At Swim-Two-Birds
Encyclopedia
At Swim-Two-Birds is a 1939 novel by Irish author Brian O'Nolan, writing under the pseudonym Flann O'Brien. It is widely considered to be O'Brien's masterpiece, and one of the most sophisticated examples of metafiction
.
The novel's title derives from Snámh dá Én (Middle Ir.: "Swim-Two-Birds"), a ford on the River Shannon
, between Clonmacnoise
and Shannonbridge
, reportedly visited by the legendary King Sweeney
, a character in the novel.
The novel was included in TIME magazine's
list of the 100 best English-language novels
from 1923 to 2005.
MacPhellimey, "a member of the devil class". The second is about a young man named John Furriskey, who turns out to be a fictional character created by another of the student's creations, Dermot Trellis, a cynical writer of Westerns
. The third consists of the student's adaptations of Irish legends, mostly concerning Finn Mac Cool
and mad King Sweeney.
In the autobiographical frame story
, the student recounts details of his life. He lives with his uncle, who works as a clerk in the Guinness
Brewery
in Dublin. The uncle is a complacent and self-consciously respectable bachelor who suspects that the student does very little studying. This seems to be the case, as by his own account the student spends more time drinking stout
with his college friends, lying in bed and working on his book, than he does going to class.
The stories that the student is writing soon become intertwined with each other. John Furriskey meets and befriends two of Trellis's other characters, Antony Lamont and Paul Shanahan. They each become resentful of Trellis's control over their destinies, and manage to drug him so that he will spend more time asleep, giving them the freedom to lead quiet domestic lives rather than be ruled by the lurid plots of his novels. Meanwhile, Trellis creates Sheila Lamont (Antony Lamont's sister) in order that Furriskey might seduce and betray her, but "blinded by her beauty" Trellis "so far forgets himself as to assault her himself." Sheila, in due course, gives birth to a child named Orlick, who is born as a polite and articulate young man with a gift for writing fiction. The entire group of Trellis's characters, by now including Finn, Sweeney, the urbane Pooka and an invisible and quarrelsome Good Fairy who lives in the Pooka's pocket, convenes in Trellis's fictional Red Swan Hotel where they devise a way to overthrow their author. Encouraged by the others, Orlick starts writing a novel about his father in which Trellis is tried by his own creations, found guilty and viciously tortured. Just as Orlick's novel is about to climax with Trellis' death, the college student passes his exams and At Swim-Two-Birds ends.
literary magazine Comhthrom Féinne (Ir.
, "Fair Play") in 1934. The story was a first-person narrative ostensibly written by a novelist called Brother Barnabas, whose characters become tired of doing his bidding and who eventually conspire to murder him:
The mythological content of At Swim was inspired by O'Nolan's affection for Early Irish literature
. He grew up in an Irish-speaking home and although he claimed in later life that he had attended few of his college lectures, he studied the late medieval Irish literary tradition as part of the syllabus and acquired enough Old Irish to be able to compose in the language with reasonable fluency. His M.A.
thesis was entitled "Nature Poetry in Irish" (Nádúirfhilíocht na Gaedhilge), although his examiner Agnes O'Farrelly rejected the initial draft and he was obliged to rewrite it. At Swim-Two-Birds contains references to no less than fourteen different sources in early and medieval Irish literature. Most of the poetry recited by King Sweeney was taken directly from the Middle Irish romance Buile Suibhne, O'Nolan slightly modifying the translations for comic effect. For example, the original "an clog náomh re náomhaibh", translated by J. G. O'Keeffe in the standard edition as "the bell of saints before saints", is rendered by O'Nolan as "the saint-bell of saints with sainty-saints".
At Swim-Two-Birds has been classified as a Menippean satire
. O'Brien was exposed to the Menippean tradition through the modern literature he is known to have admired, including works by James Joyce
, Aldous Huxley
, Søren Kierkegaard
and James Branch Cabell
, but he may also have encountered it in the course of his study of medieval Irish literature; the Middle Irish satire Aislinge Meic Con Glinne
has been described as "the best major work of parody in the Irish language".
O'Nolan composed the novel on an Underwood portable typewriter
in the bedroom he shared with his younger brother Micheál. The typewriter rested on a table constructed by O'Nolan from the offcuts of a modified trellis
that had stood in the O'Nolan family's back garden. O'Brien's biographer believes that it was the unusual material that the writing table was made of that inspired the name of the character "Dermot Trellis".
