Introduction

At the opening of Flann O’Brien’s first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds, his unnamed student narrator tells us that the collection of books on his washstand contains works ranging from ‘those of Mr Joyce to the widely read books of Mr A. Huxley, the eminent English writer,’ so it makes sense that the novel’s famous manifesto or ‘explanation’ of its literary method should in fact be read through Huxley as well as Joyce.¹ There is an ironic edge to O’Brien’s designation ‘eminent:’ the student narrator positions Huxley as the kind of literary authority whose assumptions O’Brien’s novel will proceed to subvert. However, these authorities – Huxley as well as Joyce – were shaping influences as well as satirical targets: there is an underacknowledged dialogue between the key themes of Huxley and O’Nolan’s work. To explore that dialogue, the present article charts the trajectory of Huxley’s development as a novelist as a context for Huxley’s influence on At Swim-Two-Birds. We first suggest, for example, that certain elements of the passage known as O’Nolan’s literary manifesto likely owe their origin to Huxley’s attacks on the portrayal of unitary, uniform characters as unreal, deceptive and dangerous. Secondly, on a structural level At Swim-Two-Birds can productively be read as a synthesis of literature, philosophy and science which responds to Huxley’s vision for a novel that might be socially useful (and the didactic poetics of Bertolt Brecht, by which we mean Brecht’s programme of ‘epic theatre,’ designed to prevent emotional absorption and encourage critical reflection, we suggest, are a context that Huxley and O’Nolan have in common).² Thus, this essay seeks to go beyond the existing comparisons to demonstrate more decisively that the metafictional methods of Huxley, whose work engages in systematic self-reflection on literary method as part of its own practice, represent a key frame for the study of O’Nolan, revealing a perspective on the uses and abuses of the modern novel distinctive to both writers.³

Four connecting ideas run through the analysis that follows. The first is Huxley’s theory of literature as a function of the human mind-body, drawing on the typologies of Ernst Kretschmer, Carl Jung, and William Sheldon, which holds that the writer’s physiological constitution shapes the character of their output. The second is the ‘Bovaric angle,’ Jules de Gaultier’s concept (mediated through Huxley) of the irreducible gap between artistic illusion and reality, which Huxley makes central to his critique of the novel.⁴ The third is metafiction, understood following Patricia Waugh as ‘fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.’⁵ The fourth is the novel as synthesis, Huxley’s programme of fusing fictional narrative with history, science and philosophy, and the parodic Fordist inversion of that synthesis in O’Brien’s literary manifesto.

Like Brian O’Nolan, whose family was filled with published writers and advanced intellectuals,⁶ Huxley (1894–1963) was born into a family of writers and literature critics, that had achieved fame in the British intelligentsia for two generations, starting with Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1896), whose masterful essays fill many volumes and, on his mother’s side, the eminent poet and critic Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) and Mrs Humphry Ward (1851–1920), the best-selling novelist. Huxley’s parents were both literature devotees; Leonard (1816–1933), who ran The Cornhill Magazine, a respectable literary journal, edited ‘grandpater’s’ essays, while his wife Julia (1862–1908) was one of the first women to study literature at Oxford. By the time Aldous left university during the First World War, his brother Julian (1887–1975) had already written two books on biology and would eventually be nearly as prolific as his brother Aldous.

Afflicted by an insidious eye infection as a teenager, Huxley abandoned a career as a scientist and followed in his mother’s footsteps as an undergraduate student of English and French literature. He read widely as soon as his eyesight partially revived and his understanding of literature is far from myopic. It is humbling to recall the vast swathes of world literature which Huxley perused during his lifetime in English, French, Italian, German and Spanish, not to mention Latin and Greek. Literary references abound throughout in his works and present a salutary and stimulating challenge to contemporary readers.

