Beckett and Politics [1st ed.] 9783030471095, 9783030471101

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xiv
Introduction (Helen Bailey, William Davies)....Pages 1-19
Front Matter ....Pages 21-23
The Politics of Forms in Beckett’s Writing (Nadia Louar)....Pages 25-38
Beckett, Contradiction and a Textual Politics of Change (Arka Chattopadhyay)....Pages 39-54
“Made of Words”: Beckett and the Politics of Language (Alan Graham)....Pages 55-68
“First the Place, Then I’ll Find Me in It”: The Unnamable’s Pronouns and the Politics of Confinement (James Little)....Pages 69-85
Front Matter ....Pages 87-89
Tweaking Misogyny or Misogyny Twisted: Beckett’s Take on “Aristotle and Phyllis” in Happy Days (Kumiko Kiuchi)....Pages 91-105
Insufferable Maternity and Motherhood in “First Love” (Brenda O’Connell)....Pages 107-121
Beckett, Biopolitics and the Problem of Life (Marc Farrant)....Pages 123-138
Beckett’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young “Post-War Degenerate” (Giovanna Vincenti)....Pages 139-154
Waiting for Godot and the Fascist Aesthetics of the Body (Hannah Simpson)....Pages 155-171
Front Matter ....Pages 173-175
Political Theatre and the Beckett Problem (Emilie Morin)....Pages 177-193
“The Air Is Full of Our Cries”: Staging Godot During Apartheid South Africa (Matthew McFrederick)....Pages 195-211
Samuel Beckett’s Nominalist Politics and the Pitfalls of ‘Presentism’ (Matthew Feldman)....Pages 213-230
Samuel Beckett’s Subaltern Figures (Brendan Dowling)....Pages 231-247
The Big House in the Suburbs: Home Thoughts from Abroad in Watt (Feargal Whelan)....Pages 249-261
Beckett and the Politics of Empathy in Site-Specific Theatre (Niamh M. Bowe)....Pages 263-280
Towards a Modernism with Meaning: Beckett’s Refugees (Rodney Sharkey)....Pages 281-299
Afterword (Peter Boxall)....Pages 301-312
Back Matter ....Pages 313-319

Citation preview

NEW DIRECTIONS IN IRISH AND IRISH AMERICAN LITERATURE

Beckett and Politics Edited by William Davies · Helen Bailey

New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature

Series Editors Claire A. Culleton Department of English Kent State University Kent, OH, USA Kelly Matthews Department of English Framingham State University Framingham, MA, USA

New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature promotes fresh scholarship that explores models of Irish and Irish American identity and examines issues that address and shape the contours of Irishness and works that investigate the fluid, shifting, and sometimes multivalent discipline of Irish Studies. Politics, the academy, gender, and Irish and Irish American culture, among other things, have not only inspired but affected recent scholarship centered on Irish and Irish American literature. The series’s focus on Irish and Irish American literature and culture contributes to our twenty-first century understanding of Ireland, America, Irish Americans, and the creative, intellectual, and theoretical spaces between.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14747

William Davies · Helen Bailey Editors

Beckett and Politics

Editors William Davies University of Reading Reading, UK

Helen Bailey Loughborough College of Further and Higher Education Loughborough, UK

New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature ISBN 978-3-030-47109-5 ISBN 978-3-030-47110-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47110-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Colors Hunter-Chasseur de Couleurs/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

A volume such as this is only made possible by the hard work, patience and enthusiasm of its contributors. Our first and foremost thanks are to them. Many of the authors attended or contributed to the “Beckett and Politics” conference held at the University of Reading in 2016, which sparked the debates that drove this project, and we thank all those who have been with us from the conference through to the book’s completion, as well as those scholars who have joined us through invitation along the way. Special thanks to Niamh M. Bowe, Michela Bariselli and Antonio Gambacorta for their work in co-organising the event, and to the University of Reading’s Samuel Beckett Research Centre for their institutional support and guidance. We thank the staff at Palgrave Macmillan for their support and interest in the project, and for guiding the project through the editorial process. Thanks also to the anonymous peer-review readers for their insightful and constructive comments on the volume, and to Hannah Simpson for her thorough and helpful feedback on the volume’s introduction.

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Contents

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Introduction Helen Bailey and William Davies

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Part I Beckett & Language Politics: Editors’ Preface 25

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The Politics of Forms in Beckett’s Writing Nadia Louar

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Beckett, Contradiction and a Textual Politics of Change Arka Chattopadhyay

39

“Made of Words”: Beckett and the Politics of Language Alan Graham

55

4

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“First the Place, Then I’ll Find Me in It”: The Unnamable’s Pronouns and the Politics of Confinement James Little

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CONTENTS

Part II Beckett & Biopolitics: Editors’ Preface 6

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Tweaking Misogyny or Misogyny Twisted: Beckett’s Take on “Aristotle and Phyllis” in Happy Days Kumiko Kiuchi Insufferable Maternity and Motherhood in “First Love” Brenda O’Connell

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Beckett, Biopolitics and the Problem of Life Marc Farrant

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Beckett’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young “Post-War Degenerate” Giovanna Vincenti

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Waiting for Godot and the Fascist Aesthetics of the Body Hannah Simpson

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Part III

Beckett & Geopolitics: Editors’ Preface 177

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Political Theatre and the Beckett Problem Emilie Morin

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“The Air Is Full of Our Cries”: Staging Godot During Apartheid South Africa Matthew McFrederick

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Samuel Beckett’s Nominalist Politics and the Pitfalls of ‘Presentism’ Matthew Feldman

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Samuel Beckett’s Subaltern Figures Brendan Dowling

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CONTENTS

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The Big House in the Suburbs: Home Thoughts from Abroad in Watt Feargal Whelan

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Beckett and the Politics of Empathy in Site-Specific Theatre Niamh M. Bowe

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Towards a Modernism with Meaning: Beckett’s Refugees Rodney Sharkey

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Afterword Peter Boxall

Index

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Notes on Contributors

Helen Bailey is an independent scholar and works as an Access to HE tutor at Loughborough College of Further and Higher Education. Her publications appear in various journals and books, including The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary English and Irish Poetry (2013), Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui (2019) and The Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature (forthcoming). She is currently preparing a book on Beckett, music and spirituality. Niamh M. Bowe is an early career researcher and currently works in academic publishing. She completed her AHRC-funded doctoral project on the use of empathy and abstraction in Samuel Beckett’s later dramatic work using the Samuel Beckett Collection at the University of Reading. Her research focuses on political theatre, empathy theory and Irish studies. Peter Boxall is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. His latest book is The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life (2020). Earlier books include Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism (2009) and The Value of the Novel (2015). He has edited several collections, including Beckett/Aesthetics/Politics (2000), an edition of Beckett’s Malone Dies (2010), The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction, 1980–2018 (2019) and the bestselling 1001 Books You Must Read before You Die (2012). He is editor of Textual Practice and

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series editor of Cambridge Studies in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Culture. Arka Chattopadhyay is Assistant Professor of Literary Studies in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Gandhinagar, India. He works on Modernist literature, continental philosophy and psychoanalysis. His first monograph, Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Real was published in December 2018 with Bloomsbury. William Davies is a research fellow at the University of Reading, UK. His work on Samuel Beckett includes various articles and book chapters, the volume Samuel Beckett and Europe: History, Culture, Tradition (2017), co-edited with Michela Bariselli and Niamh M. Bowe, the monograph Samuel Beckett and the Second World War (2020) and The Poetry of Samuel Beckett (2021), co-edited with James Brophy. Brendan Dowling is a doctoral alumnus of Ulster University and an independent researcher. He is currently exploring how the motifs of territorial displacement and psychosocial misrecognition, embedded in Beckett’s mature fiction, presaged analogous themes in non-European anti-colonial fiction from the 1960s onwards. Marc Farrant is an early career researcher. He completed his Ph.D. on the relation between Samuel Beckett and J. M. Coetzee in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of London, Goldsmiths College. He currently teaches in the area of modern and contemporary literature and theory at several universities in the UK, the Netherlands and Germany. He was the co-organiser of the 2017 international conference, “Coetzee & the Archive”, featuring J. M. Coetzee. Matthew Feldman is an Emeritus Professor in the Modern History of Ideas. He has published widely on Samuel Beckett, including the 2006 monograph Beckett’s Books and the 2015 book of essays Falsifying Beckett. With Steven Matthews, he is the editor of Samuel Beckett’s Philosophy Notes for Oxford University Press (2020). Alan Graham publishes regularly on Beckett and Irish cultural history. Recent publications include Beckett and the State of Ireland (2017) and “‘Sassenachs and their syphilization’: the Irish Revival, De-Anglicisation, and Eugenics” in Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism (2019). He teaches at Gonzaga College, Dublin.

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Kumiko Kiuchi is Associate Professor of the Institute for Liberal Arts at Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan. She has published articles in Journal of Beckett Studies, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, SNOW and other journals and magazines in the UK and Japan. Her recent research interests include the representation of urban space in British literature and cinema. James Little is a postdoctoral researcher at Charles University, Prague. He has published in Journal of Beckett Studies and co-edited “Draff”, a bilingual special issue of Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui on underexamined aspects of Beckett’s work. His monograph Beckett in Confinement: The Politics of Closed Space is published with Bloomsbury (2020). Nadia Louar is Associate Professor in French and Francophone Studies at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. She has published essays on Beckett’s works, literary bilingualism and self-translation and on questions of genre and gender in translation. She is the author of Figures du bilinguisme dans l’œuvre de Samuel Beckett (2016). She is currently preparing a Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui volume on The Poetics of Bilingualism in Beckett’s Works, co-edited with Dr. Jose Francisco Fernández, and rewriting her monograph in English. Matthew McFrederick is a Teaching Fellow in Theatre at the University of Reading. From 2018 to 2019, Matthew was a Jocelyn Herbert PostDoctoral Research Fellow at the University of the Arts London and the National Theatre Archive. His most recent articles have been published in Staging Beckett in Great Britain, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui and Contemporary Theatre Review. Emilie Morin is Professor of Modern Literature in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York, UK. She has published widely on Beckett’s work, and her most recent book is Beckett’s Political Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Brenda O’Connell has a Ph.D. in gender, ageing and sexuality in Samuel Beckett’s work (2019). She is an adjunct at Maynooth University, Ireland, tutoring in English literature. She has published on Beckett, Irish performance art and has forthcoming publications on the Waking the Feminists movement (2019) and queer ageing in Irish theatre (2020).

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Rodney Sharkey is Professor of English at The Cornell Medical School Branch Campus in Doha, Qatar. His interests are in the areas of philosophy, popular culture and performance studies, and he has regularly published critical work on Samuel Beckett since 1994. Hannah Simpson is the Rosemary Pountney Junior Research Fellow in British and European Drama at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. Her work focuses on modern and contemporary theatre and performance, with a particular interest in the representation of physical pain and disability, and forgotten plays of the twentieth century. Giovanna Vincenti has recently completed her Ph.D. in English Literature at the University of Reading. Her research explores how different experiences of madness (either one’s own or of another) are turned into aesthetic form in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Samuel Beckett’s early English prose. More generally, her research interests include European modernism and medical humanities. She is a translator from English into Italian and has been mainly working on film and theatre scripts. Feargal Whelan is a research associate at the Trinity Centre for Beckett Studies, TCD. He writes on Beckett and on twentieth-century Irish literature, edits The Beckett Circle and is a co-director of the Samuel Beckett Summer School. He is the author of Beckett and the Irish Protestant Imagination (2020).

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Helen Bailey and William Davies

The notion that Beckett’s life and work can be understood in political terms has, for many decades, seemed a difficult and even contradictory prospect. His writing frequently depicts human pain, subjugation, isolation and disintegration—the collapse, even, of meaning itself—yet it often appears removed from the overtly political, positioning itself both textually and authorially as an exercise in atemporal, ahistorical and even apolitical utterances. Indeed, Beckett’s reputation and popularity have previously been founded on the perception of his work as resistant to politics: an intensely aesthetic body of work underpinned by an often radical, deracinated formalism, rather than any sort of politicism. Yet, as this volume and recent developments in the field demonstrate, there is no getting away from the political in Beckett. Politics shapes our world, the way we think, the way we act and the people, ideas and critical approaches we privilege over others. As such, the author, the work and the critic must

H. Bailey (B) Loughborough College of Further and Higher Education, Loughborough, UK W. Davies University of Reading, Reading, UK © The Author(s) 2021 W. Davies and H. Bailey (eds.), Beckett and Politics, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47110-1_1

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all be ‘political’ in their own ways, even when they claim to be otherwise. As we will see, Beckett himself argued that the absence of political discourse in supposedly ‘apolitical’ writing was still, inescapably, a “political statement” (qtd. in Morin 249). In this way, while Harold Pinter was right in his encapsulation of Beckett’s work as a “body of beauty” concerned with the aesthetic possibilities of absence, desolation and hopelessness (“A Wake for Sam”), it is also clearly one of power, violence and manipulation, and the political conditions these entail. His work is as much concerned with the hegemonic implications of laughing in response to hopelessness, as it is with the pure depiction of that same hopelessness. The extent to which the question of aesthetics has remained distanced from political and historical readings shows that there is still much work to be done on the politics of Beckett’s writing. Until recently, political engagements with Beckett’s work have largely been shaped by the writer’s own dismissive views around historical interpretations of art. His ambivalent comments and opinions about the historical, political and religious implications of his work are well documented, not only in terms of the historico-political conditions of his writing, but also his non- or even anti-political views when it came to the production of art. Writing in his review of Denis Devlin’s Intercessions, Beckett defined poetry (and art more generally) as a sphere of expression that should be “free to be derided (or not) on its own terms and not in those of the politicians, antiquaries […] and zealots” (Disjecta 91). When faced with the prospect of the political appropriation of art into narratives of national history or identity, his generally wary (and weary) rejection of historical readings would often escalate into much more virulent objections. This position contributed to his distancing from the cultural agenda of the Irish Revival and Irish Free State, as well as the national sensibilities of figures such as Thomas MacGreevy. Beckett expressed exasperation with MacGreevy’s historical approach to art and its incorporation into political narratives, lamenting that MacGreevy remained “Ireland haunted” and that the work he produced for publications such as The Father Matthew Record left Beckett “wishing again you [MacGreevy] were writing more for yourself and less for Ireland” (Letters II 75). This resistance to the political appropriation of art was by no means confined to Ireland. As France attempted to recover both culturally and intellectually from nearly half a decade of Nazi occupation and Vichy collaboration, Beckett strongly opposed the preoccupation French intellectuals and politicians had with various forms of humanism. He put this

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most starkly in terms of the potential “damage” that may be done to art and artistic interpretation, professing a clear suspicion of the humanistic rhetoric being “bandied around” (“La peinture” 131; trans. in Rabaté 19) by post-war French intellectual and cultural circles: […] For art should not to need cataclysms to be able to be practiced. The damage is already considerable. With “this is not human”, one has said it all. Throw it to the garbage can. Tomorrow one will require that charcuterie be human. (“La peinture” 131; trans. in Rabaté 19)

Beckett’s concern with these intellectual-political forces demonstrates how his experience of occupied France and Vichy during the war refined the views he developed as a result of his encounters with the cultural and political agendas of pre-war Ireland and Nazi Germany. It was during his visit to the latter that he put it most succinctly, though: that the political co-option of art and writing could “start the vomit moving upwards” (qtd. in Nixon 87). Alongside the often-disorientating effect of his aesthetic, Beckett’s views about the role of both history and politics in art have undoubtedly contributed to the obscured sense in which politics is imagined in his texts. However, thanks to the work of scholars attuned to the political and historical contexts often evoked in the author’s writing (including his letters and personal notes), we now have a much clearer sense not only of Beckett’s political activities but of the extent to which his political scruples shaped his writing. Contrary to his protests around the topic of historical interpretation and the traditional critical sense that Beckett wrote ‘outside’ of history (and so, seemingly, outside of politics), we now know that Beckett’s immersion in his contexts offered a significant well-spring for creative inspiration in his bid for abstraction and literary alienation. This manifests in various forms. Taking just one example, Seán Kennedy argues that the historical and political elements of Beckett’s work often appear by way of objects, place names and historical figures that emerge as “elements in flux that cannot be pinned down” (“Humanity in Ruins” 187), revealing a political awareness that nevertheless resists a straightforward representation of historical realities. Later in life, Beckett became increasingly sympathetic to the political potential of art, even when it purported to contain no politics at all. As Emilie Morin reveals, Beckett’s attitudes often formed in direct response

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to the most significant historical and political events in the twentieth century: Antonia Fraser recalls an evening with Beckett and Bray in 1979, during which Bray defended the slogan “everything is political”, which rallied the student and labour movements long after 1968. To this Pinter objected, “Nothing I have written, Barbara, nothing ever, is political”. And Beckett offered the reply familiar to any supporter of the 1968 movement: “This very absence of politics is in itself a political statement”. (249)

It is in the political potential of art qua art that we can locate a politics of creativity that Beckett may have sympathised with. To adjust Walter Pater’s axiom on the aesthetic encounter, this is the question of how far art can modify one’s own political nature (763)? Such a question reveals new ways of conceiving of the political in Beckett’s work. It also cautions us against the blind assumption that political inquiries into Beckett’s work require a predominantly historical focus. Indeed, the very nature of ‘politics’ requires us to use a much broader interpretive scope. Fundamentally centred around power structures, it encompasses a wide range of theoretical, biographical, social, historical, geographical, cultural, environmental and linguistic perspectives. As this volume demonstrates, political approaches to Beckett’s work reveal new vistas for exploring the relationship between historical criticism and vital theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches that begin to reckon with the full interpretive potential of his writing.

The ‘Political Turn’ in Beckett Studies In early scholarship and criticism, explorations into the political aspects of Beckett’s works were broached by Darko Suvin (1967), Vivian Mercier (1977), Thomas Cousineau (1984), John Harrington (1991) and David Lloyd (1993). Harrington, Lloyd and Mercier’s studies foregrounded the uptake in later criticism of Beckett’s relationship with the history and politics of Ireland. Works such as Steven Connor’s Repetition, Theory and Text (1988, 2007 revised) also made clear the political potential of the poststructuralist strand of Beckett Studies at the time, revealing the inherent power dynamics at work in Beckett’s manipulation of language (188). However, it was not until after the publication of James Knowlson’s

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authorised biography in 1996 that the idea of a political Beckett gathered momentum. Here, it became clear that Beckett had encountered, first-hand, an unusually large number of political ideologies and events during his life. In the preface to Damned to Fame, Knowlson argues that the writer’s personal engagement with several political causes directly contradicts the ‘apoliticism’ often assigned to him: When[,] as an Irishman, [Beckett] could have been neutral in the Second World War, he chose to join a Resistance cell of the British SOE and won the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Reconnaissance Française. He was deeply committed to human rights; he firmly and totally opposed apartheid and was hostile from an early age to all forms of racism; he supported human rights movements throughout the world, including Amnesty International and Oxfam; he supported the freedom movement in Eastern Europe; and, although as a foreigner living in France he was wary of having his residential permit withdrawn, he was involved in a number of specific political cases. (xxii)

It has taken time for this picture of Beckett to be more widely accepted. Morin attributes the persistence of this ascription of apoliticism to Beckett to the fact that his political activities were not outspoken or radical enough to be of note to commentators and critics. They could not, for instance, be “shoe-horned into [the] familiar narratives of political literacy, activism and disenchantment” (23) that surrounded the likes of Sartre and Blanchot, because his outward gestures of political support were largely limited to causes that threatened the fundamental principles of his profession—namely, freedom of speech, freedom of movement and censorship—especially when those affected were known to him. Importantly, Morin notes, his support of these causes “almost exclusively benefited male artists and intellectuals with credentials that matched his own” (23). Following the publication of Knowlson’s biography, the idea of a political Beckett began gathering pace in scholarly circles, with a section dedicated to Beckett, aesthetics and politics in the 2000 volume of Samuel Beckett Today /Aujourd’hui. The same year, Jennifer Birkett and Kate Ince published a reader on Beckett, which included significant commentaries on ‘political’ and ‘feminist’ Beckett, and traced previous critical attempts to unravel the political potential of Beckett’s work, from Darko Suvin and Raymond Williams, through Adorno, Deleuze and Guattari, to Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous (10–22). Here, Birkett and Ince brought

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together many of the early considerations of the political in Beckett, including Adorno’s famous appraisal of Endgame, Stephen Watt’s consideration of Beckett’s drama in light of his reading of Baudrillard, Patricia Coughlan’s postcolonial reading of Beckett and the politics of poetic form, Julia Kristeva’s exploration of paternity and maternity in Beckett (an idea that Brenda O’Connell revisits in Chapter 8) and Linda Ben-Zvi’s reflections on female subjectivity. The year 2000 also saw the publication of David Weisberg’s Chronicles of Disorder, which reframed Beckett’s fiction in terms of changing ideas around the social, cultural and political function of literature. A year later, Henry Sussman and Christopher Devenney published their edited collection, Engagement and Indifference, gathering critics and creative writers to explore the underlying political and ethical characteristics of Beckett’s writing. This first phase of critical work on Beckett and the political in the early 2000s reached its apogee with the publication of Peter Boxall’s 2002 essay, “Samuel Beckett: Towards a Political Reading”, in which the case was made for the development of a series of frameworks through which the political tensions of Beckett’s writing (not just his life) could be read, encouraging criticism to move beyond the restrictive stranglehold of ‘apolitical Beckett’. Developing the ideas he put forward in his introduction to the “Beckett/Aesthetics/Politics” section of Samuel Today / Aujourd’hui 9 (2000), Boxall’s 2002 essay is emphatic that political readings of Beckett should neither dismiss the uncompromising achievement of Beckett’s negative and negating aesthetic, nor attempt to falsely establish Beckett as a deliberately ‘political’ writer. “My call for a political reading of Beckett’s aesthetic”, Boxall writes, “follows rather from the conviction that certain limits have been imposed on our understanding of Beckett’s work both by a widespread over-emphasis on his political neutrality, and by the ways in which his indifference has been read and articulated” (159). In his essay, Boxall articulates the three-way tension between (1) Beckett’s seeming reluctance to establish or engage with specific material or political realities; (2) previous critical resistance towards political readings of Beckett; and (3) the undeniable and untapped political potency of his work. Since highlighting this tension, the increase in scholarly and critical attention to the political aspects of Beckett’s life and texts has begun to do far more than worry the fringes of mainstream Beckett criticism. It has resulted in significant re-evaluations of Beckett’s life and writing, revealing complex and surprising relationships with Irish, German and French history and

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politics, the geo- and biopolitical considerations of staging his work, and the hegemonic structures inherent in his use of language, including his often violent humour. In her 2005 book, Beckett’s Dantes, Daniela Caselli highlighted the ingrained and restrictive power structures at play in the notion of ‘source’ as “the place where the full sense of Beckett’s texts can be recuperated”. Here, she questioned historicist tendencies to ascribe ultimate explanatory potency to the so-called ‘source’ of a work: a notebook, for instance, upon which “reassuring power is foisted” (86). A year later, Elizabeth Barry’s book, Beckett and Authority: The Uses of Cliché explored the different ways in which Beckett uses cliché to illuminate discourses of power and authority in his writing. Terry Eagleton’s 2006 essay “Political Beckett?” further echoed Boxall’s appeal for more politically framed readings of Beckett’s work—though still focusing on the major touchpoints of Beckett’s life as a lens for the work. Meanwhile, Ato Quayson’s 2007 book, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation, introduced the question of Beckett’s representation of disability and its links with imperialism, subjection and ‘otherness’. Quayson identified a disjunction in Beckett’s work between the representation of physical and mental impairment on the one hand, and the absence of pain on the other, which, he argued, forces us to interrogate the logic of Beckett’s texts to discover the ethical implications of his representation of disability. Reading “against the grain” of Beckett’s work in this way, he concludes, also means resisting the temptation of seeing it as an autonomous whole. Instead, it is “part of the construction of reality, despite its strenuous efforts at distancing and detachment from any putative reality” (209). In 2009 and 2010, Seán Kennedy and Katherine Weiss’s Samuel Beckett: History, Memory, Archive, Kennedy’s edited book Beckett and Ireland, and Andrew Gibson’s “minimalist” biography, Samuel Beckett, developed the idea of Beckett’s writing as acutely, if idiosyncratically engaged with contemporaneous and historical political situations. Kennedy and Weiss’s edited book identifies the well-spring of historicopolitical readings that could be generated from attention to Beckett’s archives, while Beckett and Ireland does much to bring what Kennedy terms the “spectral” presence of Ireland to the forefront of contextual thinking around Beckett’s work, shifting it from “a side-show to the main business of Beckett studies” (2). In the afterword to Beckett and Ireland, Gibson calls attention to the need to modify and moderate historical readings of Beckett’s works by showing how the geopolitical traces in his

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writing tend to merge, conflate and transmogrify historical references and allusions. Gibson’s biography goes on to locate Beckett’s work not only in Irish contexts, but also in those of 1930s London, Nazi Germany, Vichy France and post-Liberation Paris. Following these explorations into the historical scope of the political, Greg Garrard’s consideration of Beckett in relation to climate change (2011), Paul Stewart’s study on the aesthetics of sex (2011) and Laura Salisbury’s extensive exploration of Beckett’s humour in a post-Holocaust context (2012) expanded the sphere of political approaches, revealing the generative potential of a multi-faceted conception of ‘political Beckett’. In 2017, the study of Beckett and politics entered a new phase with the publication of Emilie Morin’s Samuel Beckett’s Political Imagination. Here, Morin examines the wide range of political campaigns, events and ideals with which Beckett interacted, attending more closely than ever to the biographical and artistic significance of his political activities. In doing so, Morin demonstrates how Beckett’s writing and creative processes were influenced by his unique exposure to an international politics in extreme flux, as well as his personal involvement in specific instances of political activism and clandestine acts of resistance. Morin’s study was followed by the publication of James McNaughton’s Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath (2018). Taking Beckett’s archives as a starting point, yet remaining cautious about overreading texts against archive material, McNaughton explores the politics of Beckett’s lifelong sensitivity to form, demonstrating the writer’s repeated negotiation of political conditions and pressures in his works, from Irish Free State conservatism and Nazi propaganda to colonial and Soviet famine politics. Morin and McNaughton’s studies mark a pinnacle in the second phase of what might usefully be called a ‘political turn’ in Beckett Studies. They followed the University of Reading’s international “Beckett and Politics” conference (which began the dialogue that culminated in this volume), as well as Marc Caplan and Paul Stewart’s 2016 articles on, respectively, the politics of passivity and the politics of form. In turn, they have been followed by further developments in the field, including Christopher Langlois’ 2017 book, Samuel Beckett and the Terror of Literature, Alan Graham and Scott Hamilton’s 2018 edited collection, Samuel Beckett and the ‘State’ of Ireland, James Little’s Samuel Beckett in Confinement (2020) and William Davies’s Samuel Beckett and the Second World War (2020), which each explore unique strands of this new phase in Beckett criticism. Taking a different approach, Michael Coffey’s 2018

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book, Samuel Beckett is Closed, is an experimental narrative meditation on Beckett and the art and process of writing, based on Beckett’s unpublished “Long Observation of the Ray”. It draws on a range of political, critical, personal and biographical materials, which are centred around four scenarios: Beckett watching a baseball match; a writer who is reading Beckett; an unknown narrator undertaking an Arabian Nights style task to put his lover to sleep and, finally, various accounts of political violence (Guantanamo Bay, the Paris terror attacks, a child’s account of 9/11). Coffey’s subversive narrative form highlights the links between Beckett, storytelling and the all-too-real actuality of twenty-first-century politics. As Amanda Dennis suggests, Coffey’s structural and narrative positioning of these four scenarios “serves as an ethical reminder of authorial limitations and of the porousness between the worlds we create and the political reality in which we live”. While archival and historical research has been key to this ‘political turn’ in Beckett Studies, this volume acknowledges Andrew Gibson’s observation—explored further by Nadia Louar in Chapter 2—that historical materialism in Beckett Studies cannot “go it alone” on the topic of Beckett and politics or in Beckett studies more broadly (“Review” 927). As noted above, while historical approaches to Beckett’s work reveal important political contexts, they only scratch the surface of the ‘political’ itself, which encompasses historical events and movements, as well as intricate ideas around morality, power dynamics, language, and discrimination by omission or commission. In order to fully appreciate the extent of the political in Beckett Studies, it is necessary to set the historical alongside and in dialogue with theoretical, philosophical and linguistic approaches. Although the aesthetic possibilities of Beckett’s work have not diminished in terms of their literary, emotional or experiential value, the vitality that this political turn gives to Beckett Studies reflects what has been the case in public and performance spheres for much longer. Indeed, since live performances must by nature be situated in the contemporary moment, they are, as Seán Golden puts it, “inherently more social […] because they presume an audience and a communal setting and tackle the situation of individual life in a social setting rather than an interior ratiocination” (443). For many around the world, Beckett’s work, and his theatre in particular, is an accurate expression of their own political situation, providing a mode of political expression for communities trapped in contexts of oppression and suffering, a “muffled minor key sounding liberation to the oppressed, and comfort to those in need”, as Karl Ragnar

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Gierow put it in the 1969 Nobel Prize speech. Many ex-Soviet nations, for instance, found Waiting for Godot to be an articulation of defiance in the face of political oppression (see Saiu). Similarly, following the devastation brought on by Syrian President Assad’s military activities in 2012, Ian Pannell’s report for the BBC identified a pertinent instance of this political appropriation of Beckett. Speaking to a man who had lost his home, which contained a 500-strong book collection, Panell recalls the citizen’s remark that Waiting for Godot was his favourite literary work: “What does [Waiting for Godot ] mean to you?” I asked. Abu Mohammed smiled. “Hope,” he said. “I believe Godot is hope.” Death and destruction had been wrought upon his hometown and we were standing in the ruins of what had been his beloved library, yet his faith was undiminished. “You know, we are waiting for Godot,” he laughed. The people I have been talking to here share an absolute conviction that this time will be different, that what their fathers began will be finished by today’s generation. And after decades of what they see as state-sanctioned oppression, the spirit of rebellion burns bright - as they wait for Godot.1

Here, Abu Mohammed’s reading of Beckett is in the hope that politics, and so reality, will change. What does it mean, then, that Godot never comes? We could read this account of hope perpetually deferred not only as a probing critique of the politics of Abu Mohammed’s historically and geographically specific situation, but also as a questioning of the reputation that Beckett currently enjoys in academic and public spheres. While there is a scholarly tendency to distrust or even dismiss optimistic readings of Beckett, there remains an inherent tension around the question of why his works mean hope deferred to some and hope denied to others. Of course, it would be both arrogant and remiss to claim that one is a naïve view of the work and the other an enlightened one. One way of understanding the unrelenting optimism that pervades many (often staged) encounters with Beckett’s work is to think of it as a product of political, historical, geographical or cultural contexts. We might argue, therefore, that these redemptive, emancipatory or humanistoptimist perspectives in public receptions of Beckett are what give his

1 Alongside briefly noting this report, Emilie Morin also recounts the remarkable story of two Syrian children playing a game called “I am Samuel Beckett” (251–52).

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work popular vitality and sustained cultural currency. While this may reveal a politics of marketisation (the rather unpalatable act of making Beckett more palatable), it must be taken as seriously as anything else if we are to consider the writer’s full political potential. However, Beckett’s work also consistently provokes new debates and ideas in public discourse, particularly in radical stagings and reconceptions that transplant his writing into unique political contexts. These ideas are carried forward in this volume, as several contributors explore the factors leading to Beckett’s work being used as a form of political theatre, thus demonstrating how the politics of his writing has had its longest history in the realm of theatre and performance. Regardless of whether we see Beckett’s work as emblematic of hope deferred, hope denied or hope at all costs, we must acknowledge that all interpretations, however ‘objective’ they claim to be, are always shaped and bound by the subjective perspectives of the individuals putting them forward. It may be easy to smooth over the tensions outlined above by claiming that everyone has their own unique and individual Beckett, but this is a passive approach that absolves us from the responsibility of probing our own interactions with the work. Whether conscious or not, there are social, political and cultural forces at play in every judgement we make (and fail to make) about Beckett’s work. They are present in the critical choices we make, and they are all too present in our inclusions and omissions of certain ideas and approaches related to his writing. In choosing one topic, author or scholar over another as worthy of further exploration, a political statement is made—not only by the individual researcher, but also by the institutions, groups and funding bodies that support the individual and their work, and that control them through the bestowal and withdrawal of that support. As we begin to understand more about the impact of Beckett’s political life on his writing, it is perhaps time to be asking harder questions of ourselves as audience members, readers, critics, actors and directors—identifying and questioning the political biases we bring to our own interpretations of his work, and resisting the temptation of adulatory interpretations of Beckett’s politics. Indeed, as Morin points out, there is a clear limit to Beckett’s liberal politics in terms of his support of certain human rights causes, particularly his starkly contrasted silence on labour rights and women’s rights. She remarks that Beckett’s “tendency to only side publicly with white men was noticed in the French press in the 1980s” (23). In this way, Morin has paved the way for scholars to probe the critical tendency to favour hagiographic

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readings of Beckett’s politics as “sounding liberation to the oppressed” (Gierow), for instance, and to counter these with an acknowledgement of the writer’s limitations. In highlighting these unavoidable political biases, we as editors are all too aware of our own motivations and contexts in the genesis of this book. As well as exploring how political engagement with Beckett may be a useful way of bringing together theoretical and historical approaches to Beckett scholarship that in some quarters are perceived to be at loggerheads, this book also attempts to destabilise some of the engrained hierarchical structures that have previously permeated the field. To this end, we have attempted to produce a volume of work that not only provides a broad picture of the political approaches that Beckett’s work invites, but that is also representative of this burgeoning field and the people who work in it. It would be foolhardy, however, to claim that the book offers comprehensive coverage of the subject matter or the scholars who work in it. It is important to acknowledge, for example, that we have traced and situated this book within a predominantly Anglophone tradition of scholarship, and we recognise the need for further work on the different political frameworks used in critical contexts beyond this scope. While the book takes stock of a wide range of approaches in the field so far, there is still much more work in progress and left to be done, especially in terms of contemporary political ideas and approaches around (for instance) gender, sex, sexuality, disability, climate change, racial politics and post-truth politics.2 The political ramifications of our editorial decisions have been a significant challenge as we have sought to ensure a wide range of topics, in addition to as representative a mix of emerging and established scholars in the field as possible. This process has challenged us to question and disrupt our own “untroubled illusions” (Gierow) of Beckett Studies and the larger fields surrounding it—an approach that has recently been adopted by several literary societies and academic communities in their issuing of guidelines to ensure greater diversity and representation of scholars (whether by gender, race, sexuality, nationality

2 While some of these areas are beginning to be discussed, for example by Peter Boxall (sexuality), Daniela Caselli (gender), Alan Warren Friedman, Kene Igweonu and Vincent Lloyd (racial politics), Greg Garrard (climate change) and Paul Stewart (sex), to date there remains a scarcity of scholars working in these areas.

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or career stage) at conferences, and in keynotes, panels and publications.3 By opening up scholarly dialogue on the various ways in which Beckett’s works are shaped and informed by the political, it is our hope that this book will provoke debate and encourage new participants to join the discussion, developing new ways of thinking about the hegemonic structures that are endemic not only to Beckett’s life and works, but also to the academic, commercial and artistic worlds that surround him.

Beckett and ‘the Political’ The obvious difficulty in dealing with the question of Beckett and politics is that the term ‘politics’ is necessarily and unavoidably multi-faceted, but here it is treated as an opportunity for bringing together an equally multilayered, multi-directional range of critical approaches. Throughout the book’s sections—Language Politics, Biopolitics and Geopolitics—contributors attend to diverse political viewpoints as they are revealed through and in Beckett’s life and works, in order to probe the variety of ways that we might recognise, and be challenged by, the political aspects of his writing. To accommodate this multiplicity, it is useful to draw on Eugene F. Miller’s notion of the ‘political’ as being defined by its equivocalness. For Miller, the term is not “hopelessly ambiguous” (57) but is best understood through its etymological root in human communities (the polis ) (61). In other words, Miller contends, ‘politics’ relates to the hegemonic interactions of human beings in structures of community, whether on a global scale, or in national, local or individual contexts. Here, the dual concept of ‘human’ and ‘community’ is by nature oblique, ambivalent and multifarious, even when limitations are imposed on what constitutes 3 These guidelines have proved effective in tackling unconscious bias in certain fields by bringing to awareness issues of diversity and inclusion in academic practice, whether in conferences, reading lists or publications. Unconscious bias—whether institutional, personal or communal—inevitably affects the appeal of a field of study to research students and scholars from underrepresented groups, with some emigrating or switching to disciplines perceived to be more inclusive, others leaving academia altogether, and others never considering the field in the first place, since it appears inimical to them (see Lawton, Morgan, Bhopal et al., Carr et al. and Puritty et al.). Though this leaves academic communities comfortably “untroubled” in their perception of the field and those who belong to it, they are arguably the poorer for losing these diverse scholars and the unique insights they bring. By challenging scholars to think more carefully about the decisions they make, these initiatives help to alleviate some of the damage caused—usually unintentionally—by ingrained and unchecked bias.

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the ‘human’ and who is therefore eligible to join (or be cast out of) the polis.4 The idea of identifying anything as ‘human’ is fraught with ambiguity, and Beckett’s clear awareness of this is something that is explored in several chapters here. According to Leslie Hill, “[p]olitics is about struggle, and about struggling for freedom” (220). This classic formulation not only encompasses the formal structures of governance, political power and elections, but also takes us beyond them. Indeed, if we are to incorporate this element of the ‘political’ into our own definition of the term, we must emphasise as much the term ‘struggle’ as we do ‘freedom’. Our invocation of the political is not simply about searching for ‘freedom’ in Beckett’s writing. It is not, in other words, about seeking out an exclusively redemptive Beckett. Instead it is about locating troubled and troubling provocations around the question of power and its exertion in and on the world, both in the context of Beckett’s work and its impact on performances and critical or creative reimaginings. From this vantage point, Beckett’s work proves intensely political, with assertions of power made through acts of dominance, violence and linguistic or physical coercion. We may consider, for instance, the charcoal burner who Molloy kicks to death; motifs of interrogation, torture and suffering, which permeate (among others) Act Without Words I , Play, Rough for Radio II , How It Is , Eh Joe and What Where; or the recurrent mistreatment of women in Beckett’s early and middle-period writing, such as the narrator’s fantasy of “kicking [Lulu/Anna] in the cunt” in “First Love” (66). Likewise, there is a political resonance to absences of power—in depictions of destitution, marginalisation, silencing, and portrayals of confinement and immobility. The “babble of homeless mes and untenanted hims” (“Text XII” 50) that are so central to Beckett’s post-war writing, for example, embody what Hannah Arendt identifies as the notion of human “superfluousness” which, she argues, is fundamental to a societal descent towards totalitarian conditions.5 While these moments and images may be disquieting and discomforting, they demand our attention as readers, audiences and scholarly commentators.

4 Stewart (2016) examines the role of the polis in terms of the social force of the theatre and the implicit non-social aspect of Beckett’s prose to elucidate the politics of form in Beckett’s late writing. 5 For a full critical engagement with Arendt’s notion of ‘superfluousness’, see LeFay.

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The chapters gathered in Beckett and Politics demonstrate how the ‘equivocal’ nature of the political is the very thing that stimulates further exploration of the field. To better understand the political resonances of Beckett’s life and writing, it is important to engage in a critical dialogue that incorporates multi-modal and interdisciplinary approaches. Indeed, as a writer famed for his exploration of liminal spaces, it is fitting that political readings of Beckett should also move and interact across boundaries and thresholds. To facilitate this dialogue, the three sections of this book are deliberately permeable in scope, definition and subject matter, with many chapters speaking as pertinently to other sections as to their own. The volume begins with language politics (arguably the building blocks of the political when it comes to Beckett), and moves through biopolitics (the consideration of human life within various power structures), to geopolitics (the broader international and environmental factors that shape hegemonies). Through this cross-disciplinary interaction, the intention of the book is to give a panoramic picture of Beckett Studies today, both hermetically and in relation to broader critical, academic and political landscapes. The political turn in Beckett studies asks us to consider Beckett’s achievements with his failures, his legacy with his appropriation, the possibilities of his works alongside their limitations. The chapters that follow demonstrate some of the ongoing attempts to rethink the political implications of Beckett’s writing. They reflect the broad and growing possibilities that this political focus has brought for reading, interpreting and encountering Beckett’s work, with a central focus on the dynamic and dialogic relationship between historical, materialist, theoretical, aesthetic, linguistic and performance frameworks. It is through these interactions that we emphasise how ‘the political’ reveals a space in which these frameworks can more cooperatively interconnect.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. “Trying to Understand Endgame”. Samuel Beckett, edited by Jennifer Birkett and Kate Ince, Pearson, 2000, pp. 39–49. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Penguin, 2017. Barry, Elizabeth. Beckett and Authority: The Uses of Cliché. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Beckett, Samuel. “La peinture des van Velde ou le Monde et le Pantalon”. Disjecta, edited by Ruby Cohn, John Calder, 1983, pp. 118–132.

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———. “First Love”. The Expelled/The Calmative/The End/First Love, edited by Christopher Ricks, Faber and Faber, 2009. ———. “XII”. Texts for Nothing and Other Shorter Prose 1950–1976, edited by Mark Nixon, Faber and Faber, 2010, pp. 49–50. ———. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. II: 1941–1956, edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge UP, 2011. Ben-Zvi, Linda. “Not I : Through a Tube Starkly”. Samuel Beckett, edited by Jennifer Birkett and Kate Ince, Pearson, 2000, pp. 259–265. Bhopal, Kalwant, Hazel Brown, and June Jackson. “BME Academic Flight from UK to Overseas Higher Education: Aspects of Marginalisation and Exclusion”. British Educational Research Journal, vol. 42, no. 2, Apr. 2016, pp. 240–257. Boxall, Peter. “Beckett and Homoeroticism”. Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies, edited by Lois Oppenheim, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, pp. 110–132. ———. “Introduction to Beckett/Aesthetics/Politics”. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, vol. 9, no. 1, 2000, pp. 207–214. ———. “Samuel Beckett: Towards a Political Reading”. Irish Studies Review, vol. 10, no. 2, 2002, pp. 159–170. Caplan, Marc. “‘Nor Mind Nor Body of Me Can Be Touched’: The Politics of Passivity in Moyshe Kulbak’s Montog and Samuel Beckett’s Murphy”. Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, vol. 3, no. 1, 2016, pp. 97–115. Carr, Phyllis L. et al. “Recruitment, Promotion, and Retention of Women in Academic Medicine: How Institutions Are Addressing Gender Disparities”. Women’s Health Issues, vol. 27, no. 3, 2017, pp. 374–381. Caselli, Daniela. Becketts Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fiction and Criticism. Manchester UP, 2005. ———, editor. Beckett and Nothing: Trying to Understand Beckett. Manchester UP, 2012. Cixous, Hélène. Zero’s Neighbour: Sam Beckett. Translated by Laurent Milesi, Polity, 2010. Coffey, Michael. Samuel Beckett is Closed. OR Books, 2018. Connor, Steven. Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text. Revised ed., The Davies Group, 2007. Coughlan, Patricia. “‘The Poetry is Another Pair of Sleeves’: Beckett, Ireland and Modernist Lyric Poetry”. Samuel Beckett, edited by Jennifer Birkett and Kate Ince, Pearson, 2000, pp. 65–82. Cousineau, Thomas. “Waiting for Godot and Politics”. Coriolan: Théâtre et Politique, edited by Jean-Paul Debax and Yves Peyré. Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail, 1984, pp. 161–167.

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Davidson, Michael. Invalid Modernism: Disability and the Missing Body of the Aesthetic. Oxford UP, 2019. Davies, William. Samuel Beckett and the Second World War: Politics, Propaganda and a ‘Universe Become Provisional’. Bloomsbury, 2020. Dennis, Amanda. “Life Writing: Samuel Beckett’s Literature of Disorder”. Review of Samuel Beckett is Closed, by Michael Coffey. Los Angeles Review of Books, 13 Feb. 2018, http://lareviewofbooks.org/article/life-writing-sam uel-becketts-literature-of-disorder. Accessed 26 July 2019. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Translated by Dana Polan, Minnesota UP, 1986. Eagleton, Terry. “Political Beckett?”. New Left Review, vol. 40, 2006, pp. 67–74. Friedman, Alan Warren. Beckett in Black and Red: The Translations for Nancy Cunard’s Negro. Kentucky UP, 2000. Garrard, Greg. “Endgame: Beckett’s ‘Ecological Thought’”. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, vol. 23, no. 1, 2011, pp. 383–397. Gibson, Andrew. “Afterword: ‘The Skull the Skull the Skull the Skull in Connemara’—Beckett, Ireland, and Elsewhere”. Beckett and Ireland, edited by Seán Kennedy, Cambridge UP, 2010, pp. 179–203. ———. “French Beckett and French Literary Politics, 1945–52”. Edinburgh Companion to Beckett and the Arts, edited by S. E. Gontarski, Edinburgh UP, 2014, pp. 103–116. ———. “Review of Samuel Beckett: History, Memory, Archive”. Modernism/Modernity, vol. 18, no. 4, 2011, pp. 926–928. ———. Samuel Beckett. Reaktion Books, 2010. Gierow, Karl Ragnar. “Award Ceremony Speech”. 1969. NobelPrize.org, www. nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1969/ceremony-speech. Accessed 27 May 2019. Golden, Seán. “Familiars in a Ruinstrewn Land: Endgame as Political Allegory”. Contemporary Literature, vol. 22, no. 4, 1981, pp. 425–455. Graham, Alan, and Scott Hamilton. Samuel Beckett and the ‘State’ of Ireland. Cambridge Scholars, 2018. Harrington, John P. The Irish Beckett. Syracuse UP, 1991. Hill, Leslie. “Beckett, Writing, Politics: Answering Myself”. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, vol. 9, no. 1, 2000, pp. 215–221. Igweonu, Kene. “‘The Tree Has Four or Five Laves’: Talawa, Britishness and the First All-Black Production of Waiting for Godot in Britain”. Staging Beckett in Great Britain, edited by David Tucker and Trish McTighe, Bloomsbury, 2016, pp. 141–156. Kennedy, Seán, editor. Beckett and Ireland. Cambridge UP, 2010. ———. “‘Humanity in Ruins’: Beckett and History”. The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, edited by Dirk Van Hulle, Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 185–199.

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Kennedy, Seán, and Katherine Weiss, editors. Samuel Beckett: History, Memory, Archive. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame. Bloomsbury, 1996. Kristeva, Julia. “The Father, Love, and Banishment”. Samuel Beckett, edited by Jennifer Birkett and Kate Ince, Pearson, 2000, pp. 247–258. Langlois, Christopher. Samuel Beckett and the Terror of Literature. Edinburgh UP, 2017. Lawton, Georgina. “Why Do Black Students Quit University More Often Than Their White Peers?” The Guardian, 17 Jan. 2018, www.theguardian.com/ inequality/2018/jan/17/why-do-black-students-quit-university-more-oftenthan-white-peers. Accessed 2 Apr. 2019. LeFay, Marilyn. Hannah Arendt and the Specter of Totalitarianism. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Little, James. Samuel Beckett in Confinement: The Politics of Closed Space. Bloomsbury, 2020. Lloyd, David. Anomalous States: Irish writing and the Post-colonial Moment. The Lilliput Press, 1993. Lloyd, Vincent. “Samuel Beckett and Black Studies”. The Emory University Race and Difference Colloquium Series, 29 Oct. 2018, www.youtube.com/watch? v=WRAAMv_u6iE. Accessed 20 Apr. 2019. McNaughton, James. Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath. Oxford UP, 2018. Mercier, Vivian. Beckett/Beckett. Oxford UP, 1977. Miller, Eugene F. “What Does ‘Political’ Mean?”. The Review of Politics, vol. 42, no. 1, 1980, pp. 56–72. Morgan, Winston. “Why Is My Professor Still Not Black?”. Times Higher Education Blog, 14 Mar. 2016, www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/why-my-pro fessor-still-not-black#survey-answer. Accessed 2 Apr. 2019. Morin, Emilie. Samuel Beckett’s Political Imagination. Cambridge UP, 2017. Nixon, Mark. Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937 . Bloomsbury, 2011. Pannell, Ian. “How Waiting for Godot Offers Syrians Hope”. BBC Magazine, 29 Apr. 2012, BBC Online, www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17857241. Pater, Walter. “Preface to Studies in the History of the Renaissance”. Victorian Literature an Anthology, edited by Victor Shea and William Whitla, WileyBlackwell, 2015. Pinter, Harold. “A Wake for Sam”. BBC Two England, 7 February 1990. A Wake for Sam with Harold Pinter (1990), www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBX gSKG84Zg. Accessed 22 Mar. 2019. Puritty, Chandler et al. “Without Inclusion, Diversity Initiatives May Not Be Enough”. Science, vol. 367, no. 6356, 15 Sept. 2017, pp. 1101–1102. Quayson, Ato. Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation. Columbia UP, 2007.

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Rabaté, Jean-Michel. Think Pig!: Beckett at the Limit of the Human. Fordham UP, 2016. Saiu, Octavian. “Samuel Beckett Behind the Iron Curtain: The Reception in Eastern Europe”. The International Reception of Samuel Beckett, edited by Mark Nixon and Matthew Feldman, Continuum, 2009, pp. 251–271. Salisbury, Laura. Samuel Beckett: Laughing Matters, Comic Timing. Edinburgh UP, 2012. Stewart, Paul. Sex and Aesthetics in Samuel Beckett’s Work. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. ———. “The Politics of Form in Samuel Beckett’s Late Theatre and Prose”. European Journal of English Studies, vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 263–274. Sussman, Henry, and Christopher Devenney, editors. Engagement and Indifference: Beckett and the Political. SUNY Press, 2001. Suvin, Darko. “Preparing for Godot—Or the Purgatory of Individualism”. Tulane Drama Review, vol. 11, 1967, pp. 23–36. Watt, Stephen. “Beckett by Way of Baudrillard: Toward a Political Reading of Samuel Beckett’s Drama”. Samuel Beckett, edited by Jennifer Birkett and Kate Ince, Pearson, 2000, pp. 50–64. Weisberg, David. Chronicles of Disorder. SUNY Press, 2000. Williams, Raymond. The Politics of Modernism. Verso, 1989; 2007.

PART I

Beckett & Language Politics: Editors’ Preface

Beckett’s use of language tests the limits of conventional modes of narrative and character, pushing the boundaries of established forms of literary meaning. From the increasingly rigorous compositional processes involved in his relentless search for a “literature of the unword” (Disjecta 173), to the particular choices of stage directions and instructions for set, his approach to language invites reflections on how power structures are created and disseminated through the sayable and unsayable. The control of expression, and the denial or permission of that expression are all integral to our understanding of the political implications of Beckett’s “literature of the unword” as both an aesthetic and political statement. Likewise, the translation of his work from page to stage, or from one language to another, is invariably imbued with political resonances. With all of these concerns in mind, it is imperative to ask who is speaking and by what authority they speak. Since language, with all its possibilities and limitations, is so central to Beckett’s aesthetic and his authorial process, it is fitting that this book opens with a section on Language Politics. Here, chapters offer explorations of the different ways in which Beckett’s attention to language and form are not only grounds for aesthetic consideration, but also for political interpretation. Both Nadia Louar and Arka Chattopadhyay draw on Jacques Rancière’s notion of the political in art as being fundamentally situated in tensions and contradictions, not only between the seen and unseen, but also in the complex relationship between object, creator and onlooker,

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and the unique contexts that shape them. Using a clearly defined Translation Studies methodology, Louar opens the section by exploring the important, yet often disregarded political significance of Beckett’s bilingual oeuvre. She examines the spectropolitics of Beckett’s bilingualism, demonstrating how his ghost-writing practices and emphasis on ‘lessness’ are imbued with more political implications than they appear. By examining his poetry and the short prose piece, “Lessness”, Louar reveals how Beckett’s creative negotiation of French and English, an aspect of his work that has often been treated as solely and demonstrably one of aesthetics, is also saturated (albeit subtly) by politics. Chattopadhyay goes on to use Rancière’s consideration of the political importance of contradiction to explore the textual politics of community in Beckett’s later prose. Drawing on the political theory of Žižek and Mao, he demonstrates how Beckett uses contradiction and change as a way of disrupting established hierarchical modes of thinking. Alan Graham follows this by bringing together the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Benedict Anderson to explore how Beckett reframes the relationship between language and subjectivity in terms of its national appropriation as a “territorialising force” in the construction of nationalist narratives. Through a detailed examination of The Unnamable and Beckett’s later prose, and with reference to the writer’s troubled relationship with Ireland, Graham contends that Beckett’s early attack on language (equating to what John Pilling calls Beckett’s “language crisis” (155)) can be read as the author’s assault on geopolitical power structures of language. Finally, James Little’s chapter interrogates the politics of confinement arising from Beckett’s radical destabilisation of the first-person pronoun in The Unnamable. Grounded in close attention to Beckett’s linguistic choices and the motif of confinement that develops in his post-war writing, Little places the novel in its historical and biographical context, especially in terms of the incarcerations of individuals with whom Beckett engaged. Together, these essays demonstrate how multimodal approaches open new ways of thinking about the political implications of language in Beckett’s work.

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Works Cited Beckett, Samuel. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and A Dramatic Fragment. Edited by Ruby Cohn, Calder, 1983. Pilling, John. Beckett Before Godot. Cambridge UP, 1998.

CHAPTER 2

The Politics of Forms in Beckett’s Writing Nadia Louar

Sometimes I confuse myself with my shadow and sometimes I don’t. The Unnamable 340.

What Does ‘Politics’ Mean in Beckett and Politics?1 The recent spate of works dedicated to ‘Beckett and politics’ is a clear indication of how much the critical focus in Beckett studies has shifted in the past two decades from the early prompts of David Lloyd and Peter Boxall to recent studies by Emilie Morin and James McNaughton. 1 Chantal Mouffe, like many other political philosophers, distinguishes between ‘the political’ (le politique) and ‘politics’ (la politique): “By ‘the political’, [she] refer[s] to the dimension of antagonism that is inherent in all human society, antagonism that […] can take many different forms and can emerge in diverse social relations. ‘Politics’ refers to the ensemble of practices, discourses, and institutions which seek to establish a certain order and to organise human coexistence in conditions which are always potentially conflictual because they are affected by the dimension of ‘the political’” (16). The understanding of politics in this chapter conflates these two terms.

N. Louar (B) University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh, Oshkosh, WI, USA © The Author(s) 2021 W. Davies and H. Bailey (eds.), Beckett and Politics, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47110-1_2

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From discussion of Beckett’s Irishness to postcolonial readings of his work to exploration of his political imagination, recent scholarship has unearthed a Beckett steeped in contemporary history and international politics. Like so many authors of his generation, Beckett assuredly grappled with the dark events of the twentieth century in his work. That he did it obliquely rather than directly corresponds to the ethos of an exilic writer who refined the art of in-betweenness. That this obliqueness is rooted in his bilingual authorship should come as no surprise. For that reason, this chapter will place bilingualism at the core of Samuel Beckett’s ‘political project’. Drawing on theoretical works by French philosopher Jacques Rancière, it will reconsider the author’s unorthodox rewriting practices and elucidate the role they play in disrupting narratological models and regulated forms of cultural production. More specifically, it will explore how Beckett’s art reinvents literary forms in ways that redefine the relationship of literary fiction to reality and, more importantly, triggers new modes of perception and grids of intelligibility. This chapter is particularly interested in the politics of forms, genres and language in Beckett’s postwar writings—that is, in the author’s experimentation with literary forms best suited to accommodate his innovative approaches to storytelling and the linguistic and generic instability of his writing. To write about ‘Beckett and politics’ often suggests an exploration of the relationship between the author’s art and his life. It often involves identifying correspondences between Beckett’s literary project and his personal responses to contemporary politics. Historicist scholarship—the mainstay of Beckett studies for some time—has captured the coming together of the personal and the political in Beckett’s oeuvre while attempting neither to sacrifice one realm to the other nor restore the romantic symbiosis of ‘the man and his work’. Four volumes of published letters and a plethora of available archival documents have nevertheless made it difficult to resist the gnomic “neatness of identifications” (Beckett, Disjecta 19) and mythologising portraits of the auteur engagé. As Emilie Morin insightfully remarks, “[the great difficulty] when it comes to connecting Beckett’s writing to political history, is that the work invokes but does not represent directly. […] He wasn’t politicised in the usual ways ” (“Interview with Rhys Tranter”; emphasis added). Indeed, in postwar France where Beckett matured as a writer and rose to world fame, being politicised mostly meant, at first, being engagé in the broadly Sartrean sense of the term; that is, being explicitly committed to socialism, anti-fascism and anti-imperialism. Accordingly, the political

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writer’s literary enterprise was to confront and cure injustice “with the means that are his own—that of the written word” (Sartre, “Letter”). In what follows, however, I will tackle the critical paradigm of ‘Beckett and politics’ not in terms of personal allegiances or sympathies, but as a form of experience. To do so, it is necessary to envision the possibility of politics being detached from content. In his laudatory review of Seán Kennedy and Katherine Weiss’s edited book, Samuel Beckett: History, Memory, Archive, Andrew Gibson concedes that “for all the power of the historical and archival materialism on display here, there cannot but be a serious place for philosophy or theory in Beckett studies, because, in the long run, it is the works and not the archive that must chiefly concern us, and the works so largely subtract history and the archive from the foreground” (927). He concludes with an important question for the future of Beckett Studies, asking “when and how it can re-admit theory as the necessary complement to the materialisms, and exactly what form that theory should take when it returns” (927). The present contribution is a tentative theoretical reading of Beckett’s texts that neither historicises the content, nor recontextualises the meaning, but focuses on the political valence of their forms. Indeed, my focus is on “the endlessly inventive, and witty means” (927) by which Beckett conveys political motifs in his work. And to avoid the pitfall of denotations that Leslie Hill encounters in his own writerly entanglement with ‘Beckett and politics’,2 I will use the term ‘political’ in the broad sense deployed by Jacques Rancière in his works, as it provides an overall framework for thinking creatively about politics in Beckett’s art: Art is not, in the first instance, political because of the messages and sentiments it conveys, concerning the state of the world. Neither is it political because of the manner in which it might choose to represent society’s structures, or social groups, their conflicts or identities. It is political because of the very distance it takes with respect to these functions, because of the type of space and time that it institutes, and the manner in which it frames this time and peoples in space. (Aesthetics and Its Discontents 23)

In light of this definition, what it means to write about ‘Beckett and politics’ is not so much to read or reread the writer’s life story as a key to the political in his works as it is to analyse the ways in which the political 2 “But in a very real sense I can’t say what I mean by politics” (218).

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figures in his writings; that is, how Beckett’s aesthetic practices harbour political concerns. A deeper and more nuanced understanding of how ‘unusually’ politics is played out in Beckett’s literature does not therefore imply reading Beckett as an apolitical author. Rather, it implies returning to the works themselves and the aesthetic traditions that shaped them. This formal literary approach is not incompatible with “a materialist and historicist examination of Beckett’s formal responses to, and engagement with [politics]”, such as James McNaughton’s remarkable study offers (3). Rather, it acknowledges the archival “butin” amassed these past two decades as a grid of historical intelligibility to explore further the forms and figures of Beckett’s aesthetic forms and their abilities to “induce novel forms of political subjectivity” (Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics 9).

Beckett’s Spectropolitics In the course of his literary career, Beckett goes from writing short stories and novels to composing asyntactic, unpunctuated prose (How It Is , Worstward Ho), and then to producing extremely short plays, for which he coins the term “dramaticules”. These experimental theatrical pieces culminate in Breath (1969), a thirty-five-second playlet that only consists of stage directions. He also chooses specific generic framing for his poetry (pochade and mirlitonnades ), short prose pieces (Foirades ) and other “abandoned works” that ingeniously regulate the reading of his works and deliberately obscure their literary engagement. In the same way in which he “[whittles] down his erudition” (Disjecta 66), Beckett most often eschews explicit political references in his works. Except in some notable cases in which his literature is explicitly engagée (i.e. Catastrophe, What Where), the political content in and of his works seems to always involve some kind of excavation. However, both Emilie Morin (12–13) and James McNaughton (19) reinterpret the political dimension of such erasure and read it not as a mere aesthetic ‘undoing’ or paring down, but as formal decisions that reflect the very political erasures choreographed by historical forces. In his analysis of the Beckettian novelistic forms, John Bolin also reads Beckett’s postmodern strategies in the trilogy as an assault against those “biographical master-narratives of education, selfrecognition, and wisdom that characterize the realistic novel” (126–27). According to these readings, Beckett’s aesthetic decisions are predicated on a “viscerally political consciousness” (Morin 237) and an “imagination immersed in politics” (McNaughton 43). Yet, Beckett’s representational

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tactics, anchored in an art of empêchement and dérobade 3 that thwart easy contextualisation (the precise strategies of resistance to politics that Beckett’s writing adopts, according to Peter Boxall, “Introduction” 211) limn a portrait of a haunted political Beckett “who creates in the shadow of a catastrophic history” (Weller 96). In that sense, the political dimension in Beckett’s work often appears phantasmatic. Hence, it would not be too far a stretch to describe Beckett’s politics as “a kind of spectropolitics” (Derrida 133) that foregrounds a certain regime of visibility and audibility, and establishes the hauntology at the core of his bilingual literary production.4 Indeed, alongside Beckett’s long line of dramatic ghosts, spectres and other aptly named revenants, the spectrality of the other language in each of Beckett’s texts is a key trope that models all the others and elicits a specific distribution of the sensible, to use Jacques Rancière’s titular phrase; that is, the configuration of a perceptual space within which what can be seen, said or heard depends on a specific “regime of art” (The Politics of Aesthetics, 82). This critical conjunction of artistic and political practices, which the philosopher captures in his extended metaphor, finds its articulation in Beckett’s (re)writing practices and their authoritarian textual and dramatic strategies of concealment and secrecy.5 The figures of authority that often govern the Beckettian ‘plot’—whether explicitly as “a voice […] giving orders” (Three Novels 169), “a whole college of tyrants” (310) or all the other “masters” (Cordingley) or inquisitional dramatic setups, as Tyrus Miller has shown—are integral to “a particular kind of speech situation” constitutive of politics (Rancière, Dissensus 6). In Rancière’s conceptualisation of politics, on which I rely here, this particular situation is always litigious because it is contingent. It pertains to a certain “moment when those who are excluded from the political order or included in it in a subordinate way, stand up and speak for themselves” (6). If the philosopher-regimented typology of aesthetic practices 3 This art of avoidance characterises Beckett’s writing and is theorised in Peintres De L’empêchement. 4 Audibility and visibility are precisely the two sensory experiences that Beckett underscores in Joyce’s Work in Progress: “the beauty of Work in Progress is not presented in space alone, since its adequate apprehension depends as much on its visibility as on its audibility” (Disjecta 27–28). 5 As studies of Beckett’s practice of self-translation have shown (Fitch, Louar, Montini, Mooney, Sardin, Van Hulle), textual erasures in Beckett’s self-translated works carry the stigmata of their cuts by implicitly or explicitly alluding to the absence of another version of themselves.

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recalls Beckett’s strictly regulated dramatic spaces, more importantly, it restates in political terms the Beckettian questions par excellence: who can (and does) speak? To whom? And from what position? What can be said, heard or seen? The aporia or, as Boxall put it, the unspeakability (“Introduction” 211) of the political in Beckett’s oeuvre comes precisely from those haunting questions and their undecidable answers: I seem to speak, it is not I, about me, it is not me. These few general remarks to begin with. What am I to do, in my situation, how proceed? (Three Novels 291) Use of the second person marks the voice. That of the third that cankerous other. Could he speak to and of whom the voice speaks there would be a first. But he cannot. He shall not. You cannot. You shall not. (Nohow On 9)

“The police” as the paradigmatic figure of authority, and one of Rancière’s key concepts, maintain order and keep the Other in its place. It is in that sense that Rancière speaks of the “distribution of the sensible” and establishes regimes of sensibility—namely, what is visible, sayable, audible, thinkable, doable; what is intelligible and what is not (supposed to be). Politics is therefore “an intervention in the visible and the sayable” (Dissensus 37). What Rancière’s theoretical conceptualisation reveals, and thus becomes particularly relevant to Beckett’s art, is that for him “[t]he essence of politics consists in interrupting the distribution of the sensible by supplementing it with those who have no part in the perceptual coordinates of the community, thereby modifying the very aesthetico-political field of possibility” (Dissensus 36). In other words, politics reconfigures, reformulates and interrogates prescribed ways of doing—poiesis, and of feeling—aisthesis. To use Beckett’s terms, it stirs from the “field of the possible” and disturbs “a certain order on the plane of the feasible” (Disjecta 139). Beckett’s spectropolitics crystallises this disruption. His ghost-writing practices, which include not only his (self)translation,6 but also the spectral modalities of subjectivities in his prose and drama, fall within a hauntology predicated on a syntax of weakness (or an aesthetics of lessness) that is more political than it appears, as will be shown below.

6 It is noteworthy that Beckett’s early literary practices included a lot of ‘lip service’ and ‘ghost writing’.

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Less: A Political Morpheme The primacy of liminal forms in Beckett’s art, whether linguistic, generic or anthropomorphic, works to coordinate a wide range of political practices that may be hypostasised in the smallest morphological element of language, the morpheme less. Highly significant in this respect is the focus on ‘lessnessness’ that still dominates the now ubiquitous question of Beckett’s political false neutrality.7 In his early works on politics, Peter Boxall takes stock of the obstacles that detract from a political reading of Beckett and identify the author’s aesthetics of lessness as the main culprit. Beckett’s work has come to mark the far limits of apolitical writing. His perceived longing for silence, for voicelessness and placelessness, his indeterminate nationality, his relentless, ascetic refusal of all forms of belonging, his paring down of reference to the point that his writing seems barely to refer to the world at all, have all led critics to suggest that his writing constitutes an abdication from, a denial of, or an indifference to the political. (“Towards a Political Reading” 159)

Historical materialist critics have now overturned the apolitical regime of Beckett’s aesthetics of impotence and ignorance. As Andrew Gibson puts it, “for all the ostensibly ahistorical character of much of Beckett’s writing”, his works are “streaked by historical turmoils and the emotions provoked by them. Historical symptoms and effects weave their way across the rocky, unforgiving Beckettian surface like intermittent lodes of ore” (Samuel Beckett 21–22). Gibson’s metaphor is an apt description of the politics of literary forms in Beckett’s art, as it evokes a mineralisation process, characteristic of Beckett’s creations, in which residual amorphous subjectivities morph again from what Boxall calls the “wreckage of politics” (“Towards a Political Reading” 159). In Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates , for instance, the poet’s alchemic reconfiguration of the sensible induces synesthetic models of expression. In what John Pilling describes as “[t]he most memorable lines” of “Sanies I” (87), where Beckett’s own version of unrequited love is dramatised, the grammatical relation between the libidinal subject and the object of its affection is founded on a visual predication and the spectral semiotics of homonyms:

7 See recent scholarship on the subject (see footnote 1).

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I see main verb at last her whom alone in the accusative I have dismounted to love gliding towards me dauntless nautch-girl on the face of the waters8 (Collected Poems 18)

In the later poem “dread nay”, which was first described as “poem abandoned”, the hauntological structure of Beckett’s version of the Proustian intermittences—not of the heart but the eyes (!)—gives its rhythm to an in-and-out movement of perception: head fast in out as dead till rending long still faint stir unseal the eye till still again seal again head sphere ashen smooth one eye no hint when to then glare cyclop no one side eerily […] come through no sense and gone while eye shocked wide with white still to bare

8 In agreement with Daniel Katz, I interpret “I see main verb at last” of the poem “not as a parenthetical description of the verb ‘see’, but rather as its object: the narrator/poet could be insisting that at this point he ‘sees’ (at last) his main verb” (61).

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stir dread nay to nought (33)

The asyntactic, but often chiastic forms of the poem trigger a figurality that rids its content of all intellection to focus—in almost didactic ways— on the form itself and its significance. From the programmatic “nay to nought”, Beckett’s poem “protests” (to borrow Francois Lyotard’s perfect formulation in Discourse, Figure) that “the given is not a text, it possesses an inherent thickness, or rather a difference, which is not to be read, but rather seen” (3). In her detailed analysis of the poem, Elizabeth Drew underscores precisely the “seemingly catastrophic event of vision” set off by the poem: “the focus on the ‘ashen smooth’ plane of the head is so distortingly narrow that the opening of an eye appears as a violent rupture” (293). In terms that recall both Rancière and Lyotard (despite their notable mésentente), “dread nay” establishes an inner figural system that disturbs the order of signification and operates a (re)distribution of the sensible grounded on discursive and figurative disjunctions. The Beckettian ‘aesthetic regime’, in the political denotation introduced by Rancière, thus departs radically from a representative conception of art which perpetuates sanctioned forms of artistic expressions within the polis. This fundamental distrust in mimesis is primarily expressed in the author’s literary bilingualism and its rhetorics of spectrality. In fact, it is symptomatic of a politics of aesthetic forms that addresses reality through alternative epistemologies and opposes any normative grammar that would hail entities into plausible subjectivities. The Unnamable, Not I and Worstward Ho are exemplary in this respect. Each of these works obeys an exacting poetics that calls for heterological voices and synecdochic figures leaving both the narrative (speaking) instance and the reader (spectator) reeling. Parodying or dismissing altogether deictic anchors, Beckett’s creatures intimate that the path to selfhood is necessarily through the experience of otherness. Making it impossible to be interpellated into subjects, they “unsettle the very grounds of political subjectivity” (Lloyd 4). The political question in Beckett’s art has, in fact, continually been that of contingencies—language, power relations, domination and hierarchies—as reflected in the provisional ‘ifs’ and random ‘pensum’ erected as narrative principles throughout his oeuvre. If his genre-bending theatre increasingly became the privileged site of the injunction of the hypothetical (think Footfalls, That Time, Come and Go, Rockaby, Ghost Trio, Eh Joe, etc.) the prose piece Lessness/sans

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exemplifies the asymptotic structure of Beckett’s writing anticipated in Belacqua’s “literary mathematics” (Dream 101). As Elizabeth Drew and Mads Haahr describe it, “Lessness is a precisely calibrated expression of indeterminacy” (3). Based on a random permutation of sentences, “first in one disorder, then in another” (Cohn 305), the experimental text consists of two sets of sixty sentences randomly divided into paragraphs of three to seven sentences. Drew and Haahr, who experiment with the actual computing of the text’s arbitrary arrangement, call attention to Beckett’s numeral tour de force, which may be best described by the very terms Tim Lawrence applies to Imagination Dead Imagine: “a figurative account of a state irreducible to any figure” (190): Random numbers are irreducible to simpler forms. They are rich in information because it requires many bits in order to communicate them. The succession of sentences in Lessness is rich in information because as far as anyone is aware, it is not possible to predict the next sentence in the sequence. Irreducibility in the piece is also reflected in the interesting fact that each half of the piece contains exactly 769 words. 769 is a prime number. (Drew and Haahr 3–4)

The prime number that the author reaches through his game of syntactic permutations finds its semantic equivalent in the morpheme ‘less’ overriding Beckett’s writing. Through an intersemiotic representation that summons the irreducibility of both ‘figures’, Lessness resignifies its own compositional entropic movement. Its “revolutionary syntax” (Brienza and Brater 245)—one that anticipates the “mortiferous vigor” of the on-and-no pattern of Worstward Ho—corrodes the discursive plane and disrupts the “meaningful fabric of the sensible” (Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics 63). As Drew and Haahr reminds us, “Lessness works on the nerves rather than the intellect of its readers” (3). About the aleatory method of composition of the text, Beckett admitted that it was “the only ‘honest’ […] thing to do” (Brienza and Brater 246). In view of the author’s linguistic scepticism, this may suggest a way out of the duperies intrinsic to language. Let us recall the warnings of (one of) the narrator(s) of Texts for Nothing: Yes, no more denials, all is false, there is no one, it’s understood, there’s nothing, no more phrases, let us be dupes, dupes of every time and tense, until it’s done, all past and done, and the voices cease, it’s only voices, only lies. (109)

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Indeed, what confers its politicity to Lessness/sans, and by extension to Beckett’s writing in general, is both an awareness that expressive forms are a priori worked on by history (always ideological)9 and an ethical obligation to ‘do with/out’—literally faire sans —as an artist. As Brienza and Brater explain: “[i]n Beckett the moreness is in the lessness itself, making language do more and more with less and less” (256). Through a critique of both intelligibility and mastery, Lessness thus replaces the horizon of shared expectations with eidetic images soliciting hypothetical reconfigurations. In her reading of Lessness, Ruby Cohn places “[a]t its center […] a small, still, naked body, with beating heart and pale blue eyes” (A Beckett Canon 305), the very existence of which, whether future, past or present, is put into question. The various entities evoked in the text (earth, sky, little body, refuge, etc.) are equally envisioned as figments. Most often, in Beckett’s writing, what is actually said, seen or done does not constitute a regime of truth. What it in fact does, is its “literarity”. Rancière defines this characteristic as “a unique logic of the sensible, which might be referred to as the democratic regime of the ‘orphan letter’, where writing freely circulates without a legitimating system and thereby undermines the sensible coordinates of the representative regime of art” (The Politics of Aesthetics 87). In other words, literarity encompasses the political effectivity of literary (aesthetic) forms in their capacity to transform ordinary experience into perceptual fragmentations. Beckett’s ‘political project’, whether intentional or aleatory, disrupts the linear models and genealogies that unfold according to a predictable patrimonial logic. In their place, he adopts a transformative and transgressive strategy of rewritings that systematically casts doubt on sense experience and elicits a phenomenological ambiguity. This “sensible politicity”, to use Rancière’s formulation (The Politics of Aesthetics 14) informs Beckett’s lifelong experimentation with figures in their multifaceted denotations (i.e. numbers, doubles, tropes, shapes and forms) and elucidates the pattern of hauntological repetitions foregrounded in his rewriting practices. It is unquestionable that Beckett’s position as an Irish writer living in France and writing in two languages during the tumultuous times of the twentieth century—in other words, his situatedness—has informed in 9 In the sophisticated language of Rancière, this means that “[t]he visibility of a form of expression as an artistic form depends on a historically constituted regime of perception and intelligibility” (The Politics of Aesthetics 50).

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decisive ways the forms in which he wrote. His prolific published correspondence opened a window into his creative processes and revealed many ‘secrets of fabrication’. It is also very reassuring for Beckett’s devoted readers and dedicated scholars that, despite the author’s ghosting writings, no skeleton was found in his archival closets. Beckett, unlike Maurice Blanchot (to whom he has often been linked), remained throughout his life on the ‘right’ side of the political track. How much that matters is the paradigmatic question of the times. Does ‘wrong’ politics corrupt an author’s writing—be it literature or philosophy—as the same enigmatic Blanchot alleges in his comments about Heidegger?10 By the same token, how much do Beckett’s political activities politicise his writings? The fact that, beyond their biographical function, Beckett’s diaries and letters are now considered a crucial part of this textual production (the “grey canon” as Gontarski calls it) adds a layer of complexity to the question.11 Cautiously skirting the issue of the politicisable content of Beckett’s texts and steering clear of the archives, what I hope to have shown in this chapter is that Beckett’s literary forms put on their head the sensus communis 12 and the political commonality it implies. Indeed, Beckett’s innovative aesthetic practices trigger dissenting modes of perception that reveal the spectre of the political in his bilingual oeuvre.

Works Cited Beckett, Samuel. Collected Poems in English and French. Grove Press, 1977. ———. The Complete Short Prose, 1929–1989. Edited by S. E. Gontarski, Grove Press, 1995. ———. Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Calder, 1997. ———. Nohow On. Grove Press, 1996. ———. Peintres De L’empêchement. Minuit, 1990. ———. Three Novels. Grove Press, 1958. Blanchot, Maurice. Les Intellectuels en Question: Ébauche d’une Réflexion. Fourbis 1996. 10 I am referring to Blanchot’s famous quote in Les Intellectuels en Question: Ébauche

d’une Réflexion: “Il y a eu corruption d’écriture, abus, travestissement et détournement du langage. Sur lui pèsera dorénavant un soupçon” (392). 11 This is precisely what Emilie Morin investigates exhaustively in Beckett’s Political Imagination. 12 The concept has taken on new meanings in the course of its complex history. It indicates here the possibility of shared sense experiences and their communicability.

