Brian O'Nolan

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Brian O'Nolan , Irish Brian Ó Nualláin (born October 5, 1911 in Strabane , County Tyrone , Northern Ireland , † April 1, 1966 in Dublin ), was an Irish writer .

He is known by his pseudonyms . Under the name Flann O'Brien he published four novels in English: At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), The Hard Life (1962), The Dalkey Archive (1964) and The Third Policeman (1968, posthumously); With Myles na gCopaleen he drew his satirical column Cruiskeen Lawn, which appeared in the Irish Times from 1940 until his death in 1966, and An Béal Bocht (1941), his only novel in the Irish language.

Life

Plaque at the birthplace of Brian O'Nolan / Brian Ó Nualláin in Bowling Green

Brian O'Nolan was born the third of twelve children. From 1929 to 1935 he studied Irish, English and German at University College Dublin and the University of Cologne . During his studies he published articles under numerous pseudonyms and was editor of the magazine Blather . From 1935 he worked as a government official, taught intermittently at University College Dublin and wrote for various newspapers. Around 1940 he wrote the three novels On Swimming Two Birds , An Béal Bocht - in Irish under the pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen (German Myles of the Horses) - and The Third Policeman. However, the third policeman was rejected by the publisher and only published posthumously . He borrowed the pseudonym from a character from Dion Boucicault's melodrama The Colleen Bawn . From 1940 he published daily in the Irish Times also under this pseudonym the satirical column Cruiskeen Lawn (Anglicized version of Irish Cruiscín Lán , "full jug"), of which almost 3,000 have appeared in 25 years. In his environment , against the Creator's intentions, the official O'Nolan became a Myles .

The Cruiskeen Lawn column is an example of the multilingual humor often found in Brian O'Nolan. Initially Irish, the column was usually written in English, but sometimes again in Irish or French, Latin or German, and sometimes in an English-Irish hybrid that he himself invented. He wanted to ridicule "linguistic nationalists" and their illusion of Irish independence. He also ironically described numerous ingenious inventions and plans to improve the situation of the Irish nation in the column. In the early 1940s he criticized the neutral foreign policy of the then Irish Fianna Fail government and thus contributed to the formation of political opinion. Among the Irish "all-purpose liberals" he most severely ridiculed the writer Seán O'Faoláin .

Grave of Brian O'Nolan / Brian Ó Nualláin, his parents and his wife, Dean's Grange Cemetery, Dublin

In 1953 he had to leave the civil service after writing a satire about a minister in his newspaper column. Although he now had more time to write, O'Brien was initially unable to build on his successful time as a writer.

Brian O'Nolan went down in literary history as a unique creator of bizarre characters and a master of puns. Central themes of his works are: Irish life, death, "scientific" theories, alcoholism and bicycles as well as the sheep as the subject of molecular-physical thought experiments as part of O'Brienscher science parody .

Novelist

O'Nolans novels thanks to their bizarre humor and her artful, the modernity associated metafiction found a large readership. Swim-two-birds , named after the ford Snámh dá Éan, English: Swim-Two-Birds , on the Shannon , is a novel about a student who writes several stories in which the characters interact with each other, for example by being unite against the author invented by the student and write a novel yourself. The third policeman , on the other hand, has a superficial plot about the vision of hell of a young Irishman living in the country, presented against the background of a satire disguised as an academic debate about an eccentric scientist and philosopher named de Selby . In the same work, O'Brien also found space to introduce the atomic theory of the bicycle, according to which humans and bicycles exchange atoms through too intensive contact: the bicycles "mutilate", the people "cycle". The protagonist in From Dalkey's Archives , another young man, meets a penitent elderly James Joyce , who allegedly never wrote any of his books and only tries to be accepted by the Jesuits . Until this succeeds, Joyce works as a temporary waiter in a holiday resort. As in The Third Policeman , this book also features the enigmatic scientist de Selby who plans to remove all oxygen from the atmosphere. The bicycle motif is again introduced into Aus Dalkey's archives by a police officer.

Other novels are The Hard Life , a fictional autobiography, and The Irish Diary or The Barmen , which O'Brien wrote in Irish and translated himself into English. This is also a fictional autobiography, which is a parody of the autobiography of Tomás Ó Criomhthain called An tOileánach .

