In the opening pages of Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow (1921) the reader encounters a scene of bicycles, uniformed men of authority, and a young man of literary/philosophical inclinations. The scene is strikingly familiar to readers of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (1967):

Denis jumped up, […] ran up the train towards the van.

“A bicycle, a bicycle!” he said breathlessly to the guard. He felt himself a man of action. The guard paid no attention, but continued methodically to hand out, one by one, the packages labelled to Camlet. “A bicycle!” Denis repeated. “A green machine, cross-framed, name of Stone. S-T-O-N-E.”

“All in good time, sir,” said the guard soothingly. […]

Denis’s man of action collapsed, punctured.¹

Having acquired his bicycle, Huxley’s young writer cycles past a rural landscape, one imbued with industry and eroticism:

The far-away blue hills, the harvests whitening on the slopes of the ridge along which his road led him, the treeless sky-lines that changed as he moved—yes, they were all good. He was overcome by the beauty of those deeply embayed combes, scooped in the flanks of the ridge beneath him. Curves, curves: he repeated the word slowly, trying as he did so to find some term in which to give expression to his appreciation. Curves—no, that was inadequate. He made a gesture with his hand, as though to scoop the achieved expression out of the air, and almost fell off his bicycle. What was the word to describe the curves of those little valleys? They were as fine as the lines of a human body, they were informed with the subtlety of art.²

The first passage’s emphasis on the bicycle – albeit one in which the young man insists on the bicycle’s importance while the figure of authority ignores it – together with the homophonic connection between ‘guard,’ the Irish garda and the evoked idea of a police officer, as well as the ‘puncture’ word play, collectively evoke The Third Policeman’s fixation on policemen and bicycles. The bucolic setting of the second passage is similarly suggestive of O’Brien’s novel, as it echoes the narrator’s movement through the Ireland reconstructed in his afterlife, with O’Brien’s unnamed narrator passing rural scenes with ‘white streaks of boulder and […] hills of rocky pasture stretching away into the distance up and down’.³ Even more provocatively, the sexual frisson that Denis experiences calls to the sexualised presentations of the bicycle in The Third Policeman: ‘I passed my hand with unintended tenderness – sensuously, indeed – across the saddle’.⁴

Denis has brought with him on his visit to Crome the first two chapters of a novel on the development of a sensitive young man – a novel much like Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) – but on hearing a fellow guest ridicule such books he destroys his work. Huxley’s Crome Yellow thus takes the place of the novel that Denis tried to write, but Crome Yellow replaces the earnest with the parodic, as it mocks the modern bildungsroman and casts a satirical eye on authorship as well as contemporary social relations. As such, not only is Crome Yellow a possible influence on The Third Policeman, but on At Swim-Two-Birds (1939). The narrator of O’Brien’s first novel is clearly a homage to Joyce’s protagonists, but Huxley’s Denis Stone potentially offers a model of ways to parody the yearning intensity of such young male writers.

We know that the student narrator of At Swim-Two-Birds has a number of books arranged above his washstand: ‘Each of them was generally recognized as indispensable to all who aspire to an appreciation of the nature of contemporary literature and my small collection contained works ranging from those of Mr Joyce to the widely read books of Mr A. Huxley, the eminent English writer.’⁵ Yet, as Germán Asensio Peral notes, there is no empirical proof that O’Brien read Point Counter Point (1928) before or after writing At Swim-Two-Birds, and I do not have definitive evidence that would suggest he read any of Huxley’s other novels, either before or after writing The Third Policeman.⁶ As we know, most of Huxley’s early novels were banned in Ireland, but formal bans or restrictions do not absolutely prevent readers from acquiring books they wish to read. As Tobias W. Harris notes, Huxley was being read by those in O’Nolan’s circle: Donagh MacDonagh describes shared enthusiasms for ‘Eliot and Yeats, Huxley, Proust and […] Joyce’.⁷ It seems probable that the banning of Huxley’s books would have only made them more interesting to O’Brien: as the student narrator of At Swim-Two-Birds had Huxley on his shelf, so too, I suggest, did O’Brien, whether covered in brown paper or hidden behind a catechism or on temporary loan from a friend.

Previous scholars have traced the connections between Huxley and O’Brien, with Anne Clissmann first offering the compelling argument that O’Brien followed Philip Quarles’ suggestions in Point Counter Point regarding the presence of novelists within novels and the structure of a book within a book: ‘Put a novelist into a novel. He justifies aesthetic generalisations […]. He also justifies experiment. But why draw the line at one novelist inside your novel? Why not a second inside his? And a third inside the novel of the second?’⁸ Peral, who has conducted a detailed comparison of At Swim-Two-Birds and Point Counter Point, notes the musical connections between the novels, but argues that the structural similarities are a stronger point of correlation than any theme.⁹ I concur that there are clear symmetries between At Swim-Two-Birds and Point Counter Point, but in this article I widen those connections to include The Third Policeman, with brief references to Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Eyeless in Gaza (1936). The structural links between the experimental forms of both authors are compelling, but I focus here on the claim that, for O’Nolan, Huxley provided a model of the ways scientific and medical themes could be incorporated into literary works, particularly those with a parodic focus.

