[In the following essay, Fletcher finds similarities between Beckett's “Fingal” and James Joyce's “Ivy Day in the Committee Room.”]

In freshman classes, I tend to define the short story as a short prose narrative of concentrated effect, complete within its own terms, showing a firm story-line and often an abrupt ending, limited in its temporal and spatial location and in the number of characters deployed, and tending to work through understatement and humor rather than explicit comment.

Joyce's Dubliners is one of the greatest short-story collections ever published. Beckett's More Pricks Than Kicks, an early book—one he refused for many years to allow to be reissued—is far from being in the same league. Still, they are worth comparing in the light of the above definition for a number of reasons. The first, and most obvious, is that the young Beckett greatly admired his older compatriot and sought to imitate him. Secondly, they are both set in Dublin and feature Dublin people, as Joyce's title explicitly acknowledges. Thirdly, they both deploy a particular sense of humor—at once intellectual, sardonic, and self-consciously literary—which readers tend to associate with Irish writing in general.

I would like in this essay to look closely at their art of the short story with particular reference to “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” from Dubliners and to the second story, “Fingal,” in More Pricks Than Kicks. I have deliberately chosen, as being more typical of their respective authors, stories that are less frequently discussed than, say, “The Dead” in Joyce's case or than “Dante and the Lobster” in Beckett's collection; because they are not perhaps the “best” story by either writer, they are, arguably, more representative of each collection taken as a whole.

“Ivy Day in the Committee Room” is set, as its full title implies, in an electoral ward committee room in Dublin as dusk falls on October 6 (Ivy Day, the anniversary of the death of Parnell) in a year early in the present century. A motley group of canvassers and election workers enter the room to warm themselves by the fire, to drink stout, and to chat. Warmed by liquor and fellowship, the half-dozen men become a trifle sentimental about their great hero, Parnell, and one of them, Joe Hynes, is prevailed upon to recite a piece of mawkish doggerel verse that he has written, being, in the eyes of his companions, “a clever chap … with the pen” (D 125). In an interesting use of what we now call intertextuality, Joyce gives the poem in extenso, all eleven stanzas of it. Deeply touched, Mr. Hynes's listeners give him a spontaneous round of applause. So moved is the poet himself that he pays no heed to the popping of the cork in his bottle of stout, and another prominent character (prominent in that he is present in the room throughout), Mr. O'Connor, starts to roll himself a cigarette, “the better to hide his emotion” (135). Even Mr. Crofton, who represents the Conservative interest (for the men, although in temporary electoral alliance, do not belong to the same political party), agrees that Hynes's panegyric is “a very fine piece of writing” (135). Joyce's irony is all the sharper for not being spelled out: drink and national sentiment temporarily unite these men who, otherwise, have little in common and who indeed (as their sarcastic remarks behind each other's backs reveal all too plainly) do not even greatly care for one another. They have, in other words, about as much charity as they have literary taste: precious little.

In Beckett's story, “Fingal,” the hero Belacqua takes his girlfriend Winnie on a walk in the countryside near Dublin. Because she is “hot” (MPTK [More Pricks Than Kicks] 23) (a sexist epithet that the author did not permit himself in later years), they take advantage of the fine spring weather to make love a couple of times. When not embracing, they gaze upon the Irish landscape in general and upon the Portrane Lunatic Asylum in particular, where Belacqua declares his heart to reside, and Winnie, a doctor friend of hers; so they agree to make for there. But Belacqua, his immediate sexual needs having now been gratified, abandons Winnie to her friend Dr. Sholto. He infinitely prefers to her company—now that the baser lusts of the flesh have been satisfied—that of a bicycle, which he steals from a farmworker. Much to Winnie's annoyance, he gets clean away on it, and the author leaves him drinking and laughing in a roadside pub. This is the “memorable fit of laughing” (23) referred to in the opening sentence of the story, a fit which, we are told, incapacitated Belacqua from further gallantry for some time.

