Trolling Academia

I delivered this paper at the 2025 International Flann O'Brien Conference, which took place in the author's hometown in Strabane, Northern Ireland.

For the uninitiated, Brian O'Nolan, Brian Ó Nualláin, Flann o'Brien, and Myles na gCopaleen are all the same person, an Irish writer active from the 1930s to the 1960s.

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Hello everyone. This is my first time at an event full of Myles fans. It’s been a wonderful experience; thank you to all the organizers and contributors. I’m used to following the field of Myles studies alone in my scholarly garret, girlishly dreaming that I might one day fight in your grand battles over the symbolism of the rear bicycle axle, then make peace in the field hospitals afterward by throwing shade at the German literature department together. Reading your works from afar, in the Parish Review and the introductions to Myles’s writings, I noted the struggle to come to grips with this complicated man—I’m thinking especially of John Wyse Jackson’s introduction to At War, him thinking as he stumbles out the door after Evelyn O’Nolan’s hospitality, “I’m sure I’ll never understand Myles”. And so I’ve decided to end my exile. It may not be exactly what you expected, but you’ve now met Myles! What a momentous occasion for you all. Having Myles as my namesake is the reason I became obsessed with his writing, the reason I imitated his behaviour for many years, and the reason I’ve traveled to a conference completely unconnected to the rest of my life to meet other people who share an attachment to Brian O’Nolan.

This fact of my name created an intense curiosity in me as a child, feeling that this author could be my guide to forming my self and interacting with the world. This was a terrible mistake that my parents should have stopped, but it left me with a unique relationship with the writer. I’m a trans woman now, but as an adolescent I was only indefinably queer, closeted, and alienated. For many years I dealt with my pain and confusion by hiding semi-voluntarily in an absurdist Myles persona, layering so much irony and comedy into my behavior that not even I could see who I really was. This approach to life was inspired by Flann’s and Myles’s fiction, but when I eventually learned about Brian O’Nolan’s life, I found certain similarities unnerving, especially how his own comedic persona Myles seemed to eventually subsume the original Brian in name and self-understanding. (He was lucky not to have that happen while he was still in the womb.) It’s no revelation that Myles was a troubled man with a slippery identity. But one way we often deal with his complexity is to partition him—that way we can analyze the style of Flann O’Brien the great novelist, the wit of Myles the columnist, the character of the Dublin pub fixture Brian O’Nolan. Today I’m trying to understand their connection: why a single person created these personae, how it shaped the form and content of his writing, and how it hurt him as a person. And I’d like to open the topic of this approach as a model for writing and behavior, and whether we can alter it to reduce the harm and make it available to more people.

Today I’m calling this behavior trolling, a shorthand that captures its essential characteristics. Mylesian trolling is adversarial, treating discussion as a competitive game between the troll and an opposing in-group. Although they set themself apart, the troll claims expert knowledge of the in-group, and superiority in the skills valued by the in-group. The troll’s ideal victory involves demonstrating that they could beat the in-group on its own terms, but instead choose to reject them, reveal the in-group’s absurdity, and create new rules for the game.

The appeal here is how this recasts the alienated position as superior. The troll does not belong (an option that may feel impossible or undesirable), but has found a way to justify this; the in-group doesn’t meet their standards, not the other way around. This motivation to prove themself is most obvious when the trolling is direct and mean-spirited, but even a lighthearted interaction boosts the alienated person’s superiority complex, allowing them to show off by manipulating the flow of interaction.

Brian O’Nolan was definitely alienated. Homeschooled and raised in the Irish language for most of his childhood, his social life was almost entirely within a family of ‘extraordinary silence’, a childhood according to Brian’s brother Ciarán with no ‘companionship or contact with other boys’. Brian first encountered the outside world at a school of appalling, arbitrary violence, where conformity was enforced through beating with an unjustifiable logic. When they transferred to the less brutal Blackrock College, Brian remained a friendless, alienated eccentricity, but started to receive admiration and encouragement for his cleverness. Here he invented his trollish trick of writing fake letters to the newspaper, discussing homework practices while pretending to be teachers and parents. At university Brian grew a reputation for witty, iconoclastic mockery, in print and through the pleasure of direct victory on the debate stage. In some ways he seems to have learned to thrive in these academic contexts; he valued intelligence, he was proud of his erudition, and he wrote about debate as a way to hone verbal skills. But he held a lifelong ambivalence toward academia as well, and a contempt for its power structures. He told mocking anecdotes claiming that he passed his rejected Master’s thesis by reprinting it on pink paper, in other words that he succeeded not by learning from the institution or conforming to it, but by manipulating the unspoken rules. And in his writing on debates, he admires the heckling mob at the back of the hall more than any respected speaker.

