Department of English

Consciousness as a Bridge between Worlds: The Fantastic

Effects of The Third Policeman

Ailya Waqar Zaman

Master’s Thesis

Literature

Fall 2019

Supervisor: Bo Ekelund

Abstract

This essay explores Tzvetan Todorov’s theories on the fantastic and aims to give an analytical

description of the cognitive processes of the reader of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman

upon encountering story elements that appear to defy natural laws.

According to Todorov, the genre of the fantastic hinges on the reader’s “hesitation”

when he tries to make sense of the supernatural element(s) in context of the novel; he hesitates

while trying to decide whether there is a natural explanation for these events or whether the

world of the narrative has entered what may be called the realm of the imaginary, the world of

the marvelous, or a(n im)possible world. The purpose of this thesis is to understand the effects

on reading when a reader is faced with a text where the storyworld remains ambiguous in terms

of its genre. Through the effects of the fantastic, I argue, the reader is urged to leave the external

storyworld of the text and finds refuge instead in the internal consciousness of the narrator-

character.

Keywords: The fantastic, cognitive narratology, storyworld, the supernatural, hesitation,

suspension of disbelief, poetic faith, immersion, attribution theory, emotion theories.

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Apparently there is no limit, Joe remarked. Anything can be

said in this place and it will be true and will have to be

believed.

-The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brien

My study aims to test and develop theories designed to make sense of the experience of reading

fantastical or unnatural narratives by means of the particular test case of Flann O’Brien’s The

Third Policeman. Needless to say, extensive research has been done in the areas such as reader-

response, cognitive narratology, psychoanalysis, linguistics and possible worlds that make the

construction of a single analytical model a moot ambition. However, with a delimited focus, a

model may be proposed that should prove useful for further exploration. This thesis will focus

primarily on the reading of the fantastic (originally theorized by Tzvetan Todorov) and will

link it to contemporary theories in the above-mentioned areas in order to grasp the experience

the reader goes through in the chimerical narrative of The Third Policeman. The purpose of

this study is to help extend our understanding of reader-response more generally since in a

broader sense the interpretive strategies and the cognitive progressions the reader undergoes

while experiencing the tensions between the real and the imaginary in terms of fictional truth

are directly applicable to the reader’s interaction with fiction itself. Todorov’s theories have

been discussed and analyzed many times but primarily in terms of their structural logic, while

not enough has been done to align them with an understanding of the reader’s cognitive

processes. I believe that his work has considerable possibilities if taken out of the limited scope

of structuralism. I am interested in the experience of the reader in this specific context, the key

term being precisely “experience”. The complexity of the question of types of readers is not

addressed in this essay as it takes the whole argument beyond the scope of the paper. I follow

a phenomenological approach while attempting to understand the reader’s position upon

encountering certain elements in a text. An important aspect that we have to assume in order

to retain the logic of the arguments is that it is the first reading of the novel. We shall discuss

the reason for the need for this in a later section of the essay.

It will be necessary to give a rather detailed summary of the first part of The Third

Policeman, in preparation for the analysis. It is the story of a man who remains nameless

throughout the novel and seems to be recounting his own tale. His parents died when he was a

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young boy and he had inherited a farm that a man named Divney looked after. The narrator-

character, after completing his education, comes home to find that Divney has not been quite

as efficient as he may have imagined. It is understood that Divney would now leave the farm

but he simply goes on staying and the narrator-character lets it happen. The narrator-character

is a scholar whose biggest ambition is to compile the works of Hubert de Selby (an eccentric

savant apparently; also fictional) and he spends his time doing that. Throughout the whole

novel he refers to de Selby’s far-fetched claims and discoveries at different points of the

narrative. The story goes on uneventfully, until the narrator-character realizes he is being

manipulated by Divney into committing a crime. Divney keeps complaining about money and

slowly imparts to the narrator-character that they should rob and murder an unlikeable old man

called Mathers. The narrator-character goes along with this scheme for the sake of getting his

book published. One night they wait for old Mathers on a dark road and hit him on the head

with a spade. After the murder, before the body is buried, Divney goes away to do something,

without informing the narrator-character of the nature of his activity. For the next three years

after this incident, Divney refuses to tell the narrator-character about the black box (the cash

box that will make them rich) saying that they must lie-low so as to avoid attracting suspicion.

The narrator-character does not think this caution is necessary and, not trusting Divney, and

not wanting to be cheated, he keeps a close eye on him, goes where he goes, even sleeps with

him in the same bed. Finally, Divney says it is time, and the narrator-character insists on going

with Divney to retrieve the black box. Once they are near the house, Divney tells the narrator-

character to get it from under a loose board in the house. The narrator-character goes inside,

finds the box and pulls it up. He feels that something has changed in the room, and notices

someone sitting on a chair in the corner, and realizes it is old Mathers. While being afraid and

not understanding what is happening, he starts a conversation which begins to spiral into

absurdity. By the end of the conversation he finds that he has to find a couple of policemen in

order to locate the black box. He also realizes that he does not remember his name. After

spending the night at old Mathers’, he starts his walk to the barracks of the policemen, gets

tired and falls asleep. When he wakes up, he meets a dodgy looking man who turns out to be a

robber and a murderer, but lets him go because both of them have a wooden-leg. He points him

in the direction of the police barracks and the narrator-character starts walking again until he

finds a building that appears to be two-dimensional. He goes in to find two policemen, and the

story spirals further and further into absurdity until eventually he ends up back in old Mathers

home where he meets the third policeman, who tells him that the black box has been sent to his

house but instead of containing cash it contains a mysterious substance called omnium. The

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narrator-character goes back to his house only to find Divney married with a kid, looking more

than a decade older. There he finds out that Divney had actually planted a bomb at old Mathers’

place and the narrator-character died at that point when he had pulled the black box. Divney

seems to be able to see the narrator-character, while his wife and son cannot, and he dies on

the spot. In the end, both the narrator-character and Divney are seen outside the police barracks

again and it is implied by the similarity of the scene that the whole story will repeat itself and

that Divney and the narrator-character are unknowingly stuck in the loop of a hellish afterlife.

This essay seeks to analyze the cognitive processes of the reader of this novel. I am

interested from the beginning of the novel, until after he meets the policemen, since I argue

that beyond that, the elements of the fantastic cease to have their effect. I claim that in a

fantastic text where the narrative world refuses to remain stable or follow the laws of non-

contradiction, the reader needs to find an anchor, and in the case of The Third Policeman that

anchor is in the consciousness of the narrator-character. In such texts, fictional minds take

precedence, envelop and sustain the whole text, becoming eventually the world of the story.

This whole thesis will be carried out by constructing an analytical description of the reader’s

experience and how she handles the ups and downs of the novel’s narrative, that is, an analytical

account of the phenomenological experience of reading. The reason I have approached the

novel in this manner is two-fold: firstly, so as to incorporate theories from different schools of

thought, such as cognitive narratology, possible worlds theory, and reader-response

approaches; secondly, because I agree with Marie-Laure Ryan when she says our present

understanding of storyworlds and the experience of the reader is limited because we try to

impose an objective logicality to something that should be studied in its phenomenological

essence ( 4.3). When we talk about the experientiality of the narrative, when we discuss the

response of the reader, we can hardly pretend that it is purely objective. Narrativity for the

reader is an experience where emotion and subjectivity cannot be sidelined (Caracciolo 117).

This thesis follows the phenomenological consciousness of an “average” reader, reading The

Third Policeman for the first time, and trying to deal with the contradictions that arise in the

narrative.

In section one, the reader has begun the process of reading and is attempting to construct

a basic structure of the storyworld. To delineate the dynamics between reading and storyworlds

in fiction, I investigate Eric Hayot’s ideas about worldmaking, Coleridge’s concept of

suspension of disbelief, Marie-Laure Ryan’s theories on immersion and accessibility between

the fictional and lived worlds, and Menakhem Perry and Marco Caracciolio’s different theories

regarding the linearity of the text giving rise to the unfolding nature of experiencing and

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constructing storyworlds. At this point in my presentation, the reader has entered the realm of

fiction, constructed the storyworld and taken her place in it.

In section two she will experience the breaking of the storyworld, that is, the elements

of the fantastic. I place the reader in the context of the fantastic and consider Todorov’s theories

in the case of The Third Policeman. The fantastic novel usually starts with laying the

foundations of realism and then gradually introduces inconsistencies of a supernatural nature,

enough to keep the reader confused but not enough to tip over to a marvelous world. In terms

of The Third Policeman we will deal with the part of the novel after the narrator encounters the

first “supernatural” incident and before the narrative goes into the realm of incontestable

absurdity. The central question asked here is the following: When dealing with such

uncertainty, what keeps the reader anchored in a destabilized textual world?

In section three the reader has entered fiction, built a storyworld, seen it collapse and is

trying to anchor herself. I explore the idea of consciousness in terms of the fictional mind and

the reader’s mind and how the reader attaches her consciousness to the character’s mind in

order to ground herself in a shifting storyworld. After piecing together theories on suspension

of disbelief, poetic faith, immersion, world-making, the effects of the fantastic and fictional

mind theories, I come to the conclusion that The Third Policeman is a classic example of the

kinds of narrative that cancel out their own storyworlds, pushing the reader to connect to the

narrator-character’s consciousness in her attempt to create a more accommodating storyworld

that would sustain the current demands of the narrative. I further claim that before a new

storyworld is created, what keeps the reader anchored is the emotion of the narrator-character

since the fantastic depends on the emotional effect it creates; so while the fantastic is creating

disturbances in the storyworld through contradictions and modalizations, it is also completely

dependent on a heightening of emotion.

Before I begin my arguments, it is important to enclose the scope of the paper and to

identify the meaning of certain terms that are used repeatedly. When I claim to apply the

phenomenological approach in my paper, I mean the study of the experience of the reader’s

consciousness in this specific context of reading The Third Policeman. I find this approach

most suitable for my endeavors because of three reasons; Firstly, it allows the study of the

reader’s experience without the rigidity of absolute objectivity, which is impossible to achieve

in reader-response anyway and the best one can do is to come up with a basic model that works

in most situations or a specific model that works in very specific conditions (Iser, 1524-5).

Secondly, it puts sufficient stress on the relationship between the reader and the text as a means

of studying what happens in the context of their interaction rather than putting emphasis solely

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on “the reader’s psychology” or the author’s construction of the text (1524). Thirdly, it allows

the study of the reader’s sense of being-in-the-world that helps for the purposes of this essay

to identify the reader’s placement in the storyworld (Sartre 1199). When I use the term “anchor”

I mean this ability of the reader to maintain the illusion of them being in the storyworld so as

to embody the experience of the narrative. When I use the term anchor in terms of the fictional

minds, I mean the reader’s attachment with the consciousness of the inner “world” of the

narrator-character of The Third Policeman as a unified, complete and familiar abode that

sustains this illusion of being-in-the-world when the external storyworld fails to function.

Todorov’s understanding of the term supernatural is an event that does not follow the laws of

the “natural world” that we live in (25), the world that Ryan refers to as AW. I use another term

“absurdity” which I use when things don’t make sense, not in the supernatural sense but in the

sense of social behavior or the manner of conversation. The dictionary definition of absurd is

“Of a thing: against or without reason or propriety; incongruous, unreasonable, illogical” and

“Of a person: acting in an incongruous, unreasonable, or illogical manner” (OED). This term

poses some difficulties as it is not so easy to generalize what is normal or not, but I use this

term loosely in the context of sense-making.

Section One: Reader in the storyworld

The reader, upon beginning her process of reading, looks for textual cues to begin the basic

construction of the storyworld where the narrative will take place. The aim of this section is to

reflect upon certain aspects of world-making that encourage the sustainability of the narrative.

Why is it important to delve into aspects of world-making for the purposes of this essay?

World-breaking or unmaking are ideas that are more relevant for The Third Policeman, but in

order to comprehend the whole journey where the novel constructs and deconstructs and then

reconstructs the world of the story, we must first grasp a few ideas related with world-making.

World-making and world-breaking are both seen as mutually dependent processes in this

section, since the mechanisms that actually make the world, when violated, take part in

breaking the world. It is important for the sake of the experience of fictionality to be able to

interact with the virtuality of the storyworld.

