LIERARY CRITICISM: Beckett and Ireland,edited by Sean Kennedy, Cambridge University Press: A stimulating collection of essays explores the importance of Samuel Beckett's Anglo-Irish heritage to his work, writes GERALD DAWE
IN THIS FASCINATING collection of 10 essays, introduced by editor Seán Kennedy, history dominates the unpredictable realities of Samuel Beckett's life as a writer who was born and brought up in Ireland during the early decades of the last century. And it is how that history finds, or shouldfind, critical shape and theoretical meaning, that bears most heavily (at times, too heavily) on many of the contributions. For Beckett here is also being read, covertly, as a kind of test case, whose cultural and class background – upper-middle-class Dublin Protestant – runs somewhat contrary to the ways in which Irish writing is conventionally viewed in the academy and the media, through various portals of critical fashion and under the remit of specific pedagogical imperatives, such as Irish Studies.
The sound of one hand clapping does at times come to mind: "We need to deconstruct the various binaries in Beckett studies – tradition-modernity, Ireland-Europe, Beckett-Beckett – so that the many fruitful tensions and correspondences between them can be more easily discerned." The editor continues: "Ultimately this will entail the development of a Beckett Studies that would apprise itself more fully of Ireland, and of an Irish Studies that would situate itself in a more conscious relation to Europe." Certainly Beckett and Ireland, the first in a series of such volumes, is full of stimulating and scholarly readings of Beckett material, which is all to the good; whether one is discovering new information on the bowler hat or the turnip ( Waiting for Godot), the local history of Fingal in More Pricks than Kicks,the possible play around the name Lucky as Lackey ( Godot), the lasting influence of the hanging of Henry McCabe in and on the writing of Dante and the Lobster ( More Pricks than Kicks) or the historically potent significance of the specifically French meaning of "attendant", among other resonances, in the original French version of Waiting for Godot. Beyond these lucrative insights, however, more complex and contentious possibilities emerge.
David Lloyd's reading of some of Beckett's plays in the light of Maurice McGonigal and Albrecht Dürer paintings of famine and melancholia alongside images of eviction from the Illustrated London News, merge into Peter Boxall's particularly powerful view of "the house" and the literal and symbolic approaches of the back road and back room in Beckett and other "Anglo-Irish" writers, including Maria Edgeworth, WB Yeats and Elizabeth Bowen. This notion of "Anglo-Irish" and "Anglo-Ireland" is the lock which each of the contributions attempts to unpick. For resounding through Beckett and Ireland, Anglo-Ireland, and various versions thereof, are identified as both source and scourge of Beckett's imaginative life.
Here is the incurable condition that history has bequeathed Irish Studies, post-colonialism and (perhaps not quite yet) the nascent diaspora readings of writers from this country, with a fatal determined finality that chimes (so it seems) with Beckett’s own temperamental experience and literary forms.
The list of guilt and admonition is unsparing and, it has to be said, misses out on the immaculate gallows humour in Beckett, his pitch-perfect rendering of English vernacular in Ireland, his unimpeachable eye for city terrain and coastal landscape – the things that make him a writer. Instead, as the editor suggests, "if Endgamemay be read as an attempt to interrogate the culpability of the Irish Protestant ascendancy during the Irish Famine it cannot be reduced to that context", the proposal on "culpability" takes wing and darts through several of these essays indicting what one of the contributors refers to as "Beckett's kind"– "Free State Protestants quailing under increasing cultural pressures from without". Later, as Andrew Gibson remarks, Beckett's "own class had commonly refused to assume any historical responsibility for the other Ireland", while the same class is viewed, by Sinéad Mooney, in "its ever-increased contraction and concomitant sense of ineffectuality and threat" characterised by "the pervasive sense of inertia, depletion and paralysis" of a "dwindling Protestant community in the Free State". Beckett is their laureate in this cumulative reading: "Beckett's work finds appropriately terminal forms for the social and cultural isolation of the residual Protestant population in the Irish Free State". There is much truth in these generalisations of Sinéad Mooney (author of a fine introduction to Samuel Beckett in the Writers and their work series, published in 2006). All That Fall,Beckett's radio play, is preoccupied with "the impotence, decay and lessening entirely appropriate to Southern Protestantism". But old Maddy is also a sensualist and has a feeling for life once earthed in her own bruised and battered body, and in the people and landscape around her. The "ghostly afterlife of the Protestant minorities in Ireland", noted by Seán Kennedy in his essay and the "profound unease at [Beckett's] position as a Free State Protestant" of Sinead Mooney's, broadens into a wider view of "a disparate band of Protestants negotiating their marginalization at the hands of Irishness as a Catholic-nationalist construct".
This may well be the case, but in order to understand the complex and contradictory reactions to the new Irish State, we need to factor in the response of Catholic writers of the late 1930s, such as Patrick Kavanagh, who, like Beckett, felt detached from the emerging Ireland and its official orthodoxies. Others, such as Beckett’s friends Brian Coffey and his publisher and editor, George Reavey (both absent from these pages), virtually bypassed the reality of Irish life in their writing. “Ireland”, Free State or Republic, didn’t matter that much; what mattered was the imagined world, literature and the visual arts.
Somewhat at odds with the personal life as we have it – the loss of his father as a young man, afflicted with ill-health both physical and emotional, with a domineering mother with whom he had a complicated loving relationship; a brave figure in the Resistance and post-second World War working with the Irish Red Cross in St Lô in destroyed France; and a writing life marked by intensity, generosity and loyalty and the affection of friends who lasted the erosions of time and the fraught egos of theatre and literary worlds – Beckett and Ireland presents a challenging picture nonetheless of just how elusive the writer is (or any writer, for that matter) when the categorical viewfinder hoves into view. “I am drawn to the thought of Beckett,” writes Michael Wood, “not as an articulator of his own and others’ despair but as a rebuker of all imperial confidence, whether about languages or about lands and seas, and even where no literal empire is in question. In claiming large truths we destroy small ones; and in failing to doubt we lose the truths that doubt alone will preserve for us”; which sounds as close as one is likely to get to how Beckett described himself once as being – “a dirty low-church P[rotestant], even in poetry”.
Gerald Dawe's poetry collections include Lake Geneva and Points West. His Conversations: On Poets and Poetrywill be published next year. He teaches at Trinity College Dublin.
