A tandem of post-modernism on the R827
If you were a municipal historian you might take a passing interest in what de Selby has to say on the subject of roads, as interpreted of course by his acolyte, Noman, the nameless narrator in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman. That discerning, fictitious, and eccentric philosopher regards roads as ‘the most ancient of human monuments, surpassing by many tens of centuries the oldest thing of stone that man has reared to mark his passing.’ It is fitting then that de Selby’s creator has rested since 1966 alongside what must be some class of an ancient thoroughfare, now known as Deansgrange Road, or, for the more exacting among us, the R827, which I have no reason to disbelieve has not been a conduit of human conveyance for thousands of years.
No doubt, the earliest road signs on the R827 were written in Ogham; perhaps something helpful like ‘Hill of Tara this way’ or ‘ritual killing, first field on the left.’ If the Tuatha de Danann were in power, a neighbourhood watch slab might read ‘Beware of the Fir Bolg’ or, if the Milesians were in control a sign might read ‘Beware of the Tuatha de Danann.’ No sign will ever say ‘Beware of the Romans’, puzzling, when you consider how straight the R827 is.
Design features aside though, you might be fascinated to learn that the aesthetically unremarkable R827 is home to some pretty impressive literary ghosts. From a mathematical perspective, the evidence becomes a bit of a geometry lesson. A plaque on a wall beside what used to be 23, Carysfort Avenue, Blackrock, denotes the fourth of thirteen addresses that the young James Joyce would live in; he resides here aged nine to ten. Draw a straight line southwards from 23, Carysfort Avenue to Deansgrange Cemetery and you will find Flann O’Brien’s grave. A few more steps north and just across the road, is a vacant shop that used to be Deansgrange Cycles. Connect the dots between these three points and you have what is called a scalene triangle; for all recalcitrant mathematics students, that is a triangle with no sides of equal length. But there are so many other dots to be joined.
For one year at any rate (1892-93), Blackrock has the honour of hosting the religious and intellectual awakening of Joyce’s fictional alter ego, the young Stephen Dedalus, as described in A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man and as such, that neighbourhood earns a place in literary history. Current residents of Carysfort Avenue might be disappointed though to learn that this address is a step down for the Joyce family, their previous abode of Number 1, Martello Terrace in Bray County Wicklow being much more regal in the late Victorian sense. Young Stephen’s schoolboy escapades between Blackrock Village and Stradbrook with sidekick Aubrey Mills remind us of the antics of Scout, Jem and Dill in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. Aubrey cuts quite a dash. He has, ‘a whistle dangling from his buttonhole and a bicycle lamp attached to his belt while the others had short sticks thrust daggerwise through theirs.’ But the young Stephen Dedalus is not to be outdone. Having acquainted himself with Napoleon's plain style of dress he chooses to ‘remain unadorned and thereby heightened for himself the pleasure of taking counsel with his lieutenant before giving orders.’ And so, dressed for Waterloo, the fledgling warriors do battle in Blackrock or drive the milk-car to Carrickmines. Once again, the homeowners of Blackrock may not be over enamoured with their Joycean connections. Stradbrook, where the cows over-winter, is remembered for its filth. Its ‘foul green puddles and clots of liquid dung and steaming bran troughs, sickened Stephen’s heart.’
