Essay

On Literature – Ancient & Modern

By Peter O’Neill

Whenever I think about Literature I think about Love. Both are written with big Ls. The Elles. Like an enjambment of run on legs, going on until infinity…And of course, when I think of Love I think also, inevitably, of betrayal, and now enters Literature. For without one, without the other. Those are the two legs that humanity, or humans, are standing up upon. And it is only in their resolution that we can find any peace. So, Literature, like history, is very personal. His story! Let me tell you mine.

It is a story about numbers, mainly. 3 and 4. And in this now, I am borrowing from Joyce and Beckett. But they, in their turn got it from another. Giambattista Vico. The Neapolitan philosopher who was so unjustly ignored in his own life time and that practice is still being continued today. As, if you were to ask anyone about Gimbattista Vico today, the chances are most people wouldn’t be able to tell you much, except perhaps how his three ages of man theory helped Joyce to formulate structurally his last great novel Finnegans Wake.

But I am getting ahead of myself. I need to go back to the women in my life. There were three, you see. I said that this was a story about the numbers 3 and four. So, in order to tell this story, I first need to tell you about these three women.

It is a story about power. All history is about power. 

You see, when I was with my first woman I was in a situation of Power. I could do anything. Or so it seemed. She clung to me. She lay at my feet and looked up to me like I was a God. And I was too. For when you are so very young, as I was then, this is how you feel. No? Like a Goddess or like a God. No? Such is youth!

Look at the them walking on the street. They are so far from things they still believe in infinity! Love for them is the eternally INFINITE. That is why with youth there is still hope. As they are believers in the truth. It spreads out before them in space and time. Boundless, they are, in a taste for exploration. And of all kinds. This is why some of them love Art. Literature. 

It is a very ennobling thing. 

You see, I am in my fifties now. I don’t believe in infinity. As for me things are all so FINITE. Where they once saw open space, I see only enclosure. 

She used to lie at my feet like I was a God. It’s a great feeling, isn’t it? To have someone at your feet like that. You have the power. You stand above them like a Goddess or like a God and you look down upon them, and you can decide upon their fate. 

It is a very powerful feeling, and of course, as we all know with such power comes an enormous responsibility. The only problem is, when you are so young you are rarely feeling so responsible, and so one day you decide to do a terrible thing. Everyone does it, at some point. You kill them. Metaphorically, at least. But, this is the first real taste of death and it is a truly terrible thing. Now, you have the taste of death upon your tongue. The one that you used to kiss. Now, she only tastes of poison. 

You move on. 

It is that simple. It is called survival. Call this the first age. When everything was Divine. When you discovered metaphor, and the apocalypse of dying. 

So, time passes. You meet another one. Number 2. She is your Nemesis. For she will destroy you. Just like you destroyed number 1, now too your time will come. Somehow here enters into our tale the notion of justice. What goes round comes round. Karma. 

Just as you had looked down, all those years ago, on your first lover. The one who crawled around at your feet. Now, you are in that very same position. Who would have thought it? There now, look at you! That miserable specimen down on both your hands and knees before Her who is looking down upon you. Like an insect. And of course She eventually squashes you. Like a bug under Her boot heels. She crushes and grinds you into the earth so that there is no longer any trace of you. You are extinguished. Finally. You are dead. 

There now. That is the story of numbers 1 and 2. 

What happens next? And what, by the way, does any of this have to do with Messrs Beckett and Joyce? Everything, my dears. Just wait. Be patient, as I will explain everything to you. I will take you by the hand and help you to join up all the dots. 

But first, let me introduce you to number 3. 

Isn’t she a beauty? Now, remember the score. It is 1 all now. Even Stephens, as we say. You are finally at the age of equality. It happens sooner for some, later for others. Sometimes it never even comes. You have to will it. But if she does come. You will finally have a chance to redeem yourself. For, like her, you too have been broken. You are no longer the youth you once were. Infinity has been clouded by impossible violence. You need to thread carefully now, and hold onto what you have with more caution. 

And you do. Whereas before your relationships, that is with numbers 1 and 2, may have lasted only five or so years, with number 3 it is all enduring. Before you know it, twenty years have gone by and you have children growing up around you and which you cherish now like you once use to cherish your own life. 

This is the story of 3. The Trinity, if you will. 

Now, I should like to talk about Samuel Beckett and the story that has obsessed me like no other story in Literature, and that is the story of How It Is. This novel, by the Irish modernist writer, is the novel which has obsessed me the most in my adult life, and its is the one which I should like to discuss with you here, as it acts like a portal into human history through Literature. As with this modernist masterpiece we will travel back to the ancients of Greece, and Rome. But before we do, I must first tell you about Giambattista Vico. Remember!

When we talk about Giambattista Vico and Samuel Beckett, we must also talk about James Joyce. There is the number three, again! They form a triad. A holy Trinity, if you will. As it was Joyce, remember, who asked the young Samuel Beckett to write an article about Work in Progress when he first met the writer in Paris back in 1928. 

This is when he wrote his famous essay Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce ( 1929), in which he singles out Vico, more than any of the other Italians mentioned in the title, and how this Neapolitan genius was to have such an influence on James Joyce, and in particular in relation to the structural composition of Finnegans Wake, but also, I must point out, to Samuel Beckett himself. This is a point that has seemed to have gone over the heads of a lot of commentators on Beckett, for some reason. 

So, let us summarize the essence of Vico’s ideas on the 3 ages of man and how Joyce was to incorporate Vico’s theories on history into his epic final novel. 

