Flann O'Brien (1911–1966)
Author of The Third Policeman
About the Author
Writer Brian O'Nolan was born on October 5, 1911. He graduated from University College, Dublin. This gifted Irish writer had three identities: Brian O'Nolan, an Irish civil servant and administrator; Myles Copaleen, columnist for the Irish Times, poet and author of An Beal Bocht (The Poor Mouth: A show more Bad Story about the Hard Life, 1941), a satire in Gaelic on the Gaelic revival; and Flann O'Brien, playwright and avant-garde comic novelist. His masterpiece, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), went almost unrecognized in its time. This novel, which plays havoc with the conventional novel form, is about a man writing a book about characters in turn writing about him. O'Brien starts off with three separate openings. The Third Policeman (1967), funny but grim, plunges into the world of the dead, though one is not immediately aware that the protagonist is no longer living. He died on April 1, 1966. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: Courtesy of Dalkey Archive Press
Works by Flann O'Brien
Romans et chroniques dublinoises: Swim-two-Birds – Le Troisième Policier – La Chienlit – Le Pleure-Misère –… (2015) 5 copies
The Poor Mouth — Author — 3 copies
Durst und andere Dinge: Slatterys Sago-Saga / Die Krone des Märtyrers / John Duffys Bruder / Durst / Faustus Kelly… (2002) 2 copies
John Duffy's Brother 1 copy
Binchy and Bergin and Best 1 copy
No title 1 copy
Brian, Flann and Miles 1 copy
Irlanda 1 copy
Associated Works
The Vintage Book of Amnesia: An Anthology of Writing on the Subject of Memory Loss (2000) — Contributor — 219 copies, 2 reviews
The Penguin Book of Irish Comic Writing (1996) — Author, some editions; Author, some editions — 29 copies, 1 review
Great Irish Writing: The Best from The Bell (Classic Irish Fiction) (1978) — Contributor — 21 copies
The Brother [VHS] — Based on work — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Legal name
- Nualláin, Brian Ó
- Other names
- O'Nolan, Brian
gCopaleen, Myles na (pseudonym)
Gopaleen, Myles na (pseudonym)
Brother Barnabas (pseudonym)
Blakesley, Stephen (pseudonym)
Knowall, George (pseudonym) - Birthdate
- 1911-10-05
- Date of death
- 1966-04-01
- Burial location
- Deansgrange Cemetery, Dublin, Ireland
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- Ireland
- Birthplace
- Strabane, County Tyrone, Ireland
- Place of death
- Dublin, Ireland
- Cause of death
- heart attack
- Places of residence
- Dublin, Ireland
- Education
- Blackrock College
University College Dublin - Occupations
- civil servant
dramatist
novelist - Organizations
- Literary and Historical Society (University College Dublin)
Members
Discussions
"The Best of Myles" by Flann O'Brien in One Book One Thread (February 2020)
Reviews
I am puzzled by the jacket copy on the John F. Byrne Irish Literature Series edition of The Third Policeman, which calls it a "brilliant comic novel." Surely, this story is dark as dark can be, and portrays a tragedy with exacting, clinical detail. The tale is in fact profoundly absurd, and checkered with the narrator's preoccupation with a perverse body of scholarship surrounding a narcoleptic alchemist. But that's bicycling for you.
To experience the full effect of this novel, I recommend show more avoiding advance glosses of the plot, although the plot is really only a fraction of the value of reading it, but this plot is reeled out in an unusual and impressive manner. Moreover, such glosses tend to have inaccuracies, like the jacket copy's misconception that the "narrator ... is introduced to ... de Selby's view that the earth is not round but 'sausage-shaped'" while at the police station, when in fact he has clearly done his exhaustive study of de Selby long before.
The 1999 introduction by Denis Donoghue insists on quoting a piece of a letter from author Flann O'Brien to William Saroyan, in which the ending of the book is perfectly spoiled. This same letter excerpt also appears at the end of the book, having been appended by the editors at the original (posthumous) 1967 publication, apparently in the belief that readers might need this assistance after failing to comprehend what they had read, despite it being as plainly put as possible. Donoghue's introduction is otherwise worth reading (after the novel), with its brief biography of O'Brien (pseudonym of Brian O'Nolan) and a debatable attempt to classify the book as Menippean satire.
