Cassandra Voices

Tag: Samuel Beckett

  • Love and Literature in Numbers

    Whenever I think about Literature I think about Love. Both are written with big Ls. The Elles. Like an enjambment of run on legs, going on ad infinitum.

    And when I think of Love I think also, inevitably, of betrayal. One cannot be without the other; the two legs upon which humanity stands. Only in their resolution can we find peace. So, Literature – like His story – is very personal. Let me tell you my own.

    It is a story about numbers, mainly Thee and Four. Here I am borrowing from Joyce and Beckett, both of whom in their turn drew from Giambattista Vico, the Neapolitan philosopher, a genius unjustly ignored in his lifetime. Even today, if you ask an educated people about Gimbattista Vico chances are most won’t know anything beyond his Three Ages of Man theory that helped Joyce formulate the structure of Finnegans Wake.

    Now let me go back to the women in my life. There were three, you see. I said that this was a story about the numbers Three and Four, but in order to tell this story, I first need to tell you about these three women.

    It is a story about Power; all history concerns Power after all.

    With the first I was in a situation of Power. I could do anything. Or so it seemed. She clung to me. She lay at my feet and looked up to me like I was a God. And I was too. For when you are so very young, you feel God-like. Such is youth!

    Look at them now, the youth of today, walking on the street! Love for them is the eternally INFINITE. That is why with youth there is still hope. As they are believers in the truth. It spreads out before them in space and time. Boundless. They are perpetually in a mindset ready for exploration. Of all kinds. This is why some of them love Art and Literature.

    Rogelio de Egusquiza‘s Tristan and Isolt (Death) (1910).

    Life Moves On

    I am in my fifties now. I no longer believe in infinity. For me things are all too FINITE. Where I once saw open space, I now see enclosure.

    She used to lie at my feet like I was a God. It’s a great feeling, isn’t it, to have that power! You stand above them like a God or a Goddess, looking down upon them, deciding on their fate.

    And of course – as we all know – with such power comes enormous responsibility. The only problem is that when you are young you rarely feel like being responsible. Then one day you decide to do a terrible thing. Everyone does it, at some point. You kill them!

    Metaphorically, at least. But this is the first real taste of death, and it is a truly terrible thing. Now, you have the taste of death upon your tongue. The one that you used to kiss. Now, s/he only tastes of poison.

    You move on.

    It is that simple. It’s called survival. Call this the first age when everything was divine and when you discovered metaphor and the apocalypse of dying.

    The Soler Family, Pablo Picasso, 1903.

    Nemesis and Trinity

    So, time passes. You meet another one. Number Two. S/he is your Nemesis. For she will destroy you. Just like you destroyed number One, now your time too will come. Somehow this enters into our conception of justice. What goes round comes round. Karma.

    Just as you had looked down, all those years ago, on your first lover; just as you looked down on the one who crawled around at your feet, now you are in that very same position! Who would have thought it? There now, look at you! That miserable specimen down on both your hands and knees before Her, who is looking down upon you. Like she’s contemplating an insect. And, of course, She eventually squashes you under Her boot heels. She crushes and grinds you into the earth so that there is no longer any trace of you. You are extinguished. Finally. You are dead.

    There now. That is the story of numbers One and Two.

    What happens next? And what, by the way, does any of this have to do with Messrs Beckett and Joyce? Everything, my dears. Just wait. Be patient, as I will explain. I will take you by the hand and help you to join up all the dots.

    But first, let me introduce you to number Thee.

    Isn’t she a beauty? Now, remember the score is one-all now. Even Stephens, as we say. You are finally at the age of equality. It happens early on for some; for others later on. And for some poor buggers, it never even comes!

    You have to will it. But if s/he does come, you will finally have a chance to redeem yourself. For, like her, you too have been broken. You are no longer the youth you once were. Infinity has been clouded by impossible violence. You need to thread carefully now, and hold onto what you have with more caution.

    And you do. Whereas before your relationships – that is with numbers One and Two – may have lasted only five or so years, with number Three it is all-enduring. Before you know it, twenty years have passed and you have children growing up around you; who you now cherish as you once cherished your own life.

    This is the story of Three. The Trinity, if you will.

    Illustration by Malina/Artsyfartsy.

    How It Is

    Moving on to Samuel Beckett and a story from his How It Is (1961) that has obsessed me like no other in Literature. This novel by the Irish Modernist writer has obsessed me throughout most of my adult life. It acts like a portal into human history through Literature, travelling back to the Ancients of Greece, and Rome. But before exploring this, I must first tell you about Giambattista Vico.

    When talking about Giambattista Vico and Samuel Beckett, we must also consider James Joyce. The number three is there again! They form a triad. A holy Trinity. It was Joyce, after all, who asked the young Beckett to write an article about Work in Progress – the working title for Finnegans Wake (1939) – when they first met in Paris in 1928.

    This was when he wrote his famous essay Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce (1929), in which he singles out Vico – more than the other Italians mentioned in the title – for particular attention, and the important influence of this Neapolitan thinker on James Joyce, in particular on the structural composition of Finnegans Wake.

    But it also demonstrated Vico’s influence on Samuel Beckett, a point that has tended to be ignored by Beckett scholars.

