flann o'brien's existentialist hell

Canadian Journal of Irish StudiesCanadian Association of Irish Studies

Flann O'Brien's Existentialist HellAuthor(s): Francis DohertySource: The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Dec., 1989), pp. 51-67Published by: Canadian Journal of Irish StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25512787 .

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Flann O'Brien's Existentialist Hell

FRANCIS DOHERTY

The Third Policeman, acknowledged by critics to show similarities to both Sartre's Nausea and

Beckett's Watt, certainly deserves to be considered as a version of hell. But the hell which is

presented in the novel is an Irish hell, owing a parodic allegiance both to the ideas of the land of

eternal youth, Tirna-Nog, and to Irish stories of a secret world just beyond the present, and also to

the lost world of an Irish country boyhood where policemen were both burly and threatening, concerned over regulations about bicycle lamps, and where there were no adult pressures. But the

narrator, a murderer, has become alienated by his murder from this now soured childhood

innocence and is like a Gulliver finding fault with the King of Brobdingnag. His experiences all

lead to disillusion, but in a world unknowingly created from himself, and he is removed from an

adult's expectation of moral punishment to this comically but appallingly distorted version of a

world of innocence which is both lost to him and yet which he has endlessly to enter and never to

leave.

L'univers fictif de The Third Policeman, oeuvre ou les critiques ont revele certaines ressemblances

avec La Nausee de Jean Paul Sartre et Watt de Samuel Beckett, merite sans aucun doute d'etre

considere comme une espece d'enfer. II s'agit pourtant d'un enfer nettement irlandais, car on y

pastiche tant l'idee d'un pays de jeunesse eternelle, Tir-na-Nog, que ce monde secret, situe au-dela

du present, qu'evoquent les contes anciens, monde perdu d'une jeunesse passee dans la compagne

irlandaise, ou les gendames, solidement batis et menacants, ne s'occupent que des reglements des

lanternes de bicyclette, monde enfin qui ne connait pas les soucis des grandes personnes. Mais le

narrateur a tue, et, aliene par son crime, il subit comme un Gulliver qui aurait censure le Roi de

Brobdingnag. Ses experiences l'entrainent dans le desillusionnement, mais dans un monde qu'il a

lui-meme cree sans qu'il le sache. La il est prive de toute possibility de se punir moralement, d'une

maniere adulte. II est done transports dans un monde faussement na4f - qui est un pastiche a la fois

comique et effroyable - d'ou il est en quelque sort exclu et ou pourtant il doit chercher a s'installer

definitivement, puisque e'est la son seul refuge.

The novel which I believe Flann O'Brien should be most celebrated for is The Third Policeman, a comic and appalling book. It seems the critical

commonplace now to link O'Brien's novels (especially At Swim- Two-Birds of 1939 and The Third Policeman, completed in 1940, published posthumously in 1967) with the names of Beckett and Sartre. Anne Clissman notes:

The circular nature of the hell which the hero endures is similar to that envisioned by Sartre in his play Huis Clos. The

similarity points to an affinity between The Third Policeman

and the Drama of the Absurd. (Clissman 354)

She quotes Martin Esslin's observation that "many of the plays of the Theatre of the Absurd have a circular structure, ending exactly as they began," and she

quotes an acute sentence from Arnold P. Hinchliffe's book on The Absurd to

point to affinities between O'Brien and the Absurdists. She repeats the



52 Canadian Journal of Irish Studies

association in her entry for Brian O'Nolan in the entry in The Macmillan

Dictionary of Irish Literature, 1979.

In a review of Anne Clissmann's book, however, Brian Cosgrove drew

attention to what he felt was a deficiency in putting The Third Policeman into

its proper context. He thought that there should have been closer attention

paid to the similarities between Beckett's Watt and O'Brien's novel;

Speaking of The Third Policeman, Miss Clissmann fails to

mention the surely related world of Beckett's Watt (both fictions deal with a pilgrim who, placed in an alien world, strives desperately to relate the absurdities he undergoes to his own limited sense of order and logic); and it is a major

shortcoming ofthe whole critical venture that O'Brien and his

contemporary Becket are never placed in any meaningful

juxtaposition. (Cosgrove 123)

A. Norman Jeffares puts his emphasis rather differently, but essentially

interestingly, on the emptiness of the vision which underlies The Third Policeman:

It is a disturbing work that examines, through the theories of de

Selby, an eccentric intellectual, a state of fear, questions the value of the imagination, and leaves the reader uneasily aware

of the emptiness O'Brien is presenting. (244)

And Hugh Kenner sees a circular comic hell, with "a man with no name

moving round one tight bizarre circle forever," because

. . . this autodidact has connived at murder and is in a hell

indistinguishable from rural Ireland save for the unfailingly magical weather and the strangeness that emanates from a

police-station. But this hell is constructed according to the mad doctrines of de Selby. It is a comic hell, devilless and Godless.

