At Swim-Two-Birds

Flann O'Brien

3 ideas

1. Dermot Trellis overthrown by his own characters

   A lazy Dublin student writes a novel about Dermot Trellis, a publican-author who creates characters to write a morality tale, including John Furriskey, born fully grown at twenty-five. The characters live their own lives only while Trellis sleeps, so they drug him to keep him asleep. Trellis's son Orlick, himself fathered on one of Trellis's creations, then writes a story in which the characters torture Trellis and put him on trial, and Trellis is saved only when a servant accidentally burns the manuscript that gives them life.

2. Aestho-autogamy: characters born fully formed

   The novel's narrator proposes that a character can be created as an adult with no childhood, a history supplied by the author, and a fixed moral function, a process he calls aestho-autogamy. Taking the author's power literally shows how complete it is and how unnatural. A being made for a purpose, with no past of its own, has every reason to resent and resist the one who made it.

3. Borrowing characters from the existing stock

   The student-narrator argues that most characters should be taken from existing literature rather than invented, because the stock already exists and readers already recognise it. On this view a novel is an assembly of pre-owned parts, so cowboys from pulp Westerns, Finn MacCool and a pooka can share a pub. Genres and registers clash on the page without being blended, and the joins stay visible as part of the effect.

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