But the real attraction of this book is the wonderful language, which alternates among three modes. There are artful descriptions of imponderables. "The silence in the room was so unusually quiet that the beginning of it seemed rather loud when the utter stillness of the end of it had been encountered" (105). There are careful reviews of academic argumentation. "His conclusion was that 'hammering is anything but what it appears to be'; such a statement, if not open to explicit refutation, seems unnecessary and unenlightening" (144-5 n). And there are personal encounters featuring ambivalent dialogues in spare and careful language. "And as I went upon my way I was slightly glad that I had met him" (49).
The book is organized into twelve chapters. If these reflect an esoteric infrastructure such as astrological houses, I haven't persuaded myself so. The pace of the prose is fast, even if the pace of events described is sometimes so slow as to be entirely immobile. The Third Policeman had been on my virtual TBR pile for many years, and my actual one for some months, when I finally read it in a matter of a few days. Alas, I may read it again! show less
To experience the full effect of this novel, I recommend show more avoiding advance glosses of the plot, although the plot is really only a fraction of the value of reading it, but this plot is reeled out in an unusual and impressive manner. Moreover, such glosses tend to have inaccuracies, like the jacket copy's misconception that the "narrator ... is introduced to ... de Selby's view that the earth is not round but 'sausage-shaped'" while at the police station, when in fact he has clearly done his exhaustive study of de Selby long before.
The 1999 introduction by Denis Donoghue insists on quoting a piece of a letter from author Flann O'Brien to William Saroyan, in which the ending of the book is perfectly spoiled. This same letter excerpt also appears at the end of the book, having been appended by the editors at the original (posthumous) 1967 publication, apparently in the belief that readers might need this assistance after failing to comprehend what they had read, despite it being as plainly put as possible. Donoghue's introduction is otherwise worth reading (after the novel), with its brief biography of O'Brien (pseudonym of Brian O'Nolan) and a debatable attempt to classify the book as Menippean satire.
But the real attraction of this book is the wonderful language, which alternates among three modes. There are artful descriptions of imponderables. "The silence in the room was so unusually quiet that the beginning of it seemed rather loud when the utter stillness of the end of it had been encountered" (105). There are careful reviews of academic argumentation. "His conclusion was that 'hammering is anything but what it appears to be'; such a statement, if not open to explicit refutation, seems unnecessary and unenlightening" (144-5 n). And there are personal encounters featuring ambivalent dialogues in spare and careful language. "And as I went upon my way I was slightly glad that I had met him" (49).
The book is organized into twelve chapters. If these reflect an esoteric infrastructure such as astrological houses, I haven't persuaded myself so. The pace of the prose is fast, even if the pace of events described is sometimes so slow as to be entirely immobile. The Third Policeman had been on my virtual TBR pile for many years, and my actual one for some months, when I finally read it in a matter of a few days. Alas, I may read it again! show less
I was recommended this book many years ago and it has probably taken me forty-five years to get around to reading it. In one way, that is a loss; in another, it is perhaps fortunate, because as a younger reader I might not have appreciated all the connections that a perusal of this text throw up. On one hand, it is a surreal masterpiece; on the other, a dark fable; on yet another, an exploration of the loquaciousness of the Irish mind. I do not yet know if O'Brien was recording the show more colloquial speech of Dublin in the 1930s, or if some of the terminology in the book was his own coinage, which professional Irish creative personalities have over time picked up and shared with us. Suffice it to say, I kept coming across words and phrases I recognised.
The language is certainly highly redolent and I found myself at times reading some of it out loud for the sheer joy of it.
