LOST 2 x 02
LOST 2 x 01
Episode 3 is suppose to be super important. ABC has mentioned that this episode will answer more than enough questions posed by Lost.
They killed Ethan ?Other Man? Rom before he could tell us dick. Will they kill Desmond ?I Like Mama Cass and ancient personal computers? No-Last-Name before he can explain what the f*ck is going on??
I finally got to meet my man Damon Lindelof, a man I now consider a great friend, in Hawaii a few weeks ago. He and I are Whedonites. He and I are bonded by the Buffy-love. He confided to me, after I had ingested many a blue beverage (as semi-naked go-go dancers writhed on a nearby Oahu beach), that tonight?s Locke-centric episode would be the one in which we learned much about The Hatch. So I?ve been anticipating.
Kevin Tighe returns as Locke?s evil bio-dad. Plus Katey Sagal, who continues to rival Janice Dickinson as the hottest fiftysomething planetwide, turns up. (Perhaps as bio-dad?s trophy wife??)
More Info:
My fellow "Lost" addicts have an ongoing debate each week about practically every issue on the show and a couple of them thought the driver "killed" by Jack's future wife (Julie Bowen) in the season premiere flashback might have been Locke. Like, maybe he was revived later and that would explain his paralysis. So I reviewed the episode on tape and they're wrong: The other driver is Shannon's dad. The EMS guy who wheels him in says the patient is "Adam Rutherford, 57 ..." Well, if you check the official Web sites, Shannon's last name is Rutherford. And remember, one of her problems is that after her dad died, her stepmom (Boone's actual mother) cut her off financially. So, depending on how you look at it, either Jack's wife killed him in the accident, or Jack killed him by choosing to treat the girl instead. Dun-dun-DUNNNNNN!
------------------------
2.03 - Orientation
Episode starts off exactly where we left off in ep 1. Desmond has a gun on Locke's bald head, and Jack has just realized he's seen the dude before. There are some more moments of yelling back-and-forth. Jack is tripping out (".....the stadium. You. But...what, how...wtf?"), Locke is a bit confused ("You know this man, Jack? Okay, just calm down....") and Des doesn't seem to remember Jack at all ("What are you goin on about? Lower your weapon! Shut it!") After this, Kate appears behind Desmond with one of the guns. Jack, Kate, and Locke eventually manage to subdue Des, and throughout the episode manage to get some answers. Mostly about the hatch, and a little is mentioned about the numbers. More questions are raised about the security system and "the sickness"...Desmond finds it hard to believe none of the castaways have gotten sick.
Meanwhile. Mike and Sawyer feel the wrath of Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje .... He beats them both unconsious. These 2, along with Jin, are captured, imprisoned, questioned, and hit some more. Then we see Michelle Rodriguez, Bernardo, and some chick named Sally. Yes, these captors aren't the dreaded "Others", but fellow survivors...several of whom have unfortunately been driven near mad by "the Others". These tail-section folks, along the brutal and mysterious Mr. Emeka (though they say they just recently found him in the jungle), have apparently had it far worse than the castways we have been with. It takes the whole ep for Emeka dude to chill...and let Sawyer, Jin, and Michael talk.
There are about five Locke flashback scenes that deal with his post-daddy trauma, and reveals how exactly he got in that wheelchair. Which is quite interesting...
By the end of the episode, Locke is beginning to lose his faith, Jack and Kate are bewildered at Desmond has to say, the 3 raft-folks are at the mercy of the tail-section tribe, and it is clear that life on will soon be changing drastically.
