Katherine and Toby dissect death in 'Two in One' before exploring Irish executions, reading Achille Mbembe's necropolitics and turning to Flann, the energy humanities, and the geological turn. Transcript Toby: Hello and welcome to another episode of Radio Myles, the podcast which hopes to entertain, intrigue, and maybe change your perspective on the figure known variously as Flann O’Brien Myles na gCopaleen, Myles na gCopaleen, George Knowall, and many other names. This episode is made of a support of Birkbeck College, university of London, and today I am joined by Katherine Ebury. Katherine is a senior lecturer in modern literature with an established international reputation as a literary historian and scholar of modernism. She has written a lot including two well reviewed monographs and led to collection many peer reviewed articles and book. Chapters, including on Flann O’Brien and science, [00:01:00] writing in the Problems of Authority collection, and on Flann O’Brien in the Death Penalty in the Gallows Humour collection. She was an editor of Flann O’Brien and the Nonhuman, the most recent collection of essays about Flann O’Brien. She was awarded an AHRC Fellowship for her research project: “Literature, psychoanalysis and a death penalty, 1900 to 1950”, which was a basis for her recent monograph in the area of law and literature, modern literature and the death penalty, 1890 to 1950. She has mentored several postdoctoral researchers funded by the AHRC and the Leverhulme Trust who have gone on to successful roles elsewhere. We are going to try to focus on today’s topic, which is Flann O’Brien and the law. Welcome, Katherine. Katherine: Thank you Toby. Thank you for having me. It’s great to be on the podcast. I’m a fan and it’s really good timing for me ‘cause I’m working on a chapter on Flann O’Brien and the law for the new Cambridge Companion for Catherine Flynn. She commissioned it from me, so is wonderful to be here talking to you about this topic. [00:02:00] Thank you for the generous introduction. Toby: And before we go on just in case there are any listeners who are totally new to Flann O’Brien, AKA Myles na gCopaleen, aka Brian O’Nolan, I do wonder at this point if there are any listeners that are totally new because presumably they’ve listened to an episode, but just in case and it’s also interesting to find this out from the different guests: would it be possible for you to give us a, thumbnail sketch of this writer and his major work? What’s the brief image of him that appears in your head? Katherine: Well, thanks Toby. Yeah, I do like the conceit that you have on the podcast of getting everyone to introduce Flann. I hope you won’t stop no matter how long the podcast goes on for, because everyone does have a different take. I think about an Irish mid-century writer who’s amazingly funny and perishingly sad. He’s the author of at least three great novels. The others we could fight about At Swim-Two-Birds, An Béal Bocht and The Third Policeman, as well as [00:03:00] these brilliantly flawed novels again, that we could fight about, as I was saying, The Dalkey Archive and The Hard Life. And recently, we’ve been discovering more short stories and plays and teleplays. I think I’m fondest of the Myles na gCopaleen persona, but at the same time, I’m conscious of all the columns. I’ve not read, you know, the limits of my expertise. Like with the students’ fearing that there’s jokes they’re not getting. I know that there are lots of people who are much better versed on Cruiskeen Lawn than I am, particularly ‘cause I’m only a novice Irish speaker. God knows where I am in Duolingo. But I do love that persona. I find it very fun. In recent years, I’ve devoured Flann’s letters wonderfully edited by Maebh Long, but I found that I learned less about the man than I expected from that exercise. He was a civil servant and a drinker. He has a crumpled, hard boiled look in photographs. Thinking of crime fiction, I think of him as a, a George Smiley or a Sam Spade [00:04:00] type. He’s a radical experimenter and he’s also conservative, as you’ve explored recently in your own book on him in the avant-garde, which I was recently reading. You were kind enough to give me a copy and I’ve properly read it and reviewed it. You can read it in Modernism/modernity fairly soon. Flann O’Brien’s eyes are really kind. But what’s he up to? I’ve planned out what I would say, but I also feel that he can’t be defined, you know, he’s much more mysterious to me as a person than most of the other authors I’ve worked on. I’ll keep reading and writing about him despite this, because of this. I think despite this the sort of pursuit of Flann O’Brien as a person is certainly never ending. I think you’ll have found the same. Toby: Yes, absolutely. The real person behind the figure almost disappears into a kind of void, into a kind of negative space, which is really [00:05:00] interesting. Thank you for mentioning my book by the way, So thank you for reading that and indeed for your review. I would say that, I also had the same impression from, Maebh Long’s, brilliant, collected letters. It’s such a useful resource and we learned so much. One of the biggest impressions I came away from that collection with was. The idea that letters of themselves performative, they’re transactional, they’re shaped by who they’re intended by the intended audience and what that audience’s reaction might be. The letters are often irascible, funny, sometimes simply businesslike, but they don’t seem to reveal much of what Myles na gCopaleen as a person was like. This is strange because you hear very different things. He certainly comes across as being very irascible and keen to get into scraps with his friends and colleagues. Yet on a personal level, we know [00:06:00] indirectly from the family members, that. He seemed to be quite a kind person. He mentioned kind eyes, you know, he seemed to be quite a trustworthy and reliable person at the same time. It is interesting that, letters are, like a surface, you can cut into a figure, and reveal something but they don’t necessarily give us any real insight. He’s not bearing his soul by any means. Katherine: I would agree with you. I do believe that version of him is a kind figure who mostly had it together, despite a lot of evidence, comparing him with George Smiley or Sam Spade, a gentle spy or a hard boiled detective. These people are kind and patient of other people’s mistakes, even when they are unfeeling themselves, you know? There, there’s something in that idea, of a certain kind of mid-century masculinity that I pursue in Flann and in Brian, in Myles. I do think crime fiction is a good place to go for someone so mysterious the [00:07:00] kinds of secrets those detectives, those spies are keeping, you know, plan and Brian is keeping his Toby: Absolutely, there’s an interesting, idea to investigate the stories that are hidden or the kind of hidden, crimes, he’s committed. This idea of truths being buried, comes across just everywhere in a way that, family relationships are depicted the way that family histories are depicted, things are so easily forgotten. Such as, in The Third Policeman where there’s a very eerie depiction of, the sort of loss of the family. This kind of inability to communicate with the family. And yet you also get the sense as you do in crime fiction, but whatever’s been buried is sort of echoing, right? It kind of repeats in different ways, in different symbolic ways throughout the text. Is that something you’re working on, at the moment. Katherine: The fascination of fun and Brian as a figure. No, it just animates what I’m doing. I’m trying to write something quite businesslike, for the Cambridge [00:08:00] Companion, student friendly, it would be something that doesn’t necessarily teach students or new scholars in the field about my bafflement. But for me, writing about the law, there’ll be some space for contradiction, certainly, in Flannn his attitude to crime and punishment. But, I keep my pursuit of the kind of character that he would be to one side. I have read a couple of novels. There’s one called The Blood Dimmed Tide, I think it’s about Yeats. I would be interested to read, such a novel about Flann if someone would care to write one for me. Toby: The other question that I ask, all the guests is how you in particular came across Flann because I would say your reputation is a much more wide ranging than that. So you published a frequency on Joyce, you’ve written on Finnegans Wake, you published on Beckett, Dorothy Sayers. So you really have a quite global perspective. And of course there is gonna be a Cambridge Companion about Flann O’Brien [00:09:00] now, which is a fantastic, achievement, for his reputation. But that’s not always been the case, you know, outside of Ireland. It’s really been quite a niche writer for many decades. how did you first come across Flann O’Brien? Katherine: Credit where credit is due. I found Flann through friends and it’s friendship and collegiality that keeps me in the field of Flann O’Brien studies, particularly as you’re saying. I’m a magpie, a picker up of many things, perhaps sometimes more things than my beak can carry. I’m a cultural historian. I write these, certainly the modern literature and the death penalty was a sort of cultural history of the death penalty through modernism. So that means you get a lot of authors. My formal studies taught me this particular cannon of modernism, Joyce, Beckett, Bowen, and I came to many other authors who are important to me today, sayers or Rebecca West through my voracious reading. I first heard about Flann O’Brien through a friend from my masters. I did my masters at the [00:10:00] University of York with Adam Winstanley, who maybe you met