Keith Hopper argues that Huxley was a ‘moral influence’ on O’Nolan, with both writers viewing science as a mode through which scientists attempt to access a ‘non-human truth.’¹⁰ For both Huxley and O’Nolan, the nature of these attempts, as well as the kind of truth they convey, bring scientists’ search for meaning in line with a Faustian betrayal of the self, of the kind we see in Lord Edward Tantamount in Point Counter Point, whose cruel refashioning of laboratory animals’ bodies is inimical to his humanity, and in the narrator in The Third Policeman, who commits his first crime of book theft and his final crime of murder for knowledge. Both men condemn themselves in their lust for understanding, reputation and ownership. Building on Hopper’s claim, I argue that Huxley’s ideas of social satire, his incorporation of scientific and medical engagement into literature, and the nature of his dystopias demonstrated ways for O’Nolan to incorporate medicine and science into satirical literary works, with Lord Edward’s theories of osmosis being particularly formative for The Third Policeman.

Jay Clayton has argued that Huxley’s satire ‘cuts in more than one direction,’ as he was a thinker who could readily parody ideas and disciplines that he valued.¹¹ This ability is, of course, a dominant characteristic of O’Nolan, particularly in his Myles na gCopaleen mode. One of the ideas Huxley parodied, Clayton posits, was that of the ‘modern synthesis.’ For scientists, the modern synthesis is the bringing together of evolution and genetics, but within the field of literary studies, Clayton claims that a major modern synthesis was the marrying of naturalism’s pessimistic realism with the idea of utopias to produce dystopian fiction. Dystopia, after all, ‘constructs a model society by extrapolating from the worst, not the best, features of the contemporary world’ to provide a bleak, warning fantasy.¹² In Huxley, Clayton argues, we see the modern synthesis of genetics and literature woven together to create a powerful writing of a scientific dystopia. The many forms of this synthesis in Huxley’s texts, I suggest, provided O’Brien with important models for the ways science, health and the body could be woven into literature in darkly satirical ways.

In this article I present Lord Edward’s obsession with osmosis in Point Counter Point as a suggestive prefiguring of O’Brien’s atomic theory. The cruel results of Lord Edward’s interests in osmosis push us to engage with the darker elements of The Third Policeman’s atomic theory. Atomic theory is a wonderful metaphor for identity and bodily integrity, it is a brilliant way to engage with the posthuman or nonhuman, it is a mode through which to encounter hybridity and invisible change, it is evidence of anxiety about borders and limits, and it evokes numerous epistemologies. But this article considers what we see when we draw on the medical satire of Huxley’s works and view atomic theory as a state of illness and infection. Huxley’s osmosis and O’Brien’s atomic theory are both modes of what we might call ‘static change,’ as they are concepts of difference produced through exchange and recycling rather than the creation of the fully new. Against their closed circuits we can consider the interests in eugenics and the management of new life that feature across Huxley’s writing and which are prominent in At Swim-Two-Birds.

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There is barely a scholarly work on O’Brien that does not make some passing reference to atomic theory. It has been linked to a diverse a range of interests, including theories of relativity,¹³ wave mechanics,¹⁴ immunology,¹⁵ queer desire,¹⁶ narrative form,¹⁷ Tristram Shandy’s hobby-horses,¹⁸ guerrilla warfare,¹⁹ influenza pandemics²⁰ and both mechanisation²¹ and anti-mechanist natural philosophy.²² The Third Policeman’s engagement with bicycles has also generated significant scholarship, which James Alexander Fraser has recently and admirably summarised.²³ In terms of health, Holly Connell Schaaf, Yaeli Greenblatt, Siobhán Purcell and Marion Quirici have conducted important work on bodies and disability in The Third Policeman.²⁴ But considering osmosis in Point Counter Point as a source of inspiration for the atomic theory of The Third Policeman emphasises its figuring in terms of illness and infection. Osmosis within popular use often refers to the gradual or unconscious assimilation of ideas, but within chemistry and biology the term names the process by which molecules of a solvent pass through a semipermeable membrane from the side of higher concentration to the side of lower concentration, so as to make the concentrations on the two sides of the membrane more nearly equal. As a social satire, Point Counter Point plays both with the general and scientific meaning of osmosis, deriding the unthinking adoption of mores and prejudices within society as well as excoriating a character’s scientific obsession with ideas of cellular movement and exchange, a movement that sounds very much like atomic theory.

In Point Counter Point the theory of osmosis is initially set against an Irish context, in such a way as might have caught O’Nolan’s eye. Lord Edward Tantamount is thinking dark thoughts about suicide, a mood triggered by his inability to care about politics. The specific political event he feels unmoved by took place on 18 April 1887, the day, as Huxley writes, that ‘the Times had published the forged letter, supposed to be Parnell’s, condoning the Phoenix Park murders.’²⁵ On 6 May 1882, members of the Irish National Invincibles fatally stabbed Lord Frederick Cavendish, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, and Thomas Henry Burke, the Permanent Under-Secretary. In 1887, letters purportedly by Charles Stewart Parnell but in fact by the journalist Richard Pigott were published in The Times, in an attempt by Pigott to destroy Parnell’s career. Although Parnell was exonerated and Pigott died by suicide, the murders and scandal derailed Home Rule. Lord Edward, then, takes the first step towards osmosis and the mantle of the mad scientist against the backdrop of complex, entangled Irish politics and Anglo-Irish relations. Specifically, the action is set against a scene in which, like atomic theory, external appearance is different to actual identity, as the scandal’s fake signatures said one name but revealed another, the hoax letters signified something very different to what they suggested, and shadowy, personal vendettas were concealed as international affairs.

