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All quotations from The Third Policeman are taken from the 1993 Flamingo Modern Classic edition.
In this essay I intend to examine Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman in the context of the time of its writing, 1940, its relation to certain English novelistic traditions and also the broader Irish literary tradition in which it belongs.
Seamus Deane refers to Ireland as a "Strange Country" and indeed O'Brien's own narrator recalls the words of his father:
" . . . he would mention Parnell with the customers and say that Ireland was a queer country." (7)
Such a concurrence indicates to a degree the peculiar nature of the Irish situation with regard to theoretical post-colonial models.
There is a temptation to see all Irish work since the revival in terms of decolonization. Cahalan, in The Irish Novel, traces the tendency of Irish writers such as Swift, Edgeworth and Maturin to employ fantastic elements and non-realism in direct opposition to English colonial models and in affirmation of certain Irish traditions. Mercier, in The Irish Comic Tradition, points also to the presence of exaggeration, absurdity and scatological detail in Gaelic heroic cycles and poetry.
In Flann O'Brien, Bakhtin, and Menippean Satire, M. Keith Booker begins by saying;
"It has now become commonplace to think of Flann O'Brien along with James Joyce and Samuel Beckett as the three great Irish fiction writers of the Twentieth Century . . . " (1)
It could be argued that there is more of an internal struggle between O'Brien and Joyce - with whom his simultaneous admiration and rivalry has been documented - than with English models. The publication of Ulysses with what Declan Kiberd has called its " . . . cathedral-like structure . . . " (Interview), left an anxiety of influence for many Irish writers. Where could one go fictionally after Ulysses?
Ulysses, seen as an attempt at an all encompassing, encyclopaedic form is more indicative of a post-colonial mimic anxiety than the work of O'Brien. Post-colonial is used here in the sense of the beginning of resistance rather than as a chronological marker. The "cathedral-like structure" while splendid, and the pointed satire of parody of English form suggests a literary materialism and an overwhelming desire to beat them at their own game. To install oneself and one's work in the epic tradition may well place one on the European literary map but it may also betray an anxiety which legitimates such hegemony.
O'Brien's subversion of bildungsroman and flight into a non-realist surrealistic mode is suggestive also of a more pressing discontent with the Irish Free State and its intolerance of difference. The balloon episode functions as an allegory of a tendency to prohibit freedom and intrude upon the privacy of the individual. (163-65) Sergeant Pluck concludes:
"That is a nice piece of law and order for you, a terrific indictment of democratic self-government, a beautiful commentary on Home Rule." (165)
A certain narrative coincidence with Dickens's Great Expectations may be noted in the opening pages of The Third Policeman although a post-modernistic prolepsis precedes the formal biographical preamble in a clear opposition of narrative styles. The apprehension of identity and its nature is central as is the sense of dislocated provenance. Both Pip and O'Brien's narrator are orphans:
"I was young and foolish at the time and did not know properly why these people had all left me, where had they gone and why they did not give explanations beforehand." ( Third Policeman 8)
There is a sense that the individual is being buffeted by greater social and economic forces. O'Brien identifies with this Dickensian concern for " . . . that universal struggle . . . " (G.E. 3), and both are akin to Beckett in terms of the elusiveness of meaning and the acute if not always enjoyed sense of being.
"My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things, seems to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening." (G.E. 3)
For O'Brien attention to detail highlights the sombre banality of existence before crime alters everything:
"Everything was very still with no sound in our ears except the dripping of the trees." (16)
The irresistible project of personal aggrandisement causes both protagonists to be transformed. Pip Becomes a gentleman and dies a spiritual death in the metropolis. O'Brien's 'I' dies for real and is condemned to a living hell having formerly denied his own being: "I don't even know my own name." (21)
O'Brien is less concerned with the colonial other than the otherness of selfhood. His narrator is less the Bloom-like l'homme sensible moyen than l'homme perdu. For O'Brien the internal censorship of a Post-colonial society may have been an opportunity and a necessity to indulge in the fantastic. His realist parallel may be found outside of this pastoral-ironic hidden Ireland in the Maguire of Kavanagh's 'The Great Hunger'. ( Selected Poems 18-44)
This project was completed under the direction of Dr. Leon Litvack as a requirement for the MA degree in Modern Literary Studies in the School of English at the Queen's University of Belfast. The site is evolving and will include contributions from future generations of MA students on other writers and themes.
This page was written by Aidan Fadden.
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The Imperial Archive Project is
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