whose verses are included in hilarious literal translations into English, meets Jem Casey, poet of porter; the Good Fairy, taken from the most sentimental of Irish tourist literature, sits down to cards with urban characters taken from the bleak world of Joyce’sDubliners (1914). The product is a novel about the unreality of various kinds of fictions, an exercise in style whose only subject is the extravagance of the styles it exploits by parody.

At Swim-Two-Birds is a collection of brief fragments organized only by the desire to express the multiple contrasts of their incompatible styles. The thread that links these fragments is situational rather than narrative: A university student is attempting to write a novel whose three possible openings and four possible conclusions frame At Swim-Two-Birds; among the characters in his novel is Dermot Trellis, himself a novelist with a work in progress; the characters in Trellis’s novel are dissatisfied with their treatment and so wreak revenge by writing their own novel about Trellis, whose authorial control lapses when he sleeps. This conceit allows O’Brien to include in his novel a plethora of styles from imaginary authors, especially rich in ironies for readers knowledgeable about Irish literature from the Celtic legends to modern writers such as Yeats.

As many of its commentators have pointed out, At Swim-Two-Birds has far more appeal and significance than most metafictional novels about a novel in progress. It is, above all else, exuberantly comic rather than pretentious.

The Third Policeman

Although it was not published until after O’Brien’s death, The Third Policeman was written immediately after At Swim-Two-Birds, and it should be considered beside that novel, despite its publication date. Like At Swim-Two-Birds, it is a very modernist exercise in the novel as a self-contained and self-generating literary text. In this case, however, O’Brien is less concerned with the identifiable styles of the Irish revival than with the ways any style creates an identity innarrative fiction, the ways style is a source of authority and control in fiction. It is crucial to this novel that the narrator be nameless; without the identity provided by a name, he must create a persona for himself by appropriating styles of expression.

The novel opens with the robbery and murder of a businessman named Mathers by the narrator and his accomplice, John Diviney. The fantastic events that ensue concern the narrator’s attempts to recover the stolen money and to hide his complicity in the crime from an omniscient but apparently uninterested pair of police officers. The appearance of Fox, the third police officer, seems to promise the release of the narrator from his predicament, but in fact it presages the realization that the narrator has been dead since the opening pages, betrayed and himself murdered by Diviney.

Released from even the faintest restraints of realism by setting his novel in the afterlife, O’Brien is free in The Third Policeman to allow language and rhetoric, rather than cause and effect, to determine the direction of his tale. The most prominent style and source of authority in the novel is an academic one related to the narrator’s interest in a fictional philosopher named de Selby, whose works are evoked for the sake of clarification, summarized, and cited in scholarly footnotes throughout the novel. Elsewhere, The Third Policeman sporadically adopts the style of the modern murder mystery, a pretentious opera review, scientific analysis, Eastern mysticism, and gothic romance. These intrusive styles color the events of the novel for the reader, much as the alien laws of the afterlife color the experiences of the narrator: They are oblique, intriguing, and ultimately baffling.

The Third Policeman lacks the dimension of cultural commentary provided by evocation of local literary styles in At Swim-Two-Birds. This same generalized environment, however, makes O’Brien’s second novel an even richer contemplation on the nature of identity than his first, one that is capable of generalizations about definitions of self that rise above provincial contexts. It is also fully self-contained by a cyclic conclusion that returns the narrator, now accompanied by Diviney, to the earliest situations in the novel. It is precisely this degree of absorption in the interior logic of its own conceits that distinguishes The Third Policeman from O’Brien’s later, less interesting reworking of these ideas in The Dalkey Archive.

The Poor Mouth

In a letter to Sean O’Casey quoted in The Flann O’Brien Reader, the author described The Poor Mouth, in its original Gaelic version, as “an honest attempt to get under the skin of a certain type of ’Gael,’ which I find the most nauseating phenomena in Europe.” This kind of Gael was in fact more a creation of the literary revival than a significant social group. The Poor Mouth, as translated by Patrick C. Power after O’Brien’s death, is a parody of a literary genre rather than a parody of life in Gaeltachts, the remote Irish-speaking areas of Ireland that continue to erode in character despite well-intentioned government subsidies. The primary targets of the parody are the enormously popular autobiographies of Gaeltacht life such as Twenty Years A-Growing (1933) by Maurice O’Sullivan, but O’Brien’s more general object of parody is all fictionalized versions of peasantry, from the folktales of Standish Hayes O’Grady to the plays of Lady Gregory and J. M. Synge.

