SOURCE: Harrington, John P. “Beckett, Joyce, and Irish Writing: The Example of Beckett's ‘Dubliners’ Story.” In Re: Joyce'n Beckett, edited by Phyllis Carey and Ed Jewinski, pp. 31-42. New York: Fordham University Press, 1992.

[In the following essay, Harrington investigates the influence of James Joyce on Beckett's short fiction, arguing that “A Case in a Thousand” is “the most apparent adoption in Beckett's early fiction of the style of Joyce's own early work.”]

After his work had taken on characteristic form and after he had acquired the public stature usual on winning the Nobel Prize, Samuel Beckett described his younger self of the 1930s as “‘a very young writer with nothing to say and the itch to make’” (Harvey 273). The itch to make without anything much to say is, of course, no specifically Irish phenomenon, but it was a particularly acute and a particularly dismal predicament in Ireland in the 1930s. The predicament was not lack of models, for there was a wide choice of exemplary figures as well as regular public debate over the quest for that fabulous Irish chimera, a unified national aesthetic. Rather, the predicament lay in the embarrassment of conveniently located riches. Writing on this in 1976 when, presumably, that predicament remained a current concern, Denis Donoghue concluded that “the price we pay for Yeats and Joyce is that each in his way gave Irish experience a memorable but narrow definition … the minor writers of the Irish literary revival were not strong enough to counter Yeats's incantatory rhetoric: no writer in Ireland has been strong enough to modify Joyce's sense of Irish experience in fiction” (131). Donoghue's “no writer in Ireland” qualification here may be a deliberate exclusion of Beckett. But most often Beckett is excluded from discussions of Irish writing by unexamined convention. However, Beckett offers the way out of memorable but narrow definitions of Irish experience. He offers no incantatory rhetoric or distinctly negative sense of Irish experience. Rather, Beckett's work offers a view of Irish experience that is not narrow, exclusionist, or otherwise provincial. Yeats and Joyce, of course, are not predominantly provincial, but the subsequent example of Beckett does throw into interesting relief the provincial strain of their work and that of others associated with the Irish literary revival and its aftermath.

The young Beckett seems to have dealt expeditiously with the spell of Yeats's incantatory rhetoric. Nevertheless, Beckett's Irish past is one of the more untidy areas of record. Richard Ellmann's recent revelation in Nayman of Noland (26) that Yeats himself praised and quoted Whoroscope to Beckett in Killiney in 1932 hints at passing literary relations then between Ireland's Nobel past and Nobel future. A fairly recent reminder of that relation's likely complexity was the basis of Beckett's 1976 teleplay “… but the clouds …,” an allusion to Yeats's “The Tower.”

Young Beckett's fancy for cosmopolitanism and newness meant that the cost of being Irish and literary was to be exacted first by Joyce. Though by now Beckett has in many ways matched the stature of Joyce as a figure on the literary landscape, Beckett's first reception often included an almost persecutorial sort of circumstantial association with Joyce. At one time part of that association was rumored identity as “Joyce's secretary”; later that was improved to the now familiar “not Joyce's secretary.” The sense of Beckett as formed by Joyce persisted even after he got as unlike Joyce as possible, even after he chose French over English and drama over fiction, changes as radical as possible but liable to perception as overreaction. Among the early responses to Beckett's first produced plays, for example, was Lionel Abel's commentary in 1959 on Godot and Endgame in an essay called “Joyce the Father, Beckett the Son”: “Joyce is present in Beckett's plays; he is confronted and he is vanquished, though Beckett, whether as Lucky or Clov, is never shown to be victorious” (27).

In early critical apprehension of Beckett as epigone of Joyce and often in critical consensus today, that confrontation and vanquishment were not of Joyce as overbearing personal example, or of Joyce as formulator of Irish experience in fiction, but of Joyce the author of Finnegans Wake. This notion was epitomized in the Shenker “interview” in 1956 when Beckett was characterized as saying “‘The kind of work I do is one in which I'm not master of my material. The more Joyce knew the more he could. He's tending toward omniscience and omnipotence as an artist. I'm working with impotence, ignorance’” (3). The emphasis on the amount Joyce “knew,” presumably cumulative, and the omnipotence to which Joyce was “tending” imply preoccupation with Joyce's last work. Even Beckett's decision to write in French is phrased and depreciated by Ellmann in terms of Joyce and Finnegans Wake: Beckett's “boldness was almost without precedent. It freed him from literary forefathers. It was a decision only less radical than Joyce's in inventing his extravagant Finnegans Wake-ese” (16). The Shenker portrayal of Beckett's work as mired in a kind of inverse relationship to Joyce's, tending to ignorance while Joyce's tended to omniscience, encouraged perception of Beckett's early work in terms of Joyce, in terms of Finnegans Wake and in terms of Finnegans Wake-ese as a great mistake. Vivian Mercier, an acquaintance of Beckett's and an estimable commentator on Irish letters, reiterated this view in the late 1970s: Beckett's “greatest folly consisted in attempting to imitate James Joyce: not the earlier work, either, but Work in Progress, the drafts of Finnegans Wake” (36).

There is some reason to see Beckett in the 1930s as largely motivated by emulation of and slow progress away from what was then Joyce's Work in Progress. Chronologies of his work, of course, usually begin with publication in 1929 of “Dante … Bruno. Vico … Joyce” both in transition and in a celebratory volume of essays in anticipation and encouragement of Joyce's work. Beckett's first publications in Dublin, in T.C.D.: A College Miscellany, were the fragmentary, anonymous dialogues called “Che Sciagura” (1929) and “The Possessed” (1930). These were seen in Dublin as quite obviously written under the spell of Joyce and the style of Work in Progress: “‘In the Joycean medley,’” T.C.D. later commented on the second of these early works, “‘its anonymous author performs some diverting verbal acrobatics, but in the manner of a number of transition's offspring, is too allusive to be generally comprehensible’” (quoted in Bair 131). Indeed, Beckett cultivated this association with Joyce by appending to his poems for a 1931 anthology called The European Caravan a contributor's note that read in part: “‘Samuel Beckett is the most interesting of the younger Irish writers. … He has a great knowledge of Romance literature, is a friend of Rudmose-Brown and of Joyce, and has adapted the Joyce method to his poetry with original results’” (quoted in Bair 129-30). The Joyce method of greatest interest then was the method of Works in Progress, which began sporadic publication in transition in 1927 as vanguard of its self-proclaimed revolution of the word. In this example of rather Whitmanesque arrogance, Beckett points to Rudmose-Brown, his mentor at Trinity College, as his background and to the Joyce method as his means to originality. The influence of Work in Progress is also clear in the excerpts from Dream of Fair to Middling Women published in 1932 under the titles “Sedendo et Quiescendo” in transition (misprinted as “Quiesciendo”) and “Text” in The New Review. In Dublin, such progress as Beckett had made in freeing himself from Work in Progress as he refashioned material from Dream for More Pricks Than Kicks was seen as only a slight inverse movement through Joyce's works. “‘Mr. Beckett is an extremely clever young man,’” concluded The Dublin Magazine in its review of More Pricks Than Kicks in 1934, “‘and he knows his Ulysses as a Scotch Presbyterian knows his Bible’” (quoted in Bair 179).

