'A brief glow in the dark': Samuel Beckett's Presence in Modern Irish Poetry

Abstract

One definition of 'Irish' that I liked a lot was Samuel Beckett's. When he was interviewed by a French journalist, the journalist said: 'Vous etes Anglais, Monsieur Beckett?'. To which Beckett replied: 'Au contraire'. (Seamus Heaney) (1) In 1982, the same year he harnessed Samuel Beckett's quip to define a notion of Irishness, Seamus Heaney protested at his inclusion in Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion's anthology The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry by pointing out that his passport was green. It is somewhat surprising that Heaney would invoke Beckett in a discussion of Irish national identity, as the latter's attachment to the national colour--and much else--was rather problematic. A week after the 1931 publication of Beckett's first book, Proust, in Chatto & Windus's 'Dolphin' series, the editor Charles Prentice wrote to Beckett apologizing for the fact that the front cover was brown rather than green: 'Clearly I have been trying to steal you from Ireland.' (2) Beckett's answer, that he had 'not noticed whether the Dolphin was green or brown', represents an early instance of what would become a lifelong ambivalence towards his native country. (3) This studied indifference is evident again in 1938, when Beckett describes Routledge's 'effort to make an Irishman of me' in the blurb to his novel Murphy as 'touching'. (4) Such efforts largely disappeared, however, following his permanent departure from the 'land of my unsuccessful abortion' for France, where 'the little operation is cheap, safe, legal + popular', not to mention his adoption of French as his creative medium. (5) Resurfacing only briefly during the 1956 Dublin production of Waiting for Godot, Beckett remained largely outside further developments in Irish cultural events until the early 1970s. (6) The timing of this (re)integration into collective cultural consciousness naturally owes much to the award of the Nobel Prize in 1969, but is surely also related to the eruption of the Troubles in that same year. In a climate where questions of identity, place, and displacement, and the role of the artist within society were highly charged, many Irish poets looked to Beckett's experiences when wondering, as Paul Muldoon does in '7, Middagh Street', 'Which side was I on? | Not one, or both, or none.' (7) This development is somewhat like that observable in post-war Germany, where Adorno's essay 'Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen' made Beckett central to socio-cultural and philosophical debates over the role, and possibility, of art in a society irredeemably altered by the Holocaust. (8) Yet in contrast to the efforts of German sociologists and philosophers to set Beckett into a more abstract and universal context, in Ireland, creative writers have entered into a more textual dialogue with Beckett's work, in an effort to investigate their own roles in the Irish community. In this undertaking, they have concentrated on Beckett's writings as creative texts, not merely as philosophical texts, whereby their religious and political aspects as well as largely ignored parts of his oeuvre have been explored. Thus the neglected field of Beckett's poetry has been discussed by Irish poets, amongst others Derek Mahon, Thomas Kinsella, and David Wheatley, often in scholarly Beckett journals. This essay will trace and explore the presence of Beckett in modern Irish poetry, particularly in that of Derek Mahon. Ruptures The Irish revival of critical interest in Beckett's work in the 1970s started a process of reappropriation, leading, for example, to John Montague's solicitation of Beckett (a few months before his death in 1989) for a contribution to The Great Book of Ireland compiled by 'Poetry Ireland'. (9) The first, most important event in the process of reintroducing Beckett into Irish cultural discussions after the Second World War was the republication of his 1934 essay 'Recent Irish Poetry' in the fourth number of The Lace Curtain in 1971 by the poets Michael Smith and Trevor Joyce. …