In 1946, as Beckett told Charles Juliet in conversation, he experienced a vision of the thing he had to write about and the way he had to write about it while peering into the darkness at the end of Dun Laoghaire pier - most probably the original of the ‘jetty’ on which Krapp experiences a similar moment in Krapp’s Last Tape (1956; see “Beckett the Irishman”, supra]. Although he calls it a transforming miracle it was not a mystical vision so much as an intense psychological and aesthetic intuition of subject-matter and form as regards the hidden significance that his development had so far taken and the steps necessary for the completion of the project that it harboured within itself, albeit in a veiled form, from the beginning.

That visionary experience now required of Beckett a radical departure from the tendency towards intellectual display which he had brought to his early fiction and which a close association with James Joyce had strongly reinforced. Henry Miller once claimed to have advised Beckett to abandon Joyce’s encyclopaedic method of composition and find his own voice, but he may not have needed this prompting. Certainly by the time he had undergone the frightening events that surrounded his involvement in a Resistance spy-ring called “Gloria” and his subsequent period of hiding from the Gestapo, he was ready to cut back to the quick of human misery and to seek an elemental form of writing to express it - even where, according to the paradox so central to that vision, there is ‘nothing to express, nothing with which to express [...] together with the obligation to express' (Proust [... &c.], London: Calder, p.103.)

In 1956 he told Israel Shenker:

Later, talking with his biography James Knowlson, he had this to add:

From the outset Joyce had the special interest for Beckett that he represented a rebuttal of the romantic tradition of the Irish literary revival, as well as a way of standing apart from both his own exclusively Irish Protestant heritage while standing aloof from the Catholic alternative. Theirs was an odd friendship while it lasted, largely passed in silence by all accounts and based on mutual recognition of the intrinisically exilic condition of the Irish intellectual of that period when only nationalist intellectuals - if that is not a contradiction in terms - were welcome at home. But Beckett did not only passively reject the nationalist writers, he positively castigated them in a commissioned article for the London-based Bookman in 1934.

Here he divides contemporary Irish poets into ‘antiquarians and others’. The ‘others’ were a handful of modernists such as Denis Devlin and his own friends Tom MacGreevey and Brian Coffey (though each of these last were a good deal caught up in Catholic mysticism). Here the ‘antiquarians’ - also called ‘our leading twilighters’ - stand accused of what Beckett calls a ‘flight from self-awareness’. According to his view, the Irish writers had chosen to perpetuate a notion of ‘Irish literature’ fostered by Yeats ... and then wisely abandoned by him when he himself outgrew it. Viewed from this standpoint, the function of literature is

In other words, to merge the self into the imagined nation, either by diminishing its differences from the majority in a collective sentimental formula, or else by asserting the identity of the self with the core values of the nation - these were the strategies of the self-consciously Irish writer. In either case Beckett saw the workings of false consciousness and condemned it with the same voice as that with which he condemned any other manifestation of excessive patriotism.

Perhaps the majority of Irish writers could hardly have done otherwise at that moment in nation-building than to join in that process. Certainly they lacked the cosmopolitan perspective that Beckett had acquired abroad; but equally they lacked the protocols and practices of the colonial middle-class which he inherited. This difference adds a bitter tang to Beckett’s comic gambols at the expense of his Irish characters, Neary, Wyllie, and the others - so different from those such as the Alba (based on Ethna MacCarthy) whose Italian or otherwise classical names serve as a passport out of Irishness. Hence Belaqua is assuredly an escapee from Ireland, even if his destination is an unenviable place in the inferno; and if Murphy is more ambiguous, it is tempting to recall that Joyce’s autobiographical character Dedalus originally bore the same name - albeit, for that author, bearing pseudo-classical connotations of morphio (as in metamorphosis).

The case with another character whom we have met before is relatively straightforward: ‘For an Irish girl Miss Counihan was quite anthropoid [...]. How far this constitutes an advantage is what every man must decide for himself.’ (Murphy, Picador Edn., p.69.) In launching this piece of comic machismo, Beckett risks apparent complicity in the colonial stereotypes that dog Anglo-Irish literature according to which the Irish themselves are always less anthropoid - that is, less human - than the English traveller/colonist in Ireland, a view explicitly offered by numerous English writers when faced with Irish customs and manners in the past. In fact, however, Beckett is writing equally outside of the colonial and the nationalist traditions while at bottom the joke is less significantly informed by Protestant derision at the under-developed forms of superstitious Irish life than by the obvious contrast between Irish pieties (national and religious) and his own unillusioned nihilism.

