Beckett's Bodies in the Trilogy, or Life as a Pensum

Abstract

Beckett's literary bilingualism challenges in unique ways notions of national literature, literary traditions and histories. The cosmopolitan literary movements with which the Irish author has been associated, on the one hand, and his systematic literary bilingualism, on the other, make it difficult to assign him definite precursors and place his work in a well-defined national literary history. Similarly, the biographies of Beckett's characters become arduous to establish as his œuvre unfolds. When the author switches to French and first-person narrators in 1946, his anti-narrative strategies and corollary enterprise of desubjectification disinherit his characters and ‘nip’ their life stories ‘in the bud.’ Beckett's ensuing practice of self-translation complicates matters further as his works come under the sway of a double genealogy. This essay reconsiders the questions of filiations, affiliations and genealogies in Beckett's works by focusing on the pivotal role of the body in the trilogy. It identifies the trajectory of the body in the novels and traces the gradual loss of its physical integrity as it is borne across languages. Drawing on three terms that resonate throughout the novels and appear in a key passage in Beckett's monograph on Proust: ‘body’, ‘pensum’ and ‘defunctus,’ it analyzes their interconnections in the novels to foreground a decomposing body that becomes liable for the narrators' linguistic failure. The essay ultimately suggests that the bilingual œuvre taken as a whole intimates the end of genealogies and substitutes for the principle of generation that of an organic corporeal life lived as a pensum.