    Let us consider the essence of Vico’s ideas on the Three Ages of Man, and how Joyce was to incorporate Vico’s theories on history into his epic final novel.

    In the La Scienza nouva or A New Science (1725), Vico attempts to break history down into a cyclical process, as natural as the four seasons. In fact, Vico’s Three Ages of Man idea actually contains four parts, and in this Joyce is a stickler. For this reason, though not alone, that Finnegans Wake is made up of four books. One being for each Age.

    The Muses Melpomene, Erato, and Polyhymnia, by Eustache Le Sueur, c. 1652–1655.

    The Four Ages

    What then are these Four Ages? The First is called the Divine Age and language in particular, but also laws, are divinely thought of, or God-given. God in this case is Jupiter, as we are in the Pagan era.

    Though, coming from a Christian era, we should recognise the intermediary nature of the Muse Uranus, mother of all the Muses, assigned the role of intermediary between God and man. However, She, in turn, needs a human vessel in order to transfer her God-given knowledge, and this, according to Vico, is where the poets come in.

    As it was a theological age, so all poets were theological, unlike today. That is to say, they were only concerned with divine matters.

    Language itself was divine. And metaphor played an incredibly important role, as signs and symbols were all-important.

    Vico singles out the bolt of lightning, for example, as the first sign of Jupiter. This is simply to show how terrified these primitive people were in the beginning. They lived in caves, like Home’s Cyclops. This was a period of epic wandering. Man was chaotic and unruly. The Muse, through her instruction, tamed him. Such are the divine origins of language.

    Joycean scholars have had great fun deciphering the various myths from the Bible and Antiquity that register in Book 1 of Finnegans Wake. It is indeed a really funny book – as Joyceans constantly highlight –full of puns referring back to famous figures, such as the Duke of Wellington and Ishtar, the ancient Babylonian Goddess of Love and War, and the Scottish empiricist philosopher David Hume, and so many more.

    It is a great sprawling narrative divided into eight chapters each one given over to one of the major characters who are called the Earwickers. Father and Mother – Humphry and Anna, and their three siblings Shem, Sham and Issy. The first chapter is a kind of prelude given over to history and the origins of the Muse.

    Beckett in How It Is begins his novel in similar fashion. Just as Joyce derives his ideas from Vico on the origins on human societies, Beckett too points to the Muse at the very beginning of the novel by starting with an invocation.

    Although unconventional, as you would expect from Beckett, that he uses the structural form tells us everything.

    The great Russian comparatist Mikhail Bakhtin, in The Dialogical Imagination (1975), is at pains to point out the origins of the novel as a genre and its debt to epic poetry, from which it took many structural features. Most novels are of tri-partite structure in theory, as Aristotle in his Poetics asserts, telling of events before, during and after – which is exactly what Beckett does in How It Is: events before Pim, with Pim and after Pim.

    Who is this Pim, you might be asking? To answer this we move on now to Vico’s Second Age, which is given over to violence.

    Odysseus and his crew are blinding Polyphemus. Detail of a Proto-Attic amphora, circa 650 BC.

    Female Domination

    Recall my story with girl Number Two? How She kicked my sorry little ass! Yes, I am talking about Female Domination of the male species, just as I spoke about Male Domination of the female in the First Age. This is karma. Although with Beckett the characters are practically sexless.

    Similarly, Joyce parodies Hitler and the Nazis in Book 2 of Finnegans Wake, who were on the rise during Joyce’s lifetime. Book 2 of Finnegans Wake is full of wonderful puns at the expense of the Nazis, referencing particularly their atrocious treatment of Jews.

    Beckett in How It Is uses the most crude and forceful comedy. It is truly grotesque. The only comparison that I can think of in literature is a Satyr play – bringing us back to Ancient Greece.

    There is only one surviving Satyr play: The Cyclops by Euripides. Anyone who is familiar with this hilarious text will be aware that it is a parody of Homer’s Odyssey. A grotesque parody in the style of Rabelais.

    Essentially, Euripides takes the myth of Zeus and Ganymede which sees the king of the gods having his way the beautiful youth.

    Ganymede is synonymous with the submissive person in an amorous relationship. The Bottom, in short. As opposed to the Top. We here use the language of S&M, which is what we are talking about. Bottoms and Tops. Dominants and submissives. This is what Beckett is obsessed with in How It Is. This is what I have come to call the maths of rejection.

    Set Theory

    As the novel progresses, Beckett becomes more and more obsessed with the numbers Three and Four. In fact the quartet, not the trilogy, is the ideal set.

    I am using the mathematical term now, taken from set theory. As this is how Beckett chooses to enter into the subject matter. It went on to become a major obsession of his during his later writing career. Consider there were two decades between the publication of How It Is in 1961 and his play Quad, completed in 1981, although tit wasn’t published until three years later.

    Beckett spends the greater part of parts 2 and 3 of How It Is going over the innumerable permutations of movements. We are back with girlfriends One and Two, which started this small discourse on Love and Literature. Remember 1 + 2 = 3. Therefore, if we were to progress to 4, that would mean a return to 1 – to my mind anyway. Meaning I would have to become the bastard again.

