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Urban Degeneracy and the Free State in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds

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Irish Urban Fictions

Part of the book series: Literary Urban Studies ((LIURS))

Abstract

Cities have long been associated with leisure and the freedom of modernity in literature, appearing as characters in a range of Victorian to modernist European fictions which depict liberatory flânerie and metropolitan idleness. In the nation-building discourses of early twentieth-century Ireland, however, the urban was often positioned as a site of moral degeneration. During the Free State period in Ireland (1922–1937), social problems such as idleness, prostitution, and corrupting modern entertainments were increasingly framed within discourses of degeneration by authorities who turned their scrutinising gaze inward following independence. Dublin in particular emerged in the most influential religious and educational discourses of the 1920s and 1930s as a locus of cultural decay and contagion, a contaminating space which endangered the entire nation. According to prominent champions of social and moral hygiene, Dublin was the chief headquarters of vice, a location which spawned indecent literature, showed immoral films, and housed the largest concentration of prostitutes in Ireland. The early twentieth-century social reform discourses which positioned Dublin as a modern forum of iniquity are precisely those under assault by Flann O’Brien in his novel At Swim-Two-Birds (1939). The novel’s portrayal of a morally squalid 1930s Dublin satirises the worst fears of the Free State’s most vocal social purity advocates. In At Swim-Two-Birds, the city becomes a site of corruption and defilement for the young male narrator, drawing him further away from the idealised visions of robust, athletic, masculinity against which he is measured. This chapter explores how O’Brien’s fictional representation of 1930s Dublin skewers contemporary Catholic discourses which constructed the city as a locus of sin and degeneration, illustrating the novel’s focus on the teachings of the Irish Christian Brothers as a particular target. O’Brien’s subversive portrayal of the moral topography of 1930s Dublin toys with the specific social anxieties which shaped the moral landscape of the Free State period as he presents the city as a site which permits rebellion against Catholic moral instruction.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Flann O’Brien. At Swim-Two-Birds, p. 44.

  2. 2.

    Gerry Smyth notes that ‘the major paradox informing any consideration of the city in cultural or social scientific terms … is that its representation as a fundamentally ambivalent and contradictory phenomenon has remained remarkably consistent … it was configured as either the primary location of ‘civilization, culture and art’, or as a place of corruption and constraints, a veritable hell on earth.’ Gerry Smyth, ‘The Right to the City: Re-presentations of Dublin in Contemporary Irish Fiction.’ Contemporary Irish Fiction: Themes, Tropes, Theories, edited by Liam Harte and Michael Parker (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), p. 15.

  3. 3.

    Fragmentation is considered a key aspect of the literary modernist representation of the city. See Bart Keunen, ‘Living with Fragments: World Making in Modernist City Literature.’ Modernism, edited by Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007), pp. 271–277.

  4. 4.

    As Scarlett Baron notes, ‘Joyce’s meticulous attention to the physical, social, and geographical realities of Dublin inscribes Ulysses within the realistic tradition’. Scarlett Baron, ‘Beginnings.’ The Cambridge Companion to Ulysses, edited by Sean Latham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 62. Maud Ellmann, too, writes that the challenging styles which confront the reader in Ulysses operate ‘in the service of an intensified mimeticism that seeks to outdo—not, crucially, undo—narrative realism. Ulysses might be an anti-realist novel, but that is only true insofar as it attempts to be more realistic than realism’. Maud Ellmann, ‘Endings.’ The Cambridge Companion to Ulysses, p. 113.

  5. 5.

    Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (1934); reprint ed. (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1960), pp. 67–68. Quoted in Karen Lawrence, ‘The Narrative Norm.’ The Odyssey of Style in Ulysses (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 11.

  6. 6.

    Declan Kiberd. ‘Gaelic Absurdism: At Swim-Two-Birds.’ Irish Classics (Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 500–520. Joseph Brooker. ‘Estopped by Grand Playsaunce: Flann O’Brien’s Post-Colonial Lore.’ Journal of Law and Society, vol. 31, no. 1, March, 2004, p. 22.

  7. 7.

    Flann O’Brien. At Swim-Two-Birds. p. 6.

  8. 8.

    Ibid.

  9. 9.

    Ibid., p. 42.

  10. 10.

    Ibid., p. 93.

  11. 11.

    Ibid., p. 24.

  12. 12.

    Ibid., p. 7.

  13. 13.

    Gregory Dobbins. ‘Flann O’Brien and the Politics of Idleness.’ Lazy Idle Schemers: Irish Modernism and the Cultural Politics of Idleness (Dublin: Field Day, 2010), p. 196.

  14. 14.

    Flann O’Brien. At Swim-Two-Birds, p. 161.

  15. 15.

    Sandra L. MacAvoy. ‘The Regulation of Sexuality in the Irish Free State, 1929–1935.’ Medicine, Disease and the State in Ireland, 1650–1940, edited by Greta Jones and Elizabeth Malcolm (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999), pp. 253–267. Louise Ryan. Gender, Identity and the Irish Press, 1922–1937: Embodying the Nation (New York: Edward Mellen Press, 2002).

  16. 16.

    The Irish Independent, 22 January 1924. This is from an advertisement promoting the Irish Christian Brothers’ publication, Our Boys.

  17. 17.

    Clair Wills, ‘Fitness, Marriage, and the Crisis of the National Family.’ The Best Are Leaving: Emigration and Post -War Irish Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 23.

  18. 18.

    Patrick Sarsfield O’Hegarty, The Victory of Sinn Féin (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1924), 130–131.

  19. 19.

