Brian O'Nolan's Systems of Mediation

Abstract

This thesis focuses on the significance of mediation in Brian O?Nolan?s body of work. The term `mediation' is used within the context of recent media theory such as that of Friedrich Kittler, and it refers to the way that O?Nolan?s texts and writerly personae ? including Myles na gCopaleen and Flann O?Brien ? sit in uncomfortable positions within the media through which they are transmitted. Close attention is directed to the ways in which O?Nolan?s writings are hostile to their own means of expression, whether this be in novel form, in his newspaper column, or in his critically neglected radio or television writings. The pressures placed on each text as O?Nolan attempts to shape his creativity into different forms of transmission feed into this writer?s sustained interest in exploring how words can be redirected and repurposed often against their author?s will. The thesis finds that O?Nolan?s body of work collectively displays a sensitivity to the way in which the words of an writer do not pass straightforwardly from pen to readership or audience, but instead are entered into a complex process which has the capacity to reshape, distort or constrain a text as it travels on its path to publication. O?Nolan, in this light, emerges not as a novelist who spread himself too thin with other work, but rather a writer whose career is fundamentally reflective of the problematics of writing across different media in mid-twentieth century Ireland. In illustrating this argument throughout his published fiction and in unpublished letters and manuscripts, the thesis uncovers an often-coded self-critical thread running through O?Nolan?s oeuvre: O?Nolan?s reflections upon the limitations of writing, and the delusional qualities associated with authorship, not only address how writing is used and misused in a cultural and political context, but they also express O?Nolan?s acute awareness of the impostures and limitations at play in the development of his own fictions and his various writerly personae.