“Proust’s Pessimism” as Beckett’s Counter-Poison

Abstract

An obsession with generation traverses Samuel Beckett's work. is, to borrow Beckett's phrase from Proust (III.260), neuralgia rather than a theme (Proust 22). (1) This obsession Beckett inherits from Anglo-Irish tradition W. B. Yeats invoked in his 1925 Senate Speech as that small Protestant he, typical man of minority, was proud to belong to: are one of great stocks of Europe, the people of Burke ... of Grattan, ... of ... of Parnell. We have created most of modern literature of this (Castle 90). Yeats's Anglo-Irish are old men who survive when All's Whiggery now, resisting levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind (The Seven Sages 252) he saw as largely Catholic. That is no country for old men, 1927 Sailing to Byzantium begins (204). young/In one another's arms, birds in trees,/--Those dying generations--at their song,/The salmon-falls, mackerel-crowded seas,/Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long/ Whatever is begotten, born and dies. That country, with its salmon-falls, is recognizably Ireland, from which Yeats sailed to Ravenna in 1924, year Free State was founded. is recognizably Ireland by its perceived fertility, despite demographic decline from famine and emigration (Whelan 59). In Yeats's anxious vision, generation is first this fertile, cyclic tide of life, Catholic majority, threatening to overwhelm band of old men massed against world (Under Ben Bulben 356): Irish, born into ancient sect/But thrown upon this filthy modern tide/And by its formless, spawning, fury wrecked (The Statues 362). Against this background, Yeats places Irish literary history. The old men are scarecrows, sterile, excluded from democratic tide of life, a minority among majority: All hated Whiggery. Goldsmith and Dean, Berkeley and Burke..../ Swift, whose heart had him into all Cast but dead leaves to equality (Blood and Moon 243). This line connects generation to population. The Irish population problem was what Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal pretended to solve, making connection explicit: It would greatly lessen number of Papists, with whom are yearly over-run, being principal breeders of nation, Swift's Protestant persona states, with exclusive we, like Yeats's we old men. The lower classes were characteristically the numerous classes. The Anglo-Irish horror pleni is fear first term--anglo--will be absorbed by second, dragged down into mankind, paradigmatically Catholic Irishkind. Oscar Wilde put what was at stake several months after his release from prison, am now simply a pauper of a rather low order and also a pathological problem in eyes of German scientists: ... I am tabulated, and come under law of averages! Quantum mutatus! (2) From perspective of generations, individual is merely a case history, a member of a class. Yeats's mathematical equality is expressed in statistics, which treats great numbers of individuals as alike. Its most characteristic classes are populations. Yeats's renowned generations (Three Marching Songs 360) from census taker's viewpoint are no exception to any survey of Irish. Beckett, too, descends from Anglo-Irish tradition. He like Wilde was a graduate of Portora Royal School and, like Wilde, and Synge, of Trinity, Dublin. Beckett's major protagonists, if Irish, are recognizably Protestant (3) and old men: bah, j'ai toujours ete vieux, Unnamable says (L'Innommable 187). Halfobegotten, they are neither born nor dead--a Beckettian theme--descendants of Swift's Struldbrugs. (4) But their sterility is not straightforwardly coupled with a Yeatsian pride in compensatory literary productivity. If Beckett inherits Yeats's anxiety, or Swift's Gulliver's, terrified he is a Yahoo, whatever his ironic distance, his stand-offishness, from things Irish-Catholic, his horror of crowd was never cultured Protestant's contempt for Catholic masses nor even acknowledgement of kinship with reservations for these Christs die upon barricades of Wilde's Sonnet to Liberty: God knows it I am with them, in some things. …