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Samuel Beckett’s Irish Voice in Not I

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Voice and Discourse in the Irish Context

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Abstract

There is probably no other play in contemporary drama in which a single voice constitutes the essence of the entire theatrical experience as it does in Not I (1972), by Samuel Beckett. This experimental play consists only of a mouth which produces a relentless discourse, gathering fragments of what puzzled spectators guess is a neglected and abandoned life. This play has been studied from numerous points of view, all of them valid attempts to decipher its inner complexities. The author of this essay proposes a rereading of Not I following a recent direction in Beckett studies which tends towards a precise contextualisation of his works. The essay, therefore, develops the assumption that vague outlines of Samuel Beckett’s contradictory responses to the idea of Ireland might be glimpsed within the interstices of Mouth’s disorderly memories.

This essay is part of the research project FFI2016-76477-P, funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad and by AEI/FEDER. The author would also like to express his gratitude to CEI Patrimonio, Universidad de Almería.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Lisa Dwan, ‘Beckett’s Not I: How I Became the Ultimate Motormouth’, The Guardian, May 8, 2013, accessed 15 May 2013. http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/may/08/beckett-not-i-lisa-dwan.

  2. 2.

    James Knowlson, ‘Practical Aspects of Theatre, Radio and Television’, Journal of Beckett Studies 3 (Summer 1978): 87.

  3. 3.

    Gerry McCarthy, ‘On the Meaning of Performance in Samuel Beckett’s Not I’, Modern Drama 33, no. 4 (December 1990): 462.

  4. 4.

    Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978), 625.

  5. 5.

    Julia Kristeva, ‘The Father, Love, and Banishment’, in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 148–58.

  6. 6.

    Patrizia Fusella, ‘Samuel Beckett’s Pas moi/Not I: Pas Traduction, Not Creation’, Textus: English Studies in Italy 15, no. 1 (2002): 121–44.

  7. 7.

    Pim Verhulst, ‘Spatio-Geographical Abstraction in Samuel Beckett’s Not I/Pas moi’, English Text Construction 1, no. 2 (July 2008): 267–80.

  8. 8.

    Kyle Gillette, ‘Zen and the Art of Self-Negation in Samuel Beckett’s Not I’, Comparative Drama 46, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 283–302.

  9. 9.

    Sinéad Mooney, ‘A Fart in his Corduroys: Beckett’s Translations of the 1920s and 30s’, in New Voices in Irish Criticism 4, eds Fionnuala Dillane and Ronan Kelly (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), 125–36; Seán Kennedy, ‘Yellow: Beckett and the Performance of Ascendancy’, in New Voices in Irish Criticism 5, eds Ruth Connolly and Ann Coughlan (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), 177–86; and James McNaughton, ‘Beckett’s “Brilliant Obscurantics”: Watt and the Problem of Propaganda’, in Samuel Beckett. History, Memory, Archive, eds Seán Kennedy and Katherine Weiss (Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 47–69.

  10. 10.

    Andrew Gibson, Samuel Beckett (London: Reaktion Books, 2010), 21.

  11. 11.

    Steven Connor, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988); Richard Begam, Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); and Thomas Trezise, Into the Breach: Samuel Beckett and the Ends of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

  12. 12.

    J. C. C. Mays, ‘Young Beckett’s Irish Roots’, Irish University Review 14, no. 1 (Spring 1984): 18–33; and Eoin O’Brien, The Beckett Country (Dublin: The Black Cat Press, 1986).

  13. 13.

    Seán Kennedy, ‘Introduction,’ in Samuel Beckett. History, Memory, Archive, eds Seán Kennedy and Katherine Weiss (Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 2.

  14. 14.

    Richard Seaver, The Tender Hour of Twilight (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 6.

  15. 15.

    Marjorie Perloff, ‘In Love with Hiding: Samuel Beckett’s War’, Iowa Review 35, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 78.

  16. 16.

    Peter Boxall, ‘Samuel Beckett: Towards a Political Reading’, Irish Studies Review 10, no. 2 (2002): 161.

  17. 17.

    Willy Maley, ‘Bend It Like Beckett: Class Rules in Irish Literature’, The Irish Review 47 (Winter 2013): 66–67.

  18. 18.

    Anthony Uhlmann, ‘Introduction’, in Samuel Beckett in Context, ed. Anthony Uhlmann (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1.

  19. 19.

    Ibid., 3.

  20. 20.

    Peter Boxall, ‘Samuel Beckett’, 161.

  21. 21.

    Emilie Morin, Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Seán Kennedy, Beckett and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and David Pattie, ‘Beckett and Obsessional Ireland’, in A Companion to Samuel Beckett, ed. S. E. Gontarski (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 182–95, among others.

  22. 22.

    Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber, 2006), 379.

  23. 23.

    Katherine Weiss, ‘Bits and Pieces: The Fragmented Body in Samuel Beckett’s Not I and That Time’, Journal of Beckett Studies 10, no. 1–2 (Fall–Spring 2000): 190.

