At the Edge of Ireland Read Online Free PDF Page A

that in an Anglican Church with five hundred congregants could have taken a good hour or more to get through, the long service inevitably developed a droney, droopy pace and mood. And I caught myself remembering the flash and flourish of Joyce’s religious revivalist rhetoric in the turbulent middle section of Ulysses , and wondered how this would go down if read aloud here in the church instead of yet another dirgy psalm:
    Hush! Sinned against the light and even now that day is at hand when He shall come to judge the world by fire. Pflaap! Elijah is coming! Washed by the blood of the Lamb. Come on, you wine-fizzling, gin-sizzling, booze-guzzling existences. Come on, you dog-gone, bull-necked, beetle-browed, hog-jowled, peanut-brained, weasely-eyed flower flushes, false alarms and excess baggage! Come on, you triple extracts of infamy. The Deity ain’t no nickel dime bum show. I put it to you that He’s on the square and a corking fine proposition. He’s the grandest thing yet and don’t you forget it. Shout salvation and King Jesus. You’ll need to rise precious early, you sinner there, if you want to diddle the Almighty God. Pflaaap!
    It didn’t happen, of course. Instead the congregation began one more murmured recitation of the Our Father, and I felt the yawns easing like sleepy cloudscapes over me. A little Joyce would certainly have juiced up and jollied the process along, but as this period is the most sacred of the Catholic calendar, maybe it was best to stick to the tried-and-true. After all, I convinced myself, we were going to need all the blessings we could engender during this new adventure of ours in a new country—and by the sound of it, most particularly on the racetrack roads where we’d been told many drivers were unlicensed, uninsured, and far too often, unsober.

    James Joyce
    And so back to Beckett, who, like Joyce, spent most of his life out of Ireland and was typically obscure when defining the settings for his works. This fragment possibly captures something of the spirit of Dublin that we sensed during our own brief introduction:
    Â 
    Apologies. As another editor emphasized to me eons ago, authors should not play games with their readers. But—this tease of blank space could be interpreted literally. I honestly couldn’t find, in all of Beckett’s works, a single reference that seemed to have any relevance to our reflections upon Dublin. Or any other recognizable place on our earth, for that matter. On the other hand, this space could be interpreted artistically as a recognition of the minimalist blankness, the emptiness, the near vacuum, the void that permeates almost all of his plays: Acts-Without-Words, Roughs-for-Theatres, Roughs-for-Radios, and even his forty-second contribution to Kenneth Tynan’s Oh! Calcutta! , “written” in 1969 and titled simply Breath . This work consists of a curtain raised up with a faint light falling on “miscellaneous rubbish” scattered across the stage followed by “a faint brief cry,” an expiration of breath, and then silence, before the curtain drops again. Some claim it’s actually been performed in just over twenty seconds as opposed to the forty seconds estimated by Beckett. Undoubtedly a relief to many in the audience.
    What a bizarre nonworld the Nobel-Prized Beckett offered to a confused public—minimalistic tableaux of suspended heads with frantically chattering mouths; people in overgrown plant pots; characters immersed in sand; two Chaplinesque tramps waiting by a solitary tree for someone or something that never comes; a man feverishly winding and rewinding a recorded tape searching for…the truth, the meaning, or perhaps just the meaning less ness of man’s existence. I find his work irritating, absurd, pretentious, arrogantly elusive (and illusive), ambiguous to the point of total nonsense—and utterly, gloriously enticing. Even if I can’t call up the