As a novelist, O'Nolan was heavily influenced by James Joyce. He had even made an effort to go to the same college as Joyce using a fake interview with Joyce's father. Nevertheless, he remained skeptical about the cult around Joyce: I declare before God that I will foam at the mouth if I hear the name Joyce again!

reception

Harry Rowohlt also translated O'Nolan into German

Brian O'Nolan is considered an important Irish writer of the 20th century. The British writer Anthony Burgess said of him: If we do not value the work of Flann O'Brien, we are stupid fools who do not deserve to have great men. Flann O'Brien is a very important man. Burgess included Two Birds On Swimming in his list of 99 Great Novels .

On Swimming-Two-Birds is now recognized as one of the most important pre-1945 modern novels. It can even be seen as a pioneering postmodern novel, although academic Keith Hopper argued convincingly that The Third Policeman - less radical on the surface - is actually a very subversive and proto-postmodern book. Swim-Two-Birds was one of the last books Joyce read. He praised it to friends. This praise was subsequently used on the covers of O'Brien's books for many years. The title of Jamie O'Neill's (2001) novel At Swim, Two Boys, set during the 1916 Easter Rising , is a reference to Flann O'Brien.

The science fiction writer and satirist Robert Anton Wilson included the fictional scientist de Selby, invented by O'Nolan, in his novel cycle The Illuminati Chronicles .

Works (selection)

  • At swim-two-birds . Longman, London 1939.
    • Two birds swimming. Translated by Lore Fiedler, Rowohlt, Reinbek 1966.
    • In swimming-two-birds. Translated by Harry Rowohlt and Helmut Mennicken. Haffmans, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-251-20071-2 .
    • On swimming-two-birds. Translated by Harry Rowohlt and Helmut Mennicken. Kein & Aber, Zurich 2002, ISBN 3-0369-5104-0 .
  • The Third Policeman . 1940/1967.
    • The third cop. Translated by Harry Rowohlt. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1975, ISBN 3-518-01446-3 .
  • To Béal Bocht / The Poor Mouth. 1941.
    • The barmen. Translated by Harry Rowohlt, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1977, ISBN 3-518-01529-X (also as Irish curriculum vitae).
  • The Hard Life. 1961.
  • The Dalkey Archive. 1964.
    • From Dalkey's archives. Translated by Harry Rowohlt. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1982, ISBN 3-518-01623-7 .
  • Flann O'Brien At War - Myles na gCopaleen 1940-1945. Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd., London 1999. Selection of columns from Cruiskeen Lawn , selected and edited by John Wyse Jackson.

literature

  • Anne Clissman: Flann O'Brien; A critical introduction to his writings. Dublin 1975.
  • Peter Costello, Peter van de Kamp: Flann O'Brien: An Illustrated Biography. Bloomsbury, London 1987, ISBN 0-7475-0328-1 .
  • Anthony Cronin : Flann O'Brien. A biography. FVA, Frankfurt 1991 (Original title: No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O'Brien . 1989).
  • Keith Hopper: Flann O'Brien: A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Post-Modernist. Cork 1995, ISBN 1-85918-042-6 .
  • Heiko Postma : "If you get what I mean" About the Irish humorist Flann O'Brien (1911–1966). jmb, Hannover 2010, ISBN 978-3-940970-30-5 .
  • Christian Schuldt: Self-observation and the evolution of the art system. Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld 2005, ISBN 3-89942-402-6 (system-theoretical analysis of O'Brien's metafictional novels At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman ).
  • Thomas F. Shea: Flann O'Brien's Exorbitant Novels. Associated University Presses, Cranbury, London, Mississauga 1992, ISBN 0-8387-5220-9 .

Web links

Individual references, footnotes

  1. ↑ The Times columns were selected by John Wyse Jackson, translated by Harry Rowohlt. Selections published as Consolation and Advice and Golden Hours
  2. ↑ John Wyse Jackson: Introduction by the Editor. In: Flann O'Brien: Golden hours: the golden hours of Myles na gCopaleen. Heyne, Munich 2006, p. 17.
  3. ↑ nytimes.com
  4. ↑ See Walter Jens (Ed.): Kindlers Neues Literaturlexikon Vol. 12, 1996, p. 576.
personal data
SURNAME O'Nolan, Brian
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ó Nualláin, Brian (real name, Irish); O'Nolan, Brian; na gCopaleen, Myles (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Irish writer
DATE OF BIRTH October 5, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Strabane , County Tyrone, Northern Ireland
DATE OF DEATH April 1, 1966
Place of death Dublin , Ireland