The problem for Beckett was, then, how to present Irish characters at all given that he lacked the communal sentiment that bonded the actually-existing Irish nation together at the time of writing. On either side a chasm: on the one, futile bitterness against their failure to embody standards inculcated in him by his class background and higher education; on the other, his own contempt for the civility of the colonial upper dog and the complacency it induces. Writing in the gap between these two positions, he aims to satirise sentimental Irishness while doing dirt on the brand of civility that has been thrust upon the Irish by their colonising neighbours. (It was the Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis’s contention that Jonathan Swift - to whom Beckett bears a certain resemblance - ‘did dirt on life’.)

That Beckett lacked the communal sentiment of contemporary Irishment can be illustrated by this irreverent - and self-confessedly irrelevant - aside in the morbidly brilliant pages of First Love [1946], an early novella written in the ‘post-vision’ period (to coin a phrase):

In Murphy the satire aimed at independent Ireland goes to the extent of setting one of the characters to beat his love-sick brains out on the bronze buttocks of Cuchulain in the GPO, where the Easter Rising was conducted. (The statue is by Oliver Sheppard who became the sculptoral laureate of the new state.) Meanwhile Miss Counihan - one of the opulently-made young females who act as magnets for the oddly-assorted males - is described in terms patently deriving from Yeats’s famous lines about ‘the walk of a queen’ in Cathleen Ni Houlihan - the part that Maud Gonne carried off so well on the Abbey stage: ‘Standing in profile against the blazing corridor, with her high buttocks and her low breasts, she looked not merely queenly, but on for anything.’ (Picador Edn., p.123.)

Beckett, then, was not an Irish writer in the sense of participating in the cult of Irish nationhood or lending literary assistance to the revivification of the Gaelic corpse in any way at all. This may seem like an entire defection; yet, in the end, his achievement as a writer who turned his back upon such things aims and strategies was to carry the idea of Irish literature onto a higher plain, charged with a self-reflexive knowledge of its own dynamics: Beckett, more than any other writer since Joyce, defines the problematics and potentials of Irish culture as a seed-bed for great literature, but also as a context for the understanding of the self in an objectively historical situation.

J. C. C. Mays has said that the chief thing Ireland gave to Beckett was ‘an inheritance to deny, or a set of appearances to go behind, or a range of authorities to disagree with’ (‘Young Beckett’s Irish Roots’, Irish University Review, Spring 1984, p.21). This may be true as to his starting point, but it does not take account of the deeper structures of his mind: that is to say, the extent to which Beckett actually shares in the Irish condition as a psychic and historical legacy, for good or ill. The simplest measure of this is perhaps his choice of characters. Like John Millington Synge, the first acclaimed genius of the Abbey Theatre, he brought to the stage the indigent and ostracised, paupers and tramps, those marginalised by society and - by implication - deprived of any of its values or the self-esteem involved in them.

Of course the reality is very different - Irishly different. The Beckettian hero is, in the first place, ‘greatly innocent’, as Molloy professes of the victim of the night-time beating he witnesses at the outset of the novel (Trilogy, Picador Edn., p.11.) Here it may be worth recalling that, in English law since the time of Henry VIII, vagrancy has been an indictable offence while in Ireland it has often been regarded as the normal condition of a people trapped between the landlord and the emigrant ship and train. In either case, the innocence of the itinerant is something that has - traditionally at least - been taken for granted in Ireland, with the effect that the dignity of the characters whom J. M. Synge calls ‘tramps’ is fairly apodictic in Irish fiction also. This is one of the paradoxical fruits of colonialism in Ireland.

The clearest instance of the principle of inverted social dignity in Anglo-Irish literature is, in fact, Synge’s play In the Shadow of the Glen in which the tramp succeeds in carrying the woman of the house away from all comfort and security in a home with a flock of sheep and (less agreeably) a doddering and malevolent old husband:

The characters of Waiting for Godot are two such tramps, or even (one might conjecture) Synge’s tramp and his companion in an androgynous after-life; and if the first shock that this theatrical novelty presented to its European audience was arguably the stripping from the stage of anything that resembled the interior of a bourgeois home, the second certainly was the presentation of clochards as comi-tragic heroes who, incidentally, spoke a markedly vernacular language nonetheless peppered with educated ideas about the history of art, religion and society without deviating from their character as down-and-outs, hobos, bums, or even refugees. In this way Beckett imported into European literature that peculiarly Irish phenomenon: the highly-educated and articulate pauper.

