Since Beckett

Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism

Peter Boxall

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781441178138
• eBook ISBN: 9781441100672
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Samuel Beckett is widely regarded as 'the last modernist', the writer in whose work the aesthetic principles which drove the modernist project dwindled and were finally exhausted. And yet despite this, it is striking that many of the most important contemporary writers, across the world, see their work as emerging from a Beckettian legacy. So whilst Beckett belongs, in one sense, to the end of the modernist period, in another sense he is the well spring from which the contemporary, in a wide array of guises, can be seen to emerge.
Since Beckett looks at a number of writers, in different national and political contexts, tracing the way in which Beckett's writing inhabits the contemporary, while at the same time reading back through Beckett to the modernist and proto-modernist forms he inherited. In reading Beckett against the contemporary in this way, Peter Boxall offers both a compelling re-reading of Beckett, and a powerful new analysis of contemporary culture.

Part One

Back Roads: Beckett, Banville and Ireland

Chapter 1
Edgeworth, Bowen, Beckett, Banville: A Minor Tradition

To think about Beckett and Ireland is to think about the back. His relationship with an Irish tradition, and his bequest of singular form of engagement with Ireland, is conducted through a poetics of the back, in all its various and delicately shaded connotations.

This connection in Beckett between Irishness and what David Wills has called ‘dorsality’ has, I suggest, deep roots in the Irish literary tradition.¹ Maria Edgeworth’s novel Castle Rackrent, for example, is one which is centrally concerned with formulations of the back. At one point in Edgeworth’s novel the hopelessly spendthrift landlord Condy Rackrent gallantly returns to his Irish ancestral home with a new bride, whose possession of fine jewellery and a large personal fortune, he fondly hopes, will save him from impending bankruptcy. On arrival at the house, the bride and groom find that, through neglect and consequent dilapidation, the front entrance is impassable. As a result, the servants gather to greet their new mistress not in the arcaded front hall, but jostling at the ‘back gate’. The disappointed bride Miss Isabella asks her husband ‘am I to walk through all this crowd of people, my dearest love?’, and he replies ‘My dear, there is nothing for it but to walk, or to let me carry you as far as the house, for you see that back road is too narrow for a carriage, and the great piers have tumbled down across the front approach; so there’s no driving the right way, by reason of the ruins’ (CR 46–7). As Miss Isabella makes her way into the house through the cramped back kitchen, the narrator Thady Quirke recounts, with his customarily oblique glee, that the ‘feathers on the top of her hat were broke going in at the low back door’ (CR 47).

This moment in the novel makes a conjunction between thresholds, thoroughfares and minority that finds echoes across the following centuries of Irish writing. The back road, the back gate and the back door are signs, in this novel, of the failure of an Anglo-Irish tradition, signs that the major lines of communication, the forms of congress and community that have made the Anglo-Irish ascendancy possible, are now impassable. The back door through which the bewildered Miss Isabella is forced to pass cannot accommodate her feathered grandeur, a grandeur which is in any case starting to look a little fragile, a little ridiculous. It is Thady Quirke, and more importantly Thady’s calculating son Jason, who are better accustomed than their masters to the back passage ways, and more adroit in the navigating of minor routes. Jason Quirke’s capacity to slip in by the back door, to enter the house as servant and leave it as master, is the central focus of Edgeworth’s narrative. Jason’s incremental and somehow inevitable prising of the house and of the land away from the exhausted grasp of his Protestant masters suggests that capital will pass, from now on, through the back doors, that the front entrances and driveways that the absentee landlords had allowed to fall into disrepair would never again be the main channels of commerce and power.

As Edgeworth writes the novel, in the months before the 1800 Act of Union, she suggests that this migration from front to back, from dominant to emergent, should be seen in the context of a larger shift in the balance of power. The homely tale of Thady’s dogged devotion to his slovenly masters, and of Jason’s canny betrayal of them, is a mildly cautionary one, but it is nevertheless possible to laugh at it because, Edgeworth insists, 1800 will inaugurate a new age in which the Quirkes and the Rackrents will speak to each other in an entirely new language. ‘There is a time’, Edgeworth writes in the preface to the novel,

when individuals can bear to be rallied for their past follies and absurdities, after they have acquired new habits and a new consciousness. Nations as well as individuals gradually lose attachment to their identity, and the present generation is amused rather than offended by the ridicule that is thrown upon their ancestors. (CR 5)

