Rubber genocide in Joyce and Beckett: from Roger Casement’s Congo to Vél d’Hiv and Auschwitz

Abstract

This essay argues that the political imaginations of both James Joyce and Samuel Beckett were shaped by their familiarity with Roger Casement’s official reports on the catastrophic atrocities that accompanied rubber extraction in the Congo Free State (1904) and Putumayo Amazon (1912). Joyce recognized the depopulation in the Congo as of a structural pattern with Ireland’s long history under British imperialism. But in Dubliners, Joyce clothes characters in consumer rubber to ask whether pursuing much-needed Irish autonomy through economic liberalism also risks backsliding into structural racism. Beckett extends the ethics of Joyce’s racial critique to Le dépeupleur (The Lost Ones), in which novella a “little people” are housed in a rubber cylinder. Here an anthropological narrator describes with French colonial tropes and humanist education why this entire population should die. Beckett’s story borrows elements from Casement and Joyce. But it also takes structure and detail from Vél d’Hiv and Drancy, Parisian holding camps for rounded-up Jews, who were then transported to Auschwitz. (Exterminatory labour from Auschwitz III-Monowitz built a factory to produce synthetic rubber, still in use today.) Beckett reworks Joyce’s caution to confront French society with its complicity in Nazi genocide, an evasion of responsibility that he suggests was prepared in colonial racism and the evisceration of intention in humanist and liberal logics. This essay shows, then, an Irish modernist tradition grappling with an ethical basis for understanding comparative genocide.