Pas de Shamrocks pour Sam Beckett ? La dimension irlandaise de « Murphy »

The French consider Beckett as their own, and Beckett, who has chosen their language and their culture has given them good reasons for this. Even when works of fiction first written in English are concerned, Murphy, for instance, the author has refused to be described as « Irish » and devoted part of his creative powers to sneer at his native country, its inhabitants and types (e.g. the Stage-Irishman) and to parody some of its institutions (e.g. the Abbey), its artists (Yeats, Clarke) and its symbols (Cathleen ni Houlihan). It is not so much Ireland that Murphy, a novel of refusal, condemns, however, as the land that has given birth to the hero or anti hero and his creator ; besides, condemned or otherwise, that land remains everpresent, sometimes to the point of recalling Joyce. Yet the two novelists are also strikingly different in achievement as well as in racial, social and religious sensibility. If Beckett appears simply « Irish » in his « Freudian blarney : Sodom and Begorrah » — to quote Dylan Thomas — his mental attitudes are essentially « Anglo-Irish » stricto sensu and so is, in part, his art of comedy reminiscent of Sheridan and Wilde and, when flavoured with a touch of the Abbey, in spite of his sarcasms, more akin to that of his fellow Protestant, Synge, than to any other playwright. The Puritanism of the Anglo-Irish variety is fundamental to an understanding of Murphy in which a Swiftian dislike for the body and bodily functions is more prominent than a Joycean tendency to make fun of them. Beckett thought that « the artist who stakes his whole being comes from nowhere » . This is patently not the case in as far as he is concerned and Ireland also is entitled to claim him as part of one of her traditions.Rafroidi Patrick. Pas de Shamrocks pour Sam Beckett ? La dimension irlandaise de « Murphy ». In: Études irlandaises, n°7, 1982. pp. 71-81