Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cisr20 Download by: [Alan Graham] Date: 24 August 2016, At: 09:41 Irish Studies Review ISSN: 0967-0882 (Print) 1469-9303 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cisr20 “Godforsaken hole called … called …”: place, nation, and spatial crisis in Beckett’s fiction and drama Alan Graham To cite this article: Alan Graham (2016) “Godforsaken hole called … called …”: place, nation, and spatial crisis in Beckett’s fiction and drama, Irish Studies Review, 24:2, 159-174, DOI: 10.1080/09670882.2016.1151152 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09670882.2016.1151152 Published online: 24 Feb 2016. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 48 View related articles View Crossmark data
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Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttp://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cisr20
Download by: [Alan Graham] Date: 24 August 2016, At: 09:41
“Godforsaken hole called … called …”: place,nation, and spatial crisis in Beckett’s fiction anddrama
Alan Graham
To cite this article: Alan Graham (2016) “Godforsaken hole called … called …”: place, nation,and spatial crisis in Beckett’s fiction and drama, Irish Studies Review, 24:2, 159-174, DOI:10.1080/09670882.2016.1151152
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09670882.2016.1151152
“Godforsaken hole called … called …”: place, nation, and spatial crisis in Beckett’s fiction and drama
Alan Graham
school of english, drama and Film, university College dublin, Ireland
The central difficulty facing scholars interested in the relevance of Ireland to the work of Samuel Beckett is the need to account for the recurring Irish allusions in his fiction and drama while observing how this oeuvre oversees a deconstruction of referentiality itself. As David Lloyd has argued, Beckett’s work is “so devoted to the dismantling of the adequacy of both representation and reference in all their dimensions” it therefore resists “any reading that would seek to draw from the work a stable cultural or political reference to Irish matter”.1 Unlike his compatriot James Joyce, whose work has assumed paradigmatic significance for an Irish studies increasingly preoccupied with material culture, the Beckett canon does not readily yield a palimpsest of socio-political concerns in relation to the author’s native country. Rather, Beckett’s texts “constellate Irish material … in conjunction with diverse and disparate materials that cannot be reduced or referred back to an Irish location”.2 In this way, Lloyd eloquently observes, Beckett’s work “neither refers to Ireland nor fails to” and it is precisely for this reason, he contends, that it is difficult, if not impossible, to “secure” an Irish Beckett.3 Yet the critical need to acknowledge how elision, partiality, and erasure in Beckett’s work guarantee the absence and impossibility of a stable set of Irish socio-cultural and political reference, in the mode of a Joycean cultural materialism, is in danger of obfuscating how these very strategies may remember and indeed homologise distinct histories. By exploring the resonance between powerful narratives of place identity in the Ireland of Beckett’s early
ABSTRACTThis essay explores how the figuring of place throughout the fiction and drama of Samuel Beckett registers and critiques narratives of place in Irish nationalist discourse. The Irish place-names of Beckett’s texts are read in relation to a toponymic re-territorialisation in post-independence Ireland, a process which enervated place identities synonymous with a Protestant culture and history. In this way, the essay argues that the celebrated “placelessness” of Beckett’s work and the collapse of spatial agency experienced by his protagonists is informed by the construction of nation-space in the country of the author’s early life. The preponderance of scatological place-names in the Beckett oeuvre is approached in these terms and read as a mode of resistance to the self-sacrifice to nation demanded in emplacement.
life and the complex figuring of place throughout his work, this essay attempts to identity important socio-political dynamics which inform a key aesthetic signature of the Beckett canon: “placelessness”. Reading the absent, strange, and grotesque place-names of Beckett’s fiction and drama against the cult of the place-name in Irish culture and, specifically, a renaming project in the early decades of independence, I wish to suggest that an Irish spatial ideology provides a key context for the disorientation and lack of agency so many of Beckett’s protagonists suffer in their experience of place. The un-writing of place in Beckett’s work, the “nowhere-ness” long cherished as key to the universality of his fiction and drama, may in fact owe much to a specifically Irish crisis in relation to emplaced identity.
In Samuel Beckett and the Postcolonial Novel (2009) Patrick Bixby provides the fullest treat-ment to date of the impact of an Irish spatial discourse in the Beckett oeuvre. “In all their minimalist abstraction and spatial deterritorialisation”, Bixby argues, Beckett’s novels manage to “address the very problems of place which have become crucial features of postcolonial writing in Ireland and elsewhere.”4 Bixby adroitly views the “deterritorialising rhetoric” of Beckett’s mature work as “an alternative to cultural nationalism, one that transforms the production of cultural space into something decidedly other than the imagination of an essentialised national community” (author’s emphasis).5 An important “space-clearing ges-ture” which Bixby considers in this regard is the “forgotten name”6 of a town encountered in the novel Molloy:
And now it was a name I sought, in my memory, the name of the only town it had been given me to know, with the intention, as soon as I had found it, of stopping, and saying to a passer-by, doffing my hat, I beg your pardon, Sir, this is X, is it not? X being the name of my town. And this name that I sought, I felt sure that it began with a B or with a P, but in spite of this clue, or perhaps because of its falsity, the other letters continued to escape me. I had been living so far from words so long, you understand, that it was enough for me to see my town, since we’re talking of my town, to be unable, you understand. It’s too difficult to say, for me.7
The absence of a place-name is key to the disorientation which molloy suffers here and, in observing this, the passage demonstrates how place-names sponsor “continuity between the subject and its location”.8 The name which molloy forgets, and which is later supplied by moran, is “Bally”9 which, derived from the Gaelic baile, is “resonant with a kind of prim-itive Irishness, forming linkages with the most traditional sense of Irish place”.10 “Bally” thus not only establishes an Irish context in molloy’s encounter with his home town but also evokes a set of ideas in relation to nation and national belonging which frame this encounter: it is a name by which, through which, molloy “might return to an essential or originary identity”.11 For Bixby, the forgetting of the place-name is not only the failure of this name to enclose and disclose place for molloy but, equally, its failure to conjure nation: “the name of molloy’s town demonstrates that his language will not, perhaps cannot, reterritorialise some prelapsarian homeland”.12 In this way Beckett’s writing of place in this important moment in the novel performs a kind of spatial negation: molloy enters a space, “my town”, which should be meaningful, but it is not; this place should spatialise him in relation to his nation, but it does not. The “forgotten name” in Molloy is thus a significant “space-clearing” which subverts one of the most charged tropes in Irish nationalist discourse: the understanding of the place-name as a recuperation of nation, the name as a staging of nation in place.
In key respects, however, Bixby’s reading of this passage miscalculates the politics attend-ing molloy’s spatial crisis and, indeed, the history that haunts many of Beckett’s vagrants.
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Bixby understands molloy as a representative figure, in his fashion, in relation to nationalist narratives of identity, his tortuous journey to reunite with his mother an articulation of the political aspirations of Irish nationalism: “a desire for assimilation with the nation in the guise of the mythic Cathleen Ni houlihan”.13 molloy’s “forgetfulness” in relation to the name of the town to which he returns to find his mother demonstrates for Bixby the profound reach of a colonial re-territorialisation project in Ireland: as a place-name which is demonstrative of “his language”, the forgetting of the name signals the loss of an original Gaelic identity and a relationship with place formed in this “originary” culture.14 even were molloy to remember the name, Bixby suggests, this would not facilitate a recovery of authenticity since, as an Anglicised version of an original Gaelic name, “Bally” perpetuates a key imperial appropri-ation of Irish space – “the very names of Irish territories”15 – and itself prevents the desired retrieval of and return to nation. his inability to remember the name of his home town is thus understood as “a striking indication of molloy’s dispossession”.16 This analysis underes-timates the impact of Irish Free State spatial projects on the disconnectedness from place which molloy experiences, which I wish to consider here. The absence of a place-name in molloy’s encounter with his home town may not be a case of a strict forgetting; rather, the rupture between place and person which his entry to the town reveals may instead revolve around a revoked name, a name which neither molloy nor his successors in the trilogy, nor we the reader, can recover.
It is because it seems to so readily offer a “stabilised frame”17 of cultural, social and polit-ical reference that Irish Beckett scholars seize upon All That Fall, Beckett’s first radio play from 1956. This is without doubt the most explicitly Irish drama in the Beckett canon; in addition to the clear evocation of the geography of South County Dublin, the play observes the social landscape of Beckett’s youth – the dynamics attending a Protestant community whose former privilege is slipping and a Catholic acknowledgement of this. A particular set of references in the play point to the recent establishment of the Irish Free State; indeed, such is the richness of allusion to the Ireland of Beckett’s formative years that Seán Kennedy can confidently speculate that the events in Boghill are set after Fianna Fáil’s success in the 1932 general election, a seismic moment in the life of the infant nation-state when the anti-regime side of the 1922–23 Civil war entered into government, thus ensuring the political stability and continuity of independent Ireland.18 The play registers reconfigurations of the Irish public realm following independence, spatialisations which underwrote and articulated the new state’s political and cultural legitimacy and by which it arrogated authority over its territory and citizens. In this way, All That Fall witnesses the encroachment of nation on the conscious-ness of a bourgeois Protestant community and an attending sense of bewilderment with a country which has become less recognisable. Stuck on the railway station steps, the aged and childless mrs Rooney and the tellingly-named spinster miss Fitt are jeered at by a mother and daughter: “Now we are the laughing-stock of the twenty-six counties”, says mrs Rooney to her companion, “Or is it thirty-six?”19 As Kennedy observes, maddy Rooney reveals here her “disorientation”20 in relation to concepts of Irish nationhood operating at the time, still uncertain, ten years after the event, of the territorial determinations rendered by the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 by which the island was partitioned into a twenty-six county Free State and a six-county Northern Irish state which remained in the UK. Later, her husband idly and erroneously speculates about the etymological origins of the sign he encountered on the railway station toilet door: “Jerry led me to the men’s, or Fir as they call it now, from vir viris I suppose, the v becoming F, in accordance with Grimm’s Law.”21 This reveals a disconnect
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from a new political regime which has assumed control over public space, yet mr Rooney’s mistake, presuming a Latin origin for the Gaelic term,22 recognises how the sign functions to encrypt the civic sphere as a realm of nation, the connection between fir and “virility” intuiting essentialist constructions of gender in the new self-styled Gaelic state fraught with anxiety about its low population. Another dimension of nation-space in post-independence Ireland is more subtly alluded to in the play. In recounting for his wife the late arrival of his train into Boghill, mr Rooney refers to the station-master mr Barrell “bawling the abhorred name”.23 This quite striking demonstration of Rooney’s contempt for his home place is no doubt in keeping with a man who has an aversion to the “horrors of home life”,24 yet, when taken in the context of the play’s engagement with its socio-political setting and, as we shall see, when read against the naming of Irish place throughout the Beckett oeuvre, this reference to an “abhorred name” and the nature of this name itself remembers a policy of renaming place in the early decades of Irish independence.
