Flann O’Brien and the Irish ‘Radio-Mind,’ 1926-1976

Radio broadcasting has major significance for O’Nolan’s career. This article reads O’Nolan’s work within the context of contemporary theories of radio, arguing that radio transmission was a live event up to the 1930s and is critical to the oeuvre. It aims to understand broadcast radio in the context of its modernist, popular and avant-garde resonances by claiming that texts written for unrecorded, live radio production rely on a broadcasting frame that is socially and politically constructed. The referent is not the radio-text per se, but the context of live radio broadcasting. The central role of communications technology in O’Nolan’s life and work revolves around his early radio exposure and experience. Critical methodologies that aim to examine an autonomous body of work for radio by a single author disregard the aesthetics of collaboration, in-between-ness, and technological constraints inherent in radio production during this period. Engaging this context, this article begins with the global development of radio in the 1920s and 30s, before moving onto Irish radio, and then considers theories of radio and sound that were emerging at the time O’Nolan began publishing his early work, which in turn demonstrates the centrality of the wireless as a technological context for Flann O’Brien studies, for late-modernism, and for the popular imagination in twentieth-century Ireland.