Christopher BrownMenippean SatireDr. Robert S. Dupree16 December 2008

Exuberance in the Face of the Ultimate and Inexorable Pancake: Un-certainty

Uncertainty and ineffability are doubtless the primary themes of The Third Policeman; the unnamed narrator repeatedly confronts unspeakable wonders and peculiar objects that elude his comprehension. Recalling Dio-genes and the skepticism of the cynics, the world that the narrator experi-ences is often beyond comprehension; unlike the cynics, the narrator stub-bornly insists on reasoning through the illogicalities of the policemen, only to find that the world around the barracks remains beyond feasibility. When the cyclical amnesia of the plot deposits the narrator exactly where he started, O’Brien dashes any hopes for a resolving denouement. Many Menippean satires are contemplations of epistemology, notably Don Quixote and Alice in Wonderland, but the peculiarity of the Menippean variety is a salvific aspect that other satire usually neglects. These Menippean satires are not cynically skeptical of all epistemology, however, they depict a dili-gent search for a better foundation: “Bakhtin emphasizes that such carniva-lesque subversions of authoritarian discourses in the Menippean satire are not pure mockery, but open serious dialogues” (Booker, Flann O’Brien 144). Despite Hugh Kinner’s judgment that “The Third Policeman is after all far from deliberate enough to bear any great weight of interpretation” (69), I believe it is O’Brien’s response to the technological dilemma of the early twentieth century, particularly Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which claims that the closer something is investigated, the less it can be fully known. In The Third Policeman the redemptive key to the absence of a con-crete epistemological foundation is exuberance and humanity—traits per-sonified by the eponymous third policeman, Fox.

One of the most striking features of The Third Policeman is the incon-sequentiality of finding, near the end, that all but the first sixteen pages take place in Flann O’Brien’s idea of hell. The grotesque mystery of the book is that the “something” that “happens” in Old Mather’s mansion is a bomb that blows the house, along with the narrator, “to bits” (O’Brien 23, 197). The majority of the book is set in hell—irrational, cyclical, ineffable, but ostensibly real and only recognized for what it is at the end. Bakhtin writes that menippea use “the most daring and unfettered fantasies…in which to provoke and test a philosophical idea” (Bakhtin 94). As with every novel—and particularly one that opens with the words, “Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade”—the reader enters Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief” be-fore turning the cover (O’Brien 7). O’Brien’s trick in The Third Policeman is to have this preliminary “suspension” carry over into the underworld, and

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then into the depths of eternity, while each level really ought to be accom-panied by a new layer of “suspension,” because each departs from the be-lief-system or rules of the preceding environment. But when the reader finds he has been reading at a level more unbelievable than he had pre-sumed, it blurs the boundaries of the first “suspension.” Deep into the book, Sergeant Pluck tells the narrator that death “is an inferior phenomenon at best”—if believing he is alive while he is dead is a transparent detail, the narrator might as well be real as fictive (O’Brien 102). In this way, the fic-tional experience of the narrator is made dubiously factual to the reader, and the “philosophical idea” outgrows the constraints of the fictional plot.

In Flann O’Brien, Bakhtin, and Menippean Satire, M. Keith Booker de-lineates Flann O’Brien’s satire on traditional epistemology and “pragmatic” solution to the resulting “negativism or nihilism” (62), interpreting the cir-cular fate of the narrator as the result of his quest to find “a final Truth” (49). Likewise, de Selby’s critics are inconclusive because of the “futility of all quests for certain knowledge” (53), and the repeated images of infinite series calls “into question the human ability ever to reach an epistemologi-cal bottom” (57). Booker admits that “it is highly appropriate that [Police-man Fox] be the title character” (48), but he does not develop the redemp-tive power of Fox, who is, indeed, the exuberant hero in the face of skepti-cism.

The narrator and Fox represent two ends of the spectrum of truth and pretense. Fox is perfectly unassuming—when he apprehends the narrator for breaking windows, he states, “if it was nothing else you have no light on your bicycle and I could take your name and address for the half of that” (O’Brien 180). The narrator, contrarily, is a fabricator: “I would be crafty. In the morning I would go to the barracks and report the theft of my American gold watch. Perhaps it was this lie which was responsible for the bad things that happened to me afterwards. I had no American gold watch” (36). Like-wise, the narrator’s motive for the murder is, ultimately, his unhesitating confidence that his “De Selby Index” “is useful… and badly wanted,” thus justifying murder for the sake of knowledge (14). Policeman Fox occupies the other pole, and the differences between the two accentuate Fox’s humil-ity and humanity.

