On the utopian scrap -heap: Samuel Beckett, Irish modernism, and European politics.

Abstract

This dissertation argues that two historical moments profoundly shape Beckett's response to 1930s modernism and the challenge of rising fascism: his disappointments with post-revolutionary Ireland and his confrontation with Nazi ideology during his trip to Germany in 1936--37. Beckettian scholarship has tended to de-historicize his work, generating readings that either embrace his apoliticism or conversely celebrate his radical politics in textual play. The dissertation rejects both views, and I chart new scholarly territory by grounding Beckett's work within the literary, philosophical, and political debates he addressed. Beckett's unpublished letters, diaries, and drafts open up new readings of his work and lead to an examination of Beckett's concern with history: how factual representation, cultural memory, and historical narrative all engage modernism and Beckett personally with debates about fascism, colonialism, and imperialism. Drawing on the poetry and letters of Beckett's close confidant Thomas MacGreevy, early chapters illustrate how Irish modernists responded to the disappointments after the establishment of the Free State---the rapid dissolution of feminist and socialist energies, the failed promise of artistic and political liberty. This experience taught MacGreevy and Beckett to acknowledge how revolutionary language quickly separates from the reality it supposedly describes. Both writers develop an aesthetics based upon dialectics: they replace Irish identity politics with non-identity politics, redefining national citizenship as the capacity of citizenry to think and to face contradiction with tolerance. Beckett applies the lessons he learns in Ireland to the crisis that modernism faced in the 1930s. While Beckett distrusted aesthetically reductive interpretations of modernity---allegory, romanticized landscapes, or histories celebrating Germanic Destiny---he nevertheless ridicules the naivete of certain strains of modernism that associate irrationalism and skepticism with a utopian political outcome. As the challenge of fascism mounted, and political resistance required adopting positions and truth claims that appeared reductive, Beckett circumvented this apparent opposition by showing across his works that interpretation depends upon specific historical contexts and core historical assumptions that language, under the pressure to serve other commercial and political ends, no longer facilitates. <italic> More Pricks Than Kicks</italic> and <italic>Watt</italic>, Beckett's short fiction and plays, all develop Beckett's expressed concerns.