In chapter thirteen of Aldous Huxley’s novel, Time Must Have a Stop (1944), the corpulent aesthete and hedonist, Eustace Barnack, succumbs to a heart attack in Florence and expires on a cold bathroom floor. Eustace’s elongated experience of dying is woven through the next few chapters of the novel as life carries on around him. His departing consciousness first passes through an omnipresent brightness before the visuals clarify into a matrix of interlocking lines. Eustace realises that the ‘calm boundlessness of bliss and knowledge had been limited by the interpenetration of an activity.’¹ Likened to the process of weaving, this ‘activity’ is

at the same time a pattern, a kind of living lattice; ubiquitous, infinitely complex, exquisitely delicate. A vast, ubiquitous web of beknottednesses and divergences, of parallels and spirals, of intricate figures and their curiously distorted projections – all shining and active and alive.²

As his incorporeal form moves within this intricate structure of light, Eustace recovers his ‘single fragment of selfhood,’ but finds it to be dependent on ‘that bright lattice of intricate relationships, located as it were, on one of its innumerable nodes of intersecting movement.’³ As his own subjectivity spins into fragments he experiences an intense and emphatic awareness of the interconnectedness of his coexistence with every other being, a relationality that had not troubled him during a gluttonous life lived on the £6,000 a year he earned from his investments in cash crops across the British Empire.⁴

Eustace’s dying hallucinations can be read alongside the transcendental imagery attributed to de Selby in the epigraph to O’Nolan’s novel The Third Policeman (1967), in which the absurd philosopher characterises ‘human existence’ as a hallucination containing ‘in itself the secondary hallucinations of day and night’ and culminating in the ‘illusory approach of the supreme hallucination known as death.’⁵ Much like Huxley, O’Nolan exploits fiction’s lack of temporal and spatial limitations to have his unnamed narrator, who dies early in the text, experience visions of transcendence and interconnection. In chapter eight of The Third Policeman, for example, the narrator’s soul also deploys the imagery of beams of light when it explains the interconnectedness of all beings: ‘I am your soul and all your souls […] Humanity is an ever-widening spiral and life is the beam that plays briefly on each succeeding ring. All humanity from its beginning to end is already present but the beam has not yet played beyond you’ (CN, 328; italics in the original).

The image of existence as a unified and interwoven pattern of relationships which is articulated through the nodes of individual experience reflects shared intellectual influences on Huxley and O’Nolan: Baruch Spinoza’s substance monism and the development of Spinozist thought into Henri Bergson’s syncretic understanding of being, wherein human existence moves through a plenum of all potentialities, receiving those experiences that pass into actuality within this overall unity. These philosophers appear numerous times in O’Nolan’s work. For example, in The Dalkey Archive (1964), the rewritten version of De Selby mentions Bergson alongside Newton, Spinoza, and Descartes as philosophers who have failed to understand time (CN, 617–18). Huxley favours Bergson’s theory of perception and memory in The Doors of Perception (1954) and the third essay of Do What You Will (1929) is entitled ‘Spinoza’s Worm.’⁶

For a collection of articles which brings the work of Huxley and O’Nolan into dialogue through the many points of connection in their lives and works, the image of the threads of existence woven into ‘a vast, ubiquitous web of beknottednesses and divergences, of parallels and spirals,’ is particularly apt.⁷ Briefly described, the process of weaving involves laying the vertical warp threads onto a loom, ensuring adequate tension, and repeatedly separating (or ‘shedding’) them to allow for the crosswise weft thread to be passed through. This motion produces a new form of order arising from the disparate strands which is akin to the new form of understanding which arises through contextualised and comparative readings. Michel Serres writes in The Five Senses that ‘tissue, textile and fabric provide excellent models of knowledge.’⁸ Knowledge, according to this model, is not the discovery of an essential truth beneath the surface of the object of study, but is constructed from new combinations of the material at hand. Knowledge is not there to be excavated, but rather a process of connection enacted by the knower. By weaving together the lives and works of two writers, we produce new knowledge about both that wasn’t present before. Rather than simply discover connections, we create a new fabric from the act of making connections. This metaphor also forms the inspiration behind the cover art for this special issue, which shows interlocking strands (representing threads of discussion or disparate texts and critical theories) interposing on each other to form a new pattern.

