O'Brien was an eccentric writer of tremendous comic spirit. His work reveals an impressive knowledge of science, philosophy, literature, and theology. But his attitudes are always playful and satiric. Like Swift, who made fun of the Royal Society in Gulliver's Travels, O'Brien had a talent for making the principles of science seem ridiculous. The Sergeant in The Dalkey Archive, for example, explains the "Mollycule" theory: "Now take a sheep. What is a sheep only millions of little bits of sheepness whirling around doing intricate convulsions inside the baste." This is all by way of explaining that people who spend too much time on bicycles, according to the Sergeant, "get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycles." In the same novel, the crazy genius and fraud De Selby invents a substance to "abolish air" and destroy the world. He calls it DMP (after "The Dublin Metropolitan Police") and it brings to mind Kurt Vonnegut's "icenine."…
O'Brien's "better-class journalism," as he called [the writing he did for the Irish Times after 1953,] is largely work that seems to ride on the coattails of his talents as a novelist: the journalism is a little too close to, and not quite as good as, his fiction…. O'Brien's newspaper work is more a run-off from his fiction. The fiction of Flann O'Brien bleeds into the journalism of Myles na Gopaleen]….
This is a free excerpt of 227 words. There are 380 words (approx.
1 page at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our O'Brien, Flann (Pseudonym of Brian O Nuallain, also Known as Brian O'Nolan) 1911–1966: Critical Essay by Terence Winch Access Pass.
