Samuel Beckett: Imprisoned Persona and Irish Amnesia

Abstract

The fashionable notion of Beckett’s writing as a coherent unity is a myth. His first published novel, Murphy, with its archaic Johnsonian syntax and collapsing sentence structures, is a mixture of juvenile melancholia and sub-Joycean humour which never finally works. His further adventures into the sustained narrative of depressive psychosis, Watt, Malone Dies and Molloy are a major advance but still grapple despairingly with the problematic of narrative entropy. In writing fiction Beckett often produced stage Irishmen in disguise. In writing plays he projected his Irish heritage onto a universal plane. Like Joyce before him, necessary exile spurred him to artistic greatness. But unlike Joyce, it was not achieved by writing about the city he had left behind him. As the son of an upper-middle-class Protestant family on the outer rim of Dublin, his fiction lacked Joyce’s precise and uncanny hold over the city, that masterly use of visual topography and clinching detail which pervades Ulysses. The city, one senses, was never his. Nor was the language. Exile entailed a mortification of the spirit through the forsaking of native language and its idiom, the curing of verbal excess by a double translation — from novel to play and from English to French, whence the actual text could be translated back again in triumph. This double exile of culture and language which Beckett found in Paris, and his puritanical resolution of it made him more of a genuine successor to Joyce and Synge than when he consciously tried to imitate them. Through the French language Beckett became one of the three great Irish dramatists of the twentieth century.