I don't want to reveal anything else about the episode. Desmond's info is interesting, but I don't want to spoil much of it. However, I will tell you this. Those strange symbols seen all over the hatch apparently have BIG meaning, and will definately be the big thing to wonder about this season.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD POLICEMAN
The Third Policeman has a peculiar, and unfortunate, publication history. In January 1940, Brian O'Nolan (Flann O'Brien) submitted the manuscript to the publishers of his first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939). At Swim was a critical success, but had failed commercially and Longman's were unhappy with the new novel, advising that: ?he should become less fantastic and in this new novel he is more so?. More rejections followed. O'Nolan wrote despondently to William Saroyan in September 1940 that: ?I got so sick looking at a ragged [?] copy of that story I wrote about the policeman that I flew into a frenzy (the Sweeny kind), put it into a box with 2 short stories and sent the whole lot across the sea to Matson & Duggan?. His American agents subsequently misplaced their copy of the manuscript, and O'Nolan began to spread the story that it had been lost entirely. (One version of this tale had the sheets blowing out of the back of his car on a drive through Donegal.) Following his failure to publish The Third Policeman, only his second novel, O'Nolan did not attempt to publish another novel in English for twenty-one years. He pillaged the unpublished manuscript for comic episodes for his fifth novel, The Dalkey Archive (1964), but he never again attempted to have The Third Policeman published. The novel appeared posthumously in 1967 to instant critical acclaim.
The Third Policeman is a story about academic obsession, a fable about crime and punishment, and, according to some, it is even a commentary on Einsteinian physics. Most obviously, it is a deadpan murder mystery which retains its major revelation for the final pages. (Those who prefer their mysteries intact should probably not read this article.) Bearing this in mind, it is fitting that The Third Policeman opens by reminding readers of their ignorance and dependency: ?Not everybody knows how I killed old Philip Mathers? (7). Throughout the novel, O'Nolan exploits the unequal relationship between author and reader, since the viability of the murder mystery obviously depends on what can be hidden from the latter. However, as in At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), authorial control proves to be a difficult matter. The narrator of The Third Policeman is another of O'Nolan's nameless protagonists, and he displays their usual brand of passive bewilderment. Ascribing the responsibility for Mathers' murder to his partner in crime, John Divney, he gives a vague, confused account of himself. This is a narrator who can vividly recall Mathers' skull ?crumple up crisply like an empty eggshell? (17), but whose idea of personal history is to say that: ?I was born a long time ago? (7). O'Nolan adopts a childlike perspective in recounting his narrator's youth, as did James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), but here the strategy becomes bleakly surreal:
a certain year came about the Christmas-time and when the year was gone my father and mother were gone also [?] My mother was the first to go and I can remember a fat man with a red face and a black suit telling my father that there was no doubt where she was, that he could be as sure of that as he could of anything else in this vale of tears. But he did not mention where and as I thought the whole thing was very private and that she might be back on Wednesday, I did not ask him where. Later, when my father went, I thought he had gone to fetch her with an outside car, but when neither of them came back on the next Wednesday, I felt sorry and disappointed. (
The vague, fairytale style of the novel's opening is momentarily broken when the narrator goes to boarding-school and first becomes acquainted with the work of the philosopher, de Selby. This is a man who cannot remember his birthday, but he remembers the day on which he first read de Selby ? the seventh of March. It is the narrator's ambition to publish a definitive commentary on de Selby and to fund this ambition he plans to murder and rob Mathers. Following the murder, the greater part of the novel follows the narrator's quest to find the black box which holds Mathers' fortune.
Unfortunately for the narrator, this search takes place in a world far stranger than the remote world of his childhood. Luckily, he is well furnished with de Selbian theories of the universe which are far more peculiar than anything he encounters on his journey. His narrative is littered with footnotes on de Selby and his bizarre commentators, these footnotes steadily increasing in size until they swamp the main narrative in chapters nine and eleven. De Selby is a natural sceptic of all known laws of physics, who cavalierly dismisses the evidence of human experience. He contends, for example, that ?the permanent hallucination known conventionally as 'life' ?(9 is an effect of constantly walking in a particular direction around a sausage-shaped earth, and that night results from ?accumulations of 'black air' ? (33). This said, his commentators ? whose work the narrator cites in impeccably scholarly fashion ? are stranger still. They not only question the authenticity of various de Selby manuscripts, they doubt each other's very existence. The de Selbian sub-plot ends with the happy image of a generation of scholarly debate being concocted by two cantankerous scholars, armed only with a host of pseudonyms.
