The Trouble with Being Borrowed: Flann O’Brien’s Characters in Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew

Abstract

In Mulligan Stew Gilbert Sorrentino takes one step further the concept of the narrator of Flann O’Brien’s legendary At Swim-Two-Birds (1939). O’Brien’s proposition that any fictitious character may be made into an author, who, in turn, may create their own fictitious characters who are authors, and so on, alerted Sorrentino to the possibility of having one of these characters write the ultimate creator of the text into another fictitious character. Within the entirely artificial universe of the novel we have the invented narrator telling his story which is the novelist’s story as well as the invented novelist telling his own story which is the supposed true story. The narrative is peopled by characters borrowed from F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dashiell Hammett, James Joyce, and Flann O’Brien. One of these is Antony Lamont, an avant-garde novelist, working on a murder mystery novel entitled Guinea Red. Antony keeps writing letters to his sister Sheila Lamont, in which he expresses his concern about her engagement to Dermot Trellis (created by the student narrator as his surrogate in At Swim- Two-Birds) as well as his criticism of Trellis’s writing. Other characters of O’Brien’s are also alluded to in Mulligan Stew. The intention behind the present paper is to examine the process and the results of transplanting characters from one novel into the other, with an emphasis on the alterations in the characters’ fictitious identities.