Patrick McGinley's Impressions of Flann O'Brien: The Devil's Diary and At Swim-Two-Birds

Abstract

Oft from new truths, and new phrase, new doubts grow, As strange attire aliens the men we know. (John Donne, the Countess of Bedford) While reading the conclusion of Patrick McGinley's novel The Devil's Diary (1988), audiences familiar the fictions of Flann O'Brien pause, hearing distinct echoes of the earlier Irish novelist. The last chapter of McGinley's novel subtly resonates overtones of O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) that intricately complicate the narrative procedures previously established in the novel. For the most part, The Devil's Diary asks be read as realistic fiction, its audience imaginatively participating in the ploys and predicaments of the main characters. But the final chapter introduces literary allusions At Swim-Two-Birds that break through the frame of the story, involving us in a variation of narrative metalepsis that promotes this novel's elasticity and inventiveness. In referring us back At Swim-Two-Birds, McGinley expands the boundaries of The Devil's Diary and asks us consider the novel as a palimpsest that covertly reveals traces of pre-texts such as O'Brien's. Most significantly, in calling our attention language as a never-to-be-finished tapestry of traces, McGinley reinvolves his readers in a central theme of the novel: anxieties of indeterminacy.(1) Since McGinley's novels are not yet as well established as those of a James Joyce or a Samuel Beckett, a brief synopsis of The Devil's Diary is necessary provide adequate context for my argument. Father Jerry McSharry, a priest serving the Donegal village of Gleenkeel, finds himself at odds one of his parishioners, Arty Brennan, over the question of local changes. Brennan has returned from America a flair for commercial development and the intention of putting Glenkeel the map. With the aid of his lackey, Mandamus McDaid, Brennan has already built a motel, a fishmeal factory, a vegetable factory, a supermarket, and a folk museum to enshrine and preserve the symbols of a way of life that his works had destroyed (45).(2) To these he plans add Brennan's Holiday Village, an enclave of traditional Irish peasant cottages, compounding turf fires and thatched roofs electricity, piped water ... gas cooker and fridge (45-46). Father Jerry adamantly opposes the new venture because Brennan's modernization of the village has already corrupted the community's culture. He warns Brennan: We've had enough changes here, more than we've been able absorb in so short a time. There is more money and more of the things that money can buy. Sadly, the quality of life has deteriorated. People have lost their innocence and it what was left of the local culture. (51) Father Jerry has recently become host his prodigal brother, Hugo, who has spent two decades embracing adventures in more openly barbaric regions of the Ivory Coast, Amazonian jungles, and New Guinea. Shortly after arriving in Glenkeel, Hugo enters the local feud on the side of his brother, and Arty Brennan more than coincidentally disappears, later turning up dead. Hugo's which Father Jerry cannot help reading, indicates that Hugo has assumed the role of deus ex machina, solving his brother's problems for him by any means possible, including murder. Although Hugo claims, My is not a but a novel in the form of a diary, the entries and events coincide too closely for comfort (91).(3) The boundaries of family ties, legal responsibilities, and priestly duties blur as Father Jerry finds himself wrestling the forbidden knowledge of what he had read in his brother's diary (79). Late in the novel, just as Father Jerry fears that his brother has designs on the life of Mandamus McDaid, it is Hugo who mysteriously disappears. In a letter Father Jerry receives days later, Hugo explains that his involvement in the parish battle and his meant-to-be-read entries were crafted temptations, designed present Father Jerry with a series of moral choices (233). …