Wooden Legs

[Jozanny]

I am always quick to note anything about disabled characters in literature, and I am about 1/3 of the way through Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, which I researched when I still cared about Lost, and then purchased when I joined The Forum Bookclub.

My initial reaction was I am glad I don't write when I'm drunk:D, but, bearing in mind I am not quite finished reading it yet, are there any Irish cultural afficionados on the network who can tell my why they think wooden legs figure so prominently in the story?

Moby Dick immediately sprang to mind. Black box=white whale. Nameless damned protagonist=Ahab condemned by his own obsession. Seems a little too pat.

Any fans have another take on this?

[Virgil]

I haven't read that book Jozy but I have read Moby Dick. I think a fabulous research thesis could be done on the theme of disability throughout literature. I'm sure some criticism exists. You know Ahab is not the only major literary character to have a wooden leg. Robert Lewis Stevenson Treasure Island has a pirate with a wooden leg. I forget his name.

[kasie]

..... Robert Lewis Stevenson Treasure Island has a pirate with a wooden leg. I forget his name.

A-arrgh, that would be old Long John Silver himself, Jim lad.


(Sorry, I was married to West Countryman who could out-do Robert Newton in phony pirate accents - a-haaa, so indeed 'e could, me 'andsomes.....Not only that but he was a seaman with a rolling gait and a snowy white beard and he looked as if he might have knocked back a tot or two of rum with Long John himself. :) )

[Jozanny]

Wow, here I am digging up one of my old threads now :), but it is because I wanted to mention that I think Flann O'Brien modeled The Third Policeman on G.K. Chesterton, whose novels I am only now just exploring. The two men lived at least a generation apart, but Chesterton's small novella, The Man Who Was Thursday, could nearly be O'Brien's dystopia twenty years earlier.

I am both pleased and disenchanted that I remain befuddled by both works. I went back to Donoghue's introduction to TTP to get his Frye citation on Menippean forms:


...the novel sees evil and folly as social diseases, the Menippean satirist sees them as diseases of the intellect, as a kind of maddened pedantry.

While I have a handle on Swift and Voltaire, I cannot say the same for G.K. or O'Brien.

Not yet, in any case. Social structures need some kind of order, and if Chesterton mocks the anarchist and the law both--in the late empire, and O'Brien mocks? the imposition of Anglo-Saxon materialism? what do they want by way of replacement?

It is accentuating my mild headache this morning... :)