Bureaucratic Sorceries in The Third Policeman : Anthropological Perspectives on Magic and Officialdom

This article discusses The Third Policeman through the lens of a dialectic of enchantment and disenchantment that is firmly anchored in the history of anthropological discourse on bureaucracy (Malinowski, Lévi-Strauss, Tambiah, Herzfeld, Graeber, Jones). From this angle, Flann O’Brien’s novel is examined as an aesthetic illustration of an essentially anthropological argument: although bureaucracy has been described as an eminently rational form of social systematisation, regulation, and control (since Weber), it also functions, paradoxically, as a symbolic site for irrationality and supernatural occurrences, haunted by madness, mystery, and delusion. The novel is intriguing partly due to its nonchalant, humorous entwining of seemingly incompatible imageries (in this case, magic and officialdom) – a strategy that proves effective not only for creating fantastic ambiguity, but also for reworking a predilect theme of bureaucratic fiction: the coexistence of rational and irrational modes of thinking, in an infinite circling around the absurd oddities of an incomprehensible Law and the impenetrable opacity of its higher powers.

Clarke's observation that science is virtually 'indistinguishable from magic' 18 and then drawing a connection with Ireland's own brand of 'systematised' fantasy. He postulates a historical fascination with institutionalised forms of enchantment: In an Irish context, this term 'magic' is further indistinguishable from that of 'fantasy,' and is apparent not only in the supernatural strain of traditional Irish culture and literature […] but also through the belief in and in deference to the various characters and dogmas of the Catholic faith, a facet of Irish social history which constitutes systematised fantasy on a grand scale and little more than the practice of magical rites and rituals by another name. 19 Grounding my study in a critical tradition which already takes note of the multiple tensions between bureaucratic rationality and magical thinking in O'Brien's work, I am looking to unpack them further by adopting an anthropological angle.
Before entering the realm of anthropological discourse on magic per se, I must briefly introduce the prevalent theoretical framework describing bureaucratic systems. It belongs to the German sociologist Max Weber, who understood bureaucracy as a form of rational organisation of social action. For Weber, the sweeping process of modernisation accompanying the Industrial Revolution brought about tendencies of 'increasing intellectualisation and rationalisation,' which convinced people that 'there are no mysterious incalculable forces' and, therefore, 'one no longer needs to have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service.' 20  an eminently rational endeavour inherent to the emancipation of modern societies from the more primitive magical thinking, bureaucracy is, according to Weber, characterised by a set of ideal and immutable principles over which towers impersonal and objective reason. Bureaucracies aim to function impartially, discarding emotions (unpredictable manifestations of subjectivity) and virtually anything that may 'escape calculation.' 21 To achieve this ideal and thus be able to guarantee the predictability of rules and outcomes, bureaucracies require a stable distribution of authority, strictly delimited by regulations and procedures. Such systems rely on technical, specialised knowledge, often articulated in official jargon that feed into a policy of 'functionally motivated secrecy' 22 that advances in direct relation with hierarchical status. Precision, speed, continuity in execution of highly specialised tasks are, according to Weber, other values associated with bureaucratic settings. 23 But this list of traits does not apply exclusively to the work of a bureaucratic agent; indeed, there are countless examples of human activity (including magic) which require trained knowledge and precision, to say nothing of speed. I argue, however, that there is a particular overlap between the workings of bureaucracy and magic in need of closer examination: namely, their reliance on the performativity of procedure, strict rules, and 'functionally motivated secrecy.' Weber himself notes bureaucrats' tendency to isolate themselves and hide away from the public. Even the most ardent champion of bureaucratic rationality admits that 'the concept of the "office secret" is the specific invention of bureaucracy, and few things it defends so fanatically as this attitude which […], cannot be justified with purely functional arguments.' 24 This is the first crack in the Weberian hypothesis according to which everything bureaucratic is necessarily reasonable. The label of fanaticism applied to bureaucratic behaviour has been prolifically unpacked by Benjamin Lewis Robinson with regard to other fictional deployments of administrative scrupulousness bordering on madness. 25 Magic would then appear out of place in the reason-driven bureaucratic system described by Weber -if by 'magic' we understand 'the use of ritual activities or observances which are intended to influence the course of events or to manipulate the 21 Weber, 'Bureaucracy,' 975. 22 Weber, 'Bureaucracy,' 992. 23 Weber, 'Bureaucracy,' 973: 'The decisive reason for the advance of bureaucratic organisation has always been its purely technical superiority over any other form of organisation. The fully developed bureaucratic apparatus compares with other organisations exactly as does the machine with the non-mechanical modes of production. Precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of the files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs -these are raised to the optimum point in the strictly bureaucratic administration, and especially in its monocratic form.' 24 Weber, 'Bureaucracy,' 992. natural world, usually involving the use of an occult or secret body of knowledge' (OED), or a spectacular performance based on a distorted sense of causality, modified through deception and illusion. However, magic and bureaucracy already intersect in their use of repetitiveness, performativity, secrecy, and highly specialised knowledge rendered in incomprehensible jargon. In the light of these similarities, though, can we continue to think of bureaucracy as an eminently reasonable and objective system?
