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Postmodern Writings of James Joyce, Flann O'brien, and Samuel Beckett Andrew V Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2010 How the Irish Ended History: Postmodern Writings of James Joyce, Flann O'Brien, and Samuel Beckett Andrew V. McFeaters Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES HOW THE IRISH ENDED HISTORY: POSTMODERN WRITINGS OF JAMES JOYCE, FLANN O‘BRIEN, AND SAMUEL BECKETT By ANDREW V. MCFEATERS A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2010 The members of the committee approve the dissertation of Andrew V. McFeaters defended on April 30, 2010. ____________________________________ S.E. Gontarski Professor Directing Dissertation ____________________________________ William J. Cloonan University Representative ____________________________________ R.M. Berry Committee Member ____________________________________ Andrew Epstein Committee Member Approved: __________________________________________ R.M. Berry, Chair, Department of English The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members. ii For Eliezane, my muse, without whom I still would be sitting still on that sidewalk all those years ago. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Stan Gontarski for his inestimable support and guidance over the years. His many insights on the works of Samuel Beckett and James Joyce are the turning-points upon which the fire of intellect is fed. I thank, too, the other members of my committee: Ralph Berry, Andrew Epstein, and William Cloonan. Their advice and support has been of invaluable service to the growth of my work. Thanks, also, to Amit Rai, a paragon of dynamic energy and innovative ideas. To be sure, the collective think tank of Florida State University‘s Finnegans Wake Reading Group has been a source of unending inspiration and stimulation over the years, and so a heartfelt thanks goes out to my friends and colleagues, Dustin Anderson, Zachary Hanson, Andrew Baumann, Fred Von Drasek, Amber Coady, Chris Sekulksi, and Nick Morris, the punsters and pranksters of our makeshift Phoenix Park. I thank also Carolyn Hall, Tara Stamm, and Stephanie Cameron Kennedy, the collective wheels and will of Florida State University‘s English Department. Above all, I thank my partner in life and crime, Eliezane, whose bountiful love and support has kept, keeps, and will always keep me going forward on the Liffey of life. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures............................................................................................................................ vi Abstract..................................................................................................................................... vii 1. AN INTRODUCTION: HIBERNIA, HYPERBOLE, AND THE HYPERREAL............................................................................................. 1 2. A JOYCEAN WAKING OF HISTORIES........................................................................... 12 3. THE MÖBIUS MUSEYROOM OF FINNEGANS WAKE................................................... 23 4. O‘BRIEN‘S HERETICAL ENDINGS................................................................................. 37 5. SAMUEL BECKETT‘S SHORT PLAYS: THE STAGING OF SUBTRACTED HISTORIES................................................................................. 49 6. BECKETT‘S THREE NOVELS AND THE MOMENT OF ONTOLOGICAL PASTICHE............................................................................... 61 7. A CONCLUSION: TRANSHIPTING HISTORIES.............................................................. 73 REFERENCES......................................................................................................................... 78 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.................................................................................................... 84 v LIST OF FIGURES 1. Irish Famine Memorial Photo A............................................................................................. 73 2. Irish Famine Memorial Photo B............................................................................................. 74 vi ABSTRACT How the Irish Ended History: Postmodern Writings of James Joyce, Flann O’Brien, and Samuel Beckett, forming a pun based on Thomas Cahill‘s popular book, How the Irish Saved Civilization, takes as its subject, not the monks who preserved history through scholarly diligence during the so-called Dark Ages, but three 20th Century Irish writers who, in reaction to the ideological pressures and limits of Irish nationalist forces, marry cultural representation with experimental writing with the following result: the end of history. James Joyce, Flann O‘Brien (nom de plume of Brian Ó Nualláin), and Samuel Beckett interrogate and complicate the notion of the archive as that which stores and disseminates factive and fictive histories. While Joyce‘s Finnegans Wake, through the collapse of the real and the imaginary in the image of the museyroom (museum), formulates the cure to Stephen Dedalus‘s nightmare in Ulysses, history being the ―nightmare from which [he is] trying to wake,‖ O‘Brien‘s The Third Policeman and The Dalkey Archive corrupt reality with alternative histories that recover the heretical thinking of the nonlinear. The supernatural world of The Third Policeman is, in fact, the product of a bureaucratic machine that rewrites the laws of time and space; whereas The Dalkey Archive reduces the eschatological and the catastrophic to the quotidian and the anticlimactic. Finally, Beckett contracts history into the moment of memory, complicating distinctions between excavation and invention in consciousness itself. While Krapp’s Last Tape and That Time expose nostalgia as conscious, creative event, What Where and Catastrophe gesture towards a moment that has yet to be staged. Beckett‘s Three Novels, on the other hand, unseats the image from distinctions between recollection, imagination, and perception as it suggests a new kind of non-representational image in place of narrative subjectivity. The writings of Joyce, O‘Brien, and Beckett effect critiques of conventionalized modes of historicity through discursive maneuvers. By destabilizing signifying relations, constructing systems of paradox, and complicating figures of archives, their writings produce a radical reconfiguration of historical understanding that supplants linearity with an aesthetics of simultaneity. The figure of the archive plays a central role in the historical dynamism generated by these authors‘ works, as it gestures beyond its function as mere repository of past events and formulates a historical sensibility that prefigures postmodern conditions. vii CHAPTER ONE AN INTRODUCTION: HIBERNIA, HYPERBOLE, AND THE HYPERREAL The title How the Irish Ended History: Postmodern Writings of James Joyce, Flann O’Brien, and Samuel Beckett forms a pun based on Thomas Cahill‘s popular book, How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995). Each title gestures towards the hyperbolic, a rhetorical strategy common to Irish literature, and each communicates a sense of finality. The implication of Cahill‘s book is that civilization would have ended had Irish scribes not recorded and maintained, like curators of history, so many of the literary and philosophical efforts of Western Civilization. Such an argument is premised on a specific idea of history, as if history can follow but one path, an idea vaguely theological and certainly, in this case, Eurocentric in its implications. Cahill asks some revealing questions about history before attempting to recover his island of saints and sages: ―How real is history? Is it just an enormous soup, so full of disparate ingredients that it is uncharacterizable? Is it true, as Emil Cioran has remarked, that history proves nothing because it contains everything? Is not the reverse side of this that history can be made to say whatever we wish it to‖ (5)? These questions acknowledge the malleable nature of history, as an archival discourse determined by the cultural biases of nations, institutions, and historiographers. Furthermore, the idea that history contains everything does more than expose history as narrative; it exposes history as a multiplicity of narratives and undermines the notion of history as a grand narrative. In Trieste, James Joyce proclaimed in his 1907 lecture, ―Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages‖: ―It is well past time for Ireland to have done once and for all with failure. If she is truly capable of reviving, let her awake, or let her cover up her head and lie down decently in her grave forever‖ (174). While the efforts of Irish nationalism would eventually succeed in waking an independent Ireland, even if involving mixed results, Joyce‘s words prophesize ironically another kind of waking. His Finnegans Wake, often cited for its excess of histories, effects an end to teleological history itself. The subject of the present study focuses on a time period other than Cahill‘s, one that has more to do with how specific writers 1 were more concerned with complicating rather than founding archives upon which notions of identity, nationalist or otherwise, can be grounded. The writings of James Joyce, Flann O‘Brien (nom de plume of Brian Ó Nualláin), and Samuel Beckett effect critiques of conventionalized modes of historicity through discursive maneuvers. By destabilizing
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