Brave New Worlds: 
Brian O’Nolan and Aldous Huxley 

7–8 February 2025, Aldous Huxley Centre, Zürich

Keynote speakers

• Dr. Maebh Long (University of Waikato)
  Editor of The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien and author of Assembling Flann O’Brien
• Professor Dana Sawyer (Maine College of Art & Design)
  Author of Aldous Huxley: A Biography and editor of Aldous Huxley and Self-Realization

Featured speakers

• Dr. Paul Fagan (Maynooth University)
  General Editor of the Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies and Co-Founder of the International Flann O’Brien Society 
• Professor David K. Dunaway (University of New Mexico)
  Author of Huxley in Hollywood and Aldous Huxley Recollected 
• Dr. Jake Poller (Queen Mary University of London)
  Author of Aldous Huxley and editor of Altered Consciousness in the Twentieth Century 
• Dr. Tobias W. Harris (Birkbeck College, University of London)
  Author of Dublin’s Dadaist: Flann O’Brien and the European Avant-Garde, 1934-45 

In At Swim-Two Birds, Brian O’Nolan’s student narrator has ‘the widely read books of Mr A. Huxley, the eminent English writer’ on the ledge of his washstand, alongside those of ‘Mr Joyce’ (CN, 7). His friend Donagh MacDonagh also places Huxley among the ‘enthusiasms’ of the O’Nolan circle. 

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 (The Poor Mouth) 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’. As John Garvin, 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.

However, the acknowledged direct influence of Huxley on At Swim-Two-Birds only touches on the myriad parallels, interconnections and echoes between these two major twentieth-century writers. Huxley’s thinking on the culture industry, spirituality, technological rationalism and society’s apparatus of control, whether through organised religion, nationalism or capitalism, echoes with ideas explored in numerous Cruiskeen Lawn columns. Responding to the results of Gallup polls, Myles asks: ‘How and how fast are the native attributes of immigrants reduced and broken down and absorbed into the American Way of Life? How long does it take, for instance, for the Irish immigrant to take to chewing gum, having good teeth, wearing doublebreasted jackets with deep lapels, drinking Manhattans, and taking an interest in Synge, the Abbey Theatre and Richard Brinsley Sheridan?' (CL, 26 September 1947, 4). In 1934, Huxley wrote: ‘How much of every human being is an automaton? Three-quarters? Four-fifths? Nine-tenths? I do not know; but in any case the proportion is depressingly high’.

20-minute papers and panel proposals are invited on any aspect connecting O’Nolan and Huxley, including but not limited to:

• The significance of the novels of ‘Mr Huxley’ for At Swim-Two-Birds, An Béal Bocht and The Third Policeman
• Point Counter Point and other early metafiction as an influence on At Swim-Two-Birds
• Counterpoint, musicality and modernism in Point Counter Point, At Swim-Two-Birds
• O’Nolan’s connections to the English avant-garde and popular novelists
• Fiction, metafiction and the critique of novel writing
• Literary and popular responses to mass culture in the twentieth century
• The response to the work of Huxley in Ireland of the 1930s and 1940s
• Huxley and O’Nolan in conflict with authority as public intellectuals
• Individual and social health, spirituality and disease
• Dystopia, apocalypse, biotechnology, temporality, posthuman and nonhuman subjectivities and totalitarianism in Huxley and O’Nolan
• Eugenics, aestho-autogamy and Huxley’s family connections
• Huxleyean ideas in Cruiskeen Lawn and anywhere else in O’Nolan’s work

Please send 250-word abstracts and a short bio by Tuesday 1 October 2024 to: tobias.harris@bbk.ac.uk

We will respond to abstract proposals by Monday 14 October.

Workshop organisers

Tobias W. Harris (Birkbeck College, University of London)

Oisín Ó Nualláin (Aldous Huxley Centre, Zürich)

Travel and accommodation

We are pleased to say that the contributors of papers which are accepted will have their travel to and from Zürich and a hotel stay for Thursday 6 February and Friday 7 February booked for them by the Aldous Huxley Centre, Zürich.

CFP Flann O'Brien Call for Papers Aldous Huxley Z Zürich