Beckett, Bicycles, Bananas. The Vacuum by Factotum

that makes no sound because it goes towards none, and a head strewn with arms laid down and corpses fighting fresh, and a body, I nearly forgot. This evening, I say this evening, perhaps it’s morning. And all these things, what things, all about me, I won’t deny them any more, there’s no sense in that any more. If it’s nature perhaps it’s trees and birds, they go together, water and air, so that all may go on, I don t need to know the details, perhaps I’m sitting under a palm. Or it’s a room, with furniture, all that’s required to make life comfortable, dark, because of the wall outside the window. What am I doing, talking, having my figments talk, it can only be me. Spells of silence too, when I listen, and hear the local sounds, the world sounds, see what an effort I make, to be reasonable. There’s my life, why not, it is one, if you like, if you must, I don’t say no, this evening. There has to be one, it seems, once there is speech, no need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life, that’s the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough. I’m making progress, it was time, I’ll learn to keep my foul mouth shut before I’m done, if nothing foreseen crops up. But he who somehow comes and goes, unaided from place to place, even though nothing happens to him, true, what of him? I stay here, sitting, if I’m sitting, often I feel sitting, sometimes standing, it’s one or the other, or lying down, there’s another possibility, often I feel lying down, it’s one of the three, or kneeling. What counts is to be in the world, the posture is immaterial, so long as one is on earth. To breathe is all that is required, there is no obligation to ramble, or receive company, you may even believe yourself dead on condition you make no bones about it, what more liberal regimen could be imagined, I don’t know, I don’t imagine. No pomt under such circumstances in saying I am somewhere else, someone else, such as I am I have all I need to hand, for to do what, I don’t know, all I have to do, there I am on my own again at last, what a relief that must be. Yes, there are moments, like this moment, when I seem almost restored to the feasible. Then it goes, all goes, and I’m far again, with a far story again, I wait for me afar for my story to begin, to end, and again this voice cannot be mine. That’s where I’d go, if I could go, that’s who I’d be, if I could be. Where would I go, if I could go, who would I be, if I could be, what would I say, if I had a voice, who says this, saying it’s me? Answer simply, someone answer simply. It’s the same old stranger as ever, for whom alone accusative I exist, in the pit of my inexistence, of his, of ours, there’s a

simple answer. It’s not with thinking he’ll find me, but what is he to do, living and bewildered, yes, living, say what he may. Forget me, know me not, yes, that would be the wisest, none better able than he. Why this sudden affability after such desertion, it’s easy to understand, that’s what he says, but he doesn’t understand. I’m not in his head, nowhere in his old body, and yet I’m there, for him I’m there, with him, hence all the confusion. That should have been enough for him, to have found me absent, but it’s not, he wants me there, with a form and a world, like him, in spite of him, me who am everything, like him who is nothing. And when he feels me void of existence it’s of his he would have me void, and vice versa, mad, mad, he’s mad. The truth is he’s looking for me to kill me, to have me dead like him, dead like the living. He knows all that, but it’s no help his knowing it, I don’t know it, I know nothing. He protests he doesn’t reason and does nothing but reason, crooked, as if that could improve matters. He thinks words fail him, he thinks because words fail him he’s on his way to my speechlessness, to being speechless with my speechlessness, he would like it to be my fault that words fail him, of course words fail him. He tells his story every five minutes, saying it is not his, there’s cleverness for you. He would like it to be my fault that he has no story, of course he has no story, that’s no reason for trying to foist one on me. That’s how he reasons, wide of the mark, but wide of what mark, answer us that. He has me say things saying it’s not me, there’s profundity for you, he has me who say nothing say it’s not me. All that is truly crass. If at least he would dignify me with the third person, like his other figments, not he, he’ll be satisfied with nothing less than me, for his me. When he had me, when he was me, he couldn’t get rid of me quick enough, I didn’t exist, he couldn’t have that, that was no kind of life, of course I didn’t exist, any more than he did, of course it was no kind of life, now he has it, his kind of life, let him lose it, if he wants to be in peace, with a bit of luck. His life, what a mine, what a life, he can’t have that, you can’t fool him, ergo it’s not his, it’s not him, what a thought, treat him like that, like a vulgar Molloy, a common Malone, those mere mortals, happy mortals, have a heart, land him in that shit, who never stirred, who is none but me, all things considered, and what things, and how considered, he had only to keep out of it. That’s how he speaks, this evening, how he has me speak, how he speaks to himself, how I speak, there is only me, this evening, here, on earth, and a voice that makes no sound because it goes towards none, and a head strewn with arms laid down and corpses fighting fresh, and a body, I nearly forgot.

THE VACUUM

someone answer simply. It’s the same old stranger as ever, for whom alone accusative I exist, in the pit of my inexistence, of his, of ours, there’s a simple answer. It’s not with thinking he’ll find me, but what is he to do, living and bewildered, yes, living, say what he may. Forget me, know me not, yes, that would be the wisest, none better able than he. Why this sudden affability after such desertion, it’s easy to understand, that’s what he says, but he doesn’t understand. I’m not in his head, nowhere in his old body, and yet I’m there, for him I’m there, with him, hence all the confusion. That should have been enough for him, to have found me absent, but it’s not, he wants me there, with a form and a world, like him, in spite of him, me who am everything, like him who is nothing. And when he feels me void of existence it’s of his he would have me void, and vice versa, mad, mad, he’s mad. The truth is he’s looking for me to kill me, to have me dead like him, dead like the living. He knows all that, but it’s no help his knowing it, I don’t know it, I know nothing. He protests he doesn’t reason and does nothing but reason, crooked, as if that could improve matters. He thinks words fail him, he thinks because words fail him he’s on his way to my speechlessness, to being speechless with my speechlessness, he would like it to be my fault that words fail him, of course words fail him. He tells his story every five minutes, saying it is not his, there’s cleverness for you. He would like it to be my fault that he has no story, of course he has no story, that’s no reason for trying to foist one on me. That’s how he reasons, wide of the mark, but wide of what mark, answer us that. He has me say things saying it’s not me, there’s profundity for you, he has me who say nothing say it’s not me. All that is truly crass. If at least he would dignify me with the third person, like his other figments, not he, he’ll be satisfied with nothing less than me, for his me. When he had me, when he was me, he couldn’t get rid of me quick enough, I didn’t exist, he couldn’t have that, that was no kind of life, of course I didn’t exist, any more than he did, of course it was no kind of life, now he has it, his kind of life, let him lose it, if he wants to be in peace, with a bit of luck. His life, what a mine, what a life, he can’t have that, you can’t fool him, ergo it’s not his, it’s not him, what a thought, treat him like that, like a vulgar Molloy, a common Malone, those mere mortals, happy mortals, have a heart, land him in that shit, who never stirred, who is none but me, all things considered, and what things, and how considered, he had only to keep out of it. That’s how he speaks, this evening, how he has me speak, how he speaks to himself, how I speak, there is only me, this evening, here, on earth, and a voice

bicycles, bishops, bananas.....beckett

how he speaks, this evening, how he has me speak, how he speaks to himself, how I speak, there is only me, this evening, here, on earth, and a voice that makes no sound because it goes towards none, and a head strewn with arms laid down and corpses fighting fresh, and a body, I nearly forgot. This evening, I say this evening, perhaps it’s morning. And all these things, what things, all about me, I won’t deny them any more, there’s no sense in that any more. If it’s nature perhaps it’s trees and birds, they go together, water and air, so that all may go on, I don t need to know the details, perhaps I’m sitting under a palm. Or it’s a room, with furniture, all that’s required to make life comfortable, dark, because of the wall outside the window. What am I doing, talking, having my figments talk, it can only be me. Spells of silence too, when I listen, and hear the local sounds, the world sounds, see what an effort I make, to be reasonable. There’s my life, why not, it is one, if you like, if you must, I don’t say no, this evening. There has to be one, it seems, once there is speech, no need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life, that’s the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough. I’m making progress, it was time, I’ll learn to keep my foul mouth shut before I’m done, if nothing foreseen crops up. But he who somehow comes and goes, unaided from place to place, even though nothing happens to him, true, what of him? I stay here, sitting, if I’m sitting, often I feel sitting, sometimes standing, it’s one or the other, or lying down, there’s another possibility, often I feel lying down, it’s one of the three, or kneeling. What counts is to be in the world, the posture is immaterial, so long as one is on earth. To breathe is all that is required, there is no obligation to ramble, or receive company, you may even believe yourself dead on condition you make no bones about it, what more liberal regimen could be imagined, I don’t know, I don’t imagine. No pomt under such circumstances in saying I am somewhere else, someone else, such as I am I have all I need to hand, for to do what, I don’t know, all I have to do, there I am on my own again at last, what a relief that must be. Yes, there are moments, like this moment, when I seem almost restored to the feasible. Then it goes, all goes, and I’m far again, with a far story again, I wait for me afar for my story to begin, to end, and again this voice cannot be mine. That’s where I’d go, if I could go, that’s who I’d be, if I could be. Where would I go, if I could go, who would I be, if I could be, what would I say, if I had a voice, who says this, saying it’s me? Answer simply,

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the vacuum

Where would I go, if I could go, who would I be, if I could be, what would I say, if I had a voice, who says this, saying it’s me? Answer simply, someone answer simply. It’s the same old stranger as ever, for whom alone accusative I exist, in the pit of my inexistence, of his, of ours, there’s a simple answer. It’s not with thinking he’ll find me, but what is he to do, living and bewildered, yes, living, say what he may. Forget me, know me not, yes, that would be the wisest, none better able than he. Why this sudden affability after such desertion, it’s easy to understand, that’s what he says, but he doesn’t understand. I’m not in his head, nowhere in his old body, and yet I’m there, for him I’m there, with him, hence all the confusion. That should have been enough for him, to have found me absent, but it’s not, he wants me there, with a form and a world, like him, in spite of him, me who am everything, like him who is nothing. And when he feels me void of existence it’s of his he would have me void, and vice versa, mad, mad, he’s mad. The truth is he’s looking for me to kill me, to have me dead like him, dead like the living. He knows all that, but it’s no help his knowing it, I don’t know it, I know nothing. He protests he doesn’t reason and does nothing but reason, crooked, as if that could improve matters. He thinks words fail him, he thinks because words fail him he’s on his way to my speechlessness, to being speechless with my speechlessness, he would like it to be my fault that words fail him, of course words fail him. He tells his story every five minutes, saying it is not his, there’s cleverness for you. He would like it to be my fault that he has no story, of course he has no story, that’s no reason for trying to foist one on me. That’s how he reasons, wide of the mark, but wide of what mark, answer us that. He has me say things saying it’s not me, there’s profundity for you, he has me who say nothing say it’s not me. All that is truly crass. If at least he would dignify me with the third person, like his other figments, not he, he’ll be satisfied with nothing less than me, for his me. When he had me, when he was me, he couldn’t get rid of me quick enough, I didn’t exist, he couldn’t have that, that was no kind of life, of course I didn’t exist, any more than he did, of course it was no kind of life, now he has it, his kind of life, let him lose it, if he wants to be in peace, with a bit of luck. His life, what a mine, what a life, he can’t have that, you can’t fool him, ergo it’s not his, it’s not him, what a thought, treat him like that, like a vulgar Molloy, a common Malone, those mere mortals, happy mortals, have a heart, land him in that shit, who never stirred, who is none but me, all things considered, and what things, and how considered, he had only to keep out of it. That’s

the vacuum

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AMONG THE RUINS By William Viney “When we got there, there was nothing at all. The whole of Saint-Lò was blotted out. Nothing was standing except a few shacks” – Raymond Lelievre, ‘Dans Nos Ruines’ It was in war-torn France, when working with the Irish Red Cross, that Samuel Beckett witnessed people made homeless, picking through ruins in search of food and shelter. And, time again, in Endgame, Waiting for Godot and Happy Days for instance, or in the prose works collected in Stories and Texts for Nothing, we find these desiccated and decaying environments envelop Beckett’s wandering characters. Language, meanwhile, offers little shelter and less consolation; it gnaws and is sucked upon, is swallowed, gags, refuses digestion and returns on its subject, giving Beckett’s work its distinctive sense of complexity – frequently at odds with its own medium – and a conceptual difficulty that leaves audiences with few certainties. In June 1944 Beckett found himself similarly exiled in the French town of Saint-Lò, during an intense period of Allied bombing that saw the town almost completely destroyed. Exactly two years later, and hoping to provide a clearer and better balanced version of events than those made available through the Irish media, Beckett wrote a short piece intended for broadcast on Radio Erin, The Capital of the Ruins. Beckett breaks off his mundane report, which contains a description of the linoleun that floored the operating theatre, and transforms a work of journalism into one whose subject extends far beyond Saint-Lò, its hospital and the conflict that had reduced it to rubble. According to Beckett, those working among the debris of Saint-Lò were rewarded with something rare, though familiar enough to be recognised as time honoured: being surrounded by destroyed things gives a glimpse of humanity undone, a state of dissolution that opens up a space for thinking on a scale and on topics which are otherwise unobtainable: Some of those who were in Saint-Lò will come home realizing that they got at least as good as they gave, that they got indeed what they could hardly give, a vision and a sense of a time

