Inventing Ireland (72 page)

The instrument which conveyed these Beckettian epiphanies was utterly bardic in tone: "A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine".
²²
The process of composition was carried out by the Gaelic
filí
as they lay on pallets in small, darkened rooms. This dark seclusion protected them from distracting light and noise and recalled the ancient links between art and sorcery.
²³
To secure themselves further, some of the poets lay with stones on their bellies or in the hands (a little like Molloy with his sixteen pebbles) or even with plads around their heads:

To one on his back in the dark. This he can tell by the pressure on his hind parts and by how the dark changes when he shuts his eyes and again when he opens them again. Only a small part of what is said can be verified. As for example when he hears, You are on your back in the dark. Then he must acknowledge the truth of what is said . . .
²⁴

The subject of a bardic exercise was set overnight: the
filí
worked on it all day, each lying on his bed in the dark until night fell, when at last lights were brought in and the words written down. The
pensum
or writing task which had to be discharged by each of the speakers of the trilogy for the approval of an adjudicating master seems to be a clear version of this procedure. "Strange notion . . . that of a task to be performed before one can be at rest".
²⁵
The students of the bardic schools lived a great distance from their homes, so that they might not be distracted by family or friends from their labours; like the younger
Krapp, each was warned against the seductions of a female who might "take his mind off his homework".

Such a literature inserts itself into the interstices between speech and writing: if as speech it seems somewhat writerly, then as writing it retains many of the qualities of a speaking voice which issues – unlike the manual effort of writing – from unconscious depths. While speech is assisted in its articulation by tone and emphasis, writing must be more immediately precise, but such precision can then insinuate itself back into the oral mode, in terms reminiscent of Yeats's "written speech" or of Wilde's rehearsed spontaneities. This is the real meaning of those paragraphs in which a seemingly cold, rhetorical claim ("The silence was absolute") is scaled back ("Profound in any case") to something like precision ("All things considered, it was a solemn moment").
²⁶
Orality, however, persists in the love of lists; in the constant rephrasing of similar statements in slightly altered wording (a notable bardic device); and, most of all, in the extraordinary discrepancy between the looseness of the overall structure of a narrative and the almost manic precision of its constituent parts. This aspect of the trilogy – characterized as "chaos in the macrocosm, order in the microcosm"
²⁷
– perfectly repeats the strategies of the bardic lyric, whose quatrains were "individually well-wrought, but often with only a vague, formal connection between them".
²⁸
The effect of Beckett's text is to install the reader in a universe which no sooner threatens to take a particular shape than it dissolves, so that the birth-trauma of the writer, hearing voices as if for the first time, is repeated by the solitary reader: "You are on your back in the dark".

Many of the greatest Gaelic lyrics are broken and gapped because of the difficulty experienced by scholars who sought to reconstitute them: the order in which individually-beautiful quatrains should succeed one another can never be more than arbitrary. This provides a useful clue to students of Beckett's art, which is in these respects very different from that of a writer like
Eliot. In
The Waste Land,
for example, each
fragment seems radiant, urging the reader to infer the whole of which it was an integral part before the
tradition exploded into pieces. But Irish tradition never knew such coherence, with the consequence that in Beckett's texts, the part achieves an internal rigour-without-radiance. As a result, the reader can never infer the whole of which it seldom, if ever, would have constituted a pan anyway.