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Bolin, John. Beckett and the Modern Novel. Cambridge UP, 2013. Boxall, Peter. “Introduction”. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, vol. 9, 2000, pp. 207–214. Boxall, Peter. “Samuel Beckett: Towards a Political Reading”. Irish Studies Review, vol. 10, no. 2, 2002, pp. 159–170. Brienza, Susan, and Enoch Brater. “Chance and Choice in Beckett’s Lessness”. ELH , Johns Hopkins UP, vol. 43, no. 2, 1976, pp. 244–258. Cohn, Ruby. A Beckett Canon. University of Michigan Press, 2001. ———, editor. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. Grove Press, 1984. Cordingley, Anthony. “Beckett’s ‘Masters’: Pedagogical Sadism, Foreign Language Primers, Self-Translation”. Modern Philology, vol. 109, no. 4, 2012, pp. 510–543. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx. Routledge, 1994; 2006. Drew, Elizabeth. “Head to Footsteps: ‘Fundamental Sounds’ in ‘Dread Nay’ and ‘Roundelay’”. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, vol. 11, 2001, pp. 291– 299. Drew, Elizabeth, and Mads Haahr. “Lessness: Randomness, Consciousness and Meaning”. Fourth International CAiiA-STAR Research Conference, Perth, Australia, Aug. 2002. Gibson, Andrew. “Samuel Beckett: History, Memory, Archive (Review)”. Review of Samuel Beckett: History, Memory, Archive, edited by Seán Kennedy and Katherine Weiss, Modernism/Modernity, vol. 18, no. 4, 2011, pp. 926–928. ———. Samuel Beckett. Reaktion, 2010. Gontarski, S. E. “Greying the Canon: Beckett in Performance, Beckett as Performance”. Beckett Matters: Essays on Beckett’s Late Modernism, Edinburgh UP, 2017, pp. 240–254. Hill, Leslie. “Beckett, Writing, Politics: Answering for Myself”. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, vol. 9, 2000, pp. 215–221. Hulle, Dirk, editor. The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett. Cambridge UP, 2015. Katz, Daniel. “Alone in the Accusative: Beckett’s Narcissistic Echoes”. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, vol. 5, 1996, pp. 57–72. Lawrence, Tim. Samuel Beckett’s Critical Aesthetics. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Lloyd, David. Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment. Duke UP, 1993. Lyotard, Jean-François. Discourse, Figure. Translated by Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon, Minneapolis UP, 2011. McNaughton, James. Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath. Oxford UP, 2018.

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Miller, Tyrus. “Beckett’s Political Technology: Expression, Confession, and Torture in the Later Drama”. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, vol. 9, 2000, pp. 255–278. Morin, Emilie. Beckett’s Political Imagination. Cambridge UP, 2017. ———. “Samuel Beckett’s Political Imagination”. Interview with Rhys Tranter, 5 July 2018, rhystranter.com/2018/07/05/samuel-beckett-politics/. Accessed 17 July 2019. Mouffe, Chantal. “The Radical Centre: A Politics Without Adversary”. Soundings, no. 9, 1998, pp. 11–23. Pilling, John. Beckett Before Godot. Cambridge UP, 1997. Rancière, Jacques. Aesthetics and Its Discontents. Translated by Steven Corcoran, Polity Press, 2009. ———. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Translated by Steven Corcoran, Continuum, 2010. ———. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by Steven Corcoran, Continuum, 2006. Sartre, Jean Paul. “Letter to the Swedish Academy After Declining His Nobel Price of Literature”. The New York Review, 17 Dec. 1964. Weller, Shane. “Beckett and Late Modernism”. The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, edited by Dirk Van Hulle, Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 89– 102.

CHAPTER 3

Beckett, Contradiction and a Textual Politics of Change Arka Chattopadhyay

In this chapter, I will examine Beckett’s textual trope of contradiction with an eye to unpack its political implications as a dialectical tool. This textual approach to politics as an interpretive effect of the Beckettian text differs from Terry Eagleton’s, for example, in “Political Beckett?” where he goes through the historical elements of dissidence in Beckett’s development, such as leaving the censorship-prone, nationalist Ireland for a more liberating France and working for the French Resistance in protest against anti-Semitism. He ultimately considers Beckett’s open vision as a politico-historical critique in the ruinstrewn land of war-stricken Europe. Elsewhere, Emilie Morin’s book, Beckett’s Political Imagination aims to “reinscribe Beckett and his work into their political milieux” (2). While Morin’s approach privileges the contextual over the textual, this chapter locates the political in Beckett in the political effects of Beckett’s work at the conceptual level of textual mechanics, rather than Beckett, the authorsubject’s political positions. Specifically, we will see how the concept of

A. Chattopadhyay (B) Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Gandhinagar, India © The Author(s) 2021 W. Davies and H. Bailey (eds.), Beckett and Politics, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47110-1_3

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contradiction is central to Beckett’s textual operations as a tool to think through the idea of change. The question of politics is not just important for a particular reading of Beckett, but more generally, for situating the political in literature. Is politics in literature only a referential question of addressing real political events through committed content and commentary? If so, does it have anything to do with literary form and its experimental horizons? If Beckett’s deliberate eschewal of political references as ‘demented particulars’ made him appear an ‘apolitical’ writer, it is on the basis of this very subtraction that Alain Badiou established Beckett as a writer of the generic (a subtractive figure of the universal that deals with the dispossessed man, in a Marxian sense) with a communist slant.1 This is one of the many contradictions that underwrites the political question in Beckett. Henry Sussman and Christopher Devenney introduce Beckettian politics through the dialectical contradiction of ‘engagement’ and ‘indifference’. Sussman notes how the political implication of Beckett’s work would have to be taken in a polyvalent sense (8). It is a question, open to subjective interpretations. To foreground another variety of contradiction, Raymond Williams argues in “The Politics of the AvantGarde” that European experimental Modernists of the twentieth century had a traction for diametrically opposite political positions of Fascism and Communism (55). Williams concludes by underlining the historical contradictions among the Modernist avant-garde: “from the first stirrings of Modernism through to the most extreme forms of the avant-garde […] nothing could stay quite as it was: […] the internal pressures and the intolerable contradictions would force radical changes of some kind” (62). In this chapter, I will recover and build on this idea of contradiction as a trope for political change in Beckett’s textual logic. Contradiction, I would argue, is a device to uphold the interruptive agency of difference against the status-quo. Contradiction instrumentalises a political event, armed by the right to contradict the hegemony of power. When Jacques Rancière connects the ‘doing’ of literature with the practice of politics, he places contradiction as a pivotal tool in this intertwining:

1 See Badiou’s book, On Beckett.

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Literature as such displays a two-fold politics, […]. On the one hand, it displays the power of literariness, the power of the “mute” letter that upsets not only the hierarchies of the representational system but also any principle of adequation between a way of being and a way of speaking. On the other hand, it sets in motion another politics of the mute letter: the side-politics or metapolitics that substitutes the deciphering of the mute meaning written on the body of things for the democratic chattering of the letter. (20)2

In this formulation on the politics of literature, Rancière locates contradiction as the agency of the literary to interrupt pre-existing hierarchies and to sabotage the realist principle of “adequation” where reality is exactly what is represented. There is a slightly different figuration of contradiction as substitution in the second part of his comment where the “letter” of literature generates a “democratic chattering” that has the agency to displace the wordless meanings written into reality. Both possibilities of this literary politics function by contradiction that unfixes any unitary and homogenous assumption of realistic meanings. Contradiction is the tool that breaks the semantic correspondence between the word and the thing or the text and the extra-textual real.

Politics of Contradiction: Mao and Beckett? If contradiction marks the relation of ‘thesis’ and ‘antithesis’ in the famous Marxian dialectic, ‘synthesis’ of this movement is the end-point when it gets neutralised. In Mao Zedong’s radical reformulation of the dialectic, there is no synthesis but an infinite generativity of contradictions, as thesis and antithesis endlessly lock horns with one another. Slavoj Žižek has recently drawn our attention to how Mao’s notion of contradiction makes the universal emerge from within the particular: “the universal dimension literally resides in this particular contradiction” (6; emphasis retained). In other words, it is the particularity of a contradiction that makes it universal and not vice versa. Let me clarify here that I am abstracting contradiction as a conceptual structure from Mao and Žižek’s historically situated discussions of contradiction as specific instances of class struggle and complex relations between various social strata. In his

2 See Nadia Louar’s essay in this volume for further discussion of Rancière.

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essay “On Contradiction”, Mao considers contradiction to be a ceaseless process that has an “absolute” character (101). For him, there is no existence without the logic of contradiction which is mounted as a politico-ontological category: “without contradiction nothing would exist” (72). Mao is convinced that it is the inner-contradiction of a thing that makes it exist in the world: “things in contradiction change into one another, and herein lies a definite identity” (95). This “identity”, reached through contradiction, does not create a static totality, thanks to the absoluteness of contradiction. Through contradiction, things change and they change into one another, i.e. p becomes what is contradictory to p and what is contradictory to p, to call it contra-p, becomes p. The vital point is that p and contra-p both do not become the same. In other words, they do not become identical, i.e. both p or both contra-p. P becomes contra-p and contra-p becomes p.3 Contradiction is thus a differential trope of change. For Mao, “contradiction exists in and runs through all processes from beginning to end; motion, things, processes, thinking – all are contradictions” (86). Žižek reads this infinite Maoist contradiction into Beckett’s famous antinomic ending of The Unnamable. After discussing Mao’s point that contradiction is absolute, he writes: “This brings us to what one is tempted to call Mao’s ethico-political injunction—to paraphrase the last words of Beckett’s L’Innommable: ‘in the silence you don’t know, you must go on severing, I can’t go on, I’ll go on severing’” (Lost Causes 188). The logic of contradiction is this operation of endless severance. To quote Mao again: “What indissoluble ties are there in this world? Things may be tied, but in the end they must be severed. There is nothing which cannot be severed” (180). Beckett features throughout Žižek’s book, alongside Mao’s dialectic, as he places Mao’s contradiction in tandem with Beckett’s famous coda of failure from Worstward Ho. To quote another co-invocation: “Recall Mao’s slogan ‘from defeat to defeat, to the final victory’, which echoes in Beckett’s already-quoted motto: ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better’” (Lost Causes 361). While Žižek characteristically refrains from any close reading of this politics of antinomy in Beckett, I will delve into a textual articulation of this political logic.

3 P is a standard notation in any elaboration of the law of contradiction.

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Contradiction and Change Contradiction has been critically acknowledged as an important phenomenon in Beckett. Andre Furlani dwells on the logical properties of Beckettian contradiction alongside Wittgenstein, and shows how it becomes a non-unitary device. Rolf Breuer studies paradox as a force in Beckett through rhetorics and linguistics. But what remains muted in these linguistic and narratological explorations is the political implication of this logic as a mechanism of change. Contradiction harbours a contradictory relation with change. Once there is contradiction, the contradictory reality cannot change because change is internal to it. As Quentin Meillassoux reflects: “a contradictory reality couldn’t change since it would already be what it is not” (28). Contrary to what this seems to mean, contradiction is not inimical to change. In fact, contradiction is change. Stated differently, it inheres the very idea of change. Contradiction means both p and non-p exist, and p and non-p constitute the entire world among themselves. All that exists which is not p is non-p. So, p and non-p hold within them the entire vista of change in terms of different possibilities. If we think through the question of the political in a philosophical sense, change is its central concept. In a late text like Worstward Ho, for example, Beckett posits a contingent ontology of sudden change and contradiction as its textual tool: Unchanged? Sudden back unchanged? Yes. Say yes. Each time unchanged. Somehow unchanged. Till no. Till say no. Sudden back changed. Somehow changed. Each time somehow changed. (85)

The contradiction functions here by the negation of “yes” through “no”. The shades that come and go come back without change, until the contradictory voice topples the “no” to change by saying yes to it. The expression “somehow” emphasises the sudden nature of this change. There is a degree of contingency in changelessness (“somehow unchanged”) which paves the way for an equally contingent change (“somehow changed”). There is conviction that a contradictory speech act of protest will go against changelessness and make change possible, even though it remains difficult to rationally explain how the change happened. Contradiction remains somewhat oblique to the rational. Given that Beckett was collecting books on Pre-Socratic atomism as late as 1988 (Nixon and van Hulle 128), we can assume that the void

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and the shades in Worstward Ho somehow speak to the theory of atoms, swerving and encountering each other as they fall in parallel lines on the void. The notion of sudden change in the above passage is testimony to Lucretius’s ‘clinamen’, posited as an inexplicable tendency in atoms to swerve. The inexplicable is foregrounded by the antinomic change of “sudden back”, “somehow changed”. While this connection has been pointed out by Anthony Uhlmann (106), what remains unstated is the political underpinnings of this contradiction-driven vision of change. Karl Marx wrote his doctoral dissertation on Pre-Socratic philosophy and as Louis Althusser has argued, we could see this atomistic philosophy as the “underground current” of materialism, running through western philosophy that climaxes with Marxism. What Althusser calls the “materialism of the encounter” involves a political mobilisation of clinamen: “an infinitesimal declination that occurs no one knows where, or when, or how. […] the clinamen causes an atom to ‘swerve’ in the course of its fall in the void, inducing an encounter with the atom next to it” (260). This is an aleatory philosophy of change where chance-encounter originates the world. To make the connection with antinomy, which Althusser does not make, clinamen is a change that takes place as a political event when the parallel lines of falling atoms are contradicted by the swerve. Parallelism and encounter are the two terms in contradiction here. Althusser builds on what he calls “the assignable nothingness of all swerve” (191) and this is where we would intervene with contradiction: In the ‘nothing’ of the swerve, there occurs an encounter between one atom and another, and this event [événement ] becomes advent [avènement ] on condition of the parallelism of the atoms, for it is this parallelism which, violated on just one occasion, induces the gigantic pile-up and collision—interlocking [accrochage] of an infinite number of atoms, from which a world is born. (191)

The contradiction lies in that the parallelism of atoms conditions the swerve, and yet the swerve introduces a contradictory violation into the logic of parallelism without encounter. As we saw in the above passage, this connection between contradiction and clinamen is foregrounded by Worstward Ho. Beckett’s “sudden back changed” as a figure of imperceptible clinamen is instrumentalised by the negation of “yes” with “no”. When the “yes” is contradicted by the “no”, the sudden change happens.

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Beckett’s work is an aleatory and materialist affirmation of change through contradiction, to recall the memorable articulation from How It Is: “suddenly like all that was not then is” (47). From the negation of “not” to the affirmation of “is”, contradiction is the stylistic taxonomy of change as a sudden, if not inexplicable, phenomenon. This is an absolute belief in a revolutionary event that will change things. The famous ending of How It Is , much like that of The Unnamable, is, in itself, an exercise in contradiction. A series of no’s rend the text and falsify the entire narrative of community, set up by the numerical elaborations in part two as the narrator declares himself to be alone.4 To return to Worstward Ho, the final condition of change as diminution, whereby the shades become three pins and one pinhole, happens through the contradiction of “no move and sudden all far. All least. Three pins. One pinhole” (103). The figure of distance is an effect of change, brought through contradiction. This notion of distance is important for its political ramifications. When a discourse engages in an absolutist and dictatorial act, the trope of contradiction introduces an oppositional voice to put the master’s discourse at a distance. Distancing is thus a political effect of contradiction. Distancing itself is in contradiction with the idea of encounter as proximity. While atomistic clinamen suggests encounter, the sudden change in Beckett is more complex, as it causes distance. We are not told whether the three pins enter the pinhole. The encounter is kept in suspense while the distance of “vasts apart” between pins and pinholes reigns supreme (103). After exploring these brief instances that establish contradiction as a motor force for change, let us concentrate on The Lost Ones where it is established as a schema for the community of “little people”, trapped in the ominous cylinder. As we shall see, there are different kinds of contradictions here. The text contradicts the intuitive understanding of politics as action by prescribing inaction as a device for change. The community shows a proclivity towards contradiction in the name of antagonism. There is another contradiction that inflects the relation of law and transgression.

4 I dwell on the politics of this oscillation in my book, Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Real.

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Contradiction and the Law of Depopulation The following reading of The Lost Ones holds the search for the Other as an antinomic hegemony of law and goes against predominant interpretations of the text where this search is seen as emancipation.5 The contradiction of inaction as action resists the pseudo-resistant action of searching for the Other which is set up by an absolute law. The Lost Ones (“Le Dépeupleur” in French), begun in 1965 and finished in 1970, depicts a little people, locked up in a cylinder where each subject searches for its lost self. This search for a lost Other indicates contradiction. The translation of the title from French to English signals an antinomic change from subject to object. While the French “Le Dépeupleur” refers to the flattened cylinder as a depopulator, or the subject, the English title points to those who are depopulated by it, i.e. the lost ones as the object. This shift generates a contradiction that it is the lost who search, whereas we do not know if their Others are searching for them. These lost ones want to find a way out of the prison-like cylinder, but it is not clear whether they are searching for their Others in the outside world or merely searching for a mythical way out. The search is ambiguously doubled up as they search for the exit in order to search for their Other selves. Contradiction is a tool to build ambiguity here: as it makes different possibilities, all equally open, it serves to make room for change. Daniela Caselli has mentioned a number of paradoxes in the text, such as transparency and opacity, the internal and the external and visibility and invisibility, not to mention sensory experience and language (183–85). Michelle Rada has examined embodiment in The Lost Ones and pointed towards irreconcilable foundational contradictions at the level of language and body (25). I will focus on a different contradiction wherein the operation of law in the text and the text itself as the law (the text is written like a report with legal words, such as “code”, “rule” and “aperçu”) are hegemonically inscribed in this search. Its renunciation at the hypothetical terminal point is not a submission to the law, but a possible punctuation in the law of the Other’s desire. There are two hundred and five bodies, divided into four types: searcher, climber, sedentary and vanquished. The

5 The text has been read as an allegory of the Platonic cave where emancipation lies in exiting (Todorov; Libera; and Murphy). David Houston Jones reads The Lost Ones as a text documenting human survival in the gas-chamber situation. No critic to my knowledge has questioned the search itself as a machination of the law.

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entropic cylinder is subject to meticulously controlled fluctuations of light and temperature. The otherwise blinding light decreases in tandem with the temperature which falls from twenty-five to five with occasional drops to near freezing point in a precise space of four seconds. When the temperature reaches the lowest, the abode becomes darkest and there is a brief lull. In this brief interruption, absolute silence prevails, and the little people temporarily enjoy favourable light and temperature until all begins again in a few seconds. It is in this brief phase of congeniality that man and woman who are otherwise “strangers” here, indulge in “making unmakeable love” (Complete Short Prose 214). As we have seen, contradiction is associated with this idea of interruption. When light and heat oscillate between two drastically contradictory conditions, the temporary interval, also an interruption, creates an iota of habitability in a generally inhospitable space. The only objects available to the little people are fifteen ladders, propped up against the inner wall. They help climbers to ascend to the niches or the alcoves (quincunxial cavities on the ceiling) which promise a way out. Some niches are connected by tunnels, often left incomplete. There is an inner belt of carriers who help the climbers by placing the ladders in different places and a narrower inner circle where temporarily halted searchers remain stationary but keep the search going through their moving eyes. There is a third and largest zone called the “arena” for the roaming searchers. The narrator painstakingly describes the “laws” which bind the searchers to the ladders. There are also “laws” regarding the intra or inter-zonal movement. There are twenty bodies sitting, sixty halted, one hundred and twenty in motion and five in a state of absolute stillness when the text begins. These five are named “vanquished”. They have renounced the desire to search and remain stock still with a bowed head. Despite its extreme rarity, there is the possibility of a vanquished returning to the “arena”. The narrator’s observation records such a rare moment. The four subjective categories are unstable because they are mutually replaceable. The sedentary searchers return to the arena of mobile search and vice versa. The halted ones and the mobile searchers can both enter the first zone of the climbers, subject to certain laws. The theoretical possibility of climbers always remaining climbers and never allowing others to enter their zone is called an “injustice” (219). It is to avoid this injustice that the openness to change among the categories is preserved. This ethic of keeping most possibilities open is a pro-change position. But there is contradiction in the return of a “vanquished” to

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the “arena”. It is this contradiction that generates the rare but crucial change. The contradiction lies in the antinomic change from vanquished to searcher. The central contradiction that marks the text is that the operative law of depopulation incorporates its own contestation in a hegemonic way. This contestation is the desire to search itself. If the cylinder has depopulated the bodies by wrenching them away from their Others, the question remains, where are these others? Are they inside or outside? Is there an outside at all? It is entirely unknown: “For in the cylinder alone are certitudes to be found and without nothing but mystery” (216). The light with its “levelling effect” (220) prohibits the searchers from seeking the niches from below. It compels them to climb. As an objective mechanism of the cylinder, light necessitates climbing as one type of search. Since time immemorial there has been a “rumour” (206) about the existence of a way out. One sect of searchers thinks that the way out is “a secret passage branching from one of the tunnels” that connects the niches, while the other sect “dreams of a trapdoor hidden in the hub of the ceiling” (206), which is completely beyond reach. These are mere speculations and the law of the cylinder has helped to fuel them. There is a continuous conversion of one belief into the other, but in the final run the first wins over the second. The logic of this shift is that the hub of the ceiling is out of reach while the niches are still searchable. The law of the cylinder thus ensures that the denizens never stop searching. The way out keeps wavering from the possible to the impossible: “Thus by insensible degrees the way out transfers from the tunnel to the ceiling prior to never having been” (207). This unreachable hub continues to tantalise as the tallest climbers on the topmost rung of the tallest ladder can explore this theoretically impossible zone, making it a little less impossible. The vital point is that this “inviolable zenith” (207) of exit is a law in itself. The way out of law exists, but only as a machination of the law. This is the contradiction. The search for the Other as transgression vis-àvis the law gets complicated by the contradiction that the search itself is imposed by the law of the cylinder. It is imposed on the little people by way of a hegemonic myth. The rumour about the exit is a “credence so singular in itself” (207) and the climbers, “amateurs of myth” (207). The narrator obliquely adds that the “fatuous light” (207) of faith will never leave them. The limit to the law thus resides inside the law as a point of contradiction. By underscoring this hegemonic mythicality of law, the

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narrator distances himself from being an unproblematic representative of the law. The text resists through the aforementioned idea of distance here. To come to the rules regarding the use of ladders and the inter and intra-zone movements, the narrator evokes legality: “The use of the ladders is regulated by conventions of obscure origin which in their precision and the submission they exact from the climbers resemble laws” (207). These laws not only restrict the possibility of the mythical search but also cause irrational acts of violence in the cylinder. How did these ladders come? Who brought them into the cylinder? There is no answer. The ladders as transgressive tools are located within the law. They are instruments of law and cause violence and disunity in the cylinder. These ladders tempt the searchers to climb towards the niches. Many steps are missing that cause difficult and acrobatic moves. Some searchers use missing rungs like sticks to attack or defend themselves. Thus, a foundation of violence is laid in the cylinder. Only one climber can ascend at a time. If one climbs before its time it leads to great fury among others. There is a law that the climber can only stay for a particular duration in a niche and must come down immediately afterwards. Failing this, he may have to wait indefinitely till another ladder is placed somewhere nearby.6 He can then take it and come down in the opposite direction to the ascending climber, who will make room for him. The laws exercising justice and giving all the opportunity to climb lead to both fraternity and violence. Some searchers only use ladders to climb to some convenient “coigns” and stay there. But even for this action, there is a time limit and if one overstays, he is thumped on the back to which he hardly reacts and comes down quietly. The narrator situates this docility of the abused as an evidence for the unintentional or mechanical nature of the abuse. The delay is the result of a “temporary derangement of his inner timepiece” (209) and thus forgivable. As we can see, all the specific laws to do with the ladders have a single purpose which is to keep the search going at any cost. The entire programme of search is triggered by the desire of the Other. These are the Others who want the little people to keep looking for them. The bodies perform this hegemonic search as a law. To look at an intra-zone law, for a sedentary or a searcher to enter the climbers’ 6 It is worth noting that climbers are generally referenced as “he” while there are women in the cylinder. This creates a gendered dimension for the human predicament in The Lost Ones but this dynamic remains beyond the scope of this chapter.

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zone, a climber has to rejoin the searchers. If a searcher trespasses into the climbers’ zone, he is immediately ejected by the nearest queue. On the other hand, if a climber queues up, he has to proceed till the end. There is no way to leave a queue from the middle. If he tries to leave, he is violently put back to his place. An interesting aspect of this law is the freedom to leave the queue, once the climber is at the foot of the ladder, waiting for the return of the one who has gone up. So, after suffering an entire queue, one is free, not only to leave the particular queue but the climbers’ zone itself and rejoin the searchers in the arena. This is another oppressive implication of this law. It sucks the courage of the climber in the process of queuing up: “For the climber may reach the head of the queue with the firm resolve to ascend and then feel it melt little by little” (217). The laws both necessitate and defer the quest. There is another law of inspection for the searchers. To inspect them properly, they make the sedentary and the vanquished turn around. The searchers must stop the moving bodies to make them stick to a particular position to inspect. But the law prohibits them from doing this to the climbers who have queued up. To a rash searcher who takes them to be one single body, due to their jostling, and dares to touch them, they manifest unprecedented wrath. The entire queue falls upon the offender like one body. It gives birth to the most horrible scene of violence in the cylinder. This violence is a product of law as contradiction. The law of inspection contradicts the law that the climbers who have queued up must be allowed to continue their search. This contradiction is internal to legality. It is not to be confused with the egalitarian contradiction that introduces true change. The extreme violence suggests that the law of the cylinder imposes both endless searching and contradiction-as-antagonism in the Maoist incarnation of class struggle. The momentary and contradictory interruption of favourable light and heat with stillness is a freezing point for the violence as fists and volleys get paused midway (213). The blows are frozen as long as the interruption is on. So, the interruption has the power to temporarily stop the violence of the law. The narrator speculates as to whether or not the cylinder is “doomed in a more or less distant future to a state of anarchy given over to fury and violence” (219). This is one possible last state of the cylinder, if the law and its self-inscribed contestation of search are followed. But the narrator imagines an alternative possibility of a last state where some real change may happen. In this case, the end will come with a complete stasis of all bodies. The bodies themselves will be caught unawares. In this possible ending,

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“light and climate will be changed in a way impossible to foretell” and in “cold darkness motionless flesh” (205) will continue to persist, but at an angular distance from the law of search. This unpredictable and supplementary change presents itself as a perpetuation of the interruption where both the light and the heat will become tolerable and the abode will be a lot more habitable. We see a different kind of contradiction in the negation of action being posited as action in The Lost Ones . The final paragraph presents the hypothesis of the “unthinkable end” (222) or the supposed “last state of the cylinder” (223) where the last searcher encounters the first vanquished. After a fleeting moment of mutual care, they fall back upon the “unthinkable past” when the first body had vanquished itself by bowing the head. All searchers are now vanquished, and the cylinder reaches its dead calm along with the dark that descends to a near freezing point. The text chooses the static over the violent end. This ending offers the culmination of a tender gesture of love, connecting the last searcher with the first vanquished: On his knees he parts the heavy hair and raises the unresisting head. Once devoured the face thus laid bare the eyes at a touch of the thumbs open without demur. In those calm wastes he lets his wander till they are the first to close and the head relinquished falls back into place. (223)

In absolute stasis, darkness descends, temperature rests not far from freezing and an impregnable silence drowns all possible cries and whispers. The text ends on the point of contradictory interruption that makes change possible. The little people re-enact the original moment of vanquishment here, but the contradiction makes sure that this vanquishment is another name for victory. This is the moment of defiance when they renounce the law of the cylinder by not searching for the Other anymore. The change brought through contradiction lies in the antinomy of inaction as action. Non-searchers contradict the Other’s desire to search and become equals in a stillness that binds them all. This renunciation of the Other’s law to search is a negation of action. But this non-action becomes an active political ethic against a legal hegemony in the textual finale. In The Lost Ones , if law inscribes a doing of politics as restricted action or non-action, this action completes a full circle from all searchers to all vanquished. Only after aborting the law of searching for the lost Other (a law set up by the Other), the subjects return to their

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originary sameness when the last searcher bonds with the first vanquished. Restricted action climaxes in a politics of radical inaction. This inaction situates a potential exterior in relation to the law. When all bodies are vanquished, their bowed heads become a cipher of justice. In contrast to the aforementioned “injustice” of some constantly climbing and others constantly searching, there is justice in complete inaction that makes them equals. The depopulator imposes an imperative that the little people should find their lost ones, while themselves being the lost ones. When they relinquish the search, they finally understand that they are the lost ones. Instead of searching, they need to be searched for by Others. The desire to search for the Other is also the desire of the Other and the little people must resist this hegemonic imperative. To conclude, we can see how Beckett’s texts have a political logic of contradiction that works as a tool to effect change. This contradiction is not just a question of style, but also one of content. It is a contradiction that opens up the entire range of possibilities in a situation to articulate the necessity of change. Let us end with the most cryptic sentence in The Lost Ones: “when in the cylinder what little is possible is not so it is merely no longer so and in the least less the all of nothing” (1211). This sentence boasts of contradiction as a stylistic element with a series of negations. It communicates an openness to different possibilities. Whatever little is not possible in the cylinder was once possible (“what little is possible is not so it is merely no longer so”) and by virtue of that, it may again be possible in future. In the final run, the impossible, which has already been mutated into the once-possible, is made even more possible through contradiction. The impossible, as the last part of the enigmatic sentence suggests, “is in the least less the all of nothing”. Hence, the impossible is “all of nothing”—i.e. the contradictory totality of nothingness. This is the openness to change enabled by contradiction. It traverses the complex path from impossibility to possibility. It is in this ambiguously open positionality that Beckett’s works espouse a textual politics of change through contradiction.

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Works Cited Althusser, Louis. Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–1987 . Edited by François Matheron and Oliver Corpet, translated by G. M. Goshgarian, Verso, 2006. Badiou, Alain. On Beckett. Edited by Nina Power and Alberto Toscano, Clinamen, 2003. Beckett, Samuel. The Complete Short Prose: 1929–1989. Grove Press, 1995. ———. Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho. Edited by Dirk Van Hulle, Faber and Faber, 2009. ———. How It Is. Edited by Edouard Magessa O’Reilly, Faber and Faber, 2009. Breuer, Rolf. “Paradox in Beckett”. The Modern Language Review, vol. 88, no. 3, 1993, pp. 559–580. Caselli, Daniela. Beckett’s Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fiction and Criticism. Manchester UP, 2005. Chattopadhyay, Arka. Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Real. Bloomsbury, 2019. Eagleton, Terry. “Political Beckett?” New Left Review, vol. 40, 2006, pp. 67–74. Furlani, Andre. “The Contradictions of Samuel Beckett”. Modernism/Modernity, vol. 22, no. 3, 2015, pp. 449–470. Jones, David Houston. “‘So Fluctuant a Death’: Entropy and Survival in The Lost Ones and Long Observation of the Ray”. Beckett and Ethics, edited by Russell Smith, Continuum, 2008, pp. 118–133. Libera, Antoni. “The Lost Ones: A Myth of Human History and Destiny”. Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives, edited by Morris Beja, Stanley Gontarski and Pierre Astier, Ohio UP, 1983, pp. 145–156. Meillassoux, Quentin. Time Without Becoming. Edited by Anna Longo, Mimesis International, 2014. Morin, Emilie. Beckett’s Political Imagination. Cambridge UP, 2017. Murphy, Peter. “The Nature of Allegory in ‘The Lost Ones’, or the Quincunx Realistically Considered”. Journal of Beckett Studies, vol. 7, 1982, pp. 71–88. Nixon, Mark, and Dirk Van Hulle. Samuel Beckett’s Library. Cambridge UP, 2013. Rada, Michelle. “Boring Holes: The Crystalline Body of Beckett’s The Lost Ones ”. Journal of Beckett Studies, vol. 27, no. 1, 2018, pp. 22–39. Rancière, Jacques. “The Politics of Literature”. SubStance, vol. 33, no. 1, 2004, pp. 10–24. Sussman, Henry, and Christopher Devenney, editors. Engagement and Indifference: Beckett and the Political. State University of New York, 2001. Todorov, Tzvetan. “L’espoir chez Beckett ”. Revue d’esthétique, 1986, pp. 27–36. Tse-Tung, Mao. “On Contradiction”. Mao on Practice and Contradiction, edited by Slavoj Žižek, Verso, 2008, pp. 67–102.

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Uhlmann, Anthony. “Beckett’s Intertexts”. The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, edited by Dirk Van Hulle, Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 103– 113. Williams, Raymond. “The Politics of the Avant-Garde”. The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, edited by Tony Pinkney, Verso, 1994, pp. 49–64. Žižek, Slavoj. In Defense of Lost Causes. Verso, 2008. ———, editor. Mao on Practice and Contradiction. Verso, 2008, pp. 1–28.

CHAPTER 4

“Made of Words”: Beckett and the Politics of Language Alan Graham

Language is undeniably the most fraught of the many neuroses which percolate through the Beckett oeuvre. From his early efforts at fiction and poetry in the 1930s to his radical re-conceptualisations of the novel and dramatic form achieved by the end of his career, Beckett’s work revolves around an unforgiving interrogation of the purchase of language on consciousness, most evident in the painstaking, and painful, reflexivity of his characters in relation to the very act of speaking itself. The excruciating mistrust of language in Beckett has come to define his achievements within the literary and theatrical traditions and, more generally, his contribution to the wider cultural imagination: “few writers at any time and in any medium have ever questioned as insistently, explicitly and profoundly as Beckett the questions of language and representation” (Katz 363); his work operates “a critique of language so absolute, so specific, and so relentless that it becomes a critique of identity itself, a critique of representation, a critique of history and a critique of the terms in which even its own existence continues” (Johnson 43); the Beckett world is

A. Graham (B) Gonzaga College, Dublin, Ireland © The Author(s) 2021 W. Davies and H. Bailey (eds.), Beckett and Politics, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47110-1_4

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finally one in which “characters struggle, not with metaphysical ideas, but with language itself” (Ben-Zvi 194). Adroitly, scholars commonly characterise this most central of the author’s preoccupations as a “language crisis” (Pilling 155), famously exemplified in Three Dialogues (1949) in which Beckett considers the central dilemma facing the modern artist— the understanding that “there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express” (Disjecta 139). The deep-seated sense of entrapment within, and also alienation from, language and the meaning it ceaselessly produces haunts all of Beckett’s fictive and dramatic texts, and if there is a discernible ethical lesson that can be gleaned from this work it is, perhaps, the complex truth that the coherence exclusively conferred on existence by language must be surmounted in order to live authentically. Scholarly accounts of the understanding of language in Beckett’s work often focus on the intellectual milieu of the avant-garde Paris to which the twenty-two-year old Irishman arrived in late 1928. Critics tend to agree that it was in this charged environment that Beckett’s “early views on language and literature were formulated” (Keatinge 86), pointing to the myriad philosophical and artistic circles around which the young writer orbited. The work of Eugène Jolas, for example, has long been privileged as an important influence on Beckett’s thinking in relation to language during these early years, and certainly Jolas’s critique of the deadening equivalence of modern language and his call for a new “twentieth century word […] the word expressive of the great new forces around us” (qtd. in Salisbury 110) resonates strongly with the equally visceral broadsides against the “terrible materiality of the word” (Disjecta 172) during Beckett’s early career. Much significance has also been attached to Beckett’s encounter during this period with Fritz Mauthner’s Contributions Towards a Critique of Language (1902), a text which urges the “thinking man […] [to] destroy language within me, in front of me, and behind me” (qtd. in Ben-Zvi 187). Linda Ben-Zvi argues that the heightened understanding of “the limits imposed by words” (197) in Beckett’s work is traceable to his reading of Mauthner and, indeed, that Mauthner’s work is the key influence in the development of Beckett’s thought on language, providing him with “the idea that an ego, even if it existed and

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could be found, would have no means of expressing itself” (193).1 Others have looked to the work of the writer and theorist Maurice Blanchot, a Parisian contemporary of Beckett’s in the 1930s and 40s, as an important source for the language crisis in Beckett. Both share an understanding of writing as “an experience of subjection to the material autonomy of words” (Bruns 79) and Blanchot’s idiosyncratic views on literature in his 1943 essay collection Faux pas, in particular, strikingly chime with the acute sense of expressive impasse that Beckett chronicled six years later in Three Dialogues . In recent years, scholars have become increasingly interested in Beckett’s familiarity with both the emerging discipline of Gestalt psychology and with developments in the field of neurological science—to which his notebooks from the 1930s testify a significant engagement—as a source for the problematic relationship with language in the Beckett oeuvre. Laura Salisbury, for example, has interestingly traced the influence of neurological diagnostics in the representation of language in The Unnamable and Not I —“stuttering, echolalia [repetition of phrases] and paraphasias [unintended syllables]” (Salisbury 88)—arguing that an “aphasic search for words […] insists as a revealing symptom” (86) throughout the fiction and drama. Scholars have been less interested, however, in the political dimensions and implications of the complex relationship with language in Beckett’s work. The critical narratives outlined above have tended to minimise— or ignore—the historical contexts with which a Beckettian language crisis might engage and, more significantly, obfuscate how the friction between language and consciousness at the heart of Beckett’s work observes the profound socio-linguistic conditioning of subjectivity in western culture. Most curiously, the growing interest in uncovering a “relationship with a material political geography” (Boxall 162) in the author’s work has shown little enthusiasm for addressing understandings of language which it offers. In his influential call for a political reading of the oeuvre, Terry Eagleton alludes to possible Irish socio-cultural origins for the discomfiting linguistic reflexivity of Beckett’s texts: “It helped”, Eagleton observes, “in signing up to a linguistically self-conscious modernism, to stem from a nation in which language, as a political minefield, could never 1 These convictions, however, were not shared by Beckett himself, as evidenced in a 1978 letter to Ruby Cohn in which he seems amused by Ben-Zvi’s claims of a Mauthnerian influence and labelled it “a wild goose chase or a red herring” (qtd. in Garforth 54).

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be taken for granted” (67). Yet, those who have gone on to excavate the political landscape of Beckett’s work have been reluctant to pursue such connections between historico-political environments and the crisis of faith in language in Beckett’s fiction and drama.2 This is evident in Emilie Morin’s Beckett’s Political Imagination, the fullest treatment to date of the author’s political preoccupations and much of which naturally focuses on the national environment from which a political consciousness may have been first imbibed. However, Morin neglects to take account of what was one of the most—if not the most—politically charged issues in the Ireland of Beckett’s youth: the perceived nexus between language and identity. In fact, it is through this particular context that we can most clearly perceive the most political of concerns in Beckett’s work— the dilemma with which all of his characters must finally come to terms: “Is there a single word of mine in all I say? […] I’m in words, made of words, others’ words” (Beckett, Three Novels 347, 386). One of the most celebrated assertions of Beckett’s antipathy towards language is the so-called “German letter” of 1937. This was written shortly after Beckett’s return from his eight-month tour of the disappearing art collections of Nazi-controlled Germany (an experience which commonly frames critical portraits of a Beckettian politics). His letter to Axel Kaun, an acquaintance from this trip, is the nearest statement to an ars poetica in Beckett’s career, featuring as it does the iteration of the extraordinary aesthetic ambition of a “literature of the unword” (Disjecta 173) and a marked hostility (perhaps unrivalled in the history of letters) towards the very material of literary endeavour: As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it – be it something or nothing – begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today […] Is there something paralysingly holy in the vicious nature of the word that is not found in the elements of the other arts? Is there any reason why that terrible materiality of the word surface should not be capable of being dissolved […]? (172) 2 In recent years, Sinéad Mooney and Emilie Morin have examined an affinity between the translation culture of the Irish revivalists (Hyde, Gregory, Synge, and others) and Beckett’s dynamic self-translation practice, but neither address how the highly political language issue in Ireland may be traceable in the language crisis in Beckett (see Mooney, A Tongue Not Mine and Morin, The Problem of Irishness ).

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It has become common in Beckett studies to approach the German letter as a tell-tale prefiguring of the turn to French in the mid-1940s. This is no doubt suggested by the fateful remarks concerning his native tongue with which Beckett presages his astonishing assault on language itself: It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it. Grammar and Style. To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman. A mask. (171)

By virtue of its pronounced understanding of the limitations of the English language, the Kaun letter is seen to represent a test site for the emergence of the bilingual Beckett and for many scholars its announcement of a “literature of the unword” is thus “best contextualised” (Pilling 152) in relation to the recent visit to Germany and the daily experience of “sinning willy-nilly against a foreign language” (Disjecta 173). However, the relationship with the English language‚ and language generally, which the Kaun letter reveals, also reverberates in a variety of ways with the long and vexed history of language politics in Beckett’s native country. In particular, the understanding of English in the Kaun letter intriguingly resonates with the ideological construction of English as a ‘dead’ language in Irish nationalist discourse. This was a dominant feature of cultural and political rhetoric in Ireland from the late-1800s to the mid-twentieth century (indeed, it persists in nuanced forms to this day) and has its roots in the very origins of an English-language literary society in Ireland.3 In particular, the cultural philosophy of “DeAnglicisation” which arose towards the end of the nineteenth century, and which was more than mildly influenced by the growing purchase of 3 In the accounts of some of the first English settlers in Ireland in the sixteenth century we see even then an anxiety about the problematic mix of two very different languages and the understanding that the newly arrived English, brought by these planters, threatened a corruption of the “native ancient tonge” (qtd. in Crowley, War of Words 33) of the country they had begun to see as their own. By the early nineteenth century, we see the Anglo-Irish lionising Hiberno-English, the dialect which had arisen among the native population, at the expense of the language of their parent culture—“a jargon unlike to any language under heaven” (qtd. in Crowley, Politics of Language in Ireland 137). This disgust with English in the Anglo-Irish philological tradition was crucial to the flowering of the largely Protestant-led Irish literary renaissance at the end of the nineteenth century.

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eugenicism on nationalist thought, conceptualised English as a degenerate language—“vulgar” and “corrupted” (Hyde 166)—in stark contrast with the spiritual power immanent to the native language of Ireland. By the time of Beckett’s birth in 1906, public discourse in Ireland was suffused with portrayals of English as dysgenic, a language “overrun with weeds of triteness and vulgarity” (qtd. in War of Words 151), a “rotten language, as rotten as anything which is corrupt”, an “internal cancer that is eating away the heart and soul of Ireland” (qtd. in War of Words 159; qtd. in Politics of Language in Ireland 203), rhetoric interestingly rehearsed in Beckett’s uneasiness concerning the aesthetic facility of the English language at the commencement of his career.4 The visceral critique of a “sophisticated” English, a language “abstracted to death […] by the contortions of 20th century printer’s ink” (Disjecta 28), in the early “Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce” essay, for example, resounds with contemporaneous Irish nationalist analyses of how the language “worn” by English use, and the “fixing of the printing press” must be replenished at “the forge of living speech” (qtd. in Politics of Language in Ireland 220). In much the same way, Beckett views Joyce’s Work in Progress as a recovery of the ontological force of language from epistemology: “It is not written at all. It is not to be read […] it is to be looked at and listened to […]” (Disjecta 27). Similarly, the Kaun letter’s espousal of a destruction of language—to “bore” into, to “[tear] apart”, to “dissolve” language—rehearses the rhetorical flourishes of nationalist language ideology. The cultural injunction “to expel the poison” of English, “to kill” English, “to wag[e] a most intense war against English” (qtd. in O’Leary 27, 34; qtd. in Foster 545) in order to return Irish culture to its spiritual source is, in many respects, a national equivalent not only of Beckett’s misgivings in relation to English as a compositional language, but also of his intuitive sense of the obscure malevolence lurking in the “materiality of the word surface”. Indeed, in many ways, the language crisis in Beckett, which is first a crisis of faith in the English language as it had been for generations of Irish, especially Anglo-Irish,

4 Beckett was certainly familiar with this discourse of linguistic purity, as evidenced

in a letter to Thomas MacGreevy from 1933, in which he comments on the ideological undercurrents of the new state’s nomenclature project. Observing the official name change of a tower on the island of Inishmore on the west coast, Beckett notes that this phallic structure had been referred to by locals as “penis erectus in Gaelic but now out of newly acquired prudery […] the upright thing ” (qtd. in Mooney 157).

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writers, discernibly recapitulates a historical Irish understanding of the ‘deathliness’ of English.5 More significantly, however, the anxiety in relation to English in the early Beckett career, which culminates in the formulation of a “literature of the unword”, also observes the political legitimation of language in the infant Irish nation-state. Shortly after Beckett’s return to Dublin from Germany in 1937, the Irish Parliament (Dáil Éireann) began examining the text of a new constitution. One of the most keenly debated issues was the proposed change in relation to the legal status of the languages spoken in the country. In two previous constitutions since 1919, the Irish language had been piously honoured as the country’s “national language” while English was begrudgingly “equally recognised” (qtd. in War of Words 175) as the vernacular of the majority. The draft text of the 1937 constitution, a document which prepared for the dissolution of Ireland’s ties with the British Commonwealth, radically altered these definitions in proposing that the Irish language would become the official language of the Irish state. The absurdity of this legal sacralisation of a minority language was not lost on some of those who debated the drafts of the new constitution, one parliamentarian adroitly pointing out that the new text, written in Irish, “will not be understood by the vast majority of Deputies on both sides of the House; and it certainly will not be understood by the vast majority of the people outside the House” (Dáil Éireann Debate). Unsurprisingly, the entrenched ideological commitment to the native language won the day and in the finalised text of the new constitution—still in effect today—the pertinent articles stipulate that: “1. The Irish language as the national language is the first official language. 2. The English language is recognized as a second official language” (Bunreacht na hÉireann 8). Article 25 of the constitution

5 Indeed, there is a not insignificant history of Irish Protestant writers (including James Clarence Mangan, Oscar Wilde, John Millington Synge, and George Moore) turning to French at crucial points in their careers as a means of “escape from the English language” (Moore qtd. in Morin, Problem of Irishness 84). Especially after independence in the 1920s, there was a concerted effort among many in the intelligentsia to rekindle a historical relationship between Gaelic and French literary cultures in an effort to “supplant the English language’s monopoly in Irish intellectual life” (O’Leary 368). Certainly, by the time Beckett started to write in the late 1920s and as he languished in Dublin at different periods throughout the 1930s with rejected manuscripts and poorly selling publications, the idea of a Francophonic Irish writer was not terribly unusual.

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reads: “in case of conflict between the texts of a law […] in both the official languages, the text in the national language shall prevail” (80) and “in case of conflict between the texts of any copy of this constitution […] the text in the national language shall prevail” (82). In this manner, the 1937 constitution established a new “linguistic competence” (Bourdieu 57) which would shape citizens’ relationship with the state. Naturally, this would negatively affect those who, like Beckett, lacked the necessary knowledge of and/or cultural affinity with the Irish language and who would be destined to a liminal position in relation to “the social domains in which this competence is required” (55).6 On 1 July 1937, a referendum was held to secure public support for the new constitution (it was carried by 55% of the electorate); on the Friday of the following week, Beckett composed his celebrated remarks to Axel Kaun from the office of his late father’s business on Dublin’s Clare Street. The conspicuous echo between the letter’s opening complaint against a “senseless […] official English” and the discourse of the day in many ways shadows the project of a “literature of the unword” which Beckett proceeds to enunciate. It also provides a way of perceiving the deeply political nature of the sustained struggle against language which would be at the centre of the work to come. The political codification of language in the Ireland of Beckett’s early life testifies to the central role of vernacular nationalism in the creation of the modern nation-state. The notion of ‘national language’ was first truly conceptualised by the figures associated with late eighteenth-century German Romanticism and Weimar Classicism—Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Fichte and Friedrich Schlegel, among others. The vernacular tongue (in contrast to the sacred language of the church) was intuited as the repository of an essential community which, being so ontologically intrinsic to the human experience, demanded a socio-political form of continuity:

6 Anthony Cronin reports that shortly after the ratification of the new constitution, Beckett was thus victimised by the state’s new language doctrine when he enquired about a position at the National Library of Ireland only to learn that he would not be considered for the position as it required the post-holder to be fluent in the “first official language” (252).

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Those who speak the same language are joined to each other by a multitude of invisible bonds by nature herself, long before any human art begins. It is true beyond doubt that, wherever a separate language is found, there a separate nation exists, which has the right to take independent charge of its affairs and to govern itself […] where a people has ceased to govern itself, it is equally bound to give up its language and to coalesce with conquerors. (qtd. in Özkirimli 15)

Fichte and his contemporaries understood language not simply as an intelligible, coherent mode of fraternity by which the nation may be organised, but, more fundamentally, as the a priori imprint of nation—a “mode of thought […] firmly implanted” (qtd. in Brennan 68)—in the individual. The consequences of this new understanding of the human relationship with language were far-reaching in making emergent an ethical consciousness which oversaw the political reorganisation of Europe by the end of the nineteenth century and, thus, a new form of citizen-subjectivity. An important corollary of the veneration of native language in eighteenth-century cultural thought was the endowment of the common tongue with a commercial facility. As Benedict Anderson’s seminal Imagined Communities observes, the birth of the nation-state was enabled by the nexus of the ideologisation of the vernacular and the advent of modern capitalism, most especially the new economic realities gained by the proliferation of print technology, a “convergence” which “created the possibility of a new form of imagined community, which in its basic morphology set the stage for the modern nation” (46). As Anderson outlines, the creation of “mechanically reproduced print-languages” conferred the sacralised vernacular with a “new fixity”, transforming it into a language worthy of “dissemination through the market” (44). An important implication of this analysis is that modern capitalism itself was formalised by virtue of the “vernacularising thrust” (39) of cultural and political discourse in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, indexed in the phenomenon of the book as the first “modern-style mass-produced industrial commodity” (34); Anderson’s contention that the “growth in literacy, commerce, industry, communications […] created powerful new impulses for vernacular linguistic unification” (77–78) is equally true in reverse. In this way, the commercial modality generated by the ideological seizure of the native tongue helped to shape the economic territory and horizon which the nation-system could circumscribe.

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The understanding of language as such a facility for the territorialisation of the nation-state is more explicitly addressed in Pierre Bourdieu’s Language and Symbolic Power which analyses the social and economic operations of what Bourdieu terms “official language”. By this he means the dominant vernacular within the established state which “imposes itself on the whole population as the only legitimate language” (Bourdieu 45). Bourdieu outlines a “properly political process” (44) by which language is appropriated as a normalising mechanism which “presuppose[s] the political or economic unification which [it] help[s] in turn to reinforce” (50). The institutionalisation of official language in effect guarantees “the minimum of communication which is the precondition for economic production and […] symbolic domination” (44–45); in this way, language becomes central to “the unification of the economy and also of cultural production and circulation” (50). In his analysis of the “linguistic market” (57) which the establishment of a state language creates, Bourdieu reveals how language use itself is irrevocably suffused with the political facility with which it has been invested, and how an official language becomes “the theoretical norm against which all linguistic practices are objectively measured” (45). Both Anderson’s and Bourdieu’s influential studies demonstrate that it was the charging of the vernacular as both economic and symbolic material which was instrumental to the transformation of a member of a language community into an object of the nation-system, a process by which the individual’s relationship with language became a demonstration of their status as citizen-subject. In the struggle against the “vicious nature of the word” (Disjecta 172) which pervades the monologic narratives of Beckett’s mature work— a struggle initiated in the shadow of the officialisation of language in the Irish Free State—we can perceive a profound understanding of the subjectivising violence of language. The most potent way in which this is examined is through his protagonists’ unnerving experience of hearing themselves speak: “no one to talk to, no one to talk to you, so that you have to say, It’s I who am doing this to me, I who am talking to me about me” (Three Novels 394). The mysterious narrator of The Unnamable is highly tuned to what he hears himself saying, feeling‚ as his story progresses‚ that he is “possessed of nothing but my voice” (311); and yet, it is a voice from which he feels remote: “My voice. The voice […] I never stop speaking, but sometimes too low, too far away, too far within” (393). Of course, what the unnamable describes here – this unsettling

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awareness of himself as a speaking being—is, as Steven Connor explains, a common human phenomenon: To speak is always to hear myself speaking. Learning to speak depends upon being able to hear myself in this way […] I cannot speak without putting myself in the position of the one who hears my voice; without becoming, in principle at least, my own interlocutor […] my voice is […] most essentially itself and my own in the ways in which it parts or passes from me. Nothing else about me defines me so intimately as my voice, precisely because there is no other feature of my self whose nature it is thus to move from me into the world, and to move me into the world. (5, 7)

Yet, there is a constant suspicion in the agonising self-awareness of Beckett’s narrators that the speech which is heard emanates from elsewhere. In its passing from him, the unnamable discovers in his speech that which he does not recognise as originating with himself but which he must have produced, all the while sensing a force which compels this speech: I seem to speak, it is not I, about me, it is not about me […] And at the same time I am obliged to speak […] it issues from me, it fills me, it clamours against my walls, it is not mine, I can’t stop it, I can’t prevent it, from tearing me, racking me, assailing me. It is not mine, I have none, I have no voice and must speak […] with this voice that is not mine. (Three Novels 291, 307)

The unnamable understands his speech to be ventriloquised. Unable to situate in his voice a nucleus of subjectivity, he finds instead a matrix of voices which propel the self, in Connor’s terms, “into the world”: I am walled round with their vociferations, none will ever know what I am, none will ever hear me say it, I won’t say it, I can’t say it, I have no language but theirs […] as if it were my own voice, pronouncing my own words, words pronouncing me alive, since that’s how they want me to be, I don’t know why, with their billions of quick, their trillions of dead, that’s not enough for them, I too must contribute my little convulsion […]. (325, 335)

In the self-interlocution which might guarantee the self, the speaking and hearing by which a “coincidence with myself” (Connor 7) may be experienced, the Beckett speaker finds instead the avowal of political and

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social discourses which lay claim to the sought-for self, subjectivising “modes[s] of thought […] implanted” in the words he utters—“Up the Republic!, for example, or Sweetheart!, for example” (Three Novels 236). In the excruciating experience of listening to the voice which passes from him, the Beckett narrator perceives the territorialising function of his own speech: To testify to them, until I die, as if there was any dying with that tomfoolery, that’s what they’ve sworn they’ll bring me to. Not to be able to open my mouth without proclaiming them, and our fellowship, that’s what they imagine they’ll have me reduced to. It’s a poor trick that consists in ramming a set of words down your gullet on the principle that you can’t bring them up without being branded as belonging to their breed. (324)

A key index of this violence in the Beckett oeuvre is the experience of language as a material force. Replete with the “puke” and “spew” (335) of speech, the Beckett monologue “everywhere insists on its materiality” (Lloyd 214) precisely because it witnesses the injunctive weight of the ethical and socio-economic discourses carried in language: “It is they […] who stuffed me full of these groans that choke me. And out it all pours unchanged, I have only to belch to be sure of hearing them, the same old sour teachings I can’t change a tittle of” (Three Novels 335). Indeed, several Beckett texts (in particular Watt , How It Is , and Worstward Ho) become overwhelmed by a kind of solipsistic materialism—“no trace on soft when from it ooze again. In it ooze again” (Company 99–100)— suggesting that as narrative comes closer to signalling an originary subject, the more it is freighted by its subjectivising function. This is the final, and perhaps only, understanding achieved by the Beckett monologist— that he is the product and object of language, and by the completion of the oeuvre, consciousness seems to consist solely in this inescapable, unforgiving reflexivity. In many respects, it is in this acute privation that the political consciousness of the Beckett world lies: language is the only material because it harbours all other.

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Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso Books, 1983. Beckett, Samuel. Company/Ill Seen Ill Said/Worstward Ho/Stirrings Still. Edited by Dirk Van Hulle, Faber and Faber, 2009. ———. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and A Dramatic Fragment. Edited by Ruby Cohn, Calder, 1983. ———. Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. Grove Press, 1965. Ben-Zvi, Linda. “Samuel Beckett, Fritz Mauthner, and the Limits of Language”. PMLA, vol. 95, no. 2, 1980, pp. 183–200. Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Translated by Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson, Polity Press, 1991. Boxall, Peter. “Samuel Beckett: Towards a Political Reading”. Irish Studies Review, vol. 10, no. 2, 2002, pp. 159–170. Brennan, Timothy. “The National Longing for Form”. Nation and Narration, edited by Homi K. Bhabha, Routledge, 1990, pp. 44–70. Bruns, Gerald L. “The Impossible Experience of Words: Blanchot, Beckett, and the Materiality of Language”. Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 76, no. 1, 2015, pp. 79–95. Connor, Steven. Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford UP, 2000. Cronin, Anthony. Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist. HarperCollins, 1996. Crowley, Tony. The Politics of Language in Ireland 1366–1922: A Sourcebook. Routledge, 2000. ———. War of Words: The Politics of Language in Ireland 1537–2004. Oxford UP, 2005. Eagleton, Terry. “Political Beckett?” New Left Review, vol. 40, 2006, pp. 67–74. Foster, Roy. Modern Ireland: 1600–1972. Penguin Books, 1989. Garforth, Julian A. “Samuel Beckett, Fritz Mauthner and the Whoroscope Notebook: Beckett’s BeiträgezueinerKritik der Sprache”. Journal of Beckett Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, 2004, pp. 49–68. Hyde, Douglas. “The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland”. Language Lore and Lyric Essays and Lectures, edited by Brendán Ó’Conaire, Irish Academic Press, 1986, pp. 153–70. Ireland. Bunreacht na hÉireann/Constitution of Ireland. www.irishstatutebook. ie/eli/cons/en/html#part2. Accessed 1 July 2018. ———. “Bunreacht na hEireann (Dréacht) – Tuarasgabháil (d’ath-thógaint)”. Dáil Éireann Debate – Monday 14 June 1937 , vol. 68, no. 4. www.oireachtas. ie/en/debates/debate/dail/1937–06-14/16/. Accessed 1 Feb. 2018. Johnson, Nicholas. “Language, Multiplicity, Void: The Radical Politics of the Beckettian Subject”. Theatre Research International, vol. 37, no. 1, 2012, pp. 38–48.

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Katz, Daniel. “Language and Representation”. Samuel Beckett in Context, edited by Anthony Uhlmann, Cambridge UP, 2013, pp. 361–369. Keatinge, Benjamin. “Beckett and Language Pathology”. Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 31, no. 4, 2008, pp. 86–101. Lloyd, David. Irish Culture and Cultural Modernity 1800–2000: The Transformation of Oral Space. Cambridge UP, 2011. Mooney, Sinéad. A Tongue Not Mine: Beckett and Translation. Oxford UP, 2011. Morin, Emilie. Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. ———. Samuel Beckett’s Political Imagination. Cambridge UP, 2017. O’Leary, Philip. The Prose Literature of the Gaelic Revival, 1881–1921: Ideology and Innovation. The Pennsylvania State UP, 1994. Özkirimli, Umut. Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Pilling, John. Beckett Before Godot. Cambridge UP, 1998. Salisbury, Laura. “‘What Is the Word’”: Beckett’s Aphasic Modernism”. Journal of Beckett Studies, vol. 17, no. 1–2, 2008, pp. 78–126.

CHAPTER 5

“First the Place, Then I’ll Find Me in It”: The Unnamable’s Pronouns and the Politics of Confinement James Little

In the first manuscript notebook of The Unnamable, the narrator asks himself two questions: “Où maintenant?” [“where now?”] and “Qui maintenant?” [“who now?”] (BDMP 2, FN1 front fly leaf v).1 As David 1 As Van Hulle and Weller point out, the incipit composed of questions “is not in fact how the first manuscript version commences” (97). In their view, “[t]he text on this flyleaf is an addition to the text on the facing recto, which was probably written earlier” (98). “Quand maintenant ” was added to a later draft (BDMP2, FLS 1r).

This chapter is a revised version of a chapter from Samuel Beckett in Confinement: The Politics of Closed Space (Bloomsbury, 2020). The work on this chapter was supported by the European Regional Development Fund Project “Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World” (No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734). J. Little (B) Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic

© The Author(s) 2021 W. Davies and H. Bailey (eds.), Beckett and Politics, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47110-1_5

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Addyman has argued, the narrator’s persistent inability to identify the place from which he is speaking is intimately related to the disintegration of self in the novel. Addyman goes on to contest “the widespread assumption that Beckett’s works move towards placelessness or pure displacement in the groundlessness of language”, one of his main targets being what he calls “the tendency to reduce everything to language” in post-structuralist critiques of Beckett’s work (113–14). But a language-centred analysis of Beckett’s work need not be inimical to a study of his spatial aesthetic. Indeed, this chapter will contend that they need to be closely linked if we are to fully understand the politics of Beckett’s work. In one of the scholarly works Addyman critiques, Steven Connor argues that Beckett’s move from the “abundance of narrative detail” in More Pricks Than Kicks to what he terms “the last extremity of solitude” in The Unnamable—a “solitude” paradoxically “thronged with revenants”—carries with it a strengthened political charge (Repetition, Theory and Text 56–57). The power structures that result, he argues, “may not be exact or paradigmatic reflections of structures of power in the social world, but they are not wholly separate from them either” (188). So, what are the power structures implied by the spatial and linguistic structures of The Unnamable? What kinds of politics are left when the novel destabilises both the “who” and “where” of narration? If the answers to these questions provided by “language-centred poststructuralist criticism” (Connor, “Preface” xxii) have been somewhat vague, critics of this approach have likewise been unable to provide a satisfactory account of the political dynamics of the spaces produced in Beckett’s texts.2 As I contend below, we can identify Beckett’s politics of confinement as an important element of his oeuvre, as he returns time and again to the dereliction of confined figures, but these politics change according to the specific spatial and aesthetic forms used in different texts. This chapter will analyse a feature of The Unnamable that previous commentators seem to have missed—Beckett’s use of non-reflexive object pronouns in statements of self-expression (such as the “I’ll find me” of my title). Even Daniel Katz, who puts The Unnamable at the centre of his excellent study into “how Beckett disrupts the traditional function of the first-person pronoun as mark of the source of utterance” does not explore the function of such pronouns (8). Doing so will help elucidate 2 See Alain Badiou’s account of Beckett’s work in terms of just two spatial set ups: “spaces of wandering” and “closed spaces” (6).

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both the political dynamics of the confined spaces that repeatedly show up in Beckett’s texts as well as these texts’ resistance to interpretation within a fixed political paradigm.

Learning to Say “I” In Beckett’s German Diaries, Mark Nixon describes the 1930s as a period in which Beckett “learnt to say ‘I’” (35). As is the case with Beckett’s decision to write in French, his move from the largely third-person narratives of the pre-war prose to the first-person narrators of the novellas and novels he wrote in the years directly after World War II is not a clear-cut shift but more of “a series of blurry zigzags” (Slote, “Bilingual Beckett” 114). In other words, Beckett’s use of the first-person pronoun needs to be understood in terms of a gradual learning process during the 1930s and 40s; a process which included experiments with the first person in prose work such as “Ding-Dong” and Watt , poems such as the collection Echo’s Bones , the “Petit Sot” poems and “Match Nul”, as well as in his diaries, letters and essays. It is notable that the pronominal disjunction so prominent in The Unnamable is foreshadowed as early as Dream of Fair to Middling Women, when the narrator asks, “surely you see now what he am?” (72). That such a disjunction appears in Beckett’s first attempt at a novel links the willed self-confinement of Dream’s Belacqua—locked up in his “wombtomb” (45)—to the more radical self-alienation described in The Unnamable. We get an example of such self-alienation on The Unnamable’s very first page: no sooner has the narrator given himself an injunction to “say I” than he begins to say “not I”. But, as the two questions with which I opened emphasise, he not only longs to know “[w]ho now?” but also “[w]here now?” (1). If we shift our focus from narrative voice to narrated place, we can identify one important similarity between Beckett’s early prose and The Unnamable—namely, their common focus on confined space. In “Dante and the Lobster”, the impending hanging of the Malahide Murderer, Henry McCabe, in Mountjoy Prison is important in prompting Belacqua’s ethical quandary on the relationship between “piety” and “pity” (More Pricks 13). Between this story (first published 1932) and The Unnamable (first published as L’Innommable in 1953), Beckett returned repeatedly to institutions of coercive confinement in his writing: using asylum settings as important locales in Murphy and Watt , starting the journeys of “The End” and “The Expelled” from unnamed

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residential institutions, and setting one of the last scenes of Malone Dies in an asylum. When The Unnamable’s first readers opened their copy of the novel to read “[w]here now?” (1), they may have justifiably expected an institution of coercive confinement to emerge as the narrative’s answer to this question. But while the political dynamics of confined space are central to The Unnamable, the novel remains resistant to such carceral interpretations. Why is this so? Like many of the novels which precede it in Beckett’s oeuvre, The Unnamable is a text abounding in bounded space. Over the course of his futile attempt to fix his location, the narrator tells stories of himself in an urn (39–46, 54–59) and an enclosed yard at the centre of which is a windowless rotunda (29). He also imagines Worm, one of his “viceexister[s]”, confined inside a windowless inspection place with holes through which his tormentors peep, shine lights and grab him—a kind of negative panopticon (26, 70–73). Elsewhere, the narrator tells us that he is “in a head” (65, 88), a “dungeon” (85) and a prison (109, 128– 29). But due to persistent “denarration”, defined by Brian Richardson as “a kind of narrative negation in which a narrator denies significant aspects of his or her narrative that had earlier been presented as given”, the possibility of any of these spaces emerging as a stable narrative locale is undermined (87). The enclosure, the inspection place and the prison are all described as “vast” (Unnamable 29, 73, 129) and, in spite of the many depictions of confinement, there is no certainty that the space from which the narrator speaks is a restricted one: “as I have said, the place may well be vast, as it may well measure twelve feet in diameter” (5). Each confined space is undermined by a first-person narrative style which has left far behind the meticulous topography of third-person narration in Murphy. As the narrator puts it, “I’m where I always was, wherever that is” (102). According to the narrator, both this topographical crisis and the existential crisis that it entails are “the fault of the pronouns, there is no name for me, no pronoun for me, all the trouble comes from that” (123). Elsewhere in the text, he pointedly attacks his own narrative “I”: “But enough of this cursed first person, it is really too red a herring, I’ll get out of my depth if I’m not careful” (56). In a draft version of this sentence, there is a list of different grammatical forms of the pronoun he wants to get rid of: “Et puis assez de moi aussi, assez de moi, de je, de me” [“Anyway enough also of me, enough of me, of I, of myself”; my translation] (BDMP2, FN1 inside back cover). This draft sentence undoes its own undoing of the self by adding further versions of the first-person pronoun to a sentence which

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sets out to repudiate that pronoun, one of the paradoxical consequences of trying to create what Beckett famously described in his 1937 letter to Axel Kaun as a “literature of the non-word” [“Literatur des Unworts ”] by adding more language to what went before (Letters I 515, 520).3 Because of the long and complex gestation of these poetics, it is necessary to turn to a poem composed eighteen years before The Unnamable in order to understand the relationship between speaking self and confined space in the novel.

Finding “Me” Written in 1932, “Serena I” contains a pronominal idiosyncrasy that Beckett would draw on over two decades later when translating The Unnamable into English. While Lawrence Harvey identifies “the substitution of the non-reflexive ‘me’, as direct object of the verb, for the reflexive ‘myself’” as “a distinctive and significant stylistic trait” (91) of “Serena I”, the implications of this pronominal disjunction for the politics of Beckett’s prose have yet to be explored. As the editors of Beckett’s Collected Poems point out, the first instance of this pronominal anomaly in “Serena I” can be read as “a literal, if disorienting, translation of the French idiom ‘je me trouve’” (286). This is then echoed in standard, interrogative form three lines later: I find me taking the Crystal Palace for the Blessed Isles from Primrose Hill alas I must be that kind of person hence in Ken Wood who shall find me my breath held in the midst of thickets none but the most quarried lovers (16)

In the penultimate line of the earliest extant version of this stanza, sent with the rest of the poem in a letter to Thomas MacGreevy on 8 October 1932, Beckett makes a direct reference to the “quiet breath” of Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” (Keats, Complete Poems 281): “my quiet breath in the midst of thickets” (Letters I 131). Two other Keats poems also use the non-standard pronominal form, and notably, they use it with the same verb as Beckett. In Book III of “Endymion”, when relating 3 Van Hulle and Weller translate this as “literature of the unword” (162).

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his enchantment and bondage by Circe, Glaucus states: “Enforced, at the last by ocean’s foam / I found me; by my fresh, my native home” (Complete Poems 127). The knight of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” uses this form again, having likewise been seduced by an otherworldly female: “And I awoke and found me here” (Complete Poems 271). As in “Serena I”, there is a possible Francophone residue to the English used in “La Belle Dame”, particularly given the chivalric troubadour tradition’s roots in France. However, as we will see below, it is specifically as an Anglophone grammatical feature that Beckett uses this pronominal disjunction to help further disintegrate the speaking self in The Unnamable. More pragmatically, in terms of poetic metre, “me”, rather than the standard “myself”, keeps the tetrametric line of “La Belle Dame” from slipping over into an ill-fitting pentameter, or a tripping anapaest. Unlike Keats’s work, “Serena I” was written in free verse, but it does fall into occasional rhythmic regularity, most notably in the six iambic tetrameters of the above stanza, which centres on Hampstead Heath where Keats once lived (Roe, Keats 155–56, 283–84); in doing so, it mirrors the dominant metre of “La Belle Dame”. Keats’s second residence on the Heath, Wentworth Place, which is situated between Primrose Hill and Kenwood House, was opened to the public in the decade before Beckett wrote his poem.4 It is from Primrose Hill that the speaker of “Serena I” has an unclear view of the Crystal Palace on the other side of the city. Beckett studied in the nearby “grand old British Museum”—mentioned in the first line of “Serena I” (Collected Poems 16)—during the summer of 1932 and spent some time walking in the parks, including Hampstead Heath (Knowlson 161). Though it has not been possible to find any evidence of Beckett visiting Wentworth Place, it would not be surprising if he paid Keats’s house a visit, especially given his professed admiration for the Romantic poet:5 4 The house was opened to the public in 1925. In 1931, a new building was erected beside the house in order to display a collection of books and other material relating to Keats (see https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/things-to-do/attractions-museums-entertain ment/keats-house/history). This would have made the house an attractive prospect for Beckett to visit in 1932. 5 Though there is no record of Beckett having signed the visitor’s book, the records for the early 1930s contain very few signatures, suggesting that it is not a comprehensive record of visits made (Kenneth Page, Interpretation Officer, Keats House, email to the author, 27 January 2017). I would like to thank Kenneth Page for his help in this regard and Martina Prani´c for her research assistance in London.

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I like that crouching brooding quality in Keats—squatting on the moss, crushing a petal, licking his lips & rubbing his hands, ‘counting the last oozings, hours by hours’. I like him the best of them all, because he doesn’t beat his fists on the table. I like that awful sweetness and thick soft damp green [? richness]. And weariness: ‘Take into the air my quiet breath’. (Beckett to Thomas MacGreevy, undated [April/May 1930], Letters I 21)6

Beckett here shears Keats’s line, lopping off the “to” which subordinates it to preceding events in “Ode to a Nightingale”: Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath (Complete Poems 281)

Beckett does the same prepositional pruning when the line is used at the climax of “Dante and the Lobster”, making it appear again as an injunction to the self rather than a description of terminal poetic production (More Pricks 14).7 As Nixon notes, Beckett “used and adapted” this line as well as the poem’s association of “death” and “breath” in Dream, Murphy and Watt , demonstrating the deep influence Keats had on Beckett’s work while he was learning to say “I” (“Beckett and Romanticism” 70). Crucially for my analysis, Beckett’s framing of his admiration of Keats in opposition to the table-thumping of other Romantics foreshadows the self-focused political dissent of The Unnamable, while the two quotations he uses—the first adapted from the personification of nature in “To Autumn” (Complete Poems 360)—emphasise the interdependence between such fictional selves and the environments they inhabit. Based on the above evidence, it is extremely likely, given the setting of “Serena I” and its explicit reference to “Ode to a Nightingale”, that Keats was the source both of the tetrametric metre of the third stanza and Beckett’s use of the non-reflexive “me” as a direct object pronoun. The 6 Beckett’s admiration for Keats continued on his deathbed, on which he recited lines by the Romantic poet (Pilling 230). For an alternative reading of the word marked uncertain in my transcription of the letter (TCD MS 10402/6), see Nixon, “Beckett and Romanticism” 71. 7 As Christopher Ricks points out, the Keats line was in quotation marks in the first published version of the story (53 n. 8). See Beckett, “Dante” 236.

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three subsequent examples—“I surprise me moved by the many a funnel hinged”, “then I hug me below among the canaille”, “and afar off at all speed screw me up Wren’s giant bully”—occur in a long stanza so metrically diverse that the saved syllables are all but irrelevant (Collected Poems 16–17). However, in the short penultimate stanza, the focus reverts to the Heath and the iambic pattern with which it has earlier been associated: “but in Ken Wood / who shall find me” (17). Such metrical constraint must be taken into account when considering the function of such pronouns in Beckett’s poem. The text of The Unnamable, rhythmic as it is, has no such constraint, making the function of its non-object pronouns more overtly political.

Finding “Me” in The Unnamable According to Anne Atik (70–71), Beckett was fascinated by Keats’s concept of “Negative Capability”, which he famously outlined to his brothers in December 1817 in the following terms: “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (Selected Letters 60). This is in line with Beckett’s own pronouncements regarding a poetics based on “impotence, ignorance” rather than “omniscience and omnipotence” (qtd. in Shenker 3). Fittingly, the narrator of The Unnamable rails against omniscience, from the reference to Greek scepticism in the use of “ephectic” on the novel’s opening page to the repeated “don’t know”s of the last page, which culminate in the declaration “I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know” (1, 134). As this shows, Keats’s influence on the novel’s pronouns precipitates not a placid, or even “capable” acceptance of uncertainty, but an aggressive disintegration of self, which goes hand in hand with the spatial uncertainty of the text.8 Having tried for more than one hundred pages, the narrator is no closer to locating himself as his narrative draws to a finish: “first the place, then I’ll find me in it”, directly echoing the pronominal idiosyncrasy of “Serena I” (118). As well as calling to mind Beckett’s debt to Keats, this statement neatly dispenses with the theological and metaphysical baggage 8 As well as noting other allusions to Keats in Molloy and Happy Days, C. J. Ackerley and S. E. Gontarski point out that The Unnamable’s line regarding windows which “opened on the sea” is reminiscent of Keats’s “magic casements, opening on the foam” in “Ode to a Nightingale” (297; Keats, Complete Poems 281).

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of the more standard phrase: “I’ll find myself”. Just as Beckett considered, but then rejected, the woolly sounding title “Beyond Words” when composing his novel (BDMP 2, EN2 front cover), it is hard to imagine the narrator of The Unnamable ever using the verb “to find” to express his own self-fulfilment in this reflexive manner, beloved of self-help gurus. The title he ultimately chose points instead to the narrating subject as the locus of Beckett’s poetics of “unwording” (Van Hulle and Weller). The text’s assault on the reflexive first-person pronoun is key to these poetics: the most common use of a non-reflexive direct object pronoun in The Unnamable is in conjunction with a verb of self-expression. From very early on, the narrator expresses doubts about his ability to “utter me” (10). In spite of this, he declares early on his intention to “speak of me” all the same (14)—this phrase is repeated throughout the novel. He also imagines himself “referring to me” and “talking to me about me” before wondering, at the end of his narrative: “perhaps they have said me already” (68, 112, 134). As the narrator’s relationship with this “they” demonstrates, Beckett’s grammatical assault is also deeply political. His second declaration of intent to “utter me” occurs in a passage which begins with the denarration of a story he has just told of his family’s death by poisoning: “I was never anywhere but here, no one ever got me out of here”. He then describes his oppression by lamenting the fact that his voice is imposed on him by an anonymous group of others: “What I speak of, what I speak with, all comes from them” (36). Self-expression in words that have been given to him by these others might be possible, the narrator contends, through a private language which is for his ears only, rather than those of the oppressive “they” who force him to speak: Do they consider me so plastered with their rubbish that I can never extricate myself, never make a gesture but their cast must come to life? But within, motionless, I can live, and utter me, for no ears but my own. (37)

However, the peculiar grammatical structure of the declaration to “utter me” in the English version of the text points to a dichotomy involved in this attempt to speak of oneself to oneself. The idea that language is a system of communication which is fundamentally social, or something “between people” (qtd. and trans. in Weiler 55), is explored in the linguistic philosophy of Fritz Mauthner, whose work Beckett read

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intensively.9 This would suggest political implications for a narrator who claims to be “in words, made of words, others’ words” (104). The irony of a fictional narrator telling us that what he is narrating is for no one else to hear—or, presumably, to read—brings into sharp focus the contradiction inherent in his attempt at inward escape.10 The oppression that the first-person narrator of The Unnamable suffers is due directly to his being bound up in a discursive system from which he feels alienated. Yet, it is clear that he must use this discourse if he is to express his sense of alienation. As can be seen in Beckett’s drafts, the French “me déclarer”, which appears in the published version of the above passage—“Mais là-dedans, sans bouger, je pourrai vivre, et me déclarer, seul à m’entendre” (L’Innommable 64)—was first translated as the reflexive “give utterance to myself” (BDMP2, EN1 42r). In the first typescript of the translation, this was changed: “But inside my shell within , motionless, I can live, and give utterance utter me, to myself for no ears but my own” (BDMP2, ET1 42r). Beckett had, from the very start of his translation process, used non-reflexive object pronouns in his notebooks and typescripts, so this edit was a grafting of a grammatical feature already employed elsewhere. Moreover, given Beckett’s use of such pronouns over two decades earlier in “Serena I”, it seems highly likely that this non-standard pronominal form was part of Beckett’s attempt to further destabilise the narrating subject of the novel, thus intensifying the uncertainty that governs this narrator’s place of being. Another consequence of the change is to give a different dynamic to the “textual construction of subjectivity” in the English version of the text (Katz 19): while the Francophone narrator can achieve some form of self-reflexive expression, the Anglophone narrator can only “utter me”.

9 See Van Hulle and Nixon 158–63. This phrase is marked in the copy of Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache preserved in Beckett’s library (BDL). 10 For a critique of the “inward turn” in Beckett criticism, see Beloborodova, who uses a postcognitivist paradigm to argue that The Unnamable “deals a serious blow to the ubiquitous all-internal Cartesian mind” (216). I am grateful to Olga Beloborodova for sharing her research on this topic with me.

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The Politics of Confinement If L’Innommable is constructed using a “non-self-coincidental voice” (Trezise 107, 138), then, because of its paradoxical pronouns, the speaking self of The Unnamable is even further away from itself. Given the pressure the Unnamable is under from an indistinct “they” to tell his story, this further self-division in translation has direct implications for the politics of the text. To clarify this point, I turn now to a contemporary of Beckett’s whose work also charts a relentless assault on the first-person pronoun. Though he told Rosemary Pountney in a letter of 1978 that he was “unaware of any influence from [the French theatre practitioner and writer Antonin] Artaud” (qtd. in Pountney 182), Beckett confirmed in a questionnaire sent to James Knowlson six years earlier that he had indeed read Artaud “for the odd blaze” prior to writing Waiting for Godot (Beckett and Knowlson).11 One of the books in Beckett’s library at his death was a 1958 English translation of Artaud’s seminal The Theatre and Its Double (BDL), in which Artaud praises the Balinese theatre’s attempt “to address not only the mind but the senses” (Artaud to Jean Paulhan, 28 May 1933 119). This quasi-Romantic privileging of “Sensations rather than of Thoughts” (Keats to Benjamin Bailey, 22 November 1817, Selected Letters 54) bears striking similarities to Beckett’s attempt in Not I to create a stage voice “[a]ddressed less to the understanding than to the nerves of the audience” (Beckett to Alan Schneider, 16 October 1972, Beckett and Schneider 283). As Beckett recorded in a diary entry on painter Kaspar David Freidrich, he was drawn to a “bémolisé” [dampened/flattened; my translation] form of Romanticism (qtd. in Nixon, Beckett’s German Diaries 142). However, while he admired Keats’s “quiet melancholy”, Beckett’s engagement in The Unnamable with the linguistic idiosyncrasy of Artaud brings forth an altogether more aggressively dissonant attitude towards social interaction (Nixon, Beckett’s German Diaries 143). Like the first-person narrators of many of Artaud’s texts, the narrative “I” of The Unnamable feels oppressed by a threatening and frequently sadistic “they”, an opposition which became a feature of Beckett’s prose from his postwar novellas onwards (Slote, “Continuing the End” 206;

11 Beckett’s quotation on Artaud is taken from the University of Reading archival finding aid: www.reading.ac.uk/adlib/Details/archiveSpecial/110246027.

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Cohn 129).12 This grammatical structure is evident from the opening line of the first of these novellas, “The End”: “They clothed me and gave me money” (Complete Short Prose 78)—a line which itself is quoted by the narrator of The Unnamable (23). Later, this charity takes a sinister turn: “You’ve been sufficiently assassinated, sufficiently suicided, to be able now to stand on your own feet, like a big boy” (46). Whereas the English version is passive, the French contains “the paradoxical grammatical construction ‘Ils t’ont […] assez suicide’” [“they have suicided you enough”; my translation] (Van Hulle and Weller 142; L’Innommable 77). The idea of an artist’s suicide being effected by social norms, enforced by the discipline of psychiatry, is the central subject of Artaud’s Van Gogh le suicidé de la société. More specifically, Artaud’s book was written as a critique of what the narrator of Murphy calls “the text-book attitude” towards asylum patients (111), with Artaud furious at the diagnosis of Van Gogh as “déséquilibré” [“unstable”; my translation] by a psychiatrist writing in Arts magazine (qtd. in Artaud, Œuvres 1436). This article was published to coincide with a 1947 exhibition of Van Gogh’s work at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, which both Artaud and Beckett had occasion to visit. Though the publication of Artaud’s book on Van Gogh would have put the term “suicidé” in the air of postwar Parisian discourse, this was not the first time he had used the unusual verbal form. It had already appeared in his 1925 article on the question of suicide, published in La Révolution surréaliste: I suffer hideously from life. There is no state that I can attain. And it is certain that I have been dead for a long time, I have already committed suicide. They have suicided me, so to speak [“ON m’a suicidé, c’est-àdire”]. (Selected Writings 103; Œuvres 124)13

Writing over two decades later, Artaud had many more reasons for a focused attack on the normative social institutions represented by this “they”, having spent over eight years in confinement, including fiftyeight electroshock treatments during his nineteen months in an asylum 12 For an analysis of sadism in the asylums of Murphy, Watt and Malone Dies , see Baroghel. I am grateful to Elsa Baroghel for sharing her research on this topic with me and for her advice on translation. 13 David Shafer translates this phrase as “someone has already suicided me” (58).

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at Rodez (Shafer 165). Released to more humane conditions at a nursing home in Ivry, Artaud gave an infamous performance at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier on 13 January 1947, within walking distance of Beckett’s apartment on the rue des Favorites. Beckett would have been able to follow the fallout from this performance in Combat (see Artaud, Œuvres 1190–1191), which he regularly read in the 1940s (Morin 25). When Artaud passed away in 1948, Beckett linked his confinement to that of James Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, whom Beckett had visited regularly in the same nursing home before the war: “Artaud died the other day in Lucia’s home at Ivry” (Beckett to Thomas MacGreevy, 18 March 1948, Letters II 75). It is highly likely, therefore, that Artaud was not far from Beckett’s mind as he started drafting L’Innommable in January 1950. According to Artaud’s book on Van Gogh, “one does not commit suicide by oneself […], there must be an army of evil beings [“mauvais êtres ”] to cause the body to make the gesture against nature, that of taking its own life” (Selected Writings 511; Œuvres 1462). The unusual grammatical construction of “suicidé/suicided” reinforces the fact that for the Unnamable, self-constitution (and its opposite, self-destruction) is still intimately connected to the “dirty pack of fake maniacs” to whom he opposes himself (84). The willed self-alienation of Beckett’s early writing, expressed through pronominal disjunctions and spaces of coercive confinement, is thus crucial to understanding the politics of The Unnamable.

Conclusion: The Resistance of The Unnamable The fiercely anti-institutional thrust of Artaud’s book on Van Gogh, borne out of his own mistreatment in confinement, was part of a wider wave of postwar writing which would in succeeding decades forcefully challenge the discipline of psychiatry.14 Where should we situate Beckett’s postwar writing in this context? And what can this context tell us about the political dynamics of his writing on confinement? Artaud identifies himself as an “authentic madman” [“aliéné authentique”] “who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor” (Selected Writings 485; Œuvres 1441). For readers of Beckett, such heroism in madness brings

14 See Porter 2–5.

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Murphy’s Mr Endon to mind—or, rather, Murphy’s opinion of Mr Endon as a hero who refuses to bow to social norms. In that novel, Murphy’s hero-worship of Mr Endon is shown up as a fetishisation of difference. Our greater narrative proximity to the disintegrating self in The Unnamable, as well as the undermining of any fixed or reliable space of narration, leads to a shift of political effect when Beckett alludes to Artaud’s polemical text on Van Gogh. For Van Hulle and Weller, “[a]n entire history of institutionalization, mental instability, victimization and artistic resistance is captured in that one, Artaudian word ‘suicidé’ (suicided)” (143). Yet the speaking self who utters that word is no longer embedded in the world of those institutions to the same degree as Murphy, Belacqua or even Malone’s Macmann. Beckett’s depictions of asylums in Murphy and Malone Dies share with Artaud’s work a sharply critical perspective on structures of “hierarchy and power in institutional environments” (Baroghel), but, due to the undermining of space in the novel, the single Artaudian echo in The Unnamable resists being interpreted as a sustained attack on these institutions. The textual resistance of The Unnamable, in which key grounds for interpretation (narrative self and narrated space) have been consistently undermined, lies at the heart of the novel’s political effects. For Sam Slote, “Beckettian resistance is such that it resists being made into a tool of resistance” (“Namelessness” 143). While Beckett was frequently instrumental in certain political causes—most notably the French Resistance during World War II—the denarration of self and confined space in The Unnamable demonstrates a resistance to the confinement of textual interpretation within a fixed political paradigm, such as, for instance, Artaudian incarceration. The political charge of Beckett’s writing emerges not solely from the subject matter he chooses to represent (figures of dereliction, often found in spaces of confinement) but also in the “resistance […] to representation” of these key elements in his compositional repertoire (Lloyd 226). Central to the politics of The Unnamable is the resistance to interpretation of a disintegrating “I”, who struggles to find “me”, continually positing and retracting spaces of confinement which fail to definitively “shut me up” (85).

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Works Cited Ackerley, C. J. and S. E. Gontarski. The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett: A Reader’s Guide to His Works, Life, and Thought. Grove Press, 2004. Addyman, David. “Phenomenology ‘Less the Rosy Hue’: Beckett and the Philosophy of Place”. Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 33, no. 4, 2010, pp. 112–128. Artaud, Antonin. Œuvres. Edited by Évelyne Grossman, Gallimard, 2016. ———. Selected Writings. Edited by Susan Sontag, translated by Helen Weaver, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976. Atik, Anne. How It Was: A Memoir of Samuel Beckett. Faber and Faber, 2001. Badiou, Alain. “The Writing of the Generic”. Translated by Bruno Bosteels, Nina Power and Alberto Toscano. On Beckett, edited by Alberto Toscano and Nina Power, Clinamen Press, 2003, pp. 1–36. Baroghel, Elsa. “‘Indoor Bowers of Bliss’: Mental Asylums in Samuel Beckett’s Works”. Paper presented at the “Beckett and Politics” conference, University of Reading, 3 November 2016, no pagination. The Beckett Digital Library: A Digital Genetic Edition. Edited by Dirk Van Hulle, Mark Nixon, Vincent Neyt and Veronica Bãlã, Antwerp UP, 2016, www.bec kettarchive.org/. Abbreviated as BDL. Beckett, Samuel. The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett. Edited by Seán Lawlor and John Pilling, Faber and Faber, 2012. ———. The Complete Short Prose, 1929–1989. Edited by S. E. Gontarski, Grove Press, 1995. ———. “Dante and the Lobster.” This Quarter, vol. 5, no. 2, 1932, pp. 222– 236. ———. Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Edited by Eoin O’Brien and Edith Fournier, Black Cat Press, 1992. ———. L’Innommable. Éditions de Minuit, 1987. ———. L’Innommable/The Unnamable: A Digital Genetic Edition. Edited by Dirk Van Hulle, Shane Weller and Vincent Neyt, Brussels, Antwerp UP, 2013. The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, module 2, www.beckettarchive.org. Abbreviated as BDMP2. ———. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. I: 1929–1940. Edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge UP, 2009. ———. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. II: 1941–1956. Edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge UP, 2011. ———. More Pricks Than Kicks. Edited by Cassandra Nelson, Faber and Faber, 2010. ———. Murphy. Edited by J. C. C. Mays, Faber and Faber, 2009. ———. The Unnamable. Edited by Steven Connor, Faber and Faber, 2010.

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Beckett, Samuel and James Knowlson. “Samuel Beckett Questionnaire”. UoR JEK A/1/2/4, 1972, no pagination. Beckett, Samuel and Alan Schneider. No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider. Edited by Maurice Harmon, Harvard UP, 1998. Beloborodova, Olga. “The ‘Inward Turn’ of Modernism in Samuel Beckett’s Work: A Postcognitivist Reassessment”. 2018. University of Antwerp, PhD Thesis. Cohn, Ruby. A Beckett Canon. U of Michigan P, 2008. Connor, Steven. “Preface”. The Unnamable, by Samuel Beckett, edited by Steven Connor, Faber and Faber, 2010, pp. vii–xxv. ———. Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text. Revised ed., The Davies Group, 2007. Harvey, Lawrence E. Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic. Princeton UP, 1970. Katz, Daniel. Saying I No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett. Northwestern UP, 1999. Keats, John. Complete Poems. Edited by Jack Stillinger, Belknap Press, 1982. ———. Selected Letters of John Keats. Edited by Grant F. Scott, revised ed., Harvard UP, 2005. Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. Bloomsbury, 1997. Lloyd, David. Beckett’s Thing: Painting and Theatre. Edinburgh UP, 2016. Morin, Emilie. Beckett’s Political Imagination. Cambridge UP, 2017. Nixon, Mark. “Beckett and Romanticism in the 1930s”. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, vol. 18, 2007, pp. 61–76. ———. Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries, 1936–1937 . Continuum, 2011. Pilling, John. A Samuel Beckett Chronology. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Porter, Roy. “Introduction.” The Confinement of the Insane: International Perspectives, 1800–1965, edited by Roy Porter and David Wright, Cambridge UP, 2003, pp. 1–19. Pountney, Rosemary. Theatre of Shadows: Samuel Beckett’s Drama, 1956–76, from All That Fall to Footfalls, with Commentaries on the Latest Plays. Colin Smythe, 1988. Richardson, Brian. Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Ohio State UP, 2006. Ricks, Christopher. Beckett’s Dying Words. Oxford UP, 1993. Roe, Nicholas. John Keats: A New Life. Yale UP, 2012. Shafer, David A. Antonin Artaud. Reaktion, 2016. Shenker, Israel. “Moody Man of Letters: A Portrait of Samuel Beckett, Author of the Puzzling ‘Waiting for Godot’”. New York Times, 6 May. 1956, “Section 2”, pp. 1, 3.

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Slote, Sam. “Bilingual Beckett: Beyond the Linguistic Turn”. The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, edited by Dirk Van Hulle, Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 114–125. ———. “Continuing the End: Variation between Beckett’s French and English Prose Works”. Publishing Samuel Beckett, edited by Mark Nixon, British Library, 2011, pp. 205–218. ———. “Namelessness from Artaud to Beckett”. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, vol. 31, no. 1, 2019, pp. 130–146. Trezise, Thomas. Into the Breach: Samuel Beckett and the Ends of Literature. Princeton UP, 1990. Van Hulle, Dirk and Mark Nixon. Samuel Beckett’s Library. Cambridge UP, 2013. Van Hulle, Dirk and Shane Weller. The Making of Samuel Beckett’s L’Innommable / The Unnamable. Antwerp UP, 2014. Weiler, Gershon. Mauthner’s Critique of Language. Cambridge UP, 1970.

PART II

Beckett & Biopolitics: Editors’ Preface

In this second grouping of chapters, our focus shifts from the relationship between politics and language in Beckett’s writing to that between politics and human life. The transdisciplinary field of ‘biopolitics’ gained ground in the mid- to late twentieth century through the work of (among others) Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Achille Mbembe. According to S. E. Wilmer and Audrone˙ Žukauskaite, ˙ biopolitics relates to anything from the question of citizenship, human rights and global security measures, through DNA mapping and organ donation, to the economic and social strategies used by governments and other authorities to control bodies, societies and populations (1). In this section, contributors recast the forms of life that populate Beckett’s writing, linking their aesthetic dimensions with complex political modalities and contexts to reveal how, as Seán Kennedy puts it, the “regimes of power” which biopolitical discourse identifies has become “indispensable to an account of Beckett’s political bodies” (1). Whether they are the more fully realised figures of his early work or the disembodied voices of the later texts, these chapters demonstrate how Beckett’s subjects operate as lacunae for a productive convergence of political, ethical and aesthetic reflection. To begin this section, Kumiko Kiuchi and Brenda O’Connell scrutinise Beckett’s own authorial choices when it came to his troubling portrayals of women. Kiuchi and O’Connell reveal how a more acute awareness of the gendered power structures in Beckett’s work can revitalise our understanding of Beckett more generally. Kiuchi’s chapter explores this through

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a comparison of the sexualised artistic motif of Aristotle and Phyllis with Beckett’s depiction of Winnie in Happy Days. Beginning with the overtly ‘feminine’ requirements for Winnie’s appearance on stage, she explains how the play operates in the tension between misogynistic depiction and subversive undermining, revealing a significant new reading of one of Beckett’s most iconic stage presences. Taking the idea of misogyny in a different direction, O’Connell moves away from Kiuchi’s exploration of Beckett’s depictions of sex and sexuality to explore the biopolitical significance of motherhood in Beckett’s prose. Through a reading of “First Love”, O’Connell suggests that Beckett’s long-held obsession with the womb and pre-natal experience remains an underexplored and, in some sense, resisted area for Beckett Studies when it comes to considerations of gender and sexuality. O’Connell argues that Beckett’s treatment of the distinctly female experience of motherhood is often inflected by an expressed misogyny that is central to how figures of the mid-century prose function. Together, these chapters invite important debates about the different ways that Beckett exerts authorial control over the female body, and the onlooker (whether reader, audience member or critic) becomes complicit through the act of looking. They demonstrate how Beckett not only offers sometimes unique depictions of femininity and the female body (most radically, perhaps, in Not I ), but also exhibits elements that are decidedly and unavoidably misogynistic. Through this biopolitical lens, we can see how the question of gender in Beckett is less an inconvenient ‘tacked-on’ idea or theme that distracts us from Beckett’s frequently masculocentric (disguised as ‘gender-free’ or ‘gender neutral’) aesthetic, than it is a pivotal undercurrent that underlies, encompasses and arguably engenders much of the political and aesthetic concerns of his work. While O’Connell highlights the necessary progenitive process involved in the acquisition of the title ‘mother’, Marc Farrant explores a related aspect of Beckett’s biopolitics: the politics of life itself. Combining several of Beckett’s philosophical influences with the biopolitical theory offered by Foucault and Agamben, Farrant suggests that Beckett does not so much establish his own political stance within his textual exploration of life, as he does a radical position from which to undermine the logic that holds together dominant modes of political thinking. Giovanna Vincenti and Hannah Simpson conclude the section by considering the historical significance of certain biopolitical ideologies. Vincenti addresses Beckett’s relationship to modernism and the 1930s

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avant-garde through a detailed analysis of Belacqua, the central figure of Dream of Fair to Middling Women and More Pricks Than Kicks. Drawing on what we know of Beckett’s reading of Max Nordau’s Degeneration, Vincenti traces the pathological degenerative trajectory of Beckett’s fictional double that occurs in the early texts. Using Beckett’s early aesthetic rendering of bodily degeneration, Vincenti explores the doublebind of European racial politics combined with Beckett’s own authorial anxieties. This historical rendering of the body is also explored in Simpson’s chapter, which uses the idea of the ‘fascist body’ to consider Beckett’s staging of pain against Nazi and Vichy body politics. Simpson uses disability theory, as well as an account of Nazi and Vichy eugenicist approaches to body politics, to demonstrate that Beckett resists the “exclusionary bodily aesthetics” of fascism in Waiting for Godot by bringing to centre stage the physically and mentally impaired bodies deemed “undesirable” in the mid-century.

Works Cited Kennedy, Seán, “Introduction. “Cephalopods of state”: Beckett and Biopolitics”. Estudios Irlandeses: Journal of Irish Studies, 14.2, (2019): 1–7. Wilmer, S. E. and Audrone˙ Žukauskaite. ˙ “Introduction”. Resisting Biopolitics: Philosophical, Political, and Performative Strategies, edited by Audrone˙ Žukauskaite˙ and S. E. Wilmer, Routledge, 2016.

CHAPTER 6

Tweaking Misogyny or Misogyny Twisted: Beckett’s Take on “Aristotle and Phyllis” in Happy Days Kumiko Kiuchi

Happy Days is unique in its dramatic representation of femininity within Beckett’s work. In contrast to most of his dramatic pieces, where female characters are often ambiguous in their age and gender, the description of Winnie is quite concrete: “[a]bout fifty, well-preserved, blonde for preference, plump, arms and shoulders bare, low bodice, big bosom, pearl necklace” (5). She is middle aged and physically glamorous, dressed as she is in an outfit that emphasises her physique, which contrasts other Beckettian female characters who tend to be covered entirely with clothing. The combination of the low bodice and the necklace suggests wedding attire, although other props, such as Winnie’s “capacious black bag, shopping variety” and “collapsible collapsed parasol ” are more mundane. Her fashion may be a collection of the different moments in her life. What adds to her uniqueness is that she is buried up to her waist in a mound in Act 1 and all the way to the neck in Act 2, during

K. Kiuchi (B) Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan © The Author(s) 2021 W. Davies and H. Bailey (eds.), Beckett and Politics, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47110-1_6

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which she becomes a target of misogynistic treatment by a so-called Mr. Cooker/Shower. In both Acts, Winnie recalls and recounts the Cooker/Shower couple who once looked at and commented on her.1 Oddly enough, the couple behave as if Winnie could not hear what they were saying, and the man comments on the misery of Winnie’s situation with a mild tone of disdain: “What’s she doing? […] stuck up to her diddies in the bleeding ground” (25). The man shamelessly objectifies her: “Can’t have been a bad bosom […] in its day. […] Is there any life in her legs? […] Has she anything on underneath?” (34). The woman, on the other hand, reacts harshly to her partner’s misogynistic remarks by calling him names. However, the woman does not go as far as to offer any help to Winnie. In Act 1, the couple touch on the possibility of digging her out, but they soon leave “hand in hand” (25) as if they had seen nothing. Yet Winnie is not resentful, even sounding as though she might miss them when, on both the occasions she speaks of the couple, she calls them the “last human kind” (25, 34). Several scholars have pointed out the misogynistic attitudes observed in Beckett’s early prose (Chiang 51). What concerns the analysis here is whether such attitudes change and, if they do, how they do so as Beckett turns to writing and staging dramatic pieces. Mary Bryden has analysed the process by which misogyny subsides from the three aspects of stasis, sterility and absence, and she argues how in many ways both male and female characters come to resemble one another in his dramatic works: they are equally restricted in physical movement (90), and the self-questioning mental faculties of female characters (for example, Mrs. Rooney in All That Fall and Winnie in Happy Days ) echo those of the male characters of Beckett’s earlier prose work (101). Furthermore, the “post-coitum” landscape, as Bryden phrases it, where Beckettian characters are so remote from “fornication” or sexual reproduction, looms in most of his dramatic texts. This alleviates the extent to which female characters can be accused of that familiar Beckettian “sin of reproduction” (94). At the same time, Bryden confirms that misogyny and stereotyping

1 The name “Cooker” evokes the German word “gucken” meaning to “direct one’s gaze at someone” while “Shower” suggests “schauen” meaning to “show” (McMullan 54).

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of women is not entirely eliminated from Beckett’s dramatic work in the 1950s and 1960s.2 Beckett himself held the view that Winnie must be a woman, not a man. On one occasion, he commented that she is “not stoic, she’s unaware” (Knowlson 17). However, the recollections of Brenda Bruce— who played Winnie at The Royal Court in London in 1962—exemplifies the word “stoic” here. Bruce recalls Beckett’s statement that only a woman “would cope with that and go down singing”, in a situation where she “would not be allowed to sleep […] [where] there is no shade”, and only “with a little parcel of things” that has seen her through life (qtd. in Jeffers 140–41). In Beckett’s understanding, Winnie can endure much suffering because she does not notice things. He conceives of Winnie as a character who does not meddle with questions, instead immersing herself in her everyday routine and her memory of the past. So, for Beckett, it seems that “being unaware” is as much an attribute of women as is the ability to “cope” and “go down singing”. This leads us back to the earlier question: does Winnie embody the remains of Beckettian misogyny, or is she a counterexample? To address this question, this chapter will consider Happy Days in terms of its scenography. It explores the possibility that Beckett intentionally adopts a misogynistic landscape from the history of art in the form of a theme called “Mounted Aristotle” or “Aristotle and Phyllis” in order to question the voyeuristic nature of the gaze of the spectator. This theme features a young woman, Phyllis, who mounts the back of the elderly philosopher, Aristotle. As the story goes, Aristotle was enchanted by her song and beauty to such an extent that he agreed to kneel down on all fours and have Phyllis climb on his back. Cunningly enough, there was an onlooker of this scene, the pupil of this philosophical master, Alexander the Great. The theme is part of the topos called “Power of Women”, and symbolises “the reversible world”, the misogynistic humour which was very popular in late medieval times and the early modern period. Here, a woman occupies the upper position, replacing male superiority and degrading and 2 Recent studies tend to approach the Beckettian misogyny as an ‘effect’ of the broader historical, psychological and socio-cultural conditions Beckett lived in, rather than to discuss and evaluate the misogyny itself. Paul Stewart identifies the “fear of procreation” and “misopoedia” (61) as instigators of misogyny; Jennifer Jeffers analyses in some Beckettian characters an inability to adapt themselves to Anglo-Irish forms of masculinity (135–44); and Chris Ackerley scrutinises Beckett’s “Notebooks”, arguing that Robert Burton is a possible source of Beckett’s early misogynistic references.

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bullying a male figure by focusing on their power and social standing (Smith 71). This theme visually resonates with Happy Days: Winnie is in the upper position, while her husband, Willie, is on all fours like Aristotle. The Cooker/Shower, as onlookers, then frame the spectacle. The connection between Happy Days and “Aristotle and Phyllis” may seem unexpected at first. Yet, along with the visual resemblances, certain biographical and philological details prove this link to be more concrete. We know, for instance, that Beckett already knew of this theme in the 1930s. In his “Psychology Notebooks”, written between 1932 and 1938 (in which he copied from or summarised books he read on psychology and psychoanalysis), he copied out the following line from German psychologist Alfred Adler’s The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology (1924): “Kampaspa the mistress of Alexander riding on Aristotle” (Adler 159; Feldman 349).3 Here, “Kampaspa” should be spelt “Kampaspe”, the German name for “Phyllis”. Beckett’s spelling error attests to the likelihood that he simply copied from Adler, who makes the same error; that is to say, Beckett likely read this name (at least in German) for the first time in this book. Adler discusses “Aristotle and Phyllis” within the context of his analysis of the positions “above and beneath”, regarding the female occupation of the upper position as the manifestation of a patient’s self-defence mechanism, called “masculine protest”, resulting from her inferiority complex. Another clue that suggests the link between Winnie and Aristotle more explicitly can be found in Winnie’s lines in Happy Days: The sadness after song. [Pause.] Have you run across that, Willie? [Pause.] In the course of your experience. [Pause.] No? [Pause.] Sadness after intimate sexual intercourse one is familiar with of course. [Pause.] You would concur with Aristotle there, Willie, I fancy. [Pause.] Yes, that one knows and is prepared to face. [Pause.] But after song … [Pause.] It does not last of course. That is what I find so wonderful. [Pause.] It wears away. […] One loses one’s classics. [Pause.] A part. [Pause.] A part remains. (33–34)

Here, Winnie makes a direct connection between sexual intercourse and the Aristotle figure. According to existing studies (Kenner 50–51), this particular sadness originates in the axiom attributed to pseudo-Aristotle, 3 Beckett’s notebooks are held in the Trinity College, Dublin, Special Collection. See TCD MS10971/8/32 for Beckett’s original transcription.

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of “post coitum omne animal triste est sive gallus et mulier [all animals after intercourse are sad except for cocks and women]”, or a similar axiom from Galen of Pergamum.4 The implication here is that both cocks and women are so boundless in their sexual drive that they do not feel sad after the intercourse. Here, Winnie, the woman, who compares sexual intercourse to singing, which is anticipated as the climax of this play. The parallel between singing and sexual intercourse appears to challenge this misogynistic axiom, though it is not obvious from the context whether or not “one” who knows “that” includes Winnie, who is already buried in the mound. Her phrase, “a part remains”, here functions as a metanarrative regarding her mistaking pseudo-Aristotle for Aristotle and her forgetfulness. In the following, Adler’s explanation on upper positions allows us to read Happy Days in light of a similarity in setting and scenography with “Aristotle and Phyllis”. Furthermore, their differences reveal Beckett’s position as conflicting with the misogyny manifest in “Aristotle and Phyllis”. Beckett borrows numerous phrases and ideas from philosophers and artists, often without mentioning their names, and proceeds to process them in his own way, arguably unveiling his (perhaps unintended) authorial intention, and thereby offering a lens through which Beckettian misogyny can be scrutinised.

Occupying the Upper Position: “Kampaspa” and Masculine Protest in Alfred Adler The exact period during which Beckett read Adler’s two books is not known, though we know it was before February 1935, since he writes to his friend Thomas MacGreevy, stating that he is “finished with Adler”, and accusing him [Adler] of evincing “[a]nother one track mind” and of being a “dogmatist” (Letters I 245–46). Beckett’s “Psychology Notebooks” show that he first read R. S. Woodworth’s Contemporary Schools of Psychology which introduced him to Adler’s work. He then moved on to Adler’s Neurotic Constitution (Feldman 343–46) and The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology (Feldman 346–50).

4 Cf. Belacqua feels a “sad animal” twice when he makes an upward movement in “Fingal” in More Prick Than Kicks. John Pilling discusses the connection between this “sad animal” and the axiom of the pseudo-Aristotle (38–40).

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Adler’s two books mention “Aristotle and Phyllis” in relation to what he calls “masculine protest”. In Section VI of Neurotic Constitution, “The Antithesis of Above and Beneath”, there is a footnote alluding to Phyllis as one of “Alexander’s paramours riding on Aristotle”.5 The footnote also lists the names of North European artists who worked on the theme. The names must have intrigued Beckett, a lover of German and Dutch artists: “Burgkmair, Hans Baldung, Grien, Dürer” (162). Adler begins this section by explaining how humans are socially trained to appreciate the value of “being up”. In the process of children learning to walk on two feet, for instance, they are also taught that “being beneath”, by crawling on the ground, is negative and unhygienic. Heavenly bodies that symbolise the place of the divine contrast with the dirtiness of the ground. Adler applies this antithetical structure to the movement of up and down and to the contrast of masculinity and femininity. An upward movement symbolises masculinity, “triumph” and “feeling powerful”, as opposed to a downward and falling movement implying “defeat” and “feeling less powerful” or being effeminate (160–61). Beckett’s summary of Adler’s theory, copied from Woodworth’s book, equally encapsulates the core of Adler’s position (Feldman 319). Here, Adler explains that the will to power derives from the consciousness of inferiority. Those with an inferiority complex seek to secure their superior position by believing that they are somehow deprived of the qualities they should have. In Neurotic Constitution, Adler names the manifestation of this kind of self-defence mechanism the “masculine protest”. Despite its name, it is a symptom observed in both male and female patients. Adler describes a case of a 25year old female patient suffering from emotional attacks, attributing her illness to the fact that she grew up feeling inferior to her younger brother. Her masculine protest manifests in her dreams, in which she climbs “on the head of everyone” and finds herself “riding on a man, on a horse” (162). For Adler, who regards dreams as reflecting a state of mind in which the desire of the individual is fulfilled, the conclusion to be drawn is that this displays the patient’s safeguarding mechanism. It is to this image of “riding on a man, on a horse” that Adler adds the footnote: “Alexander’s paramours riding on Aristotle”. Beckett’s note, “Kampaspa the mistress of Alexander riding on Aristotle”, is copied from the section “Syphilophobia” of The Practice and 5 I would like to thank Naoya Mori, Professor of Kobe Women’s University, for letting me know the existence of this note.

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Theory of Individual Psychology. It is a footnote added to the following passage: A number of the very finest works are concerned with the Kampaspa, Delilah and Salomé motif and when regarded superficially, seem to present the idea of triumph in the abstract or the power of love. At times, this problem – fear of woman – becomes even more general and delineates it spatially (big woman—small man, the woman above—the man below). […] Among the reactions to this original fear (of woman), there is also found the depreciation of woman since art is predominantly in the hands of men. (159–60, emphasis retained)

Prior to this passage, Adler explains the safeguarding nature of patients with “syphilophobia” in exactly the same way he does “masculine protest”. The patients are extremely careful that they never catch syphilis. However, some patients (mis)judge their carefulness as insufficient, thereby further enforcing their carefulness. Conversely, some patients practice extreme carelessness in order to increase the possibility of catching syphilis and to ultimately “be punished” so that they can justify their safeguarding (153–55). Adler also identifies the connection between syphilophobia and the fear of women exemplified by artists and philosophers, including Schopenhauer, a favourite of Beckett’s. Adler points out the misogynistic tendency in the representation of Kampaspe/Phyllis, Delilah and Salomé, and attributes it to male dominance in art. Following Adler’s explanation, “Aristotle and Phyllis” can be seen as an expression of the safeguarding drive in a man: they effeminate themselves, disguising themselves as being in a weaker position, an elderly man, for instance, and let themselves be bullied by the young powerful female figure to conceal their fear of women. Having discussed the philological connections between Happy Days and “Aristotle and Phyllis”, and shown the potential influence of Adler’s theories of “above and beneath” and masculine protest on Beckett, the next section focuses on the visual resemblance between “Aristotle and Phyllis” and the scenography of Happy Days.

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Happy Days and “Aristotle and Phyllis”: A Visual Resemblance The stage instructions in Happy Days include the presence of a “[v]ery pompier trompe-l’oeil backcloth to represent unbroken plain and the sky receding to meet in far distance” behind the mound where Winnie is half-buried (5). The word “pompier” hints at its neoclassical and mimetic style, as well as Beckett’s ironic attitude towards his own scenography. Framed by this backcloth, the stage looks more like part of the picture, inviting the spectators to look at it in a manner they also might at paintings in museums. This overlaps with the attitude of the Shower/Cooker couple in the play. They, too, acknowledge Winnie’s suffering, but direct only their “gaze” at the scene without talking or physically getting involved with her. They are voyeurs. The original story from which “Aristotle and Phyllis” derives does not depict the pleasure of the onlooker. One of the earliest literary works featuring this theme is Henri de la Valencienne’s fabliau, “The Lay of Aristotle” (ca.1215/1235). Here, Alexander is madly in love with Phyllis and will not leave her side, disregarding his duties and men. Aristotle judges that the situation is problematic and manages to convince Alexander to stay away from her, but Alexander cannot abstain from visiting her for more than a few days. Phyllis is infuriated that Aristotle has caused Alexander’s absence, and proposes to entrap Aristotle, to which Alexander agrees (l.171–87). However, as Alexander witnesses the scene unfolding in the courtyard, he cannot bear the sight of his master on all fours, and soon comes down to the courtyard to stop it, accusing his master of losing his mind (l.353–391); to which Aristotle admits to his pupil that natural providence can overwhelm his reason (l.392–403). By this time, Phyllis, overpowered by the presence of these male characters and their filial intellectual alliance, has withdrawn to the background of the narrative. Most pictorial representations of “Aristotle and Phyllis” exclusively capture the scene in which Phyllis mounts Aristotle, and (unlike early literary depictions) often include perceiving bystanders. In the work of Master of the Housebook (1485), there are two male figures watching the scene. The figure with a sultan hat should be Alexander, but he displays a wry grin as if enjoying the scene. Phyllis tilts her head slightly with a graceful smile, in contrast to Aristotle’s miserable expression as he is gagged. A similar scene is depicted in the engraving by Meister M.Z. (1500) where two onlookers are illustrated in the background of the left

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corner. By contrast, Hans Burgkmair the Elder (1519) and Hans Baldung Grien (1509) feature the couple without Alexander. However, there is a castle in the background as if symbolising his gaze. The absence of his figure enforces his authority in the manner of a panopticon, as well as distancing the king from the scene. Another work by Hans Baldung (1513) further sensationalises the scene by deploying nudity, contrasting old Aristotle with young Phyllis, while another small figure, which should be Alexander, watches the scene from afar as if he had nothing directly to do with it. A later sixteenth-century engraving attributed by Johann Sadeler I further explores this sensationalism and the remoteness of Alexander. Phyllis here exposes her plump arms and breasts (reminiscent of Winnie herself) with a rather muscular belly, while holding up a whip and casting a provocative gaze towards the viewer of the engraving. This example explicitly displays the intention to implicate the spectator’s gaze in the painting. Phyllis’s bold look juxtaposes the pity-arousing Aristotle, who in contrast to other engravings, is embellished in the neoclassical style. Meanwhile, the figure of Alexander is carved on the wall as both eternal and unnoticed onlooker this scene. All these engravings incorporate Alexander as the onlooker of the scene, whether he is visible or symbolised by a castle. Yet, unlike “The Lay of Aristotle”, in which the plot culminates in Alexander’s intervention, the engravings display the voyeuristic nature of the scene. In Sadeler’s engraving, Phyllis is aware of the onlooker’s voyeurism. Curiously, this echoes with Winnie, who also notice the Cooker/Shower couple as her onlooker and cherishes the idea of “someone” “looking at me. Caring for me” (29). Like Phyllis, she is aware that she is the object of the gaze of the play’s spectators. In such a structure of spectacle, suggested by the backcloth, Happy Days resembles “Aristotle and Phyllis”. However, as we will see, Winnie’s relationship with the gaze is more complex than her lines might imply because this dramatic piece plays on multiple gazes on different levels.

The Upper Position, Onlookers and the Hand Over the Gaze in Happy Days The beginning of Happy Days sees some misfortune befalling Willie due to Winnie’s upper position. For example, when Willie falls asleep, which is a frequent occurrence, Winnie twice “strikes down at him with beak of parasol ” to wake him up. With her second blow, the parasol falls out of

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her hand, and Willie’s “invisible hand” kindly returns it to her. Meanwhile, she excuses herself by saying “Don’t go off on me. I may need you […] No hurry, no hurry, just don’t curl up on me again” (8). Her bossy tone may sound as if she is manifesting her masculine protest: she wakes Willie not out of any immediate need. However, this action is familiar to the reader of Beckett: it is a sign of the need for companionship, exemplified most famously by Hamm in Endgame, who is the physically feebler of him and his companion. This also applies to Winnie. Whatever she may do to act out a superior position, it merely appears as a bluff in the eyes of the spectators of Happy Days , for none of her deeds can get her out of the mound. Nevertheless, Winnie’s upper position causes another mishap to occur in her morning ritual, at the expense of the prostrate Willie. She “swigs off ” the red bottle of medicine and “tosses cap and bottle away in WILLIE’s direction” (8). With the “sound of breaking glass ”, she says, “Ah that’s better” (8). While this line implies that Winnie feels better after taking the medication, it nonetheless also sounds mischievous to the audience as they subsequently see the “top back of WILLIE’s bald head, trickling blood” and realise that the bottle has hit him. Meanwhile, Winnie remains aloof even after she “cranes a little further back and down” to check Willie (9). The word “check” here indicates there is a purpose behind her move, but it is unclear whether her aloofness results from her lack of care for Willie or for her inability to fully check on him. Indeed, the upper position does not necessarily guarantee Winnie a better view of Willie. Although a stage instruction at the beginning of the play states that “[i]n this position her eyes rest on WILLIE” (6), appearing to point to the possibility that Winnie can clearly see him, Billie Whitelaw, who starred as Winnie for the 1979 Royal Court production, remarked: “Being on the stage as Winnie felt a bit lonely. Willie was there with me, but I couldn’t see him. I felt I had to have something of my own in the mound” (154). How often and how visible Willie is for Winnie is not clear. Given the repeated references to Willie as the “invisible hand”, and how often she calls his name, she probably sees him very little. Winnie herself explains that this upper position is not a happy place. She wants to be lifted up further to be out of the mound: “perhaps some day the earth will yield and let me go, the pull is so great” (19). In the sentences that follow, she implies that this situation may result from her age: “they are not what they were when I was young and […] beautiful […] possibly lovely to look at” (20). Here, Winnie expresses a feeling of inferiority, not

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to Willie, nor to others, but to her younger self. She cannot climb on top of herself, nor reverse time and be young again. These examples from the play subvert Adler’s assumption that the spatially upper position should symbolise a superior position. Yet, Winnie still has her gaze to cast, and it can critically reflect back upon the audience’s voyeuristic gaze, arguably corresponding to the mode of spectatorship in the “Aristotle and Phyllis” topos. In Act 1, Willie studies a postcard that Winnie asks to see. The moment he hands it over to her, she exclaims, “Heavens what are they up to!”, revealing that the postcard depicts “genuine pure filth” that would “[m]ake any nice-minded person want to vomit” (11). Her lines imply there is a pornographic scene on the postcard. Despite her disgust, she somehow continues to examine it, until she notices the third party in the background: “What does that creature in the background think he’s doing? [Looks closer.] Oh no really!” (11). Though Winnie’s comment does not fully confirm that “Aristotle and Phyllis” is on the postcard, her description alludes to a similar theme. The irony here is that Winnie, the object of the audience’s voyeuristic gaze, casts the same gaze at the two-dimensional postcard. Here, she, being unaware, also embodies the difference between the spectator of painting and the onlooker in theatre. While the latter can theoretically intervene with the scene, the former cannot. To recall, when Mr. Cooker/Shower sees Winnie, the scene is actually in her head; it is just an image. By contrast, the spectators of Happy Days are physically in front of her. The question remains whether there is alterity implicated in the gaze of “someone” and the Cooker/Shower in Winnie’s narrative. The way Winnie feels about the gaze of the onlooker changes between Acts 1 and 2. In Act 1, she associates the gaze with the adjective “strange”: “Strange feeling that someone is looking at me. I am clear, then dim, then gone, then dim again, then clear again, and so on, back and forth, in and out of someone’s eye” (23). This demonstrates not only Winnie’s uneasiness about the gaze and the oddity of “being looked at”, but also the blurred and constantly moving image of herself. There is a feeling that she is not fully objectified, for she moves “back and forth, in and out”, making the gaze porous. This contrasts with her positive evaluation of someone’s gaze in Act 2, where she feels “Eyes upon my eyes”: “Someone is looking at me still. [Pause.] Caring for me still. [Pause.] That is what I find so wonderful” (29). In fact, she actually appears thankful for the two occurrences of the Mr. Cooker/Shower episode (25) in Acts 1 and 2. The reason for

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her gratitude is not very clear, but the line “Up to date” (34) at the end of the second occurrence of the episode suggests that even her sense of appreciating the gaze is part of the daily ritual that keeps her going. On the other hand, Willie’s gaze is more challenging for Winnie. In Act 1, she tells Willie that she dreams “you’ll come round and live this side where I could see you”, although she fears she would be “unrecognisable” (27). In the final scene of Act 2, Willie is “dressed to kill ” and on all fours like Aristotle, slowly crawling up the mound. As his gaze meets Winnie for the first time, before he “sinks head to ground” due to his inability to sustain himself, Winnie, with a “Mondaine” tone, exclaims “What an unexpected pleasure!” (36), then encourages him to look at her again. She associates his gaze with her narcissistic recollection of when she was such a beauty that he was “whining for” her hand. When he looks at her again, this time “Happily”, she openly states her desire to become the object of his gaze: “Feast your old eyes, Willie”, though she immediately questions herself about her age: “Does anything remain? […] I haven’t been able to look after it, you know. You are still recognizable, in a way” (37). When Willie looks up at her again, she feels a change in his gaze and disapproves: “Don’t look at me like that”, “Have you gone off your head?” (37). In what way Willie’s gaze changes is unclear, but Winnie’s lines, echoing those of Alexander accusing Aristotle of “losing his mind”, evinces her selective attitude towards Willie’s gaze: she only approves of him when it pleases her. To recall, the gaze Winnie has approved in the play is in her memory, blended into her imaginary world, as exemplified by the Cooker/Shower episodes. By contrast, Willie’s eyes are physical and real, which she has likely looked at for the first time in the play. She rejects his last gaze because it triggers her anxiety about her old age. With his gaze refused, Willie uses his voice to re-establish a connection with Winnie, calling her “Win”. The voice makes such an impact that Winnie becomes ecstatic. She repeats his line “Win” and moves on to sing a song (37). It is worth a remark that Willie’s voice, not his gaze, gives Winnie the final boost to the climax. Here, Willie’s voice appeals to Winnie in such an emotional way as to dissipate her hesitation caused by “the sadness” she anticipates after her song (33). The fact that Winnie repeats “Win” also confirms her ability to hear Willie’s voice.6 By contrast, how much impact Winnie’s voice can have on Willie is questionable. As 6 Shari Benstock points out that the word “Win” also elicits the meaning of victory, “a cry from the place of woman” coming from Willie (184).

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Shari Benstock observes, a woman’s voice is usually portrayed as “a potent form of seduction” to a man’s ear, as Phyllis seduces Aristotle with her song. Willie’s lack of response might allude to the fact that Winnie’s voice is “reduced to banalities” (180). At the same time, it is possible that Willie is simply unable to hear Winnie’s voice on many occasions because of his old age (15). To such ears, the quality of female voices may not matter at all. With his ageing and failing senses, Willie may require a different approach to help re-establish their relationship. However, their old age may not explain the final puzzle of this dramatic piece. Winnie looks out towards the spectators, instead of Willie, before she repeats the word “Win” (33). Why does she not look at Willie? Here, the work of Sadeler again sheds some light on our question. Sadeler’s engraving shows a young naked Phyllis in an elegantly furnished and privately enclosed room. She looks to the front with her provocative gaze as if accusing the spectators of the painting of merciless voyeurism. The spectators can occupy this peeping position at ease, as the twodimensional image of a protected private space allows them to play with their fancy with no risk. At first glance, this appears to match the use of the “pompier tromp-l’oeil ” in Happy Days , encouraging the spectators to watch this play as a painting. This is how the Cooker/Shower act when they discuss Winnie in front of her. However, the play also has its physical dimensions, as it is a theatrical piece, and this differs radically from the Phyllis presented by Sadeler. Winnie is stuck in the mound out in the open, with no means to hide herself from the public gaze—although there seem to be few remaining human beings left in the apocalyptic scene. As Winnie rejects Willie’s real gaze and casts her own upon the spectators, the audience’s safety as voyeurs (granted by the “pompier tromp-l’oeil ”) collapses: the spectators are watching the physical suffering of a real female body. The subtle yet palpable physical “sensation” of the gaze, passed from Willie to Winnie and then from Winnie to the spectators, appears to subside when Winnie sings the first verse of “The Merry Widow Waltz” from the 1905 Viennese operetta The Merry Widow. There is a notable contrast here between Winnie and the woman in the operetta, as Winnie sings only the first stanza, highlighting her Phyllis-like passivity in love— never disclosing her own feelings, but demanding love from her partner: “Love me dear!”, “You love me so!” (38). By contrast, the original lyrics consist of three stanzas in which declarations of love are articulated alternately by both a man and a woman, who express mutual feelings: “You

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love me so” in the first and third stanzas, and “I love you so” in the second. However, the physical image in the song of “every touch of fingers”, resonates not only with Willie’s dire need of Winnie’s hand, but also with the couple’s rare physical contacts, and perhaps also with the chilling moment of Winnie’s hands on a revolver. Often mediated by objects such as a parasol, a medicine bottle and a newspaper, their hands evince their connection. Winnie’s hand makes physical impacts on Willie, while Willie’s “invisible” hand delivers Winnie’s parasol and the postcard; and in Act 2 he uses both hands to crawl towards her, while her hands are already buried in the mound. If the act of voicing the name “Win” is the last resort for the couple to establish their relationship, the lost connection through their hands is evoked as an image of sensation, when Winnie sings the line “every touch of fingers”. The importance of the voice and the hand, the two palpable and physical elements of theatricality, comes to the fore at the very end of Happy Days . This chapter has established some connections between Happy Days and “Aristotle and Phyllis”. These connections reveal a nested structure of the gaze of the onlookers in the play, and clarify how Winnie’s comments can function as an indirect criticism of the misogynist position of Mr. Cooker/Shower, as well as the indifferent position of the spectators of Happy Days. Adler’s work has assisted with identifying these connections, but his theory of masculine protest does not appear to apply to Winnie, since her upper position does not grant her a superior position. Her different reactions to the gazes illuminate the two types of gazes in the play: the imaginary gaze that she desires, and Willie’s real and physical gaze that upsets her, and which she rejects. In this sense, with its echoes of the persistent onlooker in the “Aristotle and Phyllis” topos, Happy Days not only questions the misogynist gaze that Winnie internalises, but also critiques the two-dimensional and voyeuristic gaze of the audience applied to the three-dimensional theatre as Winnie’s physical presence embodies a challenge to the ocular-centric nature of theatrical convention.

Works Cited Ackerley, C. J. “Lassata Sed: Samuel Beckett’s Portraits of His Fair to Middling Women”. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, vol. 12, 2002, pp. 55–70. Adler, Alfred. The Neurotic Constitution. Moffat, Yard and Co., 1921, archive. org/details/39002054753992.med.yale.edu. Accessed 21 Sept. 2018.

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———. The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology. Translated by P. Radin, Keagan Paul, Trench, Trubuner & Co. Ltd., 1925, https://archive.org/det ails/in.ernet.dli.2015.188513. Accessed 21 Sept. 2018. Beckett, Samuel. Happy Days. Faber and Faber, 2010. ———. More Pricks Than Kicks. Grove Press, 1972. ———. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. I: 1929–1940. Edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge UP, 2009. Benstock, Shari. “The Transformational Grammar of Gender in Beckett’s Dramas”. Women in Beckett, edited by Linda Ben-Zvi, Illinois UP, 1992. Bryden, Mary. Women in Samuel Beckett’s Prose and Drama. Palgrave, 1993. Chiang, H. L. Michelle. “Reconstituted Pathos: ‘Love’ from the Periphery”. Writing from the Margins, edited by Catriona Ryan, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015. Feldman, Matthew. Sourcing Aporetics: An Empirical Study on Philosophical Influences in the Development of Samuel Beckett’s Writing. 2004. Ph.D. Thesis, Oxford Brooke University. Hennessy, Susan. “Happy Days Sinking Into Immanence: Samuel Beckett and The Second Sex”. Journal of International Women’s Studies, vol. 17, no. 2, 2016, pp. 65–76. Jeffers, Jennifer. Beckett’s Masculinity. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Kenner, Hugh. A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett. Thames and Hudson, 1973. Knowlson, James. “Introduction”. Happy Days: Production Notebook. Faber and Faber, 1985. McMullan, Anna. Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s Drama. Routledge, 2010. Piling, John. Samuel Beckett’s ‘More Pricks Than Kicks’: In a Strait of Two Wills. Continuum, 2011. Smith, Susan. The Power of Women. Pennsylvania UP, 1995. Stewart, Paul. “Samuel Beckett’s Misopedia”. Irish Review, vol. 41, no. 2, 2011, pp. 59–73. Valenciennes, Henri de, Brook, Leslie C., and Burgess, Glyn S., eds. The Lay of Aristotle. University of Liverpool. School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies (French), 2011, www.liverpool.ac.uk/media/livacuk/modern-langua ges-and-cultures/liverpoolonline/Aristote.pdf. Accessed 21 Sept. 2018. Whitelaw, Billie. Billie Whitelaw…Who He? Hodder and Stoughton, 1995.

CHAPTER 7

Insufferable Maternity and Motherhood in “First Love” Brenda O’Connell

What finished me was the birth. It woke me up. What that infant must have been going through! (Samuel Beckett “First Love” 84)

“First Love” was originally written in French in 1946 as “Premier Amour”. It languished in Samuel Beckett’s trunk manuscripts before being published in 1970 and subsequently translated into English by Beckett himself in 1973. The text is arguably the most misogynistic of the middle phase of Beckett’s writing. There are overt examples of this, most notably the threat of sexual violence inherent in descriptions such as “[s]he began stroking my ankles […] I considered kicking her in the cunt” (70). The story is also caustic in its treatment of maternity and motherhood. The twenty-five-year-old narrator begins by telling his readers about his fondness for graveyards and the dead who inhabit them: “[p]ersonally I have no bone to pick with graveyards, I take the air there willingly” (64). He enjoys “the smell of corpses”, albeit a little

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“on the sweet side”, but he infinitely prefers it to the smell of the living, who “stink: their feet, teeth, armpits, arses, sticky foreskin and frustrated ovules” (64–65). The narrator displays an abjection towards the living but not the dead. According to Julia Kristeva, abjection is that which disgusts us, as it exists on the borders that threaten the construction of our identities. The abject fascinates and repulses us in equal measure, and does not respect borders, position or rules. Our narrator is disgusted by this “universal phenomenon” which takes the form of “defilement, food, taboo, and sin”, or in this case, the polluting fluids that draw attention to the permeability of the living, who “wash in vain, in vain perfume themselves, they stink”, representing the impossibility of a clean or proper body (Kristeva Powers of Horror 68; Beckett 64). Having been evicted from the family home after the death of his father, our narrator spends his days and nights on a park bench, where he meets Lulu. Lulu is “a most tenacious woman”, who pursues her man (69). The narrator is uneasy about this; as a sexually provocative initiative taker, and with a penetrative gaze, Lulu displays significant inherited traits from the early female characters of Beckett’s fiction, demonstrating that his treatment of the feminine has not yet matured.1 By analysing misogyny, maternity and motherhood in “First Love”, this chapter argues that the difficulties around gender and sexuality in Beckett’s work are revealed as not just niche political concerns, but ones that remain challenging, not fully resolvable and yet are central to Beckett’s aesthetics. “First Love” typifies the troubled obsession with the maternal figure and the recurring structural motif of the womb that is a hallmark of Beckett’s early to mid-phase of his writing. The portrayal of fictional and semi-monstrous maternal figures is a central but often ambiguous concern of this phase of Beckett’s prose, with these mother figures and allegories emerging as both nurturing and stifling. Issues around the politics of gender and sexuality in Beckett’s work, and in particular his treatment of maternity and motherhood have not been sufficiently addressed in Beckett criticism.2 This chapter argues 1 Beckett’s early prose works, Dream of Fair to Middle Women (1932) and More Pricks Than Kicks (1934) are relentless in their disparaging descriptions of women, as demonstrated by the definitive article in front of names such as “the Frica” and “the Alba”, which de-humanises them. The women of More Pricks are often described in carnal terms, such as “duck” or “cobra”; “the Frica” is compared to a randy horse in heat: her mouth “champs an invisible bit, foam gathers at the bitter commissures” (46). 2 Alongside Stewart and Weller, there are exceptions. See Ben-Zvi; Bryden; McMullan; Boxall and Jeffers. For a discussion of feminine alterities and misogyny in Beckett through

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for the need to engage more overtly with what remains, according to Daniela Caselli, “insufferable” about gender and sexuality in Beckett’s work (Institute of English Studies, London, 9 March 2018). Following Caselli, this chapter seeks to break the polite silence around these issues which have been hidden in plain sight in Beckett studies until recently. While Paul Stewart argues that Beckett’s work displays a deep mistrust of procreation, an array of supremely awkward oedipal sexual encounters, and a variety of non-reproductive forms of sexuality, including the solitary, the homoerotic and the geriatric, challenging established notions of identity politics in Beckett criticism to date, he acknowledges that dealing with misogyny in Beckett “remains a delicate matter” (70). While he does not “regret the misogyny”, which he admits is “amply” demonstrated in “First Love”, he argues that it opens up other interesting avenues of enquiry into sexual reproduction. Chris Ackerley neither accuses nor exonerates Beckett, but nevertheless admits that it remains a “recurrent grievance” in “certain caustic passages” (55). Both Ackerley and Stewart consider Beckett’s disparaging attitude towards his female characters in the early prose by locating it “in a tradition of misogynistic satire running from Juvenal to Chaucer and Burton” (Ackerley 56). They cite the influence of German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, whose unremittingly negative view of woman casts a long shadow over Beckett’s oeuvre (Ackerley 56; Stewart 70–76). In his study on alterity in Beckett, Shane Weller, employing the psychoanalytic theories of Kristeva, Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous, acknowledges that a “prevailing misogyny” saturates the novels, short stories and poetry of the first two decades of Beckett’s writing, where “woman” is presented as a “negative alterity” (164). While Stewart and Weller have contributed to a more open discussion around these difficult issues in Beckett’s work, a polite silence still prevails.3

a psychoanalytic framework, see Weller. Studies on motherhood in Beckett include Bryden, who dedicates one chapter to the maternal figure; Patrick Casement’s article “Samuel Beckett’s Relationship to his Mother-Tongue” considers the link between Beckett’s relationship with his own mother and the relinquishing of his mother-tongue; Julia Kristeva’s essay on Beckett, “The Father, Love, and Banishment”, analyses the importance of the father in relation to the narrator’s quest for an authentic, non-paternal language in “First Love” and Not I . Kristeva does not, however, comment on motherhood in Beckett’s work. 3 At the Samuel Beckett Summer School 2017, at Trinity College Dublin, a roundtable panel on “Gender and Sexuality in Beckett” was the first attempt to seriously engage with the topic since the summer school began in 2011.

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As this chapter will demonstrate, Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic framework and theories on motherhood and abjection provide an important, though surprisingly overlooked, lens through which to examine the Beckettian mother figure.4 In my analysis, I will reconsider Kristeva’s theories on maternity and motherhood as explored in Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), where she first articulates her notion of the semiotic chora and its association with the maternal body and early heterogeneous drives, her essay “Stabat Mater” (1977), arguably her most important discussion on maternity, and her study of abjection, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982). In a recent study, Katrin Wehling-Giorgi analyses the ambiguous representation of the maternal figure in Beckett’s post-war novel, Molloy (Gadda and Beckett ). Adopting a Kristevan theoretical framework, she argues that the obsession with the maternal figure and the recurring motif of the narrative space of the womb reveals a direct relationship between “the insistent presence of the maternal element, the notion of abjection and the dissolution of the self, an aspect which to date has not been paid due attention by critics” (5). The opening lines of the novel, in which we find Molloy residing in a womb-like space, having searched but now replaced his own mother, set the terms of this relationship as it reappears throughout the text: “I am in my mother’s room. It’s I who live there now” (3). Wehling-Giorgi argues that matricidal desires and resentment towards the mother in Beckett “constitutes an integral part of the subject’s process of individuation” (5). This failure to accomplish the process of “disengagement from her underlies the close mother-son relationship” in Beckett’s writing, which is of central concern in Molloy (5). Following Wehling-Giorgi, this chapter argues that the fear and hatred often displayed towards the mother in Beckett powerfully demonstrates a fear of the “archaic mother”, which, according to Kristeva, “turns out to be essentially [a] fear of her generative power” (Powers of Horror 77). 4 Phil Baker’s study, Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis, undertakes a psychoanalytic reading of “First Love” and Molloy, but does not consider Kristeva’s work in his theoretical framework. For an analysis of the close relationship between abjection and language formation in Molloy, using Kristeva’s theories on abjection, see Czarnecki. For the first study to comprehensively engage with the maternal figure in both writers through the lens of Kristeva’s theories, see Wehling-Giorgi’s Gadda and Beckett, particularly the chapter dedicated to matricide and uterine spaces in Gadda and Beckett. See also Wehling-Giorgi’s earlier article on Gadda and Beckett (“Abjection and the Fear of Alterity”).

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The female sex in Beckett’s work is not just cursed for her generative powers, but the male protagonists of his early fiction also take active revenge on their progenitors by never ceasing to blame them for their existence, as seen in Molloy: “Look at Mammy. What rid me of her, in the end? […] Perhaps they buried her alive, it wouldn’t surprise me. Ah the old bitch, a nice dose she gave me, she and her lousy unconquerable genes” (82). As Beckett’s early to mid-period prose deals with negative attitudes towards female characters and awkward sexual encounters between men and women, I argue that a general fear of the female sex and her generative powers was one of the stimuli for Beckett’s art.

Intrauterine Memories It is well known that Beckett maintained that he had a clear memory of his own intrauterine life, that “ever since his birth, he had retained a terrible memory of life in his mother’s womb. He was constantly suffering from this and had awful crises, when he felt he was suffocating” (Peggy Guggenheim qtd. in Bryden 16). In an interview with John Gruen, he again confirmed this pre-natal awareness, stating that “I have a clear memory of my own foetal existence. It was an existence where no voice, no possible movement could free me from the agony and darkness I was subjected to” (qtd. in Bryden 161). Here, his use of the phrase “subjected to” clearly echoes the helplessness and victimhood of many Beckettian characters as they voice their outrage at being unwillingly born into a world of pain and suffering. This intrauterine trope appears in More Pricks Than Kicks , when Belacqua pines: “I want very much to be back in the caul, on my back in the dark forever” (22). The reference to the caul also appears in the poem “Sanies I”: “Ah to be back in the caul now with no trusts” (17). While not suggesting that Beckett’s textual work can be reduced to his autobiography, there is a clear indication of a primary, prolonged and difficult attachment to the womb in Beckett’s early life and work, one that provides ample evidence that the journey from misogyny to maturity in Beckett’s writing follows a developmental pathway that is echoed in his evolving relationship with his mother. Beckett scholars will be familiar with this complicated relationship, and I argue that Beckett’s childhood memories are emphatically relevant to an understanding of recurring motifs in his writing. As Beckett’s close friend Geoffrey Thompson famously declared, “the key to understanding Beckett […] [is] to be found in his relationship with his mother”

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(Knowlson 178). James Knowlson details how May Beckett regulated and controlled everyday life at Cooldrinagh, the family home in Dublin’s Foxrock. From a large Anglo-Irish family, May had a strong personality and “suffered fools badly” (5). She also suffered from severe bouts of depression, when she appeared “strange”, “ill-tempered” and “difficult” (5). She disapproved of her son’s ambitions to become a writer, encouraging him instead to follow in the footsteps of his brother Frank, who ran the family building contractor business. During his late twenties and early thirties, Beckett remained financially dependent upon his mother, living intermittently in London. He blamed her for putting him on a pedestal on the one hand, while enforcing her strict regimes on the other. This fierce tug-of-war is described by Knowlson as an “almost umbilical dependence on and a desire for independence from his mother” (178). This sense of superiority, along with a sense of isolation, came to light when Beckett finally underwent psychotherapy in London, between 1933 and 1935, with the then trainee psychotherapist, Wilfred Ruprecht Bion, at the Tavistock Clinic in London. 1933 was a traumatic year for Beckett. With the deaths of his cousin Peggy Sinclair and his father in close succession, he became psychologically, emotionally and financially drained, and entered a period of profound unhappiness. In his thrice-weekly sessions with Bion, Beckett discussed his psychosomatic symptoms and explicitly explored his prenatal sense of stasis. During that time, he also read and took copious notes in the fields of Psychology and Philosophy. As Matthew Feldman’s forensic investigation of the “Psychology Notes” highlights, “much of this material was directed towards a systematic understanding of psychology and psychoanalysis, in addition to a focus on (mainly) psychosomatic symptoms that Beckett thought might be the cause of his physical maladies at this time” (14). Of particular interest here are the notes Beckett took from Otto Rank’s The Trauma of Birth (1924): Anxiety of child left alone in dark room due to his unconscious being reminded (er-innert) of intrauterine situation, terminated by frightening severance from mother. […] Analysis the belated accomplishment of incomplete mastery of birth trauma. Analytic situation identified with intrauterine one, patient back in position of unborn. Just as all anxiety goes back to anxiety at birth (dyspnoea), so every pleasure has as its final aim the reestablishment of the primal intrauterine pleasure. (qtd. in Feldman 107)

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Here, Beckett was interested in how Rank’s work distinguishes between intrauterine pleasure and the trauma and anxiety that accompanies birth, which are experientially different things. Belacqua also appears to experience intrauterine bliss when he wishes to be “back in the caul” (22), whereas incomplete mastery of the birth trauma is demonstrated by Mrs. Rooney’s remarks in the radio play, All That Fall (1957): “The trouble with her was she had never really been born” (196). These examples demonstrate Beckett’s longstanding interest in the caul. Beckett’s detailed accounts of his own primal intrauterine experiences appear different from Rank’s map of this time. While contemplating the child’s conscious memories of intrauterine experience, and the anxiety of the necessary separation at birth, Rank also claims that “all neurotic disturbances in breathing, repeated feelings of suffocation, refer directly to physical reproductions of the birth trauma”, a passage which Beckett copied into his notes (qtd. in Wehling-Giorgi 121).5 Beckett’s symbolic association of his own birth with the crucifixion of Christ (he was born on Good Friday, 13 April 1906) combined with traumatic pre-birth memories, fuelled his pessimistic attitude to life. Empirically, then, we can say that this pessimism became the central concern of his earlier fictional protagonists, who wish never to have been born, resulting in resentment towards their mothers for birthing them in the first place.6 Beckett appears to take a Jungian position in his belief that the individual is endowed with a pre-natal heightened form of consciousness, which is subsequently repressed in the process of subject formation. The trope of birth and rebirth is central to Jung’s world view that we must be imaginatively born again as part of the process of individuation. From his “Psychology Notes”, Beckett managed to turn his anxiety into distinct psychoanalytic tropes in his work. Beckett’s neurotic relationship 5 Knowlson notes that at this time of extreme grief, Beckett’s heart “started its jigs again, with night sweats and panic attacks” (172). 6 As Deirdre Bair notes, Beckett was also famously influenced by a lecture given by psychologist C. G. Jung, who told the story of a young girl who had foreseen her own early death; Jung concluded that the girl had, in fact, “never been born entirely” (qtd. in Bair 221). The remark had a profound impact on the young Beckett, resurfacing in his novel Watt (1953), where Beckett wrote “never been properly born” (217), along with a further annotation on the soul of the embryo: “the foetal soul is full grown” (discussed further in Wehling-Giorgi 122). The entire Jungian episode is re-configured by Mrs. Rooney in All That Fall , as quoted.

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with his mother continued through her illness with Parkinson’s disease, until her death in 1950. Although his grief for her was intense, from that emotional matrix came some of his best writing. Beckett’s interest in these pre-natal recollections, and his ambiguous relationship with his mother, systematically structure his work. An analysis of his writing through the lens of Kristeva’s work on maternity and abjection proves useful in illuminating the dimension of the maternal in “First Love”. One way of reading the fear and hatred towards the feminine in this text is to consider the grotesquery of the work as a way of Beckett re-birthing himself by facing the legacy of his own experience of maternal monstrosity.

Abjection in “First Love” In “First Love”, there is an endless mourning for the father as the maker of meaning. This unresolved melancholia leaves the son-narrator wandering aimlessly in a cadaverous space, separated from the rotting corpse of the father, but not liberated. The opening lines, in which the narrator ponders his “marriage”, reminds him not of his love interest, Lulu, or even his mother, who is banished from the story, but of his father’s death and his subsequent expulsion from the family home. The narrator feels cheated: “He should have left me the entire house, then I’d have been all right” (66–67). As a result of homelessness, he passes the time on a park bench, with regular visits from Lulu. A kind of love soon develops between the couple, though it is quickly reduced to the insatiable sexual appetite of Lulu. Our narrator, who “didn’t understand women at that period”, must contend with an emotion that he reluctantly admits is a form of love (71). In an ironic tone, he tells us that he has no previous experience, “but of course had heard of the thing, at home, in school, in brothel and at church” (73). He condemns Lulu as a woman who can “smell a rigid phallus ten miles away” (70). His emphasis on the word “smell” positions Lulu as the active participant, whereas his “erection” positions him as the passive responder. There is an unresolved tension between his desire for and resistance to Lulu, as he fears a situation where “it is painful to be no longer oneself” (70). Sexual encounters interfere with the mind of the narrators, who search for existential meaning, while being tormented by their own sexual desires. In an attempt to escape the dangerous lure of Lulu, the narrator abandons his bench and moves to a disused cowshed, ostensibly for reasons of bad weather, but, in a direct insult to his reader/audience, also “for other

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reasons better not wasted on cunts like you” (72). Our narrator seems fond of this deeply insulting word, which continues to have freight in our culture, referring explicitly to female genitals. While contemplating his newfound “dread” in the cowshed, he finds himself “inscribing the letters of Lulu in an old heifer pat”, asking himself if his love is “love-passion?” or “platonic Love?” (73–74). He disregards the latter, concluding that platonic love is “disinterested: would I have been tracing her name in old cowshit if my love had been pure and disinterested? And with my devil’s finger into the bargain, which I then sucked?” (74). This “dread” of any emotional attachment further reveals the narrator’s simultaneous attachment to and detachment from Lulu, who represents the abject entity, associated as she is with animal excrement. Phil Baker has remarked on the “mysterious feature” of cowpats, noting that despite Beckett’s “general scatology, cowpats belong particularly to the Novellas” (93). Although the narrator’s thoughts are of Lulu, he now decides that he is fed up with this name and decides to re-name her Anna. In drawing attention to the close link between the feminine, sexuality and excrement, this disturbing section of the story echoes Kristeva’s theories of abjection. Kristeva argues that corporeal waste, such as menstrual blood and excrement, represent the two main types of abject. Excrement and its associated elements of infection, disease, decay and death represent the threat to identity that comes from outside. Menstrual blood and excrement are polluting objects associated with abjection and the maternal feminine, whereas other leaking bodily matter, such as tears or sperm, is not considered to have a polluting value. The anxiety surrounding dependence, and yet the equal attraction towards it, is central to Beckett’s work. The narrator both needs and abjects the mother. Excrement is difficult to control and eradicate, but it is a necessary (if embarrassing) reality. As Kristeva points out: “these bodily fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly, and with difficulty, on the part of death […] such waste drops so that I might live” (Powers of Horror 3). This shit, or in this case cow dung, is of particular relevance to a psychoanalytic reading of “First Love”, where the narrator clearly links the female reproductive body, about to become a mother, with cow dung. Excrement and constipation are central themes in the story, linking the abject with that of Rank’s theories, where constipation is linked to the male neurotic and his failure to resolve the birth repression normally experienced in the pleasurable act of heterosexual sexual gratification. This

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emotional constipation links back to the association of withheld excrement with that of the female body, which we can understand in this analysis as a “fear of the archaic mother” or “fear of her generative power” (77). There is also an obsessive fear of the female reproductive body at work. Along with an obsession with the maternal, there is a recurring motif in “First Love” that relates to the narrative space of the womb. Having moved into his lover’s apartment, the narrator turns his room into a type of “wombtomb”, moving the sofa “so that the back, hitherto against the wall, was now on the outside and consequently the front, or way in, on the inside. Then I climbed back, like a dog in its basket” (80). He recalls his “one night of love”, where he displays, as Stewart argues, a mostly passive role in the sexual act, demonstrating “a lack of engagement” as though he were “watching an experiment”, rather than “taking part in a seduction” (69). According to Stewart, the narrator turns away from “the womb-substitute of sex for the most satisfactory substitute of the wombas-room” (69). The narrator does not focus on Lulu’s body, but rather on her face, where he observes a squint in her eye: “She took off everything, with a slowness fit to enflame an elephant, except her stockings […] It was then I noticed the squint” (78–79). The female body is, yet again, considered a foreign site, when he notes that “I knew she would not explode” (79). Rank argues that the neurotic fails in sexuality, as he is not “content with the gratification of partially returning to the mother”, as a way of overcoming the birth trauma, instead remaining “infantile” and “even still desir[ing] to go completely or as a whole back into the mother” (47–48, emphasis retained). Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic chora offers a useful framework to analyse the Beckettian maternal space. In Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva’s published doctoral thesis, she presents her theory of the processes which constitute language. In a re-formulation of Jacques Lacan’s distinction between the imaginary and the symbolic order, she suggests a distinction between “‘two modalities ’” in the “signifying process”, “‘the semiotic’ and […] ‘the symbolic’. These two modalities are inseparable within the signifying process that constitutes language” (Revolution 23–24, emphasis retained). Borrowing the Greek term chora from Plato’s Timaeus, where it is explicitly related to the maternal, Kristeva argues that the maternal body is “the ordering principle of the semiotic chora” (27). Put simply, the chora is the articulation of primary processes and drives; it is the material from which language emerges. In Beckett, the

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maternal body, in a series of manifestations, is the “ordering principle” of his symbology. The chora is not a sign or a position, but a kind of place or receptacle; it is “generated in order to attain to this signifying position” (26). It is a “preverbal functional state that governs the connections between the body (in the process of constituting itself as a body proper), objects, and the protagonists of family structure” (27). The subject, who is always a subject-in-process, has no understanding of this process as it involves pre-symbolic drives, which is connected to and oriented towards the mother. In his “room-as-womb” space, the narrator listens to Lulu’s lovemaking and singing that emanates from the room next door, as she entertains her paying clients, suggesting, according to Baker, “both the primal scene and intra-uterine disturbances caused by the mother’s sexual activity” (96). The narrator’s haven is only temporary, however, as the impending arrival of his first child is a real expulsion from the womb, necessitating a figural expulsion for the narrator. His withdrawal to a womb-like space, an “inward turning of the libido” (Baker 118), leads us to the conclusion that our narrator seems unable to overcome the initial disaster of being born. In his “Psychology Notes”, Beckett wrote down the following passage from Alfred Adler’s Neurotic Constitution: “[t]he motive of the fear of women is the strongest incentive to art” (188). Beckett noted that the mystery surrounding female genitalia reinforces a fear of the reproductive feminine. Judging from the attitude exhibited towards Lulu/Anna, the future mother of the narrator’s child, a general fear of the female sex and her generative powers is clearly shown to be one of the stimuli for Beckett’s art. When the narrator discovers Lulu’s pregnancy, he retorts: “[o]ne day she had the impudence to announce she was with child, and four or five months gone into the bargain, by me of all people” (83). As Lulu’s abject menstrual blood evaporates into pregnancy, the narrator’s fears grow daily: “she kept plaguing me with our child, exhibiting her belly and breasts and saying it was due any moment, she could feel it lepping already. If its lepping, I said, it’s not mine”; his explicit advice is “Abort! Abort!” (84). Love of a woman, as distinct from love of a father, is the paradigm of exile, when the narrator ponders that “what goes by the name of love is banishment” (70). This exilic encounter with the maternal feminine is the precondition for a literal and (for the hapless narrator) intolerable incarnation. The story ends with the narrator fleeing from the cries of childbirth. Fatherhood is not an option for him, and with only

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the male point of view on motherhood, the only legitimate outcome is to “Abort! Abort!” (84). At the conclusion, our narrator aborts both his fatherly responsibilities and the story itself. The child represents a rival for him, giving him only one option: escape. The climax of the novella arrives with the birth: “what finished me was the birth. It woke me up” (84). As there is no competing with the baby’s cries, this awakening represents the corresponding (re-)birth of the narrator: “I crawled out over the back of the sofa […] opened the door to the corridor. A mass of junk barred my way but I scrabbled and barged my way through in the end” (84–85). The state of the maternal and the quest for a theory of motherhood has been disputed among feminists for quite some time. Kristeva first wrote about maternity in the essay “Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini” (1975), while pregnant with her own son. Here, she suggests that pregnancy and childbirth could potentially be experienced as a reunion with one’s own mother: Kristeva argues that “by giving birth, the woman enters into contact with her own mother, she becomes, she is her own mother […] She thus actualizes the homosexual facet of motherhood” (“Motherhood”, Desire in Language 239). Here, Kristeva powerfully evokes the uncanniness of the experience of pregnancy as a space, double and foreign where “no one is present” (237). In the symbolic order, as traversed and codified by the law of the father, it is impossible to signify the event of pregnancy. The woman who is experiencing it becomes temporarily disposed, psychotic in her own body, removed from language itself. In “Stabat Mater”, arguably her most important essay on maternity, Kristeva calls for a new theory of maternity. In the essay, which is a response to critics of her “Motherhood” essay, who accuse her of equating maternity with femininity, she tackles the feminist view that she reduces woman to the biological function of motherhood. She suggests that it could function as an ontological category, one which is (currently) only available to the female sex. In her attempt to clarify what the maternal amounts to, she admits that “we are caught in a paradox. First, we live in a civilisation where the consecrated (religious or secular) representation of femininity is absorbed by motherhood” (Kristeva Reader 161). But if we look at it closely, this is an idealised vision of motherhood, a “fantasy” of “a lost territory” (161). This has resulted in a negation of motherhood by avant-garde feminist groups, where it has no discourse (161). Theoretically speaking, then, the lived experience of motherhood has been shrouded in silence and secrecy. Kristeva’s essay is profoundly disturbing in that it specifically outlines the limits of Lacan’s “beyond the

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phallus” theory. In pregnancy, a woman succumbs to this psychotic disintegration; in Lacan’s formula, for any subject to emerge, the maternal body must be conceived of as abject, an interior kind of killing, which necessitates matricide, a symbolic loss. She argues that pregnancy is an institutionalised form of psychosis, an on/off choice: “me or it” (297). Kristeva insists that the mother and the maternal body perform a central function in the formation of the subject. The child’s necessary separation from the mother, represented by childbirth, coincides with the passage from the pre-linguistic semiotic to the symbolic realm of structured language and social order. The mother assumes a “marginal position” between the two modalities because she is linked to the child in pregnancy in a symbiotic bond, but she also becomes the lost Other in the necessary separation from the child as it becomes an autonomous subject. This is a difficult transition for the child, as there is a deep desire to return to this infantile stage when the child experienced a sense of a unitary self. In Kristeva’s analysis of female depression and melancholia, she considers this “Death-Bearing Woman”: “For man and for woman the loss of the mother is a biological and psychic necessity, the first step on the way to becoming autonomous”. Matricide is, according Kristeva, “our vital necessity, the sine-qua-non-condition of our individuation” (Black Sun 27–28). The symbolic “killing” of the mother results in the psychological separation from a narcissistic union with her. This archetypal “beheading” of the mother, understood as both a “putting to death” and a “flight”, is a “necessary precondition for the psychic freedom of the subject” (Kristeva, Melanie Klein 131). In this formulation, the mother, at the threshold of selfhood, emerges as both desired and rejected. This difficult process, which is triggered by the separation, produces a constant longing for the primal unity and bliss space of the intrauterine experience.

