 First edition cover | |
| Author | Flann O'Brien |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Longman Green & Co |
Publication date | 1939 |
| Publication place | Ireland |
| Media type | Print (hard &paperback) |
| Pages | 224 pp (UK paperback edition) |
| Followed by | The Third Policeman |
At Swim-Two-Birds is a 1939 novel by Irish writerBrian O'Nolan, writing under the pseudonymFlann O'Brien. It is widely considered to be O'Brien's masterpiece, and one of the most sophisticated examples ofmetafiction.
The novel's title derives fromSnám dá Én (Middle Irish: "The narrow water of the two birds"; Modern Irish:Snámh Dá Éan), an ancientford on theRiver Shannon, betweenClonmacnoise andShannonbridge, reportedly visited by the legendaryKing Sweeney, a character in the novel.[1]
The novel was included inTime magazine'slist of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.[2] It was also included in a list, published byThe Guardian, of the 100 best English-language novels of all time.[3]
At Swim-Two-Birds presents itself as a first-person story by an unnamed Irish student of literature. The student believes that "one beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with", and he accordingly sets three apparently quite separate stories in motion.[4] The first concerns thePooka MacPhellimey, "a member of the devil class".[4] The second is about a young man named John Furriskey, who turns out to be a fictional character created by another of the student's creations, Dermot Trellis, a cynical writer ofWesterns. The third consists of the student's adaptations of Irish legends, mostly concerningFinn Mac Cool andMad King Sweeney. But even this is a jest — the first of many in the novel — as there's also a fourth beginning here: that introducing the Irish student's own discourse on the benefits of three beginnings, setting his own story in motion.
In the autobiographicalframe story, the student recounts details of his life. He lives with his uncle, who works as a clerk in theGuinnessBrewery inDublin. The uncle is a complacent and self-consciously respectable bachelor who suspects that the student does very little studying. This seems to be the case, as by his own account the student spends more time drinkingstout with his college friends, lying in bed, and working on his book than he does going to class.
The stories that the student is writing soon become intertwined with each other. John Furriskey meets and befriends two of Trellis's other characters, Antony Lamont and Paul Shanahan. They each become resentful of Trellis's control over their destinies, and manage to drug him so that he will spend more time asleep, giving them the freedom to lead quiet domestic lives rather than be ruled by the lurid plots of his novels. Meanwhile, Trellis creates Sheila Lamont (Antony Lamont's sister) in order that Furriskey might seduce and betray her, but "blinded by her beauty" Trellis "so far forgets himself as to assault her himself."[5] Sheila, in due course, gives birth to a child named Orlick, who is born as a polite and articulate young man with a gift for writing fiction. The entire group of Trellis's characters, by now including Finn, Sweeney, the urbane Pooka and an invisible and quarrelsome Good Fairy who lives in the Pooka's pocket, convenes in Trellis's fictional Red Swan Hotel where they devise a way to overthrow their author. Encouraged by the others, Orlick starts writing a novel about his father in which Trellis is tried by his own creations, found guilty and viciously tortured. Just as Orlick's novel is about to climax with Trellis' death, the college student passes his exams and reconciles with his uncle. He completes his story by having Trellis's maid accidentally burn the papers sustaining the existence of Furriskey and his friends, freeing Trellis.
The idea of interaction between the author and his characters is not new, and one earlier example isMiguel de Unamuno's 1914 novelNiebla. An even earlier example isA Sensation Novel (1871), a comic musical play in three acts (or volumes) written byW. S. Gilbert before he began collaborating with Arthur Sullivan. (Details ofA Sensation Novel reappear in Gilbert and Sullivan's musicalRuddigore.) The story ofA Sensation Novel concerns an author suffering from writer's block who finds that the characters in his novel are dissatisfied. O’Nolan first explored the idea of fictional characters rebelling against their creator in a short story titled "Scenes in a Novel", published in theUCD literary magazineComhthrom Féinne (Ir., "Fair Play") in 1934.[6] The story was a first-person narrative ostensibly written by a novelist called Brother Barnabas, whose characters become tired of doing his bidding and who eventually conspire to murder him:
The book is seething with conspiracy and there have been at least two whispered consultations between all the characters, including two who have not yet been officially created. ... Candidly, reader, I fear my number's up.[7]
The mythological content ofAt Swim was inspired by O'Nolan's affection forearly Irish literature. He grew up in an Irish-speaking home and although he claimed in later life that he had attended few of his college lectures, he studied the late medieval Irish literary tradition as part of the syllabus and acquired enoughOld Irish to be able to compose in the language with reasonable fluency. HisM.A. thesis was entitled "Nature Poetry in Irish" (Nádúirfhilíocht na Gaedhilge), although his examiner Agnes O'Farrelly rejected the initial draft and he was obliged to rewrite it.[8]At Swim-Two-Birds contains references to no less than fourteen sources in early and medieval Irish literature.[9] Most of the poetry recited by King Sweeney was taken directly from the Middle Irish romanceBuile Suibhne, O'Nolan slightly modifying the translations for comic effect. For example, the original "an clog náomh re náomhaibh",[10] translated by J. G. O'Keeffe in the standard edition as "the bell of saints before saints",[11] is rendered by O'Nolan as "the saint-bell of saints with sainty-saints".[12]
At Swim-Two-Birds has been classified as aMenippean satire.[13] O'Nolan was exposed to the Menippean tradition through the modern literature he is known to have admired, including works byJames Joyce,Aldous Huxley,Søren Kierkegaard andJames Branch Cabell, but he may also have encountered it in the course of his study of medieval Irish literature; the Middle Irish satireAislinge Meic Con Glinne has been described as "the best major work of parody in the Irish language".[14]
O'Nolan composed the novel on anUnderwood portabletypewriter in the bedroom he shared with his younger brother Micheál. The typewriter rested on a table constructed by O'Nolan from the offcuts of a modifiedtrellis that had stood in the O'Nolan family's back garden. O'Nolan's biographer believes that it was the unusual material that the writing table was made of that inspired the name of the character "Dermot Trellis",[15] although there is no reference to where this information was found.
O'Nolan used variousfound texts in the novel; a letter from ahorseracingtipster was given to him by a college friend, while the painter Cecil Salkeld gave O'Nolan the original "Conspectus of the Arts and Sciences".[16] Before submitting the manuscript for publication O'Nolan gave it to friends to read. A friend wrote him a letter which included suggestions about how to end the novel and O'Nolan incorporated the salient part of the letter into the text itself, although he later cut it. The sudden death in 1937 of O'Nolan's father Michael O'Nolan may have influenced the episode in which the student narrator regrets his unkind thoughts about his previously despised uncle.[17]
At Swim-Two-Birds was accepted for publication byLongman's on the recommendation ofGraham Greene, who was a reader for them at the time.[18] It was published under the pseudonym of Flann O'Brien, a name O'Nolan had already used to write hoax letters to theIrish Times.[19] O'Nolan had suggested using "Flann O'Brien" as a pen-name during negotiation with Longman's:
I have been thinking over the question of a pen-name and would suggest Flann O'Brien. I think this invention has the advantage that it contains an unusual name and one that is quite ordinary. "Flann" is an old Irish name now rarely heard.[20]
The book was published on 13 March 1939, but did not sell well: by the outbreak ofWorld War II it had sold scarcely more than 240 copies. In 1940, Longman's London premises were destroyed during a bombing raid by theLuftwaffe and almost all the unsold copies were incinerated.[21] The novel was republished byPantheon Books inNew York City in 1950, on the recommendation ofJames Johnson Sweeney, but sales remained low.[22] In May 1959Timothy O'Keeffe, while editorial director of the London publishing house MacGibbon & Kee, persuaded O'Nolan to allow him to republishAt Swim-Two-Birds.[23] More recently, the novel was republished in the United States byDalkey Archive Press.
