Abstract
After the Liberation of France, Beckett and Suzanne returned to Paris to find that their apartment had been occupied during their time in Roussillon, though it had not been ransacked or burglarized.1 Although the war was not completely over in early 1945, Beckett felt the need to return to Ireland to see his mother and brother. In the six years since Beckett had seen his mother, she had aged visibly and was now suffering from Parkinson’s disease. May Beckett had sold the Cooldrinagh during the war and built a small house for herself across the road. It was during this return home that he was to experience the now well-known revelation that he must work with impotence instead of excess. One could speculate that the elapsed time and the changed circumstances both inward and outward for Beckett contributed to his revelation in regard to his writing. The fact that the epiphany occurs upon his return to Ireland is momentous.
Tears and laughter, they are so much Gaelic to me.
Molloy
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Notes
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), 33–34.
Samuel Beckett, Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose, 1929–1989, ed. with Introduction and Notes, S.E. Gontarski (New York: Grove, 1995). Subsequent references to the shorts stories refer to this edition.
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove, 1995), 29a.
Angus McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries1870–1930 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997), 89.
Leslie Hill, Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words (Cambridge: CUP, 1990), 40.
Peter Boxall, “Beckett and Homoeroticism,” Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies, ed. Lois Oppenheim (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 111.
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 121.
Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard, 183 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977), 183.
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia UP, 1990), 257.
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© 2009 Jennifer M. Jeffers
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Jeffers, J.M. (2009). Return in the Postwar Fiction. In: Beckett’s Masculinity. New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-first Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101463_4
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