This becomes clear in the broken songs and stories which fill out Beckett's world: like the song about the dog and the cook in
Waiting for Godot,
they are never told to a conclusion. Eliot might in his great poem have lamented the collapse of a tradition and, with it, of a stable subject, but for Beckett these things had never existed to begin with. In
First Love,
he captured the painful problem of those who tell stories and sing songs out of sheer desperation, in the absence of any overarching narrative which might explain them: "All she had done was to sing,
sotto voce,
as to herself and without words fortunately, some old folk songs, and so disjointedly, skipping from one to another and finishing none, that even I found it strange".
²⁹
For Beckett, the Gaelic tradition seemed posited on a void, every poem an utterance in the face of imminent annihilation, every list an inventory of shreds from a culture verging on extinction. Its bards built structures without an overall purpose, in a territory which remained largely unmapped and de-centred, a world which looked weirdly like his own, only more so. At the centre of that Gaelic world – on whose circumference Beckett could locate Oisín, Cuchulain, Maeve, Tír na nÓg, the
Táin and the Hag of Beare – there was "no theme".
³⁰
And in the revivalism of the previous generation, all he could discern was an attempt to translate late-Victorian piety into the Irish language. This was not so much a rejection of Gaelic tradition as of various smug misrepresentations of it.

A fuller, more updated rendition of that tradition may be found in the
figure of the
tramp in
Waiting for Godot.
That figure had already featured in the poetry of Yeats as an image of the now-rootless Anglo-Irish, neither Irish nor English, but caught wandering across the no-man's-land between the two cultures. Synge had developed it further, signing letters to his Catholic girlfriend "your old tramp",
³¹
and in his essays comparing the artistic son of Protestant families to the youngest
son of a farmer who takes to the roads for want of a better inheritance.
³²
The temperament of such men was artistic, he claimed, and they could harmonize more easily with the forces of nature than could any member of the settled community. For Synge, the tramp was a gloriously ambivalent presence, more respectable than the universally-despised tinker, but much less compromised than the solid, sedentary citizen: he had his appointed place in the rural economy, as a casual, seasonal labourer or as the bearer of news, but he nonetheless remained a free spirit, a poet who epitomized all that the emerging rural middle class was busily rejecting in itself.

The ultimate roots of this figure were, of course, in the
spailpín
poets cast out onto the roads after the collapse of the old Gaelic order in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Yeats, for example, read the doom of Anglo-Irish poets into the fate of Aogán Ó
Rathaille in "The Curse of Cromwell": just as the Gaelic bard had been faced with a new philistine middle class, to whom the Muses were "things of no account",
³³
so was he. Ó Rathaille's self-image was aristocratic, haughty, mandarin: he had the learning and training of a bard, entitled to princely patronage, but in actual life he seemed little better than a mendicant seeking alms. It was this tradition which Beckett invoked at the start of
Waiting for Godot,
when Didi laments to Gogo that "we were respectable in those days. Now it's too late".
³⁴
Their dented bowler hats and shabby morning suits proclaim them as men who once had pretensions to gentility and education. "You should have been a poet", says a sardonic Didi: and his partner, gesturing towards his rags in the manner of an Ó Rathaille, says "I was . . . Isn't that obvious?"
³⁵
When a friend complained to Beckett that the tramps at times talked as if they possessed doctorates, he shot back "How do you know they hadn't?"
³⁶
Their self-image is certainly that of an educated class, even if they are leading the life of the hobo.

They are presented as characters without much history, who are driven to locate themselves in the world with reference to geography. But the world in which they live has no overall structure, no formal narrative: instead, it is a dreadful place in which every moment is like the next. Unable to construct a story of the past, the tramps learn nothing from their mistakes, because they can make none of the comparisons which might provide the basis for a confident judgement. Beckett's characters all know the longing to turn their lives into narrative ("it will have been a happy day")
³⁷
and, by this second look at their history, to free themselves of it; but the trick is not so easily done. Even those who think that they "possess" their past on a taperecording
or on a page find that the present invariably flavours it, emphasizing the near-impossibility of entering into a dialogue with their own history.

On the stage of
Waiting for Godot
is enacted the
amnesia which afflicts an uprooted people:

VLADIMIR: At the very beginning.

ESTRAGON: The very beginning of WHAT?

VLADIMIR: This evening ... I was saying ... I was saying ...