The initial reviews forAt Swim-Two-Birds were not enthusiastic.The Times Literary Supplement said that the book's only notable feature was a "schoolboy brand of mild vulgarity"; theNew Statesman complained that "long passages in imitation of the Joycean parody of the early Irish epic are devastatingly dull" and the Irish novelistSeán Ó Faoláin commented inJohn O'London's Weekly that although the book had its moments, it "had a general odour of spilt Joyce all over it."[24]
However, most of the support forAt Swim-Two-Birds came not from newspaper reviewers but from writers.Dylan Thomas, in a remark that would be quoted on dust-jackets in later editions of the book, said "This is just the book to give your sister – if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl".Anthony Burgess considered it one of theninety-nine greatest novels written between 1939 and 1984. Graham Greene's enthusiastic reader's report was instrumental in getting the book published in the first place:
It is in the line ofTristram Shandy andUlysses: its amazing spirits do not disguise the seriousness of the attempt to present, simultaneously as it were, all the literary traditions of Ireland. ... We have had books inside books before now, and characters who are given life outside their fiction, but O'Nolan takesPirandello andGide a long way further.[25]
O'Nolan's friendNiall Sheridan gaveJames Joyce an inscribed copy of the book. Joyce declared it the work of a "real writer" who had "the true comic spirit" and attempted to get the book reviewed in French periodicals, although without success. It is thought to have been the last novel Joyce ever read.[26]Anthony Cronin has written of the effect the novel had on him as a seventeen-year-old in 1940s Dublin, praising its "umistakable sheen of theavant-garde", describing it "breathtakingly funny" and noting "the deadly accuracy of the ear for lower middle class Dublin speech".[27]Most academic criticism of the book has sought to appropriate it[according to whom?] one way or the other; critics likeBernard Benstock, who argued that O'Brien's embrace of myth and refusal of realism "ensnare[d] him with the second rank", have been in the minority.[28]Vivian Mercier described it inThe Irish Comic Tradition as "the most fantastic novel written by an Irishman in the twentieth century – with the doubtful exception ofFinnegans Wake."[29] Rüdiger Imhof has noted how works byB. S. Johnson,Gilbert Sorrentino,Alasdair Gray andJohn Fowles carry explicit references toAt Swim-Two-Birds.[30]Michael Cronin draws attention to themetafictional and game-playing elements of the book, comparing it to the fictions ofRaymond Queneau, and responds to criticism that the book is insufficiently respectful of realist conventions:
Contrary to what Benstock argues, what post-independence Ireland needed was not less but more of the type of playful, self-aware writing being proposed by Flann O'Brien inAt Swim-Two-Birds. ... We would all be very much poorer without Mad O'Brien's narrative chessmen.[31]
Keith Hopper has argued that, contrary to the common tendency to favourAt Swim-Two-Birds as "the primary defining text of the O'Brien oeuvre", the novel is in fact less, not more, experimental than O'Brien's second novel, the posthumously publishedThe Third Policeman:
At Swim-Two-Birds is best considered as a late-modernist, transitional text which critiques both realism and modernism in an openly deconstructive manner, and in the process comes to the brink of an exciting new aesthetic. I will argue that the metafictional techniques developed publicly in [the book] ... are imbricated and embedded within the texture ofThe Third Policeman.[32]
In a long essay published in 2000,Declan Kiberd analysedAt Swim-Two-Birds from apostcolonial perspective, seeing it as a complex imaginative response to the economic and social stagnation of 1930s Ireland and arguing that the fragmented and polyphonic texture of the book is the work of an author who is "less anxious to say something new than to find a self that is capable of saying anything at all."[33] Kiberd suggests that the one element of the book which is not seriously ironised or satirised is Sweeney's poetry, and that this is related to O'Nolan's genuine if complex respect for Irish-language literature:
