DOCSLIB.ORG

Ann Banfield

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Ann Banfield 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).
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Samuel Beckett's Peristaltic Modernism, 1932-1958 Adam
    ‘FIRST DIRTY, THEN MAKE CLEAN’: SAMUEL BECKETT’S PERISTALTIC MODERNISM, 1932-1958 ADAM MICHAEL WINSTANLEY PhD THE UNIVERSITY OF YORK DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND RELATED LITERATURE MARCH 2013 1 ABSTRACT Drawing together a number of different recent approaches to Samuel Beckett’s studies, this thesis examines the convulsive narrative trajectories of Beckett’s prose works from Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1931-2) to The Unnamable (1958) in relation to the disorganised muscular contractions of peristalsis. Peristalsis is understood here, however, not merely as a digestive process, as the ‘propulsive movement of the gastrointestinal tract and other tubular organs’, but as the ‘coordinated waves of contraction and relaxation of the circular muscle’ (OED). Accordingly, this thesis reconciles a number of recent approaches to Beckett studies by combining textual, phenomenological and cultural concerns with a detailed account of Beckett’s own familiarity with early twentieth-century medical and psychoanalytical discourses. It examines the extent to which these discourses find a parallel in his work’s corporeal conception of the linguistic and narrative process, where the convolutions, disavowals and disjunctions that function at the level of narrative and syntax are persistently equated with medical ailments, autonomous reflexes and bodily emissions. Tracing this interest to his early work, the first chapter focuses upon the masturbatory trope of ‘dehiscence’ in Dream of Fair to Middling Women, while the second examines cardiovascular complaints in Murphy (1935-6). The third chapter considers the role that linguistic constipation plays in Watt (1941-5), while the fourth chapter focuses upon peristalsis and rumination in Molloy (1947). The penultimate chapter examines the significance of epilepsy, dilation and parturition in the ‘throes’ that dominate Malone Dies (1954-5), whereas the final chapter evaluates the significance of contamination and respiration in The Unnamable (1957-8).
    [Show full text]
  • Samuel Beckett (1906- 1989) Was Born in Dublin. He Was One of the Leading Dramatists and Writers of the Twentieth Century. in Hi
    Samuel Beckett (1906- 1989) was born in Dublin. He was one of the leading t dramatists and writers of the twentieth century. In his theatrical images and t prose writings, Beckett achieved a spare beauty and timeless vision of human suffering, shot through with dark comedy and humour. His 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature citation praised him for ‘a body of work that in new forms of fiction and the theatre has transmuted the destitution of modern man into his exaltation’. A deeply shy and sensitive man, he was often kind and generous both to friends and strangers. Although witty and warm with his close friends, he was intensely private and refused to be interviewed or have any part in promoting his books or plays. Yet Beckett’s thin angular countenance, with its deep furrows, cropped grey hair, long beak- like nose and gull-like eyes is one of the iconic faces of the twentieth century. Beckett himself acknowledged the impression his Irish origin left on his imagination. Though he spent most of his life in Paris and wrote in French as well as English, he always held an Irish passport. His language and dialogue have an Irish cadence and syntax. He was influenced by Becke many of his Irish forebears, Jonathan Swift, J.M. Synge, William and Jack Butler Yeats, and particularly by his friend and role model, James Joyce. When a journalist asked Beckett if he was English, he replied, simply, ‘Au contraire’. Family_ Beckett was born on Good Friday, 13th April 1906, in the affluent village of Foxrock, eight miles south of Dublin.
    [Show full text]
  • The Evocation of the Physical, Metaphysical, and Sonic Landscapes in Samuel Beckett's Short Dramatic Works
    Trinity College Trinity College Digital Repository Senior Theses and Projects Student Scholarship Spring 2012 The Evocation of the Physical, Metaphysical, and Sonic Landscapes in Samuel Beckett's Short Dramatic Works Theresa A. Incampo Trinity College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/theses Part of the Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory Commons, Performance Studies Commons, and the Theatre History Commons Recommended Citation Incampo, Theresa A., "The Evocation of the Physical, Metaphysical, and Sonic Landscapes in Samuel Beckett's Short Dramatic Works". Senior Theses, Trinity College, Hartford, CT 2012. Trinity College Digital Repository, https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/theses/209 The Evocation of the Physical, Metaphysical and Sonic Landscapes within the Short Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett Submitted by Theresa A. Incampo May 4, 2012 Trinity College Department of Theater and Dance Hartford, CT 2 Table of Contents Acknowledgements 5 I: History Time, Space and Sound in Beckett’s short dramatic works 7 A historical analysis of the playwright’s theatrical spaces including the concept of temporality, which is central to the subsequent elements within the physical, metaphysical and sonic landscapes. These landscapes are constructed from physical space, object, light, and sound, so as to create a finite representation of an expansive, infinite world as it is perceived by Beckett’s characters.. II: Theory Phenomenology and the conscious experience of existence 59 The choice to focus on the philosophy of phenomenology centers on the notion that these short dramatic works present the theatrical landscape as the conscious character perceives it to be. The perceptual experience is explained by Maurice Merleau-Ponty as the relationship between the body and the world and the way as to which the self-limited interior space of the mind interacts with the limitless exterior space that surrounds it.
