Abstract
Beckett’s work provides a visceral and clear-sighted critique of language as a territorialising force by which the self is irrevocably an object of nationalist pedagogy, that which “marks the emergence of the self and which the self does not control” (Bhabha). Exploring his fiction and drama in relation to the ethno-linguistic nationalism which emerged in Europe from the eighteenth century, a central focus of this chapter is the manner in which ‘the language crisis’ in Beckett is fraught with the language politics of his native country. It argues that Beckett’s fabled ‘abandoning’ of English recapitulates a history of cultural anxiety, especially acute among Protestant writers, concerning the viability of the English language as a vessel for an Irish national imaginary. The formulation of a “literature of the unword” in Beckett’s early career is similarly read in the shadow of the complex debate concerning ‘official’ language in the Irish Free State and a virulent nationalist language ideology which proselytised the ‘vulgarity’ of English. The chapter finally considers the disturbing ventriloquized speech suffered by Beckett’s characters, arguing that a key achievement of the Beckett canon is its exposure of language as the inscription on consciousness of political forms of community and continuity.
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Notes
- 1.
These convictions, however, were not shared by Beckett himself, as evidenced in a 1978 letter to Ruby Cohn in which he seems amused by Ben-Zvi’s claims of a Mauthnerian influence and labelled it “a wild goose chase or a red herring” (qtd. in Garforth 54).
- 2.
In recent years, Sinéad Mooney and Emilie Morin have examined an affinity between the translation culture of the Irish revivalists (Hyde, Gregory, Synge, and others) and Beckett’s dynamic self-translation practice, but neither address how the highly political language issue in Ireland may be traceable in the language crisis in Beckett (see Mooney, A Tongue Not Mine and Morin, The Problem of Irishness).
- 3.
In the accounts of some of the first English settlers in Ireland in the sixteenth century we see even then an anxiety about the problematic mix of two very different languages and the understanding that the newly arrived English, brought by these planters, threatened a corruption of the “native ancient tonge” (qtd. in Crowley, War of Words 33) of the country they had begun to see as their own. By the early nineteenth century, we see the Anglo-Irish lionising Hiberno-English, the dialect which had arisen among the native population, at the expense of the language of their parent culture—“a jargon unlike to any language under heaven” (qtd. in Crowley, Politics of Language in Ireland 137). This disgust with English in the Anglo-Irish philological tradition was crucial to the flowering of the largely Protestant-led Irish literary renaissance at the end of the nineteenth century.
- 4.
Beckett was certainly familiar with this discourse of linguistic purity, as evidenced in a letter to Thomas MacGreevy from 1933, in which he comments on the ideological undercurrents of the new state’s nomenclature project. Observing the official name change of a tower on the island of Inishmore on the west coast, Beckett notes that this phallic structure had been referred to by locals as “penis erectus in Gaelic but now out of newly acquired prudery […] the upright thing” (qtd. in Mooney 157).
- 5.
Indeed, there is a not insignificant history of Irish Protestant writers (including James Clarence Mangan, Oscar Wilde, John Millington Synge, and George Moore) turning to French at crucial points in their careers as a means of “escape from the English language” (Moore qtd. in Morin, Problem of Irishness 84). Especially after independence in the 1920s, there was a concerted effort among many in the intelligentsia to rekindle a historical relationship between Gaelic and French literary cultures in an effort to “supplant the English language’s monopoly in Irish intellectual life” (O’Leary 368). Certainly, by the time Beckett started to write in the late 1920s and as he languished in Dublin at different periods throughout the 1930s with rejected manuscripts and poorly selling publications, the idea of a Francophonic Irish writer was not terribly unusual.
- 6.
Anthony Cronin reports that shortly after the ratification of the new constitution, Beckett was thus victimised by the state’s new language doctrine when he enquired about a position at the National Library of Ireland only to learn that he would not be considered for the position as it required the post-holder to be fluent in the “first official language” (252).
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Graham, A. (2021). “Made of Words”: Beckett and the Politics of Language. In: Davies, W., Bailey, H. (eds) Beckett and Politics. New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47110-1_4
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