Sir, – While acknowledging that Beckett himself corrected Prof Eoin O’Brien in identifying Greystones harbour as the location for his artistic revelation (Weekend Review, March 23rd), the writers of the Social Network column are quick to conclude: “So much for the plaque that commemorates the spot at Dún Laoghaire”.
This plaque, quite correctly, links the anemometer on the pier with a passage from Krapp's Last Tape which describes "the wind-gauge spinning like a propeller" and Krapp's sudden insight into life's darkness: "clear to me at last".
In a further complication, which was perhaps designed to challenge interpretations identifying him with his characters, Beckett also claimed his mother’s room as the site of a personal epiphany.
All of these locations inform our understanding of Beckett’s life as the framework for his art, but are not the determining factor: the image of a man struggling on a pier towards a lighthouse with the sea flying over granite and the wind-gauge spinning needs no context; if it is to have one, then it fits perfectly with the features of Dún Laoghaire pier, not to mention Beckett’s many references to the latter in his prose works. – Yours, etc,
PAUL O’HANRAHAN,
Oliver Plunkett Road,
Dún Laoghaire,
Co Dublin.