As a young poet and critic, Huxley entered the Bloomsbury literary world and the Garsington circle presided over by Lady Ottoline Morrell, where he mixed with Virginia Woolf, Bertrand Russell, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. His first novel, Crome Yellow (1921), was a satirical roman à clef that mercilessly lampooned this world, establishing him as a writer of formidable satirical intelligence. His fame extended well beyond the London literary scene: Point Counter Point (1928) and Brave New World (1932) brought him international celebrity, and by the time O’Brien was writing At Swim-Two-Birds in the late 1930s, Huxley was firmly part of the reference set for Irish as well as English writers. As Pádraig Ó Méalóid documents in this issue, Point Counter Point was among the first publications banned in 1930 under the Censorship of Publications Act (1929), which would have increased its appeal to young and daring Irish writers. Huxley had launched The Palatine Review, a literary periodical, while still at Oxford; after the war, he worked as a staff writer for The Athenaeum under John Middleton Murry, reviewing an extraordinary range of contemporary poetry and fiction. He was close friends with D. H. Lawrence, knew Katherine Mansfield and T. S. Eliot well, and his published letters and essays show a familiarity with Joyce’s work.⁷ Huxley reflected on literature as a critic, essayist and as a writer of fiction. This applies to his poetry, his short stories and his novels, which are peopled with men (and on occasion ladies) of letters of various kinds who share their thoughts on literature with the readers and on occasion make up their own fiction within Huxley’s fiction. Collectively, Huxley’s works can also be seen as a bildungsroman tracing Huxley’s own development as a writer and literary thinker, as James Hull demonstrates in his ground-breaking Aldous Huxley, Representative Man,⁸ and Jerome Meckier in Aldous Huxley, From Poet to Mystic.⁹

As a young writer, Huxley was reacting against both the narrow goals of the ‘art for art’s sake’ movement and the demands of high modernist obscurity; he was reaching towards a literature of ideas that could encompass the full intellectual life of its age, whether scientific, philosophical, musical or psychological, without sacrificing satirical energy or readability. Steeped in a sense of life’s ineluctable dichotomies, Huxley’s poetry is as multi-voiced and dissonantly contrapuntal and polyphonic as his early novels.¹⁰ With their fusion of fictional prose and essay, Huxley’s novels reintroduced philosophy into English literature, as William Butler Yeats put it, and made a stand against the aestheticism of Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater. Huxley aimed to be more than just beautiful or witty (or ugly and grotesque in an interesting way) and convey practical meaning. Huxley’s privileging of meaning in literature coloured all of his fiction and gave English satire a new direction in the 1920s, while evolving a new literary synthesis of genres through his novel of ideas, which combined the novel with the essay. He also shaped the course of utopian literature in the 20th century more than any of his contemporaries. Brian O’Nolan’s At Swim-Two-Birds is a product of this influence and should, this essay suggests, be seen through the lens of Huxley’s evolving methods and published opinions.¹¹ The ‘explanation’ of the narrator’s ‘own work’ in At Swim-Two-Birds, often read as a form of literary manifesto, represents an echo, development and parody of key tenets absorbed from Huxley’s fiction, namely: the novel is too often guilty of a false realism, ‘frequently inducing the reader to be outwitted in a shabby fashion and caused to experience a real concern for the fortunes of illusory characters.’¹² The alternative approach to character development in fiction, pursued by Huxley and exaggerated into parody by O’Nolan, is to dispense with its illusions altogether and pursue instead the representation of fragmented existences composed of arrangements of experiences and views, alongside juxtaposition of different styles.

Both writers play at the more ludic and accessible end of modernism, foregrounding satire and laugh-out-loud humour over prose that requires footnotes and exegesis. Huxley’s earlier works are imbued with a philosophy of meaninglessness which mercilessly punctures the values and dogmas of the pre-war British world and its faith in Anglicanism, the Empire, and the triumph of civilisation through economic and technological progress. The sense of meaninglessness is coupled with the protagonists’ longing for meaning. Cynics such as Mr. Scogan in Huxley’s first novel, Crome Yellow, for instance, come across as lacking in appeal. While O’Nolan’s novels cannot be straightforwardly described as a quest for meaning, they belong in the category of the disillusioned interwar satire shaped by Huxley. Just as the longing for meaning reverberating between the lines was overlooked by many of Huxley’s earlier readers and reviewers, who mistook him just for an enfant terrible devoid of moral values, the idea that serious questions about the construction of meaning were at stake in the play of At Swim-Two-Birds briefly flickered in early essays on O’Nolan before asserting itself more prominently in accounts from that of Keith Hopper onwards.¹³