(323-24)

So: The Third Policeman is a comic hell, with affinities with Sartre's drama, the Theatre of the Absurd, and Joyce and Beckett.

But I believe that we can get closer to the affinities than such a

generalization might suggest, especially if we look to the literature ofthe late 1930s and the 1940s. Sartre's novel, La Nausee, was published in 1938,

At-Swim-Two-Birds in 1939 and The Third Policeman completed by 1940. Beckett published Murphy in 1938 and wrote his Watt through the war,

publishing it in 1945.



Flann O'Brien's Existentialist Hell 53

La Nausee, is a classic document of French existentialism, and several of its

episodes have passed into more general currency, being quoted time and again as pointers to the central features ofthe philosophical system. One ofthe most

significant of these is the declaration ofthe central figure, Antoine Roquentin, that, with his new insight into the way things are, the world is very different

from what it used to seem. For one thing, "Things have broken free from their

names":

They are there, grotesque, stubborn, gigantic, and it seems

ridiculous to call them seats or say anything at all about them: I am in the midst of Things, which cannot be given names. Alone,

wordless, defenceless, they surround me, under me, behind me,

above me. They demand nothing, they don't impose themselves,

they are there. {Nausee 177-78)

As the protagonist exclaims:

And suddenly, all at once, the veil is torn away, I have

understood, I have seen. (161)

And what he sees is frightening, a world replete with existence, out of the

control of the observer whose words no longer restrain or order it, control or

subjugate it, a world freed from those words which up till that moment had made the world safe:

Even when I looked at things, I was miles from thinking that

they existed; they looked like stage scenery to me ... .

And then, all of a sudden, there it was, as clear as day: existence

had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost its harmless appearance as an abstract category: it was the very stuff of things, that root

was steeped in existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the

bench, the sparse grass on the lawn all that had vanished; the

diversity of things, their individuality, was only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous

masses, in disorder - naked, with a frightening, obscene

nakedness. (182-83)

This mystic moment when Roquentin sees, without words, the independently extravagant existence of all things, their superfluity, their unnecessariness, is a classic modern moment. And it seems to be this moment which Beckett

acknowledges by parody, this visionary moment when for an observer all

changes and yet nothing changes, when the profoundest insight into reality depends upon absolutely nothing chartable happening, no observable altera




tion in things and yet all altered. In Watt a servant of Mr. Knott's whom Watt

is to replace reminisces about his mystical life, remembering a moment in

which he seems to have an experience which parallels that of Roquentin's.

Sitting in the sunlight on "a Tuesday afternoon, in the month of October, a

beautiful October afternoon," something happened:

The change. In what did it consist? It is hard to say. Something

slipped. There I was, warm and bright, smoking my tobacco

pipe, watching the warm bright wall, when suddenly somewhere some little thing slipped, some little tiny thing. Gliss - iss - is.

STOP! I trust I make myself clear. (Watt 41)

And, as in Sartre, the protagonist several times tries to articulate the dual facts that everything had changed and yet nothing had changed:

The sun on the wall, since I was looking at the sun on the wall at

the time, underwent an instantaneous and I venture to say radical change of appearance. It was the same sun and the same

wall, or so little older that the difference may safely be

disregarded, but so changed that I felt I had been transported, without my having remarked it, to some quite different yard, and to some quite different season, in an unfamiliar country.

(42)

This latter-day mystical vision struggles vainly with our mundane language to articulate an extraordinary but unverifiable experience, an experience which

has nothing of the unearthly or divine or numinous in it at all:

But in what did the change consist? What was changed, and how? What was changed, if my information is correct, was the sentiment that a change, other than a change of degree, had taken place. What was changed was existence off the ladder.

