Abstract
Keeping to the affect-based interpretive framework introduced in Chap. 2 and further developed in Chap. 3, this chapter examines Beckett’s trademark angry humour as articulated in his fiction, further defining his use of the “horrific-comic”—a category of humour directed, unlike earlier, opposition and disjunction-based forms, not at human foibles but at the self-perpetuating and self-serving logics of repression (religious, economic, Oedipal, or socio-political) that typically govern communal living. The last section of the chapter relates Beckett’s radically disruptive comedic mode to Neil’s recent theorization of revolution, which abandons the traditional anchoring of this concept to aspects like the central role of the proletariat/ the capture of the state. The chapter concludes that Beckett’s texts galvanize a form of solidarity free of the dangers of corporate/ authoritarian/ fascistic containment because it is based in a state of mutability facilitating immediate and continual transformation at the contact with others’ struggle and pain.
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- 1.
For an extended discussion of terror in relation to Beckett’s writing, see Langlois.
- 2.
To date, few studies define Beckett’s postwar male characters as queer. Bersani and Dutoit explore Beckett’s use of homoeroticism to destabilize consecrated relationship patterns. More recent studies by Ackerley, Boxall, Jeffers, and Stewart advance this line of argumentation. For instance, Jeffers identifies, in Molloy and other male characters’ “indifference” towards “heterosexual masculine norms,” a means to “upend the very logic” of heteronormative impositions (78–79). Noting that most of Beckett’s characters interact violently (whether they follow their inclinations or are “normalized”) and/or end up alone, Stewart concludes that Beckett may have considered solitude “preferable to a relation predicated on violence” (113).
- 3.
As Adorno notes, anti-representational modernist art often denounces structures of authority in this manner and is often subjected to censorship for this reason: “Art, even as something tolerated in the administered world, embodies what does not allow itself to be managed and what total management suppresses. Greece’s new tyrants knew why they banned Beckett’s plays, in which there is not a single political word” (Aesthetic Theory 234).
- 4.
Several other critics make this argument. Garrison identifies allusions to concentration camps in Mahood’s first story and reads the frequent references to tormentors and testimony as references to the Nazi treatment of prisoners and to survivors’ “ethical responsibility of testimony at the limit of fact” (102–3). Bryden relates the unnamed “them” to the Nazi regime (“Pain and De-paining”); Adelman connects numerous details to survivors’ testimonies at the Nuremberg trials; and Kennedy interprets characters’ “failing” bodies as a denunciation of degeneration theories (popular in Anglo-Irish circles after independence, in Hitler’s Germany, and in Vichy France).
- 5.
In Garrison’s words, in bearing testimony, the voice “jams the machine of language” (105).
- 6.
Morin identifies in this text echoes of “contemporaneous testimonies of conscription, pacification, torture and desertion” and of “reports documenting Algerian methods of guerrilla war” (233).
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Ionica, C. (2020). Under-the-Radar Derision and Anger: Becoming Revolutionary in/ through Beckett’s Fiction. In: The Affects, Cognition, and Politics of Samuel Beckett's Postwar Drama and Fiction. New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34902-8_4
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