Both writers also work within what Northrop Frye identified as the Menippean satirical tradition: a mode of writing that mixes genres, discourses and registers to expose the pretensions of systematic thought and cultural authority.¹⁴ As M. Keith Booker has demonstrated, Bakhtin’s framework for Menippean satire illuminates O’Brien’s fiction with particular force,¹⁵ and it applies with equal productivity to Huxley’s satirical novels of the 1920s, above all Crome Yellow, in which house-party dialogue, philosophical digression and embedded narratives combine in a manner directly analogous to the orchestration of voices, styles and generic registers in At Swim-Two-Birds. Both novels can also be read as romans à clef of their respective milieus, sharing generic features with the interwar satirical fiction of Evelyn Waugh and Wyndham Lewis. In a recent conference paper, Joseph Brooker has characterised the dialogue between Crome Yellow and At Swim-Two-Birds as fundamental to both novels’ formal strategies and satirical politics.¹⁶

Beginning with Those Barren Leaves, Huxley’s satire is increasingly undercut by mysticism. Mysticism does not cancel the satire but reframes it, since mysticism posits not cynical nullity but a transcendent unity beyond the reach of ordinary conceptual understanding. A mystical satire replaces the de Sadean and Nietzschean nihilism from the mid-1930s onwards, starting, obliquely, with Helmholtz Watson’s Wordsworthian poetry in Brave New World, and more explicitly with Eyeless in Gaza.¹⁷ Literature is put at the service of spirituality and social reform. The turn to mysticism is accompanied by a commitment to pacifism, and, from 1937 onwards, political aims such as decentralism, ecology and sustainability. The novel Time Must Have a Stop is used to present a co-ordinating philosophy based on a ‘nobler hypothesis’ – nobler, that is, than cynicism.¹⁸ Indeed, ‘The Minimum Working Hypothesis’ of Time Must Have a Stop becomes the blueprint for The Perennial Philosophy. In the works following Brave New World, Huxley continues to dispel illusions through satire, retaining much of his humour from the 1920s, while simultaneously committing to a moral duty to better the lot of mankind. To a certain extent, O’Nolan also turned to large-scale social questions in the fiction of the 1960s, The Hard Life, The Dalkey Archive and Slattery’s Sago Saga, reflecting his decades-long practice as a satirist and ethicist writing in the pages of The Irish Times.

On this political level, the English and Irish writers were also surprisingly aligned, perhaps because Huxley’s pacifism and anti-imperialism placed him closer to the Irish intellectual viewpoint than many other English figures: in letters, as Joseph LaBine observes, he expressed sympathies with Sinn Fein.¹⁹ As the Second World War drew to a close with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Huxley felt that the aim of literature was to help prevent a global thermo-nuclear exchange by promulgating the metanoia of the individual and of humanity as a whole. O’Nolan did not develop his novelistic career enough in the 1940s to pursue such a transformation, since he didn’t return to novel writing until 1961. Few have argued so far that there is a turn towards mysticism in his two final novels.²⁰

However, the serious intent in Huxley’s madcap humour and satire sheds light on the importance of O’Nolan’s deeper held convictions about nonviolence, the threats posed by science and technology, and human dignity. He shared Huxley’s flavour of pacifism; for example, as Myles na gCopaleen he wrote the following condemnation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 20 August 1945:

What shall I say of the atomic grenade lately perfected in America and subsequently exported to Japan, duty free? It is an astounding achievement, not so much in physics as in the more familiar sphere of human folly [...] Why should this outsize barbarity be visited on Japanese? It cannot be because Japan was at war with America, since human rights remain intact even in war [...] No, it must be because the Japanese are considered unpleasant folk.²¹

Although many of his fellow Irish republican nationalists opposed the war, especially under a regime of official neutrality and censorship, O’Nolan stands out for his commitment to pacifism and defence of Japanese and German civilisation in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nuremberg. Huxley made both his second dystopia, Ape and Essence, and his final utopia, Island, serve the purpose of pacifism. As Huxley neared the end of his life, he attached less importance to pure fiction and more to the essay and philosophical drama. If his dramatic works were not quite so successful (with few exceptions), his later essays established Huxley as one of the greatest writers and thinkers of his century. Island represents the culmination of Huxley’s shift from pure fiction to what might be called discursive philosophical fiction. The novel has much in common with great positive utopias such as Plato’s Republic or Thomas More’s Utopia. O’Nolan withdrew from writing novels entirely after his Irish-language An Béal Bocht (1941), perhaps dissuaded by the failure of his second book, The Third Policeman, to find a publisher. However, O’Nolan returned to fiction in a less experimental mode with The Hard Life (1961) and reintroduced more fantastic themes – time travel, apocalypse and the quest for theological truth – in The Dalkey Archive (1964).