Conclusion By focusing on how sexuality and reproduction come together in the figure of the mother or maternally identified woman in “First Love”, this chapter demonstrates how Beckett’s troubled obsession with the maternal figure and the recurrent structural motif of the womb informs and becomes a hallmark of his early- to mid-phase writing. In contrast to the passive sexual activity of male protagonists from this period, reproduction and pregnancy in female characters induces extreme anxiety (“Good God, what a land of breeders, you see quadrupeds everywhere”, Molloy

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27) and even violent thoughts, leading to matricidal and infanticidal fantasies. As the novella comes to its violent conclusion, the narrator flees with the image of his child firmly in mind: “what that infant must have been going through” (84–85). The memory stays with him, indicative of a genital horror: the physical process of birth and the shared pain between both mother and child as it is finally expelled from the womb. In this scenario, the pleasures of sex and the new-born child are both rejected as inadequate compensation for the birth trauma. The narrator of “First Love” manages to escape fatherhood. In endless mourning for his own father, his quest is for an authentic non-paternal language. The final scene ends with him consoling himself under the same starry sky that he once shared with his father. The narrative thus aborts the female experience of birth and motherhood in favour of a masculocentric experience of the heavens. Unlike Kristeva, who articulates the very real experience of motherhood from a woman’s point of view, maternity and motherhood are closed down by the male point of view in this story, leaving motherhood without a discourse. By analysing the “abortive” relationship between the male and female protagonist in “First Love”, this chapter demonstrates how treating misogyny as misogyny in Beckett’s writing is vital for breaking the polite silence surrounding issues of gender and sexuality in Beckett Studies to date.

Works Cited Ackerley, Chris. “LASSATA SED: Samuel Beckett’s Portraits of His Fair to Middling Women”. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, vol. 12, 2002, pp. 56– 59. Bair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978. Baker, Phil. Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis. Palgrave, 1997. de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Translated by H. M. Parshley, Vintage, 1997. Beckett, Samuel. Collected Poems 1930–1978. Calder, 1986. ———. First Love and Other Novellas. Penguin Books, 2000. ———. Molloy. Edited by Shane Weller, Faber and Faber, 2009. ———. More Pricks Than Kicks. Edited by Cassandra Nelson, Faber and Faber, 2010. ———. Watt. Edited by C. J. Ackerley, Faber and Faber, 2009. Ben-Zvi, Linda, editor. Women in Beckett: Performance and Critical Perspectives. Illinois UP, 1992.

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Boxall, Peter. “Beckett and Homoeroticism”. Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies, edited by Lois Oppenheim, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, pp. 110–132. Bryden, Mary. Women in Samuel Beckett’s Prose and Drama: Her Own Other. Barnes & Noble, 1993. Casement, Patrick. “Samuel Beckett’s Relationship to His Mother-Tongue”. International Review of Psychoanalysis, vol. 9, 1982, pp. 35–44. Czarnecki, Kristin. “‘Signs I Don’t Understand’: Language and Abjection in Molloy”, Journal of Beckett Studies, vol. 17, nos. 1–2, 2008, pp. 52–77. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Routledge, 1991. Feldman, Matthew. Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s Interwar Notes. Continuum, 2008. Jeffers, Jennifer. Beckett’s Masculinity. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. Bloomsbury, 1996. Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia UP, 1989. ———. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Edited by Leon S. Roudiez, translated by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia UP, 1980. ———. Melanie Klein. Translated by Ross Guberman, Columbia UP, 2001. ———. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia UP, 1982. ———. Revolution in Poetic Language. Translated by Margaret Waller, Columbia UP, 1984. ———. The Kristeva Reader. Edited by Toril Moi, Columbia UP, 2002. McMullan, Anna. Theatre on Trial: Samuel Beckett’s Later Drama. Routledge, 1993. Rank, Otto. The Trauma of Birth. Martino Publishing, 2010. Stewart, Paul. Sex and Aesthetics in Samuel Beckett’s Work. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin. “Abjection and the Fear of Alterity: Matricide and the Trope of the Maternal in the Works of Carlo Emilio Gadda and Samuel Beckett”. Italian Studies, vol. 66, no. 1, 2011, pp. 76–92. ———. Gadda and Beckett: Storytelling, Subjectivity and Fracture. Legenda, 2014. Weller, Shane. Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

CHAPTER 8

Beckett, Biopolitics and the Problem of Life Marc Farrant

Life in Beckett is nothing if not something to be lamented. This is a problem for any discussion of Beckett and biopower. It is far from obvious that an oeuvre characterised by an ebbing of vitality, by an irrepressible drive to return to the primordial “ooze” (Worstward Ho 96), should constitute a source of resistance towards regimes of sovereign power and violence. To enlist the feeble bodies of Beckett’s misanthropic monologuers in service of such a resistance seems both too little and too late.1 As Matthew Feldman writes in the introduction to Beckett and Death (published on the centenary of Beckett’s birth): “Beckett’s text can be read as something akin to an epitaph for all of humanity” (11). As compensation, however, this is perhaps how we might conceive of Beckett’s works as providing a form of testimony; as bearing witness to the horrors of the twentieth century (mechanised warfare; genocide; the wilful inhumanity of entrenched nativism) through the emaciated and 1 This perhaps explains the absence of the terms biopolitics or biopower in many historicist studies of Beckett’s works (e.g. Emilie Morin’s Beckett’s Political Imagination). This chapter is concerned not with how Beckett’s writings fit within existing political frameworks, but how they interrogate the very meaning of the political as such.

M. Farrant (B) Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK © The Author(s) 2021 W. Davies and H. Bailey (eds.), Beckett and Politics, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47110-1_8

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decimated selves thrust forward on both the page and the stage. As Seán Kennedy suggests, history thereby emerges as “both ineffable and ineluctable, it could neither be expressed nor escaped” (187). This chapter argues that biopolitics is a unique and useful resource for discussing Beckett’s complex relation to politics, history and political violence. By enlisting the discourse of biopolitics, one is able to re-inscribe the prior paradigms of existentialist humanism and post-structuralist antihumanism—so fundamental to Beckett’s reception in the decades that succeeded the Second World War—in a material context that is both more receptive to recent developments in historical scholarship (particularly with regard to Beckett’s fraught relationship to Ireland, and his personal exposure to the Nazi and Vichy regimes in the 1930s and 1940s) and more pertinent to a discussion of the political effects generated by the works. Therefore, rather than focus on biopolitical themes such as surveillance, confinement, sequestration and borders, all of which no doubt have considerable purchase in Beckett studies, I focus on two entwined features: the relation between language and life, and the notion of sovereignty. Such a focus, especially regarding a work’s effects, aims to circumvent a tendency to identify the narrative voices in Beckett’s works with the biographical personage of Beckett. Rather than allowing us to read the life into the works, my biopolitical approach aims to delineate life as an ineluctable and often ineffable remainder, crucial to the resistance of Beckett’s works to instrumental approaches.2 This resistance to resistance is famously epitomised by Beckett’s most political play, Catastrophe (1982), both in the oblique glare of the “Protagonist” and in the implicit warning to scholars and readers: “This craze for explication! Every I dotted to death” (459). By raising the question of whether a work’s politics can be considered apart from its author’s, and therefore as independent or in excess of historical, biographical or thematic criticism, I aim to highlight the further question of whether a work’s politics can be considered apart from its range of uses and, therefore, to reveal the urgency of Beckett’s oeuvre in contemporary debates. To begin to define what biopolitics is, and whether or not the term is synonymous with biopower, it is helpful to turn to the problem of humanism in Beckett. Earlier existential humanism, an approach typified by Martin Esslin’s reading of Beckett in “The Theatre of the Absurd” 2 Such approaches include biographical criticism, which would read into this very resistance a form of positive political resistance or affirmation.

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(1960), responded to the inherent negativity of Beckett’s works by outlining an affirmation of the timeless absurdity of the ‘human condition’: “the recognition of all these bitter truths will have a liberating effect: if we realize the basic absurdity of most of our objectives we are freed from being obsessed with them and this release expresses itself in laughter” (12–13). Insofar as such criticism emphasised the redemptive qualities of the Beckettian text, it paved the way for later post-structuralist or postmodernist affirmations of the negative. As Steven Connor adumbrates, although criticism no longer necessarily persists in advancing a timeless sense of the ‘human condition’, there is nonetheless a recalcitrant feeling that Beckett criticism “has learnt to give every extremity of dilapidation in his work a positive reflex of value” (Theory and Cultural Value 82). More recently, however, Beckett scholars have turned away from both the redemptive strategy of existentialism and the post-structuralist affirmation of rootless subjectivity. Instead, rather than pivoting on the concept of value implicit within the notion of humanism, scholars have begun to focus on the nature or being of the human as such. As Ulrika Maude argues, “Samuel Beckett’s writing can be characterized as a literature of the body” (170). By turning to the embodied forms and nervous pathologies found across the works, the formerly cerebral Beckett has been displaced by a fleshier Beckett where the very being of the human being is now at stake (and crucial to this wager is the distinction between the human and animal).3 Biopolitics is a distinctively useful resource for the discussion of Beckett, therefore, since it combines both questions of the value and nature of life. In other words, biopolitics constitutes the possibility of revivifying, in a literal sense, what was at stake in prior existential and philosophical readings of Beckett’s works. Indeed, the discourse of biopolitics posits that the very foundations of human society (notably the juridico-political foundation of rights) arise through the entanglement of originary distinctions that separate the living from the non-living, the human from the non-human. Originally formulated in The History of Sexuality Volume 1 and his lecture courses at the Collège de France in the mid-1970s, Michel Foucault establishes biopower as a central feature of modern society, defined by the 3 The embodied Beckett has often been situated or grounded in terms of his writings on painting and the visual arts. For an insightful account of Beckett’s writings on the visual arts, especially the relation of the post-war writings to French anti-humanism, see Kevin Brazil’s essay “Beckett, Painting and the Question of ‘the human’”.

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appropriation of life through mechanisms of sovereign forms of power. Sovereignty, for Foucault, arises as the power of the prince to inflict death. In the dialectic of sovereign power traced by Foucault, “The sovereign exercised his right of life only by exercising his right to kill, […] he evidenced his power over life only through the death he was capable of requiring” (The History of Sexuality 136). From the eighteenth century, however, Western politics undergoes a fundamental transformation, from the practices of sovereignty to those of biopower. The right to death exercised by the sovereign is sublimated into a form of lifeenhancing or “life-administering power” (136): “[T]his formidable power of death […] now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavours to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations” (137). Biopower constitutes both the disciplinary techniques discussed by Foucault elsewhere in terms of mastery over individual bodies (such as the famous notion of panopticism), and a biopolitics which is centred on the governance and regulation of life in terms of a new political subject: the population. Both the disciplinary and regulatory senses of biopower and biopolitics, respectively, can be deduced from simply glancing at Beckett’s works. For instance, the confined spaces and reduced or mechanical movements, that occupy so much of Beckett’s dramatic oeuvre, provide an array of metaphors for the modes of incarceration and surveillance discussed by Foucault as endemic of biopower. Alternatively, notions of population control and governance are dramatised in The Lost Ones (a story about the pitiable denizens of a cylindrical purgatory) and abound in references to Ireland, notably to issues of abortion and contraception.4 Although biopower, for Foucault, is the more expansive term, I reverse this prioritisation below in order to better indicate how the techniques of biopower yield a way of re-conceptualising the very ground of politics. This task of extending and deepening Foucault’s historical analysis is famously taken up in the work of the Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben. Indeed, Agamben starts from the premise that: “For millennia,

4 In the polemical “Censorship in the Saorstat” (1934) Beckett mockingly writes: “France may commit race suicide, Erin never will” (Disjecta 86). This indictment of the postcolonial Irish regime’s attempt to preserve the life of the nation (by aligning contraception with depopulation) marks Beckett’s fundamental distaste for the biopolitical management of life.

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man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question” (The History of Sexuality 143). For Agamben, the subjugation of life under modern forms of biopower is made possible through a founding moment in the philosophical tradition, where Aristotle draws a distinction between life as zoe (natural life) and life as bios (the linguistic and political life of the human proper). Extending Foucault’s thesis, Agamben argues that biopower doesn’t come to historically supplant sovereign power but rather constitutes it in the first instance: “Western politics is a biopolitics from the very beginning” (Homo Sacer 181). Utilising Aristotle’s distinction, Agamben argues that Western politics is founded by the exclusion of natural life from the political sphere. Man is a political animal because in language he “separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion” (Homo Sacer 8). Taking the concept of ‘bare life’ (bloße Leben) from Walter Benjamin’s critique of Carl Schmitt in “Critique of Violence” (1921), and the latter’s formulation of the sovereign as the one who decides on the exception of the rule of law in each society, Agamben argues that the sovereign ‘state of exception’ in fact constitutes the norm of the law in modern democracy.5 Like the sovereign prince who wields power over life by negating it, modern democracies are founded by an inclusive exclusion: [T]ogether with the process by which the exception everywhere becomes the rule, the realm of bare life […] gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoe, right and fact enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction. (Homo Sacer 9)

Bare life is therefore neither bios or zoe, but instead the politicised form of natural life that emerges as a limit-concept between the political and the natural. Whereas in pre-modern times the figure of bare life (which Agamben associates with the Roman homo sacer and the figure of the medieval bandit) appears at the limit of the legal order, in our modern

5 Agamben’s translation of ‘bare life’ (as vita nuda in Italian) is contentious. A more accurate translation suggests the term ‘mere life’, as used by Benjamin’s translators in the Selected Writings.

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era all life is laid bare. Accordingly, rather than posing as an aberration, the Nazi concentration camps constitute for Agamben the “nomos” (166) of the modern. This logic of inclusive exclusion arguably defines the predicament of several of Beckett’s characters and narrators. The narratorprotagonists of Beckett’s Trilogy all inhabit liminal or ‘bare’ states, often between life and death. The perambulating Molloy thus crawls around like a beast, his creaturely movement in correspondence with the indeterminacy of his destination: “No, I never escaped, and even the limits of my region were unknown to me. […] For regions do not suddenly end, as far as I know, but gradually merge into one another” (Molloy 65). This extension of the state of exception, or broader biologisation of politics, also takes on a historical dimension. Beckett was familiar with the social Darwinism and discourses of degeneration that informed Nazi doctrine.6 As Kennedy suggests, “[i]n an obvious sense, Beckett’s characters are degenerate: vagrants, perverts and the mentally ill were some of the main villains of degeneration theory, and it is precisely these outcasts that dominate his work” (197). The resulting state of the people who populate Beckett’s works might indeed best be summarised in terms of creaturely life. Taking inspiration from the writings of Eric Santner, Joseph Anderton defines creaturely life as “the suspended state of being in uncanny proximity with the non-human animal to which a subject is exposed when detached from the constitutive values and normative meanings that structure human life” (266). Rather than simply falling outside the borders of the ‘human’ per se, this sense of creaturely life yields another means of conceptualising a logic of inclusive exclusion, of belonging precisely by virtue of not belonging, or of existing in a relation of non-relation.7 Indeed, it is through the perceived vulnerability of such a state—a vulnerability derived not merely from an exposure to embodied life, but from a defencelessness generated precisely by a breakdown in cultural forms and human values—that we can begin to demarcate the continued biopolitical import of Beckett’s works. Such an

6 As Maude notes, Beckett’s extensive reading in the early 1930s included Max Nordau’s Degeneration (174), a key antecedent of the Nazi’s later designation of degenerate art (Entartete kunst ). 7 Several critics, including Amanda Dennis, Anthony Uhlmann, and Jean-Michel Rabaté infer the notion of “non-relation” from Beckett’s correspondence with Georges Duthuit and the famous “Three Dialogues”, published in Disjecta. See especially Dennis’s recent article, “A Theater of the Nerves: Samuel Beckett’s Non-Representational Art”.

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import, I argue, is not merely a matter of revalorising the body in opposition to biopower. Rather, through the very breakdown of the mimetic conventions of Western art and narrative, Beckett’s writings attest not merely to the objective fact of biological mortality, but to the material consequences of ontological finitude.8

Life and Logos Central to Agamben’s attempt to link Foucault’s account of biopolitical models of power and the juridico-institutional foundation of Western politics, via the concept of sovereignty, is the question of language. If the “production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power”, and the “modern state therefore does nothing other than bring to light the secret tie uniting power and bare life” (6), this follows from Aristotle’s original conception of the polis as the arena proper to man as a social animal. Indeed, for Agamben “[t]he link between bare life and politics” bears a direct relation to the “metaphysical definition of man as ‘the living being who has language’” (7). The transition from voice to language, from embodied speech to abstract logos, thus constitutes a division internal to the human being who is thereby maintained in a relation of inclusive exclusion. A rare essay to deal with the topic of Beckett and biopolitics, Jacob Lund’s “Biopolitical Beckett: Self-desubjectification as Resistance”, establishes the point at which language interpolates the self as the source of a radical resistance to “biopolitical control”. The impersonal language and strategies of desubjectification in Beckett’s work thus “bears witness to a potentiality, to a subject that is capable of becoming the subject of its own desubjectification: a subject that resists and evades biopolitical control” (76). In this section I will explore the relation between language, sovereignty and bare life in Beckett’s The Unnamable, and ultimately issue a caution with regards to claims of Beckett’s resistance. The Aristotelian conception of the human as a speaking animal has a long history in Western thought. Notably, in the context of Beckett’s extensive reading of philosophy and interest in Cartesian dualism, René 8 Indeed, insofar as mimetic objectivity can be seen as complicit with myths of historical progress (including racial purity), by exposing an ontological rather than merely biological contingency, I argue that Beckett’s texts suggest a limit to Maude’s preference for a “biomechanical rather than conceptual understanding of self” (183).

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Descartes argued for a fundamental division of the human and animal predicated on the latter’s lack of speech: For it is quite remarkable that there are no men so dull-witted or stupid – and this includes even madmen – that they are incapable of arranging various words together and forming an utterance from them in order to make their thoughts understood; whereas there is no other animal, however perfect and well-endowed it may be, that can do the like […] This shows not merely that beasts have less reason than men, but that they have no reason at all. (Discourse on Method 45)

This insistence that, firstly, animals possess no language and, secondly, that language therefore must be a sign of reason, is fundamentally challenged by Beckett’s art of the logoclasm. Writing to Mary Manning Howe on 11 July 1937, Beckett spells out an aesthetic doctrine that will inform his later writing: “I am starting a Logoclast’s league. […] I am the only member at present. The idea is ruptured writing, so that the void may protude [sic], like a hernia” (Letters I 521). In the famous “German Letter” to Axel Kaun in the same year, Beckett discusses a “Literatur des Unworts” (515) that further compounds a non-representational practice. Throughout the trilogy, Beckett’s ruptured writing or ‘unwording’ is set to work so as to disintegrate the self-sufficiency of the Cartesian cogito, the auto-affecting subject whose very speech is testament to the putatively rational nature of the human. It is with The Unnamable that this disintegration of the human as speaking animal reaches its apotheosis. The Unnamable begins: “Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that. Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on” (1). Through this disruption of the narrative conventions that orientate the reader regarding place (where), person (who) and time (when), the final work in the post-war Trilogy dramatically tests the link between the subject-constituting personal pronoun (‘I’) and the form of life (political; human) it is supposed to safeguard. Accordingly, Beckett’s texts recall Émile Benveniste’s celebrated writings on the deictic functioning of pronouns, which Agamben draws upon to extrapolate a theory of language whereby the subject is constitutively split or divided. For Benveniste, insofar as neither ‘I’ nor ‘you’ refer to an objective reality, but only indicate the subjects of and within an utterance, the personal

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pronoun substitutes for the living subject of the enunciation. This substitution is something that Beckett’s nameless narrator seems all too aware of: “I say I, knowing it’s not I” (123–24). This results in a transmutation from an I-subject to an I-object, and the unnameable narrator is substantiated by the very discourse that renders him absent: “Let us go on as if I were the only one in the world, whereas I’m the only one absent from it” (120). For Daniel Katz, such an effect is seen to affirm and typify Beckett’s post-war prose as an attempt to dismantle the “coherent ‘voice effect’ and all the metaphysical suppositions it entails” (16). For Agamben, this expropriation of the subject in language is the human being’s entrance into discourse and politics; the separation within the self that separates the proper being of the human as a political animal, from the individual’s mere animal or bare life: [T]he psychosomatic individual must fully abolish himself and desubjectify himself as a real individual to become the subject of enunciation and to identify himself with the pure shifter “I”, which is absolutely without any substantiality and content other than its mere reference to the event of discourse. (Remnants of Auschwitz 116)

The impossibility of the private ‘I’ in The Unnamable is also a central issue in Maurice Blanchot’s famous review of the novel, “‘Where now? Who Now?’”. For Blanchot, the novel revolves around “an empty center that the nameless ‘I’ occupies”, which we are unable attribute by “a comfortable convention [to] Samuel Beckett” (212).9 This inability, however, does not breed mere capitulation, but rather necessitates why “The Unnamable is condemned to exhaust infinity” (213). For Lund, and following Katz’s earlier work, it is in this radical absence or nothingness of the ‘I’ that we are able to envisage new forms of relationships through its pregnant potentiality—new forms of embedded subjectification in social, ethical and political constellations: “It is a matter of remaining within this double-movement of subjectification and desubjectification, in this no-man’s-land between identity and non-identity, since this place, which

9 To do so would be to reassure ourselves with the “security of a name”, by situating “the ‘contents’ of the book on this personal level at which everything that happens happens under the warrant of a conscience, in a world that spares us the worst unhappiness, the unhappiness of having lost the ability to say I” (“‘Where now? Who Now?’” 213).

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is so difficult to encircle and maintain, is the site of resistance against biopower” (75). If every subjectification involves a desubjectification, we might ask whether it follows that every desubjectification involves a subjectification, especially in terms of a spatial or embodied ‘site’ of resistance. For Lund, if Agamben provides the tools to overcome a dualistic conception of the human (split between nature and politics, life and logos, mind and body), thereby resolving the aporias of the Beckettian text in terms of a “zone of […] indistinction”, might this not involve having to rethink precisely what we mean by resistance? This problem can be further elucidated once we connect the paradox of linguistic (de)subjectification with Agamben’s paradoxical account of the origin of the sovereign as the one who exists both inside and outside the law simultaneously. As Lund argues: “The ‘I’ is a paradox. The linguistic ‘I’, to which I refer by the concept of the subject of the utterance, is at the same time a non-I, in that the narrator not only used the personal pronoun to refer to him or herself but also to mark the distance to his or her self” (70). Similarly, for Agamben, “the sovereign is, at the same time, outside and inside the juridical order” (15). As constituted through the power to proclaim the state of exception, the legal authority of the sovereign resides paradoxically in the capacity to suspend the law. This analogous logic perhaps warns against any attempt to seek the sources of one’s resistance in the conditions of one’s subjugation. Instead, to deploy an idiom associated more with ethical readings of Beckett, the logic of an inclusive exclusion permits an alternative and conceptualisation of otherness; of a sense of difference beyond mere opposition. Accordingly, if by revealing the fundamental paradox that lies at the heart of sovereignty one is nonetheless able to lessen claims to timeless or absolute legitimacy, one is, like Beckett’s narrator, still ineluctably stuck with the problem of the solipsistic self narrating itself by unnarrating itself into infinity: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” (134). In the next and final section, I draw a link between solipsism and sovereignty in order to explore an alternative way of thinking of resistance as a negative rather than positive attribute of the works.

Sovereignty and Solipsism Through the concept of solipsism, we can see how the paradox of sovereignty is refracted through Beckett’s works. In other words, just as we are constituted through “the words of others” (The Unnamable 25),

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then the zone of indistinction that marks the self cannot simply be seen as a source of freedom, since this freedom is one side of the coin of a logic that makes the relational concept of others and otherness equally dependent upon a notion of the self as a sovereign authority. One thinks of the eponymous narrator of Malone Dies as a solipsistic author residing over his narrative dominion, creating ex nihilo the others that populate his stories; just as without them, he would cease to be. In sum, what renders the human both same and other, both zoe and bios, cannot be wholly a site of resistance, as this parallels the activity of sovereign power that Agamben defines as the “‘politicisation’ of bare life—the metaphysical task par excellence” (Homo Sacer 8). The link, therefore, between the sovereign silence that marked Georges Bataille’s early praise for Beckett’s rendering of the inhuman in Molloy, and the inhumanity of a sovereign violence that duplicates the ontological silence of the animal in the historical silence of oppressed peoples, must not be forgotten. That is, the link between the inhumanity of the human and the inhumanity of the human to the human. Indeed, if life is truly what is at stake in politics (as the repressed category or concept that lies beneath any claim to freedom or legitimacy), then similarly embodied life cannot simply be a source of resistance, since the reduction of the human being to a body is precisely what biopower and acts of sovereign violence aim to achieve. The question is not, therefore, what new forms of life emerge from the disintegration of the subject, but rather how to move beyond mistaking the body as a source of significance. If Beckett’s works really constitute a literature of the body, the question is therefore not what the body means but of how it bears meaning. Indeed, Beckett’s writings encourage us to think accordingly precisely by virtue of the way that they refuse the category of life from functioning: firstly, in opposition (namely, in opposition to death) and secondly, as a source of value whatsoever. When life itself is named as such it is therefore often deployed as a source of bathos or target of abuse (much like the frequent exhortations to God): “fuck life”, as the protagonist in Rockaby puts it (442); “Bugger life!”, as Watt exclaims in Mercier & Camier (94); in Molloy, “I was limply poking about in the garbage saying probably, for at that age I must still have been capable of general ideas. This is life” (57); in Malone Dies , “all this ballsaching poppycock about life and death, if that is what it is all about, and I suppose it is, for nothing was ever about anything else to the best of my recollection” (52). The theological affirmation of immortal life is also the target of ridicule,

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as in Endgame when Clov asks: “Do you believe in the life to come?”, to which Hamm replies (sardonically stripping away the religious overtone): “Mine was always that” (116). Life as a positively charged source of affirmation or value thus always threatens to recede to a point of absolute non-value, like an everyday or commonplace platitude. The moment in Endgame where Hamm and Clov kill the flea is the apogee of this refusal to allow life to function as a source of oppositional resistance. As Shane Weller argues, the killing “is arguably carried out in order to put an end not just to a life of suffering but to life ‘as’ suffering” (215). To return to the discussion of humanism, this indeterminacy as to the value of life is directly related to the indeterminacy of the nature of life when it comes to the question of ‘what is life in Beckett?’. Indeed, the indeterminate co-implication of life and death found across Beckett’s work makes it difficult to account for life as a matter of positively identifying processes of formalisation (for example, life as a ceaseless or multiple becoming). Rather, as Molloy states, “to decompose is to live too” (22). The unbecoming of life in Beckett indicates a potentiality or an openness to change that is far from positive and even less certain as a source of resistance. This potentiality lies not in a future or present continuous state but, paradoxically, in a belatedness that renders living as a condition that is always already dying; a condition memorably encapsulated in Pozzo’s sense, in Waiting for Godot , of giving “birth astride of a grave” (83).10 Beckett’s notion of the “wombtomb” (45) in the early Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932), further compounds this sense of fatedness. Just as to be born is to be fated to die, so too does Beckett’s morphological critique of the ontogenetic fallacy of the womb as a source of pure life, portend the equally impure state of death, of a death itself stuck in a state of arrested development or condemned to an anal birth that would prevent its proper consummation. Thus, that which renders life absent from the beginning, renders absence itself absent. As Pozzo puts it: “I don’t seem able to depart”, to which Estragon replies: “Such is life” (46). Just as sovereign power paradoxically kills in the name of life (in the name of a life to come, or the life of the nation), it seems foolhardy to search for Beckett’s resistance to such a heinous logic by replicating this 10 Already in Proust , drawing on Schopenhauer’s reformulation of the Christian concept of original sin, Beckett gestures towards a literary thinking of life as constituted by an internal economy of death; of existence marked from the beginning by a corrosive force: “the original and eternal sin of […] having been born” (67).

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paradox in a naming or conceptualising of life in the works (as ‘embodied life’, for instance). Life must therefore function as a misnomer, as that which cannot be named and therefore valorised. Such a functioning disrupts Agamben’s own separation of life in terms of zoe and bios, and therefore, perhaps, also disrupts the latter’s wholly non-biological solution to biopower: the post-biopolitical life of beatitude, the Deleuzian or immanentist notion of a “happy life” that is epitomised for Agamben by Franciscan monasticism (Means without End 114).11 What is at stake in Beckett’s unwording is therefore not a matter of resistance—at least not in terms of an opposition derived from an alternative concept of life. Insofar as solipsism and sovereignty remain ineluctably entwined, that supreme selfhood is indistinguishable from absolute otherness and from the power to render others as absolutely other, any projection beyond the human runs the risk of complicity. As Jean-Michel Rabaté argues, Beckett therefore “frustrates the Deleuzian impulse to push the speaking and desiring subject beyond the human altogether” (41).12 By denying the sovereignty or self-sufficiency of life, one indeed disrupts the right to exercise death, but such an originary denial already places life on the side of death. To perpetuate this sense of “life without end” (11), as Molloy phrases it, is thus to risk that end from the very beginning; a risk that inscribes the vigilance of Beckett’s work from beginning to end. For earlier critics, such as Theodor Adorno, this vigilance constituted the negative freedom of Beckett’s writing. Through the discourse of biopolitics, however, it becomes possible to recast this vigilance in terms of a commitment to what Rabaté has called Beckett’s endeavour of “introducing us to the generic universality of defenceless life” (15). Insofar as such a generic universality cannot be named as such, or simply pinned down as a theme in the works, we might relate it instead to what Mary Bryden termed the “dynamic stillness” (179) of Beckett’s writing. This dynamic stillness names the textual or palindromic economy of the on/no that is operative across the oeuvre and distilled by the “nohow on” (103)

11 As Jacques Derrida points out, in Aristotle’s phrase zoon politikon (man as a ‘political animal’), the function of zoe is in contradistinction to Agamben’s use of the term. See The Beast and the Sovereign: Volume I for Derrida’s critique of Agamben. 12 For Rabaté, this frustration of the Deleuzian paradigm is caused because Beckett’s efforts to push beyond the human mode of being remain entangled within a theological framework (for instance, the absolute otherness of God is indistinguishable from God as a figure of absolute sovereignty).

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of Worstward Ho. Such an economy attests to a sense of life as one of infinite or generic finitude, to the absolute certainty of our contingency. To paraphrase Adorno, the task is therefore not simply to translate formal effects into thematic tropes, but rather to see the unsolved antagonisms of life (not only in terms of society, but as a concept that is in itself problematically split between the social and the biological, culture and nature) as reflected in immanent problems of form.13 This sense of life as constitutively unsolved, as the site of an inherent vulnerability both in our reasoning and with regard to our mortal selves, is therefore not merely to be accounted for in terms of the pithy phrases that the Beckettian text provides. Instead, through an experience of reading attuned to Beckett’s dynamic manipulation of literary forms and life forms, the reader is left in the unfinished situation of Beckett’s Molloy, when he asks: “My life, my life, now I speak of it as of something over, now as a joke which still goes on, and it is neither, for at the same time it is over and it goes on, and is there any tense for that?” (34).

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor, Continuum, 2011. ———. “Trying to Understand Endgame”. Translated by Michael T. Jones. New German Critique, vol. 26, 1982, pp. 119–150. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford UP, 1998. ———. Means without End: Notes on Politics. Translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, Minneapolis UP, 2000. ———. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, Zone Books, 1999. Anderton, Joseph. “‘The Impulse Towards Silence’: Creaturely Expressivity in Beckett and Coetzee”. Beyond the Human-Animal Divide, edited by Dominik Ohrem and Roman Bartosch, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 265–282. Barfield, Steven et al., editors. Beckett and Death. Continuum, 2009. Bataille, Georges. “Le Silence de Molloy”. Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, edited by L. Graver & R. Federman, translated by Jean M. Sommermeyer, Routledge, 1979, 2005, pp. 60–69.

13 In Aesthetic Theory Adorno writes: “The unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form” (7).

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Beckett, Samuel. Catastrophe. The Complete Dramatic Works. Faber and Faber, 2006, pp. 455–461. ———. “Censorship in the Saorstat”. Disjecta Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, edited by Ruby Cohn, Grove Press, 1984, pp. 84–88. ———. Dream of Fair to Middling Women. The Black Cat Press, 1992. ———. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. I: 1929–1940. Edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge UP, 2009. ———. The Lost Ones. Texts for Nothing and Other Shorter Prose, 1950–1976. Edited by Mark Nixon, Faber and Faber, 2010, pp. 99–120. ———. Malone Dies. Edited by Peter Boxall, Faber and Faber, 2010. ———. Mercier & Camier. Edited by Seán Kennedy, Faber and Faber, 2010. ———. Molloy. Edited by Shane Weller, Faber and Faber, 2009. ———. Proust. Calder & Boyas, 1970. ———. Rockaby. The Complete Dramatic Works. Faber and Faber, 2006, pp. 431– 442. ———. The Unnamable. Edited by Steven Connor, Faber and Faber, 2010. ———. Waiting for Godot: The Complete Dramatic Works. Faber and Faber, 2006, pp. 7–88. ———. Worstward Ho. Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho, Stirrings Still. Edited by Dirk Van Hulle, Faber and Faber, 2009, pp. 79–103. Benjamin, Walter. “Critique of Violence”. Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913– 1926, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Harvard UP, 2004, pp. 236–252. Benveniste, Émile. Problems in General Linguistics. Translated by Mary Elizabeth Meek, Miami UP, 1971. Blanchot, Maurice. “‘Where Now? Who Now?’”. The Book to Come, translated by Charlotte Mandell, Stanford UP, 2003, pp. 210–217. Brazil, Kevin. “Beckett, Painting and the Question of ‘The Human’”. Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 36, no. 3, 2013, pp. 91–99. Bryden, Mary. “Beckett and the Dynamic Still”. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, vol. 14, 2004, pp. 179–192. Connor, Steven. Theory and Cultural Value. Blackwell, 1992. Dennis, Amanda. “A Theater of the Nerves: Samuel Beckett’s NonRepresentational Art”. Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 40, no. 4, 2017, pp. 134–143. Derrida, Jacques. The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington, Chicago UP, 2009. Descartes, René. Discourse on Method: Selected Philosophical Writings. Translated by John Cottingham et al., Cambridge UP, 2006, pp. 20–56. Esslin, Martin. “The Theatre of the Absurd”. The Tulane Drama Review, vol. 4, no. 4, 1960, pp. 3–15. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Volume I, The Will to Knowledge. Translated by Robert Hurley, Penguin, 1998.

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Katz, Daniel. Saying I No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett. Northwestern UP, 1999. Kennedy, Seán. “‘Humanity in Ruins’: Beckett and History”. The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, edited by Dirk Van Hulle, Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 185–199. Lund, Jacob. “Biopolitical Beckett: Self-Desubjectification as Resistance”. Nordic Irish Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, 2009, pp. 67–77. Maude, Ulrika. “Beckett, Body and Mind”. The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, edited by Dirk Van Hulle, Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 170– 184. Morin, Emilie. Beckett’s Political Imagination. Cambridge UP, 2017. Rabaté, Jean-Michel. Think, Pig!: Beckett at the Limit of the Human. Fordham UP, 2016. Santer, Eric. On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. Chicago UP, 2006. Weller, Shane. “Not Rightly Human: Beckett and Animality”. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, vol. 19, 2008, pp. 211–221.

CHAPTER 9

Beckett’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young “Post-War Degenerate” Giovanna Vincenti

As suggested by the extensive annotations from Degeneration (1892) in Samuel Beckett’s Dream Notebook, Max Nordau was deliberately chosen by the author as a source of inspiration for his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (written 1932, hereafter Dream). In this chapter, I show that, at this very early stage of Beckett’s literary career, the choice of making his alter-ego protagonist Belacqua a “superior degenerate” (Nordau 179) reflects Beckett’s struggle to find an original collocation in the literary panorama, at once recognising his belonging to the European avant-garde’s intellectual atmosphere and ironically pointing out the limits of this affiliation. Since its emergence in the second half of the nineteenth century, degeneration theory has provided its adherents with an organic explanation for European immorality and decadence, by stressing the importance of environmental factors on heredity. With Traité des dégénérescences physiques, published in 1857, Benedict Morel was the first to argue that degeneration involved an alteration of human material by means

G. Vincenti (B) University of Reading, Reading, UK © The Author(s) 2021 W. Davies and H. Bailey (eds.), Beckett and Politics, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47110-1_9

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of a process of morbid inheritance which gradually leads to sterility and organic degradation. Despite the impossibility of reducing degeneration to a specific mental or physical condition, it came to signify “the condition of conditions, the ultimate signifier of pathology” (Pick 8), and gradually its language crossed the borders of specialist publications to permeate deeply popular and artistic culture. Max Nordau’s Degeneration offered a vital step in the evolution of the meaning of degeneration in relation to art whereby he presents art itself as one of the primary vehicles for the transmission of the disease. In so doing, he shaped a work of cultural criticism in the form of a medical treatise, offering detailed diagnosis, aetiology, prognosis and even therapeutics. In his attempt to apply scientific theories to avant-garde art in the shadow of Cesare Lombroso’s The Man of Genius (1891), Nordau aimed to demonstrate that many protomodernist styles and innovations were either caused by physiological and neurological disorders or by forms of mental illness: Degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, and pronounced lunatics; they are often authors and artists. These, however, manifest the same mental characteristics and the same somatic features, as the members of the above-mentioned anthropological family, who satisfy their unhealthy impulses with the knife of the assassin or the bomb of the dynamiter, instead of with pen and pencil. Some among these degenerates in literature, music, and painting have in recent years come into extraordinary prominence, and are revered by numerous admirers as creators of a new art, and heralds of the coming century. (3)

The book offers a panoramic presentation that Nordau himself calls “a long and sorrowful wandering through the hospital”. This hospital is home for different kinds of degenerate artists as well as those who are subject to their influence: according to Nordau, “exclusively literary and aesthetic culture is […] the worst preparation conceivable for a true knowledge of the pathological character of the works of degenerates” (3). By applying medical investigation to literature, Nordau’s aim was to devalue avant-garde work by way of proving that, far from being modern and progressive, it was actually atavistic and regressive. Unsurprisingly, scientific rigour did not find much space in his work and Degeneration was often denounced as charlatanism. For Beckett, Nordau’s Degeneration offered a rich “butin verbal” (letter to Thomas McGreevy, 8 November 1931, Letters I 93) made

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of erudite vocabulary which, given the peculiar nature of the text, shifts between medical/pathological and literary spheres: for instance, “echolalia” (Dream Notebook entry no. 629), “logorrhoea” (636), “onomatomania” (629), “coprolalia (mucktalk)” (671), “anxiomania” (659), not to mention the long list of phobias (662). Siobhán Purcell, in her analysis of the impact of degeneration theory on More Pricks Than Kicks (1934, hereafter More Pricks ) rightly stresses that the “significance of the excerpts from Nordau foreground Beckett’s concern with contingency of perceived degenerative conditions […] and the pathologizing capabilities of language and discourse” (31). Ulrika Maude also highlights the importance of reading Nordau for Beckett, as many symptoms described in Degeneration will then be “scattered throughout his writing” (176). But the impact of Nordau is much more immediate, as all the annotations in the Dream Notebook were in fact meant to be source material for Beckett’s first novel. This is not mentioned by Maude and is only briefly mentioned by Purcell, whose focus is largely the subsequent More Pricks. More immediately, Nordau provides Beckett with a paradigm, literary as well as physiological, to appropriate and subsequently to subvert. As Beckett writes in a letter to McGreevy in September 1931, he “has to buckle the wheel” of his writing or “run the risk of Nordau’s tolerance” (Letters I 87). Most importantly, Degeneration, with its interpretation of art in evolutionist, or rather devolutionist terms, allows Beckett, via Belacqua in Dream, to affirm his status as degenerate heir of the avantgarde: Belacqua’s failures in Dream can be read as determined by some sort of genetic heritage and, more generally, by environmental factors. In doing so, Beckett acknowledges his literary tastes and sense of belonging, but also attempts to shape his struggles with finding an original literary voice which needs an ironic detachment from “the original type” in order to develop. As with most of the degenerate artists attacked by Nordau, Belacqua can easily be ranked among what Nordau defines as “[h]igh degenerates, bordermen, mattoids, and graphomaniacs” (18),1 or, in Beckett’s words, a “horrible border creature” (123) who is affected by “graphospasmus” (66). His main degenerate trait is his characteristic “aboulia”: in Nordau’s words, “a disinclination to action of any kind, attaining possibly to abhorrence of activity and powerlessness to will” (20). More generally,

1 The second entry here is taken from Nordau in the Dream Notebook (613).

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Belacqua is affected by different degenerate behavioural tendencies such as alcoholism, suicidal thoughts, moral irresponsibility, anxiety and fits of depression. He also has “notorious physical peculiarities” (133), which although not a direct borrowing from Degeneration, would be considered by Nordau and many of his contemporaries as unmistakable marks of sexual and moral depravity: these include “a saturnine complexion” (124), “shingles and […] weeping eczema” (73) and “prostrated elephantiasis” (78). But, interestingly, some of the marks of degeneration attributed to Belacqua more clearly recall one of Belacqua’s main degenerate predecessor: Joyce’s literary alter-ego, the character of Shem in Finnegans Wake. Like Shem, a “megalomane with a loose past” (179.23) who writes on his body with his own excrement, Belacqua is a “megalomaniac” affected by “intestinal incohesion” (Dream 66). Beckett more than once portrays Belacqua by explicitly echoing Joyce’s portrait of Shem, as when he challenges the reader to “spot the style” (72) or when he signals his intention to portray Belacqua dissected into body parts, as Joyce does several times in the Wake with Shem. This representational strategy recalls medical textbooks which tended to classify patients according to their symptoms, presenting them as dissected into sick body parts. Exemplary in this sense is the opening of chapter I.7, which describes Shem’s “bodily getup” as: an adze of a skull, an eight of a larkseye, the whoel of a nose, one numb arm up a sleeve, fortytwo hairs off his uncrown, eighteen to his mock lip, a trio of barbels from his megameg chin (sowman’s son), the irony shoulder higher than the right, all ears, an artificial tongue with a natural curl, not a foot to stand on, a handful of thumbs, blind stomach, a deaf heart, a loose liver, two fifths of two buttocks, one gleetsteen avoirdupoider for him, a man root of all evil, a salmonskelt’s thinskin, eelsblood in his cold toed, a bladder tristened. (169.11–24)

Belacqua however, seems to be an even more “disinterestingly low human type” (Finnegans Wake 179.12–13) than Shem, so much so that his own author soon grows tired of him: In particular we had planned to speak of his belly, because it threatens to play so important part in what follows, his loins, his breast and his demeanour, and spell out his face feature by feature and make a long rapturous statement of his hands. But now we are tired of him. (Dream 133)

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The paragraph closes with the epigrammatic statement “Cacoethes scribendi, the doom of the best of penmen” (134). “Cacoethes” can be translated as the uncontrollable urge to do something, an ill-disposition, a malignant disease. Here, Beckett is at once defining the act of writing in terms of pathology (either as addiction or as an inability to exert control on the body) and of establishing a close connection with “The Penman”, Joyce, with whom he shares this doom. Other borrowings from Nordau indicate that Beckett frames Belacqua’s disease in a particular spatial and temporal context of the Parisian avant-gardes with the allusion to “la folie obsidionale (siege madness of 1870)” (Dream Notebook 624). This is an early definition of shell shock, which affected so many during World War I, and is known today as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Folie obsidionale, according to Nordau, originated in Paris during the twenty years of the Napoleonic war and was considered the main reason why “the craziest fashion in art and literature would necessarily arise [there]” (17). In Degeneration, he writes: In Paris a veritable epidemic of mental diseases was observed, for which a special name was found - la folie obsidionale, ‘siege-madness’. And even those who did not at once succumb to mental derangement, suffered lasting injury to their nervous system. This explains why hysteria and neurasthenia are much more frequent in France, and appear under a greater variety of forms, and […] they can be studied far more closely in this country than anywhere else. (42)

Beckett’s allusions to the obsidional insanity in Dream are thus ironic allusions to his own experiences with the Parisian literary avant-gardes as heirs of turn-of-the-century decadents. At the beginning of the 1930s, Paris was still the home for a new generation of Modernist “degenerates” who, far from becoming extinct, were even more radically integrating the insane, or at least the myth of insanity, into their aesthetic ideal. The Surrealist, André Breton, whose “simulations” were translated by Beckett into English in the 1930s, worked closely with soldiers affected by shell shock when he served in the First World War as a psychiatric worker. In Dream, Belacqua alternates states of obsidional insanity with mystical/ecstatic ones, as shown by the allusion to Ruskin: Every night when he squeezes through the breach and is absorbed by the avenue, that is his impression. But now, before that happens, before he

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regains his boxful of obsidional insanity he stands well out in the dark arena, his head cocked up uncomfortably at the star field, like Mr Ruskin in the Sistine, looking for Vega. (16; emphasis added)

Ruskin, an author adored by Proust as a young man, was to Nordau one of “the most turbid and fallacious minds” whose propositions “were decisive in determining the direction taken by the young Englishmen of 1843, who united artistic inclinations with the mysticism of the degenerate and hysterical” (28–29). None of these states seems to be true of Belacqua, however. Instead, the text tends towards self-criticism by the author for failing to find his own voice among the avant-garde of the 1930s. This idea is reinforced by the narrator warning Mr. Beckett that Belacqua is “a dud mystic” (Dream 186), another possible link with Shem, who is a “sham”. More generally, the passage could be an allusion to the particular atmosphere of experimentalism that Beckett absorbed in Paris, which, according to Nordau, was the result of deranged people forcing insane ideas on their companions, namely “folie à deux”: Among pronounced lunatics is the folie à deux, in which a deranged person completely forces his insane ideas on a companion; among hysterics it assumes the form of close friendship, causing Charcot to repeat at every opportunity: “Persons of highly-strung nerves attract each other”; and finally authors found schools. (30)

Beckett’s annotation in the Dream Notebook is rather eloquent with his personal addition in brackets: “folie à deux (exasperated into -isms)” (622; emphasis added). Ironically, as shown by the above passage, Belacqua’s degenerate inclinations were not original traits but almost stereotypical characteristics, a “folie à deux” of a whole class of “gémisseur”: “All this pallor and umbilicism à deux might be the very thing for a certain class of gémisseur, it might be the very thing for him, permanent and pertinent and all the rest of it for him” (193). “Gémisseur”, another borrowing from Nordau—namely someone who exceeds in commiseration—is an art in which Belacqua seems to excel, living in “the coastermonger times of a pale and ardent generation” (Dream 66).2 Here, Beckett enacts an

2 In the Dream Notebook, Beckett annotates the title of Morel’s treatise “Delire Panophobique des Aliénés Gemisseur” (615), which is widely quoted by Nordau. See Nordau 10, n.14.

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ironic, and even rather complacent appropriation of Nordau’s discourse. Being exposed to a particular kind of art makes him a degenerate, justifying his inability to get rid of “the stink of Joyce” (Beckett to Charles Prentice, 15 August 1931, Letters I 81). As Quirici shows, almost thirty years after Nordau, critics were still decrying “not merely the degeneracy of Ulysses, but more so its power to influence other writers”, who were thus “dangerously susceptible to contagion from Joyce, and likely to pass on the disease” (89). Through these allusions to Nordau, Beckett is thus implicitly suggesting that his lack of originality has some sort of environmental cause, as well as a hereditary one. This idea is reinforced by the fact that Beckett was particularly interested in the chapter devoted to egomania. Interestingly, the first entry in the Dream Notebook that is related to the section dedicated to egomania is: “My psychic and somatic stigmata” (660; emphasis added). Nordau associates egomania with Ibsen, who is depicted as an anarchist egomaniac. Ibsen is also the author chosen as a model by Joyce since his youth. Beckett was certainly aware of Ibsen’s influence on Joyce and it is possible that he was intrigued by the idea of a literary lineage involving Ibsen, Joyce and himself. Nordau devoted an extensive part of his chapter on egomania to his pseudoscientific explanations for the condition. An egomaniac, according to Nordau, is an invalid who: must of necessity immensely over-estimate his own importance and the significance of all his actions, for he is only engrossed with himself, and but little or not at all with external things. He is therefore not in a position to comprehend his relation to other men and the universe, and to appreciate properly the part he has to play in the aggregate social institutions. (257)

Quoting Lombroso, he points out that “all delirious geniuses are very much captivated by, and preoccupied with, their own selves” (90). These degenerate characteristics of egomania seem of particular interest to Beckett, as suggested by the following block of entries in the Dream Notebook: fallacy of the individuum (663) cœnæsthesis: general sensibility. Dimly perceived cellular organic Ego not involving cerebral consciousness (664) prenatal cœnæsthesis {tumultuous

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{exasperated cœnæsthesis (somatic)} (666) monopolising consciousness of degenerate subject {Distorting the Not I {Excluding (667)

These notes refer to a long passage in Degeneration (90–94), in which Nordau explains the evolution of the consciousness of the ego, which originates from a more general sensibility of the body. This bodily conscience, or cœnæsthesis, characterises the organism in the primal stage of its evolution. According to Nordau, “[t]he formation of an ‘I’, of an individuality clearly conscious of its separate existence, is the highest achievement of the living matter, so the highest development of the ‘I’ consists in embodying in itself the ‘Not I’, in comprehending the world, in conquering egoism, and in establishing close relations with the other beings, things and phenomena” (93), a stage named by the sociologists Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer as “altruism”. Cœnæsthesis, on the other hand, refers to the general sensibility of the “unconscious organic I”, a stage which in the natural evolution of the organism usually precedes the development of the ego (prenatal cœnæsthesis); however, the consciousness of the egomaniac is characterised by the persistence of this particular sensitivity. The egomaniac is therefore usually more focused on these kinds of interior, organic perceptions rather than in the external world: “the degenerate man remains a child all his life. He scarcely appreciates or even perceives the external world and is only occupied with the organic processes of his own body. He is more than egoistical, he is an ego-maniac” (Degeneration 94). Nordau thus introduced the specific concepts of cœnæsthesis and the “Not I”, which had long-lasting effects on Beckett’s aesthetic development. As pointed out by C.J. Ackerley, cœnæsthesis would have become a “key term in defining Beckett’s aesthetics of impotence and failure, and, with respect to his first ventures into the psychic territory, a demarcating landscape of consciousness that would henceforth be his own” (172). It is thus a serendipitous encounter with the term and concept of cœnæsthesis, which would become a characteristic trait of Beckett’s later voices, breaths and bodies that reach to a next-to-immaterial state, as if their highest form is in their ability to reduce, not to nothing, but to the bare minimum of consciousness, a reduction exemplified by the play Not I .

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However, at the time of the composition of Dream, for the border creature Belacqua, “the tumultuous coenaesthesis (bravo!) of the degenerate subject” (32) is still something he has to “flog on” in order to enwomb and expunge his consciousness. This is shown by the following passage in which Belacqua’s failure to maintain what he considers a privileged condition and what seems to be the embryonic condition sine qua non for the development of later Beckettian characters: He trained his little brain to hold his breath, he made covenants of all kinds with his senses, he forced the lids of the little brain down against flaring bric-à-brac, in every imaginable way he flogged on his cœnæsthesis to enwomb and expunge his consciousness. He learned how with his knuckles to press torrents of violet from his eyeballs, he lay in his skin on his belly on the bed, his face crushed grossly into the pillow, pressing down towards the bearings of the earth with all the pitiful little weight of his inertia, for hours and hours, until he would begin and all things to descend, ponderously and softly to lapse downwards to darkness, he and the bed and the room and the world. All for nothing. He was grotesque, wanting to ‘troglodyse’ himself, worse than grotesque. It was impossible to switch off the inward glare, wilfully suppress the bureaucratic mind. It was stupid to imagine that he could be organised as Limbo and wombtomb, worse than stupid. (123; emphasis added)

The passage shows Belacqua’s struggles to “troglodyse” himself (“Troglodyte” being another borrowing from Nordau, Dream Notebook 657); but no matter how hard he tries, as long as he is alive, he will always remain “for all his grand fidgeting and shuffling, bird or fish, flapping its wings under a press of water” (123). Bird or fish, Belacqua is a “hybrid”, and far from being a closed universe, he is often led by his bodily instincts to face the external world. In Dream, his tormented relationships come to exemplify his inability to reconcile body and mind. Belacqua’s contradictory relationship with women, especially (which leads him to masturbation and prostitutes), denotes a “degenerate sexuality” that Nordau defines as any kind of sexual practice or identity which does not subordinate itself to the imperative of reproduction. In this way, Beckett chooses for Belacqua the destiny of extinction. Still, Belacqua’s existence is not limited to Dream and in fact all the degenerate characteristics become more prominent in More Pricks, even though direct references to Nordau are much less frequent. There are a few significant exceptions, such as the reference to “cœnæsthesis” in “Love and Lethe”

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and “Draff”, and the idea of a “marriage mitigated with a cicisbeo” in “Walking Out”, a story dominated by themes of non-reproductive sexual practices, sterility and impairment.3 Far from being safe from the danger of procreation, Belacqua’s sterile intercourse with other women in More Pricks is frequent, even though he gets married twice. In More Pricks, Belacqua is also given the significant surname, “Shuah”. In the Old Testament, Shuah is the mother of Onan, a biblical figure who, in order to avoid raising descendants for his late brother, engaged in coitus interruptus. Even the choice of a Jewish name could be motivated by the widespread identification of the degenerate artist with Jews, which was reaching its apotheosis in the 1930s. The origin of the word onanism is annotated in the Dream Notebook (“Er, Onan and Shelah, sons of Judah and Shuah”, 425) as being from Garnier’s Onanisme, seul et à deux, sous toutes ses formes et leurs consequences (1883). It is possible that the choice of Garnier’s text as a source for Dream was once again dictated by Beckett’s proximity to Joyce. In this sense, the choice to attribute to Belacqua a Jewish name which alludes to his onanistic inclinations can be read as a further attempt to establish a link with Joyce: Belacqua could indeed be regarded as a descendant of Leopold Bloom, the modernist Wandering Jew par excellence, whose indulgence in onanistic practices was the main cause for Ulysses being banned in the United States for ten years. Instead of the modern Ulysses, however, we find in More Pricks the modern Fingal, which Mary Power points out is a parody of Macpherson’s Ossian Cycle (151). In “Fingal”, attention is particularly given to landscape. The story narrates one of Belacqua’s numerous romantic fiascos and is dominated by a landscape in which the most evident picturesque and romantic elements are ignored by Belacqua for the spectacle of the Portrane Mental Hospital. This is the first time in Beckett’s prose that he represents the mental asylum, which dominates Beckett’s subsequent fiction, including Murphy, Watt , The Unnamable, as well as later texts. Here, Belacqua faces the enticing possibility of avoiding all social ties. He relishes the thought of “‘No shaving or haggling or cold or hugger-mugger, no’ – he cast for a term of ample connotations – ‘no night-sweats’” (More Pricks 22), finding “the nature outside me compensating the nature inside me” (22) and seeing the asylum as “a land of

3 “[C]icisbeo” is the first entry (612) from Nordau that appears in the Dream Notebook.

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sanctuary” (25). At the beginning of the twentieth century, asylums were feared institutions in Ireland, connoting state violence and the notion of imprisonment, rather than therapy or cure. For Belacqua, though, the asylum is a vital and attractive institution, without which there would be “little left of Portrane but ruins” (23). Despite the irresistible attraction of the asylum, he does not become one of the inmates, but walks beside the border—close enough to see its occupants and wish he could be one of them. He thus appears as what Nordau defines as “the borderland dweller” (9) under which are classified the earlier defined “high degenerates”, “mattoids” and “graphomaniacs”. However, unable to attain the social standards, Belacqua runs away and manages to find a momentary refuge in Taylor’s pub. Here, he abandons himself to a “memorable” fit of laughter which could also be read as an allusion to Nordau, who considers this exasperated emotionalism another trait of degeneration: “[a]nother mental stigma of degenerates is their emotionalism. … It is a phenomenon rarely absent in a degenerate. He laughs until he sheds tears, or weeps copiously without adequate occasion” (19; emphasis added). In More Pricks, and “Fingal” in particular (one of the last stories of the collection to be written in early 1933), a reality surrounds Belacqua in which humanity, as well as the landscape, are in “ruins” (23). It is difficult to discern who is outside the asylum and who is inside. As Purcell notes: Beckett’s depiction of a ruined Ireland traversed by a self-confessed degenerate, charges his developing aesthetic with a contemporary urgency that responds to anxiety about degeneracies. […] The painful cases that populate the collection serve as a city-wide counter-narrative to the Irish Revivalist ideals of myth, physical culture and “full bodied Gaels” lamented in “Censorship in the Saorstat”. (33)

In contrast, such a counter-narrative is characterised by a system of different Irish literary allusions, specifically Joyce and Jonathan Swift, which suggest an alternative idea of Ireland. Twenty years earlier, Joyce had already depicted Dublin as the centre of paralysis in Dubliners, and Swift’s name in particular was strongly associated with mental illness and mental asylums in Dublin, owing to his own psychological troubles and his endowment of a hospital for the mentally ill. Nonetheless, Beckett does not appear to completely “[advocate] a radical aesthetic which, in keeping with Belacqua’s degeneracy, celebrates the fact of his own incoherency” (Purcell 33). Beckett’s earliest prose is still far from what Seán

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Kennedy describes as an appropriation of “the terms of the discourse of degeneration”, subjecting them to an ironic reversal, or “transvaluation” (196). At this early stage of Beckett’s aesthetic development, his writing seems to be primarily characterised by his attempt to exorcise his own “anxiety of influence”, and Belacqua’s degenerate traits are thus the result of some sort of hereditary burden. Belacqua is nothing more than a sterile deviation of an original type that Beckett abandons, following Nordau’s advice that such degenerates should be left to their inevitable fate. Belacqua still does not embody that “wretchedness which must be defended to the very end” (Letters II 25) which will characterise the figures in Beckett’s later works.4 Beckett’s author-narrator describes him in “Ding-Dong” as “an impossible person”, confessing, “I gave him up in the end because he was not serious” (More Pricks 32). He finally inflicts on Belacqua an accidental death in “Yellow”, when the doctors forget to auscultate him. This hostility towards Belacqua is reinforced by the subsequent short story, “Echo’s Bones”, in which the author-narrator makes Belacqua expiate his sins and cruelly makes fun of him even more. As Mark Nixon suggests, Belacqua is “brought back to life in order to atone for his narcissism, his solipsism and for being an ‘indolent bourgeois poltroon’ in the previous stories” (“Echo’s Bones” xv). The result, according to Charles Prentice, who commissioned and then rejected the story, was a “nightmare […] which would make people shudder and be puzzled and confused” (qtd. in “Echo’s Bones” xii). Nonetheless, at the time, Beckett thought he had “put [in it] all I knew and plenty that I was better still aware of” (Beckett to McGreevy, 6 December 1933, Letters I 171). With “Echo’s Bones”, Beckett returns to a rather Joycean language, making large use of “quashed quotatoes” (Joyce 183.22) recycled from the Dream Notebook. As Nixon notes, “there is hardly a sentence in ‘Echo’s Bones’ that is not borrowed from one source or another” (xvi). More explicitly than ever here, Belacqua is presented as a parody of the “degenerate artist”, and references to Nordau, degeneration and decadence abound. Nordau’s presence is felt on the very first page of the story when the narrator states that individual existence is for Belacqua an “injustice”:

4 See Kennedy 197.

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No one was more willing than himself to admit that his individual existence had in some curious way been an injustice and that this tedious process of extinction, its protracted faults of old error, was the atonement imposed on every upstart into animal spirits each in the order of time. (3; emphasis added)

Nixon notes that the expression is taken from Friedrich Ueberweg’s History of Philosophy (from which Beckett took notes in his “Philosophy Notes” kept in the 1930s). Ueberweg refers to a “[d]efinite individual existence [which] constitutes an injustice and must be atoned by extinction” (“Echo’s Bones” 55–56). The passage, however, is also reminiscent of “the fallacy of the individuum”, noted in the Dream Notebook (663), which is based on Nordau and consists of “the illusion […] to consider himself as an ‘individuum’, confronting the world as a separate world or macrocosm” (94). In Nordau’s description, this illusion takes place instead of the degenerate assimilating the “not I”, thus preventing them from reaching the highest stage of development. Moreover, the idea of a “tedious process of extinction” as a result of “old errors” recalls the scientific definition of degeneracy itself, the “atonement imposed on every upstart into animal spirits each in the order of time”. Here, the “old errors” generate a morbid deviation which does not allow the natural progression of the healthy species, but gradually leads to their sterility and consequent extinction. The dark afterlife in which Belacqua’s atonement takes place is depicted in markedly decadent terms, with venereal diseases, sterility and degeneracy dominating the story. We also find allusions to the artistic panorama that was contemporary to Beckett. In the second part of the story, for instance, Lord Gall of Wormwood—the “aspermatic colossus” (23)— forces Belacqua to procreate with his wife in order for him to assure a lineage and save his estate; but, ironically, Belacqua and Lady Gall conceive a daughter. It is during his absurd discussion with Lord Gall that Belacqua explicitly defines himself as a “postwar degenerate”, totally lacking original ideas: “We have faults, but ideas is not one of them” (26). Here, Belacqua’s (and Beckett’s) gaze is still directed towards the past— no matter how strictly connected degeneration theory was becoming to the totalitarian follies in the early 1930s. The war that Beckett has in mind is either World War I, the Irish War of Independence or the Irish Civil War (or a combination of all three) and, as the passage suggests, he still sees himself (and consequently Belacqua) as a “degenerate” product of the

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past, rather than an artist able to express the ineffability of the present (as he does after World War II). Lord Gall also repeatedly urges Belacqua to “cut out the style” (28), referring to Belacqua’s attempt to imitate Arthur Rimbaud, a precursor to many aspects of the decadents as well as the surrealists, with “[a]rchipelagoes of pollards, spangled with glades” (27). But the allusion here is also autobiographical: more specifically, the poem evoked is “Le bateau ivre” (“Drunken boat), a poem translated by Beckett in early 1932 (see “Echo’s Bones” 89). The parody of the decadent poet is rendered through a further reference to Rimbaud and what Beckett calls his “eye-suicide – pour des visions ” (Letters I 99). This takes place in the third section of the “little triptych” (“Echo’s Bones” 4), where Belacqua tries and fails to achieve a poetic vision: “he closed his eyes, intending to have a vision, but felt so marooned when he did so that he opened them again quick” (36). Ironically, Belacqua has also just been depicted contemplating the landscape and struggling to define the whole scene: with the moon shining, the sea tossing in her sleep and sighing, and the mountains observing their Attic vigil in the background, he found it difficult to decide offhand whether the scene was of the kind that is called romantic or whether it should not with more justice be termed classical. A classic-romantic scene. (36)

Immersed in this “classic-romantic” setting, Belacqua himself becomes a “classic-romantic corpse”. This dichotomous pairing, often translated into healthy-sane/degenerate-insane art, had dominated the artistic debate since the nineteenth century. Here, Beckett alludes to Mario Praz’s La Carne, La Morte e il Diavolo (The Romantic Agony, 1930) in which Praz stresses the limits of a neat contraposition of the term “classical” and “romantic”. A further allusion to this dichotomy is implicit when Belacqua complains of his existential ailments, acknowledging that “great art had proved a great boon while it lasted”, but soon admitting that “he could not stand the pace” (“Echo’s Bones” 43). Here, he is brusquely interrupted by Doyle: You wear me to the pit with your – […] Shall I say with the eccentricities of your conversation, your buckled discourse? You must be rotten through

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and through to fly out your own system the way you do. Stick to the point, honour your father, your mother and Göthe. (43–44)5

Doyle’s remark implies that the eccentricities of Belacqua’s conversation must be due to the process of decomposition of his body: “you must be rotten through and through”—another clear allusion to Nordau and degeneration theory more broadly. Interestingly, Beckett uses the expression “buckled discourse”, which echoes a phrase from his letter to McGreevy (quoted earlier), in which he mentions the risk of meeting “Nordau’s tolerance” if one does not “buckle the wheel of one’s poem”. As this chapter has shown, Nordau provides Beckett with a paradigm that he subverts and makes his own in later works. However, this is not the case with Belacqua. His evolution as a character reflects Beckett’s attempts to overcome the anxiety of his influences. As we have seen, Belacqua, as an unoriginal heir of the avant-gardes, is destined to extinction, and his “demented conversation” (“Echo’s Bones” 45) must necessarily be buried in order to generate something new.

Works Cited Ackerley, Chris. “Samuel Beckett and Max Nordau: Degeneration, Sausage Poisoning, the Bloody Rafflesia, Coenaesthesis, and the Not I”. Beckett After Beckett, edited by S. E. Gontarski and Anthony Uhlmann, Florida UP, 1996, pp. 167–76. Beckett, Samuel. Beckett’s “Dream” Notebook. Edited by John Pilling, Beckett International Foundation, 1999. ———. Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Arcade Publishing, 2006. ———. “Echo’s Bones”. Edited by Mark Nixon, Faber and Faber, 2014. ———. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. I: 1929–1940. Edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge UP, 2009.

5 Goethe is the archetypal representative of the classical aesthetic that Nordau counterpoises with the decadent one. In the early 1930s, Eugène Jolas also wished to counterpoise Goethe, but this time to Joyce himself. 1932 marked the hundredth anniversary of Goethe’s death, but it was also the year of Joyce’s fiftieth birthday and the tenth anniversary of the publication of Ulysses. Jolas wanted to devote a special issue of transition to Joyce and Goethe; however, at Joyce’s request, the issue was reduced to a special section of the journal, entitled “Homage to James Joyce”. Instead of the neat contraposition between Joyce and “The Olympian”, the figure of Goethe was ultimately ignored. Beckett was probably aware of this, as this was the issue which contained his text, “Sedendo et Quiescendo”, as well as the manifesto “Poetry is Vertical”.

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———. More Pricks Than Kicks. Edited by Cassandra Nelson, Faber and Faber, 2010. Garnier, Pierre. Hygiène De La Génération. Onanisme, Seul Et À Deux. Garnier frères, 1900. Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. Edited by Erik Bindervoet, Robbert-Jan Henkes, and Finn Fordham, Oxford UP, 2012. Kennedy, Seán. “‘Humanity in Ruins’: Beckett and History”. The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, edited by Dirk Van Hulle. Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 185–200. Lombroso, Cesare. The Man of Genius. W. Scott, 1891. Maude, Ulrika. “Beckett, Body and Mind”. The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, edited by Dirk Van Hulle, Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 170– 184. Morel, Benedict. Traité des dégénérescences physiques: Physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l’espèce humaine et des causes qui produisent ces variétés maladives. Libraire de l’Académie impériale de médecine, 1857. Nordau, Max. Degeneration. Translated by William Heinemann, 1898. Pick, Daniel. Faces of Degeneration—A European Disorder, c.1848–1918. Cambridge UP, 1999. Power, Mary. “Samuel Beckett’s ‘Fingal’ and the Irish Tradition”. Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 9, no. 1, 1981–1982, pp. 151–56. Praz, Mario. The Romantic Agony. Oxford UP, 1991. Purcell, Siobhán. “‘Buckled Discourses’: Disability and Degeneration in Beckett’s More Pricks Than Kicks ”. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, vol. 27, 2015, pp. 29–41. Quirici, Marion. “Degeneration, Decadence, and Joyce’s Modernist Disability Aesthetics”. Joyce Studies Annual, vol. 10, 2016, pp. 84–109.

CHAPTER 10

Waiting for Godot and the Fascist Aesthetics of the Body Hannah Simpson

The fascist politics of National Socialist Germany and Vichy France found expression in an ideology of bodily perfection.1 In the increasingly fascistinflected reconstruction of Europe following World War I, the bodily health of the individual citizen became entwined with the promise of national renewal and stability, generating what Judith Surkis terms a “physiological politics”, whereby the problem of post-war reconstruction became fixed rhetorically and legislatively on the individual bodies of the national community (104). Physical health was no longer simply 1 Although acknowledging of the distinctions between mid-century German fascism and French “ersatz” or “para-fascism” (Griffin 19) and, perhaps more importantly, the fact that “no static conception of fascism, no ahistorical definition, can do justice to the various doctrinal fluctuations that fascism underwent in France […] [and] Germany during the interwar period” (Soucy 24), this chapter focuses on the marked similarities that nevertheless existed between French and German politically inflected ideologies of the body following World War I. See Paxton, and Soucy, for further discussion of the distinction between “strong” fascist German and “weak”, “ersatz” or “proto-” fascist French politics in other respects.

H. Simpson (B) St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 W. Davies and H. Bailey (eds.), Beckett and Politics, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47110-1_10

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“a desired state” but “an ideological position” (Metzl 2). The fit, healthy and unblemished citizen’s body was increasingly venerated in French and German society as visible proof of national well-being and political obedience; the injured, invalid or otherwise impaired body was eliminated both formally and literally from art and society as undesirable and unruly entities, unable to perform adequately as their nation state demanded and menaced by eugenicist thinking. Within this context, Samuel Beckett’s pained and impaired post-war bodies offer a quietly radical rejection of this historically constituted ideology of the able-bodied. Beckett’s weakened and damaged bodies have received critical attention in the past, but primarily with reference to Beckett’s philosophical scepticism or, more recently, his own medical history.2 Little scholarly work to date has attempted to read these damaged bodies in the context of the wartime moment of Beckett’s formative years, despite his having been exposed to both the German and French fascist aesthetics of the body before and during World War II. We have thus failed to recognise fully how Beckett’s post-war theatre, in which “disability is the norm” (Davidson 112), resists the ideology of corporeal human perfection. The pained and impaired bodies that populate Beckett’s earliest stage-spaces are significant as starkly visible examples of both the type of bodies that fascist aesthetics would censor from the art-world during the 1930s and 1940s, and the types of socially censored bodies that French and German political ideology would attempt to erase from their society. In contrast to the reified physically perfect and socially obedient fascist body, Beckett’s 1952 play, Waiting for Godot (his first staged piece following World War II), presents a range of impaired human figures that are politically resistant in their refusal to be neatly contained within a prescribed social choreography. This chapter draws on disability theory and aesthetics, alongside historical detail of the fascist ideology of the body, to explore how the post-war physical forms in Waiting for Godot refuse the “dark side of power, control and fear” that haunts the ideology of able-bodied health (Davis 1). When the individual citizen is coded as the literal embodiment of national strength, governing powers typically take a heightened interest in regulating the appearance and functioning of those individual bodies, in order to ensure that they reflect the desired vision of the country. In 2 Notable recent examples include works by McTighe; Tanaka, Tajiri and Tsushima; McMullan; and Maude.

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the case of Vichy France and Nazi Germany, this resulted in the identification of physical impairment as something negatively ‘other’. “[F]ascist aesthetics emphasise control” (Nadel ix), and the regularly formed and predictably functioning body can be more easily universalised into a collective symbol of the nation’s self-image, as in the mass NSDAP rallies depicted in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will, 1935). By contrast, the irregularly or unpredictably functioning human body can be less easily choreographed into a de-individualised, obediently performing embodiment of the nation’s strength and will to power. Disability in literary and social discourse has often continued to “serve as a metaphorical signifier of social and individual collapse”, as it did Nazi Germany and Vichy France (Mitchell and Snyder 222). However, within the context of Beckett’s post-World War II theatre, the impaired body can thus signal social and individual resistance, a transgressive refusal of the politically inflected fetishising of bodily control and “cultural rules about what bodies should be or do” (Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies 6). Beckett’s bodies refuse to obey the ideology of ability vaunted by the fascist regime.

Fascist Aesthetics of the Body in Germany and France The interwar period saw a focus on the citizen’s bodily health in both France and Germany become entwined with specific—and remarkably similar—political concerns. The return of one million French and four million German veterans with severe disabilities following World War I provided stark evidence of both countries’ physical struggle for survival (Riding 3; Koonz 48), catalysing proto-fascist narratives that blamed the political decline of the nation state on the physical decline of the citizens’ own bodies. Roger Griffin identifies the hallmark of the modern European fascist mentality as the sense of “being engaged in the frontline of the battle to overcome degeneration through the creation of a rejuvenated national community, an event presaged by the appearance of a new ‘man’ embodying the qualities of the redeemed nation” (13). Thus, the literal healthy body made flesh the abstract concept of the postWorld War I French and German states. Pierre Drieu La Rochelle gave voice to a widespread contemporary sentiment when he praised European fascism in 1943 as “le mouvement politique qui va le plus franchement, le plus radicalement […] dans le sens de la restauration du corps —santé,

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dignité, plénitude, héroïsme” (“the political movement that leads most frankly, most radically […] toward the restoration of the body—health, dignity, plenitude, heroism”, 50). This ideology of the ‘healthy body’ led to the development of a particularly exclusionary body culture in both countries, in which “[t]he measure of the good, true, and healthy normal also determines the status and value of the people” within society (Garland-Thomson, Staring 30). This section will briefly outline some of the similarities in how Vichy France and Nazi Germany carefully defined and moulded the permissible forms of their national bodies, and eliminated those deemed impermissible, as part of the drive to establish a closer conformity across and control over the national citizen’s body. Physical fitness was encouraged as a key requirement of the desirable citizen in Vichy France and Nazi Germany, “the supposedly healthy body” acting as “a signifier of moral worth” (LeBesco 81). Alfred Rosenberg’s Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur (Fighting League for German Culture) oversaw a mass physical education programme intended to nationalise and regulate German citizens’ bodily fitness, encouraging “the almost manic cult of the aesthetic of body education” in Nazi Germany (Karina 26). Likewise, Vichy France’s government demonstrated a comparable “faith in the regeneration and virilising potential of physical exercise” for a society supposedly weakened by decadence and intellectualism (Tumblety 84), and sought the creation of l’homme nouveau or “new man”, “intellectually, morally and physically transformed”, and able to preserve and defend a “pure and true” French nation (Lackerstein 163). The government board, Le Commissariat Général à l’Éducation Générale et Sportive (General Commission for Physical Education and Sport) was established in September 1940, led by the national tennis champion Jean Borotra, who believed in teaching sport as a means of building character and instilling moral values. Government publications such as Les Activités d’éducation générale (Activities for General Education, 1941), and the compulsory Vichy youth initiative, Chantiers de la Jeunesse (Youth Workshops) called for a regime of austerity and heightened physical education in schools in order to reform the nation’s youth in body and spirit. By means of such physical education training, “power [was] invested in individuals through stimulating them to work voluntarily on themselves, making them docile in particular ways” that suit the state’s aims (Burt 119). The physically fit body was also the body trained into the “unified

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movement” of the German Volk or French people, obediently and unanimously exemplifying “a homogenous body, serving the state” (Patraka 22). Alongside encouraging and rewarding ‘correct’ physical form and functioning, the Nazi and Vichy fascist states also promoted the active exclusion and eradication of bodies that looked and functioned ‘incorrectly’, beginning with creative art forms. Dianne S. Howe notes that “the purpose of art, in the Nazi view, was to shape the outlook of the nation […] All art was to conform to the state aesthetic” (35). In practice, this meant that German art in its various forms was expected to reflect this corporeal ideal, “forbidden to show any bodily imperfections” (Sontag 92). The Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition in Munich in 1937 labelled as “degenerate” works that depicted literal bodily impairments, such as Otto Dix’s Kriegskrüppel (War Cripples, 1920) and George Grosz’s Bildnis Max Herrmann-Neisse (The Poet Max Herrmann-Neisse, 1927), but also modern art that distorted the ‘natural’ form of the human body, and as Carol Poore observes, “almost all the works labelled degenerate art were condemned by being associated with disability because of their fragmentation, distortion, and ugliness” (92). Similarly, at the Musée du Jeu Paume in France, Cubist paintings that disjointed the human form were burned as “degenerate art” by the Nazis, including canvases by Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Paul Klee and Fernand Léger. The display of the live human body in the theatre was still more rigorously regulated. Plays depicting physical impairment or pain were quickly banned in Germany by the Nazi administration, including Karl Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind (Die letzten Tageder Menschheit, 1918) and Ernst Toller’s Transformation (Die Wandlung, 1919). Similarly, in occupied France, many of the plays that were censored by the Vichy government or Nazi occupiers, or disrupted and forced to close by the Milice, featured ill or physically impaired characters: the mute and disfigured Kattrin in Bertolt Brecht’s Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Mother Courage and her Childen, 1939), the diabetic Yvonne in Jean Cocteau’s Les Parents terribles (The Storm Within, 1938, restaged in 1941) and the epileptic Maxim in his La Machine à écrire (The Typewriter, 1941).3 3 Following right-wing riots at the first performances of La Machine à écrire, Vichy censors demanded that the scene staging Maxim’s epileptic fit be cut from the script before its run was permitted to continue (Krauss 2, 215).

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Preference—and Vichy funding—was given instead to plays that offered models of the physically fit and fascist-approved human form, such as Huit cent mètres (Eight Hundred Metres, 1941), a play simulating the progress of an 800-metre race, written by the aptly named André Obey and staged in the sports stadium Stade Roland-Garros by Jean-Louis Barrault with a cast of “fine young physical specimens” running around the stadium track (Bradbury 24). This “fascist glamorization of the body beautiful” in the mass spectacle of numerous physically fit and obediently performing bodies in the 15,000-capacity Court Philippe Chatrier “could not escape associations with the Nazi cult of the body” (Krauss xix, 56)— and these associations become more chilling if we remember that between September 1939 and June 1940 the Stade Roland-Garros had been used as a detention centre for indésirables arrested by the Vichy police (Marrus and Paxton 250; Koestler 68). The staging of Obey’s Huit cents metres offers a particularly stark example of the replacing of the ‘incorrect’ with the ‘correct’ bodily form in fascist France and Germany. The elimination of artistic renderings of impaired bodies was violently reflected in the actual eradication of the impaired individual in Nazi Germany and Vichy France, in an infamously violent instantiation of what Tobin Siebers has named the “ideology of ability”, by which able-bodiedness is used to “define the baseline by which humanness is determined”, to “giv[e] or den[y] human status to individual persons” (8). Legal and pseudo-scientific governmental powers in both countries shaped a discourse that defined the ill or impaired body as fundamentally Lebensunwertes Leben (“life unworthy of life”), a drain on and a danger to national well-being. In July 1933 the Nazi government implemented the Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses (Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring) which permitted the compulsory sterilisation of any citizen with an alleged genetic disorder, including epilepsy, blindness, deafness and alcoholism. It is thought that approximately 400,000 individuals deemed unfit to procreate were sterilised during the twelve years of the Third Reich (Poore 78). The disabled body was permitted circulation in the public sphere only as a cautionary example: propaganda films such as Erbkrank (The Hereditary Defect, 1936) and Opfer der Vergangenheit (Victims of the Past, 1937) and print publications like Neues Volk juxtaposed ‘healthy’ Aryan bodies against images of severely disabled individuals, the latter being described as transgressing the law of natural selection (Koonz 119). In France, the Centre d’Études de la Fondation Heucqueville (Heucqueville Foundation

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Study Centre) and Alexis Carrel’s Foundation Carrel promoted eugenicist practices designed to radically ‘improve’ the French nation’s physical condition, including the similar sterilisation of individuals with congenital illnesses or physical and mental impairments, and the creation of a genetic archive to identify the souches saines or ‘healthy strains’ of the population, and to allow other strains to be “prevented, contained, or eliminated” (Reggiani 139). In Germany, these eugenicist practices would culminate in the murder of disabled citizens via Aktion T4 (Operation T4), the systematised mass extermination of individuals with physical and mental impairments and supposedly hereditary illness and genetic defects. Beginning in May 1936, the euphemistically named Reichsausschuss zur wissenschaftlichen Erfassung von erb- und anlagebedingter schwerer Leiden (Committee for the Scientific Treatment of Severe Genetically Determined Illnesses) was tasked with the murder of mentally and physically disabled children under the age of three years old. Once extermination methods had been refined from early deaths via deliberate starvation and exposure to cardiac injections of Luminal or morphine and through to the first use of the infamous Nazi gas chambers, this age limit was steadily increased to eventually include adults. By the time the official centralised extermination programme in Germany was suspended in August 1941, approximately 80,000 disabled individuals had been killed (Mostert 167; Knittel 39); it is estimated that the total number of victims rose to between 250,000 and 300,000 via the continued decentralised extermination programme across Germany and in Nazi-occupied countries and via Aktion 14f13 (Operation 14f13) in Nazi extermination camps up to 1945 (Knittel 39; Poore 89). Vichy France did not directly engage in the murder of impaired citizens, but disabled individuals made up a significant proportion of those arrested and deported by the Vichy police on behalf of the Nazis, typically to meet their deaths in Aktion 14f13. French writer Marguerite Duras recalls her neighbour’s disabled daughter being thus deported and murdered: “Sa fille est infirme, elle avait une jambe raide à la suite d’une tuberculose osseuse […] J’ai appris au centre qu’ils tuaient les infirmes. […] Sa fille était morte en mars 1945” (La Douleur 58); “Her daughter’s a cripple, she had a stiff leg from tuberculosis of the bone […] I found out at the centre that they killed cripples. […] Her daughter had died in March 1945” (The War 44). The ill or impaired body was marked as a target for total eradication in both Vichy France and Nazi Germany.

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Beckett’s Exposure to Fascist Aesthetics of the Body Samuel Beckett’s period of travel in Germany in 1936 and 1937 exposed him to the able-bodied ideology in both the aesthetic and the social realms under the Nazi government. His early novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women (written 1932, first published 1992) suggests that he was already sceptical of Germanic ideologies of bodily health, and Susan Jones notes Beckett’s “barbed account of the ‘physical health’ ideology that took itself so seriously in the 1930s in Austria and Germany” in the novel (72). Beckett mocks the Schule Hellerau-Laxenburg that taught Dalcrozean eurhythmics, which focused on an ethics of physical health and was, as Beckett’s novel sardonically puts it, “All very callisthenic and cerebro-hygenic and promotive of great strength and beauty” (13). This scepticism was heightened during Beckett’s travels in Germany by the revelation that much of the modern artworks that he admired had been condemned by Josef Goebbels as trying to “destroy or distort the natural form”. As Mark Nixon observes, “By the time Beckett arrived in Hamburg in October 1936, the ‘cultural cleansing’ of degenerate art had already reached alarming levels”, and Beckett often experienced difficulty in trying to access the modern art that he had come to Germany to see (134). Beckett visited the Schreckenskammer des Entarten (Chamber of Horrors of Degenerate Art) in the Moritzburg in Halle in January 1937, which contained the pictures that would subsequently furnish the “Degenerate Art” exhibition in Munich (Nixon 136), and also met the dancer Gret Palucca while he was in Germany (Jones 296), who had recently herself been labelled a ‘degenerate’ artist and consequently had her work shut down by Nazi storm troopers (Howe 142). In the social context, Beckett’s German diaries reveal his close understanding of exclusionary Nazi policies, particularly as they related to citizen biology, by the end of his travels in 1937 (Gibson 80; Nixon 85). Emilie Morin notes that Beckett “dedicated much energy to apprehending the workings of Nazism as a political system”, watching propaganda films, listening to broadcast party speeches and copying out statements on the Volk by Goebbels and Rudolf Hess (48–49). Andrew Gibson argues that Beckett “was ill-adapted to the culture of Gleichschaltung [conformity]” (82) that typified Nazi fascist policy and aesthetics. Intriguingly, Beckett responded physically—both voluntarily and involuntarily—to Nazi Germany’s strict regulation of physical aesthetics and behaviour. Nixon quotes Beckett’s

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visceral reaction to fascist body aesthetics, “Soon I shall really begin to puke”, and Gibson records not only how Beckett saluted Nazi official Werner Lorenz with “the wrong arm” when he attended his public lecture in October 1937 (82), but also how Beckett’s own body refused any fascist-inflected aesthetics of good health, suffering outbreaks of herpes, diarrhoea, “lumps and boils under his scrotum and in his anus” and a “raw wound on his back [that] made him fear he might have VD” (91– 92). Following his already burgeoning mistrust of such bodily aesthetics before his travels in Germany, the ironic contrast between the Nazi government’s rhetoric of good health and his own unruly body could only have heightened Beckett’s aversion to the fascist bodily aesthetic, and strengthened what Anna McMullan has called his “resistant to unitary or hegemonic definitions of proper or improper identities and bodies” (3). Beckett’s residency in France from October 1937 onwards likewise exposed him to the similar bodily aesthetics of the French and Vichy states. If Gibson is right to identify Beckett’s resistance to the Nazi culture of Gleichschaltung, then the writer was not likely to find Maréchal Pétain’s invective against “l’individualisme” any less distasteful (478): “Le premier devoir est d’aujourd’hui d’obéir”, Pétain would tell the French people in September 1940 (“Our first duty today is to obey”, 459). Beckett’s decision to remain in France following the outbreak of war and the Nazi occupation of the country meant that he witnessed first-hand the instantiation of the dangerously exclusionary bodily ideology of Vichy France, and indeed the bodily suffering that the war occasioned and which fascist bodily aesthetics attempted to conceal. Alongside the injuries and deprivations of wartime Paris and Roussillon, and the public knowledge of the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ killings in occupied countries (Poore 87), Beckett’s volunteer work at the Saint-Lô hospital in 1945 placed him in distressingly close contact with the “real devastation and misery” occasioned by the war (Knowlson 350). Against a Vichy ideology that privileged ablebodied conformity and the elimination of those bodies that did not neatly conform to the fascist aesthetic, Beckett’s wartime experiences entailed a radical exposure to the very bodily impairment and physical suffering that the fascist ideology of the able-bodied had only exacerbated.

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Waiting for Godot Following his direct exposure to both German and French aesthetics of the body, in the aftermath of World War II, the theatre medium offered Beckett a means of rendering visible the ill and impaired bodies that fascist-inflected body ideology had tried to eliminate. The pained and failing human figures that populate his post-war plays demonstrate his resistance to the fascist vaunting of physical perfection that would itself lead to such great suffering. Ira Nadel has suggested that Beckett’s wartime prose begins this process of resistance to bodily ideology, by way of “Watt’s desire to disappear, to become invisible. […] The aesthetics of the invisible is Beckett’s radical answer to the strictness of [wartime] identification […] Reducing one’s presence, Watt’s goal, is his form of resistance” (60). Beckett’s theatre following World War II, however, takes a new approach to bodily resistance, placing quite literally front and centre the pained, impaired, and fundamentally unruly bodies that his fascist contemporaries had attempted to erase from both artwork and community. Theatre’s grounding in the immediate presence of live bodies, “an art of visibility and tangibility” (Connor, Repetition 115), offered Beckett a powerful medium in which to stage the resistant visibility of the impaired human body, to “resignify elements of a constructive social script” via the staging of the “unruly body”, as Elin Diamond has described the rebellious power of the theatre form (iii). These unruly stage bodies disrupt the reigning social rules as to how ‘correctly’ functioning bodies, or bodies that are worthy of artistic representation, should look and behave. Thus, Beckett’s early post-war stage plays, and particularly Waiting for Godot , present what Siebers would later identify as a “disability aesthetics” in direct opposition to the fascist aesthetics of the body, which refuses to “embrace an aesthetic taste that defines harmony, bodily integrity, and health as standards of beauty”, or to “support the aversion to disability required by traditional conceptions of human or social perfection” (19). Waiting for Godot fills its stage with pained or impaired figures, and “takes an extravagant delight in Unfähigkeit, the fact of not being able, in the radical imperfection” of these bodies (Gibson 107). This “extravagant delight”, or more simply this framing of the disabled body as a subject worthy of aesthetic representation, distinguishes Beckett’s staging of impaired and suffering individuals from the Nazi framing of the disabled body as the subject of ‘degenerate’ art or the dangerous Other in contrast with the healthy Aryan body in the

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Entartete Kunst, Opfer der Vergangenheit and Neues Volk. The unruly staged bodies in Waiting for Godot stage disability not “as a symbol of human imperfection” but “disability as an aesthetic value in itself” (Siebers 10, 139). In Waiting for Godot , each of the four main characters presents an impaired, pained or otherwise unhealthy body. Vladimir suffers from a prostate infection that makes walking, urinating and even laughing painful; Estragon limps on swollen feet and, later, a festering leg wound. Pozzo suffers from heart trouble and a defective memory, and will later go blind. Lucky is labelled “a half-wit”, “a cretin” (26), making him eligible for sterilisation or even elimination as “feeble-minded in Nazi Germany” (Knittel 18), even before he goes mute. This is a play marked by its physically suffering bodies and corporeal impairments, offering a striking contrast to the ideal of perfect physical form and function dreamed of by the Nazi and Vichy states. The earliest performances of Waiting for Godot were choreographed to emphasise the characters’ physical impairments: [The director Roger] Blin established the distinctive action of each of the characters by associating them with their particular ailments. Estragon suffers from his feet and always tend to his stones where he may sit down to rest. Vladimir has urinary problems and is restless and peripatetic because he needs to piss. The corpulent Pozzo has heart troubles and therefore waddles about with recurrent involuntary constraints […]. Lucky suffers from general decrepitude and tends to remain fixed but trembles constantly. (McMillan and Fehsenfeld 71)

The bodily impairments in Waiting for Godot are so bluntly visible that they can be used to identify the individual figures on the stage, in sharp contrast to the fascist choreography of mass spectacles of the de-individualised, predictably formed and functioning citizen bodies. Waiting for Godot defies the attempted Vichy and Nazi erasure, both aesthetic and literal, of the impaired body via the very presence of its onstage bodies. Waiting for Godot also parodies fascist health ethics in dialogue, as well as in character physicality. In Act II, Vladimir suggests a physical workout as a way of passing the time: Vladimir: We could do our exercises. Estragon: Our movements. Vladimir: Our elevations.

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Estragon: Our relaxations. Vladimir: Our elongations. Estragon: Our relaxations. Vladimir: To warm us up. Estragon: To cool us down. Vladimir: Off we go. [Vladimir hops from one foot to another. Estragon mimics him.] Estragon: That’s enough. I’m tired. (71)

The play’s familiar anaphoric-suggestion structure of dialogue here denotes parody, an effect heightened by the mock-grandiose multisyllabic terminology that recalls the overly formalised pseudo-scientific discourse of Vichy and Nazi health rhetoric—and indeed the “very callisthenic and cerebro-hygenic” discourse of Hellerau-Laxenburg, damned in the postwar period by its association with their famous pupils Rudolf Laban and Mary Wigman, who had gone on to work closely with Hitler’s propaganda regime.4 The bluntly comic contrast between the pair’s lengthy disquisition on their “exercises” and their brief and clumsy actions underlines Beckett’s scepticism regarding contemporary able-bodied rhetoric: the combined absurdity and brevity of the pair’s one-legged hopping makes a thorough mockery of the fascist health rhetoric. Moreover, where a comparable scene of physical ineptitude might conceivably have been used in a Vichy or Nazi health publication to illustrate a warning as to the old or ‘undesirable’ national physique, this display in Waiting for Godot crucially undermines any sense of dutiful exercise as beneficial to the pair. Mechanical physical exercise will not help two men doomed to wait in one spot for the foreseeable future, and their continued attempts become increasingly distressing: Estragon: That’s enough. I’m tired. Vladimir: We’re not in form. How about a little deep breathing? Estragon: I’m tired breathing. Vladimir: You’re right. [Pause.] Let’s just do the tree, for balance. Estragon: The tree? [Vladimir does the tree, staggering about on one leg.] Vladimir: Your turn. [Estragon does the tree, staggers.] Estragon: Do you think God sees me? Vladimir: You must close your eyes. [Estragon closes his eyes, staggers worse.]

4 For further discussion on the contentious question of the roles that Laban, Wigman, and indeed Palucca played in the National Socialist regimes, see Kant.

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Estragon: [Stopping, brandishing his fists, at the top of his voice.] God have pity on me! Vladimir: [Vexed.] And me? Estragon: On me! On me! Pity! On me! (71)

This scene hardly acts as a spur for a more sincere engagement with the demands of the corporeal ideology of the fascist state. Physical exercise does nothing to aid the pair’s physical condition, their existential despair—“I’m tired breathing”, complains Estragon—or their spiritual anguish: “God have pity on me!” Far from having achieved Pétain’s 1940 injunction to the Vichy nation, “Apprenez donc à travailler en commun, à réfléchir en commun, à obéir en commun, à prendre vos jeux en commun” (485) (“Learn to work together, think together, obey together, play your games together”), Didi and Gogo end their exercise routine in conflict with one another. The fascist rhetoric of enhanced physical health as a path to broader national and self-improvement is mocked by Vladimir and Estragon’s hapless callisthenics. Lucky’s monologue also satirises the “pseudo-scientific discourses of health and physical improvement” that typified Vichy and Nazi health rhetoric (Gibson 105). Lucky’s lamentation that “man in brief in spite of strides of alimentation and defecation is seen to waste and pine waste and pine” (42) echoes mid-century fears of national physical decline. The monologue places this physical decline within the context of a syntactically manic sporting culture, which is markedly similar to that recommended by Vichy and Nazi propaganda. Physical decline continues “in spite of the strides of physical culture the practice of sports such as tennis football running cycling swimming flying floating riding gliding conating camogie skating tennis of all kinds dying flying sports of all sorts” (42).5 The original French rendering of “defecation” as “l’élimination des déchets” (60) and the insertion of “dying” to the English play-text amid the forms of sport adds an ominous echo of the wartime murder of ‘unfit’ physical bodies that was the culmination of the fascist ideology of the ‘healthy’ body. Lucky’s monologue ends with a final, bitterly comic renouncement of eugenicist logic: “the skull to shrink and waste and concurrently 5 Steven Connor, too, notes a “strain of revulsion against sport” in Lucky’s monologue, but links it to the politicised culture of athleticism in the Ireland of Beckett’s youth, in which “camogie” (the female version of hurling) was “one of the games energetically promoted by the Gaelic Athletic Association” (Material Imagination 17).

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simultaneously what is more for reasons unknown in spite of the tennis […] in spite of the tennis the skull alas” (43).6 The irony of this bitter tide of ideology parody, erupting from Lucky’s visibly ‘unhealthy’ body (flesh whitened, crooked posture, running sores, trembling limbs, as Jean Martin performed the role in the French première), adds the final note of darkly comic mockery to Waiting for Godot ’s satirising of fascist bodily ideology.

Conclusion Given the wartime fascist drive to rid the aesthetic realm and the French and German races of the ‘unfit’ body, Beckett’s post-war staging of ill, pained or simply physically maladapted bodies enacts an overlooked form of contemporary resistance to exclusionary bodily aesthetics. The impaired bodies of Waiting for Godot are resistant not only in their very visibility, but also in their refusal to obey the “ideology of containment” that Lennard J. Davis identifies as the basis of ableism more broadly, and that Susan Sontag recognises as a defining characteristic of the fascist bodily aesthetic, which is “based on the containment of vital forces; movements are confined, held tight, held in” (93). The physically fit, trained and able body is the body that the fascist state can use as an obedient showcase in their mass rallies, gymnastic displays and artworks, following the Foucauldian theory of the docile body “that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved” (136). The pained, ill or impaired body, by contrast, is less easily controlled, “an interruptive force” of “unruly resistance” (Mitchell and Snyder 223). In Waiting for Godot , Beckett’s illcoordinated, imperfect bodies limp awkwardly around the stage, stumble, overbalance, collapse unpredictably on top of each other, bleed and fester, cough and sob. In doing so, they act as “dynamic entities that resist or refuse the cultural scripts assigned to them” (Mitchel and Snyder 224)— in this case, the cultural script decreed by the fascist aesthetics of bodily perfection. Following Siebers’s theorising of the disability aesthetic in modern artforms, “[t]he figure of disability checks out of the asylum, the sick house, and the hospital to take up residence in the art gallery, 6 The emphatic focus on “tennis” at the end of Lucky’s monologue not only comically undermines the role of sport in race renewal, but also evokes Jean Borotra, Vichy France’s General Commissioner for Education and Sport between August 1940 and April 1942, as mentioned above.

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the museum, and the public square” (139)—or, in the case of Waiting for Godot, on the international theatre stage.

Works Cited Beckett, Samuel. The Complete Dramatic Works. Faber and Faber, 2006. ———. Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Arcade Publishing, 2012. ———. En attendant Godot. Les Éditions de Minuit, 1952. Bradbury, David. Modern French Drama 1940–1930. Cambridge UP, 1984. Burt, Ramsay. Alien Bodies: Representations of Modernity, ‘Race’, and Nation in Early Modern Dance. Routledge, 1998. Connor, Steven. Beckett, Modernism, and the Material Imagination. Cambridge UP, 2014. ———. Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text. Basil Blackwell, 1988. Davidson, Michael. “‘Every Man his Speciality’: Beckett, Disability, and Dependence”. Disability Theatre and Modern Drama, edited by Kirsty Johnston, Bloomsbury, 2016, pp. 109–128. Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. Verso, 1995. Diamond, Elin. Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre. Routledge, 1997. Drieu la Rochelle, Pierre. “Le P. P. F. Parti de corps vivant I”. Chronique politique 1934–1942, Gallimard, 1943, pp. 48–51. Duras, Marguerite. La Douleur. Gallimard, 1985. ———. The War. Translated by Barbara Bray, The New Press, 1986. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, 1991. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. Columbia UP, 1997. ———. Staring: How We Look. Oxford UP, 2009. Gibson, Andrew. Samuel Beckett. Reaktion Books, 2010. Griffin, Roger. “Staging the Nation’s Rebirth: The Politics and Aesthetics of Performances in the Context of Fascist Studies”. Fascism and Theatre: Comparative Studies on the Aesthetics and Politics of Performance in Europe, 1925–1945, edited by Günter Berghaus, Berghahn Books, 1996, pp. 11–29. Howe, Dianne S. Individuality and Expression: The Aesthetics of New German Dance, 1908–1936. Peter Lang Publishing, 1996. Jones, Susan. Literature, Modernism and Dance. Oxford UP, 2013. Kant, Marion. “German Dance and Modernity: Don’t Mention the War”. Rethinking Dance History, edited by Alexandra Carter, Routledge, 2004, pp. 107–18.

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———. “Practical Imperative: German Dance, Dancers, and Nazi Politics”. Dance, Human Rights, and Social Justice: Dignity in Motion, edited by Naomi Jackson and Toni Shapiro-Phim, Scarecrow Press, 2008, pp. 5–19. Karina, Lilian. “Recollections”. Hitler’s Dancers: German Modern Dance and the Third Reich, by Lilian Karina and Marion Kant, translated by Jonathan Steinberg, Berghahn Books, 2003, pp. 3–69. Knittel, Susanne C. The Historical Uncanny: Disability, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Historical Memory. Oxford UP, 2014. Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. Bloomsbury, 1996. Koestler, Arthur. Scum of the Earth. Jonathan Cape, 1941. Koonz, Claudia. The Nazi Conscience. Harvard UP, 2003. Krauss, Kenneth. The Drama of Fallen France: Reading La Comédie sans billets. Statue UP, 2004. LeBesco, Kathleen. “Fat Panic and the New Morality”. Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality, edited by Jonathan M. Metzl and Anna Kirkland, New York UP, 2010, pp. 72–82. Marrus, Michael R., and Robert O. Paxton. Vichy France and the Jews. Basic Books Inc., 1981. Maude, Ulrika. Beckett, Technology and the Body. Cambridge UP, 2009. McMillan, Dougald, and Martha Fehsenfeld. Beckett in the Theatre. John Calder, 1988. McMullan, Anna. Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s Drama. Routledge, 2010. McTighe, Trish. The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett’s Drama. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Metzl, Jonathan. “Introduction: Why ‘Against Health’”. Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality, edited by Jonathan M. Metzl and Anna Kirkland, New York UP, 2010, pp. 1–13. Mitchell, David, and Sharon Snyder. “Narrative Prosthesis”. Disabilities Studies Reader, edited by Lennard J. Davis, Routledge, 2013, pp. 222–35. Morin, Emilie. Beckett’s Political Imagination. Cambridge UP, 2017. Mostert, Mark P. “Useless Eaters: Disability as Genocidal Marker in Nazi Germany”. The Journal of Special Education, vol. 36, no. 2, 2002, pp. 157– 70. Nadel, Ira. Modernism’s Second Act: A Cultural Narrative. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Nixon, Mark. Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937 . Continuum International Publishing, 2011. Patraka, Vivian M. Spectacular Suffering: Theatre, Fascism, and the Holocaust. Indiana UP, 1999. Paxton, Robert. The Anatomy of Fascism. Penguin, 2005.

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Pétain, Philippe. Actes et écrits. Edited by Jacques Isorni, Textes Politiques Flammarion, 1974. Poore, Carol. Disability in Twentieth-Century German Culture. Michigan UP, 2009. Reggiani, Andrés Horacio. God’s Eugenicist: Alexis Carrel and the Sociobiology of Decline. Berghahn Books, 2007. Riding, Alan. And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied France. Duckworth Overlook, 2010. Siebers, Tobin. Disability Aesthetics. Michigan UP, 2010. Sontag, Susan. “Fascinating Fascism”. Under the Sign of Saturn, Writers and Readers Publishing, 1980, pp. 73–108. Soucy, Robert. French Fascism: The Second Wave 1933–1939. Yale UP, 1995. Surkis, Judith. “Enemies Within: Venereal Disease and the Defense of French Masculinity Between the Wars”. French Masculinities: History, Culture and Politics, edited by Christopher E. Forth and Bertrand Taither, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. 103–122. Tanaka, Mariko Hori, Yoshiki Tajiri, and Michiko Tsushima, editors. Samuel Beckett and Pain. Rodopi, 2012. Tumblety, Joan. Remaking the Male Body: Masculinity and the Uses of Physical Culture in Interwar and Vichy France. Oxford UP, 2012.

PART III

Beckett & Geopolitics: Editors’ Preface

In this final section, the focus shifts to the international environments and landscapes (both politically and geographically) within which expressions of human life are found. In his seminal book on the subject, John Agnew considers the “geopolitical imagination” (the way in which world politics is represented and acted on) as a historically modern phenomenon that “transcend[s] the spatial limits imposed by everyday life” and conceives of the world as “a single if divided physical-political entity” (15). Furthermore, Jason Dittmer and Joanne Sharp define geopolitics as “the theory and practice of politics at the global scale, with a specific emphasis on the geographies that both shape and result from that politics” (3). The authors of this section explore Beckett’s work through a range of contexts and frameworks, including the integration of geographical, historical and social politics in Ireland, Germany, South Africa, America and France; examinations of site-specific performances that speak to the specific political concerns of that space or place; and considerations of migration and refugee narratives that have a particular relevance and currency in twenty-first-century geopolitical readings of Beckett’s work. Emilie Morin begins by considering the international reach and relevance of political theatre after the Second World War, suggesting that Beckett occupied an important, influential, and yet always slightly ambivalent place in political debates within the arts. Looking particularly at the anti-colonial and race discourses of the 1950s (socio-political conditions which have yet to be fully explored in Beckett’s work), Morin explores

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the extent to which these internationally significant political conditions shaped and were shaped by Beckett’s post-war drama. Matthew McFrederick further emphasises the race discourses that Beckett’s work invited during and after the Civil Rights Movement through his discussion of Donald Howarth’s controversial 1980 production of Waiting for Godot, which was staged with an interracial cast in apartheid South Africa, just as international pressure was mounting to bring an end to the country’s deeply divisive and discriminatory policy. McFrederick draws on a wealth of interview and archival material to demonstrate how this staging of the play engaged in direct dialogue with the enforcement of apartheid and the political conflict it provoked at both a national and international level. Taking a different approach to Beckett’s geopolitical influences, Matthew Feldman identifies what he sees to be the risk of ‘presentism’ in investigations of Beckett’s political affiliations, which he argues have resulted in generalised claims of the writer’s apolitical and/or ‘soft left’ leanings. He suggests an alternative way of defining Beckett’s political sensibilities in terms of his philosophical interest in nominalism, locating in Beckett not a specific partisan approach, but rather a tendency towards humanistic responses to historically, socially and/or geographically specific political situations, which were usually personally significant to him in some way. The two chapters that follow explore the geopolitical influence of historical Ireland on Beckett’s writing. Brendan Dowling considers the subaltern figure of Beckett’s early prose works, arguing that there is a significant shift across his pre- and post-war portrayals of various urban/rural, fe/male figures. Drawing on the work of Homi K. Bhabha, Oona Frawley, and Vera Kreilkamp, Dowling reflects on the significant contribution that a postcolonial (and potentially also feminist) perspective brings to our understanding of Beckett’s sustained engagement with questions of subjectivity, dominance and power within the context of Ireland’s colonial history. Feargal Whelan goes on to offer a geopolitical reading of the location of the Big House in Beckett’s novel, Watt, comparing it to the later play, All That Fall. Whelan argues Beckett turns the traditional Big House trope of Irish literature on its head, resituating it (alongside its eccentric and soon-to-be expelled owner) from its erstwhile exposed and vulnerable rural setting to an “abstracted generic suburban space” in order to explore

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the social and political “atrophication” that results from this geographical distancing from both rural and urban Ireland. Moving away from the more authorially and historically situated concerns around the geopolitical environments of Beckett’s texts, Niamh M. Bowe draws attention to the importance of the dynamic relationship that occurs between the past and the present when Beckett’s work is performed. Focusing on productions of Beckett in Sarajevo, New Orleans and Dublin, Bowe explores the phenomenon of empathy and the significant role it plays in current political discourse, and reveals the ways in which site-specific theatre invites a vulnerability through which Beckett’s subjects relate to and interact with their onlookers, as well as each other. Finally, Rodney Sharkey reframes the critical paradigms by which we understand, and so often question, the emancipatory nature of Beckett’s art. Investigating the migratory aspects of Beckett’s characters, Sharkey uses a dynamic historical approach to explore the geopolitical significance of migration and displacement in Beckett’s later fiction. Moving back and forth through Irish history, Beckett’s personal history, and events in recent decades, Sharkey draws on Agamben’s theory of “destituent power” to reconsider Beckett’s work not only as a hermetic entity, but also as a way of reframing its relationship and importance to a better understanding of the present moment. In a rallying cry to the academy, Sharkey concludes with a challenge to literary scholars to establish a new kind of criticism that not only explores the political potential within a work of literature, but moves beyond it, inspiring “the urge to direct action”.

Works Cited Agnew, John. Geopolitics: Re-Visioning World Politics. Routledge, 1998. Dittmer, Jason and Joanne Sharp, editors. Geopolitics: An Introductory Reader. Routledge, 2014.

CHAPTER 11

Political Theatre and the Beckett Problem Emilie Morin

Beckett—commonly portrayed as a melancholic and withdrawn author—has never been an obvious candidate for political writing as commonly understood. His creative life has often seemed to elude comparison and explication, and his work continues to pose unusual challenges to interpretation: the close reading that it necessitates has an intensity that is prone to marginalising its political undertones, as well as the politicised dimensions of its intellectual and factual moorings. He has long been thought of, by default, as a metaphysical writer sealed off from the world; the phrase coined by Emil Cioran—who confessed that it had never occurred to him to ask Beckett what he thought about the events taking place around them during the 1960s and 1970s—says it all: an “homme séparé”, a separated man (46). Many other accounts have bolstered the widely shared sense that the political pasts and presents of Beckett’s work are, at best, undeserving of scrutiny: the Becketts crafted by Martin Esslin, Maurice Blanchot, or Stanley Cavell, notably, differ in their details but stand equally placeless and suspended. Other verdicts issued on Beckett’s politics have proved particularly uncompromising: “almost totally nonpolitical” is Alan Astro’s phrase (16); “consistent in

E. Morin (B) University of York, York, UK © The Author(s) 2021 W. Davies and H. Bailey (eds.), Beckett and Politics, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47110-1_11

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his apolitical behavior” is Deirdre Bair’s description (308); “resolutely apolitical” is Robert Brustein’s diagnosis (13). Some accounts have shown little regard for nuance or facts: in a vitriolic essay from 1968, the theatre scholar Richard N. Coe denounced Beckett as a “right-wing anarchist” along with Ionesco, Adamov, and Genet, assuming the existence of linear correlations between an author’s personal thoughts and the opinions expressed by fictional characters (108–9, 112–13). Inevitably, from such a perspective, Beckett’s work—with its characters riddled with all imaginable flaws—does not seem capable of offering scope for political insight. Like any other powerful consensus around literary history, the established view of Beckett—as militantly apolitical at worst and disaffected at best—has articulated itself in spite of abundant evidence to the contrary, and is doubled by equally powerful counter-currents. Notably, in the realm of theatre since the 1950s, Beckett has alternately (and often unpredictably) emerged as a focal point of critique and admiration in debates about art and politics. The purpose of this chapter is to survey some of the many debates and disputes about political form that emerged and receded around Waiting for Godot and Endgame. I pay particular attention to the peculiar forms of ambivalence and uncertainty that have consistently been manifested around the work’s political currency from the late 1950s to the late 1970s. Those for whom Beckett’s writing held strong social and historical significance—theorists such as Ernst Fischer, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse, politically transformative playwrights such as Lorraine Hansberry and Amiri Baraka, radical theatre companies such as the Free Southern Theater—aspired to see change, not simply in art, but in world politics. The ties between Beckett’s work and these (and other) politicised thinkers, artists, and performances unsettle common assumptions about Beckett’s legacy. Nonetheless, this political landscape comes with firm limits and has its own red lines: attempting to document the relation between performances of Beckett’s plays and the history of feminism, in particular, means running into a wall fairly rapidly—not least because meditations on male power and homosociality are central to the Beckettian worldview. Although the plays seem far removed from the misogyny of the early fiction, it takes a charitable eye to find indications of a progressive take on women and femininity in Beckett’s early and mid-career dramatic work. Of course, self-styled political interventions were never Beckett’s thing. He seems to have perceived as rather crass the idea that the artist can

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become a political militant like any other, and seems to have felt that the imposition of external agendas might, all too often, be synonymous with unsavoury artistic compromises. His tribute to Václav Havel, Catastrophe, illustrates his stance rather well: indeed the play—commonly celebrated as Beckett’s most openly ‘political’ work—worked firmly against the unifying concept chosen for the “Havel Night”, conceived as a gesture of solidarity by the Association internationale de défense des artistes victimes de la répression dans le monde (AIDA), an organisation campaigning for the defence of artists imprisoned on political grounds. For this event, Stéphan Meldegg curated an extended evening of protest songs and protest theatre around a single theme: “Vanek à la recherche de son auteur” (Vanek in search of his author—Vanek being Havel’s key character and fictional alter-ego). In a TV broadcast featuring excerpts from Catastrophe (which Beckett watched and complained about [Harmon 432]), Meldegg explained that he wanted to keep Havel’s invention alive during his imprisonment (“Spécial Avignon”). Catastrophe refutes the neat connections made by Meldegg between creature and maker, focusing instead on the role of middlemen such as the callous Director; it unveils a range of hierarchies within the act of performance, presenting the theatre stage as the vanguard of totalitarian politics and as the site of a refined form of cruelty. In other contexts, Beckett made clear his dislike of political theatre in the Brechtian mode (he much preferred the ambiguousness and comic timing of Seán O’Casey’s plays). He found the work of the Berliner Ensemble “trop riche”, too rich, if not indigestible (Atik 16), and related in letters from 1960 how he had walked out of a performance of Die Mutter, adding that he feared attending the sequel, a production of Galileo (Letters II 340). It is only when he discovered that Brecht objected equally forcefully to his work—and had thought about how he might reshape Waiting for Godot into a counter-play staging a dialectical opposition between the protagonists’ wait and Communist revolutions around the world—that his tone softened: he recalled Brecht “rewriting the play or writing an anti-Godot when smoking the final cigars” (Morin, Samuel Beckett 125). Nonetheless, Beckett’s engagement with the world of political theatre was frequently more hands-on than his declarations suggest. He supported playwrights in difficulty and openly politicised theatre companies through the various tributes that he composed and the petitions that he endorsed. Those for whom he stood in solidarity included O’Casey and Havel, as well as Otomar Krejˇca, the members of the Living Theatre,

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and Ariane Mnouchkine and Patrice Chéreau, founders of the AIDA (see Morin, Beckett’s Political Imagination 16–21, 239–49). The first public statement that he issued in the French press, which dates from May 1952, was a defence of Eugène Ionesco and Jean Tardieu against the attacks that had greeted a double-bill of Les Chaises and Les Amants du Métro; Beckett’s short note, published alongside other tributes, was addressed to Ionesco and stated that he had been profoundly moved by the performance of Les Chaises that he had seen (“Pour Ionesco et Tardieu” 4). Some of the French actors with whom he worked closely were known for their political commitments. Delphine Seyrig, notably, was a prominent feminist and a strong voice in the Movement de Libération des Femmes (the French Women’s Liberation Movement), very active in the 1970s. Roger Blin had many ties to politicised theatre groups and to anti-colonial circles, and paid a high price for his dissenting stance during the Algerian war. Other actors who have performed in Beckett’s plays—notably the South African actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona—are widely recognised for their political courage and lifetime of dedication to progressive change.1 The marking moments when performances of Beckett’s early absurdist plays, particularly Waiting for Godot , were greeted as political revelations in South Africa under apartheid, Sarajevo under siege, and New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, have been extensively scrutinised. The international performance histories of Waiting for Godot and Endgame reveal how frequently Beckett’s name has entered politically tense arenas of public debate, and how frequently his work has offered a mirror to people in situations of suffering and waiting (Bradby; Duerfahrd; McMullan et al.). In parallel, some improbable alliances have often formed between Beckett’s plays and texts dealing with vital political issues. In the mid1960s, in the Black American South, there were numerous performances of Waiting for Godot alongside Ossie Davis’s Purlie Victorious, a satire of segregation and a tale of revolt and emancipation that became a crucial cultural landmark for African Americans. At the Cherry Lane Theatre in March 1964, The Dutchman, an iconic work of the Black Arts Movement by LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), was performed with Play and Fernando Arrabal’s Two Executioners. Eight months previously, with Beckett’s support, plans were made to stage Play alongside 1 For further discussion of Kani and Ntshona’s performances, see Matthew McFrederick’s chapter in this volume.

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Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro (Harmon 140). Readings of texts by Beckett and Brecht were staged in 1967 at a fundraising event for John Calder and Marion Boyars’s Free Art Legal Fund at the Royal Court Theatre. At a gala event in 1968 for the Defense of Literature and the Arts Society and the National Council for Civil Liberties (baptised “The Arts and Censorship: A Gala Entertainment Concerning Depravity and Corruption”), Come and Go was performed alongside a reading by Edward Bond of his “Mr Dog” and fragments from Brecht and Burroughs. These are some of the many unusual pairings that have brought Beckett’s texts in public dialogue with openly politicised texts and artists. Beckett was well aware of the power that his words can acquire for those who have lost everything. He gave warm support to performances of his plays in high-security prisons and encouraged their continuation through whatever means at his disposal; he greeted Jan Jönson’s 1987 production of Waiting for Godot at San Quentin with particularly moving words, observing that in the photographs of the Black inmates rehearsing he could see “the roots of [his] play” (Oppenheim 96). Yet he always dismissed, sometimes playfully, sometimes ruefully, the possibility that his plays might have an allegorical dimension, and his words have often been taken literally—except in the arena of political theatre, where the tense relation that his plays maintain to allegory has facilitated their reception as politically inflected texts about the necessity of change. Some have presented the work’s political impact as beyond doubt and beyond necessitating explanation. Waiting for Godot was, Susan Sontag said, “the obvious choice”; “the only play [she] could do” in Sarajevo in 1993 (Pomfret). This was, she commented, a play that “seem[ed] written for, and about, Sarajevo”, a play for people who “know themselves to be terminally weak: waiting, hoping, not wanting to hope, knowing that they aren’t going to be saved” (Sontag). Beckett’s play, transformed by Sontag, soon became a parable about “waiting for Clinton” (Sontag). Other performances—notably, Paul Chan’s production of Waiting for Godot on the devastated streets of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina—have been discussed in detail.2 Debates concerning their political tenor have highlighted how real situations of crisis often involve powerless individuals pitted against all-powerful governments and international organisations 2 For further discussion of Sontag’s and Chan’s productions, see Niamh M. Bowe’s chapter in this volume.

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that appear to divest themselves of their responsibilities towards civilians. Politics, however, involves more than just that, and the changing position that Beckett’s work has occupied in wider reflections about protest theatre and theatre’s political remit shows just how fraught and how hotly debated its emancipatory potential has been. Some recent pastiches of Waiting for Godot have displayed a more nuanced understanding of the play’s political power and reach, and have rendered its open-ended wait as a wait for social justice specifically. While Waiting, a production by the Freedom Theatre’s Acting School in the Jenin Refugee Camp, was conceived as a tribute to their mentor, Juliano Mer Khamis, after his assassination and as an act of healing. It was also framed as a reflection on freedom in the West Bank, which involved “ask[ing] who and what one becomes while waiting for freedom, how to behave toward those who share the wait and how to live a semblance of a normal life without normalising the occupation – without giving into it or giving up on the notion of freedom” (“While Waiting”). Antoinette Nwandu’s play, Pass Over, recently adapted to film by Spike Lee, borrows from the dramatic structure of Waiting for Godot to reflect on waiting as a fundamentally dangerous and life-threatening activity for African Americans; it is also a meditation on American race politics which reflects on “the value of black lives” and the failures of the Obama administration to pursue an effective agenda for racial equality (Nwandu, cited in BWW News Desk). These examples cast some light on the vast range of politically inflected interpretations that Waiting for Godot has invited, from the coarse political allegory of the Sontag model about global politics in a US-led world, to much more diffuse and politically perceptive meditations on civil rights, social justice, and political memory, which sometimes display deep ambivalence about the model set by Beckett’s play. Politicised adaptations of Waiting for Godot are nearly as old as the play itself, as David Bradby has shown (162–64). In the United States, notably, radical theatre companies committed to social change in the 1960s put on performances on Beckett’s plays before they began to write their own materials. These included the Free Southern Theater, as well as the San Francisco Mime Troupe (an offshoot of the R.G. Davis Mime Troupe, associated with the San Francisco Actors’ Workshop which had produced Waiting for Godot at San Quentin Prison in 1957). Act Without Words II was among the first playtexts performed by the San Francisco Mime Troupe in 1960 (the company was founded the previous

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year), before their move from indoor to outdoor theatre and their dedication to commedia dell’arte (Harding and Rosenthal 170). When the Free Southern Theater toured their Waiting for Godot with Purlie across Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and Alabama in 1964 and 1965, the play was performed in white-face, and eventually with a white Estragon and a black Vladimir. If the 1956 premiere of the play in Miami was greeted with indifference and walkouts, responses were very different in the poor and rural neighbourhoods in which the Free Southern Theater performed Beckett’s play for free (Minor). The company perceived this performance as an integral part of its involvement in the civil rights movement, and their performance struck the most vulnerable. John O’Neal reports how a young Black girl in Holmes County, Mississippi had taken to answering, “I’m waiting for Godot” when asked about her whereabouts (Minor). He also relates the words of a woman from Ruleville, Mississippi, for whom the play was a call to all the Black men “sitting around the bars, pool halls and on the street corners waiting for something” to take action for freedom and change: “you can’t sit around waiting. Ain’t nobody going to bring you nothing. You got to get up and fight for what you want. Some people are sitting around waiting for somebody to bring in Freedom just like these men are sitting here” (O’Neal 119). In McComb, Mississippi, another audience member interpreted the play as a meditation on the unresolved injustice of slavery but was too deeply moved to articulate his response: he “got up and started to say something. But he couldn’t say anything. He just mumbled, ‘slave… whupped him… no!’” (Moses et al. 106). O’Neal concluded that “it must be agreed that Godot, although a brilliant theatre piece, was not the most appropriate kind of material” for the circumstance; yet he relished the fact that the production had “irritated the hell out of people” (“What possible relevance do you imagine Godot to have to the lives of Black people in the South?”) and had disrupted the received idea that “complicated and intellectual” plays are not for the poor (118, 119). Beckett’s influence on 1960s Black American theatre has been traced on a broader level—including in the plays of Douglas Turner Ward, the founder of the Negro Ensemble Company (Barrios 99, 104). Artists now associated with the Black Arts Movement, such as Hansberry, Baraka, and Kennedy, saw Beckett as an important yet divisive figure, and manifested interest in the idea that his work might, on some level—and ideally in an emended form—contain the seeds of new realisations about politics, white culture, and emancipation. Hansberry was fascinated by Beckett’s

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brand of absurdism; she found inspiration in Waiting for Godot and rebelled against it in equal measure. As Susan Cannon Harris has demonstrated, Hansberry’s play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, draws on Beckettian tropes of deferral to express concerns about the crisis of the white American Left (Cannon Harris 213–40). The Beckett pastiche (as yet unpublished) that Hansberry submitted to Harper’s Bazaar in the mid-1960s—a playlet entitled “The Arrival of Mr. Todog: A Bit of Whimsy (or) ‘A Little Camp on a Great Camp’”—is an unsubtle queering of Waiting for Godot, in which two male characters, reminiscent of Vladimir and Estragon, named Mary and Poopoo, are waiting for each other more than they are waiting for Todog (Cannon Harris 232; Carter 155–58). Hansberry’s Beckettian meditations reveal her deep ambivalence towards what she inferred to be Beckett’s worldview, as well as her deep-seated conviction that Waiting for Godot was a powerful social allegory, but one that ought to be thoroughly interrogated and reworked due to its unsavoury absence of resolution. For Baraka, who aspired to see the emergence of a new revolutionary “theatre of Victims […] stagger[ing] through our universe correcting, insulting, preaching” (Home 211), Beckett was sometimes a model, sometimes a figure to react against. His first signed article as LeRoi Jones was a letter to the Editor of The Village Voice on the “meaning” (inverted commas his) of Waiting for Godot, in which he argued that “Godot means God and/or Death. The ending of the word is simply death in German turned around” (“Such intellectual pomposity”, he commented in his autobiography) (184). A 1963 essay entitled “Black Writing” invokes “the great Irish writers – Wilde, Yeats, Shaw, Synge, Joyce, O’Casey and Beckett – and their clear and powerful understanding (social as well as aesthetic) of where they were and how best they could function inside and outside the imaginary English society, even going so far as teaching the mainstreamers their own language, and revitalizing it in the doing” (Home 164–65). In a manner characteristic of Baraka’s controversial and ever-shifting racial politics, later essays take a completely different stance: for example, in 1969, Jones derides “Euro-American (white) creative motif[s]”, and their “lists of white people” and “great white men” such as Beckett (who “tell[s] about it so cool”) (126).3 The conflicted Beckettian leanings manifested by the Black Arts Movement partially explain why, more recently, playwright and 3 For a detailed account of Baraka’s politics, see Watts’s Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual.

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novelist Suzan-Lori Parks has described Beckett as an honorary Black writer, as someone who “just seems so black” to her. For Parks, her key influences are Beckett, Kennedy, and Faulkner—three authors who “make [her] think of things” (Stevens 5; Drunkman 299). In more tame quarters, Beckett’s provocative aura was seen as something to capitalise on. In 1959, the BBC emphatically introduced Beckett as an immensely controversial figure in its Italia Prize competition entry for Embers (“Mimeo, 1959” 1). By then, the tradition of the midperformance walkout, which continues to this day, was on its way towards being well-established, and Beckett was a figure known for his capacity to attract copious dissatisfaction—albeit in a confused form. Gloria MacGowran has described how “fashionable” it became in the 1950s and 1960s to go and see a Beckett play in order “to say that ‘Though you never did this normally you were forced to leave […] to save your ears from being further assaulted’” (12). She gives a vivid account of the noises that interrupted the 1958 premiere of Endgame at the Royal Court, with seats snapping back and spectators shouting derogatory remarks and insults. One man, she recalls, “kept shouting ‘Rubbish, rubbish!’ whilst at the same time putting up a determined resistance to being removed from the theatre”. Jack MacGowran, who was playing Clov, reportedly came out of character and resolutely walked over to the audience, objecting: “Excuse me, sir, it may seem like rubbish to you, but it took me an awful long time to learn it” (MacGowran 12). Early London performances were also disrupted: Terry Eagleton relates how, in 1955, “cries of ‘This is how we lost the colonies!’ could be heard from the scandalized audience” (70). Audience protests had been a feature since the first run of En Attendant Godot at the Théâtre de Babylone: a brief account published in Le Monde on 31 January 1953 reported that heated exchanges between advocates and detractors of the play had erupted before the end of the first act, and that Roger Blin (the director, who also played Pozzo) had stopped the performance. The newspaper describes an impromptu intervention from spectators who seemed to have travelled from wealthier Parisian neighbourhoods: they are depicted as “empanachés ” (a term commonly used to describe the ornate attire of the aspiring upper middle class and aristocracy) and “visiblement émigrés de quartiers lointains ” (having visibly emigrated from faraway districts) (“Manifestations” 6). Heckling and protests continued later that year (Letters II 412). The French play, with its characters at the mercy of a resolution that fails to take place, had an uncanny immediacy in a

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context characterised by rapid changes of government (under Vincent Auriol’s presidency, between 1947 and 1954, sixteen different governments were appointed in turn, sometimes separated by a few days). The period between December 1952 and January 1953, which coincided with the play’s rehearsals and first performances, was marked by an extraordinary political volatility, with one government resigning, four different ministers asked to form another, and another short-lived government that lasted until June of that year. Beckett’s parable of waiting revived many spectres, from memories of occupation and collaboration (Gibson 95– 108) to anxieties about the return of penury and the continuation of political instability. For many playwrights and directors who wore their politics on their sleeves, Beckett represented a difficult problem. Some believed that the work was simply of inferior quality; Roger Planchon, for example, asserted that Adamov would be more widely remembered and would become far more influential (Planchon 16). Some British writers took exception to the work; their critiques reveal a preference for consecrated realist dramatic forms, and a poor understanding of the political potential of non-realist forms more readily accepted elsewhere. Dennis Potter and Edward Bond levied particularly serious accusations against Beckett, arguing that his work displayed kinship with the ideological failures ushered by Nazism. In 1977, Potter asked, in a Sunday Times review of the BBC2 programme Shades (which featured Not I , Ghost Trio and …but the clouds…): “Would Mickey have understood? Would Solzhenitsyn? Would the Jews on the way to the gas chamber? Question: Is this the art which is the response to the despair and pity of our age, or is it made of the kind of futility which helped such desecrations of the spirit, such filth of ideologies come into being?” (Potter 38). Three years later, in the Guardian, Bond denounced as deeply problematic Beckett’s portrayal of characters submitted to extreme hardship and degradation, and yet retaining “the human spark”. To this he objected that “[t]hose who ran the camps did not retain [that spark]”, and that historical atrocities lead human beings to “lose all vestige of humanity and become monsters”. Citing Beckett’s fame as an example of the ways in which theatre has consecrated conservative and reactionary thinkers, Bond concluded: “It is as if Beckett told us to be comforted because in the lungs of the corpse there is still a pocket of air. What use is that to the living? What teaching is that for the young?” (12). In a reply to Bond, Harold Pinter observed

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that Beckett knew “as much about the monster in man as Bond does”, but “does not write essays about it” (Pinter 12). Others moved from rejection to endorsement, and came to feel that, in spite of its apparent defeatism, Beckett’s work harboured some potential for political critique. O’Casey, for instance, objected to Beckett’s “never-ending tenebre despair” (230, 592), before showing acceptance and interest. Jean-Paul Sartre wavered between warm praise and damning comments about the work’s political positioning: he praised Waiting for Godot as “the best play since 1945”, but also portrayed it as “pleasing to the bourgeois”, and manifesting “a sort of universal pessimism that appeals to right-wing people” (“Beyond Bourgeois Theatre” 6; “Interview” 128). In 1967, while in Bonn, he celebrated Genet, Ionesco, Beckett, and Adamov as the figureheads of a new critical theatre that is humanist and political, and that utilises as its means of communication the very insufficiencies of theatre itself as an instrument of communication (“Genet” 2). On another instance, when asked whether he could identify writers working in accordance with his own ideas about commitment and freedom, Sartre named Beckett alongside practitioners of the nouveau roman, such as Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Michel Butor (“Purposes” 15). Beckett, clearly, was both irritated and flattered by Sartre’s interest. To a letter he sent to Barbara Bray in April 1964, he appended a newspaper article published the previous day, in which Sartre argued that “the contemporary writer must write through different forms of malaise while trying to elucidate what he feels. He could be a kind of Beckett who would not be completely absorbed in despair” (Piatier 13; my translation). The position of Ernst Fischer, the Communist veteran, shifted similarly from dismissal to praise, and he eventually invoked Endgame and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich as the two contemporary texts in which the problem of unfreedom is most starkly conceptualised. Fisher read Endgame as a parable about “a society of haves and have-nots, master and servants, a world of having ”, and asserted that Beckett’s characters “are not merely allegorical characters, they also wear disintegrating social masks” (8–9). “It is foolish”, he observed, “to trace works of the imagination back to social realities alone, to regard them purely as a ‘reflection’ of social conditions: but equally it is dogmatic to interpret them solely as the result of an autonomous imaginative process, an internal spectacle independent of the social world” (9). Ernst Bloch—clearly a Beckett fan, who commented elsewhere on his

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keen interest in modern painting and Beckett’s theatre (Münster 214)— was struck by Fisher’s reading of the play (Bloch). The same fluctuations in opinion were discernible in other quarters beyond the Iron Curtain. From the mid-1950s onwards, there are signs that Beckett’s plays were perceived as the promise of a new political theatre able to step beyond the limitations of naturalism—a change reflected in the well-documented performance histories of Waiting for Godot in East Germany and Eastern Europe (Füger; Huber). The East-West symposium held in Vienna in March 1965 articulated this new mood particularly sharply, and was dominated by evocations of Beckett and Ionesco, and by a push against labels such as “socialist realism”, “absurdist theatre”, and “committed theatre” (Willems 82). The twenty-five guest speakers from East and West included many who would at one stage or another meet, work with, or write on Beckett: Jean-Marie Serreau, Jean Duvignaud, Eric Bentley, Martin Esslin, Slawomir Mrozek, Jan Kott, Adam Tarn, and Otomar Krejˇca. Reporting on contributions made by Tarn, Kott, Krejˇca, Jan Grossman, Slawomir Mrozek, Erwin Axer, Gyula Háy, Grisha Ostrovski, and Liviu Ciulei, Esslin commented on the reversal of East-West clichés that he had witnessed. He discerned a “complete harmony between Eastern and Western representatives”, with “the Eastern contingent seem[ing] more avant-garde, more radical in its artistic liberalism, more ‘with it’ than the West Europeans – and as well (if not better) informed on all the latest trends and fashions” (51; emphasis retained). The organisers had centred the debate on the perceived conflict between Brecht’s epic theatre and the absurdist theatre of Beckett and Ionesco, but no one took the bait; Eastern European representatives defused Western beliefs about the pre-eminence of socialist realism, with all agreeing that “the nightmares of Ionesco, the dark broodings of Beckett” were “every whit as real” as “any play about tractor drivers and collective farmers” (Esslin 52). Other debates about Beckett also took an unforeseen turn. Commenting on the political power of Waiting for Godot , Duvignaud, the Nouvelle Revue Française theatre critic, described the little-known Arabic version conceived by the Moroccan director Tayeb Saddiki, which “actualis[ed] the image of a secular wait that has a signification much more precise in contemporary Arab countries than it does for Parisian spectators” (K.A.J. 91–92; my translation). The tree was a fig tree and the characters were dressed as North African peasants, to recall political struggles around land occupation and ownership in colonial history (Willems 82). Saddiki’s production, for Duvignaud,

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gave the play an audience greater than all of its European public, and transformed it into an allegory about the poor of the Third World (K.A.J. 92; Duvignaud and Lagoutte 74). The idea that theatre practitioners working in harsher circumstances than their Western counterparts might find something valuable in Beckett’s work reverberates elsewhere. Two years later, Ludwik Flaszen, Jerzy Grotowski’s dramaturge, reasserted the idea that a formal renewal might be found in Beckett. He presented Beckett’s plays as in some ways the origins of the new poor theatre, and as revelatory of a state of things in which tragedy can only exist in the form of the grotesque, and as parody (117). Beckett, for his part, always steered clear of pronouncements about theatre’s political remit, although an interview from February 1961, which took place in an unlikely setting (with sixth-form pupils in a bookshop in West Germany), suggests that he thought frequently about theatre’s inherited precepts and its capacity to ask new questions: For me, the theatre is not a moral institution in Schiller’s sense. I want neither to instruct nor to improve nor to keep people from getting bored. I want to bring poetry into drama, a poetry which has been through the void and makes a new start in a new room-space. I think in new dimensions and basically am not very worried about whether I can be followed. I couldn’t give the answers which were hoped for. There are no easy solutions. (Knowlson 477)

This refusal of facility reverberates across his work, from the canonical texts to forgotten pieces. Notably, the 1987 poem, “Brief Dream”— which first appeared in For Nelson Mandela, the English version of Jacques Derrida and Mustapha Tlili’s tribute published by Richard Seaver that year—comes across as having both everything and nothing to do with Mandela’s political message. The poem reads as a cryptic tribute to all those who have understood that their time will come—no matter how, no matter when—and who have the courage to continue, no matter the price to pay.4 The aim of the book was to gather “literary acts of compassion and rigor”. In this endeavour there was “no place for direct, specific political advocacy, however well intentioned” (Tlili xi). Such invitations to think carefully about what political writing should consist of in the 4 I am unable to cite this brief poem directly due to copyright restrictions. Interested readers should refer to The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett (Lawlor and Pilling 224).

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first place are now rare, yet they hold as much significance as they once did: politicised literatures never lend themselves to facile conclusions and necessitate careful reflection. Acknowledging this also means making a different reading of Beckett’s work possible, and beginning to find ways of coming to terms with its peculiar position in the modern nexus of political writing.

Works Cited A Gala Benefit in aid of the Free Art Legal Fund: An Evening of Music and Reading from the Work of Samuel Beckett and Bertolt Brecht. Free Art Legal Fund, 1967. Astro, Alan. Understanding Samuel Beckett. South Carolina UP, 1990. Atik, Anne. How It Was: A Memoir of Samuel Beckett. Faber and Faber, 2001. Bair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. Jonathan Cape, 1978. Baraka, Amiri. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones. Lawrence Hill, 1984. Barrios, Olga. The Black Theatre Movement in the United States and in South America. Universitat de València, 2008. Beckett, Samuel. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. II: 1941–1956. Edited by George Craig et al., Cambridge UP, 2011. Bloch, Ernst. “Kulturkommunist ohne Parteizierat: Zu Ernst Fischers 70. Geburtstag”. Die Zeit, 4 July 1969, Zeit Online. www.zeit.de/1969/27/kul turkommunist-ohne-parteizierat. Accessed 15 Mar. 2017. Bond, Edward. “‘The Romans’ and the Establishment’s Figleaf”. Guardian, 3 Nov. 1980, p. 12. Bradby, David. Beckett: Waiting for Godot. Cambridge UP, 2001. Brustein, Robert. “I Can’t Go On, Alan. I’ll Go On”. New York Times Book Reviews, 31 Jan. 1999, p. 13. BWW News Desk. “Photo Flash: In Rehearsal with Steppenwolf’s Pass Over”. BroadwayWorld Chicago, 20 May 2017. www.broadwayworld.com/chicago/ article/Photo-Flash-In-Rehearsal-with-Steppenwolfs-PASS-OVER-20170520. Accessed 21 Aug. 2018. Carter, Steven R. Hansberry’s Drama: Commitment Amid Complexity. Illinois UP, 1991. Chapsal, Madeleine. “The Purposes of Writing”. Translated by John Matthews. Between Existentialism and Marxism, by Jean-Paul Sartre, NLB, 1974, pp. 9– 32. Cioran, Emil. “Quelques rencontres”. Cahiers de L’Herne: Samuel Beckett, edited by Tom Bishop and Raymond Federman, L’Herne, 1976, pp. 45–55.

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Coe, Richard N. “Les anarchistes de droite: Ionesco, Beckett, Genet, Arrabal”. Cahiers de la Compagnie Jean-Louis Renaud-Madeleine Barrault, vol. 67, 1968, pp. 99–125. Drunkman, Steven. “Doo-a-diddly-dit-dit: An Interview with Suzan-Lori Parks and Liz Diamond (1995)”. A Sourcebook on African-American Performance: Plays, People, Movements, edited by Annemarie Bean, Routledge, 1999, pp. 284–306. Duerfahrd, Lance. The Work of Poverty: Samuel Beckett’s Vagabonds and the Theater of Crisis. Ohio State UP, 2013. Duvignaud, Jean, and Jean Lagoutte. Le théâtre contemporain: Culture et contreculture. Larousse, 1974. Eagleton, Terry. “Political Beckett?” New Left Review, vol. 40, 2006, pp. 67–74. Esslin, Martin. “The End of Socialist Realism?” Encounter, vol. 24, no. 6, June 1965, pp. 51–52. Fischer, Ernst. Art Against Ideology. Translated by Anna Bostock, Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1969. Flaszen, Ludwik. Grotowski & Company. Edited by Paul Allain, translated by Andrzej Wojtasik and Paul Allain, Icarus, 2010. Füger, Wilhelm. “The First Berlin Godot: Beckett’s Debut on the German Stage”. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, vol. 11, 2001, pp. 57–63. Gibson, Andrew. Samuel Beckett. Reaktion, 2009. Harding, James M., and Cindy Rosenthal, editors. Restaging the Sixties: Radical Theaters and Their Legacies. Michigan UP, 2006. Harmon, Maurice, editor. No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider. Harvard UP, 1998. Huber, Werner. “Godot, Gorba, and Glasnost: Beckett in East Germany”. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, vol. 2, 1993, pp. 49–58. “Jean-Paul Sartre: ‘Genet, Ionesco, Beckett, Adamov, etc. forment le theatre critique’”. Le Figaro Littéraire, 26 Jan. 1967, p. 2. Jones, LeRoi. Home: Social Essays. MacGibbon & Kee, 1968. ———. “To Survive ‘The Reign of the Beasts’”. New York Times, 16 Nov. 1969. K.A.J. “Théâtre sans rideau”. Preuves: Cahiers mensuels du Congrès pour la Liberté de la Culture, vol. 173, July 1965, pp. 91–92. Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. Bloomsbury, 1996. Lawlor, Seán, and John Pilling, editors. The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett. Faber and Faber, 2012. MacGowran, Gloria. “This Gentle, Spiritual Dublin Man”. The Fiction Magazine, vol. 5, no. 4, June 1986, pp. 11–12. “Manifestations au Théâtre de Babylone”. Le Monde, 1–2 Feb. 1953, p. 6.

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McMullan, Anna, David Pattie, and Mark Nixon, editors. Staging Beckett at the Margins/Autres scènes beckettiennes. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, vol. 29, 2017. “Mimeo, 1959”. BBC Typescript of Embers for the 1959 Italia Prize. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, University of Texas at Austin. Minor, W. F. “They Are Waiting for Godot in Mississippi, Too”. New York Times, 31 Jan. 1965. Morin, Emilie. Beckett’s Political Imagination. Cambridge UP, 2017. ———. Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Moses, Gilbert, John O’Neal, Denise Nicholas, Murray Levy, and Richard Schechner. “Dialog: The Free Southern Theater (1965)”. A Sourcebook on African-American Performance: Plays, People, Movements, edited by Annemarie Bean, Routledge, 1999, pp. 102–13. Münster, Arno, editor. Tagträume vom aufrechten Gang. Sechs Interviews mit Ernst Bloch. Suhrkamp, 1977. O’Casey, Seán. The Letters of Sean O’Casey, vol. 3. Edited by David Krause, Catholic U of America P, 1989. O’Neal, John. “Motion in the Ocean: Some Political Dimensions of the Free Southern Theater (1968)”. A Sourcebook on African-American Performance: Plays, People, Movements, edited by Annemarie Bean, Routledge, 1999, pp. 114–20. Oppenheim, Lois. Directing Beckett. Michigan UP, 1994. Piatier, Jacqueline. “Jean-Paul Sartre s’explique sur Les Mots ”. Le Monde, 18 Apr. 1964, p. 13. Pinter, Harold. “Letters to the Editor”. Guardian, 5 Nov. 1980, p. 12. Planchon, Roger. “Le sens de la marche d’Adamov”. Les Nouvelles Littéraires, vol. 2563, 16–23 Dec. 1976, p. 16. Pomfret, John. “Godot Amid the Gunfire”. Washington Post, 19 Aug. 1993. Potter, Dennis. “Taking the Mickey”. Sunday Times, 24 Apr. 1977. “Pour Ionesco et Tardieu”. Arts, 15–21 May 1952, p. 4. Saiu, Octavian. “Samuel Beckett Behind the Iron Curtain: The Reception in Eastern Europe”. The International Reception of Samuel Beckett, edited by Mark Nixon and Matthew Feldman, Continuum, 2009, pp. 251–71. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Beyond Bourgeois Theatre”. Translated by Rima Drell Reck. Tulane Drama Review, vol. 5, no. 3, Mar. 1961, pp. 3–11. ———. “Interview with Kenneth Tynan (1961)”. Sartre on Theater, edited by Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, translated by Frank Jellinek, Quartet, 1976, pp. 121–134. Sontag, Susan. “Godot Comes to Sarajevo”. New York Review of Books, 21 Oct. 1993. www.nybooks.com/articles/1993/10/21/godot-comes-to-sar ajevo/. Accessed 10 June 2018.

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“Spécial Avignon: Nuit Václav Havel”. Television broadcast, Antenne 2 Midi, 22 July 1982. www.ina.fr/video/CAB8201131701. Accessed 10 July 2017. Stevens, Andrea. “A Playwright Who Likes to Bang Words Together”. New York Times, 6 Mar. 1994, p. 5. The Arts and Censorship: A Gala Evening Concerning Depravity and Corruption. UK National Council for Civil Liberties, 1968. Tlili, Mustapha. “The Meaning of an Act of Compassion and Rigor: Preface to the American Edition”. Translated by Franklin Philip. For Nelson Mandela, edited by Jacques Derrida and Mustapha Tlili, Seaver Books, 1987, pp. ix–xii. Watts, Jerry. Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual. New York UP, 2001. “While Waiting”. www.thefreedomtheatre.org/while-waiting/. Accessed 10 June 2018. Willems, Paul. Vers le théâtre: Ecrits 1950–1992. Archives et Musée de la Littérature, 2004.

CHAPTER 12

“The Air Is Full of Our Cries”: Staging Godot During Apartheid South Africa Matthew McFrederick

Narratives of how productions of Beckett’s drama have handled specific political circumstances represents a limited field of exploration in Beckett Studies. Scholars have often referred to three specific performances of Waiting for Godot in Israel, Bosnia and Herzegovina and South Africa as the best examples of when Beckett’s work has been adopted to political contexts due to the comparable predicaments of his characters and their situations, but these histories have been approached with varying detail to date. Of these three, much of this attention has focused on Ilan Ronen’s 1984 staging in Israel and Susan Sontag’s celebrated 1993 Sarajevo Youth Theatre production.1 However, the earliest and least discussed of these productions is the Baxter Theatre’s 1980 production, which began in Cape Town before embarking on a national and international tour. According to Cóilín Parsons, the multiracial production staged during apartheid has “retained a certain celebrity status” when Beckett’s 1 See Niamh M. Bowe’s chapter in the present volume for a discussion of Sontag’s production.

M. McFrederick (B) University of Reading, Reading, UK © The Author(s) 2021 W. Davies and H. Bailey (eds.), Beckett and Politics, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47110-1_12

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drama is revived in South Africa (257), but the recycled memories from this production have yet to be reflected in a written history. It is this production, directed by the white English playwright Donald Howarth, that is the focus of this chapter. Before offering an extended narrative on Howarth’s production, it is worth highlighting how political performances of Beckett’s drama are proving a more popular means by which artists in countries from around the world respond to their political environment, and this emerging field of enquiry requires a more concentrated history of its own. In recent years, theatres, festivals and practitioners have offered diverse interpretations of Beckett’s work, linked to their own political situation or moment of crisis—a development which signifies the transferability of Beckett’s oeuvre; a leading characteristic in its longevity across theatre cultures. For example, the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera produced Endgame as an installation (Endgame Study #7, 2006) and later as a stage production (Biennial of Contemporary Arts, 2017), where she was drawn to the play’s relevance “when the world is seduced by so-called strong political figures and when democracy is abused instead of enacted. It feels like the end of a chapter” (Sharp, The Guardian, 11 April 2017). In Northern Ireland, the 2018 Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festival produced another alternative way of experiencing Beckett in their event Walking for Waiting for Godot .2 In this participatory performance, audience members were invited to walk along a section of the Marble Arch Caves UNESCO Global Geo-park, which spans sections of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Across this rural landscape, which included Antony Gormley’s Tree for Waiting for Godot (2012), actors from the Lyric Theatre in Belfast performed sections of the play on land that has been much-disputed territory, from the partition of Ireland to the Brexit negotiations. As these examples show, Beckett’s drama is today utilised by practitioners to signify precarious political moments or to critique current political structures and environments, thus suggesting that his drama acts as a conduit connecting art with real-life, political events.

2 Described on the Festival’s website as: “This is participatory, experiential drama at its most extreme and on the last Happy Days before Brexit the festival is culturally occupying the border with a quintessentially Irish play that nonetheless has universal appeal, whose themes could not be more relevant to our times”. See www.artsoverborders.com/progra mme/walking-for-waiting-for-godot. Accessed 24 Oct. 2018.

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This chapter will offer the first in-depth examination of Howarth’s landmark production of Godot. It will begin by discussing Beckett’s position in South African theatre cultures and contextualising the social, political and cultural factors that influenced Beckett’s decision to place an embargo on his work scheduled for segregated audiences in South Africa. The chapter will proceed to analyse the practical considerations behind the Baxter production that situated Godot in South Africa through its text, setting and casting; strands of the history that benefit from interviews with the director Donald Howarth and Pieter-Dirk Uys, who originally played the role of Pozzo in South Africa. It will consider the varied responses this staging received as it toured South Africa, the UK and America, where it highlighted the divisions of South Africa abroad, including how a misunderstanding of the production’s intentions infamously prompted anti-apartheid protests in Baltimore and the cancellation of the production.

Beckett and South Africa South Africa’s vibrant theatre culture is renowned for its diverse performance traditions, its high-quality artists and the eclectic range of creative responses it produced during and after the nation’s struggles with apartheid. Despite the international reputation some South African writers or theatre makers would have during apartheid, the reality that consumed the everyday existence of South African people tainted the infrastructure of theatres and the facilitation of theatrical events. These divisions were written into the government policy with the introduction of Proclamation 26 (from 12 February 1965) making it “illegal for theatres, concert halls and other venues of entertainment to admit at their own discretion patrons of any race or colour without a special permit” (Barrow and Williams-Short 28). Beyond the theatre, the reality of apartheid affected every strand of South African life with the writer Brian Barrow noting, “everything a person did from the cradle to the grave was determined by skin colour: education, recreation, sport, entertainment, travel – nothing was excluded” (Barrow and Williams-Short 11). Many South African theatre practitioners, producers or writers, responded to the political injustice in their work or through attempts to bypass censorship laws, but several artists also felt the toll of these restrictions on their creative endeavours. Conversely, international writers and

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theatre practitioners highlighted their disapproval of the political system through the International Playwrights Boycott, which began in 1963. Boycotts became one of the main ways for the international community to demonstrate their condemnation of the National Party’s apartheid policy and, as a result, boycotts were adopted in politics, economics, academia, sport and culture. The Playwrights Against Apartheid initiative saw fortyeight playwrights, including John Osborne, Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett, sign the following letter to The Times: While not wishing to exercise any political censorship over their own or other works of art, but feeling colour discrimination transcends the purely political, the following playwrights, after consultation with the AntiApartheid Movement and with South African artists and writers, as an expression of their personal repugnance to the policies of apartheid and their sympathy with those writers and others in the Republic of South Africa now suffering under evil legislation, have instructed their agents to insert a clause in all future contracts automatically refusing performing rights in any theatre where discrimination is made among audiences on grounds of colour. (Letters III 544)

A letter from the anti-apartheid activist and writer, Freda Troup, prompted Beckett’s actions, as he was in “entire agreement” to promote performances for “mixed audiences in all theatres” (543). Ideologically, the decision corresponded with Beckett’s long-held tolerance for other religions and races, which has been traced as far back as his days as a student at Earlsfort House by James Knowlson, though his actions here suggest what Knowlson refers to as “a much more active anti-racism” (36). The decision by international playwrights to withhold the rights of their work initially had a negative impact on South African cultural life, and writers such as Athol Fugard disagreed with the boycott, as he felt South Africa writers and artists were cut off from the rest of the world at a time when they needed to be uplifted with fresh creative perspectives. But, as Middeke, Schnierer and Homann have argued, “apartheid legislation, censorship laws and boycotts ironically contributed to the groundswell of new indigenous South African English plays rather than stifling it” (3). Beckett’s decision to put an embargo on his work was not taken lightly, as on reflection it is evident that the decision—like that taken by the other writers—restricted his reception and relationship with the country. The limitation has been evident in critical studies of his work, such as The

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International Reception of Samuel Beckett (2009), where South Africa and the continent of Africa were—by the editors’ own admission—not discussed (Nixon and Feldman 5). Even in writing this essay, I acknowledge that Beckett’s reception in South Africa deserves a more extended study, but this essay will begin to open this relationship by contextualising Beckett’s performance history, before focusing on the Baxter Theatre production. One of the earliest known performances of Godot in South Africa saw Fugard direct an all-black production at the Rehearsal Room in Johannesburg in 1962. Fugard identified how the play resonated with major moments of humanity’s failings, as he explained of his reading of Godot, “I told the cast that Vladimir and Estragon must have read the accounts of the Nuremberg trials – or else they were at Sharpeville, or were the first in at Auschwitz. Choose your horror – they know all about it” (Orkin 126). As the International Playwrights embargo came into effect one year later, Godot ’s political echoes were suppressed and, following this performance, it has been difficult to ascertain how many more official or unofficial productions of Beckett’s drama were staged in South Africa during the restrictions. Beckett withheld his rights until the mid-1970s, but it was a stance he had to occasionally reassert to South African theatres, producers and his agents, when he disagreed with the environment where his work would be staged. For example, he wrote to Jenny Sheridan of Curtis Brown in 1972: “Please refuse permission for production of Endgame by this Pretoria Theatre and all other future proposals from S. Africa to present my work before segregated audiences” (Letters IV 287). After the boycott, records suggest Beckett’s work was quickly staged more frequently in South Africa. In 1976, The Space Theatre in Cape Town (commonly referred to as The Space) staged Endgame in its first Beckett production. Led by Brian Astbury, The Space was “the first nonracial, commercial arts venue” in South Africa (“The Space Theatre”), and this was epitomised through its staging of Endgame.3 The production came at a significant time in the theatre’s history, as it had just opened its new venue located on Long Street in Cape Town. But the play’s relevance to the political oppression experienced within the country was not lost on Astbury, who recognised that “‘Endgame’ contained in it the core of the whole South African situation” (71). The production would in fact follow

3 See also http://thespacetheatre.com/. Accessed 25 Oct. 2018.

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the 1976 Uprising and riots that began in Soweto and spread nationwide, factors which Astbury had in mind when Endgame was staged: “Nobody seemed to want to be reminded of the situation – which we were to do relentlessly for the next six months” (71). Directed by Dimitri Nicolas-Fanourakis, the production’s political allusions were evident by casting a white Hamm and a black Clov in the form of Keith Grenville and Bill Curry. However, despite the significance of this decision in the South African context, Astbury believed they “allowed the play to do its own talking” (71). In the same year at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, Benjy Francis directed an all-black cast in Waiting for Godot , which confirmed the Theatre’s aspirations for racially integrated and politically aware performances. As well as assembling a strong cast in James Mthoba, Ben Mabaso, Sam Williams, Eddie Nhlapo and Ngatumue Kamiwa, the racial makeup of the cast epitomised how the Market was willing to represent political matters on stage. But for Francis, the production’s powerful message was also conveyed through the text and setting, as he argued: The tree was central to my staging; when it started to sprout leaves in act two, that sent a powerful message to oppressed people – it suggested new life and resolution, an image of hope against all desolation. (Smith et al., The Guardian, 8 March 2009)

South African practitioners suggested how Beckett’s plays could offer multi-faceted responses and metaphors to their situation, because of the way his worlds applied to the South African experience and the treatment of race within the nation. As I will now discuss with the Baxter Theatre production, this was initially not intended, but when the production toured, a production of Godot from apartheid South Africa could be read in many ways.