De Selby, the fictional philosopher, is one target of O’Brien’s satire of skepticism, but the mockery is ambivalent. While the narrator declaims against the critics of de Selby, the philosopher himself is an icon of playful foolishness that O’Brien seems to appreciate and whom the narrator idol-izes. De Selby’s most notable trait is an inventiveness that materializes in theories of physics that are tinged with atomic science and unearthed co-nundrums like Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the hare (O’Brien 50). Al-though Booker writes, “the great scholar seems distinguished by an unpar-alleled lack of any common sense whatsoever” (“Science, Philosophy” 40), the narrator’s opinion concerning one passage of de Selby depicts another perspective: “[some critics think] de Selby was permitting himself a mod-icum of unwonted levity in connection with this theory but he seems to ar-

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gue the matter seriously enough and with no want of conviction,” which demonstrates de Selby’s devotion to his work (O’Brien 94).

In terms of modern science, de Selby’s theories are, frankly, wrong. Charles Kemnitz, who goes to great lengths—though perhaps his “far-fetched” argument goes “too far” (Booker, Flann O’Brien 55)—to prove O’Brien knew modern theoretical physics, quotes a letter: “Mr Sheriden, who of course knew O’Nolan [O’Brien’s real name] well during university days and ever after, said that yes, O’Nolan had been intensely interested in modern physics as an undergraduate and it was entirely possible that The Third Policeman was based on relativity theory” (57n). However, de Selby claims that the world is sausage-shaped and that sleep is a succession of mild fainting fits due to the asphyxiation that occurs when the thick night air erupts from miniscule volcanoes. De Selby’s theories are absurd, but there is more to them than a perversion of the nascent theories of relativity and recent subatomic findings. O’Brien was not ignorant or superstitious; that de Selby seems so is not simply a satirical jab at science. Booker writes, “De Selby's theory is nonsense, of course, and his experimental re-sults quite impossible” (“Science, Philosophy” 42). Two alternative evalua-tions prevail: comic relief and analogical interpretation. De Selby, despite bouts of narcolepsy and a crippling “condition of the gall-bladder,” pursues his research with gusto, and his fortitude while examining every slide of a motion picture individually is both impressive and hilarious (O’Brien 93n, 50n). His scholastic buffoonery is endearing because he takes such joy in it. The analog between de Selby’s absurd theories and science is that, noting how Newtonian physics was being overturned by relativity theory, one must wonder how seriously to take the new science, which cannot be proved to be any more infallible than the old. O’Brien does not condemn de Selby for being a sadly deluded physicist, or even a pretentious philosopher. De Selby is not a stuffy critic; instead, he is a rather endearing mad scientist, and it is his epistemologically self-confident critics that O’Brien satirizes throughout The Third Policeman.

The ineffability of the world of the policeman that repeatedly pains the narrator demonstrates that “For O’Brien there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy or science” (Booker, Flann O’Brien 65). The narrator is insatiably analytical and endeavors to comprehend everything he encounters—an attitude that is often the cause of the psychosomatic pain that arises in the presence of such oddities as MacCruiskeen’s matryoshka-like boxes. Booker notes that “The narrator here is showing a typical human discomfort when coming face to face with the bottomlessness of infinity,” which, to quote Jorge Luis Borges, “is a con-cept which corrupts and upsets all others” (Flann O’Brien 58). The narra-tor’s discomfort, however, is due to his insistence on understanding the workmanship of the boxes; he whistles common tunes to comfort himself and disguise his pain, and does his best “not [to] believe they are there at all because that is a simpler thing to believe than the contrary,” i.e., that each is a flawless simulacrum of the preceding box (O’Brien 74). Feeling he

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must comprehend the situation, the narrator cannot let the boxes simply be, and pains himself in trying to equal the superhuman sensitivity of Mac-Cruiskeen, who here and later in the depths of “eternity” pokes fun at the narrator’s inability to comprehend. In one room of eternity, MacCruiskeen tells the narrator he will show him “something to tell your friends about”: a flood of what appear to be “full biscuit boxes” that “lacked an essential property of all known objects,” for which the narrator finds “there are no suitable words in the world to tell my meaning” (134-5).

By the end of the plot-line, the narrator has not learned to give incom-prehension its place; the two-dimensional barracks is just as inscrutable as when he first encountered it; indeed, he seems to have no recollection of ev-ery seeing it before. When he flees the dying Divney the narrator turns back onto the road (heeding Pluck’s fourth rule of wisdom, “Take left turns as much as possible”), enters a rather forbidding landscape, and loses all rec-ollection of “who I was, where I was, or what my business was upon the earth” (60, 197-8). The narrator is like a character in a book; when the reader finishes it and returns to the beginning, the protagonist is found to have forgotten his adventure completely. This is the carousel plot made ex-plicit, and the protagonist is doomed never to get off. Walking toward the barracks for the second time, he repeats nearly verbatim how he reacted when he first sought the police barracks, and “It is made clear that this sort of thing goes on for ever” (qtd. in O’Brien 200).