Part of the originality of Huxley’s poetic notions stems from the fact that, in his view, literature is a function of the human mind-body. While it may seem general, this formulation is deliberately exclusive: it leaves out the Platonic, idealist traditions in which concepts and literary forms exist independently of any individual human being, such as the tradition of the Muse, of mathematical proportion, or of divinely inspired form. Huxley, like O’Brien’s exploration of the extended or ‘wide’ mind in The Third Policeman,²² roots ideas firmly in the mind-body, but allows for an expanded conception of that body: one that encompasses physiological, psychological and quasi-mystical levels of consciousness connected to the world at large. Huxley first embraced the systems of Ernst Kretschmer and C. G. Jung before adopting the typology of the American constitutional psychologist William Sheldon. As we can see in a letter to E. S. P. Haynes of 25 March 1945,²³ Huxley insisted that literature was based on constitution, even at the risk of casting doubts on his own abilities:

The fertile inventors and narrators and genre painters have all been rather burly genial fellows. Scott looked like a farmer. Balzac and Dumas were florid to the point of fatness. Dickens was athletic and had a passion for amateur theatricals. Tolstoy was an intellectual moujik. Dostoevsky was physically tough enough to come through imprisonment in Siberia. Conan Doyle was a barrel, Wells is a tub. Dear old Arnold Bennett was a chamber pot on spindly legs and Marcel Proust was the wreck of congenital sleekness.²⁴

In Sheldonian terms, great novelists were either endomorphs or mesomorphs or both; their centre of gravity was either in the body or the feelings or a blend of the two elements. As an extreme ectomorph or, in his own words, ‘an emaciated fellow on stilts’ living mostly in his head, Huxley was ‘[...] the wrong shape for a story teller and sympathetic delineator of character within a broad social canvas;’ accordingly, Huxley frequently affirmed that he was not a congenital novelist.²⁵ The association between novel-writing with physiological and constitutional characteristics is absorbed and parodied in At Swim-Two-Birds, in which, from the unnamed narrator who does most of his work ‘in his bedroom,’ to his creation, Dermot Trellis, the largely bed-bound novelist-tyrant who has ‘three separate suits of sleeping clothes’ and ‘white worthless legs,’ novelists are depicted as physically weak, pallid and prone to the temptations of alcohol (CN, 6, 28). O’Nolan, who is reported by his friend Niall Sheridan to have ‘thundered against’ European novelists as ‘layabouts from the slums of Europe, poking about in their sickly little psyches,’ seems to have enjoyed this play with the discourse of degeneration, and in particular the Lombrosian idea of the character of literary output as the product of the author’s congenital characteristics.²⁶

Both writers also question the legitimacy and autonomy of the novel as a distinctive form. Strictly speaking, according to Huxley, there is no clear divide between fiction and non-fiction, as he maintains in ‘T. H. Huxley as a Man of Letters.’²⁷ Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and Darwin’s Origin of Species are equally fictional in so far as they verbalise reality and distort it through conceptualisation, fitting immediate experience into the ancient stereotypes of knowledge. Huxley followed Bertrand Russell in viewing language as a virtual philosophy and literature as one of its products.²⁸ As will be discussed, this attitude to literature might be taken as a lens on the practice of O’Nolan, who uses fragmentary form in At Swim-Two-Birds and overweening footnotes in The Third Policeman to present an array of philosophical and scientific theories on equal footing with the novelistic narrative.

The Function of Literature

According to Huxley, the fundamental aim of literature – the study of man and nature – is akin to that of science: ‘The proper study of mankind is Man and, next to Man, mankind’s properest study is Nature – that Nature of which he is an emergent part, and with which, if he hopes to survive as a species, if he aspires to actualise the best of his individual and collective potentialities, he must learn to live in harmony.’²⁹ Literature differs from science not so much in its overarching aim but in the means it employs. In his preface to The Devil in the Flesh by Raymond Radiguet, Huxley makes a number of interesting observations about the nature of literature in general, and how it differs from other arts such as music:

Of all the arts, music is that which has the least connection with what we currently call reality; it is not a copy of anything in nature, gives no direct account of man’s relations with things outside himself. Like mathematics, it is an almost unadulterated product of the inner world. Literature, on the other hand, is an art primarily concerned with the relations existing between the inner and the outer world. It makes copies of things which are not in the soul, and a part at least of its substance is borrowed from the external world. This means that good literature cannot be written without first-hand experience of the relations between the soul and the world outside it.³⁰

