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Date: Faculty { Print} :_ Date: Faculty {Signature): Date: Faculty {Print) : Date: Faculty {Signature): Date: 2 of 2 I The Mythical Siren in Yeats, Joyce and Beckett by 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. 1 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 2 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. 4 I 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). 5 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).