Traumatized Masculinity and Beckett’s Return

Abstract

Samuel Beckett, as a member of the coming-of-age generation of displaced Irish Protestants after the formation of the Free State, continually revisits the theme of displacement and return through the problem of masculinity and the perversion of gendered normatives. Beckett was just ten years old at the time of the Easter Uprising in 1916. As Beckett passed from childhood to early puberty and into young adulthood, Ireland was in the throes of the Troubles that involved a war with Britain, the partition of the island, a civil war, and the formation of the Free State. I contend that with the loss of Anglo-Irish identity and a place in modern patriarchal society, Beckett represents again and again his experience of losing his masculine national identity in his writing. In his 1930s “Clare Street Notebook” his “den 11 Aug” entry acknowledges that the trauma that turns into neurosis has a past that lies beyond the individual (above quoted epigraph). The collective neurosis for Beckett is the Anglo-Irish legacy of decline in the early twentieth century. This decline ultimately leads to a total oblivion of the Anglo-Irish as a “family,” race,” and “nation.”

And that fear is truly completely incomprehensible, for its causes lie in the depths of the past, and not just in the past of the individual … but the family, the race, the nation, human beings and nature itself.

Samuel Beckett, “Clare Street Notebook”¹

We ought to know from Beckett’s entire body of work that of all living writers he is the least interested in the present, in the changes time effects, and in what we might call local temporally or spatially differentiated existence. His imagination functions almost entirely outside of history: what is, has been, and what has been, will be.

Richard Gilman²