This dissertation presents an argument for the ethical value of a reader's inability to fully comprehend works by Jorge Luis Borges, G.K. Chesterton, William Faulkner, and Brian O'Nolan (aka Flann O'Brien). Such texts demand creative engagement by the reader which could be described as a necessary betrayal of the text. Viewed in the context of the so-called "ethical turn" in literary theory, the revaluation of infidelity accomplished by such unfaithful reading can foster a greater openness toward the unknown, and ultimately unknowable, other. Similarly, by juxtaposing the work of Faulkner, a canonical modernist writer, with more nontraditional writers such as Chesterton and O'Nolan, I mean to betray the sort of limitations created by employing such categorical terms as "modernism" itself. In an introductory chapter, I use the work of ethical theorist Emmanuel Levinas, as well as the socio-political theory of Zygmunt Bauman and Ernesto Laclau, to develop a theoretical framework for the project, taking some examples from the writings of Borges. My chapter on Chesterton presents "The Man Who Was Thursday" as a site of multiple betrayals which can awaken the reader to the instability of any fixed notion of identity. I conclude the chapter with a specific show of infidelity in the 1924 Russian adaptation of Chesterton's novel for the Kamerny theater in Moscow, an intentional "misreading" that reveals aspects of the work glossed over by years of more ostensibly faithful interpretations. My third chapter features a sustained reflection on the ethics of reading Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying," a work which stubbornly "keeps its secret," to use Derrida's phrasing. Since any reading of this story must be, on a certain level, a betrayal, I discuss the possibilities opened up by resisting the tendency to fix the meaning of such an undecidable work. In my final chapter, I consider the work of O'Nolan as a testimony to the constitutive power of betrayal. In his deconstruction of authorial presence, his Judas-like betrayal of James Joyce, and his provocative 1943 "translation" onto the Dublin stage of the Capek brothers' "Insect Play," O'Nolan is always unfaithful to his object; however, the revaluation of infidelity posited by this dissertation suggests that his traitorous stance could paradoxically do more justice to the objects of his focus than would a more ostensibly faithful approach.

Irish author Brian O'Nolan's (1911-1966) later career involves multi-media works that in a variety of ways challenge Ireland to be more open to the complications of modernity. These controversial works have too often been dismissed as pedestrian and unsophisticated, though they offer themselves as experiments in different media, involving technologies that were recent developments in Ireland. Looking at his later fiction, journalism, and television writings reveals that O'Nolan continued his commitment to complexity throughout his entire career. O'Nolan's experiments take many forms, including the fragmented identities of Flann O'Brien and Myles na gCopaleen, portraying an author who embraces modernity when many in the country advocated provincial lore. He is open to modernity because he seeks positions among Ireland's emerging modern and nascent provincial voices in multiple narratives. These multiple positions are located in verbal and visual forms, multiple personas, and multiple genres--including new media--where he crosses boundaries of artistic media by including visual representations in his written experiments published and broadcast in new media. I combine Cultural and New Modernist Studies in an approach that labels O'Nolan a "bad" modernist because his multi-media and multi-genre works are precise and premeditated experiments in cosmopolitan as well as regional modernity. Moreover, I contend this "bad" modernist's later works can be reexamined as one form of Ireland's modernist culture, helping to bridge the transition from colony to emerging global power. Chapter one starts with persona Flann O'Brien's last novel, Slattery's Sago Saga (1965-1966), which is an appropriate beginning because its multiple narratives are extended to a broader, transatlantic audience, that of America. The novel also adopts an ambivalent female character that reappears, almost simultaneously, as a straightforward, confident female voice in the multi-episode television series, Th'Oul Lad of Kilsalaher (1965). Since O'Brien's works can be troubled by misogynistic tendencies, studying a later novel that complicates preconceived patterns about women helps readdress criticisms of the writer. Two interchapters also depict O'Brien's diverse experiments and positions in both well-known and obscure locales, anticipating shifts in more refined writings. The first of these analyzes O'Brien's early experiments in visual form, such as cartoons in childhood and college endeavors and doodles in the