Breaking the Habit: Samuel Beckett's Critique of Irish-Ireland

Scholars of modernism generally prefer to read Samuel Beckett in cosmopolitan terms, and thus are prone to ignore the role that Ireland played in the development of his mature prose style. Tyrus Miller, for instance, in describing how Beckett came to reject the poetics of high modernism as a young writer, rightly observes that "Beckett debunks modernism's epistemological concerns and depicts the mind's autonomy as hopelessly vulnerable to the extramental and excremental contingencies of the body as the object of pleasure, pain, social power, and death."¹ But Miller does not entertain the possibility that Beckett's growing interest in questions of subjectivity had something to do with his Irish background.

Reading Beckett alongside Joyce underscores the fact that both of these writers were affected by the material circumstances of their birth country; Beckett's fascination with "the extramental and excremental contingencies of the body" has an obvious precedent in Joyce's work. Although Beckett tried to distance himself stylistically from Joyce, his goals as an Irish writer remained much the same. Like Joyce, who worked to replace the standard narrative of Irish history with"a non-narrative that would universally subsume all narratives,"Beckett sought to challenge essential notions of Irishness with a non-narrative that undermined the narratological basis of identity.²

Irish scholars—despite an initial reluctance to accept this expatriate writer as one of their own—have increasingly come to recognize Beckett's Irishness over the past three decades.³ The recent spate of Beckett biographies all shed further light on the writer's relationship to Ireland.⁴ More than one critic has defined Beckett's career as what J. C. C. Mays called "a process of extrication from and rejection of Irishness."⁵ But few have addressed the different ways in which Beckett pursued this process before and after his turn to French in the 1940s, and as a result, have generally failed to recognize his ongoing efforts to critique the exclusive structures of identity that emerged in Ireland after Independence.

Beckett initially attempted to undermine these structures in the performative brand of literary criticism that he practiced in the 1930s, which, by elevating style over substance, underscore his desire to find a voice for himself. His essays and reviews of the period make clear that he began writing with a basic distrust of all fixed notions of identity, whether constructed by the individual or by the state. This is apparent in "Dante . . . Bruno.Vico . . Joyce" (1929), which challenges "the neatness of identifications" in terms of its form as well as its content.⁶ Beckett refuses to follow the conventions of academic writing when he considers how Joyce subverts systematic modes of thought in Work in Progress. Likewise, he disrupts the discursive approach that he adopts in Proust (1931) to call attention to the deadening effects of habit that he decries in this critical monograph on the French novelist. Describing the intellectual prejudices that characterize creatures of habit, he argues for a dynamic conception of the self and the nation at the same time. Beckett's refusal to compromise his own voice by allowing it to settle into a particular mode of discourse finds unique expression in "Le Concentrisme," an ingenious send-up of academic pedantry that he presented as a formal paper to the Modern Language Society of Trinity College Dublin in November 1930. Writen in French, this literary parody does more than complicate Lloyd's reading of "Premier Amour" ("First Love") as a decisive departure for Beckett.⁷ Beckett began to explore subjectivity outside the confines of language long before he abandoned English. By cultivating his bilingual imagination, he deliberately aimed to reject overly rigid constructions of identity from the very start of his career.

Whereas Beckett challenges such constructions in linguistic terms within his earliest work, he does so in more thematic terms after his decisive turn to French in the late 1940s. Freed from the constraints of style that he associated with English, Beckett employs narrative means to explore the differences between two fundamentally opposed conceptions of identity in Molloy (1947...