At Swim-Two-Birds

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1939

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Pages 1-35

Pages 35-70

Pages 70-107

Pages 107-138

Pages 138-175

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Themes

The Power of Literature

At Swim-Two-Birds portrays the power of literature. The student is the novel’s protagonist, a man deeply involved in the literary world. Not only is he studying Irish literature at a university, but he’s also writing his own novel, and he spends many long hours debating literature with his friends in bars. To the student, literature is a powerful force around which his entire existence pivots. He values literature over everything else, even when he’s expressing his love for literature by lying in bed all day to read, much to his uncle’s annoyance. At university, in the pub, in his room, and everywhere else he goes, the student thinks and talks about literature. His life has no more powerful force, and given that the student is the protagonist of the novel and the creator of most other characters, he transfers this force into the narrative itself.

Literature’s power asserts itself throughout the novel. The student pens a novel in which authors have the power to grant life to people and then continue to have power over their creations. In this regard, the authors of even cheap literature—like Trellis and his Western pulp novels—are essentially gods. The student envisions a world in which all forms of literature, from ancient folklore to poems to pulp novels, are equally important and powerful. The creators of this literature have the power to create and destroy as they see fit. Furthermore, this power transcends the traditional limitations of the world. Literature is so powerful that it becomes a supernatural force that alters the fabric of reality. Trellis invents Furriskey, who comes into the world as a fully formed adult; Orlick writes violent passages in which a magical Pooka tortures Trellis; and Finn Mac Cool and Mad Sweeny show how the traditional folklore of Ireland has a similar power to reshape reality as people change into animals and leap miles at a time. Literature is so powerful that it doesn’t have to obey the laws of physics or reality.

The student eventually begins to worry that literature might be too powerful. When Trellis is placed on trial by the characters he creates, he is forced to answer for his sins as a literary man. He is tried because he has abused his power as a writer. This trial doesn’t end even as the student, reacting to his uncle’s unexpected sincerity, suddenly worries that he’s a poor judge of character. What saves Trellis is the student’s recognizing that the power of literature is almost too great. The student forsakes this power because he no longer entrusts it to any individual.

Working-Class Interests

According to Shanahan, Jem Casey is the poet laureate of working-class people, and Casey’s poetry provides the novel’s best-praised examples of working-class ideals. Shanahan claims that Casey’s poems about beer, for example, are simple and enjoyable for regular, working-class people. Lamont echoes his friend’s opinion. Later, when they meet Casey, they praise him for his poems and his work on behalf of common people like them. They forsake the “fancy stuff” (149) in most literature and prefer Casey’s observations of working-class life. Their praise for Casey’s poems suggests that working-class ideas need representation in literature and hints that many such ideas are disregarded because they lack the artistry or pretension of more bourgeoise works. Shanahan praises Casey’s working-class poetry precisely because he feels that the work is unfairly treated by middle-class literary people.

One of the middle-class, bourgeoise literary people whom Shanahan meets is the Good Fairy. In addition to criticizing people’s grammar and cliched phrases, the Good Fairy is notably suspicious of working-class solidarity. When Shanahan and others talk about working-class interests, the Good Fairy dismisses his comments as “Bolshevism,” warning that these ideas will lead to a disastrous implementation of communism. The Good Fairy is positioned as the antagonistic opponent of working-class literature and social policy. Whether criticizing Casey’s poetry, other people’s grammar, or the striking unions, the Good Fairy embodies middle-class tension toward the working class. That the Good Fairy bets with money he doesn’t have and is rude to the other characters suggests that his perspective on such social tensions might not be the most moral position.

Fundamentally, however, the student is a lazy, apolitical middle-class university student who fetishizes working-class ideas. He invents men like Shanahan and Casey as well-intentioned caricatures of working-class people; while the student might agree with his characters and disagree with the Good Fairy, he unintentionally writes his working-class characters as a parody. To him, working-class men are disreputable criminals who love poetry about beer almost as much as beer itself. Fortunately for the student, the working-class ideals of his characters just so happen to align with his own desire to sit in pubs and drink beer. While the student’s novel may attempt to portray class-based tensions, he only succeeds in justifying his own warped views of working-class people as alcohol-soaked, good-natured simpletons who occasionally commit crimes. As such, the student’s writing is less a portrayal of working-class tensions and more a parody of misjudged middle-class behavior.

Metafiction, Reality, and Truth

Metafiction is defined as a work that self-consciously alludes to its own artificiality or literariness through parody, absurdism, or a rejection of conventional ideas like narrative techniques or structures. At Swim-Two-Birds is not just an example of metafiction; it also contains within it a student who is writing a metafictional novel. The student’s novel features characters who become aware of their own existence in Trellis’s writing. As such, the novel’s entire structure rejects traditional ideas of how a story should be structured. From the first page, the student explicitly states that novels shouldn’t have only one beginning. Instead, he provides three alternative introductions to his novel (and, in doing so, provides four possible introductions to At Swim-Two-Birds). In addition to the beginning, the novel’s ending rejects traditional structures. The trial ends unexpectedly when the student graduates from university and begins to doubt his own judgments. Rather than finish the trial, the student adds a brief coda to Trellis’s story in which Trellis’s manuscript is burned and he is freed from his torture. Trellis’s characters receive no conclusion or resolution to their stories. This defiance of traditional structure suggests that the student now recognizes that literature can’t ever hope to contain the nuance or complexity of life. Neat, conventional endings are impossible in a world where the line between literature and reality is so blurred.

Furthermore, At Swim-Two-Birds is filled with interjections and summaries that disrupt the traditional presentation of a narrative. The student uses extracts from newspapers and dictionaries to embellish his work, while the novel itself includes passages from real gambling tipsters. The inclusion of these different forms of writing challenge the conventional construction and deployment of prose fiction. The stylistic differences between the folklore passages and the Casey’s poems, for example, show that there are different ways to tell a story. The metafictional elements of these self-aware non-prose passages compels the reader to consider that all literary works are working toward a similar goal—but asks them whether a format such as a letter, a dictionary, or a newspaper article is inherently more trustworthy or authentic than literary prose.

Throughout the novel various narrative strands compete with one another over the ability to create an objective truth. However, none of these single strands are trustworthy. Trellis’s characters believe they’re real, even though they’re just characters in a novel within a novel. In addition, they begin writing a novel in which Trellis is a character, turning the supposedly real Trellis into a fictional character over whom they have dominion. The characters compete for control of reality through literature. Ultimately, however, reality is simply too complex and nuanced to be trusted. The student realizes this when he passes his exams and is congratulated by his uncle: If he can’t trust himself to know the person with whom he is closest, then he doesn’t know how he can be trusted to weave together all these narratives. His mistaken opinion of his uncle reminds him that he may be mistaken about his own creations and his own reality.