Beckett, Evangelicalism and the Biopolitics of Famine

This chapter responds to James McNaughton’s reading of Endgame and Watt in light of the food politics of Hitler and Stalin. It recovers the significance to both works of the biopolitics of English relief efforts during the Irish Famine. It suggests that Beckett’s interest in Ireland’s limit event was shaped by his sense of complicity in British colonial atrocity by way of his family’s evangelical heritage.

‘no human shape’: Unformed Life in The Unnamable

This chapter argues that Beckett’s antipathy to normative ideas of bodily and aesthetic form derives from his resistance to the Nazi politics of art. It utilises theories from disability studies and the work of Michel Foucault and Roberto Esposito to reconsider Beckett’s post-war aesthetic of deformation, framing it as a response to the inextricable connection between biopolitics and aesthetic form in the Third Reich. It offers a reading of The Unnamable that deviates from critical accounts that cast Beckett’s text as a redemptive moral critique of Nazi biopolitics. Beckett denies the reassuring conflation of degenerate artistry with passive, nonviolent exposure to Nazi violence. The degenerate artist, as figured in The Unnamable, is both victim and perpetrator in a closed circuit of biopolitical violence and aesthetic (de)formation.

Beckett’s Queer Time of Défaillance: Ritual and Resistance in Happy Days

This chapter draws on Beckett’s Happy Days production notebooks to argue against critical assessments of Winnie as an exemplar of British pluck. Rather, the domestic rituals she performs serve to distract her from ever-encroaching entropy. Read in queer time, as chrononormative regulators, Winnie’s rituals are recast as coping mechanisms that help to normalise her abnormal situation. Happy Days thus challenges prevailing understandings of the politics of queer time, queer failure, and performance. Happy Days is read historically as a response to late capitalism’s regulatory regimes. Winnie’s queer experience of time is the audience’s, too, and her failures implicate them in their own attachments to deadening routine. Winnie’s performance of internalised discipline models (and critiques) how commodity culture deadens existence, but also how theatre as spectacle normalises suffering.

Beckett’s Safe Words: Normalising Torture in How It Is

Samuel Beckett excused himself from his affair with Pamela Mitchell with a syntactically evocative phrase: ‘It is I the hurter of the two’. The definite article is telling: How it is (1964 [1961]) universalises one cruel, asymmetric, pseudo-amorous relationship, deducing from it ‘billions’ of similarly helpless, prostrate, mud-bound ‘creatures’, exchanging roles as torturers and victims in a leniently egalitarian distribution of suffering. Titled ‘Pim’ from 1958 until its publication, Beckett’s last, long, prose-like work happened to coincide with the Algerian War of Independence, during which the French authorities tortured captured revolutionary fighters with scant concern for the European Convention on Human Rights. Their pretext was semantic: a novel legal category was invented, ‘pris les armes à la main’, or PAM—a likely homophone both of How it is’s protagonist and of Beckett’s recent ex. Using contemporaneous news reports and recent feminist historical scholarship, ‘Safe Words’ argues that the author’s biographic reminiscences have been transposed onto documented examples of state-sanctioned torture of Algerian women in particular. The essay tentatively concludes that everyday, prosaic acts of gendered domination might not be quite as qualitatively different from official violence as certain readers would wish to believe.

‘As if the sex matters’: Beckett, Barthes and Endgame in Love

This chapter reads Beckett's Endgame alongside another prominent work of the mid-century French literary context, Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse: Fragments. It proposes that queer readings of Beckett's play have emphasized queer sexual relations and sexual acts at the cost of attending to the experience of love as itself a potentially queered condition. Emphasizing the relationship of Clov and Hamm as an ongoing dialogue in the sense of that undertaken by Barthes's figure of the plagued Romantic lover, or l'amoureux, this reading finds in Barthes's work precisely the critical vocabulary to make the queer experience and relations of Beckett's play visible.

Narrating Disruption: Realist Fiction and The Politics of Form in Watt

Samuel Beckett’s Watt is, in some obvious sense, a war book. However, it is often read in eccentric relation to its historical context. Citing both Ireland’s neutrality policies and Beckett’s encounters with Nazism, James McNaughton (2018) reads the novel as a sustained interrogation of modern mechanisms of propaganda and state control. If the Irish setting displaces any immediate wartime connections, the absurd reasoning Watt deploys offers a frightening allegory for the barbaric logics of fascism. This essay both extends and complicates this reading by looking back to the critiques of realist fiction that Beckett developed over a decade earlier in his lectures on the history of the novel at Trinity College, Dublin, and in his own first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women. In doing so, it explores the extent to which Watt represents a culmination of formal experimentation that was put in train at the beginning of Beckett’s career, a process which gained dramatic political urgency in a world at war.

‘Here all is strange’: Beckett beyond the Normal

This chapter introduces Beckett beyond the Normal. It argues that Beckett’s writing before World War Two was influenced by his experience of mental illness and psychoanalytic therapy. He was invalidated by illness, alienated from Ireland’s normalising society, and turned to writing to express his struggles in artistic form. After the war, he saw how Hitler’s Nazis and the Stalinist purges had changed everything, and began to search for a new form of art that could accommodate the mess.

Murphy and the Tao of Autism

The purpose of this chapter is not to discover the presence of autism in Samuel Beckett’s Murphy, but to bury its recent discovery in order to relocate autism as a magnetising and mobilising absence in the novel – not something that is lacking or deficient in itself, as the ableist constructions of autism propose, but a difference that is lacking, or better yet wanting, in the eponymous non-autistic protagonist and, by metaphorical extension, in neurotypical subjectivity as such. I denominate this lack, this want, the objet petit a(u), with the translingual pun that entails on the Lacanian Other.

‘He wants to know if it hurts!’: Suffering beyond Redemption in Waiting for Godot

Although the characters in Waiting for Godot exist in near-constant states of physical pain, Beckett’s play repeatedly emphasises obstacles to any shared or empathetic experience of suffering, both onstage and across the auditorium space. Waiting for Godot does not offer any clear model of compassion as a means of relieving another being’s distress. Rather, by delineating its characters’ indifference to each other’s pain, and by foregrounding the spectator’s own impassivity and even recoil in the face of suffering, the play highlights just how narrow these bounds of human compassion seem to be. This chapter draws on contemporary pain studies to read the unsettling charge of Waiting for Godot’s interrogation of pain’s incomprehensibility, resisting previous determinedly optimistic, humanist-inflected reading of suffering as redemptive in Beckett’s play.