Does an age of frenetic online activity afford time for literary masterpieces, especially Outsider Novels, transcending what is considered ‘normal’?
He whose vision cannot cover
History’s three thousand years
Must in outer darkness hover
Live within the day’s frontiers.
The above stanza is from a twelve-book, poetry collection by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, which was inspired by the work of fourteen century, Persian poet, Hafez.
Rather than take the above stanza as concrete, it is worth taking it as an allegorical device, and metaphor, for what this piece sets out to champion: the work of the literary Outsider.
With various electronic devices such as, the laptop, smartphone, iPad, and media outlets like Netflix, YouTube and other broadcasters, vying for our attention(s) – and successfully so – one must enquire into whether serious, attentive reading means anything anymore?
Has the modern age – the tempered, electronic milieu – filtered out literary tomes?
The very idea of ‘The Outsider’ literary work may be unnerving in what is an age of tantamount addiction to a frenetic social media; what the writer Will Self refers to as ‘bidirectional media.’ The resulting anxiety disinclines us to engage with what many may deem ‘difficult’ books, or ‘heavy’ tomes. Knocking the bottom out of the known literary universe.
It might be said in relation to reading such books: who has aeons of uninterrupted time? In response you might say that the pandemic and lockdowns have afforded us such time. Note: no banana breads were harmed in the writing of this piece.
Critics sometimes venture towards difficult literary works from a canon such as that identified in Harold Bloom’s tautological, yet, feverish and impassioned, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. These are the works of literature which ebb in from the external to the field of the Literary Arts, and which Bloom eulogises in his reviews.
In 1812 by the Russian artist Illarion Pryanishnikov.
War and Peace
Who has read Tolstoy’s big bangers? War and Peace anyone? History’s frontiers fought over during the Napoleonic Wars, backed up with sweeping pastoral symphonies; with a charge of Russian calvary sweeping through the narrative, backed with Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. A silver Samovar dispensing tea in the officers’ mess, the colour of unearthed rubies; tea sweetened with a cube of sugar, held between the drinker’s teeth.
Or Tolstoy’s more subdued asides, with bucolic scenes of bleating lambs; and navvies sitting down in a wooded glade to consume their lunches. While out there in high summer, in the protracted Russian steppe, brown bears nosey along through tall grass to hallowed fishing grounds. With a scurry of gnats flitting at their ears.
Or what about Joycean punnery – the nightbabble of Finnegans Wake – or Beckettian gurglespeak?
If the safe, go-to novel is a halfway-house where thoughts run easily along the neuron-led rafters; where sable-eared bats hang, unruffled, in the belfry; where a forgotten greenhouse with cracked panes of burping green glass dwells in the back garden of the mind, they are there serving as a concrete, model village. Known territories; safe catch-all neighbourhoods, which imbue the reading-self with tangibility.
There has been a loss of faith in big difficult books due to less than attentive mindsets; and upon latching on this, Mediocrity Inc., sweeps in to garner easier-to-read works, which dominate book charts. What does this say about the demographics so enamoured by ease of access?
Literary, like most paradoxes, operate through conflating, and contracting, obligations. They are in a constant state of flux. (Not helpful for the binary-seeking world of the definite article, which Mediocrity Inc., often seek out to nail to the masthead.)
Satan Arousing the Rebel Angels, William Blake (1808)
Self-Made
When all the joy of writing is being sucked out of it by marketing mentalities, then things are in a bad way; they are, rather, Miltonesque: bleak; morally obtuse. Greed has taken over the minds of formerly, we hope, reasonable people.
Quality dissipates in such trends.
If you put your faith in the superficial, then the meaning of actual literature – that with substance – is diluted. Worship at the golden calf and you cannot expect your palpating thirst to be quenched.
However, the brave, writing for themselves, writer(s) will always venture out towards a different plane to help buck these acclamatory, accepted trends. The strongly composed novel could be summed up as a transference of the quotidian whereby one’s will becomes the whole of the fictional law in an expansive, infinite world.
Will Self is such a writer whose output is ‘challenging’. A writer, thinker, who goes it alone and does not yield to the Mediocrity Inc., whose plaintive, rebellious, immature cries rail that they know better, but which do not.
Outsider Novel
The stolid mentalities who often quip, “I couldn’t get into it”, say this, because, I believe, they are not prepared to challenge their perceptions of what the Outsider Novel means to them – an ungraspable leviathan which slips away into the listless fog.
Five or six literary Outsider ‘heavy’ novels from the Western Literary Canon dominate and stand on the rostrum; representing the cornerstones of the literary house that encapsulate the Canon.
Two have already been alluded to, and then there is: Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman. Bellicose in its exposition from conception to the screaming infant through to his uncle’s nose and to maturity.
One of the first ‘Outsider’ works, it is inspired by the Rabelaisian, and inhabits the world of the absurd and the fabulist. There are long paragraphs on his Uncle’s Toby’s European adventures with his servant, Trim, and of course, reams of information on the prowess of his conk. It will have you amused if not bewildered at the thought of how he got away with publishing it in the 18th century.
James Joyce’s Ulysses is a tome in tribute to the mimesis of life, and everything which Joyce termed ‘A shout in the street.’ It takes the epic towards modernism, and a rebirth of consciousness in the early-to-mid twentieth century. There are diegetic elements to the inner monologues of the characters and the streets of Dublin. You will find an urban mammoth with its quarry caught upon its wide tusks, braced with metal struts to keep the weight of the tome from falling.
This is no Cuneiform script to procrastinate over, it is a layered, complex novel to be discovered. Through two main characters, Leopold Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus we find an unparalleled commentary on twenty-four-hours in Dublin on June 16th, 1904. That is the plot. Simple. Yet, all-encompassing. Tributaries, feeding into the literary infinity pools of the Liffey, and further afield.
Hopefully readings of Ulysses will soon resume in Sweny’s Pharmacy.
Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is thronged – absolutely imbued – with a myriad of characters, and a talking lightbulb. Each copy of Gravity’s Rainbow should include its own Philharmonic Orchestra to play alongside the running-hare-prose. It is about the Second World War and V Rockets and their trajectory before falling to Earth on the places where a main character is having coitus.
Sounds mad, right? Yes. Quite, but fantastical and industrious. The prow of this literary Gridiron, in a reading, a universal, Manhattan bearing down on the sugary pap and mulch which is dished out – and is not at all, nourishing.
Launch of a V-2 rocket.
David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is totemic in its appreciation of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, with a nod to Don DeLillo, and John Dos Passos’s U.S.A trilogy, mainly, The 42nd Parallel.
The plot of Infinite Jest is initially tertiary to Wallace’s intellect and ego in fluidity. The beginning is pure vaudeville to the main circus, big-top act which is the intellect of Foster Wallace himself and the prefrontal cortex mythology, which he conspired to create and then exuded, seemingly, so effortlessly. But did Foster Wallace write a capable work? Yes he did, but it is an apostrophic set of hymnals on tennis, drug addiction and geo-political set-ups.
I looped the meta-modernist, hyper-realist circle and went along for the ride on David Foster Wallace’s encyclopaedic, metadata novel; figuring that while sedate prose is at the behest of book seller’s, and publishers – means and modes of production for the masses – I thought ‘To hell with this, give me a novel with shtick.’
So, by means of reposed epidural, I plugged into Foster Wallace’s acicular vein, man, and plunged the diviner right on into the other side. And it is shtick all the way.
Foster Wallace’s reliance on using nomenclature, acronyms are, well, trifling when you forget all the organisations he coins; we do know, for example, that O.N.A.N stands for Organization of North American Nations, a kind of dystopian superstate which is comprised of Mexico, the United States and Canada, and that the novel takes place during ‘The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment’ Y.D.A.U. It opens with tennis. Wallace was a court man, he liked to court tennis and he schlongs his racket into being more often than enough in this work.
This is not a linear prose tale as we know it.
Transcendental Idealism
These literary works fail to fall into the crushing jaws of a Western, ‘easy’ read sunset; they transcend the ‘normal’.
The oddity of the largess of such peripatetic works are still revered by committed readers. Literature, and indeed, great literature was, and is, and will forever be, a magical portal which has the power to transport consciousness into another realm. Some works, some bigger, well-crafted works exist outside the normally accepted coda of what is regarded as ‘the novel,’ and do so by existing beyond the ‘day’s frontiers’, beyond paragraphs, in marginalia.
And out there beyond the environs of ‘known-knowns’ lies the quotidian, infinite in its readiness to bypass the grassy verges of rhetoric, and up beyond ionosphere and stratosphere.
On the y-axis of a line-graph in the evolutionary trajectory of the Outsider Novel, one could hope for, works which operate outside the perceived, ‘normative’ structures of the known, easy to digest novel. In a sense they occupy the strata of the strange, the unfamiliar; their tentacles reach into the dark nooks and cervices of the mind and bring lax grey-matter in there forward, and into pulsating, roving life.
Kant’s house in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad).
If one postulates further, and looks at Kant’s Transcendental Idealism in The Critique of Pure Reason, it can be said that space and time are merely formal features of how we perceive objects; not things in themselves, existing independently of ourselves, or properties or relations among them.
Objects in space and time are said to be ‘appearances’, and Kant argues that we know nothing of substance about the things in themselves, of which they are appearances. He calls this doctrine (or set of doctrines) ‘transcendental idealism.’
Ignorance along the lines of myopic conjecture about a novel one has not read, is the syphilitic chancre on the body of literature – based on appearances and perceived conjecture on what a novel is, without taking the trouble to read it. This is harmful, detracting from the creativity behind such a work.
There are literary keys available to break those harder to ‘crack’ literary tomes. Those keys are in other books; yes, books which help you with books. Isn’t that what a dictionary is for, or a thesaurus for that matter?
Take, again, Finnegans Wake, the indolent reader’s worst nightmare – they start by gambolling around in search of the missing apostrophe ignoring the entrée; and hell, they proclaim it to be the most difficult of books.
In Christopher Marlowe’s adaptation on the stories of Faust, Doctor Faustus says, ‘Hell is just a frame of mind.’ The demonic Mephistopheles in Doctor Faustus does, however, imply a similar idea by saying that losing his place in heaven gives him experience of hell wherever he is:
Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
Think’st thou that I who saw the face of God,
And tasted the eternal joys of Heaven,
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,
In being depriv’d of everlasting bliss?
If one was to take the evolution of the novel, we could look at Sterne, Joyce then David Foster Wallace and who knows where the creative literary genre will head next?
In a powerful 1997 essay, Seamus Deane suggested that the twin forces that beset modern Irish writers such as W.B. Yeats and James Joyce were those of Apocalypse and Boredom.[1] Both the culture in which the writers lived and the art-works they produced are marked by phasic interruptions into colonial despondency of revelatory dramas and epiphanies:
In Yeats’s work–plays and essays, we may feel at times that a little boredom might be something of a relief from the constant appropriation of almost everything that happened in his lifetime to a visionary apocalypse in which all that is ‘past, or passing or to come’ flashes up in a conflagration that consumes time and exposes eternity. What I want to suggest here is the natural alliance between Joycean boredom and Yeatsian apocalypse in relation to temporality and therefore to history.[2]
Deane’s proposal reflects something of the deadlock of revisionist and radical criticism in Irish Studies in the 1990s – a political deadlock which has largely passed into desuetude in the post-Good Friday atmosphere. If revisionism proposed a certain constitutional conservatism and was a bit of a bore, the radical cultural critics wielded a language which was apocalyptically difficult to understand in its more post-post-structuralist modes. And what was lost in the debate was something of the craic of ordinary people, and the points of cracked reality in ordinary life which do not succumb easily to academic enquiry.
