Inventing Ireland

by Declan Kiberd

  Murphy is, among other things, one of the earliest novels of immigrant life in Britain. At home in Foxrock, Beckett might have been deferred to as a young toff, "a well-to-do ne'er-do-well", but in London he was just another unemployed Irishman. His novel is a challenge to the stock English image of the stage Irishman: this is done, in alternating chapters, which play off Murphy's complex psychological self-image against the widespread social view of him as an idiot and a clown. At one point, when Beckett's London publishers were trying to remove some of the more abstract chapters, he wryly joked that he was willing to cut the book down to its very tide, if that would help.14 Murphy, with the most common surname in Ireland, is "the ruins of the ruins of the broth of a boy",15 i.e. the final, exploded version of the stage Paddy. It is fitting, therefore, that he should have requested in his will that his ashes be deposited in a paper bag "and brought to the Abbey Theatre, Lr. Abbey Street, Dublin, and without pause into what the great and good Lord Chesterfield calls the necessary house, where their happiest hours have been spent, on the right as one goes down into the pit, and I desire that the chain be there pulled upon them, if possible during the performance of a piece, the whole to be executed without ceremony or show of grief".16 (Cynics will note that it remains unclear from the syntax whether the happiest hours were spent in the lavatory or the auditorium.) The national theatre had been founded to demonstrate that Ireland was not the home of buffoonery, but of an ancient idealism. So the will is a perfectly proper request from one who has been at pains to show that, although many English might see in Paddy a muscular moron, the Irishman's real problem was that he had a mind of his own without the ability to control it at all times. It is brutally ironic that, in the event, Murphy's ashes should find their resting-place not in the Abbey, but in a London pub, one of the venues in which the stage Irishman was depicted during variety-shows of the nineteenth century.

  The comedy in Murphy, as in all of Beckett's works, derives from his fish-out-of-water predicament, from the discrepancy between the reader's knowledge of him as a sophisticated, angst-ridden intellectual and the common English attitude of "derision tinged with loathing" with which he is greeted on applying for a job as a smart boy.

  " 'E ain't smart", said the chandler, "not by a long chork 'e ain't".

  "Nor 'e ain't a boy", said the chandler's semi-private convenience, "not to my mind 'e ain't".

  "'E don't look rightly human to me", said the chandler's eldest waste product, "not rightly".17

  Murphy, we are assured at once, is too familiar with this attitude to make the further blunder of trying to abate it, for he knows that there is no point trying to break into the closed system which is the English stereotype of Irishness.

  Indeed, the entire book depicts a world which is run on closed systems. Murphy's own mind is a closed entity, impenetrable by others, even by his lover: and the mind/body split in the book simply takes the estrangement of the emigrant from the host society to its ultimate degree. Murphy, all mind, loves Celia, all body, the woman whose vital statistics include a face which combines the colours of the Irish national flag:

  Eyes – Green

  Complexion – White

  Hair – Yellow

  She, too, had left Ireland, but at the early age of four: and the merely physical description bespeaks her standing as a prostitute. Back in Dublin, the red-light districts had been condemned and closed; in official Ireland no prostitutes existed. By the 1930s, many had in fact decamped to London. Murphy, who wishes to cure himself of his "deplorable susceptibility" to Celia, cannot do so; and she, who professes to love him, really loves the ideal self-image which she sees reflected back to her from his eyes, the image of a prostitute turned respectable housewife.

  As a narrative, Murphy is at all times fiercely hostile to Irish revivalism, whether the target is Gaelic iconography or AE's Candle of Vision (read in bed by the appropriately named Miss Carridge): but it remains loyal to a deeper set of literary traditions. In it may be found a Wildean mixture of elegance and desperation ("You saved my life . . . Now palliate it"), as well as a Joycean mockery ("Gas. Could it turn a neurotic into a psychotic? No. Only God could do that").18 However, ultimately, such wit and word-play serve to undermine the attack on stage Irishry: the diagnosis in the end seems but a version of the disease. Dylan Thomas was being strictly accurate, as well as very funny, when he called the book a strange mixture of Sodom and Begorrah,19 though were it not for the pun intended, he might have placed the second category first. Being a jester at the London court of his master was hardly the proper role for a writer committed to exploring the void.