To apply this idea to the act of literary scholarship: when we could pull apart any thread at all to get started, why begin from the nexus connecting the work and thought of Brian O’Nolan to Aldous Huxley? Aldous Huxley was a highly significant writer and thinker in O’Nolan’s time: first as a literary critic, then as a novelist, and then as a philosopher and social commentator. The abundance of references to Aldous Huxley in the work produced by O’Nolan and his close collaborators attests to this wide-ranging influence. It is not our purpose here to critically examine these references, rather to make the point that Huxley was a known and even overbearing point of reference for Irish writers of O’Nolan’s generation. For example, Huxley is the butt of jokes, albeit one treated with a certain deference, in a 1935 article written by O’Nolan’s friend and collaborator, Donagh MacDonagh. The article is titled ‘Words on Irish Phrases’ but is more properly an irreverent discussion of the literary scene in Dublin from the perspectives of O’Nolan’s cohort (Charles Donnelly, Niall Sheridan, Brian O’Nolan, MacDonagh himself). Starting with the ideas that ‘conversation in Ireland can be very amusing if one is simple and socially callous enough’ and that Dublin conversation benefits from its ‘eighteenth century traditions,’⁹ MacDonagh refers to remarks attributed to Huxley:

Mr Aldous Huxley, an Englishman, justly more enlightened than his prophetic grandfather and who never can feel at home with primitive peoples or Jesuits, has noticed it. He says something to the effect that the city of Dublin is the wittiest in Christendom according to its inhabitants; one deprecates this remark – so brilliant in its modern context – from one who is so successfully neither witty nor primitive.¹⁰

The article refers back to Huxley several more times, countering Huxley’s imputed description of Dublin as ‘primitive,’ with the claim that ‘Dublin has the second largest population of bicycles in the world.’¹¹ In a commemorative piece he published in the Irish Times in 1941 about their friend, the Marxist poet Charles Donnelly who died in the Spanish civil war, MacDonagh also places Huxley among the ‘enthusiasms’ of the O’Nolan circle.¹² In O’Nolan’s first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) we encounter the most important touchpoint and the one that is discussed by several of our contributors: the mention of Huxley as a figure of literary standing alongside James Joyce by its unnamed student narrator at the novel’s opening:

most of the things I deemed essential for existence—my bed, a chair which was rarely used, a table and a washstand. The washstand had a ledge upon which I had arranged a number of books. Each of them was generally regarded 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. (CN, 7)

As a novelist with widespread currency, Huxley’s forays into metafiction undoubtedly form part of the context for At Swim-Two-Birds, An Béal Bocht (1941) (The Poor Mouth (1973)) and The Third Policeman. In 1928 Huxley published Point Counter Point in which his novelist, Philip Quarles, imagines the transformations that would happen at the ‘tenth remove’ of a system in which a novelist places another novelist inside his novel, and so on: ‘a novelist telling your story in algebraic symbols or in terms of variations in blood pressure, pulse, secretion of ductless glands, and reaction times.’¹³ As John Garvin, Anne Clissmann, Keith Hopper, Monique Gallagher, and Germán Asensio Peral have observed, the nested narrative layers of At Swim-Two-Birds clearly respond to Huxley’s novel.¹⁴ O’Nolan paid attention to Huxley until the very end of his literary career. In a letter about The Dalkey Archive to a publisher, Mark Hamilton, written on 28 November 1963, O’Nolan refers to Huxley’s death on the same day as the assassination of John F. Kennedy when he predicts that ‘the book will be a scalding success in the strange world where we still have Vatican Council II but no John Kennedy or Aldous Huxley.’¹⁵