The Third Policeman seems to pose this very question, 'packed with mysteries' as it is, and having been famously rejected from publication 'on grounds of being unreasonable. Proving Weber's point about professionally-motivated secrecy increasing with rank, Policeman Fox, who holds the most authority, is also the most elusive. His spatiotemporal situatedness is as problematic as his identity: He is down there beyant somewhere during the daytime but we have never seen him there, he might be in a distinctive portion of it that he found from a separate ceiling in a different house and indeed the unreasonable jumps of the lever-reading would put you in mind that there is unauthorised interference with the works. He is as crazy as bedamned. 31 The only fact that may be determined with certainty about Fox is his constant preoccupation with writing, to which he participates with his entire being: 26    ways in which state functionaries conjure up, and conjure with, the very notion of "rationality".' 43 Herzfeld adds that luck and sorcery used to be seen as 'a characteristic of the pre-bureaucratic way of thinking.' 44 Both agree that the advent of bureaucracy is not necessarily related to modernity's passage from irrationality to reason, from enchantment to disenchantment. In fact, for Herzfeld, the functioning of modern bureaucracies requires more irrationality than most would be comfortable to admit: 'the fact that the modern world appears disenchanted in relation to its seemingly reverent forerunners should not lead us to take its rationalist claims 100% literally. It, too, rests on utopian and cosmological foundations.' 45 He agrees with David Graeber: 'all bureaucracies are to a certain degree utopian, in the sense that they propose an abstract ideal that real human beings can never live up to.' 46 Finally, Herzfeld argues that, much like magic, bureaucratic procedure typically objectifies society as a model made out of language, and then performs certain operations upon that model. Authenticity is a ritualistic system of securing one's place in the cosmos. This sounds like sorcery. The analogy When the arbitrariness of names (and, by extension, of the entire nominal system of language) 64 is exposed, the gap between the signified and interchangeable empty signifiers swells to grotesque proportions. The unnameable, the unclassifiable, the disordered are, in a bureaucratic logic, monstrosities -accordingly, they generate terrifying horror in The Third Policeman. The novel highlights such irregular appearances 'at the edges of possibility, and tampers with them to disconcerting effect.' 65 Everything is allowed in its fictional universe: from transcendental agency  This radical form of imaginative freedom (obtained by challenging basic assumptions and questioning shared normative regimes) allows for infinite possibilities and wonder. It also inaugurates a terrifyingly ungovernable jurisdiction, one that can become as unpredictable, cruel, and violent as it is good-humoured. At once dreamlike and nightmarish, reassuring and threatening, the order presented in the novel is thoroughly disconcerting and ultimately opaque: 'He now looked so innocent and good in one sentence, so that the contrast between the two registers frustrates expectations of the seriousness and gravity usually attributed to bureaucratic settings. Beyond the mere presence of impossible objects (the gowns, the metaphysical omnium, and other supernatural paraphernalia), the presence of magic is also quite explicit in the novel: the characters are 'calmly making ribbons of the natural order, inventing intricate and unheard of machinery to delude the other policemen, interfering drastically with time to make them think they had been leading their magical lives for years, bewildering, horrifying and enchanting the whole countryside.' 70 To deepen the confusion, the presence of magic is also dismissed, at the very moment of its affirmation, by the promise of a simple, all-encompassing reasonable explanation (which, however, never arrives): 'You thought there was magic in it, not to mention monkey-work of no mean order?
[…] But it can all be explained, it was very simple and the way it was all worked will astonish you when I tell you.' His offer to explain hundreds of miracles in one simple explanation was very tempting. 71 Such fragments acquire meta-fictional resonance, anticipating Tzvetan Todorov's 1970 theory of the fantastic as a genre born from the hesitation between a rational and an irrational explanation of an ambiguous event. 72 This permanent hesitation exceeds the cognitive, epistemic level of the reading experience, and soon spreads to its affective regime: the narrative's mood shifts abruptly from wonder to horror ('the murk of doubt and fear and wonder that was anchored on my brain like a raincloud on a hill.') 73 Bureaucracy and supernatural agency may both inflict awe and reverence, but also fears of omnipotent authority. Memorable in this regard is the episode with the chests encased like Russian dolls, where the game of prestidigitation and the endless showcasing of boxes can be deciphered as a sharp critique of precise systematisation, repetition, and infinite, self-referential proliferation (as bureaucratic principles). This critique, again, takes on a metafictional significance, challenging not only administrative authority but also 'the authority of narrative closure.' 74 The chests, much like de Selby's mirrors, are instances of 'infinitely repeating series' that echo 'the repetitive structure of the novel itself' 75  writing in the episode described by Lévi-Strauss, in the sense that it announces its own artificiality as nothing more than an improvised performance.
The narrator is told that such increasingly 'brain-staggering' scenes are driven by simple logic and causality: 'Like everything that is hard to believe and difficult to comprehend, […] it is very simple and a neighbour's child could work it all without being trained.' 89 This remark denounces the essential vacuity ('an astonishing parade of nullity' 90 ) of the specialised knowledge that hides the artificiality of the work performed by bureaucrats and prestidigitators alike. Both operate plays of substitutions, generate representations, and produce distorted (or schematic) realities mediated by the sheer symbolic power with which they are endowed through socially accepted conventions and ceremonies: 'Anything can be said in this place and it will be true and will have to be believed.' 91 The narrator's anonymity grants him a magic invisibility in the eyes of the law.
The simple absence of a name allows for the discursive performance of a disappearing act phrased in legal terms, whose seriousness is subverted by clownery. The subject is obscured to the eyes of the law, liberated of both rights and obligations: the law is an extremely intricate phenomenon. If you have no name you cannot own a watch and the watch that has been stolen does not exist and when it is found it will have to be restored to its rightful owner. The ontological destabilisation of objects and subjects alike is the real authority at work in The Parish. Through a casual use of the rhetoric appeal of propositional logic and sophistry, death itself is 'neutralised and rendered void,' diminished, and finally negated: 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 neutralised and rendered void by asphyxiation and the fracture of the spinal string.
If it is not a lie to say that you have been given the final hammer behind the barrack, equally it is true to say that nothing has happened to you. 107 There is something uncanny about the painstaking precision and meticulosity involved in the policeman's imperceptible, yet incredibly powerful world-shaping acts: He took a something from his pocket that was too small for me to see and started working with the tiny black thing on the table beside the bigger thing which was itself too small to be described. At this point I became afraid. What he was doing was no longer wonderful but terrible. 108 The complexity of bureaucracy as both a rational practice of systematisation and an irrational affective arrangement is comically represented by the novel's mixing of the wonderful with the terrible. As Paul du Gay notes in his study of contemporary forms of bureaucratic ethos, 'at the very least these somewhat contradictory representations suggest that bureaucracy is not a simple phenomenon, and that "popular" conceptions of it are confused and paradoxical.' 109 Simultaneously a bureaucratic and antibureaucratic narrative, The Third Policeman is preoccupied by the very confusion and paradox described by du Gay. Or, to use O'Brien's own words, the internal tensions at work in the novel would signal the existence of such 'miscellaneous apprehensions. ' 110 Ambiguity and unsolvable contradictions are instrumented here as rhetoric devices, primarily for their aesthetic value in generating humour and the atmosphere specific to fantastic narratives. However, one could not -and should not -ignore the fact that their To conclude, an analogy between the disparate worlds of bureaucracy and magic is legitimised by the fact that both are performative in nature and rely heavily on linguistic and symbolic grounds, staging social spectacles which oscillate between gravity and mockery. The ritualistic repetition of speech and writing acts, identifiable in both bureaucratic and magical settings, is used to summon a hierarchy of invisible and unpredictable powers. The efficacy of this summoning is increased when the repetition is accompanied by a specific decorum, imagery, and formalised behaviour, as indeed is the case in The Third Policeman. By virtue of strict normative regimes that do not necessarily correspond to those of the real world, these supernatural authorities are able to control and manipulate beings, objects, and affective intensities to worldtransforming ends, often with unpredictable results.
When applying the magic/bureaucracy analogy to a fictional narrative such as The Third Policeman, a theoretical framework of anthropological and sociological import proves useful in conciliating the apparent contradiction implied by the figure of a bureaucrat mastering supernatural powers, or of a recordkeeping sorcerer. Paradoxical bewilderment, which seems to be the general affective regime of the novel, comes from the enigmatic and often explicit tension between reason and unreason: 'It is a curious enigma that so great a mind would question the most obvious realities and object even to things scientifically demonstrated (such as the sequence of day and night) while believing absolutely in his own fantastic explanations of the same phenomena.' 113 The confusion resulting from this paradox is, in O'Brien's words, 'a phenomenon of great charm and intensity,' but also 'a very dangerous article.' 114 Its danger consists in having the power to destabilise ontological categories, to undermine accepted conventions (linguistic, as well as political), and to trouble the self-assured arrogance of positivist epistemologies (in humanities and natural sciences alike). The meta-narrative circularity of The Third Policeman, its complex rhetorical and pseudo-scientifical sophistry, as well as the fast-paced sequence of spectacular, unrealistic events -all add to the sense of confusion resulted from blending the imaginative promises of a fantasy world with the terrifying dryness of administration.