But what is it that reduces Beckettian characters to this anomalous condition in novels and in plays that insistently revolve around the idea of diminished fortunes, exile and eviction, quests for a lost home, or a lost mother - if not necessarily thanked for her part in bringing the character into being (as Estragon’s great speech shows)? What accounts for the conjunction of physical deprivation and imaginative largesse which gives the Beckettian character his distinction as a creature of the European stage?

One answer is their affinity with that great icon of the Depression, Charlie Chaplin and likewise with his counterpart Buster Keaton who carries the ingenuity of the disgarded worker to the point of highest ingenuity in a film like The General (1927). Beckett, a great admirer of Keaton, wrote his first film for him in 1965. Another answer - not necesssarily inconsistent with the first - may be sought, however, in one of the simple facts of Irish history and culture: those stage-tramps are very like the actual tramps and exiles who fill so much of Irish social space and no less of the Irish imagination.

More significantly still, they are like the chief examples of this breed, the Gaelic bards who were sent walking the roads of Ireland in the condition of penniless spalpeens [day-labourers], a whole treasury of culture in their heads and a rough shovel in their hands. And the prima facie reason for this misfortune was the so-called linguistic shift from Irish to English in the period from 1600 to 1900 when the colonisation of Ireland was virtually completed and carried inwards into the soul-stuff of the Irish people, only to meet with a final resistance which - as we have seen - reprojected it in an often simplified and simplistically nationalistic form.

Beckett’s relationship with English thus involves another purgation as radical, if not more so, than his vision of the nothingness at the centre of his art and mission: that is, an escape from the matrix of colonised language (though this need not be understood in a restrictedly political sense). What he rejected, in the first place, was the idea of linguistic perfectability: that is, the notion that a language such as English is the sufficient vehicle for the expression of reality and the framing of appropriate reactions to it.

In his general attitude towards language, Beckett was far from believing that it was a God given tool for the expression of the human heart, still less the divine purpose. Hence, in his essay on Joyce, he wrote:

But, by the time of writing The Unnamable, the case with language seems to be much worse: we cannot actually disentangle ourselves from the thing, to the very extent that we do not know whether we are in fact its masters or its slaves:

One of the impediments to accurate self-knowledge has always been the role played by language - and especially the cliché - in veiling self from self and self from others: it is, above all else, a habit in the etymological sense of clothing and - more rudimentarily still - the sense of being the place where one lives (L., abitare). So conceived, language is as Vladimir says of habit, ‘a great deadener’ - an anaesthetic against ‘the suffering of being’.

James Joyce placed cliché at the centre of his narrative art as so many passages in Dubliners and Ulysses readily reveal; but he did so for different reasons than those that appealed to Beckett: he saw cliché as part of what he calls in Finnegans Wake ‘broken heaventalk’ and hence a means of reconstruction truth through the collation of all the fragments still available in language, no matter how distorted.

It was Beckett’s view by contrast that he must as far as possible escape from cliché and he aimed to do so by escaping from English with all of its prefabricated denotations and, more toxically still, its connotations: the poisons of which he speaks in conversation with Charles Juliet. This he effected by writing not in English but in French; for the novels were, of course, first composed in this language and afterwards translated into English.

Beckett made it known to those who asked him that he started writing in French during the war with Watt (1953). He did so, in his biographer Knowlson’s version of the well-known remarks, because it was easier ‘to write in French “without style.”’ Knowlson continues:

Stripping away the colour in order to get more directly at Being is a perfectly credible explanation for the flight from English, providing one regards Being as an essentially colourless substance in contrast to the prismatic array that is language with all its affective variations, class distinctions, intertextual tugs and associational nudges. Of course French too has its burden of cliché and there remains a residual sense in which the novels were actually translated back into English as if they has been first sounded in that language, or in a dialect variant of it - as the Hiberno-English phraseology of En attendent Godot/Waiting for Godot in both languages curiously reveals. (Beckett allegedly said: ‘If I had meant God, I would have said God.’)