Methodologically, of course, we find ourselves these days stretched across wide and strange territories of discourse and discipline, and at a very late stage in the drama of literary criticism from Leavis to Baudrillard. Contemporary criticism has a surfeit of entry points and elaborations, resembling a quantum field in its complexity. I could, whilst sticking only to a psychological theme, find many feminist responses to one essay in late Lacan. Or I could argue for yet another return to a missed aspect of a deconstructed Freud. I would prefer though to draw simple and broad brush-strokes which would not incite the total indignation of a casual reader. My psychological terms are broadly popular (the aesthetic terms are more or less commonly known in academia since Bakhtin). And the argument is willingly simple: that ‘Apocalypse and Boredom’ as a binary needs a mediating term (Crack) which turns out to be dizzyingly deconstructive in its implications. Modern scholars cannot either manoeuvre round or simply ignore this post-structuralist facet of a text but must, as Terry Eagleton has suggested, go through theory and out the other side. And wisdom is to be found in many places including the most demotic and the most abstruse. Our common language in the end must be the structures of wisdom, and Derrida has as much a claim to them as does the greatest ‘realist’ of a pub in Grafton Street. [3]
Deane’s broad historical binary can be broadened to include a psychological dimension and also an aesthetic principle for the detailed analysis of culture, society and art. The psychological dimension appropriate to Irish modernism, I shall argue, is manic-depressive in structure. The corresponding aesthetic principle is a principle of carnival-nihilism where the hyphen suggests an affinity with the related manic-depressive psychology. The hyphen should suggest that the prior term in each case (mania, carnival) is not necessarily adjectival but has also an intimate link with its sister terms depression and nihilism. Adding these terms to Deane’s we might produce a more complex matrix for the discussion of Irish modernism for there are fascinating dialogical correspondences between manic, carnivalistic and apocalyptic phenomena, as indeed there are between depressing, nihilistic and boring colonial experiences. In the process of thus broadening the terms of reference, we will discover the emergence of that third term which ironises the solemnities of apocalypse and boredom: the term known to our common culture as crack.
It is a question of corollaries of structure. Manic-depression is episodic and interruptive of quotidian life in the same way that apocalyptic and boring experiences can be said to be episodic diversions from the ‘normal’ functioning of a happy democratic culture. Mania wrecks routine, and depression makes us incapable of routine. The terms carnival and nihilism are not new, but in an internal relationship with each other they form an aesthetic principle which deforms the more staid genre of tragi-comedy which is often taken by older critics to represent an aesthetic ‘norm’ for representing the human condition.[4] Carnival, like mania, achieves a disruption of normal boundaries, hierarchies and empirical states of mind. Depression and nihilism can kill our sense of the value of the ordinary. Christian apocalypse disrupts boundaries (‘ye shall be as gods’), hierarchies (‘I am the Alpha and Omega’) and forms of empiricism ( ‘they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory’). But it is also true that boredom can at its extreme give us an extremely interesting sense of what eternity might be like. In a Derridean sense each of these terms when pushed to its limit can turn into its opposite: there is nothing more boring than an over-long carnival, and nothing more likely to reveal ‘the hidden’ than a night of nihilistic visions.
The dialogical inter-action of these terms furnishes us with both ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ opportunities if we imagine the structure thus:
Apocalypse Boredom (Socio-cultural level).
Mania Depression (Psychological level)
Carnival Nihilism (Aesthetic level).
Taken together as a matrix of six terms we can begin to be experimental, and the advantage of adding psychological and aesthetic terms is to furnish us with a complex language for discussing the contingencies of modernist culture: what, for instance, might a manic-nihilism resemble, say in the early Nietzschean plays of W.B. Yeats such as Where there is Nothing? Could we consider the possibility of a carnival of boredom in Joyce’s Dubliners or Brendan Behan’s The Hostage? How might a sense of apocalyptic depression inform Sean O’Casey’s TheSilver Tassie? The terms are reversible, too, and this adds a further level of vocabulary to our exploration of forms: what is the function, for instance, of a depressive carnivalism in the plays of Samuel Beckett, a nihilistic apocalypse at the end of O’Casey’s Purple Dust and a boring mania in the work of Denis Johnston and Spike Milligan? I will now explore some of these terms more categorically and then go on to demonstrate how their presence can best be detected in the work of Sean O’Casey, a writer placed in the ‘minor’ category of modernists behind Joyce and Yeats, but who may come into his majority when seen as the first realist of crack.
In 1921, at the height of European modernism, the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin described manic depression for the first time as involving ‘a heightened distractibility’, a ‘tendency to diffusiveness’, and ‘a spinning out the circle of ideas stimulated and jumping off to others’. [5] In 1924 the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler concurred and drew a parallel with artistic production:
The thinking of the manic is flighty. He jumps by by-paths from one subject to another, and cannot adhere to anything. With this the ideas run along very easily and involuntarily, even so freely that it may be felt as unpleasant by the patient….
Because of the more rapid flow of ideas, and especially because of the falling off of inhibitions, artistic activities are facilitated even though something worth while is produced only in very mild cases and when the patient is otherwise talented in this direction. The heightened sensibilities naturally have the effect of furthering this.[6]
We should notice the stress here upon the ‘heightened’ sensibility of the maniac for this reminds us of the heightened sensibility required to experience epiphany and revelation. We should also note the ‘falling off of inhibitions’ for this is a feature we will observe in our analysis of carnivalesque activity. The rapid flow and spinning of ideas also reminds us of some of the features we associate with modernist texts such as Ulysses. In short, the phenomenon of mania touches upon both frenetic literary activity and apocalyptic or transformative experience.