The precariousness of identity is a theme that also runs throughout the main narrative. After the murder, Divney sends the narrator into Mathers' house to find the black box:
'If you meet anybody, you don't know what you're looking for, you don't know in whose house you are, you don't know anything.'
'I don't even know my own name,' I answered.
This was a very remarkable thing for me to say because the next time I was asked my name I could not answer. I did not know. (21)
Unfortunately for the narrator, to be without a name in a linguistically-ordered universe (like a text) is to cease to exist. His namelessness is later to cause him a good deal of trouble. However, once inside Mathers' house he almost finds the black box under some floorboards, but is distracted by encountering his victim, seemingly alive. At the same time, he acquires a conscience with which he begins to have internal conversations; this being Flann O'Brien territory, the conscience goes by the name of Joe. A bizarre three-way conversation with Mathers follows. With Mathers only answering 'No' to the narrator's questions (simply because ?'No' is [?] a better answer than 'Yes'? (29) ), the narrator learns to manipulate the linguistic game to discover the whereabouts of the black box. It is a lesson worth learning early because The Third Policeman is littered with similarly Carrollian exchanges. The trail of the black box takes the narrator to a nearby police station, home to Sergeant Pluck and Policeman MacCruiskeen, two men obsessed with the thieving, finding and general policing of bicycles. During the narrator's stay with the policemen, he is introduced to MacCruiskeen's incredible inventions, he is given a guided tour of Eternity (a kind of underground factory), is very nearly hanged for a murder he did not commit, and finally falls in love with a bicycle. The sensible Joe has the measure of the situation: ?Anything can be said in this place and it will be true and will have to be believed? (8 , but the narrator's incredulity causes him more difficulties. He would have been as well to heed the advice of Sergeant Pluck: ?The first beginnings of wisdom [?] is to ask questions but never to answer any? (62).
The narrator eventually escapes from the police station (with the help of an army of one-legged men) and passes Mathers' house on his way home. At this stage the quest for the black box had almost been forgotten, but he makes one more attempt at recovering it. Inside the house ? or to be more accurate, inside the walls of the house ? he discovers the station of the third policeman of the title, Policeman Fox, who has custody of the black box. Fox reveals that the box does not contain money, but ?omnium?, a substance MacCruiskeen once described as: ?the essential inherent interior essence which is hidden in the root of the kernel of everything? (113), but which is literally everything one desires. Policeman Fox has been using it to take the muck off his leggings and to boil his eggs just right, but naturally the narrator has more grandiose visions of his future omnipotence. He gleefully returns home with the black box, where he finds a much older John Divney who is surprisingly disturbed by the narrator's appearance: ?He said I was not there. He said I was dead. He said that what he had put under the boards in the big house was not the black box but a mine, a bomb. It had gone up when I touched it [?] I was dead. He screamed at me to keep away. I was dead for sixteen years.? (203)
The shock of seeing his dead friend kills Divney, and the confused narrator turns back to the road. At this point the narrative also turns back on itself, replicating the narrator's first approach to the peculiar police station, only this time he is accompanied by John Divney. Both are doomed to the cyclical quest for the black box. The novel ends with Sergeant Pluck's habitual refrain: ?Is it about a bicycle?? (206).