Thirty-five years later, in 1927, Flann O’Brien, the sixteen-year-old schoolboy, moves to number 4 Avoca Terrace, in the same neighbourhood as Carysfort Avenue, just a nice walking distance to school in Blackrock College. Of course, the boy racer Joyce would live in thirteen Dublin addresses by age twenty before moving to Paris on his first foray into the European postmodern literary league. O’Brien lives out the remainder of his life in Blackrock, only moving the short distance from Avoca Terrace to Merrion Avenue after his marriage. The nearest he gets to café society is a coterie of notable Dublin city centre pubs that that were favoured by the literati. I allude to the Scotch House on Burgh Quay, Neary’s on Chatham Street, McDaids on Harry St, which incidentally has been identified by Joycean scholars as the setting for the opening of Dubliners story, Grace. And then of course there are the two famous hostelries on Duke St - Davey Byrnes and the Bailey. Incidentally, Davey Byrnes was also frequented by James Joyce as well as featuring in Ulysses, when Leopold Bloom and Nosey Flynn nip in for a Gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of burgundy. The Bailey is equally famous for housing Leopold Bloom's number 7, Eccles St front door and its original stone surround. These were rescued from the house just as it was being demolished in 1967 by John Ryan, then owner of The Bailey. The rescued artifact was suitably installed at the James Joyce Centre on North Great George’s Street in 1995. Finally of course, there was Jack O’Rourkes in Blackrock village for a ‘quick one’ on the way home. While O’Brien is still only a child, and on the opposite end of the cultural spectrum, Joyce is moving in a more international milieu, consorting with the likes of Hemingway, Beckett, Pound and Eliot in bohemian eateries like Café Les Deux Magots, or the even classier Fouquets on the Champs Elysee.
But then there is that much debated trip to Germany that O’Brien makes in 1934; much debated that is because O’Brien turns a fairly mundane trip into a melodramatic odyssey. He transmogrifies a few weeks holiday into a beer hall brush with Nazis and marriage to an eighteen-year-old Clara Ungerland, daughter of a Cologne basket weaver who dies of the 'galloping consumption' one month after the wedding. It is agreed among his associates that this story is manufactured for Time magazine journalist, Stanford Lee Cooper who interviews him for a feature in 1943. You have to wonder though, is O’Brien envious of Joyce’s colourful European lifestyle and is he trying to play catch-up the only way he knows how?
O’Brien’s best kept secret, The Third Policeman, is written in 1939 but not published until 1967, the year after his death. This absurdist work about, among other things, the human qualities of bicycles and the bicycle qualities of humans is regarded by most O’Brien aficionados as a seminal work of genius equal in stature to Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. The Parish were the macabre and Faustian story unfolds represents an adolescent Ireland, an intellectual backwater with an invisible force of frightening proportions operating the gears and levers of life. It is in this parochial social tapestry that authors like O’Brien are forced to weave their way unmolested by the benighted ‘powers that be’, namely the Catholic Church, the censors and the Irish language fanatics.
It would be fair to say that if Joyce were a bicycle he would be one of those lightweight racers with a razor blade saddle; the type that takes guts to ride at high speed, as an impact could be fatal. At the end of a journey he could be a champion or he could be dead, either way though, he’d be a hero. If O’Brien were a bicycle he would be a chunky mountain bike designed for rough terrain; the type that takes a plodder, who has to keep picking himself up and dusting himself off. At the end of a journey he could be covered in muck or be considered a good old sort who muddled through. Either way, he lacks the continental suave of the superior Joyce model. In the world of postmodern literature, the Joyce model casts a much longer shadow, mainly because he leaves little post-colonial, Catholic Ireland while O’Brien stays. All things considered, I guess it would be fair to conclude that it was as courageous to stay as it was to leave.
On any weekday on the R827 there is a preponderance of O’Brien models abandoning the road for the footpath in the hope, I would imagine, that they are not flattened by, or caught in the slipstream of a double-decker bus. A just concern, you will agree, for even the bravest of cyclists on a road that was not designed by the Romans. Joycean models are seen more often at the weekend. Well, it might be more accurate to say a whirring blur that leaves a whiff of testosterone hanging in the air. Sergeant Pluck in The Third Policeman arrestingly reminds us, ‘But the man-charged bicycle is a phenomenon of great charm and intensity and a very dangerous article.’ While we know that post-colonial Ireland back pedals twenty times for every Joycean pedal forward we can justifiably sympathise with O’Brien, the postmodern author struggling through the doldrums on his heavy bicycle while Joyce’s sophisticated gears allowed him to practice his postmodern art as a grown-up, European citizen.
