Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath by James McNaughton, Beckett’s Political Imagination by Emilie Morin

Abstract

The publication of James McNaughton’s superb Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath hard on the heels of Emile Morin’s equally impressive Beckett’s Political Imagination suggests the delayed confirmation of a political turn (to join so many other “turns”—from the linguistic to the historical and ethical) in Beckett studies. On the one hand, the books could be said to represent an outcome that the field has been waiting for since the mid-1990s and the publication of James Knowlson’s and Anthony Cronin’s major biographies, which helped to better position the life and career of one of the twentieth century’s most important and enigmatic authors in relation to the many upheavals that characterized his times. McNaughton’s and Morin’s recent investigations have also been spurred along by the publication of Beckett’s letters in four volumes beginning a decade ago, as well as Mark Nixon’s work on Beckett’s German diaries, which chronicle the writer’s encounters with the Nazi regime in late 1936 and early 1937. On the other hand, the present studies could also be said to represent a fruition of the broader political turn in the study of modernist writing, which has finally brought this kind of inquiry to an author who has long been considered outside or beyond politics, somehow impervious to the kinds of questions that have defined so much of the New Modernist Studies. To be sure, although Beckett was in some sense the heir, or at least the successor, to Yeats and the literary revivalists in Ireland and a contemporary of engagé intellectuals such as Sartre and Camus in France, his career generally confounds the categories of national literature and “committed” writing. Nonetheless, as McNaughton’s and Morin’s studies demonstrate, to ignore the political implications of his writing is to miss much of what makes it so exceptional and, indeed, continues to make it relevant as both a reckoning with the tumult of the last century and a means of coming to terms with the present, as he is reread and restaged in the context of more recent upheavals.These studies, despite their differences, approach the question of Beckett and politics in ways that are neatly complementary, forming a useful pairing for anyone seeking to better grasp the significance of the question. Morin’s meticulously researched study seeks to provide something akin to a political biography, placing the writer squarely in his historical milieu, at the intersection of innumerable national movements, institutional affiliations, professional commitments, and, perhaps most crucially, personal associations: we are reminded, for instance, of Beckett’s friendship with the memoirist and former IRA commander Ernie O’Malley; his relationship with George Pelorson, a pupil at the École normale supérieure who would later head the Ministry of Youth’s propaganda unit in occupied France; and his support of Jérôme Lindon as the Parisian publisher coordinated protests against French aggression in Algeria. By tracing out these connections, Beckett’s Political Imagination gives us the fullest picture we have of the political environment that has for so long been recognized as a relevant backdrop to his literary career, even if earlier critics have mostly ignored the finer details of the writer’s entanglements with that milieu. What McNaughton’s study does so well is to demonstrate, with a series of adroit close readings, just how these entanglements bear on the form of Beckett’s writing and how the latter confronts, if often obliquely, the historical narratives and ideological imperatives that shaped his surroundings. In doing so, Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath offers us an image of a writer who was not only politically aware, but whose work consistently confronts our failed responses to modernity, whether aesthetic or philosophical, precisely by emphasizing political and historical problems.In recent years, a considerable amount of scholarship, including Morin’s previous book, Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness (2010), and McNaughton’s essays in several venues, has been dedicated to the often vexed relationship between the writer and his homeland. Much work has been done to demonstrate how Beckett’s early writing responds to the competing legacies of Irish nationalism and British imperialism and how his later writing continues to be bound to his memories of his native country, long after he left it for good. If this scholarship has already given us a glimpse of a “political” Beckett, the volumes under review give us a much fuller picture precisely by integrating accounts of his formative years with the longer narrative of how a little-known Irish writer, who suffered innumerable rejections and defeats, eventually became an internationally celebrated figure, credited with providing penetrating insights into the state of humanity after the Holocaust. Seeking out the stories of his friends and associates, Morin gathers together an image of the political culture that surrounded Beckett in Dublin during the 1920s and 1930s, including his involvement not just with O’Malley but with other Irish republicans and socialists, such as Peadar O’Donnell and Charlie Gilmore, who represented political orientations very much at odds with the Unionism that pervaded the Beckett home in suburban Foxrock. Perhaps most revelatory, however, is the detailed work