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2 of 2

The Mythical Siren in Yeats, Joyce and Beckett

William E. McGuire III

Shawn J. Rosenheim, Advisor

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in English

WILLIAMS COLLEGE

Williamstown, Massachusetts

17 April 2017 Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my advisor, Shawn Rosenheim, for his advice in composing this thesis and in coping with the stresses of writing a thesis project, his encouraging words and motivating ideas without which this would not have been made, and his patience as he advised a thesis which saw rapidly changing subjects, texts, and quality throughout the year.

I am indebted to my parents, Bill and Stacy; without their encouragement, I would not be writing a thesis today, nor would I be at this college I have called home for the past four years. I cannot repay them for their all support and kindness, but I hope that they may share some pride in this work, and consider it a small remuneration.

I am grateful to Ava, for listening to countless ideas in this thesis and many more that I have since cut out, long before they were intelligible, and for always lending an ear when I was excited, lending a shoulder when I was sad, and never failing to help pick me up when I was down.

I owe my friends and fellow thesis writers Apurva Tandon and Alex Mendez for always being around to share new ideas and commiserate when the burden of the project felt too heavy to bear.

Finally, I am grateful for all the professors whose support has shaped my path through the

English program, from beginning to end, and always for the better; and especially I am glad for the insights and advice Stephen Tifft, Emily Vasiliauskas, and Gage McWeeny have given me throughout my undergraduate years.

Table of Contents

Introduction ...... 3

Chapter One: Yeats and the Sirens ...... 5

Chapter Two: Language and Place, the Sirens of Joyce’s Dublin ...... 16

Chapter Three: The Siren in Beckett’s Tape...... 30

Bibliography ...... 50

Endnotes ...... 53

Introduction

When we think of the Irish modernists Joyce and Beckett, we can easily typecast them as exiles set apart from the world; eccentric men with harsh, uncompromising aesthetic ideals and a touch of madness who create works from a primordial soup of alienation, absurdity, sexual perversion, and a contempt for religion (and the Catholic church in particular), imperialism, and their native Ireland most of all. However, reducing these authors to writers in a political, social and aesthetic vacuum neglects the myriad of fascinating ways in which they used their works to not only denounce their motherland, but cope with their exile, understand the land they left behind, and turn the traditions from which they fled upon their heads to produce two of the greatest literary legacies of the 20th century. Instead, this thesis will examine a thin but rich thread that winds its way through Yeats, Joyce and Beckett, a trio of authors who had violently clashing and incompatible views of Ireland and the cause of Irish independence which framed the country’s politics throughout the first half of the 20th century, the figure of the mythic siren which winds its way through all three works, and is received (or shut out) in ways that illuminate where the authors are similar and especially where they differ.

In doing so, I hope that I may be forgiven for tackling the works of some of the most notoriously difficult authors, topics, and works in the last century of English literature with such a particular interest and in so few pages. However, by peering over the shoulders of these giants I hope to illuminate a few original and interesting critical possibilities that allow us to embark on new critical perspectives on the works of Joyce and Beckett that considers them in relation to the literary and historical traditions they defied. The following work asks only for you to suspend your disbelief that the works of Yeats and the Irish Renaissance may be useful in the works of authors who parodied them and rejected them outright. If nothing else, you will be left with an

3 uncommon reading of well-read authors that embraces the sense of exasperation and ambiguity in which they often leave their readers. If tracing the presence of Irish oppression and the siren figure through these works results in even the tiniest new insight into the works of authors beloved for the opacity of their works, I shall consider this endeavor incredibly successful.

Yeats and the Sirens

W.B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory’s Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902)

By the turn of the 20th century, the Irish people were in dire need of heroes. They had suffered under British rule and occupation for well over 300 years, and had been the subjects of

Norman conquest a century before that. And by all accounts their Gaelic language, folklore and myths were quickly fading from the tongues and minds of the Irish people as English and

Catholicism replaced them. Meanwhile, numerous rebellions had been crushed, countless young revolutionaries martyred, and even purely political hopes of reconsolidating Irish sovereignty were dissolving in a post-Parnell1 Ireland that had lost its “uncrowned king.”2

Enter the Irish Literary Revival, an attempt to consolidate and revive the traditional stories and myths of an ancient Ireland free from English rule. These stories, translated to

English and often "improved" by those who translated them,3 run thick with ancient heroes and their interactions with Fairies and other mystical creatures, and introduced Irish mythology and folklore to a new school of Irish authors and to the common man of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These stories served as a comfortable incubator for the literature of people lacking a strong sense of identity, yet bursting with national pride and a desire for literary independence

(Marcus 224). Returning to their pagan roots became a means for Irish writers to redefine what was meant by Irish culture in an Ireland that was cut off from the world and its past by its British rule. By retelling the stories of times when they were free, Irish authors were afforded an opportunity to apolitically express their longing to be a free people once more (Marcus 224).

This was soon to change. Irish literature of the 20th century was dominated by modernist authors penning new works about the lives and issues of the Irish peasantry and lower classes, with an increasing interest in stories that followed them as they yearned and fought for Irish sovereignty and independence. We can see this shift toward realism in subjects and settings in many of the "great" Irish writers of the Irish Revolutionary period and the early 20th century, from the revolutionaries and insurrectionists of Sean O'Casey's Dublin Trilogy,4 or the morally- questionable peasants of John Millington Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, to Joyce’s

Dubliners and his heroic epic about a common man, Ulysses. At a glance, the Irish revolutionary period appears as a brief intersection between a half-finished resurrection of Irish folklore and mysticism and a seemingly instantaneous outburst of realism and modernism in Irish literature.

W.B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory’s Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902) occupies this indeterminate space between an Irish literature devoted to myth and one devoted to realism and revolution. Yeats described Kathleen as “Ireland herself… for whom so many songs had been sung and for whom so many had gone to their death” (Kearney 218). The figure of Kathleen is that of a poor old woman wearied from travel and longing to have her “four beautiful green fields” returned to her and to see the “too many strangers in the house” ushered out (Yeats &

Gregory 53). The old woman’s simultaneous otherworldliness and apparent weariness and mortality reflect the uncertainty over Ireland’s ability to secure its culture and future independence after three centuries of English occupation. She symbolizes both the struggles and the hopes of the Irishman and the Irish author. Naturally, the work was a hit; “The success of

Cathleen ni Houlihan was immediate, with crowds being turned away and ‘continual applause’ greeting the work by the time the first production run closed on 4 April 1902” (Pethica 14).5

Author and nationalist politician Stephen Gwynn testified that the play was so powerful “that I

6 went home asking myself if such plays should be produced unless one was prepared for people to go out and to shoot and be shot” (Kearney 218). Yeats was aware of the influence the play could have at a time when nationalist tensions were running high; as an old man nearing his death, he wrote in his 1938 poem “The Man and the Echo”:

All that I have said and done, Now that I am old and ill, Turns into a question till I lie awake night after night And never get the answers right. Did that play of mine send out Certain men the English shot? (ll. 6-12)

If “that play of mine” was powerful enough to send young Irish men to their death, it also brought its central figure new life in the form of a literary legacy that brought her to the works of

Joyce6 and Samuel Beckett,7 and identified as an influence in others.8 The mythic figure

Kathleen ni Houlihan was recreated by Yeats and Gregory in and for a volatile time, and she suggests hardship and resilience as quintessential elements of the Irish experience during the

Irish revolutionary period. That she does so is ironic considering that her appearance nearly marks the growth of modernism and disappearance of myth, mysticism and folk tales in Irish literature. She offers the promise of negating history and reclaiming Ireland even as she embodies the strain English oppression has placed upon Ireland and her disappearing culture.

Where do we start with the play itself? The beginning is as good a place as any, which is to say that we might as well pass by Yeats and discuss Lady Gregory. In “Our Kathleen,” James

Pethica investigates of Lady Gregory’s role in the composition of Cathleen ni Houlihan, and convincingly argues that Lady Gregory is solely responsible for creating the peasant characters and cottage scene which comprise the first half of the play (8-9). Their collaboration on Kathleen

7 ni Houlihan followed a long period of Lady Gregory assisting, but never contributing to, Yeats’s creative work; her penciled-in annotation on copy of the manuscript describes the first ten pages as “All this mine alone” and “This with W.B.Y.” at the head of the next with what Pethica speculates is honest and sincere pride and satisfaction (8).9 Lady Gregory’s authorship of this section is essential to the play’s mixture of mythic and modern scenes and characters, as Yeats remarks in his preface to The Unicorn from the Stars:

I could not get away, no matter how closely I watched the country life, from images and dreams which had all too royal blood, for they were descended like the thought of every poet from all the conquering dreams of Europe, and I wished to make that high life mix into some rough contemporary life without ceasing to be itself… and to do this I added another knowledge to my own. (VPl 1295)10 Interestingly, Yeats’s construction of this opposition echoes that of nationalist leaders who sought to “redeem the nation” through the “negation of present history in favour of some Holy

Beginning, some eternally recurring Past,” though he suggests here that they can coexist - with the suggestion that this would make a greater work of art than either “knowledge” alone. Pethica argues that this combination of knowledges was more crucial to the success of the play than

Yeats would like to admit.

But it was precisely in fusion of realistic and supernatural or symbolic elements that Yeats failed most conspicuously in his early plays. From the awkward on-stage appearance of the angels in The Countess Cathleen to the burning harp and off-stage birds of The Shadowy Waters, his earliest attempts to dramatize the meeting of ‘man and phantom’ or to represent supernatural effects were, as he came to recognize, at best but partial successes, in which the ‘reverie’ could be destroyed by the slightest error of emphasis or presentation. (Pethica 10) By this account, it is precisely because of Gregory’s skillful depiction of a “rough contemporary life” that the play succeeded. Kathleen becomes meaningful once she is juxtaposed with a contemporary scene – yet the extent of Kathleen’s reliance upon the Irish peasant and contemporary life in Cathleen ni Houlihan runs far deeper than a matter of composition.

The play opens onto the small cottage of the Gillanes as they prepare the family’s eldest son for his marriage to Delia Cahel the following day. It opens onto a purely domestic scene, both in the sense that is domestic– the space of the home– and that it is engaged in domesticating Michael by preparing him for a new domestic life and the beginnings of a family.