honoured conception of humanity in ruins, and perhaps even an inkling of the terms in which our condition is to be thought again.1 This tumbling line is deceptively straightforward. Beckett’s careful play on the phrase ‘in ruins’ makes two meanings fold together – humanity is both dwelling in and is in a state of ruination. Ruin’s effects place the architectural and the existential entwine. But why should ruins provide an opportunity to take stock of what we are and what we might yet become, and what is so time honoured about the thinking we do with ruins? Beckett might have several interconnected traditions in mind – theological, philosophical and historical – which privilege ruin, as Beckett does, for providing a special stage for thinking about and renegotiating ‘humanity’. Without much hope of a true chronology, we will conclude a brief survey the contemplative tradition of ruingazing with the theatrical use of decay that Beckett explores in his postwar work. Theologically, ruins are given an important role in the division of knowledge, death and time. The Christian distinction between ruinam – the fall of unbelievers – and the resurrectionem promised to the faithful, engenders an idea of salvation in which architectural destruction and reconstruction plays a very active role. In scripture, Christ is both the rock upon which the church is based (Mt 16: 18–20, 1Cor 10: 1–4), and the stone that has been temporarily discarded: The stone the builders rejected / has become the capstone; / the Lord has done this, / and it is marvellous in our eyes (Ps 118: 22–33, Mt 21: 42, Mk 12: 10, Lk 20: 17). If the central tenets of Christianity are given their shape in buildings and their destruction, then it might not be so wild a thought to consider how our experience of architecture maintains some of the divisiveness implied by Christian thought. Ruins are, in this context, epoch-making; they provide a means to measure time and people, as well as bring punctuation marks to the flow

of events we experience. The elision between the end of architectural use and the end of human life typically arises through the simple expectation that buildings ought to perpetuate beyond us; what and how we build with things reflects a prosthetic legacy of what we take ourselves to be. If the history of ruin response over the last millennium has a prevailing refrain then it is morbid and self-regarding in tone. It is not simply the case that ruins always suggest death but they have frequently encouraged a way of thinking which considers life and death somehow coexist. The sociologist Georg Simmel recognised this dark capacity to translate architectural death into human life, identifying how ruins affect our sense of time and, ultimately, separate us from the easy, unidirectional movement from past to future, making us hesitate before the site of life from which life has departed […] the present form of past life.2 This made the ruin an important aesthetic object for Simmel. Despite the dispersed and dispersing materiality of ruin, “the past with its destinies and transformations have been gathered in to this instant of aesthetically perceptible present”3; ruined buildings have a telescopic ability to make legible the hopes and desires of the past. As David Lowenthal and a vast number of writers, artists and travellers have concluded that, The dominant association with [architectural] decay is our own transience. Marks of dissolution figure as memento mori, compelling reminders of death’s imminence [...] remainders of the evanescence of life and the futility of effort.4 Clearly Beckett’s engagement in and with ruin does more than simply rehearse the common association between ruin and death (though in times of war, and when working with an ambulance crew, this association must have been present). In Capital of the Ruins Beckett observes and comments upon people living among ruins. Ruination is not the absolute separation from what is past, but

If there is something in common with Beckett’s writing and the condition of ruin, it is this open confrontation with matter that lacks apparent coherence: the zone of the unusable. a material continuity, a persisting problem to behold and think through, perhaps even to admire. Beckett once declared that his work was full of people who seem to be falling to bits. This physical decay is incorporated into a broader project, an attempt to use objects and ideas that have been discarded by other writers, such as failure, ignorance, incapacity – I don’t think impotence has been exploited in the past. My little exploration is that little zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable – as something by definition incomparable with art.5 If there is something in common with Beckett’s writing and the condition of ruin, it is this open confrontation with matter that lacks apparent coherence: the zone of the unusable. In the literature written by wealthy travellers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in numerous Gothic stories and films, humanity is measured against shattered pieces of masonry. My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, / Look on my Works ye Mighty, and despair!” reads the Traveller in Shelley’s sonnet “Ozymandias”. Seeing this, the Traveller has a moment of wry reflection on the nature of impotence, observing that “Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal

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The German army occupied the town on 17 June 1940. Being a strategic crossroads, SaintLô was almost totally destroyed (95% according to common estimates) during the Battle of Normandy in World War II; it was questioned whether to rebuild it or to leave the ruins intact as a testimony to the bombing.

Wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away. 6 Shelley, like many of his contemporaries, found fascination in the ruins of antiquity and their power to inform the present. The past might be a foreign country but this sense of foreignness is intensified by the ruin, setting a stage for reflection that is capable of gesturing far beyond present circumstances. Though not obvious literary bedfellows, Beckett and Shelley use ruin as an opportunity to examine the hubristic assumptions of human power, intention and agency. Shelley and Beckett and the tradition I have put them into runs counter to some more recent writings on ruin. In these academic books, ruin is felt to “confound attempts to pin down spatial essence, to classify and categorise through representation and discourse”.7 Quite unlike the precise and rather lofty qualities given to them by Beckett, these writers identify a troubling meaninglessness in the ruin. As Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle state, The ruin is a ruin precisely because it seems to have lost its function or meaning in the present, while retaining a suggestive, unstable semantic potential [it is] uniquely ill-defined.8 In a similar way, Robert Ginsberg argues that the ruin is always unfamiliar and ever exceptional”8, always felt to be at odds with the orderly, the knowable or the categorical. I’d like to resist this kind of thinking – it seems to me that ruins can certainly pose us epistemological problems, but these problems might be exactly the reason that they have been so regularly employed in the task of imagining the terms in which our condition is to be thought again. The complexity of ruins and their troubled use opens up that zone of thinking that promises new orders, knowledge and categories of life. Saint-Lò’s ruins were observed and later written about retrospectively. Another use of ruin in literature and the visual arts is to project them into the future. The gesture

of projecting ruins, of prophesying the demise of a building or city depends upon an end that can be experienced, a sense of dénouement that is not absolutely terminal. From H. G. Well’s The Time Machine, whose Time Traveller remains watchful for every impression that could possibly help to explain the condition of ruinous splendour in which I found the world—for ruinous it was10, to the London of George Orwell’s Nineteen EightyFour, with its rotting nineteenth-century houses and the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow herb straggled over the heaps of rubble.11 Science fiction and dystopian genres are full of buildings becoming or in a state of ruin. The critic Frank Kermode recognised how these projections provided another opportunity to judge ourselves, We project ourselves–a small, humble elect, perhaps–past the End, so as to see the structure whole, a thing we cannot do from our spot of time in the middle.11 The future ruin frequently plays upon the fact that ‘the whole’ is not immediately apparent, meaning that the end it is held to represent becomes even more

In his dramatic works, so difficult to locate in space or time, ruination is a feature that helps to ground the work in the time honoured conception of humanity in ruins

provisional. The periods of time that ruins seem to call to an end allow us to read ends and beginnings into time; the future ruin, then, performs an important periodising function and represents an ally and potential antagonist in our attempts to bring the future to order, to think ourselves and our condition afresh. The lingering influence of Saint-Lò’s ruins came to colonise Beckett’s future. Though the new hospital was designed to be provisional it remained for years after its construction, leaving the lasting impression that the world had reached a new form of precariousness. Provisional’ is not the term it was, observes Beckett as he closes his piece about the town, in this universe become provisional.13 Paupered, exiled, ragged, undone – the ruin of war-torn Europe was the immediate future of everything. In his dramatic works, so difficult to locate in space or time, ruination is a feature that helps to ground the work in the time honoured conception of humanity in ruins; caught in an expanse of scorched grass rising in the centre, his characters up to the neck in rubble.14 Meanwhile, grey zero surrounds two men; all that surrounds them is corpsed.15 Perhaps we can say that Beckett universalises the condition of ruin in order to make us think again about our humanity. What can be done with such a pervasive provisionality? Not much. But perhaps there is refuge comfort in ruin, a kind of stasis that cannot be spoilt: Flatness endless little body only upright same grey all sides earth sky body ruins. Scattered ruins same grey as the sand ash grey true refuge. Four square true refuge long last four walls over backwards no sound. Never but this changelessness dream the passing hour. Never was but grey air timeless no sound figment the passing light. 16

1. Samuel Beckett, “The Capital of the Ruins”, in Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose 1929–1989, ed. Stan Gontarski (New York: Grove Press, 1995) p. 278. 2. Georg Simmel, “The Ruin,” in Georg Simmel 1858–1918: A Collection of Essays, with Translations and a Bibliography, trans. and ed. Kurt H. Wolff (Columbus: Ohio UP, 1959), p. 265. 3. Georg Simmel, “The Ruin,” p. 266. 4. David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country(Cambridge: CUP, 1985), 175, p. 148. 5. Samuel Beckett, interviewed by Israel Shenker, The New York Times, 6 May, 1956. Emphasis added. 6. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias,” in The Poems of Shelley Volume 2: 1817–19, ed. Kelvin Everest and Geoffrey Matthews (Harlow: Pearson, 2000), 2:310–311 7. Tim Edensor, Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality (Oxford: Berg, 2005), . 92, p. 94. 8. Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle, “Introduction,” in Ruins of Modernity, ed Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle (Durham, NC: Duke U P, 2010), p. 6. 9. Robert Ginsberg, The Aesthetics of Ruins(New York: Rodopi, 2004), p. 165. 10. H. G. Wells, The Time Machine and Other Stories(London: Ernest Benn, 1927), p. 32. 11. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four(1949; London: Penguin, 1987), p. 5. 12. Frank Kermode, The Sense of Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: OUP, 1967), p. 8. 13 Samuel Beckett, “The Capital of the Ruins”, p. 278. 14. Samuel Beckett, “Happy Days”, in Samuel Beckett: The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber, 2006), p.138, p.160 15. Samuel Beckett, “Endgame” in Samuel Beckett: The Complete Dramatic Works, p. 106. 16. Samuel Beckett, Lessness (London: John Calder, 1970), p. 2.

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BISHOP BERKELEY Samuel Beckett’s only screenplay, described memorably by Dilys Powell in The Sunday Times, as a load of old bosh, is the pragmatically entitled Film. It features a soon-to-be-dead Buster Keaton running about pursued, Halloween style, by a relentless, restless camera. As delightful as it is to think of Samuel Beckett as the father of slasher cinema, we have to appreciate that there is something else going on here. Film is a reaction to a 17th Century assertion by an Irish philosopher and bishop, and you wouldn’t get that combination nowadays, named George Berkeley. At the start of the film, Beckett uses the quotation: esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived). This is a truncated version of Berkeley’s original edict, lopping off the end of the full quotation which originally read: esse est percipi aut percipere (to be is to be perceived or to perceive). Precisely why he did this maybe answered by a quote Keaton gave on the Brooklyn Bridge set of the film about his understanding of his role as “O” the pursued man: A man may keep away from everybody but he can’t get away from himself. Beckett says of the film: “It’s a movie about the perceiving eye, about the perceived and the perceiver – two aspects of the same man. The perceiver desires like mad to perceive and the perceived tries desperately to hide. Then, in the end, one wins.” Beckett himself called the film an interesting failure. Gilles Deleuze, conversely, regarded it as ‘the greatest Irish film’, which is a bit of a stretch. Beckett was not the only writer to be directly influenced by the Bishop. Jorge Luis Borges’ Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, written as a faux encyclopaedia entry on a mysterious country called Uqbar, is generally viewed as a parabolic discussion of Berkelian idealism.

