Back Roads: Beckett,
Banville and Ireland
It has been clear for some time that Beckett's writing is engaged at a fundamental level with an over-determined, fetishistically autobiographical Irish landscape. It has become clear also that this engagement troubles many of the critical assumptions that have been made about the universal non-specificity of Beckett's work, and its connected apoliticism. It has proved very difficult, however, to produce a critical language that can approach the obsessional commitment to a version of Ireland that runs throughout Beckett's writing, without doing violence to the equally obsessive refusal of the consolations of localism that is one of the determining characteristics of his writing. The longing for home, and for an acutely specific rendering of homeland, comes into tension with a rejection of the pleasures and the privations of mythologies of homeliness. Indeed, the longing for and the rejection of an Irish home become part of the same expressive moment in Beckett's writing.
This paper suggests that this antinomial relationship with Ireland might be best understood through a reading of the ways in which Beckett's Ireland is inherited by his successors, and particularly by the novelist John Banville. It is striking that Banville's writing is haunted or possessed by Beckett's spirit from the beginning, from Long Lankin, right through to his recent novel The Sea. It is striking also that Beckett's spectral presence in Banville's writing is closely connected to Banville's own troubled engagement with a primal Irish landscape. A novel such as Eclipse, which is to some extent a reworking of Maria Edgeworth's Irish landscapes in works such as Castle Rackrent, is, more than anything else, an attempt to inherit a loved homeland through the strange prism of Beckett's unhomely and dislocated landscapes.
It is in the effects that are produced by this inheritance that the locked tension in Beckett between rejection of and longing for homeland might yield itself up to critical articulation. Both Beckett and Banville develop a nostalgic longing for a childhood Ireland, which is over-determined by the haunting presence of the dead father and mother, and both express this longing through an evocation of what they call the 'back roads', the rural lanes in which a certain pre-modern version of Ireland is preserved. This paper suggests that we might imagine a back road, a oblique or minor historical thoroughfare, that connects Beckett with Banville, and that offers a new kind of access to the way that Ireland figures in Beckett's writing. In Banville's treatment of Ireland, some of the questions that remain muted in Beckett's writing - such as the connection between Ireland and Europe in the light of a new global economy, or the irreconcilability of the rural and the local with the international - become the direct focus. Banville's writing is centrally concerned with rewriting or reworking historical versions of Ireland - MacNeice's and Egdeworth's as well as Beckett's - in the light of the new Europe. In watching what happens when Beckett's ghosted landscapes are reanimated in Banville's fiction, this paper offers a new perspective on the relation between Ireland and Europe in Beckett's oeuvre.
International Samuel Beckett Symposium in Tokyo 2006
September 29 – October 1