The contents of the scene are mundane, but Lady Gregory subtly crafts a series of oppositions between the domestic life and the nationalism espoused by Kathleen ni Houlihan. Before

Kathleen arrives and complains of “too many strangers in the house” and wishing to reclaim her

“four green fields,” Michael’s parents, Peter and Bridget, think of the new opportunities growing their household– and their coffers, thanks to Delia’s dowry– will provide:

BRIDGET: Leave me alone now till I ready the house for the woman that is to come into it. PETER: You are the best woman in Ireland, but money is good, too. [He begins handling the money and sits down.] I never thought to see so much money within my four walls. We can do great things now we have it. We can take the ten acres of land we have the chance of since Jamsie Dempsey died, and stock it. We will go to the fair at Ballina to buy the stock. (51-52) Of course, the woman who next comes into the house is not Delia, but Kathleen.

Kathleen has no desire to take their money (“This is not what I want. It is not silver that I want”), but to meet her “friends” who will help her reclaim her fields and empty her own house

(55). She makes the case for Michael to join the many lovers that have died for her in domestic terms, so that the four green fields of Ireland seem as familiar as those which surround his home in Killala, and her home as dear as that in which he lives. However, as she convinces Michael to aid her, it becomes clear that doing so requires Michael’s sacrifice, which threatens to unravel his family’s plans for their domestic life. Kathleen says, “It is not a man going to his marriage that I look to for help,” not because she wishes the best for Michael, but because aiding her and fighting for Ireland is incompatible with marriage and the domestic sphere (56). Kathleen ni

Houlihan’s appearance in the cottage imposes nationalism onto domestic life, not as an opposing force, but as one which consumes domesticity entirely; until her fields are secure, theirs are not, and until her home is vacated theirs will never be safe. She enters as a presence for which the house has been “prepared” because every home has “been prepared” for her, as every house rises and falls with her own until she is freed from the yoke of British occupation and oppression. She not only intrudes and imposes herself on this domestic scene: she engulfs domesticity entirely, making the domestic affairs of Ireland her own, and her own affairs the domestic troubles of the

Irish people.

The trouble with this logic – with attempting to reduce the story to logic - is that it suggests that the issue is one of stability: only when Ireland is stable and sovereign will domestic life truly be possible. However, for the poor old woman stability is death, as the prospect of seeing Ireland freed from British rule is not what gives her power. Instead, Kathleen is revitalized when Michael rushes out the door to aid the French in rebelling against the British, becoming “a young girl” who “had the walk of a queen” (57). For his sacrifice, Michael is not promised that Ireland will be freed, or domestic life will be assured for his younger brother or family – the only promise is that, for those who follow her,

They will be remembered for ever, They shall be alive for ever, They shall be speaking for ever, The people shall hear them for ever. (56) For Kathleen to retain her youth, this chorus of voices must grow continuously as more blood is shed in resistance and more young Irishmen become nothing but memories. Kearney describes this as "counselling blood-sacrifice as the only means to redeem the nation" (218), and Henry

Meritt describes Kathleen as vampiric: “The play's version of Cathleen ni Houlihan, for all her nationalist symbolism, carries a distinct flavour of the Undead. She can be satisfied only through

10 periodic blood-sacrifice” (650). However, these depictions of Kathleen suggest that she is the position of taking their blood and their lives, while the "love" that Kathleen's followers provide is freely given, despite her acknowledgement that it shall be unrequited, and that they will suffer and die like the many others who have already done so. She demands that it be so: “If anyone would give me help he must give me himself, he must give me all” (Yeats 55).

I suggest that we instead think of Kathleen as a siren, the mythological figure of Odyssey fame. In Greek mythology, the sirens live on an island riddled with the disintegrating corpses of sailors charmed by their melodious voices, from which they attempt to seduce new victims passing by their grim isle ("Sirens"). In Homer, they instill sexual desire in their victims through their voices:

Sweet coupled airs we sing. No lonely seafarer Holds clear of entering Our green mirror.

Pleased by each purling note Like honey twining From her throat and my throat, Who lies a-pining? (Homer ll.12.224-31) Ovid recalls that the sirens were born from a curse placed by the gods; like Kathleen, their mythical powers of seduction come with the loss of their young, feminine and seductive bodies:

When Proserpine was picking those spring flowers, They were her comrades there, and, when in vain They’d sought for her through all the lands, they prayed For wings to carry them across the waves, So that the seas should know their search, and found The gods were gracious, and then suddenly Saw golden plumage clothing all their limbs? Yet to preserve that dower of glorious song, Their melodies’ enchantment, they retained Their fair girls’ features and their human voice. (Ovid ll.5.549-78)

These sirens have an odd relationship to desire. Through the seductive tones of their enchanted voices, the sirens transform themselves into objects of desire, yet their bird-like bodies make them unlikely– even impossible– subjects of man's sexual desire. How can we conceptualize a sexual desire for the female in which the female form is conspicuously absent?

The oddity of sirenic desire was a common topic for Romantic authors in the 19th century, including Yeats, who included sirens (often in the form of the mermaid) as symbols of lust and femininity. Writing of the music of Mendelssohn, Wagner and other 19th-century composers, Lawrence Kramer explains why these mythical figures were reborn during this period:

Loreleis, naiads, sirens, mermaids and other undulant forms of dangerous femininity return in the nineteenth century to the waters from which the Enlightenment had banished them.11 They ply their seductive trade thereafter as projections- so the standard explanation goes- of masculine anxiety in a world of changing gender roles. The more women want, the more they demand access to public spheres and private pleasures, the more men worry about being lured by them into a fatal immersion:

A mermaid found a swimming lad, Picked him for her own, Pressed her to his body, Laughed, and plunging down Forgot in cruel happiness That even lovers drown. W.B. Yeats, “The Mermaid” (Kramer 195)12 Kathleen’s danger is even greater than this description would imply. Not only is the public sphere compromised by Kathleen’s powerful injection of nationalism into Irish life, but her domination of the domestic makes her all-encompassing. It would not be wrong to say that the

Irishman belongs to her, is subject to her control, while her inability and unwillingness to reciprocate his love makes it clear that she does not belong to the Irishman. As she “drowns” her lovers she is careful to engage them in a strange seduction without growing attached herself

12 through a form of desire that is seemingly unnamable in the play; the only explanation Bridget can muster is that Michael “has the look of a man that has got the touch” (57).

This seduction is strange because, like the sirens' bodies, Kathleen's worn and elderly form is incapable of satisfying the desires of her "lovers," and she admits that she has never lain with one of them (55). However, the realism makes the scene uncanny, rather than just mythical.

In Cathleen ni Houlihan, desire first appears in the cottage scene, taking the form of domesticity and marriage, and its peaks come with the prospect of having found a "good match." Kathleen's infertility and constant wandering only further illustrate that she is entirely unsuited to the type of life and the system of desire from which she seduces Michael Gillane. Instead, she produces desire through song, just like the sirens. She upholds the voice as an especially valuable object; though the men who follow her will die, she sings,

They shall be remembered for ever, They shall be alive for ever, They shall be speaking for ever, The people shall hear them for ever. (56) And this final song is that which hangs in the air until Michael rushes from the Gillanes' cottage to join the French at Killala. After this song, she experiences a moment of transformation, recalled by Patrick as he returns to the cottage just after Michael's flight to Killala:

Peter: Did you see an old woman going down the path? Patrick: I did not, but I saw a young girl, and she had the walk of a queen. (57) Like the sirens’ bodies, her body seems tangential to her ability to instill desire in her followers, even when this desire is clearly sexualized throughout the play. This seemingly impossible, totally engulfing desire is essential to Kathleen's character, and is the emotion to which nationalist viewers of the play seem to be drawn when they praise it and Kathleen. Imagining

Kathleen as a vampire or sacrificial executioner causes us to forget how desperately her

13 followers want to sustain her and die for her with no means of being stopped lest they were tied to a mast or hanged from the gallows.

Further, we ought to read Kathleen as a siren because she was inspired by and played by a real life siren, Yeats's longtime unrequited love and muse Maud Gonne. Gonne was the original

Kathleen when Cathleen ni Houlihan premiered at Abbey Theatre in 1902. She was a staunch nationalist whom Yeats often adulated and wrote of as a virginal Rose, akin to the pure and self- sacrificial Cathleen O'Shea in Yeats's The Countess Cathleen. He saw her this way at the time that Kathleen ni Houlihan was written, before Yeats learned of her secret love life with Lucien

Millevoye, and Gonne revealed to Yeats that her two “adopted” children were her own offspring with Millevoye. However, Merrit suggests that Kathleen ni Houlihan's other author was aware and wary of Gonne's famous seduction of Yeats:

It is very doubtful that Yeats would associate Gonne with the vampire tradition, yet Gregory associated her immediately with death. When they finally met, on 18 December 1898, Gregory recorded, 'instead of beauty I saw a death's head & what it says to him [Yeats] I know not.'13… Gregory was not prepared to like Gonne, having often been primed about how poorly Gonne had treated (and was treating) Yeats and how violently extreme she was in her politics; although she had unquestionably been told about Gonne very many times, the first mention of her in Gregory's diary is in the entry for I4 December I897, when she wrote: 'He [Yeats] talked much of Miss Gonne- all the old story- poor boy.' (650)14 Merrit proposes that Cathleen ni Houlihan also served to distance an increasingly-radical Gonne from Yeats, who was already growing weary of the nationalist political scene as he began to come into his own as a celebrated poet and playwright. Kathleen forces the Irishman between serving Ireland and life itself, but with their play Gregory gives Yeats a third option. “The only solution to the play's dilemmatic opposition between death and life is 'authorship'; the author, alone, is not forced to choose. This was clearly facilitated by Gregory's allowing Yeats 'authorial privilege'” (Merritt 651). Yeats wrote a play for and about the siren that attempted to seduce him

14 to the cause of an increasingly violent nationalism, even as he was blind to the power she had over him. His love for her was similarly unrequited, specifically to enhance his devotion and dedication to her as his muse (and the nationalism that she so proudly wore); when he complained that he was not happy without her hand in marriage, she replied,

Oh yes, you are, because you make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness and are happy in that. Marriage would be such a dull affair. Poets should never marry. The world should thank me for not marrying you. (Jeffares 102) The figure of Cathleen ni Houlihan was conceptualized by two authors acquainted with different aspects of the siren; Gregory saw its danger, while Yeats was blinded by desire.

For all Gregory’s effort, however, Yeats was unable to escape Gonne’s seduction until he was far into middle age. For future authors who had entertained Cathleen ni Houlihan, such as

Joyce and Beckett, banishing themselves from Ireland as she had been banished from her home was the only means of escaping what they depicted as the oppressive force of Irish culture that dampened their own creative energies. As we look forward to other authors, Yeats’s own interactions with the siren he created and the siren for which he created his most powerful works stands as a testament to the inescapable and engulfing nature of the siren’s seduction tightly gripping onto a culture that had long been suffocating under centuries of British oppression.

Language and Place, the Sirens of Joyce’s Dublin

James Joyce’s Ulysses

By Joyce’s account, Kathleen ni Houlihan has fared poorly since Yeats and Lady

Gregory’s Cathleen ni Houlihan revived her. A century of Irish history has passed between the

Wexford rebellion and June 16th, 1904, and twenty years of literature separate Yeats and

Gregory’s play and Joyce’s Ulysses. We first encounter Kathleen in Ulysses in “Telemachus,” only pages after the novel’s opening, as a form “darkening” the door of the tower he shares with

Buck Mulligan and Haines. However, where Kathleen appears unannounced in the cottage of the

Gillanes seeking men to serve her in battle at Killala, she appears to Stephan Dedalus and his acquaintances at their request, ready to serve them as a milkmaid. Thus, Joyce begins a depiction of Kathleen that continues throughout his novel, drawing from the image of the Poor Old

Woman while repudiating the image of a young Irish queen.15 In his narration, Stephen recognizes and acknowledges her ethereality, but his eye is much more critical of the Poor Old

Woman than that of Yeats, with explicit focus on how her aged form differs from the image of a

“young girl with the walk of the queen” which closes Yeats and Gregory’s play:

He watched her pour into the measure and thence into the jug rich white milk, not hers. Old shrunken paps. She poured again a measureful and a tilly. Old and secret she had entered from a morning world, maybe a messenger. She praised the goodness of the milk, pouring it out. Crouching by a patient cow at daybreak in the lush field, a witch on her toadstool, her wrinkled fingers quick at the squirting dugs. They lowed about her whom they knew, dewsilky cattle. Silk of the kine and the poor old woman, names given her in old times. A wandering crone, lowly form of an immortal serving her conqueror and her gay betrayer, their common cuckquean, a messenger from the secret morning. To serve or upbraid, whether he could not tell: but scorned to beg her favour. (1.397-407)

Instead of a siren and a temptress, she becomes a witch and a crone, a depiction which retains the possibility of her having some otherworldly power, but it is gained through the magical coercion of a curse or pity for the crone’s poverty than by her ability to instill desire in a lover and take advantage of his devotion. She enters “from a morning world,” but appears like a messenger rather than a queen; her cause, Irish independence, has become a faraway idea rather than a tangible political reality. Infertile, cuckqueaned and surrounded by the lowing of cattle rather than the shouts of faithful Irishmen, this “lowly form of an immortal” embodies the poor old women in name and form, with the appearance of a commoner and the trappings of a goddess, but Joyce’s pointed jabs at her infirmities suggest that she may not be so easily revived– and

Ireland may not be easily renewed through her.

Kathleen’s infertility and impotence is a recurring theme in her appearances throughout

Ulysses. She is impotent in the sexual sense– her “Old shrunken paps” are no longer able to nourish life, and even if she could create life, her cuckquean Haines (and the British nation he hails from and represents) prevents it outright. Joyce’s focus on infertility does not directly contradict any explicit element of Yeats’s depiction of Kathleen, but it is a departure from more latent themes in the play. As discussed in the previous chapter, Kathleen’s sirenic charms draw

Michael Gillane away from the domestic space of his family home, as she entices Michael to go to war rather than marry and grow his household. She takes the place of domesticity as she tears apart the ideal of domestic bliss, replacing it will the thrill of seduction by the siren’s song and a loyalty to the motherland before the family. Kathleen once controlled desire, and controlled her lovers by manipulating their desires. Whereas she once admitted, “With all the lovers that have brought me their love, I never set out the bed for any,” she is now bereft of lovers and denied from lovemaking entirely (Gregory 55). She now suffers as a cuckquean, her desire controlled by

17 her British oppressor and “gay betrayer,” the unfaithful Irishman, just as she once controlled the desires of her Irish subjects. Framing Kathleen as impotent inverts her sexualized relationship with desire by displacing her from a position of sexual control to one of being sexually controlled– from a cuckoldress to an unwilling cuckquean, a sexual subjugator made a slave.

Kathleen’s impotence extends beyond the sexual realm; just as she is no longer able to control her lovers through sexual desire, she is unable to lead, as she has scarcely anyone to lead.

Like Telemachus receiving counsel from Athena in Homer’s Odyssey, Stephen is alone in perceiving the milkmaid who appears before him in Sandycove Tower as a goddess, and he does so begrudgingly, uncertain whether “to serve or upbraid” (1.641). He refers to Ireland as a third master “who wants me for odd jobs” whom he serves after “the Imperial British state” and “holy

Roman catholic and apostolic church” (1.643-4). The deliberate use of the word “master”– or, more appropriately, mistress– preserves the ambiguity regarding Stephen’s willingness to serve his nation by serving Kathleen. Stephen is given a chance to serve her in “Circe,” as Kathleen, now the Old Gummy Granny, recites her famous lines as Stephen enrages a British private by insulting the king: “Strangers in my house, bad manners to them! Ochone! Ochone! Silk of the kine! You met with poor old Ireland and how does she stand?” (15.4587-89). She thrusts a knife in his hands and demands, “Remove him, acushla. At 8.35 a.m. you will be in heaven and Ireland will be free. O good god, take him!” (15.4737-39), yet in the chaotic and mock-apocalyptic scene that follows, Stephen is swiftly rendered unconscious by a single punch to the face. Stephen’s one-sided fistfight pales in comparison to the rebellions Kathleen once inspired, especially since

Stephen can only be roused into battle once he is terribly drunk, to little effect. Not only does he fail to kill for her, he fails to die for her. She gains nothing from the bargain.

Kathleen can also count The Citizen of “Cyclops” among her adherents, as he echoes

Kathleen’s signature line, “We want no more strangers in our house,” and proclaims, “But those that came to the land of the free remember the land of bondage. And they will come again and with a vengeance, no cravens, the sons of Granuaile, the champions of Kathleen ni Houlihan”

(12.1150-51, 12.1372-75). Yet, the Citizen’s proposition that those who fled Ireland for America in the face of the Great Famine is a tacit admission that Ireland and its people are too weak to take independence by force in contemporary times. What little we see of Kathleen’s devotees in

Ulysses demonstrates how little power she has retained since the 1798 Rebellion. With few lovers, she has little chance of freeing Ireland, and little hope of seeing them die so that she may be revitalized.

Little hope remains in Joyce’s Ireland for her previous devotees such as Michael Gillane, as well. Kathleen promises her lovers that, if they follow her and die for her,

They will be remembered for ever, They shall be alive for ever, They shall be speaking for ever, The people shall hear them for ever. (Gregory 56) Her ability to preserve their voices and sing of her lovers’ sacrifices becomes one of her defining characteristics as a siren. Yet, when Buck and Haines speak Gaelic in front of Kathleen the milkmaid, Stephen prods her,

“Do you understand what he says?” Stephen asked her. “Is it French you are talking, sir?” the old woman said to Haines. Haines spoke to her again a longer speech, confidently. “Irish,” Buck Mulligan said. “Is there Gaelic on you?” “I thought it was Irish,” she said, “by the sound of it. Are you from the west, sir?” “I am an Englishman,” Haines answered. “He’s English,” Buck Mulligan said, “and he thinks we ought to speak Irish in Ireland.” “Sure we ought to,” the old woman said, “and I’m ashamed I don’t speak the language myself. I’m told it’s a grand language by them that knows.” “Grand is no name for it,” said Buck Mulligan. “Wonderful entirely.” (1.424-34).

Kathleen, Siren of the Irish people who has taken lovers centuries old and promised that their voices would be preserved, has lost the Irish language in which they spoke and made their pronouncements of love. Even if the revolutionaries of years’ past did speak, their voices would be unintelligible to her, as would the siren songs she sang to seduce them and preserve their memories. When the voice becomes the element of mortal life preserved in the afterlife,

Kathleen’s inability to understand Gaelic isolates her from the heroes of ancient (but not too ancient)16 Ireland which the Celtic revival sought to preserve.

Losing her language is an existential threat to Kathleen, whether she realizes it or not; the siren’s victim dies happily knowing that his death is what allows her to live—in the Odyssey the sirens survive by consuming the sailors they lure to their isle, while in Cathleen ni Houlihan the blood sacrifice of the revolutionary restores Kathleen’s youth— yet Kathleen also stewards the causes of Irish independence and preserving Irish culture as an oppressed queen given new life by the Irish Literary Revival. In failing to preserve the language, she fails to preserve the sacrifices of these heroes and the cultural and literary forces that have revived her, risking her legacy and the legacy of the Irish revolutionary simultaneously. As Kathleen abandons the Irish language, she abandons the Irish revolutionary’s pledges of eternal love, condemning the heroes of old to the void of forgotten history and dying languages by adopting the language of their common oppressor.

This point can seem hypocritical, given that I did not claim that being an English poet compromised Yeats’s ability to lead a cultural revival, nor will I done so for Joyce. However, as a symbol of Irish independence, Kathleen is constituted in her resolve to resist British oppression, even if she cannot overcome it. Succumbing to British oppression by adopting the language of the oppressor without retaining her original Irish erodes her ability to play the role of

20 a traveler from an old world in which Irish independence was a political reality. As her siren songs are encumbered with the sound of English oppression, she loses the ability to express Irish independence as a political reality in which she has a historical stake– a reality which she has experienced and she has sought to reclaim long before the Irish language began to disappear from the mouths of the Irish people. Kathleen has become a herald of these ancient times, preserving the voices of Irish revolutionaries which the British silenced on the gallows, who spoke in a language which the British silenced in the schools. Yeats and Joyce are not symbols of independence per se, but symbols of oppression; their work is the work of an oppressed people, in which they express a desire for independence, manifesting in figures such as Yeats and

Gregory’s Kathleen. Kathleen ni Houlihan was recovered by Yeats as the voice of independence for an oppressed people, a mystic from a time when one could be born into a native Irish language and take Irish independence as their natural state, and she dies with the death of an independent Irish culture, the Irish language and the voices of the Irish revolutionaries who died for her. But does Irish culture and Irish independence die with her? What is the fate of the

Ireland she personifies without its language?