O'Nolan used various found texts
in the novel; a letter from a horseracing tipster
was given to him by a college friend, while the painter Cecil Salkeld gave O'Nolan the original "Conspectus of the Arts and Sciences". Before submitting the manuscript for publication O'Nolan gave it to friends to read. A friend wrote him a letter which included suggestions about how to end the novel and O'Nolan incorporated the salient part of the letter into the text itself, although he later cut it. The sudden death in 1937 of O'Nolan's father Michael O'Nolan may have influenced the episode in which the student narrator regrets his unkind thoughts about his previously despised uncle.
on the recommendation of Graham Greene
, who was a reader for them at the time. It was published under the pseudonym of Flann O'Brien, a name O'Nolan had already used to write hoax letters to the Irish Times. O'Nolan had suggested using "Flann O'Brien" as a pen-name during negotiation with Longman's:
it had sold scarcely more than 240 copies. In 1940, Longman's London premises were destroyed during a bombing raid by the Luftwaffe
and almost all the unsold copies were incinerated. The novel was republished by Pantheon Books
in New York
in 1950, on the recommendation of James Johnson Sweeney
, but sales remained low. In May 1959 Timothy O'Keeffe
, while editorial director of the London publishing house MacGibbon & Kee, persuaded O'Nolan to allow him to republish At Swim-Two-Birds. More recently, the novel was republished in the United States by Dalkey Archive Press
.
The initial reviews for At Swim-Two-Birds were not enthusiastic. The Times Literary Supplement said that the book's only notable feature was a "schoolboy brand of mild vulgarity"; the New Statesman
complained that "long passages in imitation of the Joycean parody of the early Irish epic are devastatingly dull" and the Irish novelist Sean O'Faolain commented in John O'London's Weekly
that although the book had its moments, it "had a general odour of spilt Joyce all over it."
However, most of the support for At Swim-Two-Birds came not from newspaper reviewers but from writers. Dylan Thomas
, in a remark that would be quoted on dust-jackets in later editions of the book, said "This is just the book to give your sister – if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl". Anthony Burgess
considered it one of the ninety-nine greatest novels
written between 1939 and 1984. Graham Greene's enthusiastic reader's report was instrumental in getting the book published in the first place:
an inscribed copy of the book. Joyce declared it the work of a "real writer" who had "the true comic spirit" and attempted to get the book reviewed in French periodicals, although without success. It is thought to have been the last novel Joyce ever read. Anthony Cronin
has written of the effect the novel had on him as a seventeen-year-old in 1940s Dublin, praising its "umistakable sheen of the avant-garde", describing it "breathtakingly funny" and noting "the deadly accuracy of the ear for lower middle class Dublin speech".
Most academic criticism of the book has sought to appropriate it one way or the other; critics like Bernard Benstock
, who argued that O'Brien's embrace of myth and refusal of realism "ensnare[d] him with the second rank", have been in the minority. Vivian Mercier
described it in The Irish Comic Tradition as "the most fantastic novel written by an Irishman in the twentieth century – with the doubtful exception of Finnegans Wake
." Rüdiger Imhof has noted how works by B.S. Johnson, Gilbert Sorrentino
, Alasdair Gray
and John Fowles
carry explicit references to At Swim-Two-Birds. Michael Cronin draws attention to the metafiction
al and game-playing elements of the book, comparing it to the fictions of Raymond Queneau
, and responds to criticism that the book is insufficiently respectful of realist conventions:
:
In a long essay published in 2000, Declan Kiberd
analysed At Swim-Two-Birds from a postcolonial
perspective, seeing it as a complex imaginative response to the economic and social stagnation of 1930s Ireland and arguing that the fragmented and polyphonic texture of the book is the work of an author who is "less anxious to say something new than to find a self that is capable of saying anything at all." Kiberd suggests that the one element of the book which is not seriously ironised or satirised is Sweeney's poetry, and that this is related to O'Nolan's genuine if complex respect for Irish-language literature:
In a 1939 essay titled When Fiction Lives in Fiction
, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges
described Flann O'Brien's masterpiece as follows,
Stephen Fry
has declared At Swim-Two-Birds one of his favourite books.
In 2011, the book was placed on Time Magazine's top 100 fiction
books written in English since 1923.
and first published by Meulenhoff in 1974. It was published again in 2010 by Atlas as Op Twee-Vogel-Wad. The book has been translated into German twice, once in 1966 by Lore Fiedler and subsequently in 2005 by Harry Rowohlt
. The book has also been adapted as a German-language film by Austrian director Kurt Palm. The Romanian version is by Adrian Oțoiu and was published in 2005. The Bulgarian translation "Plavashtite Chavki" by Filipina Filipova was published in 2008 by www.famapublishers.com
The book has been adapted for the stage on at least four occasions. The first stage version was commissioned in 1971 by the Abbey Theatre
in Dublin and written by Audrey Welsh. The British theatre company Ridiculusmus toured a three-man adaptation of it in 1994-1995. A recent stage version was by Alex Johnston for the Abbey Theatre in 1998. A more recent stage version was directed by Niall Henry and performed by the Blue Raincoat Theatre Company in Sligo in November 2009.