It is easy to imagine how these first interactions with social institutions influenced Brian’s later writing: he was rewarded for his wit and skill; he enjoyed recognition, but especially notoriety; he was painfully aware of the hypocrisy and absurdity of society. Superior, but alienated. In his relationship to “serious” writing he was anxious to achieve financial and critical success, but also to keep his iconoclast credentials—he reacted badly to rejections from publishers, but he was also disappointed when his works weren’t censored. And he achieved the most numerous readership in his lifetime by repeating the fake letter game at the Irish Times, inventing the persona Myles na gCopaleen, and writing a column that trolled everyone in the nation for decades.

This interests me for my own psychological reflection, and maybe some of you in the audience can relate to these experiences of precocious adolescents—or even as professional academics with an ambivalent relationship to your institutions. But we can connect this experience to his writing in a deeper way than this perspective I’ve described. To assert yourself as a superior setter of rules is to cast yourself in the role of an author, but more than that, an author aware of his authorship. These experiences are the origin of Flann O’Brien’s constant awareness of the frame, his focus on the form of the text as language itself, and his own role and actions as a despotic author-god. These are what enabled Flann O’Brien to write postmodernism at a time when it was neither palatable nor publishable. Awareness of the inventedness of school, workplace, country is related to awareness of the inventedness of language and book, and it unlocks the facility to reshape it.

This perspective also lets Myles play the role of the boy in The Emperor’s New Clothes. Trolling can disintegrate into meaningless play, but at his best the writer keeps one foot in truth and identity, while understanding them as ambiguous and shifting. We see this many times in Cruiskeen Lawn when the comedic persona of Myles uses Brian’s authentic Irishness to expose the farces within Irish revival politics, the empty lip service to badly spoken Irish or the assertion of a universal, arbitrary, politically convenient Irishness. This is another example of using the skills lauded on a surface level by the in-group—a fluency in Irish and an understanding of the nation and culture—to challenge the in-group’s authority. Trolling at its most effective uses its irony to deconstruct and expose nonsense, dishonesty, and unqualified commentary.

But despite these successes, I feel sorry for Myles. Anthony Cronin’s biography describes him as extremely shy, difficult to connect with, at the fringes of conversations. His inability to overcome his problems eventually became a major obstacle to his writing, not to mention his life. As he aged his column became less sublte and more vicious, and its trollish ambivalence became less self-aware and less sympathetic. It’s one thing to act the troll as a student, free of status, but acting as a righteous outsider is less tenable when you have spent decades working in government offices and drinking with the Dublin intellegentsia.

Speaking of drinking, all of this is the behavior of an alcoholic. The na gCopaleen scholar Jerzy Pilch has the following to say on the codependence between alcohol and writing: “One cannot properly drink without self-deception… Truly, you shouldn’t believe a single word I say. The word is my stimulant, my narcotic, and I’ve acquired a taste for overdosing. Language is my second—what am I saying, second—language is my first addiction.” The tragedy of the alienated is that this outsider perspective, this awareness of the world’s arbitrary nature, does not bring clarity on the self. This self-narrative of the isolated superior, in no need of belonging, always becomes more difficult to maintain. Drunkenness is a reprieve from the perpetual identity crisis. Drunkenness, like pseudonyms, provides a new social script for you, an escape into roleplay. Performing as Myles in a newspaper column may have been motivated partly by the joy of play and by the need for plausible deniability. But the opportunity to act differently, not because you have decided to change but because you have invented a new arbitrary frame, comes with a cost. It’s not only your audience that ends up confused about your identity, your earnest values and opinions. By fixating too long on the metastructure, manipulating the usually unspoken rules of identity, of allowed speech, of form, you lose a focus on the reality underneath, your identity and your real interaction with the world. Brian eventually lost his name to Myles, even among his friends, and lost his ability to interact with the world as himself for long periods, instead staying perpetually drunk, isolated in bed, or both. I’ve had my own struggles with Myles, the alcoholic and the comedic persona, and can tell you he’s not as fun to be as he is to read.