However, the tendency to view the young Beckett as devoted exclusively to Joyce's last works oversimplifies Beckett's critique of his predecessor. Though “Dante … Bruno. Vico.. Joyce” was of necessity devoted almost entirely to Work in Progress, Beckett's essay also refers familiarly to The Day of the Rabblement, which was Joyce's own 1901 declaration of independence from Irish literary predecessors. Furthermore, early in this essay Beckett discusses Stephen Dedalus' attitude in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and later in it he quotes part of Stephen's assertions to Lynch on the aesthetic image. David Hayman, in “A Meeting in the Park and a Meeting on the Bridge” (373), has pointed to echoes of Portrait and of Exiles in Beckett's first published short story, “Assumption,” which appeared in transition in 1929 in the same issue as “Dante … Bruno. Vico.. Joyce.” Even “Sedendo et Quiescendo,” which is obviously derived in style from Work in Progress, alludes in “art thou pale with weariness” (13) and in “a pale and ardent generation” (14) to Stephen's poem in Portrait and derivation of it from Shelley's “To the Moon.” In addition, More Pricks Than Kicks, however stridently it demonstrates its author's knowledge of Ulysses, also includes a story, “A Wet Night,” that gives its attention to Dubliners and in particular to “The Dead.” Beckett's story, like “The Dead,” describes a Christmas season party in Dublin hosted and attended by Dubliners who anxiously exude continental sophistication while showing irritability with Gaelic aficionados. At the end of Joyce's Dubliners story, of course, Gabriel Conroy approaches new self-knowledge as he views the snow from the window of his room in the Gresham Hotel: “It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves” (223). In Beckett's More Pricks Than Kicks story, it is rain, not snow, that falls, and the character, Belacqua, is oblivious to rather than intent on the rain that “fell upon the bay, the littoral, the mountains and the plains, and notably upon the Central Bog it fell with a rather desolate uniformity” (83). Nevertheless, Beckett's reference to Joyce's story is scarcely devoted imitation. That clear echo of Joyce is followed in Beckett's story by an obviously parodic approach to self-knowledge by Belacqua: “What was that? He shook off his glasses and stooped his head to see. That was his hands. Now who would have thought that!” (83).

More Pricks Than Kicks was published on May 24, 1934. In July it was reviewed in The Bookman by Francis Watson, who, having mentioned Beckett's monograph on Proust and his involvement in the translation into French of portions of Works in Progress, asserted that “The influence of Joyce is indeed patent in More Pricks Than Kicks but Mr. Beckett is no fashionable imitator. Like Joyce he is a Dubliner and an exile, and Dublin has for him that peculiar compulsion which it exercises upon all Irishmen except Bernard Shaw” (219-20). Watson's laudatory review, which praised More Pricks Than Kicks as “one of those rare books to be read more than once” (220), may have provided Beckett with the opportunity to contribute to the “Irish Number” of The Bookman in August of 1934. That issue included single essays by Stephen Gwynn, Lennox Robinson, and Sean O'Faolain. Beckett contributed two pieces to the issue. One was a review essay, now well known and reprinted, called “Recent Irish Poetry.” The other was a short story, not well known and not reprinted, called “A Case in a Thousand.”

“Recent Irish Poetry” unambiguously categorizes Irish poets as the “antiquarians” or the “others.” The antiquarians are those working poets who adhere to “accredited themes” derived from the Irish literary revival's formulation of a national literary identity and sustained by Yeats. The “others,” notably Thomas McGreevy and Denis Devlin, friends of Beckett's and within the brood T.C.D. called “transition's offspring,” pursue instead “awareness of the new thing that has happened, or the old thing that has happened again, namely the breakdown of the object, whether current, historical, mythical or spook” (Disjecta 70). Beckett had already reviewed a collection of McGreevy's poems in the July 1934 issue of The Dublin Magazine, and he would articulate his admiration for Devlin in a review for transition in 1938 (both reviews have been reprinted in Disjecta). In “Recent Irish Poetry,” McGreevy, Devlin, and Brian Coffey are decreed “the nucleus of a living poetic in Ireland” (76). The bulk of the review, though, is given over to evisceration of the “antiquarians,” including less than admiring references to fellow contributors to this special issue of The Bookman. One fellow contributor was Frank O'Connor, the only one other than Beckett with two pieces in the issue. Though no associate of transition, O'Connor was as effective as Beckett in lampooning the forms of antiquarianism in Ireland in the 1930s; his essay describes how nativism and the state revival of Gaelic in combination with censorship of writers like O'Faolain and Liam O'Flaherty had the result of government sponsorship of Gaelic translations of Emily Brontë, Dickens, and Conrad. Like Beckett, O'Connor signed his two contributions differently. O'Connor's story, “The Man That Stopped,” appeared under the pseudonym he would maintain, while his essay, “Two Languages,” appeared under his own name, Michael O'Donovan. Beckett's essay, “Recent Irish Poetry,” appeared under a pseudonym he would never use again, “Andrew Belis,” while his story, “A Case in a Thousand,” appeared under his own name. One imagines that the short story of Samuel Beckett should not be construed as wholly apart from the living poetic in Ireland proclaimed by Andrew Belis.