The Austrian director Kurt Palm made a film from the book in 1997. The title of the film is In Schwimmen-zwei-Vögel.
Actor Brendan Gleeson
will be making his directorial debut in a movie adaptation of the book. The Irish production company Parallel Pictures will produce the film with a budget of $11 million. Michael Fassbender
, Colin Farrell
, Gabriel Byrne
, and Cillian Murphy
have been attached to star in the film. Gleeson confirmed in July 2011 that he has secured funding for the project. He described the writing of the script as torturous and that it has taken 14 drafts so far.
's Heracles
: (existatai gar pant' ap' allêlôn dikha), which means "for all things change, making way for each other".
Metafiction
Metafiction, also known as Romantic irony in the context of Romantic works of literature, is a type of fiction that self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction, exposing the fictional illusion...
.
The novel's title derives from Snámh dá Én (Middle Ir.: "Swim-Two-Birds"), a ford on the River Shannon
River Shannon
The River Shannon is the longest river in Ireland at . It divides the west of Ireland from the east and south . County Clare, being west of the Shannon but part of the province of Munster, is the major exception...
, between Clonmacnoise
Clonmacnoise
The monastery of Clonmacnoise is situated in County Offaly, Ireland on the River Shannon south of Athlone....
and Shannonbridge
Shannonbridge
Shannonbridge is a village located on the River Shannon, at the junction of the R444 and R357 regional roads in County Offaly, Ireland. It lies within the townland of Raghra , at the borders of counties Offaly, Galway and Roscommon, with the majority of the population living east of the bridge in...
, reportedly visited by the legendary King Sweeney
Buile Shuibhne
Buile Suibhne is the tale of Suibhne , a legendary king of Dál nAraidi in Ulster in Ireland...
, a character in the novel.
The novel was included in TIME magazine's
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
list of the 100 best English-language novels
TIME's List of the 100 Best Novels
Times List of the 100 Best Novels, is an unranked list of the 100 best novels—and 10 best graphic novels—published in the English language between 1923 and 2005. The list was compiled by Time critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo....
from 1923 to 2005.
Plot summary
At Swim-Two-Birds presents itself as a first-person story by an unnamed Irish student of literature. The student believes that "one beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with", and he accordingly sets three apparently quite separate stories in motion. The first concerns the PookaPúca
The Púca is a creature of Celtic folklore, notably in Ireland, the West of Scotland, and Wales. It is one of the myriad fairy folk, and, like many fairy folk, is both respected and feared by those who believe in it....
MacPhellimey, "a member of the devil class". The second is about a young man named John Furriskey, who turns out to be a fictional character created by another of the student's creations, Dermot Trellis, a cynical writer of Westerns
Western literature
Western literature refers to the literature written in the languages of Europe, including the ones belonging to the Indo-European language family as well as several geographically or historically related languages such as Basque, Hungarian, and so forth...
. The third consists of the student's adaptations of Irish legends, mostly concerning Finn Mac Cool
Fionn mac Cumhaill
Fionn mac Cumhaill , known in English as Finn McCool, was a mythical hunter-warrior of Irish mythology, occurring also in the mythologies of Scotland and the Isle of Man...
and mad King Sweeney.
In the autobiographical frame story
Frame story
A frame story is a literary technique that sometimes serves as a companion piece to a story within a story, whereby an introductory or main narrative is presented, at least in part, for the purpose of setting the stage either for a more emphasized second narrative or for a set of shorter stories...
, the student recounts details of his life. He lives with his uncle, who works as a clerk in the Guinness
Guinness
Guinness is a popular Irish dry stout that originated in the brewery of Arthur Guinness at St. James's Gate, Dublin. Guinness is directly descended from the porter style that originated in London in the early 18th century and is one of the most successful beer brands worldwide, brewed in almost...
Brewery
St. James's Gate Brewery
St. James's Gate Brewery is a brewery founded in 1759 in Dublin, Ireland by Arthur Guinness. The company is now a part of Diageo, a company formed via the merger of Guinness and Grand Metropolitan in 1997. The main product produced at the brewery is Guinness Draft.Leased for 9,000 years in 1759 by...
in Dublin. The uncle is a complacent and self-consciously respectable bachelor who suspects that the student does very little studying. This seems to be the case, as by his own account the student spends more time drinking stout
Stout
Stout is a dark beer made using roasted malt or barley, hops, water and yeast. Stouts were traditionally the generic term for the strongest or stoutest porters, typically 7% or 8%, produced by a brewery....
with his college friends, lying in bed and working on his book, than he does going to class.
