Ann Banfeld “PROUST’S PESSIMISM” AS BECKETT’S COUNTER-POISON n obsession with generation traverses Samuel Beckett’s work. It is, to Aborrow Beckett’s phrase from Proust (III.260), “a neuralgia rather than a theme” (Proust 22).1 This obsession Beckett inherits from that Anglo-Irish tradition that W. B. Yeats invoked in his 1925 Senate Speech as “that small Protestant band” he, “a typical man of that minority,” was “proud” to belong to: “We are one of the great stocks of Europe,” “the people of Burke . of Grattan, . of Swift, . of Parnell. We have created the most of the modern literature of this country” (Castle 90). Yeats’s Anglo-Irish “band” are old men who survive when “All’s Whiggery now,” resisting that “levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind” (“The Seven Sages” 252) he saw as largely Catholic. “That is no country for old men,” the 1927 “Sailing to Byzantium” begins (204). “The young/In one another’s arms, birds in the trees,/ —Those dying generations—at their song,/The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,/Fish, fesh, or fowl, commend all summer long/ Whatever is begotten, born and dies.” “That country,” with its salmon-falls, is recognizably Ireland, from which Yeats sailed to Ravenna in 1924, the year the Free State was founded. It is also recognizably Ireland by its perceived fertility, despite demographic decline from famine and emigration (Whelan 59). In Yeats’s anxious vision, generation is frst this fertile, cyclic tide of life, the Catholic majority, threatening to overwhelm the band of old men “massed against the world” (“Under Ben Bulben” 356): “We Irish, born into that ancient sect/But thrown upon this flthy modern tide/And by its form- less, spawning, fury wrecked” (“The Statues” 362). Against this background, Yeats places Irish literary history. The old men are scarecrows, sterile, excluded from the democratic tide of life, a minority among the majority: “All hated Whiggery.” “Goldsmith and the Dean, Berkeley and Burke . / Swift,” whose heart “had dragged him down into mankind,” all “Cast but dead leaves to mathematical equality” (“Blood and the Moon” 243). 1. I thank Ann Smock and David Lloyd for sharing their rich knowledge of the French and the Irish Beckett. I quote Beckett in French when the original was in French or translated by Beckett himself, with a few exceptions where the English wording adds to my argument. The Romanic Review Volume 100 Numbers 1–2 © The Trustees of Columbia University 188 Ann Banfield This line connects generation to population. The Irish population problem was what Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal pretended to solve, making that connection explicit: “It would greatly lessen the number of Papists, with whom we are yearly over-run, being the principal breeders of the nation,” Swift’s Protestant persona states, with the exclusive “we,” like Yeats’s “we old men.” The lower classes were characteristically “the numerous classes.” The Anglo-Irish horror pleni is the fear the frst term—“anglo”—will be absorbed by the second, “dragged down” into mankind, paradigmatically Catholic Irishkind. Oscar Wilde put what was at stake several months after his release from prison, “I am now simply a pauper of a rather low order” and “also a pathological problem in the eyes of German scientists: . I am tabulated, and come under the law of averages! Quantum mutatus!”2 From the perspective of generations, the individual is merely a case history, a member of a class. Yeats’s “mathematical equality” is expressed in statistics, which treats great numbers of individuals as alike. Its most characteristic classes are populations. Yeats’s “renowned generations” (“Three Marching Songs” 360) from the cen- sus taker’s viewpoint are no exception to any survey of the Irish. Beckett, too, descends from the Anglo-Irish tradition. He like Wilde was a graduate of Portora Royal School and, like Swift, Wilde, and Synge, of Trinity, Dublin. Beckett’s major protagonists, if Irish, are recognizably Protestant3 and old men: “bah, j’ai toujours été vieux,” the Unnamable says (L’Innommable 187). Half-begotten, they are neither born nor dead—a Beckettian theme— descendants of Swift’s Struldbrugs.4 But their sterility is not straightforwardly coupled with a Yeatsian pride in compensatory literary productivity. If Beckett inherits Yeats’s anxiety, or Swift’s Gulliver’s, terrifed he is a Yahoo, whatever his ironic distance, his stand-offshness, from things Irish-Catholic, his horror of the crowd was never the cultured Protestant’s contempt for the Catholic masses nor even acknowledgement of kinship with reservations for “these 2. In Bristow 199. “Quantum mutatus” is the comment made of Ticklepenny, fallen from poet to male nurse in a mental hospital (Murphy 67). 