The Third Policeman is rife with comic absurdity, but like many nonsense texts it has been mined for allegorical intent. Whether about the moral consequences of Mathers' murder, or the similarities between some of de Selby's theories and modern physics, Brian O'Nolan had a simple explanation for his inventions: ?When you are writing about the world of the dead ? and the damned ? where none of the rules and laws (not even the law of gravity) holds good, there is any amount of scope for back-chat and funny cracks?. However, given the preponderance of the detective genre in metafiction, there is room for suspicion that The Third Policeman has more in common with the self-reflexive At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) than may be apparent. At the very least, the novel is quietly intertextual, assembling de Selby's idiosyncrasies from J. K. Huysmans' À rebours (Against Nature) (1884) and J. W. Dunne's brand of popular physics in An Experiment With Time (1927) and The Serial Universe (1934). Still, The Third Policeman's self-reflexiveness is more closely related to Lewis Carroll's nonsense than to postmodernist metafiction. As befits a scholar, the narrator is consigned to a Carrollian hell full of imponderables. The narrator may mimic the role of the confused reader on his journey through this countryside, but O'Nolan's satire is not confined to the laws of narrative. More disturbing than the policemen's incomprehensible universe is their own incapacity to imagine anything beyond the ordinary (in other words, a world not obsessed with bicycles). More unnerving still is their adherence to the logic of the law. When the narrator is arrested for murder simply for being on hand when a suspect is needed, his defence against his proposed hanging is that he has no name and so has no legal personality. Sergeant Pluck proves equal to the challenge:
For that reason alone [?] we can take you and hang the life out of you and you are not hanged at all and there is no entry to be made in the death papers. The particular death you die is not even a death (which is an inferior phenomenon at the best) only an insanitary abstraction in the backyard, a piece of negative nullity neutralized and rendered void by asphyxiation and the fracture of the spinal string. (105)
But the narrator was no more than ?a piece of negative nullity? all along, never sure of his identity, only capable of asserting what he was not. If At Swim-Two-Birds is an expression of what might be, an exploration of the many roles that might be assumed in a life, The Third Policeman is its inverse. Where At Swim flaunts its student's manic creativity, The Third Policeman offers only the aridity of the narrator's de Selby Index. Nevertheless, The Third Policeman's reputation as O'Nolan's bleakest novel is due not only to its dark humour. After its rejection in 1940, there is no record of Brian O'Nolan attempting another work of fiction in English until the publication of The Hard Life (1961).
MEP / Purrkins
Websites to look up:
LOST 2 x 01
Episode 3 is suppose to be super important. ABC has mentioned that this episode will answer more than enough questions posed by Lost.
They killed Ethan ?Other Man? Rom before he could tell us dick. Will they kill Desmond ?I Like Mama Cass and ancient personal computers? No-Last-Name before he can explain what the f*ck is going on??
I finally got to meet my man Damon Lindelof, a man I now consider a great friend, in Hawaii a few weeks ago. He and I are Whedonites. He and I are bonded by the Buffy-love. He confided to me, after I had ingested many a blue beverage (as semi-naked go-go dancers writhed on a nearby Oahu beach), that tonight?s Locke-centric episode would be the one in which we learned much about The Hatch. So I?ve been anticipating.
Kevin Tighe returns as Locke?s evil bio-dad. Plus Katey Sagal, who continues to rival Janice Dickinson as the hottest fiftysomething planetwide, turns up. (Perhaps as bio-dad?s trophy wife??)
More Info:
My fellow "Lost" addicts have an ongoing debate each week about practically every issue on the show and a couple of them thought the driver "killed" by Jack's future wife (Julie Bowen) in the season premiere flashback might have been Locke. Like, maybe he was revived later and that would explain his paralysis. So I reviewed the episode on tape and they're wrong: The other driver is Shannon's dad. The EMS guy who wheels him in says the patient is "Adam Rutherford, 57 ..." Well, if you check the official Web sites, Shannon's last name is Rutherford. And remember, one of her problems is that after her dad died, her stepmom (Boone's actual mother) cut her off financially. So, depending on how you look at it, either Jack's wife killed him in the accident, or Jack killed him by choosing to treat the girl instead. Dun-dun-DUNNNNNN!