The significance attached to place-names in Irish nationalist discourse derives from the tradition of dinnseanchas in Gaelic culture, an understanding of the place-name as a nexus of topography, history, and mythology. In Gaelic Ireland, “a society so significantly shaped by issues of blood and land”,25 the place-name was cherished as a potent bind between human culture and the natural world and understood to harbour a tradition of dwelling in a place. In particular, dinnseanchas carried with it a cultural imperative in relation to the accumulation and passing on of the knowledge of place encapsulated in names (a tradition with which Beckett was familiar).26 Thus, the traumatic effect on emplaced identity of colo-nial territorialising exercises, most especially the nineteenth-century mapping of Ireland (remembered in Friel’s Translations), a process understood in the Irish cultural imagination as one which “effac[ed] the collective narratives and local knowledges of folklore, mythology and history condensed in Irish place names”.27 In revivalist, and broadly nationalist, rhetoric the lost place-name (Baile beag rather than “Ballybeg”) was fetishised as a portent of cultural independence: in the restoration of the place-name lay the prospect for a recovery of Gaelic place, and with this a revival of nation. The re-inscription of Ireland’s topography with its lost names was a central aspect of the discourse of cultural purification in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nationalist thinking and perceived as a key obligation of an Irish nation-state: in order to both earn and assert its legitimacy a political home for Irish Ireland must “redeem the culture by cleansing it of its colonial impurities and retriev[e] that which had been blemished or repressed”.28 Renaming was understood as an essential exercise by which place would be restored as the possession and articulation of nation – a re-casting of place as “a unique region in which the nation has its homeland”.29 In his famous 1892 address “The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland”, Douglas hyde identified “the restoration of our place names”, “vulgarised” through Anglicisation,30 as a key objective for a native government and in 1905 and 1911 the Gaelic League published place-name pamphlets in anticipation of a renaming project; indeed, by 1910, more than a decade before independence, the nationalist-dominated Dublin City Corporation had begun marking streets with signs in both Irish and english.31 Upon coming into existence the Irish Free State went about the business of “correcting” nomenclature in Ireland. A place-names commission, An Coimisiún Logainmneacha, was established and it was decreed that all names must be displayed on maps and signs in the “first official language” of the new state, Irish, and in its “second official language”, english.32 Thus, an outward sign of Ireland’s newly-won independence was that all counties, cities, towns, villages, rural districts, and dimensions of public space therein,
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carried an Irish name in addition to the name in use before independence, a double-ness which revealed a history of contested place (in much the same way, a Gaelicised education system ensured that within a generation of independence all citizens would bear two names: one in english and one in Irish). In this way, baile, a generic term in the Irish language to denote any class of human settlement, became the most ubiquitous place-name prefix in the country. In addition, in a forcible demonstration of the cultural authority assumed by the new state, place-names which carried imperial associations were expunged, removed from road signs and maps, and replaced with an Irish-language name. For example, Queen’s County in the midlands was renamed Laois, the town of Bagenalstown in Co. Carlow was changed to muine Bheag, Charleville in north Cork became Ráth Luirc. A significant change in this regard was the eradication, in official usage, of the name Kingstown, the largest town near Beckett’s childhood home and one which features a number of times in his work (this is where Krapp experiences his epiphany). even before independence Kingstown was changed to Dún Laoghaire to reassert a traditional association with a fifth-century high King of Ireland. Given the strongly Protestant, and thus at least mildly Unionist, identity of the Kingstown area, the name change was contentious and for decades many refused to adopt the new moniker.33
“A revolution that does not produce a new space”, writes Lefebvre, “has not realised its full potential.”34 In post-colonial societies such as Ireland, the renaming of the public realm aims to complete the narrative of revolution by inscribing in space the new forms of cultural and political ownership. Renaming is a key aspect of the assumption of control over “the symbolic infrastructure of society”35 by which subject-citizens are orientated in relation to the new nation-state. more than the merely iconographic demonstrations of statehood – flags, emblems, monuments – which also announce the legitimacy of revolution, renaming is an especially powerful dissemination of nation due to the cognitive effect it renders, almost covertly, in relation to civic experience. Renaming public institutions, streets, towns, regions, ushers the political and cultural identity of the new order “into mundane … even intimate levels of everyday life”,36 guiding civic intercourse towards an experience of national belong-ing. “Nomination … is often the first step in taking possession”37 precisely because naming is the power to create space: by forming place identities which articulate those of the new state, renaming produces “governable space”,38 making material in the most profound ways the ideology of the new regime. The spatialisation of identities (for example, Catholic and Gaelic) which underwrite the new state system naturally involves the de-commissioning of those synonymous with the displaced ruling class (for example, Protestant and British). In establishing a singular and common cultural identity, the renaming of public space therefore operates a “cultural erasure”, enervating and dissolving the symbolic order and power of the old regime and creating in space the liminality that is the destiny of those affiliated with it, “those who do not meet the criteria of being indigenous … [who] neither fully belong in the nation nor can have any claim to share that national heritage”.39 Thus, more than a merely symbolic gesture, renaming oversees “a radical restructuring of power relations in society”, a shift in “power constellations”40 not only reflected in space but operated through relationships with space.
