Beckett, Benjamin and the Modern Crisis in Communication

Abstract

Beckett has so far largely defied sociological analysis, and most scholars are still preoccupied with the psychological and philosophical aspects of his work.' In an attempt to move towards a sociological perspective which could help to define more precisely the place and function of Beckett's writings in contemporary Western society, I am going to make use of Walter Bejnamin's theory of literary production, which provides an explanation of the crisis in communication and aesthetic perception that has been constitutive for many modern writers since the turn of the century. In drawing this connection, which surprisingly has so far escaped attention, I am not considering Beckett's oeuvre in toto, but only those texts which he wrote a few years after World War II Waiting for Godot and the novel trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies and Unnamable. I shall assume that his later plays and novels can be seen as a consistent development of the earlier themes and problems, some of which he had already formulated in his major aesthetic manifesto, the essay on Proust of 1931. This treatise raised issues strikingly similar to those which Benjamin discussed a few years later in his Illuminations essays, particularly The Storyteller and On Some Motifs in Baudelaire. They deal with the concepts of storytelling, memory and experience which provide focal points for the comparative analysis of Benjamin's aesthetic theory and Beckett's literary practice.2 When Beckett arrived on the European scene, he was received by a