HAMM: Get the sheet. I'll give you nothing more to eat.
CLOV: Then we'll die.
HAMM: I'll give you just enough to keep you from dying. You'll be hungry all the time.
CLOV: Then we shan't die. (Pause.) I'll go and get the sheet.56
So threadbare have these routines become that Hamm sometimes shrewdly hints at their stagy inauthenticity, as when he instructs Clov to place a toy dog standing before him in an imploring posture. And Clov's nascent rebellion is clear in the reassuring answer: "Your dogs are here".57
That looming rebellion is even more obvious in their exchange about religion. When Hamm suggests that they pray, he evokes Clov's derision, and then proceeds to concur with it by calling down a curse on "the bastard", who has the audacity not to exist. Clov's simple, subversive answer is "Not yet."58 The Irish grudge which he feels against God was summed up by the Gaelic poet Seán Ó Ríordáin, who said in response to the same question "Bhuel, má tá sé ann, is bastard ceart é" (Well, if he does exist, he's a proper bastard). What is rejected in Endgame is the old religion of fear satirized also at the end of Godot, but Clov's "not yet!" becomes a moving reprimand to those who see prayer as a set of demands rather than a real conversation, as an ultimatum rather than an overture. In his stage directions, Beckett goes to some lengths to mock the "attitudes of prayer", the mechanical hand-joining and the insincere silence of those onstage who seek a sign of God's favour. The artist whose motto was "no symbols where none intended" might have been expected to hate all wicked generations who seek obvious signs; and so the boy whom Clov sees at the end comes unbidden, to one who uttered that tentative, undogmatic phrase "Not yet!".
What is enacted onstage in both Waiting for Godot and Endgame is the bleakness of a freedom from which there will always be numerous mechanisms of escape. Beckett's is a world whose characters are constantly tempted to allow others to do their thinking for them, to resign their wills to a higher authority (often no more than a polite phrase for tyranny).
ESTRAGON: Well? If we gave thanks for our mercies.
VLADIMIR: What is terrible is to have thought.
ESTRAGON: But did that ever happen to us?59
Freedom from ancient spiritual authorities will be meaningful only if the character is capable of actual thought. Too often what he calls "freedom" is actually and only the freedom to be like everybody else. As Erich Fromm has written: "the right to express our thoughts means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own".60 The problem is that, having cut the cords which connected them to the old authority, the tramps sag like redundant puppets: theirs is the empty freedom of the puppet. Their consequent fear of their own insignificance – joked about because so greatly feared – leads them to make a final surrender to the Old Testament god of fear and loathing, or to a modern variant thereof. All of Beckett's characters worry as to whether or not they have loved or been worthy of love: many assume that this will only be possible on conditions of complete self-surrender. Their attachments to one another are not the free solidarity of equals so much as a sado-masochistic conspiracy of the wounded:
HAMM: Gone from me you'd be dead.
CLOV: And vice-versa.61
The psychology at work here is that which fed the fascist cult. There may well be a link between it and the vengeful deity on which Beckett poured such scorn in his post-war plays. Erich Fromm remarks that "once man was ready to become nothing but the means for the glory of a God who represented neither justice nor love, he was sufficiently prepared to accept the role of a servant to the economic machine – and eventually a Führer".62 Clov is tempted, like the tramps, to make himself dependent on a charismatic authority-figure, in whose aura he can bathe, and from whose confidence he can acquire a measure of the strength in which he is lacking. Because Hamm is so closely identified with his role, he is less conflicted than Clov, and more able (like Pozzo) to give a convincing impersonation. Yet in Clov's listlessness, his inability to maintain a role for any length of time, lies his great hope: the assertion of a still-defiant self.
Students of the sado-masochistic relation report that, in it, feelings of real love and tenderness only assert themselves at the very moment when the relationship is about to break up. This can also be true of the transactions between entire peoples; but it may also be found in the interplay between individuals too. Near the close of Endgame, Hamm suddenly finds in himself the grace to thank the Clov whom he believes to be leaving:
HAMM: I'm obliged to you, Clov. For your services.
CLOV: Ah, pardon, it's I am obliged to you.
HAMM: It's we are obliged to each other.63
This closing declaration is made against all the odds, and it is one of the most beautiful moments in Beckett's writings.
There is high irony in what follows, as the blind man fixes to die in the belief that Clov has gone. But Clov remains beside him, no longer a speaking servant but a silent partner, aware that there is no need for any rebellion now, because a true freedom never needs to declare or prove itself as such. Having spoken for himself in the first person singular, Clov is free to stay without objection or to go without cruelty. The compassion, which he finds in himself in these late moments, suggests also that his earlier repetitions of Hamm's platitudes may have been offered as much out of care for a suffering mortal as out of numb acquiescence. This duo, like Didi watching over the sleeping Gogo, take their places alongside all the other couples of O'Casey and Shaw, of Wilde and Synge, as the rudiments from which a real society might yet be built. It may not even take these persons, just a rational being, or, indeed, a flea. For the moment, however, the two wordless men, broken and blasted though they be, point like shattered signposts on a battlefield towards an uncertain but feasible future.