The fabled “placelessness” of the Beckett oeuvre is not simply a sense of lack of place; rather, it is often felt as a loss of place. Throughout his fiction and drama Beckett’s protag-onists commonly intuit a former connection with the space they inhabit yet are unable to construct a continuity with it; vladimir admits to estragon that he does not recognise the spot
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where they are to wait for Godot yet he is haunted by the familiarity he feels: “All the same … that tree … that bog.”41 An important precursor for the fraught relationship with place in Beckett’s mature work is the unsettling experience of a re-territorialised public realm in the Ireland depicted in the early fiction. In More Pricks Than Kicks, Beckett’s first published book of fiction, Belacqua Shuah’s aimless wanderings in the recently renamed streets of the Free State’s capital are accompanied by an alertness to new space created through the deracina-tion of older place identities: “zigzagging down Pearse Street, Brunswick Street, you know, that was … a most pleasant street, despite its name”.42 This experience of de-familiarisation haunts the “placeless” spaces of the post-war writings. Throughout the mature fiction and drama, the inability to identify with inhabited space produces an acute spatial crisis and, with this, a marked deficit in agency:
In the street I was lost. I had not set foot in this part of the city for a long time and it seemed greatly changed. whole buildings had disappeared, the palings had changed position, and on all sides I saw, in great letters, the names of tradesmen I had never seen before and would have been at a loss to pronounce. There were streets where I remembered none, some I did remember had vanished and others had completely changed their names. The general impression was the same as before. I did not know the city very well. Perhaps it was quite a different one. I did not know where I was supposed to be going.43
As Seán Kennedy has observed, this passage from The End (1945), Beckett’s first French-language fiction, contains a rich allusion to a re-territorialisation project in post-revolutionary Ireland, the “great letters, the names … I had never seen before” a discernible reference to the triumphalist deployment of the Irish language in the public sphere of the infant state in which Beckett came to maturity.44 Kennedy reads here not only a clear “sense of exclusion from” national narratives but, problematically, a “haughty defiance of the legitimating struc-tures of the new nation”45 encoded in civic space. This analysis undervalues the degree to which the narrator’s peripheral status in the new socio-economic system he encounters is shaped through his experience of new space, and not merely indexed in it. Both a linguistic and spatial reconfiguration of place, to which the narrator is highly alert, is central to his sense of being “lost”. he feels enveloped – “on all sides” – by a language with which he has no purchase, one which “I had never seen before and would have been at a loss to pronounce.” This disorientation produces a diminished agency in the space which the unsettling language creates: as he is linguistically “at a loss” so he is spatially (“I did not know where I was supposed to be going”), his new “muteness” precipitated by a seismic shift in his relationship with space and one which points to a severely enervated “spatial command”.46 It is certainly the case, as Kennedy argues, that the narrator of The End, and the vagrants which people Beckett’s work, does not provide an example of de Certeau’s “utopian” pedestrianism in which “liberated spaces … can be occupied against the prescriptions of the dominant regime”.47 Yet we can perceive how the narrator’s walk through the city is, precisely in these terms, dystopian, how his encounter with new space produces his liminality in relation to the nation-system inscribed in the cityscape. In a similar fashion, mr Rooney’s bemused response to the “Fir” sign in All That Fall (“as they call it now … I suppose”) signals his social and political margin-ality within the nation-space which the sign conjures, just as his wife’s befuddlement (“or is it thirty-six?”) speaks to her lack of emplacement in the new nation-state.
A number of other texts similarly suggest that the charged category of place in the Beckett oeuvre remembers discourses of place identity operating in post-revolutionary Ireland. In particular, the nexus between place and language at the core of spatial crises experienced
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by characters begs a consideration of Beckettian “placelessness” in relation to the specific context of the Gaelicisation of place in post-revolutionary Ireland. here again is the moment in Molloy when the protagonist enters his home town:
And now it was a name I sought, in my memory, the name of the only town it had been given me to know, with the intention, as soon as I had found it, of stopping, and saying to a passer-by, doffing my hat, I beg your pardon, Sir, this is X, is it not? X being the name of my town. And this name that I sought, I felt sure that it began with a B or with a P, but in spite of this clue, or perhaps because of its falsity, the other letters continued to escape me. I had been living so far from words so long, you understand, that it was enough for me to see my town, since we’re talking of my town, to be unable, you understand. It’s too difficult to say, for me.
It is important to observe about this passage that molloy’s effort to remember the name of the town constitutes a seeking of this place: he senses that a recovery of a place-name will reformulate an identification with the space he inhabits. The name is not bestowed by the civic environment: since entering the town molloy has not encountered signs which provide him with the elusive name, or signs he may have encountered do not carry the name he seeks. Rather, this name is “sought in my memory”. molloy’s attempt to provide himself with linguistic triggers for the name – “B” and “P” – suggests the traces of, and perhaps a contest between, two names, one or both of these felt to be in some way “false”. his default name for the town – “X” – signals his desire to locate, to find, the place of his memory in both lan-guage and space while pointing to a de-territorialisation of these which necessitates and problematises this effort. Later, he informs us that he “wandered about the town in search of a familiar monument, so that I might say, I am in my town, after all, I have been there all the time”,48 indicating an altered monumental landscape and a shift in the socio-political identity of his native place. Significantly, as with the narrator of The End, the impossibility of locating “my town” and exercising agency in this space registers with molloy as an ener-vation of his power over language: “It’s too difficult to say, for me.” moran’s account of the “molloy country” in the second half of the novel reveals what might be the place-name molloy strived to remember:
The market-town, or village, was, I hasten to say, called Bally … there exists with us no abstract and generic term for such territorial subdivisions. And to express them we have another system, of singular beauty and simplicity, which consists in saying Bally (since we are talking of Bally) when you mean Bally and Ballyba when you mean Bally plus its domains and Ballybaba when you mean the domains exclusive of Bally itself.49
Clearly, this passage parodies the ubiquity of the “Bally” prefix in Irish place-names and scholars have tended to view Beckett’s bizarre deployment here of this most Irish of names as a “fanciful caricature” and satire of the insularity and cultural conservatism of his native country.50 Yet the passage is more than mere parody. Beckett’s heightened use of the Bally place-name in Molloy registers the politicisation of place in post-revolutionary Ireland, dis-cussed above, and critiques a zealous naming which, spatialising the new nation-system, is aimed at the conferral of a cultural homogeneity and the facilitation of administrative control. The naming system Beckett improvises – “Bally”, “Ballyba”, “Ballybaba” – points to the incursion of the nation-state on consciousness in suggesting that the territorialisation of nation infantilises the subject-citizen and oversees a collapse in agency: as one goes further from the metropolitan centre of Bally, the passage seems to suggest, the more inarticulate and liminal one is rendered. Tellingly, the mysterious narrator of The Unnamable struggles, like molloy, to recall the name of his place of origin, where the “inestimable gift of life had
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been rammed down my gullet”, and can only refer to it as “Bally I forget what”,51 suggesting how the name functions to de-territorialise and dis-remember.
