Chapter 9 - Back Roads

Summary

Throughout Beckett’s later prose and drama, in Company, Stirrings Still, …but the clouds…, there emerges at key moments the figure of the back road. Beckett’s narrator imagines a character walking in a featureless place, ‘nowhere in particular on the way from A to Z’. But then he corrects himself. ‘Or say for verisimilitude the Ballyogan Road. That dear old back road’.

This re-emergence of the back road in late Beckett calls, at each occurrence, to an Irish tradition, that has always been secreted in Beckett’s writing, somewhere in the back of the mind, or the back of the page. This essay reads this back road, as it suggests a principle of historical and cultural transmission, by which Beckett reaches backwards trough a lineage of Irish writers who sit at an angle to their own historical moment, and forwards to writers who come after Beckett, and who seek to inherit his own particular Irish legacy. The back road, and the concept of the back more generally, is a recurrent concern for writers in this tradition, from Maria Edgeworth, to Elizabeth Bowen, to John Banville. In tracing the passage of the back road from Edgeworth to Banville, this essay at once summons a minor tradition to which all of these writers belong and suggests a means by which a minor tradition might be critically articulated.