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THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY of AMERICA Samuel Beckett and The THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA Samuel Beckett and the Irish Bull A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Faculty of the Department of English School of Arts and Sciences Of The Catholic University of America In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree Doctor of Philosophy © Copyright All Rights Reserved By Edmund Campion Walsh Washington, D.C. 2015 Samuel Beckett and the Irish Bull Edmund Campion Walsh, Ph.D. Director: Christopher Wheatley, Ph.D. “What is that unforgettable line?” This question, asked by Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days, epitomizes an enduring tradition for a decidedly non-traditional writer—the Irish bull. As much as he tried to distance himself from it, Beckett was the product of a culture that gave birth to writers from George Farquhar to Sean O’Casey, writers who trafficked in the self-contradictory utterances known as Irish bulls. Beckett’s Irish background and his use of bulls have received scholarly scrutiny in the past, but his place in the long-running tradition of bulls in Irish literature has not been thoroughly examined. Beckett was the inheritor of a legacy that traces back to seventeenth-century joke books and eighteenth-century stage conventions, a legacy kept alive by Maria Edgeworth’s novels, Dion Boucicault’s melodramas, Oscar Wilde’s satires, and the nationalist drama of the Abbey Theatre. By abstracting his settings and characters, Beckett achieved one of the major goals of the Abbey and its Irish predecessors: to reform prejudicial stereotypes found in stage Irish buffoonery. If characters stripped of national identities can utter as many or more bulls than stage Irish characters, self-contradiction is not merely the trait of a colonial people struggling with the English language. Like his predecessors, Beckett penned bulls that transcend buffoonery and take on paradoxical meaning. And like them, he often used bulls for satirical ends, even if the targets of his satire differed. Analysis of the works of numerous Irish writers, culminating in Beckett, bears this out. This dissertation has two main objectives: to describe a history of bulls by Irish writers; and to consider Beckett’s bulls in plays, short stories, and novels more synchronically, focusing on his era and his own writing. With Beckett’s help, the Irish bull has survived in the postmodern era as an unstable, problematic trope in an increasingly internationalized world. The chapters are as follow: Introduction; I. “Low and Pert”: Early History of the Irish Bull; II. Maria Edgeworth and Bulls in the Romantic Age; III. Boucicault and Wilde: Hiberno-Victorian Subversives; IV. “A Parrot Talks”: Bulls and the Abbey Theatre; V. Beckett’s Bulls: “A Logic in Absurdum”; and Conclusion. ii Acknowledgements I am thankful to Dr. Christopher Wheatley for his prompt and pithy comments and support during the drafting process; to Dr. Rosemary Winslow and Dr. Gregory Baker for their insightful feedback and help; to the Catholic University of America Writing Center for keeping me focused and productive; and to my parents, especially my mother who inspired this dissertation through her careful reading and analysis of my work. iii Table of Contents Introduction Page 1 Chapter I: “Low and Pert”: Early History of the Irish Bull Page 13 Chapter II: Maria Edgeworth and Bulls in the Romantic Age Page 62 Chapter III: Boucicault and Wilde: Hiberno-Victorian Subversives Page 99 Chapter IV: “A Parrot Talks”: Bulls and the Abbey Theatre Page 142 Chapter V: Beckett’s Bulls: “A Logic in Absurdum” Page 185 Conclusion Page 234 iv Introduction What is that unforgettable line? (1986 Beckett 160). This question, asked by Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days, epitomizes an enduring tradition for a decidedly non-traditional writer—the Irish bull. As much as he tried to distance himself from it, Beckett was the product of a culture that gave birth to writers from George Farquhar to Sean O’Casey, writers who trafficked in the self-contradictory utterances known as Irish bulls. Beckett’s Irish background and his use of bulls have received scholarly scrutiny in the past, but his place in the long-running tradition of bulls in Irish literature has not been thoroughly examined. Beckett was the inheritor of a legacy that traces back to seventeenth- century joke books and eighteenth-century stage conventions, a legacy kept alive by Maria Edgeworth’s novels, Dion Boucicault’s melodramas, Oscar Wilde’s satires, and the nationalist drama of the Abbey Theatre. By abstracting his settings and characters, Beckett achieved one of the major goals of the Abbey and its Irish predecessors: to reform prejudicial stereotypes found in stage Irish buffoonery. If characters stripped of national identities can utter as many or more bulls than stage Irish characters, self-contradiction is not merely the trait of a colonial people struggling with the English language. Like his predecessors, Beckett penned bulls that