As much as it can be seen to deny the “territorial and ideological partitions on which nationalism relies”,52 the forgotten name of Molloy and the ruptured continuity with place which this reveals can equally be approached as a demonstration of the success of the spatialisation of the new Free State in the manner in which this forgetting homologises the erasure of place identity operated through renaming. In The Calmative the narrator’s constipated identification with his native city, and the delimited agency he and so many of Beckett’s itinerants experience, seems to derive from an inability to reconcile an intuitive sense of place with the space he encounters: “But there was never any city but the one … I only know the city of my childhood, I must have seen the other, but unbelieving.”53 molloy’s efforts to remember the name of his town, his attempt to find this place in language and in space, is similarly motivated by a need to psychologically recover place. his feeling of displacement in a location which he nonetheless senses as “my town” resonates with Pierre Nora’s meditations on the narrative purchase of history in the western mind and a responding sacralisation of the category of memory. Nora has argued that the ascendancy of history in the modern era, and in particular the advent in the nineteenth century of “national positivist history” as a collectivising narrative, radically changed the human relationship with memory, irrevocably altering its status in consciousness and in culture.54 The dominance of history as a mode of thought can be witnessed in the “privatization of memory within the individual psychology of remembering”,55 the privileging of a national self-knowledge over individ-ual consciousness. history cannot take place unless it achieves this victory over memory: “history is perpetually suspicious of memory and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it”.56 The importance of his memory to molloy is his sense of its custodianship of “my town”, yet, operating outside of history, molloy’s memory cannot serve to archive and retrieve this place; “engulfed by history”57 it cannot secrete that which it harbours: “the name of the only town it had been given me to know”. “we speak so much of memory”, Nora tells us, “because there is so little of it left.”58
A consistent mode of reference in Beckett’s fiction and drama which both evokes Irish place and contests and undermines the socio-political implications of emplacedness is a scatological nomenclature. In Molloy alone this includes “Turdy”, “Turdyba”, “Shit”, “Shitba”, and “hole”.59 As we have seen, Beckett’s dramatisation of the social world of his native Foxrock in All That Fall substitutes this name with the allusive “Boghill” and in an abandoned text from the 1950s the place of the narrator’s birth (which took place, like Beckett’s, on a Good Friday) is the similar “Boghole”.60 where a place-name is not provided an excremental allusion often serves to denote the place in question. In hamm’s chronicle in Endgame he recounts meeting the man from whom he acquired Clov: “where did he come from? he named the hole.”61 The name of the birthplace of the mute girl whose story mouth feverishly recounts in Not I is elided in a similar fashion: “godforsaken hole called … called … no matter”.62 Sinéad mooney has interestingly argued that these place-names retrieve the “scatological humour”63 of Gaelic literature from the prudish and censorious revivalist reception of the Gaelic tradition, but we can also approach this type of naming in terms of a hazardous con-tinuity between subjectivity and nation-space.
Not only do we see scatological place-names in Beckett’s work but territory itself is com-monly redolent of excrement. The narrator of The Unnamable struggles to identify the mate-rial in which the figure worm finds himself “riveted”: “it isn’t earth, one doesn’t know what
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it is, it’s like sargasso, no, it’s like molasses … it’s like slime … it’s like shit, there we have it at last, there it is at last, the right word”, a location, and condition, which looks forward to the enveloping mud terrain of what is commonly considered Beckett’s last full novel, How It Is (“this so-called mud were nothing more than all our shit … billions of us crawling and shitting in their shit”).64 In Waiting for Godot the tramps sense that their inability to remem-ber and attach themselves to their place is linked to its unsettling topography: “Recognise! what is there to recognise … Look at this muckheap.”65 In the early short story “Love and Lethe” Belacqua and Ruby ascend to the top of a hill, “complete with fairy rath”, to view the panorama of Dublin it affords, an experience jarred by what they find at the summit: “a human turd lay within the rath”.66 A significant place in this regard in Beckett’s work is the “molloy country”, the names of which, as we have seen, remember a re-territorialisation of place identity in post-independence Ireland. In the finished novel moran, providing a survey of the topographical and social characteristics of this place which acts as a counterpoint to molloy’s lack of knowledge of his own territory, stops short of informing readers of its eco-nomic modality: “what then was the source of Ballyba’s prosperity? I’ll tell you. No, I’ll tell you nothing. Nothing.”67 Yet in the manuscript drafts of Molloy moran is much more forthcoming: “D’où Ballyba tirait donc ses richesses? Je vais vous le dire. Des selles de ses citoyens” / “From where, therefore, did Ballyba draw its riches? I’ll tell you. From the shit of its citizens.”68 what follows in this draft (from the third notebook of four in which the novel was composed) is a thirteen-page atomisation of the “administrative, cultural and societal practices employed to ensure that there is a plentiful supply of organic matter” in the Bally region, including details concerning the committee whose duty it is to “stringently regulate the production of faecal matter, setting bi-monthly quotas for each citizen”.69 As Adam winstanley observes, this scatological system harbours obvious and distinct resonances in relation to Beckett’s native country and may be read as a critique of, indeed a scathing assault on, the cultural, political, and economic insularity of post-independence Ireland, most especially the isola-tionist politics of the de valera era which defined the regime’s response to the crisis on the Continent during the Second world war.70 The operation of a “coprophagic economy”71 is in fact traceable in a number of Beckett’s texts: a lengthy section of the narrator’s musings in The Unnamable is a memoir of his time as a human steriliser for the garden of the patroness of a butcher shop, “represent[ing] for this woman an undeniable asset … the services I ren-dered to her lettuce”.72 In her first social encounter in All That Fall maddy Rooney is offered sty dung by a Catholic neighbour, an offer which she refuses yet which she repeats to herself later in the play as if attempting to decode its significance: “Do you want some dung?”73 most obviously, the elaborate scatological system winstanley outlines in the Molloy avant-texte is prefigured in First Love (one of the four post-war novellas) in its famous lampooning of a paralytic, and unmistakably Irish, cultural nationalism:
what constitutes the charm of our country, apart of course from its scant population, and this without the help of the meanest contraceptive, is that all is derelict, with the sole exception of history’s ancient faeces. These are ardently sought after, stuffed and carried in procession. wherever nauseated time has dropped a nice fat turd you will find our patriots, sniffing it up on all fours, their faces on fire.74
An economic and socio-cultural structure premised on the production, exchange, and con-sumption of human excrement is elided in the finished Molloy, yet Beckett retained the toponymy which signals it, charging the category of place and the status of the place-name with this pathology. This scatological nomenclature literalises the systems of circulation –
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cultural, social, political, economic – by which the nation-state itself operates. In addition to a “satirical depiction of Irish economic policy”75 which these names perform, Beckett’s “cod Irish place-names”76 homologise the material and also the cognitive operation of nation in emplacement.