------------------------
2.03 - Orientation
Episode starts off exactly where we left off in ep 1. Desmond has a gun on Locke's bald head, and Jack has just realized he's seen the dude before. There are some more moments of yelling back-and-forth. Jack is tripping out (".....the stadium. You. But...what, how...wtf?"), Locke is a bit confused ("You know this man, Jack? Okay, just calm down....") and Des doesn't seem to remember Jack at all ("What are you goin on about? Lower your weapon! Shut it!") After this, Kate appears behind Desmond with one of the guns. Jack, Kate, and Locke eventually manage to subdue Des, and throughout the episode manage to get some answers. Mostly about the hatch, and a little is mentioned about the numbers. More questions are raised about the security system and "the sickness"...Desmond finds it hard to believe none of the castaways have gotten sick.
Meanwhile. Mike and Sawyer feel the wrath of Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje .... He beats them both unconsious. These 2, along with Jin, are captured, imprisoned, questioned, and hit some more. Then we see Michelle Rodriguez, Bernardo, and some chick named Sally. Yes, these captors aren't the dreaded "Others", but fellow survivors...several of whom have unfortunately been driven near mad by "the Others". These tail-section folks, along the brutal and mysterious Mr. Emeka (though they say they just recently found him in the jungle), have apparently had it far worse than the castways we have been with. It takes the whole ep for Emeka dude to chill...and let Sawyer, Jin, and Michael talk.
There are about five Locke flashback scenes that deal with his post-daddy trauma, and reveals how exactly he got in that wheelchair. Which is quite interesting...
By the end of the episode, Locke is beginning to lose his faith, Jack and Kate are bewildered at Desmond has to say, the 3 raft-folks are at the mercy of the tail-section tribe, and it is clear that life on will soon be changing drastically.
I don't want to reveal anything else about the episode. Desmond's info is interesting, but I don't want to spoil much of it. However, I will tell you this. Those strange symbols seen all over the hatch apparently have BIG meaning, and will definately be the big thing to wonder about this season.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD POLICEMAN
The Third Policeman has a peculiar, and unfortunate, publication history. In January 1940, Brian O'Nolan (Flann O'Brien) submitted the manuscript to the publishers of his first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939). At Swim was a critical success, but had failed commercially and Longman's were unhappy with the new novel, advising that: ?he should become less fantastic and in this new novel he is more so?. More rejections followed. O'Nolan wrote despondently to William Saroyan in September 1940 that: ?I got so sick looking at a ragged [?] copy of that story I wrote about the policeman that I flew into a frenzy (the Sweeny kind), put it into a box with 2 short stories and sent the whole lot across the sea to Matson & Duggan?. His American agents subsequently misplaced their copy of the manuscript, and O'Nolan began to spread the story that it had been lost entirely. (One version of this tale had the sheets blowing out of the back of his car on a drive through Donegal.) Following his failure to publish The Third Policeman, only his second novel, O'Nolan did not attempt to publish another novel in English for twenty-one years. He pillaged the unpublished manuscript for comic episodes for his fifth novel, The Dalkey Archive (1964), but he never again attempted to have The Third Policeman published. The novel appeared posthumously in 1967 to instant critical acclaim.
