Beckett's Present Moments

Abstract

As a comfortable middle-class Protestant in Southern Ireland, Beckett was well placed to live the life of what Badiou ironically refers to as ‘the deserving body’ (59). However, Beckett moved beyond such home comforts to witness at close hand some of the most disruptive moments of twentieth century European history. This essay proposes that his work is both a manifestation of that history and a complex response to it in its content, and, particularly, in its form. In Aesthetic Theory, Theodore Adorno proposes that ‘the unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form’ (7). Exemplifying Adorno's proposition that ‘aesthetic form is sedimented context’ (9) Beckett's work remains disruptive of Western late capital commodification through the restatement of historical antagonisms that involve characters having to choose between privilege and impoverishment, quietism and protest, and being and its obliteration. The result is a body of work that continues to present, for its readers’ consideration, the parameters of a politics of choice which are repeatedly instantiated by the traces of the tumultuous history the work carries within itself. As the decisions facing Beckett's characters reflected those faced by late twentieth century European society, so too his work now resonates in the present moment as the contemporary world struggles in the shadow of neo-liberal capitalism and COVID-19.