Despite the casual tone of Kathleen ni Houlihan’s admission that she does not know the

Irish language, in Ulysses the concept of language receives the fertility and symbolic weight which Joyce takes from her. Joyce is openly contemptuous of the English language; in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus reflects on the Irish adoption of English during a conversation with his dean at Belvedere College:

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language. (159)

Joyce considers English the language of an oppressor, yet in this passage the language itself oppresses his mind, tongue and hands as he uses it in his thoughts, speech and writing. However, adopting Irish as a spoken language seems unlikely. In “Ithaca,” Bloom and Stephen recite

“fragments” of “Ancient Hebrew” and “Ancient Irish” to one another in Bloom’s kitchen, and write glyphs of Hebrew and Irish text on Molly’s copy of Sweets of Sin, like scholars sharing tidbits of two branches of extinct and scant-recovered knowledge. The catechistic narrator of the chapter admits the improbability of either language seeing daily use by either:

Was the knowledge possessed by both of each of these languages, the extinct and the revived, theoretical or practical? Theoretical, being confined to certain grammatical rules of accidence and syntax and practically excluding vocabulary. (17.741-44) It seems apparent, both from historical hindsight and the political reality of the novel, that the

English language is an inextricable component of Irish culture and Irish daily life, for better or worse.

Joyce takes this matter-of-fact assertion further. As Stephen wanders along Sandymount strand in “Proteus,” he remarks, “These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here”

(3.288-9). The whole strand is comprised of these “Sands and stones. Heavy of the past” (3.290-

91). The idea is opaque, but theoretically rich. It certainly suggests an intrinsic connection between the language spoken in a place and the place itself; language not only determines how we experience and relate to the thoughts, sounds and written scripts used to describe the world around us, but the world is composed by language, i.e. language becomes the material of its composition. The famously misprinted lines from Martha’s letter in “Lotus Eaters” may help us here; she writes to Henry Flowers, “I called you naughty boy because I do not like that other world. Please tell me what is the real meaning of that word?” (5.245-46). Martha’s letter suggests

22 that words can become a pathway or portal to other worlds, alternate realities, and they can do so spontaneously, just as the accidental insertion of an ‘l’ instantaneously injects Martha’s misunderstanding of Bloom’s language with the framework for a new theory of language. In this context, these are not other lands, but other sexual realities—which, given the sexually-charged themes that accompany Kathleen ni Houlihan’s relationship to Irish independence in Yeats and

Gregory’s play and Ulysses—may manifest in alternate political realities. These alternate realities allow the author and reader to escape their homeland and the languages deposited in them, to change them or recreate them entirely.

The difference between languages, here, becomes more than a difference in dialects or systems of communications used by different peoples—the type of difference that impedes communication, but can be remedied by translation—instead the importance of language seems tied up in what concepts or meanings can be generated by one’s use of a language, which can differ without and within a particular tongue. Language becomes a means of negotiating and navigating the tides of history, and different tongues have different means of confronting different histories, but different speakers do as well. In a time when most Irishmen speak English natively and Irish sparsely, if at all, Irish speech and writing is deposited upon sands recumbent with the English language, and it lies there much differently than it did in centuries before.

Therein lies the perceptual difference that allows Kathleen ni Houlihan’s ignorance of Irish to signify the erosion of the ideal of Irish independence as a tangible political reality while the lack of Irish in Joyce and Yeats’s works signifies the extent of their oppression; Kathleen, a figure of myth, and thus a figure outside history, becomes impotent when she is unable to recover Irish lands now recumbent with the English language, and instead becomes subject to the linguistic and political reality represented in them.

In “Penelope”, Molly makes a similar, though (as she often does) more direct statement while recalling the letter Bloom sent her the morning they consummated their affair: “I wish somebody would write me a loveletter his wasnt much and I told him he could write what he liked yours ever Hugh Boylan… if he wrote it I supposed thered be some truth in it true or no it fills up your whole day and life always something to think about every moment and see it all round you like a new world” (18.734-39). Molly has no need of a love letter to allow her to escape reality– she does this plenty in Penelope, imagining what her life would be like if she had kept up her courtship with Mulvey, or if she were able to run away with Boylan. What she wants is a letter that allows her to import just the slightest degree of fantasy into her regular life– not a gateway to some other world, but a way to slightly change the world she lives in now. The

“world,” in this sense, is not a physical space such as her home on Eccles street nor Dublin nor

Ireland nor Earth, but the perceptive space around her, a space constructed by perception, which language and letters “fill up” themselves.

This follows a trend in modernist and specifically Irish literature which Richard Kearney describes in the essay “Myth and Motherland;” he writes that authors such as Beckett and Joyce

“resolved to demythologize the pretentions of the Revival in the name of a thoroughgoing modernism;” their literature “endeavoured to liberate literature from parochial preoccupations with identity into the universal concern of language as an endlessly self-creative process. As

Beckett put it, language ceased to be about something and became that something itself” (70).

Joyce’s version of this sees language constructing worlds— worlds which can be a form of escape, detached entirely from our own, as in “other world” Martha sees in the sexual suggestiveness of Henry Flowers’s letter, or slight, playful alterations to the perceptive space in which the reader lives which Molly wants Boylan to create for her in a love letter. The renewal

24 of Kathleen ni Houlihan has its roots in a similar ideal, that the Ireland of old can be recovered through the sacrifice of faithful Irishmen– an ideal which Joyce rejects.

In Ulysses, rather than recreating an Irish past, Joyce creates Dublin anew through meticulous research and attention to detail, and constructs it using a new language in his form of stream of consciousness. Joyce’s novel was designed to depart from the literary and mythic tradition left to him while remaining within the familiar confines of Dublin and Ireland. “For myself, I always write about Dublin,” he said, “because if I can get into the heart of Dublin I can get into the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal”

(Ellman 520). In “Joyce and Stephen, the Provincial Intellectual,” Seamus Deane describes

Ulysses as a combination of and departure the English and European novelistic traditions. Deane writes, “Joyce registered, particularly in Ulysses, a mutation in European culture. He attempts to understand the experience of cultural disintegration by forging classical antiquity and

Christianity into a fable of their collapse which would nevertheless be an ordered fable, one in which organization and disorganization would confront one another” (78-79). Joyce brings to this mutation a parodied form of the English novel, perennially preoccupied with domestic life and domestic bliss, substituting an adulterous, broken marriage and “the strange isolated figure of the outcast artist to whom exile is a supreme value and simultaneously a great disaster” in its place (81). Ulysses drew from European and English literary traditions even as he broke from them to forge a literary tradition of his own. Thus, we see Joyce’s novel becoming universal through the particular (in his exploration of Dublin) and particular through the universal

(creating a new tradition by responding to many). Language not only allows the author to create a place– it becomes a means for the author to transcend or escape the particular by recreating it, and reshaping it to fit his own vision.

Joyce’s new language, stream of consciousness, is found throughout Ulysses, but it undergoes its most remarkable transformation in “Sirens”, and the chapters that follow each contain a unique perspectival shift that allows Joyce to engage in new forms of linguistic play, reshaping Dublin as each hour and chapter passes. From its opening overture, “Sirens” makes clear that its language is not organized by the principles of ordinary linguistics, but a musical ear that connects phrases which are otherwise chronologically or consciously disjoint. In the essay

“The Love-Life of Phonemes,” Stephen Tifft describes the narrative voice of “Sirens” as one laden with phonemes (the most minimal units of sound which, in combination, produce words and speech) whose musicality “overtakes Joyce’s language” (162). Tifft continues, “‘Sirens’ seems at first to be all about yearning subjects, not objects; moreover, one might expect so aural and so formally exorbitant a style to turn away from the world of things. But it seems to be

Joyce’s idea that to listen to the yearning subject is to become absorbed in a world of verbal things” (163). By now, a “world of verbal things” should seem like a familiar concept in Ulysses.

What is different here is how that appears to us; rather than a physically familiar world of physical action, moving through a chronological space, it is a messy web of semantic and sonic relationships arranged by sensual aural possibilities rather than any recognizable rational determination.

This messy web enables new interpretive connections and possibilities to crop up as it juxtaposes and combines phrases and ideas which are connected by their sonic appeal, but would be disconnected by chronological time, place, or differing states of consciousness. Tifft writes,

“As musical language coalesces into objects that pursue a life of their own, the subjectivity that speaks it, betraying itself through its doting attentions, is dislocated and disseminated; it becomes unclear in whose subjective consciousness a given utterance is taking place” (164). What

26 develops is a universal consciousness, a blend of Bloom’s consciousness, scraps of speech and song in the Ormond bar, echoing sounds from the Dublin streets, such as the jingling of Boylan’s cart as it travels toward Bloom’s home, the echoes of thoughts and events from earlier in the day, and voices that are not Bloom’s, but seem to come from within as they mingle with his thoughts.

Most often, the erotic mixes with the revolutionary as the chapter’s imagery alternates between the two sirens, bronze by gold, Miss Douce by Miss Kennedy, the singers, Ben Dollard and

Simon Dedalus, the sexualized stories and actions of the former, and the revolutionary and romantic songs sung by the latter. One such collision occurs right as Bloom gets up to leave the bar:

On the smooth jutting beerpull laid Lydia hand, lightly, plumply, leave it to my hands. All lost in pity for croppy. Fro, to: to, fro: over the polished knob (she knows his eyes, my eyes, her eyes) her thumb and finger passed in pity: passed, reposed and, gently touching, then slid so smoothly, slowly down, a cool firm white enamel baton protruding through their sliding ring. With a cock and a carra. Tap. Tap. Tap. I hold this house. Amen. He gnashed in fury. Traitors swing. The chords consented. Very sad thing. But had to be. (11.1112-1121) The images flicker from Lydias manual stimulation of the beerpull, part action and part perception as it is increasingly sexualized, to thoughts of the song “The Croppy Boy,” then directly to a first-person fantasy (likely Bloom’s, but we cannot be sure), to one of the chapter’s onomatopoeic refrains that follow around Bloom’s attraction to the sirens, to Boylan tapping at

Molly’s door, to lines from “The Croppy Boy,” to an ambiguous line that could refer to any of them: sexual consent to Lydia’s manual activities; sonic agreement with “The Croppy Boy,” acceptance of the inevitability of Molly’s affair, the necessity that good boys will die for Irish independence. All these concepts become one in the verbal confusion of “Sirens”.