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Totality of the World

In this process of reading there is an unavoidable concept of a ‘totality’ of experience, whether

in the form of poetic faith asked of the reader, or a sense of holistic completeness given by the

storyworld. In “On Literary Worlds”, Eric Hayot builds on Immanuel Wallerstein’s definition

of the “world” (as “an adjective, referring… to the quality of worldedness, the self-constituting

and inner directed force, of a given system”) and connects it with Niklas Luhmann’s description

of the world being “autopoietic” which is a “self-generating and self-directed” ability where “a

world governs the operations of the totality internal to it, of which it is the endlessly modifying

expressive limit” (129). A world is a unit, that the whole world is buildup of: in other words,

the “grains of sand” (139) that make up the whole desert, or the bricks that make up the

complete building, are smaller, complete worlds on their own (the desert and the building being

the “bigger” worlds here). This implies that a world can be a pre-existing phenomenon,

independent of actants and self-sustainable on its own, as well as a construction dependent on

the elements (that may be called as smaller worlds) that it is made up of and without them it

cannot possibly come into existence. It seems that sometimes Hayot goes back and forth in

trying to place the idea of the world as a noun- a stable phenomenon existing in time and space-

and then completely adheres to the adjective-ness or verb-ness of this worldedness. He says

that even “a sentence in a novel, a word in a poem, a look, an exclamation, or a punctuation

mark can become a world if read as a formal totality of its own” (139). There are two important

things to note: 1) the word “totality” is a keyword here and 2) the condition for its existence

being that “if” it is “read as” that. What that means is that this totality of the storyworld—as an

effect intended as a setting for the narrative—is highly dependent on the reader’s cooperation.

Let us try to understand this cooperation a little better in the sense of “suspension of disbelief”,

“poetic faith” and “immersion”. Catherine Gallagher mentions Samuel Taylor Coleridge as

coining the term “suspension of disbelief” and pioneering the notion of dispelling judgements

in a controlled environment, much like dreaming, where we enter the dream state willingly but

have no control during the act of dreaming. Suspended disbelief allows the reader to engage

with “greater responsiveness and more vivid perception” where she is “no longer supposing

but rather fictionally experiencing” (348). She can immerse herself deeply in the illusion as she

is “protected from the delusion by the voluntary framework of disbelief” (348-349). This idea

of fictionally experiencing something we know to be unreal is at the heart of attempting to

decipher what the reading process entails when we are enveloped in a fictional world. How do

we experience fiction? Michael Tomko argues that suspension of disbelief in association with

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the poetic faith that Coleridge mentions, rather than being a “begrudging toleration of the

fabulous” (2) is actually a complex balancing of the reading process that negates the extremes

of “absorbed delusion models” and “stoic critical vantage” (47) because both have such

limitations that deprive the reader of a full experience. In Tomko’s account, Coleridge

advocates instead for the reader to “experience some delicate dialectic between belief and

unbelief, between fiction and reality, between influence and resistance” (47). Tomko claims

that for Coleridge’s ideas to be understood better we need to understand what he means when

he uses the words such as faith and belief/disbelief and these cannot be understood in a secular

light since although Coleridge may not intend to couple religious faith and poetic faith together,

his religious inclinations cast an unavoidable light on his ideas. For Coleridge, having “poetic

faith” is key to be able to experience fiction fully and here faith does not correspond to “ironic

credulity” (Gallagher 346), rather an engagement with the whole self as a person would engage

in his religious faith1. A perusal of Coleridge’s religious writings, including letters and prayers

gives an acute glossary of these basic terms: “To believe is to assent to the coherence,

reasonableness, and goodness of these doctrines; to disbelieve is to reject their validity. Faith

lives and moves and has its being in those doctrines; unbelief fails to do so.” (Tomko 77-8)

There are a few important points to note here: firstly, that belief and faith have different

meanings where the former is a stable perception and the latter is an everchanging and dynamic

“energy” that demands the engagement of the whole person (79)2; Secondly, suspending one’s

disbelief then means that skepticism is the reader’s normal state, which she would put away for

the sake of the aesthetic experience; thirdly, that poetic faith is not simply a state of mind that

the reader needs to set straight before entering fiction, but an “active” and “collaborative” (69)

process that is retained throughout the reading process. Hence suspending disbelief makes

sense at the beginning of the narrative, something akin to “choosing” to believe. But this

perception that the reader embodies before entering the text cannot sustain her while she is in

the narrative. In that way poetic faith becomes a more precise term to encapsulate the

experience she “beholds” during this odyssey of reading3. How does this poetic faith differ

from the naïve delusion that Coleridge so adamantly tries to distance his theories from? For

Coleridge, poetic faith is not synonymous with credulity, instead, faith and reason are two sides

of the same coin (79-80). Reason, here, is an elevated form of understanding: “understanding”

is the use of the faculties and “reason” is the beholding of transcendental knowledge, truth and

1 A term used by Martinez-Bonati in his 1981 article “The Act of Writing Fiction” pg 35) 2 He takes the term “energy” and “beholding” from Coleridge’s own “Essay on Faith” (SWF 2: 844) 3 See footnote 2.

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“meaningful experience” (80). They do not contradict each other but remain on separate stages

of enlightenment; understanding relies on the material world for knowledge and cannot fathom

the mysteries of the universe that fall under the realm of reason (80). For Coleridge, faith is

reason and reason is faith, and the embodiment of one is the embodiment of the other,

developing a holistic attribute of thorough engagement. Thus, in this light, poetic faith, as a

manifestation of reason, refuses to be a passive willingness to go along with the text; instead

(in the contemporary context of Coleridge’s terms) it requires an active anticipation of entering

a storyworld and accurately perceiving its laws and rhythms so as to engage with it deeply.

This cannot happen inertly with a consumer entitlement of the text doing all the work, but a

continual reconfiguration of the elements of the text to absorb as much from the experience as

possible. Thus, every time I use the word “illusion”, I do not mean a delusional apparition that

deceives the reader, rather a collaborative construction of a structure or a setting that the text

and the reader actively set up in the background for the narrative to be performed within.

Another way to comprehend this experience is through the process of “immersion” which

Marie-Laure Ryan describes as a corporeal experience, where “the phenomenological idea of

consciousness as a sense of being-in-the-world… is at the core of (its) theory and poetics...”

(14). She mentions how the experience of virtual reality is dependent on spatial coordinates

and a three-dimensional virtual presence within the surroundings. What are these

“surroundings” that we inhabit in the process of reading? She says that “in the phenomenology

of reading, immersion is the experience through which a fictional world acquires the presence

of an autonomous, language-independent reality populated with live human being”. This shows

that the reader’s ability to immerse, to corporeally experience, to dispel disbelieve and engage

with poetic faith, is what provides the storyworld with a consciousness, a virtual illusion of

being real. But this construction, as mentioned earlier, is a collaboration, which means that “for

the text be immersive” it must also provide the reader with certain things such as “a space to

which the reader, spectator, or user can relate” and it “must populate this space with

individuated objects” and “construct the setting for a potential narrative action” (14-15). But

in the case of postmodern texts, reading becomes more complex as the reader encounters a sort

of a playfulness that creates a “carnivalesque” perception of words where there is no clear body

of meaning on “which the reader projects a virtual alter ego”, rather it is an “unstable,

decentered, multiple, fluid, emergent” cluster of fireworks where “the sparks (are) generated

by associative chains that connect the particles of a textual and intertextual field of energies

into ever-changing configurations” (5). Here what is required from the reader is no

straightforward task but a feat that constantly requires shifting positions according to the whims

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of the postmodern text. Moreover, it is also noteworthy that Coleridge uses the word “energy”

to describe faith, which then associates with poetic faith that the reader needs while engaging

with the narrative, and Ryan uses the word “energy” as a quality inherent in the text at the level

of semiotics. Where does this energy truly reside, in the reader or in the text? I argue that this

energy is actually the interaction between the two and it is this collaborative energy that creates

the illusion of depth and consciousness in the storyworld. We will discuss more about this at

the end of this section. At present, it is more important to ask how the text tries to retain its

immersive and illusive qualities.

To understand this better, let’s ask a few more relevant questions: how do these worlds

get built in the reader’s mind? How are they constructed? This “worldedness, the work-oriented

force of any given work of art, is an aesthetic effect that emerges only at certain scales of the

work itself” (Hayot 139). The world of the story can never be truly “complete” (146) since

there are numerous parts of the world that have not been given textual presence. But in order

for us to experience the world as a totality, and for the world to feel believable and real to the

reader, an illusion of completeness is required. Such a world needs to have “persistence” (148)

to live beyond the text, and possibly beyond the protagonist/narrator, so the reader manages to

reasonably fill the gaps in their mind. “A world with a sophisticated enough set of starting

conditions and self-referential algorithms could theoretically persist well beyond its use by any

human players at all” (149). The world posed by fiction is in many ways an illusion – an illusion

of completeness, an illusion of stability, an illusion of reality. Thus what I understand from this

is, that in its essence, this world, or the quality of worldedness, is transient, moveable, unstable,

dependent. But as a means of creating a setting for the narrative to follow, for the characters to

inhabit, and the readers to enter, this worldedness poses as a stable and reliable virtual space.

A major factor in keeping this illusion alive is the reader’s poetic faith, her commitment to the

creation of this setting, her readiness to immerse herself in it. Hayot talks about another

“variable” that I think is a chief constituent in upholding the illusion of stability and totality of

the world: amplitude. He compares the distance between foreground and background between

two texts: the scene of the scar on the leg in Homer’s Odyssey and the sacrifice of Isaac by

Abraham in the Bible (142)4. The former because of the equal pacing of narrative action,

detailed description, little to no gaps between the character’s action and externalized thoughts

creates a “zero amplitude” between the foreground and the background: in other words, the

4 His argument is derivative of Erich Auerbach’s chapter “Odysseus’ Scar” in Mimesis: The Representation of

Reality in Western Literature, pg 23.

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foreground becomes the background. The latter, the biblical account, achieves an opposite

effect. The narration is uneven in terms of its rhythm which highlights certain aspects and keeps

the others in obscurity, creating a mysterious gap of the unmentioned and a wide space between

the foreground and the background. The consequence of which is that an illusion of depth and

space is created in the storyworld of the latter as compared to the former. This illusion of a vast

background is a significant part of the totalizing experience. Not only does it provide a certain

depth to the setting, but it inevitably creates the illusion of depth, amplitude and meaning for

events and characters. It does not matter whether the narrative at any point draws attention to

this background, but this illusion of the existence of the background greatly impacts how we

perceive the foregrounded narrative. In terms of The Third Policeman, because the beginning

of the story is based on realism, albeit not being given much information about the narrator-

character’s storyworld, we are given enough to focus on the character’s story while knowing

that the rest of the world also exists “out there”. There is a farm and a bar and customers and

old Mathers place and people and a whole world going on. We do not need to be given much

detail but there is a stability about its existence because of the pacing of the story5. From

childhood ‘til thirty years of age, we are given an uneven account of his life; years pass in a

matter of paragraphs or a few sentences. But after the first event of the supernatural (his

meeting with old Mathers) has happened, the existence of the rest of the world becomes foggy

since we are no longer sure about what natural laws this outside world would follow because

we have contradictory textual cues regarding the possibilities. Everything suddenly comes to

the foreground, like an uninterrupted flow of consciousness. Once the narrator-character leaves

old Mathers house, his descriptions of the strangeness of the surroundings throws us off:

My surroundings had a strangeness of a peculiar kind, entirely separate from the

mere strangeness of a country where one has never been before. Everything

seemed almost too pleasant, too perfect, too finely made. Each thing the eye

could see was unmistakeable and unambiguous, incapable of merging with any

other thing or being confused with it. (O’Brien 41)

In one way the surroundings seem “normal” as we encounter familiar everyday objects like

trees and roads, but the narrator-character keeps implying that things are different and strange.

