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Samuel Beckett and The Problem of Irishness (review)

Don’t let the title of Emilie Morin’s book deceive you. She knows there’s more than one problem with Irishness—for Beckett and for critical approaches to his work, at least. Once in a job interview, for instance, the search chair put the following to me, in a flat tone that brooked no contradiction: “But I’ve always thought Beckett was a French writer.” This shorthand identification—French—points to at least three traditions in Beckettian interpretation: the early reception of his French writing as absurdist, his later interpretation as a poststructuralist, and his work’s ongoing fascination for writers in French such as Alain Badiou. The turn to Irishness in evaluations of Beckett’s work—both in Morin’s and in other recent critical studies—is a complex response to the oversights of earlier readings that often actively excluded Beckett’s own biography, even as he includes it in his fiction; the specific historical or political concerns that his works articulate, respond to, or erase; and the persistence of Irish locales, landscapes, and speech patterns, the latter even in his French writing, as Morin points out. Irishness, then, provides a handy way of addressing a number of critical conversations at once, and Morin’s project, informed by her labor in the voluminous international Beckettian archives and beneficially indebted to Adorno’s thinking, sensitively explores Beckett’s intellectual links to Irish writing and the deployment of Irishness in his own work. A line in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, which Morin does not quote, helps to characterize her approach: