Samuel Beckett's humor and Gaelic storytelling traditions

¶ … Laughing Leprechaun

While we have all been told at one time or another to avoid stereotypes, even the most unbiased of us tend to have such simplistic views ensconced somewhere in our minds. And so it is that when one thinks of the Irish one is a little too likely to think either of famine or of jollity. Or even both together. For the Irish, and especially Irishmen, can seem congenitally bound up with the idea of the glint in the eye, the whistling wayfarer, the jig at the bar, the leprechaun with his absurd green hat. Irish humor is stereotypically bound up with the idea of making the best of things, of creating step-dancing and reels and stories of faerie out of misery rather than with more mordant forms of humor. It is perhaps for this reason above all that the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett seems to be (or is at least judged as being) so humorless. He is not the Gaelic bard with a "glint in his eye and a glass in his hand" (as in the words of many folksongs) but a man straddling Modernism, looking wryly at the world around him. This paper examines the humor to be found in Beckett's plays and how it is tied both to his moment in literary history and to the older traditions of Gaelic storytelling.

It is hard to know where to begin in describing Samuel Beckett, and so it is of no small comfort to know that one of his primary biographers also seemed to have a difficult time knowing how to set out the writer's origins. "Biographies often begin with a date of birth, the date on which the subject's experiences can be said to begin. In the case of Samuel Beckett there are two difficulties about adopting this simple procedure. One is his claim to have been born on Good Friday, 13 April 1906. The other is his repeated insistence that he had memories of life in his mother's womb." (Cronin 3).

The problem with the first statement is that the official record of his birth does not back this claim up. The problem with the second statement is more complicated.

While generally a truthful man, Beckett may have been to tempted by the attraction of having been born on Good Friday to resist some tweaking of the historical record, for he very much identified with Christ. This feeling of connection, writes Cronin, was neither sacrilegious nor narcissistic, but reflected Beckett's keen understanding of human suffering as exemplified by the human aspects of Christ.

The idea that he had been born on Good Friday, the day of the Saviour's crucifixion, pleased him, more especially since Good Friday happened in 1906 to have been Friday the thirteenth. What better birth-date could there be for someone so conscious of the suffering which underlies human existence; and conscious also that misfortune, in comic or tragic guise, awaited every venture and departure? In a late work, Company, which is highly autobiographical, the coincidence of his birth-date with the day of the Saviour's death is emphasized.

'You were born on an Easter Friday after long labour...' And: 'You first saw the light and cried at the close of the day when in darkness Christ at the ninth hour cried and died.' Not only was Beckett pleased with the Christ connection involved in having been born on a Good Friday, but he was never averse to introducing analogies and comparisons between Christ's life-story and those of his degraded characters (Cronin 3-4).

As Spender, writing a review of Beckett in 1958, would summarize this aspect of the Irish playwright's work, Beckett is continually drawn to the "foetal position to describe life, all the life of his unnamable non-heroes." Beckett hops from one childhood to the next, like a religious fanatic leaping from one burning coal to the next, as his characters (in his autobiographical works) relentlessly pursue their " the search for identity of the about-to-be born, the loss of identity of the senescent."

There is humor in this, certainly, as there is always humor in an accurate description of the human condition. But it is humor-at-a-reserve, the quiet laugh of the observer.

Such a balance between the infantile and the senescent -- those two states of human development during which the individual is both the most deserving of compassion and the most likely to be the recipient of scorn. Beckett may well have associated such a combination of contempt and compassion with the ways in which the world viewed Ireland and the Irish. Much of the humor in his plays (as well as in the rest of his writings) arises from his awareness of the misery into which he plunges his characters and the ways in which they carry on, defending their humanity even as they are reduced scene by scene to an utter lack of humanity.

As Taubman wrote in his 1961 review of Happy Days, Beckett can be funny even in the middle of the most poignant descriptions of despair. Humor for Beckett arises most often and most effectively from his exploitation of incongruity, and his favorite incongruity is that between the misery of life and the hope that humans persist in carrying with them.

Like his earlier plays, Mr. Beckett's latest work reflects a sorrowing vision of man and his world. A bitter, often earthy, humor lights it up. But what it reveals is shadowed in pessimism. Man struggles for hope, but his destiny, as "Happy Days" sees it, is tragic. The earth reduces him to a crawling thing and ultimately swallows him.... "Happy Days" describes the aridity of life, but, in Winnie's words, "sorrow keeps breaking in." If Mr. Beckett does not lift the heart, his mournful song is at least compassionate, and that is a great deal.

This is the key to his artistry, and essential to the Irishness of his work -- something that is more obviously present in his English-language work than in his French writings.

Teetering on the Edge of the Postmodern

It is no doubt a fool's errand to try to draw any sort of bright line between the end of Modernism and the beginning of Postmodernism, especially as there was no sudden bolt from on high by the literary gods that banished Modernism from the scene. For while it is certainly convenient to set up the rules for different literary traditions and to see different schools as arising opposition to each other, there is always a certain amount of looseness between different schools. There are suggestions of Postmodernism in James Joyce -- and Franz Kafka -- and there are strong strains of Modernism in John Updike. The authors of any generation (at least since the Enlightenment) have never been unified.

