The Prison of Language: Brian O’Nolan, An Béal Bocht, and Language Determinism

Abstract

Rather than reaffirming An Beal Bocht’s status as a parody of other Irish-language texts, Radvan Markus bridges the gap between An Beal Bocht as Gaelic satire and the postmodernism of O’Nolan’s English-language novels At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman. The essay explores the influence of German pre-Romantic and Romantic philosophers, such as Johann Gottfried Herder and Wilhelm von Humboldt, on the language revival movements which swept through Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. Markus’s essay thus places O’Nolan’s works in Irish into a productive critical dialogue with continental philosophies of language and cultural identity. In doing so, Markus argues that An Beal Bocht exhibits many of the same literary and linguistic postmodern tropes found in O’Nolan’s English-language novels: ‘An Beal Bocht should be regarded as an important precursor to postmodernism in exactly the same way as O’Nolan’s English writing is nowadays seen.’