The impossible “yoke”: Community and the trace of the social system in Samuel Beckett's plays

Aegyung Noh, Purdue University

Abstract

This dissertation serves as a corrective to the general disinterest of Beckett criticism in the political dimension of his oeuvre by examining the traces of community and social systems throughout his plays. The two hierarchical paradigms presented in Waiting for Godot, the relationships of the tramps with Godot and of Lucky with Pozzo, condense in the most minimalist way human being's subordination to a social contract and to the intrasocial dynamics of domination and servitude. The tramps' nomadic individualism, which represents an anarchic bias detected in modernist politics, is antithetical to the protocol of social collectivism as it is incarnated by Godot, while Pozzo and Lucky embody power and servitude. Hamm's “kingdom” in Endgame is Beckett's microcosmic portrait of postwar Western capitalist society agonized by its own self-destructive drive. An allegory of modern politics, the play, through another paradigm of domination and slavery, not only pursues the problematic apparent in Godot—which is Man's double subordination to social collectivism and intrasocial hierarchy—but also illuminates the nature of modern political leadership. Heavily reliant on the autobiographical facts of his own upbringing in Ireland where an oppressive collectivism stifled his individualistic penchant and turned him into an exile on the continent, Beckett in All That Fall returns to the subject of the Irish ethos seen through an individual's emotional struggle with an Irish Protestant community. In Happy Days, the trace of the social system is a nostalgic one conjured by memory. In its Edwardian overtone, the system produces a worn out, and hence futile, ideology that prevents the freedom of an individual, pressing her down with coded middle-class femininity. Not I uncovers a psychologically integrated version of the tyranny of the social system, that equates individualism—Mouth's idiosyncrasy in insisting on the third person instead of assuming the unified selfhood of ‘I’—with social transgression and thus places the subject in a perpetual cycle of punishment, purgation, and social justice. The most political in its intent among all Beckett's works, Catastrophe , in portraying the dynamics of hegemonic relationships in the theatrical system, crystallizes his hitherto latent interest in individualism tyrannized by the voice of a systematized social collectivism. Privileging the individual over the social collectivity—and thus evidencing his fundamentally modernist roots—Beckett regards systematized human collectiveness as a “yoke” that hinders natural individual liberty. Beckett not only inherits the political anarchism of the modernists, but reasserts it in a body of major dramatic texts.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Adler, Purdue University.

Subject Area

British and Irish literature|Romance literature|Theater

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