The stories that the student is writing soon become intertwined with each other. John Furriskey meets and befriends two of Trellis's other characters, Antony Lamont and Paul Shanahan. They each become resentful of Trellis's control over their destinies, and manage to drug him so that he will spend more time asleep, giving them the freedom to lead quiet domestic lives rather than be ruled by the lurid plots of his novels. Meanwhile, Trellis creates Sheila Lamont (Antony Lamont's sister) in order that Furriskey might seduce and betray her, but "blinded by her beauty" Trellis "so far forgets himself as to assault her himself." Sheila, in due course, gives birth to a child named Orlick, who is born as a polite and articulate young man with a gift for writing fiction. The entire group of Trellis's characters, by now including Finn, Sweeney, the urbane Pooka and an invisible and quarrelsome Good Fairy who lives in the Pooka's pocket, convenes in Trellis's fictional Red Swan Hotel where they devise a way to overthrow their author. Encouraged by the others, Orlick starts writing a novel about his father in which Trellis is tried by his own creations, found guilty and viciously tortured. Just as Orlick's novel is about to climax with Trellis' death, the college student passes his exams and At Swim-Two-Birds ends.
Genesis and composition
O'Nolan first explored the idea of fictional characters rebelling against their creator in a short story titled "Scenes in a novel", published in the UCDUniversity College Dublin
University College Dublin ) - formally known as University College Dublin - National University of Ireland, Dublin is the Republic of Ireland's largest, and Ireland's second largest, university, with over 1,300 faculty and 17,000 students...
literary magazine Comhthrom Féinne (Ir.
Irish language
Irish , also known as Irish Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family, originating in Ireland and historically spoken by the Irish people. Irish is now spoken as a first language by a minority of Irish people, as well as being a second language of a larger proportion of...
, "Fair Play") in 1934. The story was a first-person narrative ostensibly written by a novelist called Brother Barnabas, whose characters become tired of doing his bidding and who eventually conspire to murder him:
The book is seething with conspiracy and there have been at least two whispered consultations between all the characters, including two who have not yet been officially created. [...] Candidly, reader, I fear my number's up.
The mythological content of At Swim was inspired by O'Nolan's affection for Early Irish literature
Early Irish literature
-The earliest Irish authors:It is unclear when literacy first came to Ireland. The earliest Irish writings are inscriptions, mostly simple memorials, on stone in the ogham alphabet, the earliest of which date to the fourth century...
. He grew up in an Irish-speaking home and although he claimed in later life that he had attended few of his college lectures, he studied the late medieval Irish literary tradition as part of the syllabus and acquired enough Old Irish to be able to compose in the language with reasonable fluency. His M.A.
Master of Arts (postgraduate)
A Master of Arts from the Latin Magister Artium, is a type of Master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The M.A. is usually contrasted with the M.S. or M.Sc. degrees...
thesis was entitled "Nature Poetry in Irish" (Nádúirfhilíocht na Gaedhilge), although his examiner Agnes O'Farrelly rejected the initial draft and he was obliged to rewrite it. At Swim-Two-Birds contains references to no less than fourteen different sources in early and medieval Irish literature. Most of the poetry recited by King Sweeney was taken directly from the Middle Irish romance Buile Suibhne, O'Nolan slightly modifying the translations for comic effect. For example, the original "an clog náomh re náomhaibh", translated by J. G. O'Keeffe in the standard edition as "the bell of saints before saints", is rendered by O'Nolan as "the saint-bell of saints with sainty-saints".
At Swim-Two-Birds has been classified as a Menippean satire
Menippean satire
The genre of Menippean satire is a form of satire, usually in prose, which has a length and structure similar to a novel and is characterized by attacking mental attitudes instead of specific individuals...
. O'Brien was exposed to the Menippean tradition through the modern literature he is known to have admired, including works by James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
, Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family. Best known for his novels including Brave New World and a wide-ranging output of essays, Huxley also edited the magazine Oxford Poetry, and published short stories, poetry, travel...
, Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was a Danish Christian philosopher, theologian and religious author. He was a critic of idealist intellectuals and philosophers of his time, such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel...
and James Branch Cabell
James Branch Cabell
James Branch Cabell, ; April 14, 1879 – May 5, 1958) was an American author of fantasy fiction and belles lettres. Cabell was well regarded by his contemporaries, including H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis. His works were considered escapist and fit well in the culture of the 1920s, when his...
, but he may also have encountered it in the course of his study of medieval Irish literature; the Middle Irish satire Aislinge Meic Con Glinne
Aislinge Meic Con Glinne
Aislinge Meic Con Glinne is a Middle Irish tale of anonymous authorship, generally believed to have been written in the late 11th/early 12th century...
has been described as "the best major work of parody in the Irish language".