As his contemporaries eagerly discuss Irish ingratitude and duplicity, Lord Edward falls into despair at his isolation from their passionate involvement. On his return home, however, he reads a piece by French physiologist Claude Bernard that moves from the ‘glycogenic function of the liver’ – a major discovery of Bernard’s – to the insistence that living beings are part of a great natural harmony:

The living being does not form an exception to the great natural harmony which makes things adapt themselves to one another; it breaks no concord; it is neither in contradiction to, nor struggling against, general cosmic forces. Far from that, it is a member of the universal concert of things, and the life of the animal, for example, is only a fragment of the total life of the universe.²⁶

Despite Bernard being most famous for his contributions to the concepts of homeostasis and the milieu intérieur (interior environment), which posit that the body’s internal environment is self-regulating and able to counter deficiencies in the surrounding environment, Lord Edward’s life is changed by his reading of Bernard in terms of the precise opposite: the body’s permeability and interconnectivity with its external environment.²⁷ At a point during which he felt cruelly separate from his fellow men, or more accurately, his fellow Englishmen, Lord Edward encounters a text that appears to insist on the interconnectedness of all.

Lord Edward interprets the article’s depiction of the energy exchange of the universe extremely literally: ‘Bits of animals and plants became human beings. What was one day a sheep’s hind leg and leaves of spinach was the next part of the hand that wrote, the brain that conceived the slow movement of the Jupiter Symphony.’²⁸ Huxley’s text expands upon this description of molecular transfer to give it a slower, more naturalistic bent, as the exchange is connected to the decomposition of bodies into the earth: the body of a musician becomes earth, which grows grass, which is eaten by sheep, which are in turn eaten by people and so on. But from this realist description Huxley emphasises Lord Edward’s excited imaginings: ‘Perhaps when I was at Vienna last year, I actually consumed a piece of Mozart’s substance. It might have been in a Wiener Schnitzel, or a sausage, or even a glass of beer. Communion, physical communion. […] Transubstantiation, cannibalism, chemistry. It comes down to chemistry in the end.’²⁹ It is difficult, for this reader at least, not to see such lines as strongly akin to a de Selbian view of science and the world, and as a strong foundation for the cellular transfer of atomic theory. Lord Edward’s fixation arises when he mistakes Claude Bernard’s mystical philosophy for science, and those familiar with The Third Policeman know that de Selby’s theories stem from his confusion between actuality and its appearance, metaphors or explanations. De Selby’s insistence that night is the accumulation of black air from volcanic eruptions or his extension of Zeno’s paradoxes to claim that as journeys must be hallucinations one can travel without leaving one’s bedroom stem from similar logics of reductio ad absurdum. That said, it is important to note that although Lord Edward may conduct sickening experiments on newts, he is a more complex character than the de Selby the narrator of The Third Policeman presents, as he speaks passionately about the real dangers of intensive agriculture, the polluting effects of the over-use of fertilisers and the damages of insistence on unregulated progress. Yet, that nuance noted, Lord Edward’s responses to osmosis provide an example of the ways Huxley provided a possible template for O’Nolan’s writing of fantastical science into fiction, and are an enticing possibility for the inspiration of atomic theory.

Significantly, in Eyeless in Gaza (1936) Huxley considers a similar, if more pessimistic consideration of interconnectedness. Here, rather than mapping a process of interplay leading to transubstantiation, Anthony Beavis notes the innate sameness of matter at a molecular level:

Matter, analyzed, consists of empty space and electric charges. Take a woman and a washstand. Different in kind. But their component electric charges are similar in kind. […] each item in one experience resembles the corresponding atom in another. Viewed microscopically, a woman’s body is just like a washstand, and Napoleon’s experience is just like Wellington’s.³⁰

Beavis’s drilling down to molecular levels of homogeneity finds a twisted relation in the Policemen’s machine that ‘splits up any smell into its sub- and inter-smells the way you can split up a beam of light with a glass instrument’.³¹ Similar machines for taste and touch show that although ‘there is nothing so smooth as a woman’s back […] if that feel is broken up for you, you would not be pleased with women’s backs. Half of the inside of the smoothness is as rough as a bullock’s hips’.³² Or as rough, perhaps, as a washstand, which adds an extra dimension to de Selby’s apparent inability to distinguish between men and women.

Beavis’s description of the homogeneity of atoms is a useful addition to the osmosis of Point Counter Point. That is, for Beavis it is not that atoms transfer but that they are, beneath their outward appearance, all the same anyway, and it is only our limited sight and understanding that imposes coherent shapes or consistent outward appearances. As he continues:

Why do we imagine that solid matter exists? Because of the grossness of our sense organs. And why do we imagine that we have coherent experiences and personality? Because our minds work slowly and have very feeble powers of analysis. Our world and we who live in it are the creations of stupidity and bad sight.³³

To put this in the terms of The Third Policeman, the passage of cells between bicycle and rider is all the easier because of their core similarity. And, if Beavis is correct, the difference between bicycle and rider, even before any cycling takes places, is merely the result of the habit and expectations of the perceiver.

