Aristeus and Thanatos. Samuel Beckett’s Insect Poetics Creepy

Abstract

In the broadest possible terms, this paper aims at exploring the relation between death and insects in Samuel Beckett with a special emphasis put on the fact that it is insects that form one of the most repetitive and complex animal figures in his oeuvre. Surprisingly, his otherwise desolate and bleak spaces – despite the inherent anthropocentric framework they are founded on – are inhabited by the plethora of nonhuman species. Insects are here no exception; Beckett’s writings are abundant in references to flies, bees, hornets, wasps, or ants. The paper begins with confronting Alain Badiou’s take on Beckett with Rosi Braidotti’s and Giorgio Agamben’s theories, including the anthropological machine. It is argued that, contrary to the human figures condemned to ceaseless agony and torment deprived of the ultimate horizon of death, insects belong entirely to the realm of death in Beckett; in other words, they struggle to breach through the wall of life. In order to prove that, I discuss the unclear ontological status of Worm in The Unnamable. Moreover, the paper reconstructs Moran’s relation to his bees, depicted in Molloy, including his insightful study of the waggle dance and the discovery of their cadavers. Finally, the paper focuses on the logic of a swarm, which Beckett seems to be fascinated with, and the metonymies of insect tropes and technology, whose Thanatic aspects disclose the unsettling connections between humans and nonhumans in Beckett’s works.