The assiduous association between place and excrement in the Beckett oeuvre naturally begs consideration in relation to psychoanalytic discourses; this is the basis for David Lloyd’s influential reading of First Love:
If we accept the depiction of an infantile symbolic logic for which the faeces are the first gift and therewith the first realisation of a potential self-alienation, ending a process of assimilation to self and inaugurating an assimilation to others, we may read in the fetishisation of excrement the index of a negative dialectic of identity … That impossible demand … structures the ide-ological project of nationalism and imperialism alike through the logic of self-sacrifice to the state, whose transcendental function is always to “take up the matter” and ensure that every subject gets his epitaph.77
Reading excrement as the sign of the demand of personhood made by nation, the scatolog-ical figuring of Irish place in Beckett’s fiction and drama registers how this sacrifice is staged in the condition of being emplaced. If the turd in the rath of “Love and Leth” can be conceived as a humanising trace left over from the rehabilitation of an ancient space as a synecdoche of a revived Gaelic Ireland, as Cóilín Parsons has argued,78 it can also be approached as a gesture towards the separation from self entreated in nation-space: a reminder, and warning, of the digestion of the person overseen by the nation-system. The privileging of constipa-tion in Beckett’s work can equally be viewed in relation to this anxiety: the “cruel sessions in the necessary house” in First Love, the Unnamable’s “paltry excrements”, the “unattainable laxation”79 suffered by the pointedly-named Krapp, signify a resistance to meta-narratives which threaten to absorb consciousness. we also witness in Beckett’s writings those who purposefully avoid lavatories (The Expelled, The End), those who choose, in Lloyd’s terms, to “keep the matter to themselves”. In addition to their sense of being anomalous in new nation-space, the Rooneys’ socio-political liminality in All That Fall is equally indexed by their lack of participation in a circulation of faeces. One implication of the very Irish phrasing of Christy’s offer to maddy – “I suppose you wouldn’t be in need of a small load of dung?”80 – is that the old Protestant couple retain their own waste and thus do not make themselves available to the socio-economic networks by which the state-system functions. This refusal to contribute to and sacralise “national soil” suggests a level of awareness of the power that nation arrogates in relation to the category of subjectivity itself and “the perpetual debt [that] is the normative condition” of the citizen. As the nation narrative demands that “one labours to produce oneself for others”, a response to this must be a “struggle against domination at the material level”.81 The scatological rendering of place in Beckett’s work underscores the process of subject-formation imbued in emplacement but it also points to a mode of resistance to this power.
The major achievements of the Beckett canon, the de-aestheticisation of the novel over-seen in the mature fiction and the deconstruction of the western dramatic tradition in the theatrical oeuvre, rely upon a concomitant deconstruction and de-aestheticisation of the human experience of place. The centrality of a negotiation with emplacement in Beckett’s work witnesses the fundamental importance of place to the construction of selfhood:
Place is … that within and with respect to which subjectivity is itself established – place is not founded on subjectivity, but is rather that on which subjectivity is founded. Thus one does not first have a subject that apprehends certain features of the world in terms of the idea of place;
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instead, the structure of subjectivity is given in and through the structure of place. (Author’s emphasis)82
The understanding of place as that which cognitively locates and gravitates subjectivity is evident throughout Beckett’s fiction and drama. It should not be surprising that this is especially so as his work shifts in the post-war era towards a marked geographic and cultural indeterminacy; in the effort to negate place the structure and operation of its psychological traction becomes all the more apparent and charged: “Did I wait somewhere for this place to be ready to receive me? Or did it wait for me to come and people it? … our beginnings coincide, that this place was made for me, and I for it, at the same instant.”83 As the active elision and erasure of traceable socio-cultural contexts, Beckettian “placelessness” can be viewed as the attempt to liberate consciousness from place, from the in-authentication rendered by the processes of acculturation sited in emplacement: “Now is here and here there is no frankness, all I say will be false and to begin with not said by me, here I’m a ventriloquist’s dummy, I feel nothing, say nothing.”84 The denial of place is the denial of the consciousness-formation which operates there by which “the subject is grasped as object to be transformed quite inauthentically into subjectivity … to be made or read by another, to be given meaning.”85 This is the understanding of place and the condition of “being in place” which emerges in Beckett’s work: to resist place is to resist being subjectified.
