Diminishing the Authorial Footprint: Objects and Texts of Reuse and Refuse in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds

Abstract

Starting from Myles’ playful advertisement of book-handling services, the paper explores O’Brien’s/Myles’ systematic recycling, rewriting and inscribing of modernist texts and narrative devices, imbricated with the featuring of second-hand and repurposed objects. I argue for a provocative self-positioning of Flann’s/Myles’ texts and their recasting of modernist authorship and the authority of the author in the context of the increasing relevance, and ever faster obsolescence, of commodity culture in the first half of the twentieth century. The collage/assemblage of texts belonging to different genres, ages, languages and aesthetics is situated at the interface between Handlung with its corollary, the ethos of productivity, and handling, reuse and repurposing, at an ironic angle to the modernist slogan, “make it new”.