Beckett’s move from Dublin to Paris, then, was in one sense a break from nationalist Ireland to modernist, cosmopolitan Europe. Yet there was a good deal of continuity involved as well. For one thing, nationalism (a thoroughly modern phenomenon) has much in common with some currents of modernism. Both seek to move forward into the future with their eyes fixed on the past. For another thing, early twentieth-century Ireland fulfilled all three classical conditions, as Perry Anderson has defined them, for producing a modernism of its own.2 It had an impressive lineage of high culture for artists to plunder and dismantle; it was in the throes of political revolution; and it was experiencing the impact of modernization for the first time. What emerged from all this, to be sure, was a modernist movement rather than an avant-garde – a Yeats rather than a Mayakovsky, a George Moore rather than a Piscator, the Abbey Theatre rather than the Bauhaus. In Beckett’s eyes, this failed to cut deep enough.
Even so, Irish culture was hospitable to anti-realist experiment as its English counterpart was for the most part not. Realism had never been the favoured mode of Irish fiction, from the fantasy extravaganzas of the Celtic sagas to the Gothic of Maturin, Lefanu and Bram Stoker, and the great anti-novels of Sterne, Joyce and O’Brien. If Ireland was in some ways a traditionalist society, its traditions were peculiarly fractured and disrupted by a history of colonial intervention; and this meant that it was no stranger to the estranged, fragmented, unstable self, all of which played a role in the flowering of a distinctively Irish modernism. The progressive narratives of realism made little sense in such a stagnant, de-industrialised nation. Nor did realism’s assured totalities. Language in Ireland had for long been a political minefield rather than a taken-for-granted reality, a fact which (as with Joyce) lent itself easily to the verbal self-consciousness of modernist art.
From Dublin to Paris, then, was not so huge a leap. It was a good deal shorter, as both Joyce and Beckett were to discover, than from Dublin to London. The cosmopolitan sympathies of both men helped to drive them out of their provincially minded, inward-looking native land; yet Ireland has also had a long tradition of looking over the heads of the British to the Continent, all the way from the peripatetic monks of the Middle Ages to the corporate executives of the Celtic Tiger. Even nationalism is a thoroughly international phenomenon, and the Irish species of it which Joyce and Beckett spurned had fruitful contacts with India, South Africa, Egypt, Afghanistan and a number of other places. It was not a matter of a simple opposition between home and abroad.
Nor is it a question of a simple coupling of Joyce and Beckett. In an illuminating discussion, Casanova shows how the two men went their different literary ways in the pursuit of similar anti-representational ends. If Beckett aimed to have no style, Joyce sought to imitate every style he could lay his hands on. If Beckett wanted to purge words of their meanings, Joyce dreamt of laying meaning on so thick that the English language would crumble to pieces in his grasp. Beckett, always an ascetic, chooses the via negativa of non-meaning, while his compatriot pursued the carnivalesque path of polyphony. Beckett’s frugal language is among other things a reaction to the baroque hyperbole of Irish nationalist rhetoric. The celebrated avant-garde materiality of the word struck the younger Irish author as, in his own term, ‘terrible’. In his search for a ‘literature of the unword’, language was to be eliminated, not foregrounded.
Since eliminating meaning is an impossible literary project even for a Mallarmé, writing itself becomes for Beckett the very signifier of the failure which so gripped his imagination. In a superb passage in the book, Casanova shows us how it was just this insight into the ineluctability of literary failure which enabled Beckett to find his feet as an author. He would not go the way of Yeats and Dublin, or of Shaw and London; but for a while he could not go the way of the avant-garde either, since an enormous obstacle named Joyce loomed up to block that path. In Bloomian terms, Joyce was the strong precursor to Beckett’s belated ephebe – or, as they say in Ireland today, Ulysses is the nightmare from which Dublin is trying to awaken. Beckett will finally find a way around this daunting presence by placing the very impediment to writing at the centre of his writing, transforming the question of failure into the very form of his art, telling incessantly of the failure to tell. He will accept that though he won’t write, can’t write, has nothing to say and nothing with which to say it, he must write. The act of literature thus becomes a kind of empty Kantian imperative, a law without logic, an obligation without content. Like desire, it is nothing personal.
What finally strikes one most about this book is its remarkably ambitious scope. Packed into its brief compass are reflections on Irish history and European philosophy, some scrupulous analysis of individual texts, speculations on the artistic avant-garde, a fascinating excursus on Beckett and Dante, along with a coherent and provocative viewpoint on Beckett’s work as a whole. One can have no doubt that the maestro himself would have admired its elegant economy.
As depicted in the fearsome, hieratic photographs imposed by official portraiture, Beckett has come to embody, at least in France, the prophetic, sacred mission assigned the writer by devotees of literature. Accordingly, he has been assimilated to a vague metaphysics, in a strange, solitary place, where suffering permits only a well-nigh inarticulate, shapeless language, a kind of pure cry of pain, cast just as it comes on to paper.
As if he alone represented a kind of poetic beyond, Beckett has only ever been read as the messenger or oracle of the truth of ‘being’. The Unnamable, writes Maurice Blanchot, is ‘a being without being, who can neither live nor die, stop or start, the empty space in which the idleness of an empty speech speaks’.1 This representation of poetic tragedy, which is but one of the countless forms of literature’s annexation by philosophers, reduces the poet to the passive, archaic function of inspired mediator, charged with ‘unveiling being’. (‘Ah, the old questions, the old answers, there’s nothing like them’2, says Beckett who, in irony at least, surpasses his commentators.) Even though the jargon of ‘authenticity’ was alien to him, the obscurity and strangeness of his texts had to be reduced to the only legitimate form of profundity. As early as the 1950s, Blanchot’s view became in France the sole authorized commentary, helping to ‘fabricate’ a tailor-made Beckett, hero of ‘pure’ criticism. Lacking a history, a past, an inheritance or a project, Beckett disappeared under the flashy garb of poetic canonization.
This heroic imagery has proved one of the surest ways to obscure the specificity of literary form, to refuse Beckett any aesthetic impulse, the search for a form therewith being reduced to an artifice unworthy of the quest for ‘authenticity’. Thus, apropos of The Unnamable, Blanchot writes of a book ‘without cheating or subterfuge … in which aesthetic sentiments are no longer apposite’.3 The (apparent) obscurity of Beckett’s texts has served the obscurantist designs of Blanchot-style criticism.
A reconstruction of Beckett’s trajectory,