Brian O'Nolan and Irish cultural debate, 1931-1945

Abstract

This thesis is a historical study of Brian O'Nolan's fiction and journalism which encompasses the early period of his career, from his earliest newspaper publications in 1931 to the first months of the uncensored, post-war Cruiskeen Lawn in 1945. Criticism of O'Nolan's work has tended to concentrate primarily on his early fiction, particularly A t Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman, and to some degree this thesis seeks to redress this imbalance. O'Nolan began and ended his literary career as a comic journalist, and in reading his fiction within its contemporary context, this study narrows the distinction between the humorous daily columnist and the experimental novelist. Unlike most studies of O'Nolan's work, it closely examines the entire run of Cruiskeen Lawn in this period, and draws extensively on unpublished material held in the Brian O'Nolan collections in Boston College and Southern Illinois University Carbondale. By focusing on the early novels, and their metafictional elements, much previous criticism has cast O'Nolan as a precocious literary theorist. In contrast, this thesis contends that his humour was inextricably bound up with its time, and wholly engaged with contemporary intellectual controversies. It also argues against a simple understanding of his fiction or journalism as subversive satires of Ireland in the 1930s and 1940s. By examining the various comic modes which O'Nolan exploited in his work, it demonstrates how a certain comic ambivalence and evasiveness run throughout his early writing, with a more consistently polemical tone emerging towards the mid-1940s. The ambiguity of the early writing is not simply a function of its literary sophistication, but a symptom of O'Nolan's ambivalent response to contemporary Ireland, and to the position of the writer in Irish society.