inventors, or if you please, marshals of such anarchic laughter are dangerous people indeed, informed, as they are, by love, hatred, and, above all, perhaps, a salutary shame for the human species and its ridiculous pettinesses and pretensions.
I think that O’Brien was fearful of or apprehensive about these extraordinary comic gifts, even as he permitted them to flourish, and flourish most notably, in his two greatest books, At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman. It's impossible to know or even to guess at whether this fear was caused by the classically Irish, macabre nature of the works themselves (both novels are cruel at their core, and many of their most deliciously risible scenes, conversations, and set pieces are rooted in pain, anguish, ignominy, humiliation, and death); or whether his very being as a comic artist was one he could not or would not change, lest such change damage his lavishly inventive psychology. Put simply, if, perhaps, reductively: Did he fear his books or did he fear the talent that created them? Whatever the case, he, arguably, attempted to protect himself, to shield himself from his own work, at once to own and disown it. At Swim-Two-Birds brusquely avoids its eerie logical conclusion—the assault upon and possible erasure of its primary creator, the writer himself—and The Third Policeman was, remarkably, repressed by its author during his lifetime (behind the preposterous, trumped-up story of the supposed loss of the supposed single copy of the manuscript), appearing soon after he was safely dead. The Dalkey Archive, a “re-vision” of The Third Policeman, and published during O’Brien’s lifetime, has, not facetiously, in my view, a dedication to “my Guardian Angel, impressing upon him that I’m only fooling and warning him to see to it that there is no misunderstanding when I go home.” I see this novel as a non-sinister apologia for the unearthly terrors of The Third Policeman, as well as a barrier between the latter and O’Brien; and the charge to his Guardian Angel has to do with the suppressed text, for which The Dalkey Archive was but a surrogate.
O’Brien believed that fiction is not far removed from life, that it is, in a sense, another kind of life, separate from the mundane by the thinnest of walls. He would have been, I suspect, highly amused, in his slashing, merciless way, at the claims to truth made by solemn, didactic, and “transgressive” memoirists. I don’t mean, it should go without saying, that he harbored the innocent notion that will have the page famously mirroring the world, and that the more precisely representative the mirrored image, the closer we are to life. Joyce, with his precise detonations and subversions of specific locations, mores, events, and speech, with his straightforward retelling of the Facts—his realism, that is, that pulls its house down around itself—taught O'Brien (and everybody else who was paying attention) that such a notion was no more than a literary shibboleth. O’Brien’s sense of the presence of the porous wall between what is here and what the writer makes to add to it was sophisticated and not a little spooky.
It would seem that in O’Brien’s world, that which occurs within the confines of a book can “bleed” out of the book’s pages and perform, in three dimensions, here in the actual space of the material world. It is as if the myriad signs of the book exist not only as the markers that can never represent or approximate the actual, but that can also—in a moment of authorial carelessness or even exuberance—escape from the book, shed their lives as signs, and become substantial, become, that is, the things that they had only pointed at. And when, as in At Swim-Two-Birds, the characters of the book are writers, storytellers, fabulists, bullshit artists of every stripe—linguistic magicians of one sort or another—their power to influence reality becomes enormous. And this, as I’ve suggested, frightened O’Brien in the odd, superstitious way that writers are often frightened by their work. It may be that literature is the last profession for which training does not equip its practitioners to understand its power over them: hence writers’ reliance on hunches, talismans, coincidences, luck. It wasn’t merely Brian O’Nolan’s frivolity or eccentricity that effected his concealment of himself behind such names as Flann O’Brien, Myles na Gopaleen, George Knowall, and, even as a student, Brother Barnabas. “I didn’t write this stuff!” one might imagine O’Nolan saying (to his Guardian Angel). And, in a certain odd but profound way, O’Nolan never wrote anything.
As I’ve noted, the ending of At Swim-Two-Birds is sudden and unexpected, although I can’t for a moment imagine what a “satisfactory” ending might look like. The mysterious and beautiful virtuoso prose of the last three pages comprise, I would argue, a coda that is outside of the novel’s narrative of web-like and multi-planed concerns. That book ends with the destroying fire which brings to a close the various existences of the invented writers who might well have succeeded, such was their power, in calling into question the very fact of O’Nolan’s existence; or, perhaps more potently, written him off as a creator.
