Ur-story: "'Is it about a bicycle?' he asked."

The first declaration of the International Necronautical Society Manifesto states : "That death is a type of space, which we intend to map, enter, colonise and, eventually, inhabit." Well, they are not original and they were not first. Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman beat them to the draw. O'Brien's unnamed flaneur describes precisely such an arc, eventually lapsing into a stunned forgetfulness as he experiences the apparent eternal return of the same. (Or, alternatively, cycles down the drain toward extinction.)

Now, Nietzsche was no farceur, though Zarathustra gave me more than a few chuckles. His principle was more a moral one: a person should live as if everything he did would be repeated over and over again throughout eternity. [Groundhog Day anyone?] O'Brien is more of a fatalist: if you think life is absurd, wait'll you hit the afterlife.

Denis Donoghue, in his Introduction, cites Hugh Kenner's observation (re Beckett) that

The crucial place of Ireland in the recent history of Western literary art is accounted for by the historical fact that Ireland escaped the humanist dogma. Consequently the great Irish nihilists (for so they appear in a humanist perspective) have been the persistent reformers of the fictional imagination. Swift, a bare seven years after Robinson Crusoe, ascribed an overriding concern for footling verisimilitude to a mind so biased toward positivism and so devoid of moral resources that it could be permanently imposed on by talking horses." (xi)

Donoghue declares that

"it is indeed characteristic of Irish fiction—or at least Irish anatomies—to stand aside from the common urgencies of feeling and to treat the whole farrago of sensibility as warranting merely speculative attention. The murder in The Third Policeman is accompanied by no sign of guilt or scruple: the ethical issue is disposed of in silence. Nature, conventionally a great source of heart-stirring, is not allowed to pour its benisons over the populace." (xi)

Of course, it is only fitting and proper that I take on a so-called anti-humanist text after declaring so positively my humanist creed in a previous post.

Our nameless 'hero' (for lack of a better term) in his fantastical world encounters (without parenthetical comment, appearing as he does to have no inner life beyond devising deceptions for avoiding conviction for the murder he commits) a two-dimensional police station filled with odd policemen and a number of magical devices, including an infinity of nesting boxes; an elevator to another (infinite) dimension; a society obsessed with bicycles; and a policeman who steals citizens bicycle parts, then hides them so he can then appear to find them; bicycles which are part human

I don't know if you ever pranked your high school or college teachers like this, but a group of us once invented a philosopher (I forget his name now) and cited several of his works innocuously in papers we submitted for several different college classes. We got away with it. None of the professors ever called us on it. O'Brien does the same thing here, beginning nearly every chapter with a reference to the absurd philosophus gloriosus, de Selby, and the contentious "scholarship" on him, right and left. "For my part I had completed my definitive 'De Selby Index' wherein the views of all known commentators on every aspect of the savant and his work had been collated," (14) the narrator assures us. de Selby, it turns out, had some interesting ideas:

"A row of houses he regards as a row of necessary evils. The softening and degeneration of the human race he attributes to its progressive predilection for interiors and waning interest in the art of going out and staying there." (21)

"Roads he regards as the most ancient of human monuments, surpassing by many tens of centuries the oldest thing of stone that man has reared to mark his passing." (37)

"'[A] journey is an hallucination'. The phrase may be found in the Country Album cheek by jowl with the well-known treatise on 'tent-suits', those egregious canvas garments which he designed as a substitute alike for the hated houses and ordinary clothing. His theory, insofar as I can understand it, seems to discount the testimony of human experience and is at variance with everything I have learnt myself on many a country walk. Human existence de Selby has defined as 'a succession of static experiences each infinitely brief', a conception which he is thought to have arrived at from examining some old cinematograph films which belongs probably to his nephew. From this premise he discounts the reality or truth of any progression or serialism in life, deniews 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'." (50)

"If a man stands before a mirror and sees in it his reflection, what he sees is not a true reproduction of himself but a picture of himself when he was a younger man. ... Ultimately he constructed the familiar arrangement of parallel mirrors, each reflecting diminishing images of an interposed object indefinitely. The interposed object in this case was de Selby's own face and this he claims to have studies backwards through an infinity of reflections by means of 'a powerful glass'. What he states to have seen through his glass is astonishing. He claims to have noticed a growing youthfulness in the reflections of his face according as they receded, the most distant of them—too tiny to be visible to the naked eye—being the face of a beardless boy of twelve..." (64-5)

"In the Layman's Atlas he deals explicitly with bereavement, old age, love sin, death and the other saliencies of existence. It is true that he allows them only some six lines but this is due to his devastating assertion that they are all 'unnecessary'. Astonishing as it may seem, he makes this statement as a direct corollary to his discovery that the earth, far from being a sphere, is 'sausage-shaped.'" (93)

"[H]e held (a) that darkness was simply an accretion of 'black air', i.e. a staining of the atmosphere due to volcanic eruptions too fine to be seen with the naked eye and also to certain 'regrettable' industrial activities involving coal-tar by-products and vegetable byes; and (b) that sleep was simply a succession of fainting-fits brought on by semi-asphyxiation due to (a)." (116, n.1)

"[H]is ideas of paradise are not without interest. ... Briefly he indicates that the happy state is 'not unassociated with water' and that 'water is rarely absent from any wholly satisfactory situation'. ... The story is one of a long succession of prosecutions for water wastage at the suit of the local authority. At one hearing it was shown that he had used 9,000 gallons in one day and on another occasion almost 80,000 gallons in the course of a week. ... none of the vast quantity of water drawn in ever left the house." (144-6)

Of course, all of the foregoing is duly documented and footnoted—some notes running upward of eight or nine pages, all tongue-in-cheek. O'Brien introduces each major section of the book with a de Selby disquisition which, oddly, relates the main themes of that section and, what's more, de Selby's views turn out to be plausible in the absurd world of the text. I'm sure much scholarship has been brought to bear on this point. (O'Brien giggles in the background.)

Again, we are in the realm of the Ur-story. The strategy O'Brien a/k/a O Nuallain a/k/a na gCopaleen adopts is the absurdist one: turn the whole thing into a farce. Some readers might want to turn the whole thing into an allegory—maybe with the police representing the Church and de Selby Aquinas or some such. I resist this. The story is what the story is. O'Brien is showing us that, on his conception, death takes us from a three-dimensional time-space world to a bizarre timeless, two-dimensional space which has its own conception of death and portal to its own eternity which, to my mind, would be the one-dimensional one, and on and on to nothingness: a gradual diminution not unlike some of de Selby's philosophical musings.

Tom McCarthy [pdf] take note:

"There is nothing mysterious about the Necronautical project. The aim announced in the First Manifesto of exploring, mapping and colonising the space of death does not suggest a 'beyond' of which we have knowledge, nor, emphatically, the spurious tales and consoling fictions reproduced by culture. The space of death is traced in the boundaries, horizons and faults within art, literature and language; lines, moreover, which are not transgressed but are woven into the texture of our craft. Necronautical materialism has no message from the 'other side' but is a technique for subjecting event, performance, text and map to rigourous examination and transformation." [Used without permision which is apparently okay.]

Here's your map.

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Of course, we would be remiss, given the name of our blog, to omit the book's key quote about Wisdom:

"'The first beginnings of wisdom,' he said, 'is to ask questions but never to answer any. You get wisdom from asking and I from not answering. ...Turn everything you hear to your own advantage. Always carry a repair outfit. Take left turns as much as possible. [Right turns in non-British countries.] Never apply your front brakes first.'"

In a world predominated by bicycles and men who are part bicycle, such wisdom is deserving of heed.

Ur-story: Things To Do in Dublin When You're Dead*

Do you like the television show 'The Office'? (Especially the British version?) What about the Blackadder TV series with Rowan Atkinson and Hugh Laurie? Then, you must love Monty Python. And you may or may not know about The Goon Show, the British radio series starring a young Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, and Michael Bentine. The Goon Show ran throughout the Fifties on British radio. It is still played in many places in syndication. I used to listen to it in college—I think it came on WUNC-FM on Saturday evening's just before A Prairie Home Companion (a different kind of humor altogether). The best way to describe it is surreal, absurdist farce with sound effects. Firesign Theater, if you know them, owes the Goons a great deal. But, they're not from the British Isles and that is not the purpose of this post.