The style throughout “Fingal”—indeed throughout the entire collection—is marked by elaborate and calculated allusiveness combined with extensively developed verbal irony. At its best this can give rise to suggestively witty prose, as in the coy way the sexual act is referred to: “They had not been very long on the top [of the hill] before [Belacqua] began to feel a very sad animal indeed” (23). This is an erudite allusion to a saying usually attributed to Galen, the most famous physician of ancient Rome, to the effect that every creature suffers depression after intercourse (“omne animal post coitum triste est”); and the bawdy innuendo here is that the first act of love must have been intensely pleasurable for Belacqua since it leaves him feeling particularly sad, whereas the second embrace, on the top of another hill, makes him only plain sad. (What Winnie experiences is not specified, unless we are meant to understand something quite abstruse from the assertion that, after the first occasion, she appears to Belacqua to be in high spirits; following the same logic, the author may be implying that she did not have an orgasm and so escaped Galen's depression. But this may be carrying obscene interpretation further than even this witty author intends.)

At less than its best, this kind of writing is pedantry pure and simple, arrogantly disdaining simple formulations and cloaking a banal idea in an esoteric manner. On the second page of the story, for instance, there is elaborate and rather fatuous play on the name of the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine, and on the third, some toying with Latin and Roman history. This is neither funny nor particularly clever, unlike the rather effective joke upon Galen's aphorism.

All the stories in More Pricks Than Kicks are set in Dublin and its environs and are, like Dubliners, permeated with the atmosphere of the Irish capital. In snatches of dialogue that anticipate the elegant Irishisms of Waiting for Godot, we hear the authentic brogue of the people, which Beckett sometimes helpfully translates (“Now would they¹ do him the favour to adjourn … ? This meant drink” [31]), and their characteristic accent (“Dean Swift” pronounced “Dane Swift” [33], for instance). Nevertheless, Belacqua is something of an outsider as far as ordinary Irish people are concerned: he is idle, he is educated, and above all, he is a Protestant, a “dirty lowdown Low Church Protestant high-brow” (172). Inevitably, then, one does not find in More Pricks Than Kicks the same intimate familiarity with Dublin life—the sense of belonging to a society that is unique with its particular customs, humor, and myths—as one experiences in Dubliners. The country and its people are contemplated in Beckett's collection from a certain distance, which is perhaps not so surprising in the work of a Protestant Irishman, but, for all that, the feeling of alienation cannot be explained solely in terms of religion and ethnic origin. Belacqua is not only a member of the “Protestant Ascendancy,” which ruled Ireland until independence; he is also the first in a line of Beckettian heroes whose condition of exile becomes gradually more painful. He is, in fact, the natural precursor of Molloy and of the Unnamable.

Physically, indeed, Belacqua appears a bit of a clown, an early version of the Chaplinesque figures in Waiting for Godot. It is easy, for instance, for Dr. Sholto to give a “brief satirical description” (MPTK 34) of his person, which would run on these lines: a pale fat man, nearly bald, bespectacled, shabbily dressed, and always looking ill and dejected (he is suffering from impetigo on his face in “Fingal,” much to the disgust of Winnie, who has been kissed by him). His appearance is in fact grotesque enough to provoke comment and even laughter in all places except where he is well known. He is a total eccentric; we have already noted his habit of preferring bicycles to women. This oddity in his reactions (or, rather, his incapacity for registering the normal reactions expected of him) is coupled with a faculty for acting with insufficient motivation, which his creator maintains is serious enough to make a mental home the place for him (hence his avowal that his heart resides in the Portrane Lunatic Asylum). But, even more than a padded cell, what Belacqua really longs for is to return to the womb, where he fantasizes about lying on his back in the dark forever, free from “night sweats” (i.e., sex). In default of such a refuge, Belacqua enjoys to the full a melancholy indulged in for its own sake: landscapes, such as Fingal, are of interest to him only insofar as they furnish him “with a pretext for a long face” (30).

Beckett uses this oddity—a person not quite at one with his fellow men, often more an onlooker than active participant in what goes on in the stories—for satirical ends. Inspired caricature fixes the less amiable aspects of a person in few words as is the case in “Fingal” with Dr. Sholto, “a pale dark man with a brow” (31) who feels “nothing but rancour” (32) toward Belacqua, evidently because Winnie prefers him to Sholto (which may indicate that what made Belacqua “sad” was pleasurable for her, after all). This is all the more galling to the pompous, prissy doctor in that Belacqua patently prefers his own company, laughing out loud alone in the pub, to getting “sad” with Winnie: his “sadness” falls from him “like a shift” (32) as soon as he finds the bicycle, we are told. Despite an unsightly rash on his face, we are meant to understand that Belacqua is “sexier” than Sholto, even assisted, as the latter is, by the aphrodisiac of a glass of whiskey.