  Not long after Murphy, Beckett began to write in French, a language in which he could create "without style".20 By this, he may have meant to indicate a language of such exactitude that the search for le mot juste offered greater satisfactions than the baroque rhetoric of English, but it seems that he wished most of all to curb in himself the fatal temptation which assailed so many Irish writers of English to exaggerate the coefficient of wit and blarney. The attraction of French for Beckett may not have been its intrinsic character as a language, so much as the fact that he would have to use it with the literal-minded caution of a learner confronted with a second language: it reminded him that a writer is always estranged from the language. French served for Beckett the same function which Irish discharged for Brendan Behan, freeing him from the pressure of an Anglo-American audience and from its attendant temptations. In their respective ways, both men were thus enabled to express rather than exploit their Irish materials, and to transcend the confinements of revivalist eloquence.

  The voices which Beckett heard and committed to paper for the rest of his life as an artist were unambiguously Irish. Occasionally, they bore faint Wildean echoes, as in the inversion of a famous quotation or proverb, but more often they were austere, controlled, pared back. The promise of Yeats and Joyce to take revivalist rhetoric and wring its neck was being brought to a strict conclusion. Yet Irish those voices steadfastly remained, in their inflections, their phraseology, their range of reference: ". . . all is dark, there is no one, what's the matter with my head, I must have left it in Ireland . . ."21 The Irish landscape of south county Dublin in particular was celebrated through famous passages of the trilogy in the concrete, chaste, descriptive style of the Celtic nature poets, without the burden of abstract metaphorical meaning, without any patriotic eroticizing of this or that landscape as a synecdoche for the whole of Ireland. But, as with the Celtic nature poetry, what was offered in such passages was an exile's celebration, which seemed once again to illustrate a bleak law: the imaginative possession of the Irish landscape seemed possible only to those who were removed from it.

  The instrument which conveyed these Beckettian epiphanies was utterly bardic in tone: "A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine".22 The process of composition was carried out by the Gaelic filí as they lay on pallets in small, darkened rooms. This dark seclusion protected them from distracting light and noise and recalled the ancient links between art and sorcery.23 To secure themselves further, some of the poets lay with stones on their bellies or in the hands (a little like Molloy with his sixteen pebbles) or even with plads around their heads:

  To one on his back in the dark. This he can tell by the pressure on his hind parts and by how the dark changes when he shuts his eyes and again when he opens them again. Only a small part of what is said can be verified. As for example when he hears, You are on your back in the dark. Then he must acknowledge the truth of what is said . . .24

  The subject of a bardic exercise was set overnight: the filí worked on it all day, each lying on his bed in the dark until night fell, when at last lights were brought in and the words written down. The pensum or writing task which had to be discharged by each of the speakers of the trilogy for the approval of an adjudicating master seems to be a clear version of this procedure. "Strange notion . . . that of a task to be performed before one can be at rest".25 The students of the bardic school
s lived a great distance from their homes, so that they might not be distracted by family or friends from their labours; like the younger Krapp, each was warned against the seductions of a female who might "take his mind off his homework".

