Joyce and Beckett

Joyce and Beckett: Two Roads Out of Dublin

As the saying goes, "The English invented the language. It took the Irish to show them how to use it." In William Butler Yeats, James Joyce and George Bernard Shaw, Ireland provided the 20th century with its predominant poet, novelist and playwright. Samuel Beckett is not less than these talents, and has also had a profound effect on the literature of this century.

It is a peculiar fact, then, that Beckett and Joyce were close friends. Beckett transcribed parts of Finnegan's Wake for Joyce, translated the Anna Livia Plurabelle section of the work into French for him, read to him, and was accepted as part of Joyce's privileged circle of friends. This relationship begs the question: to what extent did they influence each other? The early works of Beckett show a significant Joycean influence, and the mature works of both writers are as far from each other as one might imagine two writers' works could be. Joyce is florid, dense, opaque, working on a massive scale, including all, drawing ever-increasing canvases of the human psyche. Beckett is astringent, clean, removed, thinking on a minimalist scale, constantly reducing human experience to its simplest denominators.

More than direct stylistic influence, then, Joyce helped Beckett to define himself as a writer: to find his identity as an author. The sheer power of Joyce's personality, combined with a huge number of shared influences, drove Beckett into a direction that he was not

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nce in a manner more radical than Joyce ever attempted (Adams 93). Ten years after Joyce's death, Beckett finally and completely made the transition from quixotic proto-Joycean modernist into an artist with his own voice, own agenda, and own identity. In 1951, he published the first of the great trilogy of novels that were to permanently identify him as an artist separate from Joyce and formidable in his own right. The novel Molloy, followed by Malone Dies and The Unnamable "represent his first, and, some think, most brilliant attempt to break out of the Joycean trap" (Gluck 104). To begin with, Beckett has by now made the decision to write almost exclusively in French. Beckett's choice of language is not a mere sideshow. One of the primary themes of Joyce and Beckett, and, indeed, Irish literature as a whole, is the question of language. Joyce and Yeats approached the language issue with the question: Is the adoption of English, as opposed to Gaelic, a capitulation to British rule? Joyce's response might be characterized as: if so, then to use the language with a greater mastery than the English is a form of victory. Beckett's response is to avoid the issue altogether. The language question that had haunted Irish writers

Category: Literature - J