    [Show full text]
  • The Writing of the Words Upon the Window-Pane
    Colby Quarterly Volume 17 Issue 2 June Article 3 June 1981 "Out of a Medium's Mouth" the Writing of The Words Upon the Window-pane Mary Fitzgerald Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq Recommended Citation Colby Library Quarterly, Volume 17, no.2, June 1981, p.61-73 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Colby. It has been accepted for inclusion in Colby Quarterly by an authorized editor of Digital Commons @ Colby. Fitzgerald: "Out of a Medium's Mouth" the Writing of The Words Upon the Windo "Out of a medium's mouth": the Writing of The Words upon the Window-pane by MARY FITZGERALD NSCRIBING James A. Healy's copy of the Cuala Press edition of The I Words upon the Window-pane (1934), W. B. Yeats noted: "I wrote this playas a help to bring back a part of the Irish mind which we have been thrusting out as it were foreign. Now that our period of violent protest is over we claim the Anglo-Irish eighteenth century as our own." 1 Although this affirmation of the Anglo-Irish protestant ascen­ dancy was a new theme for Yeats's plays, it was already familiar to readers of his poetry and prose. He had given it defiant and memorable formulation on 11 June 1925 in an address to the Irish Senate: ...I am proud to consider myself a typical man of that [Anglo-Irish] minority. We ... are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Europe.
    [Show full text]
  • Travels with Samuel Beckett, 1928-1946
    Beyond the Cartesian Pale: Travels with Samuel Beckett, 1928-1946 Charles Travis [I]t is the act and not the object of perception that matters. Samuel Beckett, “Recent Irish Poetry,” e Bookman (1934).1 Introduction he Irish Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett’s (1902-1989) early writings of the 1930s and 1940s depict the cities of Dublin, London and Saint-Lô Tin post-war France, with affective, comedic and existential flourishes, respectively. These early works, besides reflecting the experience of Beckett’s travels through interwar Europe, illustrate a shift in his literary perspective from a latent Cartesian verisimilitude to a more phenomenological, frag- mented and dissolute impression of place. This evolution in Beckett’s writing style exemplifies a wider transformation in perception and thought rooted in epistemological, cultural and philosophical trends associated with the Conti- nental avant garde emerging in the wake of the fin de siècle. As Henri Lefeb- vre has noted: Around 1910, the main reference systems of social practice in Eu- rope disintegrated and even collapsed. What had seemed estab- lished for good during the belle époque of the bourgeoisie came to an end: in particular, space and time, their representation and real- ity indissociably linked. In scientific knowledge, the old Euclidian and Newtonian space gave way to Einsteinian relativity. But at the same time, as is evident from the painting of the period—Cézanne first of all, then analytical Cubism—perceptible space and per- spective disintegrated. The line of horizon, optical meeting-point of parallel lines, disappeared from paintings.2 At the age of fourteen, Beckett, a son of the Protestant Anglo Irish bourgeoisie, witnessed in the largely Catholic nationalist uprising in Ireland, something Charles Travis is at Trinity College Dublin, Long Room Hub.
