The Books: “At Swim-Two-Birds” (Flann O’Brien)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

At Swim-Two-Birds, by Flann O’Brien.

It’s kinda hard, as an O’Malley, to talk about this book in a normal book-report kind of way. I think I even sort of believed, as a child, that Flann O’Brien might have been related to us. Or something. There must be SOME personal connection. And O’Brien is my grandmother’s maiden name. So it was possible! I didn’t even read the book until after college – but the title – At Swim-Two-Birds – was already in my life and consciousness (forever) by, oh, age 4? I don’t know. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware that there was a man named Flann O’Brien and he had written a book with a mysterious title called At Swim-Two-Birds. My first blog’s URL was atswimtwobirds… And then, of course, there was my first published essay – if you go here and scroll down, you can see that they excerpted my essay on the back cover and it’s called “Two Birds”. It’s not even a book to me, for God’s sake. It’s basically the story of my family, my childhood, everything. I have no idea why. It’s one of the weirdest books ever written. I write about the book a bit here – and link to a terrific John Updike article about Flann O’Brien (one of his many monikers). I might be repeating myself a bit from that post, but here goes:

At Swim-Two-Birds anticipates the experimental meta-literature of today – Dave Eggers, for example, owes a great debt to At Swim-Two-Birds, with his narrator that suddenly steps forward, looks right at the reader, and starts addressing us directly. The goofiness, the non-literal structure … things have no real substance, everything is malleable. The book is really about a young Holden Caulfield type narrator – a college student, who lives with his uncle, and basically lies around in his room smoking all day, dreaming up the great novel he will write. And then occasionally he goes out with his buddies and gets absolutely wasted. His uncle is pretty much horrified at what a loser his nephew is. The book also, fantastically, becomes about the entire history of Ireland – its myths, legends, old tales come back to life in a modern context. The novel the narrator is writing is about Finn McCool – or, he’s one of the characters – and also Mad King Sweeney – the dude who turned into a bird – and the narrator keeps writing outlines of what he wants to write – the whole book is broken up into headings and sub-headings, as though it itself is the outline for another book … and at some point, the narrator loses control of his own characters. They start to behave in ways he finds incomprehensible, they say and do whatever the hell they want – and he is struggling to rein back them in, to take charge again. But once Pandora’s box is opened … Finn McCool and Mad King Sweeney stroll the modern streets of Dublin. They’re out. Flann O’Brien also directly references Joyce – especially in one section that is set up exactly like the famous ithaca episode in Ulysses (excerpt here) – with the call-and-response … James Joyce casts a giant shadow. Irish writers struggle to either be compared TO him or defined AGAINST him … Either way, he can’t be ignored. Even when an Irish writer comes out and says, “You know what? I hate Joyce!” – it’s still evidence of the fact that Joyce dominates the landscape still, to this day. Flann O’Brien doesn’t wrestle with Joyce in private, he brings it on out into the open, and puts it all in his book. He doesn’t worry about structure or narrative. He lets Irish history – fanciful and literal – be unleashed … Ireland, so consumed by its own past (one of the things Joyce found so annoying and why he looked elsewhere for inspiration) – here in At Swim-Two-Birds the past has come to life. It’s not a tale in a dusty book. It’s real people, stepping out of the pages of a manuscript … despite the author’s intentions.

I have to say, too, that At Swim-Two-Birds is laugh-out-loud funny – although perhaps it’s very specific humor. I would imagine if Catch-22 (excerpt here) made you laugh out loud, At Swim-Two-Birds would, too. There is a laboriousness to some of the descriptions – that just go on forever – and it gets funnier and funnier, the more specific Flann O’Brien gets. Like this. The elaborate sentence goes against what he is talking about – a most base human experience – and that just makes it funnier. There are also about 20 more words in the sentence than there “needs” to be, and that just makes it funnier too:

Notwithstanding this eulogy, I soon found that the mass of plain porter bears an unsatisfactory relation to its toxic content and I became subsequently addicted to brown stout in bottle, a drink which still remains the one that I prefer the most despite the painful and blinding fits of vomiting which a plurality of bottles has often induced in me.