Depression.
Seamus Deane refers in his essay to the ‘marks of boredom’ he detects in Joyce, Beckett and Kafka. They include:
– ‘dinginess of physical circumstance and dress’,
– ‘extreme routinization of action and speech’,
– ‘an individual eloquence that derives from consensual banalities’,
Let us contrast this list with a list of depressive symptoms described by Irish psychiatrist Anthony Clare:
‘-Feelings of guilt or worthlessness
– Loss of concentration
– Loss of energy and noticeable tiredness of fatigue
-Suicidal thoughts …
-Agitation or marked slowing down (retardation’).[8]
Sean O’Casey, Image by Reginald Gray.
It is clear from these lists that clinical depression and cultural boredom are intimately related. As we shall see in the work of Sean O’Casey, the subject feels that he has been broken into pieces. It is an experience of extreme boredom as a form of disintegration which results, paradoxically, in a form of apocalyptic fear:
[The depressive] feels solitary, indescribably unhappy, as ‘a creature disinherited of fate’; he is sceptical about God, and with a certain dull submission, which shuts out every comfort and every gleam of light, he drags himself with difficulty from one day to another. Everything has become disagreeable to him; everything wearies him … he thinks he is superfluous in the world, he cannot restrain himself any longer: the thought occurs to him to take his life without his knowing why. He has a feeling as if something had cracked in him, he fears that he may become crazy, insane, paralytic, the end is coming near. (Italics inserted).[9]
Colonial depression is a much more disintegrative experience than the term ‘boredom’ allows. The depressive is opened up to extraordinarily painful inner confusion and despair as he ‘cracks’ under the strain of living a false life. The only redemptive feature of the experience lies in the fact that extreme depression can become a form of revelation of capitalism’s utter inner monotony. The depressive subject can become aware of his extreme oppression through his consciousness of his fractured personal moods. There is , also, as we shall see, something redemptive and ironical about that ‘crack’.
Carnival.
So much has been written about carnival in recent decades that the term has sadly been recuperated as a ‘boring’ academic category. We can crack open the term however when we inflect it with an analysis of its relationship with mania and nihilism. The classic description of the function of carnivalism belongs to Mikhail Bakhtin:
The laws, prohibitions, and restrictions that determine the structure and order of ordinary, that is noncarnival, life are suspended during carnival…. All distance between people is suspended, and a special carnival category goes into effect: free and familiar contact among people.[10]
It is a characteristic feature of mania that the patient demonstrates a ‘loss of inhibitions, particularly sexual and social’ and displays an ‘infectious mood – humorous, jocose, euphoric.’[11] The maniac also enjoys breaking the boundaries of propriety- talking to people familiarly on the street, entering private property without permission, cocking a snook at policemen and authority figures. In a sense, we might think of carnival as a form of collective mania licensed by its social contract. The maniac is stigmatised because of his solitude- his actions are not very different from those of the carnival clown. ‘The basic principle of grotesque or Carnival realism’, writes Michael Bristol, ‘is to represent everything socially and spiritually exalted on the material, bodily level. This includes cursing, abusive and irreverent speech, symbolic and actual thrashing’ and so on.[12] The patient in a manic phase often dresses bizarrely, curses abusively and irreverently, thrashes around and confuses his own body with that of a god. Mania is, in a sense, a one-man carnival.
‘Carnival’, writes Bakhtin, ‘celebrates the shift itself, the very process of replaceability, and not the precise item that is replaced, Carnival is, so to speak, functional and not substantive. It absolutizes nothing, but rather proclaims the joyful relativity of everything.’[13] The maniac, remember, is identified by his infectious mood, flights of ideas, pressurised speech with fast punning and rhyming, loss of judgement and inhibition. The maniac, too, proclaims the joyful relativity of all relationships, concepts and objects. There are clear structural connections, then, between the forms of apocalypse, mania and carnival, and I would suggest that mania is the mediating element between the two apparently unconnected forms of apocalypse and carnivalism. In one grotesque twist, the Christian apocalypse is all about the burning flesh of men, and carnival too (L. carne) concerns the destiny of the flesh. We might indeed view the Last Judgement through one grotesque optic as a kind of carnival of revelation.
Nihilism.
Nihilism is the rationalisation of boredom and depression. It is, as it were, the ideology of melancholy. Where people merely act bored or depressed, as in, say, Joyce’s Dubliners , there is at least hope that some relief might come from the pain of their condition. These characters are not committed ideologically to the notion that life is meaningless but are merely acting out the paralysis of a cycle of colonial history. Nihilism, however, perceives the permanent negation of teleology, divinity and broadly socio-spiritual meaning. It searches for the lethal nothingness at the heart of any project and proclaims this as its secret truth. In conjunction with carnivalism as part of the couplet carnival-nihilism, nihilism acts as a corollary to the depression in manic-depression though with an even greater sense of finality. Where the maniac is reduced, in time, to the horrible vacuousness at the heart of his euphoria, the carnival subject, too, comes to understand that his destruction of all actually existing social forms conceals a secret and permanent nihilism. Carnival cocks a snook at authority but conceals from itself the secret vacuousness of its activity. It is a good thing to place a king’s crown on an ass’s head but it is also a gesture of hatred towards norms. Nihilism is thus the darkest of the six terms with which we are approaching Irish modernism because it emerges from the very heart of parodic action. But, in a final redemptive twist, we shall see that nihilism can be dialogised by the comical. Too much nihilism is, simply, funny, as James Joyce illustrates in his ironic parody of Catholic hell in APortrait of the Artist as a Young Man and as Samuel Beckett discovered in Waiting for Godot. [14] Several pages of doom and gloom can become amusingly intense. As we shudder at the crack of doom, we cannot help but be reminded of the craic.
