Beckett's
repertoire, "Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes'
chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the
privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied
expression." (At
Swim-Two-Birds) Though starting like Beckett, his usage
of introductory comments (above) recall the penultimate chapter of Joyce's
Ulysses,
as Bloom and Dedalus traverse back to Bloom's house. Joyce explores
the usefulness of a cold, scientific approach to understanding. He
asks a series of questions, and with enormous detail at times, answers
them. This is a technique O'Brien uses throughout the novel to separate
his convoluted plot line.
Though
it satisfies O'Brien to poke fun at the scientific community, he never
misses a chance to load his work with material that will humiliate the
pompous Gaelic League. His novel massacres the Irish epic An
Tain bo Cuailgne. The legendary cattle raid is only one of the
myths O'Brien savages throughout his novel. For a good measure of
Irish guff, he uses the immense proportions and abstract musings of Finn
MacCool, the legendary hero that built Giant's Causeway on the North coast
of the Emerald Isle.
Along
with him he adds the evil Pooka, who is unsurpassed in politeness and manner,
though exact in torturous zeal, and the Good Fairy, who is evil spirited
and rude at every available juncture. Using historical and mythical
characters had been practice of O'Brien's since his early days at University
describing the history of the Literary and History Society (which included
amongst others, Finn MacCool). Again in "Cruiskeen Lawn," we find
Keats and Chapman, two figures who neither lived in each other's time let
alone that of Myles'.
In a dramatically different style of novel as far as the
plot goes (it seems to be a solitary unit), O'Brien's masterpiece, The
Third Policeman, is his most complete, structured, and comprehensible
novel. Again, O'Brien has no intentions that the reader might assume
that this is an ordinary pile of pages to be read and left. From
the beginning words, like in At Swim-Two-Birds, we are aware that
O'Brien is up to mischief. Rather than starting the book with the
second paragraph that provides biographical information, he begins with
the narrator's account of himself killing of Phillip Mathers. One of the
titles that a publisher thought might be appropriate for the novel was,
Hell
Goes Round and Round. Indeed, though aesthetically inept, the
title hints at the nature of the book. Soon the narrator finds himself
in a world he is not familiar with, though he is only minutes from home
and has never lived anywhere else. The reader must make sense of
this extravagance, but the events of the narrator's encounters with the
magical policeman confound the reader to submissive abandon as they await
O'Brien's next impossibility. In the Police barracks he is bombarded
by questions regarding bicycles. Though he is actually looking for
a box of money (the reason for killing Mathers) he has to play along with
their lines of inquiry.
Further complicating the matter, he has forgotten his
name. This fantastic series of events is underlined by a continuous
commentary by the narrator on a fictitious personage by the name of de
Selby. This savant is widely studied in the sciences and proposes
a number of illegitimate theories. These theories are often footnoted
in fictitious references to books not written. Later in the book,
the narrator brings in critics of the errant de Selby who in turn have
an argument that threatens to subvert the original plot; the reader has
difficulty in whether or not to continue with the story and return to the
notes, or get those out of the way first. O'Brien intentionally disrupts
the reasonable flow of natural and expected laws of physics and literature
in order to highlight his narrator's environment, which we learn later
is indeed hell.
O'Brien later recycled these ideas in The Dalkey Archive.
Since they remained unpublished until after his death, he plundered the
theories and characters and redirected the story to the third person, his
only novel to do so. The work is a shadow of the original humor and
genus of The Third Policeman, though maintains O'Brien's tendency
toward the fantastic. De Selby has become a real character, rather
than a
series of footnotes,
and also James Joyce makes a cameo appearance, though not 
quite
as the reader expects him. He admits having nothing to do with the
writing of Ulysses, and has been creating pamphlets for the Catholic
Truth Society. The novel employs few of the subversive techniques
found in The Third Policeman, and At Swim-Two-Birds. This
novel was converted into a successful play by the name of "When The Saints
Go Cycling In," by Hugh Leonard.
A disappointment to O'Brien, The Hard Life failed to be included on the Irish banned books list. His theory was that the list was the first step to notoriety. (The English Writings of Flann O'Brien) There is very little of the postmodernist flair as in his previous books, however, Mr. Collopy does find himself engaged in a dire conversation with the pope in the vatican. The pope ejects Mr. Collopy and his friend Fr. Fahrt (the name, O'Brien thought, would surely get the book banned by Catholic Nationalists). Soon after, Mr. Collopy weighing in at well over three hundred pounds as a result of using a product sold by Finbar's unscrupulous brother, he falls to his death through a collapsing balcony in a performance arts building. The novel ends shortly after. The bizarre chain of events is O'Brien-esque, however, his speeches through Mr. Collopy on the subject of equal treatment of women seem uncharacteristic.
An Beal Bocht (The Poor Mouth) appeared
in 1941 written in Gaelic. Though the translator includes a note
about the many puns and linguistic nuances overlooked necessarily by a
translation into another language, the book creates a charicature of native
Gaelic speakers and Gaelic Revivalists. The narrator describes how
he lives with the horse and the pigs and every meal is potatoes.
The family devises a plan to attract scholars with money by opening a college
on their grounds. Emphasizing the frailty of the starved natives,
they were being praised by the revivalists for dying while doing traditional
dances. The book is a continuous description of the wretchedly and
ignorantly poor, but "classically" Gaelic. There are few of O'Brien's
literary interruptions. Complementary to his style, the simple writing
and understanding of the first person narrator emphasizes the ignorance
and observational nature of the Gaelic situation he mocks.
FLANN
O'BRIEN PAGE