Late Modern Rigmarole: Boredom as Form in Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy

Abstract

Bored of Beckett At the least, it is fair to say that the work of Samuel Beckett resists the easy periodization schemes of twentieth-century literary history. Situated both historically and stylistically between the high modernism of Joyce and Proust on one side, and an emergent postmodern, metafictional style on the other, Beckett has been critically conscripted into the service of both camps by displaying in his work elements of each, while at the same time denying their ready-to-hand formal taxonomies. Two studies with similar titles illustrate this point: Anthony Cronin’s biography Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (1997) figures its subject as the final avatar of modernist aesthetic practice, pushing it “to a degree which was unusual and obsessive even among the modernist masters” (376); meanwhile, Richard Begam’s Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity (1996) portrays a postmodernist avant la lettre, “anticipat[ing], often in strikingly prescient ways, many of the defining themes and ideas of Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida” (4). The difference between these titles equally charts the trajectory of Beckett criticism, with Cronin’s text aligning neatly with the early humanist-existentialist readings of Martin Esslin and Hugh Kenner, and Begam’s with the attention to linguistic differance subsequently explored by Thomas Tresize, Steven Connor, and Leslie Hill. These competing modern and postmodern periodizing narratives seem to have arrived at a point of exhaustion: the early emphasis on nihilism and absurdity now appears dated; the deconstructionist machine has begun to produce predictable results. The debate about Beckett’s modernism or postmodernism is irresolvable, and its terms have become somewhat tedious; the early, major novels from Murphy (1938) through the trilogy Molloy (1955), Malone Dies (1956), and The