The Third Policeman as Lacanian Deity: O'Brien's Critique of Language and Subjectivity

Like Joyce and Beckett, Flann O'Brien used the postcolonial position of being in revolt against the existing order as a basis to call into question human claims to understand and control life. These writers used laughter as a support for their denial of the fundamental assumption that leans on mythology to make life livable, that one can know the principles that govern the universe. Joyce, Beckett, and O'Brien were all born as colonial subjects; though O'Brien was quite young at the founding of the Free State, his situation is further complicated by the fact that he grew up speaking Irish. These writers' intellects made visible the pervasive, systematic deployment of imperial injustice as a model of rationality, and this spurred them to anticipate the radical denial of all ideology by poststructuralist criticism later in their century. Colonial ideology systematically made sense of the world in English terms. To these Irish writers, this could cast doubt on the very manufacture of sense.

As English was his second language and linked to a history of oppression, O'Brien tended to see words as separated from the reality they tried to describe. He thus anticipated one of the founding principles of poststructuralism, Jacques Lacan's emphasis on Ferdinand de Saussure's notion that the signifier can never reach the signified, or that a word can never equal what it stands for. This principle is active everywhere in The Third Policeman (1939), which is often regarded as O'Brien's greatest novel. It is especially evident in the novel's many scenes that focus on names that do not fit their objects, running through series of proper nouns that are rejected as inappropriate, as when the narrator is questioned about his name at the police station:

"Would it be Mick Barry?"

"No."

"Charlemange [a squalid emperor] O'Keefe?"

"No."

"Sir Justin Spens?"

"Not that."¹

This particular passage goes through twenty-three possibilities, which it describes as "An astonishing parade of nullity," in its effort to find the name for the protagonist.

Obviously, O'Brien could not have known of Lacan. Yet a number of Lacan's concepts are paralleled in The Third Policeman, even a radical thesis of his seventeenth seminar: that all knowledge is created by slaves and that philosophy is a system for converting the concrete knowledge of slaves into the abstract property of masters.² The central figure of The Third Policeman loses his knowledge of reality because he is enthralled by theories. He is a slave insofar as the life he supposedly "leads" follows orders from a source he cannot comprehend. As the narrator, he creates virtually all of the novel, which is all projection from the second chapter, in which he dies, to the last; yet everything that appears seems amazingly out of his control.

As psychoanalysis tries to explain irrational behavior, a psychoanalytical approach may provide a useful approach for speaking of this novel, in which the "hero" is continually confounded by what happens to him even though he causes it. This fantastic plot abolishes the realities that underpin conventional plots. It may be that O'Brien noticed disturbing undercurrents in his satiric murder fantasy, which may be one reason he did not press on to publish the novel after it was rejected several times, as Anthony Cronin's biography reports; it appeared posthumously in 1967, as a postmortal narrative.³

Lacan argues that the subject of consciousness is formed by the field of language that extends through society and operates unconsciously. This principle is extended by the Marxist Louis Althusser, who used Lacan's theories, into the claim that "a subject endowed with a consciousness in which he freely forms or freely recognizes ideas in which he believes" is an ideological construction imposed by the systems of belief with which society frames us.⁴ The narrator of The Third Policeman is continually shocked out of such beliefs through the long process of his death, which takes him beyond earlier protagonists in his role as an outsider to the dominant system of ideology. This should...