But Flann O'Brien has other targets in view besides high‐epic hype. It's the hand of a master parodist, in a word, that shows up first in “At Swim-Two-Birds” - an especially pleasing item for anyone tormented in youth by Teutonophile Anglo‐Saxon instructors who regarded giggling at Higelac, in “Beowulf,” as sin. What of the “squeal of a troubled mare” or “the complaining of wild‐hogs caught in snow?” What, for that matter, of “the whining of small otters in nettle‐beds at evening?” How choose? But then, he adds, other equally exquisite sounds of agony abound. “The lamenting of the wounded otter in a black hole, sweeter than harpstrings that,” he concedes. “Of the musics you have ever got,” his followers ask, “which have you found the sweetest?” Rolling his eyeballs - they're the color, incidentally, of “the slaughter of a host in snow” - the hero struggles to decide. Nicer still is the attention paid by the narrator to those characterological idiosyncrasies that the kinkier among Finn's fin de siècle fans probably found most endearing - Finn's developed taste for torture. And it's plain at once that the narrator of “At Swim” knows the mode to its corrupt heart's core. The narrator, who is never named, begins quoting liberally from an “incursion into ancient mythology,” material centered on bardic tales starring Finn MacCool and other “legendary heroes of old Ireland.” Such stuff was fashionable early in the present century and a little before, thanks to the translator Standish O'Grady (and others) and the general dimness of the Celtic Twilight. ”) One senses the imminence of antinovel, a mental illness of French origin that's caused much suffering and driven scores of writers to break up, like monkeys with mirrors, at the sight of their own doings. my uncle: red‐faced bead‐eyed, ball‐bellied.
(“DescriptionĮdited and with an Introduction by Stephen Jones.
#Irish funny pages how to#
page or so of Tristram Shandyish fiddle about how to write a book, followed by abrupt introductions of a nondescript university student -:the narrator of the work - and his landlord‐uncle. FOR a masterpiece, which it is, Flann O'Brien's “At Swim-Two-Birds”(1939) opens poorly.
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