In contrast with the protagonist’s doleful fate, the dialogue and dic-tion of The Third Policeman is a noteworthy instance of exuberance. Bakhtin writes in Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Art that “The consciousness of others cannot be contemplated and analyzed and defined like objects and things–one must relate dialogically to them” (56). This, one of the fundamental as-sertions of his theory of dialogism, is one sense in which the narrator truly connects to the world of the policemen. The dialogue between the narrator and policemen, generally concerning the peculiarities of their strange world, is one of the primary sources of humor. A strange guessing game re-occurs often enough to merit analysis; in one instance, the narrator guesses at a stranger’s occupation (43-5); in another, Sergeant Pluck strenuously at-tempts to pin down the narrator’s name (100-1). The guesser delights in ex-hausting his imagination even though he is never successful in guessing cor-rectly. This is a comic celebration of a “copia,” “seldom concerned with the quality of the abundance it displays,” but finding “sufficient interest” in merely exhibiting its copiousness (Dupree 163-4). Conversation is often su-perfluous—Paul Simpson notes that “much of the humorous impact” derives from the “pragmatic mismatches” between characters—but the engagement in mere verbosity is an act of pleasure (81).

Returning to the skepticism of epistemology, the interplay between questions and answers among the characters of The Third Policeman is paramount. Throughout, questions are given precedence because they indi-cate search and inquiry. The first episode of this is the narrator’s conversa-tion with Mathers, who answers negatively to every question put to him.

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This renders the answer practically meaningless because it is predictable and unchanging, and for this reason the narrator’s questions must be care-fully crafted to provoke Mathers into further explanation. Sergeant Pluck tells the narrator, “The first beginnings of wisdom… is to ask questions but never to answer any. You get wisdom from asking and I from not answer-ing,” and later to Gilhaney, “Questions are like the knocks of beggarmen, and should not be minded” (O’Brien 59, 79). Investigation, we discover, is the fundamental action—finding the answer is not. Arriving at an answer and being satisfied with it is the end of the conversation, and consequently the end of dialogic dynamism.

That the narrator is nameless and oblivious to his death is representa-tive of the human condition. The namelessness is, in part, due to his killing; the murderer John Divney’s last words in life to the narrator are like a death sentence: “you don’t know what you’re looking for, you don’t know in whose house you are, you don’t know anything” (O’Brien 20). The narrator, on be-ing condemned to death by the policemen, hopes to escape on account of his anonymity, which previously prevented his recovering his gold watch, were it ever found. Yet, his lack of a name only removes the role of law in the execution; Pluck asserts the execution will nevertheless be “a piece of negative nullity neutralised and rendered void by asphyxiation and the frac-ture of the spinal string,” which is just to say that even though he cannot be killed officially, they can certainly “hang the life out of [him]” (102). Sue As-bee points out that at the loss of one’s name, “one’s personal history is lost, then there is nothing on which to base the construct of identity or individu-ality” (63). On dying and losing his name, the narrator is forced to rebuild an identity; this is disastrous, however, as Neil Cornwell writes: “The ‘new world’ in which the narrator ‘now invents himself as well as finds himself’ comes… from his dreams, fantasies and memories, and is a reversion to a lost, though now scarred, world of childhood innocence” (269). In this un-derworld, the narrator represents man stripped of his artificial cultural sup-ports, an unsettling image, and one that the cynics knew intimately.

Undoubtedly the savior of the work is Fox, the third policeman—“a sort of God-like figure” (Booker, Flann O’Brien 130), whose exuberance and human erring make him the redeeming figure of the work. Pluck’s introduc-tion of Fox is bizarre: “He is mad as a hare, he never interrogates the public and he is always taking notes” (O’Brien 77). We hear that although Pluck and MacCruiskeen do their sleeping “Down below—over there—beyant,” in the timelessness of eternity, Fox sleeps in his normal bed (152). Although Pluck attributes this to a desire to “die as soon as possible,” it is due to Fox’s curiosity: he believes there is something further down the road they take to eternity, and in the opposite direction (153). Fox’s alleged insanity is also due to his “unbearable curiosity”; he looked, once, at a card that Mac-Cruiskeen kept in a box in his room, on which was a peculiar color that works like Medusa’s head (154). Merely to glance at it—or to feel it, in Andy Gara’s case—leaves the viewer or feeler insane. Fox is not perfect, as he falls for the trick of the one-legged men, who “took a great rise out of Fox”

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by tying themselves together and carrying their wooden legs (164). It is pe-culiar that Fox could tell from their tracks that they were one-legged, but not see through their trick, which only serves to depict his fallible humanity.

