Complete Novels

I N T R O D U C T I O N -- 'I considered it desirable that he should know nothing about me but it was even better if he knew several things which were quite wrong.' So says the eccentric unnamed narrator of The Third Policeman, lost in a strange land, deliberately shielding his identity and true nature. The desire for self-effacement persists among all of the crazy narrators in Flann O'Brien's five novels, and perhaps it is key to understanding the man behind the novel, who has hidden himself as well under a penname. For the very first thing to know about Flann O'Brien is that he is one of the creations of Brian O'Nolan. And there are more than one of him. Beginning in his college days and continuing on to the end of his life, O'Nolan was a serial pseudonymist, but we need only concern ourselves with two. In addition to Flann, the quondam author of the breathtaking At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman, The Hard Life, and The Dalkey Archive, there is Myles na gCopaleen, author of An Beal Bocht (translated as The Poor Mouth), who appeared nearly every day as the first-person narrator of the column 'Cruiskeen Lawn' (The Overflowing Little Jug) in the Irish Times from through. More often than not, Myles was also a character in 'Cruiskeen Lawn,' serving not only as a narrator and jesting anatomist of the social and political life of Dublin, but also as an elusive figure. A man of so many identities that he had none. Variously self-described as the Uncrowned King of Ireland, the archetypical Dublin Man, ageless confidant of everyone from Synge to Joyce, Myles was a cross between the comic stage Irishman embodying every known stereotype and a savage critic of cliched language and thinking, bureaucracy, mendacity, and other social foibles. To the intelligentsia of Dublin, however, and habitues of the pubs, Myles was a real human being. He's that man in the corner nursing a pint, the fellow under the hat, the person otherwise known as Brian O'Nolan. On occasion, all three persons met in 'Cruiskeen Lawn,' such as this encounter in stimulated by the republication of At Swim-Two-Birds. In his thick mock Dublin accent, Myles says: There's stories going round that Flann O'Brien and my good self are wan and the same pairson. I know my own know about that leaper. People has said that I have receded under many disguises in many papers, but nobody on or under this world knows what I have written or can declare on oath what I have not written. Receding under many disguises, Flann and Myles and Brian are wan and the same, although all three have their respective roles. However, perhaps Myles is right to say that nobody can know for certain where one identity begins and ends. This much is known: Brian O'Nolan was born on October, one of a family of twelve children, in Strabane, Ulster, Ireland. His cradle songs were sung in Irish. His father, Michael Nolan, was an Irish nationalist who met his mother, Agnes Gormley, in an Irish language class. After they married, the Nolans became theO Nuallain (the Irish Gaelic form) and in their home Irish was spoken, with English reserved as the language of social intercourse for the outside world. The family led a peripatetic lifestyle before finally settling in Dublin proper in, where Brian was to spend the rest of his life. Brian O'Nolan's bilingualism played an important role in his intellectual and artistic career, and this split - Irish at home, English everywhere else - factors into the practice of masking his identity. The underlying linguistic differences between the two languages and the historic intertextual relationship with English play an integral role in the style and structure of the work done as Flann O'Brien and Myles na gCopaleen. But before he was either of those two fellows, Brian O'Nolan entered an English-speaking school at age eleven, and seven years later, in 1929, began his studies at UniversitDonohue, Keith is the author of 'Complete Novels', published 2008 under ISBN 9780307267498 and ISBN 0307267490.