Equality, as John Donne reminds us, is one size fits all when we die, regardless of the success or otherwise of our literary endeavours. Holding onto that universal truth then, isn’t it funny the way skeletons always look like they are grinning, even guffawing, regardless of their humour at time of death or the manner of that death? If the human race died out as mysteriously as the dinosaurs and a future life-form from another planet discovered ‘earthling’ skeletons, they would conduct many scholarly debates on why we all died laughing. Contrariwise, if all skeletons looked glum as a matter of course, despite the felicity or otherwise of their life or the manner of their death, I feel sure that O’Brien’s skeleton would buck the trend and sport a wide grin. With a bicycle shop just across the road from Deansgrange cemetery until 2015, O’Brien may have devoted some supernatural thinking time to the impact of the Atomic Theory in the parish of Blackrock, as does Sergeant Pluck in The Third Policeman:
‘The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms in each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles.’
Consequently, and always cognisant of the spiritual presence of Flann O’Brien in the local environs, I make it my business to pay particular attention to the behaviour of cyclists on the R827 to ascertain if those ‘diminutive gentlemen’ called atoms are interfering with the natural order of the unsuspecting peddlers. I am sad to report that I have never witnessed even one elderly gentleman in the local supermarket or library resorting to leaning against the wall with his elbow in order to remain upright. Moreover, I have never witnessed an ecstatic cyclist riding a bicycle of the opposite sex or, inexplicably ‘noticed crumbs at the front wheels of some of these gentlemen’ outside the cake shop. Above all, I have never been propositioned by any bicycle I have borrowed from a male owner.
I often had reason to visit Deansgrange Cycles; usually to have my purely Platonic pushbike serviced after a long holiday in the garden shed. As always, it was the effectiveness of the brakes that most concerned me. On these visits, I would be reminded of Sergeant Pluck’s alarm about bad brakes, ‘The country is honeycombed with bad brakes, half of the accidents are due to it, it runs in families.’
I like to picture that nascent, postmodern literary family; a ten-year-old Joyce and a sixteen-year-old O’Brien, cycling a tandem up the R827. I can hear Joyce shouting, ‘Faster, faster,’ and I can hear O’Brien respond, ‘The feckin’ brakes aren’t working!’
Copyright Berni Dwan 2016
If you were a municipal historian you might take a passing interest in what de Selby has to say on the subject of roads, as interpreted of course by his acolyte, Noman, the nameless narrator in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman. That discerning, fictitious, and eccentric philosopher regards roads as ‘the most ancient of human monuments, surpassing by many tens of centuries the oldest thing of stone that man has reared to mark his passing.’ It is fitting then that de Selby’s creator has rested since 1966 alongside what must be some class of an ancient thoroughfare, now known as Deansgrange Road, or, for the more exacting among us, the R827, which I have no reason to disbelieve has not been a conduit of human conveyance for thousands of years.
No doubt, the earliest road signs on the R827 were written in Ogham; perhaps something helpful like ‘Hill of Tara this way’ or ‘ritual killing, first field on the left.’ If the Tuatha de Danann were in power, a neighbourhood watch slab might read ‘Beware of the Fir Bolg’ or, if the Milesians were in control a sign might read ‘Beware of the Tuatha de Danann.’ No sign will ever say ‘Beware of the Romans’, puzzling, when you consider how straight the R827 is.
Design features aside though, you might be fascinated to learn that the aesthetically unremarkable R827 is home to some pretty impressive literary ghosts. From a mathematical perspective, the evidence becomes a bit of a geometry lesson. A plaque on a wall beside what used to be 23, Carysfort Avenue, Blackrock, denotes the fourth of thirteen addresses that the young James Joyce would live in; he resides here aged nine to ten. Draw a straight line southwards from 23, Carysfort Avenue to Deansgrange Cemetery and you will find Flann O’Brien’s grave. A few more steps north and just across the road, is a vacant shop that used to be Deansgrange Cycles. Connect the dots between these three points and you have what is called a scalene triangle; for all recalcitrant mathematics students, that is a triangle with no sides of equal length. But there are so many other dots to be joined.