What saved O'Brien from lapsing into postmodern nihilism was not his Catholicism which held that the world was a doomed and hopeless place, but his respect for the prose ofAn tOileánach or the poetry ofBuile Suibhne, where language still did its appointed work. ... He was an experimentalist who was way ahead of his time: only after his death did his readers learn how to become his contemporaries.[34]
In a 1939 essay titledWhen Fiction Lives in Fiction,Argentine writerJorge Luis Borges described Flann O'Brien's masterpiece as follows,
I have enumerated many verbal labyrinths, but none so complex as the recent book by Flann O'Brien,At Swim-Two-Birds. A student inDublin writes a novel about the proprietor of a Dublin public house, who writes a novel about the habitués of his pub (among them, the student), who in their turn write novels in which proprietor and student figure along with other writers about other novelists. The book consists of the extremely diverse manuscripts of these real or imagined persons, copiously annotated by the student.At Swim-Two-Birds is not only a labyrinth; it is a discussion of the many ways to conceive of the Irish novel and a repertory of exercises inprose andverse which illustrate or parody all the styles of Ireland. The magisterial influence of Joyce (also an architect of labyrinths, also a literaryProteus) is undeniable, but not disproportionate in this manifold book.Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that dreaming and wakefulness are the pages of a single book, and that to read them in order is to live, and to leaf through them at random, is to dream. Paintings within paintings and books that branch into other books help us sense this oneness.[35]
In 2011, the book was placed onTime magazine's top 100fiction books written in English since 1923.
At Swim-Two-Birds has been translated into several languages, including French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Polish, Hungarian, Swedish, Romanian and Bulgarian. The first French translation,Kermesse irlandaise, was written by Henri Morisset and published in 1964; another,Swim-Two-Birds, was published in 2002. The Spanish translation,En Nadar-dos-pájaros, was published in 1989 byEdhasa. The Dutch translationTegengif was made byBob den Uyl and first published by Meulenhoff in 1974. It was published again in 2010 by Atlas asOp Twee-Vogel-Wad. The book has been translated into German twice, once in 1966 by Lore Fiedler and subsequently in 2005 byHarry Rowohlt. The book has also been adapted as a German-language film by Austrian director Kurt Palm.[36] The Romanian version is by Adrian Oțoiu and was published in 2005, as ' La Doi Lebădoi'. The Bulgarian translation "Plavashtite Chavki" by Filipina Filipova was published in 2008 by www.famapublishers.com
The Austrian directorKurt Palm made a film from the book in 1997. The title of the film isIn Schwimmen-zwei-Vögel.
ActorBrendan Gleeson has long planned to make his directorial debut in a movie adaptation of the book. The Irish production companyParallel Pictures announced that it would produce the film with a budget of $11 million.Michael Fassbender,Colin Farrell,Gabriel Byrne,Jonathan Rhys Meyers andCillian Murphy have at various times been attached to star in the film.[37][38] Gleeson confirmed in July 2011 that he had secured funding for the project. He described the writing of the script as torturous and that it had taken 14 drafts so far.[39] As of April 2014, the film was still in development.[40]
The book has been adapted for the stage on at least four occasions. The first stage version was commissioned in 1971 by theAbbey Theatre in Dublin and written by Audrey Welsh.[41] The British theatre companyRidiculusmus toured a three-man adaptation of it in 1994–1995[42] and there was a 1998 version by Alex Johnston for the Abbey Theatre.[43] A more recent stage version was directed by Niall Henry and performed by the Blue Raincoat Theatre Company in Sligo in November 2009.[44]
The novel was adapted for radio by Eric Ewens and broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 26 August 1979, repeated 2 November 1980. The director wasRonald Mason.[45]
The Greek phrase found in the front-matter of the novel is fromEuripides'sHerakles:ἐξίσταται γὰρ πάντ' ἀπ' ἀλλήλων δίχα (existatai gar pant' ap' allêlôn dikha), English "for all things change, making way for each other".[46] This may be construed as a consolation: "No matter how bad you feel, don't lose hope, because you can count on things getting better."[47]
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