Belacqua's compulsive urge to retreat from the body and its “night sweats” into the wider freedom of the mind springs from a dualistic conviction that he shares with his successor-heroes in the Beckett canon. They, too, are lovers of bicycles; man and machine together form what Hugh Kenner calls, in an arresting phrase, a “Cartesian centaur” (Kenner 132), from Descartes, whose thought deeply influenced the young Beckett who wrote More Pricks Than Kicks. In all his writing, indeed, Beckett advances his own version of Cartesianism, in which the mental part of his heroes seeks continually to escape from the physical part. In this early story, therefore, there is already discernible a theme—not quite drowned by the academic wit and the tiresome allusiveness—which becomes increasingly central in Beckett's fiction: the radical split between body and mind, a disconnection that allows the mind to retreat progressively into itself, into an isolated life of its own. In the later works, the body is left to break down, like a worn-out piece of machinery, while the mind, panic-stricken at the prospect of cessation, chatters on, rehashing continually its never-changing futilities.

Thus the seeds of For to End Yet Again were sown forty years earlier in More Pricks Than Kicks, just as the long road to Finnegan's wake starts out from the committee rooms and parlors of the Dubliners whom Joyce portrays so deftly in “Ivy Day” and the other stories. Just as the bicycle that enables Belacqua to escape from Winnie is the twin of the one that leads Molloy into his disastrous encounter with his mistress, Lousse, so the Liffey, which the friends cross in a ferryboat in the second story of Dubliners, is the same “riverrun,” the same Anna Livia's “hitherandthithering waters of” Finnegans Wake.

Both writers, then, are supremely consistent with themselves: just as both—the senior, a Catholic; the junior, a Protestant—are intensely, politically, Irish. The political dimension is less in evidence in “Fingal,” but it is there, discreetly, in references to Swift and to the potato famine (the tower near which Belacqua and Winnie make love the second time was, they learn, “built for relief in the year of the Famine” [28]). The Fingal landscape stretching out before them is, Belacqua asserts in stoutly patriotic tones, a “magic land” comparable at least to Burgundy and far superior to Wicklow (24).

But Beckett does not—perhaps understandably, given his background—comment upon or even reflect contemporary Irish political concerns: there is no trace in his work of any reference to the Easter Rising or to the civil war; his criticisms are purely social and cultural in nature. Developments like literary censorship or the ban on contraceptives² he does satirize and debunk, but he eschews party politics and above all the bitter struggles surrounding the birth of the Irish Republic. Joyce, as a member of the majority community, feels no such inhibitions about expressing his feelings in Dubliners. There is telling satire in “The Dead” of the kind of nationalist virago who hurls the insult “West Briton!” at anyone who does not wear his shamrock heart on his sleeve, and in “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” as we have seen, mawkish patriotism is ridiculed in Mr. Hynes's ghastly doggerel. At the same time, the men's emotion is genuine enough, even if its expression is inflated and pretentious. The figure of Parnell himself, it is important to note, is not ridiculed; if anything, it emerges enhanced by the extremes of devotion to which his admirers will go, composing and applauding bad verse in homage to their “dead King,” felt so much more truly to be their sovereign lord than Edward VII, who is about to pay a visit to his “wild Irish” subjects (132) and who is derisively referred to as “Eddie” (124) for his pains. Insofar as the views of the implied author can be surmised, they are those of moderate nationalism, unemphatic patriotism, and temperate republicanism. This tolerant, non-extremist position stands in sharp contrast to the intolerance of the harpy in “The Dead” and to the naïve hero-worship of Mr. Hynes in “Ivy Day in the Committee Room.”