Writing as Myles na gCopaleen, O’Nolan draws on Huxley’s work or refers to him several times in the Cruiskeen Lawn column he wrote for the Irish Times. In 1947, O’Nolan quotes from Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy (published just one year earlier). Defending the validity of an ‘ineffable’ and ‘inexpressible’ thought which he is unable to articulate, Myles highlights the originality of his own stance by contrasting it with the authority of Huxley, who wrote in the aforementioned work of comparative mysticism that ‘certain thoughts are practically unthinkable except in terms of an appropriate language.’¹⁶ In 1947, Myles fills column inches by quoting, at length, a description of Aldous Huxley by Cyril Connolly published in the London Picture Post, but swaps the name with his persona, so that the amended quoted account begins ‘Myles na gCopaleen, a scholar of Eton and Balliol, a contemporary of the Sitwells, is now a man of fifty-five.’¹⁷ The augmented description provides an assurance that O’Nolan knew plenty of detail about Huxley’s life and reputation, and the fact that Huxley is treated to the dubious privilege of being impersonated by Myles suggests a certain form of attention and attachment to the ‘comic sense,’ ‘visual and sensual imagination,’ and ‘gift of analysis’ of this man, ‘easily the most intelligent of all English professional writers since Bertrand Russell.’¹⁸ In 1958 Myles writes: ‘Sunt lacrimae rerum, as Aldous Huxley says, nos et mutamur in illis.’¹⁹ The confected quotation, for which we have not yet identified a source in Huxley’s work, amends a line from the Aeneid by adjusting the second part with a commonplace from Renaissance writings to produce the sense: ‘There are tears for things, and we too are changed in them.’ The column begins by bemoaning the propensity of ‘literary sans-culottes, Abbey Theatre playwrights, “novelists” and whatnot’ to continue writing after they have been parodied in the Cruiskeen Lawn and also quotes an excerpt from ‘Aeolus’ in Ulysses in which Ireland’s beauty spots are absurdly eulogised as ‘wellpraised prototypes.’²⁰ Whilst unpacking the significance of this column would be the work of another article, Myles’s continued association of Huxley with Joyce demonstrates that this particular triptych is worthy of more attention.

Indeed, while there is, as yet, no evidence that Aldous Huxley read or reviewed O’Nolan’s work, we know that Huxley paid close attention to Joyce and his apparent distaste for both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake is widely documented in his essays and letters. Although he describes the ‘brilliant Ulysses of James Joyce’ in a letter written to his brother, Julian, in 1918, his opinion in published print is harsher.²¹ One example can be found in an article that Huxley wrote in Vanity Fair in April 1924:

When, from the depths of my calm solitude, I reflect on the many extraordinarily foolish and time-wasting things I have done for the sake of being up-to-date and earning the approval of the fashionable, I shudder and am amazed that I could ever have been so idiotic. Thus, I remember spending at least seventy-two precious now irremediably perished hours in reading Mr. James Joyce’s Ulysses.²²

It is difficult to know exactly how seriously to take such criticism. D. H. Lawrence, deeply admired by Huxley, in a letter to Aldous and Maria referred to Joyce as ‘a clumsy olla putride,’²³ (meaning a rich Spanish stew whose name translates as a ‘putrid pot’) and the argument could be made that Huxley reorientated his initial appreciation of Joyce based on his literary opinions of personal friends.

To return to our main subject: the clear evidence of the significance of Huxley’s writing and thought for O’Nolan establishes firm grounds for comparative readings. The material woven by those readings produces a new perspective on Irish and English late-modernism. Huxley, for example, is often left out of accounts of English high modernism that address Clive and Vanessa Bell, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and so on. This is noteworthy because not only does Huxley make extensive use of modernist techniques such as metafiction, montage, intertextuality, and synaesthesia, he was also a friend and associate of all of the figures named above. Regarding Huxley’s influence on O’Nolan, we note that the Irish dialogue with English modernism is becoming better understood. We know thanks to work by Karl O’Hanlon, for example, that Ezra Pound’s model for the ‘integrated man, going into action,’ was the Irish revolutionary and later conservative senator Desmond Fitzgerald, a prominent figure referenced many times in the Cruiskeen Lawn.²⁴ Setting O’Nolan in the context of Huxley enables us to draw out the stakes and seriousness of the questions his fiction and journalism engages in – biopolitics, eugenics, authoritarianism, and philosophy of mind – much as the placement of Huxley in the context of O’Nolan uncovers the existence of a distinctive genre of interwar Menippean satire which is shared by English and Irish writers, as proposed by Joseph Brooker at the colloquium in Zürich in February 2025, which inspired this special issue.