Well, to start off. In the La Scienza nouva or A New Science ( 1725), Vico attempts to break history down into a cyclical process which is as natural as the four passing seasons. Oh yes, that is the thing about Vico’s so called 3 Ages of Man idea, there are actually 4 parts. And in this, Joyce is a stickler. For it is this reason, though not alone, that Finnegans Wake has four books. One being for each age. What then are these 4 ages? I hear you ask.

Let us go through them.

The 1^st age is called the Divine Age, and language, in particular, but also laws, are divinely thought of. What does this mean? God given. God being Jupiter, as we are back in pagan times. The time of the ancients. Or first peoples. Though, coming from a Christian era, we will recognise the intermediary nature of the Muse Uranus, mother of all the muses, who is given the role of intermediary between God and man. However, She, in turn, needs a human in order to transfer her God given knowledge, and this, according to Vico, is where the poets come in. As it was a theological age, that divine, all poets were theological, unlike today. That is to say, they were only concerned with divine matters. 

Language itself was divine. And metaphor played an incredibly important role, as signs and symbols were all so important. Vivo singles out the bolt of lightning, for example, as the first sign of Jupiter. This is just to show how terrified these primitive people were in the beginning. They lived in caves. The Cyclops of Homer. There’s previous was a period of wandering. Unruly and chaotic, the Muse, through her instruction , tamed them. Such are the divine origins of language. 

Now Joyce, in Book 1 of Finnegans Wake, as many Joycean scholars have shown through countless publications, have had great fun trying to decipher all the many myths from both the bible and the ancients that crop up in Joyce’s comic masterpiece. It is a really funny book, this is something that Joyceans are constantly underlining, as it is full of puns which are referring back to famous figures such as the Duke of Wellington and Ishtar the ancient Babylonian Goddess of Love and War, and the Scottish empiricist philosopher David Hume, and so many more. It is a great sprawling narrative in divided up into eight chapters each one given over to one of the major characters who are called the Earwickers. Father and Mother – Humphry and Anna, and their 3 siblings Shem, Sham and Issy. The first chapter is a kind of prelude given over to history and the origins of the Muse etc.  

Beckett in How It Is begins his novel in a very similar way. Just as Joyce derives his ideas from Vico’s ideas on the very origins on human societies, Beckett too signals the muse right at the very beginning of his novel by starting the book with an invocation. Even if it is an unconventional one, as you would expect from Beckett, the fact that he uses the structural form tells us everything. The great Russian comparatist Mikhail Bakhtin, in The Dialogical Imagination ( 1975), is at pains to point out the origins of the novel as a genre and its debt to epic poetry, having taken many structural features from it. Most novels being of tri-partite structure in theory, as Aristotle in his Poetics asserts, in which they tell of events before, during and after which is exactly what Beckett does in How It Is – events before Pim, with Pim and after Pim.

Who is this PIM, by the way? 

Well that is a very good question, and in order to attempt to answer it we must move on now to Vico’s 2^nd age which is given over to violence. You remember my story with the girl? How She was to kick my sorry little ass! Yes, I am talking about Female Domination of the male species, just as I spoke about Male Domination of the female in the first age. This is karma. Of course, in Beckett the characters are practically sexless. As they are in all of Beckett’s work, post WW2 at least. 

Joyce parodies Hitler and the Nazis in Book 2 of Finnegans Wake. They were on the rise, remember, during Joyce’s lifetime. While he was writing, nay, composing his great final work, Adolf Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany ( 1933). Book 2 of Finnegans Wake is full of wonderful puns at the expense of the Nazis, referencing particularly their atrocious treatment of the Jews. 

Beckett in How It Is uses the most crude and forceful comedy. It is grotesque comedy, and its only reference that I could think of in literature was Satyr play, again going back to ancient Greece. Now, we only have one existing Satyr play in existence which is The Cyclops by Euripides. Now anyone who is familiar with this hilarious text will be aware that it is a parody of Homer’s Odyssey. A grotesque parody mind, in the style of Rabelais. Basically Euripides takes the myth of Zeus and Ganymede which recounts how Zeus basically had his way with the beautiful youth. Ganymede being synonymous with the person who is in the submissive position in an amorous relationship. The Bottom, in short. As opposed to the Top. We must use the language of S&M. As this is what we are in effect talking about. Bottoms and Tops. Dominants and submissives. This is what Beckett is obsessed with in How It Is. What I have come to call the maths of rejection.

For as the novel progresses, Beckett becomes more and more obsessed with the numbers 3 and 4. In fact the quartet, not the trilogy, is the ideal set. I am using the mathematical term now, taken from set theory. As this is how Beckett chooses to enter into the subject matter. It went on to become a major obsession of his throughout his later writing career. If one considers the fact that How It Is was published in 1961 and Quad which was written and produced in 1981, it wasn’t finally published until three years later. That’s a period of 23 years between both works. 

Anway, Beckett spends the greater part of parts 2 and 3 of How It Is going over the innumerable permutations of movements. But basically, we are back with girlfriends 1 and 2 which started this small discourse on Love and Literature. 1 + 2 = 3. Remember! And, if we were to progress to 4, that would mean a return to 1, for me at least. I would have to become the bastard again. Beckett uses the terms Victim and Torturer. These are the two modes of so called human behaviour. You are basically, in Beckett’s world, or, at least in the universe of How It Is one or the other.      

So tell me, which one are YOU?

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