Swimming through At Swim-Two-Birds

At Swim-Two-Birds is one hell of a trip. It is unlike anything I have read before, and most certainly unlike anything else on this list so far.

Flann O'Brien is one of the several noms de plume of Brian O'Nolan, an Irish contemporary of James Joyce. Written at the height of High Modernism, At Swim-Two-Birds is convoluted and non-linear, encasing stories within stories and levels upon levels. But this must be one of the most tongue-in-cheek modernist novels written. There were many times when I laughed out loud (LOL!) at the ludicrous storylines. One of the characters, for example, Finn MacCool is a hero of Irish legend who likes to tell stories, recite poetry, and engage in hyperbole. Early in the novel, Finn relates what a man must do to be a part of Finn's gang. Near the end of a list of impossible abilities, Finn adds:

"One thousand rams he must sequester about his trunks with no offense to the men of Erin, or he is unknown to Finn. He must swiftly milk a fat cow and carry milk-pail and cow for twenty years in the seat of his drawers. When pursued in a chariot by the men of Erin he must dismount, place horse and chariot in the slack of his seat and hide behind his spear, the same being stuck upright in Erin. Unless he accomplishes these feats, he is not wanted of Finn. But if he do them all and be skillful, he is of Finn's people."

O'Nolan delights time and time again in the absurdities of the happenings in this novel. The structure alone is absurd. O'Nolan has a fictitious author, O'Brien, write a novel of a fictitious narrator, unnamed, who writes a fictitious book about a fictitious author, Trellis, who writes his own stories and keeps his own fictitious characters locked up in his house. Trellis's character Finn tells a lengthy story of his own about a man called Sweeney. Trellis rapes one of those fictitious characters who then gives birth to a son, fully grown, who meets up with Trellis's other characters to write a piece of revenge fiction about Trellis. Who is the author and who is the authored becomes intertwined and in some ways inseparable.

The highest frame of the story, that of the narrator and his encounters with his college friends and his confrontations with his uncle seems rather trivial, since it seemed to me merely a way to get out the stories about Trellis and his characters. There is not much of a plot as far as the narrator goes. He is a lazy man who spends most of his time in bed writing his stories. He leaves his room to share his stories and to be needled by his uncle, whom the narrator detests, to study harder and be a good student. I was surprised therefore when I came to the end of the novel and found myself combing through the story with this tension between the narrator and his uncle as my guide.

See, this is a novel obsessed with the act of writing and creating. And as the story of Trellis and his characters brings to the fore, "author" is intimately tied to the word "authority." He who writes claims a power and an authority over that which he writes. But that authority is tenuous at best. The characters have full lives beyond the boundaries of the novel. Like actors, they play the part directed by the author, but when business hours are over, they drug the author and have free reign of the house. In that piece of revenge fiction, the characters bring a lawsuit against Trellis for misusing and abusing them.

Trellis is an interesting combination of the narrator and the uncle. Like the narrator, Trellis spends all his time in bed, but like the uncle, he wields his authority bluntly. And when the uncle demonstrates fairness at the conclusion of the novel, the narrator seems to reconceive Trellis's cruel fate, letting him off the hook, but simultaneously freeing the characters by burning Trellis's manuscript.

That's why I see this novel as the portrait of the artist as an awkward young man. The author is part rebel (against society and the authoritative forces around him) but he is the very essence of authority and a creator of society (within the boundaries of the novel) itself. How does the self-aware young author reconcile these internal contradiction? With great absurdity and humor according to O'Brien. And a lot of bloodshed and pain too, for the characters express this struggle in the young artist with their own contradictory natures. Specifically, there is a great amount of gentility to the characters and their exchanges with each other (at every level of the story (stories)), but they are simultaneously vicious, devising levels of punishment through which few readers could experience any kind of uncomplicated joy.

This novel confounded my original attempts to make any sense of it, and somewhere around page 20, I just let go and let the current sweep me away, laughing as I went. And whether or not you struggle with the whats and wherefores of the novel, you are in for a good time if you have a keen sense for the absurd.