Beckett and Ireland (review)

Irish identity, muddled at least since Henry II but seemingly clarified at the end of the nineteenth century, the run up to the Easter Rising, and the emergence of the Free State, remains unsettled to this day, its fractal imagery and representations amid cultural and literary history multiplying or dissolving into identities. The vastly influential Norton Anthology of English Literature (emphasis mine) exacerbates the muddle. One might expect some geographical cohesion or political sensitivity in this gathering, but how account for so much Yeats, twenty-eight poems, a survey of Joyce that includes two stories from the very localized Dubliners, and, perhaps most curiously, Samuel Beckett's Endgame, written in French some thirty-five years after independence? Beckett, English? Au contraire, he famously quipped, invoking Irish otherness. But other "English" curiosities abound: Brian Friel's anti-English Translations, and the assimilation of poets Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, and Eavan Boland into the web of Englishness. Even more curious is The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, volume VI, The Twentieth Century and Beyond (emphasis mine) where the Irish big three, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett (among others), are absorbed into the fabric of Britishness. The Longman Anthology of British Literature, volume 2, is likewise fitted out, propped up, say, with Irish authors. Such fluid, expandable definitions of identity permit, presumably, a talent grab with rules of inclusion as slippery as those used to determine World Cup football sides.

This then is the territory that Seán Kennedy and his band of nine contributors return to in something of a reassessment of Beckett and Ireland. That said, Kennedy takes issue with suggestions that the enterprise might be tinged with reverse or counter colonialism, "a wrong-minded move to reclaim him," an enterprise, he observes, often deemed "reductive" (3). Kennedy bristles at the charged word "recolonize," which he may misread, albeit creatively: "The suggestion is that birth in Ireland represents a form of colonization for Beckett, and flight to Europe a means of decolonizing" (5). The issue, in fact, is less that of birth than critical readings or stagings of the work, and some high profile campaigns by homelanders. The dialectics of Kennedy's argument requires counterattack: "there must also be something reductive in the desire to retain Beckett as a quintessentially 'European' writer" (3). Agreed, but the attack on either/or, binary thinking that pervades the introduction and most essays in this volume may be too easy a target since it appears in very little serious contemporary criticism. Kennedy attributes such a position to the authors (not the editors as the bibliography would have it) of The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett (2004) and to a special issue of the Journal of Beckett Studies also published as a book called Beckett the European (2005) where, he argues, "the dichotomy is forcefully restated" (5). But the binary argument exists in neither, especially as Kennedy clarifies the issue, "wrong only that it overstates the case if applied unthinkingly across the entire oeuvre" (10-11). The position of both publications is, finally, that which Kennedy himself advocates, that is, to dismiss or diminish Beckett's Irishness is as reductive as seeing him through Irish eyes exclusively. Beckett's nationalism may be closer to that version of home(land) expressed in the miniature story, "neither," as that "between two lit refuges," or in the failed syncretism of First Love. Kennedy's call "to deconstruct the binaries of Irish Studies" (8) and his insistence that "the two spaces of [Beckett's] writing, Ireland and Europe, need to be considered together" (7), thus sound remarkably familiar, what Andrew Gibson calls limbo, which Beckett "made . . . his element" (195). It is, after all, Beckett's own method, as Micheal Wood suggests and develops in his essay: "dissolving of binary logic occurs everywhere in Beckett's late work" (175).

The most forceful, direct, if not combative statement of theme and purpose is that offered by Rónán McDonald in chapter 1: "The concern in this chapter is with the...