"Stalking about London in a green suit" Beckett's Murphy, London and Flanerie

Raymond Mullen

Issue 379, vol.95, Autumn 2006

In Paris, Joyce and Beckett would become avid flaneurs [street-saunterers]. Throughout Beckett’s writing characters such as Murphy, Molloy, Moran, Malone, Watt are at some point overtaken by ‘intoxication’ as they walk aimlessly along streets and roads.

Like Joyce, who had ‘Dublinized’ Ulysses – famously stating that should the city be levelled to the ground it could be rebuilt, brick by brick, with the aid of his novel – Beckett consciously ‘Londonized’ Murphy. Just as Joyce had used Thom’s Directory in Ulysses as a means of plotting the time-space co-ordinates of his fictional world and anchoring the comic action to a fixed realistic grid – in the same way, in Murphy, Beckett used Whitaker’s Almanac for London.

Murphy’s ‘wandering to find home’ echoes the ‘necessary journey’ of Bloom’s homecoming and Dedalus’ journey to meet the self he is ineluctably destined to become [in Ulysses]. But in counterpoint to this ‘heroic’ note, Beckett has Murphy make an unheroic ‘necessary journey’ – a quite half-hearted search for employment. (Murphy has taken up with Celia, a street-walker/wanderer).

Murphy eventually finds work helping in a mental hospital. Quickly he is overcome by feelings of respect and unworthiness before these figures of the ‘little world’ of the hospital – the patients whom the ‘big world’ looks down on…So we are not surprised to hear from a literary critic of today – citing Kierkegaard and Siegfried Gideon – that the flaneur will often go for a walk in his mind, where “deep below the surface…estrangement and surprise, the most thrilling exoticism, are all close by”.

Raymond Mullen is the first Postgraduate Fellow of the National Centre for Franco-Irish Studies in ITT, Dublin, where he is writing his doctoral thesis on the influence of Proust and Camus on the work of John McGahern.