For one year at any rate (1892-93), Blackrock has the honour of hosting the religious and intellectual awakening of Joyce’s fictional alter ego, the young Stephen Dedalus, as described in A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man and as such, that neighbourhood earns a place in literary history. Current residents of Carysfort Avenue might be disappointed though to learn that this address is a step down for the Joyce family, their previous abode of Number 1, Martello Terrace in Bray County Wicklow being much more regal in the late Victorian sense. Young Stephen’s schoolboy escapades between Blackrock Village and Stradbrook with sidekick Aubrey Mills remind us of the antics of Scout, Jem and Dill in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. Aubrey cuts quite a dash. He has, ‘a whistle dangling from his buttonhole and a bicycle lamp attached to his belt while the others had short sticks thrust daggerwise through theirs.’ But the young Stephen Dedalus is not to be outdone. Having acquainted himself with Napoleon's plain style of dress he chooses to ‘remain unadorned and thereby heightened for himself the pleasure of taking counsel with his lieutenant before giving orders.’ And so, dressed for Waterloo, the fledgling warriors do battle in Blackrock or drive the milk-car to Carrickmines. Once again, the homeowners of Blackrock may not be over enamoured with their Joycean connections. Stradbrook, where the cows over-winter, is remembered for its filth. Its ‘foul green puddles and clots of liquid dung and steaming bran troughs, sickened Stephen’s heart.’
Thirty-five years later, in 1927, Flann O’Brien, the sixteen-year-old schoolboy, moves to number 4 Avoca Terrace, in the same neighbourhood as Carysfort Avenue, just a nice walking distance to school in Blackrock College. Of course, the boy racer Joyce would live in thirteen Dublin addresses by age twenty before moving to Paris on his first foray into the European postmodern literary league. O’Brien lives out the remainder of his life in Blackrock, only moving the short distance from Avoca Terrace to Merrion Avenue after his marriage. The nearest he gets to café society is a coterie of notable Dublin city centre pubs that that were favoured by the literati. I allude to the Scotch House on Burgh Quay, Neary’s on Chatham Street, McDaids on Harry St, which incidentally has been identified by Joycean scholars as the setting for the opening of Dubliners story, Grace. And then of course there are the two famous hostelries on Duke St - Davey Byrnes and the Bailey. Incidentally, Davey Byrnes was also frequented by James Joyce as well as featuring in Ulysses, when Leopold Bloom and Nosey Flynn nip in for a Gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of burgundy. The Bailey is equally famous for housing Leopold Bloom's number 7, Eccles St front door and its original stone surround. These were rescued from the house just as it was being demolished in 1967 by John Ryan, then owner of The Bailey. The rescued artifact was suitably installed at the James Joyce Centre on North Great George’s Street in 1995. Finally of course, there was Jack O’Rourkes in Blackrock village for a ‘quick one’ on the way home. While O’Brien is still only a child, and on the opposite end of the cultural spectrum, Joyce is moving in a more international milieu, consorting with the likes of Hemingway, Beckett, Pound and Eliot in bohemian eateries like Café Les Deux Magots, or the even classier Fouquets on the Champs Elysee.
But then there is that much debated trip to Germany that O’Brien makes in 1934; much debated that is because O’Brien turns a fairly mundane trip into a melodramatic odyssey. He transmogrifies a few weeks holiday into a beer hall brush with Nazis and marriage to an eighteen-year-old Clara Ungerland, daughter of a Cologne basket weaver who dies of the 'galloping consumption' one month after the wedding. It is agreed among his associates that this story is manufactured for Time magazine journalist, Stanford Lee Cooper who interviews him for a feature in 1943. You have to wonder though, is O’Brien envious of Joyce’s colourful European lifestyle and is he trying to play catch-up the only way he knows how?
O’Brien’s best kept secret, The Third Policeman, is written in 1939 but not published until 1967, the year after his death. This absurdist work about, among other things, the human qualities of bicycles and the bicycle qualities of humans is regarded by most O’Brien aficionados as a seminal work of genius equal in stature to Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. The Parish were the macabre and Faustian story unfolds represents an adolescent Ireland, an intellectual backwater with an invisible force of frightening proportions operating the gears and levers of life. It is in this parochial social tapestry that authors like O’Brien are forced to weave their way unmolested by the benighted ‘powers that be’, namely the Catholic Church, the censors and the Irish language fanatics.
