At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien

First published: 1939

Type of work: Satirical fantasy

Time of work: The mid-1930’s

Locale: Dublin

Principal Characters:

• The Narrator, unnamed, an Irish university student who neglects his studies to write a novel
• Dermot Trellis, the protagonist of the narrator’s novel, a publican and moralizing novelist
• The Pooka Fergus MacPhellimey, an Irish demon
• John Furriskey, the villain of Trellis novel
• Finn MacCool, a legendary Irish hero
• King Sweeny, a bird-poet, the hero of one of Finn’s stories

The Novel

All the action takes place in the mind of the anonymous narrator, a university student living with his carping and penurious uncle. This uncle continuously criticizes his nephew’s apparent indolence, in ignorance of the novel the young man is writing behind the locked door of his bedroom. This novel-within-the-novel features a man called Dermot Trellis, who neglects his bar business to write a novel of his own on the moral decline of modern Ireland. Trellis’ novel features two “original” characters, John Furriskey, a depraved villain, and Sheila Lamont, a girl of virtue and refinement. His other characters—the Pooka Fergus MacPhellimey, Finn MacCool, Paul Shanahan, the servant Peggy, and various cowboys—he “hires” from previous literature (Irish folklore, Celtic mythology, popular Westerns) to further the action. Whenever Trellis falls asleep, these characters rebel against his management, and in order to pursue their independent inclinations, they conspire to drug and then eliminate their author entirely.

As self-determining characters, Furriskey falls in love with and marries Peggy, while Finn MacCool betrays his trust as her father; Finn also tells the tale of the mad King Sweeny: Having insulted a saint, Sweeny has been condemned to spend his life as a bird, so he travels all over Ireland singing the praises of its places and trees (including the oddly named place which gives the novel its title). Meanwhile, the secondary (Trellis) plot is complicated by the birth of Orlick, the son of Trellis and one of his characters, Sheila Lamont. The fate of this new arrival is decided by a card game between the Good Fairy and the Pooka. When the victorious Pooka takes charge of Orlick, he discovers that the child has inherited his father’s literary talents. The Pooka then persuades Orlick to write a novel in which Trellis is extravagantly tormented preparatory to his execution. The novel concludes with a court trial engaging characters from each of the plots. The accidental burning of Trellis’ manuscript saves him from the death intended for him by his vengeful characters. Finally, back in the primary plot, the narrator passes his exams and is reconciled with his dour and dull-witted uncle.

Thus, At Swim-Two-Birds comprises four fictional frameworks: Flann O’Brien’s novel about the student narrator, which contains the narrator’s novel about the pub-keeper Dermot Trellis, containing in turn Trellis’ tale of good and evil, containing in its turn Orlick Trellis’ novel about his father. These arrangements are complicated by the rivalries and alliances between characters from different frames, and the mutual dependencies of characters and narrators from frame to frame.

The Characters

These fictional frames are extended by reference to various types of literature, each providing appropriate characters, cast from the resources of realism, folklore, mythology, and popular culture. Each of these characters is driven by one or two prevailing forces and contrasts or complements another character in the novel.

One stratum of characters—such as the narrator’s uncle and Anthony Lamont—represents workaday Dublin. With his unerring ear for the intonation and cliches of common speech, O’Brien renders a convincing, realistic image of their materialism, servitude, and philistinism; they have no appreciation of the wonders of the imagination which constitute the world they inhabit. A related group is made up of the narrator and his university student friends: The most intelligent of the rising generation of Irishmen, they represent various degrees of independence from staid society, although the avenues by which they express their departure from convention betray their own immaturity: excessive drink, coarse conversation, and strained efforts to impress with a little learning.

From Irish folklore come the Good Fairy and the Pooka, and from the popular romance of the American cowboy come the hired hands of William Tracy. These characters provide variant mythologizations of the archetypal struggle between Good and Evil, and the interweaving of their subplots, dialects, and Dublin city references develops the fantastic humor and satirical thrust of the novel.

From Celtic mythology, on the other hand, come the weightier figures of Finn MacCool and King Sweeny. While together they form a heroic and eloquent contrast with prosaic modern characters and values, they are comic and tragic counterparts to each other. Finn’s sociability, versatility, size, and absurdity contrast with Sweeny’s alienation, suffering, and physical lightness. Between them, they represent a world of feeling and aspiration larger than those found in any other dimension of the novel, a world hospitable to women, drink, and poetry, which cultivates the love of nature, acknowledges the presence of a Creator, and accepts with humor the pain of the human condition.

Critical Context

At Swim-Two-Birds is best understood against the background of the Irish Literary Revival (1890-1930). O’Brien is a member of the “second generation” of writers who followed William Butler Yeats, John Millington Synge, James Joyce, and Sean O’Casey into the establishment of a literature which aimed to be both contemporary and national. This movement drew on the indigenous dialect and folklore as well as translations from medieval and ancient Irish texts to give resonance to literary renditions of modern Irish life. For all of its achievements, however, it had little effect on the way in which the Irish Free State was administered or on the lives of its ordinary citizens. O’Brien’s work, then, has a complicated relationship with the literary pretensions of the Revival and with the actual quality of life in Ireland during the 1930’s. On the one hand, At Swim-Two-Birds parodies the romantic translations of Irish heroic texts done two generations before him, and on the other, the Sweeny passages are his own original translations from the Middle Irish Buile Shuibhne (date unknown; English translation, 1913). The novel also bears a heavy debt, in its technique and subject matter, to Joyce’s works, particularly A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). The novel can also be viewed as a document in the modernist movement, because of its prevailing mood of irony, its mythologizing of experience, its ambiguity, and its attention to the complexities of the individual consciousness.

Bibliography

Clissmann, Anne. Flann O’Brien: A Critical Introduction to His Writings, 1975.

O’Keefe, Timothy, ed. Myles: Portraits of Brian O’Nolan, 1973.

Ryan, John. Remembering How We Stood: Bohemian Dublin at the MidCentury, 1975.