We have no obvious reasons to disbelieve him, but it could always mean that something has

changed in his perception. Perhaps we would have discounted it as a bizarre projection of

inward feeling if the brazen supernatural event (of finding the dead old Mathers sitting in front

of him) had not happened. The lack of an explanation creates more ambiguity and strangeness

5 This stability of the existence of the storyworld despite being given many details also exists because of Ryan’s

Principle of Minimal Departure that we will discuss in the next sub-section.

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in the whole affair. A certain two-dimensional-ness is created regarding the rest of the world,

as if only the present sensual reality of the character-narrator exist, suspended in a vacuum. We

only know the interior world of the narrator-character to be “real”, even if it is absurd,

unreliable, confusing, but the rest (the external world) is slowly unfolding before us in a way

similar to how the headlights of a car show only a short space on a dark road, where the length

or the existence of the dark road beyond the light is under question. After the narrator-character

has gone to the police station and talked to the officers, we finally begin to understand the

workings of this new strange world, the nature of its bicycles and so on, but this construction

of the world is very slow and it depends on our belief that we have definitely entered a

marvelous world. But what happens during the fantastic moments of hesitation? What ‘world’,

what reality do we rely on then?

Thus, this storyworld that the narrative moves in, is a collaboration between the reader

and the text, that helps retain the most suitable setting for the case of specific narratives. Now

that we have become a little aware of some of the attributes of world-making, in the next sub-

section we shall explore it further by understanding how the fictional world relates to or does

not relate to the ‘real world’.

Accessibility of the world

According to Hayot, “Aesthetic worlds, no matter how they form themselves, are, among other

things, always relations to and theories of the lived world, whether as largely unconscious

normative constructs, as rearticulations, or even as active refusals of the world-norms of their

age.” (137) This refers to the mimetic quality of the fictional worlds but not only in terms of

its adherence to representation but also in terms of its absolute rejection of it; either way, this

“lived world” remains as a reference. Marie-Laure Ryan proposed “the principle of minimal

departure” and Kendell L. Walton put forward “the reality principle,” both of which in essence

amount to the perception and expectation of the reader to assume the fictional world as a

referent to the lived world until told otherwise-until the narrative declares a different sets of

rules or violates our basic understanding of this lived world.6 Another theory is by W. Michelle

Wang in “Postmodern Play with Worlds” where she proposes a flip expectation by the reader:

“maximal departure” (134). She says that different texts elicit different expectations from the

reader. Upon entering the text they may begin with minimal departure but when certain textual

6 Ryan writes in the living book of narratology, “Possible Worlds”, paragraph 6.

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cues appear, when “the fantastic, strange, and nonsensical” are implied, the reader, without

canceling out the “effects of minimal departure,” instead expects elements and experiences

different from those in the lived world. This notion of maximal departure is useful in clarifying

the reader’s position as enabling “active refusals of world-norms” that we were discussing

earlier, and it also extends where Ryan’s idea of minimal departure ends, that is, ‘until the text

says otherwise’. But all of this brings us to the same point that we concluded earlier: in one

way or another, the lived world constitutes some form of referent for the fictional world.

In her essay “Possible Worlds and Accessibility Relations: A Semantic Typology of

Fiction,” Marie-Laure Ryan provides a more complicated idea of a world. She shows how a

text can contain many worlds, some at the center and some at the periphery and this may cause

a multiple recentering throughout the narrative for the reader as new information is given. This

means that the text does not project one world, but a “universe”7 (555). The terminology

introduced by Ryan in this article is useful for indicating the different types of worlds that are

at play in the text. There is an Actual World (AW), that is, the world that we all live in, the

world that the author lives in. Then there is a Textual Actual World (TAW) that is at the center

of the fictional narrative and one or several Possible Actual Worlds (PAWs) which refers to

the embedded narratives of the characters. She provides a comprehensive set of rules and

connections that help link the AW with the TAW8, thus giving the readers a basic foundation

upon entering the text.

But what about worlds that have “undecidable relations” (566) between AW and TAW?

This undecidability occurs when the text or the narrator is unable “to establish the laws of

TAW” (566). This then might cause one of these three situations: 1) We get an “empty center”

when insufficient attention is given to the “worlds at the periphery” and an ambiguity about

the laws of the TAW causes a confusion about its accessibility in reference to the AW. 2) An

“unknowable center” emerges when it becomes hazy that the text at the moment is referring to

a TAW or the inner world of one of the characters who could be dreaming or hallucinating. 3)

A “radical lack of authority” is the case when we do know that this is the interior perceptual

world of the narrator, his “incoherent ramblings,” that contradict one another and cannot be

taken as truth on face value. (567). In the case of The Third Policeman, the novel begins with

7 This universe simplifies the distinction with the smaller worlds, but as a totality this universe is also a world,

as Hayot says that a world is a smaller unit and a bigger unit of totality. 8 These links include: a) objects in both worlds have same properties b) both worlds have same objects c) TAW

has same members as AW as well as some native members d) TAW does not temporally stand in AW’s future

e) the natural laws of both worlds are the same f) have the same species with the same properties g) both worlds

respect the principles of noncontradiction and of excluded middle h) objects designated by the same words have

the same essential properties and i) the language by which TAW is described can be understood in AW. (558-9).

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a stable world that follows straightforward links between TAW and AW and so no ambiguity

emerges. After the first supernatural event however- the meeting with old Mathers- a

contradiction emerges:

I knew that old Mathers had been felled by an iron bicycle-pump, hacked to

death with a heavy spade and then securely buried in a field. I also knew that

the same man was now sitting in the same room with me, watching me in

silence. His body was bandaged but his eyes were alive and so was his right

hand and so was all of him. (O’Brien 27)

The presence of old Mathers is not a sure sign that something supernatural is happening. A

natural explanation may be given for it later, the reader may suppose. Maybe he had not really

died and had been saved by someone just in time? Maybe the narrator-character had not really

killed him (as he himself questions that perhaps the murder had been “a bad dream” (27))?

Maybe Divney was playing some trick? Maybe the narrator-character is

dreaming/hallucinating right now? Whatever the possible natural explanation, no matter how

likely or unlikely it is, until it is given, a contradiction has arisen in the narrative. Natural laws

are broken and the straightforward link between the TAW and AW has become complicated,

if not altogether broken. The longer the narrative goes without resolving this contradiction, the

lesser the accessibility of TAW becomes. In such a situation, where the narrative contradicts

our initial assumptions of the minimal departure, the narrator-character apparently seems lucid

enough (but could be unreliable or tricked), how do we gain access to the TAW?

How do we gain an intuition of the principles by which these worlds are put

together? We apprehend the TAW through its reflection in the minds of

characters, and even though we do not trust the details of that reflection or

cannot identify the reflecting mind, we assume that the mental image respects

the basic configuration of the reflected reality. If the character’s subjective view

of the TAW is linked to the AW through a certain cluster of relations, we assume

by a law of transitivity that the same relations hold between the AW and the

TAW. (Ryan 567)

This conclusion that Ryan reaches is profound. The very nature of accessibility has shifted.

The reader’s perception of the narrative, the reader’s orientation in the world, the reader’s

complete experience of it, everything shifts. Putting it another way, it can be said that the reader

understands the narrative and the storyworld through the references the TAW makes to a world

that departs minimally from the AW, but once that whole dynamic fails to work directly, she

places herself within the mind of the character as a point of view, a reference, a habitat and an

indirect link to the AW. Despite the possible unreliability of the character, despite the

possibility that the character is being deceived by his senses or someone is playing a trick on

him, we have to rely on the character (in our case the narrator-character) to provide us with

some manner of grounded-ness in this unfamiliar setting and this extraordinary experience.

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Ryan goes on to give the example of Alice in the Wonderland, claiming that it causes

“an internal gesture of recentering” that does not let it fit in the “standard realistic novels”

because its dreamworld is “lived as a reality” instead of being “at the periphery of the textual

universe”. But since it is lived as the real world but isn’t really the lived world (since it is a

dream) it is also disparate from the “universe of fairytales” which requires the breaking of these

natural laws “in the central world of the system” (569). This means that we live through the

narrative tale as if all the broken laws have become the ‘norm’ of the narrative, but at the end

it turns out that those broken laws had a natural explanation and were only possible within the

dreamworld of Alice and their breaking does not dismantle the stability of the links between

AW and TAW. The important point to note here is that in some ways the ending of the story

changes how we perceive the stability (or lack thereof) of the storywold, but in other ways most

of the narrative has been an experience of absurdity with no natural reasoning and the ending

may be able to give a structure to the experience of absurdity but it cannot take away the

experience of absurdity itself. In addition to that, since we are focusing on the first reading of

the text, we also need to keep in mind that the reader has no indication that a natural explanation

will be given in the end. And the reader has to find the means to cope with the chaos and

absurdity for the most amount of reading. Now applying all of this to The Third Policeman, the

question of the ending arises similarly. Unlike Alice in the Wonderland however, where

absurdity in dreaming is an acceptable part of a realistic world, the narrator-character turns out

to be dead, which gives a ‘natural explanation’ of the absurdity, but absurdity in the afterlife

still does not keep it within the confines of realism, does it? Either way, it is does not matter

what genre the end causes the novel to remain in, like Alice in the Wonderland, most of the

novel has been passed in a dreamlike state, in a state of absurdity, in an extraordinary

experience of events.

Furthermore, Ryan mentions Todorov, saying that according to him “the fantastic

atmosphere arises from a hesitation between a rational and a supernatural interpretation of the

facts.” (579). She acknowledges that in common usage, the fantastic may be seen as a

“transgression” of the natural laws of AW. But according to Todorov’s definition the fantastic

is separated from the “marvelous” which may also be called the “fairy tale” in the sense that

the latter has an “epistemic homogeneity” in its world-making and “the supernatural is

spontaneously accepted as part of the TAW” whereas the “fantastic text must create an

epistemic uncertainty by making the relation AW/TAW at least temporarily undecidable with

respect to” natural laws (572). When such events arise when the character or the narrator (in

the case of The Third Policeman, the narrator-character) or the reader cannot equate the

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possible as the actual, he attempts to justify “the events… by consigning them to a peripheral

world, such as that of a dream or hallucination.” (570). Even when the natural laws are being

broken “the characters perceive the TAW as respecting these relations”. Here she mentions

only the character, but the reader is in the same league. Whatever is happening in the TAW,

the character and the reader will keep on trying to fit these incidents in the frame of the

possibilities of the AW (for the reader) and a TAW (for the character) that corresponds to the

laws of the AW until the events defy all reasonable justifications and the reader and character

are “forced to revise (their) model of reality by adhering to a dualistic ontology”. Thus, in the

beginning, “the epistemic worlds of the characters conform to the AW but conflict with the

TAW; in their final state, they are aligned with the TAW, but they deviate from the AW” (570).

This concluding sentence manages to capture the turbulence of the fantastic as an “example of

potential semantic polyvalence” but it fails to clarify what happens to the character or reader

while they are between the stages of either siding with the TAW or the AW. When the

characters are clinging to the AW but unable to come to terms with the TAW? It is important

to note here that the characters are always within the TAW, having no ontological place in the

AW. Ryan’s point is that their epistemic world does not conform to the TAW possibilities as

they turn out to be, but to the AW realm of the possible. It is because the TAW turns out to be

radically different from the AW that the characters have to revise their epistemic assumptions.

In other words, the internal world of the character is clashing with the external realities of the

storyworld that are unfolding before him. That is when he enters the realm of the uncanny or

the uncanny-fantastic, and when later in the text or in the end his internal world has aligned

with the TAW, that is when the narrative has gone into fantastic-marvelous or marvelous9. But

what about the period when neither world is accessible or grounded enough. How does the

reader deal with the ambiguity, when he is in a purely fantastic state? I shall answer these

inquiries in the next section when we look deeper into what the state of the fantastic actually

entails.

This sub-section provided certain conclusions regarding the accessibility relations that

the reader follows from the lived world (AW) to the central fictional world (TAW) and how

the reader attaches herself to the character’s consciousness in a world where the TAW becomes

ambiguous due to the uncertainty regarding its laws. The next sub-section shows a couple of

aspects of world-making relevant to our understanding of The Third Policeman.