The combination of the sexual and revolutionary, desire and loss at once is as suggestively rich here as it is in Yeats and Gregory’s play. It is so promising and alluring that

Tifft proposes that we read Bloom’s temptation and desire for the barmaids in “Sirens” as the temptation of the chapter’s language challenging us, allegorized by Bloom (166-67). Once we give in, there is no escape: “Yet while music clearly poses the danger of seduction, in “Sirens” as in the Odyssey, there does not seem to be anything outside of music in Joyce’s writing; it is an inescapable medium, like the sea to which Odysseus must repeatedly commend his body even in his assertions of fidelity to home and wife” (167). Joyce’s language takes Kathleen’s place as a siren, reclaiming revolution as an erotic concept even as he espouses the futility of such idealistic romanticism as he makes Kathleen impotent and archaic. Like Kathleen’s seductions, Joyce’s language in “Sirens” is all-consuming, overtaking the already avant-garde stream of consciousness used in the preceding chapters of Ulysses and eradicating all forms of expression that do not share its inherent musicality. Instead of reclaiming ancient Ireland, the world made of a dead language, however, Joyce aspires to create Ireland anew.

This new Ireland is not ignorant of Ireland’s oppressed past– unlike Kathleen, Joyce refuses to ignore the fact of Irish oppression, and his new world differs from Kathleen’s as it promises to preserve the record of Ireland’s revolutionary struggle in the which flow throughout

“Sirens”. The chapter also promises to keep the voices of Ireland’s dead heroes alive, a feat which Kathleen failed to achieve; the chapter ends with the last words17 of Irish rebel hero

Robert Emmet prior to his execution by the British interspersed throughout Bloom’s thoughts and onomatopoeic sounds as he reads them in a shop window:

Seabloom, greaseabloom viewed last words. Softly. When my country takes her place among. Prrprr.

Must be the bur. Fff! Oo. Rrpr. Nations of the earth. No-one behind. She’s passed. Then and not till then. Tram kran kran kran. Good oppor. Coming. Krandlkrankran. I’m sure it’s the burgundy. Yes. One, two. Let my epitaph be. Kraaaaaa. Written. I have. Pprrpffrrppffff. Done. (11.1284-94) In Joyce’s Dublin, language takes Kathleen ni Houlihan’s place, and then some, placing Ireland in a universalized world that is not free from the memory of British oppression, but is independent of British literature and the British people, built by a language that appropriates the

English tongue as much as it deviates from it. However, making language into a siren only amplifies the pain of being shackled to the language of one’s oppressor, as expressed by Stephen

Dedalus in Portrait. In doing so, Joyce’s work demonstrates the necessity for a modern Irish literature that acknowledges and feeds from Ireland’s history of oppression while looking ahead to a future independence that is both literary and political.

The image of the siren, Kathleen ni Houlihan, becomes the image of Joyce’s new literature and its language which allows the downtrodden Irish to express the pains in their revolutionary spirits as a means of finding a hope for independence. It is a literature that gives a voice to the revolutionary consciousness silenced by British domination, both as it exists in the present as it echoes in the voices of slain Irish rebels. In this way, Joyce’s new language and literature preserve the Irish myths of old even if he does not subscribe to them and their political aims– they are incorporated into the greater cause of establishing an independent Ireland, created first in literature and realized someday as a political reality. Kathleen ni Houlihan is welcomed into this modernist Irish literature as a relic from an ancient world, sacred and fragile, which the author and nationalist can fight to preserve without dying in vain.

III

The Siren in Beckett’s Tape

Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (1958)

Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape is a play about an obsession with the voice that is itself obsessed with voices. This is emphasized by and emphasizes the play’s stark minimalism;

Krapp’s Last Tape is inhabited by one body and two voices who share a dark stage and the memories of their shared past. One is embodied, that of the old, crabby Krapp who is present in the space in which the play is performed and has persisted throughout the time periods and events mentioned in the play. The other is disembodied, the voice of a younger Krapp captured on tapes which Krapp archives and plays obsessively. Despite this, criticism surrounding the play rarely attempts to understand how the play’s second character, the tape reel occupying

Krapp’s desk, enhances and deepens the meaning of the work’s plot and many of the critical perspectives which have been offered on the work.

This chapter will first attempt to provide a reading of the recording in box three, spool five, charting the disintegration of Krapp’s love life throughout a past year as he describes it in his own words; what happened to Krapp that led to his current state of squalor? Then, we will examine how the tape works–how the presentation and performance of the story of Krapp’s love life is enhanced and challenged by the tape, and what critical possibilities are enabled by the medium–and why it functions particularly well as the medium through which Krapp’s story is told. We can attempt to compare Beckett’s absurdism to the more canonical representations of the voice in the Greek sirens and Kathleen ni Houlihan which bear striking similarities to

Krapp’s tale, in hope of discovering how the recording process, necessarily absent from earlier works involving the voice, interacts with the voice in new ways. Finally, we shall see how these sirens and Krapp’s life intersect with Beckett’s own artistic philosophies and his The aim is to understand the voice, because understanding the role of the voice in Krapp’s Last Tape is essential to understanding Krapp. Yet, as we will see, understanding the voice is made much easier by attempting to understand Krapp, and thus we shall start with him, or what little of him is made available in a surface reading of the play.

Farewell to Love; Farewell to Life KRAPP: (He peers at ledger, reads entry at foot of page.) “Mother at rest at last… Hm… The black ball… (He raises his head, stares blankly front. Puzzled.) Black ball?... (He peers again at ledger, reads.) The dark nurse… (He raises his head, broods, peers again at ledger, reads.) Slight improvement in bowel condition…Hm…Memorable…what? (He peers closer.) Equinox, memorable equinox. (He raises his head, stares blankly front. Puzzled.) Memorable equinox?... (Pause. He shrugs his shoulders, peers again at ledger, reads.) Farewell to– (he turns the page)–love.” He raises his head, broods, bends over machine. Switches on and assumes listening posture, i.e. leaning forward, elbows on table, hand cupping ear towards machine, face front. (Beckett 13) By the time we encounter our “wearish old man” Krapp on “a late evening in the future,” he has forgotten many things from his life– so many that the seemingly tragic “farewell to love” is merely an afterthought. In the tape recording that is played on stage, Krapp listens to his younger self describe the happenings of the year, the losses he has incurred and things which will be lost in the interim. The quotation gestures toward many fragments of memories, many of which cannot be fully constructed within the text or without. Love is last in the list and the full extent of its loss is the consequence of the memories which precede it.

There is the obvious loss of familial love, indicated by the death of Krapp’s mother and

Krapp’s own immediate acceptance of its finitude. In the tape, he starts his recollection with a 31 surprisingly cold account, saying, as he sat in view of her window, “There I sat, in the biting wind, wishing she were gone” (Beckett 19). This indifference subsists even in his account of the moment of her death: “I was there when… the blind went down, one of those dirty brown roller affairs… I happened to look up and there it was. All over and done with, at last (Beckett 20).

Krapp was throwing the black ball to a little white dog while waiting for the curtain to drop, and this is where we might see the tiniest glimmer of affection in the cold-hearted narrator on the tape. He reflects, “Moments. Her moments, my moments. (Pause.) The dog’s moments.

(Pause.) In the end I held it out to him and he took it in his mouth, gently, gently. A small, old, black, hard, solid rubber ball. (Pause.) I shall feel it, in my hand, until my dying day. (Pause.) I might have kept it. (Pause.) But I gave it to the dog” (Beckett 19-20). We hear a pause, then a sigh. In the silence, regret peeks through. His love for his mother, or what remained of it, became symbolized by and encapsulated in the ball, and was given away. Now, in his weary state, Krapp has lost both the ball and the memory of it, and all it symbolized. In his younger days, these absences–silence and the missing weight of the black ball– made his memories inescapable.

Now, he is left alone with the absence of his memories. Rather than the absence of presence, which kindles desire, Krapp is left with the presence of absence, an oppressive void consuming his memories that mimics nonexistence.

When he first hears his younger self recounting the story, beginning, “there is of course the house on the canal where mother lay a-dying, in the late autumn, after her long viduity…,”

Krapp fixates on the word viduity, looking at the definition in the dictionary, indifferent to the fact that his reaction to the passing of his mother lies beyond. He is unable to feel sympathy for one whom he has forgotten (a concept that will, unsurprisingly, reoccur), and he forgets the black ball, his mother, and how he felt for her long ago. The love between a mother and son forms a

32 foundation or framework for all , then Krapp’s inability to recall it in thought or feeling hints that his “farewell to love” is not a farewell to one women, or a few, or all, but just for a time; with no foundation for new love, those relationships which have withered away between his mother’s death and his final farewell listed in the ledger will be his last.

In the meantime, many fragmented memories of women are invoked within the tape, presumably spanning both the year preceding the tape and much of his youth. His loneliness is punctuated by these brief descriptions of women who represent lost possibilities of what could have been, some lovers, others not: Bianca in Kedar Street, “a girl in a shabby green coat, on a railway station platform,” the “dark young beauty” in all white pushing a black perambulator, all of whom Krapp has forgotten and forsaken.

The dark young beauty, while only a passing affectation, provides a clear glimpse into the cause of Beckett’s loss of love. While the younger Krapp remarks upon “The face she had! The eyes! Like… (hesitates) chrysolite!” (Beckett 19), Beckett notes the connection “chrysolite” forges between Krapp and Shakespeare’s Othello in the margin of his notebook for the 1973

London production:

If heaven would make me such another world Of one entire and perfect chrysolite I’d not have sold her for it.18 Othello V 2 (Pountney 139)19 As Rosemary Pounteny concludes, the line, spoken by Othello about Desdemona shortly after he murders her, suggests that Krapp has similarly lost his love through his own folly. Yet, this woman was not Krapp’s wife or lover, but a stranger in the street who, upon his attempt to make an introduction, “threatened to call a policeman. As if I had designs on her virtue!” (Beckett 19).

Some part of Krapp, at his mother’s passing, still yearns for the possibility of love, and regrets

33 the women and worlds20 he has left behind, yet the line referenced here occurs after

Desdemona’s death, at which point there is no hope of saving the love that he has lost. The mention of chrysolite marks the time of the death of Krapp’s mother as a time when Krapp was still sympathetic to love, while the literary allusion reveals that he has no chance of recovering it.