What is it with those wacky Brits and their humor? You find it in Beckett and Sterne and Swift and Douglas Adams. You see it in the movie "Brazil". In particular, you get in spades in the novel The Third Policeman, by Flann O'Brien a/k/a Brian O Nuallain a/k/a Myles na gCopaleen.

This may be one of the funniest novels I've ever read, rights up there with, say, A Confederacy of Dunces or Don Quixote. It's also one of the strangest, and here we venture into originality. In the introduction to the edition I have, the Dalkey Archive paperback [btw: FYI: The Dalkey Archive is also the title of another book by O'Brien!], Denis Donoghue calls on the typology/anatomy of types of prose fiction of Northrop Frye we discussed in an earlier post, calling it "of the Menippean form. ... [It] takes its place in a well-established tradition of fictive, anatomical weirdnesses." (ix-x)

At first glance, the set-up is a rather simple one: an anonymous wooden-legged man conspires with his "lazy and idle-minded" friend and tenant farmer, John Divney, to rob and murder one Phillip Mathers who "carried no less than three thousand pounds with him every time he hobbled to the village to lodge his money." (15) They carry out their plan and mug the man who is carrying a black box presumably full of money. Divney hides the box while the narrator buries Mathers. After an appropriate interval, Divney sends the narrator to fetch the box which he says is hidden in a hole in the floor of the old man's mansion. This is when things get weird:

"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.

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. It was as if the daylight had changed with unnatural suddenness, as if the temperature of the evening had altered greatly in an instant or as if the air had become twice as rare or twice as dense as it had been in the winking of an eye; perhaps all of these and other things happened together for all my senses were bewildered all at once and could give me no explanation. The fingers of my right hand, thrust into the opening in the floor, had closed mechanically, found nothing at all and came up again empty. The box was gone!" (23)

Now, we are in the region of the Ur-story.

Then he has tea with old Mathers, whom he (and we) had presumed dead. Mathers, it turns out, can only reply in the negative to any questions the narrator puts to him. This is clearly Monty Python territory. When asked his own name, the narrator responds: "I have no name." He hews to this tactic throughout the story in the hopes it will keep him from being held accountable for the murder of the old man.

Next, we venture further into a weird bit of metaphysics as Mathers explains that you can tell how long a person will live by determining "the colour of the wind prevailing at his birth. ... the lighter the better." (33)

"'When I was born there was a certain policeman present who had the gift of wind-watching. The gift is getting very rare these days. Just after I was born he went outside and examined the colour of the wind that was blowing across the hill. He had a secret bag with him full of certain materials and bottles and he had tailor's instruments also. He was outside for about ten minutes. When he came in again he had a little gown in his hand and he made my mother put it on me.'

'Little gowns?'

'He made it himself secretly in the backyard, very likely in the cowhouse. It was very thin and slight like the very finest of spider's muslin. 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 edge of it. It was the purest and most perfect manifestation of the outside skin of light yellow. This yellow was the colour of my birthwind.'" (33)

(One has to go to Brian Evenson's novel about Mormon weirdness, The Open Curtain (which is not funny), to get a better depiction of magical underwear.)

The recipient gets a new gown from the policeman each year on his birthday and puts it on over the ones from the years before. Each year, with the accumulation of these diaphanous and stretchy gowns, the person's color gets darker until it turns black, and the person dies. The narrator figures these policeman can help him regain his lost black box, and Mathers points him to the local police barracks:

"'There is Sergeant Pluck and another man called MacCruiskeen and there is a third man called Fox that disappeared twenty-five years ago and was never heard of after. The first two are down in the barracks and so far as I know they have been there for hundreds of years. They must be operating on a very rare colour, something that ordinary eyes could not see at all. There is no white wind that I know of. They all have the gift of seeing the winds.'" (35)

The remainder of the book is the narrator's absurd odd-y-sey to recover the black box. (more to follow)

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* Extra credit and bonus points if you pick up the allusion in the title.