It is a convoluted quote but an accurate one to demonstrate the post-pun reading that, perhaps, we should have just saved ourselves the time and not have read the little story in the first place. But with an attitude like this, the reader is also being surreptitiously introduced to the big picture—that nothing is worth reading for its content when all climaxes of every story end in the same sense of delayed or partial gratification.
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Close reading unfortunately invites the risk of driving Keats and Chapman from the simplicity of the pun into the torpor of literary metaphysics. You can read this way, if you wish, but I recommend avoiding it.
Too much talk and too much thought will drain the humor out of most any joke. Here is the Brother on philosophy:.
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I would rather be without it, for there is quare small utility in it. It is a great mistake and a thing better done without, like bed jars and foreign bacon…it is a quare contraption, very dangerous, a certain death-trap. Is the Brother merely a voice echoing a popular sentiment? Yet one must bear in mind that the Brother is only a voice in a pub, disembodied, with nary a sign of a true identity according to the criminal processing functions of the state: Oct 24, Matthew rated it it was amazing Shelves: The column tells of two friends, Keats the poet and Chapman famous translator of Homer into English and their encounters here and there and everywhere.
Every little story is an elaborate build up to a bad pun, which assisted by O'Brien's knowledge of languages such as Gaelic and Latin. The only way to do it justice is to display some of the articles here: There was a heavy debt on it. The pastor made many efforts to clear the debt by promoting whist drives and raffles and the like, but was making little headway. He then heard of the popularity of these carnivals where you have swing-boats and round-abouts and fruit-machines and la boule and shooting galleries and every modern convenience. He thought to entertain the town with a week of this and hoped to make some money to reduce the debt.
He hired one of these outfits but with his diminutive financial status he could only induce a very third-rate company to come. All their machinery was old and broken. On the opening day, as the steam organ blared forth, the heavens opened and disgorged sheets of icy rain. The scene, with its drenched and tawdry trappings, assumed the gaiety of a morgue.
Keats and Chapman waded from stall to stall, soaked and disconsolate. Chapman unwisely, perhaps asked the poet what he thought of the fiesta. Chapman collapsed into a trough of mud. One evening, shortly before the hour when Mr. Quelch was scheduled to take the remove for prep, the young fellow was sent down the High with a jug and strict instructions to bring back a pint of mild and bitter without spilling it.
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The minutes lengthened and so did Chapman's face, who disliked going into class completely sober. He fumed and fretted, but still there was no sign of the returning fag. In the opposite armchair lay Keats, indolently biting his long nails. He thought he would console his friend with a witty quotation.
Sep 22, David Katzman rated it liked it Recommends it for: Flann O'Brien completists only. I was charmed, but take it with a grain of salt because I love O'Brien. This book collects a bizarre and hilarious one man play--about a poor Irish lout who doesn't like playing the characters that "that fellow" Flann O'Brien forces upon him--and a series of shaggy-dog puns featuring the unlikely Laurel and Hardy duo of John Keats and George Chapman, translator of Homer.
The puns are excerpts from O'Brien's newspaper columns and collected out of context. Despite some of the puns paying off in I was charmed, but take it with a grain of salt because I love O'Brien. Despite some of the puns paying off in Latin or with references to mid-Century Irish slang, I still enjoyed the sheer bravado of them. Fuck you, he says, their bad puns. Jan 09, Signor Mambrino rated it liked it. Its purpose, for Brian O'Nolan, was to disagree - the prerogative, and perhaps the province, of all writers. Was it severe pressure brought on by ill-health and the thirsty pursuit of too many balls of malt?
That, and the rancour of the powers-that-were who would no longer abide a civil servant lambasting them in the daily press. Anthony Cronin, No Laughing Matter: But the best game of all, played now on websites, is the atrocious, execrable punning of The Various Lives of Keats and Chapman. Quips, quirks, figaries, quodlibetifications; "the frothy quibble" No, the pun is not loved in the English-speaking world. Smollett gives us this couplet:. In his dictionary Johnson defines "conundrum" as a low jest; a quibble; a mean conceit.
But, in passing, Johnson was no mean hand at the pun himself. Here is my favourite. Two termagants are quarrelling across a lane from tenement windows. And there you have the essence of the pun: Too well is it called a clench, for we do feel an involuntary musculation, a clinch of recognition as though our buttocks truly had squeezed. It is perhaps only in Ireland that the pun is given its proper due. Listen to the banter in any Dublin pub: In Ireland we have a playfulness with our English.
The language is not a national treasure. It's a borrowed thing, a loaned vocabulary on an older Gaelic syntax. Picture it and you see peasants cavorting in the Big House, chopping up the Chippendale for low use on the fire. We have a child's delight in vocabulary, as though the novelty has yet to wear off.
Whims and shams, puns and flams
There is a certain anarchy, too, in the Irish make-up, a lust for licence, an anti-authoritarianism. And a corresponding love of rules - the better to know how to break them, perhaps. This dazzles in the fireworks of Joyce, even in Wilde. So how do we approach these tall tales?
Well, on first looking into Myles's Keats and Chapman, we're struck by their fantastic, almost Gothic, structure. We find our two heroes in the most unlikely circumstances. They are strolling players in France, explorers on behalf of the Royal Society, they go beer-tippling in the south of England, they supervise the construction of the Zurich tram-car system. They are duellists, biochemists, carnival showmen, amateur physicians, potato factors, economists of the Manchester School.
They attended Greyfriars together. They visit the Vale of Avoca. Was ever in English letters a comparable duo?
The Various Lives of Keats and Chapman and the Brother by Flann O'Brien - FictionDB
Well, of course not. The direction of the extravagance is the pay-off of the pun. But its purpose is the extravagance itself. It goes without saying that these tales were written backwards. The pay-off came first. And the prodigality of the supporting structure is all the more fantastic for having been, necessarily, erected downwards. The temptation, when reading the tales, is to follow this course, to jump to the last line and find out where on earth we're travelling.