  Such a literature inserts itself into the interstices between speech and writing: if as speech it seems somewhat writerly, then as writing it retains many of the qualities of a speaking voice which issues – unlike the manual effort of writing – from unconscious depths. While speech is assisted in its articulation by tone and emphasis, writing must be more immediately precise, but such precision can then insinuate itself back into the oral mode, in terms reminiscent of Yeats's "written speech" or of Wilde's rehearsed spontaneities. This is the real meaning of those paragraphs in which a seemingly cold, rhetorical claim ("The silence was absolute") is scaled back ("Profound in any case") to something like precision ("All things considered, it was a solemn moment").26 Orality, however, persists in the love of lists; in the constant rephrasing of similar statements in slightly altered wording (a notable bardic device); and, most of all, in the extraordinary discrepancy between the looseness of the overall structure of a narrative and the almost manic precision of its constituent parts. This aspect of the trilogy – characterized as "chaos in the macrocosm, order in the microcosm"27 – perfectly repeats the strategies of the bardic lyric, whose quatrains were "individually well-wrought, but often with only a vague, formal connection between them".28 The effect of Beckett's text is to install the reader in a universe which no sooner threatens to take a particular shape than it dissolves, so that the birth-trauma of the writer, hearing voices as if for the first time, is repeated by the solitary reader: "You are on your back in the dark".

  Many of the greatest Gaelic lyrics are broken and gapped because of the difficulty experienced by scholars who sought to reconstitute them: the order in which individually-beautiful quatrains should succeed one another can never be more than arbitrary. This provides a useful clue to students of Beckett's art, which is in these respects very different from that of a writer like Eliot. In The Waste Land, for example, each fragment seems radiant, urging the reader to infer the whole of which it was an integral part before the tradition exploded into pieces. But Irish tradition never knew such coherence, with the consequence that in Beckett's texts, the part achieves an internal rigour-without-radiance. As a result, the reader can never infer the whole of which it seldom, if ever, would have constituted a pan anyway.

  This becomes clear in the broken songs and stories which fill out Beckett's world: like the song about the dog and the cook in Waiting for Godot, they are never told to a conclusion. Eliot might in his great poem have lamented the collapse of a tradition and, with it, of a stable subject, but for Beckett these things had never existed to begin with. In First Love, he captured the painful problem of those who tell stories and sing songs out of sheer desperation, in the absence of any overarching narrative which might explain them: "All she had done was to sing, sotto voce, as to herself and without words fortunately, some old folk songs, and so disjointedly, skipping from one to another and finishing none, that even I found it strange".29 For Beckett, the Gaelic tradition seemed posited on a void, every poem an utterance in the face of imminent annihilation, every list an inventory of shreds from a culture verging on extinction. Its bards built structures without an overall purpose, in a territory which remained largely unmapped and de-centred, a world which looked weirdly like his own, only more so. At the centre of that Gaelic world – on whose circumference Beckett could locate Oisín, Cuchulain, Maeve, Tír na nÓg, the Táin and the Hag of Beare – there was "no theme".30 And in the revivalism of the previous generation, all he could discern was an attempt to translate late-Victorian piety into the Irish language. This was not so much a rejection of Gaelic tradition as of various smug misrepresentations of it.

  A fuller, more updated rendition of that tradition may be found in the figure of the tramp in Waiting for Godot. That figure had already featured in the poetry of Yeats as an image of the now-rootless Anglo-Irish, neither Irish nor English, but caught wandering across the no-man's-land between the two cultures. Synge had developed it further, signing letters to his Catholic girlfriend "your old tramp",31 and in his essays comparing the artistic son of Protestant families to the youngest son of a farmer who takes to the roads for want of a better inheritance.32 The temperament of such men was artistic, he claimed, and they could harmonize more easily with the forces of nature than could any member of the settled community. For Synge, the tramp was a gloriously ambivalent presence, more respectable than the universally-despised tinker, but much less compromised than the solid, sedentary citizen: he had his appointed place in the rural economy, as a casual, seasonal labourer or as the bearer of news, but he nonetheless remained a free spirit, a poet who epitomized all that the emerging rural middle class was busily rejecting in itself.

