‘embarrassing enlightenments’: casual text play in “John Duffy’s Brother”

This paper argues that as a play text, “John Duffy’s Brother” invites two simultaneous readings: that of the primary mimetic narrative, and of a performative metadiscourse through which the protagonist’s metamorphosis into a train may be interpreted as a critique of the absurdity of fictionalisation. The paper develops an idea of reader activation in which the reader participates in the world- and text-making processes of mimesis and performance, before demonstrating how the text creates and undermines mimetic expectations. In doing so, the text ‘casually’ creates ‘embarrassments,’ inviting the reader to adopt a meta-attitude towards what the narrative is doing. Beginning with the frame-breaking strategy of the story’s paradoxical opening, the first part of this paper outlines Wolfgang Iser’s concept of text play, and defines the unconventional nature of the story’s “textual schema”: the non-mimetic elements of the text that create the “tilting game” through which the text may be read two ways simultaneously. Using Sue Asbee’s analysis of the text’s opening paragraph as the point of departure, I draw a parallel with Samuel Beckett’s “Imagination Dead Imagine,” to demonstrate the foregrounding of the untenability of regular mimesis. The tonal difference between these two texts is also highlighted, leading to a discussion of the importance of the narrator’s ‘casual,’ co-conspiratorial voice, and how the “gesture towards anecdote” (to use Asbee’s phrase) contributes to the ludic openness of the text. This section also explores the importance of the playful presupposition that the text exists within the fictive world of the text. I then argue that the reader then encounters a series of narratological flourishes that sustain the text’s self-referentiality. Whereas most critics seeking a Joycean parallel have focused on the overt influence of “A Painful Case,” this paper looks to Margot Norris’s analysis of “The Sisters” to illuminate the function of Duffy’s spyglass, interpreting it as a “hermeneutic signal” which serves to sustain and alter the textual schema, and which draws the eye of the reader and the eye of Duffy parallel in a game of suspicious sign reading. We then see how those elements that frustrate the traditional narrative are sustenance for our ‘embarrassed’ reading, and for potential play. The final section of this paper identifies a potential mise-en-abyme within the text, which equates mimesis with madness and suggests that the metamorphosis may be the consequence of over-interpretive sign-reading; an imagination gone off the rails. Thus the function of the metamorphosis is to remind us that, as the opening paragraph warns, the fictionalising act in which we are engaged is “absurd.” As the narrator alternates between the protagonist’s human and trainlike aspects, the urge to draw a correspondence between the strange episode and our dual reading of the text is shown to be irresistible. The paper concludes by noting the importance of the story’s casual narrative voice in differentiating O’Brien from his contemporaries, resulting in a text which, to quote Neil Murphy and Keith Hopper, is “a garden in which all of us may play."