Spectres of ascendancy: Beckett, Yeats, and the politics of postcolonial amnesia

Abstract

This essay reflects on the shifting status of “Ascendancy” as a colonial social formation and an historical and aesthetic category shaping the development of anticolonial and postcolonial thought in Irish writing and culture from the late nineteenth century to the contemporary moment of commemoration and anti-imperial reckoning. In particular, the essay considers how Ascendancy is a surprisingly useful category for thinking about Samuel Beckett and his reflections on power and empire. The essay reevaluates Beckett’s relationship with W. B. Yeats and explores the significance of their markedly different but intertwining relationships to Ascendancy. Looking at the arc of Beckett criticism within Irish studies alongside new readings of Yeats’s elegies for the Ascendancy Big House and his plays The Countess Cathleen and Purgatory, the essay explores how we might reevaluate that intellectual and cultural history amidst the recent controversies attending Ireland’s “Decade of Centenaries” and the reimagining of Ireland’s place within a global imperial history. As part of that exploration, the essay considers Beckett’s and Yeats’s legacies alongside twenty-first-century Ireland’s public monuments, commemorations, and architectural heritage while also reflecting on commissioned inquiries into the legacies of empire by the President of Ireland and Trinity College Dublin. In the midst of what President Michael D. Higgins has labeled a “feigned amnesia” around the legacies of empire in Ireland, the essay considers how Beckett’s work might be seen to have anticipated the terms of much of the current discourse.