The story describes an intellectual conspiracy to imagine, and therefore bring into existence, a new world. This new world, Tlon, would be a fantastical realm with its own physical and metaphysical laws, which would be problematic for me as I’d never get anything done. As the story unfolds thoughts and ideas become increasingly substantive until ultimately it is revealed that the earth is becoming Tlon. The major theme of Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is that ideas ultimately manifest themselves in the physical world; an obviously tip of the mitre to Berkeley. So who was this Irish cleric whose thinking resonated through the writing of these titans of Twentieth Century literature? Glad you asked. Berkeley was born in Dysart Castle, his family seat, in March of 1865. He was educated at Kilkenny College and Trinity College, Dublin, and completed his Master’s degree there in 1707 He remained at Trinity as a tutor and Greek lecturer. It was during this tenure that he wrote his Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1707). All of Berkeley’s later themes are presented here in embryonic form: visual distance, position and the problems of sight and touch; all the basic tenets of his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge completed in 1710. This was the biggie for Berkeley and the first outing for his notion of Immaterialism, latterly more commonly known as Subjective Idealism. This idea denies the existence of material substance, contending instead that objects like chairs, pipes or trousers are merely ideas in the minds of perceivers – they therefore do not exist without being perceived. His key notion, previously quoted, is esse est percipi aut percipere, which proves, if nothing else, that he never trod on a plug on a midnight trip to the bathroom. Berkeley believed that God was the immediate source of all our experiences,

His key notion, previously quoted, is esse est percipi aut percipere, which proves, if nothing else, that he never trod on a plug on a midnight trip to the bathroom. which you or I would think means he needs a good talking to, but Berkeley, a Christian, thought he was just great. His proof of God, tying in neatly to his philosophy of perception, goes something like this: though I have the power to martial my own thoughts, when I open my eyes I don’t have the power to choose what I see. Therefore some other will must be thinking them up. I choose to call that entity God. Watertight, I think you’ll agree. And because God had provided these perceivable objects he was not the distant celestial watchmaker that Newton had described, he was an everyday omnipresence, littering our pathways with the signs and symbols of his word, and it was up to us to try and understand them. According to T.I. Oizmann: The revelation of God was directly accessible to man; it was the sense-perceived world, the world of man’s sensations, which came to him from on high for him to decipher and so grasp the divine purpose Berkeley’s thinking is often misrepresented as the notion that we live in an illusory world but in fact, for him, the opposite is true. Berkeley doesn’t claim that nothing is real but that ideas

by john higgins themselves are real things. When we look at an object and it resonates through our senses; informs us that is the idea: ideas themselves comprise reality. Thus Johnson’s famous refutation of Bishop Berkley’s “ingenious sophistry”, recorded in Boswell’s Life, seems somewhat disingenuous: I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- “I refute it thus. Though I did much the same thing with “my treading on a plug” joke earlier and for probably much the same reason. The use of the concepts: “spirit” and “idea”, central in Berkeley’s philosophy, aren’t easy to understand. As used by him, these terms are difficult to translate into modern terminology. His concept of “spirit” is analogous, perhaps, and I’m being disconcertingly vague I know, to the idea of “mind”. The concept of “idea” could be read as “sensation”. Berkeley did not deny the existence of physical objects such as teeth or combs. As he says himself: “I do not argue against the existence of any one thing that we can apprehend, either by sense or reflection. That the things I see with mine eyes and touch with my hands do exist, really exist, I make not the least question. The only thing whose existence we deny, is that which philosophers call matter or corporeal substance. And in doing of this, there is no damage done to the rest of mankind, who, I dare say, will never miss it.” Principles #35) This idea is, in fact, fundamentally different from the claim that to be is to be perceived. Berkeley pares back human knowledge to two elements: spirits and ideas. A person’s spirit, or, let’s not forget “mind”, which understands ideas, can be comprehended intuitively by reflection. For Berkeley, while we can never

in Italy, who is generally regarded as the founding father of American portrait painting. He hadn’t finished with Bermuda though, and made plans to build an ideal city there. It didn’t happen, funds were not forthcoming, and in 1732 he left America to return to London.While living in London he took part in efforts to create a home for the city’s abandoned children. The Foundling Hospital was founded by Royal Charter in 1739 (on my birthday!) and Berkeley is listed as one of its original governors. It was not a hospital in the ordinary sense, the title was used in this case to indicate the institution’s “hospitality” to those less fortunate. On being received children, they were not usually taken after the age of twelve months, were sent to the countryside with wet nurses where they stayed until they were four or five years old. At sixteen girls were generally apprenticed as servants for four years, the boys apprenticed at fourteen for seven years. In 1734, he was appointed Bishop of Cloyne in Ireland. Soon afterwards, he published Alciphron, or The Minute Philosopher, another dialogue, this time between a thinly veiled Shaftesbury, a free thinker, and himself, as an oddly progressive Christian. His last book was also his best selling (in his lifetime). Further Thoughts on Tar-water was published in 1752 and extolled the virtues of pine tar. Pine tar is an effective antiseptic and disinfectant when applied to cuts on the skin, but Berkeley saw greatness in it. He thought that it could become a universal panacea, effectively bringing about an end to all disease. It was a bold claim and backed by scant evidence, but isn’t it always the way: the public never really “get” your best stuff. In fact during his lifetime his philosophical ideas remain fairly uninfluential and it wasn’t until the 1870s, over a hundred years after his death, and with the publication of Alexander Campbell Fraser’s The Works of George Berkeley that he came to be recognised as a founding empiricist, the missing link between Locke and Hume.

fully understand the perceptions, the ideas, of others we have good reason to believe that they must be there, for their existence explains the purpose we find in our experience of others:

Schopenhaur wrote of him: “Berkeley was, therefore, the first to treat the subjective starting-point really seriously and to demonstrate irrefutably its absolute necessity. He is the father of idealism.”

It is plain that we cannot know the existence of other spirits otherwise than by their operations, or the ideas by them excited in us

That probably wouldn’t wash with Dylis Powell, though.

Dialogues #145). This is Berkeley’s solution to the problem of other minds. He also senses an order and purposefulness informing all of our experience, a guiding perception: that God guy again. Thus a material thing such as an apple consists of a collection of ideas (shape, colour, taste, physical properties, etc.) which are caused in the spirits of humans by the spirit of God. All of these ideas were posited in his chief philosophical work A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge in 1710 which, because nobody liked it, he rewrote as lengthy conversation called Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous three years later. This unusual gambit paid off. In it, Berkley’s own ideas are mouthed by Philonous (lover of mind), while opposing ideas are expressed by Hylas (matter), usually thought to represent the view of the proto-empiricist, John Locke, whose theory of the tabula rasa, the “blank slate”

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mind, was clearly at odds with Berkeley’s. While Berkeley’s theory was often ridiculed, critics like Samuel Clarke and William Whiston did acknowledge his “extraordinary genius” while still decrying his first principles as false.In the period between 1714 and 1720, he interspersed his academic endeavours with periods of extensive travel, and when he’d done Europe he turned his wandering, perceptive eye to the Americas, founding a college in Bermuda 1725 for the training of ministers and missionaries in the colony, causing him to lose his deanery with its

income of £1100, which was a lot of money in those days. And is still a lot of money for your average philosopher. In 1728, he married Anne Forster, daughter of the Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, who was probably worth a bob or two. He then went to America on a salary of £100 per annum landing near Newport, Rhode Island, where he bought a plantation in Middletown – the famous “Whitehall” (the other famous Whitehall, nothing to do with farces or farcical politicking). He also brought to New England John Smibert, the British artist he discovered

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pedaling with pleasure books & bicycles...

By Emily DeDakis

1. GLEE

I can forgive glee. Usually it’s obnoxious when a writer’s preoccupation earns them permanent literary dibs (Louis MacNeice forever owns snow & trains; Philip Roth gets masturbation & gloves. That sort of thing). But Samuel Beckett can bring bicycles to Eternal Author Show-and-Tell because he gets such a wide-eyed kick out of them. In Part One of Molloy, mulling over bikes is a relief from Molloy’s subterranean mind-muck: “Dear bicycle ... It is a pleasure to meet it again. To describe it at length would be a pleasure”; and lame Moran salivates over his savior-bicycle in Part Two: “I had to admit it must once have been quite a good bicycle. I would gladly describe it, I would gladly write four thousand words on it alone.” Easy, cowboys. Beckett on bikes isn’t straight-ahead or even comfortable reading — less quick-fix metaphor & cosy symbolism, more Poe-esque fetish. Beckett’s a perfect (if uphill) place to start a bike-lit review; he yanks between desire, frustration and elation. His bicycles are fullblooded, equal parts pleasure and torture. So yeah, in Beckett’s world: glee.

Beckett plots (like Beckett sentences) are all struggle & circularity: no payoff without pain, and you end suspiciously close to the starting mark. Crippled Molloy arranging himself on his cycle is a lesson in discomfort and perseverance: “I fastened my crutches to the crossbar, one on either side, I propped the foot of my stiff leg (I forget which now they’re both stiff) on the projecting front axle, and I pedaled with the other.” More like he’s strapping himself into the rack to be Medievally stretched. But there’s always the possibility of getting it — or at least thinking you’re getting it — as right as imaginable. In Part Two of Molloy, Moran finally gets rolling: “Happily it was downhill. Happily I had mended my hat, or the wind would have blown it away. Happily the weather was fine and I no longer alone. Happily, happily.” Oh, but can it last? The Penguin Book of the Bicycle (1978) describes the attainable but un-maintainable ideal of pedaling a bike:

FRUSTRATION & ELATION

that fast, relaxed and perfect rotary motion of the legs which makes for sustained speed. Everything else is poise. The body is balanced

and breathing fully, the mind is fixed on ‘stillness at the centre’, the eyes alert on the road as it whirls toward you. Everything moves. Everything is still. Molloy admits that if he consciously realises he’s riding, he falls off. When cycling characters in Molloy or O’Brien’s Third Policeman achieve perfection, it’s just before they discover they’re already dead. The body’s a cumbersome hell, but at least it can dream of sustained, effortless joy.

DESIRE

A dash of obsession turns the workaday object into a thing of fantasy. In Taming the Bicycle (1884), Mark Twain describes turning a corner as somewhere between falling in love and dragon-slaying: “every fibre of you is tense with a watchful strain ... your squirmy nerves are all full of electric anxieties ... your heart stands still, your breath hangs fire, your legs forget to work.” Halfway through Lolita (1955), Humbert buys his girl a bicycle and a book on art history. Lo’s too low-brow for the book, but H. can content himself to watch her ride. Flann O’Brien — a colleague of Beckett’s

in writing, being Irish, and being half-gone about bicycles — starts this passage from The Third Policeman (published 1967) with a horse metaphor, but soon strays: I led the bicycle to the middle of the road ... and swung myself into the centre of her saddle as she moved away eagerly under me in her own time. How can I convey the perfection of my comfort on the bicycle, the completeness of my union with her, the sweet responses she gave me at every particle of her frame? And yes: Riding a bike is practical but intimate — straddling something and manipulating it to get you somewhere. Sexy hitchhiking? In Molloy (1955), Beckett invented an eroticism revolving entirely around the bicycle –sometimes predatory, sometime shy & fumbling, always super-freaky: “I trembled for my testicles which swing a little low”, Moran admits in Part Two; and ”Its bulges dug into my buttocks. The more things resist me the more rabid I get.” Heavily populated bike racks never looked so tasty.

4. HUMANITY Bicycles are people too. Paul Fattaruso’s Bicycle (2007) is negligible lengthwise, but injects the bicycle with a wider range of human characteristics than some novelists give their protagonists. The delectable Hotel St George Press calls it a short story collection; it reads as a handful of aphorisms – a few too spare, some maybe overwritten. But then there’s Every day she rode gradually along the median, towing her wagonload of ageless and wellmannered babies. and My bicycle moves always patiently. Its mother was a magnificent birdcage; its father was a grandfather clock.

Not as iconic as Spielberg’s pedaling boy with alien cargo, but it should be.

EDUCATION

The freewheeling + cowboys-&-Indians ethos may be why bicycles occupy youthful, nostalgic territory — except, as Michael Specter points out, in places like Italy, where thousands of middle-aged men [feel] perfectly comfortable spending many hours a week in brightly colored spandex. In the UK & US especially, carry on pedaling into adulthood and you’ve got no choice, certain principles, or a screw loose. Some of the richest literature on bikes is juvenile and YA. Behold the teaching power of bicycling: kids learn to overcome adversity (just by

7. MESSENGERS John Forester (serious cyclist and son of novelist C.S.), wrote an essay in 1989 called “Cycling as Viewed in Literature”. In trawling the written word, he found that people (except maybe Italians and Oregonians) tend to see bicycles as outsider objects, specialty of few & hobby of a few more. But he thinks fiction gives a nuanced sense of how we relate to bicycles — more so than “serious works on cycling transportation”, which yammer on about evil motorcars but don’t say much deep about the bicycle itself. Though, he notes, the balance between poetics and mechanics is usually skewed: The market’s still open for a pro biker/mechanic who can write a linguistically and structurally challenging narrative. Lance Armstrong may have a

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At the heart of long-distance writing & riding is the pleasure of learning how to deliver a good message. For Beckett, the bicycle was an emblem for his mindset — his agony & adoration of the impossibility of clear, facile self-expression; his fascination with the inevitable human cycle of aspiring and failing. And yet we keep learning. Here’s Mark Twain in Taming the Bicycle: And then fall off, maybe on one side, maybe on the other; but you fall off, you get up and do it again; and once more; and then several times ... But you have ceased to mind the going down by this time; you are getting to light on one foot and then the other with considerable certainty. Six more attempts and six more falls make you perfect.