Don't come down the ladder, If or, I haf taken it away. This I am

happy to inform you is the reversed metamorphosis. The Laurel into Daphne. The old thing where it always was, back again. (42)

And comically we have a pirouetting around change/no-change, meaning/ no-meaning, wisdom/ nonsense which inevitably will meander on in its

seemingly unendable self-destructive Beckettian comic and painful riot of

words, doomed to fail, doomed to self-destruct:




. .. because what we know partakes in no small measure of the

nature of what has so happily been called the unutterable or

ineffable, so that any attempt to utter or eff it is doomed to fail,

doomed, doomed to fail. (61)

What poor Watt is to make of all this blather with the ruined mind that he has

is only one part of the book's jokes. There may be a link between Beckett's world and that of Flann O'Brien,

judging by the curious opening to Watt. In that opening we are presented with

a character who is an observer and commentator on life around him, a Mr.

Hackett, "hunchy Hackett." Anne Clissman reports that on 15 January, 1939, before the publication of At-Swim-Two-Birds, O'Nolan was alarmed by the

possibility that his pseudonym, Flann O'Brien, which had been used for the

first time in a controversy in the Irish Times with Sean O'Faolain and Frank

O'Connor, might cause problems for his new book by bringing with it rancour

and bad feeling from the well-publicized exchanges of letters. (Clissman 19,

78) O'Nolan wanted to change his older pseudonym for a new one, "John

Hackett," but it was too late for the publishers, Longmans, to allow any alteration. A diminutive Punch-like observer of Dublin and Dublin life, Mr.

Hackett would very well have been Beckett's distorted pub-mirror's reflection

of Myles. But, more substantially, both Beckett's Erskine from Watt and Sartre's

Roquentin are related in some way to the unnamable narrator of O'Brien's

The Third Policeman. All three of them experience (or claim to experience) non-dramatic unnoticeable dramatically significant changes in reality, though

O'Brien's is the least highlighted, almost least noticed of them. Of course, the

author has his own good reasons for that particular strategy. But in The Third

Policeman, near the opening of the novel, in the place where the narrator is

searching his murdered victim's house for the reputed black cash-box hidden

under a loose floorboard, everything and yet nothing changes:

I saw a black metal cash-box nestling dimly in the hole. I put my hand down and crooked a finger into the loose reclining handle

but the match suddenly flickered and went out and the handle

of the box, which I had lifted up about an inch slid heavily off

my finger. Without stopping to light another match I thrust my hand bodily into the opening and just when it should be closing about the box, something happened. (23)

Of course, at the end of the novel we discover what happened. What the

narrator was led to believe was his victim's cash-box was, in reality, a bomb, and at some precise moment he is himself killed as the bomb goes off. It is hard

to say exactly at which moment death is supposed to occur, and the writing is




carefully plotting so many junctures at which the impossible moment of death

could be inserted. The "something happened" of the narration may well be not

the only possible moment for "something" to happen. Bombs have a nasty habit of being detonated when they are touched, however clumsily or

fleetingly, and the crooking of a finger into the handle would do just as well as

anything else. I think that what the novel is saying is something about the

continuity of the life of the protagonist, even though it is changed, "changed

utterly," and a horrible reality is not born but somehow discontinuously continued.

But the "moment" of his death is not known to the narrator. What ought, at

least by many accounts, to be the end of things is not the end, though in some

ways it is. "Death is not an event in life," we are led to say, but in O'Brien this

both is and is not the case:

I cannot hope to describe what it was but it had frightened me

very much long before I had understood it even slightly. It was

some change which came upon me or upon the room,

indescribably subtle, yet momentous, ineffable. (23)

There's the Beckett word, "ineffable".

From the "moment" on the life of the narrator is altered; he finds a voice which he has never heard before talking occasionally to him, a voice from

"deep inside me, from my soul." The apparently live-dead Mathers, when

questioned, replies to every question negatively (or, at least he does so at first), and he introduces the narrator to a physical world utterly at variance with the old laws of physics. In this new world, for instance, every person has a colour, "the colour of the wind prevailing at his birth," and each colour is made into a

little gown for the new-born child. In Mathers's case "a certain policeman" was present at his birth "who had the gift of wind-watching," and who went outside to return with a little gown for the baby.

