Bicycles, Pumps, and Inflated Egos

When Smyllie engaged O’Nolan in October 1940 to write the column that would run in The Irish Times until his death in 1966, he had already known him for some time. John Garvin notes, for example, that he and O’Nolan celebrated the publication of At Swim-Two-Birds in March 1939 at the Palace Bar with Smyllie and Alec Newman of The Irish Times.²¹ In the back room of that establishment, literati, artists, and intellectuals gathered daily around the Editor for late afternoon sessions, although unlike many of these acolytes, O’Nolan preferred to remain on the periphery. In 1941, O’Nolan (as Myles na gCopaleen) dedicated his book An Béal Bocht to Smyllie in Irish: ‘Do mo chara R. M. SMYLLIE, R. M. Ó SMAOILLE, .i. AN SMAOLACH.’²² White notes that ‘smaolach means thrush,’ and that in Smyllie’s copy of the book, ‘Myles had added with a pen the gloss: turdus magnus.’²³ The thrush is a bird of the genus turdus, but there is no ‘turdus magnus’ other than the ‘big turd’ of O’Nolan’s irreverent annotation. The parodies of the Editor’s overblown style in Cruiskeen Lawn suggest that their author considered him a bit of a windbag, and that O’Nolan may have shared his friend Donagh MacDonagh’s opinion that Smyllie had ‘an overwhelming personality but without an equal intelligence’²⁴ – qualities he translated into the inflated persona of Sergeant Pluck in The Third Policeman.

Erwin Schrödinger arrived in Dublin in mid-1939. He had resigned from his professorship in Berlin in 1933 (the year he won the Nobel Prize in Physics) when the rise of Hitler made him increasingly uncomfortable in Germany. In 1938 he was dismissed from his post at the University of Vienna when the Austrian authorities declared him persona non grata for his earlier anti-Hitler pronouncements. He was then forced to flee the country. Seizing the opportunity, Éamon de Valera engaged him to head up the School of Theoretical Physics in his newly established institute. On 3 November 1939 the freshly appointed professor delivered his first public lecture, titled ‘Elementary Introduction to Wave Mechanics,’ in the Physics Department at Earlsfort Terrace. Schrödinger was an unorthodox, outgoing, and sociable man, interested in theatre and the arts, and quickly became part of the circles to which O’Nolan belonged. He hid his considerable ego behind a façade of faux modesty: for example, at the gatherings in Desmond MacNamara’s studio he would say, after making a brilliant contribution, that he was ‘only a naïve physicist.’²⁵

Even in a city where the bicycle was a common means of transportation, Smyllie and Schrödinger stood out as avid cyclists. Tony Gray records that, regardless of the occasion, the Editor ‘went everywhere by bicycle.’²⁶ He pedalled back and forth every day between his home in Ballsbridge and the office of The Irish Times in Westmoreland Street with his portable typewriter tied to the handlebars of ‘his enormous and obsolete Raleigh bicycle.’²⁷ Schrödinger had learned to ride a bicycle as a child, during a visit to his English relatives in Leamington Spa. In a short essay he wrote for The Bell in 1946, he described a cycling vacation in Galway during his first spring in Ireland.²⁸ In Dublin, day in and day out, Schrödinger cycled the five kilometres between his home in Clontarf and the Institute in Merrion Square, in wet conditions wearing ‘a professional-looking waterproof cycling suit.’²⁹ In 2021, in honour of both his contributions to science and his cycling prowess, DIAS launched a downloadable ‘Schrödinger Cycling Map,’ providing a route between Clontarf and the Institute, but withdrew its support of the project when, a few months after the launch, new research found that the physicist had been a sexual predator.³⁰

In The Third Policeman, the policemen’s obsession with bicycles and bicycle pumps reflects both the inflated nature of their personalities, which mirror the inflated ego of the narrator himself, and the cyclical, closed nature of the hell to which the latter has been condemned. The humorous and grotesque possibilities of bicycles and bicycle pumps and the literal and metaphorical meanings of inflation and deflation appealed to O’Nolan. In a 1941 column, for example, he included ‘the act of inflating hare’s offal with a bicycle pump’ among several meanings of the Irish word cur he claimed to have found in an ‘authentic source known only to my little self,’³¹ while in a 1944 column he self-importantly reported that ‘the other day’ he had been summoned to a crisis meeting at the Central Bank, where he made his way on a decrepit bicycle, suffering one flat tyre after another and making seventeen unsuccessful attempts to borrow pumps along the way, only to be consulted upon arrival about ‘the danger of inflation’ should it become ‘widespread in the country.’³²

