At Swim-Two-Birds - Literary Significance & Criticism

Literary Significance & Criticism

The initial reviews for At Swim-Two-Birds were not enthusiastic. The Times Literary Supplement said that the book's only notable feature was a "schoolboy brand of mild vulgarity"; the New Statesman complained that "long passages in imitation of the Joycean parody of the early Irish epic are devastatingly dull" and the Irish novelist Sean O'Faolain commented in John O'London's Weekly that although the book had its moments, it "had a general odour of spilt Joyce all over it."

However, most of the support for At Swim-Two-Birds came not from newspaper reviewers but from writers. Dylan Thomas, in a remark that would be quoted on dust-jackets in later editions of the book, said "This is just the book to give your sister – if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl". Anthony Burgess considered it one of the ninety-nine greatest novels written between 1939 and 1984. Graham Greene's enthusiastic reader's report was instrumental in getting the book published in the first place:

It is in the line of Tristram Shandy and Ulysses: its amazing spirits do not disguise the seriousness of the attempt to present, simultaneously as it were, all the literary traditions of Ireland. We have had books inside books before now, and characters who are given life outside their fiction, but O'Nolan takes Pirandello and Gide a long way further.

O'Nolan's friend Niall Sheridan gave James Joyce an inscribed copy of the book. Joyce declared it the work of a "real writer" who had "the true comic spirit" and attempted to get the book reviewed in French periodicals, although without success. It is thought to have been the last novel Joyce ever read. Anthony Cronin has written of the effect the novel had on him as a seventeen-year-old in 1940s Dublin, praising its "umistakable sheen of the avant-garde", describing it "breathtakingly funny" and noting "the deadly accuracy of the ear for lower middle class Dublin speech". Most academic criticism of the book has sought to appropriate it one way or the other; critics like Bernard Benstock, who argued that O'Brien's embrace of myth and refusal of realism "ensnare him with the second rank", have been in the minority. Vivian Mercier described it in The Irish Comic Tradition as "the most fantastic novel written by an Irishman in the twentieth century – with the doubtful exception of Finnegans Wake." Rüdiger Imhof has noted how works by B.S. Johnson, Gilbert Sorrentino, Alasdair Gray and John Fowles carry explicit references to At Swim-Two-Birds. Michael Cronin draws attention to the metafictional and game-playing elements of the book, comparing it to the fictions of Raymond Queneau, and responds to criticism that the book is insufficiently respectful of realist conventions:

Contrary to what Benstock argues, what post-independence Ireland needed was not less but more of the type of playful, self-aware writing being proposed by Flann O'Brien in At Swim-Two-Birds.... We would all be very much poorer without Mad O'Brien's narrative chessmen.

Keith Hopper has argued that, contrary to the common tendency to favour At Swim-Two-Birds as "the primary defining text of the O'Brien oeuvre", the novel is in fact less, not more, experimental than O'Brien's second novel, the posthumously published The Third Policeman:

At Swim-Two-Birds is best considered as a late-modernist, transitionary text which critiques both realism and modernism in an openly deconstructive manner, and in the process comes to the brink of an exciting new aesthetic. I will argue that the metafictional techniques developed publicly in ... are imbricated and embedded within the texture of The Third Policeman.

In a long essay published in 2000, Declan Kiberd analysed At Swim-Two-Birds from a postcolonial perspective, seeing it as a complex imaginative response to the economic and social stagnation of 1930s Ireland and arguing that the fragmented and polyphonic texture of the book is the work of an author who is "less anxious to say something new than to find a self that is capable of saying anything at all." Kiberd suggests that the one element of the book which is not seriously ironised or satirised is Sweeney's poetry, and that this is related to O'Nolan's genuine if complex respect for Irish-language literature:

What saved O'Brien from lapsing into postmodern nihilism was not his Catholicism which held that the world was a doomed and hopeless place, but his respect for the prose of An tOileánach or the poetry of Buile Suibhne, where language still did its appointed work. He was an experimentalist who was way ahead of his time: only after his death did his readers learn how to become his contemporaries.

In a 1939 essay titled When Fiction Lives in Fiction, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges described Flann O'Brien's masterpiece as follows,

I have enumerated many verbal labyrinths, but none so complex as the recent book by Flann O'Brien, At Swim, Two Birds. A student in Dublin writes a novel about the proprietor of a Dublin public house, who writes a novel about the habitues of his pub (among them, the student), who in their turn write novels in which proprietor and student figure along with other writers about other novelists. The book consists of the extremely diverse manuscripts of these real or imagined persons, copiously annotated by the student. At Swim, Two Birds is not only a labyrinth; it is a discussion of the many ways to conceive of the Irish novel and a repertory of exercises in prose and verse which illustrate or parody all the styles of Ireland. The magisterial influence of Joyce (also an architect of labyrinths, also a literary Proteus) is undeniable, but not disproportionate in this manifold book. Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that dreaming and wakefulness are the pages of a single book, and that to read them in order is to live, and to leaf through them at random, is to dream. Paintings within paintings and books that branch into other books help us sense this oneness.

Stephen Fry has declared At Swim-Two-Birds one of his favourite books.

In 2011, the book was placed on Time Magazine’s top 100 fiction books written in English since 1923.