From the ruins of time and space

Abstract

Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two Birds (2001[1939]) serves as an avant-garde guide to the streetscapes and zeitgeist of post-colonial Dublin in the 1930s, and illuminates Jonathan Raban's perspective that ‘one man's city is the sum of all the routes he takes through it, a spoor as unique as a finger print’. Joseph Hassett and Declan Kiberd have respectively observed that O'Brien's mise en abyme reflects the ‘concentric enfolding of modern urban events’, and that the ‘very geography of Dublin, with its fiercely independent villages and suburbs’, may have served as the template for the novel's multiple narrative lines and hyper-real depiction of place. This paper explored O'Brien's novel by focusing Giambattista Vico's ‘Historical Arcs’, Mikhail M. Bahktin's ‘Historical Poetics’ and Guy Debord and the International Situationists' concept of the dérive through the lens of a Geographical Information System (GIS). This ‘digital hermeneutic’ approach (to borrow Umberto Eco's term) created a means to visualize and parse the confluences of critical theory, the palimpsest of history and the overlapping narrative lines and multi-dimensional spaces of Dublin at play within At Swim Two Birds. Inspired by the Dadaists, the Surrealists, as well as the critical interventions of Henri Lefebvre and Walter Benjamin, this paper's study draws upon psychogeographical practices and idiosyncratic GIS techniques in an attempt to sidestep (in Bob Catterall's phrase) the standard ‘linear approach of much social and socio-spatial “science”’ and ‘mainstream urban studies’ to visualize, map, engage and ‘game’ O'Brien's kaleidoscopic, hyper-urban, post-colonial perspective.