Chapter 2 - Cultural and intellectual contexts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
The problem with trying to locate Beckett in any national or cultural tradition is that, in his young days at any rate, he forswore any such relationship. He scorned an art which concerned itself with ‘local accident’ or the ‘local substance’, holding instead that the true object of literature is ‘the issueless predicament of existence’ (D 97). Take, for instance, his relationship with Ireland. His characters' names – Murphy, Molloy, Malone – and the cadence of their speech often have an Irish inflection while the topography of Beckett's childhood haunts his work. Yet he wrote most of his major works in French, before translating them, and spent most of his life abroad. Moreover, just as his early critical writing is impatient with politicised art, he has a great deal of scorn for cultural nationalism. He was clearly influenced by Irish forebears like Swift, Yeats and especially Synge but he had little time for the project of the Irish Revival that dominated cultural life in his native city while he lived there. In his 1934 essay ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, he scorned the ‘antiquarians’ who kept alive the Revivalist spirit by writing about Irish myth and legend (D 70). Art for Beckett was timeless, the very opposite to politics and nationalism. He praises the paintings of Jack B. Yeats (brother of the poet and one of Beckett's heroes) for ‘Strangeness so entire as even to withstand the stock assimilation to holy patrimony, national and other’ (D 149).
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- Information
- The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Beckett , pp. 21 - 28Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007