that Morin’s book does to position Beckett’s occasional writings, including “Censorship and the Saorstat” (written 1934, published 1983) and “Recent Irish Poetry” (1934) within cultural debates taking place in the Dáil Éireann (the lower house of the Irish Parliament) and the Dublin popular press during the 1930s, at the same time as his attention to fascism and intolerance on the Continent was awakening.McNaughton’s study takes account of the political situation in the Irish Free State and what we know of Beckett’s youthful psychology in order to discern how his early writings work to dismantle the cynical interpretations that shaped this political milieu. This mode of reading is consistently productive of new insights into these texts, and even develops a nuanced account of the fate of modernism in Ireland, as Beckett negotiates between Irish provincialism and the metropolitan perspectives of France and England. Focusing on “Dante and the Lobster” (1934), the first chapter draws attention to the repeated allusions to sensationalist newspaper accounts of the execution of Henry McCabe, a real-life gardener summarily executed for the alleged murder of his employers in 1926. With these circumstances clearly in view, we can more easily make out how Beckett’s protagonist, the would-be modernist Belacqua, is conditioned by his environment to acquiesce to the intertwining logics of consumer society and the bourgeois state as he anticipates his dinner that evening: “the force of habit,” according to McNaughton, “prepares Belacqua to accept the lobster being boiled alive to satisfy his appetite, and more importantly, to accept McCabe’s execution” (39). It is not possible to do justice to the nuances of McNaughton’s argument here, but suffice it to say that his readings track the various ways that Beckett’s writing calls into question habituated, ideologically laden language that shuts down or deflects effective political engagement. He extends this line of inquiry into the next chapter, on “Echo’s Bones” (written in 1933, published in 2014), by examining how Beckett’s long-unpublished story parodies the language of both Irish and Continental politics, including Yeats’s advocacy for the Protestant Ascendancy and the emerging specter of fascism in Ireland and abroad. The result is a more distinct picture of the young Irish writer as an aspiring cosmopolitan intellectual, who is indifferent to the legacy of Ascendancy and yet skeptical of the promises of the newly founded Irish Free State, as he continues to drift farther and farther from his Irish affiliations: “Provincialism in Beckett’s work,” as McNaughton pithily concludes, “is not an excuse for irresponsibility, but its source; not a lack of modernity, but its fulfilment” (40).In her study, Morin makes clear that this drift away from home was already well underway in the early 1930s, as Beckett undertook the translation of Nancy Cunard’s groundbreaking Negro: An Anthology (1934). As Morin shows in her second chapter, Beckett’s work as a translator of the volume, with its global account of Black struggle and achievement, not only exposed the young man to ways of thinking about race and prejudice that were distant from his upbringing in the Dublin suburbs; it also brought him into contact with the Surrealist’s critique of French colonialism: indeed, according to Morin, Cunard’s anthology was “the first English language publication to give substance to the idea of a Surrealist political front, tied to major internationalist movements for equality and social justice” (118). Although in his study McNaughton rightly points out that Beckett’s correspondence reveals he was not entirely impressed with the contributions to the anthology and was even skeptical about the project as a whole, Morin is able to demonstrate, through attentive readings of the translations, how much care the young writer gave to the work—and even to glean how his evolving understanding of anticolonial politics impacted his translation practices. She is able to draw similar lessons from his efforts as a translator for UNESCO after the war although, as she points out, Beckett was rather ambivalent about the work because “the liberal humanism sponsored by the organization and its internal politics were deeply alien to him” (122). If the account of his translation of Anthology of Mexican Poetry (later known as Mexican Poetry: An Anthology), edited by Octavio Paz, yields some insight into Beckett’s political attitudes in the late 1940s, what is perhaps more valuable in this chapter is the detailed image of his political milieu, in the company of Paz and the likes of Jean-Jacques Mayoux and Emile Delavenay, as they participated in the UNESCO mission with varying degrees of commitment.This attention to Beckett’s efforts as a translator is evidence of the sustained and still growing interest in the so-called grey canon of his work, which also includes the almost innumerable letters, manuscripts, and notebooks that he generated over the course of his long career. As I suggested at the outset, these documents have been crucial in driving the historical and now, more specifically, political turns in Beckett studies, with the present investigations giving particular attention to his German diaries. Morin mines these texts—jotted down as Beckett traveled through the country, visiting museums and galleries, but also witnessing Nazi celebrations, discussing current events, and reading local newspapers—for details that reveal his developing political sensitivities in the