    Beckett uses the terms Victim and Torturer. These are the two modes of so-called human behaviour. In Beckett’s world, or, at least in the universe of How It Is, you are one or the other. I wonder which one are you?

    This is a slight simplification, as the movement of the couples in How It Is is in permanent flux.

    Beckett was also obsessed by Heraclitus and Democritus, the crying and laughing philosophers who form the two masks of theatre showing both aspects, extreme poles of human nature: the Tragic and the Comic; the legacy of the Ancient Greeks, which Beckett – without a doubt the greatest playwright of the twentieth century – revitalized.

    What other playwright uses farce to such a violent advantage? Think of the Tramps Estragon and Vladimir contemplating hanging themselves from the tree, as a form of entertainment in Waiting for Godot; Nag and Nell consigned to the dustbins in Endgame; or Winnie up to her neck in it in Happy Days.

    In all the unforgettable imagery conjured in Beckett’s theatre we find unforgettable visual metaphors encapsulating, in their simplicity, human tropes, which endure eternal.

    In this Beckett is the poet of catastrophe and disaster, a role he inherited from the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867).

    Baudelaire was the first to mine the negative aspect in man to such a profound and relentless degree, in this sense Beckett is really his doppelgänger. It was Beckett’s genius to align himself so much to the dark side, as it were, which Baudelaire had ploughed so successfully in Les Fleurs Du Mal.

    Featured Image: Louis Jamnot (1814-1892), Le Vol de l’âme

  • The Literary ‘Outsider’ Novel

    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.

    Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest

    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.

    Literary Keys

    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?

    To Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann?

    Maybe the form has hit its parabolic arc, and now needs to descend for a while from its illustrious meridian.

    Break the mould – escape the insular, self-created Hell and free yourself. Read as far and as wide as the splendid sun, and beyond.

    Feature Image: Marilyn Monroe reading Joyce’s Ulysses in 1955 by Eve Arnold.

  • Restoring Wild Literature

    L’histoire naturelle, ce n’est rien autre que la nomination du visible.
    Michel Foucault – Les mots et les choses

    Walking with my dog this morning, I was struck by the various rewilding projects which certain aspects of my local community have been embracing. For example my twelve-year-old daughter’s primary school, in its wisdom, has decided to carve out niches in its grounds for ‘Managed Wildlife’, otherwise known as rewilding projects.

    What does this mean? Well, whereas previously the grass would have been meticulously trimmed like a tight haircut, thus permitting no wildlife to blossom or bloom, be it wildflowers or grass, the latest trends is to encourage the wild to grow again.

    Any botanist will tell you that in the absence of wild flowers and long stemmed grasses the biodiversity of our green spaces suffer. An absence of flowers lead to less insects and less insects to less birds, and on and on.

    Now, instead of regimented green empty spaces a profusion of wild flowers and grasses grow, roped off so school children cannot run amok, and destroy the phenomenal growth on display. I also noticed that the local council has adopted similar rewilding practices along the green spaces by the roadsides. This has increased bird song all around, which is really quite wonderful.

    While Argo, my Jack Russel of four years seemed quite content sniffing the blossoming flowers, and as I extracted the biodegradable poop bag in anticipation of his morning’s delivery, I couldn’t help but think how our own culture would benefit from a similar rewilding process.

    The Wild Ones

    When was the last time that you read a book that was described as ‘Wild?’ Yeah, that’s what I thought. We never read such an adjective alongside a work of contemporary literature any longer. And why is that? Why are there no more Flann O’Briens, Thomas Bernhards or William Burroughs? Where are all the wild men and women of literature?

    William S. Boroughs

    You don’t hear about them anymore. Why is that? And more importantly, what does this say about contemporary society? These are just some of the questions that I considered while looking at the rewilding projects this morning.

    One of the things you will read about, on a similar topic, in both the mainstream media and on social media sites is the apparent decline of Western culture. There is a lot of rhetoric, particularly promoted in far-right media that are waging a cultural war against what they see as the fundamental destruction of Western values by what they perceive as the inexorable rise of political correctness or ‘Woke’ culture. Why is this? And could there be any truth in what they are saying?

    Having completed the paragraph above, I now enter the political minefield of the culture wars. This article could be dismissed as yet another text advocating a far-right agenda, but hear me out, as I can assure you that I am not a Populist, and have nothing to do with exclusionary ideas, Yet nether am I an apologist for the political left. So, what am I then?

    I am, first and foremost, a Writer. Yes, with a capital W. And that means that I am a champion of free speech. This is extremely important as it seems to me that we are at a cultural impasse in the West because publishers are so afraid of the negative feedback that they refuse to publish anything deemed offensive,

    As a result, these days, there is practically nothing of any interest going on in contemporary literature. This probably sounds very polemical, but I ask the question again; when was the last time that you read anything remotely Wild lately?

    I am reminded of Rabelais, now, particularly. His bawdy sense of humour which was to cause so much shock, and yes, offence to some. That was the whole point! There was a time when to publish meant shocking people out of their comfort zones.

    If literature or writing could ever be described as having a function then it is to shock people out of their day-to-day existence, and get them to sit up and question it. That is to say, question the society in which they are living.

