Flann O'Brien: Acting Out ed. by Paul Fagan and Dieter Fuchs (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Flann O'Brien: Acting Out ed. by Paul Fagan and Dieter Fuchs
• Erika Mihálycsa (bio)

FLANN O'BRIEN: ACTING OUT, edited by Paul Fagan and Dieter Fuchs. Cork: Cork University Press, 2022. xiv + 450 pp. $45.00 cloth.

Flann O'Brien's (Brian O'Nolan's) writing for the theater and television has received relatively little attention until recently, being less experimental and thus less suitable for framing inside the parameters of late-modernist or postmodern aesthetics or, lately, as enacting posthumanist or biopolitical preoccupations. However, much of this maverick writer's output across media and genres "acts out" often contradictory potentialities and is inherently theatrical, including the performance of multiple writerly personae. Flann O'Brien: Acting Out, exemplarily edited by Paul Fagan (who also contributes the introduction) and Dieter Fuchs, the fourth volume in the series dedicated to this author published by the Cork University Press, is the first book-length study systematically to assess O'Nolan's protean oeuvre in the context of modernist debates about (anti)theatricality or within the institutional framework of performance. In his jocose manifesto of democratic fiction, the narrator of At Swim-Two-Birds provocatively reverts Stephen Dedalus's argument about the superiority of the dramatic form in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and designs fiction as deceptive performance, which calls for frame-breaking devices to counteract outwitting the credulous reader;¹ while employed in a novel, these devices are inherently (meta)theatrical, showing that performance is never far away from O'Nolan's pranks.

One of the key features of O'Nolan's writing is his keen audience awareness and constant preoccupation with the role of his contemporary Irish audiences and critics: through incorporating dramatic techniques, as Alana Gillespie shows in her chapter, his prose and journalism function as a "grotesque revue" (40) of Irish theatrical productions and their audience, nettling revivalist ideals of educating the public and subversively intervening in the debates about who should have a say in the cultural self-representation of the modern democratic nation state. O'Nolan's most sustained theatrical performance was his cultivation of multiple pseudonyms and masks, a subject explored by Johanna Marquardt and John Greaney; Marquardt traces the replacement of "Flann O'Brien" the novelist by the composite construct "Myles na gCopaleen" (279), the author of the comic column [End Page 169] Cruiskeen Lawn written for The Irish Times, in the memoirs of fellow Irish literati and family members, aided by the domestic cultivation of the figure as an eccentric, and coming to a secondary life as an intertextual fictional character in other writers' anecdotical reminiscing.

O'Nolan's output and Cruiskeen Lawn in particular have long been recognized as the product of joint authorship, evincing a strong anti-authoritarian poetics. Maebh Long brings to light the "flexibility around ideas of originality, borrowing, identity and inheritance" (21) in the workshop of Niall Sheridan, Brian O'Nolan, and Niall Montgomery, incisively demonstrating that much of the foundational ideas and scaffolding, if not quite the fictional strategies, employed in The Third Policeman sprang from free-wheeling reciprocal takeovers among the three, including the motif of bicycles, policemen, and the narrator's purgatorial afterlife, anticipated already in Sheridan's 1939 short story "Matter of Life and Death."² The image that emerges is of a collaborative network of intertextual inscriptions and acknowledged plagiarism, O'Nolan reacting protectively toward his "handiwork" only when he saw the brand "Myles" threatened by congenial stylistic pranks by Montgomery, one of the column's ghost-writers. Joseph LaBine traces the intersections of the 1930s and 1940s texts with the work of William Saroyan, a writer-friend who tried to aid O'Nolan's career overseas, pointing toward a shared poetics of "eccentric, character-based drama."³

The volume's most significant contributions map the enmeshment of O'Nolan's texts with key modernist theories of theater, including nineteenth- and twentieth-century performance practices and institutions. Two of the book's highlights discuss the nexus between O'Nolan, Luigi Pirandello, and Bertolt Brecht. While Pirandello's influence on O'Nolan had long been surmised, though never systematically charted, Neil Murphy treats both as part of...