O'Nolan composed the novel on an Underwood portable typewriter
Typewriter
A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical device with keys that, when pressed, cause characters to be printed on a medium, usually paper. Typically one character is printed per keypress, and the machine prints the characters by making ink impressions of type elements similar to the pieces...
in the bedroom he shared with his younger brother Micheál. The typewriter rested on a table constructed by O'Nolan from the offcuts of a modified trellis
Trellis (agriculture)
A trellis is an architectural structure, usually made from interwoven pieces of wood, bamboo or metal that is often made to support climbing plants...
that had stood in the O'Nolan family's back garden. O'Brien's biographer believes that it was the unusual material that the writing table was made of that inspired the name of the character "Dermot Trellis".
O'Nolan used various found texts
Found object
A found object, in an artistic sense, indicates the use of an object which has not been designed for an artistic purpose, but which exists for another purpose already. Found objects may exist either as utilitarian, manufactured items, or things which occur in nature...
in the novel; a letter from a horseracing tipster
Tipster
The term tipster refers to someone who on a regular basis provides information on likely winners in sporting events. In the past tips were bartered for and traded but in modern times, thanks largely to the Internet and premium rate telephone lines, it's increasingly likely that a tip will be...
was given to him by a college friend, while the painter Cecil Salkeld gave O'Nolan the original "Conspectus of the Arts and Sciences". Before submitting the manuscript for publication O'Nolan gave it to friends to read. A friend wrote him a letter which included suggestions about how to end the novel and O'Nolan incorporated the salient part of the letter into the text itself, although he later cut it. The sudden death in 1937 of O'Nolan's father Michael O'Nolan may have influenced the episode in which the student narrator regrets his unkind thoughts about his previously despised uncle.
Publication history
At Swim-Two-Birds was accepted for publication by Longman'sLongman
Longman was a publishing company founded in London, England in 1724. It is now an imprint of Pearson Education.-Beginnings:The Longman company was founded by Thomas Longman , the son of Ezekiel Longman , a gentleman of Bristol. Thomas was apprenticed in 1716 to John Osborn, a London bookseller, and...
on the recommendation of Graham Greene
Graham Greene
Henry Graham Greene, OM, CH was an English author, playwright and literary critic. His works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world...
, who was a reader for them at the time. It was published under the pseudonym of Flann O'Brien, a name O'Nolan had already used to write hoax letters to the Irish Times. O'Nolan had suggested using "Flann O'Brien" as a pen-name during negotiation with Longman's:
I have been thinking over the question of a pen-name and would suggest Flann O'Brien. I think this invention has the advantage that it contains an unusual name and one that is quite ordinary. "Flann" is an old Irish name now rarely heard.The book was published on 13 March 1939, but did not sell well: by the outbreak of World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
it had sold scarcely more than 240 copies. In 1940, Longman's London premises were destroyed during a bombing raid by the Luftwaffe
Luftwaffe
Luftwaffe is a generic German term for an air force. It is also the official name for two of the four historic German air forces, the Wehrmacht air arm founded in 1935 and disbanded in 1946; and the current Bundeswehr air arm founded in 1956....
and almost all the unsold copies were incinerated. The novel was republished by Pantheon Books
Pantheon Books
Pantheon Books is an American imprint with editorial independence that is part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.The current editor-in-chief at Pantheon Books is Dan Frank.-Overview:...
in New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
in 1950, on the recommendation of James Johnson Sweeney
James Johnson Sweeney
James Johnson Sweeney was a curator, and writer about modern art. From 1935 to 1946, he was curator for the Museum of Modern Art. He was the second director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, from 1952 to 1960...
, but sales remained low. In May 1959 Timothy O'Keeffe
Timothy O'Keeffe
Timothy O'Keeffe was an Irish-born editor and publisher. He served as editorial director of the London publishing house MacGibbon & Kee and later formed his own publishing house, Martin, Brian & O'Keeffe...
, while editorial director of the London publishing house MacGibbon & Kee, persuaded O'Nolan to allow him to republish At Swim-Two-Birds. More recently, the novel was republished in the United States by Dalkey Archive Press
Dalkey Archive Press
Dalkey Archive Press is a publisher of fiction, poetry, and literary criticism in Illinois in the United States, specializing in the publication or republication of lesser known, often avant-garde works...
.
Literary significance & criticism
New Statesman
New Statesman is a British centre-left political and cultural magazine published weekly in London. Founded in 1913, and connected with leading members of the Fabian Society, the magazine reached a circulation peak in the late 1960s....
complained that "long passages in imitation of the Joycean parody of the early Irish epic are devastatingly dull" and the Irish novelist Sean O'Faolain commented in John O'London's Weekly
John O'London's Weekly
John O'London's Weekly was a weekly literary magazine that was published by George Newnes of London between 1919 and 1954. Regarded as the leading literary magazine in the British Empire, at its height it had a circulation of 80,000, and it was popular among young and older readers alike.Founded in...
that although the book had its moments, it "had a general odour of spilt Joyce all over it."