Thus far, for the purposes of comparison, I have been treating “Fingal” and “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” as more or less of equal interest, but, as I made clear at the outset, the two stories are not of equal merit. Joyce's story, even though not the finest story in Dubliners, is markedly superior to “Fingal.” For one thing, Beckett's story is slighter, shorter than Joyce's by about a third, and it deploys fewer and less interesting characters. Belacqua engages our sympathy, no doubt because the author tends to treat him indulgently, but Winnie is not very plausible, and Sholto is no more than sketched. Joyce, by contrast, introduces seven main characters and brings them on like a competent dramatist at different points in the narrative. Old Jack and Mr. O'Connor are present as the story opens and remain in the room throughout; Mr. Hynes the poet enters, leaves, and re-enters later to deliver his composition; Mr. Henchy enters about one-third of the way through; Father Keon puts in a brief, rather sinister appearance at about the half-way mark; and Mr. Crofton and Mr. Lyons walk in shortly afterward and remain to the end. This deployment of characters gives a much tauter feel to the story than Beckett's does. The effect (to return to my simple definition of the genre outlined at the beginning of this essay) is therefore more noticeably concentrated in “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” and the story line is appreciably firmer, the end coming precisely when it should, with the emotional responses to Hynes's elegy undercut by the implied author's discreet mockery of the enterprise when he gets Mr. Crofton (normally a political opponent) to concede that it is “a very fine piece of writing.” The manner in which the end of “Fingal” refers back to the beginning (confirming the previously enigmatic allusion to Belacqua's fit of laughing) is competent enough but feels rather contrived in comparison with the ending of “Ivy Day in the Committee Room.”

Both stories are sensibly limited in terms of temporal and spatial location, each covering a few hours in real time and a single setting, the committee room in Joyce's case and the vicinity of the Portrane asylum in Beckett's. The closed space of the committee room symbolizes the inward-looking nature of the men's political and social concerns—parochial and mundane—just as Beckett's outing to the country in fine weather is the objective correlative of Belacqua's escaping from convention and flouting of social niceties. And, last but not least, both writers work their effects by understatement and humor rather than explicit comment, although Beckett is, rather curiously, more old-fashioned than Joyce in his occasional, admittedly muted, use of the authorial aside to the reader, a device that the modernist Joyce eschews altogether. Not only that, but the Beckettian asides reveal the writer's unease: he is not really at home in the short-story form, and rhetorical questions like “Who shall silence them, at last?” (26) betray his discomfort. We are, after all, nearly half a century away from the great brief texts Imagination Dead Imagine, Lessness, Still and the others, texts that are Beckett's supreme, unique contribution to the short prose form. The classic short story, on the other hand, the kind that Chekhov, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, and Joyce himself developed to such a high pitch of aesthetic perfection and emotional power, was never (to use an apt colloquialism) Beckett's “scene,” any more than the play in several acts was: he wisely abandoned about the same time an attempt to write a stage work in four acts, one act devoted to each of the four years between the widowing and the remarriage of Mrs. Thrale, Dr. Johnson's friend. In the only section actually composed, Act One, Scene One, the tone is already at odds with the realistic, historical material that Beckett was trying manfully to shape into dramatic form. The pauses, repetitions, and formal patterns in the fragment that survives are precisely those which he was to hone later, in Waiting for Godot, into a style that, even as early as 1937, is characteristically Beckettian. But the form available to him in the '30s was not suitable to his purposes, and he abandoned the project (Disjecta 155-66). He did not abandon More Pricks Than Kicks, but he did, as we saw earlier, refuse for many years to have it reissued. In his eyes the book was juvenile stuff, and although that judgment was not fair, he was correct in accepting that, as examples of the short story form, his collection did not begin to match up to those of his great mentor Joyce.

The difference is highlighted by the humor. In both cases, as I said at the outset, this is intellectual, sardonic, self-consciously literary, and characteristically Irish in manner. But in Beckett's case the intellectualism is just too clever by half, the wryness veers disturbingly close to spite, and the literary self-consciousness borders on the arch. The difference between a master of the form and an apprentice who is trying hard to do well can be seen in sharp focus if two characteristic passages of humorous dialogue are compared in detail. In Dubliners Joyce wrote:

The old man watched him attentively and then, taking up the piece of cardboard again, began to fan the fire slowly while his companion smoked.

“Ah, yes,” he said, continuing, “it's hard to know what way to bring up children. Now who'd think he'd turn out like that! I sent him to the Christian Brothers and I done what I could for him, and there he goes boozing about. I tried to make him somewhat decent.” 5

He replaced the cardboard wearily.

“Only I'm an old man now I'd change his tune for him. I'd take the stick to his back and beat him while I could stand over him—as I done many a time before. The mother you know, she cocks him up with this and that. …” 10

“That's what ruins children,” said Mr. O'Connor.