Fattaruso’s bicycles are ridden, polished and repaired but also consulted (Suddenly I am certain something is written on the inside of my bicycle.), or even harmed (I awake in a hammock, ink still wet on my lips, holding a disembodied handlebars.) They have flair (The bicycle wears its bell like a drop of venom, a berry of thunder.), transform the atmosphere of a day (Already noon, and still the sunlight is thin as Bible paper; women ride through the streets in their nightgowns.), and lend ardor to a quest (Yes, I miss you. Yes, I am pedaling.) Any of y’all doubting the humanity of bicycles? Double-check Sergeant Pluck and Policeman MacCruiskeen’s Atomic Theory in The Third Policeman. Irrefutable.

5. ESCAPE The Wright Bros. started with a bicycle firm before they glued feathers to their arms. A human being on a bicycle is the most efficient form of transport on earth — salmon, horses and jumbo jets clock in just behind. Human + bicycle = an ideal effort-to-result ratio, with almost no waste created and little skill needed: the perfect escape. Beckett’s More Pricks Than Kicks (1934) features the bike as bachelormobile: both adulterous partner and getaway vehicle. The bicycle Twain tamed is both ship (handlebars = “tiller”) and horse (“skittish, like any other colt”). Bicycles have spawned some amazing escape stories, true & imagined. Curious George’s creators, Hans & Margret Rey, fled Nazi Germany on bicycle; mischievous monkey George often sneaks a go on one. Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles (published 1977) is a fantasy of his Polish hometown, Drogobych, on whose streets he was killed by the S.S. in 1942. In it, Schulz takes the bicycle to the night sky: [...] a human river overshadowed by the cyclists on their spidery machines. Oh stellar arena of night, scarred by the ovolutions, spirals and leaps of those nimble riders; oh, cycloids and epi-cycloids executed in inspiration along the diagonals of the sky, amid lost wire spokes, hoops shed with indifference ... the thirteenth group of stars, included forever in the zodiac and resplendent since then in the firmament of our nights: THE CYCLIST.

learning to balance on a two-wheeler), practice sustainability (make a bike from scraps and keep it running forever), and also self-reliance (see Patricia Lee Gauch’s Morelli’s Game [1981]: “A private-school English teacher divides his class into two competing teams, equips each with a map and five dollars, and sends them off on a two-hundred-mile bicycle journey to Washington, D.C.” THEM’s some freaking Darwinism.) The biggest schooling is in value and property. Almost every kid-lit bicycle is or becomes a prized possession (viz: The Berenstain Bears: Yike! Yike! Where’s My Trike! by Stan Berenstain [1996). Sharing looms large; in My Trike by Gina Ingoglia (1989), proper tricycle enjoyment means keeping it clean and offering rides to her friends. And trust children’s lit to reinforce the societal status quo. We learn in My Rows and Piles of Coins by Tololwa Marti Mollel (1999) that a Tanzanian boy who saves up loose change to buy a much-needed bike will probably never have enough, whereas every little Norman in North America has at least one on his ledger sheet — and might not have learned sharing yet.

fallback if he can rock the free indirect style. But bicycles in literature have a different practicality. Californian writer William Saroyan earned his bike-enthusiast badge by working as a Western Union bicycle messenger; that job inspired his book The Human Comedy (1943). Messengers have a fast-moving and unpredictable job, learning many ways to get from A to B, and being able to quickly recalibrate. According to Saroyan (who was a friend of Flann O’Brien’s, and tried hard in the ‘40s to help him publish The Third Policeman), biking’s meditative, rhythmic physicality exercises thought too. In The Bicycle Rider in Beverly Hills (1952) he gives a trade secret — and not a Western Union one: I found out a great deal about style from riding them. Style in writing, I mean. Style in everything. [...] I learned to go and make it fast. I learned to know at one and the same time how my bike was going, how it was holding up, where I was, where I would soon be, and where in all probability I would finally be. [...] A man learns style from everything, but I learned mine from things on which I moved, and as writing is a thing which moves I think I was lucky to learn as I did.

SUGGESTED READING Hugh Kenner. The Cartesian Centaur in Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study (1968) Janet Menzies. Beckett’s bicycles in Journal of Beckett Studies (Autumn 1980) David B. Perry. Bike Cult: The Ultimate Guide to Human-Powered Vehicles (1995) Friedhelm Rathjen. The Joys of Cycling With Beckett (2001) Michael Specter. And Now He is Nothing in The New Yorker (24 August 2012) James Starrs. The Literary Cyclist: bicycles in literature Or, Everything about bicycles except how to ride one.

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Pick, pack, pock, puck I There is an old quiz question, the answer to which is Samuel Beckett. Who is the only Nobel Prize winner to be listed in Wisden (Wisden being the almanac of cricket)? And it’s Sam. Of course, being listed in Wisden is only evidence that you have played firstclass cricket. It is no guarantee of having played well. It’s curious how academics and biographers have tended to tread a little gingerly around Beckett’s bowling and batting figures, as if there might be some shame in not having starred rather than just having played. Beckett’s entries in Wisden come from two touring games in which he was picked for Dublin University against the English county side Northamptonshire. Beckett opened the batting for Trinity against Northants in 1926. It was a four innings game. Beckett scored four runs in the first innings, one in the second. For those readers not familiar with cricket, this is not so good. Someone opening the batting is meant to stay in for a while longer than Beckett did and to score more runs. Polite commiserations would have greeted him at the pavilion, but glances would have been averted in tacit acknowledgement of his failure. Beckett also bowled – left-arm medium pace. He took no wickets in either match. II The cricket team I play for will never warrant an entry in Wisden. It was once, I recently discovered, mentioned on Test Match Special on BBC Radio 4 when an RTÉ presenter was discussing cricket in Ireland during an Ireland v. England match. Radio 4 politely ensures that a commentator from whichever nation is playing against England is represented in the commentary box. Our particular team, The Theatrical Cavaliers, has a grudge match against RTÉ each year and this game, named for obscure theatrical reasons ‘The Marlowe’, was used by the Irish commentator as an example of grassroots cricket in Dublin. Many excited texts were sent when the team got its ‘Beckett in Wisden’ moment on Test Match Special. The Theatrical Cavaliers play by Taverners’ rules, a gently modified version of the game which allows everyone a fair go. I’m a bitpart player, with no specialism and no skill. I hardly played and certainly never excelled at school. And having played a lot in the past two years I have come to realize that I’m never really going to be much better than I am now. Finding this out was deeply dispiriting at first. But having to live with this knowledge, recognising my physical limitations and deteriorating loss of agility and co-ordination, has been a kind of relief. There is then no pressure to improve, or evolve. There is no looking forward breathlessly to enhanced

techniques next season, nor to revelations in my capacity for concentration (for cricket involves long passages of dull attention). No, all I need now is an acceptance of my low-level but unappalling incompetence, interspersed with occasional flashes of what might have been, but never will. The sudden weight of the ball in my hand still shocks me. If I manage to hit the ball when I’m batting it feels like I may have broken something – the bat, a bone, a window, a long-standing convention. Maybe three times a season I play a shot which has the feel and sound of a ball which has been truly hit and I can watch it run off to the boundary, or, more likely, loop into the air and towards the lottery of catching which is Taverners’ fielding. And as that red ball unfolds its parabola I know that scoring four runs or being caught out is entirely down to chance. What a relief, what a lifting of daily responsibility, then accompanies the ball in its flight. If my lack of proficiency might tend to make me shy of playing at all, then that is balanced against the pleasure of wearing the whites, of the sudden movements of the game, and the slow resettings of the field for the next ball. All of these are things I treasure. Clearly, in comparison to my teammates and I, Beckett was a fine cricketer. Maybe he enjoyed the theatricality of it all, the stage-direction series of motions. My teammates are mostly professional actors, and maybe that’s why they like it too, this idea that there is a slow script being acted out on the green stage on a summer’s evening. Each of us is then our own Clov, shuffling six steps to the left at the direction of the captain’s field placings. But this is a bit trite. I wonder, is there some more real connection between Beckett and cricket, other than the fact that he played it? Is cricket germane to his writing? The closest I’ve ever been to Beckett, Beckett the person and thus the cricketer, was during an actual cricket match. One of original founders of The Theatrical Cavaliers was the actor Barry McGovern. The winter before last I listened to him read The Trilogy on CD. I played the CDs in the car everywhere I went for about a month. As well as being very moving, I found The Trilogy very useful for calming my children. A kind of quietness settled over them almost as soon as Barry picked up the narration. The Unnameable had a particularly soporific on a talkative five-year old. Then the following summer I played a match on the pitch in Trinity College, which would have been exactly the one Beckett played on. And there was Barry McGovern on my team. Barry, whose voice is now indistinguishable in my mind from Beckett’s. Barry bowled slow, looping balls high into the city sky (and, as it happened, the setting sun) which plonked down and lost all momentum just in front of a frustrated batsman. This batsman eventually angrily swung his bat at

Beckett was a fine cricketer. Maybe he enjoyed the theatricality of it all, the stagedirection series of motions.

by COLin GRAHAM

one rolling ball, missing it, and watched as it went modestly but inexorably towards his stumps, keeping back just enough energy to shake the stump in a way that meant a bail fell off. Which, again for those of you not au fait, means he was out. Not a happy man. Barry, on the other hand, wore a look on his face which he also deploys when he plays Vladimir in Godot. Sure that it was going to come. ‘Without fail’. Grimly sure and nearly comic. III It would be nice to believe that there is something about writers, or maybe the act of writing, which is in sympathy with playing cricket. Reading P.G. Wodehouse’s letters recently I found that he enthuses about cricket in the most banal ways. Wodehouse seems to

be only able to talk about the game in a tone that mixes celebrity culture with old school affiliations. It’s all a bit dull and nauseatingly claustrophobic. But Wodehouse’s letters did reveal that P.G. was once a young upstart in a team that variously featured Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, A.A. Milne and J.M. Barrie. A great batting line-up, and add to that the fact that Conan Doyle once, apparently, bowled out W.G. Grace (the god of cricketers) and it’s a team I’d have liked to play a game for. Though having Conan Doyle or Kipling as captain might take some of the pleasure out of it. Lots of fierce shouting, I think. There is, though, little more that we can discern from this coincidence of writers and cricket than what we already should know – that cricket was part of a class structure and was embedded in the Edwardian public school system in England. Wodehouse’s early sporting and crickety novels, The Golden Bat, for example, are rubbish, proving that hoping for any direct connection between the sport and (good) writing yields few rewards. Maybe if Beckett had a Beckettian take on cricket it came not from his school and university background, or at least not in the same way as Wodehouse got his immersion in the game. Could it have been a less settled, more angst-ridden experience for Beckett? Did Beckett arrive at cricket with a consciousness that it was an English sport, played only on license by the non-English, and that to take part in the game was, above all, an ironic acting out of English public school identity? The logic here would be that anyone who plays cricket either is, or is self-consciously, playfully, ironically, imitatively, or in some

tortured fashion, performing a quintessential act of Englishness. Vivian Mercier, for example, thought that this had some purchase in Beckett’s sense of himself as Irish. More widely the identity politics of cricket are largely based on variations of this postcolonial argument. C.L.R. James, in his famous book Beyond a Boundary, argues that in the Caribbean cricket was ‘appropriated’ as a form of anti-colonial resistance. It’s a compelling argument, partly built around proving that those who are not English but play cricket are not necessarily ‘mimic men’. It’s hard to see Beckett mimicking anyone, though if there’s one writer he follows closely it is, of course, Joyce. Joyce has his cricket moments, both in Potrait of the Artist As a Young Man (“pick, pack, pock, puck”) and, more stupendously, in Finnegans Wake, in which there is a substantial cricketing passage (set in the Phoenix Park, home of the oldest cricket team in Ireland, ‘Phoenix’, who celebrate Major Robert Gregory and Charles Stewart Parnell as ex-members). Into this passage in the Wake is woven almost every cricketing term available to Joyce, and to the English language, at the time. Joyce manages to give each term some sexual double entendre (“caught in the slips”, that sort of thing), which can be seen either as a dig at the pomposity of cricketing parlance and all it represents, or a pleasure at entering and taking possession of yet another odd linguistic subculture. The trouble with the post-colonial-identity take on cricket is that it assumes that being Irish or English or Indian is the foremost thing in the personhood of any particular individual at any particular moment. This is dandy in

theory, but not helpful, nor perhaps even possible, when a cricket ball is coming towards you at 60mph. It must be very irritating for the current Irish cricket team, who are good and getting better, to have to deal with this identity crisis during fielding practice. It is a real phenomenon though, this cultural war carried through cricket – just not the whole story. A few years ago Neil Hannon recorded an album with Thomas Walsh of Pugwash, under the title The Duckworth Lewis Method (a mathematical formula for working out who wins a game of cricket in case of rain). The standout track is The Age of Revolution, a blockbuster ELOish song celebrating the rise of Pakistani millionaire players and their new-found cricketing dominance in the global sport. Real post-colonialism them, and arguably an Irish identification with post-colonial counterparts. But it is only one song on a long album. Equally there’s Out on the Boundary a meanderingly pleasant imitation of fielding on the outskirts of things on a quiet day, drifting off into an oblivion of ennui. That, rather than, sporting battles which equate with clashes of civilisations, seems more akin to what cricket actually is in its everyday experiences. Standing there with your hands behind your back, anticipating. Neil Hannon, it turns out, occasionally makes an appearance for the Theatrical Cavaliers. Imagine, he’s fielding beside Barry McGovern. It’s all coming together. Cricket, like most sports, is the drama of being alive, played out on a field. But cricket may just be the sport most like a Beckettian life. Perhaps it was not mastery of the art of batting that made cricket important to Beckett. Maybe we don’t need to know that he was good enough to get that entry in Wisden. Cricket has a set of arcane rules with a selfsupporting logic, but no real reason behind them. The game is held together only by the consensus that it might as well be played as not be played. Its ‘spirit’ is the tempering of

