|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
The Beckett Landscape
| Article
# : |
15199 |
|
|
Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
|
| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1989 |
4,139 Words |
| Author
: |
Hugh Kenner
Hugh Kenner is professor of English at Johns Hopkins Univesity
and the author of many celebrated books, particularly on Ezra
Pound. |
That Beckett's art is quintessentially Irish is a fact that goes generally unrecognized because his dialogue shuns stage-Irish fancy dress. The Irishness we're readiest to recognize comes in talk like Sean O'Casey's in The Plough and the Stars: Here we have Fluther, exclaiming loudly, "Excited? Who's gettin' excited? There's no one gettin' excited. It would take something more than a thing like you to flutther a feature o'Fluther." It is also found in J.M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World when Christy, the eponymous playboy, states: "Ten thousand blessings upon all that's here, for you've turned me a likely gaffer in the end of all, the way I'II go romancing through a romping lifetime from this hour to the dawning of the judgment day."
Such quaintness isn't thinkable on a page of Beckett's, whose most famous play opens with a bare declaration: "Nothing to be done."
Yet what would one day be the stage conventions of Waiting for Godot young Beckett studied from the stalls of Dublin's Abbey Theater in the mid-1920s. By that time the Abbey, which had opened in 1904, was no longer the Cause it had once been for W.B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory. A scruffy-looking little hall with eccentric sight-lines and a seating capacity of about five hundred, it had dwindled into being a shrine to its own past. Putting in an evening there was just an alternative to the newfangled cinema. Bankruptcy was fended off by O'Casey revivals (which drew crowds); otherwise, the Abbey kept itself occupied with recycling its legendary repertoire (which didn't).
There, in his student days, Sam Beckett saw the O'Casey tenement plays, all the work of J.M. Synge, and several of the strange short pieces Yeats had taken to basing on the conventions of the Japanese No. No longer what they'd once been, occasions for passionate controversy, all these were simply accessible to his detached inspections. And it's especially to be noted that decades later Beckett answered a question about his forerunners with "Who else but John Millington Synge?"
The play Synge's name conjures up is always the Playboy; put that out of mind, though, long enough to ponder the opening of The Well of the Saints. Its risen curtain discloses "Roadside with big stones, etc., on the right." Next we see "Martin Doul, a weather-beaten blind beggar," and "Martin Doul, his wife, a weather-beaten, ugly woman, blind also, nearly fifty." When they "grope in on left and pass over to stones on right, where they sit," we can recognize an adumbration of the Beckett universe, especially
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