There is, moreover, a more historical side to the question: one that concerns the peculiarly Irish context of Beckett’s linguistic formation as an Irishman. This context is significantly glimpsed in the often-noted exchange in the play All That Fall that comes closest in many ways to a portrait of Beckett’s native suburb of Foxrock: the station-master in the play is, for instance, the self-same person who presided over the little platform at which Beckett’s father daily boarded and disembarked from the train he took to work.

Excruciating is a term not only for agony on the cross [L. crux, cruces] but for a needlessly protracted agony, and we must feel the post-Christian force of the word in this play just as we feel it in Waiting for Godot where Vladimir attests that, in Jerusalem, ‘they crucify quick’ at least. Here is Mrs Rooney’s rejoinder:

In that exchange the characters reflect on the burden of archaism and politesse embedded in the polite version of Hiberno-English that they speak - a language which will undoubtedly go the way of the lesser known Irish language in the fullness of time, as likewise the better-known English language for all its empires in the modern world. Hence it is the sheep that has the last word - or perhaps because sheep, as a species, are more native to Ireland than either those humans who speak English or those who spoke Irish as natives or speak it again as revivalists.

The relationship between English and Irish in Ireland is necessarily a fraught one to the extent that the first-named extirpated the second and in so doing, carried into itself enough traces to comprise the distinctive dialect we call Hiberno-English or sometimes Anglo-Irish - though strictly speaking the two are a distinguishable from each other in proportion as the former approximates more closely to the shaping influence of underlying patterns of Gaelic grammar and lexis.

Yet less important than the difference is the common predicament of each variant: for within this Irish-English dialect there is a constant tension between the two components such that the original colonial conflict is endlessly fought out between the higher and the lower or the more ‘natural’ or simply the more prosperous and self-possessed and the poorer and more dispossessed. And, as a final irony, the dispossessed itself becomes the richer through the empowerment bestowed upon it in the Irish literary revival thus turning the entire set of cultural relations embodied by the language into a sort of closed system or cycle, vicious or benign depending upon the standpoint of the speaker/auditor.

No wonder, then, there was a felt need to take flight from English into French - just as, in a very different context, the bilingual Irish poet Michael Harnett felt it necessary to say “Farewell to English”: ‘I have made my choice / and leave with little weeping. / I have come with meagre voice / to court the language of my people.’ [See Ricorso, infra]. For Beckett this was not an option; indeed, the move back into our poor dead Gaelic seemed, from every viewpoint, a regressive step and just one more token of the ‘flight from self-awareness’ that he complained about in speaking of the Irish poets.

But if Samuel Beckett and Michael Hartnett differ in this matter it might be said that they share a linguistic strategy as well: the tearing away of norms in such a way that the capacity for anodyne experience and sentimental reception of experience is impaired and the carapace of linguistic habit consequently removed. This is a dramatic development; yet it is important not to oversimply the issue or the outcome as some recent Irish writers have done, albeit with the kindly intention of explaining it to others not accustomed to the predicament or the nuances of Irish-English speakers. Thus, for instance, in an American journalistic forum called ‘The Writing Life’, John Banville has said of Irish literature and its characteristic medium:

He then goes on to say:

It may be true that Beckett revels in ambiguity throughout the Trilogy and certainly the language has a vitality of its own in the special sense that it is the language which actually constitutes the plot rather than passively reflecting events that ‘happen’ in the solid and comforting spaces of the outer world. A more analytical view of Beckett’s language in the novels reveals, however, that the , however, a type of writing that constantly explores the arbitrariness of signs and signification, uncovering self and world as something continually getting lost, being covered over, then found and lost again. Again, it is the Unnamable who comes closest to this recognition:

Allowing that John Banville offered a comparatively soft-centred version of the genius of Irish prose - itself a soft-centre conception fostered by the middle generation of Irish critics in the 1970s - he spoke in a harsher and truer accent about the same matter on another occasion:

Here he deviates for a moment to fend off the spectre of Irish sentimentality: ‘Shamrocks. Leprechauns. The gift of the gab. Little old men with pipes in their gobs sitting on ditches and maundering on about how things were in their fathers’ time. In a word, pronounced chaarrm.’

The world that is out there, certainly, but the world that is in here also: and which of these is the more excruciating is the ultimate Beckettian question.