The Turd in the Rath: Antiquarians, the Ordnance Survey, and Beckett's Irish Landscapes

Abstract

This paper engages with one of the potential sources to which the experience of being lost, or misrecognising the landscape, that is so common in Beckett's work might be traced. Linking Beckett's often ignored early collection of short stories, More Pricks Than Kicks, to the abstract landscapes of the post-war fiction, allows us to trace an interest in unsettled places to a much earlier point in Beckett's work than is usually allowed. The interest in antiquities so prevalent in the early fiction emerges from a larger national conversation in Ireland about the preservation of the Gaelic past in the face of capital's push for abstract space. This work of preservation was begun by the Ordnance Survey in the 1830s, and the Survey's abstract representations of a landscape fractured by colonialism bears many resemblances to Beckett's early landscapes, which this paper traces. The tendency towards placelessness was already a key component of Beckett's most placed early work – he recognised that the landscape of Ireland was radically alienated from itself.