“A Case in a Thousand” is the most apparent adoption in Beckett's early fiction of the style of Joyce's own early work. It is written with a scrupulous meanness uncharacteristic of Beckett's other early fiction, including precise but understated attention to descriptive details of principal and minor characters. Forms of address, variations in Anglo-Irish dialect, and trivial mannerisms indicate social distinctions among characters. The Dublin setting at a nursing home beside The Grand Canal is established unobtrusively and without the sort of painful and scatological imagery common in Beckett's Dublin poems of this period, such as “Eneug I.” The narrative, in the third person, proceeds without the allusiveness and obfuscation usual in Beckett's “transition's offspring” fiction.

The story concerns a Dr. Nye and his treatment of a tubercular boy who is worsening since surgery by another doctor. Dr. Nye's treatment of the case is complicated by his discovery that the boy's mother, who watches the hospital room window from the bank of the canal outside, is in fact his own former nanny, a Mrs. Bray. Soon Dr. Nye must make a decision on a second operation. He chooses surgery, the boy dies, and Dr. Nye feels compelled to confront Mrs. Bray with his memory of infantile eroticism. Mrs. Bray clarifies the memory for Nye, in a conversation denied the reader, and they part: “Mrs. Bray to go and pack up her things and the dead boy's things, Dr. Nye to carry out Wasserman's [sic] test on an old schoolfellow” (242).

As the title suggests, Beckett's story echoes in important instances Joyce's “A Painful Case” story from Dubliners. Beckett's story opens with great economy and asserts in the opening of the second paragraph that “Dr. Nye belonged to the sad men, but not to the extent of accepting, in the blank way the most of them do, this condition as natural and proper. He looked upon it as a disorder” (241). Joyce's story opens with a more elaborate exposition of setting and scene and asserts in the opening of the second paragraph that “Mr. Duffy abhorred anything which betokened physical or mental disorder. A medieval doctor would have called him saturnine” (108). Both characters are troubled by women characters, who threaten the males' assumed roles and assured selves. Mr. Duffy's relationship with Mrs. Sinico begins when “little by little he entangled his thoughts with hers” (110). Beckett's character resists his thoughts and entanglement with Mrs. Bray when “little by little Dr. Nye reintegrated his pathological outlook” (242). The entanglements in both stories are confessional. “With almost maternal solicitude,” Mrs. Sinico encourages Mr. Duffy “to let his nature open to the full; she became his confessor” (110). Mrs. Bray offers to Dr. Nye the opportunity to “disclose the trauma at the root of this attachment” (242). In Joyce's story, the relationship ends on a trivial indelicacy, and years later Mr. Duffy learns in reports about Mrs. Sinico's death that she had become one of “the hobbling wretches whom he had seen carrying cans and bottles to be filled by the barman” (115). In Beckett's story, the relationship ends in Dr. Nye's childhood, and years later he is “troubled to find that of the woman whom as baby and small boy he had adored, nothing remained but the strawberry mottle of the nose and the breath smelling heavily of clove and peppermint” (242). Near the end of “A Painful Case” Mr. Duffy is revolted by “the threadbare phrases, the inane expressions of sympathy, the cautious words of a reporter” (115) used in the newspaper report of Mrs. Sinico's death. At the end of “A Case in a Thousand” such words are elided: Mrs. Bray “related a matter connected with his earliest years, so trivial and intimate that it need not be enlarged on here, but from the elucidation of which Dr. Nye, that sad man, expected great things” (242).

Both stories pivot on moments when the male characters recoil from their women confessors; when, in Beckett's words and in both cases, “he really could not bear another moment of her presence” (242). The consequence of Mr. Duffy's withdrawal is the eventual realization that he has sentenced himself, that his own “life would be lonely too until he, too, died” (116), and so, finally, that “no one wanted him; he was outcast from life's feast” (117). In “A Case in a Thousand” Dr. Nye has a comparable revelation, but at the beginning of the story and without context: “Without warning a proposition sprang up in his mind: Myself I cannot save” (241). Beckett's story most resembles those in Dubliners in the occurrence of such an epiphany, such a sudden perception of limitation. In the Beckett story, however, that epiphany is preliminary, not conclusive, and it is not explicitly connected with the subsequent events in the story. “A Case in a Thousand” demands comparison with “A Painful Case” in title, narrative, and style, but it manipulates the poetics of the Joycean model in a fashion that disrupts representation of oppressive determinacy. Beckett's story is an ironic form of this “Joyce method,” as indeed his earlier use of the “Joyce method” of Work in Progress is ironic, though perhaps insufficiently so if it seems to later commentators a great mistake.