The Baxter Godot in South Africa When Waiting for Godot was first presented at the Baxter Theatre in 1980, the theatre was still in its infancy. Largely funded from a bequest left by Dr William Duncan Baxter to the University of Cape Town, the theatre opened on 1 August 1977, fulfilling Baxter’s wish to see a theatre constructed that would fill a cultural void in the life of the city. Baxter first dreamt of the theatre at a time when Cape Town had a limited number of venues after the old Opera House and Tivoli Theatre were closed to make

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way for the General Post Office and a commercial building, respectively. Meanwhile, as highlighted earlier, The Space’s earnest beginnings in 1971 represented a new, experimental fringe theatre within the proximity of the city centre. Although these venues faced their own political challenges, the effects of apartheid were most evident when comparing the larger scale ambitions of the Baxter with the Nico Malan Theatre Centre (now known as the Artscape Theatre Centre),4 which opened in May 1971. The ideology of the two theatres could not have been more different. The Baxter was designed to be open to people of all races or ethnicities, and because it was built on University land at the Rosewater site, they could welcome audience members without permits or restrictions. In contrast, the Nico was built on the Foreshore—a site ironically first considered for the Baxter—and audience members required a permit to enter the venue, with Malan announcing in his inaugural address that “as long as he was alive no black performer or patron would ever be allowed into this exclusively white opera house” (Barrow and Williams-Short 31). Inevitably, such policies had a negative impact on the international reputation of the arts in South Africa, but the Baxter’s refreshingly open policy offered a different perception of the nation’s wider theatre culture, particularly once its lively programming added to the vibrancy of the beautiful Theatre. Among the many obstacles the Baxter faced in its early history, it is fair to argue that several eventualities appeared fortuitous for the Theatre. One such example concerns its founding director, John Slemon, who was accidentally not shortlisted for the role of Manager in the first instance, before the Irish native was subsequently appointed and then promoted to Director in what would prove to be a successful tenure lasting until his retirement in 1995.5 Across the Baxter’s three spaces close to fifty productions a year were scheduled by 1980, and Slemon aimed to cater for a range of tastes to attract audiences to the theatre: “We were having commercial theatre besides serious non-commercial stuff,

4 This venue became known as “The Nico”, with the Theatre bearing the name of the Administrator of the Province of the Cape of Good Hope, who led proposals for the Centre. 5 Slemon was, by his own admission, a failed actor on the boards of the Peacock Theatre in Dublin, before he demonstrated his flair as a Manager at the city’s Abbey Theatre. His appointment at the Baxter was initially questioned, but any doubts were quickly nullified by the energy and zeal he brought to the role, the theatre’s vision and its programming.

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an Agatha Christie beside a Woza Albert, The Cherry Orchard with a bedroom farce next door” (Barrow and Williams-Short 49). The decision to stage Waiting for Godot appealed to the three key agents Slemon approached as collaborators on a potential project: Donald Howarth, Winston Ntshona and John Kani. As Howarth suggested: It was John Slemon’s creative management that asked me if I would do a production for him and the Baxter with John Kani and Winston Ntshona. And I said what shall we do? And there was either, because he was Irish, Beckett and Waiting for Godot , or we would improvise a play with John and Winston, because that’s what they did. (Personal interview, 14 January 2015)6

From the outset, the initial rationale behind staging Godot was not political, but these readings would develop over the life of the production. The company that assembled for the 1980 production of Godot was talented and experienced, and epitomised the inspired programming from Slemon’s tenure. Howarth directed and designed the performance, but he was perhaps best known as an early playwright for the English Stage Company at the Royal Court, where he had his plays Sugar in the Morning (1959) (previously Lady on the Barometer 1958), OGODIVELEFTTHEGASON (1967) and Three Months Gone (1970) produced.7 After previously working as the Literary Manager at the Royal Court, Howarth moved to South Africa in the early 1970s, where he quickly integrated himself into the country’s theatre community and directed his own play, Othello Slegs Blankes (Othello for Whites Only), at the Space Theatre in 1972, an adaptation of Othello where the eponymous character does not appear.8 Like other Beckett productions in South Africa, 6 All subsequent references from Howarth are taken from this interview. Sadly, Howarth died on 24 March 2020, but he was pleased to see a final copy of the chapter when I last saw him in 2019. This interview was integral to the development of this chapter, as were his good-humoured conversations and his spritely reenactments of scenes from the play. He will be greatly missed. 7 Sugar in the Morning was originally produced as Lady on the Barometer in 1958. Meanwhile, another Howarth play, A Lily in Little India (1965), was also staged at the Hampstead Theatre Club in a performance that would see Sir Ian McKellen’s West End debut when it transferred to the St Martin’s Theatre in 1966. 8 Howarth told me of this production: “The programme said Othello by William Shakespeare and when Brian Astbury gave out the programme he would stamp it with ‘Slegs Blankes’ on the programme”.

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the race of the actors cast in the Baxter production of Godot proved significant. Howarth’s multiracial cast was led by the country’s most highprofile black actors, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, who played the roles of Vladimir and Estragon. By 1980, Kani and Ntshona were already internationally renowned actors, particularly for their collaborations with the playwright Athol Fugard. With Fugard, they co-wrote and acted in Sizwe Banzi Is Dead (1972) and The Island (1973), for which they jointly won the 1975 Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play. Alongside this notable double act, Howarth cast the white actors, Pieter-Dirk Uys and Peter Piccolo, as Pozzo and Lucky, and a nineteen-year-old black actor Silamour Philander as the boy. Although it may be possible to argue that the production’s casting was politically motivated, these initial decisions were made with less discernible political intentions than became evident through the play’s international reception, as I will discuss later. Unlike other productions of Godot staged in political circumstances, Howarth met Beckett in Paris to discuss his plans for the Cape Town production, thanks to an introduction from their mutual friend, Jocelyn Herbert. Beckett was supportive towards Howarth’s plans, offering advice, answering questions and agreeing to specific changes relating to the context of the performance. For example, rather than strictly setting the play on a country road, Howarth chose to locate the play in the South African veldt—a move epitomised by the dusty tracks of his rolling, rural wasteland set. Furthermore, Howarth explained to Beckett that in this environment, Kani and Ntshona “can’t wear bowler hats in the middle of the veldt”, as he believed it would eschew his social realist reading of the play, and as a result, the actors wore lax cloth hat that could be easily moulded. While these decisions were agreed with Beckett, some South African commentators, most notably Peter Fourie in a letter to The Cape Times on 8 March 1980, argued “Howarth’s attempt to give it a local connotation [was] an affront to the serious theatregoer and an unforgiveable bastardisation of one of the great plays of the century” (Fuchs 164). Fourie’s main grievances related to the local connotations and changes to Vladimir and Estragon’s dialogue, which Howarth and Uys did not recall. Howarth did, however, seek Beckett’s permission to amend one specific line in the text: I did change one word, which I thought they would never ever say it. They say when Pozzo is on the stage in the scene with him, they say, “We are not caryatids”. […] There is no way that John and Winston would have

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used that word. So, we changed it to “crutches”, and of course they had this wonderful accent: “We are not his crutches”.

These small alterations to the set, costume and text represented unusual concessions for Beckett, and rather than spoiling the play, they enhanced the relevance of Godot to the cast and creative team, as well as to the diverse South African audiences that would access the play, in most cases for the first time. The play’s resonances with South Africa saw the Baxter schedule a national tour, where the production was also staged at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg and the Grahamstown Festival. Controversially, however, the Performing Arts Council of the Transvaal (PACT) “refused to sponsor the presentation in the Transvaal” (Fuchs 164). Distractions aside, for the cast, creative team and Theatre, it was an exciting production to mount in South Africa and one that was favourably received by its audiences. This reception was alluded to by Uys, as he reflected on aspects of the performance: We started performing to a fantastic reaction and everyone was very excited. I did realise quite soon that John and Winston weren’t interested in the chorus. They were up there. Acting to row 3 and row 14, and they were like this … scratching their arses. They behaved like two black men from Port Elizabeth, which was ok for the tramps. Lucky – Peter Piccolo – was amazing. He just got that thing where he was so fucking heart breaking. And I sort of pounced around like Orson Welles on crack. (Personal interview, 5 June 2018)9

Although Uys was frustrated that Kani and Ntshona’s performance acknowledged the audience, he was complimentary of the overall mark they left on the play and its connection with the time: “John and Winston made it their own with the huge atmosphere of their reality: two black men in apartheid South Africa. But whenever they said things, it made total sense”. Howarth recognised the production could not escape from the political allegory of a South African context, and his considerations towards the text and performance highlighted how he read the underlying circumstances Kani and Ntshona were situated in as Vladimir and Estragon. Howarth admitted he did find it difficult to look beyond the 9 All subsequent quotes from Uys are taken from this interview.

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poignancy of the play’s final moments without a political perspective: “[They ask] ‘What are we waiting for’. We’re waiting for Mandela to come out of prison. Of course, you don’t say that. We’re waiting for the end of this. It’s not going to end. This was 1980, it’s another ten years you’ve got to do this”. At the time of their production, Kani and Ntshona’s situation as Didi and Gogo highlighted the resilience of black South Africans and their need to persevere against the uncertainty of their future and the limiting restrictions of the system that governed their lives. Howarth indicated this in his reading of the characters in a South African context: “when Gogo keeps saying, ‘Can’t we go now?’ [he is trying to say:] ‘Can’t we stop being black? Can’t we just be South Africans yet?’ They don’t say that of course … that is the under text. Why do we have to stay in this wasteland? Because we have passbooks. We can’t go anywhere else. We’re here”. These sentiments suggest how Didi and Gogo’s situation in Godot connected with the realities of daily life for black South Africans, and although the native iteration of this production attempted to offer a close reading of Beckett’s text, the time of the production, its local connotations, the actors and the play itself meant—whether it was intended or not—that the Baxter Theatre presentation brought politics to Beckett’s drama.

The Baxter Godot in London Following the production’s success in Cape Town, and during its national tour, the next step for the Baxter production was to tour England and America, where the combination of Beckett and South Africa represented an attractive proposition for receiving theatres in both countries. The tour was an opportunity to export South African culture, but also, given Godot ’s multi-faceted meanings and Beckett’s prominence as a writer, an opportunity to raise awareness of apartheid to international audiences through a more political reading of Beckett’s text. The Baxter production began their Old Vic residency on 17 February 1981, but with some notable changes. Significantly for the tone of the production, Howarth decided Pieter-Dirk Uys needed to change his portrayal of Pozzo. As he explained, “He played him sort of Humpty Dumpty, like it was a European production. When we came to the Old Vic, I said you can’t play it like that. You can’t play it English, you’ve got to play it like an Afrikaner”. Here, Howarth highlighted the need to stress the South African predicament to an international audience. This artistic

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decision opened the performance to more overtly political interpretations rather than the subtler insinuations he deployed in South Africa. When he was first offered the role of Pozzo, Uys initially questioned whether he was cast because of his P. W. Botha impression from other sketches, but akin to Howarth’s reflections he recalled a conversation ahead of the tour where: Donald said, “You do understand, we can’t do it like we’ve done it here. We’ve got to really be a South African production. You asked me before about P. W. Botha. We now want you to do it like P. W. Botha”. I said, no, no, no, we can’t go to London with a pantomime of crap politics, we can’t do that.

While Uys protested, the company—who supported the decision—did manage to convince him to do one run through as the newly politicised Pozzo, where he beat Didi and Gogo by whipping them, but he found the idea so repulsive he admitted to throwing up after the first scene. As a result of the tour’s political intentions, Uys resigned from the production and was replaced by Bill Flynn, whose costume as Pozzo saw him wear a checked shirt and gumboots—clothing traditionally associated with an Afrikaner landlord.10 Beckett was invited to attend rehearsals when the production arrived at the Old Vic, though he declined, fearing his meticulous working methods may upset the practitioners in rehearsals, leaving Howarth to work with his cast alone (Letter to Jocelyn Herbert, 11 January 1981). When the company arrived in London, Howarth recalled how they were affronted to find a poster of the production’s key information displayed with an inappropriate main image: a cartoon of two white characters, foreshadowing Kani and Ntshona’s Vladimir and Estragon. The mistake left Howarth furious and he insisted they change the image out of respect to Kani and Ntshona, but to the frustration and embarrassment of both sides, it was too late to change the poster’s design. Beyond this little

10 On reflection, Howarth said he would have made further changes to the casting: “If I had been able to do it again, I’d have cast Lucky as neither African nor white, as there’s a large Indian population in Durban and in the Cape”.

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known, but significant faux pas, relations did improve in a performance that would mark the first London Godot to feature black actors.11 Ironically, despite the complications that arose from the poster, the same image featured on the Old Vic’s accompanying programme. Indeed, the programme was loaded with political emphasis as it drew clear connections between the actors’ situation as Vladimir and Estragon with the plight of black South Africans and the ruling government’s apartheid system. Under the heading, “The adventures of Didi and Gogo”, five pages of the Old Vic programme deliberately presented images of the Baxter Theatre production with quotes from the play, including the following examples: • • • • •

DIDI: We’ve lost our rights. DIDI: Did they beat you? DIDI: Was I sleeping while the others suffered? GOGO: And if he comes? DIDI: We’ll be saved.

These examples highlight the additional weight given to Beckett’s text when played in a South African production during apartheid. Rather than produce humour or inspire conversations, the lines act as a reminder of the authoritarian regime and the severity of the racial segregation imposed and implemented across the country. Unsurprisingly, when the production opened, many London critics read the performance through its South African context. Michael Coveney saw the political connotations behind the touring performance, arguing that Kani and Ntshona represented “black vagrants dumped on a useless terrain by an intolerable political system”, while Bill Flynn’s Pozzo signified an Afrikaner landlord—“not the racist bully you would imagine, but a mildly ineffective plump caricature on his way to market to sell the bit of ‘white trash’, Lucky” (Financial Times, 19 February 1981). One of the strengths of the Kani and Ntshona double act in Cape Town was their comedic portrayal of Didi and Gogo, but in London several critics 11 The production histories of Beckett’s drama in London has been dominated by white actors. Of the few performances featuring black actors, Norman Beaton played in Krapp’s Last Tape at the Bloomsbury Theatre in 1988 and, more recently, Talawa Theatre Company presented the first London performance of Godot with an all-black cast at the Albany Theatre in 2012.

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felt their well-intended physical and cross-talk humour was weakened due to the production’s political connections. As Irving Wardle commented, “It is true that the racial setting diminishes the comic opportunities; but even so, the performance could do with more invention” (The Times, 19 February 1981). Beyond the political associations that some British critics would inevitably read into the performance, many saw it as an “illuminating event”, albeit with some reservations due to the impressive range of Godot s previously staged in the UK, including the recent tour of Beckett’s Schiller Theater production in 1976.

The Baxter Godot in America After its initial teething problems and a varied reception in London, Howarth’s Godot moved on to the American leg of its tour, where a more complex and problematic set of challenges awaited the touring company. It began with a critically acclaimed presentation at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre in 1981, which Mel Gussow declared “a challenging act of political theater” in The New York Times (27 April 1986). Although Gussow’s perception of the performance did not motivate what was to follow, when the production travelled on to the Baltimore International Theatre Festival for its eight scheduled performances, it found itself in the middle of an unusual political storm. What unfolded in Baltimore highlights how intended political viewpoints can be miscommunicated. The Baltimore International Theatre Festival was due to be the final leg of the Baxter’s tour, but as this unconventional history has suggested, this would not prove straightforward and the planned presentation did not materialise. As the New York Times reported, “[a] racially integrated South African drama troupe today cancelled its appearance at a theater festival after a protest against apartheid by local black leaders” (“Baltimore Protest”, 18 June 1981). Although the tour had artistic and commercial merits for the Baxter, in many respects it was also intended to highlight the ongoing system of apartheid in South Africa to international audiences. However, this ambition received opposition from a group known as the Baltimore Coalition in Support of the Liberation of South Africa, who criticised their multiracial production for “not represent[ing] the political realities of South Africa”. The demonstrations were aimed at the event as it was a product of South Africa, but they were undoubtedly motivated by the Baltimore City Council’s decision to condemn South Africa’s apartheid policy, which was

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announced in the same week. When interviewed about the production, Kani commented, “We were led to believe we would be welcomed by all segments of the community, and we are disappointed to find there is disagreement between blacks and whites in Baltimore” (“Baltimore Protest Halts Drama By South Africans”). In discussing these unforeseen events many years later, Howarth was frustrated in his recollection of what transpired and sarcastically commented: They said we are boycotting this performance…we want apartheid to come to an end. We didn’t of course. We were all for keeping apartheid. John and Winston were doing Waiting for Godot, because they couldn’t find white actors to do it. So that’s why we’re taking it to a Festival in Baltimore to represent apartheid South Africa.

As a result of this surprising protest, which included pickets outside the venue, the company decided to withdraw from the Festival, despite the best efforts of the organisers for them to reconsider. The Festival Director, Hope Quackenbush, was upset at the reception the touring production had received before it was even staged, and argued, “the troupe’s appearance was an artistic, not a political, event”, before adding, “[w]e didn’t invite South Africa, we didn’t invite England, we didn’t invite Israel, we didn’t invite Ireland. We invited performers” (“Baltimore Protest Halts Drama By South Africans”). Howarth believed the locals read their performance as “made in South Africa” and as a result they were, as Quackenbush stated, “misdirected” over the treatment of race in performance from a Company of those origins.12 Ironically, the unusual events in Baltimore would prove the inspiration for a play by Bruce Bonafede entitled Advice to the Players, a one-act play about a collision of art and politics,13 but the non-performance in Baltimore marked a depressing conclusion to the life of the Baxter Godot. Nonetheless, the profile, reception and challenges this production faced at home and on tour ensured it would seep into the cultural memory of 12 Amidst the dispute, the actors had decided to postpone their first performance by one day “to allow members of the company to observe the fifth anniversary of the Soweto student rising in which more than 600 blacks were killed” (“Baltimore Protest Halts Drama By South Africans”). 13 Advice to the Players was first presented at the “Shorts Festival” at the Actors Theatre in Louisville before becoming a 90-minute play when it was staged at the Philadelphia Festival Theatre for New Plays in 1986.

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Beckett’s performance history in South Africa. Unfortunately, the nonevent in Baltimore was also the final act of Howarth’s practical career in the theatre. Nevertheless, the production highlighted the open and varied ways through which Beckett’s drama could be read or adjusted in terms of text, setting, race, tone and its overtones for a given audience. Whether intended or not, the production would be read as political due to the immediacy of the performance in the backdrop to apartheid South Africa. Regardless of its reception, the production’s desire to convey facets of the South African experience through the situation of Beckett’s characters, underlined the need for hope and resilience to audiences at an uncertain and fraught time in South Africa’s national politics.

Works Cited “All Mankind Is Us: Walking for Waiting for Godot”. www.artsoverborders. com/programme/all-mankind-is-us-walking-for-waiting-for-godot-roi-2019. Accessed 19 Aug. 2019. AP. “Baltimore Protest Halts Drama By South Africans”. New York Times, 18 Jun. 1981. Astbury, Brian. The Space/Die Ruimte/Indawo: March 1972–September 1979. Moyra and Azriel Fine, 1979. Barrow, Brian and Yvonne Williams-Short. Theatre Alive! The Baxter Story 1977– 1987 . The Baxter Theatre at the University of Cape Town, 1987. Beckett, Samuel. Letter to Jocelyn Herbert. 11 Jan. 1981. University of Reading, Special Collections, HER/102. ———. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume III: 1957–1965. Edited by George Craig et al., Cambridge UP, 2014. ———. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume IV: 1966–1989. Edited by George Craig et al., Cambridge UP, 2016. Coveney, Michael. “Waiting for Godot”. Financial Times, 19 Feb. 1981. Fuchs, Anne. Playing the Market: The Market Theatre, Johannesburg. Rodopi, 2002. Gussow, Mel. “Art and Politics in Bonafede’s ‘Advice’”. New York Times, 27 Apr. 1986, www.nytimes.com/1986/04/27/theater/art-and-olitics-inbonafede-s-advice.html. Accessed 16 Dec. 2018. Howarth, Donald. Personal interview. 14 Jan. 2015. Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. Bloomsbury, 1996. Middeke, Martin, Peter Paul, Schnierer and Greg Homann. The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary South African Theatre. Bloomsbury, Methuen Drama, 2015.

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Nixon, Mark and Matthew Feldman. The International Reception of Samuel Beckett. Continuum, 2009. Orkin, Martin. Drama and the South African State. Manchester UP, 1991. Parsons, Cóilín. “Waiting for Godot (review)”. Theatre Journal, vol. 63, no. 2, 2011, pp. 257–260. Sharp, Rob. “Master and Servant: How Tania Bruguera Is Using Beckett to Dismantle Power”. The Guardian, 11 Apr. 2017, www.theguardian.com/ stage/2017/apr/11/tania-bruguera-samuel-beckett-endgame-boca-porto. Accessed 24 Oct. 2018. Smith, David, Imogen Carter and Ally Carnwath. “In Godot We Trust”. The Guardian, 8 Mar. 2009, www.theguardian.com/culture/2009/mar/08/sam uel-beckett-waiting-for-godot. Accessed 17 Dec. 2018. “The Space Theatre”. 11 May 2017. South African History Online: Towards a People’s History, www.sahistory.org.za/place/space-theatre. Accessed 19 Aug. 2019. Uys, Pieter-Dirk. Personal interview. 5 June 2018. Wardle, Irving. “Waiting for Godot”. The Times, 19 Feb. 1981.

CHAPTER 13

Samuel Beckett’s Nominalist Politics and the Pitfalls of ‘Presentism’ Matthew Feldman

This chapter proposes to reappraise the subject of ‘Beckett and politics’. In order to paint the canvas broadly as a ‘think piece’, I will consider the much-contested term, ‘high politics’, or what is sometimes called ‘geopolitics’: the tectonic plates of international relations, of central types and objectives of domestic governance, and in the twentieth-century Europe witnessed by Beckett, totalitarianism, total war and genocide (all unthinkable previously—and scarcely thinkable since). Considering Beckett’s politics, in short, also means considering the revolutionary politics of Europe during his lifetime.1 This is a historicist proposition, to be sure, and one that forms the backdrop to the ensuing points on Beckett, politics and finally, ‘post-Holocaust art’. First of all, this is emphatically not to simply dismiss ex post facto political engagements with Beckett’s universalised message as apolitical 1 A good overview from a left-wing perspective is Hobsbawm. A more recent and neutral account is offered by Jarausch. See also Bell; also Brose.

M. Feldman (B) NSC, University of York, York, UK © The Author(s) 2021 W. Davies and H. Bailey (eds.), Beckett and Politics, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47110-1_13

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or heuristically inferior. In the words of the 1969 Nobel Prize presentation speech, Beckett’s art was often received at the time—and since—as a “muffled minor key sounding liberation to the oppressed, and comfort to those in need” (Gierow). That claim entails, surely, more than just political liberation, as it is narrowly understood. As Peter Boxall sagely puts it, this is due in no small amount to the “nuanced political and critical difficulties posed by Beckett’s writing” (159). It is precisely the oft-cited openness of Beckett’s work that has enabled cutting-edge inquiries via Queer Theory and Post-Colonialism, to take just two, or scholarship on Beckett and disability, mental health or the non-human. Representations of gender, ethnicity, the body and other forms of social identity—especially as they relate to Beckett’s drama—are intensely political, it scarcely needs to be said. Indeed, some of the most fruitful theoretical work in Beckett Studies is taking place from just these perspectives. Using twentieth-century ‘high politics’ as its framework, this chapter sets out two main paradigms for approaching ‘Beckett and politics’, before beginning to sketch the outlines of a third. The first and, until recently, probably most common view, holds that Beckett is an ‘apolitical’ writer, whose writing lacks overtly ‘political’ engagements. According to this view, he was the quintessential ‘absurdist’, ‘nihilist’ and aloof artist. He refused to be a card-carrying anything. In short, he was the antithesis of contemporary Laureates, like Harold Pinter or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.2 This broadside should be familiar to all, and likewise I will not engage much with it here. A better start, in contrast, is a revealing excerpt from the Socialist Worker’s Party (SWP), which published a wide-ranging piece for Beckett’s centenary in April 2006: Beckett is charged with the celebration of nihilism, despair and pessimism. His work is seen to represent the antithesis of any progressive political engagement. Georg Lukács, the Marxist literary critic and theorist, accused Beckett of portraying “the utmost pathological human degradation”. The experimental writer Bertolt Brecht also despised Beckett’s artistic vision, at one point planning to write a counterattack to the play Waiting for Godot. Sean

2 Pinter was a forthright socialist and political activist. Solzhenitsyn, who was outspokenly critical of the Soviet Union, received the Nobel Prize in 1970, the year after Beckett.

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O’Casey, the left wing Irish dramatist, wrote of Beckett’s work, “there is no hazard of hope, no desire for it, nothing in it but a lust for despair”—and declared that he would have nothing to do with him. Another left wing writer, Dennis Potter, identified the instincts in Beckett’s work with the moral deformities that created the concentration camps and gulags: “Is this the art which is the response to the despair and pity of our age, or is it made of the kind of futility which helped such desecrations of the spirit, such filth of ideologies come into being?” I want to argue that taking such a view is to profoundly misunderstand both Beckett the man and his work. (Kennedy)

This is an important break with the more familiar far-left reduction— namely: Beckett equals wallowing in human degradation equals bourgeois apoliticism. This is exemplified by Jean-Paul Sartre during his years of political partisanship for Soviet communism, whose take on Beckett’s work was that it was “profoundly, essentially, bourgeois in content”: Take Beckett. I like Waiting for Godot very much. I go so far as to regard it as the best thing that has been done in the theatre for thirty years. But all the themes in Godot are bourgeois – solitude, despair, the platitude, incommunicability. All of them are a product of the inner solitude of the bourgeoisie. And it matters little what Godot may be – God or the Revolution. […] What counts is that Godot does not come because of the heroes’ inner weakness; that he cannot come because of their ‘sin’, because men are like that. (51)3

Mistaken as I think this is, there is an instructive truism buried here: ideological types tend to know their own. And Beckett was certainly no Stalinist; in fact, the two characters in Waiting for Godot were initially presented as the ‘Stalinist comedians’—sort of ‘release valves’ in the totalitarian USSR; a pseudo-couple who were able to publicly poke fun at Marshal Stalin. Four years earlier, in “The End”, an unmistakeable caricature of communist fanaticism is presented in the figure of an orator 3 Still later, in an interview with Kenneth Tynan of 1961 (published in The Observer

in two parts, on 18 and 25 June 1961), Sartre continued: “I have not liked Beckett’s other plays, particularly Endgame, because I find the symbolism far too inflated, far too naked. And although that Godot is certainly not a right-wing play, it represents a sort of universal pessimism that appeals to right wing people. For that reason, although I admire it, I have reservations” (Sartre on Theater 128).

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“perched on the roof of a car and haranguing the passers-by. That at least was my interpretation. He was bellowing so loud that snatches of his discourse reached my ears. Union … brothers… Marx… capital…bread and butter…love. It was all Greek to me”. At the end of this paragraph, the narrator concludes: “He must have been a religious fanatic, I could find no other explanation. Perhaps he was an escaped lunatic. He had a nice face, a little on the red side” (Complete Short Prose 94–95). It is far from a sympathetic rendering of Marxism. When it comes to recognising one’s ideological confrères, moreover, Beckett has certainly never been claimed by the far-right. This is an unsurprising point, for unlike Sartre, Brecht and most far-left writers, Beckett got his hands dirty standing up to the Third Reich, risking life and limb in the French Resistance (for which Beckett later received the Croix de Guerre). Briefly, a good example of that radical right canon, underscoring my suggestion that ideological partisans recognise their comrades, comes from 2002 via a literary-minded neo-fascist from New Zealand named Kerry Bolton, who claims a right-wing canon that includes Yeats, Lewis, Pound, Marinetti, D’Annunzio, Knut Hamsun, Oswald Spengler and Julius Evola. There are of course exceptions to ideological leopardspotting, such as the astonishing left-wing literary-critical engagement with fascists like Heidegger or Carl Schmitt, to name just two—but there can be no doubt as to why Beckett is excluded from Bolton’s (or others’) Thinkers of the Right. The Marxist critic Terry Eagleton would have us believe of Beckett that: “Unusually among modernist artists, this supposed purveyor of nihilism was a militant of the left rather than the right ”; indeed, “Beckett’s is an art born in the shadow of Auschwitz” (“Champion of Ambiguity”, emphasis added).4 This chapter will return to the “shadow of Auschwitz” assertion below, but for the moment I think it safer to posit that the opposite of Eagleton’s view is closer to the mark: that Beckett’s politics were un-militant, even anti-militant. This brings us to the second paradigmatic view, which is probably shared by most Beckett scholars: that Beckett was ‘pink’—‘near left’ rather than far-left, a reforming social democrat rather than a communist revolutionary. This political outlook might be

4 See also Eagleton’s “Political Beckett”.

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characterised as moderate, rather than Marxist left; a position that prioritised human liberation and equality within certain limits,5 as confirmed by Emilie Morin’s various examinations of Beckett’s engagement with political materials in Samuel Beckett’s Political Imagination, particularly petitions, protests and letters of support. I suspect that most Beckett specialists hold this view, and with good reason—not least as it probably describes the political position of most of Beckett Studies. Famously, Beckett’s response to Nancy Cunard’s Authors Take Sides on the Spanish Civil War was one word: “¡UPTHEREPUBLIC!” (qtd. in McNaughton 26).6 Two years later Beckett fell out with MacGreevy over the latter’s nationalistic portrayal of Jack Yeats.7 He had seen enough nationalism from visiting Fascist Italy in the 1920s and Nazi Germany in the 1930s, and the furthest he would go himself in this respect (notwithstanding his Protestant, middle-class background), was an interwar notebook bearing the inscription “Irish Free State” on the cover. Forty years later, in reference to the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland on 2 July 1985, he remarked to Mel Gussow: “Get the British out of Ireland” (52). Between these decades, we are given artistic portrayals that might today be characterised as ‘progressive’, such as what Peter Murphy calls the satirical rendering of Moran as a “petty bourgeois tyrant” (191) in Molloy, or the lampooning of authority figures more generally, like the Civic Guard in Murphy or the moronic Garda encountered a decade later in Mercier and Camier. In a more allegorical light, Pim Verhulst has made a compelling case that the backdrop of the bloody war in Algeria may have inspired the torture portrayed in Rough for Theatre II , concluding: “Even though the play is not directly about the historical events, their influence proves that Beckett was not entirely aloof from the political issues of his time” (124).8 Verhulst is right of course: Beckett kept up to date with the news, even on holiday, and preferred (though not exclusively) broadly left-wing sources of daily information. His partner, Suzanne, was comfortably on the far-left, while his friends and contacts in Paris seem

5 Gender equality, perhaps, being an exception to the rule. 6 See Letter to Joseph Hone, 3 July 1937 (Letters I 508). 7 See Beckett’s “MacGreevy on Yeats” (Disjecta 95–97). 8 For the broader context of the Algerian war in relation to Beckett’s work, see Morin

(184–224).

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to have been largely drawn from the left rather than right. In this context of French use of torture during the Algerian War—which his publisher at Minuit, Jerome Lindon, was actively campaigning against (and Beckett helped by storing some censured books) (Morin 185)—Verhulst cites a fascinating diary entry by Robert Pinget from 4 August 1958: [W]e talked about torture and the death penalty. At first Sam seemed to find it unacceptable that a person who kills someone in France would be let off with a brief imprisonment, thanks to all kinds of mitigating circumstances. So at first he seemed to be in favor of the death penalty. Violent reaction by Michel. Sam then seemed to side with him, with all of us, who were against it in principle – but very difficult to explain why. Sam then asked if torture could not be justified in some cases. Horrified reaction by Michel. Sam wondered if, for example, our mother or brother or some other dear one was being held captive, in danger of starving to death, would it not be justified to torture the captivator, if it were the only way to rescue our parent. I concurred at once. Michel still protested. In the end we all agreed it was something one would do instinctively but which could never be justified in general. (qtd. in Verhulst 123, emphasis added)

I will return to the significance of this last sentence presently. But first, in this more familiar accounting, politics may be opaquely rendered in Beckett’s work, but it is there, universalised and always applicable; a cantankerous humanitarianism. James Knowlson’s Damned to Fame captures this best in the chapter “Politics and Company”. While “Beckett’s attitudes were basically left-wing and anti-establishment ”, he suggests, when it came to “the abuse of human rights, censorship, and attacks on individuals by a repressive political regime, [Beckett’s] instinctive response was to ask what he could do to help”, which usually involved him giving significant financial contributions to fund-raising organisations such as Amnesty International (640, emphasis added). Knowlson points out that Beckett was non-partisan when it came to his support of these issues of human rights and individual and artistic liberty: It did not matter to him whether the regime perpetrating the oppression was left-wing (like the Communists in Eastern Europe) or right-wing (like the Fascists in Spain or the National Party in South Africa). It was enough that they were behaving with inhumanity, barbarity and injustice. (641)

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This passage is provided in the context of Beckett’s support for his Polish translator and pro-democracy campaigner, Antoni Libera. Still more famously, Beckett’s 1982 Catastrophe was dedicated to Vaclav Havel, the Czech dissident leader of what became known as the 1989 ‘Velvet Revolution’, who became the President of Czechoslovakia on 29 December 1989 (a week after Beckett’s death).9 But a more temperamentally adduced sign for the genesis of what might be called Beckett’s ‘anti-totalitarian left’ outlook comes some 50 years (and 600 pages in Knowlson’s biography) earlier. Here, Knowlson describes how, between the ages of nine and thirteen, a “tolerance for religious differences and an emphasis on equality” were fostered during Beckett’s time at Earlsfort House, which later “transformed into a much more active anti-racism” (36). Beckett’s early inculcation of the importance of tolerance and equality was redoubled at Trinity College, Dublin (at that time, remarkably, still flying the Union Jack and not admitting Catholics) under his supervisor’s “crucial” influence. Taken from Thomas Rudmose-Brown’s memoirs, Knowlson highlights the tutor’s vocal refusal to take a political side, and the effect of this on the late-teenage Beckett: “I accept no dogma and deny none. […] I am neither Fascist nor Communist, Imperialist nor Socialist”; and moreover, “I cannot accept the interference of a Church in politics, social economy and ethics” (qtd. in Knowlson 50). Conceived in this way, it is possible to see how a third option might be discernible between an apolitical and ‘soft left’ Beckett: a humanistic, rather than partisan outlook, engaged specifically and individually, rather than being identified with an ‘ism’. I argue that, more than his contemporaries, Beckett’s politics were shaped by the particular and the personal, with each political act or statement demanding especial consideration in terms of its socio-historical context. What Pinget identifies as a politics that wants to ameliorate “instinctively but which could never be justified in general” (albeit with a historicist caveat), I want to call ‘Beckett’s political nominalism’.

9 For further discussion of Catastrophe, see Stewart.

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Beckett’s Political Nominalism: An Alternative Framework Let us approach this alternative framework of Beckett’s political nominalism by initially returning to 1936–1937, when the writer was travelling in Nazi Germany. As Mark Nixon, James McNaughton and others have shown, Beckett clearly rejected the racist norms and anti-Semitism there.10 As a particularly insightful ‘German Diary’ entry from the time emphasises: I am not interested in a ‘unification’ of the historical chaos any more than I am in the ‘clarification’ of the individual chaos, & still less in the anthropomorphisation of the inhuman necessities that provoke the chaos. What I want is the straws, flotsam, etc., names, dates, births + deaths, because that is all I can know […]. Whereas the pure incoherence of times & men & places is at least amusing. Schicksal = Zufall, for all human purposes [e.g. fate equals coincidence …]. the expressions ‘historical necessity’ & ‘Germanic destiny’ start the vomit moving upwards. (German Diaries, notebook 4, 15 January 1937; qtd. in Knowlson 244–45; McNaughton, Politics of Aftermath 69)

Before setting out what this might mean in terms of Beckett’s politics, a caveat to my argument is that ‘nominalism’ is a freighted term, both philosophically and in Beckett Studies. In 1983, Ruby Cohn’s edited volume of Beckett’s marginal writings, Disjecta, published the well-known “German Letter of 1937” in which Beckett sought “to compare Nominalism (in the sense of the Scholastics) with Realism. On the way to this literature of the unword, which is so desirable to me, some form of Nominalist irony might be a necessary stage” (170–73). Understood philosophically, nominalism is the medieval doctrine that only individual things exist, not generic classes of things, no abstract entities (species, colours, ideologies, etc.). Nominalism allows only individual things rather than metaphysical concepts: it is countless grains of sand rather than a beach. The latter is associated with realism or universalism. It seems Beckett was properly introduced to the scholastic debate between nominalism and realism through close note-taking from Wilhelm Windelband’s A History of Philosophy in the middle 1930s—perhaps the

10 See Nixon (German Diaries ); also McNaughton (“Futility of Protest”; Aftermath).

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most important text in Beckett’s self-taught philosophical education— which included a wonderfully Beckettian passage on the radical language scepticism of “terministic nominalism”: For this Terministic Nominalism, knowledge of the world refers to the inner states excited by phenomena. Nicolas Cusanus, who committed himself absolutely to this idealistic Nominalism, taught that human thought possesses only conjectures, modes of representation corresponding to its own nature. This awareness of relatively of all positive prediction, this knowledge of non-knowledge, is the docta ignorantia. (342)

As I have set out elsewhere, nominalism is also a discernible feature of Beckett’s work long after the 1930s, drawn from his interwar “Philosophy Notes”.11 Around the time of his 1937 “German Letter”, Beckett was also taking notes on nominalism from other sources. The following is a translation from Beckett’s page-long Latin notes on the first of Joseph Gredt’s twovolume study, Elementa Philosophiae. The first half, reproduced below, offers a much longer term, albeit anachronistic, perspective on nominalism that included many of the figures he had learned about in his ‘Philosophy Notes’: 2. Nominalists: Heraclitus (+475 BC), Cratylus, Heraclitus’ disciple, Antisthenes (+369), the Epicureans like Roscellinus (XI century) who was St Anselmus’ adversary. The Empiricists, the Sensualists and the Positivists of the most recent periods: Hobbes (1588–1679), Locke (1632–1704), Hume (1711–1776), Condillac (1715–1780), August Comte (1798– 1857), Stuart Mill (1806–1873), Spencer (1820–1903), Wundt (1832– 1921). They give to “universality” only a mere denominational meaning. In fact, they deny concepts and preach that the term “universal” does not correspond in one’s mind to a universal concept, but to a group of individuals already established […] Realists believe that universals have a correspondence with the individuals in the external reality. Nevertheless, once more we have two different positions: one which believes that the universal exists independently as such (exaggerated realism). The other instead, (i.e. Aristotle (384–322), Boethius (480–525), St Anselmus (1033–1109), St Thomas (1225–1274) and most Scholastics) teaches that we must distinguish two elements: the matter and what contains the

11 See Feldman (Falsifying Beckett ).

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universal concept, namely, nature and form. In fact, they teach that universality is present not only in the intellect but also in the singular object (moderate realism). (qtd. in Feldman, Falsifying Beckett 224–25)

After presenting some of my work on Beckett’s archival engagements with nominalism at the 2011 Samuel Beckett: Out of the Archive conference, Shane Weller posed the question as to whether a ‘politics of nominalism’ could also apply to Beckett. Upon reflection, it might look something like Andrew Gibson’s ‘minimalist’ intellectual study, especially the provocatively titled introduction, “Fuck Life”. For Gibson, “Beckett’s art repeatedly turns towards minima”, and any biographical approach needs to be “respectful of that scepticism” so suffusing Beckett’s temperament (11). It ought also to evince an awareness of the “specificity of difficulty, suffering and waste” personified by his characters: “the ‘life’ with which they struggle or against which they set their face turns out be, not a universal expressed in a particular form, but a particular form taken for a universal one”. Accordingly, Gibson’s sensible biographical solution is to situate Beckett’s life “in relation to a succession of discrete contexts” (14). Gibson’s minimalist approach fits well with Beckett’s intellectual outlook, characterised in Damned to Fame as incorporating Beckett’s love of “tiny verifiable details of individual human lives” with his lack of time or patience for “broad sweeping analyses of motives or movements” (244). It also helps us to make a broader sense of Beckett’s politics: a succession of isolated engagements rather than overarching ‘sides’ or ‘ideologies’ or organisational strategies. Put simply, if ‘life is fucked’ anyway, one response is to reject all labels and try to comfort our fellow galleyslaves as best we can, rather than taking some general position that is ‘left’ or ‘right’, ‘radical’ or ‘moderate’. By his late 20s, for Beckett, this meant responding to specific needs and specific contexts.

Beckett’s Contextual Politics and the Dangers of ‘Presentism’ For any ‘political nominalism’ to be effective, I contend, the idea of ‘contexts’ is crucial. Attending to historical circumstances with care above all entails an awareness of the dangers of ‘presentism’—that is, of projecting

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our current values and preferences onto the past.12 For example, objections to the misogyny in some of Beckett’s early writings—for instance, Celia, the goddess-prostitute in Murphy—ought to be contextualised. For our objections to be more than simply patting ourselves on the back for being so ‘right on’ today, we must at least take into account how prevalent those social attitudes were at the time. To take but one example, Beckett lived in France for several years before women received the right to vote there. Gender bias is unacceptable today, but that was far from the case for most of the twentieth century, in both Europe and beyond. Similarly, avoiding presentism also underscores just how ahead of its time was Beckett’s “poem to music” for Henry Crowder in 1930, or his decision to translate some 63,000 words from 19 texts for Nancy Cunard’s anthology, Negro.13 Rightly, it should be noted that the word ‘negro’ burns our ears; it’s a slur today: but not 90 years ago. That is the key point and the pitfall of ‘presentism’. It should be noted, however, that this is not to say that current concerns around the politics of staging Beckett, the non-human, gender, sexuality and so on are somehow invalid or less intellectually worthwhile; it is simply a different subject than that addressed here. When handled sensitively, political contextualisation can be enormously productive. A good example of this is the African-American casting of Waiting for Godot , staged after Hurricane Katrina devastated parts of New Orleans; or, to stick with Waiting for Godot, Susan Sontag’s 1993 production of the play (dubbed “Waiting for Clinton”) during the Siege of Sarajevo. About the production, Sontag said simply: “Beckett’s play, written over 40 years ago, seems written for, and about, Sarajevo”.14 But in other contexts, ‘presentism’ can be not just anachronistic, but downright misleading. Think of what has been all too loosely called Beckett’s “post-Holocaust art”. Since this is a popular area of inquiry at present, it is important to address some of the underlying assumptions. Most of the works concerned with this area of Beckett Studies focus 12 See Stone (3). 13 This anthology, edited by Nancy Cunard (Henry Crowder’s partner at the time) and

including works by (among others) Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. DuBois and Langston Hughes, was ahead of its time in its advocation of racial emancipation. Its significance to the postcolonial canon, however, has since been largely neglected by scholars. Beckett was the most prolific translator in the volume. See Freidman (1–2) and Morin (84–104). 14 See, for instance, Smith, and Niamh M. Bowe’s chapter in this volume.

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on Beckett’s breakthrough “siege in the room”, between circa 1945 and 1953. To choose a forerunner here, the first chapter of David Houston Jones’s Beckett and Testimony is concerned with The Unnameable and Texts for Nothing ; moreover, the very first page notes that “Vladimir in En attendant Godot originally appears under the name Lévy: the Jewish identity” (1). This, in turn, underscores the nature of “Beckettian testimony, and equally pervades discussions of post-Holocaust art” (2). Jackie Blackman goes still further in “Beckett’s Theatre: ‘After Auschwitz’”, positing that “the engagement with the Holocaust in Beckett’s work figuratively recasts Beckett as a ‘survivor’ and ‘witness’ of ‘Auschwitz’” (72). Such a contention must be figurative, of course, since Beckett never visited Auschwitz; nor, for that matter, did he ever visit Poland, where the Nazi death camps were all placed; nor was he one of the 5% of Holocaust survivors, who passed under the Arbeit Macht Frei gates and survived— unlike the 1.1 million other victims, overwhelmingly (but not exclusively) Jewish, at Auschwitz-Birkenau.15 In 2016, Rhys Tranter published an even-handed review of one of the most recent, ambitious of these works, Joseph Anderton’s Beckett’s Creatures: Art of Failure after Holocaust, which “allows us to rethink the writer’s complex negotiation with the Holocaust, and the failure of meaning that arose in its wake” (98). Therein, like most scholarship on Beckett’s “post-Holocaust art”, Anderton focuses on Molloy, Malone Dies , The Unnamable, Waiting for Godot and Endgame, explaining in the PhD thesis that foreshadows his book that “these texts are central to the Beckett canon, contemporaneous with the immediate post-Holocaust cultural milieu” (38). This is, Anderton argues, because “Beckett’s enduring texts are broadly recognized in relation to the author’s wartime experiences and the Holocaust” (thesis 26), especially those “pertinent conditions or states made apparent by the catastrophe whilst having repercussions for the status of art and the human ‘after the Holocaust’” (Beckett’s Creatures 31).16 I argue that we need to be very careful in

15 Auschwitz-Birkenau is the name of the whole complex. Birkenau was where all but one of the gas chambers and crematoria were located. 16 See Morin and McNaughton (Aftermath) for extended discussions of the historical contexts in which Beckett can be most clearly situated, both in terms of what would become known as the Holocaust, and more broadly.

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drawing these relations and repercussions—not simply for Beckett’s (putative) nominalist politics, but for both ‘historicising’ and theorising more generally. Around Beckett’s aforementioned “frenzy of writing”, only two transnational studies had appeared on the Shoah. The first, by Léon Poliakov, was published in French in 1951 as Bréviaire de la haine: Le IIIe Reich et les Juifs (later translated as Harvest of Hate). The second, by Gerald Reitlinger, was published in 1953, using the Third Reich’s term for the “Endlösung der Judenfrage”: The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939–1945. Even if most people knew that Jews were singled out by Nazi racism, their genocidal plan for a ‘judenfrei’ Europe was simply not known at the time. Instead, the general impression was that Nazi occupation was hell on earth for everyone— especially homosexuals, leftists, Jews and other ‘undesirables’ targeted by the Third Reich, such as asylum patients—and not, as we now know, a parallel war against Jews and other civilians, based largely in central Eastern Europe (particularly the ‘Bloodlands’, using Timothy Snyder’s memorable term, which suffered double wartime occupation under Nazi and Soviet regimes). This sense of a general inferno in ‘les camps ’, rather than a specific, genocidal plan to murder Europe’s estimated 11 million Jews, was pervasive right through the 1950s, especially in postwar France. The evidence supporting our current explanations for the Holocaust was simply not there. In fact, the term ‘Holocaust’ itself, as it relates to the genocide of European Jewry—often, these days, expanded to the millions of other civilians killed by the Third Reich during WWII—was credited to Elie Wiesel in 1958, a year after the opening of Fin de Partie at the Royal Court Theatre. A revealing example of this undifferentiated understanding is Alain Resnais’s 1955 Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog ), based on the 1941 Nazi decree, Nacht und Nebel, which licenced the Gestapo to arrest whoever they wanted at the dead of night. In this celebrated 32-minute film, there is no recognition that 72,000 French Jews (more than all other targeted groups in France combined) were killed in (mostly) Auschwitz-Birkenau, due in part to French collaboration; nor is there any suggestion that the Nazi ‘imaginary’ viewed these groups as more marked for death than, for instance, socialists or Freemasons.17 In fact, historians really date the start of ‘Holocaust studies’ to the early

17 For further discussion, see Hayes and Roth; and Feldman (“Debating Debates”).

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1960s, around the time of the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem, and the publication of Raul Hilberg’s widely-read masterpiece, The Destruction of the European Jews. In the early 1960s, according to Deidre Bair, Beckett “replied to Kay Boyle, trying to remain noncommittal in response to her impassioned demand for his opinion of the Adolf Eichmann trial. As far as Beckett was concerned he had made his last political statement when he killed rats at St Lo” (456). The latter was, of course, the context for Beckett’s short piece on “the time-honored conception of humanity in ruins” (Complete Short Prose 278) for radio in 1946, “The Capital of the Ruins”, deriving from his postwar work with the Irish Red Cross Hospital in war-torn Normandy. Put simply, for nearly a generation after 1945, there was no ‘Holocaust’ as we conceive it today. To describe Beckett’s work as engaging with the Holocaust mistakenly elides this point and invests him and other contemporaries with a knowledge that was not available at the time. As late as 1984, tellingly, in thanking Gottfried Büttner for sending him a photographic text on the Warsaw Ghetto, Beckett merely remarked: “that hellish place at that hellish time” (639). Such a view, even into the 1980s, was standard fare across Europe, and only really started to deepen after Beckett’s death, with the dissolution of the USSR and the opening of Soviet archives in the 1990s.18

Conclusion It is important to stress that the temptation of eliding unprecedented genocide and Beckett’s experiences of WWII into the mistitled container ‘Holocaust experiences’ is not the same as political recontextualisation or appropriation. As it happens, starting with Adorno and other exiles, who had access to wartime information that occupied Europe did not, a number of writers on the historical Holocaust have championed Beckett’s art in—to use the Pulitzer Prize winning Saul Friedländer’s title phrase— “probing the limits of representation”. In a paradigm-shifting collection of that title, Friedländer characterises the Holocaust as “an event which tests our traditional conceptual and representational categories, an ‘event at the limits’ […] there are limits to representation which should not be but can easily be transgressed” (3, emphasis retained). Intriguingly, Friedländer

18 See Lawson.

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cites Paul Celan’s poetry and Lanzmann’s Shoah as instances where “the unsayable is almost directly presented”, in a form of “allusive or distanced realism” (3). This was clearly his preference for artistically presenting the Final Solution: “Reality is there in its starkness, but perceived through a filter: that of memory (distance in time), that of spatial displacement, that of some sort of narrative margin which leaves the unsayable unsaid” (3, emphasis retained),19 and is far removed from applying today’s values and understandings to the past. The temptations of ‘presentism’, then, are incommensurate with the contextual, limited and specific nature of Beckett’s—and most of the world’s—immediate postwar knowledge about the Holocaust and the aftermath of the Second World War. We are only really learning about much of it now, and even then, so much simply cannot be said. In any case, attending to these contexts, limits and specificities, it seems to me, is what the politics of nominalism might look like in Beckett Studies. But how might this be applied to Beckett’s politics, finally, in terms of the above example of the Holocaust? For one, rather than projecting our contemporaneous understandings of the Holocaust backwards onto Beckett’s attempt to turn what he called his “dereliction, profoundly felt, into literature” (declared in 1937, not 1947 or 1957; qtd. in Nixon 58), we might highlight his discrete experiences and relationships in their fixed and spectral historical milieu. In this spirit, it is worth noting that it was Beckett’s friend and fellow Joycean assistant, the French Jew Alfred Péron, who brought Beckett into the Gloria French Resistance group. Péron was later arrested on 14 August 1942, under the aforementioned Nacht und Nabel decree, and sent from Paris to Mauthausen (a concentration camp rather than an extermination camp—the latter all located in Poland) in German-annexed Austria. In Beckett Remembering/Remembering Beckett, Beckett described the horrific aftermath as follows:

19 Friedländer

continues, responding to Habermas’s well-known position that “Auschwitz has changed the basis for continuity of the conditions of life within human history”: “What turns the ‘Final Solution’ into an event at the limits is the very fact that it is the most radical form of genocide encountered in history: the wilful, systematic, industrially organized, largely successful attempt totally to exterminate an entire human group within twentieth-century Western society” (3).

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After the war, it was terrible! The forces just opened the extermination camps as they came through. They had nothing to eat, those of them who were left alive. So there was cannibalism. Alfred wouldn’t do it. Amazingly he got as far as Switzerland and then he died of malnutrition and exhaustion [on 1 May 1945; the day Hitler’s suicide was announced]. After the war we saw quite a bit of Mania, Alfred’s widow. (Knowlson and Knowlson 86)

Rather than standing for ‘Jews’ as a whole, in an event poorly understood in the 1940s and 1950s, this affectionate, specific relationship seems to me a more likely source for the early titling of Vladimir as ‘Lévy’ in Waiting for Godot . And as with that breakthrough play for Beckett, the message was universalised, but the creative impetus may well have come from horrific personal experience; not owing as much to big terms like ‘left’ or ‘anti-fascist’—or even French Resister and Holocaust ‘witness’— but as a sensitive individual driven to respond to the unspeakability of lives and victims like Péron. Attending to such searing moments across Beckett’s oeuvre is, ultimately, what I think a nominalist politics in Beckett Studies could be. Rather than displacing apoliticism or ‘pinko’ sensitivities, I argue that characterising Beckett’s politics as nominalist offers the possibility of bridging those very different approaches through a historicising spirit, placing at the forefront those “demented particulars” of which Beckett was so fond.

Works Cited Anderton, Joseph. Beckett’s Creatures: Art of Failure After the Holocaust. 2013. University of Nottingham, PhD Thesis. ———. Beckett’s Creatures: Art of Failure After the Holocaust. Bloomsbury, 2016. Bair, Deidre. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. Picador, 1978. Beckett, Samuel. The Complete Short Prose 1929–1989. Edited by S. E. Gontarski, Grove Press, 1995. ———. Disjecta. Edited by Ruby Cohn. Calder, 1983. ———. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. I: 1929–1940. Edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge UP, 2009. ———. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. IV: 1966–1989. Edited by Lois More Overbeck et al., Cambridge UP, 2015.

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Bell, P. M. H. Twentieth Century Europe: Unity and Division. Hodder Arnold, 2006. Blackman, Jackie. “Beckett’s Theatre: ‘After Auschwitz’”. Samuel Beckett: History, Memory, Archive, edited by Seán Kennedy and Katherine Weiss, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Bolton, Kerry. Thinkers of the Right. Self-published, 2002. Boxall, Peter. “Samuel Beckett: Toward a Political Reading”. Irish Studies Review, vol. 10, no. 2, 2002, pp. 159–170. Brose, Eric. A History of Europe in the Twentieth Century. Oxford UP, 2005. Eagleton, Terry. ‘Champion of Ambiguity’. The Guardian, 20 Mar. 2006, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/mar/20/arts.theatre. Accessed 1 May 2017. ———. “Political Beckett”. The New Left Review, vol. 40, July–August 2006. Feldman, Matthew. “Debating Debates in Holocaust Studies”. Holocaust Studies, vol. 6, no. 3, 2011, pp. 156–174. ———. Falsifying Beckett: Essays on Archives, Philosophy and Methodology in Beckett Studies. Ibidem/Columbia UP, 2015. Friedländer, Saul. Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution”. Harvard UP, 1992. Friedman, Alan Warren, editor. Beckett in Black and Red: The Translations for Nancy Cunard’s Negro (1934). Kentucky UP, 2000. Gibson, Andrew. Samuel Beckett. Reaktion Books, 2010. Gierow, Karl Ragnar. “1969 Award Ceremony Speech”. Swedish Academy, www. nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1969/press.html. Accessed 1 May 2017. Gussow, Mel. Conversations with and about Beckett. Grove Press, 1996. Hayes, Peter and John K. Roth, editors. The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies. Oxford UP, 2011. Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991. Abacus, 1996. Houston Jones, David. Samuel Beckett and Testimony. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Jarausch, Konrad. Out of Ashes: A New History of Europe in the Twentieth Century. Princeton UP, 2015. Kennedy, Sinead. “Samuel Beckett: Poet of Pessimism or Herald of Resistance?”, Socialist Workers, 8 August 2006, https://socialistworker.co.uk/art/8440/ Samuel+Beckett%3A+poet+of+pessimism+or+herald+of+resistance. Accessed 1 May 2017. Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame. Bloomsbury, 1996. Knowlson, James and Elizabeth Knowlson. Beckett Remembering/Remembering Beckett. Bloomsbury, 2006. Lawson, Tom. Debates on the Holocaust. Manchester UP, 2010. McNaughton, James. Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath. Oxford UP, 2018.

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———. “Beckett, German Fascism and History: The Futility of Protest”. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, vol. 15, 2005, pp. 101–115. Morin, Emilie. Samuel Beckett’s Political Imagination. Cambridge UP, 2017. Murphy, Peter. Beckett’s Dedalus: Dialogical Engagements with Joyce in Beckett’s Fiction. Toronto UP, 2009. Nixon, Mark. Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–37 . Continuum, 2011. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “People’s Theatre and Bourgeois Theater”. Sartre on Theater, translated by F. Jellinek, edited by Michael Contat and Michel Rybalka, Quartet Books, 1976. Smith, David. ‘In Godot We Trust’. The Guardian, 5 Mar. 2009, www.the guardian.com/culture/2009/mar/08/samuel-beckett-waiting-for-godot. Accessed 1 May 2017. Stewart, Paul. “The Politics of Form in Samuel Beckett’s Late Theatre and Prose”. European Journal of English Studies, vol. 20, no. 3, 2016, pp. 263– 274. Stone, Dan. “History and its Discontents”. The Holocaust, Fascism, and Memory: Essays in the History of Ideas, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Tranter, Rhys. Review of Beckett’s Creatures: Art of Failure After the Holocaust, by Joseph Anderton. Studies in Theatre and Performance, vol. 36, no. 4, 2016, pp. 97–98. Verhulst, Pim. The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Radio Plays: Interpretative Implications of Reading and Writing Traces. 2014. University of Antwerp, PhD Thesis. Windelband, Wilhelm. A History of Philosophy. 1901. Harper, 1958.

CHAPTER 14

Samuel Beckett’s Subaltern Figures Brendan Dowling

This chapter explores how the marginalised secondary subaltern figures, encountered by Belacqua in Dream of Fair to Middling Women and More Pricks Than Kicks , provide the nullifying indices of socio-economic disadvantage, societal oppression, misrecognition and identity aporia that characterise the protagonists of Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. In doing so, the chapter demonstrates how Beckett’s incorporation of the bottom-up perspective of his previously silent subalterns constitutes one of the biggest stylistic changes in his prose. The cultural-political term ‘subaltern’ that will be used in this discussion is traceable to Antonio Gramsci’s reconceptualisation of the Marxist concept of the urban ‘proletarian’ of northern Italian cities, in order to equally acknowledge the oppression suffered by the small Catholic landholders of the country’s agrarian south.1 Employed as a heuristic tool within postcolonial critique, it allows access to those voices which are commonly relegated to “the bottom layers of society”—whether colonial or postcolonial (Lehner 1).

1 See Beverley 2.

B. Dowling (B) Ulster University, Coleraine, UK © The Author(s) 2021 W. Davies and H. Bailey (eds.), Beckett and Politics, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47110-1_14

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The pre-Second World War Beckettian narrator’s empathetic treatment of inner-city Dublin inhabitants contrasts sharply with the primary character Belacqua Shuah’s spurious interest in those male and female subaltern figures who occupy the margins of his peripheral vision. The narrator’s 1930s predilection for socially excluded Dublin citizens in Dream and More Pricks reflects the younger Beckett’s post-university exposure to those identifiable as subaltern by virtue of vagrancy, class discrimination, exile, psychiatric issues, unemployment or social opprobrium.2 Accordingly, an implied elitist-subaltern distinction quickly emerges between the social status of the socially unassimilated university-educated “high-brow” Belacqua (More Pricks 184), who keeps “himself to himself” (54), and the marginalised figures, who cling to the perimeter of Dublin society. In Dream, Belacqua’s social inadequacy is initially evident in his awkward interactions with tobacconists, booksellers, waiters, post office workers, bank tellers and even the Carlyle Pier operator (7, 127). Because of his self-induced “boycott”, it befalls the narrator to obliquely foreground those post-independence dispossessed citizens, who include an impecunious pregnant single mother, a condemned prisoner and a blind paralytic beggar (among others).3 However, the narratorial emotional involvement with the urban subaltern in Dream, More Pricks and the late-30s novel, Murphy, differs from the less than sensitive portrayal of the rural subaltern. One of the rare moments of congruence between the narrator of Dream and More Pricks, and the cosmopolitan protagonist, emerges in their shared preconception of an urban/rural divide that retains a residuary trace of the self/other colonialist binarity. This bifurcated view of early twentieth-century Irish life in Beckett’s early fiction persists until his more culturally nuanced critique of anthropological, colonialist and nationalist representations of the small West Coast farmer in Watt. The narratorial recalibration of the peasant image in Watt , Molloy and Malone Dies , when combined with Beckett’s pre-war treatment of passively marginalised urban subalterns, jointly function as a socio-ethical critique of Ireland’s inherited colonial structures in the postcolonial transitional period, dating from 1922 to 1948. 2 See Gordon 96. 3 As well as the single mother, the criminal and the beggar, the texts feature prostitutes,

vagrants, lonely elderly bachelors, disease-stricken “slum children” and criminalised turfselling youths; see Dream 28, 53, 127, 140, 206, and More Pricks 26, 47.

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The Postcolonial Urban Subaltern Figure in Dream and More Pricks Upon his arrival in Cobh harbour from the continent, the Belacqua of Dream finds himself seated beside a pregnant single mother, “Colleen Cresswell”, as their tug makes its way towards the disembarkation station. From the nearby America-bound ship’s deck can be heard the strains of “Dear Little Shamrocks ” as the ship’s band welcomes the approaching passenger boat with the boarding emigrants (140).4 Noting that she is returning home from the infamous neighbourhood of London’s Clerkenwell, the narrator ironically juxtaposes the song’s saccharine image of the “fair and fresh […] daughters of Erin” with the earthier reality of Belacqua’s travelling companion’s “present condition” (140). His ironic identifier of the “slut bawn” references the title of Dion Boucicault’s melodrama, “The Colleen Bawn”, which tells of a marriage across the colonial lines of landlord and tenant in which Eily O’Connor is eventually accepted by her husband’s gentrified family.5 Conversely, Beckett’s elliptical pastiche predicts the aptronymic Cresswell’s arrest on prostitution charges in Green Street Court, and her subsequent incarceration and tragic death in a bridewell. Her plight highlights the consequences of the absent father for a young single woman with child in the increasingly conservative milieu of 1920s Ireland, and concludes with the ironic aside that: “She was born well, she lived well and she died well, Colleen Cresswell in Clerkenwell and Bridewell” (140; Grene 21). The narrator’s artful reference to the mystical island of Hy-Brasil “beyond Cobh”, in which “the priests are abroad […] with bludgeons” (140), succinctly conveys the repressive imbrication of Celtic mythology and a restrictive moral theology upon the Irish psyche, which Beckett later lamented in a letter to Thomas MacGreevy on 31 January 1938 as, “the rudimentary thoughts and acts belted into it by the priests and by the demagogues in service of the priests” (Letters I 599). In the first story of More Pricks, “Dante and the Lobster”, the crustacean of the title is kept alive pending boiling, symbolically coinciding with the circumstances surrounding the impending execution of the 4 Beckett alludes to Andrew Cherry’s “The Dear Little Shamrock of Ireland” in which Irish country maidens are described as “Fair and fresh as the daughters of Erin, whose smiles can bewitch”. 5 See Potter 611; Shipley 114.

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Mountjoy prisoner, Henry McCabe, on the evening of 8 December 1926, for the murder of four members of the McDonnell family at “La Mancha Villa”, Malahide, in March 1926.6 By way of contrast with his emotionally detached protagonist, the narrator highlights the horror of the imminent execution by imbuing Belacqua’s mundane actions with subliminal reminders. His “real skill” (11) in manipulating the toasting grill parallels the technical preparation for the hanging conducted by the English executioner, “Ellis” (17). Similarly, Belacqua’s vow to turn the “warm” and “alive” (11) bread to burnt toast is construable as an oblique reference to the suspected death by fire that McCabe was alleged to have visited upon his victims, as well as intimating his symbolical status as a sacrificial lamb. These allusions also indicate that McCabe’s plight is as easily forgotten by the emotionally removed student as the “loaf” he places “back into [its] prison” (11). Correspondingly, learning that “the man must swing at dawn” (as a consequence of the public petition for a reprieve being rejected) merely “further spiced” his food, whereas the concern expressed by “half the land” (17) in requesting clemency is reminiscent of the revulsion felt by ordinary Dubliners at the executions of seven anti-Treatyites.7 These took place between November 1922 and May 1923, less than four years earlier. The harsh juridical stance adopted towards McCabe, of denying clemency on a Holy Day of Obligation, fits a pattern of punitive government action that is designed to contain a possible reactivation of subversive republicanism. This decision prompts the shocked narrator’s plaintive plea: “Why not piety and pity both?” (20). His implied socioethical critique suggests that the state’s pre-emptive recourse to capital punishment is as equally calculating as McCabe’s alleged violent act. In “Ding-Dong”, seated on the granite plinth of the Thomas Moore statue in Westmoreland Street, Belacqua observes the blind paralytic beneath the Bank of Ireland arcade, whose irritation at the late arrival of his “chairman” in returning him to his Coombe tenement, is demonstrated by his “bitter look” and the irregular movement of his wheelchair as it flits “in and out of sight behind the bars of the columns” (42). Beckett strategically places the beggar between two ideologically discredited architectural monuments in College Green: the previous home of the pre-1800 Irish Parliament (contemporaneously functioning as a

6 See also Court Reporter 7; Deale 99; O’Brien 361. 7 See Murphy 284.

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bank), and the Thomas Moore monument (erected in 1857). Respectively emblematic of a failed Protestant hegemony and an impotent nineteenth-century blarneyed version of nationalist culture, the beggar figure connotes the peripheral relevance of both ideological legacies in the face of 1920s urban poverty. Discomfited by this distressful scene, Belacqua flees down “straight Pearse Street” where he witnesses the fatal accident of “a little girl […] run down” by a passing bus (43). The surreptitious theft of the victim’s discarded loaf by a tenement girl illustrates the social Darwinism generated by the struggle for survival in a deprived urban environment. This incident is also framed within the triptych of emblematic colonialist and nationalist structures. The “vast Barrack of Glencullen granite”, the former home of the colonial Dublin Metropolitan police, is juxtaposed with “the home of tragedy” (43), the birthplace of the nationalist leader, Patrick Pearse.8 The implied ideological opposition between these evocative sites suggests an oblique critique of colonialist and nationalist neglect of the native metropolis. A triadic image pattern also emerges in “Fingal” whereby emblematic architectural remnants encase Winnie Coates’ meditation on political vicissitudes, serfdom, and women’s secret suffering (27). These include the “ramparts of ex-favourites”, the “Dane” Swift-associated “tower” of Portrane Castle (known as “Stella’s Tower”), and the mock Celtic “round” tower (“built for relief in the year of the famine”) on the former Portrane demesne (27–29, 34).

Countering Rural-Based Nationalist Iconography Framed within the macro-cultural context of a burgeoning urban– rural divide, post-independence literary nationalism rebranded itself as a predominantly traditional society, imbued with Catholic, Gaelic and rural values. From Dream to Watt, the narratorial antipathy towards an insular rural-based sociocultural ethos, which both excluded and suppressed that which it was unable to absorb (JanMohamed and Lloyd 10), mirrors the non-fictional voice of Beckett as a young critic. This anti-hegemonic trend is especially evident in “Recent Irish Poetry” (1934), where Beckett challenges the orthodox view of Irish rural life depicted by Austin Clarke in “Cattle-drive” and in “Arable Holdings” by Mr. Higgins, describing it 8 Although “the home of tragedy” is sometimes interpreted as a reference to the Queen’s Theatre in Pearse Street, it may also refer to the birthplace of Patrick Pearse.

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as a “flight from self-awareness” (71). Analogously, the narrators of More Pricks, Dream and Murphy replicate their protagonists’ colonialist-derived resistance to the assimilatory hegemonic agenda of sociocultural facilitators, such as priests, policemen, politicians and “local poets” like “Seum or Liam or Harry or Sean” (Dream 156). The verbal and physical abuse that the inebriated Belacqua receives from the Civic Guard near Lincoln Place in “A Wet Night” links the latter’s ineptitude with his country origins. Treading his beat in the Leinster Street area, the guard is described as a crimson-faced, ogre-like figure from rural Laois/Offaly (formerly Queen’s and King’s County, and both literally and figuratively “beyond the pale”), who administers a sharp “dunch on the breast” after Belacqua commits the perceived “misdemeanour” of vomiting over the former’s “enormous pair of boots” (76). In an equivalent incident, the narrator of Dream utilises a coinage derived from the nineteenth-century Irish ‘bastún’ (lout), indicating heavy-handedness when describing the indictment of two turf-stealing youths by “the Civic Guards, those plush bosthoons ” (53). This pejorative rustic representation of the Civic Guard continues in Murphy, where the narrator, in mock-heroic mode, disparages the quaint rustic speech-patterns of the absent-minded “nobly proportioned” officer who intervenes when witnessing what he assumes to be the vandalous act of Neary headbutting Cúchulainn’s “deathless rump” (28, 36). Post-independence nationalist politicians identified the revivalistinspired relational dynamic between peasant and landscape as a core indicator of authentic Irishness that provided an available sociocultural template for contemporary writers.9 In “A Wet Night”, on his way to the home of Miss Caleken Frica, the anti-ruralist, Belacqua, chooses the route upon which he is least likely to encounter “poets and peasants and politicians” (54) of this ilk. His plan to locate a suitably anonymous pub and sit alone on a “high stool” is thwarted by the boorish invitation from a rustically attired poet to join him in the Grosvenor pub (54). The narratorial employment of the neologism “politico-ploughboy” to describe the intoxicated “homespun” poet, and his idiosyncratic interjection that the latter had “lost a harrow and found a figure of speech” (57), is symptomatic of Beckett’s anti-traditionalist resistance to an aesthetic

9 See Frawley 51.

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that privileged a rural version of Irish identity, to the detriment of pressing urban realities. In Murphy, Miss Counihan’s seemingly interminable enumeration of Ireland’s favourable natural features (ranging from “bays, the bogs, the moors, the glens” to “the lakes, the rivers [and] the streams” 152) is construable as a parody of an “Old Moore” (121) song and is also interpretable as Beckett’s anti-pastoral critique of the nationalist idealisation of landscape. The isomorphic connection that Beckett makes between Miss Counihan and rural topography may well have been prompted by his exposure to the 1928 new Irish currency, the punt, which featured the symbolic postcolonial representation of the Saorstát, Cathleen Ni Houlihan, on seven of the notes.10 Their illustrator, Sir John Lavery, produced a composite female figure by combining the typology of W.B. Yeats’s allegorical representation of Ireland in his 1902 anti-colonial drama, Cathleen Ni Houlihan, with the homeliness of an “archetypical Irish Cailín” (Symes). Adorned with a shawl and traditional harp, Lavery depicts the mythological Ni Houlihan silhouetted serenely amid her customary landscape of lakes and mountains. In Beckett’s anarchic caricature of the allegorical heroine’s interpellation of her nationalist acolytes, the anti-climactic sub-plot of Murphy charts the mad-cap efforts of Miss Counihan to locate her recalcitrant suitor and “knight-errant” (33) and return him to his senses—and to Dublin. To this end, Beckett recasts Ireland’s freedom-seeking mythical rural sprite, Ni Houlihan, as an unflatteringly licentious reincarnation of her former effulgent persona, by allocating her a phonetically evocative cognomen, relocating her to her native metropolis, and apportioning her the “profession” of canny urban sex worker (111).

