Introduction

Aldous Huxley and Brian O’Nolan came of intellectual age in an era of rapid expansion in mass-circulation print culture. By the 1930s, the production of newspapers had become a major industry across the industrialised world, and the opinion column had emerged as a distinctive genre, reaching larger audiences than earlier forms of public intellectual address: the pamphlet, the lecture, the essay collection. For both writers, this expansion was inseparable from its political contexts: the Great Depression, which threw the liberal democratic model into question and lent credibility to fascist and communist planned economies, and the simultaneous rise of radio and cinema as mass media technologies. To write newspaper journalism in such a moment was to participate in what Huxley described as humanity’s confrontation with its own mind as its ‘most formidable enemy.’¹ The pharmacological ambivalence of the mass printed page is a central problem for both writers. They saw that the same technology that enabled propaganda and mass distraction could, in the right hands, also generate critical consciousness. The newspaper had the potential to act as both a poison and a cure.

Throughout this essay, ‘journalism’ refers specifically to the genre of the periodic opinion column and the general-press article, the forms in which Huxley’s Evening Standard and Nash’s Pall Mall contributions appeared and in which O’Nolan’s Cruiskeen Lawn operated for twenty-six years. Where my discussion draws on non-fiction essays or short stories, it does so to illuminate the pharmacological concerns that find their most concentrated expression in journalism. I argue that Aldous Huxley and Brian O’Nolan can be related to each other by analysing their use of style in journalism to produce strategic ambivalences of tone. These ambivalences enable the subversion of journalistic conventions at the same time as they are exploited. The authors use the genre of the opinion piece to reach a wide audience, but, through the means of style, it is re-engineered so that the ethical implications of that reach—the homogenisation of thought and the orientation of emotional reflexes towards consumerism and nationalism—are not left unexamined.

In order to understand the practice of writing that can be characterised as ‘pharmacological,’ it is first necessary to conceptualise the paradoxical conditions of the poison and the cure as presented in Jacques Derrida’s essay ‘Plato’s Pharmacy.’ Derrida’s essay is an analysis of Plato’s presentation of writing as a ‘pharmakon,’ a recipe with the potential to be both a remedy and a poison, in the Socratic dialogue Phaedrus.² This essay’s argument rests on the extension of Derrida’s ideas into the realm of memory and technology undertaken by his student Bernard Stiegler. Stiegler understands communication technologies as exteriorised memories (which he describes as retentions) that both support the possibility of human consciousness and govern its possibilities.³ This pharmacological reading of media technology is applied to both writers: Huxley’s early journalism connects print culture to a critique of the impact of technology on life more generally by characterising advances in consumption media like mass reading, film, and radio as stripping away human capacity for enjoyment. I argue that Huxley has this in common with O’Nolan’s journalism, whose ‘pathology’ of reading and print addiction mirrors Huxley’s thought. Huxley’s critique of print was paired with his belief in the power of written words to organise information and improve society. Likewise, O’Nolan is no cynic. Instead, as a commentator and political figure, he was involved in the modernisation of Irish print cultural practices.

The second part of this article explores O’Nolan’s and Huxley’s approach to the genre of the opinion column along these lines, using the Brechtian concept of ‘functional transformation’: doing one’s utmost to change the media apparatus one serves.⁴ In the face of journalism’s automation of thought, where opinions write themselves according to the logic of established styles and the use of cliché, Huxley and O’Nolan use tone and stylistics to subvert these conventions. My article finishes with a re-evaluation of the reputation of Huxley as a prose stylist in the light of O’Nolan. I suggest that O’Nolan’s extreme manipulation of frame, tone, and stylistics in his columns for the Irish Times unlocks a new way to critically appraise the complex performances of Huxley as a journalist and satirist.

The pharmakon of print in Huxley and O’Nolan

A turn to critical theories of technologies of inscription, dissemination, and transmission is well underway in O’Nolan studies: for example, a recent special issue of the Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies dedicated itself to the discussion of the significance of radio for O’Nolan’s work.⁵ Yuta Imazeki addresses O’Nolan and radio, pointing out how the noisiness of the new ‘prosthetic’ media of the ear—the gramophone, radio, telephone—exerted a change on writing practice by proving the disjunction between sign and world and between the psyche and physical realities.⁶ Most significant for my argument is recent work by Maebh Long which applies the ‘media determinism’ of Friedrich Kittler to explore the importance of the distinction between the role of handwritten inscriptions, which are ‘personal and immediate,’ and the ‘mode of impersonal mechanical assemblage’ which is the ‘overt commitment’ in At Swim-Two-Birds.⁷

