Transgressing (Nar)rational Boundaries in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds R. Aslıhan Aksoy-Sheridan April 15–17, 2009 4th International IDEA Conference; Celal Bayar University, Manisa, Turkey This paper will argue that Flann O'Brien's 1939 novel At Swim-Two-Birds, far from being a prime example of the novel form in the tradition inaugurated by James Joyce's Ulysses, is in fact in the tradition of Menippean satire, and, as such, by focusing on the carnivalesque narrational atmosphere present in At Swim-Two-Birds, the paper will show that the novel does not implement modernist literary notions, but rather tests both those notions and, in the process, the idea of the god-like creative author that constitutes a central element in the modernist episteme. The literary and narrative conventions brought about through that idea of the god-like creative author, as well as the epistemological certitude underlying them, are precisely what O'Brien undermines through the Menippean form, whose unusual settings he uses as a means of materializing modernist literary notions only to put them to the test. At Swim-Two-Birds, with its many characters drawn from a variety of literary texts and genres, is a Chinese box of a novel, whose multitude of layers ranges from the highly fictional to the less fictional and leads, ultimately, to a deep ontological confusion. This infinitely regressive structure and the confused ontological farrago the text creates make of At Swim-Two-Birds a “meta-novel”, one in which all literary conventions fall victim to a mocking assault, just as the novel's fictional author Trellis falls victim to a rebellion on the part of the characters he has created. Such a loss of authority by the author creates a carnivalesque ambiguity in which no ontological or hierarchical configurations vis-à-vis the distinction between fiction and reality can be established. By focusing on Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds through the lens of the tradition of Menippean satire, particularly in terms of temporal and spatial elements, this paper will show how the novel uses the traits of that tradition to effectively deconstruct, in a carnivalesque manner, the modernist episteme.