Beckett, Vichy, Maurras, and the Body: Premier amour and Nouvelles

Abstract

This essay is about the relation between the treatment of the body in Beckett's major French texts of 1945–6 and the Vichy regime. It examines Vichy conceptions of physical life and their effect on Beckett's texts, considering those texts as responses to them. It addresses the ideological construction of the body in France 1940–4 and its connection with Vichy pastoralism, folkloric regionalism, natalism, familialism, and paternalism; the historical materiality of mutilated, impoverished, ‘inferior’, and expelled bodies and their significance under Vichy; and the influence on the Vichyite conception of the body of Le Play, Barrès, and above all Maurras, his nationalism, provincialism, and reactionary aesthetics. Beckett's letters show him to have been dismissive of these influences. Premier amour and the Nouvelles repeatedly evoke certain features of the experience of bodily life under Vichy. They also conduct a war on Vichyite, Pétainist, and Maurrasian body politics and its moral terrorism, not least because the ideological construction of the body in Vichy France was strikingly close to that in de Valera's Ireland. The texts are a weird, ironical hymn to incapacity, to the ‘second-rate’ or ‘defective’ body. This in turn dictates the specific character of Beckett's break with representation at this time.