face of the Third Reich. Listening to the radio, he transcribed the Völkisch propaganda of Josef Goebbels and Rudolph Hess, as if to better understand its sway over the German people, and found himself at a charity event for the Hitler-Franco alliance, which he coyly protested by performing the Nazi salute with his left arm. But while specifics like these from the diaries remain only anecdotal and suggestive for Morin, they take on the status of something like an interpretive key for McNaughton. This is not to say that the diaries render visible what is occluded or encoded in his literary works, but that they demonstrate a certain kind of political literacy, a sensitivity to ideology, that we can trace into the literary works, as well as a formal response to the versions of German history and the Nazi propaganda that repulsed Beckett during his travels. Close attention to these features of the diaries allows McNaughton to see significant parallels in Watt (written 1942–44, published 1953), which he reads as “a dark parable of the challenges of confronting institutional authority” (61) that reactivates literary form and linguistic experiment in the context of a historical maelstrom. Written during the war but set in Ireland, the novel is both about and not about the Nazi image of history and its warrant for violence: “Watt investigates the strategies that allow one to profit from complacency, valorizing doing nothing, defending the status quo simply because one benefits from it, and rationalizing the past in a manner that exculpates one from addressing injustices in the present” (78). This is a reading, as McNaughton acknowledges, that is all but unavailable without access to the diaries, which enable us to interpret enigmatic scenarios in the novel that the narrative calls into question precisely for what they neglect or omit.It has long been held, as a kind of critical orthodoxy, that Beckett’s writing is intimately related to the ordeal of the Second World War and its aftermath, even if critics have too often failed to specify the precise nature of this relationship, opting instead for vague or universalizing claims that tacitly refuse to acknowledge the force of his political aesthetic. Perhaps the most significant contribution that Morin’s and McNaughton’s studies make is to return to that critical orthodoxy (with the full breadth of the grey canon now available to them) and to seek ways to scrupulously reconsider and rearticulate its unspoken assumptions. The key term for each critic in this reconsideration is “aftermath,” though again they often approach the concept in divergent ways. Morin acknowledges that, for most critics, “Beckett’s writing remains inextricably bound to the aftermath of the Second World War and its traumas” (130), though her account cannot offer much new information about Beckett’s activity during the war, since there is very little extant record of these years. But her research does provide a meticulous portrait of his position in French literary and political life following the liberation: his attitudes toward the fate of collaborationist intellectuals, his place among the contributors to Les temps modernes, his interest in books on the legacy of the war, even his brief stay at the Lutetia Hotel, which had become a site of considerable strategic value for both the Germans and the French in these years. Significantly, in her third chapter on “the politics of testimony,” Morin identifies the integration of contemporary political idioms into his postwar fiction and drama, although most of her attention to this period of intensive composition in the late 1940s is dedicated to the political environment that surrounded Beckett as he wrote his most celebrated works: the mass repatriations after the war, the sanctions against collaborationist intellectuals, the emerging details of the Holocaust. McNaughton’s focus, on the other hand, continually returns to the literary texts in order to demonstrate, for instance, how Malone Dies (1951) negotiates the relationship between writing and bodily suffering, in a chapter that connects Beckett’s daily observations regarding the workings of propaganda and mass coercion in Germany with both the internal movements of his writing and the murderous history of the war years.Both studies converge in their assessment of Beckett’s “Siege in the Room,” and both demonstrate that war testimony is a mode of writing relevant to, even consonant with, his artistic project. In this, they follow, but also try to find a way beyond, Theodor Adorno’s contention that Beckett’s texts were written “in the ashes of Auschwitz” (quoted in Morin, 130) and address the aftermath of the Holocaust in their very refusal to represent directly the events of recent history, even as they abjure ahistorical philosophical abstractions. Calling on a constellation of texts, including “Suite” (1946), Mercier and Camier (written 1946, published 1947), Eleutheria (written 1947, published 1995), Molloy (1951), and The Unnamable (1953), Morin locates Beckett’s postwar writing—its concern with violence, victimization, and internment—in relation to the emergence of a new testimonial literature in France after the war, even if his texts travel along an opposed trajectory. “Beckett’s texts reverse the premise of such literature, rendering history as unintelligible, and the process of telling as burdened by too many demands to enable the articulation of testimony” (131). McNaughton focuses on a particular testimonial, Georges Loustaunau-Lacau’s “Chiens maudits”: Souvenirs d’un rescapé des bagnes hiltériens (1945)—which recounts, among other things, the experience of Beckett’s friend, Alfred Péron, in the Mauthausen concentration camp—in order to demonstrate how The Unnamable intersects with camp literature, especially the ways that their language is both strained by and implicated in the mass atrocities of the Nazi period. The claim here is not, or not just, that Beckett’s writing engages in an epistemological and linguistic inquiry into the failure of representation. Instead, through a masterful reading of the novel’s radically eccentric prose, McNaughton’s approach demonstrates how the narrator’s own inquiry into the failure of representation, including his rapid oscillations between the abstract and the concrete, the corporeal and the performative, are best understood as a response to horrors he can hardly bring himself to face. In this way, put succinctly, “Beckett’s work brings the reader and critics to a place where the ethics of representation are at their most perilous” (108).One regrets that McNaughton did not pursue this thesis into the prose and theater fragments written in the late 1950s, as France became more deeply embroiled in the Algerian War of Independence. To be sure, much less has been written about the role of this conflict, and the controversies that surrounded it, in Beckett’s literary imagination than about the influence of the Second World War on his writing; and Beckett himself, in an era of petitions, appeals, and open letters, expressed a reluctance to weigh in on the matter publicly, because he still saw himself as something of an outsider in France. But Morin, in a chapter that covers the Algerian War, makes an important contribution to our understanding of this context and its bearing on Beckett’s work. She provides a detailed picture of the artistic and intellectual environment in Paris in the late 1950s, populated by ardent dissenters, including Jérôme Lindon and many of his authors at Éditions Minuit, as well as Beckett’s most important collaborators in the theater, Roger Blin and Jean Martin, who both paid a heavy price for their opposition to the war. She also details the many daily reminders of the war that the author would have encountered in Paris, including the view from his new apartment of La Santé prison, where hunger strikes and executions of National Liberation Front activists were a regular occurrence. But perhaps most significant for Beckett’s work was the French use of torture, which became a key factor in growing opposition toward the war. With attention to How It Is (1961) and Rough for Theatre (written in the late 1950s, premiered in 1979), Morin demonstrates that the texts Beckett wrote at the apex of antiwar sentiment contain images of torture that “carry explicit political resonances” (232), even if they cannot be “indexed to a stable context” (236) because these allusions fuse with a range of cultural referents. But, according to this thesis, Beckett’s work is nonetheless capable of shedding light “on the hard face of politics” (249) by persistently probing the dispossession and distress generated by the integration of violence and state power characteristic of modernity.If the contextual details and brief analyses in Morin’s timely study are consistently suggestive of this often-ignored capacity in Beckett’s writing, the conceptual framework and close readings in McNaugton’s valuable book bear out this suggestiveness, offering us a more intricate understanding of how this capacity is actualized in the innovative forms of Beckett’s prose and drama. The final chapter of McNaughton’s study, “‘Prophetic Relish’: Famine Politics in Beckett’s Endgame,” takes a bigger historical leap than the others by connecting Stalinist famine politics and the rise of the Nazi regime in the early 1930s to a play written in the late 1950s, but in doing so it bears out the role of political memory, of aftermath, in Beckett’s writing. According to this reading, the play takes place in a spectral version of the “Lebensraum” (“living room”), imagined by Hitler as a space where the German people could secure the soil needed for their survival and continued security through a racial war. In this way, McNaughton convincingly challenges existential interpretations of the play that read it as an allegory of “time-as-death” by highlighting the historical predicaments of food power and grain hoarding that pervade the entire drama. With this careful reading and those throughout the book, McNaughton largely succeeds in his aim to illuminate the “problem of form” and the “antagonisms of reality” (11) that Adorno evokes in his reading of Beckett, though the philosopher never traces through the textual effects and modes of power invoked in his work. In concert with Morin, then, McNaughton offers us a clearer vision of the political implications of a body of writing that, despite its undeniable importance for the literature of the last century, has mostly eluded the efforts of critics to articulate its precise significance, its full implications, for a world living in the aftermath of the Second World War. But if their books have confirmed the “political turn” in Beckett studies, this is not the end of the road: they open up the possibility of additional fine-grained attention to the political valences of Beckett’s “Siege” writings and to the increasingly abstracted and attenuated writings produced after his Nobel Prize in 1969, writing that still awaits a comprehensive treatment of its political effects.