In The Third Policeman, it is the faces of the Sergeant and the Policeman that link them to the men on whom they are modelled. Pluck’s face is that of Smyllie. The Editor was enormously fat, his rotund figure being topped by a ‘round, chubby, reddish face.’³³ He sported ‘a ginger moustache enclosing the stem of a curved pipe the size of a flower-pot.’³⁴ This ‘unruly, walrus-like’ moustache³⁵ seemed to be ‘made out of pluckings from the yard brush.’³⁶ The narrator observes that Pluck has an ‘enormously fat face,’ the lower half of which is ‘hidden by a violent red moustache’ which shoots ‘out of his skin far into the air.’ His cheeks are ‘red and chubby,’ so that his eyes are nearly hidden by ‘the fat foldings of the skin’ (54). Like Smyllie, Pluck smokes ‘an enormous pipe’ which protrudes from his lips ‘like a great hatchet’ (99). Patrick Campbell describes the Editor as, among other things, ‘child-like, cultured and entirely unpredictable.’³⁷ In The Third Policeman, the narrator’s initial impression of Pluck’s ‘good nature, politeness and infinite patience’ (55) is complicated by the Sergeant’s dictum that ‘to turn everything to your own advantage is one of the regulations of true wisdom’ (98), the enactment of which means that nothing in his parish is ever remotely predictable. One of Smyllie’s maxims was ‘Masterful Inactivity,’ which meant ‘doing absolutely nothing about anything,’ on the assumption that whatever problem presented itself would eventually just go away.³⁸

Policeman MacCruiskeen is described quite precisely to evoke certain characteristics of Schrödinger. While his inflated body resembles Pluck’s, his ‘dark Jewish face’ with its ‘hooky nose’ and ‘masses of black curly hair’ looked ‘far more intelligent’ than the Sergeant’s. It was ‘unexpectedly lean and the eyes in it were penetrating and observant,’ making him look ‘more like a poet than a policeman’ (57). Schrödinger had lost his professorships in both Germany and Austria because of his perceived hostility to the Nazi regime. He had sharp features and unruly hair, and O’Nolan may have thought he was Jewish (which he was not), or made him look Jewish as a form of shorthand to refer to his position as a refugee from the Nazis. Schrödinger made no secret of the fact that his ‘early desire’ had been ‘to be a poet.’³⁹ Philosophy remained an abiding interest, and he did publish a volume of poetry in 1949. The narrator of The Third Policeman tells us that MacCruiskeen’s voice ‘was high, almost feminine, and he spoke with a delicate careful intonation’ (58). A recording of a radio talk Schrödinger gave for the BBC in 1949 confirms that he had a high voice, enunciated his sentences carefully, and spoke with a cultivated, nearly flawless English accent.⁴⁰ Schrödinger had a way of dismounting from his bicycle with a complicated jump, which was described by a young man who encountered the physicist on a cycling holiday in Kerry: ‘instead of throwing one foot back while the other rested on the pedals, he threw it forward over the handle bars so fast that the movement of his hands to make way for his foot was barely noticeable.’⁴¹ MacCruiskeen’s method of dismounting from his bicycle is equally unusual: he performs ‘some complicated leap which was concluded only when the bicycle had been spun round adroitly to form a seat for him with its bar’ (163).

Whereas Pluck’s and MacCruiskeen’s faces are quite distinctive, their bodies appear to be equally ‘heavy-fleshed and gross’ (57). But while they look ‘massive,’ they are in fact more like tightly inflated bladders. Pluck confesses to the narrator that he once dreamt he had a slow puncture, with the air escaping from his ‘enormous backside’ (121), earlier described as his ‘broad pneumatic seat’ (97). Pluck’s name in English evokes bravery and resolve but may also refer to the inner organs that have been ‘plucked’ from a slaughtered animal, leaving a hollow carcass. Dinneen’s dictionary tells us that in Irish, pluc means a swelling or bulge, a ‘pull’ in smoking, or a puffing or swelling up of the cheeks – in other words, the inhalation and retention of air.⁴² The Sergeant, then, is a hollow windbag. Upon hearing from MacCruiskeen that the mysterious readings on the underground machinery have reached dangerous levels, Pluck literally becomes deflated: his face develops ‘empty pouches and ugly loosenesses and laxities,’ while life runs out of the hand gripping the narrator ‘like air out of a burst balloon’ (163). According to Mathers, the policemen can see the colours of the winds; they present each newborn with a little gown tailored by them in the hue of the prevailing breeze – a birthday suit or ‘windbag’ that envelops the entire person.⁴³ Certainly, the narrator himself is as big a windbag as Pluck. When the Sergeant tells him about the atomic theory, which turns people into bicycles and vice versa, the narrator emits ‘a gasp of astonishment that made a sound in the air like a bad puncture’ (85). When he is eventually confronted with Policeman Fox, who has the face and voice of the murdered Mathers, the narrator feels ‘horribly ill,’ and his head swells out ‘like a bladder’ (183).