I am sure that there must have been many sermons preached which talked to a congregation about the soul having a "baptismal robe" which it is duty bound to keep unspotted by sin, and that we must renew this robe by confessing our sins and having them washed clean; and so on:

You would not see it at all if you held it against the sky but at

certain angles of the light you might at times accidentally notice the edges of it. (33)

This is a curious and self-justifying physical world, like but unlike the one we

know, and it is one which the narrator accepts easily, even the oddities like

policemen who attend childbirths, yearly delivering gowns until people are big enough to collect their own from the barracks, and the possibility that there




are only three policemen. Of these three, Policeman Fox has not been seen for

twenty-five years, and Sergeant Pluck and Policeman MacCruiskeen "are

down in the barracks and so far as I know they have been there for hundreds of

years." (35) Time in this new mode is not our time, but, more importantly, the hearer is

not appalled by the discrepancies between Mathers's account ofthe world and

his own previous experience. The narrator has changed so much without his

knowing it that he is peopling the world with nothing but his murdered victim

and policemen. In the ordinary world of crime the killing of a man might well

be confidently claimed to generate in the murderer a great wish to avoid all

policemen whatever, to make himself unknowable to the lot of them and to all

authorities investigating crimes. In this new world post-death the narrator

naively (and impossibly) thinks a "bright thought" when he hears of the

policemen:

If they knew so much they would have no difficulty in telling me

where I would find the black box. (36)

We should, as readers, know far more than the narrator, our being sharply aware that the policeman's question is far more likely to be "where did you get that black box" than "I'll certainly help you to find someone else's black box,

especially as you went to the great trouble of killing him for it." But, as

readers, we do not possess the imagination of the narrator, because this is the

"world" which we have entered, a world unique to its inventor. Only someone

who was obsessed with the lunacies ofthe thinker De Selby could conceive the universe in his terms, and this is partially what is being conceived. But the

important point is that it is a universe which suits the narrator, one in which he is genuinely alone, a condition which he takes for granted, but whose horror

will only gradually be borne in upon him. For the moment I think we ought to see something which he has not yet seen (if he ever will): that the killing of the

man with the box, "old Mathers," is the killing of a combined mother and

father, the compounded plural "Mathers," not a difficult task for Myles na

Gopaleen of Cruiskeen lxiwn\

Consider these four words, which convey between them the whole picture of the last war.

KAISER SERBIA JOFFR E FRENCH Now take out your pen (a pencil will do also, of course) and draw a vertical line through the middle ofthe words. Now if you read down each half, you will get precisely the same words that

you had got across. Get it? (Best of Myles 242)




Killing Mathers isolates the narrator from all mankind, leaving him only his

victim and heavenly-hellish policemen, his conscience, his dreams of success, his obsession with the alternative physical system of de Selby, and neither God nor Devil, Heaven nor conventional Hell. The new world is one in which he now invents himself as well as finds himself, everything being generated from

himself, from dreams, fantasies, memories, fictions. It is a new version of Tir na Nog, the idyllic, unchanging otherworld of ancient Irish myth, seen in

medieval Irish tales like The Voyage of Bran, a land where

. . . There is nothing rough or harsh

But sweet music striking on the ear

Without grief, without sorrow, without death

Without sickness, without debility.

O'Brien then redefines this particular "Land of Youth" continuously throughout the novel, mercilessly forcing a modern consciousness of a

sophisticated man back into an imagined ideal land where promises are

constantly never fulfilled and where modern or sophisticated thoughts and modes of behaviour are bemused by apparently naive ones, but ones which

always defeat modernity or sophistication. The landscape which the narrator finds himself in is not simply a perfected

Irish rural landscape, but a landscape arranged for the eye of a beholder, a

landscape of a Paul Henry, for instance:

I found it hard to think of a time when there was no road there because the trees and the tall hills and the fine views of bogland had been arranged by wise hands for the pleasing picture they

made when looked at from the road. (Third 37)

The unfamiliar road which is close enough to the narrator's home to have been

familiar, a road which is unaccountably alien, reveals to the observer a world

which is too perfect:

There was another thing. My surroundings had a strangeness of a peculiar kind, entirely separate from the mere strangeness of a

country where one has never been before. Everything seemed almost too pleasant, too perfect, too finely made. Every thing the eye could see was unmistakable and unambiguous, in

capable of merging with any other thing or of being confused with it. The colour of the bogs was beautiful and the greenness of the fields supernal. Trees were arranged here and there with far-from-usual consideration for the fastidious eye. (39)




Such a discovery seems a little like the discovery of Sartre's Roquentin that he

had started to see the things in the world about him as "like stage scenery" ("comme un decor"). Something had slipped. But the anguished alienation of

Roquentin from the world is softened in O'Brien to a gentle acceptance of

artifice, an unalarmed merging with that which a rational or daytime mind

would be most alarmed by. We are in a dream, or that which has some of the

features of our dreams.