Unfortunately for literature, it seemed to be even further removed from reality than scientific essays, which could at least lay claim to some degree of empirical verifiability. How could literature ever hope to express meaning and contribute to our understanding of reality, seeing as though it was locked into the confines of human language and the categories of human reason? This was not a question Huxley regarded as unanswerable. In On the Margin (1923), he had already argued for a poetry capacious enough to encompass the full intellectual life of its age, from scholastic philosophy to empirical science, while remaining grounded in what he called ‘passionate apprehension:’ the felt, rather than merely reasoned, grasp of ideas.³¹ Huxley’s approach thus seeks literature’s expansion rather than liberation from linguistic and rational constraints. The difficulties of literature in studying man were exacerbated by the fact that the multilayered human psyche presented insurmountable difficulties, as Huxley observes in Vulgarity in Literature, man is

a very unsatisfactory subject for literature. He is the inhabitant of a kind of psychological Woolworth Building; you never know – he never knows himself – which floor he’ll step out at tomorrow, nor even whether, a minute from now, he won’t take it into his head to jump into the elevator and shoot up a dozen or down perhaps twenty stories into some totally different mode of being.³²

Huxley is here referring not just to the different strata of the human mind-body, from ordinary self, the personal subconscious, the physiological intelligence and the deeper levels of the collective subconscious to man’s ultimate level, the Clear Light of the Void,³³ but also to the fact that the ordinary consciousness, within which we live, is constantly changing without our being aware of it. Writers who understood psychological reality better were faced with the choice of either misrepresenting human existence in a way that made sense or of showing it in all its profoundly disturbing anarchy. As most writers and their readers were unregenerate and unaware of their own psychological multiplicity, literature was more often than not an act of swindling which cultivated self-delusion and a false sense of reality. It was in the nature of artistic creation to

take a bit of the chaotic and irrational world of phenomena and deliberately shape it into something that has meaning; something possessing what reality never has, a definite outline, a beginning and an end. [. . .] Art and philosophy are transpositions of the vague melody of our experience into another key, the key of the humanly significant and the rationally explicable. In order to make this transposition, artists and philosophers resort (in all good faith and with the best intentions) to a form of intellectual swindling.

How was this achieved? Artists and philosophers simply excluded from their field of vision what did not fit in and replaced ‘the real by the appropriate.’³⁴ Literature was no exception; speaking with the French philosopher Jules de Gaultier (1858-1942) and with reference to Gustave Flaubert’s (1821-1880) masterpiece, Madame Bovary, Huxley called the discrepancy between artistic illusion and reality the Bovaric angle.³⁵ Unregenerate readers wrongly believed that they were blessed with unified and consistent personalities; consequently, they favoured literature featuring characters with unified and consistent personalities. Moreover, they enjoyed literature about unregenerate characters who suffered through crises and conflicts. Modern readers preferred criminals, rogues, and maniacs to gentle saints, who were also beyond their comprehension – a fact which accounted for the paucity of truly positive protagonists in world literature:

There are no completely healthy or completely grown-up good characters in imaginative literature. The Duke in Measure for Measure is a symbol. Dostoevsky’s Idiot is an epileptic. Dickens’s good characters are all infantile. Gorki’s Hermit is extravagantly eccentric. To represent a completely adult, healthy good man one must be adultly good oneself. And nobody who was not himself adultly good would understand what was being talked about if such a character were truthfully rendered. That is why all deeply good characters in imaginative literature have to be, as it were, diluted with weakness or eccentricity; for only on such conditions are they comprehensible by readers and expressible by writers.³⁶

O’Nolan’s manifesto reflects something of Bovaric critique of the novel when, although acknowledging both novels and plays as ‘pleasing intellectual exercises,’ he describes the novel as ‘inferior’ because, since it lacks the theatre’s ‘outward accidents of illusion,’ it results in readers being ‘caused to experience real concerns for the fortunes of illusory characters’ (CN, 31-2). At Swim-Two-Birds also parodically embodies Huxley’s observation that novelists trade on the desire of his readers for scandal and disgust (rather than depict good characters who would bore them) in the practices of his novelist-within-a-novel, Dermot Trellis. Trellis is writing a book about ‘sin and the wages attaching thereto’ but he ‘realizes that a moralizing book would not reach the public:’ only by providing his readers with the most salacious details of a plot involving rape and murder ‘that would show the terrible cancer of sin in its true light’ can he morally improve his readers (CN, 21).

Huxley overtly turned to mysticism with his novel Eyeless in Gaza and After Many a Summer, which provoked scathing criticism from one reviewer for sporting a spiritual guide, Mr. Propter, who was the most tedious character of English literature. The following comment by Huxley in his foreword to Maxim Gorki’s short stories in 1939,³⁷ the year After Many a Summer appeared, shows that he knowingly incurred the risk:

When writers attempt to portray a person who is both virtuous and grown-up, they generally succeed only in portraying a prig. Goodness combined with absurdity or mental defect is much easier to paint than goodness combined with intelligence. Not only do absurdity and mental defect facilitate the writer’s task; they are also reassuring for the reader. An adequate portrait of a grown-up virtuous person would probably make the beholder feel rather uncomfortable.³⁸

If one of literature’s main raisons d’être was to study man, bad literature failed to do so by furthering self-misunderstanding, while the greatest literary works enabled readers to achieve self-knowledge. The very worst literature gave rise not just to self-misunderstanding, but also to a warped perception of nature, as in the case of Shelley’s (1792–1822) ‘Ode to the Skylark.’ Rampion’s sarcastic remarks in Point Counter Point testify to Huxley’s own objections:

‘Do you remember the “Ode to the Skylark?” “Hail to thee, blithe spirit! Bird thou never wert!”’ Rampion recited with a ludicrous parody of an elocutionist’s ‘expression’. ‘Just pretending, just lying to himself, as usual. The lark couldn’t be allowed to be a mere bird, with blood and feathers and a nest and an appetite for caterpillars. Oh no! That wasn’t nearly poetical enough, that was much too coarse. It had to be a disembodied spirit. Bloodless, boneless. A kind of ethereal flying slug. It was only to be expected. Shelley was a kind of flying slug himself; and, after all, nobody can really write about anything except himself.’³⁹

Huxley levelled similar criticisms at Goethe (1749–1832), who ostensibly claimed, in the Chorus mysticus, at the end of the little-read second part of Faust, that all creation was an emblem of the Divine, revealing himself to be a bogus mystic. Huxley insisted that God was both transcendent and immanent. Nature therefore meant itself and was in no way symbolic.⁴⁰ Here there is perhaps not an unsurprising connection. O’Nolan describes working his way through Goethe’s Faust at university and wrote a Faustian play performed in 1943.⁴¹ The figure of Orlick in At Swim, the product of Trellis’s rape of Sheila Lamont, one of his own characters, represents a parody of the Homunculus in Faust Part II, the product of Faust’s intercourse with Helen of Troy.

The narrator’s ‘explanation’ of his method in At Swim-Two-Birds also rejects the authorly practice of writing characters with unified and consistent personalities, albeit on somewhat different grounds. O’Nolan parodies Huxley’s critique of the novel but also takes it in a different direction, inspired by Bertolt Brecht and Luigi Pirandello, by suggesting that not only do the practices of novelists such as Dermot Trellis cultivate illusory feelings in readers, they are unfair on the characters being represented in the novel: ‘It was undemocratic to compel characters to be uniformly good or bad or poor or rich. Each should be allowed a private life, self-determination and a decent standard of living.’⁴² The narrator suggests that the only ethically viable form for the novel is as a ‘self-evident sham, to which readers could regulate at will the degree of their credulity’ (CN, 21). This is essentially a Brechtian statement on theatre applied to the novel: intelligent reading requires that readers maintain a detachment from the events depicted, so that they may think critically about stories rather than be swept along by emotions.⁴³

O’Nolan’s manifesto, with the Brechtian play in mind, holds that ‘the novel was inferior to the play insofar as it lacked the outward accidents of illusion.’⁴⁴ Huxley held that drama was a less suitable medium for conveying ideas than the novel for the same reasons. While comedy was able to accommodate philosophy or political content to a limited degree, tragedy had little or no room for it. Writers were well advised to share philosophical insights through other channels: ‘As a medium for conveying important information and expounding significant ideas, the drama is not so effective as the essay, the treatise, or even the fictional narrative with digressions.’⁴⁵ For this reason, Huxley felt that plays generally failed to promote political causes and even great playwrights such as George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) were at bottom unsuccessful propagandists.⁴⁶ Huxley accords him the doubtful privilege of being the only literary luminary to survive alongside the religious deity of Henry Ford, who is also known as ‘Freud,’ in Brave New World. Huxley grew through his labours as a theatre critic into a critic of the form overall, and in an essay republished as part of Along the Road he establishes the idea that playwrights exploit actors to do much of the work for them: they set up a dramatic situation and require that actors do the emotional work of playing out its consequences for the audience (whereas novelists are forced to create every effect they wish to produce with their own words). This concern for players is the Huxleyan version of O’Nolan’s more extreme and absurd concern for the rights of characters themselves. In At Swim-Two-Birds the characters created by Trellis, like the actors in Pirandello’s play Six Characters in Search of an Author, refuse to play out the disgusting and scandalous situations he has set up and choose to turn their congenital appetite for violence and degradation on the puppet-master himself, Trellis, who they write into a trial and torture scene. The attachment generated by character-based narrative is a phenomenon both writers strive to transcend. If significant messages were less likely to travel on the stage, there were alternatives beyond the Huxleyan novel of ideas and philosophical satire. Huxley writes that:

philosophy is best expounded through a biography, real or fictional, or a historical narrative. The narrative doesn’t suffer from being made the centre out of which the philosophy radiates – indeed, it is actually enriched by its association with the general ideas. And the general ideas take on greater force through being concretized in, and illustrated by, a particular case history.⁴⁷

Huxley elaborates on this in his Paris Review interview: ‘I think that fiction and, as I say, history and biography are immensely important, not only for their own sake, because they provide a picture of life now and of life in the past, but also as vehicles for the expression of general philosophic ideas, religious ideas, social ideas.’⁴⁸ For this reason, Dostoevsky was ‘six times as profound as Kierkegaard,’ because he wrote fiction.⁴⁹ Of Huxley’s four major biographies, two – Grey Eminence and The Devils of Loudun – can be enjoyed as novels, while his account of the life of Maine de Biran, ‘Variations on a Philosopher,’ can be categorized as a philosophical essay.

For literature to be more than trivial or a drug for mass-stultification writers had to look for unusual uses of language, which, in the words of the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898) went beyond the language conventions of the tribe, either as word magic, the intimation of meaning between the lines, or – even more mysteriously – the poetry of silence. What Mallarmé says of the nature of lyric poetry, Huxley applies to all of literature and science. In Literature and Science Huxley observed that Mallarmé ‘advised’ the poet to ‘[scratch] out all words with a too specific reference to brute reality and concentrate on the words themselves and their relationships within the phrase and sentence.’⁵⁰ In both science and literature, language is arranged in a way that means more than it does in common parlance. These inter-relationships give specific meanings to words between the lines that don’t normally exist in everyday usage. In At Swim-Two-Birds, O’Brien transposes this aspiration into the comic register: the narrator’s claim that ‘a wealth of references to existing works would acquaint the reader instantaneously with each character’ parodies the ideal of synthesis as Fordist efficiency, reducing the visionary programme of Mallarmé and Huxley alike to a question of industrial economy of expression. However, there is a difference in approach; unlike scientists who strive for unambiguity, writers of literature go about their business

with the express purpose of creating a language capable of conveying, not the single meaning of some science, but the multiple significance of human experience, on its most private as well as on its more public levels. He purifies, not by simplifying and jargonizing, but by deepening and extending, by enriching with allusive harmonics, with overtones of association and undertones of sonorous music (79).

At his disposal the writer of fiction had a plethora of stylistic devices evolved by the greatest poets of many millennia. However, Huxley felt that none of these were necessarily sufficient in themselves. Technically perfect but soulless literature failed to achieve greatness and beauty. Huxley is describing not technically accomplished writing in general, but writing that achieves formal perfection without that ‘white magic,’ the intimation of universal significance between the lines, which distinguishes the greatest literature from the merely accomplished.

According to Huxley, exceptional works of literature employed a form of white magic, which filled the spaces between the lines with universal significance and beauty. Literature, in this sense, faced the task of repurposing language entirely:

In good literature – good, that is to say, on the private level – the blunt imprecisions of conventional language give place to subtler and more penetrating forms of expression. The ambition of the literary artist is to speak about the ineffable, to communicate in words what words were never intended to convey (95).

Huxley felt that literary fiction of the highest order was able to transcend itself and penetrate beyond the fictitious existence or the ordinary self to eternal reality. In that sense, the greatest poets paradoxically created non-fiction through fiction as a form of objective art. Poetry, and lyric poetry in particular, were better placed to achieve the ideal of intimating a level of experience above ordinary perception than prose, as we can tell from Huxley’s definition of the poet in the introduction to Texts and Pretexts:

The poet is, etymologically, the maker. Like all makers, he requires a stock of raw materials – in his case, experience. Now experience is not a matter of having actually swum the Hellespont, or danced with the dervishes, or slept in a doss-house. It is a matter of sensibility and intuition, of seeing and hearing the significant things, of paying attention at the right moments, of understanding and co-ordinating. Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. It is a gift for dealing with the accidents of existence, not the accidents in themselves. By a happy dispensation of nature, the poet generally possesses the gift of experience in conjunction with that of expression. What he says so well is therefore intrinsically of value.⁵¹

As Gerhard Wagner reveals, Huxley viewed the poet as ‘a prime ordering and synthesizing force.’⁵² Nevertheless, poetry was more limited in its scope than either the essay or the novel. Philosophy could only be assimilated if it was felt ‘with a kind of passion,’ and as immediately important to the poet as a personal relationship; the subject-matter of most of the greatest poetry was ‘death, love, religion, nature; the primary emotions and the ultimate personal mysteries’.⁵³ Poetry had much in common with the language of the majority of the mystics, who employed poetic devices such as symbols, ambiguity, the imagery of love poetry and the paradox or the non-sequitur, in a futile attempt to capture the ineffable. These attempts are ‘futile’ not because Huxley dismisses mysticism or poetry, but because the unitary knowledge they seek lies beyond language. This position is developed most fully in The Perennial Philosophy (1945), where Huxley argues that mystical experience across traditions points toward a non-verbal Ground of being that symbolic language can only approximate, never fully express.

The notion of literary fiction and poetry as a synthesis is parodied thoroughly in the ‘explanation’ in At Swim-Two-Birds’ manifesto, where the narrator declares that the route forward for the novel is as a grand synthesis, not on the grounds of mystical significance but on the basis of literary value reimagined in Fordist terms as economy of expression and apprehension – for the right class of readers:

The modern novel should be largely a work of reference. Most authors spend their time saying what has been said before – usually said much better. A wealth of references to existing works would acquaint the reader instantaneously with each character, would obviate tiresome explanations and would effectively preclude mountebanks, upstarts, thimbleriggers and persons of inferior education from an understanding of contemporary literature (CN, 21–22).

Although the vision of poetry and literary fiction as a synthesising force was a widespread conceit, preoccupation and problem for the high modernists and O’Nolan’s circle, it is worth considering the extent to which O’Nolan specifically responds to Huxley’s statements on the topic. In Huxley, O’Nolan would have found a figure who demonstrated an almost unrivalled level of insight into contemporary literature and, as he would’ve read in Brave New World, had thought through the implications of Fordism in depth.⁵⁴ The natural move, to O’Nolan’s kind of mind, was to bring these things together: to satirically apply Fordist principles as critical lens on the contemporary novel and a mode of metafictional discourse in his own novel. This merging of epistemic fields represents a response to Huxley which Huxley himself would doubtless have delighted in had he chanced to come across the novel.

Whereas in Brave New World, the controllers produce humans by the batch-load, tailoring their outputs scientifically to the needs of an idealised society, in At Swim-Two-Birds it is novelists who are rebranded as ‘psycho-eugenists,’ an entirely new disciplinary field invented in the novel to redescribe the craft of writing novels as the more amateurish and haphazard home-brewed science of breeding characters. The purpose is hypocritical: while framed as a moral quest, the details of the eugenic process reveal that such literary creation is pursued to make money by industrialising novel-writing in the manner of a tycoon (CN, 37). Although such pseudo-biological tyranny provides At Swim-Two-Birds with the framing for its orchestration of these characters’ rebellion, akin to the intellectual rebellion of Bernard Marx that precipitates the action of Brave New World, the depiction itself represents an evolution of the metafictional method anticipated by Huxley in the musings of Philip Quarles, the novelist at the heart of Point Counter Point.⁵⁵ The dialogue stops with O’Nolan’s response to Huxley, as far as we know, but the connection is significant for our overall understanding of metafiction’s development in the mid-twentieth century: its implications for how we read O’Nolan, Huxley, and literary modernism have only just begun to be understood.

Competing Interests

Tobias W. Harris is one of the guest editors of this special issue but was not involved in the blind peer review or acceptance process.