Hybridity and Parody in ‘Ulysses’ and Flann O’brien’s ‘at Swim-Two-Birds’
Hybridity and Parody in ‘Ulysses’ and Flann O’brien’s ‘at Swim-Two-Birds’

Summary/Abstract: The aim of the present essay is to explore the hybridity, heterogeneity of discourse, as they appear in two central texts of the canon of Irish (post)modernism, Joyce’s Ulysses (The Cyclops) and Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds. If in Ulysses Joyce points out what the Celtic Revival ‘forgot to remember’ - the actual racial heterogeneities that were obscured by an imagined retrospective construct, ‘Irishness’ of a homogeneous national character -, this hybridity is explored to the fullest in the Cyclops parodies of literary, journalistic etc. discourses/styles, most notably, Celtic literary traditions. These parodies are ‘revisited’ by O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, a novel which presents itself as a self-conscious metafiction whose principal devices are play, irony, parody, intertextuality, and where creation is replaced by an endless chain of intertextual borrowings, making it possible for extremely different fictional characters and narratives to join in a fictional world where play and parody are the only ordering principles.

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