unpublished, first manuscript of At Swim-Two-Birds. In chapter two, the Cruiskeen Lawn columns, written under the Myles persona, mark a new form of journalism that uses intersections of verbal monologue and found illustrations to form its jokes. This word and image debate is made humorous by old trade magazine illustrations being recycled as new etchings, and this compounds the literary forgery evident throughout O'Nolan's career. Additionally, Myles' new journalism can be considered public art because The Irish Times where the columns are circulated is a natural arena of debate. A second interchapter hints at O'Nolan's part in shaping public thinking while offering his talents for pay. These experimental sketches show the "bad" modernist in O'Nolan when he tries to sell his Myles identity to Irish businesses like the Irish Hospital Sweepstakes, Guinness, and Whiskey Distilleries as a viable brand (a satirist who combines visual material with current and historical events) in the commercial market, even when the archives remain ambiguous. Finally, chapter three focuses on Myles' writings in television, and it is in Th'Oul Lad of Kilasalaher that a confident, modern female voice first emerges in his writing career. I compare his early, full-length television plays, which are often formulaic and transferable to other modern nations, to the multi-episode series, O'Dea's Yer Man and Th'Oul Lad of Kilasalaher, in part to reveal his pioneering role in developing a new form of modernity for Ireland; that he wants them to remain open to independent ideas rather than forcing on them a prevalent and predominant form of modernism. In the epilogue, I compare O'Nolan's modernist experiments to Anne Enright's parallel and contemporary work The Wig My Father Wore (1995).

In the immediate post-independence period, forms of state-sponsored Irish nationalism were pre-occupied with exclusive cultural markers based on the Irish language, mythology and folk traditions. Because of this, a postcolonial examination of how such nationalist forms of identity were fetishised is necessary in order to critique the continuing process of decolonization in Ireland. This dissertation investigates Brian O’Nolan’s engagement with dominant colonial and nationalist literary discourses in his fiction and journalism. Deleuze and Guattari define a ‘minor’ writer’s role as one which deterritorializes major languages in order to negotiate textual spaces which question the assumptions of dominant groups. Considering this concept has been applied to postcolonial studies due to the theorists’ linguistic and political concerns, this dissertation explores the ‘minor’ literary practice of Brian O’Nolan’s authorial personae and writing techniques. Through the employment of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the deterritorialization of language alongside Walter Benjamin’s models of the flâneur and translation, and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s concept of bricolage, this thesis examines the complex forms of postcolonial narrative agency and discursive political resistance in O’Nolan’s work. While O’Nolan is often read in biographical terms or within the frameworks of literary modernism and postmodernism, this thesis aims to demonstrate the politically ambivalent nature of his writing through his creation of liminal authorial selves and heterogeneous narrative forms. As a bi-lingual author, O’Nolan is linguistically ‘in-between’ languages and, because of this, he deterritorializes both historical and literary associations of the Irish and English languages to produce parodic and comic versions of national and linguistic identity. His satiric novel An Béal Bocht exposes, through his use of an array of materials, how Irish folk and peasant culture have been fetishized within colonial and nationalist frameworks. In order to avoid such restricting forms of identity, O’Nolan positions his own authorial self within a multitude of pseudonyms which refuse a clear, assimilable subjectivity and political position. Because of this, O’Nolan’s authorial voice in his journalism is read as an allusive flâneur figure. Equally, O’Nolan deterritorializes Irish mythology in At Swim-Two-Birds as a form of palimpsestic translation and rhizomatic re-mapping of a number of literary traditions which reflect the Irish nation while in The Third Policeman O’Nolan deconstructs notions of empirical subjectivity and academic and scientific epistemological knowledge. This results in an infinite form of fantastical writing which exposes the limited codes of Irish national culture and identity without reterritorializing such identities. Because O’Nolan’s ‘minor’ literary challenge is reflective of the on-going crisis of Ireland’s incomplete decolonization, this thesis employs the concept of ‘minor’ literature to read Ireland’s historical past and contemporary modernity through O’Nolan’s multi-voiced and layered narratives.