    But that is not the case today because there are no wild writers any more. They have all been silenced. The great blanket of fear has gently stolen over a whole civilisation, and now everyone is looking over their shoulders. Nobody has the guts to say anything difficult or troubling, without necessarily believing in it, any more, as no publishers has the guts to publish it for fear of a backlash from the politically correct ‘Woke’ brigade.

    How did we get here?

    It is a particularly disturbing phenomenon for me as an Irish writer who grew up in Cork during the 1980s, which was a period of incredible repression, mainly due to collusion between Church and the State.

    Image: Richard Tilbrook (wikicommons)

    I eventually escaped the awful cultural conformity and went to live in Paris like so many writers and artists before me. Globalisation and the boom eventually blew away that culture of fear, and I returned to live in Ireland on the eve of the millennium in order to experience first hand the most historic cultural shifts that have taken place on this island since independence one hundred years ago.

    The boom years had an enormous effect on every single aspect of Irish life, in particular the influence the Church which gave way to a newfound secularisation.

    But what has happened in the intervening years? Consider education and the huge changes that have happened there. I remember while studying for a PME in one of Ireland’s leading universities a few years ago being advised to drop history as a subject if I wanted to have any real chance of getting a job. Instead I was encouraged to train to become a religious teacher. It was as if we had come full circle!

    As an Irish writer, with over ten publications behind me, I seriously worry about the future. In the last couple of years, I have had to reject offers of working with commercial publishers, both here and abroad, who wanted me to make major changes to books that I had written as they were too scared to take them on in their current form. My best selling book, for example, More Micks than Dicks despite selling a thousand copies in its first year of publication remains out of print as the content is considered to ‘wild’ for current tastes.

    This is sad. The satirical book is a send up of academia in the spirit of Beckett and yet remains out of print as it may ‘offend’ certain sensibilities. On that basis, I ask the question: would Beckett have had a single one of his books published today? This question must be considered not only by the world of literature but society at large, if there is to be any significant change.

    Recently, I was looking at a European website offering courses for teachers and students alike which were being financed in part by the European Union. I found the contents of the majority of the courses truly shocking, as they amplified these newfound sensitivities. A lot of buzz words, without any real substance. You know you have a serious problem when your system of education is actually offering you nothing of any real substance.

    Of course, gardens and ideas, more specifically philosophical systems, have been around for as long as man has been cultivating nature.

    Royal Hospital Kilmainham.

    One only has to think of the exquisite formal gardens at the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham here in Dublin. These formal gardens, the only ones of their kind on the island, are a beautifully ornate reconstruction of the gardens one would fine typically anywhere in Europe during the period of the Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries.

    The gardens, rather like the rational mind, were symmetrically ordered into very carefully refined partitions, labyrinthian yet clearly purposeful and well-defined, so that in the botanical body we can find man’s most elaborate and refined expression of his development of order in nature.

    The grasses and hedges are so neatly trimmed, so tidy are they that a team of gardeners are required to keep on top of the work, ensuring that an apparently disorderly nature does not predominate. Indeed, one merely has to peer over the walls of the garden and look onto some of the common land that surrounds the Royal Hospital at Kilmainham to be reminded of a wilder nature when she is not maintained by man.

    And there you have a prefect illustration of the mind body duality characteristic of the Enlightenment. Nature on her own is chaotic and man, being a part of nature, must keep a firm hold on himself, subduing his wild passions. Such was the moral instruction, at least, behind the formal gardens at the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham.

    But we should remember their historical origins also: the gardens were to be a place for peaceful contemplation for reposing soldiers recuperating from the various wars they had borne witness to. Indeed, one only has to visit the Hospital grounds and walk along its carefully laid out lanes to appreciate the solace and contentment that the gardens must have brought to the poor, suffering men.

    However, the appreciation of gardens and nature is a very subjective experience. What may bring clarity and peace to one – the formal garden for example – may be the stuff of nightmares for others.

    To get a better demonstration of the multiple facets of human personality, I would recommend a stroll through your nearest allotments like where my wife spends the greater part of her days. There, here again in Skerries, you can see the very rich profusion of plants in some of the organic plots.

    She cultivates numerous species of tomato growing in her polytunnel: Black Russian, Brandywine, Cherokee Purple, Chocolate Cherry, Hillbilly, Jubilee, Ukrainian Purple and Old German each one as distinctly ornate and tasty as the next. The very diversity of nature, cultivated or otherwise, is simply remarkable. Surely a similar form of diversity should be reflected in our nation’s literature? Yet is it?

    And so I ask the question again. Where are all the wild women and men of literature gone? The truth of the matter is we are killing our Western Culture, just as we killed our environment. This is one of the principle reasons why the West is in decline, and it is in decline. You can see the evidence everywhere; it is in our schools, in our work places, it has even crept into our pubs, the places of our supposed relaxation.

    I shall leave you with a question: if you don’t have any freedom worth speaking of, any real freedom to speak your mind, what freedom are you actually fighting for? This is a very serious question and its importance, as far as I can see, is only going to grow in stature over the coming months and years.

    Here is another: where were YOU when it died? And another: what did you do exactly to protect her?

  • Love Denied: Baudelaire’s Une Charogne

    Une Charogne (1859) is among the most important poems of the 19th century, containing all of its author’s ground-breaking aesthetic. Our own aesthetically challenged century could learn a lot from it, in terms of the aesthetic of rupture, spleen and discord.

    It is Baudelaire’s response, in a sense, to the early Romantics, such as John Keats for example, and particularly concerning notions of beauty. Baudelaire, like Mary Shelley and Shakespeare before her, found more engagement in what could be described as the dark horror of existence, which had always existed in literature, particularly in writers such as Dante Alighieri, in whose work Dame Francis Yates saw the keys, or genesis, of the Gothic novel: in particular in the last Canto of the Inferno when Count Ugolino is forced by starvation to eat his sons locked away in a tower. However, Baudelaire’s genius was to take such an aesthetic into the everyday. In this this way he was a true revolutionary and visionary.

    Count Ugolino and his sons in their cell, as painted by William Blake circa 1826.

    Une Charogne is the perfect example of his aesthetic. The poet starts off describing a carcass which he has seen rotting on his way home, and which he associates with a former love which he felt for his girlfriend. The reader, however, is only made aware of this in the very last verse of the poem. The remarkable contrast of topics is so unexpected that even one-hundred-and-sixty-years on the poem continues to shock.

    The poem, typically, follows the genre of memento mori, Baudelaire’s originality lies, however, in applying what were rather banal motifs associated with death – such as skulls placed alongside everyday fare like fruit and flowers – and then to insert affairs of the flesh, and, of course, the heart.

    Only readers who have experienced real heartbreak themselves, what the Ancient Greeks described as the Orphic mysteries, will have any real appreciation of the fantastical act of catharsis that is taking place, how the poet wonderfully evokes his former passion for a beloved, and then inverts Love with its counterpart Hate; thus upturning the apple cart of feelings for the beloved which have been transformed into their opposite; diabolical hatred and disgust; perhaps more so for himself, for being duped by such feelings in the first place!

    As indicated, anyone who has been in Love and who has then lost – inevitably harbouring a sense of betrayal – will recognise, and feel, the powerful emotions driving the poem forward. The poet’s dedication and craft at the description of the whole process continue to inspire awe.

    Three Studies for a Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, by Francis Bacon,1963.

    Francis Bacon Interviews

    Regarding my transversion, I was helped enormously by using the interviews conducted by David Sylvester with the twentieth century British painter Francis Bacon. Bacon was a keen reader of Baudelaire, and one who followed the French poet’s dramatic overhaul of the Romantic spirit. One only has to consider Bacon’s entire corpus of imagery, the violent palette of colour, the decomposing matter of flesh, and the ‘smoky bacon’ of decomposing Love!

    I find that this unique aesthetic contradicts directly the flimsy narrative of many contemporary literary journals which are marred by politically correct censorship; the overwhelming and ever-present narrative of all-inclusivity and sensitivity to Others that has now reached idiotic proportions.

    What do I mean by that? Take for example the narrative of Une Charogne below. Anybody reading the poem with a half a brain will understand there is a very definite mask wearing taking place on the part of the poet. The diabolical humour is just that, a very nasty joke. But one which is very human.

    When one has been jilted the immediate response is to seek revenge. Exact some hate! This is simply being human, and to deny the presence of this impulse is simply perverse. All is fair in love and war. A person who has betrayed you with another having vowed to love you forever is now in the arms of another.

    Portrait of Charles Baudelaire by Gustave Courbet (1848).

    Fail Again

    There is, I would say, no greater pain on this Earth than the agony of abandonment. It is the hardest possible task for any human being to accept graciously that loss, and then to move on. It reflects the instruction of Samuel Beckett in Worstward-Ho: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’

    Life onwards will be mere monochrome. A travesty in a sense. This is the exact sentiment that lies behind Baudelaire’s Une Charogne. The poet is damned, damned by the Other. And so he will exact his revenge. The poet finds it in the poem, alone, in its very composition.

    I would liken this Art to extracting puss. It is an act of catharsis. Again, a very Greek notion. Francis Bacon was also a great fan of the Ancient Greeks, like Baudelaire before him.

    I have made the point repeatedly: if there is not a little poison in the well there is no sweetness to the water. I have met all too many high-minded moralists who plead constantly for whatever Other is currently in fashion.

    These latter-day saints among the chattering classes are hypocrites, who sanctimoniously bottle up their resentments. I have been a witness to a deformed humanity spurting out in the most toxic manner imaginable. Believe me, it is not a pretty sight! — Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère! (— Hypocritish reader, — my fellow, — my brother!)

    The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.

    Broken Word

    On the philosophical plane the poet has completely sublimated Friedrich Hegel’s (1871-1831) dialectic of the Master and Servant. To speak in the terms of Baudelaire’s countryman Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) – of a different generation but observing an unaltered humanity – he is killing symbolically the Other in the world of the Real. This for Lacan, as for the poet, is entirely symbolic.

    Baudrillard – perhaps the most Baudelairean of late twentieth century French thinkers – was to make of this his unique discourse point. He believed that we had lost our capacity for creating metaphor, so enamoured were we by the hyperreal; that is to say the literality of living we now observe in a mediated age where news is constant, and so ever-present. The Hegelian Now repeated ad infinitum is a poet’s nightmare. This explains why we are living in a period of atrocious, purely confessional poetry. The so- called ‘Spoken Word’ where the Now is Ever Present!

    I AM

    The spoken word speaks – BEING poetry itself! Such is the utter fallacy.

    This is the poetry of idiots.

    If you do not kill your enemy symbolically, you will never kill him. Such is the Real. Not reality, but the symbolically Real, which for a poet IS the only reality.

    Have you ever considered where Populist monsters spring from?

    Take a leaf out of Baudelaire’s black book, write your words in Hate, as much as Love. Be the totality that is You. And you will be a better artist, and Human, for it.

     

    XXIX.- UNE CHAROGNE

    Rappelez -vous l’objet que nous vîmes, mon âme,
    Ce beau matin d’été si doux :
    Au detour d’un sentier une charogne infâme
    Sur un lit semé de cailloux,

    Les jambes en l’air, comme une femme lubrique,
    Brûlante et suant les poisons,
    Ouvrant d’une façon nonchalante et cynique
    Son ventre plein d’exhalaisons.

    Le soleil rayonnait sur cette pourriture,
    Comme afin de la cuire à point,
    Et de rendre au centuple à la grande Nature
    Tout ce qu’ensemble elle avait joint ;

    Et le ciel regardait la carcasse superbe
    Comme une fleur s’épanouir.
    La puanteur était si forte, que sur l’herbe
    Vous crûtes vous évanouir.

    Les mouches bourdonnaient sur se ventre putride,
    D’où sortaient de noirs bataillons
    Des larves, qui coulaient comme un épais liquide
    Le long de ce vivants haillons.

    Tout cela descendait, montait comme un vague,
    Ou s’élançait en pétillant;
    On eût dit que le corps, enflé d’un souffle vague,
    Vivait en se multipliant.

    Et ce monde rendait une étrange musique,
    Comme l’eau courante et le vent,
    Ou le grain qu’un vanneur d’un mouvement rythmique
    Agite et tourne dans son van.

    Les formes s’effaçaient et n’étaient plus qu’un rêve,
    Une ébauche lente à venir,
    Sur la toile oubliée, et que l’artiste achève
    Seulement par le souvenir.

    Derrière les rochers une chienne inquiète
    Nous regardait d’un oeil fâché,
    Épiant le moment de reprendre au squelette
    Le morceau qu’elle avait lâché.

    Et pourtant vous serez semblabe à cette ordure,
    A cette horrible infection,
    Etoile de mes yeux, soleil de ma nature,
    Vous, mon ange et ma passion !

    Oui ! telle vous serez, ô la reine des graces,
    Après les derniers sacrements,
    Quand vous irez, sous l’herbe et les floraisons grasses,
    Moisir parmi les ossements.

    Alors, ô ma beauté ! dites à la vermine
    Qui vous mangera de baisers,
    Que j’ai gardé la forme et l’essence divine
    Des mes amours décomposés !

     

    XXXIX. – The Exquisite Cadaver

    Remember the ideal object which you discovered~
    That beautiful summer morning, Dear soul:
    By way of the path where you found that exquisite
    Cadaver lying on a bed of pebbles,

    Her legs in the air, like some old tart,
    Burning and stewing in poisons,
    Her belly slit, almost nonchalantly,
    Pouring forth all manner of noxious gasses.

    The sun burns down on the decomposing
    Body, as if searing a steak,
    Rendering back a hundred- fold to Mother Nature,
    What she herself had first conjoined.

    And the sky looks upon the superb carcass
    As it would upon a flower of Evil,
    The rigor mortis encroaching to such a point
    That the very earth around it has been scorched.

    Great Blue Bottles swarm in convoys,
    Buzzing out of the gaping cave, Cyclopean…
    While a treacle of feasting larvae thickly drip,
    Making of the stain a macabre Persian carpet.

    The process of decomposition rose before me,
    Falling in waves, and which I perceived in a kind of
    Pointillism, so that, wave-borne,
    The corpse seemed to come alive and multiply before me!

    This alternate universe was announced in atonal chords,
    And hit me with all the fever of a jungle humidity,
    Or, like the sporadic grains, scattered by a winnower,
    Whose rhythmic movements spun me in a dervish.

    The effaced shapes and forms were as if but a dream
    From a preliminary sketch, slow to arrive,
    And which the artist, not being able to rely on memory,
    Had then to resort to the magnetism of specific photographs.

    Behind the rocks an unnerved dog
    Looked at us both with a ravenous eye,
    Trying to deduce the auspicious minute
    When he could rip apart some rotting flesh from the bones.

    And yet, You now would appear to be not so dissimilar to this horror,
    This putrid infection,
    At one time Star de mes yeux,
    You my one time, all consuming passion!

    Yes! After the last rites have long ago been pronounced upon us,
    O You, my once graceful Queen,
    When will you now, in your own time,
    Wallow with these bones upon the grass?

    So, my great Beauty! Whisper then to the vermin
    How you will cherish their kisses,
    While I guard for eternity this sublime image,
    Of all of our decomposing Love.

    Feature Image: Charles Baudelaire by Étienne Carjat, 1863

  • Meeting Ingmar Bergman

    I had second thoughts about boarding a plane to Stockholm to meet Ingmar Bergman twenty-four hours after being diagnosed with a severe bronchitis, possible pneumonia, in the depths of the winter of 2000-2001. But the chance of a rare encounter with the greatest humanist in cinematic history proved irresistible.

    Bergman now appears like a colossus among the Lilliputians in our present Netflix-inflected-era of cinema. By the time I met him – Jean-Luc Goddard excepted – he was the last one standing among a golden generation from the dominant art form of the twentieth century. As Gore Vidal put it: ‘The Tenth Muse, as they call the movies in Italy, has driven the other nine right off Parnassus, or off the peak, anyway.’

    So, the last of a fine vintage was residing in Stockholm, that Nordic enclave of decency and rigour.

    As director (both in film and theatre) and scriptwriter Bergman is almost unsurpassed as a humanist artist in the twentieth century, but he was also unquestionably an autocrat – a quality one might forgive in a director – who could act like a right bastard. Or so it was said. Certainly his relationships with women (of whom in the fashion of a Tudor monarch he married five and divorced four), and the testimony of male colleagues, would suggests he could be quite the unpleasant human being.

    When I visited him, I encountered an aged man, but not a paltry thing, devoid of sentimentalism and self-destructive tendencies, notwithstanding unfair attempts to sully his reputation by the Swedish tax authorities in 1976.

    This unfortunate episode led to a mental breakdown and a ten-year German exile. In its aftermath, the special prosecutor said that the alleged crime had no legal basis, and that it would be like bringing ‘charges against a person who has stolen his own car, thinking it was someone else’s.’

    Revealing, even a society as solidly rational as Sweden’s was inclined to defenestrate its greatest living artist.

    Bergman and actress Ingrid Thulin during the production of The Silence, 1963.

    Ladies’ Man

    Liv Ullman in 1966.

    Bergman seems to have been quite the heartbreaker in his time. Although I think men probably hated him more, which he seemed to be clearly aware of. At least some of his lovers did well out of their association, even if he could be merciless about them.

    A long-time lover and mother of one of his nine offspring, the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann used his fantastic script to create the poweful film ‘Faithless’ (2000). It was more his than her own, and she knew it.

    His qualities as a martinet are well attested to. Stellan Skarsgård who worked with him and the Danish director Lars Von Trier said that although he thought the latter was probably mentally ill, he considered him, nonetheless, a great person, unlike ‘that not nice guy’ (a.k.a. bastard) Bergman. Sadly, the qualities of greatness are rarely juxtaposed with niceness.

    Christopher Hitchens, excluding his worst failure in not opposing the Bush-Blair invasion of Iraq, claimed before his death that he had nothing to be ashamed of, bar a few unforgivable acts with women. Bergman lived much longer and his genius was undimmed, but there were actions for which many in Sweden will never forgive him. I suspect, however, among males of his generation there was a certain sexual jealousy, as well as professional rivalry.

    So a distinct singlemindedness did not make for a ‘man’s man,’ but films suffused with such warmth as ‘Wild  Strawberries’ (1957), ‘Fanny and Alexander’ (1982) or Smiles of The Summer Night (1955) hardly sprang from the consciousness of a psychopath.

    Ultimately, despite a reputation, like Andrei Tarkovsky, for being a difficult bugger, there is an extraordinary humanity to his oeuvre, evident especially in ‘Fanny and Alexander’, along with a contempt for religious fundamentalism and the deliberate infliction of cruelty. That film is a masterpiece of a kind that acts as a building block to civilisation.

    I recall viewing it in the old Lighthouse Cinema on Abbey Street in Dublin on its Irish premier in 1982 along with the late Irish film director Kieran Hickey, a big-hearted gay man. Kieran arrived with a strikingly youthful boyfriend, and another Irish film director of international renown (who will remain nameless) in tow. Afterwards in the nearby Palace Bar that well known director was heard to mutter belligerently “The talented bastard.”

    Press conference of Ingmar Bergman at The Venice film festival in 1985.

    Stockholm Syndrome

    So on that flight to Stockholm I was very concerned about my health, but I determined to go nonetheless having secured the elusive appointment with Bergman at the Swedish Film Institute after a lengthy recitation of how I adored his films.

    Mercifully and miraculously, the fever and lung condition ceased to trouble me on arrival, perhaps it was the anti-bacterial effect of temperatures fourteen degrees below, or maybe the adrenalin rush of getting out of Dublin and into a new exciting environment such as Stockholm worked the trick. Either way, the cold expelled the demons from my system.

    The following day, after a pleasant tour around the so-called Venice of the North, I was feeling chipper and made my way through the unglamorous state-sponsored housing of Stockholm’s immigrant district to the Institute.

    Bergman had allocated a half hour of his time, which ran into over an hour. He was both engaged and culturally astute. James Joyce and Samuel Beckett were discussed, the former dismissed, the latter lauded. Although certainly lacking in avuncularity, I did not encounter a numbing coldness in Bergman. On the contrary I discerned a modulated passion, devoid of sentimentality.

    He probably sensed he was on his last lap, but it was several years before his final film ‘Saraband’ in 2003. A last, most wintry achievement.

    By that time, he explained, he had retired from cinema due to osteoporosis, as his hands could not operate the cameras. The digital age gave him the freedom to create ‘Saraband’ . So he came out of retirement and created a final work of genius.

    It is a rare for an artist to produces a great work of art when over the age of seventy. A select list includes: ‘Ran’ (1985) by Akira Kurosawa, Westward-Ho (1983) by Samuel Beckett, containing the immortal pronouncement: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better’; Saul Bellow’s final novel Ravelstein (2000), and the late flowering of Michelangelo of course. Bergman thus belongs in the Sistine chapel of talent undimmed by age.

    I would not describe Bergman as emotionally closed when we met. Unlike Samuel Beckett, who I also encountered, he was far from reluctant about talking about his own work. Though hardly modest, he was at least self-critical. Such modesty would have been misplaced in a genius.

    The exterior of the building was used by Ingmar Bergman for the bishop’s house in the film Fanny and Alexander (1982).

    Relationship with Religion

    After retiring as a director in 1982, his script writing came to the fore, earning him many awards. Thus, a screenplay about his parents’ lives ‘The Best Intentions’ (1992) brought a Palm D’Or to its director Bille August. ‘Faithless’, (2000), featuring a character called Bergman, and directed by Liv Ullman was also much garlanded, as was his theatre work in that period.

    Above all else there are clear intellectual and humanistic themes evident in his work, often demonstrated in stark terms, but leavened by a comic touch.

    Where to start with evaluating this genius? It is worth recalling that his father was a conservative Lutheran pastor under whose authority the young Ingmar was locked up in dark closets for infractions such as wetting himself.

    His autobiography Laterna Magica (The Magic Lantern, Chicago 2007) records:

    While father preached away in the pulpit and the congregation prayed, sang, or listened. I devoted my interest to the church’s mysterious world of low arches, thick walls, the smell of eternity, the coloured sunlight quivering above the strangest vegetation of medieval paintings and carved figures on ceilings and walls. There was everything that one’s imagination could desire—angels, saints, dragons, prophets, devils, humans…

    He also bridled at the testing and homework required in secondary school, and was thus considered a ‘problem child;’ it is striking how many artists are ‘problematic’ to authority figures.

    Resistance to authority figures and a deadening Puritanism is obvious in a film such as ‘The Seventh Seal’ (1957), which includes the extraordinary scene of a life or death chess match between the knight played by Max von Sydown and Death played – pronounced evocatively as Döden in Swedish – played by Bengt Ekerot.

    There is also a precious understanding that children should be children in ‘Fanny and Alexander’, and we find an acute understanding of pain and death in ‘Cries and Whispers’ (1972). Then we find a chilling grasp in ‘Persona’ (1966) of the abusive relationships between women and men, and women and women, based on inequality, intellect and bargaining power.

    Despite his early rejection of religion, Bergman displayed a love of magic and ritual in many of his films; while the first part of ‘Fanny and Alexander’ features a release of warmth in what we assume to be a cold person, but is not entirely so. The idea of time passing and emotional disappointment is beautifully conveyed in ‘Wild Strawberries’, which scales the achievements of the Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu.

    And of course there is merriment in parts of Fanny and ‘The Magic Flute’ (1975), and the awful deceptions of love in ‘Summer with Monika’ (1950); and above all in the brilliant romantic comedy ‘Smiles of a Summer Night’ (1955), which was turned into a Broadway musical ‘A Little Night Music’ by Stephen Sondheim in 1973, and which also inspired Woody Allen’s ‘A Midsummer’s Sex Comedy’ (1982).

    Bergman on the set of ‘Wild Strawberries’ in 1957.

    Fårö Away

    By the time I met Bergman, he was dividing his time between Stockholm, and a more reclusive existence on the island of Fårö in the Baltic Sea.

    Dressed in a duffle jacket and an ordinary pair of jeans he set about recommending various sights to visit in Stockholm and its environs, and spoke at length about Beckett and Tarkovsky who he regarded as a natural successor. He considered Liv Ullmann his greatest muse. Perhaps he considered her the one who got away, given the pair never married, despite having a child together, unlike the other mothers to his other children, all of whom he married.

    Victor Sjöström

    I recall him also waxing lyrical on the performance of Victor Sjöström – then approaching eighty years of age – in ‘Wild Strawberries’ – which must go down as one the best performances by an aged actor in cinematic history.

    After the first hour had elapsed it became clear that I would not be graced by his presence any longer. Genius loves company to quote Ray Charles, but on its own terms, and time was precious.

    Bergman was undoubtedly a selfish individual, and an egomaniac, but he was, nonetheless, among the greatest humanist artists of all time.

    His work has a lot to say to our own muddled time: that children deserve childhood and not religious intrusion; that fundamentalism of all types is dangerous to civilisation; that bullying can occur between and across genders; that death and plague are omnipresent in the game of life, and that our modern age is precarious and an historical consciousness remains important.

  • Meeting Samuel Beckett’s Genius in Person and his Plays

    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’s award-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.

    Illustration by Malina/Artsyfartsy

    [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