‘I cannot enter the social order except as a vagabond.’ – James Joyce, 1904
The Crack.
To be cracked can mean, as we have seen, to be depressed to the point of madness, but to ‘have the crack’ can mean the opposite: to be infected with carnivalistic joy. A crack can be a fault-line from which revelation might arise (literally ‘a seismic event’ as Deane has it) or a blow inducing paralysis. [15] It is an ambivalent term which mediates between our six analytical terms thus:
Apocalypse Boredom
Mania Crack Depression
Carnival Nihilism.
Crack is the deconstructive term which mediates the transition from one side of the grid to the other. When apocalypse turns into boredom there must be a point at which a position is neither apocalyptic nor boring and I would suggest that the subject here acts like a manic-depressive. When mania begins to turn into depression the patient feels that he is cracking up in the manner described by Emil Kraepelin:
He has a feeling as if something had cracked in him, he fears that he may become crazy, insane, paralytic, the end is coming near. [16]
A post-apocalyptic culture can feel that the old moulds have been cracked but this can induce a morose fear for the future that can induce an anxious boredom. Contrarily, when a culture experiences the onset of an apocalypse it encounters heightened, euphoric feelings as in the 1916 rebellion where millennial fever gripped sections of the population of Dublin. As it becomes hypomanic society can have an almighty craic before its euphoria reaches its peak of revelation and collapses back into self-hatred and paralysis. Crack is therefore something of a pharmakon. A good night out in Temple Bar can be a ‘cure’ for depression, but the booze leaves us with a poisonous headache. A crack on the head from an Irish Brother can give us a poisonous hatred of authority, but can also cure us of all our idealism. Crack is undecided in its effects: both violent and creative, fun and pain, a break and a mould. It is a very archetype indeed of deconstruction, for what could be more ambivalent than a textual crack: a point where the text roars and collapses, enjoys and splits, surges and cleaves. At the very point where Beckett reaches his cracked vision of futility, we can’t help but begin to crack up. There is no craic where there is no crack. And there is no crack where there is no craic. In fact, the term is not just a pharmakon, but the very possibility of there being a pharmakon because there could not be a limit which could not crack, crack being the condition of its hymenicity.
Crack is a transitive term then but one which cannot sustain itself either as a form or a limit. We crack under pressure but then crack away at a solution. A crack in a cup is a pain but great craic if it causes our landlord to drop tea on his trousers. Ireland itself is cracked along its Ulster border, but the border itself is ‘crackers’. A crack cannot be a thing, by definition: but is certainly something. The crack may be Ninety in the Isle of Man, but the crackdown in the Dublin of 1916 was terrible.
Sean O’Casey and The End of the Beginning.
In the work of Sean O’Casey, nihilism is articulated as it emerges from the scandalous pranks of his exuberantly carnivalesque Dublin slum-dwellers. [17] As his work progresses through the years of modernism and civil war, his vision becomes increasingly bleak, so bleak, in fact that it becomes, in an ironic twist, comical. O’Casey’s work hovers in the space of ambiguity created by the word ‘crack’ which can represent both a fault or interruption in the smoothness of a quotidian continuum and a sense of comical social play (craic). ‘Mr O’Casey’, wrote Samuel Beckett, ‘is the master of knockabout in this very serious and honourable sense- that he discerns the principle of disintegration in even the most complacent solidities, and activates it to their explosion.’[18] O’Casey’s wilful destruction of empirical solidities impressed Beckett philosophically (it was entropic) but also because, to use a contemporary phrase, it cracked him up. O’Casey was at his most amusing when he was being nihilistic and achieved his greatest spasms of laughter from his creation of ‘spasms of dislocation’ in the art-work.[19] In his 1934 play The End of the Beginning, two characters, Darry Berrill and Barry Derrill set about the destruction of an Irish country house with great relish and, in the process, wreck themselves:
Darry falls down the chimney … there’ll be a nice panorama of ruin … nothin’ done but damage … I’m after nearly destroyin’ meself! [20]
The country house should be read as symbolic of an emerging De Valeran pastoralism which both O’Casey and Conor Cruise O’Brien took to be a disappointment.[21] ‘Our generation’, wrote O’Brien, ‘grew into the chilling knowledge that we had failed, that our history had turned into rubbish, our past to a “trouble of fools.”‘[22] O’Casey’s country house is an objective correlative of post- Free State Ireland’s paralysis in which his comedic pair stumble blindly about in a void:
Darry (shouting madly). Barry, Barry, come here quick, man! I turned the key of the tap too much, ‘n it slipped out of me hand into a heap of rubbish ‘n I can’t turn off the cock, ‘n I can’t find the key in the dark. (p. 41.)
O’Casey and O’Brien could agree upon the ‘heap of rubbish’ that Irish history had become. Typically, however, O’Casey intensifies the nihilism in the sub-text of the play until its atmosphere becomes apocalyptic:
I can’t do anything … I don’t know what to do …What in the Name of God has happened? … can you do nothin’ right! … God grant that it won’t be the end … Is the clock stopped? For God’s sake, touch nothing … It’s as dark as pitch in there … (pp. 21-30).