  The ultimate roots of this figure were, of course, in the spailpín poets cast out onto the roads after the collapse of the old Gaelic order in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Yeats, for example, read the doom of Anglo-Irish poets into the fate of Aogán Ó Rathaille in "The Curse of Cromwell": just as the Gaelic bard had been faced with a new philistine middle class, to whom the Muses were "things of no account",33 so was he. Ó Rathaille's self-image was aristocratic, haughty, mandarin: he had the learning and training of a bard, entitled to princely patronage, but in actual life he seemed little better than a mendicant seeking alms. It was this tradition which Beckett invoked at the start of Waiting for Godot, when Didi laments to Gogo that "we were respectable in those days. Now it's too late".34 Their dented bowler hats and shabby morning suits proclaim them as men who once had pretensions to gentility and education. "You should have been a poet", says a sardonic Didi: and his partner, gesturing towards his rags in the manner of an Ó Rathaille, says "I was . . . Isn't that obvious?"35 When a friend complained to Beckett that the tramps at times talked as if they possessed doctorates, he shot back "How do you know they hadn't?"36 Their self-image is certainly that of an educated class, even if they are leading the life of the hobo.

  They are presented as characters without much history, who are driven to locate themselves in the world with reference to geography. But the world in which they live has no overall structure, no formal narrative: instead, it is a dreadful place in which every moment is like the next. Unable to construct a story of the past, the tramps learn nothing from their mistakes, because they can make none of the comparisons which might provide the basis for a confident judgement. Beckett's characters all know the longing to turn their lives into narrative ("it will have been a happy day")37 and, by this second look at their history, to free themselves of it; but the trick is not so easily done. Even those who think that they "possess" their past on a taperecording or on a page find that the present invariably flavours it, emphasizing the near-impossibility of entering into a dialogue with their own history.

  On the stage of Waiting for Godot is enacted the amnesia which afflicts an uprooted people:

  VLADIMIR: At the very beginning.

  ESTRAGON: The very beginning of WHAT?

  VLADIMIR: This evening ... I was saying ... I was saying ...

  ESTRAGON: I'm not a historian.38

  Such lost souls can, paradoxically, be as deadened by habit as by forgetfulness, a recognition sadly voiced by Gogo: "That's the way it is. Either I forget immediately or I never forget". Mostly, however, he forgets everything:

  ESTRAGON: We came here yesterday.

  VLADIMIR: Ah no, there you're mistaken.

  ESTRAGON: What did we do yesterday?

  VLADIMIR: What did we do yesterday?

  ESTRAGON: Yes.

  VLADIMIR: Why . . . (Angrily) Nothing is certain when you're about.

  ESTRAGON: In my opinion we were here.

  VLADIMIR: (Looking round) You recognize the place?

  ESTRAGON: I didn't say that.39

  As a victim of a history which he does not u
nderstand, Gogo must deal with every situation as if it were a wholly new event. In the face of that terror, he enacts – as do all people whose pasts have been denied them – the invention of traditions.

  Lacking an assured part, the tramps can have no clear sense of their own future. This is one reason why they cannot persist with any one of their chosen activities for very long. They are waiting without hope for a deliverance from a being in whom they do not really believe, in the manner of the aisling poets; and they are doomed to repeat the past precisely because they have never allowed themselves, or been allowed, to know it fully. This explains the paradox of persons who seem at once fixated on the past and supremely indifferent to it. Their surroundings seem decontextualized, because they represent a geography which has been deprived of a history. The historian Louis Cullen has spoken of "the general poverty of tradition in Ireland", which is why the people view their country "uncertainly and apologetically".40 Another scholar, noting the indifference of country folk to local antiquities, likens them to a people condemned to live without a key in a superbly coded environment.41 The loss of the ancestral heritage was a major contributory factor in this process.

  The tramps try as best they can to restore and reconnect memories which have been taken from them, but there are just too many gaps, caused by a life of poverty, migration and constant interruption. The "dead voices" haunt them with teasing possibilities – they are like leaves, like wings, like sand – but the sheer proliferation of possibilities means that all are annulled, and so they induce only vague feelings of guilt and frustration. The past erupts, again and again, to usurp the present, but never to connect meaningfully with it. Worse still, the forgetfulness is catching, as Pozzo discovers after exposure to the Tramp's confusions: