Abstract
This chapter explores the figure of the refugee in Beckett in a double sense. In the first instance, it considers Beckett’s work as comment on the fate of the international, political victim who suffers forced migration. In the second sense, it analyses the feeling of Beckett’s work as one representative of a mobile subjectivity that challenges Cartesian self-containment and with it forms of subjectivity that exclude the other. 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.
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Notes
- 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).
- 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).
- 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.
- 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.
- 6.
These notes are held in Trinity College Dublin Library; MS 10971/7 and MS 10971/8.
- 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).
- 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.
- 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 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).
- 10.
For a recent treatment of Beckett’s time at Saint Lô, see Davies.
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Sharkey, R. (2021). Towards a Modernism with Meaning: Beckett’s Refugees. In: Davies, W., Bailey, H. (eds) Beckett and Politics. New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47110-1_17
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