The compositional evolution of the 1972 drama Not I is particularly revealing in relation to the drive in the Beckett oeuvre to revoke place in order to achieve a negated subjectiv-ity. This daringly experimental and innovative play, a key masterpiece in Beckett’s canon, stages a singular, elevated and lit mouth surrounded by total darkness. At blistering pace, mouth produces, spews forth, an elliptical narrative which charts the traumatic experience of an unnamed female figure who, having being “speechless all her days”, has been over-whelmed by a torrent of words, a “sudden urge to … tell … start pouring it out”.86 The play is structured around four monologic movements each of which concludes with the dramatic “what? … who? … no! … she!”,87 a fraught assertion that the story recounted is not that of the de-corporealised and de-spatialised mouth. As in other pieces from this late period, the play’s dramaturgy separates a subject of narration and a narrating source even as these appear to exemplify each other, just as the off-stage voice of the old woman in Rockaby would seem to chart the history of the figure we see on-stage, and the reading of the book in Ohio Impromptu appears to chronicle the relationship between Reader and Listener (this innovation is prefigured in the conception of the tape-recorder in Krapp’s Last Tape as a disembodied narrator). As emilie morin has observed, the first and second drafts of Not I were built around first-person narration, Beckett not having yet made the key decision to disconnect story and teller. In addition, these early drafts seem to locate the birthplace of the female protagonist:
in the bog … named- … what? … the downs? … godforsaken hole in the downs? … no … no! … the bog … godforsaken hole in the bog … named … named … forgotten …88
If not “firmly anchored” in a specific place, as morin claims,89 this manuscript draft does sug-gest that the place of origin of the play’s tormented soul is the Glen of the Downs, a scenic woodland area in Co. wicklow which Beckett often visited on his marathon-like walking excursions during his early life in Ireland. From the third draft of the play “the downs” is expunged and in the finished text the opening movement reads:
… in a godfor- … what? … girl? … yes … tiny little girl … into this … out into this … before her time … godforsaken hole called … called … no matter …90
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As morin points out, this decision is consistent with a process of eliding Irish references across the composition of Beckett’s mid- to late career theatre (equivalent decisions in relation to Irish place and material culture are discernible in the manuscript drafts of Eh Joe, That Time and Footfalls).91 In addition to the removal of this reference to a particular Irish location, it is also in the third draft of Not I that Beckett dispenses with the first-person narrator around which the earliest versions of the play were shaped, eventually progressing towards the con-cept of mouth as the problematic narrator who denies for itself the consciousness to which it is medium. Thus, the suppression of a place which might originate selfhood coincides with the suspension and deferral of a subjective consciousness in the play’s narrative structure. In this way, the revocation of subjectivity, the play’s thematic core and the key achievement of its dramaturgy, is signalled by a cancellation of place as the force which produces subjectivity:
The incident of identity’s relapse from locality, and following on that the eventual non-existence of ego-identity, decomposes the metaphorical relationship between body, location, space, ter-ritory, enclosure, incarnation, self and selfhood … Being nobody is belonging to no place … Nowhere, therefore, is no one.92
Tellingly, the remains of an Irish place of origin in the text of the completed play are distinctly scatological: “out into this … godforsaken hole … no matter …”. Read against the excremental rendering of place throughout the Beckett canon, a portrayal especially relevant to under-standings of Ireland in his work, this trace suggests that the de-subjectification performed in Not I relies upon a retreat from the circulatory apparatus of the nation-system. A negation of nation in the negation of place is signalled by Beckett’s use of the loaded “no matter” at the monologue’s commencement and conclusion (or more properly, the point at which the audience is rescued from the monologue) indicating a de-commissioning of place as the material operation of nation – a dissolution of place as nation-space and an operation discernible throughout Beckett’s texts.93 Both the reticence in relation to place-names in Beckett’s work and its complex naming of place contest the processes of subject-formation which operate in emplacement. These strategies seek to de-materialise place as a repository of nation: to negate the forces, material and spiritual, by which the subject-citizen is formed. This negation demonstrates the powerful reach of the master narrative of nation in sug-gesting that to circumvent and elude nation, which Beckett’s vagrants perpetually attempt, subjectivity itself must be escaped. The signature “placelessness” of the Beckett oeuvre can thus be understood as a resistance to being subject to place, to being a subject in place.
Notes
1. Lloyd, “Samuel Beckett as an Irish Question,” 35.2. Ibid., 51.3. Ibid., 48, 51.4. Bixby, Samuel Beckett and the Postcolonial Novel, 169.5. Ibid., 172–3, 176.6. Ibid., 176, 177.7. Beckett, Three Novels, 31.8. Bixby, Samuel Beckett and the Postcolonial Novel, 177.9. Beckett, Three Novels, 133.10. Bixby, Samuel Beckett and the Postcolonial Novel, 178.11. Ibid.12. Ibid.13. Ibid., 176.
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14. Alexander mcKee has similarly argued that molloy’s inability to remember the name reveals that he has “lost touch with his native language” (mcKee, “Breaking the habit,” 56).
15. Bixby, Samuel Beckett and the Postcolonial Novel, 178.16. Ibid., 177.17. Kennedy, “Ireland/europe,” 12.18. Kennedy, “‘A Lingering Dissolution,’” 248. Anthony Cronin has reported that this election was
in fact the only one in which Samuel Beckett participated, reputedly selling his vote to his father for a pound. According to Cronin, Beckett had intended to vote for Fianna Fáil which he perceived, like many, as a radical new alternative in Irish politics until his father persuaded him to vote for the safer Cumann na nGaedheal, a party which seemed to be more mindful of the vulnerabilities of Ireland’s discomfited Protestant community (Cronin, Samuel Beckett, 188).
19. Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works, 184.20. Kennedy, “‘A Lingering Dissolution,’” 249.21. Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works, 195.22. Boyce, “Pismires and Protestants,” 502–3.23. Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works, 195.24. Ibid., 193.25. Smyth, Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination, 48.26. In the early 1930s James Joyce, who was writing Finnegans Wake, commissioned Beckett to
undertake research on the exalted status of the cow in Irish culture. In the resulting notes, later bequeathed to Trinity College, the young Beckett notes place-names which derive from the veneration of this animal in Gaelic Ireland (see Samuel Beckett, “Cow Notes,” TCDmS 10971/2/7, manuscript Department, Trinity College Dublin Library).
27. Nash, “Irish Place Names,” 140.28. whelan, “Between Filiation and Affiliation,” 95.29. Anderson, “Nationalist Ideology and Territory,” 24.30. hyde, Language, Lore, and Lyrics, 166–7.31. Nash, “Irish Place Names,” 140–1.32. Bunreacht na hÉireann, 8.33. The Irish Times, the traditional newspaper of middle-class Protestant Ireland, carried
advertisements for Kingstown businesses well into the 1950s (my thanks to my colleague Dr Feargal whelan for bringing this to my attention).
34. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 54.35. Azaryahu, “Naming the Past,” 59–60.36. Ibid., 53.37. Robinson, “Language and Significance of Place in America,” 160.38. vuolteenaho and Berg, “Towards Critical Toponymies,” 11.39. Nash, “Irish Place Names,” 137–8.40. Azaryahu, “Naming the Past,” 60.41. Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works, 16.42. Beckett, More Pricks Than Kicks, 69, 43.43. Beckett, Complete Short Prose, 81.44. Kennedy, “‘In the street I was lost,’” 103–4 (the “great letters” may be a reference to the revived
use of the traditional Gaelic script cló Gaelach in signage).45. Ibid., 106.46. Addyman, “Phenomenology ‘less the rosy hue,’” 121.47. Kennedy, “‘In the street I was lost,’” 106, 105.48. Beckett, Three Novels, 60.49. Ibid., 133–4. Of course “Bally” is a fit for the “B” name molloy pondered but, typical of the
destabilising force of Beckett’s writing, his musing on “B” or “P” keeps two possibilities alive for the place-name he strives to recall: “Bally” could be a name known by moran but not by molloy.
50. morin, Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness, 88, 89.51. Beckett, Three Novels, 298.52. Bixby, Beckett and the Postcolonial Novel, 181.
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53. Beckett, Complete Short Prose, 62.54. Nora, “Between memory and history,” 21.55. whelan, “Between Filiation and Affiliation,” 97.56. Nora, “Between memory and history,” 9.57. Ibid., 18.58. Ibid., 7.59. In the manuscript of the novel, “hole” features first as “Carrick” (Ackerley and Gontarski, Grove
Companion to Samuel Beckett, 254), an Anglicisation of the Gaelic term carraig (literally “rock”) and a name in abundance in Beckett’s native South County Dublin: Carrickmines (commonly referred to locally as Carrick) is adjacent to Beckett’s Foxrock, Blackrock (An Charraig Dhubh) is a sizeable nearby village, and the Gaelic name for Foxrock itself is Carraig an tSionnaigh.
60. Cited in Nixon, “Beckett’s Unpublished Canon,” 289.61. Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works, 117. As scholars have observed, the sole place-name in
hamm’s story alludes to the port of Cobh in Co. Cork and the Famine history attached to this place: “I enquired about the situation at Kov, beyond the gulf. Not a sinner” (ibid.). Interestingly, this place has endured a number of name changes: known as Cove until 1850 when it was conferred with the name Queenstown to commemorate a visit by Queen victoria, it was renamed Cobh in 1922 by the new Free State. Beckett’s coinage of “Kov” (which he instructed actors to pronounce as “Cove”) for Endgame (1957) is presaged in a letter to Thomas macGreevy in 1936 in which he outlines his itinerary for his trip to Germany that year and in which he fumbles with the new name: “I have booked passage on the washington sailing from Cove” (Beckett, Letters of Samuel Beckett Volume I, 369). his mistake, commonly made at this time one would imagine, points to an obscuring of place identity and an estrangement from place effected by the process of renaming, a making other of place remembered in the culturally indeterminate “Kov”.
62. Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works, 376.63. mooney, A Tongue Not Mine, 158.64. Beckett, Three Novels, 364, 365; How It Is, 58.65. Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works, 57.66. Beckett, More Pricks Than Kicks, 100.67. Beckett, Three Novels, 134.68. Beckett, “molloy” Notebook 3, Samuel Beckett Collection, harry Ransom humanities Research
Centre, University of Texas at Austin, SBC mS 4.7 (1947a), 132, cited in winstanley, “‘Grâce aux excréments des Citoyens,’” 92 (the english translation of this passage is Adam winstanley’s).
69. Ibid., 93, 94.70. Ibid., 95. eamon de valera was Taoiseach (Prime minister) from 1932 to 1948; Beckett quit
Ireland and moved to France permanently in 1937. The few remarks he made in relation to this fateful decision suggest that it was cemented by the deprivation he witnessed and experienced during the German occupation of his adopted country compared to the relative abundance of material comfort in Ireland during the war and what Beckett saw as a corresponding lack of empathy for the human suffering on the Continent.
71. Ibid., 93. As winstanley points out, the term “coprophagia” refers to “the consumption of excrement, deriving from the Greek copros (dung) and phagein (to eat)” (ibid.).
72. Beckett, Three Novels, 328.73. Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works, 197.74. Beckett, Complete Short Prose, 33–4.75. winstanley, “‘Grâce aux excréments des Citoyens,’” 97. As winstanley observes, the scatological
economy of Ballyba resonates with Swift’s sardonic prescriptions for eighteenth-century Ireland in A Modest Proposal and also with Berkeley’s writings on Irish economic matters, with which Beckett was familiar.
76. mooney, A Tongue Not Mine, 157.77. Lloyd, “writing in the Shit,” 48–9.78. Parsons, “‘The Turd in the Rath,’” 96.79. Beckett, Complete Short Prose, 28; Three Novels, 343; Complete Dramatic Works, 218.
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80. Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works, 173.81. Lloyd, “writing in the Shit,” 50, 55.82. malpas, Place and Experience, 35.83. Beckett, Three Novels, 296.84. Beckett, Complete Short Prose, 133.85. Lloyd, “writing in the Shit,” 54.86. Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works, 381, 382.87. Ibid., 377.88. Not I, RUL mS 1227/7/12/2, f.1, cited in morin, Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness, 148.89. Ibid.90. Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works, 376.91. An early version of Eh Joe, for example, includes a reference to “waterford cut glass” but in
the finished text this has become the generic “flint glass”; similarly, the first draft of the play mentions Bullock harbour in Dalkey and the Kish lighthouse off the Dún Laoghaire coast, names which disappear from the completed work (morin, Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness, 141, 142).
92. Davis, “On Beckett’s metaphysics of Non-location,” 399, 401.93. The negation of self and place as material correlatives in Not I is presaged in the closing
crescendo of The Unnamable: “it’s a body, it’s not I … no matter, I’ll say it’s I, perhaps it will be I, perhaps that’s all they’re waiting for … waiting for me to say I’m someone, to say I’m somewhere” (Beckett, Three Novels, 410).
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