An early critique of technical reproducibility appears in Plato’s Phaedrus dialogue, when the god Thoth offers the King of Egypt, Thamus, the ‘pharmakon’ of writing, claiming that it will aid memory and wisdom. Thamus rebukes him sternly:

this invention will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it because they will not need to exercise their memories (lēthēn men en psuchais parexei mnēmēs ameletēsiai), being able to rely on what is written, using the stimulus of external marks that are alien to themselves (dia pistin graphēs exōthen hup’ allotriōn tupōn) rather than, from within, their own unaided powers to call things to mind (ouk endothen autous hupb’ hautōn anamimnēskomenous). So it’s not a remedy for memory, but for reminding, that you have discovered (oukoun mnēmēs, alla hupomnēseōs, pharmakon hēures). And as for wisdom (sophias de), you’re equipping your pupils with only a semblance (doxan) of it, not with truth (alētheian). Thanks to you and your invention, your pupils will be widely read without benefit of a teacher’s instruction; in consequence, they’ll entertain the delusion that they have wide knowledge, while they are, in fact, for the most part incapable of real judgment.⁸

Derrida’s use of Phaedrus sets out the terms for my reading of Huxley and O’Nolan, following Long who, in Assembling Flann O’Brien, conducts a Derridean reading of the production logic of the fragment in At Swim-Two-Birds.⁹

Stiegler builds on Derrida’s discussion by extending a pharmacological account to all technology, which he defines as the prosthetic extensions of capability that predate the emergence of modern humans (if we consider tools which are millions of years old, such as hand axes). I therefore seek to apply the thinking of Stiegler to O’Nolan and Huxley, noting that Huxley himself anticipates some of Stiegler’s theoretical notions about technology, memory, and intersubjectivity. For example, anticipating the importance of exteriorised memory to Stiegler, in the essay ‘Science, Technology and Beauty,’ Huxley writes that ‘technology has endowed the scientist with two kinds of artificial memory—the artificial memory housed in computers and embodied in symbols, and the artificial memory embodied in visual images by the camera.’¹⁰ Drawing on Edmund Husserl, Stiegler describes memory as a form of ‘retention’ that has three varieties. Primary retentions are immediate sensory perceptions, secondary retentions are memories as they are experienced psychically, tertiary retentions are memories turned into images and representations that find their way into external objects: ‘A tool is, before anything else, memory: if this were not the case, it could never function as a reference of significance.’¹¹ Such human-made objects, whether manufactured physical items or markings, are prosthetic memories. As technology becomes more exteriorized, it increasingly reduces the individual’s body to an appendage: ‘automatizing’ the individual. When artificial forms of memory change, the earlier forms of retention also change with them, either because they are absorbed into the newly dominant mode (think of how print has been absorbed into the digital, for example) or rendered illegible (like scribal productions are to us now). O’Nolan comically models this process through the operation of the ‘atomic theory’ in The Third Policeman: the exchange of atoms with bicycles on bumpy roads leads humans to unconsciously take on their physical traits, and vice versa, whereas for earlier generations this interchange took place between humans and horses.¹²

In the temporal space of the Socratic myth of the origin of writing in Ancient Egypt, it is possible to take writing or leave it: the Egyptians can decide to retain memories mentally and communicate orally, or to submit those memories to these external characters that seem to contain the knowledge they lay claim to but are, in fact, as inscrutable to our understanding as the surface of an image. However, as Plato knew, the choice is illusory; our thoughts already present themselves to us as mediated by the governing system of tertiary retentions, whether that is oral, print, broadcast, or digital culture. Socrates explains the impossibility of refusing the pharmakon when he compares the Sophists to merchants in Plato’s Protagoras:

Then can it be […] the sophist is really a sort of merchant or dealer in provisions on which a soul is nourished? […] I tell you there is far more serious risk in the purchase of doctrines than in that of eatables. When you buy victuals and liquors you can carry them off from the dealer or merchant in separate vessels, and before you take them into your body by drinking or eating you can lay them in your house. But you cannot carry away doctrines in a separate vessel: you are compelled, when you have handed over the price, to take the doctrine in your very soul by learning it, and so to depart either an injured or a benefited man.¹³

The problem with ideas is that as soon as we have understood them, it’s already too late. Huxley recognises this exact problem in his essay ‘Writers and Readers’ when he turns to the mass-produced fiction of his time and draws on the insight of Cervantes and Flaubert: ‘Works of imaginative literature have another and more easily recognizable effect; by a kind of suggestion they modify the characters of those who read them.’¹⁴ We have absorbed the things we read by virtue of understanding them, and the mind is changed by these artificially supplied memories. Huxley emphasises that mass reading produces an addicted, ‘drugged,’ population:

In Europe and America universal primary education has created a reading public which is practically co-extensive with the adult population. Demand has called forth a correspondingly huge supply: twenty thousand million pounds of wood pulp and esparto grass are annually blackened with printer’s ink; the production of newspapers takes rank, in many countries, among the major industries; in English, French, and German alone, forty thousand new books are published every year […]. To a considerable extent reading has become, for almost all of us, an addiction, like cigarette smoking. […] The power of such literature to impose upon those whom we may call its addicts a kind of drugged acceptance of the most sordid realities is probably very considerable.¹⁵