Many readers of the Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies will not necessarily have a close understanding of the development of Huxley as a writer and thinker. That gap is closed by an article co-authored by Robin Hull and Tobias W. Harris which places the comic literary manifesto of At Swim-Two-Birds in the context of Huxley. Huxley experimented widely with metafiction and, as a literary critic, published numerous essays on the ethical stakes of literary form in the modern novel and its precursors. O’Nolan, Hull and Harris argue, responds directly to Huxley’s concern that the presentation of character in modern novels leads to psychological problems in readers who model themselves too closely on illusionary fictional archetypes.

One clear theme that emerged from the article submissions was the use of biopolitics as a means of understanding the worldviews expressed and critiqued in Huxley and O’Nolan’s works. In her article, Emily Reed charts the co-development of the fields of linguistics and eugenics, and applies this context as a biopolitical lens through which to understand power as enacted in Brave New World (1932) and An Béal Bocht. A consideration of ethnonyms that obscure familial ties and individual identities, alongside technologies of language that implant irrational but durable beliefs, as well as ossifying oral culture in an idealised and permanent format, demonstrates how both Huxley and O’Nolan understood language and language-based technologies as a necessary arm of biopower. By demonstrating the close interlocking of the fields of language and eugenics, this analysis furthermore turns enquiry back towards the origins of linguistics as a discipline, showing the value of literary texts to understanding the impact of broader historical trends and movements.

With a similar focus on the body, but this time on the biomedical body horror of Point Counter Point and The Third Policeman, Maebh Long suggests that Huxley’s satirised accounts of medical exploration may indeed have influenced O’Nolan’s depictions of atomic transfer in the afterlife of The Third Policeman. In Long’s analysis, Lord Tantamount’s grotesque experiments on newts, and Huxley’s wider theorising of molecular interconnectedness, are reframed as a de Selbian take on matter as it exists in the world, and a foundation for the molecular transfer in O’Nolan’s hellish afterlife plagued by a bicycle epidemic that destabilises the integrity of the human body. Long also invokes eugenics in her description of the policemen’s efforts to control those within their jurisdiction, although likening this to a ‘necro-eugenics’ that aims more to stabilise a stasis than to promote and ameliorate their population’s genetic quality. Analysing a draft typescript of At Swim-Two-Birds held in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, Long takes the theme of selective breeding even further, revealing how O’Nolan uses this idea to satirise Irish nationalism.

The third article to explicitly take on the theme of biopolitics is that of Marianne O’Kane Boal, who appraises the regulations around food and sleep in Brave New World and At Swim-Two-Birds. O’Kane Boal productively surveys how sleep is inverted from a state of rest into a state of restlessness across the two novels, is stripped of restorative power, and instead altered into a time to indoctrinate and to rebel. Food is likewise stripped of sensory pleasure and cultural significance. In Brave New World food is replaced by mass-engineered sustenance and drug-like substances to simultaneously optimise and control citizens by dulling their senses, while in At Swim-Two-Birds there is only access to a limited diet, and food scarcity is often addressed through alcohol provision.

The theme of how food intake organises psychological and social imaginations takes a different turn in Eoin McGloin’s reading of An Béal Bocht. McGloin reads the Irish-language novel O’Nolan published as Myles na gCopaleen through the lens of Huxley’s reflections on mescaline and psychedelic experience in The Doors of Perception (1954) and Heaven and Hell (1956). McGloin uses Huxley’s theory on the opening of the mind, which he contends is accomplished by psychedelic substances which block sugar intake in the brain, to draw the important observation that in An Béal Bocht the characters also experience a form of self-transcendence through extreme deprivation. McGloin therefore uses Huxley to generate a significant new reading of the imaginative possibilities in O’Nolan’s seminal Irish-language novel. The interface between the pharmacological and the extended mind also inspires Tobias W. Harris to explore Huxley’s and O’Nolan’s responses to the mass media, specifically print technology and the genre of the daily opinion piece, through the theoretical lens of Derrida’s ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ and its subsequent elaboration into a theory of technology as exteriorised memory in the work of Bernard Stiegler.