In his use of osmosis, Aldous Huxley was also, perhaps, thinking of ‘On a Piece of Chalk,’ a lecture given by his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, in 1868 and published the same year. In this essay Huxley explains how chalk contains the remains of sea creatures.³⁴ As W. Deane Butcher wrote in 1911, ‘In this piece of chalk as Huxley saw it, you have the grave-yard of a host of living things whose skeletons are enshrouded in their mineral envelope, a grave-yard which like other grave-yards tells of life and activity of long ago.’³⁵ Chalk contains the cells of aquatic life and is, then, a cemetery. The process of (ex)change that Aldous Huxley links to osmosis is presented in Point Counter Point in terms of death, as the cells of the decomposing body become part of the land, with its more figurative extension speculating that a glass of beer contains part of Mozart. The land, then, is both life and death, a cemetery of old life turned into something new. The articulation of death as a process of change or as the circle of life offers another insight into the kind of hell that O’Brien had in mind when writing The Third Policeman, one in which these processes of change become literal. As the inhabitants of the policemen’s jurisdiction contain the cells of the bicycles and road, they literalise the death of and within the realm: the chalk-graveyard that Thomas Huxley outlines and Aldous Huxley parodically extends is fantastically reworked such that the narrator’s hellish place of posthumous punishment is populated by characters containing, through atomic transfer, the cells of death, of disease, of otherness. The narrator is cycling through a graveyard of chalk, seen through the metaphor of cellular exchange with bicycles.

The osmotic movement of cells from a higher volume of water to a lower volume of water is deeply suggestive of the fantastical movement of supposedly ‘harder’ bicycle cells into the ‘softer’ cells of the human body. And, while Huxley’s theory is connected to an Irish-related event, it is also linked to health. When Lord Edward encounters the theory that would change his life he does so from a place of terrible mental health. His depression and suicidal ideation improve through his new-found interest in osmosis, but his obsession with this mode of connectivity and transfer leads not to empathy, but to horrific medical experiments with hybridity and bodily change. It is possible that Huxley had some sympathies with Lord Edward’s acquired sense of a unanimous world, but the licence to mutilate that a recognition of permeability and transmittal gave Lord Edward makes the scenes of vivisection ones of science gone disturbingly awry, regardless of Huxley’s position on monism. In his laboratory Lord Edward experiments with the regenerative powers of newts’ tails: removing the tails from newts, he amputates healthy limbs and attaches the stub from which a new tail was forming to the severed part:

the little bud of regenerated tissue which would normally have grown into a new tail had been removed and grafted on to the stump of its amputated right foreleg. Transplanted to its new position, would the bud turn into a foreleg, or continue incongruously to grow as a tail?³⁶

Previous experiments had produced a new leg, but also ‘a monster with a tail where an arm should have been.’³⁷ The recognition of entanglement and hybridity that osmosis enables leads Lord Edward to attempt to refashion bodies and make them monstrous. O’Brien’s atomic theory version of osmosis is more subtle – a radical yet invisible change as the building blocks of the body are quietly replaced with a substance wholly other yet generally imperceptible to the naked eye.

The Shelleyan elements of this potential source material encourage a recognition of the darker health implications of atomic theory. Sergeant Pluck describes the transfer of atoms as an epidemic that is ‘doing untold destruction […] half of the people are suffering from it, it is worse than the smallpox.’³⁸ In keeping with this medical presentation, the first figure of authority the narrator thinks to call on for help combatting atomic theory is the Dispensary Doctor. The Dispensary Doctor was part of a medical system for the poor, reformed under the 1851 Medical Charities Act and linked to the Poor Law system.³⁹ One of the duties of the Dispensary Doctors was smallpox vaccination and the control of epidemic diseases: by suggesting that they be brought in to deal with the impacts of atomic transference, O’Brien connects atomic theory to the medical and the infectious, as well as to institutions of biopower and control, as the land the narrator finds himself in might be a parish, but it is a parish of medicalised policemen, not priests.

The first person named as suffering from the effects of atomic theory is Michael Gilhaney, and he is described as ‘nearly banjaxed’ by the process of cellular transfer.⁴⁰ His hybridity does not appear to give him greater speed or a stronger frame, instead, the policeman insist on the transfer as a threat to wellbeing. ‘Is the Atomic Theory as dangerous as you say?’ the narrator asks, to which Pluck gloomily replies, ‘It is between twice and three times as dangerous as it might be […] Early in the morning I often think it is four times.’⁴¹ When atomic transfer between walker and road is described, it is presented as radically life-shortening:

The continual cracking of your feet on the road makes a certain quantity of road come up into you. When a man dies they say he returns to clay but too much walking fills you up with clay far sooner (or buries bits of you along the road) and brings your death half-way to meet you.⁴²

This contamination or calcification of the body’s cellular structure is horrifying, and there is no mention in The Third Policeman of atomic transfer granting longer life. The Third Policeman’s molecular theory is an engagement with the nonhuman, but it also shows a human body being modified in a way that aligns with illness and infection. There is no biohacking or enhancement here. The hybrids that arise from atomic theory are no healthier than Lord Edward’s newts with tails where their arms, even if such change is invisible.