Again, the new world is strange, but not all aspects of the strangeness are as

obvious to the narrator as they are to the reader. Hard words would be an

example to point to. We are used, well enough, to the principle of the

malaprop whereby under- or ill-educated people reach down the wrong word from the linguistic top shelf, causing smiles in those better in the know. So,

when Policeman Mac Cruiskeen "explains" why the narrator cannot hear the

diminutive musical instrument which he has been playing, words fail and slip from their accustomed places in the repertoire:

That does not surprise me intuitively,' said MacCruiskeen, 'because it is an indigenous patent of my own. The vibrations of

the true notes are so high in their fine frequencies that they cannot be appreciated by the human earcup. Only myself has

the secret of the thing and the intimate way of it, the

confidential knack of circumventing it. Now what do you think of that?' (75)

What, indeed, are we to think of "intuitively,""indigenous" (for "ingenious"),

"circumventing"? The narrator is obviously deeply affected by the same

contagion, answering that he thinks "it is extremely acatalectic." The statement of MacCruiskeen may or may not be "acatalectic"; it is hard to say, as it may or may not be "complete in its syllables." What it on the other hand,

quite definitely is, if not "extremely acatalectic," then "partially acataleptic" (meaning "incomprehensible," a coinage of 1731 deriving from the Sceptic term, "acatalepsy" meaning the incomprehensibility of something).

Of course, the narrator may be repaying MacCruiskeen back in the same

debased linguistic coinage, but the ending of both episode and chapter on this

punch line seems much more like the habit of a Myles na Gopaleen ending of a

Keats and Chapman story with its appalling and deceptive wrongness, usually there of a pun beyond normal belief. It is, though, a fooling with the reader, a

reader who can almost be guaranteed not to be intimately acquainted with either rare term, "acatalectic" or "acataleptic." This may be no more than

"clowning," as he claimed for other of his writing which critics become over-serious about. He wrote to Gerald Cross in 1962 about the English critics who have no understanding of humour:




. . . they look for overtones, undertones, subtones, grunts and

"philosophy"; they assume something very serious is afoot. It's

disquieting for a writer who is only, for the moment, clowning. (Clissman 197)

But, his anger notwithstanding, I do think that here is more than simple

"clowning." We have a world in which the narrator is at the mercy of others, has no prior means of dictating how or what will be said, or how it will be said, or how or what will be understood or misunderstood. In our world we do have standards which we can refer others to, even if it is only the neutral authority of a standard dictionary. In this new world there is none that the narrator has access to or prior knowledge of. He is a child loose in a world whose rules he still has to learn. Yet he is no child, though this world of grown-up words used

inappropriately but elaborately seems very like that of the child's primitive fascination with the world, wrongly but elaborately understood by way of

false analogy, wrong association, speculation, imaginative inventiveness,

fantasy.

Part of this joke against the narrator by the fable is that his sophistication of

thinking, including/w excellence his involvement with the speculations of De

Selby, and his feeling of moral superiority, being as he is a man who has

experienced murder, when confronting an apparently simple, trusting and bucolic policeman is always at a grave disadvantage when he most sees

advantage. He always loses.

We could say, equally plausibly, that somehow the narrator has brought an adult fallen man's perceptions to bear on a world which is not equipped to deal with them, a world which constantly resists them. He remains a visitor, or, to

put it more strongly, an alien in his own world. He may have descended into a world where small boys are aware of beefy, amply comforting, and yet threatening policemen whose only apparent interest might seem to be in

whether or not your bicycle was properly and legally equipped with front and rear lights; a world where everything which might have been either comforting or threatening to a small boy has become mad. Bicycles have become not only a constant; they are a monomaniacal obsession. Madness is built into the fabric of conversation, where the partially understood or misunderstood fact becomes the base for false conclusions. The Sergeant sees Russia in this

simplified and comically bizarre way:

'In Russia,' said the Sergeant, 'they make teeth out of old

piano-keys for elderly cows but it is a rough land without too much civilization, it would cost you a fortune in tyres.' (80)