MacCruiskeen’s rotundity appears to be caused by a combination of inflation and a monstrous appetite. Shaken by the news that the narrator had not arrived by bicycle, he exclaims that he has never heard a queerer story in his ‘natural puff,’ while his face becomes deflated ‘like an empty bag with no blood in it’ (66–67). Despite (or because of) his apparent hollowness he is a voracious eater who loosens his belt before attacking his food with sounds ‘of coarse slobbering’ (59). It should be noted that Schrödinger could be regarded as a man of unbridled appetites: he was an indiscriminate chain smoker (of pipe, cigars, and cigarettes –MacCruiskeen smokes the latter), was extremely fond of wine, and was ‘intensely concerned with sexual experience,’ to the point where ‘he was devoted to it as the principal nonscientific occupation of his life.’⁴⁴ Moore reveals that Schrödinger’s temperament ‘was as volatile as a prima donna’s,’⁴⁵ and that he was ‘an irascible man, given to occasional childish temper tantrums’; in Meine Weltansicht (1925, later translated as My View of the World), the physicist himself discussed such outbursts of anger as instinctive forces and emotions caused by an outpouring of adrenaline in the bloodstream.’⁴⁶ There is a moment in The Third Policeman when MacCruiskeen also has an unexpected fit of violent rage: his face colours ‘dark plum with passion,’ he froths at the mouth and becomes ‘temporarily insane with anger’ (113); just as suddenly, the passion ebbs away, and he resumes his civil demeanour.

Pluck and Smyllie

Sergeant Pluck speaks a strange vernacular of English that mixes colloquialisms like ‘by the holy Hokey’ (56) and ‘great cripes’ (100) with words and phrases that require greater erudition than would be expected of a country policeman. If the narrator’s business is not about a bicycle, he reasons, it might be about a ‘velocipede’ (55). Names are pronouns, cogs, and surnouns (56), while Gilhaney is described as a ‘constituent man’ who is ‘largely instrumental but volubly fervous’ (81). The narrator quickly gets the hang of Pluck’s linguistic idiosyncrasies and at one point describes the expression on the Sergeant’s face as a look ‘he himself would describe as one of non-possum and noli-me-tangere’ (84). He even begins to attempt to speak the language himself, just as Pluck’s inflated way of speaking has also rubbed off on all the other characters inhabiting his world. Richardson describes Smyllie’s speech as ‘a blend of Dublin argot and pompous obscurity’⁴⁷: he was ‘verbose, fond of untranslated foreign words,’ but also ‘self-deprecating.’⁴⁸ Campbell recalls him referring to bicycles as ‘velocipedes,’ and celebrating a victory at dominoes by stating: ‘That, gentlemen, should wipe the shuddering grins off your kissers. Nemo me impune lacessit’ (‘no one attacks me with impunity’).⁴⁹ To write economically was to ‘prehensilise.’ Displeased with the topic on which one of his subeditors was ‘dilating,’ Smyllie told him to change the subject ‘without any further delay or prevarication,’ or else he would be ‘obliged to issue an ultimatum’ to ‘desist at once.’⁵⁰ Those who worked with Smyllie often responded in similar terms to his pretentious prose, which, in Gray’s view, was ‘painfully easy to parody, as Myles na Gopaleen was later to realise and brilliantly to exploit’⁵¹ – in Cruiskeen Lawn and also, as it turns out, in The Third Policeman.