Osmosis enabled Lord Edward to see Mozart in a sausage, but he doesn’t ask the more ridiculous question about the impact of a sausage on Mozart. The Third Policeman does. When osmosis or atomic transfer happens, when the molecules of the bicycle merge with your own and when your cells leave your body to enter that of a bicycle, does it hurt? Do you feel ill as your cell structures change? With this focus comes a greater realisation of the body horror of the idea. Atomic transfer is less a whimsical play with the bone shaking experience of cycling a bicycle with hard tyres and no suspension over gravelly roads, and instead a description of penetrating infection and the failure of immunity. Inhabitants of The Third Policeman’s hellish realm lack immune systems that can resist incursion from external contaminants, while also lacking the structural integrity to retain their own cells, which shed off into the bicycles. Thinking of this process medically brings into focus the impact of the bicycle cells themselves. What if the bicycle is rusty? Or broken? Do the cells that come to you from a flat tyre differ from the cells that come from a fully inflated one? Do you age if you cycle an old bicycle? What impact does this transfer have on your heart and lungs and kidneys? Such questions are unanswerable, of course, but such uncertainty only adds to the effectiveness of the novel’s medical horror.

Atomic transfer is a communicable disease caused by contact, particularly contact between human and nonhuman surfaces. It names a process akin to a viral infection, as viruses enter host cells, hijack the cells by releasing their own genetic material and proteins into the host cell and then use the host’s cellular machinery to make copies of themselves. Pluck says that if a person more than fifty percent bicycle ‘walks too slowly or stops in the middle of the road he will fall down in a heap and will have to be lifted and set in motion again by some extraneous party.’⁴³ At what point do people transition from leaning against counters or falling over to becoming paralysed? Do they retain some consciousness in this state, meaning that some small part of them is locked into this form, aware of loss and change but no longer able to articulate it? Where, for that matter, is the seat of consciousness and personality in this process? In the human-bicycle or the bicycle-human? Or both? Or neither? When we think of the health implications, when we consider the process as a virus or something akin to a parasite, the play of the atomic theory retreats behind a wall of horror. When the narrator feels the wood of his prosthetic leg creeping in to him, is this what other inhabitants of the policemen’s jurisdiction feel? The hellish quality of the narrator’s afterlife is dramatically increased: what a terrible thing to be living on, through death, in a place of a consuming disease. Tuberculosis was the leading cause of death in children in Ireland during the 1930s – the place of the narrator’s posthumous survival is haunted by an absolute form of consumption.⁴⁴

The narrator of The Third Policeman says, after he has learned of the threat of atomic theory, that he found himself ‘walking nimbly and lightly on my toes in order to prolong my life. My head was packed tight with fears and miscellaneous apprehensions.’⁴⁵ The apprehensions are valid, as the policemen’s jurisdiction is a plague town. The disease is not passed between people, so there is no need for quarantine within the population, but the policemen, who are the novel’s plague doctors, desperately try instead to contain the epidemic by removing the main source of contagion: the bicycles. Their actions mean that they are briefly likened to medics: when the policemen take the narrator to eternity and he realises that he cannot take away the wealth he has generated there – a nice inversion of death – he sobs. While he cries he says: ‘I heard the two policemen discussing me in sympathetic undertones as if they were trained doctors in a hospital.’⁴⁶ MacCruiskeen then doses him with a sweet. Unlike Lord Edward, whose recognition of osmosis led him down a Dr Frankenstein-like path, in O’Brien’s novel the policemen-as-doctors are purportedly trying to limit molecular transfer, not extend it, but given their willingness to hang the narrator without a trial, and their deeply unsettling demeanours, they are as ethically compromised as Lord Edward and O’Brien’s narrator.

If Lord Edward’s experiments on the newts and the atomic transfer within the hellish jurisdiction of The Third Policeman see change to subjects that are fully grown, or fully dead, At Swim-Two-Birds joins a host of Huxley’s novels to consider change at the point of birth. Modes of refashioning life, be it through experimental operation or experimental reproduction, osmosis or atomic theory bring us, then, to eugenics.⁴⁷ In Crome Yellow Mr Scogan insists that future generations will find ways of removing reproduction from sex: ‘An impersonal generation will take the place of Nature’s hideous system. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires.’⁴⁸ Later in the novel, Scogan argues that in the Rational State,

human beings will be separated out into distinct species, not according to the colour of their eyes or the shape of their skulls, but according to the qualities of their mind and temperament. Examining psychologists, trained to what would now seem an almost superhuman clairvoyance, will test each child that is born and assign it to its proper species. Duly labelled and docketed, the child will be given the education suitable to members of its species, and will be set, in adult life, to perform those functions which human beings of his variety are capable of performing.⁴⁹

These concepts are, of course, expanded upon in the breeding programmes we see in Brave New World. The policemen’s surveillance of their jurisdiction and their sorting of the community into types of hybrids based on their percentages of impurity takes on a Brave New World air of managing types of identity.

The policemen’s acts of biopower, in which they use legal and illegal methods to control the nature of life/death within their jurisdiction, is eugenicist, but as their jurisdiction is a place of death, it is a death-driven eugenics, a necropolitics, if you will, that prefers circularity to growth and exchange to real change. This necro-eugenics builds on the eugenics in At Swim-Two-Birds. The term ‘eugenics’ implies a uniformity of position that is misleading: there were numerous ways a eugenicist control of breeding could manifest, ways that spanned ideas of race, class, gender, sexuality as well as notions of preference, agency, and self-determination alongside control, purity, and narrow measures of normativity. Although the Catholic Church saw eugenics as human interference in the field of reproduction, and eugenics societies appear to have had less interest in Ireland, there are numerous avenues from which O’Brien could have been influenced by eugenicist source material.⁵⁰ Nonetheless, given the mention of Huxley within At Swim-Two-Birds, we can look to his works as a potential source of the eugenicist conversation that O’Brien enacts in his novel.

