The Irish Beckett by John P. Harrington (review)

Book Reviews JOHN P. HARRINGTON. The Irish Beckett. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press 1991. pp. 210. $29.95· As the 1991 Beckett Festival in Dublin showed, Ireland has at last discovered that Beckett is an Irish writer. "The Irish Beckett" was the title of a Festival lecture (by James Mays) and the Autumn/Winter issue of the Irish University Review continues the trend with an article by Francis Doherty, "Watt in an Irish frame." John Harrington 's book belongs to an increasingly active movement to establish Beckett's lrishness. What it means to be Irish, what Beckett's attitudes to Ireland have been at different periods, and how these have been reflected in his art; such are the questions Harrington pursues, working out from Conor Cruise O'Brien's definition of Irishness: "the condition of being involved in the Irish situation, and usually of being mauled by it." The phrase, "the Irish situation," indicates the cultural direction of Harrington's study. He has relatively little to say about the drama but focuses chiefly on the early fiction and critical writings which contain the bulk of the evidence for Beckett's interest in Irish cultural identity. Later, the Irish allusions tcnd to be more abstracted, disguised (and also more personal), though as Harrington shows, geographical distance a~one did not diminish Beckett's preoccupation with his place of birth. Distance from the source is woven as a theme into the cultural disorientation of Murphy, set in London, and Watt, set in the no-place of Mr. Knott (there is an interesting discussion of Watt's relationship to the Big House tradition in Irish fiction). The argument is sometimes pushed a little far. [s Murphy really to be taken so consistently as an expression of Yeatsian antimonies (that Yeats is often in mind in the novel is nol in doubt)? Does All Thar Fall really show Beckel! applying his "exposure of sustaining positivistic illusions ofa modem, partitioned Ireland"? But ifspecial pleading is required on occasion to support the thesis that Beckett's "poetics offutility" is "consistently grounded in a particular local/rish cultural predicament," some excellent detail is uncovered to explain and illuminate allusions which clearly do point in that direction. Modern Drama, 35 (1992) 617 618 Book Reviews The short stories in More Pricks than Kicks of 1934. Beckett's DubUllers, notably gain in interest from the connections Harrington makes between the mocking stance of the anti-hero, Belacqua, and the cultural climate of Dublin in the 19305. Suggestive glimpses are given into books like Corkery's The Hidden Ireland and the various refutations it drew, filling in a real-life background to the chatter of the Celtic Twilighters , Gaelic Revivalists and the like encountered by Belacqua. Beckett gets much fun out of all the pretentiousness, including Belacqua's own. "You make great play with your short stay abroad," his girl friend, Winnie, thinks caustically to herself when he deplores Irish insularity and holds forth about the Irish landscape in tenns of its "French" qualities. But there are enough dark notes to support Harrington's view that the cultural confusion has to be taken seriously as an immobilising force and that, far from showing Beckett's detachment from Dublin culture, More Pricks than Kicks is an extreme example of the disillusionment it engenders. The case for seeing Beckett as actively involved in the Dublin literary debate is partly argued from biographical detail. He appeared as witness in a literary libel case in Dublin in 1937 and might well have been sued himself for his caricature of Austin Clarke as the pot poet, Austin Ticklepenny, in Murphy. That novel uses its London setting to enjoy an orgy of satire on the Irish literary scene and in other, less ironic ways to draw upon Beckett's Irish literary antecedents. Cathleen ni Houlihan disguised as Miss Counihan is one of many such in-jokes. But Murphy's last wish, to have his ashes flushed down the lavatory at the Abbey Theatre, "where their happiest hours have been spent," should not, suggests Harrington, be taken as a cynical put~down of the nationalist theatre by "the future pioneer of the Theatre of the Absurd...