Perhaps the strangest thing, though, was that whilst reading the book, I had a BBC radio news/current affairs programme on; and I became aware that the items I heard - an interview with a professor of political economy and migration statistics from the London School of Economics, followed by a piece on trying to get an AI to write topical jokes - seemed to acquire some of the oblique propensities of O'Brien's prose. Either the world was suddenly revealed to me in its true surreal nature, or the book itself was warping reality. Perhaps de Selby could enlighten me.... show less
The language is certainly highly redolent and I found myself at times reading some of it out loud for the sheer joy of it.
Perhaps the strangest thing, though, was that whilst reading the book, I had a BBC radio news/current affairs programme on; and I became aware that the items I heard - an interview with a professor of political economy and migration statistics from the London School of Economics, followed by a piece on trying to get an AI to write topical jokes - seemed to acquire some of the oblique propensities of O'Brien's prose. Either the world was suddenly revealed to me in its true surreal nature, or the book itself was warping reality. Perhaps de Selby could enlighten me.... show less
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.
-Rita Mae Brown
The phrase practically screams common sense, does it not? And yet endurance, perseverance, and stubborn tenacity are all valued qualities in the face of a seemingly unobtainable goal. Personally, what immediately comes to mind are the trials and tribulations of scientists in countless laboratories scattered across the globe. Proclaiming a hypothesis, designing an experiment to match it, and show more then conducting it over and over and over again, enough to gain enough data points to exclude both systematic and random error, avoidable and unavoidable biasing of the results. Three is the magic number required to measure just how wrong the data could possibly be, but more is always encouraged, just in case a monstrous outlier rears its head due to some unforeseen amount of chaos.
And if that experiment proves faulty, scientific training demands a do-over. Correct the hypothesis a touch, adjust the variables a smidgen, re-calibrate the chemicals and fine-tune the machinery, then repeat the process countless times more. On and on and on, as one of the blessings of the scientific method is that conclusions can always be questioned, answers can always be tested ad infinitum, and theories that have lasted for millenia can have their sterling reputations cracked like an egg during the space of a single hour.
Now, what does this have to do with The Third Policeman? Well, the previous two paragraphs in essence described a major plot point, the "twist" if you will of the entire narrative, as well as an action that multiple characters take part in throughout the course of the story. More importantly, there are a surprising amount of passages that are grounded firmly in the 'insanity' that science is.
Human existence de Selby has defined as 'a succession of static experiences each infinitely brief'...From this premise he discounts the reality or truth of any progression or seriallism in life, denies that time can pass as such in the accepted sense and attributes to hallucinations the commonly experienced sensation of progression as, for instance, in journeying from one place to another or even 'living'....The illusion of progression he attributes to the inability of the human brain - 'as at present developed' - to appreciate the reality of these separate 'rests', preferring to group many millions of them together and calling the result motion...
Some of you may be familiar with the concept of integration in mathematics. For those who are not, imagine a line on a graph. Make it as curved and chaotic as you please. Now, imagine finding an equation to calculate the area underneath that line for however far it shoots out into infinity, bounded only by the horizontal (x) and vertical (y) axes that the line originates from. The accepted process is to imagine an infinitely narrow slice of that area, then add up as many of the slices as necessary. Realistically speaking, this is impossible. Mathematically, this is one of the fundamental bases of calculus, and is one of if not the most useful calculation skill to have under one's belt for engineering.
The parallels between seeming insanity and hard science don't stop there.
'How big is all this place?'
'It is no size at all,' the Sergeant explained, 'because there is no difference anywhere in it and we have no conception of the extent of its unchanging coequality.'
In engineering problems involving lines, shapes, and volumes, it is a very popular method to extend one or more of the axes of the shape out to infinity, thereby reducing seeming differences to insignificant in the grand scale of things, and ridding one of the necessity of calculation for that particular part. You would not believe how much easier this makes calculation, although it is true that these infinitely long, infinitely wide, and infinitely large objects have a very major issue:
They lacked an essential property of all known objects...Simply their appearance, if even that word is not inadmissible, was not understood by the eye and was in any event indescribable.
Regardless, the calculations always work out.
Another scientific curiosity, albeit a bit more grounded in fact than the previous.