For his own part, Beckett appears to have believed that the conditions of post-war France, in which he wrote his plays, held vital lessons for Irish people, still nursing their own wounds three decades after British withdrawal from the twenty-six counties. In June 1946, he prepared a broadcast for Radio Éireann on the work of an Irish Red Cross hospital, of which he was storekeeper, at St. Lô, a town which had been bombed almost out of existence in a single night. Now, he was happy to report, it was being rebuilt by a combination of German war-prisoners, Irish technical expertise, and French pluck. In a coded rebuke to Irish neutrality during the war, he ended by suggesting that the Irish doctors, nurses and relief-workers at St. Lô "got at least as good as they gave . . . got indeed what they could hardly give, a vision and sense of a time-honoured conception of humanity in ruins, and perhaps even an inkling of the terms in which our condition is to be thought again".64 The talk was never broadcast. One of the editors at Radio Éireann was Roibeárd Ó Faracháin, a follower of those antiquarian poets whom Beckett had derided in 1934 for their flight from self-perception. In the suppressed broadcast, Bechett clearly stated that the Irish in France were the real inheritors of a national genius for building amid ruins with the shreds and patches, the metal sheeting and the wooden boards, of a shattered society. When asked whether he was English, his reply was laconic enough: "au contraire". To the end, Beckett held onto his green passport.
Perhaps, in the contours of a France remaking itself after the devastation wrought by the Nazis, he saw the image of an ideal Ireland of the future.
Thirty-One
Post-Colonial Ireland – "A Quaking Sod"
Patrick Pearse had always feared that the shapers of an independent Irish state might consolidate the order which they had set out to overthrow. He had, after all, opened The Murder Machine, his essay on educational reform, with a warning that freedom was so little experienced or understood that "the very organizations which exist in Ireland to champion freedom show no disposition themselves to accord freedom; they challenge a great tyranny but they erect their own little tyrannies".1 The danger was that people would mistake a repressive colonial machine for nature itself and proceed, unbidden, to employ many of the old categories of thought upon
themselves. When Michael Collins sent for British guns to help the Free State army to defeat the republican insurgents in the Four Courts, he did at the level of action what generations of Irish intellectuals would do at the level of ideas. Years later, after similar experiences in Africa, Fanon was to write:
... In its wilful narcissism, the national middle class is easily convinced that it can advantageously replace the middle class of the mother country. But that same independence which literally draws it into a corner will give rise within its ranks to catastrophic reactions, and will oblige it to send out frenzied appeals for help to the former mother country.2
The new élites had, quite simply, arrived too late, missing out on the heroic period of the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century, that phase when its members learned how to found heavy industries and factories. The new rulers emerged only after independence in the twentieth century and the vast majority of them never learned how to produce, only how to consume. In Ireland, they failed to transform the semi-developed economy inherited from the British regime.
The history of independent Ireland bears a remarkable similarity, therefore, to the phases charted by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth. In the early decades, the new leaders soothed a frustrated people with endless recollections of the sacred struggle for independence. Commemorations abounded, the Irish version of this disease being the repeated political taunt "Where were you in 1916?"
Poor leadership and scant resources condemned the nation for years to the status of an artisan economy, featuring local products. Shoddy native manufactures were protected by tariff barriers, just as bad writers who played up "local colour" were elevated over talented modernists who refused to follow the approved line. When this way of living was revealed as untenable, the native élite identified its historic role as intermediary for multinational companies: and, thereafter, it modelled its lifestyle on that of the international élite, whose members it invited to visit as tourists in search of the exotic. At this point, the literary exponents of local colour found themselves ratified by a new, even more influential, even more ecstatic, audience.
The new régime created not industries so much as industrial authorities, not factories so much as fixers. Its schools remained obsessed with a hyperacademic form of learning, derived from the colonial period, which tested new recruits for the swelling civil service. The curriculum emphasized languages, not just English and Irish but also Latin and Greek, "resembling that of the English public schools of the mid-Victorian period".3 Science and technology tended to be secondary. This ruling group mimicked the surface-effects of western consumerism, while its politicians bought votes at election-time with borrowed cash: but it built no infrastructure with which to service the debt. Its educators scarcely concealed their snobbish contempt for those who actually made things with their hands.