In At Swim-Two-Birds O’Brien reframes the idea of selective breeding and different modes of generation by considering not test tubes but pens as a form of parturition, offering the hazy process of psycho-eugenics and aestho-autogamy as the means through which authors can create perfect characters. Eugenics provided the possibility of a pseudo-scientific justification for extensive and varied acts of social manipulation, as the eugenicist focus on breeding healthy populations that are mentally and physically suited to the world they inhabit also permitted a focus on the supposedly unsuited and unfit. Within many eugenicist ideologies, the fit are healthy, but they are also, in a neo-Darwinian, neo-Spenserian sense, those most suited to their context: as Huxley hyperbolises in Brave New World, they are bred for a specific purpose.⁵¹ Hence nurses, engineers, lift operators are all perfectly designed to find utter contentment in their tasks. In At Swim-Two-Birds we see similar authorial attempts to create fit characters, who are ideally suited to each author’s needs. Yet things keep going awry. Characters have too much free will and so they rebel – Furriskey, for example, who was created to be corrupt and rape, refuses to submit to his author’s careful design and instead is part of a group who decide to drug their creator. At the other extreme, Trellis’s creation of the perfect Sheila Lamont leads to rape and death and the birth of a son who will go on to torture his father. Eugenics in At Swim-Two-Birds always fails.

It is possible to see this failure as presenting an alternative process, where characters’ self-determination creates another, better form of the ‘fit,’ one more moral and helpful for society. Agency is set over predestination and the needs of the group, in this case the characters’ needs are privileged over the needs of the single, selfish author. But Furriskey, Shanahan, and Lamont are also objects of satire, as they are foolish and wedded to sorely limited ideas of progress, intelligence, and social good. As such they hover in a complex space between fit and unfit. They are unfit to fulfil Trellis’s desires for a moral story whose appeal is founded on its gratuitous violence, and later on unfit for Orlick’s more subtle plans for revenge. They are, O’Brien’s satire implies, fit only for the limitations and constrictions of Irish society. As such, the novel presents a story of stasis, as none of the attempts at change through breeding new characters or repurposing old ones succeed. The pettiness and small-mindedness of modern Ireland, At Swim-Two-Birds suggests, is too entrenched, at a cellular level, for society to be able to change. It will just continue to re-produce itself. In this way the connections between At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman become clearer, as both works are obsessed with the ways power over birth (At Swim-Two-Birds) and death (The Third Policeman) become enmeshed in failed or imperfect types of radical change (new processes of birth, rebellion against despotic rule, crime and punishment, rejections of predestined roles, molecular exchange).

The published novel’s engagement with eugenics is even more pronounced in an earlier typescript. We do not have the earliest drafts of At Swim-Two-Birds, which were likely substantially longer and did not include the biographical reminiscences of the student-author.⁵² The draft typescript held in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, is very close to the published version, but it does contain some significant differences. In the section on the cattle raid, which marries the Ulster and Fianna cycles with cowboy stories, the typescript contains the following:

[Relevant Excerpt from the Press:] – Mr Michael (‘Red’) Flanagan, said the Freeman’s Journal, the genial landlord of the circle N, has turned from botany to anthropology in his tireless quest for variety in nature. Having successfully achieved a black rose last year by a process of grafting, (the bloom, preserved, is on loan at the moment to the Museum of Montreal), he is now engaged in the difficult task of producing a human being green in colour, the sex of which is left with safety to fall into one or other of the conventional categories. Researches are carried forward night and day in the ranch’s extensive dormitories where a comprehensively inter-racial stud has been established. Thanks to Mr Flanagan’s extensive holdings in the Black Slave business he is fortunate in being enabled to mate his Irish, Indian and Arab cowpunchers with Kentucky river-girls, all of them fine physical specimens of their class. The results, sometimes surprising, are always interesting. In deference to national sentiment, an emerald green has been decided on and experiments will be carried forward until such time as the desired shade has been achieved.

Should a suitable child be born, no expense will be spared to give it a good start in life and such competence as will make it immune from the inducements of showmen and circus-masters.⁵³

We see here that At Swim-Two-Birds’ engagement with modes of creation and selective breeding extends even further in the unpublished draft. The mention of slavery is unpalatable, but given that O’Brien would have found the word less taboo as a comparative concept than we do now, it enabled him to re-emphasise the power dimensions of the novel: the control that certain groups have over others, epitomised by the power of author over character. The rape of the Kentucky river-girls that takes place in this extract adds more sexual coercion to the novel and the layers of cruelty in this section run particularly deep. The plan is to breed, within a slavery context that makes consent impossible, greater variety in human types, but given the choice of skin colour, it is clear that the decision is also to create a human who is wholly, intrinsically Irish, if being Irish is to be born in Ireland and to present the most nationalistic appearance possible.⁵⁴ In this unpublished section of At Swim-Two-Birds, being eugenically bred for Ireland means being born so overtly, stereotypically Irish that living normally in Ireland would be impossible. This breeding experiment of exceptional nationalism will render the individuals always different and potentially isolated. As such, although the selective breeding process might intend to make the perfect Irish person from a mixture of Irish, Indian, Arabic, American and African genes, the implication is that the process inherently collapses. In trying to be more Irish, the satirical logic of the piece implies, Ireland is becoming more inauthentic as it is creating only the stereotypical appearance of Irishness. Overtly, the child will be green, but at a cellular level a mixture of different nationalities.