While many of the anomalous spatial and temporal characteristics of the otherworld ruled by the policemen are derived from the space-time continuum of which Schrödinger was such a prominent proponent, they were also inspired by the strange, inverted temporality of the newspaper over which Smyllie presided. The work of the Editor and his staff took place largely at night. Smyllie would arrive in the office at about 4:30 in the afternoon and work until 6 p.m., when he took a break to hold court in the Palace Bar. At around 10 p.m. he returned to the office, where he stayed until 4 a.m., when the first copies of that day’s paper reached the editorial department. The night was given over to the mechanical production of the newspaper, with ‘a battery of Linotype machines rattling out a last-minute story for the front page, and the presses down in the basement beginning to creak and groan into action.’⁵² In The Third Policeman, the underground eternity where Pluck takes the narrator has a floor resembling ‘the railed galleries that run around a great printing press’; there are sounds of ‘hammering,’ both ‘loud [and] frenzied,’ like the sound of Linotype machines (which had both keyboards and levers), and ‘gentle and rhythmical,’ like that of typewriters (132). Each move forward in this underground eternity leads the narrator back to the place he has just vacated. The Sergeant explains that the location ‘has no size at all […] and we have no conception of the extent of its unchanging coequality’ (133). In a 1943 Cruiskeen Lawn column, O’Nolan reflected that ‘newspapers may come and go,’ but ‘the Irish Times goes on forever.’⁵³

MacCruiskeen and Schrödinger

In The Third Policeman it is Schrödinger’s mind-bending theories that are the focus of O’Nolan’s caricature. Patrick O’Neill suggests that MacCruiskeen’s name, ‘the son of a cruiskeen,’ or little whiskey jar, implies that his mad inventions are presented as ‘the product of an intoxicated imagination.’⁵⁴ However, it should be noted that the policeman’s name predates the title of Cruiskeen Lawn, because by the time O’Nolan began writing his column in late 1940, he had already completed the manuscript of The Third Policeman. According to Dinneen’s dictionary, a crúsca can also be a ‘small box or coffer,’ so that the word’s diminutive, crúiscín, may denote a very small box or coffer, like the serially diminutive chests made by MacCruiskeen that so disturb the book’s narrator.⁵⁵ As Maslen observes, ‘The Third Policeman is filled with boxes’ of one kind or another, most of which ‘are deadly.’⁵⁶ This includes the cashbox-bomb that blew up the narrator, which is mirrored by the ticking ‘black box with coloured wires coming out of it’ that powers the mangle MacCruiskeen uses to turn sound into heat and light (106). When O’Nolan was writing the book in 1940, physicists were just beginning to discover the dangers and possibilities of nuclear energy. An anonymous piece published in The Irish Times in May 1939 warned that an accidental or deliberate nuclear explosion could ‘blow the world to smithereens’; however, provided the scientists did not succeed in ‘blowing everybody into the Ewigkeit,’ they might also eventually ‘be able to use atomic energy to do the work that steam and electricity are doing at present.’⁵⁷ As Schrödinger’s alter ego, MacCruiskeen is very much at the cutting edge of such developments.

The inconceivable creations MacCruiskeen reveals to the narrator are based on Schrödinger’s scientific discoveries as well as his unusual hobbies. The physicist preferred to do his serious work after midday. In the mornings, he diverted himself by making perfectly formed miniature objects and what Time magazine referred to as ‘tiny doll-house furniture.’⁵⁸ Schrödinger showed a visiting Irish Press journalist ‘beautifully wrought Celtic ornaments,’ the creation of which he considered ‘practice in mathematics,’ as well as ‘models of Celtic-cornered garden-benches’ and ‘little pieces of woollen tissue woven on a primitive hand-loom.’⁵⁹ His wife then pointed out that he had also designed and made a lampshade, which ‘was of a strange shape’ so that it would ‘concentrate the light to one side.’ However, Schrödinger’s ‘greatest triumph,’ the reporter pointed out in almost the same breath, ‘was the invention of wave mechanics as applied to physics.’ In imagining MacCruiskeen’s strange creations, O’Nolan combined Schrödinger’s craft projects with his science. The little wind-gowns fabricated by the policemen for newborn babies may have their origin in the tiny textiles Schrödinger would weave ‘on a midget Irish loom.’⁶⁰ MacCruiskeen shows the narrator a perfectly proportioned diminutive wooden chest which has ‘indents and carvings and fanciful excoriations and designs on every side of it. […] At every corner there was a shiny brass corner-piece and on the lid there were brass corner-pieces beautifully wrought’ (70). The chest contains a nesting series of twenty-eight other boxes, each with ‘the same completely perfect brasswork on a smaller scale’ (72), the smallest of all ‘being nearly half a size smaller than ordinary invisibility’ (74). MacCruiskeen uses his mangle to stretch the light ‘for diversion and also for scientific truth’ (106). This works because everything is omnium and ‘comes in waves’ (109). The lamp on the wall of the police station is operated by means of the mangle.

