Beckett's Political Imagination by Emilie Morin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Beckett's Political Imagination by Emilie Morin Erika Mihálycsa (bio) Beckett's Political Imagination, by Emilie Morin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 276 pp. $41.99 cloth, $29.99 paper, $24.00 ebook. "None of the three," Samuel Beckett is documented answering the question if he was "a Christian, a Jew, or an atheist," according to Emilie Morin (75). At face value, it was one of his characteristic disengagements from fixed identities, but the question was far from neutral: it featured in a court deposition, in November 1937, where Beckett appeared as key witness in the libel action against Oliver St. John Gogarty, in whose memoir As I Was Going Down Sackville Street Beckett's late uncle, the art dealer William Sinclair, had been portrayed with the full array of anti-Semitic stereotypes, culminating in allegations of pedophilia.1 In this case, much publicized on account of Gogarty's prominence as former senator, and initiated to defend the reputation of a man whom racial laws had recently forced to leave Nazi Germany, Beckett was publicly pilloried by the defense as a dubitable anti-Celticist literary figure; the "shrill and enshrined anti-Semitism" (73) of the court register illustrates well the ominous political overtones against which much of Beckett's writing and his few public statements were articulated. The event is one of hundreds investigated in Morin's groundbreaking Beckett's Political Imagination, a veritable archaeology of the enmeshed political and aesthetic contexts of Beckett's bilingual work that examines in particular his harnessing of politically charged linguistic codes. With that, it corrects the reading that has remained dominant since the institutionalization, in Anglophone academia, of "French" theory, of a sphinx-like Beckett of Blanchovian extraction, in whose work even the constitutive historical events and traumas are refined out of recognizability. Morin's book proves, rather, that this work is studded with historically and politically over-determined referents, published in intensely politicized venues, which played a key role in drawing attention to collaborationism in Vichy France and to colonial policies and wars before and after World War II, as well as to the ultimate scandal, the [End Page 209] naturalization of the discourses of torture and extermination. While such filling-in-the-blanks was initiated in James Knowlson's biography, in the edition of Beckett's letters, and in Andrew Gibson's work, among others,2 Morin's book is certainly the most comprehensive study of its kind. The Gogarty-Sinclair trial was but one of Beckett's many encounters with homegrown anti-Semitism in the 1930s. In reinserting Beckett's early texts, exercises in political satire, reviews, and aborted projects into their original chronotope, Morin shows how they thematize the growing acceptance of Irish and continental brands of fascism, even by literary scions like W. B. Yeats. Similarly, she demonstrates how the mordant early criticism, including the lost review of Yeats's 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse, "violated some powerful political codes" (77), enough to lead to Beckett's isolation in influential Irish literary circles, and certainly enough to justify his qualms expressed in the 1930s letters that his reviewing of contemporary Irish modernists like Denis Devlin in transition might "damage" their reputation in Ireland (78).3 Far from mere self-commiseration, such fears were fueled by a daubing of Beckett by members of the Irish literary establishment in colors tainted by a nativist distrust of continental modernism, amounting to accusations of rootlessness. That this was but coded anti-Semitism becomes shockingly evident in a 1937 letter by a piqued Yeats who states that the "racketeer" Beckett "and [his uncle] the chicken butcher are Jews" (76). This vicious slur casts in a different light Beckett's tongue-in-cheek self-description, years later in Eleutheria, of himself as a mix between "a Jew from Greenland and a peasant from the Auvergne" (146).4 Allegations of Jewishness were a routine method of discrediting intellectual opponents in pre-war Ireland as much as in Vichy France; more than that, they show the roots of Beckett's personal risk-taking in the French Resistance and his continued creative engagement with the occultation of the Shoah, to which he lost...