The Dalkey Archive (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) by Flann O’Brien

Author:Flann O’Brien [O’Brien, Flann]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780007405893
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2016-03-31T04:00:00+00:00

12

The floor of that apartment in Mick’s head which he liked to call the spare room was becoming a bit littered and untidy. Several tides seemed to be running simultaneously on the same shore, if that metaphor serves better. Matters had altered somewhat and he felt that he should now set out, in due order, the problems as they had grown and hardened in his mind, think out in what sequence they should be tackled and the results reconciled. Beforehand let it be agreed that the Father Cobble episode, silly and pointless as it was in the event, had cleared away worry about De Selby’s plan for disseminating his poison. Use of the Post Office was true anti-climax, considering the grandeur of the threat, but it removed the question completely from the list of things to be done by Mick, and was also salutary in reminding him that a mind portentous in ingenuity had withal its pathetic simplicities. Here then is the list, as he mentally drew it up, of the imponderable tasks which seemed to confront him.

1. De Selby’s cask had to be stolen as soon as possible, with the co-operation of Sergeant Fottrell.

2. To the end of (1) he would make a bogus appointment with De Selby at the Colza Hotel and, by pre-arrangement with Hackett, have him detained there while he, Mick, and the sergeant rifled his house.

3. To the end of (2) he would have to fix on a date, with a time about 9 P.M., and in the meantime see Hackett, taking care to remember to keep Sergeant Fottrell informed.

4. He would have to devise, at a longer remove, a method of ensuring that De Selby would not resume manufacture or production of his deadly DMP, for an interim solution of the awful menace was no solution at all. At the same time his Christian conscience forbade the simple killing of De Selby.

5. Investigation of the James Joyce situation at Skerries was an urgent necessity to the greater honour and promotion to celebrity of his virgin Mary, but did he love Mary so fully and deeply as he had been persuading himself he did? Did she secretly despise him?

6. Assuming he met Joyce and won his confidence, could the contretemps at (4) be resolved by bringing together De Selby and Joyce and inducing both to devote their considerable brains in consultation to some recondite, involuted and incomprehensible literary project, ending in publication of a book which would be commonly ignored and thus be no menace to universal sanity? Would Joyce take to De Selby, and vice versa? Does a madman reciprocally accept a dissimilar madness? Could the conjunction of the two conceivably bring forth something more awful even than DMP? (All those were surely very harassing puzzles.)

7. Was he losing sight of the increase and significance of his own personal majesty? Well, it seemed that he had been, probably out of the force of habit of his lowly way of life theretofore. Nobody, possibly not even Mary, seemed to think that he mattered very much.

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