“An Anthropomorphic Insolence of Short Duration”

Abstract

Compared with other ancient Greek myths of royal investiture, the Oedipus myth offers an unusual picture of masculine development. Oedipus's intellectual heroism (vis-à-vis the Sphinx) marks him as a representative of mankind's self-declared triumph over the natural world. However, in compliance with mythic logic, it also dooms him to incest and parricide. Beckett plays on this mythic inextricability of human identity and self-consciousness with incest and, especially in his famous trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable (originally published in French, 1950-52), he represents masculinity as a condition that simultaneously contests and capitulates to the apparent inevitability of myth. Beckett's characters treat the Oedipus myth (and especially Freud's interpretation of its centrality to human development) as an absurd but necessary narrative blueprint around which they can construct their own otherwise ungrounded musings on human nature and masculine identity.