The new consciousness that Edgeworth invokes here, perhaps anticipating the ‘uncreated conscience’ that Joyce’s Dedalus ascribes to his ‘race’ in Portrait over a century later,² will give rise to a new cosmopolitanism, in which the local struggle between dominant and emergent cultures in Ireland will become a charming irrelevance. ‘When Ireland loses her identity by an union with Great Britain’, Edgeworth goes on, ‘she will look back with a smile of good humoured complacency on the Sir Kits and Sir Condys of her former existence’ (CR 5). This assured confidence that the Union will effect a transformative cultural renaissance, however, is always somewhat strained in Edgeworth’s account. In her preface there is a curious temporal slippage – it is the ‘present generation’ who thinks with a new consciousness, and yet the Union is still in the future, and evoked in the future tense – which echoes or anticipates the temporal confusion of the novel itself. Thady’s narrative begins on ‘Monday Morning’ (CR 7), and Edgeworth explains in her glossary that this Monday marks a stalled time that is a feature of provincial Irish culture. Thady ‘begins his Memoirs of the Rackrent family by dating Monday Morning’ Edgeworth explains in the glossary to the novel,

because no great undertaking can be auspiciously commenced in Ireland on any morning but Monday morning. – ‘Oh please God we live till Monday morning, we’ll set the slater to mend the roof of the house – On Monday morning we’ll fall to and cut the turf – On Monday morning we’ll see and begin mowing – On Monday morning, please your honour, we’ll begin and dig the potatoes,’ &c.

All the intermediate days between the making of such speeches and the ensuing Monday are wasted, and when Monday morning comes it is ten to one that the business is deferred to the next Monday morning. (CR 99)

In a sense, the novel sets out to remedy this collapse of linear time into a single, eternal Monday. The narrative is peppered with footnotes in which the editor of Thady’s narrative insists that the Monday in which Thady is marooned has well and truly passed away. Thady says, for example, that ‘Sir Murtagh had no childer’, and the editor politely points out at the foot of the page that ‘this is the manner in which many of Thady’s rank, and others in Ireland, formerly pronounced the word Children’ (CR 18). This word ‘formerly’, meaning before the Act of Union, comes up time and again in the narrative, where it marks a gap between Thady’s blindly static narrative and the editorial apparatus of glossary, preface and footnotes that reflects upon it, and that belongs to a post-Union culture that has re-entered historical time.³ But in the preface, already, it is possible to detect this same stalling, this same confusion between past and future, between next Monday and last. The union which will build a new, broad road across the Irish channel, allowing the comically circuitous back roads of Thady’s narrative to pass into obscurity, has both already occurred in the preface, and is still to come, suggesting that the confident separation between the future and the past upon which the novel is predicated is in fact far from clear. The scholarly voice of the preface and the notes is infected, as a result of this temporal confusion, by the idiomatic provincial voice in which the narrative is told. The former should belong to a utopian period after the Union, the latter should fall away into the pre-Union gloom. But the possibility of a unified cosmopolitan perspective which would allow Ireland to join with Britain – to enter into modernity – seems always just beyond the novel’s grasp. Edgeworth conceives of the Union not only as a political act, but also as a sundering of the imagination from the coils, the back roads of a pre-modern Irish identity. This imaginary sundering, though, belongs to a future which cannot quite arrive – which even the 1800 act of Union cannot deliver – while the editorial voice of Castle Rackrent is returned to a troubling complicity with the ‘former’ Irish culture which it tries to mock.

One sign of this failure in Edgeworth to detach the cosmopolitan from the provincial might be the continuing resonance in Irish writing of the back – the back door, the back room, the back road. It is possible to draw a line from Edgeworth through Elizabeth Bowen to Samuel Beckett and to John Banville – to map a kind of back road – which suggests that there is something like a tradition to be found here, a tradition of the back, or of the minor; a shadow of the Anglo-Irish tradition plotted by W. J. McCormack in From Burke to Beckett.⁴ To take some examples more or less at random, we might trace a line from Edgeworth’s back road, to Bowen’s extraordinary ghost story ‘The Back Drawing Room’, to Beckett’s late, nostalgic evocation of the ‘dear old back roads’ in Company (NO 18), Stirrings Still (CSP 260) and … but the clouds … (CDW 422), to the ‘dappled back roads’ in Banville’s Body of Evidence (BE 102), and the ‘back roads’ that were prowled in his youth by Alexander Cleave in Banville’s Eclipse (E 33). In each of these instances, it might be argued, the back road or the back room is asked to carry the burden of an Irishness that has not yet been accommodated within the unified cosmopolitanism that Edgeworth was reaching for in 1800, but that is also unable to find a major language in which to articulate itself, or to put itself into the foreground. In all of these writers, the failure of the kind of reconciliation that Edgeworth imagines in her preface to Castle Rackrent has produced a curious shroudedness in reference to Ireland, a kind of occlusion, as if Ireland can no longer be looked at other than squintwise, as if it can be named only through the suspension of the name. Where Edgeworth imagines that the back roads of Thady’s narrative will fall into a kind of disuse as Ireland is refashioned and renamed through its union with Britain, these writers suggest instead that Ireland’s difficult relationship with modernity and with Europe has led to a kind of failure of reference, a failure that is already anticipated in the curious contradictions exhibited by Edgeworth’s narrative. The Ireland imagined in Thady’s story cannot be translated into the language of European modernity, as Brian Friel’s play Translations attests, but neither is there a language available in which to preserve the rural culture to which Thady belongs. Rather, the naming of and reference to Ireland in these writers takes place in a kind of hidden back room, stowed somewhere beneath a surface which tends towards placelessness and geographical anonymity.

This connection between Ireland and the minor, or the back, tends, in Elizabeth Bowen, to produce a certain spectrality. The spectral can be felt in many of her novels – in works such as The Last September and To the North – but it is in her short stories that she explores this relation between Ireland and the ghostly most effectively, and particularly in her story ‘The Back Drawing Room’ – a story explicitly about the ghostliness of the back. This story, despite the article in the title, is in fact a tale of two back drawing rooms. The first of these, in which the story opens, is the scene of an intimate gathering of cosmopolitan intellectuals, a salon of some kind, in a place which remains unnamed and unspecified, but which we are led to assume is in England, possibly London. The conversation is lofty, self-conscious and pompous, and turns around the possibility of the survival of the soul after death. The question that the company are addressing as the story begins is whether it is fitness or tenacity that guarantees the survival of the soul; is it a Darwinian principle, or something more mysterious – some blind, willed tenacity – that allows a trace of life to linger on after the conditions of its possibility has lapsed. Into this company blunders an unnamed stranger – ‘Somebody who came in late had brought him, with an apology’ (CS 200). The stranger, who has none of the sophistication of the salonnière and her guests, misreads the tone of the conversation, and sees the discussion of the post-mortem soul as a cue for a ghost story; ‘Hell’, says one of the guests, ‘bring in the Yule log, this is a Dickens Christmas’ (CS 203). It is the ghost story that the stranger tells, against the mocking protests of the other guests in the salon, that takes us to the story’s second back drawing room; the back drawing room of an Irish big house that has been burnt down by republicans during the troubles, but that has somehow lingered on, somehow survived the passing of its age through a blindly willed tenacity, rather than through any Darwinian fitness. Everything in the story hinges round the seam that the stranger opens here between the two rooms, a conjunction that produces a number of contradictory effects. Bowen’s story tells of the movement from the first room to the second, but it quickly becomes apparent that the journey from first to second, from front story to back story, is haunted, from the beginning, by a simultaneous movement in the opposite direction. As the mocking guests who repeatedly interrupt the stranger’s story are quick to point out, this is a clichéd tale of a journey towards a haunted house, a journey from the real and the quotidian towards the spectral, the absent, the strange. ‘What was the house like’ one of the guests interjects: ‘Was it very obviously haunted? Weren’t there any dark windows’ (CS 206). But while the journey is, in one sense, from the real to the spectral, in another sense the story moves in the opposite direction, from the vague to the defined. While the first back drawing room remains unlocated, adrift, the second room is located, from the beginning, in Ireland. The movement towards the centre of the stranger’s story is one that takes us from placelessness to place. With the stranger’s journey, the anonymity of the story’s setting is gradually broken, as the narrative takes us from a generalized cosmopolitan locale, across the Irish channel towards a realized space that becomes increasingly concrete, until the stranger himself is riding bumpily along on a bicycle on a country road that is given more substantiality, more descriptive colour, than anything that belongs to the shadowy environs of the first back drawing room. Indeed, the salonnière herself, Mrs Henneker, registers this sense that the stranger’s story is taking us across a threshold from vagueness to the vividness of a specific place, but even as she does so she registers also the opposite direction in which the stranger’s story moves. The stranger begins his story by saying that last year he ‘went over to Ireland’, and Mrs Henneker interrupts him:

‘Ireland’, said Mrs Henneker, ‘unforgettably and almost terribly afflicted me. The contact was so intimate as to be almost intolerable. Those gulls about the piers of Kingstown, crying, crying: they are an overture to Ireland. One lives in a dream there, a dream oppressed and shifting, such as one dreams in a house with trees about it on a sultry night.’ (CS 203)

The stranger’s fictional journeying towards the second back drawing room takes him over the threshold marked by Kingstown, a name which might be thought of, itself, as a royal English mask for the Irish Dun Loaghaire. For Mrs Henneker, this journey towards the heart of Ireland is a journey towards an intimacy, towards a kind of contact that is unbearable in its overwhelming presence. But at the same time, it is a journey towards a dream, a journey away from the real. As the story continues, this confusion between the dreamlike and the concrete becomes increasingly marked, until we arrive at the heart of the story, a dead centre composed at once of the real and the spectral, the clichéd and the original, the present and the absent.

As we enter this dead centre – the heart of the back – the word back starts to repeat itself uncontrollably, as if the word is part of the haunting, one of the revenants in the stranger’s story. The stranger, out for the day on a bike ride in the Irish countryside, arrives at the ghostly big house, where he lets himself timidly into the hall (his bicycle has had a puncture, and he is looking to the house, as per the generic convention, for help and shelter from the rain). The house seems deserted, until ‘a door at the back of the hall opened’ (CS 207), and the figure of a woman appears. Losing his sense of propriety, as if hypnotized or possessed, the stranger follows the woman into ‘a drawing room, a back drawing room’ (CS 207). (‘Here was I’, the stranger says, reliving his bafflement with a quiet, ironic reference to his uninvited presence as narrator in the first back drawing room, ‘Here was I, unintroduced, in a back drawing room, really quite an intimate room, where I believe only favoured visitors are usually admitted’ [CS 208]). As the stranger enters this intimate back room, there is an immediate sense that both he and his narrative are becoming somehow submerged, immersed in the backness of this place that seems lost to time and to history. With his entry into this ghostly dimension, the voices belonging to the first back drawing room that have been haranguing him and holding him back fall away, and a new voice starts to speak, from the back, as it were. Adding to the overwhelming sense of immersion, the unnamed voice suggests that the woman, who is now sobbing silently before the stranger on the couch, is ‘drowning’. When the drowning woman looks up at the stranger, he says, he is startled, and the unnamed voice interrupts again, ‘as if you had not known she had a face’ (CS 208). This encounter between the stranger and the drowning woman, mediated by an unanchored voice coming from the back heart of the narrative (a voice belonging at once to the drowning woman and to salonnière Mrs Henneker, but also to neither), is one in which the back shows its face, in which we discover that the back does indeed have a face, if not one which is describable or thinkable or knowable. The sight of this face, the stranger says, ‘made me feel the end of the world was coming’:

‘I couldn’t speak to her again; she – she …’

‘Beat it back’.

‘Beat it back’. (CS 208–9)

With this repetition of ‘beat it back’ – a repetition in which the voice of the stranger merges hypnotically with the unnamed, dislocated voice – the story is over. The woman ‘put down her face again’, and the stranger ‘went back into the hall’, and out of the house, back along the country road to the cosmopolitan present, and to the first back drawing room in which he tells his tale (CS 209).

The convention of the ghost story within the story dictates that the return of the teller to the scene of telling effects a closure, in which the spectral or the monstrous that is encountered at the story’s heart is somehow neutralized. The return to the normative setting with which we began allows us to put things back together, as if waking from a dream, having exorcized our fear of the other which the story has both banished and assimilated. But in Bowen’s story, the encounter with the back does not allow for such a return. The directional and spatial effects that are produced around the word back mean that return itself, coming back, becomes entangled with its opposite. The back becomes the face, returning becomes a form of going on, producing what, in To the North B...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction: Since Beckett
• Part One: Back Roads: Beckett, Banville and Ireland
• Part Two: Tune Accordingly: Beckett, Bernhard and Sebald
• Part Three: How It Ought To Be: Beckett, Globalization and Utopia
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index