Samuel Beckett, W. B. Yeats, and Jack Yeats: Images and Works by Gordon S. Armstrong (review)

Reviews361 Gordon S. Armstrong, Samuel Beckett, W. B. Yeats, and Jack Yeats: Images and Works. Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 1990. Pp. 268. $42.50. This book is divided into three parts, the first devoted to Samuel Beckett, the second to Beckett and W. B. Yeats, and the third to Beckett and Jack B. Yeats, the poet's artist brother. It is illustrated with five very good color plates and six black and white reproductions representing works by Jack B. Yeats. According to the jacket copy (which I cite for its concision), "The author argues that Beckett rejected W. B. Yeats's elaborate symbology and dramaturgy, which stressed the evocative power of language, for a spare, gesture-oriented theater in which language functions in limited and essentially literal ways—a theater that owes its conventions, to a remarkable degree, to the paintings and writing of the younger Yeats brother." Though I would challenge the claim that in Beckett's theater "language functions in limited and essentially literal ways" (the author's formulation, see page 10) , such a comparative study of Beckett and the Yeats brothers (especially, from my point of view, Jack B. Yeats the painter) is potentially interesting, and Armstrong's book, with its color reproduction of Yeats' powerful Two Travellers (1942) on the cover, looks initially very promising. Two Travellers is bound to be highly evocative for readers of Beckett, who will readily associate the two eloquent figures and the distinctive and powerfully rendered landscape they inhabit with all those characters, from Mercier and Camier on, whom Beckett has unforgettably depicted "stravaguing the roads." It is all the more frustrating and disappointing therefore to discover that, despite the prominent position the painting occupies in the volume (it is reproduced again facing the title page), Two Travellers is subsequently and unaccountably ignored in the text, where it is never discussed. I have singled out the treatment of Two Travellers because it is a dramatic instance of what I find problematic about Armstrong's book as a whole, for Samuel Beckett, W. B. Yeats, and Jack Yeats: Images and Words, despite its initial promise, turns out to be a profound disappointment , and this is largely because the intuition that appears to have inspired it, which has to do with a certain "Irishness" in Beckett, and the occasional flashes of insight it contains, are never satisfactorily developed. Thus, as with Two Travellers, the author will, periodically, introduce a compelling image or provide a glimpse of a promising line of inquiry but then, instead of pursuing it, will immediately embark on an apparently unrelated and comparatively banal discussion in the course of which the reader's interest is rapidly and effectively dissipated. Let me give some examples. "I needed to know where the 'Irish-ness' of Beckett's characters originated," Armstrong writes in his preface, "and how to account for his personal antipathy towards Ireland and his literary sympathy for it" (p. 9). While Beckett's relationship to Ireland is no doubt far more complicated than this statement would allow, and while it would be on Beckett's own Irishness, as it is expressed in his oeuvre, rather than on the alleged "Irishness" of his characters that one might wish to focus, 362Comparative Drama it is nonetheless true that the "Irish question" is of crucial importance to the interpretation of Beckett's work, as Armstrong intuits. But the implicit interest of this intuition, which, given Beckett's inscrutability, not to mention his contrariness, would call for delicate handling, cannot and does not survive the kind of unrefined analogies that the author then proceeds to draw between the plays of W. B. and Jack B. Yeats and Beckett's theater. Thus the quest for the origin of the "Irish-ness" of Beckett's characters is submerged in a quite literal-minded pursuit and identification of "influence": so strong an imperative in Armstrong's book that it all but eclipses, when it does not undermine, his opposing claim that Beckett actually rejected the symbolism of W. B. Yeats' theater. A further instance of the failure to capitalize on a potentially interesting discovery occurs on page 34, where Armstrong, discussing the "extraordinary lengths" Yeats was...