O’Brien deleted this scene of bio-engineering, thereby downplaying the primacy of sexual reproduction in the novel. Sexual assault remains, but to sex is added aestho-autogamy or psycho-eugenics. In The Third Policeman, a place of death, no new characters or people are created, but a mode of change occurs by redistributing atoms between humans and nonhuman objects. In both At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman there are sexual elements to these processes, but the primary mode is usually to replace sexual reproduction with something different. The satire involved, of course, and here O’Brien and Huxley particularly overlap, is that O’Brien is making fun of multiple, often contradictory, positions at the same time: sex, anxieties about sex, eugenics, degeneration and attempts at social control. In both At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman attempts to rewrite political, national, domestic, biological identity collapse: in At Swim-Two-Birds Trellis’s eugenicist project of perfect character generation goes awry, the characters’ rebellion fails and the student-narrator is absorbed, albeit imperfectly, into a normative version of Ireland. In The Third Policeman the extreme change of atomic theory and the body horror it involves is matched by the circularity of the hellish space: first, the creation of hybrid bodies is a process of exchange that reorders the existing rather than creating anything new (which calls us back to Huxley’s concept of osmosis), and second, this reshuffling takes place in a posthumous space-time that resets and repeats, thus nullifying any concept of growth. Eugenics, osmosis and atomic theory become modes through which O’Brien’s comically, acerbically explored his sense of the impossibility of real change in 1930s Ireland. Thus, as we see with Denis in Crome Yellow, the only possible position to take is one of ironic, sardonic distance. It is this mode of writing about health and medicine that O’Brien likely absorbed from Huxley, while also potentially being inspired by Huxley’s play with biopower in myriad forms. In the palimpsests that are O’Brien’s earliest written novels, layers of Huxley remain, having soaked into his work by osmosis.