In his advanced age, even imagining love is too much for Krapp. His peregrinations on

Effie demonstrate this:

Scalded the eyes out of me reading Effie again, a page a day, with tears again. Effie… (Pause.) Could have been happy with her, up there on the Baltic, and the pines, and the dunes. (Pause.) Could I? (Pause.) And she? (Pause.) Pah! (Beckett 25) Krapp has not only lost love, but the possibility to recapture it entirely; even fictional love with the protagonist of Theodor Fontaine’s Effi Briest seems unimaginable. His farewell to love was not only a farewell to the situation or state of being in love, but the verb itself; the capacity to love or feel loved. He cries because of the unbearable weight of the absence of love, not because he feels an unrequited love for any object. His tears beg for sympathy, but his dismissal reminds us that he said farewell to sympathy long ago. Combined with the prior memories, Krapp’s

“farewell to love” cannot be excused as a mere parting of ways with unintended consequences.

Rather, it is positioned as the finale of a systematic eradication of sympathy and affection from

Krapp’s life, starting from its roots in the maternal bond and extending through Krapp’s relationships into the present and the potential for relationships in the future.

So what of the final farewell to the girl in the punt, the climax of the tape and Krapp’s sexual life? This lyrical and intimate section of the tape is immediately preceded by Krapp’s

“memorable equinox,” his great discovery by a pier that he believes will lead him to great creative success. Krapp, listening to the tape, becomes so disgusted in hearing his follies that he quickly skips this section, hiding Krapp’s revelation from our ears:

The vision, at last. This I fancy is what I have chiefly to record this evening, against the day when my work will be done and perhaps no place left in my memory, warm or cold, for the miracle that…(hesitates)… for the fire that set it alight. What I suddenly saw then was this, that the belief I had been going on all my life, namely–(Krapp switches off impatiently, winds tape forward, switches on again)–great granite rocks the foam flying up in the light of the lighthouse and the wind-gauge spinning like a propeller, clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most–(Krapp curses, switches off, winds tape forward, switches on again). (Beckett 21) James Knowlson recalls that Beckett wrote that the dark was “‘in reality my most–‘ Lost: [when

Krapp switches off the tape recorder and runs the tape forward] ‘my most precious ally’ etc. meaning his true element at last and key to the opus magnum” (319).21 Thus, Krapp’s decision to abandon love at the punt is preceded by a conviction to embrace darkness and isolation as a means of pursuing artistic perfection. Compared to the slow eradication of love in his life that precedes this scene, and the grandiloquent fragment of what was likely a long and complicated speech detailing his convictions at the pier, his break-up with her is quick and blunt: “I said again

I thought it was hopeless and no good going on, and she agreed, without opening her eyes”

(Beckett 22). However, the soft and low tone with which Krapp’s younger voice continues to describe the scene, and the lyricism of his speech, suggests that he has not shed his sentimentality entirely, and still longs for the moments recounted in the tape:

I asked her to look at me and after a few moments–(pause)–after a few moments she did, but the eyes just slits, because of the glare. I bent over to get them in the shadow and they opened. (Pause. Low.) Let me in. We drifted in among the flags and stuck. They way they went down, sighing, before the stem! (Pause.) I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side. (Beckett 22-23) Even as he pushes her away he wants to get closer, and now longs for suspended animation in that moment– if only he could return to that time, and live in it forever. This climax of Krapp’s sexual life is presented as a whisper, as love’s fading or withering away rather than the complete destruction of a passionate, tragic parting. The woman’s agreement with Krapp is not a validation that the love is gone at the moment of their parting, but that it cannot continue to

35 grow, which is the natural, foregone conclusion if Krapp is unwilling to dedicate himself to the relationship any longer. Rather than the final, tremendous renouncement of love that we are promised in the ledger and that is suggested by the preceding events of the tape, this “farewell” begins the slow, painful death of love which has not completed by the time of the recording, and, as we shall see, is still incomplete by the time Krapp records his last tape.

Love, the Object

Krapp’s relationship with love is ostensibly a story about women, told through a voice in a recording, but it is told as a story of images and objects, or people devolving into objects. One obvious example is the black rubber ball– by the point that he has moved beyond his mother’s death and her life, he can encapsulate his experience of her and her passing, “Moments. Her moments, my moments,” into the black ball that he gives away to a little white dog (Beckett 20).

Krapp’s attempts to completely detach from maternal love and familial sympathy lead him to attempt to displace his memories into the inanimate object of the black rubber ball, a thing which cannot love or be loved.

The romantic affairs and interests of Krapp’s youth culminate in an interest in the eyes.

For instance, when the voice in the tape recalls listening to a tape at least a decade old, he says,

“At that time I think I was still living on and off with Bianca in Kedar Street. Well out of that,

Jesus yes! Hopeless business. (Pause.) Not much about her, apart from a tribute to her eyes. Very warm. I suddenly saw them again. (Pause.) Incomparable!” (Beckett 16). Likewise, the “dark young woman” is remarkable for her eyes, which are “Like… chrysolite!” (Beckett 19), while

Krapp longs to see eyes of the woman in the punt once he has made his fatal decision:

I said again I thought it was hopeless and no good going on, and she agreed, without opening her eyes. (Pause.) I asked her to look at me and after a few moments–(pause)– after a few moments she did, but the eyes just slits, because of the glare. I bent over to get them in the shadow and they opened. (Pause. Low.) Let me in. (Beckett 22) In Beckett/Beckett, Vivian Mercer notes, “Although I do not recall his ever actually using the phrase, Beckett unquestionably regards the eyes as the windows to the soul” (131). Krapp’s love interests in his youth are based on images that root them in the soul rather than the body. As

Krapp breaks off his relationship with the woman in the punt, her closed eyes shut him out, signifying the end of their love and the end of all love for Krapp. Their closing ends any possibility for Krapp to find “another world/ Of one entire and perfect chrysolite,” confining him to the grim future of Krapp’s Last Tape.

We can compare this what scraps of a romantic life Krapp has found in his advanced age, which he describes in his last tape: “Fanny came in a couple of times. Bony old ghost of a whore.

Couldn’t do much, but I suppose better than a kick in the crutch” (Beckett 25). Fanny is reduced to a single object, the sexual organ, both in her name, a familiar pun on her rear and a less familiar pun on her genitals, and her utility for Krapp as a prostitute. As she comes at the end of his life, we might take Fanny to represent Krapp’s love life being displaced and dissolved into lust by virtue of being his final “love,” but Krapp takes the implication further: “How do you manage it, she said, at your age? I told her I’d been saving up for her all my life” (Beckett 25-

26). Economic and seminal concerns aside, Fanny is described as the result of Krapp’s life; she is the only option for a man looking for love who has isolated himself and turned away from love at every opportunity. He has led him from the eyes to the groin, from the soul to the body, from love to lust, and from pleasure to simply fulfilling basic biological desires. This process of detaching from romantic love mirrors the process of detaching from his mother, in that the love which is lost is displaced into an object which Krapp cannot possess; the ball in the latter case,

37 and Fanny (and her fanny) in the former, the genitals of a woman whom he can only rent, with whom he cannot form any emotional attachment or romantic bond.

Krapp’s sentimental memories of the eyes have decayed as well. He makes this clear while recording his new tape: “The eyes she had! (Broods, realizes he has been recording silence, switches off, broods. Finally.) Everything there, everything, all the– (Realizes this is not being recorded, switches on.) Everything there, everything on this old muckball, all the light and dark and famine and feasting of… (hesitates)… the ages! (In a shout.) Yes!” (Beckett 24).

Whereas Krapp once saw heavens made of chrysolite in the eyes of the women he desired, now his memories of them are as corrupted and ugly as his love life, filled entirely with pain, suffering and contradictions; what little he remembers of that world is misremembered alongside its opposite, culminating in a world engulfed in light and darkness, full of famine and feasting, locked into a single moment in the past and representing all the ages.

Krapp’s representations of love are rooted in images, yet he relies little on images now, and entirely on tape. We could argue that the recorded voice merely emphasizes that he has lost love– that the tape simply focuses our attention on Krapp’s obsession with memories– yet that is clear far before we reach this depth of analysis, and this reading seems shallow and reductive for a major plot device in Krapp’s Last Tape. By fixing the voice is into the tape recording, the tape objectifies the voice, making it tangible and available– it can be listened to at Krapp’s leisure, much like Krapp’s memories of his mother are evoked by an unassuming black rubber ball (the loss of which has caused him to forget those memories) or Fanny can be hired to satisfy his sexual desires at his whim. Yet recording also causes the voice to evade possession; the tape contains not only the voice, but words, which themselves have meanings. If we think of the voice as a character, as an entity distinct from its speech, we fumble while attempting to understand the

38 voice in the tape and the words and ideas recorded in it as separable subjects. In trying to recover a younger version of Krapp, we are trying to recover a younger world by stripping language from it– yet our Joycean instincts tell us that if we strip language from this world, we destroy it entirely.

In Course in General Linguistics, Saussure marks a distinction between the sound of speech and its meaning: “Linguistics works in the borderlands where the elements of sound and thought combine; their combination produces a form, not a substance” (113). This leaves the voice as the substance of speech– the voice which brings language into existence, without which language cannot be expressed. Saussure’s definition places language (language, here, being thought codified into a system organized by sounds) in a “borderlands,” between two worlds, yet without language to create and describe these worlds, what lies beyond these borders becomes unintelligible. It is not sound nor thought that we are after, but some other quality of the recording that occupies it as the voice occupies Joyce’s language-world. It is an occupying force that produces the difference in English spoken on British tongues and that of Stephen Dedalus when he notes, “How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine!... His language, so familiar and foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech”

(Portrait 159). It is the tangibility of language, inseparable from the expression of language– aural, written, or otherwise– while also lying far beyond it.

Thus, the recorded voice is an ideal mechanism for coping with Krapp’s lost loved objects, such as the black ball and the eyes of the women he loved, as it is doubly objectified: once by the physical imprinting of sound on tape, and once by the voice as it fixes language into sound. Furthermore, the recorded voice contains and retains memories of loved ones which

Krapp himself cannot recall– memories in which Krapp longs to revel and re-experience.22

Beckett realizes the power of the voice in these passages, too: despite his minimal stage directions, he is certain to direct the tone of the prerecorded voice during the scene on the punt:

“I bent over her to get them in the shadow and they opened. (Pause. Low.) Let me in” (22).

Words alone fail to express what resides in Beckett’s dramatic imagination.

The recorded voice is also especially suited toward the self-centered egoism which impelled Krapp to forsake love to embark on his all-important writing. In “The Object Voice,”

Mladen Dolar writes, “To hear oneself speak– or just simply to hear oneself– can be seen as an elementary formula of narcissism that is needed to produce a minimal form of self” (13). This hearing must be self-referring or self-reflective, Dolar continues, for hearing one’s own voice allows one to be “both sender and receiver in one’s pure interiority” (14). As a plot device, this narcissistic process is a form of characterization, in which we begin to know Krapp as a character because of his obsession with hearing himself speak.

However, Dolar claims that the voice which is reflected, which is voiced and then heard again, acquires a special autonomy of its own by entering the dimension of the Other (Ibid.).

Dolar explains this in terms of the Narcissus myth:

The best witness is, after all, Narcissus himself, whose story, maybe not surprisingly, involves both the gaze and the voice. Both his curious “affair” with the nymph Echo, who could only echo his words and couldn’t speak by herself, is a story of a failed love and failed narcissism– the voice returned is not his own voice, and he would rather die than abandon himself to the other…. And when the nymph dies, only her voice is left, which still makes echo to our own, the voice without a body, the trace of the object. (14) The narcissism of listening to oneself is disrupted from the inside by another element of the voice, “the voice that affects one at the most intimate level, but which one cannot master and over which one has no power or control,” a personal psychoanalytical impulse of consciousness which manifests itself in “the intractable voice of the Other that imposed itself upon the subject”

(Dolar 14). That is, the narcissist’s intense preoccupation with and cultivation of his own self- presence fosters an “alien kernel” of interiority that threatens self-presence and narcissistic auto- affection from the interior voice which is of keen interest as a part of the narcissist’s self, yet is beyond his control (Ibid.). The voice, in all its interiority, must become an Other. In bringing his voice into the world, the narcissist alienates it from himself, or he risks alienating the world from himself. This is necessary for the voice to be rendered as an object, as it allows the voice to be divorced from the speaker, and ultimately speech.

Krapp’s use of his voice allows him to characterize himself as we characterize him, by differentiating himself from the “Other” voices on the tapes, voices which have been mechanically separated from the moment of their speech. For Krapp, who continually records himself, this is a compromising caveat, as each element of Krapp’s selfhood at any given point is at risk of one day being condemned, as Krapp, in his last tape, condemns his younger voice, saying, “Just been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago, hard to believe I was ever as bad as that. Thank God that’s all done with anyway” (24). This is a habit for Krapp; the voice he listens to condemns an even younger iteration: “I did not check in the book, but it must be at least ten or twelve years ago…. Hard to believe I was ever that young whelp. The voice! Jesus! And the aspirations!” (15-16). Krapp has tried to define himself, but he has not learned anything; he has only described how he is different from his most recent recording, the latest iteration of his voice. The recordings are as impotent as Krapp in that sense, as he uses them to cope with isolation, yet they also help him prolong it with the façade of an

Other. He turns to them in lieu of love in hope of completing his work, yet they only stunt his growth as a person and an author and prolong his isolation.

Perhaps we are giving Krapp too much (or too little) credit here. Krapp’s tapes appear to us as an autobiography, but in listening to them, he does not long for more of himself. The final lines, the lines that enrapture him, are not those where he recounts his great discovery on the lighthouse– a scene he skips in anger– nor the moment where he describes his reaction to his mother’s death, but his description of the final moments he shared with the last woman he loved:

“I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving, but under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side”

(Beckett 27). Krapp listens to himself, but he is listening for her. He is listening because the tape is the only object he has that contains a fragment of the love they shared; the only connection he has with the experience of love is the knowledge that it was in the mind of the voice on the tape as he described it. Krapp’s painful silence once the tape reel ends, his non-reaction to its final lines, is telling:

TAPE: Here I end this reel. Box–(pause)–three, spool–(pause)–five. (Pause.) Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn’t want them back. Krapp motionless staring before him. The tape runs on in silence. (Beckett 28) Krapp agrees that his best days are behind them, but he listens to the tapes because he desperately wants them back. He wants more than that the description the voice provides. In his last tape, he still questions if things had to be this way:

Sometimes wondered in the night if a last effort mightn’t–(Pause.) Ah finish your booze now and get to your bed. Go on with this drivel in the morning. Or leave it at that. (Pause.) Leave it at that. (Pause.) Lie propped up in the dark–and wander. Be again in the dingle on a Christmas Eve, gathering holly, the red-berried. (Pause.) Be again on Croghan on a Sunday morning, in the haze, with the birch, and listen to the bells. (Pause.) And so on. (Pause.) Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn’t enough for you. (Pause.) Lie down across her. (Beckett 27) At this point, Krapp violently tears the tape from the reel, to listen to the scene on the punt once more. He desperately wants to re-experience that moment in time which the tape divorced from

42 his past, in hopes that he might somehow recover a tiny memory from that time to keep him company in his final days. The voice in the tape is not only bound with his younger voice, or painful language, but with memories of a world that Krapp wants to recover, left behind in a time where there was a possibility of reversing his actions and finding love again.

The recorded tape is essential to this experience because it mimics the place of the love objects which Krapp has lost, allowing him to pour whatever love he can muster back into the tape, briefly re-experiencing a trace of his past and mourning its loss anew. However, the recording has been mechanically separated from the time in which it was made and the experiences of its speaker, and all its connections to experiences beyond it have been permanently severed. Krapp has realized that his folly lies in his extreme devotion to himself and the literary fame which never arrived, yet chronicles of his life are now the only means by which he can connect to that which he has lost. Tragically, that which the recording promises, the possibility of reuniting with the women he has lost, is what it is least suited to provide. The façade of otherness which the recorded and reflected voice provides, which externalizes the experiences which Krapp can no longer recall, is necessary to maintain this illusion that Krapp can reconnect with a past which has been obliterated by the passage of time and the consequences of Krapp’s convictions. The voice and the tape which contains it lie at the root of

Krapp’s follies, helping him cope with his loss while wagging it in front of his nose, alluring him into deeper and deeper dependence on the tapes which now take the place of his memories entirely. His desire for love is displaced onto the tape and the voice, allowing it to become a love object in place of the love which he has lost. Like Narcissus, he spends his final days transfixed by himself, though this time it is not the gaze which allures him, but his own Echo from the past.

Siren Songs

Michael Gillane’s enchantment with Kathleen ni Houlihan, who seduces him into leaving his bride-to-be to fight for an independent Ireland the day before their wedding, is echoed in

Krapp’s obsession with his work that impels him to abandon the woman in the punt and his last chance at love following the death of his mother. He is obsessed with his own longing for that which has already been lost, and never can be- he is enraptured by his tapes as Michael Gillane with the Poor Old Woman, and as dedicated to their fictions as Kathleen ni Houlihan is to her own tales. Krapp is a regretful revolutionary, who paid the price for his love of the siren, then lost his love for her and her cause. Now he spends his nights alone, lamenting the fruitlessness of his sacrifice, like the many men who had died for Cathleen in vain– men whom, by Joyce’s account, have been forgotten alongside the language they once spoke and the Ireland that was built from that language. Krapp joins them as his language and voice is forgotten in a few private tapes and a poorly-published unread book.

By this account, Krapp’s attempt to use the tape as an object that he can substitute for those which he has lost is mirrored by his attraction to the tape as if it were a siren that could replace the sirenic women he followed in his youth. The classical Greek sirens and our Irish one are marked by their ability to suggest and instill desire for femininity by their use of the voice.

Both sirens use this allure in place of their feminine appeal, making themselves objects of love that can displace physical desire by using the voice to subvert it. The voice in Krapp’s tape, performed sonorously and wistfully, charms Krapp with the allure of memories of the women he has loved, memories which he forgot long ago, which are unrecoverable in the past. The voice in the tape is the only and greatest object of his desire, and because of this it has a dangerous power over him which has made him dependent upon the tape to help him cope with the loss of his love

44 and the objects of his love. His desire for this voice, a desire to return to a past where he can feel desire, becomes a desire for desire, self-enabling and impossible to satisfy. As he listens, Krapp becomes Odysseus tied to the mast, shipwrecked off the Sirens’ isle, as unable as he is unwilling to turn or be turned away from the object of his desire.

Sirens are not an inevitable means of interpreting Krapp’s loneliness, but considering their seduction songs alongside the apparent inevitability of Krapp’s decline and the degree to which he has been forgotten by society casts the absurdism of Beckett’s theatre in an uncanny light while contemporizing the horrors of the old stories, reminding us that Sirens are rooted in very real and relatable fears. This chapter only considers the voice in the context of Krapp’s Last

Tape, as the absence of the female bodies and voices which Krapp desires complicate our conceptions of the voice while provoking a dichotomic discussion of love, language, and the object voice, and the much like Krapp is only understood in terms of that which he is lost. We endeavor to understand the voice by its absence before we can appreciate its presence in other plays, where it may be taken for granted as a component of the dramatic medium. As we have seen, Beckett grants the voice a subtle power that operates through the silences of the voices which are not heard and not expressed. This power allows it to express images and memories from which it has been divorced by the process of recording, retelling Krapp’s history in a manner which is inherently dramatic, as it is performed on stage, and anti-dramatic as it refuses to bring motion to the stage. This seems to be the repetitive and pervasive nature of Krapp’s Last

Tape; every admission is followed by a denial, and meaning is always deferred just as it seems like we may reach some understanding about the play, its protagonist, and Beckett.

This quality of deferral may just be an aspect of Beckett’s minimalism; his art was in stripping away meaning and from his drama. Beckett’s great artistic epiphany, a moment he

45 described to his biographer James Knowlson, appeared to him while visiting his mother at his childhood home in Foxrock, Ireland in 1989: “I realised that Joyce has gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realised that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than adding”

(Knowlson 319). This penchant for deferral and deviation fits nicely with the siren myth; in the

Odyssey and Cathleen ni Houlihan, the sirens’ seduction is an act which causes the sirens’ victim to deviate from a predetermined path: a sea route in the former, and his marriage plans in the latter. Kathleen and Beckett both wish to escape reality by creating voices, though Kathleen wishes to recover the past by renewing mythic traditions, while Beckett rushes into the future by rebelling against tradition.

Krapp’s Last Tape is a particularly striking avenue of escapism for Beckett. To start.

Knowlson records quite a few similarities between the lives of Beckett and Krapp. Krapp wonders what it would be like to “be again” on Croghan on a Sunday morning “with the bitch,” to reexperience Beckett’s walks with his own father in his youth (Knowlson 399). Beckett’s lack of success selling copies of Murphy resemble Krapp’s own literary failures, as well (Ibid). Then there is the tender-but-cold retelling of the death of Krapp’s mother, draped in emotion and black-and-white symbolism which is woven into the structure of the play, which recalls the death of Beckett’s own mother 8 years prior (Ibid). Yet Knowlson warns us, “Personal elements cannot simply be pinned down, then, to comfortable real-life equivalences. They convey more universal feelings of yearning or loss, nostalgia or regret, aspiration or failure” (Ibid).

These feelings reach an apex in Krapp’s epiphany scene, wherein he (recording at the age of 39), receives the “vision at last” that promises to change his life and turn his artistic ambitions into

46 success and fame. Biographically, Knowlson connects Krapp’s revelation to the one Beckett had at Foxrock, where he determined to base his work in subtraction, as Krapp determines to embrace darkness in his work. In doing so, Beckett attempts to create some much-needed distance between himself and the shadow of Joyce’s literary legacy and that of the motherland

(and mythic mother) they have in common, which appears prominently and explicitly in both

Joyce’s work and Krapp’s Last Tape.

Beckett’s personal relationship to Ireland was strained, too. Soon after Waiting for

Godot’s appearance on Broadway in 1956, he recalled to Israel Shenker, “I didn’t like living in

Ireland. You know the kind of thing- theocracy, censorship of books, that kind of thing…. I was in Ireland when the war broke out in 1939 and I immediately returned to France. I preferred

France in war to Ireland in peace." Like his epiphany, his decision to leave Ireland occurred not in Paris, but when he was with his mother in Foxrock. Knowlson can only speculate as to the exact reason for his departure, but he persuasively argues for a series of disagreements and quarrels with his mother about his public image and her hopes for his behavior and future (252).

By this time, Beckett was determined that he could never function as a writer in Ireland

(Knowlson 253). Thus, the break was as personally liberating as it was artistically transformative. He would make Paris his permanent residence for the rest of his life. Ironically, visits to his mother in Foxrock would become the only thing which could reliably draw Beckett back to Ireland (Shenker).

In the context of Beckett’s personal connections to Krapp (tempered by the “universal feelings” which Knowlson urges us to remember), Kathleen is entangled in their inner anxieties about the success of their artistic ambitions, their strained family lives, the home country which seemed to smother them, the theme of loss which pervades Krapp’s Last Tape, and their fears

47 that their best days are behind him. Suggesting Kathleen ni Houlihan as a symbol for Krapp’s misery is blatantly non-Beckettian. As Richard Kearney describes in “Myth and Motherland,”

Beckett abhorred the ideals of collective community and continuity, preferring discontinuity and alienation instead– he rejected the idea of symbolism itself (71-72). “’No symbols where none intended’, he retorted to those critics who sought to translate his record of misery into myth.

‘There can be no communication’, he bluntly insisted, ‘because there is nothing to communicate’” (“Myth and Motherland” 72).

However, Beckett’s subtractive minimalism must take as its subject something which can permit some subtraction– to deviate from tradition he must be aware of it and understand it well enough to know where it has gone wrong. Kathleen ni Houlihan is not a symbol of Beckett or

Krapp. However; she is the symbol they have left behind, though Krapp has done so more drastically and more completely, and is left more impoverished economically and creatively for it. For Krapp she embodies the siren of love, a figure for the desire he now wishes to recapture in his final days. For Beckett, Kathleen serves as a point of departure, an image which conflates themes in his work and life which he attempts to abandon in each, themes from which he wishes to escape, to varying degrees, and the unwanted burden of obligation to a national literary tradition whose shadow bears down upon him. Kathleen lives in the negative space of Beckett’s subtractive process, in the markings which have been erased from the script of Krapp’s Last

Tape.

Despite his anti-symbolic, anti-community and anti-continuity ideology, Beckett arrived at his principles by departing from lovers of symbolism, mythmakers who tried to use national myths as a way of strengthening community ties, and authors who tried to emphasize their works’ ties to their people’s ancestral tales. Krapp’s attempts to depart from this tradition take

48 him into a miserable future, and thus Krapp serves as the answer to the question “What if I erase too much? What if I go too far?” Like Joyce before him, Beckett sees the siren Kathleen as a figure to be avoided. Yet, like Yeats, he finds himself unable to turn away and break from her entirely. The impermeability of Krapp’s Last Tape, its tendency to defer or deny transparency to its viewer or reader, is a function of this uncertainty– it is a play built on anxieties about love,

Ireland, artistic success, and, ultimately, Beckett’s unwillingness to abandon his sirens outright.

This ideological imperfection is appropriate and necessary for a play whose subject is the folly of unwavering and uncompromising idealism. Krapp’s Last Tape is brought alive by follies, imperfections and insecurities that exist somewhere between Beckett’s philosophies of stark minimalism and artistic rebellion and the figure of Kathleen ni Houlihan, the embodiment of what he has tried– and in many ways failed– to leave behind in his Irish motherland. The shadow of Kathleen ni Houlihan hangs over Krapp’s Last Tape, and the play bears the weight of the heavy burden which hangs over an author attempting to escape the inescapable, the weight of a nation which has vexed him and left an unmistakable impression on his work, a nation which has molded his artistic ideologies through its suppression, and a world he always kept at a distance, but never too far away.

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Endnotes

1 Charles Stewart Parnell was the single most popular leader of Irish nationalists in the British Parliament and the face of the Irish Home Rule movement throughout the late 19th century up to his death in 1891. The revelation of his decade-long adulterous affair with Katharine O'Shea in 1890 scandalized him in the eyes of the Catholic Church, which had long supported him, and fractured the Home Rule cause between the Parnellite faithful and those that believed that he was no longer fit to stand as the face of Irish nationalism. 2 One striking portrayal of the “uncrowned king” is in Hynes poem “The Death of Parnell” in James Joyce’s “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” from Dubliners. 3 For a more detailed account, see Phillip L. Marcus, Yeats and the Beginning of the Irish Renaissance, “Old Irish Myth and Modern Irish Literature.” 4 The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924), and The Plough and the Stars (1926), all of which premiered at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in the years given. 5 Pethica’s source for this quotation is The Letters of W.B. Yeats (ed.) Allan Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954; New York: Macmillan 1955). 6 A parodic reference appears in the short story “A Mother,” from Dubliners, which features a greedy mother to a Kathleen who is “determined to take advantage of her daughter’s name” (116), by arranging her performance in a concert in an Irish cultural society, organized by a Mr. Holohan. This appearance and the prevalence of Kathleen ni Houlihan in Ulysses will be further elucidated in the next chapter. 7 In Damned to Fame, James Knowlson claims that Miss Counihan from Murphy “echoes the legendary Yeats figure Cathleen ni Houlihan, chased around the circumference of a circle in a plot resembling Racine’s Andromaque, in which one character loves another, who loves another, who loves another” (200-201). 8 Seamus Heaney suggested that a figure in Brian Friel’s Translations (1980) could allude to Kathleen ni Houlihan in his review “English and Irish”, found in the Times Literary Supplement from 1981. Ethna Carbery’s “Passing of the Gael” (1906) names Kathleen ni Houlihan as a personification of Ireland which Irish emigrants sorely long for. 9 Pethica relies on the manuscript held by the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection, which is written entirely in Lady Gregory’s hand (7). His evidence for his conclusions comes from Lady Gregory’s annotations, the fact that the second section of the draft is written on different paper and has more signs of revision indicative of collaboration between two authors, in addition to Yeat’s own recollections on the play, detailed above. 10 That is, The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W.B. Yeats. I owe Pethica for bringing this quote to my attention in “Our Kathleen” (10). 11 Given the Irish penchant for voluntary banishment and exile, the Sirens, exiles of the Enlightenment, and the Irish, exiles of the British, become natural bedfellows; forgotten beings attempting to reclaim their place in the metaphorical and physical world. 12 Kramer cites the following here: No. III of “A Man Young and Old” from The Tower (1928), in Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (London, Macmillan, 1967), 250. 13 Merrit cites Lady Gregory's Diaries I892-I902, ed. By James Pethica (Gerrards Cross: Smythe, I996) p.197 here. 14 Merrit cites Lady Gregory's Diaries I892-I902, ed. By James Pethica (Gerrards Cross: Smythe, I996) p.161 here.

15 Kathleen’s approach and entrance to the Sandycove Martello tower mimics and parodies her approach to the Gillane’s cottage in Yeats and Gregory’s play in several ways. In Cathleen ni Houlihan, Michael Gillane goes to the door to see if the Poor Old Woman Patrick spotted earlier is approaching and calls out her arrival, prompting Peter to quickly hide the dowry received from Delia Cahel’s family. In Ulysses, Haines sees Kathleen the milkwoman approaching, causing Buck Mulligan to shout in surprise as he hurriedly prepares breakfast and the tea for which they need the milk she brings. Peter and Buck offer her food and money in both cases, though she only accepts money from Buck. These similarities allow Stephen to observe Kathleen as a third party (similar to Michael Gillane), while not being implicated in the conversation like Michael by not meeting her at the door. In both instances, Kathleen plays the part of a stranger who remains in the home while seeming at the limit of overstaying her welcome. 16 See Don Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated, l.1.428, “from the west”: “From the Gaeltacht, those remote areas in the west of Ireland where Irish was still in everyday use among the peasants (some of them still monoglot in 1900). Education and commerce in nineteenth-century Ireland had been so dominated by the English language that Irish had all but disappeared from most accessible parts of the country by 1900” (21). 17 Gifford’s annotations provide the last paragraph of Robert Emmet’s last words: “Let no man write my epitaph; for as no man who knows my motives dares now vindicate them, let not prejudice or ignorance asperse them. When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth then and not till then, let my epitaph be written. I have done” (310). 18 The lines Beckett quotes are ll.5.2.142-4. 19 Pountney cites R.U.L. MS. 1227/7/10/1 for this line. 20 These left-behind “worlds” take two forms here. If the eyes are windows to the soul or (being somewhat liberal with our architectural metaphors) portals to the soul, we can think of them as a means of accessing another world, the world of chrysolite which Othello longs for, and defining this world in relation to Krapp will be the job of the later part of this chapter. Additionally, Beckett’s allusion to Shakespeare, a man often touted as the father of English drama and the English language, as Krapp discusses regret is an unexpected move from an author who is famous for his departures from literary and dramatic tradition. 21 Knowlson cites the following here: Notes sent in 1987 to JK, who at the time was preparing an edition of Beckett’s theatrical notebook of Krapp’s Last Tape. 22 The recorded voice contains memories as they are described and narrated on the tape, preserving the details of Krapp’s life. The recorded voice retains memories as a character who recalls living them where Krapp does not.