Like, that is RIDICULOUS. But soo funny to me. This formal intricate sentence basically saying, “I love beer, even though it makes me barf.” And then there’s the even more ridiculous first sentence of the book, which is a masterpiece of self-consciousness:

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.

See, I’ve read the book a couple of times and that kind of sentence is STILL funny to me. It’s ridiculous. It’s observant. It’s hugely overwritten. You want to say to him, “Oh, get OVER yourself!!” Who describes their own behavior that way?? But that’s why it’s funny.

I can’t really talk more about the book – it’s very weird, with 25 page long discourses on Irish history – with poems and songs and Finn McCool tromping through the pages … but it’s one of the all-time great Irish books. And it’s funny: its influence is enormous. He is the precursor of the self-conscious looking-in-mirror-at-self literature we see in vogue today. It feels very very modern, this book – when you read it now. At the time it was published, it was unlike anything else out there – and in a way, it still is unlike anything else. But his experimentation with form, and content matching form, was hugely influential.

EXCERPT FROM At Swim-Two-Birds, by Flann O’Brien.

That same afternoon I was sitting on a stool in an intoxicated condition in Grogan’s licensed premises. Adjacent stools bore the forms of Brinsley and Kelly, my two true friends. The three of us were occupied in putting glasses of stout into the interior of our bodies and expressing by fine disputation the resulting sense of physical and mental well-being. In my thigh pocket I had eleven and eightpence in a weighty pendulum of mixed coins. Each of the arrayed bottles on the shelves before me, narrow or squat-bellied, bore a dull picture of the gas bracket. Who can tell the stock of a public-house? Many no doubt are dummies, those especially within an arm-reach of the snug. The stout was of superior quality, soft against the tongue but sharp upon the orifice of the throat, softly efficient in its magical circulation through the conduits of the body. Half to myself, I said:
Do not let us forget that I have to buy Die Harzreise. Do not let us forget that.

Hazreise, said Brinsley. There is a house in Dalkey called Heartrise.

Brinsley then put his dark chin on the cup of a palm and leaned in thought on the counter, overlooking his drink, gazing beyond the frontier of the world.

What about another jar? said Kelly.

Ah, Lesbia, said Brinsley. The finest thing I ever wrote. How many kisses, Lesbia, you ask, would serve to sate this hungry love of mine? – As many as the Libyan sands that bask along Cyrene’s shore where pine-trees wave, where burning Jupiter’s untended shrine lies near to old King Battus’ sacred grave:

Three stouts, called Kelly.

Let them be endless as the stars at night, that stare upon the lovers in a ditch – so often would love-crazed Catallus bite your burning lips, that prying eyes should not have power to count, nor evil tongues bewitch, the frenzied kisses that you gave and got.

Before we die of thirst, called Kelly, will you bring us three more stouts. God, he said to me, it’s in the desert you’d think we were.

That’s good stuff, you know, I said to Brinsley,

A picture came before my mind of the lovers at their hedge-pleasure in the pale starlight, no sound from them, his fierce mouth burying into hers.

Bloody good stuff, I said.

Kelly, invisible to my left, made a slapping noise.

The best I ever drank, he said.

As I exchanged an eye-message with Brinsley, a wheezing beggar inserted his person at my side and said:

Buy a scapular or a stud, Sir.

This interruption I did not understand. Afterwards, near Lad Lane police station a small man in black fell in with us and tapping me often about the chest, talked to me earnestly on the subject of Rousseau, a member of the French nation. He was animated, his pale features striking in the starlight and his voice going up and falling in the lilt of his argumentum. I did not understand his talk and was personally unacquainted with him. But Kelly was taking in all he said, for he stood near him, his taller head inclined in an attitude of close attention. Kelly then made a low noise and opened his mouth and covered the small man from shoulder to knee with a coating of unpleasant buff-coloured puke. Many other things happened on that night now imperfectly recorded in my memory but that incident is still very clear to me in my mind. Afterwards the small man was some distance from us in the lane, shaking his divested coat and rubbing it along the wall. He is a little man that the name of Rousseau will always recall to me. Conclusion of reminiscence.