'Some people,' he said, 'call it energy but the right name is omnium because there is far more than energy in the inside of it, whatever it is. Omnium is the essential inherent interior essence which is hidden inside the root of the kernel of everything at it is always the same.'
I nodded wisely.
'It never changes. But it shows itself in a million ways and it always comes in waves. now take the case of the light on the mangle.'
'Take it,' I said.
'Light is the same omnium 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...But ominium is the business-end of everything. If you could find the right wave that results in a tree, you could make a small fortune out of timber for export.'
Light is both a particle and a wave, waves that have a much higher frequency than sound waves. Every object in the physical world has what is called a 'resonant frequency', most popularly illustrated by an opera singer breaking a glass with their voice. At that point, the frequency of the noise matches the vibrational frequency of the multitudes of atomic bonds within the structure, causing it to absorb energy and eventually break apart. Whether this process can ever be reversed and form physical objects from vibrations is a fascinating question indeed.
And finally, the amazing properties of water.
[de Selby] praises the equilbrium of water, its circumambiencey, equiponderance and equitableness, and declares that water, 'if not abused' can achieve 'absolute superiority'...In Bassett's view the water was treated in the patent water-box and diluted to a degree that made it invisible - in the guise of water, at all events - to the untutored watchers at the sewer.
If you ever find yourself working with bioengineers, you'll run across drug delivery problems. Not only do they involve integration and shapes that break the laws of reality, they involve liquids of all densities, viscosities, and diffusion constants. Unless you're dealing with water or something that has been 'infinitely diluted' in water, essentially easing calculations by being deemed 'perfect' in its insignificant interactions. In other words, you can ignore it. The only problem with de Selby's approach is attempting to demonstrate these mathematical tricks in real life, resulting in a household usage of 9,000 gallons of water in one day, none of which was observed to ever leave the house. Again, realistically incomprehensible. But scientifically sound.
I could go on about the myriad reality-defying ways the book illustrates that in actuality are necessary for successful scientific reasoning. But I think that you have all had enough lessons in mathematics/physics/general engineering for one day. Rest assured, this is not all that the book has going for it. There are many passages of dry wit that had me flat out giggling, as well as wonderfully unconventional metaphors that raised the reality the words described to a unusual, yet beautiful art. You'll even find scathing critiques of society and profound existential meanderings within these pages.
However, what stuck with me the most were the uncanny similarities between the strange logic that the book operated on and the science of the real world. Not all of the book's weirdness is reflected in sound science, but science itself has its own cases of crackpot theories and misinformed conclusions. Ultimately, to discover the truth, scientists delve into these realms, these hells if you will, of supreme weirdness and nonsensical assumptions, bring back bits and pieces for the rest of humanity to benefit from, and then dive back for more. It's a wonder that more of them don't go mad from the effort. show less
Everyone has a theory about this novel. There are at least five commonly cited explanations:
1. Flann O'Brien is the forgotten postmodernist, the one who didn't leave Ireland. The 'Third Policeman' is one of the last books Joyce read, and by implication the 'Third Policeman' is a kind of Doppelgaenger to 'Finnegans Wake.' Its play with language and its reflexivity about the novel form is somehow parallel to Joyce's.
2. Flann O'Brien was an alcoholic, and this is the product of so many unhappy show more binges and half-remembered delusions. The book is an indirect but eloquent record of that generation in Ireland, when the humor was desperate, when the church was all-powerful, when what's now called 'homosocial' life in crowded dingy pubs had to stand in for wider society.
3. Flann O'Brien is a member of what Hugh Kenner called 'Irish nihilism.' There is no moral sense in the book, which after all begins with someone's head being crushed by a garden spade. This also supposedly explains the absence of contrition or any religious feeling. Denis Donoghue almost assents to this in his strange and covertly republican Afterword to the Dalkey Archive edition.
4. Flann O'Brien is a minimalist, with deep ties to Beckett. This is one of the lines in Fintan O'Toole's 2009 review in the 'New York Review of Books.'