However, most of the support for At Swim-Two-Birds came not from newspaper reviewers but from writers. Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas
Dylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh poet and writer, Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 11 January 2008. who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself...
, in a remark that would be quoted on dust-jackets in later editions of the book, said "This is just the book to give your sister – if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl". Anthony Burgess
Anthony Burgess
John Burgess Wilson – who published under the pen name Anthony Burgess – was an English author, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic. The dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange is Burgess's most famous novel, though he dismissed it as one of his lesser works...
considered it one of the ninety-nine greatest novels
Ninety-nine Novels
Anthony Burgess's book Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939 — A Personal Choice covers a 44-year span between 1939 and 1983. Burgess was a prolific reader, in his early career reviewing more than 350 novels in just over two years for the Yorkshire Post...
written between 1939 and 1984. Graham Greene's enthusiastic reader's report was instrumental in getting the book published in the first place:
It is in the line of Tristram Shandy and UlyssesO'Nolan's friend Niall Sheridan gave James JoyceUlysses (novel)Ulysses is a novel by the Irish author James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, in Paris. One of the most important works of Modernist literature,...
: its amazing spirits do not disguise the seriousness of the attempt to present, simultaneously as it were, all the literary traditions of Ireland. [...] We have had books inside books before now, and characters who are given life outside their fiction, but O'Nolan takes PirandelloLuigi PirandelloLuigi Pirandello was an Italian dramatist, novelist, and short story writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934, for his "bold and brilliant renovation of the drama and the stage." Pirandello's works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and about 40 plays, some of which are written...
and GideAndré GideAndré Paul Guillaume Gide was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars.Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide...
a long way further.
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
an inscribed copy of the book. Joyce declared it the work of a "real writer" who had "the true comic spirit" and attempted to get the book reviewed in French periodicals, although without success. It is thought to have been the last novel Joyce ever read. Anthony Cronin
Anthony Cronin
Anthony Cronin is an Irish poet. He received the Marten Toonder Award for his contribution to Irish literature....
has written of the effect the novel had on him as a seventeen-year-old in 1940s Dublin, praising its "umistakable sheen of the avant-garde", describing it "breathtakingly funny" and noting "the deadly accuracy of the ear for lower middle class Dublin speech".
Most academic criticism of the book has sought to appropriate it one way or the other; critics like Bernard Benstock
Bernard Benstock
Bernard Benstock was a literary critic and a professor of English at the University of Miami. He was an authority on British mystery writers, and Irish writers Sean O'Casey and James Joyce. He was editor of the "James Joyce Literary Supplement" and a co-founder of the International James Joyce...
, who argued that O'Brien's embrace of myth and refusal of realism "ensnare[d] him with the second rank", have been in the minority. Vivian Mercier
Vivian Mercier
Vivian Mercier was an Irish literary critic. He was born in Clara, County Offaly, Ireland and educated first at Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh, and then at Trinity College, Dublin. He became a Scholar of the College and edited the student magazine T.C.D...
described it in The Irish Comic Tradition as "the most fantastic novel written by an Irishman in the twentieth century – with the doubtful exception of Finnegans Wake
Finnegans Wake
Finnegans Wake is a novel by Irish author James Joyce, significant for its experimental style and resulting reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language. Written in Paris over a period of seventeen years, and published in 1939, two years before the author's...
." Rüdiger Imhof has noted how works by B.S. Johnson, Gilbert Sorrentino
Gilbert Sorrentino
Gilbert Sorrentino was an American novelist, short story writer, poet, literary critic, and editor.In over twenty-five works of fiction and poetry, Sorrentino explored the comic and formal possibilities of language and literature...
, Alasdair Gray
Alasdair Gray
Alasdair Gray is a Scottish writer and artist. His most acclaimed work is his first novel Lanark, published in 1981 and written over a period of almost 30 years...
and John Fowles
John Fowles
John Robert Fowles was an English novelist and essayist. In 2008, The Times newspaper named Fowles among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".-Birth and family:...
carry explicit references to At Swim-Two-Birds. Michael Cronin draws attention to the metafiction
Metafiction
Metafiction, also known as Romantic irony in the context of Romantic works of literature, is a type of fiction that self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction, exposing the fictional illusion...
al and game-playing elements of the book, comparing it to the fictions of Raymond Queneau
Raymond Queneau
Raymond Queneau was a French poet and novelist and the co-founder of Ouvroir de littérature potentielle .-Biography:Born in Le Havre, Seine-Maritime, Queneau was the only child of Auguste Queneau and Joséphine Mignot...
