'Tell Me This, Do You Ever Open a Book at All?': Portraits of the Reader in Brian O'nolan's at Swim-Two-Birds (Critical Essay‪)‬

Reviewing At Swim-Two-Birds on its publication in 1939, Jorge Luis Borges aptly described it as an exploration of 'the many ways to conceive of the Irish novel'. (1) However, At Swim is not simply a collage of literary styles; it dramatizes the process of composition, demolishes the notion of original genius, and allows its characters to oscillate between the roles of writer and reader, storyteller and audience. At Swim indicates that collaboration is an inevitable component of literary production, whether this is implied in the student's literary parodies or explicitly dramatized in the critical debates between his characters. Dialogue is an essential element of this text and O'Nolan acknowledges Dublin's oral culture as much as its literary heritage. By structuring his novel as a work-in-progress, he could draw attention to both his contemporary intellectual environment and his literary precursors. The result is an intertextual work which emphasizes the actual process, and the context, of the act of writing (and reading). This article follows O'Nolan's direction to read At Swim within its contemporary context and does so by exploring depictions of readers in the novel. It deals first with O'Nolan's implied readers--his fellow students in UCD in the nineteen thirties--in order to establish a context for At Swim's peculiarly ambivalent comedy. It then demonstrates this ambivalence at work in At Swim's representation of contemporary Irish readers. In O'Nolan's hands, these are caricatures of the 'plain' reader (and ancestors of Cruiskeen Lawn's 'Plain People of Ireland') which satirize the contemporary literary marketplace.