Notes

1. Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow (Chatto & Windus, 1931), 3. [^{^}]
2. Huxley, Crome Yellow, 4. [^{^}]
3. Flann O’Brien, The Complete Novels (Everyman’s Library, 2007), 265. [^{^}]
4. O’Brien, Complete Novels, 378. [^{^}]
5. O’Brien, Complete Novels, 7. [^{^}]
6. Germán Asensio Peral, ‘“The eminent English writer”: Point Counter Point de Aldous Huxley y At Swim-Two-Birds de Flann O’Brien,’ Complutense Journal of English Studies 26 (2018): 97. [^{^}]
7. Tobias W. Harris, Flann O’Brien and the European Avant-Garde, 1934–45: Dublin’s Dadaist (Bloomsbury, 2025), 38. [^{^}]
8. Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (The Modern Library, 1928), 350–351. Anne Clissmann, Flann O’Brien: A Critical Introduction to his Writings (Gill and Macmillan, 1975), 95. See too Rüdiger Imhof, ‘Introduction,’ in Alive-Alive O! Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, ed. by Rüdiger Imhof (Wolfhound Press, 1985), 14. [^{^}]
9. Peral, ‘The eminent English writer,’ 99. [^{^}]
10. Keith Hopper, Flann O’Brien: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-Modernist (Cork University Press, 1995), 239–240. [^{^}]
11. Jay Clayton, ‘The Modern Synthesis: Genetics and Dystopia in the Huxley Circle,’ Modernism/modernity 23, no. 4 (2016): 875. [^{^}]
12. Jay Clayton, ‘The Modern Synthesis,’ 876. [^{^}]
13. Charles Kemnitz, ‘Beyond the Zone of Middle Dimensions: A Relativistic Reading of “The Third Policeman,”’ Irish University Review 15, no. 1 (1985): 56–72. [^{^}]
14. Andrew Spencer, ‘Many Worlds: The New Physics in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman,’ Éire-Ireland 30, no. 1 (1995): 145–158. [^{^}]
15. Maebh Long, ‘Abject Bodies: Flann O’Brien and Immunology,’ in Flann O’Brien: Gallows Humour, ed. by Ruben Borg and Paul Fagan (Cork University Press, 2020). [^{^}]
16. Andrea Bobotis, ‘Queering Knowledge in Flann O’Brien’s “The Third Policeman,”’ Irish University Review, 32, no. 2 (2002): 242–258. [^{^}]
17. Thomas Dilworth, ‘Yes No: Form and Content in The Third Policeman, Essays in Criticism, 75, no. 1 (2025): 42–74. [^{^}]
18. Clissmann, Flann O’Brien, 354n18. [^{^}]
19. Tom Walker, ‘“A true story”: The Third Policeman and the writing of terror,’ in Ruben Borg, Paul Fagan and Werner Huber (eds), Flann O’Brien: Contesting Legacies (Cork University Press, 2014). [^{^}]
20. Maebh Long, ‘“Not with a Bang but a Whimper”: Uncovering Pandemic Strains in Flann O’Brien’s Later Works,’ Irish Studies Review 31, no. 4 (2023): 488–501. [^{^}]
21. Rónán McDonald, ‘“An astonishing parade of nullity”: Nihilism in The Third Policeman,’ in Flann O’Brien and Modernism, ed. by Julian Murphet, Rónán McDonald, and Sascha Morrell (Bloomsbury, 2014). [^{^}]
22. Katherine Ebury, Paul Fagan, and John Greaney, ‘Flann O’Brien’s nonhuman imaginary,’ in Flann O’Brien and the Nonhuman: Environments, Animals, Machines, ed. by Katherine Ebury, Paul Fagan, and John Greaney (Cork University Press, 2024), 2. [^{^}]
23. James Alexander Fraser, ‘“more to it than the monstrous exchange of tissue for metal”: Reading the O’Brien bicycle’ in Ebury, Fagan, and Greaney, Flann O’Brien and the Nonhuman: Environments, Animals, Machines. [^{^}]
24. Holly Connell Schaaf, ‘Putting Iron on You: Mobility and internalised ableism in The Third Policeman,’ in Ebury, Fagan, and Greaney, Flann O’Brien and the Nonhuman: Environments, Animals, Machines; Yaeli Greenblatt, ‘“the tattered cloak of his perished skin”: The Body as Costume in “Two in One”, At Swim Two Birds and The Third Policeman, in Borg and Fagan, Flann O’Brien: Gallows Humour; Siobhán Purcell, ‘Reading the Regional Body: Disability, Prosthetics and Irish Literary Tradition in The Third Policeman and Molloy,’ in Borg and Fagan, Flann O’Brien: Gallows Humour; Marion Quirici, Fitness for Freedom: Disability, Degeneration, and Modern Irish Writing (Syracuse University Press, 2025). [^{^}]
25. Huxley, Point Counter Point, 33. [^{^}]
26. Huxley, Point Counter Point, 34. [^{^}]
27. See, for example, Denis Noble, ‘Claude Bernard, the First Systems Biologist, and the Future of Physiology,’ Experimental Physiology 93, no. 1 (2008): 16–26. [^{^}]
28. Huxley, Point Counter Point, 34. [^{^}]
29. Huxley, Point Counter Point, 34–35. [^{^}]
30. Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza (Chatto & Windus, 1936), 140–141. [^{^}]
31. O’Brien, Complete Novels, 346. [^{^}]
32. O’Brien, Complete Novels, 347. [^{^}]
33. Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza, 140–141. [^{^}]
34. Thomas Henry Huxley, ‘On a Piece of Chalk,’ in Collected Essays (Cambridge University Press, 2011). [^{^}]
35. W. Deane Butcher, ‘Osmotic Growth – The Mechanism of Life,’ The Journal of the Röntgen Society, January 1911, 9. [^{^}]
36. Huxley, Point Counter Point, 36–37. [^{^}]
37. Huxley, Point Counter Point, 37. [^{^}]
38. O’Brien, Complete Novels, 293. [^{^}]
39. Catherine Cox, ‘Access and Engagement: The Medical Dispensary Service in Post-Famine Ireland,’ in Cultures of Care in Irish Medical History, 1750–1970, ed. Catherine Cox and Maria Luddy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 57–78. [^{^}]
40. O’Brien, Complete Novels, 294. [^{^}]
41. O’Brien, Complete Novels, 297. [^{^}]
42. O’Brien, Complete Novels, 300. [^{^}]
43. O’Brien, Complete Novels, 300. [^{^}]
44. Georgina Ferry, ‘Dorothy Stopford Price and the Control of Tuberculosis in Ireland,’ The Lancet 393, no. 10166 (2019): 20. [^{^}]
45. O’Brien, Complete Novels, 300. [^{^}]
46. O’Brien, Complete Novels, 348. [^{^}]
47. For more on eugenics in O’Brien and Huxley, see Emily Reed’s article in this special issue. [^{^}]
48. Huxley, Crome Yellow, 47. [^{^}]
49. Huxley, Crome Yellow, 242. [^{^}]
50. See Greta Jones, ‘Eugenics in Ireland: the Belfast Eugenics Society, 1911–15, Irish Historical Studies 28, no. 109 (1995): 81–95; Lloyd Meadhbh Houston, Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health (Oxford University Press, 2023); Quirici, Fitness for Freedom. [^{^}]
51. For example, Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (Harper & Row, 1962), 8–11. [^{^}]
52. For more see Samuel Kauffman Anderson, ‘Pink Paper and the Composition of Flann O’Brien’s At-Swim-Two-Birds’ (MA thesis, Louisiana State University, 2002). [^{^}]
53. Flann O’Brien, ‘At Swim-Two-Birds,’ typescript with holograph corrections, Flann O’Brien Manuscripts and Criticism 1934–89, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, 79–80. Square brackets indicate a penciled addition by O’Brien; strikeout indicates passages crossed out with pencil. [^{^}]
54. In this way the passage anticipates O’Brien’s short story ‘The Martyr’s Crown’, in which a man is described not as having died for Ireland, but having been born for Ireland. With this reworking of the common phrase, O’Brien moves the sacrifice from the man to the woman who gave birth to him, as in his story the man’s mother conceals the Irish soldiers hiding in her house by pretending to a suspicious English officer that she is a sex worker. She has sex with the officer to distract him and the story claims that as the young man was born of this ploy, he was a hero who was born for Ireland. While story shows the brave acts of women, the story’s seeming feminist attributes end there, as the respect, such as it is, is afforded to the son rather than the mother. Furthermore, not only are the story’s primary commitments to the joke of the wordplay, rather than the woman herself, it is very possible that the story is not true, being told simply to elevate the teller’s own importance. [^{^}]

References