“A Case in a Thousand” is of interest in several respects other than the parallel with “A Painful Case.” Deirdre Bair, for example, finds it most significant because it “seems in many respects to be Beckett's way of using his analysis creatively” and because “the story contains the same equivocal erotic attitudes toward women first introduced with Belacqua in Dream and More Pricks Than Kicks” (185). Eoin O'Brien, in The Beckett Country, identifies the setting of the story as the Portobello Nursing Home. O'Brien discusses that nursing home along with the Merrion Nursing Home, which is only two bridges away on the canal (195-201). At the Merrion Nursing Home Beckett attended his mother's final illness in 1950, and Krapp's Last Tape evokes the experience of watching a hospital room window from outside, like Mrs. Bray's. The setting of “A Case in a Thousand” is an early, more easily identifiable appearance in Beckett's work of the canal on the south side of Dublin, which reappears in many later works—for example, in That Time. Also, in this story Dr. Nye weighs the charms of a meditative life that spares the feet and thinks in bed in the fashion of Malone. Mrs. Bray is introduced into the story with an emphasis on hat and bosom and umbrella suggestive of Winnie in Happy Days.

Biography, autobiography, and portents of later work aside, “A Case in a Thousand” remains of interest for its indication of the kind of influence on Beckett's work of Joyce's work and for its appearance in a special issue on Irish writing. In the same “Irish Number” of The Bookman Norreys Jephson O'Conor, writing on “The Trend of Anglo-Irish Literature,” offered the opinion that “younger [Irish] writers, brought up in the atmosphere of what is euphuistically called the ‘trouble,’ in their search for realism turned towards Russian and other Continental authors—an attitude strengthened by the experimentation and growing reputation of James Joyce” (234). O'Conor was no doubt thinking of Irish writers, such as Frank O'Connor, who advertised their admiration of the Russian short story. But Norreys Jephson O'Conor's observation indicates that Joyce's example could then, in 1934, be one of experimentation, including forms of realism like Dubliners and not only the polyglot allusiveness of Work in Progress. Consideration of “A Case in a Thousand” beside “Sedendo et Quiescendo” indicates the extent to which Joyce's example was less than monolithic, less a limitation than a liberation, and less one of a single experiment than one of the enterprise of experimentation. It is entirely in keeping with such an example that Beckett's “A Case in a Thousand” is less imitation of “A Painful Case” than ironic manipulation of its method. The effect of such use of a well-known model is a story that is a critique—in this case a commentary on the poetics and representation of contingent entrapments central to Joyce's story. “A Case in a Thousand” certainly is not the only critique of a model in Beckett's early fiction, or even the only critique of Joyce's works. But Beckett, as the prescient Francis Watson recognized as early as 1934, was “no fashionable imitator.” “A Case in a Thousand” is an early instance of the project central to Beckett's later work, the play with epistemology—the project that propels the narratives of Molloy, Malone, and the Unnamable and preoccupies the characters waiting on stage for Godot.

The example of Joyce for a writer like Beckett in the 1930s (“nothing to say and the itch to make”) entailed the influence of Joyce's work both in itself and as exemplar of new Irish writing. In the 1930s, when most apparently conscious of Joyce's work, Beckett was also most conscious of being an Irish writer. Soon after writing these two pieces for the “Irish Number” of The Bookman, Beckett wrote “Censorship in the Saorstat,” an essay on the absurdity of the Irish Censorship of Publications Act of 1929. Derision of that piece of legislation was then a favorite pastime of Irish writers both “antiquarian” and “other,” as witness Frank O'Connor's essay for the “Irish Number.” Furthermore, writing on that subject gave Beckett the opportunity to include himself and More Pricks Than Kicks in the group of Irish writers and works, including Joyce and Ulysses, for whom and for which being banned at home was a badge of honor. “Censorship in the Saorstat” was prepared for The Bookman, but the journal ceased publication before that essay could appear.