, and responds to criticism that the book is insufficiently respectful of realist conventions:
Contrary to what Benstock argues, what post-independence Ireland needed was not less but more of the type of playful, self-aware writing being proposed by Flann O'Brien in At Swim-Two-Birds. ... We would all be very much poorer without Mad O'Brien's narrative chessmen.Keith Hopper has argued that, contrary to the common tendency to favour At Swim-Two-Birds as "the primary defining text of the O'Brien oeuvre", the novel is in fact less, not more, experimental than O'Brien's second novel, the posthumously published The Third Policeman
The Third Policeman
The Third Policeman is a novel by Irish author Brian O'Nolan, writing under the pseudonym Flann O'Brien. It was written between 1939 and 1940, but after it initially failed to find a publisher, the author withdrew the manuscript from circulation and claimed he had lost it. The book remained...
:
At Swim-Two-Birds is best considered as a late-modernist, transitionary text which critiques both realism and modernism in an openly deconstructive manner, and in the process comes to the brink of an exciting new aesthetic. I will argue that the metafictional techniques developed publicly in [the book] ... are imbricated and embedded within the texture of The Third Policeman.
In a long essay published in 2000, Declan Kiberd
Declan Kiberd
Declan Kiberd is an Irish writer and scholar. He is known for his literary criticism of Irish literature in Irish and English, and his contributions to public cultural life....
analysed At Swim-Two-Birds from a postcolonial
Postcolonialism
Post-colonialism is a specifically post-modern intellectual discourse that consists of reactions to, and analysis of, the cultural legacy of colonialism...
perspective, seeing it as a complex imaginative response to the economic and social stagnation of 1930s Ireland and arguing that the fragmented and polyphonic texture of the book is the work of an author who is "less anxious to say something new than to find a self that is capable of saying anything at all." Kiberd suggests that the one element of the book which is not seriously ironised or satirised is Sweeney's poetry, and that this is related to O'Nolan's genuine if complex respect for Irish-language literature:
What saved O'Brien from lapsing into postmodern nihilism was not his Catholicism which held that the world was a doomed and hopeless place, but his respect for the prose of An tOileánachTomás Ó CriomhthainTomás Ó Criomhthain was a native of the Irish-speaking Great Blasket Island off the coast of County Kerry in Ireland. He wrote two books, Allagar na h-Inise written over the period 1918–23 and published in 1928, and , completed in 1923 and published in 1929...
or the poetry of Buile Suibhne, where language still did its appointed work. [...] He was an experimentalist who was way ahead of his time: only after his death did his readers learn how to become his contemporaries.
In a 1939 essay titled When Fiction Lives in Fiction
When Fiction Lives in Fiction
When Fiction Lives in Fiction is the title of a significant narrative essay written in 1939 by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. Weighing in at something less than three pages in length, Borges explores in his inimitable way the teleological nature of metadocuments in fiction such as, for...
, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...
described Flann O'Brien's masterpiece as follows,
I have enumerated many verbal labyrinths, but none so complex as the recent book by Flann O'Brien, At Swim, Two Birds. A student in Dublin writes a novel about the proprietor of a Dublin public house, who writes a novel about the habitues of his pub (among them, the student), who in their turn write novels in which proprietor and student figure along with other writers about other novelists. The book consists of the extremely diverse manuscripts of these real or imagined persons, copiously annotated by the student. At Swim, Two Birds is not only a labyrinth; it is a discussion of the many ways to conceive of the Irish novel and a repertory of excercizes in proseProseProse is the most typical form of written language, applying ordinary grammatical structure and natural flow of speech rather than rhythmic structure...
and verseVerse (poetry)A verse is formally a single line in a metrical composition, e.g. poetry. However, the word has come to represent any division or grouping of words in such a composition, which traditionally had been referred to as a stanza....
which illustrate or parody all the styles of Ireland. The magisterial influence of Joyce (also an architect of labyrinths, also a literary ProteusProteusIn Greek mythology, Proteus is an early sea-god, one of several deities whom Homer calls the "Old Man of the Sea", whose name suggests the "first" , as protogonos is the "primordial" or the "firstborn". He became the son of Poseidon in the Olympian theogony In Greek mythology, Proteus (Πρωτεύς)...
) is undeniable, but not disproportionate in this manifold book. Arthur SchopenhauerArthur SchopenhauerArthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher known for his pessimism and philosophical clarity. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the four separate manifestations of reason in the phenomenal...
wrote that dreaming and wakefulness are the pages of a single book, and that to read them in order is to live, and to leaf through them at random, is to dream. Paintings within paintings and books that branch into other books help us sense this oneness.