At the centre of Free State Ireland, O’Casey surmised, there lay a metaphysical darkness and his play establishes an atmosphere of cosmic doom throughout. Strangely, though the effect of the treatment is comical because his pair of clots are so endearing, reminding us of Laurel and Hardy as they crash into furniture, disappear up and down chimneys and knock cracks in the walls of the de Valeran dream. We cannot tell whether the apocalypse of nihilism is serious or part of the craic. ‘Can’t you find anything?’ asks Darry. ‘I can see nothing’ replies Barry, as the play reaches its climax (p. 24), but again, the effect is amusing in the manner of a cartoon where all the lights go out and we see just the cartoon rabbit’s eyes glowing in the dark. O’Casey is attempting a serious critique of his country’s post-apocalyptic (Easter 1916) boredom, but he discovers that boredom holds a potential energy within it which can explode into epiphanies of entropy, at which point he cannot decide whether to laugh or go mad. His culture is exhausted (‘not a drop left in it, not a single drop! What’re we goin’ to do n– …’) but hysterically explosive: ‘… He lets go of the rope, and runs over to the oil drum. Darry disappears up the chimney‘ (p. 33). For O’Casey, De Valeran Ireland is literally ‘cracked’, deformed in a vortex of nihilism and farce:
He turns and sees that Darry has disappeared.
Lizzie (speaking outside in a voice of horror). The heifer, the heifer!
Darry (calling out). Lizzie, Lizzie!
Lizzie rushes in as Darry falls down the chimney…. (p.33.)
The terms Apocalypse and Boredom are not adequate in their singularity to capture such ambivalencies. Boredom taken too far can rebound as a form of apocalyptic emptiness as in O’Casey’s work from 1923-34 where we encounter darknesses which take us beyond the merely paralytic state of Joyce’s Dubliners towards Beckettian nihilism. Apocalypse, too, can be strangely boring as we can note from my opening quotation where Seamus Deane speaks of the relief that we seek from Yeats’s constant revelations. We must seek mediating terms for the movement between Deane’s twin poles of analysis for, in the end, the terms begin to deconstruct one another. The first step in moving towards a more complex analysis is to introduce more specific psychological and aesthetic terms. The second step is to seek a mediating term for the deconstructive activity of this more complex matrix. In the term ‘crack’ we have a term which mediates the ambiguities of the deconstructive inter-actions of apocalypse, mania and carnival, boredom, depression and nihilism. Yeats and Joyce may have wanted Ireland to aspire to being an Attic culture, but I would wish to install Crack within Seamus Deane’s paradigm to remind us that Ireland was always, already, a very Antic country.[23]
[1] Seamus Deane, ‘Boredom and Apocalypse: A National Paradigm’ in Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1970 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997).
[2] Deane, Strange Country, p. 171. For a discussion of manic-depressive activity in the life of W.B. Yeats, see my ‘”Down Hysterica Passio”: The Mood Structures of W.B. Yeats’, Irish University Review vol. xxviii, no. 2, Autumn/Winter 1998, pp. 272-80.
[4] See, for instance, David Krause, Sean O’Casey: The Man and His Work (London, MacMillan, 1960), pp. 86-89 and passim. ‘Carnival’ and ‘nihilism’ should be thought of as standing to the extreme left and right, as it were, of the traditional terms ‘comedy’ and ‘tragedy’. Where tragi-comedy suggests an organic genre in which its terms are nevertheless discrete, carnival-nihilism should suggest an aesthetic that is in creative contradiction with itself. For further discussion of the principle of carnival-nihilism, see my (unpublished) M. Litt. thesis, Ideology and Dramatic Form in the Plays of Sean O’Casey, 1922-46 (Oxford, Bodleian library, 1994).
[5] Emil Kraepelin, Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia , trans. R.M. Barclay, ed. G.M. Robertson (Edinburgh, E&S Livingstone, 1921) in Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (New York , Simon and Schuster: Free Press, 1994), pp. 107-8. We might consider manic depression to be a ‘modernist’ illness in the way that some writers have conceived schizophrenia to be a ‘post-modern’ illness (see, for example, Frederic Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism’, New Left Review, 146, pp. 53-92.) Where the schizophrenic patient loses touch with structures of space and time permanently, the manic-depressive experiences episodic disorientation. He is able to recuperate his identity, albeit tentatively, and thus retains a sense of ironic detachment from a self in crisis which a schizophrenic patient cannot since his very sense of self has collapsed into a permanent ‘flow’ of disorder.
[6] Eugen Bleuler, Textbook of Psychiatry, English ed. A.A. Brill (London, Macmillan, 1924) in Jamison, Touched with Fire, p 108. The reader is referred to Jamison, Touched with Fire, pp. 262-3 (Appendix A) for the fuller Diagnostic Criteria of Mania.
[8] Spike Milligan and Anthony Clare, Depression, p. 35.
[9] Emil Kraepelin in Milligan and Clare, Depression, pp. 23-4.
[10] Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 8, trans., ed., C. Emerson (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 122-3.
[11] Milligan and Clare, Depression, p. 38.
[12] Michael Bristol, Carnival and Theatre: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (New York, Methuen, 1985), p. 22.
[13] Bakhtin, Problems, p. 125.
[14] See, for example, James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London, Minerva, 1992), pp.130-40 and Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (London, Faber and Faber, 1965), pp.11-15.
[16] Emil Kraepelin in Milligan and Clare, Depression, pp. 23-4.
[17] See, for instance, Sean O’Casey, ‘The Silver Tassie’, Collected Works vol. ii (London, MacMillan, 1967) where a carnivalesque opening of great joy mutates into a despairing nihilism: The sound of a concertina playing in the street outside has been heard, and the noise of a marching crowd…. Shouts are heard– ‘Up the Avondales!‘ ; ‘Up Harry Heegan and the Avondales!’ Then steps are heard coming up the stairs, and first Simon Norton enters, holding the door ceremoniously wide open to allow Harry to enter … carrying a silver cup joyously…. (p. 25).
cf.:
Teddy: Strain as you may, it stretches from the throne of God to the end of the hearth of hell.
Simon. What?
Teddy. The darkness. (p. 89).
[18] Samuel Beckett writing about The End of the Beginning in ‘The Essential and the Incidental’, Thomas Kilroy, ed., Sean O’Casey: Twentieth Century Views (London, MacMillan ,1975), p. 167.
[19] Beckett, ‘The Essential and the Incidental’, p. 168.
[20] Sean O’Casey, ‘The End of the Beginning’, Five One Act Plays (MacMillan, 1990), p. 33. Further references to this play can be found in the text.
[21] This pastoralism would later produce the De Valeran vision of a countryside ‘bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths, the laughter of maidens; whose firesides would be the forums of the wisdom of serene old age.’ (Eamon De Valera quoted in David Krause, intro., Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (London, MacMillan, 1991), pp. 15-16. In Cock-a-Doodle Dandy , O’Casey developed the point made in The End of the Beginning– that the boredom of pastoralism concealed an apocalyptic force (the cock) which could rip its pretensions apart.
[22] Conor Cruise O’Brien, ‘The Embers of Easter’, O.D. Edwards and F. Pyle, ed.s, 1916: The Easter Rising (London, MacMillan, 1968), p. 231.
[23] For an interesting essay on the relationship between antics and melancholy, see Harry Levin, ‘The Antic Disposition’, Hamlet: A Selection of Critical Essays, ed. John Jump (London, MacMillan, 1968), 122-36. The word antic derives etymologically from the Italian antico (antique) which gives the phrase ‘Antic country’ a satisfyingly Yeatsian accent.
Undeniably, Ireland has produced some of the finest creative writers in the history of the English language. From the Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) through to Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), who ultimately abandoned English in favour of French, a body of work has expressed a contradictory national character.
A recurring theme in Irish writing has been what a therapist would refer to as abreaction – the expression and consequent release of a previously repressed emotion. Thus, the drama of colonisation and sectarian division enthralled a global audience, at a remove from what is often the painful direct experience of a dysfunctional state and troubled society.
On the other hand, we have seen little in the way of philosophical wisdom in Irish letters, apart from George Berkeley (1685-1753), and Edmund Burke (1729-1797) at a stretch. So Ireland must make do with imaginative writers as intellectuals: our novelists of departure, and poets of abstraction.
I had the good fortune to encounter in the flesh arguably the last in the line of towering figures, Samuel Beckett, in a café in Montparnasse, Paris in 1982.
Ireland had just won rugby’s Triple Crown in what was then called the Five Nations, before succumbing to the French team at the Parc de Princes, and Beckett was primarily inclined to banter about rugby and cricket with his countrymen. It must be stressed that he was a charmingly convivial person, and while austere, decidedly good company; even when pressed to do so he sedulously avoided discussion of his own work, preferring to muse on the artistic contributions of others.
That slightly detached dignity, captured in John Minehan’saward-winning photograph was exactly as I found him. A kind and decent man, who concealed a madness arising out of intense creativity. A burning gaze alone revealed the creative fire that raged inside.
The Last Modernist
Beckett was the last of the great Modernists. His crucible and training ground was the Paris of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, as well as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is a great pity that Beckett never had the chance to meet the author of The Great Gatsby – that great work exploring the vacuity of capitalist aspirations. Fitzgerald matched him for pithiness, although he lacked the same profundity.
Those were heady days on the Seine, albeit Beckett was late to the party. He acted as a sort of amanuensis to Joyce, assisting him, in a way that is still unclear, in the completion of Finnegans Wake (1939). At one level he seems to have operated like a staff nurse, or what today we call a carer, leading Joyce – who was almost blind by that stage – to his final statement of total incomprehensibility, or brilliance, depending on your viewpoint.
Photographic portrait of Samuel Beckett as a young man.
Yet Joyce’s torrent of words – full of richness and fecundity – the psychobabble of tongues and the fiddling with language, had a depressing effect on Beckett aesthetically. It is widely agreed that the latter’s early works, such as Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932), More Pricks Than Kicks (1934), and Murphy (1938), did not scale the heights of his post-World War II masterpieces.
Similarly, I would argue the polyglot innovation found in Joyce’s final work is a form of literary escapism of limited relevance in this dark age of casino capitalism. Linguistic accuracy in marshaling facts is what I prize most highly, and Beckett delivered powerfully in this regard.
Beckett laconically described the relationship between the two literary titans in the following terms: ‘James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyser, trying to leave out as much as I can.’[i]
Irish Bluffers
In my experience the Irish often display a tendency towards loquacity and linguistic chicanery. Unfortunately this provides scope for bluffers and often brings a resistance to facing up to the truth. Too often we take refuge in the deliberate self-deceptions of lyricism, or display a love of rhetoric and bombast that permits falsities.
As Seamus Heaney puts it in the poem ‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’ (1975):
O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,
Of open minds as open as a trap,
Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks,
Having said that Joyce in his early work, particularly Dubliners, captures some of the spoofing that is still a feature of life in the city, particularly evident politics, where the theatrical pseudo-debaters of hucksterdom are out in force.
Perhaps if we Irish were better listeners, and concentrated on using language with greater precision, we would not have dug ourselves, collectively and individually, into the awful hole we found ourselves in when the Banks crashed in 2007.
Uncharacteristically as an Irishman, Beckett is famous for the compression of language, which may explain his departure into French. Not a word is wasted in his writing; but like Joyce, words are sometimes re-invented or used in novel ways. Thus Beckett mangles and distorts language, stripping it to the bone to devastating effect, yet generally enhancing our understanding of it.
I cannot say I have enjoyed reading all of his oeuvre. The later works, particularly the plays, are heading towards the extinction of language itself, and offer an unsparingly bleak take on both art and human communication. I should add that all of this was in marked a contrast to the chatty and open person I encountered in Montparnasse.
However, the quartet of plays, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapps Last Tape and Happy Days bear the unmistakable hallmark of genius, a commendation that should also apply to All That Fall, a play for radio memorably dramatized by Michael Gambon in 2013.
In my view the only playwrights his equal over the course of the twentieth century have been Eugene O’Neill for his A Long Day’s Journey into Night (which is also an exercise in Irish psychosis); Arthur Miller with Death of a Salesman and The Crucible; and perhaps David Mamet for Glengarry Glenn Ross; as well as the best of Bertolt Brecht. Indeed, Brecht was the only twentieth century dramatist of comparable stature, and even then he falls short in my view.
I would argue the only real modern rival – and that excludes the Bard of Avon – to Beckett’s Godot or Endgame is his near Irish contemporary Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Surviving an Irish upbringing is never easy. It is perhaps no coincidence that Wilde died a broken man in Paris having endured imprisonment in Reading Gaol – immortalized in verse – his downfall coinciding with the Importance of Being Earnest becoming the toast of London.
Beckett preserved his genius to the end through an intelligent exile, the default option for Irish creatives and intellectuals. Yeats died in France. Beckett and Wilde in Paris. Joyce in Zurich. Most Irish writers get out Hibernia – ‘the land of winter’ which the Romans chose to steer clear of – if they can.
In my experience the Irish can be a deeply malicious lot. Anything goes and always has. Our downfall, collectively as a nation, lies in the art of cutting tall poppies down to size, and destroying national heroes. Thus the great nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell (1846-1891) was driven to an early grave for an affair out of wedlock with a married woman, Kitty O’Shea.
Charles Stewart Parnell, driven to an early grave.
Not all artists, it should be emphasised, lack wisdom and judgment. Beckett aged gracefully and is now buried in modest Parisian grave, where he is treated as a French writer and a hero of the Resistance during the Nazi occupation of France, where he demonstrated true courage.
The Novels
Moving on to the novels of Beckett, including the famous, or infamous, post-War trilogy of novels: Molloy (1951); Malone meurt (1951), Malone Dies (1958); L’innommable (1953), The Unnamable (1960). It is here we see a gradual dismantling and delimiting of language. In my view by the time of The Unnameable the artifice has gone too far and the conceit frankly tiresome.
My favourite novel, suffused with humanity, is Company (1980), which was part of an Indian summer of later works. Company, and indeed Worst Ward How (1983), also demonstrate the compression of language of the greater plays, as well as a playful sense of humour, something he is often unfairly accused of lacking.
Company is a lyrical and profound statement of his childhood in Leopardstown. Coincidentally, I was born just up the road from Beckett’s childhood home – not two hundred yards away – although not to the same conditions of privilege.
The compression of language at times in the novels is aphoristic and the statements on the human condition act like gelignite in their exactitude: ‘You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on,’ from The Unnameable, and in the and in the 1983 story Worstward Ho – ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’
There is an effortless font of ridicule in this. Woody Allen would have a field day, as he did in his essay on Irish writers.
In Our Times
I am not a literary critic and do not pretend to be one, so I am appropriating Beckett’s legacy for my own purposes.
It is clear to me that in our post-truth universe we require searing honesty rather than linguistic chicanery of a sort that provides us with ‘known unknowns,’ associated with the former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. We need to concentrate on that which matters, which is the truth, forensically researched and conveyed with precise language – and barbed if necessary – thereby providing an accurate portrayal of the human condition and the challenges we confront.
The extent to which Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou, the great Marxists or post-Marxists of our age, quote Beckett is revealing, although less surprising in the case of the latter given he is French. They quote Beckett to couple both absurdity and engagement, and to demonstrate the effective use of language.
Thus every lawyer committed to the truth, particularly a criminal defence lawyer, would do well to read and absorb Beckett in order to focus precisely on what is chosen to be said and, equally importantly, left unsaid. Beckett also helps us to recognise the nuances and tropes of language.
Moreover, a close reading of Beckett embeds a faculty for detecting bullshit: contained in his works you will find an unstinting focus on the essentials to human life.
What do you mean when you say this? What do you mean by what you say you mean? What do you mean by what you say or said or said then? Why did you do what you did? Who are you, and what do you say you have done?
Cross examination techniques are of course a poor excuse for a Beckettian aphorisms, but the importance of a literary appreciation in a lawyer should not be underestimated.
Samuel Beckett in 1977.
Swift Return
Other great Irish writers besides the Modernists are also relevant to our present dark age, Jonathan Swift above all else. The Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral received a disappointing sinecure after a controversial career as a journalist in London, where in carrying out his duties he alienated a large amount of influential people. The culmination of his rage arrives at the end of his life in the totemic work: ‘A Modest Proposal’.
The conceit of that piece, based on acute recognition of the Malthusian capitalism operating at the time, and contempt for absentee landlords, is that rather than letting the poor die in increments it would make ‘economic sense’ to eat their babies whole. This was the ultimate cost benefit analysis approach to law and economics, still evident in our dangerously commoditized world.
Finally, another Irish Nobel laureate, W. B. Yeats is also relevant in this regard, not for the Romantic murmuring of Innisfree, nor the more insightful political poems surveying the grubby inception of the state – ‘And add the halfpence to the pence. / And prayer to shivering prayer’ – but for the mystical poems from 1919 onwards, with their anticipation and exploration of the totalitarianism on the horizon.
Thus in ‘The Second Coming’ (1919) Yeats anticipates a world of immoderate extremism that has returned to haunts us.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
he falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
So notwithstanding a tendency towards bluffing and linguistic chicanery, Irish writers have much to offer. Above all Beckett. He reminds us to be precise and exact with our words, while anticipating the age of extremes we have entered – a dark age of neo-liberal meltdown and capitalist excess, with fascism rearing its ugly head again.
[i] Mel Gussow, ‘BECKETT AT 75- AN APPRAISAL’, New York Times, April 19th, 1981, https://www.nytimes.com/1981/04/19/theater/beckett-at-75-an-appraisal.html
