At the limits of cultural nationalism : language, culture, politics in the earlier writings of Brian O'Nolan (Flann O'Brien/Myles Na Gopaleen)

Abstract

Starting with an analysis of the dominant concerns of O'Nolan criticism in Chapter 1, the thesis argues that critical readings of O'Nolan have typically figured his work in terms of a series of oppositions located around the antagonistic relationship between cultural nationalism and literary modernism. Focusing primarily upon the experimental character of his fiction, the cultural politics which underlie this are implicitly presumed to signal a radical critique of the essentialising discourses of cultural nationalism and, more specifically, to contest the aspirations of the Gaelic Revival. By firmly relocating O'Nolan1s writing of the 1930s and 1940s in its historical moment as a body of works actively engaged in contemporary cultural debates around Irish cultural identity, the thesis aims to counter the reductive definitions of modernism and cultural nationalism often deployed in O'Nolan criticism and the prevailing assumption that O'Nolan is hostile to cultural nationalism per se in order to argue that his response to cultural nationalism is both far more complex than is usually allowed and often in fact expresses an impulse to ground cultural identity in something authentically and essentially Irish and which is compatible with certain aspects of cultural nationalist thought. The following chapters of the thesis read 0'Nolan's writing in the context of the central tenets of official discourses of cultural nationalism in the 30s and 40s, concerning language, religion, the land and the peasantry. Chapter 2 focuses upon the critically neglected issue of 01Nolan's engagement with debates around the Irish language and sets out to theorise his complex relations with Irish and English in the context of the crisis of the Irish language in this period. Chapter 3 examines At Swim-Two- Birds in relation to modernist responses to contemporary culture and explores the novel's attempt to counter the perceived degeneracy of modern Irish culture through recourse to the regenerative potential of traditional bardic culture. Chapter 4 explores the formal strategies of O'Nolan's 'documentary' writings in order to provide a context through which to read The Third Policeman in terms of its figuration of the relationship between Irish cultural identity and the land. Chapter 5 reads The Poor Mouth in the context of contemporary idealisations of the western Irish peasantry and argues that, rather than constituting a straightforward critique of metropolitan views of rural life, the text presents an ambivalent investment in precisely those idealising discourses it purports to critique.

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