    [Show full text]
  • Call No. Responsibility Item Publication Details Date Note 1
    Call no. Responsibility Item Publication details Date Note TKNC0001 Roberts, H. Song, to a gay measure Dublin: printed at the Dolmen 1951 "200 copies." Neville Press TKNC0002 Promotional notice for Travelling tinkers, a book of Dolmen Press ballads by Sigerson Clifford TKNC0003 Promotional notice for Freebooters by Mauruce Kennedy Dolmen Press TKNC0004 Advertisement for Dolmen Press Greeting cards &c Dolmen Press TKNC0005 The reporter: the magazine of facts and ideas. Volume July 16, 1964 contains 'In the 31 no. 2 beginning' (verse) by Thomas Kinsella TKNC0006 Clifford, Travelling tinkers Dublin: Dolmen Press 1951 Of one hundred special Sigerson copies signed by the author this is number 85. Insert note from Thomas Kinsella. TKNC0007 Kinsella, Thomas The starlit eye / Thomas Kinsella ; drawings by Liam Dublin: Dolmen Press 1952 Set and printed by hand Miller at the Dolmen Press, Dublin, in an edition of 175 copies. March 1952. (p. [8]). TKNC0008 Kinsella, Thomas Galley proof of Poems [Glenageary, County Dublin]: 1956 Galley proof Dolmen Press TKNC0009 Kinsella, Thomas The starlit eye / Thomas Kinsella ; drawings by Liam Dublin : Dolmen Press 1952 Of twenty five special Miller copies signed by the author this is number 20. Set and printed by hand at the Dolmen Press, Dublin, in an edition of 175 copies. March 1952. TKNC0010 Promotional postcard for Love Duet from the play God's Dolmen Press gentry by Donagh MacDonagh TKNC0011 Irish writing. No. 24 Special issue - Young writers issue Dublin Sep-53 1 Thomas Kinsella Collection Listing Call no. Responsibility Item Publication details Date Note TKNC0012 Promotional notice for Dolmen Chapbook 3, The perfect Dolmen Press 1955 wife a fable by Robert Gibbings with wood engravings by the author TKNC0013 Pat and Mick Broadside no.
    [Show full text]
  • "The Given Note": Traditional Music and Modern Irish Poetry
    Provided by the author(s) and NUI Galway in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite the published version when available. Title "The Given Note": traditional music and modern Irish poetry Author(s) Crosson, Seán Publication Date 2008 Publication Crosson, Seán. (2008). "The Given Note": Traditional Music Information and Modern Irish Poetry, by Seán Crosson. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Publisher Cambridge Scholars Publishing Link to publisher's http://www.cambridgescholars.com/the-given-note-25 version Item record http://hdl.handle.net/10379/6060 Downloaded 2021-09-26T13:34:31Z Some rights reserved. For more information, please see the item record link above. "The Given Note" "The Given Note": Traditional Music and Modern Irish Poetry By Seán Crosson Cambridge Scholars Publishing "The Given Note": Traditional Music and Modern Irish Poetry, by Seán Crosson This book first published 2008 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2008 by Seán Crosson All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-84718-569-X, ISBN (13): 9781847185693 Do m’Athair agus mo Mháthair TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements .................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • The Yiddishists
    THE YIDDISHISTS OUR SERIES DELVES INTO THE TREASURES OF THE WORLD’S BIGGEST YIDDISH ARCHIVE AT YIVO INSTITUTE FOR JEWISH RESEARCH From top: Illustration from Kleyne Mentshelekh (Tiny Little People), a Yiddish adaptation of Gulliver’s Travels published in Poland, 1925. The caption reads, “With great effort I liberated my left hand.”; cover page for Kleyne Mentshelekh Manger was not the only 20th-century Yiddish-speaking Jew to take an interest in Swift’s 18th-century works. Between 1907 and 1939, there were at least five Yiddish translations and adaptations of Gulliver’s Travels published in the United States, Poland and Russia. One such edition, published in 1925 by Farlag Yudish, a publishing house that specialised in Yiddish translations of literary classics, appeared in their Kinder-bibliotek (Children’s Library) series alongside other beloved books such as Harriet Beecher GULLIVER IN YIDDISHLAND Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Edith Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle and fairytales by the Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett were just some brothers Grimm. Literature and journals THE YIDDISHISTS of the Anglo-Irish and Irish writers whose work was translated and for children and youth, both those written specifically in Yiddish and those translated adapted by 20th-century Yiddishists, says Stefanie Halpern into the language, were a lucrative branch of Yiddish publishing in the interwar n his 1942 poem ‘A Song of the Dean of Stella’s golden brooch, a reference to ‘A period. Such material became especially Jonathan Swift and the Yiddish Journal to Stella’, Swift’s 1766 work based important with the establishment of a IRhyme-maker Itzik Manger’, the poet on letters he sent to his real-life lover Yiddish secular school network across and playwright Itzik Manger imagines a Esther Johnson.