  24. 24.

    Hersh Zeifman, ‘Being and Non-Being: Samuel Beckett’s Not I’, Modern Drama 19 (1976): 43.

  25. 25.

    In James Knowlson, Damned to Fame (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), 590.

  26. 26.

    In Gerry McCarthy, ‘On the Meaning of Performance,’ 456.

  27. 27.

    Rosette Lamont, ‘Three by Beckett ’96: Nacht und Träume, Not I, and Quad I and II, The Other Theater Company at the Judith Anderson Theater, New York’, Journal of Beckett Studies 6, no. 1 (Autumn 1996): 153.

  28. 28.

    Laura Barge, ‘Out of Ireland: Revisionist Strategies in Beckett’s Drama’, Comparative Drama 34, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 201.

  29. 29.

    Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 380.

  30. 30.

    Eoin O’Brien, The Beckett Country, 49.

  31. 31.

    Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 377.

  32. 32.

    Roy F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600–1972 (London: Penguin, 1989), 520.

  33. 33.

    Emilie Morin, Samuel Beckett, 136.

  34. 34.

    Joan Plowright, And That’s Not All (London: Orion, 2002), 104.

  35. 35.

    Anne Atik, How It Was (London: Faber, 2001), 40.

  36. 36.

    Katharine Worth, ‘Beckett’s Ghosts’, in Beckett in Dublin, ed. S. E. Wilmer (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1992), 62.

  37. 37.

    In Emilie Morin, Samuel Beckett, 147.

  38. 38.

    Brynildur Boyce, ‘The Negative Imprint of the Past in Samuel Beckett’s Embers and Not I’, in Recovering Memory. Irish Representations of Past and Present, eds Hedda Friberg, Irene Gilsenan Nordin and Lene Yding Pedersen (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), 199.

  39. 39.

    J. C. C. Mays, ‘Irish Beckett, a Borderline Instance’, in Beckett in Dublin, ed. S. E. Wilmer (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1992), 137.

  40. 40.

    Ibid., 142. The author’s emphasis.

  41. 41.

    George O’Brien, ‘Contemporary Prose in English: 1940–2000’, in The Cambridge History of Irish Literature. Vol. 2. 1890–2000, ed. Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 424.

  42. 42.

    Colin Graham, Deconstructing Ireland: Identity, Theory, Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 5.

  43. 43.

    In Anne MacCarthy, Identities in Irish Literature (A Coruña: Netbiblo, 2004), 111. The author’s emphasis.

  44. 44.

    Rosemary Pountney, Theatre of Shadows. Samuel Beckett’s Drama 1956–1976 (Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire: Colin Smythe, 1988), 123.

  45. 45.

    John H. Lutterbie, ‘“Tender Mercies”: Subjectivity and Subjection in Samuel Beckett’s Not I’, in The World of Samuel Beckett, ed. Joseph H. Smith (London and Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 87; and Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (London: Vintage, 1996), 12.

  46. 46.

    Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 378.

  47. 47.

    Ibid., 58.

  48. 48.

    Samuel Beckett, Mercier and Camier (London: Faber, 2010), 18.

  49. 49.

    Shane Weller, ‘“All the Dead Voices”: Beckett and the Ethics of Elegy’, in Transnational Beckett, eds S. E. Gontarski, William Cloonan, Alec Hargreaves and Dustin Anderson (Tallahassee, FL: JOBS Books, 2008), 86.

  50. 50.

    Andrew Gibson, ‘Afterword: ‘The Skull the Skull the Skull the Skull in Connemara’—Beckett, Ireland, and Elsewhere’, in Beckett and Ireland, ed. Seán Kennedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 194.

  51. 51.

    James Knowlson, and John Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett (London: Calder, 1979), 197–98.

  52. 52.

    Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 378.

  53. 53.

    Ibid., 377.

  54. 54.

    Ibid., 378.

  55. 55.

    Ibid., 381.

  56. 56.

    Ibid., 382.

  57. 57.

    Katherine Weiss, ‘Bits and Pieces’, 187.

  58. 58.

    Anna McMullan, Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s Drama (New York and London: Routledge, 2010), 118.

  59. 59.

    Samuel Beckett, ‘First Love’, in The Complete Short Prose 1929–1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove Press, 1995), 34.

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  1. Universidad de Almería, Almería, Spain

    José Francisco Fernández

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  1. José Francisco Fernández
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  1. Universidad de Extremadura, Cáceres, Spain

    Diana Villanueva Romero

  2. Universidad de Extremadura, Cáceres, Spain

    Carolina P. Amador-Moreno

  3. Universidad de Extremadura, Cáceres, Spain

    Manuel Sánchez García

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Fernández, J.F. (2018). Samuel Beckett’s Irish Voice in Not I . In: Villanueva Romero, D., Amador-Moreno, C., Sánchez García, M. (eds) Voice and Discourse in the Irish Context. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66029-5_7

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