“To be sure it is,” said the old man. “And little thanks you get for it, only impudence. He takes th'upper hand of me whenever he sees I've a sup taken. What's the world coming to when sons speaks that way to their fathers?” 15

“What age is he?” said Mr. O'Connor.

“Nineteen,” said the old man. 20

“Why don't you put him to something?”

“Sure, amn't I never done at the drunken bowsy ever since he left school? ‘I won't keep you,’ I says. ‘You must get a job for yourself.’ But, sure, it's worse whenever he gets a job; he drinks it all.”

Mr. O'Connor shook his head in sympathy, and the old man fell silent, gazing into the fire 25.

[119-20]

Beckett's humor is quite different, as the following passage from More Pricks Than Kicks reveals:

A stout block of an old man in shirt sleeves and slippers was leaning against the wall of the field. Winnie still sees, as vividly as when they met her anxious gaze for the first time, his great purple face and white moustaches. Had he seen a stranger about, a pale fat man in a black leather coat. 5

“No miss” he said.

“Well” said Winnie, settling herself on the wall, to Sholto, “I suppose he's about somewhere.”

A land of sanctuary, he had said, where much had been suffered secretly. Yes, the last ditch. 10

“You stay here” said Sholto, madness and evil in his heart, “and I'll take a look in the church.”

The old man had been showing signs of excitement.

“Is it an escape?” he enquired hopefully.

“No no” said Winnie, “just a friend.” 15

But he was off, he was unsluiced.

“I was born on Lambay” he said, by way of opening to an endless story of a recapture in which he had distinguished himself, “and I've worked here man and boy.”

“In that case” said Winnie “maybe you can tell me what the ruins are.” 20

“That's the church” he said, pointing to the near one, it had just absorbed Sholto, “and that” pointing to the far one, “'s the tower.”

“Yes” said Winnie “but what tower, what was it?” 25

“The best I know” he said “is some Lady Something had it.”

This was news indeed.

[32-33]

Both writers feature characters who speak in Dubin dialect, but Beckett catches it less accurately (lines 17-19, 22-24 and 26) than Joyce does: the syntax in Joyce is exact and plausible, fully characteristic of the Dublin working class (in standard English “only I'm” in line 10 would be “if I were not,” and “while” in line 11 would be “until,” with “I could no longer” replacing “I could”; and “amn't I never done at” in line 22 would be “do I ever stop remonstrating with”). At the lexical level, words like “cocks up” (12-13), “sup” for “drink” (17), and “bowsy” (22) are authentic Irish idioms, non-standard English, as “somewhat” (7) would be “into someone” in standard speech. Grammatically, “done” for “did” (6) and “says” for “say” (23) are examples of dialectal deviations.

What these contrasted examples really show, of course, is not so much that Beckett could not reproduce dialect authentically as that he was not greatly interested in doing so. He was not concerned with realism at all, in fact, as is revealed stylistically by his use of non-realist features like free indirect speech (4-5), self-quotation or self-intertextualization (9-10), and authorial asides (16, 27).

This crucial difference between Beckett's approach and Joyce's affects the nature of their humor. Joyce's is mimetic; Beckett's is self-reflexive. Joyce's is satirical, that is, extroverted, while Beckett's is self-conscious, that is, introverted. Joyce's suits admirably the short-story form; Beckett's does not. Both men are great writers, but Joyce is already working at the peak of his form in Dubliners, whereas for Beckett, the works of his maturity have still to be written when More Pricks Than Kicks is composed. Had Beckett died in the same year as Joyce did, he would now be remembered, if at all, as a mere promising disciple of a great Irish writer. The world is fortunate that he lived, in fact, much longer than Joyce (who died at the age of fifty-eight) and became a great Irish writer in his turn. We, their readers, able to re-Joyce 'n Beckett, are thus doubly blessed.

Notes

1. The phrasing “Now they would do …” is a misprint in the original. The order as printed makes no sense in Anglo-Irish. Also the question mark indicates an interrogative order.

2. See “Censorship in the Saorstat” (Disjecta 84-88), and Watt for an extended joke about the aphrodisiac Bando which, like the humble condom, “cannot enter our ports, nor cross our northern frontier, [but] is immediately seized, and confiscated, by some gross customs official half crazed with seminal intoxication …” (170).

Works Cited

Kenner, Hugh. “The Cartesian Centaur.” Perspective 11 (Autumn 1959): 132-41.