In At Swim-Two-Birds, we are proffered, then, a dizzying proposition: any fictitious character can be made into a writer, who, in turn, can create his own fictitious characters who are writers, and so on. And there is nothing to prevent—so the machinery of the novel posits one of these characters from hitting on the idea of writing the ultimate creator of the book (O’Nolan/O’Brien) into another fictitious character, distorting the work beyond recognition. That the “prime mover” of the text might do this himself and to himself is of little moment: writers, as a regular practice, use their work to comfort, soothe, excite, entertain, amuse, and flay themselves. There is, indeed, a cure for such possible distortion of the text—its destruction. Get rid of the book and the writer cannot be at its mercy.
O’Brien didn’t destroy his book, but he made certain that the novel’s major writer, the lazy and sullen student of literary bent who creates Dermot Trellis (a nicely exaggerated surrogate for the student, and himself a sullen writer), is left without the book that we have been reading. It is suddenly burned in a stove by Trellis’s servant. It’s very much to the point that this fiery destruction of the text occurs—if you will bear with me for a brief excursion into vertigo—not within the frame text created by O’Brien, but within the frame text created by O’Brien’s student writer; and that the servant who does the burning is Trellis’s servant, Trellis being, as the reader, of course, knows, the writer who has created characters who exist in yet another frame also inhabited by Orlick Trellis, Dermot’s son, who has been born out of wedlock as a fully grown, wholly developed, adult writer who hates his father.
O’Brien, shielded from the dangers of his own fiction by a pen name, strengthens that shield by placing even the obliteration of his narrative at two further removes from himself, viz., Dermot/the student/O’Brien/O’Nolan. The burning of the text, that is, occurs within a fiction that O’Brien’s fictitious writer has created; and O’Brien is himself a fiction created by O’Nolan.
This is a magical book, a book of great risk and danger, and O’Brien would never attempt anything like it again, since, I believe, the “solution” to such a book must have been, for him, always the same: to get rid of the thing before it could get rid of him. The Third Policeman presents a circular hell filled with demons and the dead, a hell of terrible adventures and stygian comedy. But it has a single narrator and the terrors of the novel are rigidly contained in its circular form: there is no vertical movement apparent in the text, and the magnificently loony footnotes are encrustations, not new levels, of story.
Hugh Kenner says that O’Brien was “somehow scared” of this latter novel, suggesting that this may have been so because of the fact that there is no Satan in O’Brien’s hell, this absence calling the existence of God into question. The implication here is that the book frightened O’Brien because of its odor of blasphemy, if not heresy. This may well have been so, but I can’t quite agree with Kenner, who calls At Swim-Two-Birds “a preternaturally gifted student’s jape,” and praises The Third Policeman at its expense. I think that such fears that O’Brien may have felt because of the possible religious transgressions of his book of the damned were, indeed, religious fears. It can be argued, and I would argue it, that the phony disappearance of the text was its author’s penance for its impieties, real or suspected. O’Brien distanced it from himself by refusing to allow it existence. But At Swim-Two-Birds is distanced from its author by a radical act of formal literary violence.
Basically, The Third Policeman was a book that was “possible” for O’Brien to write, despite its flirtation with Manichaeism; while At Swim-Two-Birds was the book that was “no longer wonderful but terrible,” as the dead hero of The Third Policeman says of the demon policeman, MacCruiskeen’s, creation of intricately fashioned chests, one of which is said to be smaller than a bigger chest which is itself too small to be described. The hero says, “I shut my eyes and prayed that he would stop while still doing things that were at least possible for a man to do.”
This piece appeared in CONTEXT magazine in 1999, and is collected in Sorrentino’s Something Said, which contains seventy-two essays on a range of authors, including William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Edward Dahlbert, Coleman Dowell, Paul Bowles, Italo Calvino, David Antin, Robert Creeley, John Hawkes, and more.
I would love to see those Reading Guide lists!