5. Flann O'Brien's own explanation is that the book is about a dead man, and that the last page shows how the damned suffer their punishments eternally. But that's only an explanation if your idea of hell already includes knives so thin they can't be seen, microscopic carved wooden boxes, and sexually mutable bicycles. Otherwise it doesn't 'explain' anything.
The fact that these are all forced or unhelpful should probably indicate that the book is stranger than its commentators think. But the fact that people keep coming up with these one-line explanations shows how the novel keeps prodding its readers: it is just too strange to be accepted as a mid-century modernist novel, and for many readers a theory, no matter how artificial, helps soothe the discomfort. But what is the avant-garde, if it isn't a thing that is not anticipated? That can't be accommodated? That wasn't asked for, that solves no problem we ever thought we had?
One thing I especially love about the 'Third Policeman' is the sense of Irish landscape that it conjures, in between its many fantasies and concoctions. If you take away the hallucinated afterlife that occupies most of the book, what remains? A very poor, simple countryside, with farms and a few police stations and pubs, and miles of bumpy roads, sodden fields, muck, brambles, dripping copses, and gorse. There is almost nothing else: people ride bicycles everywhere. When they think they might become rich, they dream of changes of clothes. There is almost no mention of what they eat or drink. It is an impoverished landscape -- and in relation to it, O'Brien's perverse and perfervid inventions are even more desperate, more necessary, and more painful. show less
1. Flann O'Brien is the forgotten postmodernist, the one who didn't leave Ireland. The 'Third Policeman' is one of the last books Joyce read, and by implication the 'Third Policeman' is a kind of Doppelgaenger to 'Finnegans Wake.' Its play with language and its reflexivity about the novel form is somehow parallel to Joyce's.
2. Flann O'Brien was an alcoholic, and this is the product of so many unhappy show more binges and half-remembered delusions. The book is an indirect but eloquent record of that generation in Ireland, when the humor was desperate, when the church was all-powerful, when what's now called 'homosocial' life in crowded dingy pubs had to stand in for wider society.
3. Flann O'Brien is a member of what Hugh Kenner called 'Irish nihilism.' There is no moral sense in the book, which after all begins with someone's head being crushed by a garden spade. This also supposedly explains the absence of contrition or any religious feeling. Denis Donoghue almost assents to this in his strange and covertly republican Afterword to the Dalkey Archive edition.
4. Flann O'Brien is a minimalist, with deep ties to Beckett. This is one of the lines in Fintan O'Toole's 2009 review in the 'New York Review of Books.'
5. Flann O'Brien's own explanation is that the book is about a dead man, and that the last page shows how the damned suffer their punishments eternally. But that's only an explanation if your idea of hell already includes knives so thin they can't be seen, microscopic carved wooden boxes, and sexually mutable bicycles. Otherwise it doesn't 'explain' anything.
The fact that these are all forced or unhelpful should probably indicate that the book is stranger than its commentators think. But the fact that people keep coming up with these one-line explanations shows how the novel keeps prodding its readers: it is just too strange to be accepted as a mid-century modernist novel, and for many readers a theory, no matter how artificial, helps soothe the discomfort. But what is the avant-garde, if it isn't a thing that is not anticipated? That can't be accommodated? That wasn't asked for, that solves no problem we ever thought we had?
One thing I especially love about the 'Third Policeman' is the sense of Irish landscape that it conjures, in between its many fantasies and concoctions. If you take away the hallucinated afterlife that occupies most of the book, what remains? A very poor, simple countryside, with farms and a few police stations and pubs, and miles of bumpy roads, sodden fields, muck, brambles, dripping copses, and gorse. There is almost nothing else: people ride bicycles everywhere. When they think they might become rich, they dream of changes of clothes. There is almost no mention of what they eat or drink. It is an impoverished landscape -- and in relation to it, O'Brien's perverse and perfervid inventions are even more desperate, more necessary, and more painful. show less
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Statistics
- Works
- 48
- Also by
- 11
- Members
- 12,559
- Popularity
- #1,863
- Rating
- 3.9
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- 254
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