transcend buffoonery and take on paradoxical meaning. And like them, he often used bulls for satirical ends, even if the targets of his satire differed. Analysis of the works of numerous Irish writers, culminating in Beckett, will bear this out. 1 2 A Long Tradition of Self-Contradiction Since the 1600s authors sympathetic to Ireland used absurd language as a way of endearing Irish stage characters to audiences, transcending the folly, confusion, and stupidity that might be associated with these convoluted statements. Contortions of conventional English usage could be a source of comedy and figurative invention, rather than merely satire aimed at the people speaking them. The degree of sympathy and respect for bull-speakers varied greatly over time and among audiences. By 1803 in Essay on Irish Bulls, Maria and Richard Edgeworth dramatized the hypocrisy of some English observations about Irish forms of speech. In a two- chapter play within the essay, “Bath Coach Conversation,” the authors introduce a character known as the Englishman who acknowledges a double standard often involved in English perceptions of Irish speech: what is deemed poetic when spoken by the title character of Shakespeare’s Macbeth is seen as mere confusion coming from an Irish speaker. The Englishman observes: “To make assurance doubly sure.” Now there is an example in our great Shakspeare of what I have often observed, that we English allow our poets and ourselves a licence of speech that we deny to our Hibernian neighbours. If an Irishman, instead of Shakspeare, had talked of making ‘assurance doubly sure,’ we should have asked how that could be. The vulgur in England are too apt to catch at every slip of the tongue made by Irishmen. (Edgeworth 68) Some 14 years after the Edgeworths’ work, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote in Biographia Literaria about the speech construction known as the Irish bull after quoting the Macbeth witches’ alliterative opening observation that “fair is foul and foul is fair.” Using the Edgeworths’ Essay as a source, Coleridge, stated that bulls—whether or not spoken by the Irish—involve “bringing together two incompatible thoughts, with the sensation, but without the sense, of their connection” (75). Bulls, he notes, can make audiences feel superior for their 3 ability to detect them and laugh at them. Coleridge’s passage on bulls bring to mind John Keats’ brief remarks on negative capability, remarks recorded in a letter the younger poet wrote soon after Biographia Literaria was published and possibly under its influence (Wigod 384). Keats ascribed to Shakespeare this negative capability, a predisposition for “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (60). Negative capability allows for the semi-truths and self-contradictory insights that can be found in many bulls; it values sensations without immediately apparent logical sense. The Edgeworths and the English Romantics were not the first or last to cast bulls in a positive light. In Farquhar’s The Stage-Coach, a decades-long commercial success from its first London performance in 1704, Captain Basil describes one of his travelling company as a “booby” and a “coxcomb” but also as “an Irish Wit” and “the profound Teague with his Nonsense”; while Macahone, the Irish wit, speaks bulls such as the description of his home in Tipperary, where there is “my Mansionhouse for me and my Predecessors after me” (15,16). In Robert Howard’s early-Restoration play The Committee; or the Faithful Irishman, the stage Irishman, while buffoonish, is not the most ridiculous of the characters and proves both loyal and crafty in helping the Cavalier protagonists. Casting back further still, Vivian Mercier traces Ireland’s comic tradition to the earliest Gaelic literature, a tradition with “a bent for wild humor, a delight in witty word play, and a tendency to regard satire as one of the indispensable functions of the literary man” (vii). For audiences, a bull can indicate mere stupidity, struggle with a foreign and imperial language, sarcasm, or a figurative trope that surpasses its superficial incongruities. For example, Teague in The Committee commits a bull by comically mistaking the notion of “taking the covenant,” in the sense of taking an oath of loyalty, with taking or stealing a physical document. Rather than mere buffoonery, this confusion spotlights the 4 injustice of requiring oaths of loyalty at all. The more negative sense of bulls and stage Irishry in general tended to emerge when political tensions flared between Ireland and England (Earls 15- 16, Leerssen 108-113). They could be understood by English cultural imperialists as a linguistic emblem of the nativist corruption colonial authorities had feared for centuries of their rule (Crowley 27). Irish bulls generated more negative inferences about the Irish following the Great Famine. Bulls, which had often previously been an audience-charming stage convention, entered in the nineteenth century into a new “realist frame, asking to be taken as real-life utterances overheard on-the-fly and written down” (Moore 2).
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