The middle, the east, the west of Erin: Narrative disorientation and the production of space

Abstract This essay extends political and aesthetic implications in relationships between space and narrative by investigating narrative strategies that displace or disrupt access to narrative setting, spatiotemporal movement, or the space of narration. I fuse Henri Lefebvre’s work on the social production of space to Gabriel Zoran’s systems of narrative space in order to propose a spatial critique that describes and categorizes ways that narrative is central to the politics of spatial practice. I then apply that spatial critique to Flann O’Brien’s prototypically disorienting novel At Swim-Two-Birds (1939). In that intersection between critical geography and narrative theory, At Swim-Two-Birds becomes a narrative about the complicated interplay between creation and control of space – the way that space is configured and reconfigured through spatial practice.