Through MacCruiskeen’s impossible creations, O’Nolan ridicules quantum mechanics, which, compared to traditional mechanics with its ‘hard-edged objects existing at well-defined positions in space,’⁶¹ introduces ‘an entirely new set of rules, governing what happens when systems are observed or measured. Most notably, measurement outcomes cannot be predicted with perfect confidence, even in principle. The best we can do is to calculate the probability of obtaining each possible outcome.’⁶² The infinitely sharp and thin spear MacCruiskeen sticks into the narrator’s hand ‘is so thin that maybe it does not exist at all […] and you could put no thought around it in the end’ (68–69). Atomics, too, ‘is a very intricate theorem and can be worked out with algebra’ but in the end you might ‘not believe what you had proved at all’ (84–85). The impossible position of the first-person narrator of The Third Policeman, who is simultaneously the external observer and chronicler of his own past and present predicament, and the passive object of that observation who has forgotten almost everything, puts him at the heart of the quantum paradox. Schrödinger himself wrote in Science and the Human Temperament (1935): ‘It can never be decided experimentally whether causality in nature is “true” or “untrue,”’ which leaves scientists free to maintain the principle of cause and effect ‘or to alter it according to our convenience,’ for a developing empirical science ‘must not be afraid of being taunted with a lack of consistency.’⁶³ Certainty is replaced by probability. Given that ‘what we call a “law of nature” is nothing else than any one of the regularities observed in natural occurrences,’ it should be accepted that ‘chance is the common root of all the rigid conformity to Law that has been observed.’⁶⁴ In The Third Policeman, this law of chance is the law enforced by the policemen in charge of the otherworldly parish.

The narrator often finds himself responding ‘mechanically’ to his surroundings, and frequently, and ironically, fears for his life, but he never ceases to return to the belief that he is in full control of his destiny. In What Is Life?, a lecture delivered at DIAS in February 1943, Schrödinger notes a similar paradox. The body ‘functions as a pure mechanism according to the Laws of Nature’; but the individual nevertheless knows by ‘incontrovertible direct experience’ that he is directing the body’s motions for which he is therefore responsible. Schrödinger concludes that it is thus the individual ‘who controls the “motion of the atoms” according to the Laws of Nature,’ which makes him ‘God Almighty.’ This is a blasphemous notion in Christianity but not according to the Upanishads – Hindu scriptures which Schrödinger often quoted and according to which ‘the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self.’⁶⁵ Embracing the Vedantic notion of rebirth, Schrödinger writes in My View of the World:

As surely as [the earth] will engulf you tomorrow, so surely will she bring you forth anew to new striving and suffering. And not merely ‘some day’; now, today, every day she is bringing you forth, not once but thousands upon thousands of times, just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over. For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.⁶⁶

The narrator of The Third Policeman, cut off as he is from Christian salvation, can only conceive of life after death in ‘sinful’ terms of rebirth, the eternal present, or the ‘eternal return.’ Joe argues that past humanity ‘is not only implicit in each new man born but is contained in him’ (119). This echoes Schrödinger’s notion that ‘the Self is not so much linked with what happened to its ancestors, it is […], in the strictest sense of the word, THE SAME THING as all that.’⁶⁷ Both Joe and the narrator imagine poetic forms of reincarnation after death. Ever full of pride, the narrator speculates he might become ‘an essential part’ of a river, a mountain, or a creature – in any case, something ‘far-from-usual’ (159) – while Joe thinks he might become ‘the spirit of the scenery in some beautiful place like the Lakes of Killarney, the inside meaning of it’ (162). Schrödinger argued that, while you will certainly be reborn, ‘that could not possibly be to say that you will remember this life or any part of it.’⁶⁸ For the narrator, the only eternal recurrence that will happen once his cycle is completed is his oblivious re-entry into the same hell he has just endeavoured to leave behind.