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the competitive urge with fierce, sometimes merciless politeness. The experience of playing cricket is not really one of spectacular skill and extraordinary human achievement (not for the everyday cricketer). And for every wicket taken there is the hanging head of a disappointed batsman. Cricket’s drama can be very undramatic. Failure, accepting the universality of physical decrepitude, a slow, often uninteresting unfolding of a story, and, however long it takes to get there, a finale, are the true joys of playing cricket. It is a game orchestrated by arcane rules which can be endlessly discussed and never entirely, comprehensively, understood. This is the world not so much of Waiting for Godot as that of How It Is (“semi-side right left leg left arm push pull flat on face mute imprecations”). An Observer cricket correspondent once said of the English batsman Chris Tavare, who was notoriously unaspiring in his batting style, that watching him was like ‘waiting to die’. And this was praise. It is also a description of Company, or Worstward Ho. This is the thing that distinguishes cricket from most other sports: it understands boredom and, therefore, death. And especially death by boredom. If cricket meant anything to Beckett, if it’s in his writing anywhere, it’s not, I think, his achievement in getting in to Wisden that is important. The cricketing experience which really reappears in his writing is there in his trudge back in to the pavilion after being out for 1 in the second innings against Northants.

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FUNNY WALKS

Vladimir: Charming evening we’re having. […] Estragon: It’s awful Vladimir: Worse than pantomime. Estragon: The circus. Vladimir: The music hall. Estragon: The circus. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot It is not coincidental that the part of Vladimir in Roger Blin’s 1953 French production of En Attendant Godot/Waiting for Godot was played by Lucien Raimbourg, a music-hall comedian who had previously won some acclaim with a series of cabaret pieces entitled Quatre Pas dans le cirage (4 steps in a stupour, etre dans le cirage, means to be dazed or in a stupour). Or that later British productions of Godot featured Max Wall, another music hall dancer and comedian, who would also gain some reknown for his Professor Wallofsky character, whose funny walk was meant to have inspired John Cleese of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. We don’t know whether Wall had to be restrained from making too much use of his funny walk in rehearsing for Godot, as it is said of Raimbourg. But as the presence of these music-hall comedians in Beckett’s Godot suggests, this play, like much of his subsequent work, abounds in the cross-talk, physical humour, and pratfalls, of circus and music-hall revues, as well as the gestural comedy of silent film stars Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, that had been a staple of entertainment during Beckett’s days as a student in 20s in Dublin. In Beckett’s later work, many of these comic techniques – the cross-talk, pratfalls, and gestural comedy – would recede into the background. But one aspect of the circus, music-hall, and silent film would remain a constant presence throughout Beckett’s oeuvre, from his early works in prose and theatre, to his later, more experimental works for film and television: namely, the funny walk. If one were to offer a brief overview of funny walks in Beckett’s oeuvre, keeping in mind that for Beckett, funny ‘haha’ and funny ‘strange’ always go hand-in-hand, it might look something like this: Funny walk one (head-long tardigrade does funambulistic stagger): A character enters on scene, arms dangling mechanically at his

sides, and, with the slow-motions of an upright sloth balancing on a tight-rope, turns his head stiffly under his hat through a quarter of a circle, turns his bust as far as possible towards the north and at the same time flings out his unbending right leg as far as possible towards the south, then turns his bust as far as possible towards the south and at the same time flings his unbending left leg as far as possible towards the north, and so on, over and over again. “But it’s not particularly silly, is it? I mean, the right leg isn’t silly at all and the left leg merely does an unbending outward fling toward the opposite cardinal point…”. So you might say, if, while reading this passage, you were channelling those infamous lines from Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks. The above passage, a slightly edited version of Beckett’s description of Watt’s funny walk in the eponymous novel of 1953, may not have inspired the funny walks of Monty Python, or even Max Wall. But Watt’s “funamabulist stagger” (the stagger of a tight-rope walker), and his “headlong tardigrade” (from the Latin, ‘tardigradus’, walking slowly, and ‘tardigradua’, suborder of slow-moving mammals which include the sloth), as Beckett describes it in the original passage, did in fact inspire a homage by the conceptual performance artist Bruce Nauman. Nauman’s 1968 video work, Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk) (1968, B &W, 60 min.), features the artist walking slowly and precisely, with a measured but awkward gait, around a track on the studio floor, lifting one unbending leg high before him, and as it lands, raising the other leg high behind him, tracing the cardinal points of the track just as Watt does of the space he covers. Nauman, furthermore, video-taped his walk with the camera on its side, so that he seems to be walking a tight-rope up the side of wall. Funny walk two (with ladder gag): A figure enters with a stiff, staggering walk, as though the legs belong to a different mechanism than the body. He turns and looks up at a window, hobbles over to it, looks up, turns around, hobbles off-stage, brings back a step ladder, climbs the ladder with only one bending leg, looks out the window. Brief laugh. He gets down, hobbles six steps towards another window, looks up, remembers the ladder, hobbles back for it, carries it to the window,

By Dr. Adrienne Janus

climbs up, looks out. Brief laugh. He gets down, hobbles three steps towards the first window, looks up, hobbles back for the ladder, carries it to the window, looks out, brief laugh, and so on, over again three more times. This scene, as you may recognise, constitutes the opening of Beckett’s Endgame/Fin de Partie (1957), where Clov, who plays servant / dogsbody to Hamm, the wheelchair bound master, engages us with a good five-minutes of the ladder gags (albeit in a typically

minimalist, Beckettian version) that were a staple of clown acts in the music hall and circus in the 20s, as well as of the silent films of Charlie Chaplin (Pawn Shop) and Buster Keaton (Cops). In Beckett’s ladder gag, unlike those of the circus, music-hall or silent film, there is none of the virtuouso acrobatics, the comic kinaesthetic potential offered by the ladder as both prop and symbol of the tramp/ outcasts’ climb up the (social) ladder and the tragic-comic violence of the fall down. But the ladder as prop and symbol, and the mood of

Clov, who plays servant / dogsbody to Hamm, the wheelchair bound master, engages us with a good five-minutes of the ladder gags (albeit in a typically minimalist, Beckettian version)

sublimated tragic-comic violence, is still there, along with the bent, but unbowed persistence of the underdog (embodied in that stiff, staggering walk) to continue playing the losing game, with whatever props one can find. Funny walk three (the upspeed-hobble): In a long dark overcoat with collar up, hat pulled down over eyes, right hand shielding his face, hugging the wall on his left, he comes into view like a rotund penguin hobbling in blind haste along the sidewalk, bumps into an elderly couple holding a pet monkey, storms on, turns back, stops to look them, registers the shocked expressions of the couple, the indifference of the monkey, then storms off in comic foundered precipitancy. This is the opening scene of Beckett’s Film, an almost-silent film shot in black and white in 1965 (there is one sound-effect, that of a character saying ‘shhh!’), starring Buster Keaton, whose early career in vaudeville lead on to a star-studded career in slapstick comedy of the silent film era with works such as Cops (1922), Go West (1925) and The General (1927). Beckett had been a fan of Keaton’s work since his student days in Dublin, and if he chose Keaton to star in his one and only feature film, it was not only for Keaton’s stoic, dead-pan expression in the face of adversity (Keaton was nicknamed ‘the great stone face’). It was also the physical humour, embodied in the funny walk that features so prominently in Keaton’s work, such as in Go West, where the outcast, loner Keaton, goes west to find his fortune, enters the town of Dirt, and,

agglutination of bodies as a means of keeping upright; the substitution of any-space-whatever for designated areas; the substitution of a ‘gestus’ as a logic of postures and positions for all story or narrative; the quest for a minimalism; the appropriation by dance of walking and its accidents; the acquisition of gestural dissonances. It is needed not only for the walking, but the hiatus, the punctuation, the dissonance.

to fit in with the natives, imitates a barrellegged cowboy walk, to hilarious effect. The “comic foundered precipitancy” that Beckett describes in the script for Film is played out brilliantly by Keaton here (and intensified by the ‘upspeed-look’ that Beckett reproduces from silent cinema), where Keaton’s walk, hobbling in blind-haste, is performed not to escape notice by the natives, but to escape being perceived by the eye of the camera, to escape, in other words, perception itself. Funny walk four (Beckett boogie-woogie): Four figures, all alike in build, covered in floorlength gowns of different colours (white, yellow, blue, red), cowls hiding their faces. Each pace the given area, each following his particular course. One starts the course of pacing from one corner of the square to another, shuffling, hunched over, to the pacing beat of drum, joined by the second and the sound of a gong, the third and a triangle, the fourth and a woodblock. The sound of shuffling feet is heard as the figures move toward the centre of the square, narrowly avoid impact at the centre, resume their course of pacing to and from the corners of the square, in four different permutations. This description of Beckett’s Quad (1982), a piece for television, reveals the trajectory of Beckett’s funny walks, from circus, musichall, and silent film, to performance art and contemporary ballet. Indeed, Beckett’s script for the television piece notes that for the walkers, “some ballet training is desirable.” As the philosopher/critic Gilles Deleuze so perceptively notes: Quad is close to a ballet. The general similarities between the work of Beckett and modern ballet are numerous: the abandonment of all privileging of vertical stature; the

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(Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” Substance 78: 1995, 14). The walks Beckett presents us with in Quad are not funny ‘haha’ or even funny ‘strange’; but they are funny in their ability to fascinate, to mesmerise us with the rhythms of bodies shuffling through the paces of their predetermined course, rhythms punctured by moments of arrhythmia, that moment of rupture or dissonance when the pacers near the centre, only to veer off and continue their course. In the dynamism of its geometric movement, the piece recalls a Mondrian grid retraced and brought to ‘life’ by the presence of pacing bodies. It is the cystallisation, the intensification of the question and problem that underlies all Beckett’s funny walks: how to go on? The answer, as Beckett’s Unnameable famously tells us: “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

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Tramps “Well once out on the road and free of the property what then, I really do not know...” Samuel Beckett, From An Abandoned Work In so often choosing as his central characters tramps, vagabonds and people otherwise displaced from normal social intercourse, Beckett leads us to ask questions. We may be familiar with Beckett’s techniques and the world that he creates in his writing, but we nonetheless find ourselves wanting to account for the distance between it and the supposedly rational, explicable universe we inhabit. How have these unfortunates, these fallen wanderers come to be in such a plight? What has befallen them, to cut them off so entirely from the world we know and the friends they must presumably once have had? We rarely receive any answers, even when his characters discourse at length on their memories and experiences. Indeed, these recollections serve only to emphasise the cruelty of the juxtaposition between their current state – homeless, ageless, timeless, friendless – and some former life, a life in which there were at least some fixtures of some kind, house, mother or wife. The figure of the tramp has many potential symbolic significances. In English culture and politics, the vagabond has been portrayed as a potent threat to the established order for nearly a thousand years, and laws against vagrancy have been in place since at least the 14th century. At a time when the economy relied on labourers being tied to the land, vagabondage was dangerously suggestive of freedom from feudal bonds and social obligations. Except in times of war, when men could be mobilised to fight far from home, and women and children might be made refugees, it was highly unusual for people to stray from the ties of home, family, church and work: nearly all common people were multiply obligated in this way. Later, during the chaotic years of the Civil War and Commonwealth in the mid-17th century, political or religious dissent often took the form of wandering; both men and women would go from village to village, begging food and fomenting discontent, challenging the authority of a church which denied communion to those who strayed from their own parish, and the legitimacy of a ‘new order’ whose beneficiaries still maintained that it was ordained by God. At the close of the 17th century, the Agricultural Revolution brought new rural displacements: most significantly the gradual mechanisation of tilling and harvesting, and the development of new cropping systems (and, of course, the introduction of the turnip, apparently a symbol of poverty for Beckett: even Estragon turns his nose up at one when offered it by Vladimir, choosing instead a blackened radish). An agriculture that had been based entirely on a human scale (often an individual human scale, since measurements of distance and land area, most particularly the acre, were all related to how much land

one man could plough in one day with one ox) began to dispense with the humans who had tended it; simultaneously the common lands were seized and enclosed by private landlords and customary grazing rights disappeared. As livelihoods derived from the land became no longer viable, so peasants were forced onto the road and into vagabondage; and again, these wandering vagrants, begging for work from farm to farm and town to town, were framed as legal and political ‘outsiders’. Their lot was to become the captive labour force in the Industrial Revolution, the sweated labour of the new mills and factories. Capitalism reclaimed them most effectively. In Beckett’s Ireland, there was a much more recent history of displacement and dispossession from the land, most obviously during the Famine, when approximately half a million people were forced from their homes. Many critics have made a great deal of the significance of this history of eviction and starvation to Beckett’s particular characters, but it’s worth remembering that his wanderers often seem to have chosen their destiny willingly, shedding their obligations in a desire simply to be ‘free of the property’. Perhaps we do well not to romanticise or heroicise the tramp too

