Soft Drink, Hard Drink and Literary (Re)production in Flann O'Brien and Frank Moorhouse

Abstract

This essay compares how Flann O'Brien's 'At Swim-Two-Birds' (1939) and Australian author Frank Moorhouse's 'The Electrical Experience: A Discontinuous Narrative' (1974) use beer and soft drink manufacture, respectively, as conceits both for literary production and for the production of 'character'. In so doing, these texts offer challenging representations of authorial power, class relations and the intersections between literature and commodity culture. The Irish and the Australian authors were born a generation apart, and Moorhouse (b.1938) has never claimed O'Brien as a literary influence, but the two authors' comic visions have certain affinities, most evident in how they draw imaginatively on the beverage industry to explore whether human life itself might be considered a mass product like Guinness or Coca-Cola.