Flann O’Brien‘s interest in detective fiction has yet to be fully documented by the bibliographers, but it is becoming well-known – ‘in certain quarters’, Kharms would say – that O’Brien (or rather O’Nolan) contributed dozens of plots to a London publishing company specializing in a Sexton-Blake style series. Neither Soviet Russia nor de Valeran Ireland had been greatly feted for its contribution to this important back-alley of literature: indeed both societies were (for different reasons, perhaps) incapable of tolerating or sustaining such a figure as the resourceful Holmes. In Ireland, the best detective novel actually set in the Saorstat or its successor is that deliberate piss-take of half-a-dozen plots criminal and fictional, Murder in Three Moves (1960) by Rutherford Watters. Only in burlesque or under the elaborate export licences employed by F. O’Brien & Co. can detective fiction be manufactured in Ireland.
Distinct from the romanticized criminality associated with Byron, Maturin and Baudelaire, there is a forensic subdivision of nineteenth-century fiction, beginning perhaps with Edgar Allan Poe in America but in Europe making its début in the 1860s with Wilkie Collins and Sheridan Le Fanu. In connection with Collins, The Moonstone (1868) is the case in point, and Sergeant Cuff the pioneering detective. Le Fanu’s Checkmate (1871, but based on an earlier novel) can be similarly cited. However, it is really with the stories which make up In a Glass Darkly (1872) that investigative fiction and the kind of religious theme later summarized in Zarathustra’s cry, ‘God is Dead!’, first conspire in English. Commencing with a title misquoting Saint Paul (cf. 1 Corinthians 12: 13), the stories of In a Glass Darkly are ostensibly the papers of a certain Dr Martin Hesselius but they progressively abandon their clinical discretion to map out the many culs-de-sac into which modern religious belief has run, must run. This serial and forensic technique is conventionalized in the Sherlock Holmes stories. In these, it is the map of London and a monograph on tobacco ash – programmed through the great investigator’s intellect but narratively invincible and pre-determined – which run down purely secular offenders against the social order. The calculating machine, regularly turned out in a veritable uniform of distinctive clothing, has replaced God. But for the moment it resembles a bachelor inhabitant of those high-grade diggings, 221b Baker Street. Holmes is sexless because the Holmesian fiction propagates a vast untruth, the untruth of an imperial civilization.
Why Sherlock Holmes’s creator (Doyle) and his eternal foes (Moriarty and Moran) should bear Irish names is a conundrum worthy of Sergeant Pluck himself in The Third Policeman. In Le Fanu and Doyle, there is still a persistent, civil asking of questions, entertaining in itself for the reader even if (in the case of Doyle’s detective stories) one rapidly becomes tired of the character’s ability to solve mysteries which have after all been set by that lesser intelligence, his creator. In Le Fanu the questions disturb, in Doyle the answers are intended to assuage. By the time one comes to Flann O’Brien, however, the question itself has become elliptical, or mirror-like, problematical anyhow:
‘What is your pronoun?’ he inquired.
‘I have no pronoun‚’ I answered, hoping I knew his meaning.
‘What is your cog?’
‘My cog?’
‘Your surnoun?’
My reply again surprised him and also seemed to please him.
He raised his thick eyebrows and changed his face into what could be described as a smile. He came back to the counter, put out his enormous hand, took mine in it and shook it warmly.
‘No name or no idea of your originality at all?’
‘None.’
Thus, the narrator and his policeman, the colleague of that third policeman who never is present in the fiction, Policeman Fox.
In Daniil Kharms, by what appears contrast, questions are comparatively rare but none the less disorientating: consider the dialogue in the latter half of ‘Makarov and Petersen’, after Petersen has disappeared. Interrogation as such rarely obtrudes, but the story which most directly reflects the political climate in which Kharms wrote – ‘The Drawback’ – is also the one which accommodates (well, almost) something like ordinary sexual desires and relations. The connection between the interrogative mood, crime as a theme, and human sexuality is most extraordinarily treated in ‘Rehabilitation’. As in John Banville’s The Book of Evidence (1989), the narrator is a singularly voluble murderer, mitigating suavely even as he catalogues his crimes:
And also I did not rape Yelizaveta Antonovna. In the first place, she was no longer a virgin; and secondly, I was having dealings with a corpse, so she has no cause for complaint. What about the fact that she just happened to have to give birth? Well, I did pull out the infant …
The stream of horrifying confessions – ‘I didn’t tear his head off: it was his thin neck did that …’ – indirectly testifies to the interrogatory method which is textually absent. The absurdity of the piece would register its truthfulness, providing one could re-place the inadmissable interrogation. Sexual violation is, so to speak, the register of textual violation which (in an almost religious or scriptural sense) is violation of the truth. Thus sex rarely intrudes because the truth can rarely be written.
It is probably misleading to argue that some affinity (however inverted or proportionally distorted) exists between the worlds of Flann O’Brien and Daniil Kharms. The Soviet Union of the 1930s, and Ireland even at the worst of times, remain incomparable and this not simply in a way which wags the finger at Stalin: Kharms and his associates were part of the left-wing alternative culture. For comparative purposes then, other literatures and other societies might well provide clearer parallels. Yet the introduction of Kharms into Irish literary debate can serve to alert us to some previously unnoticed features of familiar texts. In Gulliver’s Travels, for example, the fragmentary third voyage with its disjointed accounts of scientific experiments and metaphysical theories might now be reconsidered in relation to the comprehensive acts of classification which are so rigorously sustained throughout the other three voyages. The fragment is a sort of escape, an awkward witness turning up at the show trial, a talisman or an omen. In the work of Flann O’Brien, the unending textuality of the two best novels can be contrasted with the fragmentary Best of Myles. Something is required to defamiliarize the Irish literary canon as it is now propagated. Daniil Kharms is just the man for the job.
Further Reading
George Gibian (ed. & trans.), The Man in the Black Overcoat: Russia’s Literature of the Absurd: Selected Works of Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky. Evanstown, Ill:, Northwestern U.P., 1987. This revised and expanded edition of an earlier (1971) publication, includes The OBERIU Manifesto.
R. Milner-Gulland, translations in Modern Poetry in Translation, 6(1970).
Alice Stone Nakhimovsky, Laughter in the Void: An Introduction to the Writings of Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedenskii in Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, Sonderband 5 (1982). This, the only book-length study of Kharms, should be used with caution; see also R. Milner-Gulland, ‘Kovarnye stikhi: Notes on Daniil Kharms and Aleksandr Vvedensky’ in Essays in Poetics, vol. 9 no. 1 (1984).
Neil Cornwell is currently editing the first collection of essays on Kharms, which will also include his translation of the definitive text of ‘Yelizaveta Bam’ (Russian text first published in the USA in 1987 and in the Soviet Union in 1988). This collection is due to be published by Macmillan in 1990.
Copyright
First published 1989 by
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Copyright © 1989 Neil Cornwell, Hugh Maxton
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