Irish Setters and Palestine Retrievers: Liberal Zionism in Beckett’s Watt Manuscripts

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Samuel Beckett wrote Watt in occupied France. Its defining theme would be complicity. From the Watt manuscripts, we can glean insights into what Beckett was thinking as he tried to work through the rise of fascism and France’s capitulation to it. Central to that attempt was an artistic dialogue – vigorously comic but also rigorously ethical – with W. B. Yeats. Watt is, among other things, an Irish Big House novel, and it revolves around the problem of disposing of a landlord’s leftovers by way of a dog – or colony of famished dogs – bred for that purpose. This has been read as a parody of liberal political economy with its founding problem of waste. In the manuscripts, the ideal breed of dog for the task is a cross between an Irish setter and a Palestine retriever. I read this detail as a critique of the biopolitics of liberal Zionism, which Beckett understands as an aspect of the biopolitics of liberal colonialism more generally. Zionism’s early forays into Palestine were already enmeshed in the same colonial dynamics that had shaped the English occupation of Ireland. Characteristically, Beckett covered his tracks as he moved towards publication. But the manuscripts, written in the white heat of occupation, trace the emergence of his ethical response, both to Yeats’s incipient fascism and the liberal pretensions of the Zionist project.