The simplicity or naivety of the Sergeant is still coupled with power and

authority, and though his remark is comic for us, his idee fixe of cycles and all




their parts is not simply funny. His knowledge is in some respects greater than

the narrator's (and, being "wrong," is greater than the reader's), and his

uniform gives him both weight and power. He is at home in the world in which

he is found; he partakes of its curiousness, as do all of the bizarre creatures

whom Alice encounters in her journey. But the world where the Sergeant is at

home is (amongst other serious lacks) totally without women; somewhere

there seems to be a joke being played where not only elderly Irish bachelors are

involved, but also a remark that in heaven there is neither marriage nor giving in marriage. The man/ woman relationship which society goes so far out of its

way to regulate and make laws about is here replaced by the regulation of the

man/bicycle interchange. Care must be taken to prevent riders ofthe bicycle like the O'Feersas from becoming complete bicycles themselves, through the

natural exchange of atoms in the riding (though given their name: "fearsaid* shaft or spindle," this might be difficult). The police are happy to prevent some

ofthe ill effects of over-riding by any means available, even frankly immoral

ones, like bribing the postman to deflect a ten pounds' prize from the O'Feersa

family (presumably into their own pockets). The childish ways in which magical or miraculous powers are deployed by

the policeman both amuse and terrify the narrator. The principle of the unity of matter which allows MacCruiskeen to integrate sound and light amuses the narrator because all that the stupid policeman thinks to do with this great power is to supplement domestic heating and lighting:

'Light is the same onmium on a short wave but if it comes on a

longer wave it is in the form of noise or sound. With my own

patents I can stretch a ray out until it becomes sound

'And when I have a shout shut in that box with the wires, I can

squeeze it till I get heat and you could not believe the

convenience of it all in the winter . . . .'(110)

But, given the need, post-Einstein, of accepting that energy is a constant, that

it takes many forms, that light must be both wave and particle, that nothing is

what it seems, that space is curved when it seems not, that we must learn to

adjust our thinking about the physical world, then MacCruiskeen's domesti

cation of these great truths is not far removed from all of us switching on

electric light, where electricity "becomes" light, or sound if you switch on the

radio, or pictures if the television.

The world ofthe policeman is at odds with that ofthe narrator, and there is a strong sense in which the narrator feels superior to his captors who seem to be pitiably simple-minded. To possess the magic box with the four ounces of omnium ("four point one two on the Post Office scales") would allow any

right or wrong-thinking fantasist to change it into a dream of all that might be

imagined ("formless speculations crowded in upon me, fantastic fears and




hopes, inexpressible fancies, intoxicating foreshadowing of creations,

changes, annihilations and god-like interferences"). Into this breathless and

Coleridgean set of abstractions breaks the countryman's plain:

'You would not believe the convenience of it... it is very handy for taking the muck off your leggings in the winter.' (189)

The narrator's question about using the onmium to prevent muck getting on

the leggings in the first place rouses the policeman's (apparent) praise for the

mind of the narrator and his own self-deprecation:

'You are very intellectual and I am certain that I am nothing but a gawm.'(189-90)

And the question about ridding the world of its entirity of muck yields a

chastened response -

"I'm the world's champion gawm."

This is that point at which we can see the narrator falling into a trap, the

belief that his mature sophistication puts him far above the bucolic, slow

witted country policeman. We have, needless to insist, been here before, but then it was to be embarrassed at the visiting Gulliver's feeling that the King of

Brobdingnag was a "gawm" for not understanding what marvels he could do in the way of controlling his own people and conquering others if only he were

enlightened enough to use the gunpowder whose recipe Gulliver wanted him to have.

Here the reader knows that there is something more than meets the narrator's eye, more than is dreamt of in his philosophy. He is led to dismiss Policeman Fox and the underground "cellars" which the policeman has shown him:

His oafish underground invention was the product of a mind which fed upon adventure books of small boys, books in which

every extravagance was mechanical and lethal and solely concerned with bringing about someone's death in the most elaborate way imaginable. (190)

There are several things which could be observed here. One is that the narrator is the one who has brought about someone's death himself. Then, the likelihood is that the hell to which the narrator has been consigned is his own

hell, its appropriateness being that it is the land of his eternal and unchanging youth, and the imagining of an underground of the kind which he has seen is, in an important sense, recognizable as a naive version which his own

childhood has called up. He, the bookish person, meets his own bookish

childhood, transformed terrifyingly.




To be returned to a land of youth, yet having an adult mind, is to remain an

alien in a known but inhospitable land, and something of this lies behind the

dislocation between the narrator and Policeman Fox, the third policeman. Here a further observation might be brought in. This is to do with the

recognized kinship of this novel with early Irish tales of visits to strange lands.

There the terra seer eta (the talam deirii) was seen in a vision. In the Vita

Brendasc, as noted in the introduction to H.P.A. Oskamp, The Voyage of Mae I Duin, when St. Brendan was on his voyage to his terra secreta he saw the

devil on the prow of his boat, and only he of all the crew could see him:

The saint asks the devil why he has come, and he answers: 'To

seek my punishment in the deep closes of this black dark sea.'