The tramp – Vladimir, Estragon, Molloy / Moran, Malone and various unnamed, unnamable others – is just us, but with all our attachments and affectations stripped away much; after all, even if he doesn’t threaten the very basis of civilisation as we know it, he is at best revealed to be a selfish, solipsistic ne’erdo-well, less a rebel than a good-for-nothing, a victim of nobody but himself, and, of course, the imperishably unjust universe. With the long historic stages of imperialism, decolonisation and now globalisation (whatever we think that term means) has come the internationalisation of vagrancy and wandering. The refugee is surely an exemplary figure of the late 20th and early 21st centuries: the person displaced by war, the migrant in search of work; despite all variously fleeing the effects of capitalism’s uneven development,

By Daniel Jewesbury

such subjects are divided by a cruel, exacting logic into the ‘deserving’ (‘real’ refugees) and the undeserving (‘bogus’ asylum seekers, and, even worse, mere economic migrants), much as the poor were in Victorian Britain. Following Hannah Arendt’s considerations of the fatal, circular paradox of post-war espousals of ‘human rights’ (the moment when you might need to make an appeal on the basis of your human rights is precisely the moment when you no longer have access to them), the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has written extensively about ‘Homo Sacer’, the contemporary human subject who is subject to the law but who cannot appeal to it, the person who is reduced to a condition of ‘bare life’. These are not theoretical subjects, they are all around us: look no further than the ‘second rank’ EU citizens from Romania or Bulgaria, paying to buy copies of the Big Issue (‘a hand up, not a handout’) that they can resell: ‘self-employed’ modern-day serfs. So much for the tramp as the outcast of society, or as a dangerous malcontent preaching simple (or not so simple) disobedience. What about the wanderer as a privileged seer, or even a redemptive, holy figure, the sacred fool who takes all our sorrows and suffering onto himself? Again, Beckett seems to play with this imagery, familiar not only from the post hoc symbology surrounding the tormented, sacrificed Christ himself but from his own teachings (‘I was naked and you clothed me...’), as well as from the Hindu figure of the Sadhu, and from a great many other cultures around the world. Charlie Chaplin’s famous ‘little tramp’ had something of this metaphorical significance, as did the innumerable music hall ‘costers’ he was based on. But Beckett’s everyman, his Christ, is no case for either compassion or pity; he is an undeserving figure, base, often devious, certainly unreliable. Which may be the point. The tramp – Vladimir, Estragon, Molloy / Moran, Malone and various unnamed, unnamable others – is just us, but with all our attachments and affectations stripped away, avaricious and spiteful, hurt and hurtful, lost and regretful, not a saint or a radical or the saviour of mankind, not a metaphor, just a consciousness, cut loose.

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Art and hypochondria by Fionola Meredith I don’t know if t he surrealist comic writer Spike Milligan agonised about the state of his health, but the words on his tombstone - “I told you I was ill” - seem to be the perfect epitaph for a hypochondriac. Samuel Beckett, however, was definitely a sufferer. Especially as he grew older, he was regularly troubled by odd symptoms and strange conditions such as hammer toes, painful teeth, neck swellings and pruritis – an unexplained and compulsive desire to scratch. On one occasion, his shoulders and upper back were entirely paralysed by either bursitis or pleurisy, Beckett could not decide which. His “bitch of a heart” caused him much grief, and cysts were a particular problem, forever popping up in the most unfortunate places. An anal cyst disrupted a trip to Germany in 1937, until it ruptured and subsided. Beckett wrote to a friend: “the anus is better, it was really awful for fully 10 days in Berlin—consternating.” In fact, it is this willingness to speak freely and openly of the most intimate of problems that marks Beckett out as a true hypochondriac, rather than a straightforward victim of poor health. Hypochondriacs are morbidly self-involved, monitoring their every bodily sensation with forensic scrutiny, to the extent that they forget the sensibilities of those around them. All they can see is the symptom, and the mortal horror it presages. Freud called it a “state of being in love with one’s own illness”. Historically, hypochondria is common amongst artists, writers and thinkers, but it has been a neglected subject. However, author Brian Dillon has recently published an extensively-researched book which casts new light on this weird phenomenon. Charles Darwin, it turns out, was obsessed with the workings of his own digestive system. He kept meticulous records of his patterns of flatulence - which varied from “slight” to “considerable”, sometimes “baddish” or “sharp” and even “excessive” - and he also experienced regular bouts of uncontrollable retching. While some sufferers exist in a state of self-denial, convinced with each new boil, swelling or flutter that they are seriously ill, others are able to reflect more lucidly on their own condition. The German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, was, like Darwin, a careful observer of his own evacuations, as a friend of his wrote in 1783. Kant wrote that hypochondria is a “morbid anxiety” that causes us to mistake ordinary sensations for portentous symptoms. He said that it is a state of heightened alertness, like listening, in the quiet of the night, to a cricket chirping in the house. Charlotte Bronte diagnosed herself as a victim

of “hypochondria—a most dreadful doom,” although she may have been referring to a form of depression and nervous tension rather than fear of serious illness. Yet since Bronte’s four sisters had died young – Maria and Elizabeth from typhoid, Anne and Emily from consumption – perhaps she had good reason to be fearful. Genuine hypochondriacs are irrational, building an edifice of cumulative fears on the discovery of a fleeting symptom. The 18th century author and diarist James Boswell, himself a sufferer, associated his hypochondria with writer’s block and constipation. He attempted to treat all three by half an hour of dancing in his bedroom every morning, before a breakfast of three pints of porridge with milk. Boswell wrote that “a Hypochondriack fancies himself at different times suffering death in all the various ways in which it has been observed, and thus he dies many times before his death.” This is a tellingly accurate observation: many hypochondriacs are also obsessed with death, and their health-related anxiety is an extension of that. Conversely, though, Alice James – the novelist Henry James’s sister – was said to be strangely happy when she was diagnosed with breast cancer because it brought meaning to her lifelong career as a professional invalid. Sometimes hypochondriacs find themselves tempting fate. Molière’s final play, The Imaginary Invalid (1673), features a fretful miser called Argan, who is aggravated by all kinds of mysterious ailments. In the first production of the play, Molière took on the lead role himself. During the fourth performance of the play, he suffered a haemorrhage and died later that night. The French writer Michel de Montaigne suffered from an unusual, second-hand form of hypochondria. He wrote: “I am one of those by whom the powerful

blows of the imagination are felt most strongly. Everyone is hit by it, but some are bowled over. It cuts a deep impression into me: my skill consists in avoiding it, not resisting it. I would rather live among people who are healthy and cheerful: the sight of another man’s suffering produces physical suffering in me, and my own sensitivity has often misappropriated the feelings of a third party. A persistent cougher tickles my lungs and my throat.” Marcel Proust turned hypochondria into an art form. For the last 10 years of his life, he sequestered himself away in a cork-lined room in Paris, wheezing with asthma and allergies, and claiming that he could not bear the noise of everyday life. He insisted on using only the very softest towels and handkerchiefs, and went into paroxysms of coughing every time his servants lit the fire. Yet, as Brian Dillon points out, the great writer’s retreat actually provided the conditions for his creativity. Dillon argues that Proust’s bed was “a wellprovisioned craft in which he set sail on a darkened ocean”. The idea of hypochondria is an ancient one, but it was originally thought to have physical origins. The Greeks located the source of it in a spot just under the rib cage, and Plato thought it was a form of indigestion. It was not until the sixteenth century that hypochondria began to be associated with melancholy, sorrow and fear. The modern sense of hypochondria, as an irrational disease of the imagination, similar to obsessivecompulsive disorder, started to take hold in the nineteenth century. In fact, at this time, a highly-strung attitude to personal well-being was likely to mark you out as someone of refined sensibilities. The disorder is named in Edgar Allan Poe’s famous story, The Fall of the House of Usher, in which Roderick Usher is overwhelmed by his own bodily sensations. Andy Warhol was one of the best-known

hypochondriacs of the twentieth century. He was convinced that, as he put it himself, he had a “bad body”. Particularly in the last years of his life – and certainly after he was shot in 1986 – Warhol was plagued with fears about his own mortality, all of which are documented in his extensive diaries. Cancer, AIDS and brain tumours are invoked, and on one occasion, Warhol was concerned that he may have caught pneumonia from drinking an extremely cold daiquiri. When someone whisked his silver wig off his head at a book signing, he claimed that “it hurt. Physically.” He fretted about his fragile body and blotchy skin, and was disproportionately bothered by his red nose. Yet while Warhol was occupied in worrying intensively about dramatic illnesses, he neglected an infected gall bladder, which ended up killing him. Perhaps this is the greatest danger of hypochondria – to fixate so obsessively on vastly-inflated imagined fears that we lose sight of everyday risks. The late Michael Jackson may well have been a hypochondriac: from his finicky dietary habits to his radical surgery and skin bleaching, he seems to have been a man who was uncomfortable in his own body. Some say that the bleaching of his skin seemed intended less to make him look like a white person as to ensure that he vanished altogether: a classic hypochondriac fantasy. Hypochondria shows how the mind can make the body into a prison, a source of tortuous fears. But insofar as it has afflicted a disproportionate number of artists and writers over the centuries, it clearly exists hand-inhand with creativity. As the philosopher Gilles Deleuze observed, it seems that the artist has a special feeling for the bodily proximity of thought, imagination, terror and catastrophe – often to his or her cost.

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Agent 160 is a new female writer-led theatre company launched in February 2012 with a two-night show in Cardiff, London and Glasgow. Agent 160 Theatre Company – named after playwright Aphra Behn’s code-name when she was a spy – will present 6 new short pieces, commissioned from a pool of writers from across the British Isles, in Agent 160 Presents Agent 160. Currently women write just 17 per cent of all produced plays in the UK – a statistic Agent 160 wishes to address. Tue 23rd & Wed 24th October 2012 At the Black Box Belfast 7.30pm £8 As part of Belfast Festival at Queen’s. Written by Ioanna Anderson, Vittoria Cafolla, Clare Duffy, Sarah Grochala, Lisa Parry, & Morna Pearson. Directed By Aislinn Clarke & Moninne Dargan Tickets available from www.belfastfestival.com ****Workshop**** How to perform being a female playwright. This workshop will unpack what we think, assume, hope and fear being a woman and a playwright is and creatively explore the tricky, fruitful and sometimes paradoxical relationship between the two. We’ll ask: ‘If you are a woman who writes, how do you feel about being a ‘female playwright’? With Agent160 Writers, Ioanna Anderson & Clare Duffy Thursday 25th October 10-12pm Black BoxFREE- limited availability. Please contact vittoria@ agent160theatre.co.uk to book your place

***Panel*** On the 25th October, at 1pm in the Black Box, there will be a Panel and Question and Answer session discussing the Irish theatrical landscape with regards to female writers. With Hanna Slattne (Tinderbox,Belfast) Suzanne Bell (The Royal Exchange, Manchester Richard Lavery (Accidental theatre Company, Belfast) with More still to be confirmed.

