Christopher Brown

Menippean Satire
Dr. Robert S. Dupree
16 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 diligent search for a
better foundation: “Bakhtin emphasizes that such carnivalesque 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 re-
sponse to the technological dilemma of the early twentieth century, particu-
larly Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which claims that the closer
something is investigated, the less it can be fully known. In The Third Police-
man the redemptive key to the absence of a concrete epistemological found-
ation is exuberance and humanity—traits personified 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 ma-
jority 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 menip-
pea use “the most daring and unfettered fantasies…in which to provoke and
test a philosophical idea” (Bakhtin 94). As with every novel—and particu-
larly 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 Col-
eridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief” before 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 then into the depths of
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eternity, while each level really ought to be accompanied by a new layer of

“suspension,” because each departs from the belief-system or rules of the
preceding environment. But when the reader finds he has been reading at a
level more unbelievable than he had presumed, 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 fictional 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 delin-
eates Flann O’Brien’s satire on traditional epistemology and “pragmatic”
solution to the resulting “negativism or nihilism” (62), interpreting the circu-
lar 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 epistemological
bottom” (57). Booker admits that “it is highly appropriate that [Policeman
Fox] be the title character” (48), but he does not develop the redemptive
power of Fox, who is, indeed, the exuberant hero in the face of skepticism.
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 morn-
ing 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). Likewise,
the narrator’s motive for the murder is, ultimately, his unhesitating confid-
ence 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 humility and hu-
manity.
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 idolizes.
De Selby’s most notable trait is an inventiveness that materializes in theories
of physics that are tinged with atomic science and unearthed conundrums
like Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the hare (O’Brien 50). Although Booker
writes, “the great scholar seems distinguished by an unparalleled lack of any
common sense whatsoever” (“Science, Philosophy” 40), the narrator’s opin-
ion concerning one passage of de Selby depicts another perspective: “[some
critics think] de Selby was permitting himself a modicum of unwonted levity
in connection with this theory but he seems to argue the matter seriously
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enough and with no want of conviction,” which demonstrates de Selby’s de-

votion 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 “farfetched”
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 min-
iscule 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 non-
sense, of course, and his experimental results quite impossible” (“Science,
Philosophy” 42). Two alternative evaluations prevail: comic relief and analo-
gical interpretation. De Selby, despite bouts of narcolepsy and a crippling
“condition of the gall-bladder,” pursues his research with gusto, and his forti-
tude while examining every slide of a motion picture individually is both im-
pressive and hilarious (O’Brien 93n, 50n). His scholastic buffoonery is en-
dearing because he takes such joy in it. The analog between de Selby’s ab-
surd 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’Bri-
en 65). The narrator is insatiably analytical and endeavors to comprehend
everything he encounters—an attitude that is often the cause of the psycho-
somatic 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 concept which corrupts
and upsets all others” (Flann O’Brien 58). The narrator’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 sim-
pler thing to believe than the contrary,” i.e., that each is a flawless simulac-
rum of the preceding box (O’Brien 74). Feeling he must comprehend the situ-
ation, the narrator cannot let the boxes simply be, and pains himself in trying
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to equal the superhuman sensitivity of MacCruiskeen, 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 bis-
cuit 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
every 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 recol-
lection 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 fin-
ishes it and returns to the beginning, the protagonist is found to have forgot-
ten his adventure completely. This is the carousel plot made explicit, 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 diction
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 reoccurs
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 para-
mount. Throughout, questions are given precedence because they indicate
search and inquiry. The first episode of this is the narrator’s conversation
with Mathers, who answers negatively to every question put to him. This
renders the answer practically meaningless because it is predictable and un-
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changing, and for this reason the narrator’s questions must be carefully craf-
ted to provoke Mathers into further explanation. Sergeant Pluck tells the nar-
rator, “The first beginnings of wisdom… is to ask questions but never to an-
swer any. You get wisdom from asking and I from not answering,” 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 ac-
tion—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 dy-
namism.
That the narrator is nameless and oblivious to his death is representat-
ive 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 negat-
ive nullity neutralised and rendered void by asphyxiation and the fracture 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 Asbee
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 individuality”
(63). On dying and losing his name, the narrator is forced to rebuild an iden-
tity; 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 underworld, the
narrator represents man stripped of his artificial cultural supports, an unset-
tling 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 hu-
man erring make him the redeeming figure of the work. Pluck’s introduction
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 curi-
osity: 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” by tying
themselves together and carrying their wooden legs (164). It is peculiar that
 Brown 6

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’Bri-
en 77). Confronting the policeman in the dark, the narrator exclaims, “noth-
ing was clear to me except his overbearing policemanship” (180). Fox is ab-
solutely discomforting to the narrator, yet somehow steadying: “In the pres-
ence 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 Math-
ers.
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, horri-
fying, 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 cannot
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 narrator
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 uncertainties
of life. Fox is the unsatirical comic relief in The Third Policeman, embodying
the appropriate response to the uncertainty that seems to make life sense-
less, because “Comedy is about man’s ability to survive within uncertainty”
(Dupree 170). Fox’s glee in playing tricks on his co-workers and pride that his
private police station is “spick and span” are representative of the general
 Brown 7

tone of much Menippean satire (O’Brien 183). When the world becomes inef-
fable in its complexity, the solution is the natural, moment-to-moment life-
style of the exuberant cynic, from telling jokes on the street corners to writ-
ing “back-chat and funny cracks” (qtd. in O’Brien 200).
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