Samuel Beckett's Tattered Syntaxes: The Mother Tongue Estranged and the Matter of Less

Beckett’s conflicted Irish identity centered around the figures of mother, Mother Ireland and “mother Anglo-Irish”. Refusing Yeats’s Anglo-Irish legacy, he chose the first major Irish-Catholic writer as a model instead. From Joyce came the “itch to write”, but one inhibited by Beckett's fear that he had “nothing to say”. The vision of a series of “brotherly likes” generating only the same seemed to condemn his project, shared with Joyce, of developing a language that was no one’s mother ton...