In talking about my own experiences, and discussing O’Nolan, Gombrowicz, M. John Harrison, and the sickly psyches of other authors from the slums of Europe, I’ve noticed a strong gendered component to this phenomenon. Myles, the dead one, and Myles, the living one, could both rely on our intelligence, wit, and knowledge because we could be valued for it, however complicated that experience was. We were alienated, but we were not directly excluded. The same wasn’t true for the girls and young women around me. When I excelled at school, I was told I was a genius, would thrive at university, no doubt become a professor. With similar academic performance, my sister was told the same thing: that I, her brother, was a genius. I trolled my way through school because I found this gendered praise so uncomfortable; but my sister had to take school seriously and excel within the rules to get any respect at all. Marginalized by her gender, as others are marginalized by their class background or race, she had much less access to Mylesian trolling. Myles did have to have a lot of skill to earn an audience and thumb his nose at convention for as long as he did; but many people are not listened to in the first place, let alone allowed to take risks and receive as many chances as he was given.

As I mentioned, Brian’s later life saddens and discomforts me, especially the ways the Myles persona took over Brian and damaged him. If he had been given fewer chances, if he’d been forced somehow to face his alienation directly and grapple with it, would he have ended so badly? The invention of Myles, not just as an arbitrary name for anonymity but as a blustering, self-aggrandizing, unfettered comic persona, wasn’t a solution to Brian’s shyness, for he remained shy, but a desparate escape from it.

Is there another model of trolling, of outsider voices who contribute to academia or literature under false pretenses but with a more honest commitment to a goal? Many women writers have adopted male pseudonyms, but often to straightforward effect, as a necessary prerequisite for publication or for being taken seriously. There’s a directness in this approach that Myles lacks: a concrete problem these women face, and a solution to it. Other authors engage with the complexity of names and identity as a real, holistic individual. George Sand approached gender and names in an ambiguous and multifaceted way, but she didn’t do this by hiding behind a man’s persona; she unapologetically adopted her noncomformity in her actual life.

The closest parallel I’ve thought of is Alice Sheldon, the science fiction author who wrote under several pen names but most successfully as James Tiptree Jr., and who contributed in the 1970s to a symposium-by-mail on women in science fiction while her fellow discutants still thought she was a man. There is a multilayered absurdity to that situation that reminds me of Myles, but there’s no hint of insincerity in her letters, or in her many short stories about gender. What comes across is her anguish on the topic, and her alienation and difficulty finding a place in her gendered society, whether she writes from a man’s or woman’s perspective, in fiction or nonfiction.

I’m still processing this topic, and I am far from clear answers. I love Myles’s writing. I love his awareness of the frame, his conscious attempts to revivify language and exorcise stale, thoughtless constructions. I’m sympathetic to his trollish games as a matter of social critique, and as a matter of comfort and survival, at least as much as I can guess at without ever knowing the real man.

But I don’t know if there’s a way to adopt this style without paying such an awful cost. It would have been much easier and less stressful for me to troll this conference by mocking an academic style without making any serious points. At the last Flann O’Brien Conference two years ago, which I couldn’t attend in the end, I submitted an abstract of complete nonsense, an analysis of Flann’s “least-credited” work, Moby Dick. That could have been entertaining, and maybe I’ll do something like that in future, but for our first meeting it would have meant running away from the topics that I want to discuss with you. I would have been hiding behind a trolling mask. Instead, I’m recognizing that showing up here as a stranger to you all doesn’t have to be a dramatic ego battle. My position outside academia allows me to share my thoughts and ask questions without the pressure of career and reputation, and I’ve enjoyed that. Whatever our individual reasons for studying Brian O’Nolan, I look forward to talking with you more about trolling, pseudonyms, and complex identities.

And I’ll leave you with one last request: please recommend me an easy-to-read, well-adjusted author so I can change my name and lead a boring life.

Thanks for listening.