While the consensus view has always been that O’Nolan never touched the manuscript of The Third Policeman again after it had been rejected, the apparent inclusion in the version published after his death of information relating to Schrödinger from later in the 1940s would suggest he did return to it, although this is impossible to prove in the absence of an archive of notes or drafts. O’Nolan began writing ‘Hell Goes Round and Round’ in August 1939 and finished the manuscript in early 1940, when his agent sent it to Longmans. In March 1940, the publisher rejected the book. On 1 November 1940 his agent returned the typescript to O’Nolan, having unsuccessfully attempted to place the novel with four other publishers. O’Nolan felt he had written the book too hastily and that it should be revised, because as it stood it was ‘just a good idea banjaxed for the want of proper work and attention and patience.’⁶⁹ Just after its completion, he had shown the manuscript to several acquaintances. Writing after the author’s death, Niall Sheridan claimed that the typescript he read then was exactly the same as the book that was published in 1967.⁷⁰ Mervyn Wall, too, had read the manuscript in 1940, and once more looked at it in early 1959, when he was handed the typescript by Seán O’Faolain, who had been asked by O’Nolan to give his opinion of it. If this was a revised version, Wall may not have realised it: he told Peter Costello that he did not read very far into the text because its author ‘arrived at his office demanding its return.’⁷¹ When the book was eventually published, however, Wall did notice that it differed from the version(s) O’Nolan had shown him before: ‘since then he apparently worked on it, disciplining and improving it beyond all measure.’⁷² In a subsequent article Wall again suggested that, in his last years, O’Nolan ‘revised an earlier unpublished work, made a small masterpiece of it, and had it published under the title “The Third Policeman.”’⁷³ If O’Nolan did revise the book it seems unlikely that he did so late in his life, given that by then he had already used some of its material in The Dalkey Archive; moreover, Smyllie had died in 1954 and Schrödinger had left Dublin in 1956, so their relevance was much diminished. Since Evelyn O’Nolan was aware that the abandoned manuscript lay untouched among her husband’s papers, it is more likely that any revisions took place before 1948, the year of their marriage. Regardless of whether or when he made any changes, a plausible reason why O’Nolan showed some friends the manuscript in 1959, before abruptly changing his mind and putting it back on the shelf, was that McGibbon & Kee were reissuing At Swim-Two-Birds that year, and the publishers were excited that they might have ‘an option on the lost book!’⁷⁴

Teeth and Tyrants

The arbitrary laws of the otherworldly parish, where the narrator can be hanged for murder simply because he has no name, represent ‘the ultimate tyranny,’ which is only intensified by Sergeant Pluck’s supremely civil demeanour as he applies his random justice.⁷⁵ Underneath his bonhomous appearance Smyllie, too, was something of a dictator, and his elevated sense of his own importance was a byword with those who knew him. White suggests that he was an editor ‘in the sense that Louis XIV was a king: an editor by divine right, an absolute tyrant.’⁷⁶ John Ryan contends that ‘Smyllie had some justification in seeing himself as the Lorenzo the Magnificent of Westmoreland Street,’⁷⁷ while the pseudonymous Bellman (likely Seán O’Faolain, the editor of The Bell) describes him as ‘the Leader, the Fuehrer, the Duce […] in whatever company he finds himself.’⁷⁸ Compared to these assessments, O’Nolan himself is rather restrained when he paints a picture of Smyllie holding court in the Palace Bar and clicking his fingers at the coterie surrounding him: ‘he is king in this particular Palace.’⁷⁹

The Third Policeman connects Pluck’s despotism to bad dentistry. When the narrator first arrives at the police station, the Sergeant is busy looking in the mirror, fingering his ‘yellow stumps of teeth’ (59) and murmuring to himself that, ‘Nearly every sickness is from the teeth’ (54). The notion that tooth decay ‘is the cause of death, misery and many diseases, and is responsible for the degeneration of the human race in no small degree,’ can be traced to a book by Edward Samson called The Immortal Tooth, which was reviewed in The Irish Times on 24 April 1939. Headed, ‘Bad Teeth May Make a Dictator’ and featuring a photograph of Hitler ‘in 1932 on the eve of his accession to power,’ the review explains that bad teeth

can produce such profound disturbances in the mental make-up that it is impossible not to take with some degree of seriousness the author’s contention that carious teeth may be responsible for the attitudes of some of the dictators of to-day. As Mr. Samson points out, the earlier days of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin were passed under conditions peculiarly unfavourable to the growth of good teeth.⁸⁰

The notion that dental decay can cause both ill health and despotism lends a dark note to Pluck’s statement that, in his day, ‘half the scholars in the National Schools were walking around with enough disease in their gobs to decimate the continent of Russia and wither a field of crops by only looking at them’ (80). Stalin’s persecution of landowners and forced collectivisation of agriculture had been a major cause of the Soviet famines of the 1930s, and starvation was used by his regime as a political tool against large sections of the population.⁸¹