3. The speaker of “L’Expulsé” clearly sees the Catholic as “the famous other,” watch- ing a funeral pass with “un papillotement de mille et mille doigts” and commenting that “si j’en étais réduit à me signer j’aurais à cœur de le faire comme il faut” and not like “eux” (Nouvelles, 23–4); he uses the typically Beckettian paranoid “they,” whose mark is to lack an antecedent. The generic present—“font”—makes it even clearer that “ils” belong to a larger class of which the present mourners are members. Surely Watt looks at Mr. Spiro, editor of Crux, “the popular Catholic monthly,” from the distance of difference. Mr. and Mrs. Rooney are identifed as Protestant. Of the major Beckett characters, only Moran is Catholic, the exception that proves the rule. 4. “Beckett’s characters . are usually old . Swift portrayed the superannuated in his Struldbrugs, who however do not speak; Beckett’s Struldbrugs do little else” (Ellmann 103). “Proust’s Pessimism” as Beckett’s Counter-Poison 189 Christs that die upon the barricades” of Wilde’s “Sonnet to Liberty:” “God knows it I am with them, in some things.”5 Beckett’s treatment of the cycle of generation he inherits with his Protestant exceptionalism took a form at once more abstract and more personal. Gen- eration in Beckett is a formalization of Yeats’s cycle of conception, birth and death, reduced to the process of like begets like. The products are what Beckett calls “brotherly likes” (How It Is 37), his translation of Comment c’est’s “mes semblables et frères” (58), with its Baudelairean echo. Beckett had already used “like” as a substantive in The Unnamable to translate “semblable”: Each new character will “be a like for me,” “un semblable, un congénère” (The Unnamable 378; L’Innommable, 152). The fnal word underscores that “likes” belong to the same species, sharing a similar reproductive origin. The round of generations is the potentially infnite series of “my father’s and my mother’s and my father’s father’s and my mother’s mother’s [earth]” in Watt (46–7). Such series are everywhere in Beckett. Later in Watt, we read of Mr. Graves that “his father had worked for Mr. Knott, and his father’s father, and so on.” “Here then was another series” (143), the text comments, and adds later “Mr Knott too was serial” (253). Yeats’s imperative to remember that restricted subset, the renowned generations, is followed by the warning “Fail and that history turns to rubbish,/All that great past to a trouble of fools” (360). For there is always the threat that the little band will be engulfed by sheer numbers, by fertility itself. Beckett’s series of mother’s mother’s and father’s father’s does turn to rubbish, ending with “An excrement.” But the similarity is partial: Beckett’s rubbish is generated by the series itself and no privileged subset escapes it. It is simply having ancestors and descendents, being born, which is the kiss of death. “Birth was the death of him” (The Collected Shorter Plays 265). An individual is sui generis, stands outside the round of generations like Yeats’s old men. Or, in the formula Beckett borrows from Jung, is not fully born: “il n’y a que moi d’immortel, que voulez-vous, je ne peux pas naître” (L’In- nommable 160). To be born, the Unnamable fears, is to enter the series, be duplicated, cloned. Generation as reproduction of like by like is “à tourner en rond” (Comment c’est 191), revolving “de la spermathèque jusqu’au four crématoire” (Murphy 61), where “the grave sheets serve as swaddling- clothes” (Proust 8) to “naîtr[e] enfn dans un dernier soupir” (L’Innommable 93)—“debout le mort, aux fourches spermatozoïde” (L’Innommable 153). For “The maximum of corruption and the minimum of generation are identical,” 5. “Beckett was more respectful of Yeats” than Wilde, for Yeats “transform[ed] himself from a nineteenth-century writer into a twentieth-century one. Beckett and Yeats met only once” in 1932, when “Yeats astonished Beckett by praising a passage from ‘Whoroscope’” (Ellmann 109–12). 190 Ann Banfield in the formulation of “Dante . Bruno. Vico . Joyce” (21): “moi qui suis en route, de paroles plein les voiles, je suis aussi cet impensable ancêtre dont on ne peut rien dire” (L’Innommable 110). Generation is arithmetical, adding, multiplying, reduplicating like count- able units, over and over, ad infnitum, Beckett’s mathematics being repeated application of the generative principle: “j’ai toujours aimé l’arithmétique elle me l’a bien rendu” (Comment c’est 57). Counting is Beckett’s way of catego- rizing, classifying, whether the sequence of generations, of Kraks, Kreks, and Kriks of frogs in chorus (Watt 137–8), “the multitude of looks,” possible and actual, exchanged by members of a committee (175), the Pims, Pams, Prims, Boms, Bems strung out in the mud in Comment c’est, the series of crawls and falls, affrmations and negations, footfalls, accompanied or not by “l’ombre de ton père” (compagnie 18), a “trotteuse et son ombre dans leur gyration parallèle apparamment sans trêve autour du cadran” of a watch (82).