Murphy ’s Sub-plot as Subaltern Chronicle Beckett’s counter-allegory features Cooper as urban factotum to the Murphy search party of Counihan, Neary and Wylie. His hierarchical status is traceable to the earlier nineteenth-century Punch colonial stereotype of the rural “honest Paddy”, where his presence beside the “vulnerable Hibernia” functions as a foil to the simian-like Fenians and

10 See Symes: Ni Houlihan’s image appeared on the 10-shilling, 1-, 5-, 10-, 20-, 50-, and 100-pound note.

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ferocious-looking land agitators.11 Playing a similar role within the postindependence dispensation, Cooper has transmogrified into an urban subaltern figure whose literary lineage as Neary’s “man-of-all-work” (34) also replicates characteristics that are traceable to the nineteenth-century English stage prototype of the absurdly loyal (if eccentric) “servant”. Bullied by Wylie and bribed by Counihan in their respective attempts to inveigle prior notification of Murphy’s current whereabouts, Neary’s former “tried and trusted servant” (68) emerges outwardly servile to both, while being compliant with neither. In Chapter 10, suspecting that Wylie is about to unmask his conflicted loyalties, the narrator marvels at the sheer dexterity of Cooper’s equivocal countenance, ranging from “irresolution, revulsion [and] doglike devotion” to “catlike discretion” (115)—expressions that he rallies in a desperate attempt to conceal his duplicitous dealings with Wylie’s rival, Counihan. The urban subaltern’s restlessness, creative ambivalence, verbal reticence and alcoholic dependency are also interpretable as symptoms of a suppressed inner conflict secreted beneath a compliant mien (“That’ll be all right” 116). Pejoratively referenced as a ‘shoneen’ mentality, this attitudinal contradiction might also be diagnosed as “postcolonial schizophrenia” (257), which the sociologist Mícheál Mac Gréil ascribed to “generations of low self-esteem imposed by the [colonial] system on many ordinary Irish people” (374). Cooper’s enmeshment in the machinations of the posse, led by Counihan and Wylie, stands in contrast to Murphy’s apparent noninvolvement in the mini-saga. Apart from viewing his body in the morgue, a flashback of a conversation with Neary, and Cooper’s brief glimpse of him in his West Brompton mews, neither Wylie nor Counihan physically encounter the novel’s primary protagonist. Murphy’s abandonment of his relationship with Miss Counihan is construable, in mythopoetic mode, as a counter-allegorical contrivance that conveys the former’s eschewal of Irish cultural nationalism’s assimilatory stratagems. Given the significant role of collective memory in nationalist mythologising, that Murphy’s recall ability is deemed “treacherous” (46) connotes not merely forgetfulness but betokens his betrayal of a revivalist-derived vision of sociocultural regeneration. Willing the dispersal of his ashes in “the pit” (151) of the twentieth-century home of the Irish Literary Revival constitutes a comic snub to the peasant-centred drama of the Abbey Theatre, while critiquing

11 See Cashman 361.

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the romanticised arcadian settings in which revivalist nineteenth-century artists and post-independence pastoral polemics have located the Irish rural dweller. Likewise, Beckett’s counter-intuitive emplacement of the self-exiled Murphy in a London West Brompton mews, “unfit for human habitation” (74), challenges the latent anti-urban bias embedded in an anti-colonial nationalist ideology, while also reflecting a Dubliner’s disillusionment with de Valera’s self-sufficient agrarian idealism. The Irish Free State’s lack of national self-sustenance, and its continued dependence on the United Kingdom, is also evident in the imported gifts from tropical climes (“mangoes, orchids, Cuban cigarettes” 32), which the besotted Neary bestows upon the acquisitive Counihan. Beckett’s list of imported items may also constitute an ironic reference to the impact of the trade stalemate between Britain and Ireland, since one of the discernible effects of the “economic war” (1932–1938) between the two countries lay in the consequential inability of Ireland to access those trade routes controlled by Britain.12

The Pseudo-Peasant in Watt Following Murphy, Beckett’s critique of both colonialist stereotyping and nationalist idealisation of the rural figure in Watt intrudes upon the isolated gothic world of Knott’s establishment. Arthur recounts how Ernest Louit presents an ostensibly hapless seventy-six-year-old, “Mr Thomas Nackybal” (174), as a suitable anthropological specimen to verify his “research expedition” to “the western seaboard” (171, 181). Nackybal’s childlike guise alludes ironically to Dr. George Petrie’s anthropological thesis that the West Atlantic islanders enjoyed a “primitive simplicity” (Haddon and Browne 801). Patrick Bixby identifies the “strict opposition between the civilized and the primitive”, and the implied inference that “only the civilized researcher can adequately represent (speak of and for) primitive peoples” (136), as the flawed assumptions that underly Louit’s doomed ethnographic project. He also notes the similarity in research methods between Beckett’s fictional anthropologist and A.C. Haddon, “the chief investigator of the British Association’s Ethnographic Survey of the British Isles” (138). The work of a less recognisable associate of Haddon, Charles R. Browne, might also have been known to

12 See Kennedy et al. 33.

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Beckett during his student days at Trinity College, as its Anthropometric Laboratory constituted the former’s research base (Lysaght 416; Walsh 17). Certainly, from the indigenous perspective of the great-grandchildren of Haddon and Browne’s subjects, the ethnological search for the origins of the Islands’ natives is generally perceived as part of the wider drive to extend Anglo-Irish hegemony among its colonial subjects (Walsh 16, 19–21). From a European perspective, Andrew Gibson associates Lucky’s seemingly obscurantist discussion of anthropometric practice in a Frenchsounding academy in Waiting for Godot , with the Vichyite eugenicist discourse of Alexis Carrel, who “promoted the anthropological study of peasants and immigrants […] to help determine the ethnic features best suited to the French” (186–87). This segment of Lucky’s speech is also interpretable as Beckett’s dismissive response to the study of specific “anthropometric types” along Ireland’s West Coast, given that the measurement of “the skull in Connemara” to “the nearest decimal” conjures up the image of the rural inhabitant, “naked in the stockinged feet” (43), being measured by an anthropometrist. While the satirical treatment of the rural subaltern figure by British magazines, such as Punch, parodied the primitive nature of Irish rural life and associated it with Darwinian retrogression, post-independence nationalism responded by exoticising and idealising the figure of the Irish country dweller as an adumbration of cultural authenticity and political legitimacy. During the sixteen years that marked the second phase of Ireland’s post-independence transition (1932–1948), Fianna Fáil triumphantly re-appropriated revivalist West of Ireland tropes in order to regenerate Ireland’s cultural ethos. By marketing the rural image of “de Valera’s ideal colony of pious peasants” (Mays 32) as a sociocultural template, the young self-governing nation made a necessity out of an accident of history by imaginatively conveying prestige upon a rank that had previously symbolised the subalternship of the country. However, by doing so, it unwittingly reinforced assumptions underlying the English stereotype of the primitive Celt, which dated from the seventeenth-century conquest (Cheng 48).

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Subaltern Metamorphic Readaptation in Molloy and Malone Dies In the second half of Molloy, Jacques Moran Senior’s journey, from Turdy to “the Molloy country” (133), removes him incrementally from the town, the archetypical locus of colonialist enculturation, and emplaces him in the metonymically identifiable Irish pastoral realms of fields and “bogland” (134). His physical journey is paralleled by “great inward metamorphoses” (164)—signalled by his socio-economic dereliction— that are as much socio-political in their implication as they are psychosocial in origin. One effect of his “changed” self-image is his perceptual retrogression from an aspiring middle-aged metropolitan elitist in the second half of Molloy, to his socially disaffected older self, Molloy, who— in an inversion of chronological sequencing—re-emerges in the novel’s opening section to plod and cycle his solitary way over “endless roads, sands, shingle, bogs and heather” (164, 12). Oona Frawley suggests that Beckett’s re-interpretation of the Irish pastoral tradition involves “another way of making political commentary on Irish, and […] world politics” (6). Certainly, Moran alludes to a culturally hegemonic Catholic-rural context when illustrating the religious sensibility of the Ballyba inhabitants and their devotion to the Madonna, whose image they craft from its “inferior turf” (135). Although bereft of food, shelter and companionship somewhere near the Turdy border in a rain-drenched Ballyba, Moran’s urban antipathies towards the “yokels and their weak points” (174) deter him from “turning for help […] to the peasants” (173); the Turdy Madonna in fulfilment of a vow (173). In the penultimate incident of the novel, while inhabiting a liminal psychosocial space between elitist thinking and subaltern experience, Moran’s speculations are overtaken by the aggressive intervention of the moustachioed figure of the “big ruddy farmer” who “brutally” accosts him from behind (173).13 In an earlier exchange with the same farmer, while crossing his field to enter Ballyba, Moran had attributed similar hostile behaviour to a possible recent theft of cows or pigs (136). He extracts himself from the current accusation of trespassing by manipulating the farmer’s religious sensibility, in his concoction of a pilgrimage to the Turdy Madonna in fulfilment of a vow (173).

13 Baker associates the moustache motif with authority figures (38–39).

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Within the context of a post-independence reversal of hegemonic roles, the religiously conservative farmer is sociologically identifiable as a probable beneficiary of the 1885 Ashbourne Land Act, by which the Land Commission facilitated the purchase of holdings from the Landlord.14 Those tenants who acquired larger tracts experienced an elevation in their hierarchical status from former colonial rural subjects to membership of an indigenous bourgeois-nationalist elite (Guha 2).15 Indeed, the Land Commission had expedited the purchase of so much former estate acreage near Dublin that, in “Yellow”, Belacqua entertains the facetious thought that at least “Pale wales in the east [was] beyond the Land Commission” (177). While in Watt , the unappealing lifestyle of the solitary small farmer on his “ancestral half-acre of moraine” (175) is obliquely compared to revivalist conceptions of the peasant figure, it is the antediluvian preconceptions of the narrator/protagonist Moran in Molloy that are equally subjected to Beckettian irony. Despite Moran’s relegation to subaltern status, his impressions of the bellicose landowner—identifiably a representative of an embryonic rural elite—are filtered through a residual elitist consciousness that is colonialist-like in its characterisation of the former as irascible, backward, superstitious and easily prone to violence (Watson 22; Romani 198, 203). The evolving nature of Beckett’s rural commentary is evident in the contrasts between his parodic treatment of the pseudopeasant, Nackybal, in Watt, his darkly satirical portrayal of an emergent postcolonial native elite in Molloy, and Saposcat/Malone’s empathetic vignette delineating the “labours of the peasants” in Malone Dies (194). The Lambert family endure a subsistent living standard on a small farm inopportunely situated “in a hollow”, so that it was “flooded in winter and in summer burnt to a cinder” (201). Unsurprisingly, Big Lambert, who makes a precarious living from butchering pigs on sometimes distant homesteads, resorts to the survival strategy of secretly grazing his goats at night upon a “fine meadow” that was not his, but belonged to “other peasants living at a distance” (200–1).

14 See Frazier 121: ‘‘The rapid revolution in Irish property ownership […] is the main social cause of the Irish Revival and a factor in the modernism of major Irish authors.” 15 See also Lehner 14.

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In Dream, the narratorial reference to “the plight of the small farmer in the Europe of our time” (160) fleetingly alludes to contemporaneous prewar challenges posed by the continent’s rural-urban migration and waning rural communities. This observation occurs within a satirical critique of the discursive methods of Dublin’s “eager young sociologists” (159), as Belacqua believes that his first-hand knowledge of French and German cities—ranging from Paris to Hamburg—greatly surpasses their abstract sociological presuppositions when discussing Europe (31, 109). Nevertheless, sixteen years later, when writing Malone Dies in 1948, Beckett had himself achieved that newfound awareness of the physical detail of rural life attributed to his experience labouring on the Aude farm near Roussillon (Knowlson 325; Gunn lxv). Speaking to John Fletcher, he admitted that he had modelled the Lamberts on a farming family he knew in the Vaucluse, and had evinced a familiarity with the French peasant custom of pig-killing in December and January (Fletcher 162). It is within the matrix of a neo-conservative European ruralism that Beckett’s post-war change of sensibility towards the poorer country dweller becomes explicable, even as the rural substratum that underlies Malone Dies remains identifiably Irish (Brown 21). His usage of a dual French-Irish overlay in his mature fiction is evident in his gritty depiction of farming life and functions as a foil to polemical ruralism—whether the offspring of Irish post-independence hegemony, or the rural project of Vichy’s Révolution nationale—which promoted a traditionalist image of a homogeneous ethno-national grouping, rediscovering its old values within a new political order (Marrus and Paxton 229). As noted, de Valera’s post-independence idealisation of an agrarian social order eulogised “frugal comforts” as emblematic of a culturally authentic lifestyle (Watson 23). From a similarly patriotic viewpoint, wartime France’s policy of “retour à la terre”, adopted by the collaborationist administration of Vichy, reflected French right-wing support for the Dutch agricultural model that developed into a larger programme of social reform, intent upon replacing the revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity with the catchphrase of “travail, famille, partie”—“work, family, homeland” (Atkin 99; Humbert 329). In contrast, Beckett’s portrayal of the Lambert family conveys the author’s withering response to ideological thinking that hypothesised the fulfilment of human potential—whether in Ireland or France—with any brand of ethno-nationalism. For Lambert’s subjugated grey-haired, pale-faced wife and his equally harassed daughter, the frequently hidden reality behind polemical ruralism

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has transmogrified into a vile durance, as they bear the brunt of an unremittingly arduous lifestyle. As Winnie Coates observes in “Fingal”, the “grey fields” bear the imprint of women’s hidden suffering, both past and present (More Pricks 27). In the fragmentary vignette detailing Saposcat’s visits to the “peasants” (196), Malone empathetically reveals the pattern of baleful intimidation, emotional poverty, economic hardship and regular beatings with the “battle” (washboard), which Lambert’s wife endures at the hands of her husband (201). Unlike Lucy after her “terrible accident” in “What a Misfortune”, she displays none of the resilience that “only women seem able to command” (More Pricks 125). Instead, yielding to histrionic outbursts “several times a day” in her “filthy kitchen”, she mimes the psychological impact of her servitude by flinging her arms up in the air with an involuntary sigh and a hopeless cry of “What’s the use?” (Malone 202). The dispassionate narratorial tone, free of the satire reserved for earlier rural figures, renders the domestic scene even more compelling, while signalling Beckett’s more intimate awareness of rural realities. Similarly, his post-war vignette of Moran’s encounter with the landowner challenges an idealised ruralism as an identity remaking catalyst, and questions its viability as a culturally reinvigorating force within Europe. The grim depiction of the dysfunctional Lambert family dynamic is also construable as Beckett’s late 1940s counterhegemonic critique of post-independence nationalist polemics that apotheosised an agrarian and family-based Irish society (Gallagher 717).

Conclusion In my treatment of urban and rural figures in Beckett’s fiction, I have applied the insights of the subaltern historiographer Ranajit Guha to Beckett’s tangential representation of sociocultural conditions in postindependence Ireland—particularly, the former’s concept of postcolonial “bourgeois-nationalist elitism” (Guha 1). I have traced the evolving narratorial process, whereby Beckett’s post-war humanised version of the rural dweller’s life-struggle in an unforgiving natural environment supersedes his pre-war parodic treatment of the polemical rural stereotype. I have also shown how Beckett’s representation of Cooper, the urban subaltern, and the pseudo-peasant, Nackybal, demonstrates how outmoded colonialist and anthropological assumptions continued to imbricate the presuppositions of 1930s nationalist discourse.

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The protagonists/narrators of Beckett’s mature prose fiction share survival stratagems previously exhibited in vignettes of Belacqua, Murphy and Watt’s socially powerless fellow citizens. The errant Molloy’s feigned deference, when confronted by the ruler-wielding sergeant (22), and Moran’s equally deft amelioration of the belligerent farmer (173), is foreshadowed by Cooper’s creative ambivalence when interacting with a confrontational Wylie (Murphy 115). Dream, More Pricks, Murphy and Watt obliquely examine sociocultural exclusion, while the protagonist/narrators of the novelistic trilogy and post-war novellas explore in microscopic detail the subjective impact of marginalisation. They appropriate the postcolonial subaltern indices of socio-economic disadvantage, abject privation, cultural-status-anxiety, loss of autonomy, psychic and physical imprisonment and identity aporia. Accordingly, the psychosocially precarious Molloy is more powerless than the average peasant, whose “wagons and carts” he hears “a little before dawn […] on their way to market” (15) in a surrealistic Irish pastoral landscape. Correspondingly, the culturally dissident subaltern narrator of The Unnamable articulates the aporetic psychosocial effect of metropolitan pedagogical processes, and claims that any subaltern figure, including the physically disabled “billy in the bowl”, might well be his next “vice-exister” (317).16 By charting this shift in socio-political perspective across Beckett’s prose of the 1930s and 1940s, we can see the crucial ways in which his work continues to negotiate the role and presence of subaltern figures in the cultural and political discourse of mid-century Ireland.

Works Cited Atkin, Nicholas. “Ralliés and Résistants: Catholics in Vichy France, 1940–44”. Catholicism, Politics, and Society in Twentieth-Century France, edited by Kay Chadwick, Liverpool UP, 2000, pp. 97–118. Baker, Phil. Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis. Macmillan, 1997. Beckett, Samuel. Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Edited by Eoin O’ Brien, The Black Cat Press, 1992. ———. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. I: 1929–1940. Edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge UP, 2009. ———. Molloy, Malone Dies: The Unnamable. Calder, 1997.

16 See O’Brien 292: “Dublin’s Billy” although “legless […] propelled himself through the city of Dublin in a wooden bowl shod with iron”.

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———. More Pricks Than Kicks. Calder & Boyars, 1970. ———. Murphy. Calder & Boyars, 1973. ———. “Recent Irish Poetry”. Disjecta, Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, edited by Ruby Cohen, John Calder, 1983, pp. 70–76. ———. Waiting for Godot: The Complete Dramatic Works. Faber and Faber, 1986. ———. Watt. Grove Press, 1959. Beverley, John. Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory. Duke UP, 1999. Bixby, Patrick. Samuel Beckett and the Postcolonial Novel. Cambridge UP, 2009. Brown, Terence. “Beckett and Irish Society”. Samuel Beckett Playwright and Poet, edited by Christopher Murray, Pegasus Books, 2009, pp. 12–22. Cashman, Ray. “Visions of Irish Nationalism”. Journal of Folklore Research, vol. 45, no. 3, 2008, pp. 361–81. Cheng, Vincent J. Inauthentic: The Anxiety Over Culture and Identity. Rutgers UP, 2004. Court Reporter. “Malahide Murders: Men Interrogated by the Civic Guard”. The Irish Times, 16 Apr. 1926, p. 7. Deale, Kenneth Edwin Lee. Memorable Irish Trials. Constable & Co., 1960. Fletcher, John. The Novels of Samuel Beckett. Chatto and Windus, 1964. Frawley, Oona, Irish Pastoral: Nostalgia and Twentieth-Century Irish Literature. Irish Academic Press, 2005. Frazier, Adrian. “Irish Modernisms, 1880–1930”. The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel, edited by John Wilson Foster, Cambridge UP, 2006, pp. 113– 32. Gallagher, Raphael. “Morality in a Changing Irish Society”. The Furrow, vol. 32, no. 11, 1981, pp. 713–24. Gibson, Andrew. “Afterword: ‘The Skull the Skull the Skull the Skull in Connemara’—Beckett, Ireland, and Elsewhere”. Beckett and Ireland, edited by Seán Kennedy, Cambridge UP, 2010, pp. 179–203. Gordon, Lois. The World of Samuel Beckett 1906–1946. Yale UP, 1996. Grene, Nicholas. The Politics of Irish Drama: Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel. Cambridge UP, 2000. Guha, Ranajit. “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India”. Writings on South Asian History and Society, edited by Ranajit Guha, Oxford UP, 1999, pp. 1–8. Gunn, Dan. “Introduction”. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. II: 1941–1956, edited by George Craig et al., Cambridge UP, 2011. Haddon, A. C., and C. R. Browne. “The Ethnography of the Aran Islands, County Galway”. Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy (1889–1901), vol. 2, pp. 768–830.

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Humbert, Agnès. Résistance: A Woman’s Journal of Struggle and Defiance in Occupied France. Bloomsbury, 2008. JanMohamed, Abdul R., and David Lloyd. “Introduction: Towards a Theory of Minority Discourse”. Cultural Critique, no. 6, 1987, pp. 5–12. Kennedy, Kieran A., et al. The Economic Development of Ireland in the Twentieth Century. Routledge, 1988. Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. Bloomsbury, 1996. Lehner, Stephanie. Subaltern Ethics in Contemporary Scottish and Irish Literature: Tracing Counter-Histories. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Lysaght, Patricia. “Hospitality at Wakes and Funerals in Ireland from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century”. Folklore, vol. 114, no. 3, 2003, pp. 403–26. Mac Gréil, Mícheál. Prejudice in Ireland Revisited: Based on a National Survey of Intergroup Attitudes in the Republic of Ireland. Dublin Survey and Research Unit, St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, 1996. Marrus, Michael R., and Robert O. Paxton. Vichy France and the Jews. Basic Books, 1981. Mays, J. C. C., “Young Beckett’s Irish Roots”. Irish University Review, vol. 14, no. 1, 1984, pp. 18–33. Murphy, Breen Timothy. The Government’s Execution Policy During the Irish Civil War 1922–1923. NUI Maynooth, PhD Thesis, 2016. O’Brien, Eoin. The Beckett Country: Samuel Beckett’s Ireland. Faber and Faber, 1986. Potter, George W. To the Golden Door: The Story of the Irish in Ireland and America. Little, Brown, 1960. Romani, Roberto. “British Views on Irish National Character, 1800–1846: An Intellectual History”. History of European Ideas, vol. 23, nos. 5–6, 1997, pp. 193–219. Shipley, Joseph T. Guide to Great Plays. Public Affairs Press, 1956. Symes, Peter. “Lady Lavery”. Mar. 2003. www.pjsymes.com.au/articles/Lavery. htm. Accessed 19 July 2019. Walsh, Ciarán. “Charles R. Browne, the Irish ‘Headhunter’”. Irish Journal of Anthropology, vol. 16, no. 1, 2013, pp. 16–22. Watson, G. J. Irish Identity and the Literary Revival: Synge, Yeats, Joyce, and O’Casey. Catholic U of America, 1994.

CHAPTER 15

The Big House in the Suburbs: Home Thoughts from Abroad in Watt Feargal Whelan

The significance of the Second World War in Europe as an impactful historical event in Beckett’s life cannot be overstated, but it must also be borne in mind that the whole of his life to that point, was experienced in the shadow of an equally strong environment of political, military and social upheaval in his native country. Born in Ireland in 1906, he witnessed the unsuccessful military rebellion of 1916, the prolonged guerrilla war of Independence of 1919–1921, and the short but savage Civil War of 1922–1923. While certainly unequal in scale, the uncertainty and violence Beckett experienced in France from 1939 to 1945 should be read as a continuum which began for him with the mayhem that ultimately led to the creation of the Irish Free State. With this in mind, I argue that the political concerns of early twentieth-century Irish life, which are inescapable given their ubiquity in the national discourse, informed much of Beckett’s thinking when he came to compose the novel Watt in extremis.

F. Whelan (B) Trinity Centre for Beckett Studies, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland © The Author(s) 2021 W. Davies and H. Bailey (eds.), Beckett and Politics, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47110-1_15

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As much of Watt was written while ‘on the run’ during the Second World War it might be expected that it either openly engages with the political actuality of the time, or equally, that it shuns it as a means of escape from the horrific reality. However, the ambiguity surrounding much of his engagement with the political in its broadest sense, foregrounded of late by Emilie Morin and James McNaughton, suggests that within works as superficially abstracted from their political environment as Beckett’s prose, a sensibility is detectable, however obliquely, which is wholly engaged with the historical/political. Morin quotes Beckett’s response to a direct question about whether or not he was political— “No, but I joined the Resistance” (13)—as a deliberately contradictory reflection on his attitude to conventional political commitment. It is neither fully engaged, nor fully indifferent. Watt makes a very specific commentary on the social environment not of wartime France, but of post-independence Ireland. Yet, it is done in the same sense of semidetachment observable in his interview answer. Framed in a fairytale logic, much in the manner of the short story “Echo’s Bones” (1933 [2014]), Watt contains its narrative in the highly politicised genre of the Big House/Anglo-Irish Gothic novel, within which is a meditation on the actual nature of the Irish revolution and its effect, or lack thereof, on the status of its inhabitants. The depiction of Mr. Knott, his house and the experience of Watt as his servant, inverts the logic of the genre it adopts, while foregrounding the obsessions of property ownership and the land which underlies so much of Anglo-Irish discourse in the nineteenth century. The cause of Irish independence was inextricably bound up in the issue of ownership of the land. In simple terms this meant that independence would only be achievable with the ousting of the Anglo-Irish landlords and the collective assumption of ownership by the Irish people. But the simplicity of this premise, and its inherent unfeasibility, led to an idealising of the nature of the land beyond its physical and economic meaning. As an example, Michael Davitt, the early socialist and nationalist, proposed a scheme of nationalisation of the land along socialist principles, understanding that the simple moment of transference of ownership would not necessarily confer freedom on the Irish peasantry and working classes. Yet, despite his standing as one of the pre-eminent figures of the Land League—on a level with Parnell—his fundamental proposals were ignored, if not derided. Writing at the end of the nineteenth century he admitted defeat, recognising that his sensible ideas had

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not appealed to the strong human desire or passion to hold the land as “owner”, which is so inherent to the Celtic nature (qtd. in Marley 268). Davitt, the hero of the Land War, was effectively conceding the inability, at that stage, of the native Irish to view land redistribution and ownership in a progressive context outside of the abstracted ideal of ‘possession’ and ‘ownership’. In his final great work, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland (1904), he reflected on the history of nineteenth-century Irish land agitation and concluded ruefully that, in Ireland at least, “land could never be viewed as a normal market commodity”, such was the pre-eminence placed on it by the indigenous population (qtd. in Marley 268). If its effects on the nationalist population were to grant a mythic status to the land or soil itself, the concerns of the land war are visible through the two definitive literary genres of the time: the Anglo-Irish Gothic and the Big House novel. Central to Irish Gothic, as W.J. McCormack points out, are “arcane or antique documents, compromising last wills and testaments […] and an underlying concern for linkage and continuity, especially for the transmission of property” (831). The Big House novel had always been concerned with decay and loss, but by the twentieth century, particularly in the hands of Elizabeth Bowen, it became a chronicle of the final loss of the property itself. Yet, in reality, the binary that characterises the genre, with Catholic accession on the one hand, and Protestant dissipation and surrender of land on the other, had in reality become distinctly complicated by the status of the suburban settlements around the cities—especially Dublin—which subverted that narrative. As much as All That Fall (1956) might be read as Beckett’s great work of suburbia, the social critique which lies at the heart of that play’s work is evident as a central motif in Watt. In All That Fall, Boghill represents the generic Dublin suburb, of which Foxrock was one, with its commuter railway, racecourse and comfortable housing. Rather than focus precisely on Boghill’s depiction as a representation of an abstracted Foxrock, I suggest that it needs to be read as an abstracted generic suburban space, identifying a precise society at a precise historical moment. The “lingering dissolution” of the inhabitants, through their sterility and inertia, has been read by Terence Brown and Seán Kennedy (among others) as representative of the dying endgame of the Protestant bourgeois class; and this is certainly the case. Yet it is also true that within this depiction is a critique of the rarefied nature of this Dublin suburb and its sense of detachment, which Beckett seems to identify as a cause of its atrophication. The landscape of Watt may be less readily identifiable than that of Boghill, but its

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core setting of a large house beside a racecourse and on a commuter-line railway station arguably situates its milieu precisely in that of All That Fall , and offers a similar critique. The nature of the bourgeois Irish suburb is distinct from its British counterpart, because of the effect of the concurrent political and cultural environment of its development. Fundamentally, the impulse for the creation of the suburb was the same in Ireland as in England. As Raymond Williams defined it, there was “the need to establish a separation of ‘work’ and ‘life’ as a response to the difficulties of industrialism” (213). For Williams, the suburban home created a cosy refuge from the hectic, cutthroat economic activity of the city, not by reacting against industrial capitalism, but by creating a spatially separate zone of familial love and comfort that was exempt from capitalism’s influence. This construction of a newly imagined community abstracted from the industrial urban landscape, and the concomitant development of a sense of detachment, was also central to the Irish experience. In Ireland, however, it was also born of a necessity to create a cosy refuge for the urban Anglo-Irish from the politically inspired assaults on wealth brought about by the Land War and independence-inspired agitation. I argue that while the English suburb attempted to create a rus in urbe by drawing on an ideal imagined rural source for its construction, in Ireland, the Protestant bourgeoisie used the already politically complicated landscape of the Anglo-Irish rural estate as its source to create a modern version of those estates in which a political reality might be avoided. In Beckett’s youth, the suburbs of Dublin were a singularly distinctive space. Mary Daly points out that in the 1850s the City of Dublin Corporation comprised a blend of liberals, nationalists and unionists, Protestants and Catholics. But by the 1880s it had become nationalist and Catholic, dominated by publicans and shopkeepers. In contrast, the suburban townships of Rathmines, Clontarf and Pembroke, and further afield in Blackrock and Kingstown, were predominantly Protestant, unionist and middle-class, where political changes and the fact of a Protestant minority in the city could be largely ignored by the better-off classes, cushioned, as they were, by property, wealth and a degree of self-governance (Daly 202). They did not derive their wealth from the land, as their rural counterparts had done, and had no particular ties with any specific estate in rural Ireland. In effect, they became self-sustaining colonies within the greater Dublin area. The independence of these colonies was further

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reinforced by the fact that, administratively, they existed outside the governance of the Corporation of Dublin. The suburban houses were substantial, and usually detached on a plot of land. But they differed greatly from the situation of the big houses of the country by being built adjacent to each other in clusters, offering physical support and security, and thereby sustaining a sense of collective safety and increasing morale. As a result, suburban houses were not dependent for survival on an economic relationship with the peasant community, through the hiring of labour or letting of land, to the same extent that their country counterparts had been. Crucially, the isolation of the individual country houses in their estates, and the sense of encroachment on the environment by those outside, were completely removed. The houses of the suburbs were arranged to be self-contained and private, while providing a sense of communal belonging through the grouping of so many of the same caste in a relatively small area. The suburban communities may have been isolated, but they were isolated in a position of strength, unlike their counterparts in the country. The echoes of the status of country houses remained, however, by the way individual houses were named in the new suburbs. In the case of the Beckett family home, William Beckett gave it the name “Cooldrinagh” as a tribute to the name of the former estate of his wife’s family (Cronin 12). The Roe family are a typical example of a country Protestant family, who became big house landlords quite late in life. They only moved into Cooldrinagh in 1875, and suffered financial decline following the death of Samuel Roe, Beckett’s grandfather. This decline led to Beckett’s mother having to migrate to Dublin for paid employment (Knowlson 13). Yet the aspiration of having a substantial house on its own lands had been achieved by Roe, and so fulfilled the performance, at least, of the trajectory of Irish ascendancy. By referencing the name of the putative old family estate in the title of the new house, there is a real sense that the suburban house declared itself the inheritor of the mantle of country house, itself in decline by now, and thereby attempted to reinvigorate the family seat, or at least stanch the haemorrhage. There is also a sense in which the addition of a historically resonant name afforded a measure of legitimacy on the newly constructed house by establishing links to a historical past. Most importantly, the new safe house performed the role of the one it supplanted. Surrounding Cooldrinagh were houses with equally allusive names: Cloncarrig, Gortamore and Carrickbyrne

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(Thom’s 1793) which at least give the impression of referring to an estate somewhere in the country, real or imaginary. In Watt , the sense that the environment represents this type of transposed space is foregrounded by Watt’s first encounter with an inhabitant: Mr. Knott’s neighbour Lady McCann, about whom we are told “few women had a more extensive experience of the public road” (24). In this, there is an indication that recent history has caused the norms of ownership and class to have been reversed. Although she is titled, suggesting a past of wealth and property, she may now be a vagabond with a detailed knowledge of the roads. The passage of time has allowed the fact of her title to persist, though the specific details of status have been lost, their precise origins, much like the original Cooldrinagh, are now a faded memory, as she is described as being “one of the McCann’s of ? ” (25). The Irish Big House novel has always had a dysfunctional house at its core, isolated in a rural setting, which is under siege from its natural surroundings and the local peasantry. In her analysis of the actual big houses, Elizabeth Bowen asserts that, from the beginning (the seventeenth century), the real dwellings were doomed, as they were built on a boggy landscape which would consume the brick and stone used to build them (72). In the literary version, the owners of the houses are always set to decline and ultimately disappear, complicit in their extinction through inertia and the stubborn adherence to a sterile and artificial performance of an equally sterile and artificial etiquette. In Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800), the increasingly dissolute eponymous family lose their estate to the increasingly sharp, increasingly better educated and cunning servants. In the last great novel of the genre, Bowen’s The Last September (1929), the house is destroyed by the local IRA in the War of Independence. Yet it is apparent that the family itself has been culpable in its destruction by lingering on by at least one generation too many, and through acts of sheer avoidance and social dislocation. In this case, although the actual servants do not take over, it is the wider Catholic population that do, mirroring the political actuality of the time. The genre was particularly resonant in the post-Independence period for those Anglo-Irish who stayed on in Ireland. They were forced to interrogate ideas of ownership and appropriation, which had been at the core of their community’s experience over the previous three hundred years. Lennox Robinson, Edith Somerville and W. B. Yeats all attempted to validate and contextualise the persistence of the community, with reference to the totemic use of the image of the Big House in the period

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following the War of Independence and civil war, conflicts which saw the destruction of so many of the country’s best examples through political conflagration. Yeats’s interpretation was his second-to-last play, Purgatory (1938), a work which is inflected by disturbing eugenicist sensibility. In it, Yeats depicts the endgame of a great house, describing its destruction as a catastrophe that is destined to recur again and again. An old man, born of the “miscegenation” (Yeats’s term) of the daughter of a big house and the servant stable boy, is condemned to bear witness to the death of his mother, his son and the house itself in an unending, grotesque performance for all eternity. In a play in which there are many crimes, up to and including filicide, “to kill a house” is the absolute nadir and “a capital offence”, according to the central figure (257). While not making a claim for influence, it is significant that Beckett was in the audience for the premiere at the Abbey Theatre in 1938 (Pilling 81). John P. Harrington was the first to suggest reading Watt within the Irish Big House genre, and he has been followed by Jennifer Jeffers, Ellen M. Wolff and Seán Kennedy. Most of the criticism suggests a geopolitical antagonism on Beckett’s part, with the thrust of the genre, as suggested by Wolff, demonstrating a certain disinterest in the parochialism of Ireland, which is replaced by a necessary “extra-Irish reading” of the novel. Alternatively, Kennedy reads it as a direct political attack on W.B. Yeats. Either way, the acceptance of Mr. Knott’s house as a crumbling edifice at the heart of a decaying narrative is unquestioned, and whether parody or straight-telling, Watt complies with the parameters of the genre. But it is not a Big House novel in the traditional sense, as it does not depict the decline and ultimate end of the structure and the simultaneous demise of the proprietor and the family. It reverses the trope of usurpation by the servants to demonstrate a persistence of the proprietorial line, albeit in shabby circumstances. In doing so, Watt becomes a commentary on both the concerns of the Anglo-Irish community, and on the nature of the resilience of the bourgeois suburb, following the shock and potential catastrophe brought about by the assertion of Irish political independence in 1923. It is not a Big House novel of the traditional sort because it recognises the actuality of the solid suburban big house, drawing a sense of security from its situation within walking distance of the commuter train station, near the racecourse, with at least some other houses on the road. In such circumstances, the proprietors (such as the dissolute Mr. Knott) may be expected to survive in however frail a condition, without any sense of being overwhelmed from the outside.

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As is the generic norm, in Watt a seemingly chaotic house is inhabited by a cast of grotesque servants and an ‘eccentric’ owner. Attention is paid to the lives of servants and their relationship to the built and natural environment of the house and gardens. Yet there are crucial inversions of the genre’s norms. Although the welfare of the owner is a central concern, the unsustainable nature of his sustenance never seems to result in any diminution of his health. At the end of the narrative there is no sense of Mr. Knott’s decline. Quite the reverse, in fact. The changes in personnel suggest a decline in the servants and an inevitability to their demise as workers in the house. The inversion comes through the maintenance of Mr. Knott as the unique point of survival in the house, in contrast to the constant removal and replacement of those who attend him. As Arsene points out: “And yet there is one who neither comes nor goes […] but seems to abide in his place, for the time being at any rate, like an oak, or an elm, the beech and the ash, and we nest awhile in the little branches” (48). In contrast to the usual portrayal of the landlord figure of the genre, nothing is offered about Mr. Knott’s history, as the servants, who usually convey the story, are not given access to any detail. Mr. Knott has appeared without trace: “Yet come he did once, otherwise how would he be here, and go sooner or later I suppose he must though you wouldn’t think it to look at him” (48). In this, he most resembles a successful version of Count Dracula, who must (literally) consume those around him in order to survive. But in this case, the weight and depth of the count’s family history are occluded. The role of the decaying proprietor and the surviving servant is reversed as Watt becomes consumed by his labour until exhausted: “Watt was now tired of the ground floor, the ground floor had tired Watt out” (127), and he begins his work “sick and alone” and ends it “sicker and aloner” (127). While also resembling the archetypal norm of the eccentric master of the Big House, Mr. Knott’s behaviour also echoes the supernatural of the gothic master, and of Dracula in particular. The vampire’s special quality of not having a reflection, and his shape-shifting abilities, are alluded to in Watt’s difficulty in addressing the physical presence of the host: “the few glimpses caught of Mr. Knott, by Watt, were not clearly caught, but as it were in a glass, not a looking-glass, a plain glass” (126). Before moving upstairs, he cannot tell what “corpulence, complexion, height and even hair” Knott has, despite the glimpses of him. Later, when he can observe him, Watt finds Knott just as elusive, as the latter regularly “disappears” from the room he occupies (187). The most salient description is of Knott’s “fixity”.

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Louit desires to return to what he calls “the fixity” of Mr. Knott’s house, but Watt does not agree, observing, “[f]ixity was not the word he would have chosen” (172). For Watt, the environment is much more fluid as he notes, following a lengthy description of Knott’s behaviour and room, that it is only “the bed which maintained the fixity of illusion” (179). In the manner of Dracula’s consumption of new victims, it is at this point of exhaustion that the new ‘victim’, Arthur, appears in Mr. Knott’s house. The lack of “fixity” suggests that Knott, like the Count, might be a supernatural ‘shape shifter’, a point which is reinforced by the description of his clothes as “very various, very very various” (173). As Luke Gibbons points out, there are many Irish subtexts in Dracula; so many, in fact, that it is difficult to claim otherwise. Indeed, these subtexts cannot but invite us to consider the metaphorical role of the Count in the discourse of contemporary Irish history. Gibbons cites Seamus Deane and Joseph Valente’s differing and nuanced interpretations. Which critic is correct is not a matter for discussion here; rather it is the strength of each identification of Dracula as embodying, at the very least, the isolated anxiety of the Irish landlord. The complexity of this anxiety is key to understanding Dracula’s narrative (Gibbons 77). Beckett’s use of the Dracula trope, albeit in an inverted manner, predicts this later political interpretation, and intensifies its significance by placing it in the context of a contemporary satiric commentary on Irish life. This reversal of the traditional trope of familial decline in the Big House genre becomes apparent in the depiction of Mr. Knott, whose timelessness absolves him of the need to continue his family, and as such removes the jeopardy of disrupted inheritance which plagues the norm of the dissolute gentry family. As Watt discovers in a moment of revelation: This was the first time Watt heard the words Knott family. There had been a time when they would have pleased him, and the thought they had tendered, that Mr Knott too was serial, in a vermicular series. But not now. For Watt was an old rose now, and indifferent to the gardener. (222)

Watt discovers, too late, that like Dracula, Mr. Knott is a seemingly eternal presence, by dint of being part of a family line. The allusion to Mr. Knott’s forming a part of a line of familial descent is merely a passing one, however, and the important trope of what Vera Kreilkamp calls the Anglo-Irish Gothic’s “single-minded preoccupation with family lineage” (102) appears in the novel most clearly in the overblown and

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tortuous description of the family tree of the Lynch family. This extended focus on the meanest of the inhabitants, rather than on the landowning class, is emblematic of the social revolution promised by the coming of independence. Yet it is a cynical, even vicious commentary on that revolution, since it is the peasant Lynches, almost certainly a Roman Catholic family from their surname, who anxiously perform the absurd maintenance of a family line, by successfully multiplying themselves, despite living in privation. Meanwhile, the titled landowners shiver and worry their way to oblivion in their draughty homes. The irony, which becomes visible to the close reader, is that it is the apparently anxiety-free suburban home-owners who continue with the ownership of the asset of the land, while the post-independence ‘winners’, the Lynches, assume the anxiety of perpetuating the line without any of the proprietorial benefits. The other major concern for the Big House narrative is the delineation of the space occupied both within the walls of the house and within the walls of the estate. The very raison d’etre of the estate and its surroundings made a significant political statement, as Guy Fehlmann points out, which went beyond the mere delineation of space by definitions of ownership and class: “The high walls of the Big House were to separate for seven centuries the Gaelic population from the English invaders and this partition gave birth to two separate worlds, both perfectly alien and yet close to each other” (15). The original structures were the Norman ‘keeps’, still common throughout the country, growing and being rebuilt through the highpoint of building in the eighteenth century, following which there was a decline through the interventions of the Great Famine in the 1840s, Church disestablishment in 1869 and, most catastrophic of all, the dissolution of the estates following the succession of Land Acts of the late nineteenth century (Genet ix–xii). From its inception, the physical reality of the structure is synonymous with the political reality of invasion and usurpation. Its development throughout its subsequent history reinforces its status as a symbolic and actual presence in the definition and delineation of the space which was inhabited by its owners. Big houses came in many sizes, and defined many areas of land, but they all performed essentially the same function: keeping those within secure, and excluding those without. This performance of confinement and exclusion is mirrored in Watt , as the fences confine the servants and prevent their escape. This is most evident in Chapter III, when Watt has moved from the house to another “mansion”, and spends occasions meeting Sam, the narrator, outside the

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confines of the garden of the dwelling. The fact that the area around the house is described as a “garden”, rather than a field or a farm, draws attention to its suburban nature. Unlike the ramshackle walls surrounding Castle Rackrent and Danielstown in The Last September, this garden “was surrounded by a barbwire fence” (133). The neighbouring gardens are also similarly enclosed in a sealed fashion: “no fence was party, nor any party on any fence” (134). Though the narrator insists on calling it a “garden”, the space appears more substantial: “Not that the garden was so little, for it was not, being ten or fifteen acres in extent” (131). The strict demarcation of each garden space determines the overriding sense of confinement and escape which defines the encounters between Watt and Sam. The fence that surrounds the gardens may be a “high barbed wire fence, greatly in need of repair, of new wire, of fresh barbs” (135), but it exerts a power over the narrator and, by implication, Watt, which heightens the sense of the servitude that each individual experiences, so that Sam describes being “impelled, as though by some external agency, towards the fence” (135).1 The trajectory of the Big House genre in an Irish setting can be neatly bookended, beginning with Edgeworth and finishing with Bowen. The timing of their writing details particularly notable moments in AngloIrish history, and in both cases, they serve as a meditation on the future fate of the community they describe. Edgeworth’s novel was written in the shadow of the Act of Union (1800) in which all legislative powers for Ireland, such as they were, were withdrawn to London, and the book was published as the act was being debated by the then Irish Parliament. Its conclusion deliberately addresses the English reader with the observation: “It is a problem of difficult solution to determine whether an [sic] Union will hasten or retard the amelioration of this country” (97). Bowen deals with what might be called the last days of Empire, as she sets her narrative during the events of 1919–1921, which led to political independence and the creation of the Free State. It is notable that in both cases there is an overriding sense of terminal decline of the house and its family inhabitants, which is mirrored, but not precipitated by the historic events that happen outside of its walls. By the time the Act of Union is enacted, the Rackrent family (through their own profligacy) have lost everything to the educated son of their ‘loyal’ retainer; and by the time of independence, 1 For a discussion of the politics of confinement in Beckett’s work, see James Little’s essay in this volume.

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the vitality of Bowen’s Naylor family has been sapped so fully by its own indolence that their end is merely coincident with the foundation of the state. Almost simultaneously with Bowen’s authorship of The Last September, what Beckett describes in Watt is the persistence of the ersatz Big House in its secure suburban setting, as opposed to the decline and extinction of its original rural counterpart. By departing the squalor of the city to re-settle the hinterland—thereby performing an abstraction from reality— members of Beckett’s own community had insulated themselves from the fate of their country cousins, who were listening to the sound of the trees being chopped down in their own cherry orchards. The suburbanite existence was guaranteed, at least in the short term, until Beckett returned to their eventual dissolution, which he addressed in All That Fall . As is obvious from the example of Edgeworth, Bowen and Stoker, the narrative of the Big House must hinge on the eccentric owner, who must one day lose the house. By contrast, what we find in Watt is an eccentric owner who keeps his house and loses his servants only when they have served their purpose for him.

Works Cited Beckett, Samuel. Watt. Edited by C. J. Ackerley. Faber and Faber, 2009. Bowen, Elizabeth. “The Big House”. The Bell, vol. 1, no. 1, October 1940, pp. 71–77. Brown, Terence. “Some Young Doom”. Ireland’s Literature: Selected Essays, Lilliput Press, 1988, pp, 117–26. Cronin, Anthony. Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist. Harper Collins, 1996. Daly, Mary. Dublin: The Deposed Capital. Cork UP, 1984. Deane, Seamus. Strange Country. Clarendon Press, 1997. Edgeworth, Maria. Castle Rackrent. 1800. Oxford World’s Classics, 1995. Fehlmann, Guy. “An Historical Survey”. The Big House in Ireland, edited by Jacqueline Genet, Barnes & Noble, 1991, pp. 15–18. Genet, Jacqueline. The Big House in Ireland: Reality and Representation. Brandon, 1991. Harrington, John. The Irish Beckett. Syracuse UP, 1991. Jeffers, Jennifer. Beckett’s Masculinity. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Kennedy, Seán. “‘A Lingering Dissolution’: All that Fall and Protestant Fears of Engulfment in the Irish Free State”. Assaph: Studies in the Theatre, vol. 17/18, 2003, pp. 247–62.

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———. “‘Bid Us Sigh on from Day to Day’: Beckett and the Big House”. The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett, edited by S. E. Gontarski, Edinburgh UP, 2014, pp. 222–36. Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. Bloomsbury, 1996. Kreilkamp, Vera. The Anglo-Irish Novel and the Big House. Syracuse UP, 1998. Marley, Laurence. Michael Davitt: Freelance Radical and Frondeur. Four Courts Press, 2010. McCormack, W. J. “Irish Gothic and After (1820–1945)”. The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, vol. II, edited by Seamus Deane, Field Day, 1991, pp. 831–54. McNaughton, James. Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath. Oxford UP, 2018. Morin, Emilie. Beckett’s Political Imagination. Cambridge UP, 2017. Pilling, John. A Samuel Beckett Chronology. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Thom’s. Dublin Directory 1917 . Thoms, 1917. Valente, Joseph. Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood. Illinois UP, 2002. Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society. Hogarth Press, 1987. Wolff, Ellen. “Watt … Knott … Anglo-Ireland: Samuel Beckett’s Watt ”. Journal of Beckett Studies, vol. 5, nos. 1–2, 1995, pp. 107–41. Yeats, W. B. Selected Plays. Edited by Richard Allen Cave, Penguin, 1997.

CHAPTER 16

Beckett and the Politics of Empathy in Site-Specific Theatre Niamh M. Bowe

Using empathy in site-specific theatre, this chapter argues that Samuel Beckett’s work, regardless of his own explicit political leanings, has become a clear political artefact. The notion of empathy in politics, or more exactly, the political, is not a new phenomenon. However, in recent years, empathy has risen to the top of modern discourse, becoming an integral part of political rhetoric, the ideology of liberal movements, particularly identity politics,1 and the mobilising principles upon which many political and social changes rest.2 Empathy, as a positive force in political movements, espouses the notion that through certain processes, such as the arts, people gain a shared sense of feeling with others which leads to a sense of understanding, responsibility and, ultimately, action for the marginalised other. However, there are many definitions of empathy

1 As discussed in Prinz 211–29; Lakoff. 2 See Nussbaum and Pedwell for a discussion of how empathy is instrumental in political

movements concerned with feminism and anti-racism.

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in modern scholarship, so clarification of the term in the context of site-specific theatre is needed. Empathy is the faculty through which we understand the feelings and thought processes of another as one which we can share, or we imagine we can share. There is some difficulty in defining empathy, as the terms ‘sympathy’ and ‘empathy’ have become confused at different historical points and in different languages. In typical English language usage, they are not synonymous, but represent very different states, usually defined as feeling ‘for’ (sympathy) and feeling ‘with’ (empathy). These differentiations refer to a binary value judgement in modern usage, as sympathy suggests a power exchange where the subject understands the pain of the other without the attendant feeling, whereas empathy suggests that in understanding, subject and object share the same attendant feeling. The word empathy was first introduced into the English language in 1909 by Edward B. Titchener, a British psychologist who created the first modern Psychology department at Cornell University.3 He translated the term from the German word einfühlung as ‘feeling into’, from the Greek term ´ ™μπαθεια, taken directly from the German Philosopher Theodor Lipps.4 That Beckett was aware of Titchener’s ideas on introspection and einfühlung is evident from his reading of Robert S. Woodworth’s Contemporary Schools of Psychology (1931), in which Titchener occupies a whole chapter, and his reference to Titchener in the critical essay ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ (74). Empathy as “feeling with” directly corresponds to the ethos of site-specific theatre which attempts to immerse the audience through space, sensation or proximity to actors. According to Joanne Tompkins, inherent in the definition of the site-specific is the slippage between audience and performance site as productions attempt to merge in order to create a shared experience which presents new and interesting types of performance (4). This chapter focuses on the contemporary problem of empathy through site-specific performances of Beckett’s work for theatre. It looks at three productions: Susan Sontag’s Waiting for Godot , Paul Chan’s Waiting for Godot and Sarah Jane Scaife’s Act Without Words II and 3 It must be noted that many critics claim Vernon Lee coined the term in her work in Beauty and Ugliness (1912) in regard to how we empathise with colours and abstract shapes such as triangles and squares. 4 The English spelling came from the Greek: em-pathos or ‘feeling into’. See Titchener, 25–30.

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adaptation of Fizzles. The use of the site-specific and unconventional theatre space opens the political contexts of Beckett’s plays, which Lance Duerfahrd suggests are already unstable on the proscenium stage (351). For Duerfahrd, and in my own reading, empathy is paramount to Beckett’s plays when performed outside of mainstream theatre. However, this understanding needs to be examined, as Emilie Morin obliquely suggests, “Beckett’s political identity is defined in accordance with a seemingly uprooted politics of free speech and empathy, carrying the promise of a new West-dominated polity in which the artist’s voice can act as a political force in its own right” (10). Contrary to the positive understanding of empathy in performance as a form of political motivation is the position that empathy should not be a consumable act of entertainment, but what Juliet Koss describes as “a potentially uncomfortable destabilisation of identity along the viewer’s perceptual borders, a sensation at once physical, emotional and psychological” (Koss 67). As Josephine Machon notes of site-specific theatre, politics in these instances is a chance for the audience to share an ideological perspective, but also a way in which the spectator can reconnect with their affective selves, responding to a range of sensations outside of the mainstream theatre experience (119). Put simply, the theatre audience is stripped of their well-formed identity as silent, unobtrusive viewers of the theatre space. Instead, they become part of this site-specific space, breaking down the barriers of self/theatre, art/world that Western audiences are conditioned to appropriate. Machon’s consideration of site-specific theatre and Koss’ description of empathy intersect in their description of a process which destabilises identity and pushes the boundaries of our sensory experience of the other. The theme of all these site-specific performances is the recognition of the marginalised figure: the besieged Sarajevans, the disenfranchised residents of New Orleans and the homeless population of Dublin city. This consideration of empathy requires a nuanced understanding of the contextual implications of the performances. The Bosnian war, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and the homelessness crisis in Ireland all present politically contextualised information for an audience that can sit within the abstract gap which Beckett’s works otherwise create.

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Sarajevo The Bosnian war and the siege of Sarajevo were the backdrop against which Susan Sontag directed her now (in)famous staging of Waiting for Godot . The war was a result of the Bosnia–Herzegovina conflict which followed the break-up of Yugoslavia into a mix of ethnic minorities, including Muslim Bosniaks, Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats. Tensions imploded into a war based on ethnic cleansing, systematic mass rape, indiscriminate shelling of cities on all sides and forced deportations which echoed the horrors of the Second World War. The siege of Sarajevo exemplified the destruction capable in modern warfare, as the city was besieged by Army Republika Srpska from April 1992 to February 1995,5 ensuring mass casualties from bomb strikes, starvation and structural damage of the city. Heavy media coverage of the conflict throughout Europe and the United States became a daily phenomenon, while political agencies were slow to step into the complicated conflict—a move that seemed to espouse a form of political quietism, which corroborated Western avoidance of intervention. The lack of understanding and cultural complexity of the conflict needed empathetic guidance for a Western audience, which Haris Pašovi´c may have had in mind when he invited Sontag to produce a play in Sarajevo. While Sontag had already visited Sarajevo in the past, she made a resolution with Pašovi´c to put on a play, Waiting for Godot, in order to come back to Sarajevo not as a witness but as an active participant in the ongoing war effort. Sontag’s production was first performed on 17 August 1993 at the Pozorište Mladih theatre. Waiting for Godot was, for Sontag, the political wedge of the Western dramatic canon which allowed the besieged Sarajevans to express their own helplessness, ennui and strength in the face of powerful forces. The production was site-specific in terms of the salience of the geographical and political location of Sarajevo, and the subsequent immersion faced by director, actors and audience was in Sarajevo itself, rather than the theatre space. This is not the general understanding of the site-specific, but the geographical location was so pertinent to the production that it became an integral part of performance. 5 Sarajevo was the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Following the declaration of independence from Yugoslavia, made by the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the city was besieged firstly by Yugoslav People’s Army and later by the Army Republika Srpska. The Army Republika Srpska was the military army of the Serb Secessionist Republic, commonly referred to in English as the Bosnian Serb Army.

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Three sets of men and women were cast, which included an all-male, all-female and male/female cast of Vladimir and Estragon. The actress, Ines Fanˇcovi´c, played Pozzo, and “the boy” was played by Mirza Halilovic (child actors could not be sourced). The themes of poverty, food shortage and dereliction present in Waiting for Godot were pervasive for the cast as the slippage of seeming into being in the production was unavoidable. Malnourished actors claimed difficulty with remembering lines or having the energy to move onstage. Even the wizened vegetables eaten by Vladimir and Estragon were difficult to find (Sontag, “The play’s the Thing”). Sontag also made the decision, without input from the cast, that only Act I would be performed, as Act II was too negative and Act I had “enough despair” (“Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo” 97). Sontag’s travel to Sarajevo and the subsequent theatre production was rigorously followed by Western media and became an important representation of the Sarajevan conflict. The audience of the Sarajevan Waiting for Godot was twofold, each watching from two very different geopolitical stances: (1) the Sarajevan audience at the run, and (2) the Western audience through media representation. Sontag gave extensive interviews to Western newspapers; however, the cast of the production were rarely photographed or interviewed. While the Sarajevan audience may have understood Waiting for Godot as a play, which helped them situate and reflect their own experience, the media attention was focused on the Western interest in Sarajevo through Sontag. While Western governments claimed an inability to aid the Bosnians under siege, the media influx into war sites, such as Sarajevo, was typical of modern war coverage. The western impetus was to look, to see the suffering of war exemplified by the play, rather than to help the suffering of the Sarajevans. It reflects a central moment of tension in Waiting for Godot: Vladimir: Where did all these corpses come from? Estragon: These skeletons. Vladimir: Tell me that. Estragon: True. Vladimir: We must have thought a little. Estragon: At the very beginning. Vladimir: The charnel house! The charnel house! Estragon: You don’t have to look. Vladimir: You can’t help but looking. (60)

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It is at this cusp that the indeterminate ethics of empathy lie: is seeing an act of kindness or the violent act of voyeur? The boundaries between witnessing another’s suffering and being a voyeur of that suffering is one in which the self does not occupy a privileged position in the empathetic exchange. In terms of media coverage, the violence of the gaze was quite real, as gangs of reporters took up the valuable resources of a starving country and photographed corpses without relatives’ permission. What is less certain is whether the use of Waiting for Godot corresponded to the real political situation of the siege, or whether it was, in fact, an opportunity to aim the western gaze at the Sarajevans through the play. Two questions arose in tandem: (1) Did Beckett’s work aid the Sarajevans’ ability to empathise with their own situation, and (2) did the use of Waiting for Godot act as an agent of vicarious feeling for the Western audience? The rhetoric of empathy as a political tool can fetishize the suffering of others: the audience is urged to look at suffering and to empathically understand it without any further recourse to action—thus, empathy itself becomes a void political act. As Sara Ahmed notes in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, this “faux” empathy highlights instances of “learning that we live with and beside each other and yet are not one” (39); a direct negation of witnessing which may yet underscore altruistic feelings without the attendant action. This faux empathy refers to subsets of affective empathy such as personal distress in which the audience is concerned with how the suffering of others can make the spectator feel anxious and uncomfortable without any attendant sensations of fellow-feeling or empathetic concern. The ethical murkiness of attempting to capture the suffering of others, rather than documenting the suffering self, is a problem which Sontag previously addressed in her work, On Photography: “One has the right to, may feel compelled to, give voice to one’s own pain – which is, in any case, one’s own property. One volunteers to seek out the pain of others” (39–40). Jean Baudrillard’s opinion, originally appearing in the French newspaper Liberation, was that “the sin the West committed” in Sarajevo was the “mental paralysis” of waiting during a time of ethnic cleansing (87). Baudrillard’s stance is a hard-line of what Sontag supported in her own critical work; that the documentation of suffering in Western media, and its own recourse to empathy allowed Western civilisation an ethical rejoinder of “we know what is happening, we feel the pain you are suffering, but we can do nothing”. Baudrillard argued that images of suffering driven by empathy can desensitise, and that empathy reneges the culpability needed for political change:

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Worse than such cultural soul boosting, however, is the condescension and the inability to distinguish positions of strength from positions of weakness. They are strong and we, who look to them for something, anything, to revive our strength, are weak. (80)

Baudrillard’s article and his overall argument admonished the use of empathy for Sarajevans, underscoring what the psychologist Paul Bloom would later highlight as the inefficacy of empathy in comparison to action (67). As Silvija Jestrovic notes, this empathy for Sarajevo as documented by Sontag severely limited the Western understanding of the former Yugoslavian country, by suggesting a nexus of suffering in which all other human activity had ceased. To the contrary, during the war, artistic efforts had flourished, with over three thousand artistic and cultural events reported to have taken place. This included multiple performances of the Sarajevan Philharmonic Orchestra, the Sarajevo Film Festival, one hundred and eighty-two performances in Sarajevo theatres, and over one hundred and seventy art exhibitions in improvised venues across the city (Jestrovic 122). In comparison, Jestrovic notes that rarely is the ‘I’ interchanged with the communal ‘We’ in Sontag’s documentation of Waiting for Godot . The true centre of the empathetic relation was not in the Sarajevan actors and audience of Waiting for Godot, but in Sontag herself. It is through her reportage of the work, rather than the actors and/or audience, that we claim an awareness of the many instances of violence, poverty and fear which pervaded the city during the conflict. Our empathy as Western onlookers, then, for the site-specific production is an empathy for Sontag’s comprehension of the site.

New Orleans While Sontag’s production emphasised the need for action on behalf of besieged Sarajevans, via empathy channelled through Waiting for Godot , Paul Chan’s performance project of Waiting for Godot in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina responded to a different type of governmental problem. The focus of Chan’s Waiting for Godot was the use of empathy for this political moment as an instrument that channelled positive action at both an individual and community level (Waiting for Godot in New Orleans 209). Chan’s project showed that the aesthetic tool of empathy not only occurs in performance in a site-specific area but can also extend

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to become a modus operandi for a politically attuned production of Beckett’s dramatic work. With its Cajun, Creole and French roots, New Orleans is a city famous for its African-American culture, for annual events such as Mardi Gras, as the home of (among others) Sidney Bechet, Truman Capote and Louis Armstrong, and for its unique cuisine. When Hurricane Katrina passed southeast over New Orleans on 25 August 2005, it was the city’s AfricanAmerican community that was worst affected. The hurricane caused mass flooding, which was intensified by the failure of flood prevention infrastructure across the city. Although the majority of New Orleans was evacuated, a portion of the population, many of whom were from AfricanAmerican communities, had no access to vehicles due to poverty and ill health, resulting in over 1500 deaths. The inferior infrastructure, preexisting chronic health problems and lack of access to healthcare that was already present in these communities was further exacerbated in postKatrina New Orleans.6 Many areas of the city, particularly the Seventh, Eighth and Ninth wards, and the Gentilly area, were utterly devastated by flooding, and most of the homes were simply abandoned. Communities of New Orleans found the media to be superabundant in its attention to the spectacle of the flooding. However, the consequent lack of action by the Bush administration resulted in disaster tourism, with buses full of tourists travelling to the city in order to photograph the carnage, or to use the destruction of New Orleans as material for artistic work. The economic benefits of this voyeuristic industry rarely impacted the communities most affected. Creative Time, a non-profit organisation promoting public artworks, such as “Towers of Light” at Ground Zero of the Twin Towers in New York, collaborated with director Christopher McElroen and Paul Chan on the production of Waiting for Godot as an installation piece in New Orleans. Pivotal to their project was the inclusion and permission of residents of the Ninth ward and the surrounding community to perform Beckett’s work, as many still lived in the site space and had family members who had recently died there. Robert Green, a resident whose mother and grandchild had died during the flooding in the Ninth ward, 6 In public health research the disproportionate effect of the Hurricane for ‘non-White’ populations of New Orleans was connected to chronic health concerns, stress-related morbidities, post-traumatic stress disorder and high crime rates. See Curtis, Warren Mills and Leitner.

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bore a pivotal role in the creation of the performance site. Green helped raise awareness and funding for the project, and would later allow the performance on his own land in a space that represented not only the destruction of property in the wards but also a tremendous sense of personal loss. As recorded in an interview with Green, Chan’s main tactic for including residents in the initiative was to simply offer them copies of Waiting for Godot to invite them to empathise with the characters of the play (Godot in New Orleans 277). Chan and McElroen believed that the best way to avoid disaster tourism was through two processes: (1) an aesthetic of “incompleteness”, and (2) listening to the community to create an empathetic connection for the work, as described in a short production memoir by producer Gavin Kroeber: Most days we sat down with local arts administrators, recovery workers, theatre directors, artists, lawyers, and activists from 8am to 9 pm. We met whenever and wherever to introduce Paul, Creative Times, and the Classical Theatre of Harlem. As quickly as possible, we would ask: “How do we do this right?” Then, we would silence ourselves and turn the conversation over. (Godot in New Orleans 139)

The performance began in early November 2007 and was set on the rubble-strewn road of New Orleans Lower Ninth ward and Gentilly, areas in which there was little re-development and where many of the surrounding houses still bore the scars of the damage Hurricane Katrina had caused. The lower Ninth ward represented the most evident destruction of Hurricane Katrina as a space which had no lights, no people and no surrounding terrain. In comparison, the Gentilly ward site included a house front which was used during the performance, creating a more playful, vaudevillian aspect to the play. The space of the performances became politicised through use, as the ravaged land and rotting houses not only offered a space for empathetic perspective-taking, but also immersed the audience who may have been unaffected by the disaster. Pozzo, styled after a gone-to-seed Tom Wolfe in ‘elitist white’, entered the performance space with lights and sirens blaring on a form of makeshift adult tricycle with loudspeaker to hand and expensive headphones cradling his neck. Simulating the experience many of the audience had of Pozzo as the figure of the ‘white-elite’, he began by taking a photograph while exclaiming “It’s a disgrace!”, intercut by the mechanical winding

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up of the camera as he took pictures of the wreckage and apathetically concluded, “but there you are” (Beckett 24). Due to the constant dialogue with the community, the project’s awareness of the ethics of voyeurism as a form of empathy became a pivotal part of the work; early rehearsals had included disaster buses as transportation for the boy character of the play. In incorporating the image of the camera lens into the performance, Chan and his company actively questioned the media’s need to observe the catastrophe, evoking Sontag’s own observation of the nature of photographing suffering: Although the camera is an observation station, the act of photographing is more than passive observing. Like sexual voyeurism, it is a way of at least tacitly, often explicitly, encouraging whatever is going on to keep on happening. To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged. (Sontag, On Photography 12)

While the production was far more aware of the ethical ambiguity of basing their political stance on a form of empathy, as Sontag had done before them, the performance did not destabilise boundaries of identity, but rather encouraged them. The performance itself was an attenuated form of proscenium theatre where New Orleans and the destruction of the wards became the backdrop. Rather than questioning the construction of theatre and the relation between the audience and stage, the New Orleans production questioned the audience’s own position in sharing a sense of responsibility to the lower wards. Waiting for Godot became a tool through which to actively construct a shared sense of ennui, despair and perseverance as a cultural event.

Dublin As Anna McMullan suggests, the prevalence of Beckett’s work as a marketable brand in Ireland raises ethical questions in relation to the types of bodies that are displayed in the plays (361–74). Indeed, Paul Murphy points out that “[t]he real homeless people outside the performance venue are too busy holding hunger and the elements at bay to be worried about the ‘terrible silence’ that presumably represents the existential ache of the philosopher-playwright” (73). McMullan argues that Pan Pan Theatre and the work of SJ Company, run by Sarah Jane

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Scaife, have offered important interventions for innovative scenographic interpretations of Beckett. Scaife’s site-specific performances, in particular, challenge the concept of an absence of ethics in the performance of Beckett’s work. The ‘anethical’ position, described by Shane Weller in Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity and subsequently by Russell Smith in the introduction to Beckett and Ethics, which rejects or actively evades responsibility for the other as an “ethical undoing” (Smith 3), is interrogated by Scaife through the physical space of the performance. Furthermore, her work emphasised site-specific theatre as a political intervention, which readily produces ethical relevance in the form of challenging and negotiating empathy. Scaife has written extensively on her own process and the role that empathy must play in the construction of her productions, including performances in Ireland and Great Britain of Act Without Words II , Rough for Theatre I , and a stage adaptation of Beckett’s prose series, Fizzles. In 2007, Ireland went through the throes of economic recession after a period of extreme prosperity, referred to as the Celtic Tiger years, from 1995 to 2007. During these years, the Irish government turned to neoliberal policies of landlordism and low corporate taxes, which failed to provide adequate social welfare for Irish citizens. As Timothy White puts it, “[i]n the same years [as the Celtic Tiger boom], Ireland saw the persistence of poverty at a rate among the highest in the European Union, suggesting that housing, food, and transportation costs challenged many in the lower economic strata to take advantage of the overall economic gains” (32). In the early stages of the global economic crash, the Irish government favoured guaranteeing bad loans for several banks, particularly the Anglo-Irish Bank, through severe taxation of the Irish public. Salaries dropped, a young workforce emigrated in large numbers, and many were left homeless (Kirby 205–22). While Ireland has now returned to relative economic stability, the homeless population has tripled in the last decade, leading to numerous political demonstrations and recent forced take-overs of unoccupied buildings, such as Apollo House in Dublin city (McGarry). This is connected, though not necessarily directly related, to severe addiction problems in Irish communities, particularly in Dublin. Through this political emergency, Scaife tested the boundaries of audience empathy by exploring the intersections between audience, performer and performance space, challenging the way that the homeless crisis in Dublin was institutionally both actively marginalised and deliberately

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unseen. The site-specific spaces of these productions brought audience members to outside spaces where the homeless of Dublin took shelter. Drawing on the work of Marc Augé, Brian Singleton refers to this form of site-specific theatre as “non-space”, a space outside the theatre that is also abandoned, derelict or transitory, and that “invariably generate[s] empathy between audiences and characters” (175). Singleton takes this notion of transience to describe Irish site-specific theatre, which focuses on the transient abject body as a rejection of the Celtic Tiger economic boom. The use of “non-space” in Ireland became a form of theatre which “focused on the politics of the personal, often obliquely in a world of no ambition, alcoholism, and self-abjection” (175). Scaife’s Act Without Words II was first produced as an installation for Dublin Theatre Fringe Festival 2009 in St. John’s Lane, Christchurch Cathedral, adjacent to a methadone clinic and beside a well-known homeless sleeping area (Scaife 160). In 2013, Act Without Words II then became a project for Beckett in the City, with another play, Rough for Theatre I , placed in City Quay car park in Dublin, and later as part of the Barbican’s Beckett Festival in London, 2015. Recalling Singleton’s notion of “non-space”, Scaife’s choices of location, such as derelict parking lots, abandoned buildings, back streets and areas of Dublin city, rejected the view that Beckett’s work belongs to a privileged Western canon, an idea so pervasive in Sontag’s production, and troubled the notion that his works are found solely in the ostentatiousness of traditional theatre institutions. In Act Without Words II , the painstakingly slow and effortlessly graceful movements of Raymond Keane’s emergence from a sleeping bag, and his attempt at a routine, highlights the issue of what Lennard J. Davis refers to as the body “not like mine” (126–57). According to Davis, the concept of a body “not like mine” incorporates a political gaze that distinguishes between the ‘normal’ body and the othered body of disability, disease and addiction. This is not a normalised body for the audience, but one reflecting the drug-addicted and impaired bodies of the homeless. Here, Scaife maps cultural code onto the body of the actor as a work of art. The drawn-out movements, through which every muscle is snarled, curled and distorted by Keane, reflects the endurance elements of performance art, as well as the intense muscle cramps of heroine withdrawal. Scaife and Keane’s own backgrounds in dance and physical performance shaped the bodies of these productions, carving out performances that allow suffering and shame to mould the surface of the bodies (Ahmed 4).

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The performance site and the use of these distorted and curled bodies in Act Without Words II and, later, in Fizzles, are complicated further by the audience’s position while viewing these works. In the performance at St. John’s Lane, the conspicuous presence of the audience was noticed by the general public, making the audience themselves part of the performance as active onlookers. The interplay between looking and not looking is integral to Scaife’s use of non-place, a relation that Elin Diamond describes as “cross-hatched gazing”, a technique which forces the audience to look at themselves as an audience, confounding the dynamic of empathy (Diamond 201). Unlike the audiences of Sarajevo and New Orleans, it is the audience who are gazed at, as Scaife’s choice of space encouraged the privileged paying audience, rather than the performers, to be subjected to scrutiny by both the Irish public and the homeless people who were using the space as a resting spot. This disrupts what Laura Mulvey refers to as the voyeuristic male gaze in her seminal work, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975). It is not necessarily the male gaze being interrogated in Scaife’s work, but the privileged and objective gaze of the Irish middle-class on homeless bodies, as Scaife suggests that empathy with these bodies is a complicated process. Scaife’s purpose in using these non-spaces and merging them with performances of Beckett’s work was to challenge the theatre audience as an audience, bringing them to areas of Dublin city which risked direct contact with the homeless, while also engaging the audience with a bodily poetics through Beckett’s work. This disruption of the privileged objective gaze plays with the notion of how empathy is used as a political tool. Here, the earlier ethical complications of Sontag’s work are renegotiated through an explicit acknowledgement of what Richard Sorbel describes as an empathy that “must not only have happened but must be seen to have happened” (Sorbel 472). Scaife’s work also sought out spaces in Dublin which were fraught with a complicated past and present, such as Henrietta Street, famous for its slum buildings, and the derelict Pidgeon House Generating Station. Like her previous work, Scaife’s production of Fizzles incorporated an element of guidance through the urban space on the peripheries of the city, leading the audience to Henrietta Street and through various rooms of the tenement building. Unlike previous productions, which focused on the unseen humanity in the city, Fizzles focused on the site-specific space as a microcosm of a range of issues, including the history of the Irish slum, Catholic imagery and modern economic degeneration, using the passive body of

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the actor Keane as a key dynamic. Keane’s projected body doubled on the dilapidated walls of Henrietta street and the abandoned power station, creating a response to space through the body. References could be faintly made through the scattered ephemera of needles, condoms, bottles and rubbish, as well as the Catholic imagery present in the waiting area of the Fizzles site. Set over three rooms, the performance included different representations of the body, the projected body and objects. Pivotal to the work was the destabilising projection of Keane, transforming the bare walls of the first room into a textured memory or painted image for the audience—pushing the understanding of the “body not like mine” to its very limits. The text was adapted from fragments of Fizzles, including “He is barehead” (224), “Still” (240) and “Afar a Bird” (232). Like Beckett’s written text, “He is barehead” splits the narrator into voice, ghostly manifestation and physical body. Excluding the face from view in the “Still” act, the body disappears altogether in the final act, only to be replaced by the remains of the body: a great coat hanging in mid-air. By projecting another host’s site onto the walls of Fizzles, the ghostly influence of multimedia plays with the issue of absence/presence as empathy. This form of mediated empathy in which Keane’s body appeared as a moving painting upon the damaged wall of the tenement flat arises from the response to the mediated physical body, questioning the notion that empathy must occur through a living body. As Scaife notes, in this way, Fizzles suggests that it is through the somatically conditioned spectator that the inference of embodying the anxiety and guilt of Irish society is present (122). This embodied response as empathic relation is one that is not tied inherently to any culture or society, in theory, but rather the emotional reaction of reception. Like Beckett’s work, particularly in his theatre, the apparent boundaries between empathetic identification, voyeurism and sentimentality become distinctly unstable in these performances. Scaife’s work suggests that, while Beckett’s writings erode outward specificities, it is impossible to erode the specifics of the body, space and time—the primary material of his theatre. These specificities become the material through which Scaife crafts her site-specific space, imbuing meaning with intense focus. Scaife’s work is the most consciously attuned to the problematic role empathy plays in site-specific performances, and so the productions carry some of the most tense and complicated links to empathy and Beckett (Scaife 154). She challenges the notion that “in all societies, one must learn when to look away and pretend not to have seen

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or heard at certain moments” (Hollan 344), and her productions engage with this problem by using Beckett’s work to demonstrate empathy as a process which shows vulnerability in both audience member and performer. Martha Nussbaum links the use of vulnerability to empathy as an affect which does not include a power relation between subject and other. Indeed, Judith Butler suggests that vulnerability is a more reflexive response than empathy—a discourse which promotes openness and response (26), as seen in the site-specific responses to different forms of catastrophe discussed in this chapter. Considering how empathy has been used in these three cases, perhaps the most political act in Beckett’s work is one of vulnerability, in which empathy is not only a safe act or a substituted act for ethical action, but one that changes the perception of audience members in terms of how they engage with the representation of marginalised figures. Sontag pushed the boundaries by situating her work within a dangerous warzone. However, she did not challenge, but rather welcomed the Western ‘ineffective’ gaze. Chan visited New Orleans after the scene of a natural disaster, and his work attempted to bring a whole community together through Waiting for Godot , using the damaged site of the wards to frame empathic relations to the social and political situation that the AfricanAmerican population faced in the aftermath of Katrina. Pushing the boundaries even further, Scaife explores the interaction between vulnerability and performance in Act Without Words II and Fizzles through the intensely vulnerable bodies of the actors, alongside the precarious situation of the audience being present in urban areas that are construed as dangerous and important to avoid. These directors’ acute awareness of the political and ideological traps that empathy can create meant that they could use this concern to build nuanced performances of Beckett’s work that were dependent on cultural space and earnest creative processes. In all three case studies, empathy occurs through the destabilisation of borders, challenging the audience to reconstruct their own understanding of a moment of political and cultural disaster. While Beckett’s own political leanings are still the subject of debate, the use of his theatre as a political tool, centred around empathetic encounters between spectacle and spectator, has clearly become an international phenomenon in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.

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Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotions. Routledge, 2004. Baudrillard, Jean. “No Pity for Sarajevo; The West’s Serbianization; When the West Stands in for the Dead”. This Time We Knew: Western Responses to Genocide in Bosnia, New York UP, 1996, pp. 79–89. Beckett, Samuel. “Fizzles”. Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose, edited by S. E. Gontarski, Grove Press, 1995. ———. “Recent Irish Poetry”, Disjecta, edited by Ruby Cohn, John Calder, 2001. ———. Waiting for Godot: The Complete Dramatic Works. Bloomsbury, 2006. Bloom, Paul. Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. The Bodley Head, 2016. Brown, Wendy. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton UP, 1995. Burdeau, Cain. “Play Is Emblem of New Orleans’ Problems”. USA Today, 3 Nov. 2007. https://newsok.com/article/3163912/play-is-emblem-of-neworleans-problems. Accessed 19 Mar. 2019. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2004. Chan, Paul, editor. Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: A Field Guide. Creative Time, 2010. Chan, Paul, and George Baker. “An Interview with Paul Chan”, vol. 123, Oct. 2008, pp. 205–233. Coplan, Amy, and Peter Goldie, editors. Empathy, Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives. Oxford UP, 2011. Curtis, Andrew, et al. “Katrina and Vulnerability: The Geography of Stress”. Journal of Healthcare for the Poor and Underserved, vol. 18, no. 2, 2007, pp. 315–330. Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body. Verso, 1995. Diamond, Elin. “Feminism, Assemblage and Performance”. Performance, Feminism and Affect in Neoliberal Times, edited by Elin Diamond et al., Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 255–268. Duerfahrd, Lance. “Staging Waiting for Godot at the Occupy Wall Street Protest”. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, vol. 29, 2017, pp. 350–360. Hollan, Douglas. “Empathy Across Cultures”. Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy, edited by Heidi Maibom, Routledge, 2017, pp. 275–288. Jestrovic, Silvija. Performance, Space Utopia: Cities of War, Cities of Exile. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Kirby, Peadar. “Globalization, the Celtic Tiger and Social Outcomes: Is Ireland a Model or a Mirage”. Globalizations, vol. 1, no. 2, 2004, pp. 205–222. Koss, Juliet. Modernism After Wagner. Minnesota UP, 2010.