On the face of it, dentures may appear to be the solution to the tyrannical tendencies engendered by bad teeth. In The Third Policeman, Schrödinger’s alter ego, MacCruiskeen, has ‘white enamelled teeth’ arranged ‘like delph on a neat country dresser’ (57). Yaeli Greenblatt has discussed teeth and other detachable body parts in O’Nolan’s oeuvre as signatures for the uncanny, the unnatural, or the inhuman,⁸² and indeed, MacCruiskeen’s glossy artificial teeth and the policeman’s ‘smooth inhuman smile’ (71) befit a character whose incomprehensible inventions and experiments appear to go directly against nature: inventions which at first glance seem ‘wonderful’ but which on closer inspection turn out to be ‘terrible’ (73), for dentures may be a death trap. There are several references in the book to false teeth going astray and inhibiting the flow of air into the lungs. The fictitious, pompous Dr Solway Garr – a potential identity Joe suggests for the nameless narrator – saves the fainting duchess’s life by extracting ‘a small denture’ from her thorax (42). Pluck comments on the dangers of a loose dental plate, which is ‘a scorcher, nobody lives very long after swallowing one and it leads indirectly to asphyxiation’ (78). False teeth are part of the unpredictable, inhuman, ‘mechanical’ universe of the parish, where the ‘Atomic Theory’ (or quantum mechanics) is at work (83), where the narrator responds in a ‘mechanical way’ to stimuli (24), and where the policemen, after Mathers has been discovered knifed to death, end up ‘politely arranging the mechanics’ of the narrator’s death by asphyxiation for a murder he both did and did not commit (160).

Policeman Fox

Having miraculously eluded death by hanging when Sergeant Pluck is called away to deal with an emergency in the underground eternity, the narrator, once he has ‘come back sufficiently from death’ (165), begins to think about making his escape. A semi-human bicycle unexpectedly delivers herself into his hands, but the machine’s ‘unassuming competence’ and ‘docility’ (170) are yet more wishful projections of his own overbearing ego. To get away from Pluck and MacCruiskeen, who have followed a ‘leftward’ (or sinister) direction, the narrator turns right; this is the direction favoured by Policeman Fox, who is described by his Sergeant as ‘crazy as bedamned’ and as ‘a man of ungovernable inexactitudes’ (152). Fox is a loose cannon in a parish governed by chance, and his advocacy of the ‘right’ (also in the sense of what is good and just) makes him suspicious in the Sergeant’s eyes: ‘the right is much more tricky than the left’ (153). The narrator’s willing bicycle leads him directly to Mathers’s house and into a false sense of security. Now close to his own home, the narrator looks forward to telling his ‘old friend’ Divney his ‘strange story’ so that ‘the next day we could both begin again to look for the black cashbox’ (174). This is ironic, for in the next cycle of his hellish adventure, which is about to begin, he will be accompanied by Divney.

A conundrum and a paradox, Fox is a powerful figure who incorporates all the elements of the narrator’s damnation and punishment. Initially appearing to inhabit an unlocatable space, he turns out to have his own diminutive police station within the walls of Mathers’s house, like a box within a box. His name associates him with Reynard the Fox, a trickster figure in allegorical fables of the Middle Ages, who is adept at deceiving others for his own advantage. Fox impresses the narrator with his ‘overbearing policemanship’ and an ‘unimpeachable reality’ so ‘massive’ that even the words that fall from his lips emerge as ‘thick friendly lumps’ (180).⁸³ Translated into Irish, however, his name, sionnach, associates his body with inflation in the same way that Sergeant Pluck’s name in Irish (pluc) makes him a windbag, for a piobshionnaich (fox pipe) is an Irish bagpipe ‘blown with bellows,’⁸⁴ a sionnach being the valve of a bellows or pipe-reed in a set of uilleann pipes. Fox’s face is that of Mathers, but now it looks as if ‘hot thick blood’ had been pumped into it, although the eyes remain ‘unnatural’ (183). The voice, too, is that of the old farmer, so that the narrator is once more face to face with the origin of his doom.

As a trickster, Fox presents himself as ‘childlike,’ ‘innocent,’ and ‘good-natured,’ so that he does not strike the narrator as ‘a very formidable enemy’ (185). He readily admits that he found the black box the narrator is looking for and had it dispatched to his house, revealing that it contains enough omnium to make him ‘a man of private means and anything else you like to fancy’ (188). MacCruiskeen had earlier explained that everything in the universe is omnium, which some people call God (111). Fox’s news sends the narrator into a megalomaniacal frenzy of speculation: ‘I could destroy, alter and improve the universe at will. […] I would bring de Selby himself back to life to converse with me at night and advise me in my sublime undertakings’ (189). Completely taken in by Fox’s humble self-assessment as ‘the world’s champion gawm,’ the narrator departs for his house feeling ‘enormous, important and full of power’ (195). But deflation soon follows. In his kitchen, he comes face to face with Divney, now also ‘enormously fat,’ who dies of terror when confronted with the ghost of the man he thought he had killed sixteen years earlier. At that point, the narrator’s mind becomes ‘completely void’ (197). Now once more without a bicycle, he walks away from his house in the direction of the police station, soon followed by the figure of his ‘old friend.’

By imagining that the box of omnium will allow him to perform all sorts of ‘god-like interferences,’ and that he will be able to ‘do anything, see anything and know anything’ with no limit to his powers (189), the narrator of The Third Policeman doubles down on his sin of pride and shows himself to have the biggest of all inflated egos. In this context, the Latin word ‘omnium’ means roughly ‘the sum total of everything.’ It represents, in Ondřej Pilný’s words, the ‘age-long obsession of philosophers and scientists […] with the discovery of the primary matter of which the universe is composed, or the quest for the magic formula that provides the secret key to a universal theory of everything.’⁸⁵ However, as Maebh Long and others have previously pointed out, ‘omnium’ is also a discipline in track cycling.⁸⁶ Dating back to 1917, the omnium event combines different sprint and endurance elements with the aim of crowning ‘the most complete cyclist.’⁸⁷ Omnium racing was popular in the 1920s and 1930s, when the Herne Hill Velodrome in South London attracted thousands of cycling afficionados. In Ireland, these races were covered by BBC radio, Radio Éireann, and by newspapers like the Irish Independent, which in August 1927, for example, reported that F.H. Wylde had won the ‘omnium’ race at Herne Hill ‘and so earned the title of best all-round cyclist.’⁸⁸ The original title of The Third Policeman was ‘Hell Goes Round and Round.’ Fox uses omnium as the bait to propel the narrator into the next round of the circuit of hell he will be doomed to repeat in perpetuity. In that sense, and even without a bicycle, his endless pursuit of the omnium bestows on the narrator the title of best and most complete all-round cyclist ever.

The Sin of Pride

Although O’Nolan recycled some elements of The Third Policeman in his 1964 novel The Dalkey Archive, the latter is a very different book in almost every regard. Gone are the circular hell and the parodies of Smyllie and Schrödinger. The sin of pride, however, so central to The Third Policeman, evidently remained of such significance to the author that he retained it at the novel’s core. In The Dalkey Archive, De Selby is a self-styled theologist and physicist who reveals to Mick, the protagonist, that he has invented a substance called D.M.P. which will allow him to wipe out all life on earth. Putting himself forward as a new Messiah, he aims in this way to protect God’s Supreme Truth ‘finally and irrevocably’ from the corruption of all existing Churches.⁸⁹ Diagnosing De Selby’s problem as ‘an overweening intellectual arrogance,’⁹⁰ Mick foils his plan by stealing the D.M.P. Having thus rescued mankind from obliteration, he comes to consider himself ‘a god-figure of some sort,’ whose obligation it is in turn to ‘save the Almighty’ from all his corrupt Churches.⁹¹ Mick’s hubris cancels out De Selby’s arrogance, a stalemate that causes the plot to grind to an anticlimactic halt. Having acknowledged the error of his ways, De Selby abruptly departs to rejoin his wife in Argentina. Mick contemplates entering a religious order but instead consents to tie the knot with ‘his virgin Mary,’⁹² the girlfriend he suspects of secretly despising him and whose intelligence and independence he privately denigrates. In an ironic echo of the Annunciation story, the punishment for Mick’s hubris is Mary’s cliff-hanger announcement that she is certain she is going to have a baby, implicitly leaving him to contemplate the conundrum of the child’s paternity. In both The Third Policeman and The Dalkey Archive, O’Nolan presents the central sin of pride as the sin of absolute, god-like certainty that blinds the sinner to what really matters and denies the unfathomable mystery of God’s ways. In each instance, the protagonist belatedly discovers that he does not have divine powers after all, that he has paid attention to the wrong things, and that his miserable fate is already inexorably sealed.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.