The diagnosis of the print ecosystem as addictive is consistent with Huxley’s critique of a broader media landscape across his non-fiction of the same decade. In ‘Pascal,’ the long essay that closes Do What You Will (1929), Huxley extends the analysis beyond the reading of fiction to encompass the entire apparatus of popular media consumption: ‘the clerk and the taylorized workman leave their imbecile tasks to spend their leisure under the influence of such opiate distractions as are provided by the newspaper, the cinema, the radio; they are given less and less opportunity to do any active or creative living of their own.’¹⁶ That this ‘taylorized’ model of leisure mirrors the Fordist production line is not accidental: for Huxley, the newspaper, the cinema, and the radio are the leisure-time counterparts of the factory floor. In his essay ‘Pleasures,’ published in On The Margin (1923), Huxley suggested that, with our working days already consumed by ‘mechanical tasks’ performed mindlessly, in the ‘hours of leisure, we turn to distractions as mechanically stereotyped and demanding as little intelligence and initiative.’¹⁷ The pleasure-element of mechanised mass distraction is emphasised in Huxley’s The Elder Peter Bruegel, which connects early modern public spectacle to the modern newspaper: ‘the impresarios who sold seats at Tyburn have been replaced by titled newspaper proprietors who sell juicy descriptions of Tyburn to a prodigiously much larger public.’¹⁸ The mass reproduction of violence-as-spectacle is not, for Huxley, an exclusively modern pathology; what mass print technology has achieved is its industrialisation and global distribution.

The opiate of mechanised leisure in the form of the consumption of mass media objects, including print media, constitutes a ‘supplement,’ to use a Derridean term. The supplement is an unnamed support for the experience of fulfilment that suggests, in turn, the possibility of a transference to yet another supplement, another substitution, in an unending chain.¹⁹ For example, reading a novel becomes reading a digest, which becomes reading reviews of books, which becomes listening to radio programmes about reviews, and so on. Supplements can change in substance. For example, Huxley sees this kind of mass-produced written material as a precursor to more advanced forms of psycho-biological control and manipulation: ‘The propagandists of the future will probably be chemists and physiologists as well as writers. A cachet containing three-quarters of a gramme of chloral and three-quarters of a milligram of scopolamine will produce in the person who swallows it a state of complete psychological malleability.’²⁰

The same attention is directed towards behaviour that seems mass-produced, involuntary, or automatic in the writing of O’Nolan. Writing as Myles na gCopaleen in his Cruiskeen Lawn column, he proposes ‘what one might call the pathology of literature’:

What prompts a sane, inoffensive man to write? Assuming that to ‘write’ is mechanically to multiply communication (sometimes a rather large assumption, especially if one writes a book in Irish), what vast, yeasty eructation of egotism drives a man to address simultaneously a mass of people he has never met, and who may resent being pestered with his ‘thoughts’? They don’t have to read what he writes, you say. But they do. That compulsion is, indeed, the most vicious neurosis that calls for investigation. The blind urge to read, the craving for print, is a very deep-seated infirmity. Some people blame compulsory education and Lord Northcliffe. Writers can be shot or put in concentration camps. But what can one do with the millions of passive print addicts?²¹

Writers are compelled to write by the existence of ‘print addicts’ who are equally subject to ‘blind urges,’ an automatically instilled habit induced by the existence of printed text in the first place.²² Print media is a supplement, in Derrida’s sense, that undermines both ‘passivity’ and ‘activity’ on the part of authors; it governs writing as a mode of production, of text ‘in the infrastructural sense’ in which ‘the system of a writing and of a reading which we know is ordered around its own blind spot.’²³

However, Huxley and O’Nolan made a living by supplying the endless appetite of their cultures for print. Huxley began his career as a writer working for the Athenaeum magazine, producing book reviews and articles at a breakneck pace, as well as writing for the Daily Herald, the New Statesman, the Westminster Gazette, and many other newspapers and magazines.²⁴ In 1920 Huxley became involved in magazines run by Condé Nast, helping to set up House and Garden as a single-handed ‘Staff of Experts,’ and writing prolifically for its other magazines, Vogue and Vanity Fair, where he continued to publish after moving to Italy in 1923.²⁵ Huxley transitioned from a reviewer into a travel writer, and his engagement with social and cultural themes developed in sophistication. He travelled back to England and published observations on the ‘state of England in the Depression-ravaged British Midlands and in the north of England’ in magazines like Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine.²⁶ In March 1935 he published two essays on the state of France as observed by a foreigner, which featured on the front page of Europe’s highest circulation newspaper, Paris-soir.²⁷ Huxley’s participation in this print economy was inseparable from a discomfort with it that is traceable from the beginning of his career. In ‘The Bookshop,’ a story from Huxley’s collection Limbo (1920), a conversation between the narrator and a Parisian bookseller diagnoses journalism as ‘piddling quotidianism,’ in which ‘the ephemeral overwhelms the permanent, the classical.’²⁸ A related diagnosis appears in ‘Nine A.M.’ (1924), where the journalist Ronnie Galt objects to the ‘beastly’ condition of contemporary journalism, with his own report on the war in Smyrna placed in the same issue as a piece glorifying capital punishment.²⁹