Fox, in person, is much more personable than Pluck presents him, likely because Pluck and MacCruiskeen “never see or hear tell of him at all” (O’Brien 77). Confronting the policeman in the dark, the narrator exclaims, “nothing was clear to me except his overbearing policemanship” (180). Fox is absolutely discomforting to the narrator, yet somehow steadying: “In the presence of this man I had stopped wondering or even thinking” (183). For the narrator, Fox is a link to his past life, in part because his face is that of Mathers.

When the narrator asserts to Fox that he escaped from execution, Fox replies with the crippling question: “Are you sure?” (O’Brien 183). Against this, the most direct and personal question that he is asked, the narrator tries to reassure himself with things he knows about his external world: “I knew that he was not Fox but Mathers. I knew Mathers was dead…” (183). Fox skeptically asks him to explain how he is alive; faced so bluntly with his inability to prove himself alive, the narrator is temporarily incapacitated. To his relief, Fox changes the subject and comments on his barracks, in which he takes immense pride. The narrator grows comfortable again, to the point that he raises the question he has wanted to ask since he died: he inquires after the whereabouts of the stolen “black cashbox” (185). As Fox reveals that he has found it and sent it to the narrator’s house, he discloses that it held “four point one two ounces of omnium,” with which he has been having great fun deluding Pluck and MacCruiskeen with the apparition of eternity and the significance of their machines’ readings, in short, “bewildering, hor-rifying, and enchanting the whole countryside” (188).

Beginning to glimpse the potential of the omnium, the narrator in-dulges in a page of exorbitant vapid cupidity imagining all that he could do with it, only to be interrupted by Policeman Fox: “it is very handy for taking the muck off your leggings in the winter” (O’Brien 189). The narrator can-not bear Fox’s simplicity: “Why not use it for preventing the muck getting on your leggings at all?” (189). Fox suddenly feels sheepish, and the narra-tor proceeds, “Why not use it… to have no muck anywhere at any time?” at which the policeman becomes “very disconsolate” (190). As the narrator is leaving, Fox confesses embarrassedly to having used a slight amount of the omnium to repaper his barracks. The narrator condescendingly tells him “he was very welcome,” and leaves (191). Thence he travels home, finds he has been dead for sixteen years, loses his bicycle, and forgets everything.

Fox, the “man of ungovernable inexactitudes,” here represents the salvific force in this Menippean satire (O’Brien 152). His sense of humor and childlike simplicity are redemptive in the face of the inevitable uncer-tainties of life. Fox is the unsatirical comic relief in The Third Policeman, embodying the appropriate response to the uncertainty that seems to make life senseless, because “Comedy is about man’s ability to survive within un-certainty” (Dupree 170). Fox’s glee in playing tricks on his co-workers and

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pride that his private police station is “spick and span” are representative of the general tone of much Menippean satire (O’Brien 183). When the world becomes ineffable in its complexity, the solution is the natural, moment-to-moment lifestyle of the exuberant cynic, from telling jokes on the street cor-ners to writing “back-chat and funny cracks” (qtd. in O’Brien 200).

Works Cited

Asbee, Sue. Flann O’Brien. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1991.Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. R. W. Rotsel.

Woodstock: Ardis, 1973.Booker, M. Keith. Flann O’Brien, Bakhtin, and Menippean Satire. Syracuse:

Syracuse University Press, 1995.Booker, M. Keith. “Science, Philosophy, and ‘The Third Policeman’: Flann

O'Brien and the Epistemology of Futility.” South Atlantic Review 56.4 (November 1991): 37-56. JSTOR. Blakley Library. University of Dallas, Irving, TX. 1 November 2008.

Cornwell, Neil. "Flann O'Brien and the Purloined Absurd." The Absurd in Literature. Manchester: Manchester U P, 2006. 251-278.

Dupree, Robert S. “The Copious Inventory of Comedy. The Comic Terrain. Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1984. 163-194.

Kemnitz, Charles. “Beyond the Zone of Middle Dimensions.” Irish University Review 15.1 (March 1985): 56-72. ILLiad. Blakley Library. University of Dallas, Irving, TX. 20 November 2008.

Kinner, Hugh. “The Fourth Policeman.” Conjuring Complexities. Ed. Anne Clune and Tess Hurson. Antrim: W. & G. Baird Ltd, 1997. 61-72.

O’Brien, Flann. The Third Policeman. Normal: Dalkey Archive Press, 1967.Simpson, Paul. “The Interactive World of The Third Policeman.” Conjuring

Complexities. Ed. Anne Clune and Tess Hurson. Antrim: W. & G. Baird Ltd, 1997. 73-82.