9 We will come back to these terms in the next section.

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Unfolding of the world

In this sub-section we will look at two major aspects of world-making, the first is in regards to

the semantic unfolding of the text and the second is about the enactivist unfolding of the

storyworld.

The text and the narrative that we read do not come all at once to us. There is a certain

linearity that we must follow as one sentence reads into another and the story, characters,

storyworld unfolds10. In “Literary Dynamics: How the Order of a Text Creates Its Meanings”,

Menakhem Perry makes a case regarding the sequence that the text follows and how the

arrangement of information or events that are given to the reader impact the meaning and effect

of the whole text. He calls this process “concretization” where we arrange, rearrange and

comprehend the data given to us to keep our reading process as coherent as possible (35). He

talks about the “primacy effect” (53) which predisposes us in the favor of the early impressions

that we make while constructing the storyworld. We hold on to these early textual cues and

keep holding on to them and keep justifying them and trying to keep making sense of them

unless unavoidable contradictions arise in the text. In that situation, we follow the interpretation

that makes most sense. He states that there are two “motivations” to arrange the text in a certain

manner to gain a certain effect. Firstly, there is the model-oriented approach where such a text

is given that fulfills the criteria of classical models in storytelling that the reader is already

familiar with and then either sustains that model or deforms it according to its own intents and

purposes. Defamiliarizing a familiar structure or narrative gives the reader a false sense of

security and creates a certain reaction in the reader. While it is familiar, the reader puts certain

expectations on the text, and if the text tangents off into an unfamiliar territory and the reader

can no longer “justify the arrangement of the elements in the text by an ‘objective’ chronology”

a different “temporal ordering” needs to be arranged in “the order of consciousness” which

means that the “text conforms” to the reality that is “experienced or perceived by one (or more)

of the characters of the ‘narrated world” (38). In the case of a third person narrative where “the

narrator refers to such a character as ‘he,’ we have a ‘combined point-of-view’” which means

that “the narrator reports the occurrence while” following-either “throughout the text or some

segments of it, the sequence whereby the information was perceived by” the character. If the

character and the narrator are the same person, like in the case of The Third Policeman, and

the narrator is revealed to us as an ‘I’, this is also a “combined point of view… (where) the

10 Here we are not interested in texts that require a non-linear reading. The reading of the fantastic has to be linear to gain its effects. We will discuss this more in section 3.

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narrating ‘I’ transmits the information to the reader ‘now,’ while following the sequence in

which it had ‘once’ come to his knowledge as the experiencing ‘I’” (38). In reference to The

Third Policeman, another complication comes to light. The narrator-character seems to be

reporting the story to the reader, and he continues to retain his reporting style even after the

supernatural element has happened-in other words, after he has died. The first line of the novel

is:

Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with

my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney

because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down by giving him a great

blow in the neck with a special bicycle-pump which he manufactured himself

out of a hollow iron bar. (O’Brien 7)

Such a going back and forth of reliving an experience through storytelling is maintained

throughout the narrative: “Then something unusual happened to change all this and after it

happened, Divney and I never parted company for more than one minute either night or day.”

(13). Then he goes on to describe in what way he has been keeping a watchful eye on Divney

to the extent that he has been sleeping in Divney’s bed. This is being said before the killing of

old Mathers is narrated, even before Divney has begun slowly convincing him of becoming an

accomplice in the murder. Later her says: “I must go back several years to explain what

happened to bring about this peculiar situation.” (14). This reporting style makes sense before

he dies, he could be narrating this to someone. However, the narrator-character is also

‘presently’ aware of the supernatural event that will happen later, because he mentions an

instance regarding the conversation between him and old Mathers. Before he goes in to the

house to retrieve the black box, he has this exchange with Divney:

‘I will be back in ten minutes,’ I said.

‘Good man,’ he answered. ‘But remember this. 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. (O’Brien 21)

This ‘next time’ is a little while later when he goes into the house, finds the black box, gets

blown up and meets old Mathers in the ‘afterlife’ where he asks him about his name and he

does not seem to remember. During the second reading it is easy to assume that he forgets his

own name because of his death and it becomes a metaphor for him not existing anymore. But

since our whole analysis is dependent on the first reading, let’s look at the sequence of events

again. Our narrator-character goes into old Mathers house to retrieve the black box. He enters

the gate and goes in through a window: “I clambered through the opening and found myself,

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not at once in a room, but crawling along the deepest window-ledge I have ever seen. When I

reached the floor and jumped noisily down upon it, the open window seemed very far away

and much too small to have admitted me.” (O ‘Brien 23). This weird description is almost itself

fantastical in nature, but not really a supernatural occurrence since it could quite possibly be

an optical illusion or an unusual architecture. Upon the second reading we can be more sure of

this being an absolutely ‘normal’ discrepancy in perspective, especially since our narrator-

character has not died yet. But upon the first reading, when we do not know what will happen

next, we are suffused with an eerie feeling of the house, building on the familiar setting of an

unnatural haunted house. Full of thick “dust, musty and deserted of all furniture” (23-4),

cobwebs on the fireplace, dark and bleary: we are steadily plunged into a familiar rising dread

upon being in the house of a man recently murdered. “I had a sudden urge to have done with

my task and be out of this house forever.” (24). After this setting, the sudden presence of old

Mathers in the corner is anticipated, if not expected. There is a continuation of experience, a

foreboding given through textual cues. This is the point when he dies:

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. (O’Brien 24)

For the first reading, the reader knows something has happened, but what? Arranging the text

in this way does two things: 1) by combining this strange change with the appearance of old

Mathers’ presence, the reader is tricked into thinking that this change had something to do with

the presence of the ‘ghost’ rather than the other way round (i.e., the ghost is visible because

this change has happened), so this change could quite possibly be construed as a projection of

fear, and 2) by saying that “it had frightened me very much long before I had understood it

even slightly” tricks the reader into thinking that the narrator-character would eventually come

out of this situation, have time to deliberate about it and would “understand” the situation a

little bit. In another way, “before I understood it even slightly” could also mean before he got

his bearings right and actually saw old Mathers sitting in the corner and took some time to

absorb the situation. Either way, the reporting style of the narration does not diminish, and

keeps continuing forward, although, as we discussed earlier, the rhythm of the reporting does

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change and there are no gaps in the experience narrated to us (as compared to earlier when

years were narrated in only a few sentences).

The second approach that Perry mentions regarding the sequence of a text is “reader-

oriented” where the textual sequence is maintained and justified as a means of creating an effect

intended for the reader and does not come together structurally. In other words, “the text is

grasped as a message which is supposed to be experienced” (40) and coherence of it is unified

by means of the vivid nature of this experience, not unlike the fragmentary images and

sensations evoked by poetry. It is not to say that these two approaches or motivations cannot

be combined and can create a combined effect in terms of the structuring and construction of

the storyworld and the experience of reading. This second approach seems to be the case during

the part of the text after the supernatural event and throughout the whole ‘journey’ of the

narrator-character after he leaves old Mathers while looking for the black box. But since there

is a structure (or at least an illusion of a structure) of the narrator-character’s aim i.e., his quest

for locating the black box, that keeps the narrative intertwined even when the storyworld is

confusing. Perry also says that throughout this experience of immersion, the reader is actively

piecing information together and “linking hypotheses” in order to attain the full meaning of the

text while experiencing the narrative most vividly. As our narrator-character leaves old Mathers

place and starts his unusual journey, for the reader there is not only a hesitation between the

world of the marvelous and the world of the uncanny, but also between meaning and

experience. What is the link between meaning and experience? Is meaning a mental process of

piecing together and experience a bodily sensation of being-in-the-world? Are they on two

sides of the spectrum or on two sides of the same coin? To investigate this let’s look at a

different theory of the unfolding of the storyworld.

Marco Caracciolo proposes a completely different way of understanding a storyworld.

He believes that David Herman’s definition of storyworlds, that is, mental “models built up on

the basis of cues contained in narrative discourse” (Herman 20)11 is too vague about what these

psychological models actually mean (Caracciolo 113). The enactivist perspective says that

storyworlds are mental modes that become constructed bit by bit as readers and characters

embody the experiences of the narrative and their interaction and attention causes meaning and

the construction of a setting. The verbs and actions of the narrative cause a “motor resonance”

where the readers “internally and unconsciously enact the characters’ movements by

combining traces of their past interactions with reality.” (124) He defies the autonomous nature

11 Herman in Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative, pg 20.

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of the world (calling this world as “groundless”) because it does not incorporate the unfolding

aspect of it. Instead of the world existing as a platform for the readers to step in, it actually does

not begin to exist until the reader, with her psychological density, begins to construct it by her

engagement with the text. Caracciolo says that the whole notion of a fictional storyworld

disintegrates when we realize that it has no “ontological segregation and representational

stability”. This means that the enactivist understanding of the experience of the reader is that

the reader with her complexity and consciousness and emotions and memories embodies and

interacts with the narrative experience, but what she feels and experiences is not disparate from

her ‘normal’ emotions that she experiences in the lived world. It is like experiencing in a dream;

when we dream we presently live with those experiences even if they are in an unstable and

chaotic environment. Our basic emotions of fear, love, happiness, desire do not change. Of

course, once we have woken up from our dream we can detach these emotions as being based

on ‘reality’ or not but when we are experiencing them they are experienced just as in normal

life. These arguments do not seem to differ a lot from the ones for interactive immersion and

poetic faith. The bottom line being that there is no disparity between fictionally experiencing

and real life experiencing in the consciousness of the reader. I believe that there is a lot of

weight behind Caracciolo’s theories. I think that the reader does not step into a world, but

definitely co-creates it. But this embodiment of experience heavily depends on the nature of

the text itself. Here a hermeneutically phenomenological construction of the storyworld is

sustained by the reader following textual cues and the textual cues depending on the reader to

ascribe meaning and depth. I argue that the enactivist approach does not need to be in discord

with the construction of a storyworld especially when we understand the storyworld as a verb

or an adjective rather than a noun. The world is of course not stable, but the illusion is

maintained, and the illusion keeps us filling gaps, believing in the world, staying ‘grounded’ in

an ‘ungrounded’ space. It goes without saying, the storyworld is a manifestation of

psychological “models built up on textual cues”. It is all in the head, but the mind and the body

are not disparate. Psychological models help retain this illusion of a spatial habitat that seems

to be autonomous. Enactivism is one of the interpretive strategies that the reader maintains

depending on how the text unfolds: texts help the reader decide how to approach it and the

reader adjusts her interpretive strategies according to whichever approach provides with the

most coherency and does not disrupt the flow of experiencing the narrative. In the case of The

Third Policeman, the beginning of the narrative seems to follow a traditional model of

storytelling and for the reader the basic construction of a storyworld is fairly accessible. After

the supernatural event, when the rhythm changes, the amplitude goes near to zero, and the

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storyworld’s laws become obscure, it makes more sense for the reader to “move” in this

ungrounded space by “internally and unconsciously enacting the character’s movements” that

Caracciolo talks about (124). Thus I believe that the experience of the reader, and the approach

she uses, is dependent on the demands of the narrative, and she manages to follow these

demands through concretization.

The next sub-section will look more deeply into these “demands”: what happens when

the fantastic elements effect the (un)making of the storyworld?

Section Two: Reader in the fantastic

The reader has made a decision of willingly believing or at least suspending her disbelief, in

the face of fictionality. She gathers information as the text unfolds in front of her, as the

narrative moves forward and an illusion of a storyworld is created around her. The stage- that

is, the storyworld, is more or less set and the narrative is allowing the reader to add or cancel

aspects of this storyworld according to what is needed for the coherence of the narrative. Then,

the fantastic ensues, first threatening the foundational stability of the storyworld, then placing

contradictions, modalizations, hesistation, ambiguity, absurdity, so much so that the setting that

was working for the narrative until now, no longer works. That would not have been so much

of a problem if the text would then grant cues for the making of a different world, but the

narrative starts moving forward, committing to nothing, not giving the reader sufficient data to

decide to have a setting of a marvelous world, but infusing the narrative with enough

contradictions and confusion for the reader not to be satisfied with the previous setting of the

storyworld. In this section I will study the elements that cause the breaking of the storyworld-

the elements of the fantastic. Wang argues that postmodern fiction playfully tends to use the

feeling belonging to game-playing that Roger Caillois “ilinx” as a means of instilling chaos

and instability in their textual worlds. Ilinx here “is characterized by the… momentary

destruction of stable perceptions” and it cannot be detached from the consequential “coherence-

restoring cognitive processes” that constantly come to aid to neutralize these “disorienting

effects of play” (132). Storytelling, as an act of narration, seems intuitively a means of building

and creating, but a certain playful destruction brings about a separate set of skills in the process

of reading. Before we delve into the reader’s handling of the ilinx, let’s understand what this

ilinx is. In the case of The Third Policeman, this ilinx can also be categorized as the effects

created by the fantastic; this section will investigate these effects.

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In the The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, Tzvetan Todorov

attempts to construct a comprehensive definition and scope of the fantastic as a genre; his

theories are based on the structural nature of the text but he dwells on the thematic and linguistic

aspects as well. This section expounds on Todorov’s theories on the fantastic and aims to

understand the cognitive processes of the reader of The Third Policeman upon encountering

the supernatural. Although while analyzing the novel I do not follow a linear approach,

however, as I mentioned earlier, when I talk about the ‘reader’ of The Third Policeman I

suppose it to be the first reading of the novel, of course in a linear fashion. The fantastic depends

more on a linear reading of the text as compared to an 'ordinary' text because the fantastic

elements of the text can only be rightfully studied if the reader is not yet aware of what the

ending brings and what this hesitation will amount to. The first reading is the most important

because the second “reading inevitably becomes a meta-reading, in the course of which we

note the methods of the fantastic instead of falling under its spell” (Todorov, 90). This next

sub-section will look into the genres surrounding the fantastic so as to define the fantastic itself

along with its intended effects.

Neighboring genres, emotions and effect

Todorov’s genre categorization suggests that the fantastic is a genre between the marvelous

and the uncanny. This sub-section will look into these two genres to better understand the

qualities of the fantastic and to investigate the link between emotions and effect in terms of

these genres.

The sequence of these genres goes as follows: pure uncanny, fantastic-uncanny, pure

fantastic, fantastic-marvelous, pure marvelous. Each of these is separate from the other because

of some small but significant differences, although at times it becomes difficult to disentangle

them. Starting from the pure versions: The simplest description of these genres is that 1) the

marvelous is where the supernatural is incontestable and it is part of the world created, and 2)

the uncanny is where the supernatural has a natural explanation at some point that does not

contradict the laws of the natural world.

We already know the matter-of-fact that separates the uncanny from the fantastic: the

reasonableness of the first and the ambiguity of the second. But what is the similarity between

these two genres that makes Todorov put them next to each other. The uncanny is the literature

of horror and the grotesque within reason, but the emotion of ‘fear’ that it depends on overlaps

with the fantastic. The uncanny has to have a natural explanation at the end, or at some point

in the narrative, but the emotion of fear causes a supernatural experientiality that affects the

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whole narrative. This fear may be triggered due to the emergence of extreme but “ancient

themes linked to more or less ancient taboos” like “scenes of cruelty, delight in evil, murder…”

(48). In its “pure” form, the uncanny stays steadily within the bounds of the natural laws, but

reveals horrors that are still “incredible, extraordinary, shocking, singular, disturbing or

unexpected, and which thereby provoke in the character and in the reader a reaction similar to

that which works of the fantastic have made familiar” (46). If we pause on the instance of

murder for a second, this is just as alien an experience for most readers (in the sense of having

first-hand witnessed, committed or being attempted on) but the instinct to violence is quite

intrinsically familiar. Imagination- and a subconscious recollection of previous similar texts-

aids the reader in coming up with an automated response. The fact that our narrator-character

took part in a murder is in no way supernatural, but Divney’s ability to slowly persuade him

over some time, that we encounter in the text in only a paragraph, provides us with a feeling of

sudden dread. The pacing affects the (lack of) emotion attached to it:

I do not know exactly how or when it become clear to me that Divney, far from

seeking charity, intended to rob Mathers; and I cannot recollect how long it took

me to realize that he meant to kill him as well in order to avoid the possibility

of being identified as the robber afterwards. I only know that within six months

I had come to accept this grim plan as a commonplace of our conversation.

Three further months passed before I could bring myself to agree to the proposal

and three months more before I openly admitted to Divney that my misgivings

were at an end. (O’Brien 15-16)

Here the uncanniness is of a different nature, that of cold planning. Fear here is not a blatant

emotion, but a subtle dread for the narrator-character of the manipulative capabilities of

Divney. This dread is heightened as after the murder Divney disappears with the box for an

amount of time and the narrator-character is left with the dead body. It lingers on for the next

three years when the narrator-character keeps Divney close, a quiet distrust spreading between

the two. But the pacing of the uncanny changes when the narrator-character enters the house

of old Mathers: the fear in this situation becomes the familiar anticipation and dread of a horror

story. Even seeing the ‘ghost’ of the dead person elicits a familiar response of the expected. It

takes us into the territory of the “fantastic-uncanny” which has two sub-types: real/imaginary

(events that did not happen but we thought they happened due to “madness”, “drugs”, “dreams”

etc) and real illusory (events that did happen but there is a natural explanation for why and how

it happened in the form of “coincidences, tricks, illusions”) (45). Perhaps the sheer amount of

guilt or fear or a number of other emotions involved might be playing a trick on him. Maybe

guilt has driven him to go mad, to start hallucinating. Either way, we don’t immediately jump

into the fantastic the moment the ghost appears. There is a transition, a certain sense of

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coherence-making involved, that attempts to adhere to the narrative that has been working ‘til

now. What is not familiar though, and what causes a huge jump in the narrative, is when the

fear settles down, and the narrator-character and the dead man start having an absurd

conversation in a casual manner. What is even more unfamiliar is firstly that the narrator-

character spends a night in the same house willingly, which cancels out the horror of the

“haunted” house. Secondly, that the next day he admits that more than the fact that he was

hosted by the dead man he is sure he murdered, he is more perturbed by the fact that he doesn’t

remember his own name. Thus, it is not only the transition from reality to the hesitation of

encountering the supernatural, it is also the way in which he eventually handles this encounter.

Absurdity begins not upon encountering the supernatural, but upon the unfamiliar response of

the narrator-character. It seems that the moment the narrator-character stops being afraid, the

text suddenly becomes marvelous. But once a new day arrives, it goes into the fantastic again

since we do not yet know if the supernatural event (including the absurdity of the conversation)

was a singular event or the trend of the rest of the narrative. When he meets the man who claims

himself to be a robber and a murderer, the narrative becomes uncanny again, but this

uncanniness is not very far from the fantastic because of the absurdity of the conversation and

the outright humorous tone of the narrative. The reader continually waits for the natural

explanation, because in the absence of it the reader has to start imagining a marvelous world

then.

The genre of the marvelous is where the supernatural elements are understood

to be part of the world and are taken on matter-of-factly (54). The fairy tale genre is a type of

the marvelous, but it is not the only one12. Todorov says that the uncanny might be the feeling

without the supernatural event and the marvelous may be the event without the feeling (47).

This in effect depends so much on how the supernatural event is received. When the narrator-

character actively gets confused, frightened, worried or shows any normal emotional response

to the supernatural events, it becomes the fantastic, but when he doesn’t, it goes in the direction

of the marvelous. Here the marvelous is not only in the realm of the supernatural events, but

also in the absurdity of discourse. While our narrator-character is communing with old Mathers,

the conversation takes a philosophical turn, where the narrator-character’s emotions stop being

heightened, and he starts figuring out a way to get information about the black box. The

12 Todorov divides the marvelous into four categories: 1) hyperbolic: exaggeration of normal events, objects,

animals, people etc 2) exotic: because of geographically being in a place we are not familiar with certain things

seem extraordinary and imaginary 3) instrumental: is intended to be supernatural but can be possible in the

actual world by means of technology e.g. ali bab’s cave opens when a word is uttered 4) scientific marvelous:

shown as scientific and ‘real’ but is beyond the scope of contemporary science. (54-7)

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fantastic-marvelous is the genre closest to the fantastic because the more time passes and we

don’t get a sufficient natural explanation, and the more absurdity ensues, the more the genre

tips over to the marvelous. In the case of The Third Policeman this can be a little complicated:

strictly speaking the event of the fantastic begins when the narrator sees the dead man sitting

in front of him who he had already murdered13. Where the fantastic ends and goes into the

realm of the marvelous is a little harder to locate. The story gradually begins to go into absurdity

but the supernatural elements lessen. Perhaps that is why we can’t seem to locate the precise

point when we decide this is not ‘normal’ any more. The absurdity of discourse is not enough.

The one-dimensional building? A trick of the eyes? Confused senses? Forgetting his own

name? The presence of the soul (Joe)? The invisible prick of the needle? The box within the

box? Here the supernatural becomes the absurd, but the only way the absurd will become the

marvelous is when the narrator-character will stop thinking it is absurd. We go from

supernatural dread to a very common dread of being robbed and then a subtle but real dread of

being caught-out by the policemen and then the spiritual dread of marvelous items (the invisible

needle and the box within the box). There is a continuous enmeshing of familiar dreads and

unfamiliar dreads and even where the outward circumstances seem natural, the conversation

becomes too absurd to be a part of a ‘normal scenario’: absurdity (the talk of bicycles and the

man with no name that the narrator-character pretends is his father) and hints of

supernaturalness (the needle and the boxes) tilt us towards the marvelous but is this enough for

us to be sure? Unless the elements of supernaturalness are blatant, absurdity, no matter how

absurd, does not mean the impossible. Characters can be absurd, conversations can be absurd,

but they are not sufficient to cause a rift in the naturalness of the lived world. While the

narrator-character keeps on referring to them as “unusual policemen” (61), keeps on being

aware of the inconsistencies of the narrative, the storyworld cannot be holistically marvelous.

But it is worthy to note here that the narrator-character does not want to reveal his confusion

too much and is sort of ‘going along’ with whatever is happening. His outward calm seems

more reasonable than absurd since he is a criminal and he has things to hide and has an agenda.

His internal admittance of weird circumstances and his constant declarations that this was not

a hallucination has an effect. Instead of thinking that the narrator-character is mad, on the

contrary, (since we still are not in a marvelous world where supernaturalness and absurdity is

normal) the reader’s stance is not too far from his stance she sides with him as they try to

understand their mad surroundings. It is like the narrator-character, a sane self, has entered a

13 We are discounting the case of the deep windowsill as a possible illusion.

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mad world, because the narrator-character seems more or less the same as before (his references

to Selby solidify that idea) but the setting he is in is not aligning with his inner world. And

while this discrepancy continues to exist, the reader is unable to create a suitable setting, a

suitable storyworld, and is stuck in between.

The fantastic then is the genre in between, the genre of uncertainty, the genre of

confusion, the genre that keeps the reader wondering about what is happening. Todorov’s three

main ‘rules’ of the fantastic are: firstly, there needs to be an implied hesitation between the

natural and supernatural world; secondly, the characters could also feel this hesitation and

although this is not a definite criteria, it is more often than not part of the fantastic texts, and;

thirdly, that the text is being taken in a literal sense that is neither poetical nor allegorical (33).

We have already discussed the first category, now let’s discuss the next two.

The hesitation that we have been discussing is primarily the hesitation of the reader.

But Todorov mentions that this hesitation may also be found in the protagonist of the story.