It would be fair to say that if Joyce were a bicycle he would be one of those lightweight racers with a razor blade saddle; the type that takes guts to ride at high speed, as an impact could be fatal. At the end of a journey he could be a champion or he could be dead, either way though, he’d be a hero. If O’Brien were a bicycle he would be a chunky mountain bike designed for rough terrain; the type that takes a plodder, who has to keep picking himself up and dusting himself off. At the end of a journey he could be covered in muck or be considered a good old sort who muddled through. Either way, he lacks the continental suave of the superior Joyce model. In the world of postmodern literature, the Joyce model casts a much longer shadow, mainly because he leaves little post-colonial, Catholic Ireland while O’Brien stays. All things considered, I guess it would be fair to conclude that it was as courageous to stay as it was to leave.
On any weekday on the R827 there is a preponderance of O’Brien models abandoning the road for the footpath in the hope, I would imagine, that they are not flattened by, or caught in the slipstream of a double-decker bus. A just concern, you will agree, for even the bravest of cyclists on a road that was not designed by the Romans. Joycean models are seen more often at the weekend. Well, it might be more accurate to say a whirring blur that leaves a whiff of testosterone hanging in the air. Sergeant Pluck in The Third Policeman arrestingly reminds us, ‘But the man-charged bicycle is a phenomenon of great charm and intensity and a very dangerous article.’ While we know that post-colonial Ireland back pedals twenty times for every Joycean pedal forward we can justifiably sympathise with O’Brien, the postmodern author struggling through the doldrums on his heavy bicycle while Joyce’s sophisticated gears allowed him to practice his postmodern art as a grown-up, European citizen.
Equality, as John Donne reminds us, is one size fits all when we die, regardless of the success or otherwise of our literary endeavours. Holding onto that universal truth then, isn’t it funny the way skeletons always look like they are grinning, even guffawing, regardless of their humour at time of death or the manner of that death? If the human race died out as mysteriously as the dinosaurs and a future life-form from another planet discovered ‘earthling’ skeletons, they would conduct many scholarly debates on why we all died laughing. Contrariwise, if all skeletons looked glum as a matter of course, despite the felicity or otherwise of their life or the manner of their death, I feel sure that O’Brien’s skeleton would buck the trend and sport a wide grin. With a bicycle shop just across the road from Deansgrange cemetery until 2015, O’Brien may have devoted some supernatural thinking time to the impact of the Atomic Theory in the parish of Blackrock, as does Sergeant Pluck in The Third Policeman:
‘The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms in each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles.’
Consequently, and always cognisant of the spiritual presence of Flann O’Brien in the local environs, I make it my business to pay particular attention to the behaviour of cyclists on the R827 to ascertain if those ‘diminutive gentlemen’ called atoms are interfering with the natural order of the unsuspecting peddlers. I am sad to report that I have never witnessed even one elderly gentleman in the local supermarket or library resorting to leaning against the wall with his elbow in order to remain upright. Moreover, I have never witnessed an ecstatic cyclist riding a bicycle of the opposite sex or, inexplicably ‘noticed crumbs at the front wheels of some of these gentlemen’ outside the cake shop. Above all, I have never been propositioned by any bicycle I have borrowed from a male owner.
I often had reason to visit Deansgrange Cycles; usually to have my purely Platonic pushbike serviced after a long holiday in the garden shed. As always, it was the effectiveness of the brakes that most concerned me. On these visits, I would be reminded of Sergeant Pluck’s alarm about bad brakes, ‘The country is honeycombed with bad brakes, half of the accidents are due to it, it runs in families.’
I like to picture that nascent, postmodern literary family; a ten-year-old Joyce and a sixteen-year-old O’Brien, cycling a tandem up the R827. I can hear Joyce shouting, ‘Faster, faster,’ and I can hear O’Brien respond, ‘The feckin’ brakes aren’t working!’
Copyright Berni Dwan 2016