The Third Policeman is a story about academic obsession, a fable about crime and punishment, and, according to some, it is even a commentary on Einsteinian physics. Most obviously, it is a deadpan murder mystery which retains its major revelation for the final pages. (Those who prefer their mysteries intact should probably not read this article.) Bearing this in mind, it is fitting that The Third Policeman opens by reminding readers of their ignorance and dependency: ?Not everybody knows how I killed old Philip Mathers? (7). Throughout the novel, O'Nolan exploits the unequal relationship between author and reader, since the viability of the murder mystery obviously depends on what can be hidden from the latter. However, as in At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), authorial control proves to be a difficult matter. The narrator of The Third Policeman is another of O'Nolan's nameless protagonists, and he displays their usual brand of passive bewilderment. Ascribing the responsibility for Mathers' murder to his partner in crime, John Divney, he gives a vague, confused account of himself. This is a narrator who can vividly recall Mathers' skull ?crumple up crisply like an empty eggshell? (17), but whose idea of personal history is to say that: ?I was born a long time ago? (7). O'Nolan adopts a childlike perspective in recounting his narrator's youth, as did James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), but here the strategy becomes bleakly surreal:
a certain year came about the Christmas-time and when the year was gone my father and mother were gone also [?] My mother was the first to go and I can remember a fat man with a red face and a black suit telling my father that there was no doubt where she was, that he could be as sure of that as he could of anything else in this vale of tears. But he did not mention where and as I thought the whole thing was very private and that she might be back on Wednesday, I did not ask him where. Later, when my father went, I thought he had gone to fetch her with an outside car, but when neither of them came back on the next Wednesday, I felt sorry and disappointed. (
The vague, fairytale style of the novel's opening is momentarily broken when the narrator goes to boarding-school and first becomes acquainted with the work of the philosopher, de Selby. This is a man who cannot remember his birthday, but he remembers the day on which he first read de Selby ? the seventh of March. It is the narrator's ambition to publish a definitive commentary on de Selby and to fund this ambition he plans to murder and rob Mathers. Following the murder, the greater part of the novel follows the narrator's quest to find the black box which holds Mathers' fortune.
Unfortunately for the narrator, this search takes place in a world far stranger than the remote world of his childhood. Luckily, he is well furnished with de Selbian theories of the universe which are far more peculiar than anything he encounters on his journey. His narrative is littered with footnotes on de Selby and his bizarre commentators, these footnotes steadily increasing in size until they swamp the main narrative in chapters nine and eleven. De Selby is a natural sceptic of all known laws of physics, who cavalierly dismisses the evidence of human experience. He contends, for example, that ?the permanent hallucination known conventionally as 'life' ?(9 is an effect of constantly walking in a particular direction around a sausage-shaped earth, and that night results from ?accumulations of 'black air' ? (33). This said, his commentators ? whose work the narrator cites in impeccably scholarly fashion ? are stranger still. They not only question the authenticity of various de Selby manuscripts, they doubt each other's very existence. The de Selbian sub-plot ends with the happy image of a generation of scholarly debate being concocted by two cantankerous scholars, armed only with a host of pseudonyms.
The precariousness of identity is a theme that also runs throughout the main narrative. After the murder, Divney sends the narrator into Mathers' house to find the black box:
'If you meet anybody, you don't know what you're looking for, you don't know in whose house you are, you don't know anything.'
'I don't even know my own name,' I answered.
This was a very remarkable thing for me to say because the next time I was asked my name I could not answer. I did not know. (21)
Unfortunately for the narrator, to be without a name in a linguistically-ordered universe (like a text) is to cease to exist. His namelessness is later to cause him a good deal of trouble. However, once inside Mathers' house he almost finds the black box under some floorboards, but is distracted by encountering his victim, seemingly alive. At the same time, he acquires a conscience with which he begins to have internal conversations; this being Flann O'Brien territory, the conscience goes by the name of Joe. A bizarre three-way conversation with Mathers follows. With Mathers only answering 'No' to the narrator's questions (simply because ?'No' is [?] a better answer than 'Yes'? (29) ), the narrator learns to manipulate the linguistic game to discover the whereabouts of the black box. It is a lesson worth learning early because The Third Policeman is littered with similarly Carrollian exchanges. The trail of the black box takes the narrator to a nearby police station, home to Sergeant Pluck and Policeman MacCruiskeen, two men obsessed with the thieving, finding and general policing of bicycles. During the narrator's stay with the policemen, he is introduced to MacCruiskeen's incredible inventions, he is given a guided tour of Eternity (a kind of underground factory), is very nearly hanged for a murder he did not commit, and finally falls in love with a bicycle. The sensible Joe has the measure of the situation: ?Anything can be said in this place and it will be true and will have to be believed? (8 , but the narrator's incredulity causes him more difficulties. He would have been as well to heed the advice of Sergeant Pluck: ?The first beginnings of wisdom [?] is to ask questions but never to answer any? (62).
