Abstract
Abstract The 1960s marked a period of relative liberalization, modernization, and prosperity for the Republic of Ireland. This chapter explores why, under such circumstances, Flann O’Brien (Brian O’Nolan) felt compelled to retreat from an increasingly confident present into what, in his much-maligned final novel, The Hard Life (1961), he constructs as the sexually squalid and politically paralysed culture of turn-of-the-century Dublin. Moving beyond The Hard Life, it identifies how, in O’Nolan’s late fiction, drama, and Cruiskeen Lawn columns, the key themes and debates addressed in this study re-emerge in an exhausted or ‘used-up’ manner. At the same time, by examining O’Nolan’s thwarted efforts to stage a Syngean confrontation with Dublin audiences and a Joycean confrontation with the censorship board, it illustrates how Irish modernist provocations in the domain of sexual health had been surpassed by their context, even as the issues which animated them remained socially divisive and culturally urgent.
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