This issue also contains a richly illustrated contribution by Pádraig Ó Méalóid which delves into the history of censorship lying behind the presence of the ‘widely read books of Mr A. Huxley’ and those of Joyce on the student narrator’s shelf in At Swim-Two-Birds. Ó Méalóid adds depth and detail to the observation made by Maebh Long and Germán Asensio Peral that Huxley’s novel Point Counter Point was among the first group of books banned by Ireland’s Censorship Board. The contextual material about the restrictions on book circulation in the Free State supplied by this note helps to explain the significance of O’Nolan’s decision to place books by Huxley and Joyce on his unnamed narrator’s washstand.

The ‘tissue, textile and fabric’ that is created by weaving together the threads of Huxley and O’Nolan’s work bring into view new perspectives on the possibilities of literary modernism and its interaction with the societal themes that still loom large over us today: biological engineering, surveillance, environmental conditions and the role of political authoritarianism and technology in the construction of the human mind. The placement of these writers alongside each other also helpfully requires that we pay attention to the importance of literary work as a response to those challenges. Fittingly, this issue too will experience a form of afterlife. The renewed consideration of Huxley as context for O’Nolan has produced a rich set of writing projects currently underway, and we hope to augment the essays published in this issue with several more contributions in the next issue of The Parish Review.

Notes

1. Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have a Stop (Vintage, 2015), 154 [^{^}]
2. Huxley, Time Must Have a Stop, 154. The image partially inspires the cover design of this special issue. [^{^}]
3. Huxley, Time Must Have a Stop, 154. [^{^}]
4. Huxley, Time Must Have a Stop, 44. [^{^}]
5. Flann O’Brien, Complete Novels (Knopf, 2007), 221. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the main text as CN. Italics in original. [^{^}]
6. Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell (HarperCollins, 2009), 22; Aldous Huxley, Do What You Will (Chatto & Windus, 1929), 49–73. [^{^}]
7. Huxley, Time Must Have a Stop, 154. [^{^}]
8. Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, trans. Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley (Continuum, 2008), 100–1. [^{^}]
9. Donagh MacDonagh, ‘Words on Irish Phrases,’ Comthrom Féinne: The College Magazine (April 1935): 68. [^{^}]
10. MacDonagh, ‘Words on Irish Phrases,’ 68. [^{^}]
11. MacDonagh, ‘Words on Irish Phrases,’ 69. [^{^}]
12. Donagh MacDonagh, ‘Charlie Donnelly,’ Irish Times, 15 March 1941: 5. [^{^}]
13. Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (New York: Harper Perennial, 1965), 302. [^{^}]
14. John Garvin, ‘Sweetscented Manuscripts’ in Myles: Portraits of Brian O’Nolan, ed. by Timothy O’Keeffe (Martin Brian & O’Keeffe, 1971), 55; Anne Clissmann, Flann O’Brien: A critical introduction to his writings (Gill & MacMillan, 1975), 95; Keith Hopper, Flann O’Brien: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-Modernist, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 70; Monique Gallagher, ‘Reflecting Mirrors in Flann O’Brien’s “At Swim-Two-Birds,”’ The Journal of Narrative Technique 22, no. 2 (1992): 128–135 (134); Germán Asensio Peral, “The eminent English writer”: Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point and Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds,’ Complutense Journal of English Studies 26 (2018): 95–109. [^{^}]
15. Flann O’Brien, Collected Letters, ed. Maebh Long (Dalkey Archive, 2018), 364. [^{^}]
16. Myles na gCopaleen, Cruiskeen Lawn, Irish Times, 7 May 1947: 4 (hereafter CL), quoting Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (Chatto & Windus, 1946), 24. [^{^}]
17. CL, 17 November 1947: 4. [^{^}]
18. CL 17 November 1947: 4. [^{^}]
19. CL 5 March 1958: 6. [^{^}]
20. CL 5 March 1958: 6. [^{^}]
21. Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed. Grover Smith (Chatto and Windus, 1969), 170. [^{^}]
22. Aldous Huxley: Complete Essays, vol. 1, ed. Robert S. Baker and James Sexton (Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 374. [^{^}]
23. Collected Letters of D.H. Lawrence, vol. 2, ed. Harry T. Moore, (Heinemann, 1962), 1075. [^{^}]
24. See Chapter Two in Karl O’Hanlon, Official Voices: Poets and the Irish State (Liverpool University Press, 2025). [^{^}]

References