Beckett certainly has elements of the Modernist in him, for he has little respect for the conventions of time-line and plot and authorial consistency that a writer like Henry James validated and valued. His work (and this is probably most obviously apparent in his most famous work, Waiting for Godot) wanders and darts from here to over there, stopping along the way at points that are obvious only to the author and his characters, not to the audiences and readers. Watching his plays can have the same feeling as watching a very young child let loose on the beach: Joy and terror in the face of the ocean's might, and delight in both the most wondrous and most ordinary of jetsam.

Exactly how to categorize Beckett -- pursuing the idea for now that such characterizations are important to the process of understanding the author -- is made more problematic, as Fiedler's 1997 commentary on Beckett notes, because of the order in which the world became familiar with Beckett's work:

By one of those odd accidents of literary history the work of Samuel Beckett has been revealed to most of us backward: first his play, "Waiting for Godot," written in the Fifties, next "Malloy" and "Malone Dies," novels published just after the last war; and now "Murphy," which first appeared in 1938 but was scarcely noticed in this country. In the meanwhile Mr. Beckett has undergone a transformation from an English writer to a French one. "Murphy" was published first in the language of its Irish author. The later novels and the play have come to us as his own translations from the language of the country of his exile, France.

The metamorphosis is appropriate: Beckett is one of the last of the post-World War I expatriates, an almost final survivor of that experimentalism in literature and that vision of Paris as a cultural homeland, over which his master, James Joyce, once presided. Come on in the Fifties, discovered backward from the highbrow burlesque of "Godot," such a survivor has a special appeal, seems quite different from what he might have appeared against the background of the decaying tag-ends of the avant-garde of the Twenties.

Not only did Beckett span the worlds of Modernism and Postmodernism in terms of his biography, as a result of the particulars of when and where he was born, moving foreward from Modernism to Postmodernism, but he also moved backward from Postmodernism to Modernism as people tended to come into contact with his work in reverse order.

Such a parsing of into which school Samuel Beckett can be slotted may seem to be nothing more than intellectual engagement -- not that there is anything wrong with this -- but it also serves as an important way of assessing both the "Irishness" and the humor of Beckett's writings. Unlike a writer like John Synge, for example, or William Butler Yeats, Beckett is generally not clearly identifiable as Irish from the dialect or settings or historical references in his writings. (This is especially true, of course, once he begins to write in French.) But there are hints of his nationality in this back-and-forthing that he does with literary genres and literary conventions. Such liberty with self-identification in terms of artistic identity is not solely Irish, of course. But an unwillingness to be categorized neatly does seem to be clearly associated with colonial identity. Ireland in Beckett's time was still culturally and politically very much a colony, very much a nation that did not get to define himself. By refusing to be a single kind of writer, Beckett both acknowledges and laments this kind of colonial sidelining.

Clov: Better than nothing! Is it possible?

We in the audience are prepared to answer, "Of course it is possible." But then we are overtaken by the farcical nature of Beckett's writing and characters. Maybe, after all, nothing is as good as we can expect.

Krapp's Last Tape, which premiered in 1958 as an accompaniment to the play Endgame (first performed the previous year) is like so many of Beckett's works most immediately grim: This is our impression as we watch the lone actor on the stage. That life is grim. That human existence is indeed as nasty, brutish, and short as Hobbes could have imagined. Nothing redeems us. And yet -- again -- Beckett asks us to laugh at this fact. No, life goes on in its tedium and smallness and terribleness. And we can live with this, and even smile (Barrett, 1965).

While Beckett does not conform to stereotypes of Irish humor, he does play with stereotypes of the Irish, something that is most obvious in Krapp's Last Tape. In this set of stage directions from Krapp's Last Tape he plays with stereotypes of the Irish drunk -- the jolly Irish drunk. And yet he plays with this stereotype, makes it unfamiliar. He introduces one of the most absurd of all physical props -- the banana -- into a scene of "typical" excessive Irish drinking. By doing so, by emphasizing the what-does-not-belong in this picture nature of the scene, he invites us to laugh along with him at the unexpectedness of the choices that humans make.

Krapp switches off, broods. Finally he fumbles in his pockets, encounters the banana, takes it out, peers at it, puts it back, fumbles, brings out the envelope, fumbles, puts back envelope, looks at his watch, gets up and goes backstage into darkness. Ten seconds. Sound of bottle against glass, then brief siphon. Ten seconds. Bottle against glass alone. Ten seconds. He comes back a little unsteadily into light, goes to the front of table, takes out keys, raises them to his eyes, chooses key, unlocks first drawer, peers into it, feels about inside it, takes out reel, peers at it, locks drawer, puts keys back in his pocket, goes and sits down, takes reel off machine, lays it on dictionary, loads virgin reel on machine, takes envelope from his pocket, consults back of it, lays it on table, switches on, clears his throat and begins to record.

At the very end of this set of stage directions, we feel that we should know what comes next. We know this scene, after all. The Irish drunk pushes up to the bar, demands a drink -- but of course that scene is not this scene. Beckett has his drunken Irishmen drinking offstage. Our expectations have, in fact, been turned upside down from the very beginning.

Faced with such incongruity wrapped inside the unexpected curled into the enigma of both humor and Irish identity, we find ourselves smiling. Wryly, and even sadly. That last is the core of Beckett's humor: There are things that can make us simultaneously smile and cry.