ESTRAGON: I'm not a historian.
³⁸

Such lost souls can, paradoxically, be as deadened by habit as by forgetfulness, a recognition sadly voiced by Gogo: "That's the way it is. Either I forget immediately or I never forget". Mostly, however, he forgets everything:

ESTRAGON: We came here yesterday.

VLADIMIR: Ah no, there you're mistaken.

ESTRAGON: What did we do yesterday?

VLADIMIR: What did we do yesterday?

ESTRAGON: Yes.

VLADIMIR: Why . . . (Angrily) Nothing is certain when you're about.

ESTRAGON: In my opinion we were here.

VLADIMIR: (Looking round) You recognize the place?

ESTRAGON: I didn't say that.
³⁹

As a victim of a history which he does not understand, Gogo must deal with every situation as if it were a wholly new event. In the face of that terror, he enacts – as do all people whose pasts have been denied them – the invention of traditions.

Lacking an assured part, the tramps can have no clear sense of their own future. This is one reason why they cannot persist with any one of their chosen activities for very long. They are waiting without hope for a deliverance from a being in whom they do not really believe, in the manner of the
aisling
poets;
and they are doomed to repeat the past precisely because they have never allowed themselves, or been allowed, to know it fully. This explains the paradox of persons who seem at once fixated on the past and supremely indifferent to it. Their surroundings seem decontextualized, because they represent a geography which has been deprived of a history. The historian
Louis Cullen has spoken of "the general poverty of
tradition in Ireland", which is why the people
view their country "uncertainly and apologetically".
⁴⁰
Another scholar, noting the indifference of country folk to local antiquities, likens them to a people condemned to live without a key in a superbly coded environment.
⁴¹
The loss of the ancestral heritage was a major contributory factor in this process.

The tramps try as best they can to restore and reconnect memories which have been taken from them, but there are just too many gaps, caused by a life of poverty, migration and constant interruption. The "dead voices" haunt them with teasing possibilities – they are like leaves, like wings, like sand – but the sheer proliferation of possibilities means that all are annulled, and so they induce only vague feelings of guilt and frustration. The past erupts, again and again, to usurp the present, but never to connect meaningfully with it. Worse still, the forgetfulness is catching, as Pozzo discovers after exposure to the Tramp's confusions:

VLADIMIR: We met yesterday. (Silence) Do you not remember?

POZZO: I don't remember having met anyone yesterday. But tomorrow I won't remember having met anyone today. So don't count on me to enlighten you.
⁴²

Lacking a clear sense of themselves, the tramps invent short-term identities (Let's play Lucky and Pozzo) or counterfeiting real emotion (Let's abuse each other). Like the Irish in England, or the black man in New York, they feel constantly "on". They become obsessed with the performative element in all exploitative relationships: and their curiosity about Pozzo and Lucky centres on the manner in which the master invents (but seldom deigns to notice) his slave, and in which the slave reciprocates by noticing and thus ratifying his master. Pozzo's absolute need is for such ratification ("Is everybody looking at me?"),
⁴³
for if he is not perceived, he will not feel certain that he exists. Hegel, in his writings on the master/slave paradigm, had taught that the one who attains recognition without reciprocating becomes the master, while he who recognizes but is not recognized becomes the slave. The master thus reduces the slave to a mere instrument of his will, yet in that very victory lurks a longer-term defeat. Alienated from human labour, Pozzo loses the means of transforming his world and himself, but the slave who works upon objects thereby transforms himself. Moreover, since the slave is no better than an animal in the eyes of his master, Pozzo finds the recognition which he obtains inauthentic, because he is recognized only by someone unworthy. Hence, in the play, Pozzo
cannot go for long without seeking the society of his likes (the tramps must be "human beings none the less ... Of the same species as Pozzo") but, he hastily adds, to be suitable to his purposes such figures must be degradedly different as well ("even when the likeness is an imperfect one"). He seeks a botched metaphor, a strained theatricality: while the tramps want most of all to literalize, to write their own script and produce their own drama, of a kind which will not be abjectly dependent on an audience.