Then Brendan asks where this place is, but the devil tells him

that 'no one can see it, and remain alive afterwards.' Yet the

devil reveals the gate of hell to Brendan, and an extensive

description follows of the pains and means of torture. (Mael Duin 26)

It seems that in this novel the depths of the sea have been replaced by the

depths of the earth, that the live saint who is saved by his sanctity from the

death which would ensure from his seeing the gate of hell is replaced by a

sinner who is already dead. The devil in his wickedness is replaced by bucolic

Policeman Fox, a benign devil, and the gate of hell is now the underground cellar leading to "thousands of doors like the strong-hinged doors of ovens and arrangements of knobs and keys that reminded me of American cash

registers." What could have been a paradise, with the promise of all the

material delights he can think of or demand ("a bottle of whiskey, precious stones to the value of 200,000, some bananas, a fountain-pen and writing

materials, and finally a serge blue suit with silk linings,"and so on) turns into a

non-paradise for our protagonist, at least a place which promises delights only to frustrate those promises. He is not allowed to bring anything out of the

underground cellar, though he has been allowed to call for whatever he could think of. Crying like a baby, he returns to the upper world, not accompanied by Virgil, but by two sweetmeats, "Sugar Barley," "Carnival Assorted,"

"Liquorice Pennies," "Fourpenny Coffee-Cream mixture," "Dolly Mixture,"

"Ju-jubes, and jelly-sweets and Turkish Delights." Of course, being no longer a child, the Sergeant's digestion could take none of them:

'What are you saying, man,' the Sergeant cried, turning to view MacCruiskeen's face, 'are you out of your mind, man alive? If I

took one of these - not one but half of a corner of the quarter of one of them - I declare to the Hokey that my stomach would blow up like a live landmine and I would be galvanized in my




bed for a full fortnight roaring out profanity from terrible

stoons of indigestion and heart-scalds. Do you want to kill me

man?'(141-42)

In this parodic Tir na Nog this children's game played unselfconsciously by the

policemen clashes comically, if a little sourly, with the grossly materialistic

dreams of the narrator.

The final reversal of expectations is the non-event ofthe interception ofthe

narrator by "The Third Policeman,"the one by whom he is apprehended as he

thinks he has escaped the death by hanging which has been in store for him

when he was in the hands ofthe Sergeant and the other policeman. As readers

we expect that the mysterious, hitherto unseen Policeman Fox will somehow

or other have the power of magic to subvert the hopes ofthe narrator's escape and his urge to return to his origin. Instead, we find that, although Policeman

Fox is a "secret policeman," concealed within the walls of old Mathers's

house, as close as any policeman could get to being an observer of the actual

murder of the occupier of the house, he certainly does not work within the

terms which we should expect. The incident of the narrator's being taken

within the house's interior is a comic one, and as well as being a parody of

police surveillance and interrogation, there are other sublime jokes embedded

there too - "the Kingdom of God is within you" and another parody of

conscience, the interior castle of St. Teresa, and so on.

Policeman Fox's world is a complete microcosm, a "tiny police station,"

and in the intimacy of this interior we expect to discover the "truth." When the narrator asks the policeman why the station is within the walls of old Mathers's house, and when we and the narrator are expecting a metaphysical

or, at least, an ethical reason, the question is turned back on the narrator, as

though he would in all conscience be able to supply the appropriate answer.

That is a very simple conundrum. I am sure you know the

answer of it.'(184)

Ane, true to the spirit of the novel, and true too to the inability of the

narrator's world to move within the same terms or values of this fir na Nog, the "real"answer has nothing to do with surveillance, crime or conscience, but rather with saving money on the local rates:

It is fixed this way to save the rates because if it was constructed the same as any other barracks it would be rated as a separate hereditament and your astonishment would be flabbergasted if I told you what the rates are in the present year. (184)

Sure enough, when the narrator looks intently at the face ofthe policeman, as




he is seen (in a superior and educated man's dismissive fashion) laboriously

writing details of an unreal and wholly fictitious lost bicycle lamp in his ledger, the face "was beyond all doubt the face of old Mathers." No alarm or horror is

shown by the narrator at this discovery, only the calm recognition of a dream

when the face is both the same as it should be and yet at the same time

changed. The face was not changed for the worse (as, presumably, a dead

Mathers's face would be, in decay), but changed for the better, having

... a simple childlike quality as if the wrinkles of a long lifetime, evident enought the first time I looked at him, had been

suddenly softened by some benign influence and practically erased. (185)

Only the reader, presumably, sees the profound irony of a murderer's thinking of the face of his victim as having been altered by some "benign" influence, and the speaker seems now almost floating in a world where remorse has no

existence, where evil is comically but eerily reduced to fibbing about bicycle

lamps. It does not take much ingenuity to reverse many of the words which the narrator uses to arrive at a recognition that a moral deadness has overtaken

the narrator, and that he will learn nothing about his state ever again. However, the narrator pushes all puzzles to one side and focuses his

attention on escaping, and, again, on the all-important black box. Of course,

the policeman knows all about the narrator and his "legitimate" claim on the black box, and he has, he says, been looking after it for him. But, having lost

patience, the policeman has sent it to the narrator's home by the (impossible or

unbelievable) "express bicycle." Questions about murder, about ownership,

about guilt and so on all disappear before the explanation of the power of the four ounces of omnium. In real detective fictions, no doubt, the policeman can

play with the guilty party, can know more than he reveals, can play the elaborate games of the hunter and trapper. What O'Brien does is to allow some concealment to Policeman Fox, some naivety and some mystery, and

yet show that the very self-conscious cunning and guile of the narrator can never defeat the essential innocence of the policeman antagonist. This is the world of paradox, neither heaven nor hell, but a morally ambiguous world where all the ways of the world of grown men are defeated. Here, then, there is no direct punishment for the murder of a man for gain, for the possibility of

turning the contents of a black (cash) box into the promotion of strange ideas, but, instead, we have a world whose concern is with by-laws, breaches of

minor rules, together with the possibility of turning the contents of a black box into anything the mind can imagine, the heart desire or the senses ache for. But all this is within a world where there is a marked but never remarked on absence of work, domestic chores, sex, politics, or any of the pressing concerns of our adult world.




Each man's hell is that of his own devising. And the horror ofthe conclusion

of this work is that the process which we have seen is to start all over again, but, seemingly, without any recognition that this time round is yet another

round. Each round is the first, and each round will be endlessly repeated. No

advance will be made in understanding or recognition as the process

interminably goes on, and we are put in mind, inevitably, of Beckett's repeated worlds, where no significant change is possible, no significance in change, no

change in significance:

And if I could begin it all over again, knowing what I know

now, the result would be the same. And if I could begin again a

third time, knowing what I would know then, the result would

be the same. And if I could begin it all over again a hundred

times, knowing each time a little more than the time before, the

result would always be the same, and the hundreth life as the

first, and the hundred lives as one. (Watt 46)

But, at least Beckett's character contemplates his version of life with a

measure of self-awareness and a kind of memory, whereas in O'Brien the

horror is suggested as being an essential lack of awareness. The reader, but not

the narrator apparently, is aware that, once within range of the police barracks, the two accounts, early in the novel and at its conclusion, grow

towards identity, and the narrator's exact phrasing, unknown to him but

remembered by the reader, comes out again, but as if for the first time. Beckett does not shrink from metaphysical torment, but O'Brien's torments

come from a fascination with an intensified world of self-punishment. His is a

world where guilt and disillusion are transposed into being paradoxically both

comforting and distressing. All guilt-making adult concerns seem banished, and urban complex life never obtrudes; the physical space of Ireland is reduced to a small boy's country Ireland with bicycles and large policemen. But this is as close to hell as you are going to get when you take a journey back into the land of your youth when you are no longer equipped for the innocent

simplicities of youth, when you are alienated from life. This small world is big enough to resist hope, and is enough to bring

disillusion, always a journey towards a recurrent beginning. Life without end.

WORKS CITED

Beckett, Samuel. Watt. London: Calder, 1963.

Clissman, Anne. Flann O'Brien: A Critical Introduction. London: Gill and

Macmillan, 1975.

Cosgrove, Brian. Irish University Review. 6 (1976).




Jeffares, A. Norman, in Macmillan Dictionary of Irish Literature. London:

Macmillan, 1982.

Kenner, Hugh. A Colder Eye. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.

O'Brien, Flann. The Best of Myles. Ed. Kevin O'Nolan. London: Picador, 1968.

O'Brien, Flann. The Third Policeman. London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1967.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. La Nausee. Paris: Labrarie Gallimard, 1928.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Nausea. Trans. Robert Baldick. Harmondsworth: Penquin,

1965.

The Voyage ofMael Duin, Imram Curaig Maele Duin. Groningen: Wolteres

Noordhoff, 1970.



flann o'brien's existentialist hell

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