Dublin Bricolage Map

The affective, comedic and existential renderings of Samuel Beckett’s depictions of Dublin in his early short story collection  More Pricks Than Kicks (1934) volume of poetry Echoes Bones and Other Precipitates (1935) and first French language publication Le Fin (1946)  illustrates a shift in his literary perspective from a latent Cartesian verisimilitude to a more phenomenological and fragmented, existential impression of  place.  Despite official  Saorstát  representations promoting  Ireland as a rural, Gaelic country,  Beckett’s  depictions impart a modernist urban impression of  Dublin as it existed in the 1920s and 1930s. Unhappy as a lecturer in French at Trinity College Dublin, he turned to writing, taking long walks in order to overcome ‘writer’s block.’ Beckett  ‘would use these long frustrating walks –from one end of Dublin to the other, through the Wicklow Hills, along country lanes and past deserted railway stations – in his writing, in descriptions of the countryside or of his thoughts while pacing.’ (1) During these walks, he acted as a literary surveyor,  creating discursive maps consisting of snatches of prose and poetic fragments  in which distinct and affective renderings of place were depicted.  

In a 1934 essay entitled Recent Irish Poetry, Beckett wrote   ‘it is the act  and not the object of perception that matters,’ (2) and in a 1930 essay entitled Proust  he observed that the great French writer  accepted ‘the sacred ruler and compass of literary geometry,’ (3)   and hinted that writing, like mapping consisted perhaps in the  ‘the imposition of our own familiar soul on the terrifying soul of our surroundings.’ (4)  Although the character Belacqua from More Pricks Than Kicks was ‘conceived when Beckett was rootless geographically and professionally,’ (5) his  native city and  Joycean influence left a strong imprint on the collection:  ‘The Dublin background of More Pricks Than Kicks is carefully documented after the manner of Ulysses: the street names, the Liffey, Trinity College and the statue of Thomas Moore, combined to present the busy city landscape against which Belacqua is drawn.’ (6) Beckett’s impressionistic depiction of his native city in Echoes Bones,  also  illustrates that ‘modernity implie[s] a phenomenal world -a specifically urban one -that was markedly quicker, more chaotic, fragmented, and disorienting than in previous phases of human culture.’ (7)

Beckett’s mapping of Dublin and its hinterland  in his early prose and poetry anticipates to an extent  Guy Debord and the Internationale Situationniste’s  concept of  urban drifting known as   ‘dérive  (with its flow of acts, its gestures, its strolls, its encounters),’ (8) which can produce psychogeographies  defined as  ‘the sudden change of ambience in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres.’ (9)   A composite  Beckettian Bricolage Map of  Dublin charted from the stories in  More Pricks Than Kicks, the poetry of Echoes Bones (Human Figure Tabs Above) and the transposed cityscapes  of Le Fin (Green Tabs Above),  can be plotted to convey Beckett’s  fragmented sense of space.  The short story A Wet Night  depicts  Belacqua’s perception of the misty neon streetscape of College Green outside of Trinity College Dublin:

Bright and cheery above the strom of the Green, as though coached by the Star of Bethlehem, the Bovril sign danced and danced through its seven phases.

More Pricks than Kicks (New York: Grove Press, 1972 [1934]) p. 47.

Several passages in the poetry of Echoes Bones offer a fragmented sense  of  Dublin’s environment.  Beckett’s physical  and mental discomfort can be felt in his 1931 piece Enueg II. The poem’s alienated and anxious speaker stands alone  in the angst-ridden  heart of the city:

. . . lying on O’Connell Bridge
goggling at the tulips of the evening
the green tulips
shining around the corner like an anthrax
shining on Guinness’s barges.

Poems 1930-1939 (London: Calder, 2002)  pp. 15-16.

Returning to the short story A Wet Night we can visualize civil offices, places of commerce and traffic as imprinting themselves upon Belacqua’s consciousness as he  makes his way down,

Long straight Pearse Street, it permitted a simple cantilena in his mind, its footway peopled with the tranquil and detached in fatigue, its highway dehumanised in a tumult of buses. Trams were monsters, moaning along beneath the wild gesture of the trolley. But buses were pleasant, tires and glass and clash and no more.

More Pricks than Kicks (New York: Grove Press, 1972 [1934]) p. 48-49.

Beckett often commenced Belacqua’s  peregrinations  through the streets of Dublin near the  Thomas Moore Statue and the ‘hot bowels of McLouglin’s’  pub which  adjoin the front gates of Trinity College whose motto 'Perpetuis futuris temporibus duraturum (It will last into endless future times),’ underscored Beckett’s sense on the repetitious nature of  time,  and its influence on his fragmented perceptions of space.  The landscape in the poem  Enueg (1931) was based upon a walk that Beckett took along the Grand Canal from the Portobello Private Nursing Home, near Merrion Square, into Dublin.

I trundle along rapidly now on my ruined feet
Flush with the livid canal;
at Parnell Bridge a dying barge
carrying a cargo of nails and timber
rocks itself softly in the foaming cloister of the lock;
on the far bank a gang of down and outs would seem
   to be mending a beam.