Stephen Fry
Stephen Fry
Stephen John Fry is an English actor, screenwriter, author, playwright, journalist, poet, comedian, television presenter and film director, and a director of Norwich City Football Club. He first came to attention in the 1981 Cambridge Footlights Revue presentation "The Cellar Tapes", which also...
has declared At Swim-Two-Birds one of his favourite books.
In 2011, the book was placed on Time Magazine's top 100 fiction
Fiction
Fiction is the form of any narrative or informative work that deals, in part or in whole, with information or events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary—that is, invented by the author. Although fiction describes a major branch of literary work, it may also refer to theatrical,...
books written in English since 1923.
Translations and adaptations into other media
At Swim-Two-Birds has been translated into several languages, including French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Polish, Hungarian, Romanian and Bulgarian. The French translation, Swim-Two-Birds, was published in 2002; the Spanish translation, En Nadar-dos-pájaros, was published in 1989 by Edhasa. The Dutch translation Tegengif was made by Bob den UylBob den Uyl
Jacob den Uyl was a Dutch writer of mostly short stories.His writing style is mostly ironic and observant. The most prominent theme in his work is the purposelessness and absurdity of existence. His earlier work consists mostly of absurd stories...
and first published by Meulenhoff in 1974. It was published again in 2010 by Atlas as Op Twee-Vogel-Wad. The book has been translated into German twice, once in 1966 by Lore Fiedler and subsequently in 2005 by Harry Rowohlt
Harry Rowohlt
Harry Rowohlt is a German writer and translator. He also plays the role of a derelict in the famous German weekly-soap Lindenstraße.- Background :...
. The book has also been adapted as a German-language film by Austrian director Kurt Palm. The Romanian version is by Adrian Oțoiu and was published in 2005. The Bulgarian translation "Plavashtite Chavki" by Filipina Filipova was published in 2008 by www.famapublishers.com
The book has been adapted for the stage on at least four occasions. The first stage version was commissioned in 1971 by the Abbey Theatre
Abbey Theatre
The Abbey Theatre , also known as the National Theatre of Ireland , is a theatre located in Dublin, Ireland. The Abbey first opened its doors to the public on 27 December 1904. Despite losing its original building to a fire in 1951, it has remained active to the present day...
in Dublin and written by Audrey Welsh. The British theatre company Ridiculusmus toured a three-man adaptation of it in 1994-1995. A recent stage version was by Alex Johnston for the Abbey Theatre in 1998. A more recent stage version was directed by Niall Henry and performed by the Blue Raincoat Theatre Company in Sligo in November 2009.
The Austrian director Kurt Palm made a film from the book in 1997. The title of the film is In Schwimmen-zwei-Vögel.
Actor Brendan Gleeson
Brendan Gleeson
Brendan Gleeson is an Irish actor. His best-known films include Braveheart, Gangs of New York, In Bruges, 28 Days Later, the Harry Potter films, The Guard and the role of Michael Collins in The Treaty...
will be making his directorial debut in a movie adaptation of the book. The Irish production company Parallel Pictures will produce the film with a budget of $11 million. Michael Fassbender
Michael Fassbender
Michael Fassbender is an Irish-German actor. He is best known for playing Lt. Archie Hicox in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds and Magneto in the superhero blockbuster X-Men: First Class...
, Colin Farrell
Colin Farrell
Colin James Farrell is an Irish actor, who has appeared in such film as Tigerland, Miami Vice, Minority Report, Phone Booth, The Recruit, Alexander and S.W.A.T....
, Gabriel Byrne
Gabriel Byrne
Gabriel James Byrne is an Irish actor, film director, film producer, writer, cultural ambassador and audiobook narrator. His acting career began in the Focus Theatre before he joined Londo's Royal Court Theatre in 1979. Byrne's screen debut came in the Irish soap opera The Riordans and the...
, and Cillian Murphy
Cillian Murphy
Cillian Murphy is an Irish film and theatre actor. He is often noted by critics for his chameleonic performances in diverse roles and distinctive blue eyes and general sex appeal....
have been attached to star in the film. Gleeson confirmed in July 2011 that he has secured funding for the project. He described the writing of the script as torturous and that it has taken 14 drafts so far.
Epigraph
The Greek phrase found in the front-matter of the novel is from EuripidesEuripides
Euripides was one of the three great tragedians of classical Athens, the other two being Aeschylus and Sophocles. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him but according to the Suda it was ninety-two at most...
's Heracles
Heracles (Euripides)
Herakles is an Athenian tragedy by Euripides that was first performed c. 416 BCE. While Herakles is in the underworld obtaining Cerberus for one of his labours, his father Amphitryon, wife Megara, and children are sentenced to death in Thebes by Lycus...
: (existatai gar pant' ap' allêlôn dikha), which means "for all things change, making way for each other".