The narrator eventually escapes from the police station (with the help of an army of one-legged men) and passes Mathers' house on his way home. At this stage the quest for the black box had almost been forgotten, but he makes one more attempt at recovering it. Inside the house ? or to be more accurate, inside the walls of the house ? he discovers the station of the third policeman of the title, Policeman Fox, who has custody of the black box. Fox reveals that the box does not contain money, but ?omnium?, a substance MacCruiskeen once described as: ?the essential inherent interior essence which is hidden in the root of the kernel of everything? (113), but which is literally everything one desires. Policeman Fox has been using it to take the muck off his leggings and to boil his eggs just right, but naturally the narrator has more grandiose visions of his future omnipotence. He gleefully returns home with the black box, where he finds a much older John Divney who is surprisingly disturbed by the narrator's appearance: ?He said I was not there. He said I was dead. He said that what he had put under the boards in the big house was not the black box but a mine, a bomb. It had gone up when I touched it [?] I was dead. He screamed at me to keep away. I was dead for sixteen years.? (203)
The shock of seeing his dead friend kills Divney, and the confused narrator turns back to the road. At this point the narrative also turns back on itself, replicating the narrator's first approach to the peculiar police station, only this time he is accompanied by John Divney. Both are doomed to the cyclical quest for the black box. The novel ends with Sergeant Pluck's habitual refrain: ?Is it about a bicycle?? (206).
The Third Policeman is rife with comic absurdity, but like many nonsense texts it has been mined for allegorical intent. Whether about the moral consequences of Mathers' murder, or the similarities between some of de Selby's theories and modern physics, Brian O'Nolan had a simple explanation for his inventions: ?When you are writing about the world of the dead ? and the damned ? where none of the rules and laws (not even the law of gravity) holds good, there is any amount of scope for back-chat and funny cracks?. However, given the preponderance of the detective genre in metafiction, there is room for suspicion that The Third Policeman has more in common with the self-reflexive At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) than may be apparent. At the very least, the novel is quietly intertextual, assembling de Selby's idiosyncrasies from J. K. Huysmans' À rebours (Against Nature) (1884) and J. W. Dunne's brand of popular physics in An Experiment With Time (1927) and The Serial Universe (1934). Still, The Third Policeman's self-reflexiveness is more closely related to Lewis Carroll's nonsense than to postmodernist metafiction. As befits a scholar, the narrator is consigned to a Carrollian hell full of imponderables. The narrator may mimic the role of the confused reader on his journey through this countryside, but O'Nolan's satire is not confined to the laws of narrative. More disturbing than the policemen's incomprehensible universe is their own incapacity to imagine anything beyond the ordinary (in other words, a world not obsessed with bicycles). More unnerving still is their adherence to the logic of the law. When the narrator is arrested for murder simply for being on hand when a suspect is needed, his defence against his proposed hanging is that he has no name and so has no legal personality. Sergeant Pluck proves equal to the challenge:
For that reason alone [?] we can take you and hang the life out of you and you are not hanged at all and there is no entry to be made in the death papers. The particular death you die is not even a death (which is an inferior phenomenon at the best) only an insanitary abstraction in the backyard, a piece of negative nullity neutralized and rendered void by asphyxiation and the fracture of the spinal string. (105)
But the narrator was no more than ?a piece of negative nullity? all along, never sure of his identity, only capable of asserting what he was not. If At Swim-Two-Birds is an expression of what might be, an exploration of the many roles that might be assumed in a life, The Third Policeman is its inverse. Where At Swim flaunts its student's manic creativity, The Third Policeman offers only the aridity of the narrator's de Selby Index. Nevertheless, The Third Policeman's reputation as O'Nolan's bleakest novel is due not only to its dark humour. After its rejection in 1940, there is no record of Brian O'Nolan attempting another work of fiction in English until the publication of The Hard Life (1961).
MEP / Purrkins
Websites to look up: