“SPLITTING THE ROCKS”: Derek Mahon’s Beckett

Abstract

This study assesses impact of Beckett's work upon early work of Northern Irish Derek Mahon. Arguing that Mahon co-opts Beckett as an influence by misreading his work as that of manque, essay examines Mahon's handling of Beckett as source, model and 'adopted' precursor in four poems: Exit Molloy, An Image from Tithonus and Last of Fire Kings.The pros outweigh cons that glowfrom Beckett's bleak reductio -Mahon, Beyond Howth Head1. Exit MolloyIn 1984 essay on Samuel Beckett's poetry, Derek Mahon called him a minor and idiosyncratic poet (1996, 50). As editor of The Sphere Book of Modern Irish Poetry in 1972, Mahon had represented Beckett by two poems and from Waiting for Godot (1972b, 111-14) - famous exchange from act 2 of play about All dead voices (the title Mahon gives it), complete with its name prefixes and directions. The 1984 essay ends by quoting same passage which, Mahon asserts, achieves [...] condition of music (1996, 53). The anthologist's co-option of passage is perhaps not surprising. In early Beckett criticism (of 1950s and 60s) it was commonplace to insist on musical or nature of much of his writing. In 1963, for example, Louis MacNeice, Mahon's poetic forerunner, described Beckett's drama as essentially lyrical, asking the sort of question that used to be prerogative of poets (124). In 2006 essay Mahon effects merger from opposite direction when he describes Beckett's best poems, examples of the existential lyric (1996, 56), as dramatic pieces in their own right [...] continuous with work for stage (2006, 1). But Mahon's anthologization of passage from Godot also hints at significantly personal reading.To present Godo /-passage as an honorary is to emphasize its qualities as momentary illumination, still point of insight amidst tedium and anxiety of waiting. In its context these qualities are heavily qualified: illumination is both made possible and clouded by obligation to speak, to bale out silence. While epiphany is not sine qua non of lyric, luminous moment is nonetheless native to genre. In drama, however, even lyrical drama of Beckett, any moment of is always likely to be submerged or rendered ambiguous by current of action. But Mahon's tendency has always been to read Beckett as manque. Much of time it is even dull, he wrote of Beckett's prose in 1976. One is tempted to skip. [...] But good bits are very good indeed. Not inexpressive as their author might wish, but expressive of rare vision, like 'brief scattered lights' [1959, 207] in Malone Dies (1996, 60). In 1986 tribute, Mahon asserts that novels of Beckett are a matter of texture rather than incident, quoting from How It Is: a few images on and off in mud earth sky few creatures in light some still standing (Beckett 1964, 8). This insistence on luminous moment issues in remarkable observation about the last words of Lucky's 'think' in Waiting for Godot, where 'the skull in Connemara,' 'the tennis' and 'Cunard' combine to suggest Proustian glimpse of childhood, summer afternoon in west of Ireland during long-ago school holidays (1996, 58).Although there is no evidence for it (Mahon was writing in 1976, before first generally available biographical information about Beckett), this last speculation is shrewd enough: comfortably-off Protestant Dubliners might very well have holidayed in West in 1910s. And Proust connection is natural. After all, Beckett's first book was critical study which asserts that Proust's entire book is monument to involuntary memory and epic of its action (Beckett 1965a, 34). Furthermore Beckett always claimed that vital shift in his own writing life and creative output, trigger for post-war frenzy of writing, which produced three novellas, trilogy of novels and Waiting for Godot, was result of revelation (Knowlson 351-53) in his mother's room in Foxrock. …