    [Show full text]
  • “No Man Is an Island” ½™¾—— National Literary Canons, Writers, and Readers
    “No Man is an Island” ½¾—— National Literary Canons, Writers, and Readers LYN INNES ENEDICT ANDERSON HAS ARGUED FOR the importance of literature in the creation of an imagined national community through the B stories we tell about ourselves.1 However, it is not only the stories we tell about ourselves but the story we tell about the stories that becomes significant in the formation of national identity or, in other words, the creation of a national literary canon with its inclusions and exclusions. That narrative also entails the ways and contexts in which we are encouraged to read those texts – the questions we ask of them, the themes we emphasize, the frame- works and structures we set up to establish continuity, a story of a developing and grounded national literature. The resulting national literary history is, more often than not, a remarkably insular one. As Joe Cleary has remarked in his excellent book Outrageous Fortune,2 the literary historiography of the Irish novel is itself seen as a kind of Bildungsroman, tracing it from its infant ‘origins’ towards a kind of maturity, often along the lines of Ian Watt’s “rise of the novel.”3 Moreover, specific texts are selected to act as ‘milestones’ or, in T.S. Eliot’s term, “monuments,” 1 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflecting on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 2 Joe Cleary, Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland (Dublin: Field Day, 2007). 3 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (1957; Berkeley: U of California P, 2001).
    [Show full text]
  • Irish Quotes
    Irish Quotes No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating. Oscar Wilde The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything. Oscar Wilde Peter O’ Toole was once asked what was his favorite Irish food: “My number one choice is Guinness. My number two choice would be Guinness. My number three choice would have to be Guinness.” Peter O'Toole. "A Kerry footballer with an inferiority complex is one who thinks he's just as good as everybody else." - Author John B. Keane The rain drove us into the church - our refuge, our strength, our only dry place...Limerick gained a reputation for piety, but we knew it was only the rain. Frank McCourt "Making peace, I have found, is much harder than making war." - Gerry Adams "The immigrant's heart marches to the beat of two quite different drums, one from the old homeland and the other from the new. The immigrant has to bridge these two worlds, living comfortably in the new and bringing the best of his or her ancient identity and heritage to bear on life in an adopted homeland." - Irish President McAleese I think there's a bit of the devil in everybody. There's a bit of a priest in everybody, too, but I enjoyed playing the devil more. He was more fun. Gabriel Byrne "I spent 90% of my money on women and drink. The rest I wasted." - Soccer star George Best "It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious." Oscar Wilde "We have always found the Irish a bit odd.
    [Show full text]
  • Habituation and the Aesthetics of Disenchantment in Proust's Search of Lost Time Vols. I-II
    City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works School of Arts & Sciences Theses Hunter College Spring 5-15-2020 Habituation and the Aesthetics of Disenchantment in Proust’s Search of Lost Time vols. I-II Hayley C. Nusbaum CUNY Hunter College How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/hc_sas_etds/593 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] Habituation and the Aesthetics of Disenchantment in Proust’s Search of Lost Time vols. I-II by Hayley Nusbaum Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Literature, Language, and Theory, Hunter College The City University of New York [2020] 05/15/2020 Nico Israel Date Thesis Sponsor 05/15/2020 Gavin Hollis Date Second Reader Nusbaum I Table of Contents Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 1 Habit Definition and Etymology .............................................................................................. 6 Philosophical Tradition of Habit ............................................................................................. 8 Swann In “Love” ..................................................................................................................... 17 At Mme Swann’s ....................................................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • 2. Seamus Heaney (1936– )
    Anglo-Irish satirist, essayst, political pamphleteer (first for the Whigs, then for the Tories), poet and cleric who became Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. He is probably the foremost prose satirist in the English language with his huge success Gulliver’s Travels (1726). 8. JONATHAN SWIFT • 1667: born in Dublin, he alternated his childhood years and his youth between England and Ireland where he graduated. • 1688: back in England, he accepted a position as secretary to Sir William Temple, a scholar and an important retired Whig statesman. • 1690: he became a victim to Ménière’s disease, a disorder of the inner ear that affected his balance with fits of vertigo and progressive hearing loss. 1694: ordained as an Anglican minister, he was sent to Kilroot but in 1695 he returned to work for Sir William (till the latter’s death four years later) and completed his works The Battle of the Books (1697) and A Tale of a Tub, written for the universal improvement of mankind (1704). 2 8. JONATHAN SWIFT 1699: back in England, he accepted a position in the church, living near Esther Johnson, his beloved Stella. 1710: politically active again, he wrote sharp-tongued political satire, as the editor of the Tory weekly “Examiner”. 1713: made Dean of St. Patrick’s he returned to Ireland but the Whig return to power quenched his expectations of a career – he started writing in support of Irish causes soon becoming a national hero. 1726: the manuscript of Gulliver’s Travels was published anonymously in London and it was an immediate HIT!! 1738 – 1744: he was tormented by his sickness, suffering great pain and showing signs of madness till he died in 17453 .
    [Show full text]