Abstract for PSA Conference (Waterford, May 2009)

Title of Paper:
Linguistic postcolonial concerns within the Irish Free State: Brian O’Nolan’s minor literature

Abstract:
In their study Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari define a minor writer’s role as one which deterritorialises major languages in order to negotiate textual spaces which question the assumptions of dominant groups. Considering this concept has been applied to colonial and postcolonial studies due to Deleuze and Guattari’s linguistic concerns, my interest lies in understanding how Irish writers’ use of English in their literary productions can illuminate the question of to what extent the end of empire and the installation of a Catholic nationalist state had an impact on Irish literature produced within the Irish Free State. This interest investigates how Brian O’Nolan’s use of the major language English in his first novel At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) is a deterritorialising linguistic strategy in post-independence Ireland. If the novel is read within the light of Deleuze and Guattari’s first principle of a minor literature, whereby a minor literature is constructed within a major language, I argue that O’Nolan expresses similar linguistic concerns to other postcolonial writers. Firstly, this paper will offer a brief review of how Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of minor literature as a combative and anti-hegemonic writing strategy has been applied to postcolonial literary studies, particularly within an Irish context. Secondly, through close textual analysis of O’Nolan’s novel, I will demonstrate that O’Nolan takes pre-existing dominant models of cultural expression that define Ireland as nationalist, Gaelic and Catholic, and disrupts these traditional structures by exaggerating and amplifying their assumed signifying practices. I will concentrate on two episodes in the novel where O’Nolan makes his reader aware of the constructed nature of Irish identity by dominant discourses. Finally, it will be argued that O’Nolan’s language, in order to avoid reterritorialising within these episodes, creates ambiguous political metanarratives which avoid easy signification or clear definitions of Irish identity.