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BANANA DRAMA By Jason Mills

The first actions of the forlorn protagonist of Beckett’s 1957 play Krapp’s Last Tape revolve around bananas. Throughout years of adaptations, actors such as Patrick Magee and John Hurt have brought Beckett’s schtick opening directions to the stage and screen with great conviction; Retrieving a piece of the fruit from a desk drawer, Krapp ‘(strokes banana, peels it, drops skin at his feet, puts end of banana in his mouth and remains motionless, staring vacuously before him)’. He then eats the banana whilst pacing up and down, slipping on the skin in the process, before repeating the exercise with a second banana, this time kicking the skin into the audience. We learn later in the play through the medium of his old tape recordings that Krapp had resolved to give up bananas thirty years previously because they exacerbate his bowel complaint (Fatal things for a man with my condition). Thus, bananas come to symbolise the death of his goals and aspirations, a comic prop in a tragic tale of blighted hope. It is fitting that Beckett should use this somewhat farcical food, with its slapstick and sexual connotations, as a primary motif. What follows is ao overview of the historial role the banana has played in culture and politics; Biblical times In western culture there is an unshakable belief in the apple as the Garden of Eden’s tempting fruit, but in the Koran the forbidden tree is identified as a banana tree (the talh or ‘tree of paradise’). The apple story only emerged around 400 AD in an edition of

the Bible that brought together ancient texts into a cohesive Latin form. Older versions, written in Hebrew and Greek, don’t identify an apple specifically and some pedantic scholars (in particular a nineteenth century Swedish botanist named Linnaeus) have speculated that Eve may have eaten a banana. Like anyone cares either way, Linnaeus. One of the speculative arguments used to support this theory is that bananas were once referred to as ‘figs’, and thus could have been the figs referred to in the Bible. Actual fig leaves may also have been a bit too skimpy for bashful Eve’s underwear drawer, so it is possible that she camouflaged her nether regions in banana foliage. 1600s In Japan, the man who is credited with elevating haiku from a lowly game into a sublime form of 17-syllable poetry is Basho, a revered figure who named himself after a banana tree. It is said that some of his early followers built him a rustic hut to live in and planted the tree beside it. Predictably, he spent long hours staring at it in a Zen-like manner. After reaching the desired level of banana nirvana he decided to adopt the name in its honour. Historically he is regarded as a master of the form and has inspired contemporary poets like Ezra Pound and Allen Ginsberg and even got a mention in an episode of The Simpsons.

1920s Bananas reached Latin America in the mid1800s via European missionaries. Little more than half a century later the region had become the US’s own personal fruit garden in order to meet soaring domestic demand for this cheap and palatable new convenience food. Military interventions had made the region safe for the operation of banana companies, the largest of which was United Fruit (today called Chiquita). Strikes by plantation workers were quickly put down in Honduras, Panama, Guatemala and Columbia (more on which later). However, a problem had begun to emerge in the form of Panama disease, an incurable fungal malady which attacked (and eventually wiped out) the pervasive Gros Michael variety. The American public remained largely unaware of both native unrest and this new threat, but cursory blips in the supply chain gave rise to the best-selling piece of sheet music in history - Yes, We Have No Bananas, a jocular, slightly loony jingle first performed by Eddie Cantor, went to Number 1 upon its release in 1923. During the depression and food shortages of the early 1930s the song was adopted by marching bands on both sides of Belfast’s religious divide, who played it together on a protest march to Custom House Square. Given its cross-community significance and subsequent performance on The Muppets, surely it would be appropriate to play it before each sitting of the Assembly at Stormont. Also in 1923, Charlie Chaplin kicked off what would become a mainstay of slapstick comedy when he slipped on a banana peel in

With few rubbish disposal facilities, people had a habit of abandoning their peels in the street and, whilst a fresh banana skin presents minimal danger, one that has begun to rot soon becomes a health and safety nightmare. The Pilgrim. Far from being a purely fictional narrative, the sketch actually reflected a growing problem in urban areas at the time. With few rubbish disposal facilities, people had a habit of abandoning their peels in the street and, whilst a fresh banana skin presents minimal danger, one that has begun to rot soon becomes a health and safety nightmare. To stem the tide of injured pedestrians, municipal authorities had to employ street cleaners for the first time and introduce laws to prevent littering. 1950s The term ‘banana republic’ was by now commonly used to refer to countries whose servile governments facilitated the exploitation of their populace by the banana companies. In 1951 one such place, Guatemala,

Canaan Coconut Banana (1936 – 2003) served as the first President of Zimbabwe from 1980 until 1987. A Methodist minister, he held the largely ceremonial office of the presidency while his eventual successor, Robert Mugabe, served as Prime Minister of Zimbabwe.

democratically elected a socialist President, Jacobo Arbenz, who redistributed large swathes of United Fruit’s unused land to peasants. In the following years United Fruit launched an aggressive PR campaign aimed at both Congress and the American public, portraying Arbenz as a dangerous communist whose leadership in Guatemala threatened the stability of the entire region. Sure enough, in 1954 a bloody CIA-backed coup d’etat ousted Arbenz and instated a leadership favourable to the US’s economic interests. In 1956 Harry Belafonte released Banana Boat Song with its memorable “Day-O” refrain. His version was a Calypso reworking of a Jamaican folk song sung by dock workers who stayed up all night to load bananas onto trade boats (Daylight come and me wanna go home). 1960s In 1967 the underground newspaper The Berekley Barb printed a hoax article which claimed that it was possible to get high on a fictional psychoactive substance called ‘bananadine’ by drying out the peels and smoking the stringy bits on the inside. The story was taken at face value by gullible stoners and also the more solemn US Food and Drug Administration, who conducted laboratory experiments to disprove the theory. By coincidence, Donovan released his single Mellow Yellow around the same time which even included a reference to an ‘electrical banana’. This fuelled the rumours further, but he later disappointed everyone by revealing that the line was actually about vibrators. In the same year The Velvet Underground also did their bit to resurrect the banana as a phallic symbol by using Andy Warhol’s painting on the cover of their debut album. On the original LP the banana skin was a sticker which could be peeled back to reveal a pink, metaphorical flesh. In 1969 the potential of the banana as a weapon was demonstrated in a Monty Python sketch where John Cleese, playing a selfdefence instructor, encourages members of his class to attack him with one. He is only able to

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“Yes! We Have No Bananas” is the title of a novelty song by Frank Silver and Irving Cohn. Sung by Eddie Cantor (above), the song became a major hit in 1923. It also inspired a follow-up song, “I’ve Got the Yes! We Have No Bananas Blues”, recorded by Billy Jones and others in 1923.

escape unscathed by shooting his assailant, a testament to the combative superiority of the fruit. Striking a much more serious note, Gabriel Garcia Marquez fictionalised a real event known as The Banana Massacre in his epic, Columbia-set novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. A leading character in the book, Jose Arcadio Segundo, organises a strike by banana plantation employees who are overworked in inhumane conditions and only paid in company coupons. As the dispute deepens, the government entices 3000 workers and their families into the town square after Sunday mass under the pretence of negotiations with the Governor. However, the army surrounds the square and opens fire on the crowd with machine-guns before loading their bodies onto a train and dumping them into the sea. Shockingly, most of the details of this episode actually did take place in Cienaga, Columbia in 1928, at a plantation under the control of United Fruit. Through these chapters, Marquez preserves the memory of an incident that would otherwise have been lost in the annals of history, as well as dismantling United Fruit’s benign, mythological image of itself. 1980s Whether Bananarama spent time meditating on a banana tree (c.f. Basho) before naming themselves is unclear. There was no mention of bananas in any of their songs though, not even an electrical one. However, it is possible that this was an artistic double bluff and that all of their songs are, in fact, banana allegories. There was no such trickery with Bananaman - the Marvel comic superhero and cartoon star was candid about his potassium intake. The story of a normal, slightly nerdish schoolboy who is able to wield unbridled powers after the consumption of bananas sounds almost like a United Fruit marketing campaign. While not directly related to the subject at hand, it is worth mentioning the first President of the newly created country of Zimbabwe, Canaan Banana, for highlighting

The creationist evangelist Ray Comfort dubbed bananas ‘the atheist’s nightmare’ and took the ill-advised step of peeling one on his TV program The Way of the Master in order to prove the existence of God. his namesake’s comic associations. So sensitive was he about his surname that in 1982 he prompted Prime Minister Mugabe to pass legislation making it illegal to joke about it. Nonetheless, on foreign soil it was open season - on a state visit to the UK he was asked by Prince Philip ‘Did you come by yourself or is there a bunch of you?’ The real fun didn’t start until 1997 when Banana was found guilty of sodomising some of his staff and sent to jail. Unable to help themselves, the international press gleefully ran headlines such as ‘Man Raped By Banana’ (The Herald), ‘Banana Sentenced For Gay Assault’ (BBC), and ‘Mugabe Slips On Banana’ (South African Mail & Guardian). 2000s The creationist evangelist Ray Comfort dubbed bananas ‘the atheist’s nightmare’ and took the ill-advised step of peeling one on his TV program The Way of the Master in order to prove the existence of God. In what could easily pass as a spoof (check the clip on Youtube) Comfort ‘demonstrates’ how God made the banana to fit perfectly into the human hand with a non-slip surface, outward colour indicators for ripeness, a tab at the top with which to open it, a biodegradable wrapper, and a curve to make it easier to eat. In order to come to this conclusion it was necessary to overlook was the entire history of the banana (and also ignore the question

of what God was thinking when He made pineapples). There are thousands varieties of wild bananas, most of which are sour and contain tooth-shattering seeds. However, a genetic accident led to an edible, seedless mutation which was subsequently discovered by hunter-gatherers. The first recorded human cultivation of these sterile versions was in India in 500BC. From there the banana eventually circled the globe via armies, traders and explorers, but has always required man’s intervention in order to propagate the crop in view of the fact that they do not reproduce naturally. The behaviour of banana companies in Latin America came into focus again in 2007 when Chiquita (the rebranded United Fruit) was fined $25 million by the US Justice Department over years of protection payments to paramilitary groups in Colombia. If nobody reporting the story wrote a headline about feeding bananas to guerrillas then it should be considered an opportunity missed. Future Just over half a century since Panama disease wiped out the ubiquitous Gros Michael banana, it has now come back in a new strain to threaten its replacement, the soft, sweet Cavendish, (which we now take for granted as ‘the’ commercially available variety). Millions of plants have died in Asia, Africa and Australia, leading scientists to try and develop a hybrid or genetically modified variety resistant to disease. While it is unlikely that they will become extinct completely, the next, unwritten chapter of this chronicle may involve bananas which are more sci-fi than slapstick.

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Call My Bluff On a surprisingly mild November evening in Dublin 1930, a beleaguered Samuel Beckett addressed the Modern Language Society of Trinity College. Recently appointed as a lecturer in French, this talk would prove to be one of the highlights of Beckett’s brief spell as a Trinity academic. It would also reveal his contempt for the College and his disillusionment with Dublin’s literary scene. The talk was about a French poet, Jean du Chas, who created a literary movement known as “Le Concentrisme”. However, both the movement and the poet were pure figments of Beckett’s imagination. As such, the paper revealed relatively little about what “Le Concentrisme” actually represented. Instead, Beckett’s attention was drawn to tracing Jean du Chas’s biography and teasing out subtle parallels between his own life and that of the fictional French poet. Both men, for example, shared the same birthdate and one of the few quotations Beckett provided from Chas’s putative poetry translates as: ‘go be bored elsewhere’ – a reflection, perhaps, on Beckett’s bourgeoning desire to leave the ennui of the Trinity’s Exam Hall. Yet, despite the lies and the curious biographical details (Chas, Becket tells us, was obsessed with concierges) the paper was a resounding success. Following the talk, Beckett’s audience became engaged in a heated discussion as to the significance of “Le Concentrisme” in the context of French Literature. Moreover, some members of the audience even claimed to have encountered the group and, miraculously, to have also met its founding member. Now, aside from the gullibility of Trinity’s modern language scholars, Beckett’s sophism raises an important question: has anyone else from Ireland created an artistic movement that managed to bluff the academic word? In the past Myles Na Gopaleen has suggested that most of Ireland’s literary groups were only formed ‘to give people a pretext for getting away from their families’ and, with this in mind, a retrospective glace through Ireland’s momentous literary heritage could be salutary. By looking for the more dubious elements in Ireland’s artistic groupings, it might be possible to uncover some more fallacious practices that could reshape literary history. It is with imperative that this article will proceed. An obvious place to start is with The Rhymers Club. Meeting regularly just off London’s Fleet Street at Ye Old Cheshire Cheese Tavern in the early 1890s, The Rhymers were spearheaded by W.B. Yeats and counted Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson among its number. The Rhymers have been accredited with striving for new poetic forms, subject matter and emotions. Moreover, ideas which would provide the poetic backbone to future movements like Symbolism were supposedly developed within this rhyming coterie. Yet, the fact that all this so called