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Lakoff, G. Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. Chicago UP, 2002. LeFort, Claude. The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy and Totalitarianism. MIT Press, 1986. Machon, Josephine. Immersive Theatres, Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performances. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. McGarry, Patsy. “No More Than 40 Homeless to Stay at Apollo House Each Night”. Irish Times, 21 Dec. 2016. www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/ no-more-than-40-homeless-to-stay-at-apollo-house-each-night-1.2914980. Accessed 19 Mar. 2019. McMullan, Anna. “Staging Beckett in Ireland: Scenographic Remains”. Staging Beckett in Ireland and Northern Ireland, edited by Trish McTighe and David Tucker, Methuen Drama, 2017. ———. “Staging Ireland’s Dispossessed: Sarah Jane Scaife’s Beckett in the City Project”. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, vol. 29, no. 2, 2017, pp. 361– 374. Morin, Emile. Beckett’s Political Imagination. Cambridge UP, 2017. Murphy, Paul. “‘Idle Youth Waiting for Godot’: Destitution in Waiting for Godot in Relation to the Irish Performance Tradition”. Staging Beckett in Ireland and Northern Ireland, edited by Trish McTighe and David Tucker, Methuen Drama, 2017. Nussbaum, Martha. Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defence of Reform in Liberal Education. Harvard UP, 1997. Pedwell, Carolyn. Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Scaife, Sarah Jane. “Practice in Focus: Beckett in the City”. Staging Beckett in Ireland and Northern Ireland, edited by Trish McTighe and David Tucker, Methuen Drama, 2017. Singleton, Brian. “Beckett and the Non-Place in Irish Performance”. Staging Beckett in Ireland and Northern Ireland, edited by Trish McTighe and David Tucker, Methuen Drama, 2017. Smith, Russell, ed. Beckett and Ethics. Continuum, 2008. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. Picador, 1977. ———. “The Play’s the Thing”. The Independent Magazine, 21 Aug. 1993. ———. “Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo”. Performing Arts Journal, vol. 16, no. 2, May 1994, pp. 87–106. Sorbel, Richard. “Beyond Empathy.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, vol. 51, no. 3, 2008, pp. 471–478. Titchener, Edward Bradford. “Introspection and Empathy”, Dialogues in Philosophy, Mental and Neurosciences, vol. 7, 2014, pp. 25–30. Tompkins, Joanne, and A. Birch, editors. Performing Site-Specific Theatre: Politics, Place, Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

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Weller, Shane. Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. White, Timothy J. “Celtic Collapse or Celtic Correction? Ireland’s Recession from a Historical Perspective”. New Hibernia Review, vol. 14, no. 4, 2010, pp. 27–43.

CHAPTER 17

Towards a Modernism with Meaning: Beckett’s Refugees Rodney Sharkey

The incurious seeker, under the influence of Beckett, must surely approach the latter’s bridge in Dublin with trepidation. In keeping with the spirit of its inspiration, one suspects it might collapse halfway from here to there. Or worse, once the crossing has begun, a quickly obscuring fog may descend, producing in the seeker the inexplicable feeling that this, the briefest of crossings, will now be extended to the last syllable of recorded time. On the bridge, the seeker will also encounter two inscriptions: the first (with no irony intended by Dublin Corporation on this occasion) in “our own poor dear Gaelic” (All That Fall 26), and the other, a quote from “The End”: “But the general appearance of the river, flowing between its quays and under its bridges, had not changed. Yes, the river still gave the impression it was flowing in the wrong direction” (82). The idea of the Liffey, Joyce’s symbol of humanity’s conception, appearing to flow in the opposite direction is interesting, not just in the context of Beckett’s inter-textual relationship with Joyce, but for Beckett Studies in general, and particularly when considering the relationship

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between Beckett and politics. This chapter proposes that travelling like a salmon, backwards up the river of Irish history, facilitates the reader in better understanding what we might call Beckett’s refugee sensibility. By studying, however briefly, Beckett’s lifelong affinity with those experiencing enforced movement, one begins to understand his mature artistic and aesthetic vision as one characterised by migration and exile. On this notional journey from the Beckett Bridge back up the Liffey, the first significant port of call is the Dublin famine memorial, built a stone’s throw from the bridge, and preceding its construction in time. Indeed, when the memorial was installed in 1997, it stood on the margins of the city, facing towards the mouth of the open sea. Now it sits squarely in the middle of the new commercial heart of the Hibernian metropolis, and like the Beckett Bridge itself, functions more as a tourist attraction than as a representation of humanity in ruins. Regarding the Irish famine, and despite scholarly efforts to uncover in Beckett’s work an allegorical treatment of it, his notoriously indeterminate use of time and place, allied to his disavowal of Irish nationalist sentiment, has made such identification difficult.1 However, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggests, it is in precisely the overlapping matrix between time, space and culture that human thought convenes, and does its work. And in Beckett’s attempts to somehow represent a destituent feeling of displaced anxiety, frequent in his characters as a result of their forced eviction, different temporal and geographic spaces are bridged and coalesce, and we are closer to the Irish famine victims than conventional conceptions of space and time might suggest.

Streams of Thought The OED defines “politics” as “[t]he activities associated with the governance of a country or area, especially the debate between parties having power”. It is in the space between parties and power, or where parties, individual and collective, exercise their power, that Samuel Beckett found himself continuously. Almost from the beginning, his life was determined by the political upheaval in which he was constantly immersed. At ten 1 Seán Kennedy proposes that the “Kov” of Endgame (32) is a homophone for Cobh from where an estimated two million departed Ireland during the famine (“Edmund Spenser” 112). See also James McNaughton on famine politics and Beckett in The Politics of Aftermath (137–65).

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years of age, the Irish “Easter Rising” threw his hometown into chaos for a period that extended beyond the Civil War of 1922. Commentators often refer to Beckett’s memory of watching the first revolutionary fires of Dublin from afar, consolidating the idea of both a comfortable distance and a corresponding emotional detachment (see Bair 42). James Knowlson records that “Beckett felt the event scarcely impinged on him at the time” (42), and Cronin notes that for the Beckett family, “life went on normally enough” (36).2 The family decision to transfer Sam to Portora distanced him further from the events that consolidated the push towards the Irish post-colonial moment. Nevertheless, Knowlson records: Ireland was partitioned during Beckett’s second year at [Portora]. And […] passing across the border at the beginning and end of each term and seeing British troops stationed nearby [...] must have had some impact on his developing political awareness. (Damned 37)

The impact might best be measured with a question: where exactly was he safest living: home or abroad? And in terms of belonging, which was which? The recent Irish Times Rising, a commemorative book released by the Dublin-based newspaper, contains photographs of the Irish Volunteers undertaking a military drill in what looks like the Dublin Mountains in 1915 (11). Likewise, J. J. O’Connell’s “Memoir of the Irish Volunteers” records military exercises in Stepaside in September 1915, just a stone’s throw from the Ballyogan Road (13). It is worth considering that these exercises were taking place while Sam and William Beckett were taking their constitutional walks; the fresh-faced volunteers unnoticed by the son, but perhaps plainly obvious to the father. After the rising in 1916, and while the volunteers regrouped with newfound purpose and zeal, the sense of the Dublin Hills being unsafe must only have been exacerbated. The fate of Noel Lemass is a case in point. The IRA captain was arrested 2 See Feargal Whelan’s chapter in the present volume, which considers the comparative immunity of wealthy suburban communities from the dangers of revolution. In contrast, this chapter proposes that the context of traumatic experience is largely understated in Beckett’s writing. Consider this line from “The End”, which points towards Beckett’s emotional involvement in a moment that is often used to establish his emotional distance from the events of 1916: “It was evening, I was with my father on a height, he held my hand. I would have liked him to draw me close with a gesture of protective love, but his mind was on other things” (98–99).

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in Kilternan while on manoeuvres in October 1919, only months after Beckett was removed to Portora. In the aftermath of the Civil War, and shortly after Beckett returned to the area, Lemass’s mutilated body was discovered in October 1923 near the site of his arrest. It is little surprise that the fate of Lemass, whose demise effectively bookends Beckett’s Northern sojourn, makes its way into Mercier and Camier, albeit in ironically distant form. There is no question that Beckett was aware, during his temporary migration to the North, that his neighbourhood was the site of a very profound political transformation, despite his parents’ efforts to shield him from such realities. Moving away from Ireland, and during his first attempt to settle in Paris as a writer, Beckett was forced to migrate again when Paul Doumer, the French President, was assassinated on 7 May 1932. As Beckett did not have a valid Carte de s éjour, the necessary administrative document that allowed him to reside in France, he had to leave Paris in a hurry. Shortly after returning to Dublin, his father died, sending Beckett into a spiralling depression. After an unhappy period in Dublin, he moved to London in 1934 for his own psychological welfare. In both the Parisian and London migrations, the imperative to move away was bound up with a psychology of loss. In the late 1930s, Beckett travelled in Germany during the rise of National Socialism, and watched as German artists were exiled for fear of state retribution in response to their “decadent art”—a development, Beckett noted, that started “the vomit moving upwards” (Knowlson 245).3 His involvement in the French Resistance during the Second World War also had a profound effect on him, being forced to flee Paris a few hours after being discovered by the Gestapo, and escaping to the precarious domicile of Roussillon during the central war years, which Emily Morin notes “was close to camps in Arles, Aspres-sur-Buëch, and Reillanne, and the Camp des Milles near Aix-en-Provence” (161). Beckett’s most direct experience of the impoverished refugee figure is reflected in his comment to Knowlson: “At the end of the war, it was terrible! The forces just opened up the extermination camps as they came through. They had nothing to eat, those of them who were left alive” (Beckett

3 For example, Max Beckmann fled to Amsterdam on the opening day of the Entartete Kunst exhibition, Paul Klee went into exile in Switzerland and Peggy Guggenheim, once a lover of Beckett, helped Max Ernst get to America.

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Remembering 86). Unsurprising, then, that Beckett’s war recollections have prompted Alysia Garrison to suggest: While not a ‘survivor’ in the sense of the term used in Holocaust studies, Beckett nonetheless fought in the Resistance, survived close friends’ and colleagues’ deaths, hid with Jews, witnessed emaciated camp victims, and comforted [Alfred] Peron’s widow after the war. (100)

Garrison emphasises the survivor motif in order to frame Beckett’s postwar work as a “tropological intimate” with trauma survivor narratives.4 I suggest, however, that these experiences are utilised by Beckett, not so much to replicate the point of view of a survivor, or even of a victim in the quantifiable sense, but to capture something of the ontological experience of feeling like a refugee; and of the feeling wherein the refugee is at first divested of refuge (from French ‘réfugié’: “gone in search of refuge”), and must then seek asylum elsewhere.5 If we look at Beckett’s immediate post-war work, for example, all four protagonists from the novellas are thrown out of their domicile. The narrator of “First Love” describes finding “my room locked and my belongings in a heap before the door” (28). “The Expelled” commences with an actual physical ejection: “The fall was therefore not serious. Even as I fell I heard the door slam, which brought me a little comfort, in the midst of my fall. For that meant they were not pursuing me down into the street with a stick, to beat me in full view of the passers-by” (47). In “The Calmative”, spatio-temporal relations are deliberately confused when the story begins with the famous statement, “I don’t know when I died” (61). Nevertheless, the narrator still inquires “[w]hat possessed me to stir when I wasn’t with anybody. Was I being thrown out? No, I wasn’t with anybody. I see a kind of den littered with empty tins” (61). As such, his vision of the afterlife appears to be of a decidedly makeshift modern refuge. The narrator of “The End” also begins his tale with his 4 See Rhys Tranter, Beckett’s Late Stage: Trauma, Subjectivity and Language (2018) for a recent reading of Beckett’s life and work through the prism of Trauma Studies. 5 Because it is largely Beckett’s experience to be forced out rather than to voluntarily

move away, it is suitable to frame his experience as that of a refugee rather than a migrant, recognising in the process that the use of the word migrant calls forth a necessary debate on how restrictive border policies limit equal opportunity. That said, “refugee” deliberately frames the individual as disempowered, better capturing the psychology of loss that this chapter proposes.

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ejection from an unspecified institution: “They clothed me and gave me money. I knew what the money was for, it was to get me started. When it was gone I’d have to get more, if I wanted to go on” (78). Tellingly, each story turns on the fulcrum of an ejection, without explanation. Similarly, in Waiting for Godot , Vladimir and Estragon seek refuge from their vagrancy, without being able to explain their origins or the socio-political context in which they find themselves. In order to explain these missing elements and many other absences in Beckett, it is necessary to pass along another important stream that considers Beckett’s experience of that cultural intervention designed to establish absent details: the analytic encounter. And it is through his creative reimagining of the psychoanalytic process that Beckett begins to articulate, in tandem with his portraits of the dispossessed, something of a refugee subjectivity.

Up River, Inner Station In his ground-breaking book, Beckett/Beckett, Vivian Mercier accentuates a type of cultural estrangement that is particular to the Anglo-Irish in Ireland: When we remember that he is a special kind of Irishman—Protestant, suburban, middle-class, but brought up for the most part, educated in what is now the Republic […]—alienation and the search for identity are both serious problems for an Irishman of that heritage. The typical AngloIrish boy learns that he is not quite Irish almost before he can talk; later he learns that he is far from being English either. (21)

These are precisely the sort of thoughts that must have preoccupied the young Beckett on his bus journeys to and from Portora in 1920. Whereas other Irish people enjoyed a far less complicated form of national allegiance, Beckett’s relationship with the notion of a ‘mother-’ or ‘fatherland’ took place at a distance (just as Beckett also lived his life at a necessary distance from his own notably domineering mother). Furthermore, at the time of his father’s death, Beckett had also fallen out of favour with James Joyce, and so lost the latter’s support as a literary father—a nom du père (Lacan 18)—who nonetheless represented for Beckett a creative imago to help negotiate the more conservative social values in which his ‘Irish’ life was enmeshed. Arguably, the result of this trifecta of absent father figures was a nervous breakdown in Dublin so

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acute that he was prepared to undergo psychoanalysis in London in an attempt to cure a set of symptoms that included “a bursting, apparently arrhythmic heart, night sweats, shudders, panic, breathlessness, and, at its most severe, total paralysis” (Knowlson 206). In short, he was experiencing the panic of a self unmoored from conventional familial, national and professional ballasts. While undergoing psychotherapy, Beckett took copious notes on the practice and process, known today as his “Psychology Notes”, which confirm readings in psychoanalytic discourse identifying a difficult birth as a potential reason for his anxiety.6 His notes from Otto Rank’s The Trauma of Birth record that because “primal anxiety is induced at birth […] in consequence of the change from a highly pleasurable situation to an extremely painful one, [it] acquires a psychical quality of feeling ” (Beckett, 1933–35, MS 10971/8, fol. 36; qtd. in Feldman 111; emphasis added). Moreover, according to Rank, the anxiety associated with traumatic birth continues throughout life as a constant quality of feeling that reflects a founding instance of psychic disturbance. As this chapter contends, lifelong exposure to enforced movement arguably accentuated Beckett’s identification with Rank’s traumatic birth motif, itself arguably less recalled memory and more a displaced unconscious wish for filial independence. In any case, the twin experiences of psychoanalysis and peripateticism served to further problematise the fantasia of selfidentical identity that conventional, stable social experience affords. In other words, an identity such as Beckett’s, forged through psychic energy and anxiety derived from an expulsion motif, and maintained through continuous exile from the coordinates of habitual place, could never settle on convenient identifications of belonging. And the “psychical quality of feeling” these psychological and actual experiences induce can profitably be used to describe much of Beckett’s oeuvre. From the ejections operative in the novellas, through the discombobulated Godot tramps on the roadside, and the “little panic steps” across the ruinstrewn lands of the short fiction (Fizzle 3 233), to the “out … into this world … this world … tiny little thing … before its time” (214) of the displaced, depersonalised woman in Not I , Beckett’s work resonates with “a psychical quality

6 These notes are held in Trinity College Dublin Library; MS 10971/7 and MS 10971/8.

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of feeling” that is an attempt to capture something of the trauma of being thrown out or expelled, forcefully.7 Crucially here, I am defining ‘feeling’ as the conscious experience of self one has on the inside, and which one attempts to communicate to others in various ways, such as through language, and especially literary language. This is the dominant sensation of what I refer to as Beckett’s ‘refugee subjectivity’, in which the anxiety of traumatised self is constantly present and in danger of invading and annihilating an otherwise self-identical and coherent subjecthood. And this movement from anxiety to dissolution is also articulated in the works of psychoanalytic theory that Beckett paraphrases in his “Psychology Notes”. For instance, ‘introjection’ is a word that describes how an individual internalises the identifications and/or injunctions of parents and/or authority figures as part of a process of socialisation, which, in Freudian terms, contributes to the formation of both the superego and the ego. In his notes, Beckett paraphrases the following passage from Karen Stephens’ The Wish to Fall Ill: In psychoanalytic terminology the child […] is described as having ‘introjected’ its parents. […] Just as the ideal way to begin life would be for the child to identify with a parent who is loved and accepted, so the dangerous way is to take inside itself a parent who is more hated than loved and who is defied. […] This introjection of the hated parents appears to explain some kinds of madness—I am thinking of melancholia, in which the unhappy patient hates himself and pursues himself with the most relentless enmity. (183–84)

Judith Butler notes of introjections that, in general, they “belong to the imaginary”: they are fantasmatic efforts of alignment, loyalty, ambiguous and crosscorporeal co-habitation; they unsettle the ‘I’; they are the sedimentation of the ‘we’ in the constitution of any ‘I’, the structuring presence of alterity in the very formation of the ‘I’. (105)

7 Beckett told Knowlson that during analysis he felt “trapped” and “imprisoned” in the womb. Afterwards he surmised: “I think it all helped me to understand a bit better what I was doing and what I was feeling ” (207; emphasis added).

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In other words, Butler argues, the very process of introjection calls into question and/or destabilises any centrally imagined self-identical subjecthood. It is this sense of introjection that Beckett utilises in his fiction.8 Here, introjection is a recurring ‘other voice’ that arises from within (or without) a character, and that represents a duality or split (and, as such, a challenge to the singularity of the Cartesian subject), sending the latter into a state of anxiety-ridden self-exile. For instance, towards the conclusion of his narrative, Molloy is invaded by an uncanny moment of introjection: In reality I said nothing at all but I heard a murmur […] and then something arose within me, confusedly, a kind of consciousness, which I express by saying, I said, etc., or, don’t do it Molloy, or, is that your mother’s name? said the sergeant […] And I had no impression of any kind, but simply somewhere something had changed, so that I too had to change, in order for nothing to be changed. (90)

By referencing previous narration that Molloy has engaged in, and by distancing Molloy from recognising that voice as his own, Beckett draws attention to how, in contrast to Molloy’s predicament, narration usually consolidates, as part of its ideological operation, a coherent sense of the sovereign subject as one with hindsight, foresight and present continuous awareness. By introducing the sense that Molloy may have constructed a subject out of maternal attachments, encounters with Lousse, the sergeant, and others, Beckett draws attention to the subject as composed and consolidated through introjections that form and drive identity. It follows that a quelling of voices serves the idea of the single subject, but instead Molloy succumbs to a series of rising interjections. For example, because Molloy gives way to the “‘we’ in the constitution of his ‘I’”, his personality/narrative splits at its conclusion, the character ending (in a double sense) with the line: “Real spring weather. I longed to go back into the forest. Oh not a real longing. Molloy could stay, where he happened to be” (93). Thus, the experience of reading Molloy is one in which introjection, rather than producing an affirmative ego, produces instead dissociation, which leads to the sense that Molloy is expelled, refugee-like, from his own story. This expulsion is coextensive 8 I am indebted to Anna McMullan’s reading of Butler in Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s Drama (9) for much of the direction of this argument.

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with the end (if not the closure) of his narration. Halfway through Molloy, the eponymous character becomes a refugee in his own narrative: mobile, marginal and largely forgotten. Beckett told Deirdre Bair: “I wrote Molloy and what followed on the day I became aware of my own stupidity. Then I began to write the things I feel” (312). “This psychical quality of feeling” is one in which anxiety at a loss of self, at the loss of a stable refuge for the self-identical subject, can result in that subject’s dissolution. In Part II of Molloy, Moran (a character who in contrast to Molloy is desperate to keep any sense of dissolution at bay) first notes that although he has never met Molloy, he has knowledge of him, consciousness of him within himself. This causes him to reflect: How little one is at one with oneself, good God. I who prided myself on being a sensible man, cold as crystal and as free from spurious depth. I knew then about Molloy, without however knowing much about him. I shall say briefly what little I did know about him. He had very little room. His time too was limited. He hastened incessantly on, as if in despair, towards extremely close objectives. Now a prisoner, he hurled himself at I know not what narrow confines, and now, hunted, he sought refuge near the centre. (117)

It turns out that the centre, where Molloy seeks refuge, is the centre of Moran himself. Shortly after recognising this introjection, which destabilises his sense of self, Moran experiences something of his own psychic dissolution. He records “a crumbling, a frenzied collapsing of all that had always protected [him]” from profound ontological doubt (155). The “frenzied collapsing” of the sovereign subject, which precipitates Beckett’s “refugee subjectivity”, is perhaps most acute in The Unnamable, where the reader encounters a pervasive feeling of anxiety on the move, an anxiety representative of a subject shorn of ontological coordinates, without the possibility of refuge or rehabilitation: “I am afraid, as always, of going on. For to go on means going from here, means finding me, losing me. […] I shall begin to know something, just enough for it to turn out to be the same place as always, the same which seems made for me and does not want me” (13). As a philosophical intervention, Beckett’s post-war prose suggests that subjectivity is something that can be maintained or displaced through narrative, and through the ideological paradigms that narrative transmits and maintains. As Foucault observed:

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“In a society such as ours, but basically in any society, there are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterize and constitute the social body” (93). As a result of being imbricated within such power structures, Stewart Hall has suggested that the nature of identity is “not being an essence but a positioning” (226), and Chris Weedon notes, “the site of this battle for power is the subjectivity of the individual and it is a battle in which the individual is an active but not sovereign subject” (40). Beckett’s writing questions the possibility of such a sovereign subject, displacing and dispersing it across both narrative and character. In this way, he recognises that literature, like painting and other art forms, and the disciplines of psychology and philosophy, afford the critical space to question what it means to be a subject, and what it means to be a subject within particular social and cultural formations; formations which are always “psychological and metaphysical instances with indistinct contours and highly politicisable contents” (Dubreuil 101).

Currents A major ethical question arises as a result of proposing that Beckett articulates a refugee subjectivity. What are the consequences of attempting to expose personal identity as a contingent, artificial formation and, in so doing, generate the feeling of what it might be like to be a refugee? Is the interrogation of transparent subjectivity, induced in the reader by Beckett, something that can really discomfit in a manner similar to how refugees are divested of a sense of belonging, or is it irresponsible to claim that literary experience can be equated with actual experience? In order to avoid this direct equation of the imaginary and the real, the feeling Beckett evokes in his work is quite deliberately not tied to specific, historical experiences of mass exile or migration. In fact, the very terrifying experiences of such conditions, as experienced or observed by Samuel Beckett, are constantly elided from his oeuvre. And if he does allude to such experiences, it is often to indicate the very impossibility of complete identification. Adorno said as much of Beckett’s work when he noted that one can only “speak euphemistically about what is incommensurate with all experience” (“Trying to Understand” 123).9 For example, 9 Beckett’s aesthetic engagement, which privileges mining the emotional feeling of an event rather than attempting verisimilitude of representation, mirrors the following note Beckett took on “Psychoanalysis & Related Schools” in his “Psychology Notes”: “Free

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the contextual and structural absences of “As the Story was Told” suggest the suppressed presence of the concentration camps of World War II. Further, with its temporary huts and tents, it is the text that most closely describes the mise en scène of refugee experience. The short piece begins: As the story was told me I never went near the place during sessions. I asked what place and a tent was described at length, a small tent the colour of its surroundings. Wearying of this description I asked what sessions and these in turn were described, their object, duration, frequency and harrowing nature. (255)

The narrator is able, by asking questions, to engage someone in dialogue, who first tells him the story that the narrator then narrates to the reader. He recalls asking “where I was while all this was going forward. In a hut, was the answer, a small hut in a grove some two hundred yards away, a distance even the loudest cry could not carry, but must die on the way” (255). The piece is triangulated in the sense that the narrator, who narrates what he is told by his interlocutor, thus tells the second-hand story of an old man who dies, perhaps through torture— “[a]s the story was told me the man succumbed in the end to his ill treatment”—and who might have been pardoned if he only knew what to say: “I did not know what the poor man was required to say, in order to be pardoned” (256). Unfortunately, the interlocutor does not enlighten the narrator in this regard, so both the character and reader remain in the dark. Likewise, the relationship between the tents and huts and a summer house are never established. In fact, the basic coordinates required to make sense of what is taking place are entirely absent. Biographically, it is quite reasonable to assume that the tableaux of “As the Story was Told” reflects, in some imaginative way, Beckett’s experience at the temporary Irish Hospital in Saint–Lô, for which he worked as a porter in late 1946. In The Capital of the Ruins , he informs the reader that the “hospital of the Irish Red Cross in Saint–Lô […] consist[s] of some prefabricated wooden huts” (17–18). One interpretation of this story of tents and huts in a camp—where there is an implication of torture, complicated by a diegesis within a diegesis, which

association, unable to accomplish factual reconstruction (of secondary importance) of early events, was utilised for their emotional recapitulation (of primary importance)” (10971/7, marked 13, quoted in Nixon, 16).

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makes it impossible to ascertain who is speaking—is to suggest that it represents a shifting subjectivity that might be a way of representing refugee experience, be it in the concentration camps or in the temporary hospital in Saint–Lô. But at the same time, the old man may be a version of the narrator in an introjection that divides. Such strategies of elision and introjection necessarily obscure singular, self-identical memory. Beckett states in The Capital of the Ruins that “Saint–Lô was bombed out of existence in one night” (25); so, where we might reasonably expect contextual detail in Beckett’s fictionalised account of a besieged town, instead we encounter a divided and traumatised self which cannot accurately represent the experience. Yet, because Beckett does not tie suffering directly to specific material causes, to specific refugee experience, the structural absences of the story contribute to the work’s psychical quality of feeling, redolent as it is of anxieties associated with alienation and loss of self. Furthermore, allied to the positive experience of international cooperation he encountered in Saint Lô, Beckett uses the temporary camps to present “an inkling of the terms in which our condition is to be thought again” (28). Arguably, it is a condition in which the universal human subject might be perceived as a refugee, the subject alienated from its origins and itself through direct suffering, but with sufficient agency not to tolerate the suffering of others in silence.10

Approaching International Waters On two separate occasions Beckett voiced his dissatisfaction with Franz Kafka’s “serenity of form”, countering it with a subversive formal strategy of his own: The Kafka hero has a coherence of purpose. He’s lost but he’s not spiritually precarious, he’s not falling to bits. My people seem to be falling to bits. Another difference. You notice how Kafka’s form is classic, it goes on like a steamroller—almost serene. It seems to be threatened the whole time— but the consternation is in the form. In my work there is consternation behind the form, not in the form. (Shenker 147)

Here, Beckett draws attention to both the physical and psychical disintegration of his characters, and he does so in tandem with structural 10 For a recent treatment of Beckett’s time at Saint Lô, see Davies.

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absences and elisions that reflect consternation that something, perhaps something ineffable, is wrong in the very production of the art object itself—something behind it that nonetheless constitutes the reason for how it is. The idea of characters falling to bits in a world charged with a sense of anxiety suggests that Beckett’s universe is a pathological one. In Beckett’s Thing: Painting and Theatre, David Lloyd revisited Kant’s ethical universal subject to illustrate how late capital produces a pathological subject defined by equivalence rather than equality. Emphasising the notion that all subjects are equal (as presupposed by Kant to formulate his collective ethics), Lloyd reads Beckett’s How It Is as the text that inflects equality with equivalence, such that all subjects become substitutable and dispensable in the political imaginary of modernity. In formulating Beckett’s revision of Kant’s ethical subject, Lloyd argues “[t]he re-articulation of an aesthetic that embraces its foundations in the pathological subject necessarily passes then by way of the body’s vulnerability rather than in its potentialities” (217). The serialised slot rattling of Bim and Bom and so on, through the mud, recasts Kant’s idea of the rational and thus “ethical universal subject” as a “pathological subject”, forced to recognise itself as an object among objects in the instrumentalisation of late capitalism. Beckett’s concern for those rendered vulnerable by instrumentalised modernity is well established. Of a taxi ride in 1961, he commented to Tom Driver: On the glass partition between me and the driver were three signs: one asked for help for the blind, another help for orphans, and the third for relief for the war refugees. One does not have to look for distress. It is screaming at you even in the taxis of London. (The Critical Heritage 147)

If it is legitimate to advocate for a refugee subjectivity in Beckett, which, in the late capital imaginary, may well be a universalised ontological subjectivity, then his work represents a form of aesthetic political engagement that frames the distress of our collective, pathological existence, while remaining faithful to each individual, in-appropriable experience. It is clear from his work that his characters are almost all “destituent”, to use a word given currency in recent philosophy by Agamben in order to conceptualise a power established through relinquishment rather than attainment. Agamben argues:

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To think such a purely destituent power is not an easy task. […] It is precisely because power constitutes itself through the inclusion and the capture of anarchy and anomy that it is so difficult to have an immediate access to these dimensions […]. A really new political dimension becomes possible only when we grasp and depose the anarchy and anomy of power. (28)

Rather than oppose power with a power that will eventually become indistinguishable from it, destituent power attempts an escape elsewhere. Perhaps, then, the conclusion of “The End” is the articulation of a type of destituent prose. The narrator has a vision in which he commits suicide by deliberately sinking his rowboat while out at sea. The first inkling that this is his intention is when “a great clanking is heard”, of which he notes: “That was the chain. One end was fastened to the bow and the other around my waist. I must have pierced a hole beforehand in the floorboards, for there I was down on my knees prying out the plug with my knife”. As the water rises, he records: The sea, the sky, the mountains and the islands closed in and crushed me in a might systole, then scattered to the uttermost confines of space. The memory came faint and cold of the story I might have told, a story in the likeness of my life, I mean without the courage to end or the strength to go on. (99)

The narrator effectively relinquishes all influence, all power and agency over a living future, in this dystopian visionary moment. Tellingly, in this crisis of uncanny capitulation he remembers not the story of his life, but a story in “the likeness” of it, in which all fortitude is lost. But as his narrative continues beyond the moment of annihilation (the consequence of it being a vision rather than the narrating of an actual experience), the whole is suffused with a feeling of destituent power that lays no claim to redemption or resuscitation. Most poignantly, the reader feels the absence of the experience of annihilation, carried beyond the atomisation of the narrator by the persistence of his voice, and so is guided by an aesthetic choice that represents an insistent psychical quality of feeling suggestive of, but not speaking for, those who experience terminal disaster. Here, rather than simply experimenting with a refugee metaphor, Beckett articulates the feeling of refugee subjectivity.

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“That Was the River, This Is the Sea”11 In May 2015, the Prime Ministers of Europe had a crisis meeting, after which the Irish Government took a decision to send the Irish Navy to the Mediterranean to conduct humanitarian search and rescue operations in cooperation with the Italian Government. From 24 September to 27 December 2015, Lieutenant Commander Anthony Geraghty captained the LÉ Samuel Beckett through Operation Pontus (before transitioning afterwards to the EU mission Operation Sophia). The vessel was tasked with rescuing migrants off the coast of Libya from dangerously overloaded cheap rubber and timber boats, which offer their occupants between twelve to twenty-four hours safety time, before they inevitably disintegrate or sink, resulting in death from drowning. The crew of the LÉ Samuel Beckett soon discovered that on many boats a single passenger was given a mobile phone with one phone number in its directory. This was the Italian coast guard number, to call once the boat was out of sight of land or began to sink. Geraghty and crew came to understand that the smugglers’ objective was not necessarily to get the refugees to a destination, but to create a situation from which they had to be rescued. To participate in this live Russian roulette, those being trafficked paid the smugglers anything between five hundred and two thousand dollars, based on their means. Geraghty recalls his first encounter with one of these boats as follows: The first rubber boat I saw, the weather was closing in, and conditions were deteriorating quickly. I’m 45 years of age, and every day I’ve been near the sea or on the sea so I would consider myself to be an educated and experienced and therefore competent mariner. So, I thought why would anyone get into that boat? The only reason someone would get into a boat like that is if your life was so bad that you felt the only option, which might include murder, assault, theft, rape, slavery, drowning, is in that boat. You’d only get in that boat if you had no other choice.

In a not entirely dissimilar fashion, Beckett characterised his own artistic obligation as an absence of choice. When he famously states that “there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the

11 Quoted from the song “This is the Sea” by the Waterboys.

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obligation to express” (Disjecta 139) he means, in principal, writing is worthless yet there is no choice but to “go on” documenting all “this this here”: namely, human suffering. And in not attempting to speak on behalf of those who suffer, in awareness of the impossibility of speaking on their behalf, he has furnished us with a pantheon of pathological characters who remain suffused with a certain psychical quality of feeling, which is itself a rare destituent power—a feeling of exiled anxiety driven by the knowledge that, in late capital modernity, it is murder to be abroad. When I asked Lieutenant Commander Geraghty his thoughts on operating the LÉ Samuel Beckett during the ongoing crisis, he responded with a question: I know Godot in Waiting for Godot doesn’t come, so in this situation in the Mediterranean, could Godot represent the international community which doesn’t come when expected? Isn’t fulfilling what Godot is supposed to be the manifestation of a better life? And yet, at the same time, things don’t change. And the sad thing is that nobody is recording this historically – getting this down on film, or in a book. There should be a witness. There are nine Irish Naval Captains and all of this is fresh in their minds, and somebody needs to capture the Irish navy’s operation in the Mediterranean. People haven’t realised yet that it’s a really historical time—a shift in understanding of the geography of the world—and it speaks to our Irish history, the famine ships, in a way we should recognise.

What is striking about Geraghty’s comments is the parity between Irish famine casualties, condemned to coffin ships, and today’s refugees—both victims of a continuing imperial politics that betrays every claim towards a compassionate modernity. In his destituent art, Samuel Beckett speaks of such people obliquely, and he also speaks for them by, in part, not assuming to speak on their behalf. The important question, now, is whether the industry of academia can begin reframing the study of literature in a way that also attempts to bridge the gap between exploring the possibilities of metaphoric rhetoric and establishing a criticism that inspires the urge to direct action.

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Works Cited Adorno, Theodore. “Trying to Understand Endgame”. Translated by Michael T. Jones, New German Critique no. 26, 1982, pp. 119–150. Agamben, Giorgio. “From the State of Control to a Praxis of Destituent Power”. Resisting Biopolitics: Philosophical, Political and Performative Strategies, edited by S. E. Wilmer and Audronë Žukauskaitë, Routledge, 2016, pp. 21–30. Bair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. Routledge, 2011. Beckett, Samuel. All That Fall. Faber and Faber, 2009. ———. “As the Story Was Told”. The Complete Short Prose of Samuel Beckett, edited by S. E. Gontarski, Grove, 2007, pp. 255–256. ———. Endgame. Faber and Faber, 2009. ———. “First Love”. The Complete Short Prose of Samuel Beckett, edited by S. E. Gontarski, Grove, 2007, pp. 25–45. ———. “Fizzle 3: Afar a Bird”. The Complete Short Prose of Samuel Beckett, edited by S. E. Gontarski, Grove, 2007, pp. 232–233. ———. Molloy. Edited by Shane Weller, Faber and Faber, 2009. ———. Not I: Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett, Grove Press/Atlantic, 2010, pp. 213–225. —–. “The Calmative”. The Complete Short Prose of Samuel Beckett, edited by S. E. Gontarski, Grove, 2007, pp. 61–77. ———. “The Capital of the Ruins”. As the Story Was Told: Uncollected and Late Prose, John Calder, 1990, pp. 17–28. ———. “The End”. The Complete Short Prose of Samuel Beckett, edited by S. E. Gontarski, Grove, 2007, pp. 78–99. ———. “The Expelled”. The Complete Short Prose of Samuel Beckett, edited by S. E. Gontarski, Grove, 2007, pp. 46–60. ———. The Unnamable. Edited by Steven Connor, Faber and Faber, 2010. ———. “Three Dialogues with George Duthuit”. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, edited by Ruby Cohn, Calder, 1983, pp. 137–145. Cronin, Anthony. Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist. HarperCollins, 1999. Davies, William. “A Text Become Provisional: Revisiting Samuel Beckett’s ‘The Capital of the Ruins’”. Journal of Beckett Studies, vol. 26, no. 2, 2017, pp. 169–187. Driver, Tom. “Beckett by the Madeleine”. Columbia University Forum, vol. 4, no. 3, 1961. Reprinted in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, edited by Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979, p. 219. Dubreuil, Laurent. The Refusal of Politics. Translated by Cory Browning, Edinburgh UP.

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Hegarty, Shane, and Fintan O’Toole. Irish Times Book of the 1916 Rising. Gill and Macmillan, 2006. Feldman, Matthew. Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s “Interwar Notes”. Continuum, 2006. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. Edited by Colin Gordon, Vintage, 1980. Garrison, Alysia E. “‘Faintly Struggling Things’: Trauma, Testimony, and Inscrutable Life in Beckett’s The Unnamable”. Samuel Beckett: History, Memory, Archive, edited by Séan Kennedy and Katherine Weiss, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 89–111. Geraghty, Anthony. Personal Interview, 17 Jan. 2016. Hall, Stewart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”. Identity and Community: Culture and Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford, Lawrence and Wishart, 2003, pp. 211–231. Kennedy, Seán. “Edmund Spenser, Famine Memory and the Discontents of Humanism in Endgame”. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, vol. 24, 2012, pp. 105–120. Knowlson, James, and Elizabeth Knowlson. Beckett Remembering/Remembering Beckett. Bloomsbury, 2006. Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. Bloomsbury, 1996. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Psychoses. Vol. III, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Russell Grigg, Norton, 1993. Lloyd, David. Beckett’s Thing: Painting and Theatre. Edinburgh UP, 2016. McMullan, Anna. Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s Drama. Routledge, 2010. McNaughton, James. Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath. Oxford UP, 2018. Mercier, Vivian. Beckett/Beckett. Souvenir Press, 1990. Nixon, Mark. Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937 . Continuum, 2011. O’Connell, J. J. “Memoir of the Irish Volunteers, 1914–17”. Edited by Daithi O’Corrain, Analecta Hibernica, vol. 47, 2016, pp. 1–102. Shenker, Israel. “Moody Man of Letters”. Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, edited by L. Graver and R. Federman, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979, pp. 146–149. Spies, Werner. Max Ernst: Life and Works. Thames and Hudson, 2006. Stephen, Karen. The Wish to Fall Ill: A Study of Psychoanalysis and Medicine. Cambridge UP, 1960. The Waterboys. “This Is the Sea”. By Mike Scott. This Is the Sea, Island Records, 1985. Weedon, Chris. Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory. Wiley-Blackwell, 1997.

CHAPTER 18

Afterword Peter Boxall

None looks within himself where none can be. The Lost Ones 211

In accepting the great honour of writing an afterword to this volume— without question one of the most important and powerful collections of essays to be published on Beckett’s writing in the history of Beckett studies—I find myself in a strange position. The contributors to this volume wrote their pieces before the spring of 2020, before the global spread of the coronavirus pandemic; I am writing in the midst of the event, in an upstairs room in my house, my children playing Tomb Raider somewhere downstairs, the ardour for home-schooling having cooled. This difference, between before and after, is inscribed into this volume, as it is inscribed into all current acts of political and cultural imagination. What we are collectively living through now (or half collectively, quasicollectively, pseudo-collectively) is an event that has a transformative effect on how we understand the defining terms of global political life. One of the collective or pseudo-collective elements of this experience is an awareness of newly contingent relations between the global, the national and

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the local. Those of us with access to the internet, to Twitter and rolling news, have become accustomed to studying data that allows us to see the pandemic at a global scale. We look at maps of the world scarred with gruesome red patches representing concentrations of infection or death. The darker the red, the deeper the wound, the denser the contagion. We look at tables giving updated figures of the infected and the dead, also choosing to represent death in red. We look at graphs which express numbers of new infections and deaths as a curve, broken down by nation. Each nation has its own curve, the curve itself a simple linear manifestation of complex nonlinear forces—political systems, welfare provision, personal freedom versus state control. We carry these data with us, these schemas of a global pandemic, as we look at events unfolding around us, as we try to frame them or find a national scale at which to calibrate them. For us in the UK, this task has become intertwined with the spectre of ‘herd immunity’.1 The UK government went out on a limb to adopt an immunity strategy, in accordance with which we allow the virus to spread, at the cost of the vulnerable, in order to provide immunity to the healthy majority. As I write, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is in intensive care with Covid-19, a powerful manifestation of the fact that the herd is comprised of individual people, people who might, even, be oneself. We watch our political leaders act on the data we look at in maps, in tables, in graphs and then we step outside for our hour of daily exercise (still permitted in the UK, for now). We give passersby a wide berth, exaggerating the distance to indicate goodwill, care for others expressed as a removal from their zone of influence. Two metres adjudged to be how far beyond ourselves we reach. We marvel, if we live in a town or a city, at the becalmed streets. The businesses lying dormant, storefront after storefront displaying a scrappy blu-tacked piece of paper bearing the emboldened heading ‘Covid-19’, followed by small print expressions of regret, and the injunction that we should take care of ourselves. We look at the sky, on cloudless days, the blue unmarked by contrails, the roads of the air erased. We try to match our local experience of life, to the policies enacted by governments, to the data displayed in graphs and spreadsheets, and we feel that we are living in a new world where these scalar relations have become estranged, a different world, the world of after, all else recast as 1 For an account of the UK’s herd immunity strategy, see for example, William Hanage, ‘I’m an Epidemiologist’ (2020).

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before. Every conversation, with loved ones, with friends, with strangers, begins and ends with this, the perception that the world we once knew bears no relation to the world that we are trying to live in now. As Arundhati Roy puts it, pandemics have historically ‘forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew’ (np). The coronavirus outbreak, she says, marks just such a break, opening ‘a portal, a gateway between one world and the next’. This is the gap, between before and after, across which I reach, as I offer some closing reflections on Beckett and politics. Does the concept of the political, as understood in the essays that are collected here, match up with the political as it shows itself to me now, as I write in the midst of the pandemic, or as it appears to the reader of this book, in its possible aftermath (aftermath: new grass growing after mowing, green shoots)? Do the terms in which Beckett understood the political, or in which the political inscribes itself in his writing, survive the kind of transformation that the pandemic brings about, the shifted relation it inaugurates between the individual, the nation and the world? I see friends and colleagues around the world asking each other for guidance on what book to read, what music to listen to, what film to watch, as we look to our collective past to find a guide to an alienated future (I, for what it is worth, am looking with a peculiar kind of trepidation at a copy of The Magic Mountain and wondering, will it help?). Does Beckett’s work, and the forensic terms in which Beckett’s work is anatomised in this book, offer one such bridge, one such junction between then and now? If the answer to that question is yes, it is so because the pandemic has exposed a faultline that runs through political life, dividing the particular from the systemic—the faultline that lies too at the ground of Beckett’s political imagination. When we act as political subjects, our actions are shaped in accordance with the particular temporal and spatial pressures that operate upon us, that determine the meaning of those actions at a local level, even as that localism is situated within ever-widening fields of force. To live is to feel the friction of particularity. But the pandemic, in demanding that we institute a collective defence of life, suspends that particularity, removes that friction, exposes us to a systemic logic in which the specificity of political life itself shades into the generality of species being. Some of the most insistently recurring televisual images produced by the virus so far are the montages of iconic city centres around the world, all empty, all still. Here’s Times Square in New York, here’s Piccadilly Circus in London, here’s St Peter’s Square in Rome, here’s

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Tahrir Square in Cairo. There is something haunting about the recognition that the same phenomenon, the spread of a virus, has brought all of these separate places, with their embedded histories, to a standstill. And in all of these places, the absent people, the people locked away in their separate chambers, are undergoing versions of the same experience, even if those same experiences are wildly different depending on your wealth and your circumstances. The particular pressures that shaped their and our lives, that set the clocks, that determined where we should travel, who we should meet, have been suspended; we are no longer living as differentiated subjects, but as one of the herd that might, in terms of the UK’s misguided policy, expect one day to be immune. Isolation from the community as a function of one’s belonging to the herd. The task of each day is no longer political but has become instead biological, or ontological. We feed ourselves, clean ourselves, exercise ourselves, feed our young. We jog on the spot. We wait for the moment when the clocks will be restarted, when the school term will recommence, when the pub will reopen; and while we wait we give ourselves to an abeyance, in which living has become a kind of existing. The pandemic, in opening Roy’s portal from one world to the next, brings out of hiding this relation between the particular and the systemic—a relation in which the particularities of our lives are laid over a systemic substrate which both endorses them and cancels them out. As the father in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road comments, in witnessing that novel’s apocalyptic event that ends one world and ushers in another, ‘in the world’s destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made’ (293). Once the features of the world are erased, one can see the mechanism of world itself; and if Beckett’s work might offer one way of conceiving of a bridge between before and after, one world and the next, then this is perhaps because his writing, too, proceeds as a form of revelation through erasure. The pandemic scrapes away the particular surface to reveal a generic understructure, the undifferentiated raw material of being; Beckett’s works, his plays, his novels, his pieces for television, all proceed in the same fashion. Who could read Endgame now, or watch it on YouTube, and not see it as a representation of self-isolation? ‘[He turns the telescope on the without.] Let’s see. [He moves the telescope.] Nothing … nothing … good … good’ (130). Who could read or watch Waiting for Godot now and not recognise afresh the quality of that waiting, the waiting in abeyance in which the removal of the features of the world— the calendar, the place names, the specificities—casts you away on the

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desert island of the world itself. Let’s go. We can’t. We’re on earth, there’s no cure for that. All mankind is us. We might recognise our current predicament as it is foreshadowed in Beckett’s work—the predicament from the midst of which I am writing— because Beckett’s work is built on the faultline between particular and the systemic that the pandemic unearths. But, of course, this recognition does not itself amount to a politics. Indeed, it is perhaps Beckett’s proximity to this faultline that has made it so difficult to articulate a politics in his writing, as it is difficult for us to orient ourselves to the current pandemic with an existing political compass. The effect of the move from the particular to the systemic is not to reveal our political condition so much as to set it aside, to trivialise politics or the merely political by approaching a systemic condition that is in some sense apolitical, prepolitical, or suprapolitical. In view of the labours unfinished of Testew and Cunard, it is established beyond all doubt, in spite of the strides of physical culture, the practice of sports such as tennis football running cycling, regardless of the penicillin and the succadenea, that man wastes and pines, for reasons unknown, that he shrinks and dwindles, in spite of the tennis. The job of the writer, Beckett says famously in 1937, is to remove the ornaments, the local distractions of ‘culture’, so that this systemic truth, this substrate, might come to view, the bare bones of living and dying. ‘More and more’, he writes in a letter to Axel Kaun that has taken on the status of a mantra in Beckett studies, ‘my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it’ (Letters I 518). Our writerly task is not to heighten or dignify our language games, to enshrine the communities they conjure, the forms of relationality they summon, but rather to degrade them, to dismantle the linguistic medium itself, to ‘drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through’ (Letters I 518). In suggesting this alternative in 1937—between the ‘something’ or the ‘nothing’ that underlies the veil of language—Beckett rather neatly predicts the terms in which his work would predominantly be read in the first two waves of the critical industry that was established in his name; terms which, in both cases, rest on the perception that Beckett’s work is in some way inimical to politics, that it somehow reveals a substrate to being as an alternative or an antidote to political life. The first wave saw that Beckett found, beneath the trivialities of social and political life, a distinct ‘something’—a plastic depository of being. ‘The

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human condition’, Alain Robbe-Grillet writes, ‘is to be there’, a condition given its exemplary form in Beckett’s drama. ‘The dramatic character is on stage, that is his primary quality: he is there’; ‘at last we would see Beckett’s man, we would see Man’ (111). The second wave, drawing its momentum from a post-structuralist or deconstructive suspicion of the metaphysics of presence, took rather the opposite view. What Beckett found when he drew back the veil of language was not something at all, but was rather nothing. As Steven Connor writes, in dialogue with Robbe-Grillet, Beckett’s drama should not be seen as a ‘humanist theatre of presence’, but is rather ‘stranded in the not-yet or intermission of waiting’, in which the stage space ‘is never itself, but always a representation of itself, anticipated or remembered, which is to say, non-present’ (120). Not something, but nothing. It is the third wave of Beckett criticism—the wave which reaches its full maturity in the essays collected here—that seeks to negotiate between these poles of something and nothing, in order to generate a politics from the disjuncture in Beckett’s work between the particular and the general, between the local specificities that characterise cultural life, and the systemic matrices that underlie them. For the critics who have contributed to this wave, it is not the case that Beckett’s work involves the eradication of the word surface—of the material particularity of language and life—in order to expose an underlying condition, consisting either of something or of nothing; or at least it is not simply so. The local, the material, the political, is not burned off to expose the universal, the transcendental or the systemic (understood as a revealed humanism, or as the emptying throes of a deconstructive language). Rather, the particular and the systemic, the granularity of enworlded being and the smooth conditions that underlie that enworlding, are put into a vibrating relation with one another—a relation that, by virtue of its vibration, instantiates a Beckettian politics. The centres of gravity that are identified in this collection—language politics, biopolitics, geopolitics—constitute the most fully developed critical expression of the forms in which Beckett’s writing tests the bonds between the specific and the nonspecific. Language, body, place, these are not emptied out, universalised, negated; rather, the ties that hold literary language to its specific instantiations in the world are at once asserted and denied, as Watt finds that events are both attached to their plastic manifestations and divorced from them. Reading Beckett through this prism, one finds oneself in the predicament suffered by Watt, when he tries to fathom the ‘incident of the Galls’, the father and son

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team who come to Mr. Knott’s house to tune the piano. ‘What distressed Watt in this incident of the Galls father and son’, the narrator says, was not so much that he did not know what had happened, for he did not care what had happened, as that nothing had happened, that a thing that was nothing had happened, with the utmost formal distinctness. (73)

When Beckett puts language and body and place together—when he imagines a mind, in a body, in a place—he makes a thing that is nothing happen, he encloses nothingness in words. If Beckett is a difficult writer, then his difficulty resides in large measure in this, in the fact that his writing does not suppress but relentlessly reveals the terms in which it brings nothing into contact with something. For readers of his work—as for Watt, struggling with his contemplation of Mr. Knott’s notness—these terms are ‘hard to accept’. We cannot accept that Beckett attaches nothing to something, the nonspecific to the specific, in the way that Watt cannot accept ‘that nothing had happened with all the clarity and solidity of something’ (73). It is difficult to accept, because it threatens to reveal on the one hand that the density of the somethings that we live for are shadowed by the vacuity of a nothingness that underlies them, and on the other that the purity of the nothingness in which our most pristine ethical imperatives are embalmed, the nothingness that we want most to be disinterested, is contaminated always by its attachment to the somethings in which that nothingness is realised. We cannot accept it but, like Watt, we find ourselves returning to it, living through it, as Watt revisits the incident of the Galls, ‘in such a way that he was forced to submit to it all over again, to hear the same sounds, see the same lights, touch the same surfaces, and so on, as when they had first involved him in their unintelligible intricacies’ (73). If there is a Beckettian politics, and if his work offers a bridge from the last world to the next, then it is found in this movement of not being as it is threaded into the unintelligible intricacies of being, this dense amalgam of something and nothing in the warp of the world that it brings to thought. As I write, in the very midst of the transition from before to after, I find myself thinking almost constantly of this movement, this amalgam. I spent my hour’s exercise this gentle springlike morning walking in a nearby park with my partner. The park is ringed by a path that is popular with joggers, and as we walked we watched runner after runner pass us by, keeping a respectful distance. Some of

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them we saw twice, as they lapped us in our sedate pace, and it was hard not to be struck by the redundancy of the sight, the futility. We are all unplugged, it seemed to say, all waiting in abeyance, and as we wait we service the hardware in case there should come a time when it will be needed again. It was hard, for me at least, not to see this turning ring of runners as a version of the searchers in The Lost Ones , the searchers who skirt the wall of the cylinder, forming a ‘slow round’ in which they ‘slowly revolve in Indian file intent on the periphery’ (210). It is hard not to see, in the spectacle of the pandemic, in the montages of becalmed cities from every continent of the globe, a vision of our global population as Beckett’s ‘little people of searchers’ (223), moving busily around their cylinder, ‘one body per square meter’ (204). The pandemic requires us to think systemically, to think globally, to see ourselves not in our particularity but as members of the herd, as the narrator’s view of the cylinder requires, he says, a ‘perfect mental image of the entire system’ (204). We are led to think of ourselves not as individual agents, but as exchangeable elements in the spread of a virus, and so the magic that allows us to grant a specific gravity to our own particular movements or actions, our morning jog, our afternoon’s writing, suddenly expires. Observing the population of the park, the distribution of runners and walkers, the frisbee throwers, diablo maestros, children on bikes with stabilisers, feels like observing the searchers in the cylinder, ascending and descending their ladders, turning clockwise and counterclockwise in the cylinder’s various zones. The movement of the searchers is dictated, the narrator says, by a series of conventions which, ‘in their precision and the submission they exact resemble laws’ (207). The systemic view of the cylinder makes these laws appear arbitrary, as Swift’s Gulliver finds the customs and mores of Lilliput, seen from his lofty perspective, to be laughably arbitrary. When we think at a global scale, as the narrator of The Lost Ones requires us to, as the experience of the pandemic requires us to, we lose faith in the very particularities, the unintelligible intricacies, that such a global perspective is employed to preserve. Our political distinctions and niceties come down, in the end, to whether we are big-endians or little-endians. But if this is so, if global thinking in The Lost Ones trivialises whatever the local political imperatives are that compel these searchers so relentlessly to search, it is the case too that the total view of the cylinder contains within it a peculiar seam of invisibility, a nonbeing woven into being that grants their searching an ethical and political grace. However

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hard the narrator strives to see whole—the ‘entire space’, he says, is ‘uniformly luminous down to its last particle of ambient air’ (215)— the narrative produces pockets of darkness, of nothingness, that assert themselves as an effect of the very effort towards sight. ‘From time immemorial’ the narrator says, in a phrase that again leaps out at us quarantinos, ‘rumour has it or better still the notion is abroad that there exists a way out’ (206). There persists a mythical belief in the cylinder— the residue perhaps of religious faith—that what we see is not all there is, that there might be an outside to the cylinder, that the world might still consist of a contingent relation between what we know and what we don’t know, what has happened already and what has not happened yet, a relation between something and nothing that gives the searching of the searchers a rationale. The response of the narrator to this faith, to this ‘fatuous little light’ which keeps such hope alive, is of course to eradicate it. One ‘sect’ in the cylinder believes that the way out is hidden in one of the tunnels, the other that it is accessed by a trapdoor in the ceiling; but the narrator says that, over the endless reach of historical time, with imperceptible gradualness, the population of searchers slowly comes to accept that there is no way out, that all is known, that the world we see with the aid of the lit air is all that is the case. ‘Of these two persuasions’, the narrator says, ‘the former is declining in favour of the latter but in a manner so desultory and slow and of course with so little effect on the comportment of either sect that to see it one must be in the secret of the gods’ (206–7). ‘Thus by insensible degrees’, he goes on, ‘the way out transfers from the tunnel to the ceiling prior to never having been’. The total seeing to which the narrator aspires does not admit of a way out; but the beauty of The Lost Ones , its central discovery, is that the global seeing that denies the poetry of the invisible, that abolishes the province of the not yet which grants a political urgency to our striving, produces the very outside, the very freedom from the known, that it refuses. The voice itself, in tracing the imperceptible decline of religious belief, in offering us an account of the ‘insensible degrees’ by which the population secularises itself, casts itself into the very condition—the insensible, the imperceptible—that he sets out to deny. In offering us a view of the cylinder as a whole, the voice is cast outside of its domain, passing through the rubbery walls that declare themselves to be sealed. ‘In the cylinder alone are certitudes to be found’, the narrator says ‘and without nothing but mystery’ (216); but in making such a claim, in granting himself access to the mysterious outside, the narrator breaks the seal of that wall, shows it not to be

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smooth and impenetrable, but rather to be porous and leaky. The trap door in the ceiling, like the doors and windows in Beckett’s late miracle Ghost Trio, is not shut, or not simply shut, but is ‘imperceptibly ajar’ (Complete Dramatic Works 408). The movement of the voice itself, in its very refusal of the consolations of doctrine, takes us across this imperceptibly open channel between what there is and what there is not, between Watt’s something and nothing. As a young Beckett puts it, in his dialogue with Georges Duthuit, the artwork, like the cylinder of The Lost Ones , is a ‘total object, complete with missing parts’ (Proust 101). It is this capacity, across Beckett’s work, to unearth the faultline which joins the seen with the unseen, through a blank refusal to enshrine the unseen in mythical or enchanted forms, that constitutes his politics. It is not the case that the searching of the searchers, as they climb their ladders or circle the perimeter of the cylinder, is revealed to us to be futile, any more than the global seeing granted or forced upon us by the pandemic renders futile the jogging of the runners in the park this morning. What The Lost Ones reveals to us is a disconnect between the local forces which drive our actions and the systemic conditions which underlie them. Beckett’s work does not scrape those local forces away to reveal the underlying conditions, but rather opens an imperceptible passage between living and existing, between the political and ontological, in order to watch as literary thinking negotiates between these cardinal points of being. It is in this sense that his writing remains urgent to us now, as urgent as ever. His work is not a despairing verdict on the futility of searching; it does not disdain those searchers who strive to find the purpose of their being not in their own persons, but reflected in those others for whom and with whom they live. On the contrary, it is a passionate injunction to us to think and imagine a relation between that searching, and the historical conditions that determine it. ‘None looks within himself’, the narrator says of his searchers, ‘where none can be’ (211); and this is another of those lines that strikes us, as we lock ourselves inside our houses, as we exercise doggedly in the park, as we attend to the mothballed upkeep of ourselves and our loved ones. Isolation has brought us up against a newly overwhelming recognition that our being is not isolated, that we rely for our self-perception on the perception of others, that to be is to be perceived. The spread of the virus has recast the way that we think not only about our relations to each other within our community, but about the nature of geopolitical relations between nations, about the ways that nations are part of a collective, systemic global condition. It

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is one of the recurring responses to this transitional moment between before and after to observe that, when the pandemic is ‘over’, we cannot return to the way things were, to how it was. As the Secretary General of the United Nations António Guterres has recently argued, the pandemic requires us to radically reconceive the nature of borders, between the local and the global, between the north and the global south, as we can no longer maintain the pretence that our own local imperatives, the rules governing our own climbing and searching, are insulated from those that obtain elsewhere. We cannot suppress the virus only ‘here’, but have to suppress it everywhere, otherwise it will simply reappear as people move from place to place because, as we can see now more clearly than ever, all humankind is us. ‘Ending the pandemic everywhere is both a moral imperative’, he writes, ‘and a matter of enlightened self-interest’ (np). The narrator of The Lost Ones says of the rules that govern behaviour in the cylinder that ‘it is enjoined by a certain ethics not to do unto others what coming from them might give offence’ (222). The bleakness of The Lost Ones, as well as its gleams of comedy, stem from the realisation that we don’t understand this ethic of reciprocity, that we cannot situate it or fathom its historical logic, any more than we can codify Guterres’ ‘moral imperative’. But what The Lost Ones leaves us with, what Beckett’s work grants us, is an access to that disappearing relation between our own local actions and the world historical forces that sustain them—the very relation that in our own moment, as in all moments of political transformation, calls with the greatest urgency to be rethought.

Works Cited Beckett, Samuel. The Complete Dramatic Works. Faber and Faber, 2006. ———. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. I: 1929–1940. Edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge UP, 2009. ———. The Lost Ones. Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose, 1929–1989. Edited by S. E. Gontarski, Grove Press, 1995. ———. Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit. Calder, 1965. ———. Watt. Calder, 1976. Connor, Steven. Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text. Blackwell, 1988. Guterres, António. “Recovery from the Coronavirus Must Lead to a Better World”. The Guardian, 2 Apr. 2020, np. Hanage, William. “I’m an Epidemiologist”. The Guardian, 15 Mar. 2020, np. Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain. Translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter. Vintage, 1999.

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McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. Picador, 2006. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction. Translated by Richard Howard. Northwestern UP, 1989. Roy, Arundhati. “The Pandemic Is a Portal”. The Financial Times, 3 Apr. 2020, np. Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. Oxford UP, 1998.

Index

A Ackerley, C.J., 76, 93, 109, 146 Addyman, David, 70 Adler, Alfred, 94–97, 101, 104, 117 Adorno, Theodor, 5, 135, 136, 178, 226, 291 Agamben, Giorgio, 126, 127, 129–133, 135, 294 Althusser, Louis, 44 Anderson, Benedict, 63, 64 Anderton, Joseph, 128, 224 Arendt, Hannah, 14 Aristotle, 93–95, 98, 99, 102, 103, 127, 129, 135 Arrabal, Fernando, 180 Artaud, Antonin, 79–82 Astbury, Brian, 199, 200 Astro, Alan, 177 Atik, Anne, 76, 179 Auriol, Vincent, 186 Axer, Erwin, 188

B Badiou, Alain, 40 Bair, Deirdre, 178, 226, 283 Baraka, Amiri, 178, 180, 183, 184 Barrault, Jean-Louis, 160 Barrow, Brian, 197, 201, 202 Barry, Elizabeth, 7 Bataille, Georges, 133 Baxter, William Duncan, 195, 197, 199–205, 207, 208 Beckett, Frank, 112 Beckett, May, 112 Beckett, Samuel All That Fall , 92, 113, 251, 252, 260, 281 Breath, 28 “The Calmative”, 285 The Capital of the Ruins , 226, 292, 293 Catastrophe, 28, 124, 179, 219 “Censorship in the Saorstat”, 126, 149 Company, 66

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 W. Davies and H. Bailey (eds.), Beckett and Politics, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47110-1

313

314

INDEX

“Dante and the Lobster”, 71, 75, 233 “Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce”, 60 “Ding-Dong”, 71, 150, 234 “dread nay”, 32, 33 Dream Notebook, 139, 141, 143–145, 147, 148, 150, 151 Dream of Fair to Middling Women, 71, 134, 139, 162, 231 “Echo’s Bones” (short story), 71, 150–153, 250 Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates , 31 Embers , 185 En attendant Godot/Waiting for Godot , 10, 79, 134, 156, 164–166, 168, 178–185, 187, 188, 195, 196, 200, 202, 215, 223, 224, 228, 240, 264, 266–270, 272, 277, 286, 304 “The End”, 71, 215, 281, 283, 285, 295 Endgame, 6, 100, 134, 178, 180, 185, 187, 196, 199, 215, 224, 282, 304 “The Expelled”, 71, 285 “Fingal”, 95, 148, 149, 244 “First Love”, 14, 107–110, 114–116, 119, 120, 285 Fizzle 3, 287 Happy Days , 91–94, 97–101, 103, 104, 196 How It Is , 14, 28, 45, 66, 294 L’Innommable/The Unnamable, 33, 42, 45, 57, 64, 69–82, 129, 131, 132, 148, 224, 231, 245, 290 The Lost Ones , 45, 46, 49, 51, 126, 308–311 Malone meurt/Malone Dies , 72, 80, 82, 133, 224, 231, 232, 242, 243

Mercier & Camier, 133, 217, 284 mirlitonnades , 28 Molloy, 14, 76, 110, 119, 128, 133, 136, 217, 224, 231, 232, 241, 242, 245, 289, 290 More Pricks Than Kicks , 70, 108, 111, 141, 231 Murphy, 71, 72, 75, 80, 82, 148, 217, 223, 232, 236, 237, 239, 245 Not I , 33, 57, 71, 79, 109, 146, 151, 186, 287 “Petit Sot”, 71 “Philosophy Notes”, 151, 221 Proust , 134, 310 “Psychology Notes”, 112, 113, 117, 287, 288 “Recent Irish Poetry”, 235, 264 Rockaby, 33, 133 Rough for Radio, 14 “Sanies I”, 31, 111 “Serena I”, 73–76, 78 Texts for Nothing , 224 Three Dialogues , 56, 57, 128 “Walking Out”, 148 Watt , 66, 71, 75, 148, 232, 239, 242, 249–251, 254–256, 258, 260 Worstward Ho, 28, 33, 34, 42–45, 66, 123, 136 “Yellow”, 150, 242 Beckett, William, 253, 283 Benjamin, Walter, 127 Benstock, Shari, 102, 103 Bentley, Eric, 188 Benveniste, Émile, 130 Ben-Zvi, Linda, 6, 56, 57, 108 Bion, Wilfred, 112 Bixby, Patrick, 239 Blanchot, Maurice, 5, 36, 57, 131, 177 Blin, Roger, 165, 180, 185

INDEX

Bloch, Ernst, 178, 187 Bolin, John, 28 Bonafede, Bruce, 209 Bond, Edward, 181, 186 Borotra, Jean, 158, 168 Boucicault, Dion, 233 Bourdieu, Pierre, 62, 64 Bowen, Elizabeth, 251, 254, 259, 260 Boxall, Peter, 6, 7, 12, 25, 29–31, 57, 214 Boyars, Marion, 181 Bradby, David, 180, 182 Bray, Barbara, 4, 187 Brecht, Bertolt, 159, 179, 181, 188, 214, 216 Breton, André, 143 Browne, Charles R., 239 Brown, Terence, 251 Bruce, Brenda, 93 Bruguera, Tania, 196 Brustein, Robert, 178 Bryden, Mary, 92, 109, 111, 135 Butler, Judith, 277, 288, 289 Butor, Michel, 187

C Calder, John, 181 Caplan, Marc, 8 Carlyle, Thomas, 232 Carrel, Alexis, 161, 240 Caselli, Daniela, 7, 12, 46, 109 Cavell, Stanley, 177 Celan, Paul, 227 Chan, Paul, 181, 264, 269–272, 277 Chéreau, Patrice, 180 Cioran, Emil, 177 Ciulei, Liviu, 188 Cixous, Helene, 5, 109 Clarke, Austin, 235 Cocteau, Jean, 159 Coe, Richard N., 178

315

Coffey, Michael, 8, 9 Cohn, Ruby, 34, 35, 57, 80, 220 Comte, Auguste, 146, 221 Connor, Steven, 4, 65, 70, 125, 164, 167, 306 Coughlan, Patricia, 6 Cousineau, Thomas, 4 Coveney, Michael, 207 Cronin, Anthony, 62, 253, 283 Cunard, Nancy, 217, 223, 305 Curry, Bill, 200

D Davis, Ossie, 180 Davitt, Michael, 250, 251 Deane, Seamus, 257 Deleuze, Gilles, 5 Dennis, Amanda, 9, 128 Derrida, Jacques, 29, 135, 189 Descartes, René, 130 Devenney, Christopher, 6, 40 Dix, Otto, 159 Doumer, Paul, 284 Drew, Elizabeth, 33, 34 Driver, Tom, 294 Duras, Marguerite, 161 Duvignaud, Jean, 188

E Eagleton, Terry, 7, 39, 57, 185, 216 Edgeworth, Maria, 254, 259, 260 Esslin, Martin, 124, 177, 188

F Fehlmann, Guy, 258 Feldman, Matthew, 94–96, 112, 123, 199, 221, 222, 225, 287 Fichte, Johann, 62, 63 Fischer, Ernst, 178, 187 Flaszen, Ludwik, 189

316

INDEX

Fletcher, John, 243 Foucault, Michel, 125–127, 129, 290 Fourie, Peter, 203 Francis, Benjy, 200 Frawley, Oona, 236, 241 Friedlander, Saul, 226 Freidrich, Kaspar David, 79 Friedman, Alan Warren, 12 Fugard, Athol, 198, 199, 203 Furlani, Andre, 43 G Garnier, Pierre, 148 Garrard, Greg, 8 Garrison, Alysia, 285 Geraghty, Anthony, 296, 297 Gibbons, Luke, 257 Gibson, Andrew, 7, 9, 27, 31, 162–164, 167, 186, 222, 240 Gierow, Karl Ragnar, 10, 12, 214 Goebbels, Josef, 162 Golden, Seán, 9 Gormley, Antony, 196 Graham, Alan, 8 Gramsci, Antonio, 231 Gregory, William, 58 Grenville, Keith, 200 Griffin, Roger, 157 Grossman, Jan, 188 Grosz, George, 159 Guattari, Félix, 5 Guha, Ranajit, 242, 244 Gussow, Mel, 208 H Haahr, Mads, 34 Haddon, A.C., 239, 240 Hall, Stewart, 291 Hamilton, Scott, 8 Hansberry, Lorraine, 178, 183, 184 Harrington, John P., 4, 255

Harvey, Lawrence, 73 Havel, Václav, 179, 219 Háy, Gyula, 188 Heidegger, Martin, 36, 216 Herbert, Jocelyn, 203, 206 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 62 Hilberg, Raul, 226 Hill, Leslie, 14, 27, 74 Hitler, Adolf, 166 Houston Jones, David, 46, 224 Howarth, Donald, 196, 197, 202–206, 208–210

I Igweonu, Kene, 12 Ionesco, Eugène, 178, 180, 187, 188 Irigaray, Luce, 109

J Jeffers, Jennifer, 93, 108, 255 Jolas, Eugène, 56, 153 Jones, Susan, 162 Jönson, Jan, 181 Joyce, James, 29, 81, 142, 143, 145, 148–150, 153, 184, 281, 286

K Kafka, Franz, 293 Kamiwa, Ngatumue, 200 Kani, John, 180, 202–207, 209 Kant, Immanuel, 166, 294 Katz, Daniel, 32, 55, 70, 78, 131 Kaun, Axel, 58–60, 62, 73, 130, 305 Keats, John, 73–76, 79 Kennedy, Adrienne, 181 Kennedy, Seán, 3, 7, 27, 124, 128, 150, 251, 255, 282 Klee, Paul, 159, 284 Knowlson, James, 4, 5, 74, 79, 93, 112, 113, 163, 189, 198, 218,

INDEX

219, 243, 253, 283, 284, 287, 288 Kott, Jan, 188 Kraus, Karl, 159 Kreilkamp, Vera, 257 Krejˇca, Otomar, 179, 188 Kristeva, Julia, 5, 108–110, 114–116, 118–120 L Laban, Rudolf, 166 Lacan, Jacques, 116, 118, 286 La Rochelle, Pierre Drieu, 157 Lawrence, Tim, 34 Lee, Spike, 182 LeFay, Marilyn, 14 Léger, Fernand, 159 Lemass, Noel, 283, 284 Lewis, Wyndham, 216 Libera, Antoni, 46, 219 Lloyd, David, 4, 25, 294 Lloyd, Vincent, 12 Lombroso, Cesare, 140, 145 Lorenz, Werner, 163 Lucretius, 44 Lund, Jacob, 129, 131, 132 Lyotard, Francois, 33 M Mabaso, Ben, 200 MacGowran, Gloria, 185 MacGowran, Jack, 185 MacGreevy, Thomas, 2, 60, 73, 81, 95, 217, 233 Mac Gréil, Mícheál, 238 Mangan, Clarence, 61 Manning Howe, Mary, 130 Marcuse, Herbert, 178 Marx, Karl, 44, 216 Maude, Ulrika, 125, 128, 129, 141, 156

317

Mauthner, Fritz, 56, 77 McCabe, Henry, 71, 234 McCormack, W.J., 251 McMullan, Anna, 92, 108, 156, 163, 180, 272, 289 McNaughton, James, 8, 25, 28, 217, 224, 250, 282 Meillassoux, Quentin, 43 Meldegg, Stéphan, 179 Mercier, Vivian, 4, 286 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 282 Miller, Eugene F., 13 Miller, Tyrus, 29 Miró, Joan, 159 Mnouchkine, Ariane, 180 Mooney, Sinéad, 29, 58, 60 Moore, George Henry, 61 Moore, Thomas, 234 Morel, Benedict, 139, 144 Morin, Emilie, 2, 3, 5, 8, 10, 11, 25, 26, 28, 36, 39, 58, 61, 81, 123, 162, 179, 217, 218, 223, 224, 250, 265, 284 Mrozek, Slawomir, 188 Mthoba, James, 200 Murphy, Peter, 217 N Nadel, Ira, 157, 164 Nhlapo, Eddie, 200 Nicolas-Fanourakis, Dimitri, 200 Nixon, Mark, 3, 43, 71, 75, 79, 150, 151, 162, 199, 220, 227 Nordau, Max, 128, 139–141, 143–151, 153 Ntshona, Winston, 180, 202–207 Nwandu, Antoinette, 182 O Obey, André, 160 O’Casey, Seán, 179, 184, 187, 215

318

INDEX

O’Connell, J.J., 283 O’Neal, John, 183 Osborne, John, 198 Ostrovski, Grisha, 188

P Palucca, Gret, 162, 166 Pannell, Ian, 10 Parks, Suzan-Lori, 185 Parnell, Charles, 250 Parsons, Cóilín, 195 Pater, Walter, 4 Pearse, Patrick, 235 Péron, Alfred, 227, 228 Pétain, Phillippe, 167 Petrie, George, 239 Picasso, Pablo, 159 Piccolo, Peter, 203, 204 Pilling, John, 31, 56, 59, 75, 95, 189, 255 Pinget, Robert, 218, 219 Pinter, Harold, 2, 4, 186, 198, 214 Poliakov, Léon, 225 Potter, Dennis, 186 Pound, Ezra, 216 Pountney, Rosemary, 79 Power, Mary, 148 Praz, Mario, 152 Prentice, Charles, 145, 150 Proust, Marcel, 144 Purcell, Siobhán, 141, 149

Q Quackenbush, Hope, 209 Quayson, Ato, 7 Quirici, Marion, 145

R Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 3, 128, 135 Rada, Michelle, 46

Rancière, Jacques, 26–30, 33–35, 40, 41 Rank, Otto, 112, 113, 115, 116, 287 Reitlinger, Gerald, 225 Resnais, Alain, 225 Richardson, Brian, 72 Riefenstahl, Leni, 157 Rimbaud, Arthur, 152 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 187, 306 Robinson, Lennox, 254 Roe, Samuel, 74, 253 Ronen, Ilan, 195 Rudmose-Brown, Thomas, 219 Ruskin, John, 144

S Saddiki, Tayeb, 188 Sadeler, Johann, 99, 103 Saiu, Octavian, 10 Salisbury, Laura, 8, 56, 57 Santner, Eric, 128 Sarraute, Nathalie, 187 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 5, 27, 187, 215, 216 Schlegel, Friedrich, 62 Schmitt, Carl, 127, 216 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 97, 109, 134 Seaver, Richard, 189 Serreau, Jean-Marie, 188 Seyrig, Delphine, 180 Siebers, Tobin, 160, 164, 165, 168 Sinclair, Peggy, 112 Slemon, John, 201, 202 Slote, Sam, 71, 79, 82 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 186, 187, 214 Somerville, Edith, 254 Sontag, Susan, 159, 168, 181, 182, 195, 223, 264, 266–269, 272, 274, 275, 277 Spencer, Herbert, 146, 221

INDEX

Spenser, Edmund, 282 Stalin, Joseph, 215 Stephens, Karen, 288 Stewart, Paul, 8, 12, 14, 93, 108, 109, 116, 219 Stoker, Bram, 260 Surkis, Judith, 155 Sussman, Henry, 6, 40 Suvin, Darko, 4, 5 Swift, Jonathan, 149, 308 Synge, John Millington, 58, 61, 184 T Tardieu, Jean, 180 Tarn, Adam, 188 Tlili, Mustapha, 189 Toller, Ernst, 159 Tranter, Rhys, 26, 224, 285 U Ueberweg, Friedrich, 151 Uhlmann, Anthony, 44, 128 Uys, Pieter-Dirk, 197, 203–206 V Valente, Joseph, 257 Van Gogh, Vincent, 80–82 Van Hulle, Dirk, 29, 43, 69, 73, 77, 78, 80, 82

319

Verhulst, Pim, 217, 218 von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 153 W Ward, Douglas Turner, 183 Watt, Stephen, 6 Weedon, Chris, 291 Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin, 110, 113 Weisberg, David, 6 Weiss, Katherine, 7, 27 Weller, Shane, 29, 69, 73, 77, 80, 82, 108, 109, 134, 222, 273 Whitelaw, Billie, 100 Wiesel, Elie, 225 Wigman, Mary, 166 Wilde, Oscar, 61, 184 Williams, Raymond, 5, 40, 252 Williams, Sam, 200 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 43 Wolff, Ellen M., 255 Woodworth, R.S., 95, 96, 264 Y Yeats, Jack B., 217 Yeats, W.B., 237, 254, 255 Z Zedong, Mao, 41 Žižek, Slavoj, 41, 42