This trahison des clercs might have been attributed to the failure to overhaul the "murder machine" so that education could instead have served the community's needs. Hence, Nigerian children found themselves sweating through Corneille's Le Cid at much the same time that V. S. Naipaul in Trinidad was straining over Dickens and Irish students were picking their way through the essays of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.4 Ngugi reported from 1960s Kenya that its children, after a decade of independence, were still taught to know themselves only through London and New York, and he recalled the complaint of a syllabus committee that "students were still being subjected to alien cultural values which are meaningless to our present needs".5 Chinua Achebe noted that the post-independence élite of readers, "where they exist at all, are only interested in reading textbooks", and he recalled a pathetic letter from a Ghanaian reader of his Things Fall Apart, which took the form of a complaint that he had not included sample questions and answers at its end, "to ensure his success at next year's school examination".6
Such a system produced, with dire predictability, a people lacking in self-confidence and easily bullied by outsiders. Doctors, dentists, lawyers, engineers and architects were produced in over-abundance, to meet the career-aspirations of the new élite, but most were then exported as free, instant experts to the First World: and so it is with most Irish critics. The more gifted amongst them were often simply internalizes of the imperial mode. "No Irishman", wrote Denis Donoghue, "can ever assume that he is at the centre of anything".7
In the post-colony, school students engaged in rote-learning of the old, familiar texts, on courses often taught by mediocre lecturers from the former colonial power rather than by persons of talent from the independent state. In Nigeria, Achebe noted a similar tendency in college administrators: "Given a chance, they will appoint a European over a Nigerian to teach at their university".8 Ngugi's account also rejected the widespread notion that Africa was a mere extension of the West. He recollected a question put by young lecturers in 1968: "if there is need for the 'study of the historic continuity of a single culture', why can't this be African? Why can't African literature be at the centre so that we can view other cultures in relation to it?"9 Eventually, of course, these reforms would be achieved: but one side-effect of the intervening crisis was the extraordinary tardiness in the development of a probing native criticism. The few native-born critics who emerged in the years immediately following independence often specialized in overseas literature, while the leading native writers were most fully explicated by foreigners: and many lower-level postings in universities were occupied by foreign academics hoping desperately for a summons back to a more "prestigious" assignment in the old country. Today, all that has changed, but in the intervening period much psychological damage was done.
"When exams matter so terribly", writes Paul Harrison in Inside the Third World, "rote learning is encouraged and creative, adaptable thinking is suppressed. Anyone who has taught in a developing country cannot help noticing the problems of bringing out students' self-confidence and ability to make independent judgements".10 The student was often taught a covert self-hatred, seeing advancement as the poised imitation of English masters. V. S. Naipaul put this very well in The Mimic-Men:
We pretended to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves for life, we mimic men of the New World, one unknown corner of it, with all its reminders of the corruption that came so quickly to the new.11
And George Lamming was even more blunt:
Supervising this complexity of learning to be a new man, in a new place, was an authority whose home was elsewhere.12
The Irish, being the first English-speakers to decolonize in this century, were inevitably the first to make the expected wrong-turning, before, in Achebe's words, "the great collusive swindle that was independence showed its true face to us".13 Achebe adds that at least Empire had its glorious heyday, its years of honour, but "its successor, independence, did not even wait to grow old before turning betrayer".
It seemed, at the outset, as if the Irish might genuinely renovate their students' consciousness. Eoin Mac Néill, a brilliant Gaelic scholar and co-founder of the Gaelic League, became the native Minister for Education of whom Pearse had long dreamed, a man who abolished payment of teachers according to examination results and who introduced open courses in literature, without the dead weight of prescribed and approved texts. But he did not abolish the hated examination system, and so schools faced the ultimate nightmare, an open course followed by a set test. The bleakness of such a freedom could not long be tolerated and, by June 1940, a new Minister, Éamon de Valera, reintroduced prescribed books. The anthologies of English literature thereafter studied, for the next three decades in Ireland, were described by one teacher as "a monument to an essentially Victorian sensibility".14 While England in the 1940s and 1950s transformed itself into a welfare state and retuned its syllabi to that modern world, the Irish continued for another decade to model their literary studies on the methods of Quiller-Couch.
The fact that religion, rather than English literature, was held to be the central subject of study in schools helped to prevent the emergence o
f a movement of literary critics such as followed F. R. Leavis in England. Even more regrettable was the fact that the courses studied paid scant heed to the considerable achievement of modern Irish writers in the English language. It may even have suited certain dogmatists in the Department of Education to misrepresent English culture by antique imperial curiosities, since that helped to feed a pet theory that Irishness was only to be found within the Gaelic tradition. If religion was the central subject in the humanities, then the Irish language and its literature were not far behind. English literature was nothing more than a pretext for the study of historical sensibilities. It was, therefore, hardly surprising that Ireland should have continued to produce some of the foremost exponents of belles lettres still working in the English language.
The problem, as Daniel Corkery saw it at the end of the first decade of independence, was that such a system produced in most cases neither an English nor an Irish sensibility, nor any admirable hybrid. It led instead to confusion, the kind that would be found later in Ghana when nationalists sang "Lead, Kindly Light" to welcome their leader Nkrumah back from jail, or in Kenya when the young Ngugi, seeking to visualize Wordsworth's daffodils in a school classroom, reached hopelessly for the image of fish crowded into a lake. In Ireland, too, Corkery detected not just a lack of native forms, but the want of any foundation on which to shape them. "Everywhere in the mentality of the Irish people are flux and uncertainty. Our national consciousness may be described, in a native phrase, as a quaking sod. It gives no footing. It is not English, nor Irish, nor Anglo-Irish ...."15 That is what Lamming had in mind when he described how the colonized is invariably separated from the original ground on which the colonizer found him: "It is this awareness of distance between what is his and what he has learned to do, it is precisely this awareness which undermines his confidence in what he really was and really could be".16
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