When listing down the criteria for the genre of the fantastic, he explicitly states that the

character’s feeling of hesitation is not necessary for the fantastic effect, but it is usually found

in most fantastic texts. It is important to find that fine line when the character’s hesitation makes

the reader hesitate as well, as compared to the reader suddenly loses his trust on the character

and dismissing the whole event as the madness or unreliability of the character. It is all about

the textual cues relating to the character that the reader absorbs before the event of the fantastic

takes place. Does the character seem sane? Why would the character lie? Does it seem like the

character might be deceived in his perception and understanding of the event? All these

questions are vital but there needs to be some hesitation before the reader can confidently say

that the character is no longer reliable. Madness of the narrator or the protagonist is often used

as a means to cause “ambiguity” (37). Even the narrator himself sometimes thinks he is mad

but neither he nor the reader is certain of it (37) and madness seems too simple an explanation

for the whole events. That is why the unreliability of the narrator is at times the best interpretive

strategy according to cognitive narratologists (Nunning 30). Even if there is a slight hesitation

there, the effects of the fantastic will hold. Todorov says that it becomes even harder to question

the reliability of the character when he is the narrator as well. A narrator-character is the perfect

story-teller for the purposes of the fantastic effect. We cannot verify or “test” truth in literature

and instead we take what is said on face value, unless a contradiction emerges that we cannot

ignore and that affects the “coherence” of the whole piece. (Todorov 82-3) Todorov says that

we are predisposed to believe that a character can “lie” but a narrator will not. This of course

isn’t necessarily true but as a reader we tend to trust the narrator more than the character

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because distrusting the narrator destabilizes the structure and the heart of the storytelling. In

the case of the narrator-character, like in The Third Policeman, we begin with taking things on

face value if we have no reason to disbelieve. In the case of inconsistencies or contradictions

however, we have to entertain the possibility that our storyteller is unreliable, because he is a

character also (83-4). There are two reactions at play here: as readers want to “authenticate

what is narrated” (84) but at the same time “we seek, with him, a rational explanation for these

bizarre phenomena.” (85) The possibility of the narrator-character lying (or being unreliable)

always exists and “authors have variously exploited” this “ambiguous status” of the narrator-

character but as a reader if there is another explanation, we will look for it, even if at the back

of our mind we do not fully trust the narrator-character. This hesitation of trust and doubt for

the narrator-character, instead of downplaying the whole narrative, enhances the qualities of

the fantastic.

Now let’s discuss the third quality, that of the fantastic not to be confused with the

poetical or the allegorical. Todorov says that if the fantastic loses its effect if the “reader

questions not the nature of events, but that of the very text” (58)-in other words, if she starts to

take the textual meaning to be poetical or allegorical rather than ‘literal’. Here the word literal

can be used in two different ways, but only one of them defines the fantastic. When the word

‘literal’ is attributed with poetry it means that “the implicit Poetry is taken in semantic and

literal terms” (60) as opposed to “referential, descriptive, representative” (62). On the other

hand, if ‘literal’ is taken in terms of an opposition of the allegorical it means it is “in opposition

to figurative” (62). Allegories are explicit and are not dependent on the reader’s interpretation

thus they can’t be fantastical. (63-4) That is why the fantastic can only be found in fiction rather

than poetry or allegory. Does the reader after a while start taking the ‘world’ of the protagonist

as poetical rather than interpretative? Do we go into the realm of the allegory when we stop the

process sense-making on the literal level and find another interpretive strategy? What do things

like the cycles becoming human mean? So instead of making sense of the world that we are in

and trying to understand the laws of it we start looking at it through an allegorical approach.

Everything seems to have become a metaphor for something. Todorov then talks about subtle

allegories which he calls “Hesitating” allegories (67). This means when “the narrative whose

reader reaches a point of hesitating between the allegorical interpretation and the literal

reading.” (69) When characters stop being (or were) surprised or shocked by the sudden

supernatural elements (that are subtle but clear) we start thinking this might be allegorical. (70)

How far does the reader hesitate, and when does the reader decide that whatever is

happening in the narrative is either in the realm of the marvelous now or is allegorical. For the

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fantastic to work it needs to be both literal and fictional (75) but even if we do not know at

what point it stops having its effect, we can most surely know that by the end of the novel,

when the reader along with the narrator-character finds out that he died a long time ago and all

the supernatural elements are represented in the afterlife, the fantastic elements are ‘resolved’.

Todorov says that most fantastical texts end up resolving their elements in one way or another,

that is either coming up with a natural explanation or falling fully in the marvelous category.

He says that even though after either of these two situations has happened and the narrative

stops being fantastic, the whole text is still considered within the genre of the fantastic because

the “unity” of the text should not come between the diagnosis of the fantastic and that we can

look at particular parts of the text in “isolation” because most works find some kind of

resolution at the end and so if we look at the works as a whole most of the works that we deem

as fantastic would leave this genre. Thus the fantastic needn't be dependent on the end of the

story because it is the journey and the effect that it leaves in the reader that is important. (42-

3) Furthermore, we are not concerned in attempting to fit the novel within the genre, instead

we are more interested in looking at the qualities – and more importantly, the effect – that the

fantastic produces on the reader14. In essence, the fantastic is less of a genre and more of an

effect and it uses the heightened sense of emotions for “the creation of a specific impression”

as H. P. Lovecraft puts it (34). The whole genre depends on the ability of the narrative to create

a state of emotional sensitivity where the senses observe the dichotomy between the real and

the unreal. The next sub-section will discuss the effects the fantastic creates through a stylistic

device and its themes.

Modalization and blurring of boundaries

In this sub-section we will discuss two aspects that Todorov believes are intrinsic to the effect

of the fantastic. One is what Todorov calls as a stylistic device and another is what he refers as

the themes of the fantastic.

Starting with the former, Todorov talks about a stylistic device that lets ambiguity seep

into the text—and within the subconsciousness of the reader—long before any supernatural

event actually takes place: “modalization”. (38) According to Todorov this stylistic device

keeps the reader “in both worlds at once” (38). But I think they keep the reader on the bridge

which has the qualities of both worlds as well as of none. The reader is not on solid ground,

she is constantly in transition, trying to make her way back and forth and not ready yet to be

14 For further inquiry in genre-making, read Todorov’s Genres in Discourse.

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certain of the way. If we only look at the time of the first supernatural incidence, these are the

modalizations I find:

…the open window seemed very far and much too small to have admitted me.

(O’Brien 23)

It was as if the daylight had changed… as if the temperature of the

evening had altered… as if the air had become twice as rare…perhaps all of

these and other things happened together for all my senses were bewildered…

(24)

Such a conception, possibly with no foundation at all in fact, disturbed me

agonizingly and gave rise in my mind to interminable speculations… (26)

… perhaps it was his twin brother… (26)

Perhaps the murder by the roadside was a bad dream. (27)

Here modalization means that if these italicized terms were not added, “we should be plunged

into the world of the marvelous” with more surety (Todorov 38). These terms give hints of

uncertainty and textual cues that make the experience hesitate between subjectivity and

unreliability. But then even the times when the narrator-character seems to be sure of his

observations or decisions, those also create ambiguity since they outwardly contradict; like the

“fact” that he gives a detailed observation of old Mathers being present in the corner and

concludes after debating with his soul (who he calls with the name of “Joe”) that he is sure that

“He was the man I had murdered beyond all question” (26). These contradictions cause the

emergence of things that he does not understand, but either ignores them or decides to react to

them in a certain way in order to create an illusion of normalcy:

I decided in some crooked way that the best thing to do was to believe what my

eyes were looking at rather than to place my trust in a memory. I decided to

show unconcern, to talk to the old man and to test his own reality by asking

about the black box which was responsible, if anything could be, for each of us

being the way we were. I made up my mind to be bold because I knew I was in

great danger. I knew that I would go mad unless I got up from the floor and

moved and talked and behaved in as ordinary a way as possible. (27)

And then later, after successfully engaging in a conversation with old Mathers, he thinks: “It

meant that my mind had got to grips with his, that I was now almost arguing with him and that

we were behaving like two ordinary human being.” (29) His contradictions, his constant going

back and forth, the constant usage of words like “unusual” and the constant sense that the

narrator-character finds the situation just as absurd but is trying to stick with things that make

sense and creating order in chaos, makes the reader follow the workings of the narrator-

character. Thus, this means that while modalization creates multiple possibilities that the reader

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is not equipped to choose from, the narrator-character through a process of reasoning decides

a certain path, a certain reaction, and the narrative and the reader follow that.

Moving on to the latter part of this sub-section, according to Todorov, since the fantastic

can have a range of themes, it is pointless to suppose that any theme is better than the other or

is more applicable to the fantastic. But if we look at themes not as themes of the genre but

rather of the feeling that the genre creates then we do have certain elements that are seen more

than others. One of them is the blurring of boundaries between distinct elements. This could

mean the blurring of two genres and the blurring of two worlds, but it also means the blurring

of the external and the internal. There is a loosening of mind and matter; previously they lived

separately and had different functions for the reader but now ideas and thoughts and the mental

lived space has become the ‘real’ space. “The supernatural begins the moment we shift from

words to the things these words are supposed to designate” (113) and “...the transition from

mind to matter has become possible” (114). This could also mean the transition “between idea

and perception” (115). This means that the inner world is being projected on the outer world,

and it goes to such an extreme that the inner world then becomes the outer world, but for the

reader the transition, although strange, is still coherent enough since they are familiar with the

inner world of the character and through the character's emotions and thoughts, the reader is

following from one world to the other. What was merely a thought has now through perception

become ‘visible’. Normally how we perceive a situation is also a union of our inner world and

the outer reality/world. But when the inner world takes over there is no limit to what the outer

reality can achieve. This “collapse of limits between matter and mind was considered,

especially in the nineteenth century, as the first characteristic of madness”. (115) This

confusion between “perception and imagination” (115) is what keeps the hesitation alive and

the triumph of the imagination over the perception stabilizes the world of absurdity. There is a

certain opening up of the possibilities and one person can suddenly become “several persons -

here the impression will be incarnated on the level of physical reality” (116) “Another

consequence of the same principle has still greater extension: this is the effacement of the limit

between subject and object. The rational schema represents the human being as a subject

entering into relations with other persons or with things that remain external to him, and which

have the status of objects. The literature of the fantastic disturbs this abrupt separation... We

look at an object - but there is no longer any frontier between the object, with its shapes and

colors, and the observer.” (116-7) In The Third Policeman the objects that had a certain

meaning, like the black box or the broken bicycle of the protagonist (due to which he walks to

old Mathers to retrieve the black box) no longer have the same meaning once the storyworld

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has fallen apart (after the supernatural event i.e. after the protagonist dies): the objects after the

fantastic effect are different, like the needle of the policeman or the bicycles that appear to have

consciousness. “The physical world and the spiritual world interpenetrate; their fundamental

categories are modified as a result. The time and space of the supernatural world, as they are

described in this group of fantastic texts, are not the time and space of everyday life. Here time

seems suspended, and it extends beyond what one imagines to be possible” (118).

In this section I highlighted the effects of the fantastic elements in The Third Policeman

that cause a destabilization of the storyworld. The emotions of the narrator-character play an

important part in sustaining the narrative and keep the reader grounded.

Section Three: Reader in consciousness

The reader has willingly set her mind to believe, to immerse with poetic faith, to interact in the

construction of the storyworld and then has faced the ilinx of the fantastic elements. I have tried

to show how the whole effect of the fantastic is maintained because the narrator-character

remains confused about the goings-on of this new and strange world he is in and his confusion

keeps us from deciding that this is a marvelous world. Here we see how important the fictional

mind is in deciding the nature of the storyworld and to understand this better I will look more

deeply into fictional minds and what it means for the reader to take refuge in them. Moreover

we will see how emotions become bridges that we hesitate on. In the first sub-section we

understand the fictional mind and how it relates to the concept of experientiality for the reader.

In the second sub-section we see how a fictional mind can become a possible world, and how

that ‘world’ is needed in The Third Policeman for the reader to anchor herself in.

Fictional mind and the reader’s experience

Although the name of the book is Fictional Minds, Palmer succeeds in composing an array of

research on real minds over the decades. Since not much work had been done on fictional minds

prior to his work, he tends to derive theories from a number of different approaches such as

narratological, cognitive and linguistic, and connects them through the readers’ intuitive

abilities of coherence and sense-making from their understanding of real minds. In this

subsection I will attempt to understand what a character’s fictional mind means and how it

relates to the reader’s experience of the narrative. In the case of The Third Policeman, the

fictional mind we are concerned with is the narrator-character’s fictional mind and the way he

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handles to the discrepancies between the epistemic world he has assumed and the reality he is

experiencing, that is, his internal world and his external world. The reader’s experience of the

narrative is completely dependent on the narrator-character after the effects of the fantastic,

and so she waits for him to guide the way.

A character or a “character-system” is one of the major components of “narrative

worldness” that depends on two features: one is the space that the character maintains in the

text, that is, “the number of pages devoted to any character”; second, the amount of

“characterological access” granted to the reader (Hayot 155)15. We can see the narrator-

character of The Third Policeman in two ways: one of these ways is to see him through his

actions, the way the ‘rest of the world’ sees him and judge him according to what he does and

what he doesn’t do, quite like how we spend our lives trying to “decode accurately the behavior

of others” (Palmer 10). In that case he is an orphan, an academic, an owner of a farm, a

murderer. But then we also have an insight into what he is thinking and the thinking that goes

in between his actions and his discourse; that is where all the real drama is happening in the

case of this novel. We are shown both the stage and the backstage and we piece both of them

together to try to understand what is happening. The more we find out that the narrator-

character finds the unusual things unusual, the more we trust him. His going along with the

absurd events (even when he finds them absurd) is at times confusing if we think about his

behavior objectively but we know from before that he has a passive-aggressive tendency

towards external triggers, for example, him thinking that it would be good if Divney got

married and went away, but he doesn’t kick Divney out by himself although technically he has

the authority. If the reader was not made aware of the narrator-character’s inner life, his

behavior would certainly not be enough to understand the narrative. Especially after the

fantastic elements take over, and the storyworld is confusing, his mind is what helps the reader

orient herself while observing the spiraling of the story into absurdity.

Here I will not go deeply into the broad and highly controversial question of the

character’s function in the storyworld but I will briefly summarize the connection between a

character and the experientiality of the storyworld16. The idea of experientiality was first

properly introduced by Monika Fludernik: she claims that narrativity and experientiality are

intricately linked so much so that narrativity is actually experientiality17. Without

15 He takes this concept from Alex Woloch in The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the

Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003),17. 16 For further insight into the debates surrounding ‘Character’ see Fotis Jannidis’ essay “Character” in the living

handbook of narratology. 17 Marco Caracciolo’s essay “Experientiality” in the living handbook of narratology.

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experientiality a text has “zero narrativity” like factual summaries and reports. This

experientiality is what defines narrativity and narrativity is the “representation of character’s

experiences” (5). This claim seems perhaps too extreme: the character’s experiences are what

give us a medium but I am not sure if that is what narrativity completely is. Having said that, I

do understand that events, unless experienced by someone, have no meaning. “It is difficult to

imagine a narrative that consisted entirely, for example, of descriptions of natural events in

which no person was present to experience those event” and these events become experiences

once there is a character to ascribe meaning to them (Palmer 30). Palmer says that “events

cause or are caused by mental states and mental episodes” (30). Here the question of these

mental states comes in: do characters have mental states? Characters are fictional, they exist

within the folds of the text, within the folds of the reader’s mind. It sounds absurd that they

would have a mind of their own. But in that case, the very existence of the character is absurd.

Like the illusion of the character, the illusion of its mind is also a necessary one to construct,

to imagine, to believe in, in order to understand the intricate details of the character’s

contribution in the storyworld. The best way of understanding a character is as a non-actual

individual classified by Margolin: “The character as a non-actual being who exists in a possible

world and who can be ascribed physical, social, and mental properties” (38). These mental

properties, or the “inclusive use of the term mind embraces all aspects of our inner life: not just

cognition and perception, but also dispositions, feelings, beliefs, and emotions” (19). Ascribing

“personhood” to characters, being capable of giving them an interiority, giving them the depth

of a consciousness, is both the work of the text and the reader, a sort of a “necessary

cooperation” needed for the construction of this illusion. The reader will create links between

the textual information given about the character and construct a schema of his inner

consciousness. The reader has to connect the dots and fill in the gaps to create a dynamic and

holistic version of the character they encounter in the text: a lack of a complete consciousness

would break the illusion of a “convincing” character which would inevitable effect the nature

of the reader’s experientiality (43). In order to comprehend the inner forces that drive the

narrative plot or design, as a reader we have to imagine that the mind of the fictional character

has the same basic design as a real mind especially in terms of its processing, adapting and

growing nature (90).

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Consciousness as a ‘ground’ and emotions as bridges

Dolozel says that according to “the viewpoint of the reader, the fictional text can be

characterized as a set of instructions according to which the fictional world is to be recovered

and reassembled”18 (Dolozel 489). But what happens when this fictional world, that is, this

storyworld refuses assembly for some time in the narrative? What happens when the reader can

no longer be in either world, (the marvelous or the uncanny), but needs to go back and forth

between both worlds? That is when the reader needs a bridge, a temporary solid ground to

anchor herself in while the storyworld becomes clearer and more solid. In this sub-section we

will discuss how the narrator-character’s mind is the perfect place for the reader to take refuge

in the crumbling setting of the storyworld.

While talking about the fantastic in section three we discussed how one of its themes is

the blurring of boundaries. Minds are more forgiving to logical contradictions, and it is easier

to entertain the possibilities of impossibilities while we are in the confines of the mind.

Realism, imagination, possibilities, all of these aspects can become intermingled within the

mind. Whatever can be thought of has the possibility to exists within the folds of the mind. So

in this space the nature of hesitation changes. We are in a world where the literal and the

allegorical, the real and the imaginary, the possible and the impossible all co-exist. But how

can the mind be a possible world, or even just a world? Let’s come back to the question that

“how do readers comprehend fictional texts sufficiently to be able to enter the storyworld that

is described in the text?” (Palmer 33). Dolezel thinks that the process of reading entails the

reader to access “the target domain” (that is, “the storyworld”) from “the source domain” (that

is, the lived world), “through semiotic channels” that infuses the fictional experiences as a part

of the reader’s reality thus canceling the barriers of ontological segregation. Palmer thinks that

these semiotic channels that in the first place cause this accessibility occur due to “the reader’s

understanding of the workings of characters’ minds” (34).

In the case of The Third Policeman, the fictional mind of the narrator-character is not

only one of the elements of the narrative, but actually the element of the narrative that sustains

it after the fantastic elements disintegrate the stability of the storyworld. When I say that the

reader infuses their consciousness to the narrator-character’s consciousness I do not mean that

the reader identifies with the character. No, it simply means that the reader sees through the

narrator-character’s eyes and experiences what he feels, making him the medium for the

narrative flow; moreover, the reader pauses their co-construction of the storyworld and instead

18 “Mimesis and Possible Worlds” Poetics Today 1988, pg 489.

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gives the complete reigns to the narrator-character. The same way that the reader does that she

can simultaneously also locate the narrator-character within the world but more often than not

she is sitting within the character’s mind and that is her “world”. The fluid nature of

worldedness, and its quality of totality work as an illusory setting for the reader to anchor

themselves in. The consciousness of the fictional mind may not be a storyworld on its own, but

a gateway, and the reader is able to anchor herself within this setting. The very essence of

constructing the storyworld is to not having to think about the context or the setting of where

the narrative is happening so that it becomes easier to fill in the gaps and the storyworld

continues to ‘exist’ in the background. A storyworld in the background helps the reader to

understand certain rules and rhythms and to fill in the gaps of the narrative. The same can be

applied to the consciousness of the fictional mind. A fictional mind can be autonomous and

complete, in the same illusory sense that a storyworld can be, and the fictional consciousness

can be a world of its own. It helps the reader to experience, understand, and remain in the

narrative journey and it makes the experience seamless.

To understand more, let’s look at the trajectory of the evolution of the fictional mind:

When the narrator-character leaves old Mathers’ place, he starts off by wondering about this

sudden forgetfulness of his own name that is “at best alarming, a sharp symptom that the mind

is in decay” but his emotions, “the unexplainable exhilaration” that his surroundings trigger,

make him want to go along with whatever is happening with light hearted humor (43). When

he meets the robber, he decides that the “wisest thing to do” is to simply “agree with everything

he said” (48). The same happens when he is sitting with the policemen: he decides to be careful

about what he reveals to the policemen and to be “cunning” in order to get what he wants (57).

After he sees the absurd direction their conversation keeps going to, he comes to the conclusion

“without hesitation that it was a waste of time trying to understand the half of what he said,”

and so he sticks to his “inquiry” that would lead him to find his black box (63). Interestingly,

on the other side of the conversation, the policemen also find everything that he says quite

absurd and extraordinary, especially when it relates to bicycles and consider him to be “a queer

far-fetched man” (69). But this gap between their minds starts to become lesser and lesser: as

Sergeant MacCruiskeen begins to philosophize, the narrator-character starts feeling that he is

perhaps talking about something so genius that he himself should pretend to understand in

order to seem “like a wise person” (70) and “big and learned and far from simple” (68). As the

conversation goes on, he starts to follow the workings of the Sergeant’s mind and tries to “speak

his own language” (73) so much so that his mind becomes full “with wonder at the skill of the

policeman” (75). He is shaken after his encounter with MacCruiskeen but is still “determined

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to pretend that everybody was an ordinary person like” himself (77). After that he goes with

Sergeant Pluck to go investigate regarding the stolen bicycle and Sergeant Pluck tells him about

the “Atomic Theory” which is taking over the town: people, due to constant use of bicycles,

are absorbing the qualities of bicycles and bicycles are becoming more human. Here the

narrator-character begins asking questions in his “extreme simplicity”, like a student trying to

fathom and adapt to his new realities (81). He realizes that this constant exposure to such ideas

is causing a “great strain” on his mind and he starts fearing “to look at some things in case they

would have to be believed” (84). Eventually, he looks around and thinks: “The scene was real

and inconvertible and at variance with the talk of the Sergeant, but I knew that the Sergeant

was talking the truth and if it was a question of taking my choice, it was possible that I would

have to forego the reality of all the simple things my eyes were looking at” (O’Brien 89). Here

it is important to note that there is still a discrepancy between the narrator-character’s

understanding about the world and the other characters’ understanding of the world, but the

narrator-character has begun to be persuaded by the Sergeant’s way of thinking by foregoing

his own idea of reality. This is a step in the acceptance of a new reality-a new storyworld with

a different reality. Not much later it becomes clear that the narrator-character has become

affected by this reality and in one way or another has internalized it, when the Sergeant informs

him that this atomic theory not only works between people and their bicycles but also between

other things we come in contact with often, even things like roads. After listening to this the

narrator-character starts “walking nimbly and lightly” on the road to reduce these effects

(O’Brien 93). I think after this point the passivity of the narrator-character grows more and the

inner discrepancy between the narrator-character’s inner world and the “reality” he sees around

him becomes lesser and lesser. I cannot claim that this discrepancy completely goes away,

since it does emerge at different points of the narrative but there is no active confusion enough

to sustain the tension of the fantastic. Instead, a basic structure of a marvelous storyworld is

constructed, where the narrator-character may still be surprised or shocked by the supernatural

elements, but it is no longer a confusion whether those supernatural elements exist or not. The

narrator-character does not gain entry into this new storyworld directly, but through the minds

of the “natives” of this storyworld. Likewise, we gain access to these storyworlds through his

mind and his connection to other fictional minds whose inner selves are congruent with the

outer realities of this new storyworld. The reader’s ability to adapt and recenter according to

the situation is the height of human intelligence. (Palmer 89) In the case of The Third

Policeman, our consciousness, which helps us to “adapt intelligently to our environment” (89)

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attaches itself to the narrator-character, who himself adapts and attaches his own consciousness

with the policemen. Let’s try to understand more how this happens.

Jan Alber in “Logical Contradictions, Possible Worlds Theory, and the Embodied

Mind” talks about encountering logical incompatibilities in a text. It does not matter whether

the fictional world is possible or impossible, but we interpret it experientially. (160) Our

emotions help us deal with matters our minds cannot comprehend. Logical compatibilities are

destabilizing, destructive, confusing, but they are also a means of enhancing the reader’s

abilities of sense-making (159). How we respond emotionally to these logical incompatibilities

defines our “first orientation” or our “proto-interpretation” (161) because cognition and

emotion are closely linked, and emotions are the most natural reactions of embodied

experience. These emotions “color” perceptions and can overtake the whole “mood” and “tone”

of an experience (Palmer 19-20). In The Third Policeman, emotions are quite tricky because

especially in the part before the supernatural element occurs, the emotions are subdued. But

“even stories that are written in a flat emotional style often use this stylistic device to heighten

the emotion” (117) and The Third Policeman uses that strategy. Emotions bridge the gap

between us and the character by the means of familiarity. The feeling of familiarity is the most

“pervasive features of ordinary conscious awareness” (101), and the familiarity of emotions

plays an even important role after the destabilizing effects of the fantastic. The familiarity of

consciousness is not the familiarity of the external surroundings, but a deep intuitive quality of

the self, “an inner sense of what it feels like to be me, a feeling of myself” (Searle 133-4). This

inner sense orients the reader in his experience of the fictional mind, his tone, his peculiarities,

his emotions: this is what keeps the reader oriented in an unfamiliar encounter. So here the

reader is, on the bridge, not being able to go to the previous storyworld of realism and the

uncanny, and not being able to cross over into the world of the marvelous or the allegorical.

The reader stays with the narrator-character because they are both in the same situation of

trying to understand the “reality” of what they are experiencing. In addition, the narrator-

character is making the rules, deciding how to react, how to proceed, what to believe in, what

to disregard, what to ignore. And while the narrator-character tries to make sense of his

experience, he observes and narrates that experience. The reader has access to his fears, his

anxieties, his memories, his thoughts; she takes refuge in his consciousness. The most powerful

aspect of him that keeps the reader’s experientiality alive is his emotions, and the constant and

necessary use of them, because the fantastic relies on a heightening of emotion to sustain its

effect. And so these emotions become the most stable and coherent ground beneath the reader’s

feet. Until the reader has made a basic structure of this new world, and the narrator-character

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has decided to believe in the absurd, his emotions keep the reader anchored. For the reader the

experience of reading is not as jarred or fragmentary as it seems while we attempt to analyze

and categorize these stages. The reader’s conscious experience come together as a “unified

sequence” (100). The active reading that causes all these changes of keeping up with new

information while dealing with the text is what makes the experience so novel. The mind of

the fictional character, his consciousness, has an illusive totality to it, the same that the

storyworld creates. The emotions of the narrator-character make the transition from the external

space of the storyworld into the consciousness of the fictional mind much easier. The reader’s

mind integrates with the mind of the fictional character in order to have a sense of a coherent,

comprehensive experience of the narrative. “Emotions, cognitions, goals, action, context, and

so on, they all flow into one another until, as Pinker and Damasio argue, the distinctions are

difficult to maintain” (117). Emotions cause a depth of consciousness that creates experience

instantaneously. Every narrative has its own demands. In the case of The Third Policeman the

demands of the text are to fuse the consciousness of the narrator-character with your own in

order to experience the narrative journey. This experience entails placing yourself in the most

ideal and stable position so as to maintain the coherence of the narrative despite its turbulent

and shifting elements.

I would like to end my argument by an alternate summary of The Third Policeman- a

summary of the narrative experience of the reader:

Before the reader begins the act of reading, she makes a decision to believe. This

believing is related to deciding. During the process of reading however, she does not need to

decide to believe again, this is when the poetic faith takes place. During reading if she actively

decides to believe it means that she is aware of the fictionality and trying to move past it. To

engage with the narrative she needs to enter that dream state, that active and passive state, that

interactive and observational state. Fictionality and narrativity takes her into a dimension where

the experience she is going through is ‘real’ while she is in it. It has lingering effects too, like

the lingering effects of dreams upon waking up, but then she can analyse, categorize, reflect on

them. During reading she is experiencing them. The same way that she brings this energy of

engagement to the text, the narrativity of the story provides her with this experientiality. For

this narrativity to work, and for the embodiment of this experience, the illusion of a world is

created, a world where fictionality ‘exists’ and the narrative can ‘happen’. Of course, this world

is a mental construction, something the reader, through the textual cues of the narrative, builds

up. Once this world has been created sufficiently, stable enough for the narrative to proceed,

this world goes into the background. It has actually always been in the background, but its

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construction has been happening instantly as the narrative goes on. But once a basic structure

has been put up, the reader can add or substract from this storyworld according to what the

narrative needs. This world according to the minimal departure principle, is as close to the

actual world as the narrative allows. But even if the world is completely like the actual world,

every realism has its own flavor, its own mood, its own expectations and boundaries. If the

reader enters this world with the narrator-character, she knows the world through his eyes, but

with her own eyes as well. She understands how he must have felt being an orphan, not just

through his own observations but her own understanding of loss and abandonment. She brings

her own understanding, her own awareness, her own world-making into the narrative and

confidently fills in the gaps made by the narrative. Even in regard to characterization, she

makes value-judgements, understands the dynamics and follows the character’s journey

confidently enough, letting the narrative lead, and where the narrative does not wish to give

her the necessary information, she makes intelligent guesses. Then an event occurs, that does

not pertain with the laws of the natural world, the lived world, the world that she has been

taking references from to co-build this storyworld. Such an encounter shakes the basic

foundation of world-making, and she is not sure about a lot of her assumed realities. She

follows the text more closely, looks for clues, tries to keep the world beneath her feet from

completely disintegrating. She switches to maximal departure, expecting all possibilities, but

even so, not being sure enough does not allow her to fill gaps anymore, make assumptions

anymore. She is no longer the co-creator of this storyworld, because there is no storyworld to

be sure of in the first place. Even when she makes assumptions, she does so weakly, and she

cannot predict how the narrative world will unfold. But she is not completely left hanging. She

goes down to the basics, of things she can be sure about, and that is the narrator-character. The

storyworld has shifted but he is yet familiar, because he is just as bewildered by this shifting

storyworld as she is. The state of chaos and disintegration that she is left with becomes less

chaotic when she focuses on the here and the now, and the here and the now is that he is afraid,

confused, terrified for his life. No world-making of the past, no world-making of the future is

needed to experience the present emotional state of the narrator-character. Even in “normal”

texts, storyworlds are subjected to changes as the reading process continues and the epistemic

assumptions that the reader makes in the beginning may have completely altered by the end of

the narrative. But these changes happen slowly, gradually, and the reader can retain here

grounding in those cases. But when complete chaos ensues, a complete contradiction, what can

she do? Is that a ghost? Did old Mathers die in the first place? Is this a trick being played on

the narrator-character? And then she keeps on losing further grounding as she does not have

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enough evidence to simply co-construct the realm of the marvelous, because the narrator-

character is not ready to accept it yet. He is questioning everything, getting confused, sticking

to the laws of the natural world while acknowledging that he is experiencing these new natural

laws. The reader does not have the capacity to decide how the narrator-character should

proceed. The narrator-character and the reader, they are in the same boat in terms of their

confusion. The reader does not know what world to create unless the narrative goes forward

and gives her some more clues. But for now, she follows the narrator-character as he makes

decisions. He decides to talk to the ‘ghost’ while laying aside his disbelief at him being there.

The reader allows this contradiction to stay on the side, just like he has. She suspends her

disbelief with him and just goes along, “just” experiencing. He reflects, while she listens and

he leads while she follows, until he decides to focus finding the black box despite the confusion

of his surroundings. Here the narrator-character has set an intention for the narrative. She still

does not know what storyworld she is in, but she follows his intention and they move on. He

finds a robber, makes a friend. He listens to the whole conversation, piecing clues, finding very

little hints as to the nature of the world they are in. Nothing supernatural occurs but the

conversation goes into absurdity, and the reader still does not know enough to be able to

construct a world in the background. The whole narrative stays in the foreground as he goes to

the police barracks. He admits to himself that the architecture of the building seems unnatural

and that he is afraid by it. Inside the building, he feels something is unusual but he has no

evidence, and so the reader has no evidence of anything supernatural. He meets the first

policeman and they have absurd conversations. He meets the second policeman, and then he is

shown the needle that goes into invisibility and the box within a box. He gets rattled by the

existence of such objects. Can these things can happen? Is this within the realm of the possible

or is this truly impossible? Before there is time to decide, he goes out with the first policeman

and they try to find the missing bicycle. He has stopped expecting a following of normal rules,

instead he is trying to understand the rules of this new world and the reader follows his lead.

As he starts “believing” the Sergeant, piece by piece the reader creates a wobbly structure of a

world that has marvelous elements in it. And thus, she has crossed the bridge. What has this

bridge been? The mind of the narrator-character, his emotions, fears, thoughts, musings,

decisions, this has been her passage. After that she still doesn’t have enough information to

create a solid marvelous world, because she knows less about objects. The reader’s construction

of this new world is on the basis of absurd conversations, and absurdity becomes the new

normal. She may interpret this absurdity on the level of the metaphorical, on the level of the

non-literal, as philosophical discourses, whichever, but the interpretive strategy that she needs

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to maintain is purely experiential. Taking one step at a time, letting the narrative proceed, not

trusting too deeply in the storyworld, and letting the narrator-character decide the course of the

narrative.

Conclusion

My premise is that the narrative of The Third Policeman follows a structure that causes the

reader to shift her interpretive strategy radically. The storyworld that the narrative creates in

the beginning falls apart during the instance of the fantastic. In order to handle the hesitation,

that does not allow a model of a storyworld to remain standing, the reader attaches her

consciousness with the consciousness of the narrator-character and this helps her stay anchored

in the narrative while this turbulence of the fantastic lessens and she is able to co-construct a

basic marvelous storyworld that may sustain the rest of the narrative. The fantastic is an effect

that causes ilinx but it is also heavily dependent on the use of emotions such as fear and

confusion. The reader, through the process of concretization uses the familiarity of these

emotions in the unnatural narrative and gains access to the fictional consciousness which helps

her to cross over to the marvelous world once the narrator-character has decided to be

persuaded by the reality of this new storyworld.

The construction of a storyworld is a collaborative process manifested by the interactive

energy between the reader and the text; this allows the illusion of totality and amplitude to be

maintained in the storyworld to serve as a setting for the narrative to follow. The reader

manages to co-construct the storyworld by means of its accessibility to the lived world, also

known as the actual world. But in the narratives that do not let the relations between the AW

and TAW persist, the reader has to attach her consciousness to the character’s consciousness

(the narrator-character in the case of The Third Policeman) even if she finds him unreliable,

because at least she will be able to maintain some sense of the experience by doing this. The

reader of The Third Policeman follows the interpretive strategy of concretization in order to

retain the coherency of the narrative. Since the novel starts with what seems to be a traditional

model, it is easier for her to construct a basic storyworld based on the principle of minimum

departure and does not need extensive details from the text. However, as the narrative

introduces elements of the fantastic that make it impossible for the reader to decide whether

the storyworld is marvelous or uncanny, she switches to the enactivist approach that aids her

to attach her consciousness to the narrator-character who becomes the decision-maker of the

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flow of the narrative. Until he “decides” to believe in the marvelous elements of the text and

accept them as real, the reader is unable to create a marvelous storyworld and unable to “go

back” to the uncanny storyworld since too many unavoidable contradictions have arisen. The

fantastic elements create three-fold effects: firstly, as mentioned before, they do not allow a

steady construction of a fictional storyworld, secondly, they heighten the emotional sensitivity

of the narrative due to their dependence on the emotional effect, and thirdly, they create a

blurring of boundaries. The last effect makes it easier for the reader to take refuge in the

consciousness of the fictional mind because the mind allows the co-existence of contradictions.

The second effect makes the emotions of the narrator-character as a steady pathway for

bridging the gap not only between the mind of the narrator-character and the reader, but also

between the narrator-character and the “natives” of the new storyworld- the storyworld that he

and the reader both have been trying to gain accessibility to. These emotions are a reliable

ground for the reader because as the narrator-character starts accepting and believing in the

marvelous elements of the story and the tensions between the real and the unreal are lessened,

the reader is able to fathom some basic rhythms of this marvelous world that allow the existence

of absurdity. Thus, the reader’s experience seems seamless, unitary and grounded rather than

jarring or fragmented despite the uprooting effects of the fantastic.

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