The Life of the Mind and the Importance of the Bedchamber in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)
One of the greatest comic novels in the English language is At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), the first published novel of Irish author Flann O’Brien. It is a metafictional joke of epic breadth and density. The title itself appears entirely unfathomable and unhelpful to the first-time reader; however, it is a simple literal translation of an Irish place name, Snámh Dá Éan. “Snámh” is a common Irish word most often translated as “swim” but in the context of a place name it denotes a ford or river crossing. Snámh Dá Éan, “the ford of the two birds”, is a real place, a ford over the River Shannon which is associated in Irish mythology with the mad king Sweeney, an important character in the novel.
If the title is not as tricky as it sounds, the opening of the book is more so. It begins with the most apparently straightforward of markers: “CHAPTER ONE”. This is reassuring but it is only on rereading that one realises the work is not divided into chapters and this is the only chapter heading in the whole book. “CHAPTER ONE”, then, is a joke at the reader’s expense.
The opening sentence of the novel is worth lingering on. Though I don’t remember seeing it in lists of best opening sentences in English novels, it is very striking and immediately establishes the singularity and precision of O’Brien’s style, and introduces several themes of the novel:
Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression.
Paperview, 2005, 1
The language here is not conventionally literary, rather it is absurdly formal and precise. The first detail, relating to the amount of chewing time provided by the bread he has eaten, takes the book out of the realm of conventional literary preoccupations and into that of a narrator whose attitude to his own bodily processes is marked by distance and calculation. There is a distinctly alien or robotic feel to the narrator’s reflections and observations, and this is heightened by the fact that he remains nameless to the reader throughout.
Having eaten the amount of bread specified, the narrator “withdrew his powers of sensory perception”. This brings in a key theme of the novel: the life of the mind as opposed to that of the body and the apparent impossibility of fully taking part in both. The second sentence makes apparent the reason for the narrator’s mental abstraction:
I reflected on the subject of my spare-time literary activities. (1)
Throughout the book, this subordination of the empirical to the intellectual, specifically literary activities, is explicitly stated.
This dichotomy of sensual v. literary brings to mind one of O’Brien’s major influences: Aldous Huxley. A couple of pages in, the narrator notes that in the bedroom of his uncle’s house where he lodges, he keeps a small collection of books “ranging from those of Mr Joyce to the widely read books of Mr A Huxley, the eminent English writer” (3). O’Brien’s debt to Joyce is well known, and it is rare to read an article on At Swim without reference to Joyce. The Huxley influence is much less discussed.
Huxley became a household name in the 1920s for a series of novels which were social satires with elements of novels of ideas. Later in his career, the ideas took precedence and his books became less novelistic, even those that were nominally novels. Huxley’s first novel, Crome Yellow (1921), created a significant stir on first publication and set the tone for his early work. It has been described as “the brightest and wittiest of Huxley’s books” (Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual, Kindle, loc 2635), and gives perhaps a better indication of the reasons for Huxley’s immense popularity and influence among his contemporaries than the now more famous Brave New World (1932).
The narrator of Crome Yellow, Dennis Stone, is reminiscent of that of At Swim. Dennis, too, is an intellectual young man. I have quoted the opening of Crome elsewhere, but here it is again. It relates Dennis’ experiences on a train:
Denis took his chattels off the rack and piled them neatly in the corner opposite his own. A futile proceeding. But one must have something to do. When he had finished, he sank back into his seat and closed his eyes. It was extremely hot.
Oh, this journey! It was two hours cut clean out of his life; two hours in which he might have done so much, so much—written the perfect poem, for example, or read the one illuminating book. Instead of which—his gorge rose at the smell of the dusty cushions against which he was leaning. (Chapter I)
Dennis, too, is consciously making a choice to renounce the sensual realm. Once he sits down in the train, his first action is to close his eyes to the outside world. Then he begins to reflect that he could be writing a perfect poem or reading an illuminating book before the smell of the dusty cushions intrude and create in him a feeling of disgust. All sensuality is tiresome or disgusting to Dennis, and he tries throughout the novel to escape from life into ideas, often failing in a semi-comic manner.
This same sensual disgust is a feature of At Swim. For the narrator of the novel, the everyday world he hates and wishes to flee is represented by the uncle he lives with, a resolutely unintellectual middle-class, middle-aged man whose worldview is reduced to a series of cliches about the value of work and the vice of idleness. There is a revealing episode halfway through the novel when the narrator is observing his uncle interact with his similarly bourgeois friend from the Rathmines and Rathgar operatic society, Mr. Corcoran:
Suddenly [Mr. Corcoran] sneezed, spattering his clothing with a mucous discharge from his nostrils. As my uncle hurried to his assistance, I felt my gorge rise. I retched slightly, making a noise with my throat similar to that utilized by persons in the article of death.
[…]
I went to my room and lay prostrate on my bed, endeavouring to recover my composure.
[…]
Such was the degree of my emotional disturbance that I walked down to the centre of the town without adverting to my surroundings and without a predetermined destination. (108)
The narrator’s response is clearly disproportionate. A poorly guarded sneeze leads him into a state of “emotional disturbance”, one of very few admissions of deep feeling in the novel. Like Huxley in the opening lines of Crome, O’Brien uses the metaphor of the gorge rising. It reveals what all of the narrator’s previous interactions with his uncle have suggested, a deep and unbridgeable fissure between the intellectual and literarily ambitious narrator and his working-class uncle. He never tries to analyse his feelings or his difficult relationship with his uncle, just as he never gives any personal or family background. He merely presents their various run-ins, in which the language they use is jarringly different. The one pedantically formal and exact; the other colloquial, conventional and full of trite moralising. True communication is impossible.
In the aftermath of the sneeze episode, the narrator’s retreat to his bed when he is upset points to the importance of that article throughout the novel. The narrator rows consistently with his uncle about the inordinate time he spends in bed. “Aren’t you very fond of your bedroom now” his uncle asks with exasperation. He is, and justifies it in the narration, referring to “the tender trestle of my bed’ and “the envelope of my bed”. Later, another character of an intellectuo-literary disposition, one Byrne, offers a lofty panegyric to beds and sleep. An opposing view appears in the dark and disorienting final passage of the novel, attributed to a Professor Du Fernier of the Sorbonne:
It is of importance the most inestimable, he writes, that for mental health there should he walking and not overmuch of the bedchamber. (246)
That is bad news for our narrator, for whom bed is the locus of reflection, ideas and the life of the mind. It is freedom from the repulsive vulgarity of the other. The narrator has cast off the world even more drastically than Dennis Stone in Huxley’s novel. The results of such a course of action are uncertain, and may hint at encroaching darkness and madness. All we know for sure from reading At Swim is that they are funny, to a degree perhaps unparalleled in literature.
The Victorian Sage 