“rhyming” took place within a pub suggests that something else was afoot. Rather than avant-garde poetics, Symons’s suggests that the group was little more than a dinning club with the odd poem thrown in. According to Symons an average meeting consisted of ‘taking supper with ale downstairs and then adjourning in an upper room for the serious business: more ale or punch and smoking churchwarden pipes’. Indeed, when pushed, Yeats admitted that they sang of ‘wine and women’ more than anything else. VERDICT: BLUFF The Rhymers were not the only artistic group to which Yeats turned his hand. W.B. also provided the momentum to a movement with far grander aspirations, The Irish Literary Revival. Also known as The Celtic Twilight, this literary movement undoubtedly made some waves. The Revival aimed to dispel the influence of English literature by cultivating a sense of the Irish past. As such, it sought to recover Ireland’s heritage: the country’s myths, legends and language. In so doing the movement produced a range of off-shoots like the Gaelic League, the Irish Literary Society and the Abbey or National Theatre. Arguably, it was The Irish Literary Revival that provided the cultural framework through which Ireland’s independence could be sealed. This is what we have been led to believe. However, if we look a little closer at this legacy, cracks begin to appear. Take the national language that the movement supposedly “revived”. How can we be sure that it is genuine? The Irish language is officially branded across Ireland certainly, but how many people actually read it? How many really know what it means?’ Also the whole trajectory of this “movement” is rather contortionist and absurd. The Revival aspired towards an Irish future, but to do so it looked back into Ireland’s past. It is as if Yeats & Co were trying to move forward in a reverse gear or to ride a bike backwards, a task which, as many a Beckettian character would tell you, is practically impossible to achieve. Then, of course, there are the Abbey’s Playboy riots; was this the moment when the rest of Ireland got wise to the Revival’s casuistry? Was it this that caused the audience to stamp their feet? Viewed from this perspective, perhaps James Joyce was right when he suggested that the whole thing was nothing more than a ‘Cultic Twalette’. VERDICT: TRUTH BUT ONLY JUST... Joyce, of course, can be accredited with having initiated another Irish movement: Irish Modernism. This movement has only recently been acknowledged thanks to the Irish prefix approach, about which I will say more later, but it still packs some serious firepower - largely

By George Legg

in the form of Ulysses. Widely considered the greatest novel of the Twentieth Century, Ulysses has launched and sustained many an academic career, never mind an artistic following. Furthermore, the book has spawned its very own tourist industry and ensures that the Irish economy is given a yearly cash injection on the 16th June. Alongside Guinness and U2, Ulysses is probably one of Ireland’s biggest exports. But is this success justified? Does Ulysses deserve this hype? A certain Brazilian writer doesn’t think so. Having read Joyce’s 265,000 word novel, Paulo Coelho confidently feels that, contrary to popular belief, Ulysses has ‘nothing’ to offer its reader. At most, Paulo maintains, Joyce gives us ‘a tweet’. Well, either Coelho has misplaced his reading glasses or Joyce, like Beckett, has successfully duped his audience. Granted that when you stumble upon that ‘ineluctability modality of the visible’ bit Ulysses suddenly becomes a very attractive doorstop, but to say that the novel’s linguistic profusion amounts to something more than 140 characters of inane twittering is surely wrong? Then again, Coelho could just be inferring that buried within Ulysses’s labyrinthine structure, Joyce outlines the format through which Twitter will come to operate. Another feather in Joyce’s cap no less. VERDICT: TRUTH Heading into the North of Ireland, more potentially spurious movements arise. First amongst these is the legendary Belfast Group. As a writing coterie chaired by the English academic Philip Hobsbaum, The Group has gained something of a mythic reputation. Its activities are held to have provided an interpretative paradigm which incubated the work of Edna Longley, Michael Longley, Michael Allen, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon and Frank Ormsby to name but a few. Indeed, it is largely because of The Group that Heaney’s poetic career commenced; many of the poems that formed Death of a Naturalist were discussed within the confines of Hobsbaum’s cosy Fitzwilliam Street flat. Yet this is only one side of the story. Another is provided by some of The Group’s more fugacious members. Derek Mahon, for example, has confessed that The Group was simply ‘an invented story that suited English journalism at a time when English poetry wasn’t up to much’. More damningly, one erstwhile member (who remains nameless) has suggested that the only reason people kept returning to Philip Hobsbaum’s abode was not to learn the tricks of the poetic trade, but because ‘Philip was a nice guy and he could afford whiskey’. VERDICT: BLUFF But perhaps the most potent movement the North has produced is The Field Day Theatre Company. Much like The Literary Revival,

Field Day also sought to make a dent in Ireland’s political and cultural spheres. Founded by Brian Friel and Stephen Rea, Field Day produced an array of pamphlets, plays and most significantly, if not controversially, four anthologies of Irish Writing. Through these practices Field Day has had a pronounced effect upon Irish culture and, as such, it is difficult to conceive how exactly this literary movement could be considered a fabrication. That said, there is something in the insouciant pun between the group’s title and its founders’ names (Friel & Rea / Field Day) that suggests the movement might have been the product of a rhyming dictionary, rather than an aspiration to intervene in Northern Ireland’s stale political scene. Plus, it is also impossible to shake Edna Longley’s assertion that Field Day was engaged in serving ‘old whines in new bottles’. Perhaps the whole thing was a front for some sort of dubious distillery; its members did tend to have rather rosy cheeks. VERDICT: PENDING Presiding across all these movements is the precarious position of Irish Studies itself. While the rest of the world was actively formulating their own artistic movements, Ireland, we are reliably informed, was going one better and hijacking such groupings with a splash of emerald green. So, rather than Modernism we have Irish Modernism; instead of Gothic Fiction we have Irish Gothic Fiction; The London Group becomes The Belfast Group; and, how could we forget, William Shakespeare becomes the Irish Shakespeare. Yet, while affixing the word “Irish” to pre-existing literary movements suggests a blunt mode of aesthetic fabrication, there are far more dubious ways of creating a literary group. After all you could give your movement a name that sounds so preposterous, so much like a cross between a pub quiz team and a racehorse that, no matter what the group achieves, no one could possibly believe its validity. This seems to be the approach in Eastern Europe. Here artistic movements include: The Mezzanine of Poetry, Smithy, Wedge Group, Storm Circle, Council of Brilliant Knowledge, Flame, Golden Horn, Poets Cloister, Plough, Village Prose, Acmeism, The Little Theatre Group and The Young Pencil Club. You tell me which is a genuine literary movement and which an outsider that has won the Gold Cup.

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quantity surveying By Stuart Fallis

I actually went to the same school as Samuel Beckett – under entirely different circumstances, of course. At age 14 Beckett was sent to board at Portora, then considered a prestigious public school; over the years, as the school was forced to become more egalitarian (yet inexplicably retaining elitist delusions of grandeur), pupils ended up there because of their gender, “perceived identity”, and academic selection. I guess neither of us had much say in the matter. While I was attending our appointed educational establishment, I can remember staring at that photo of the school cricket team, and Beckett’s sour bake staring back at me. I can also remember thinking “If you’re so famous, how come I’ve never heard of anything you’ve done?”. You see, Portora in those days seemed to have little interest in drama and literature (or even the canon of its alumni), but did have a good track record in churning out professions: medics, lawyers, engineers, and even the odd quantity surveyor. In contrast, the schooling Beckett received managed to steer him away from a career in quantity surveying, where he was expected to join his father and brother in the family construction business: J. and W. Beckett of South King Street, Dublin. Quantity surveyors had begun to appear in the early nineteenth century, when they were known as `measurers’, and were employed to estimate the amount of material likely to be used in any particular building contract. William Beckett, Samuel’s father, who has been described as having a “not very studious disposition”, faced societal pressure to enter one of the professions – this was especially the case in snobbish Dublin. By the late nineteenth century entry to the profession was being increasingly regulated by an apprenticeship and examination system, and William was apprenticed to J. and E. Pannister. William served his time, developing into a shrewd businessman and successful in his profession. In William’s day, the professional boundaries between quantity surveying, civil engineering and architecture were rather blurred, and quantity surveyors frequently described themselves as any one of the three. Nowadays, the skillset of a quantity surveyor is well defined and there are a number of qualifying professional institutions which can grant chartered status. For many prospective quantity surveyors, the first step on the path to chartered status is completion of an undergraduate degree, which focuses on managing procurement and legal, contractual and financial matters. A significant portion of the quantity surveyor’s day-to-day work is no longer the

In Northern Ireland, the Construction Contract (Northern Ireland) Order 1997 (and its 2011 Amendment) is the legislation that governs adjudication and payment within the construction industry. calculation of required materials, but the management of contracts, subject to the relevant contract and construction regulations. In Northern Ireland, the Construction Contract (Northern Ireland) Order 1997 (and its 2011 Amendment) is the legislation that governs adjudication and payment within the construction industry. The quantity surveyor identifies and collates the costs involved in order to develop an overall budget for a project. A Schedule (or Bill) of Quantities is drafted, which defines the materials, labour and services required for a project. This allows contractors to calculate tender prices fairly and on an equitable basis as their competitors. Once the tenders have been accepted, the quantity surveyor can calculate cash flow data,

enabling the client to programme resources adequately to meet contract commitments. This means the quantity surveyor essentially decides how much should be paid for a job over the course of a project – this is important, as the value of money can change drastically with fluctuations to the cost of capital, and noone wants to hand over money before it is due. In order to make sure that construction costs and production are managed as efficiently as possible, the quantity surveyor coordinates with all members of the design team to arrive at practical solutions and stay within the project budget. The final detailed estimated prepared in consultation with a project architect or civil engineers informs the Schedule/Bill of Quantities (anecdotally, civil engineers are “easier to work with”). To calculate the Schedule/Bill of Quantities, quantity surveyors refer to their bible – SMM7 (Standard Method of Measurement for Building Works Seventh Edition). First published by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors in 1922, this reference manual lays out a set of rules for measuring building works and defines best practice, and covers everything from preliminaries and general conditions (tasks that must take place before construction can get underway: preliminaries describes the works as a whole, general conditions outlines requirements for their execution e.g. subcontracting, authorisations, testing etc.) to masonry,

waterproofing and communications. The ‘taker-off’ (the person preparing the Schedule/ Bill of Quantities) “takes-off” measurements from the drawings and calculates the total lengths, areas and volumes of the dimensions, which are then abstracted to produce a final total for each individual description. The skill of taking-off is now under pressure from software services that combine SMM7 rules with 3D CAD and technical Enterprise Resource Planning software. There is the potential for the quantity surveyor to get the sums wrong and make a huge, expensive mistake. As a project progresses, the quantity surveyor will measure and value the on-going work, to provide regular valuations for the architect (or project administrator) to include in interim payment certificates (a provision to assist the contractor’s cashflow). The quantity surveyor’s valuations will include variations to the works (a contractor’s entitlement to be paid for extra work), as well as excluding the value of defective or incomplete works. Again, the quantity surveyor has to get the sums right at the end of a project, and owes a duty to the employer to exercise reasonable skill and care when conducting these calculations. As such, mistakes are rare and can be usually compensated for in a subsequent valuation. Additionally, the quantity surveyor’s duty does not extend beyond calculations of quantities. It is the responsibility of the architect to advise him of any defective or incomplete works that should not be valued. So Samuel Beckett’s grandfather, William senior, couldn’t blame the quantity surveyor when, during his firm’s construction of Leinster House, the Mountcharles sandstone was embedded incorrectly and began to crumble. Fortunately for William senior, the National Library of Ireland that his firm was constructing adjacent to Leinster House stood firm, and in 2006 acquired Alan Clodd’s Beckett collection – virtually all of Beckett’s work in first edition form, along with proof copies and galley proofs. There are approximately 800 items in the collection – a number worth your scrutiny…

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Humbly Through The Dust

Tracey Emin and Grayson Perry come to Enniskillen. Humbly Through The Dust is a unique exhibition curated especially for County Fermanagh by artist Helen Sharp, who lives and works on Inisherk island on the Crom Estate. The title of the exhibition Humbly Through The Dust is taken from the novel Ring O’Rushes written by Shan Fadh Bullock, who was born on Inisherk in 1865. Inishkerk is an island situated on Upper Lough Erne on which only three houses are built, one of which I now live in. Both fictitious and autobiographical, Bullock’s writing borrows from fact and from imagination to weave tales of country life; so too does Humbly Through The Dust. The exhibition gleans from the curious ways in which the autobiographical emerges through rural landscape and and the terrain of the imagination. It has at its heart a personal response to the experience of living and dreaming in County Fermanagh (and other outlands) and contemplates the human bond with Nature, the land and in particular its beasts. Humbly Through The Dust also dances a dance with the experience of loneliness and aloneness and teases out some truths that often unfurl within small communities.

The exhibition also echoes Sharp’s experience of growing up on the Hebridean island of Vatersay and the truths that unfold within small communities. For this remarkable exhibition, Sharp was offered the privilege of working with The British Council and to choose from its extensive collection housed in London. The exhibition includes work by Grayson Perry, Tracey Emin, Henry Moore, Mark Wallinger, Sean Gooden and Maggi Hambling amongst many others, and has been curated in a such a way that these internationally recognised artists hang alongside work by some of the most exciting contemporary artists living and working on the island of Ireland. These include work by Ursula Burke, Deirdre McKenna, Megs Morley and Tom Flanagan, Hari MacMillan, Seamus Harahan, Duncan Ross, Sean Lynch, Anne Quail, Annie-June Callaghan, Julie Bacon, Nicholas Keogh, Emily Robyn Archer, Catherine Roberts, David Prior and Larry Lynch, Keith Connolly, James Stopforth and Gillian Wylde. Preview - Thursday 4th October 2012 at 7.00pm The Cooper Wilkinson Building, Enniskillen. Opening hours 11.00am - 4.00pm, Monday - Saturday until 3rd November