摘要：Focusing on the personae of Flann O’Brien and Myles na gCopaleen, this article examines a seemingly intractable inconsistency in Brian O’Nolan’s body of work: the early O’Brien novels are punctuated by extreme, murderous, graphic violence, while the voice in na gCopaleen‘s Cruiskeen Lawn is characterised by an urbane, decorous control. The essay deploys a Freudian understanding of the architecture of the psyche to explore these two opposing impulses within O’Nolan’s authorial ego. Reading O’Nolan in light of Freud’s comments on the creative process emphasises the extent to which the various personae producing the texts enact a drama of textual and authorial anxiety caused by the repressive and censorious cultural contexts to his oeuvre.