The title of the novel evokes the idiom of “poormouthing,” or inventing poverty for self-serving purposes, and The Poor Mouth is about the discovery by enthusiastic outsiders of a Gaeltacht in the middle of truly astonishing poverty. The wretched cohabitation of these peasants with their pigs in leaky shacks is a source of some tall-tale humor in the novel, although this poverty does have its darker side, as indicated by casual references to disease and death from starvation, alcoholism, and fighting. O’Brien’s real focus here, however, is on the willful self-degradation of the peasants at the feet of their enlightened English-speaking visitors, who gauge the merit of Gaelic tales by the poverty of the teller and limit their own charity lest they spoil the purity of the peasants’ profound misery.

The great irony of The Poor Mouth, and an essential component of its publication in Gaelic, is that these visitors are, rather than actual Englishmen, anglicized Irishmen enamored of the peasantry. The pure bile of the novel, which is well preserved in its English translation, derives from this image of Ireland foisting a factitious stereotype on itself, of romanticizing a peasantry in such rigid ways that all males in this Gaeltacht are called James O’Donnell. The use of this collective name is only the most obvious indication of the novel’s relevance to O’Brien’s governing interest in the theme of identity. Rather than a parody of multiple identities, however, The Poor Mouth is a portrait of surrender after limited resistance to a bleak and uniform identity. It has a special importance in O’Brien’s work for this pessimism, for its publication in Gaelic, for his refusal to permit a translation, and for the fact that he would not write another novel until twenty years later.

The Hard Life

The Hard Life lacks the literary frames of reference that give O’Brien’s first three novels their focus and energy. Published in the wake of the rediscovery of At Swim-Two-Birds, it is a charming rather than derisory treatment of characteristically Irish forms of naïveté and provinciality, one that panders to audience expectations about Irish writing that were ridiculed by the ironies of O’Brien’s earlier novels. It is harsh in its criticisms of the Jesuit father, Kurt Fahrt; the misguided Dubliner, Mr. Collopy; and his slatternly daughter, Annie. These satiric elements, however, are rendered benign by the time frame of the novel, written in 1961 but set in the years preceding 1910. The most attractive qualities of the novel—its digressive narration, bitter account of lower-class Dublin propriety, and the extravagantly misinformed conversations of Father Fahrt and Collopy—are facile if skillful entertainments never qualified by the shrewd ironies surrounding such mannerisms in O’Brien’s earlier novels.

In all of O’Brien’s novels, narrative structure is incidental to stylistic preoccupations, but in The Hard Life there is no literary focus to compensate for the lack of narrative structure. The comedy of the Fahrt-Collopy conversations and of several of the improbable events in the novel is brilliant, but the lack of an informing literary perspective renders them isolated exercises in caricature, resembling in tone and length the best of O’Brien’s newspaper columns.

The Dalkey Archive

In reworking some of the central conceits, notably the de Selby material, from The Third Policeman, O’Brien made The Dalkey Archive his only novel narrated in the third person. This alteration eliminates many of the ambiguities and complications found in his earlier novels because of their limited narrators. In other respects, too, The Dalkey Archive turns away from the most imaginative conceits of O’Brien’s earlier work. As such, it represents a distinctly regressive coda in the works of O’Brien.

The novel individually treats the imaginative constructions of three personages. St. Augustine appears and reveals that neither his youthful sins nor his religious conversion were as complete as have been supposed. Sergeant Fottrell reveals his theory that the molecules of men and bicycles mix during riding, with predictable results. Finally, James Joyce, discovered living in retirement in the seaside resort called the Skerries, denounces Ulysses as a scam perpetrated by Parisian intellectuals and reveals that his true vocation is writing pamphlets for the Catholic Truth Society. These three are joined by their shared intellectual pride, a characteristic that the novel condemns even as it luxuriates in the pleasures of intricate shams.

O’Brien’s first three novels were entirely enclosed within their literary conceits. In The Dalkey Archive, however, the elaborate shams and crazed logic are dispersed and corrected by the omniscient narrator on surprisingly moralistic grounds. In O’Brien’s first three novels, no assumptions about identity were exempt from scrutiny, but The Dalkey Archive ends with an extremely complacent announcement of betrothal by its lackluster central characters Mick and Mary. With this gesture, O’Brien’s last novel relinquishes the imaginative explorations of self and the elaborate metafictional elements of his finest novels.

Brian O’Nolan adopted the pseudonyms Flann O’Brien and Myles na Gopaleen with a characteristically ironic purpose: He would, under the names of one literary fabrication about Ireland and the Irish, expose the fabulous nature of a later image of the country and the people. At the end of his life, he wrote two novels, The Hard Life and The Dalkey Archive, deficient in the ironic intent of his important novels. It was as if at this point in his career he actually became Flann O’Brien, the stage Irishman, content with the identity foisted upon him. In At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman, and The Poor Mouth, however, the ironies surrounding his choice of pseudonyms were in full operation. The complexities and opacities of those novels represent a break from the mainstream of modern Irish literature and the most probing examination of the new national literature’s roots in the mythologies of the Irish Literary Revival.