John Clare in Neon: Environmental Crisis and the Poetics of the Field

Happy Days is contemporaneous with a number of seminal contributions to the concept of the everyday in postwar France. This essay suggests that the increasingly constrained verbal and physical routines performed by its protagonist Winnie constitute a portrait of the everyday, and goes on to trace the affinities between Beckett's portrait and several formulations of the concept, with particular emphasis on the pronounced gendering of the everyday in many of these theories. The essay suggests the aerial bombings of the Second World War and methods of torture during the Algerian War as potential influences for Beckett's play, and draws a comparison with Marlen Haushofer's 1963 novel The Wall, which reimagines the Romantic myth of The Last Man as The Last Woman. It is significant, however, that the cataclysmic event that precedes the events of Happy Days remains unnamed. This lack of specificity, I suggest, is constitutive of the menace of the play, and has ensured that the political as well as aesthetic power of Happy Days has not dated. Indeed, the everyday of its sentinel figure posted in a blighted landscape continues to articulate the fears of audiences, for whom the play may resonate today as a staging of twenty-first century anxiety about environmental crisis. The essay concludes that in Happy Days we encounter an isolated female protagonist who contrives from scant material resources and habitual bodily rhythms a shelter within a hostile environment, who generates, in other words, an everyday despite the shattering of the social and temporal framework that conventionally underpin its formation. Beckett's play in this way demonstrates the political as well as aesthetic power of the everyday in a time of crisis.

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Sara Guyer, Reading with John Clare: Biopoetics, Sovereignty, Romanticism

Romanticism ◽

10.3366/rom.2018.0359 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 24 (1) ◽

pp. 103-106

Author(s):

Robert Heyes

Keyword(s):

John Clare

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Green Statehood and Environmental Crisis

Politics and Ethics Review ◽

10.3366/per.2006.2.2.101 ◽

2006 ◽

Vol 2 (2) ◽

pp. 101-108

Author(s):

John Vogler

Keyword(s):

Environmental Crisis

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George Crabbe and John Clare: Refinement and Reading

Romanticism ◽

10.3366/rom.2014.0175 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 20 (2) ◽

pp. 174-184

Author(s):

Thomas Williams

Keyword(s):

John Clare ◽

George Crabbe

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The Life of Rural Scenery

Romanticism ◽

10.3366/rom.2020.0464 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 26 (2) ◽

pp. 191-201

Author(s):

Paul Chirico

Keyword(s):

Natural World ◽

Abstract Concept ◽

John Clare ◽

Material Basis ◽

The Moment

John Clare observed and described the natural world with an unsurpassed accuracy and intimacy. But his landscapes also bore the memories of life and labour. Like Wordsworth, he sought to create textual objects in transmissible forms, to deliver their reported worlds – expansive, dynamic, somehow inhabitable – to distant readers, drawing them into sympathetic intercommunion with a complex living scene. His intimate descriptive poetry reveals the tangible qualities of light and sound, and the material basis of the apparently abstract concept of time. Memory and imagination are understood to inhabit bodily spaces, provoking ‘real transport’: an observer lost in – and to – the moment. From his place and time, Clare felt solidarity with isolated birds, alienation from labour, estrangement from human communities. Publications such as annuals often showcased formulaic reflections on nature and on memory; Clare exploited textual duplicability, his meditative descriptive poetry spanning the history and futurity of an observed scene.

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