Abstract
Literature is the space in which the inadmissible—including the otherwise largely unacceptable or unspeakable question of suicide—can be addressed. Focusing on the prominence of representations of suicide in modernist literature, I suggest that while Virginia Woolf and James Joyce represent the act with considerable sympathy and understanding, Woolf’s writing gives suicide the privileged status of an event, while in Joyce’s work it is often laden with a heightened pathos. In Samuel Beckett’s major works, by contrast, suicide appears prominently but in the margins, while the works that thematize suicide are relatively minor in the Beckett canon. By distancing the act from an affective intensity with which it is usually associated, Beckett’s work produces a radical normalization of the act that presents it as both unexceptional and lacking in pathos. In Beckett, suicide is (in Henry Maudsley’s phrase) ‘just a necessary incident from time to time’ in the course of the subject’s evolutions.
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Notes
- 1.
However, the suicide features more prominently in holograph drafts of the novel. See The Waves: Two Holograph Drafts, transcribed and ed. J. W. Graham (London: Hogarth Press, 1976).
- 2.
It was later discovered that both Virginia and Leonard Woolf were on the National Socialists’ Sonderfahndungsliste, a list of prominent people who were to be arrested upon the Nazi invasion of Great Britain. This list, prepared in 1940, later became known as ‘The Black Book’.
- 3.
We do, however, witness Sir William, Septimus’s physician, talking about ‘the deferred effects of shell shock’ (Woolf 2015: 164) at Clarissa’s party.
- 4.
Virginia Woolf herself, as Hermione Lee observes, felt ‘“forced” into rest-homes and rest-cures’ (1996: 336).
- 5.
In ‘The Dead’, Michael Furey stands in the cold and the rain outside Gretta’s window. Gretta tells her husband, Gabriel, ‘I implored of him to go home at once and told him he would get his death in the rain. But he said he did not want to live’ (Joyce 2000a: 174). He dies a week later.
- 6.
The lines are an abbreviation of the refrain of Thomas Noel’s song, ‘The Pauper’s Drive’, inspired by the sight of ‘a funeral where the body was borne upon a cart at full speed’ (Joyce 2008: 805).
- 7.
Beckett, having discovered that in the first French production of Waiting for Godot Estragon’s trousers only fell ‘as far as his hips’, wrote to Roger Blin on 9 January 1953, ‘that the pants fall completely around the ankles […] might seem stupid to you but for me it’s capital’ (qtd. in Bair 1978: 428–429).
- 8.
One exception in the Beckett canon is his first television play, Eh Joe, which in its textual version can be seen to thematize suicide in a solemn way. In the play, ‘The green one … The narrow one … Always pale’ commits suicide either in actuality or in Joe’s guilt-ridden, or perverse, imagination (ATF 117). However, both the BBC production and He, Joe, the Süddeutscher Rundfunk production of 1966, which Beckett himself directed, seem to reverse this sentimental reading. In the closing scene of He, Joe, Deryk Mendel, who plays the role of Joe, returns the camera’s gaze by staring straight into the screen with a menacing smile on his face (see Beckett 2008). Here, Beckett seems again to be subverting or parodying a conventional literary motif. As he put it in a letter to Alan Schneider, in April 1966: ‘I asked in London and Stuttgart for a smile at the end (oh not a real smile). He “wins” again.’ (Beckett 1998: 202).
- 9.
On suicide as increasingly normalized in late nineteenth-century discourse, see Hacking (1990: 173–179).
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Maude, U. (2018). ‘Temporarily sane’: Beckett, Modernism, and the Ethics of Suicide. In: Beloborodova, O., Van Hulle, D., Verhulst, P. (eds) Beckett and Modernism. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70374-9_15
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