Intertextuality and Parody of Law in The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien: a Literary and a Linguistic Reading

This essay aims to provide a dual reading of Flann O’Brien’s novel The Third Policeman: a literary one, centred on the multifarious references to famous works by authors such as Sterne, Gide, Dostoevsky and Kafka, and a linguistic one, in which the intertextual game is sought in the language of legal texts, particularly those belonging to the Irish tradition. While Patrizia Nerozzi explores the interplay with literary genres, motifs and narrative patterns, Mara Logaldo’s analysis identifies wordplays and other recurring rhetorical strategies, focusing on the typical traits of Irish and Legal English. Both studies concentrate on the parody of law that permeates the text: while the literary reading highlights the complex declinations of nonsense within this novel vis-à-vis other literary texts, the linguistic analysis shows to what extent Flann O’Brien exploits the idiosyncrasies of legal language to build up, with words, his architecture of absurdity, his fable of law.