The Library and the School of English have used Beckett’s archival materials as a starting point to explore the theme of SILENCE during Trinity Week.
In a glass case in Trinity’s Long Room, above the Book of Kells, documents related to Samuel Beckett sit beside a letter smuggled out of prison by Bobby Sands, written on toilet paper, while a little set of badges commemorates the theatre work of Rick Cluchey, a former prisoner who staged Beckett’s plays.
As a lecturer in the School of English, one of the things I most admire about Beckett’s novels and plays is their focus on the underdog – bad-tempered men and women who are social outcasts and grumble to themselves for pages and pages of funny, meandering, grubbily beautiful writing. But Beckett is a canonical author, so highly respected that even the drafts of texts that he abandoned as scraps and scribbles are lavished with attention by scholars. What about people in less privileged positions than Beckett, who are themselves underdogs and silenced by society, but have tried to make their voices heard through writing?
Bobby Sands was a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army who died in prison in 1981 at the age of 27 after a hunger strike that lasted 66 days. During the strike, Sands smuggled letters out of Long Kesh prison to public figures. The only writing paper he had access to was toilet paper. The letter on display in the Long Room found its way to the playwright John B. Keane (1928-2002).
In 1961, prisoners in San Quentin State Prison in California put on a production of Waiting for Godot which resonated powerfully with the inmates – for them, there was no mystery to the two characters talking about everything and nothing, stuck in the same place and powerless to leave, waiting for something to change. Beckett developed a lasting relationship with the former prisoners who set up the San Quentin Drama Workshop. The exhibition features photos of Beckett at rehearsals with the group. The case also contains a production photo of Catastrophe, Beckett’s play written for the imprisoned Czech dissident playwright Vaclav Havel. The play was written in 1981, the year Sands died. The protagonist in that play says no words, but communicates nonetheless.
The campaigning group for free speech, Index on Censorship, cannily referenced Beckett’s sympathy for prisoners when they used his image in an advertisement that they first published in 1986 and used in campaigns until 1989.
The Long Room exhibition, which will be on show till the middle of May, is one element of a multi-part collaboration between the School of English and the Library. There will also be a panel discussion, with myself and Feargal Whelan, research associate at the Trinity Centre for Beckett Studies, which will explore some of the issues raised by the exhibition about the cultural value of poor-quality writing material and the body as a site of resistance. Everyone is more than welcome to this free ticketed event.
Throughout the week there will be a series of blog posts written by myself, Feargal and Jane Maxwell, one of the Library’s curators in Manuscripts & Archives, which will deal with the following subjects: the current Long Room exhibition from the curatorial perspective; Beckett’s plays Catastrophe and Endgame; the materiality of specific literary artifacts focusing on the John B. Keane papers and the Bobby Sands letter; a letter from Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington (1877-1946) to Frank Gallagher (1893-1962), both early-twentieth-century hunger strikers; and a memoir and diary written by an eighteenth-century woman Dorothea Herbert (c.1767-1829) who used literature to manage her mental illness.
It has been a great pleasure to have collaborated on this with Manuscripts & Archives in the Library, and with the Department of Conservation and Preservation.
Dr Julie Bates
School of English