Poems 1930-1939 (London: Calder, 2002)  p. 13

In  Serena III   the direction that Beckett’s poem takes from Dublin traces a walk from Ringsend along the strand of the Sandymont coast, to the salt marshes of Booterstown, with the Dublin Mountains looming in the background. It begins with the speaker crossing the hunch-backed stone bridge that spans the Dodder River:

 . . . Whereas dart away through the cavorting scapes
bucket o’er Victoria Bridge that’s the idea
slow down slink down the Ringsend Road
Irishtown Sandymount puzzle find the Hell fire.

Poems 1930-1939 (London: Calder, 2002)  p. 47; 49; 27

These examples from Beckett’s early prose and poetry acts as  discursive, fragmented cartographies which visualize  an individual’s  idiosyncratic  perceptions and movements  through  the series of  landscapes which compose Dublin and its hinterlands.  

Beckett’s 1946  first French language short-story Le Fin (The End) transposes the cityscapes of St Lô and Paris upon Dublin providing a map of  a post-war landscape which is simultaneously alien and familiar. He commenced writing the story in English, but completed it in French.  The desolate beauty of the poem Saint-Lô and the dislocation which characterizes Beckett’s story  Le Fin,  intimates the fire bombing of the town which occurred on 25 July 1944  during the Allied invasion of Normandy.  Occupied by the German Army at the time, Saint-Lô  was located on the river Vire, and served as a landmark for the high-altitude Allied bombing raids of Operation Cobra. The target area was ‘pounded with elemental fury’ (10) and ‘saturated with 50,000 general purpose and fragmentation bombs.’ (11)  In 1946 Beckett prepared a radio broadcast The Capital of Ruins for Radio Telefis Eireann documenting its post-war reconstruction:  ‘Saint-Lô was bombed out of existence in one night. German prisoners of war, and casual labourers attracted by the relative food plenty, but soon discouraged by housing conditions, continued, two years after the liberation, to clear away debris, literally by hand.’ (12)  Beckett distilled the remains of Saint-Lô  in a short poem:

Vire will wind in other shadows
unborn through the bright ways tremble
and the old mind ghost-forsaken
sink into its havoc.

Poems 1930-1939 (London: Calder, 2002)  p. 34

The lines echo the theme of his  radio address by tracing the path of the  River Vire winding through the town’s apocalyptic landscape. As such, a phenomenological counterpoint to the quotidian objectivity of  Beckett’s piece of broadcast journalism can be intuited in the poem’s ‘. . .  tiny structure: two lines about Saint- Lô, two lines about the speaker, the halves of the poem, by a baffling geometry, at once parallel and divergent. Cities, its theme runs, are renewed like rivers . . . ‘. (13) Le Fin is narrated from the perspective of an existential figure with ‘A mask of dirty old hairy leather, with two holes and a slit,’ who is expelled, rather than released, from a charitable institution. He finds upon his release that ‘the city had suffered many changes, Nor was the country as I remembered it.’  Authorial perspectives of  Cartesian verisimilitude which characterized Beckett’s earlier depictions of cities were replaced with impressions of  existential and phenomenological dislocation:

In the street I was lost. I had not set foot in this part of the city for a long time and it seemed greatly changed. Whole buildings had disappeared, the palings had changed position and on all sides I saw in great letters, the names of tradesmen I had never seen before and would have been at a loss to pronounce. There were streets where I remembered none, some I did remember had vanished and others had completely changed their names. The general impression was the same as before. 

‘Le Fin’  in First Love and Other Novellas (London: Penguin, 2000) p. 22; 18; 22; 12

The city, built on the mouth of a bay, with two canals and mountains to the south, intimates St Lô, Paris and Dublin simultaneously: ‘the general appearance of the river flowing between its quays and under its bridges, had not changed. Yes the river still gave the impression it was flowing in the wrong direction.’  But the vestigial landscape of  1930s Ireland, marked by the social and economic blight resulting from the Free State’s economic war with Britain, emerges and fades in Le Fin under Beckett’s transposition of the human and physical desolation he encountered along the banks of the Vire in the bombed out ruins of  Saint-Lô.   Accordingly ‘a fictional space is created that is related to the geographical space but has its own more universal validity.’ (14)   For Beckett, the setting of  ‘the post-war city does not function as a representation of social chaos [. . . ] Rather, Beckett presents the “greatly changed” city as a space of narrative debility.’ (15)   This is enhanced by his protagonist’s incomprehension of his surroundings: ‘the eyes rose to a confusion of low houses, wasteland, hoardings, chimneys, steeples and towers,’ and the story concludes with an implosion of narrative perspective:  ‘The sea, the sky, the mountains and the islands closed in and crushed me in a mighty systole, then scattered to the uttermost confines of space.’   Beckett’s experience of Saint-Lô,  and Paris coupled with  his memory of watching the Dublin  fires of the Easter 1916 Uprising were distilled in the story’s last image of  impending destruction:

It was evening, I was with my father on a height, he held my hand. I would have liked him to draw me close with a gesture of protective love, but his mind was on other things [. . . ] And on the slopes of the mountains, now rearing its unbroken bulk behind town, the fires turned from gold to red, from red to gold.

‘Le Fin’ in First Love and Other Novellas (London: Penguin, 2000) p. 13; 27;31; 30

Le Fin is marked by a dissolution of the Cartesian perspective and marked by Beckett’s narrative transition from third person English to first person French leaving an indelible ‘image of the storyteller whose primitive, suffering, deathless existence is itself an emblem of the ruins into which stories, for Beckett, had collapsed.’ (16)  

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