    Daire Keogh, ‘Our Boys: The Christian Brothers and the formation of youth in the ‘new Ireland’ 1914–1944.’ History of Education, vol. 44, no. 6 (2015), p. 709.

  20. 20.

    Keogh, p. 716.

  21. 21.

    Ibid.

  22. 22.

    Ibid.

  23. 23.

    Ciara Breathnach, ‘Introduction: Ireland church, state and society 1900–1975.’ The History of the Family vol. 13, no. 4 (2008): 335. See also K. Theodore Hoppen, ‘Promised Lands: Ireland Since 1921.’ Ireland Since 1800: Conflict and Conformity. 2nd ed. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), pp. 185–291.

  24. 24.

    The Evening Herald, January 1924.

  25. 25.

    The Evening Herald, December 1923.

  26. 26.

    The Irish Independent, March 1931.

  27. 27.

    See Daniel Shea, ‘A Rank Outsider: Gambling and Economic Rivalry in Ulysses.’ James Joyce Quarterly vol. 48, no. 1 (2010): pp. 75–88.

  28. 28.

    ‘A Great Social Evil: The Passion for Gambling.” Our Boys, August 1927.

  29. 29.

    Ibid.

  30. 30.

    ‘The Betting Craze.’ The Irish Independent, October 1927. ‘Dublin has the betting craze bad.’ The Evening Herald, March 1930. ‘Dublin’s Gambling Plague.’ The Evening Herald, September 1928.

  31. 31.

    ‘Evils of Gambling: Dublin Police Ask For New Legislation.’ The Ulster Herald, March 1928.

  32. 32.

    ‘How Youth Fell: Justice and Betting Scandal: Dublin ‘Gambling Hells’.’ The Irish Independent, August 1930.

  33. 33.

    The Irish Examiner, May 1931.

  34. 34.

    ‘Clergyman and Gambling.’ The Irish Independent, March 1933.

  35. 35.

    Katherine Mullin, “Antitreating is about the size of it’: James Joyce, Drink, and the Rounds System.’ Review of English Studies vol. 64 (2013): pp. 311–328.

  36. 36.

    Our Boys, October 1931. Our Boys, April 1923. ‘Self control.’ Our Boys, May 1934.

  37. 37.

    Our Boys, December 1927.

  38. 38.

    Flann O’Brien. At Swim-Two-Birds. p. 18.

  39. 39.

    Mulcahy, Reverend W. ‘Alcohol and Health – 1.’ The Christian Brothers: Higher Literary Reader (Dublin: M.H. Gill and Son Limited, 1925), pp. 85–92.

  40. 40.

    Our Boys, November 1927.

  41. 41.

    Our Boys, July 1922.

  42. 42.

    Our Boys, November 1927.

  43. 43.

    Ibid.

  44. 44.

    R.S. Devane. ‘Indecent Literature: Some Legal Remedies. Introductory: The Bishops’ views.’ Irish Ecclesiastical Record 25 (1925): p. 183.

  45. 45.

    Carol Taaffe, ‘The Genesis of At Swim-Two-Birds.’ Ireland Through the Looking-glass: Flann O’Brien , Myles na gCopaleen and Irish Cultural Debate (Cork: Cork University Press, 2008), p. 34.

  46. 46.

    Ibid., p. 17.

  47. 47.

    Ibid.

  48. 48.

    Ibid.

  49. 49.

    Ibid., p. 19.

  50. 50.

    Ibid., p. 17.

  51. 51.

    Ibid., p. 22.

  52. 52.

    Ibid., p. 19.

  53. 53.

    Ibid.

  54. 54.

    Ibid., p. 20, 23, 39, 47.

  55. 55.

    Ibid., p. 93.

  56. 56.

    Ibid.

  57. 57.

    Ibid.

  58. 58.

    Ibid., p. 47.

  59. 59.

    Ibid., p. 36.

  60. 60.

    Ibid., p. 193.

  61. 61.

    See Charles Travis, ‘From the Ruins of Time and Space: The Psychogeographical GIS of post-colonial Dublin in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (1939).’ CITY: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action vol. 17, no. 2 (2013): pp. 209–233.

  62. 62.

    Ibid., p. 44.

  63. 63.

    Ibid.

  64. 64.

    Ibid.

  65. 65.

    Ibid., p. 7.

  66. 66.

    Devane, p. 183.

  67. 67.

    Flann O’Brien. At Swim-Two-Birds. p. 93.

  68. 68.

    Ibid., p. 31.

  69. 69.

    Ibid.

  70. 70.

    Our Boys, August 1927.

  71. 71.

    Liam Lanigan, ‘Epilogue: Writing Dublin after Joyce.’ James Joyce, Urban Planning and Irish Modernism: Dublins of the Future (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 207.

  72. 72.

    M. Keith Booker, ‘Flann O’Brien in the Twentieth Century.’ Flann O’Brien, Bakhtin and Menippean Satire (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1995), p. 122.

  73. 73.

    Maebh Long, ‘Introduction.’ Assembling Flann O’Brien (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 9.

  74. 74.

    Peter Childs, Modernism (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 207.

  75. 75.

    Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938), edited by J.C.C. Mays (London: Faber & Faber, 2012), p. 75.

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  1. University College Cork, Cork, Ireland

    Laura Lovejoy

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Correspondence to Laura Lovejoy .

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  1. Centre for Studies in Otherness, Aarhus University, Denmark

    Maria Beville

  2. University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Deirdre Flynn

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Lovejoy, L. (2018). Urban Degeneracy and the Free State in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds. In: Beville, M., Flynn, D. (eds) Irish Urban Fictions. Literary Urban Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98322-6_7

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