Daily middlebrow journalism was also the mainstay of O’Nolan’s income and activity as a writer for most of his adult life, and his main source of income after his departure from the civil service in 1953, after which he syndicated his columns in regional newspapers such as the Sunday Dispatch and the Nationalist and Leinster Times and wrote for the Guardian.³⁰ O’Nolan had entered the pages of the Irish Times in October 1940 with a satirical column, initially written in Irish, which became known as Cruiskeen Lawn and was published under the name Myles na gCopaleen. The column lasted for twenty-six years. Although not intended for ‘mass consumption,’ the circulation of the newspaper during the period the column appeared reached 25,500 daily readers, mostly Dublin’s professional classes.³¹ Such was the popularity of the column that Myles na gCopaleen became one of Ireland’s best-known literary figures. Internationally, he was praised by British post-Surrealists like Alex Comfort in the 1940s and profiled in Time magazine in 1943.³² The persona of Myles was used to launch a novel in Irish, An Béal Bocht, in 1941, two plays and a sketch in 1942–43, a bilingual edition of the columns in 1943, numerous radio appearances (often at Christmas), and even an advertising campaign for a brand of mattresses.³³

The extensive media careers of Huxley and O’Nolan left them in no doubt of the dangers of mass-produced culture as a technology of memory and transmission. According to Thamus in the Platonic myth, writing poses as a tool to improve the state of knowledge and education by aiding our memories, but, in fact, writing acts only as a ‘reminder,’ recording a semblance that is on one level inscrutable or ‘alien’ to us, and thus risks replacing the individual capability for memory with the delusion of knowledge, an investment in a trace that only points to the real content of knowledge. Stiegler extends a ‘pharmacological’ understanding of all technology that codifies, records and transmits information: he describes a process of ‘grammatization,’ beginning with the codification of mental images in cave paintings and leading to the fully automated production of traces via modern digital tracking networks, that now threatens us with a fully ‘automatic society.’³⁴ Adapting Husserl’s understanding of music, Stiegler describes broadcast technologies as ‘industrial temporal objects’ which produce simultaneous subjective experiences on a global level, producing ‘new forms of consciousness and collective unconsciousness.’³⁵ Stiegler argues that these mass-produced experiences lead to the ‘proletarianization’ of subjective and social life: its reconfiguration along the lines of the Fordian production-line society in Brave New World which is subject to ‘hyper-control’ established through a process of ‘generalized automatization.’³⁶ The longevity and success of their careers in journalism demonstrate that, when O’Nolan and Huxley critique the effects of the specific form of writing engendered by mass print technology and its interactions with the daily reader, they do so from the inside-out: as participants in the surging ecosystem of mass circulation print from the early to mid-twentieth century. In their roles as journalists and occasional writers for the radio and screen, Huxley and O’Nolan understand the pharmakon represented by popular print culture; and as satirists and critical thinkers, they are also impelled to disrupt the print apparatus, to refunction its premises rather than passively supply it. They do so in service of a goal: the restoration of the reader’s capacity for critical judgment which the automatic consumption of opinion-column prose tends to erode. To counteract the automatization process requires not the refusal to engage with the latest technological paradigm but the development of new ‘therapies’ and ‘therapeutics,’ put more simply by Stiegler as new ‘rules for taking care of the world’ in the scientific, artistic, legal, and spiritual realms, or, in simpler language still, discharging ‘our responsibilities.’³⁷ The pharmacological nature of print, broadcast, and digital media is handled by creating rules or responsibilities for users of this technology that preserve their capability for individual thought, a goal Stiegler describes as ‘de-automatization’: the re-imagining of work in ‘new social organizations’ that create and value knowledge rather than reduce it to only a semblance or delusion.³⁸

Huxley’s journalism of the 1930s demonstrates his understanding of the contradictions of technical progress in a mass media era. In the essay ‘Victory of Art over Humanity,’ he writes that ‘[not] nature, but, in the word’s widest sense, art—this is now man’s most formidable enemy; not matter but his own mind.’³⁹ Yet to draw from these statements the conclusion that Huxley was not in favour of technical progress would be entirely wrong. His response is shaped by the experience of the Great Depression, in which the entire system of market democracy seemed to collapse into chaos, leading to widespread hunger, and casting the planned systems emerging in the Soviet Union and fascist Europe in a more positive light. In David Bradshaw’s collection The Hidden Huxley, we see a Huxley who, as part of a group of Fabian Bloomsbury socialists, was an exponent of a ‘samurai caste’ of global economic planning, of population control; in other words, a technocrat par excellence. What are we to make of articles such as ‘Babies—State Property,’ published in the Evening Standard in May 1930 and republished as ‘Has the Family Outlived Its Usefulness?’ in the Times of India in February 1931, in which Huxley argues that in ‘two or three generations’ the family will have ceased to exist, and its ‘decease will go unmourned’?⁴⁰ Or his comment to the journalist Alan Campbell Johnson in 1935 that with Brave New World his sympathies were not with John Savage, nor with ‘the ideal of conditioned stability,’ but ‘with neither’; Huxley believed instead, according to the interview, that ‘some mean between the two is both desirable and possible and must be our objective.’⁴¹

Similarly, Huxley’s contempt for mass printing and mass reading should not be confused with an anti-modern attitude to writing itself. Huxley felt that print was a far superior means for governing humanity than the speeches he encountered in a British Parliament which either bored the audience senseless or convinced them on the basis of ‘oratory’, not ‘the intrinsic soundness’ of the argument.⁴² For Huxley, no technology is good or bad: all technology can produce either improvements or harm depending on how it is used. The mass dissemination of romantic novels harms the population by modifying consciousness along Stieglerean lines: producing deluded and unhappy individuals.⁴³ In parliament, however, print is a remedy for the harm caused by emotive but semantically empty oratory.

Huxley’s logic extends from print technology to scientific knowledge more widely. In Science, Liberty and Peace (1946), he draws an explicit distinction between theoretical science, the disinterested pursuit of understanding, and its application in the service of industrial, military, or governmental power.⁴⁴ Pure research, in this account, represents the pharmacological ‘remedy’: the expansion of human cognitive capacity through the externalisation of knowledge in reliable tertiary retentions. Applied science, when deployed in the interest of profit or state control, risks becoming ‘poison’: a technology whose products diminish rather than extend the autonomy of those subjected to them. Huxley dramatises this problem in After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939), where the scientist Dr Obispo’s research into cellular longevity is commandeered by the oligarch Joe Stoyte as a technology of personal immortality.⁴⁵ Huxley’s distinction between the theoretical and the applied mirrors the pharmacological logic of the essay’s broader argument: no technology is inherently good or bad, but the conditions of its application determine whether it functions as remedy or poison for those in its field of influence.

Readers of Cruiskeen Lawn will recognise in Huxley’s statement about parliamentary prose the tone of Myles na gCopaleen’s attack on the nature of oratorical miscommunication in the Irish lower house, Dáil Éireann.⁴⁶ O’Nolan recognised the harms of written language and the psychological damage it had done to the population but also saw the promise of print culture as a means of influence and reform. One example of Myles’s attempt to intervene in the rules governing printed text is his attempted reform of Irish spelling and typeface for the third edition of An Béal Bocht.⁴⁷ O’Nolan set the scene for his simplified Irish spelling system in a two-part article for the magazine Comhar, published in October 1957 and March 1958, where he proposes reforms to Irish spelling, including measures such as eliminating double letters.⁴⁸ These orthographic proposals and his adapted version of Times New Roman for the Irish language were implemented in the edition of An Béal Bocht published by Dolmen in 1964. The edition and its inserted ‘Publisher’s Note,’ which explains the justification for O’Nolan’s ‘Cló nua-Rómhánach,’ stand as a testament to his belief that he could bring ‘clarity and economy’ to Irish-language print culture by modifying its underlying rules: ‘Since 1571,’ runs the ‘Publisher’s Note’ included in the 1964 edition and almost certainly authored by O’Nolan himself, ‘over twenty different Gaelic typefaces have been made. In attempting to be “different” and in drawing inspiration from bastard sources, most of these have failed in their essential purpose [of communicating clearly].’⁴⁹ O’Nolan subsequently suggested that Underwood Business Machines create a new typewriter based on his newly-minted typeface, venturing that the machine ‘may well cause a revolution in the presentation of Irish language material in print’ when it ‘comes to the notice of Government’ (the letter was positively received by Underwood’s Irish distributors).⁵⁰ O’Nolan, like Huxley, critiques the technology of writing and mass print culture in a way that Stiegler would endorse: they understand its harms but seek therapies within the technological paradigm rather than resisting it wholesale.

Refunctioning the opinion column

‘Refunctioning’ (or functional transformation) is a translation of Bertolt Brecht’s term ‘Umfunktionierung’, which means challenging the media production apparatus—everything from its technical equipment, its funding model, and its mode of presentation and marketing, to its management of the audience—through our intervention in it. Walter Benjamin argues that Brecht ‘was the first to make of intellectuals the far-reaching demand not to supply the apparatus of production without, to the utmost extent possible, changing it in accordance with socialism.’⁵¹ Benjamin uses the example of the subversion of the norms of artistic production in Dadaism as his primary example of refunctioning. The Dadaist montage reveals the constructed nature of representations in artworks when they are placed into contact with reality:

The revolutionary strength of Dadaism consisted in testing art for its authenticity. A still life might have been put together from tickets, spools of cotton, and cigarette butts, all of which were combined with painted elements. The whole thing was put in a frame. And thereby the public was shown: Look, your picture frame ruptures time; the tiniest authentic fragment of daily life says more than painting. Just as the bloody fingerprint of a murderer on the page of a book says more than the text.⁵²

Brecht’s ideas provide a useful framework for understanding O’Nolan,⁵³ as well as Huxley. As we have seen, Huxley and O’Nolan were prolifically involved with the aspect of print media production that most crowds in on consciousness: the articles in newspapers and magazines which are consumed automatically as a supplement, a substituted version of auto-affection that acts as a support for everyday existence. Both writers understand everyday print consumption to divest authors and readers of their autonomy, to make thought automatic. To intervene in that media apparatus requires of intellectuals, in Benjamin’s conception of Brechtian refunctioning, to undertake to change it in some way. In the genre of the opinion column, Huxley and O’Nolan achieve this transformation through a technics of literary style: a manipulation of the medium that changes our usual response to the journalistic media object.

Benjamin turns to John Heartfield and other Dadaists to define Brechtian refunctioning: in the example above, the act of refunctioning involves placing materials in a frame to show how the smallest ‘fragment of daily life’ can disrupt the artistic image.⁵⁴ I suggest that, in Huxley and O’Nolan, the method of refunctioning is to unsettle the frame which the printed page presents. There are innumerable examples in Cruiskeen Lawn where the typical frame for journalistic writing is brought into view, questioned, or repurposed. For the opinions printed in the daily paper to become our own, they rely on the stability newspapers cultivate as the voice of a certain demographic. Yet as Myles, O’Nolan is simultaneously the professional man about Dublin, a roving reporter, an irascible opinion peddler, the erudite cultural snob and educator, and the man in the pub frowning at such displays of erudition.

I will use just one example from a column published during the Second World War—a time when certain freedoms and entertainments were still available in Dublin, a neutral city thronged with emigré artists, visiting artists, and even quantum physicists such as Erwin Schrödinger, who came to join Dublin’s Institute of Advanced Studies (which specialised in the unusual combination of medieval Irish and subatomic physics) on the invitation of Eamon de Valera.⁵⁵ This thriving cerebral scene is what inspires Myles to begin a skit in which the usual frame for an opinion piece as a piece of social reportage, a genre which in the Irish Times was represented by ‘An Irishman’s Diary,’ often written by its editor R. M. Smyllie under the pseudonym ‘Nichevo,’ is inverted and demolished:

People who do not live in Dublin (or, living there, keep clear of the ‘intellectual’ rat-runs) would find it very hard to credit the extraordinary guff that passes for conversation when a couple of beards and corduroys get together. It is very funny. It is so good that it should be recorded. In fact, it is being recorded—by me and my stool-pigeons. Today I inaugurate a feature unique in the annals of Irish journalism. I print below one of the best of these spiels that has come to my notice. With it I give the reader my categorical assurance that it is genuine. It has not been added to or altered in any way; the words are given exactly as they were spoken. Stand clear!⁵⁶

Myles claims here to be a documentary journalist, and, indeed, at the same time, he was writing social realist pieces for Sean O’Faolain’s magazine the Bell.⁵⁷ Yet the pained assertion of the authenticity of the extract alerts us to the likelihood that it must be, in fact, completely made up. We are called to question the reportage of daily life inherent in the opinion piece: are journalists reporting on reality or shaping it?

The performance is so compellingly erudite in its subject matter that we are called to question its framing on several levels. Not only is the reported conversation too ridiculous to be documentary; it is also worked too convincingly to be a total fake:

I remember when we thrilled in retrospect to the bizarre adventure of quattrocento ballistics and thought of Leonardo as the spiritual father of Nobel and Maginot! […] Then you get that gigantic efflorescence of tectonic virtuosity round the Ile-de-France—I can still recall the ecstasy in which I first saw the west facade of the glorious little Church of Saint Dagobert sana Culotte (corner of the Rue des Grues Nues); there the joyful old masons had so done their work, each stone fitted into its neighbour so exquisitely, each union worked so independently, so proudly, yet with such true Gallic sympathy, such Anglo-Saxon collaboration that (irresistibly reminded of Vlacsz’ ‘Waterworks’ quintet) (Bé-mol, No. B36, ‘L’ ’41) I cried out: ‘See! They are singing! Singing! Singing!’⁵⁸

The display of international cultural knowledge, including the detailed geography of Paris, alludes to the tone often adopted in the arts and reviews pages of the Irish Times or in its Times Pictorial supplement, signalling a display (or an attempt to rival a display) of Anglo-Irish cultural capital. The style may seem verbose and florid to modern ears, but it trends closely to the tenor of other cultural commentary in the Irish Times. In 1946, for example, Donat O’Donnell signs off a book review by describing Albert Camus’s The Outsider as ‘just one of a myriad luminosities in the decay of the most intelligent nation the world has even seen.’⁵⁹

The passage by Myles concludes by further playing with the framing of the reportage:

Now!

If any reader can recall having ever heard anything to beat that, let him or her write to me and tell me. Such things should not be kept in secret for selfish pleasure. It is no use, however, inventing speeches that were never said, because a child could tell the genuine article from any concocted substitute. This is the sort of thing that just can’t be faked. The real thing rings like a silver bell and shines like gold.

I showed the gem above to a butty of mine. His comment was: “‘Eist le glór na h-óinsigh agus gheobhair Braque!” Those who have sufficient education to understand will admit that this is neat.⁶⁰

Here, Myles pays a backhanded compliment to his audience by insisting their own tonal judgment is the guarantor of the veracity of his reportage: ‘this is the sort of thing that just can’t be faked. The real thing rings like a silver bell and shines like gold.’ Here, the truth-claim of journalism is reduced to something inherent in the qualities of the language it uses—and the audience are reduced to the level of having to either nod along in agreement or admit their own ignorance.

This tactic, bamboozling and effectively coercing audiences through a wealth of emotive embellishment, is exactly the problem with political oratory that Huxley shares in his pessimistic early 1930s piece about parliamentary oratory discussed above. The ‘real thing’ that hides, presumably behind the veneer of journalist prose, is revealed more or less transparently to be, as Joseph Brooker has said of the Cruiskeen Lawn columns themselves, a ‘function of style.’⁶¹ The end of the column explains that its content has already been reported to a friend, probably O’Nolan’s collaborator and reader Montgomery, prompting the witty riposte, ‘Listen to the voice of the fool and you will get Braque.’ This adaptation of the proverb ‘listen to the sound of the river and you will get a fish’ further compounds and problematises the journalistic frame. This closing element thus refunctions the editorial or diary piece to alert us to the danger of action on the street following ‘what you read in the paper.’ In this case, what supposedly happens in the street is now being fabricated in the paper but only so that it may be heard, as if anew, in the street. Myles reorganises our system of apprehending the truth-value of the language by openly repositioning the veracity of its claims as a function of its quality as prose, rather than using rhetoric and stylistics to lend truth-value to claims more tacitly. As Benjamin remarks in the quotation above on the significance of breaking frames via the use of reality fragments in the collage/montage method for pictorial art, the artist’s manoeuvre is a means of ‘testing art for its authenticity.’⁶² This move is precisely what Myles undertakes. The ideological content of an editorial viewpoint that might otherwise seep automatically into the mind is restored by this ambivalence to the status of a non-integratable remnant.

The use of frames, tone, and style in O’Nolan to refunction the genres of the social diary and the editorial opinion column sheds light on some of Huxley’s most provocative work from the early 1930s, enabling us to understand it as the deliberate product of a mind that sought to ‘dis-autonomize’ the minds of readers of print media. As mentioned above, one example is the article ‘Has the Family Outlived Its Usefulness?’ published in the Times of India on 19 February 1931 after first appearing as ‘Babies—State Property’ in the Evening Standard. This article argues that, facilitated by the modern education system that promotes self-realisation, the family is under siege, both because individuals are increasingly valuing the kind of individual self-expression and self-realisation that large families make impossible, and because the statecraft of ‘advanced democrats’ finds it an obstacle. The problem is that small families cannot act as a simulation of the world in miniature like a throng of siblings can. Instead, nations are turning to forms of artificial families: the orthodoxy of ‘advanced people,’ Huxley claims, is that ‘the family system will be abolished altogether and that the professional educator, paid by the State, should take control from earliest infancy. Indeed, this view threatens to become the orthodoxy of the modern democratic State.’⁶³ He turns to the more authoritarian example of the Soviet Union to show the inevitability of a state-controlled childhood: ‘[with psychologists] having shown the enormous importance in every human existence of the first years of childhood, the State will obviously try to get hold of its victims as soon as possible.’⁶⁴ Huxley walks an unusual tightrope between contrasting positions as he sombrely informs the reader that there are ‘Changes Ahead’ and that the ‘process of standardisation’ will begin at the very moment of birth.⁶⁵ First, he suggests that the threat to the family is a temporary product of circumstances:

both the individual and the family are in for a very bad quarter of an hour. That they will emerge again when the danger has passed I have no doubt.

Individuality is something that has grown and waned and grown again throughout recorded history; and the family relationships have always provided such a variety of important psychological satisfactions that it seems impossible that human beings can ever consent to dispense with them permanently.⁶⁶

Having supplied the caveat that the family is unlikely to disappear completely from the human evolutionary scene, Huxley changes tack:

For the moment, however, there seems to be no doubt that the family is on the decline. The institution is disliked, as I have shown, both by the self-conscious individuals and also by the advanced democrats who are the enemies of anything that stands in the way of social solidarity.

Against this double assault the family cannot stand. A single generation has already profoundly modified the character of the institution.

In two or three more generations from now it will be unrecognisable; it will perhaps have ceased to exist. But as nobody with a personal experience of family life will then be alive its decease will go unmourned and probably almost unnoticed.⁶⁷

Is Huxley seriously suggesting that an institution recognisable in one form or another throughout recorded human history will disappear ‘almost unnoticed’? The tone here is uncertain because the frame is uncertain. It is presented as a factual statement, but the argument is outrageous; too unsettling to pass as documentary reportage. Huxley openly contradicts himself by simultaneously suggesting that the family ‘will emerge again when the danger has passed’ yet concludes with the thought that ‘in two or three more generations from now it will be unrecognisable; it will perhaps have ceased to exist.’

Huxley’s ambivalent attitude towards the family, which may have some basis in his own difficult childhood experiences, also shifted in his lifetime.⁶⁸ He mollified the total destruction of the family in Brave New World, where babies are grown in vitro and the very words ‘mother’ and ‘father’ are taboo, with a more utopian reform of the family in Island (1962), where in Pala it becomes a voluntary formation via the use of ‘mutual adoption clubs’: parenting groups of ‘fifteen to twenty-five assorted couples’ in which children are free to leave their homes and spend time with the ‘deputy’ parents if conflicts arise at home. The family has not quite been abolished by the state in the island of Pala, but by means of the state, it is still, to borrow the term Huxley uses in 1930–31, ‘unrecognisable’ when compared to the conventional recipe described as a ‘sexually inept wage-slave […,] one dissatisfied female […,] two or […] three small television-addicts’ who we ‘marinate in a mixture of Freudism and dilute Christianity’ and ‘bottle up tightly in a four-room flat.’⁶⁹

The frame for this article is thus shifting behind the scenes: is Huxley, out of desperation, propagandising for the necessity of Soviet-style state control (we know he made remarks to this effect)?⁷⁰ Or is he satirising these very arguments, anticipating the attack on some of his own ideas in Brave New World and thus defending a form of freedom for the expression of family ties? The reader is left uncertain. The lesson: the pundit is to be seen not as a source of authority but rather as systematically unreliable. In Huxley’s hands, as in those of O’Nolan, the opinion column is refunctioned from a genre which invokes its own conventions to make claims for moral certainty to a polyvocal performance which raises new questions.

Myles’s refunctioning of the genres of print journalism is nowhere more compressed or more explicit than in the recurring ‘Catechism of Cliché’ features of Cruiskeen Lawn, one of which appeared on 3 December 1942 under the title ‘Béarla Marbh’ (Dead English/langauge).⁷¹ The connection between cliché and print is not metaphorical but etymological. In the vocabulary of the nineteenth-century compositor, a cliché was a cast-metal stereotype plate—a mould produced from a forme of set movable type so that a frequently-occurring phrase could be reproduced in a single impression without the labour of resetting each individual character. The cliché is language frozen into metal. It is the typographic embodiment of Stiegler’s ‘generalised automatization’: a tertiary retention so absorbed into the machinery of the press that it bypasses individual judgment at each stage of its production and consumption. The cliché is a semblance of meaning, just like the markings that stand in for thought and wisdom in the Socratic myth. When Myles titles his section ‘Béarla Marbh,’ he names this condition exactly. These are phrases whose living connection to meaning has been killed by the printing press itself, fossilised in the cliché-plate and circulated as though they were still capable of referring to the world.⁷²

The Catechism—which opens with a pointed joke at the expense of the Gaelic Revival’s national mythology, ‘To what solitary personality are all the family Gaelic-speakers? / To a man’—proceeds to exhume these fossilised metaphors one by one, submitting each to a literalising interrogation that forces the buried image back into view. The catechistic form is itself a refunctioning of a familiar print genre: the religious question-and-answer format, intimate to Irish readers through the Catholic catechism absorbed in primary education, is repurposed as an instrument of linguistic vivisection. Each exchange in the column compels the reader to register the strangeness of the dead metaphor they have been consuming automatically:

To what obscure cardiac shellfish is heat imparted by the sight of the national flag flying over the Old House in College Green?

It warrums the cockles of me heart.

What negative ossification does a dacent man make about doing a pal a good turn?

No bones.

What bisected cerebral phenomenon have I to shut up? Come on, that’s an easy one.

You don’t know?

½ a mind.

In what non-downward condition of being tapped am I sometimes to be found?

I am knocked up.

What mysterious cipher am I not up to on such occasions?

The mark (God save it).⁷³

Where Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt deploys projected titles and interruptions to make the audience consciously recognise the social construction of what they are watching rather than surrendering to illusion, the Catechism interrupts the automatic consumption of the journalistic phrase and labels what it is: a ‘negative ossification,’ a ‘bisected cerebral phenomenon,’ an ‘obscure cardiac shellfish.’ The dead metaphor, which had operated as a tertiary retention without friction is restored, however briefly, to the status of an active perception: something to be thought about rather than automatically thought through. The reader is no longer the ‘passive print addict’ of O’Nolan’s earlier formulation but is forced into the position of the analyst.⁷⁴

Conclusion: Not a ‘Dichter’?

Robin Hull points out that Hermann Hesse felt that Huxley was brilliant and a writer of great significance but ‘clearly not a “Dichter”—an author whose works may lay claim to artistic and poetic greatness.’⁷⁵ This view has largely steered criticism away from analysis of Huxley’s stylistics and poetics.⁷⁶ This essay suggests that greater literary investigation of his prose begins to reverse that position. Journalistic style as it evolves in Huxley has potential as a locus of scholarly attention for understanding the ambivalences of what Huxley tells us about the way that culture, individuals, and technology can interact. Such an analysis can be conducted using tools developed in the study of the performances of his contemporary Brian O’Nolan, in his guise as Myles na gCopaleen for Cruiskeen Lawn. The same can be said of Huxley’s novels, where an analysis of prose style with the same scrutiny as we apply to O’Nolan’s novels would likely reveal the same degree of complexity. I have also argued that there is a purpose to such strategic ambivalence. For both writers print culture is a pharmakon: a recipe for both a dangerous supplement that saturates the population in automatic thinking and a potential remedy with the capability to re-establish independent thought. These manoeuvres are no less relevant today. The refunctioning of the media object, by generating consciousness of the automatising tendencies of communications technology, continues to hold the potential to jolt us into thinking more intentionally in a fully algorithmic society where content is produced automatically and consumed on our behalf by devices that, like the cackle of the laughter track in a bad TV comedy, try to do the experiencing for us.⁷⁷

Competing Interests

The author was one of the guest editors of this special issue but was not involved in the blind peer review or acceptance process.