Joyce could sustain younger writers in many ways, but for Beckett in the 1930s an important part of that sustenance lay in Joyce's example for consciously Irish writers. Irish writers younger than Beckett testify to the liberating effect of the example of Joyce and the connection of that example to Beckett. Thomas Kinsella, casting the influences on Irish writers in the same Yeats/Joyce terms as Denis Donoghue, concludes that “Yeats stands for the Irish tradition as broken; Joyce for it as continuous, as healed—or healing—from its mutilation” (65). The mutilation in question here is precisely the rigidity of conventions, or imitation, termed antiquarianism by Beckett in “Recent Irish Poetry.” Aidan Higgins, in the course of asking “Who follows Beckett, himself following so closely on Joyce?” characterizes those works not following Joyce and Beckett as “linear, traditional, benign, and dull” (60). Just those qualities were circumvented in Beckett's “A Case in a Thousand” because the story followed from, and did not merely imitate, Joyce's “A Painful Case.” In David Hanly's novel In Guilt and in Glory two characters discuss Joyce and then continue, with ambivalent sarcasm, to Beckett: “‘He's a Protestant of English blood,’” says one, “‘educated at Trinity, a cricket player who lived in Paris and writes in French. Of course he's Irish’” (99). These approach definitions of Irish experience that are not narrow.

These examples, like that of “A Case in a Thousand,” point to the interesting dimension of Beckett's work in the context of Irish writing. He is a complicated and enriching addition to the local literary history. In turn, Yeats helped define Ireland as a positivistic literary subject, Joyce offered a scrupulous critique of Ireland, and Beckett adumbrated the luxury of aloofness to Ireland. This last is, too, a liberation. “A Case in a Thousand” is a significant example of the extent to which the young Beckett was most conscious of himself as an Irish writer and, like many others, one most conscious of Joyce's own early work. In extricating himself from inherited cultural and national contexts, Beckett began the critique that extended to literary form and language in his major works. Though close attention to Irish literary precedents is for the most part a feature of Beckett's early work, the examination of inherited premises in “A Case in a Thousand” and other early pieces is compatible with the analysis of Godot or How It Is. Just that continuity and relevance of early work to late is one sense of the words of the narrator of Company, written in English and published in 1980: “Having covered in your day some twenty-five thousand leagues or roughly thrice the girdle. And never once overstepped a radius of one from home. Home!” (60).

Works Cited

Abel, Lionel. “Joyce the Father, Beckett the Son.” The New Leader 14 December 1959: 26-27.

Bair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.

Beckett, Samuel. “A Case in a Thousand.” The Bookman 86 (1934): 241-42.

———. “Sedendo et Quiesciendo” [sic]. transition 21 (1932): 13-20.

Donoghue, Denis. “Being Irish Together.” The Sewanee Review 84.1 (1976): 129-33.

Ellmann, Richard. Samuel Beckett: Nayman of Noland. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1986.

Hanly, David. In Guilt and in Glory. New York: Morrow, 1979.

Harvey, Lawrence. Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970.

Hayman, David. “A Meeting in the Park and a Meeting on the Bridge: Joyce and Beckett.” James Joyce Quarterly 8 (Summer 1971): 372-84.

Higgins, Aidan. “Tired Lines, or Tales My Mother Told Me.” A Bash in the Tunnel: James Joyce by the Irish. Ed. John Ryan. Brighton: Clifton, 1970. 55-60.

Irish Number. Special Issue of The Bookman 86 (1934).

Kinsella, Thomas. “The Irish Writer.” Davis, Mangan, Ferguson? Tradition and the Irish Writer. By W. B. Yeats and Thomas Kinsella. Dublin: Dolmen, 1970. 57-66.

Mercier, Vivian. Beckett/Beckett. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

O'Brien, Eoin. The Beckett Country: Samuel Beckett's Ireland. Monkstown, Co. Dublin: Black Cat Press, 1986.

Shenker, Israel. “Moody Man of Letter.” The New York Times 6 May 1956: sec. 2; 1,3.

Watson, Francis. Review of More Pricks Than Kicks. The Bookman 86 (1934): 219-20.