Chapter 12 - Beckett’s Poetry and the Radical Absence of the (War) Dead

Summary

Beckett’s poetry is striking in its intensity and force, and over his long career it twists around the erotic, desiring, remembering voice, locked into relations with absent objects of passion and feeling. The poems seem resolutely apolitical, lacking context beyond eerie empty references of place name and time frame. I will be reading them as shaped according to surrealist, existential and phenomenological abstractedness, and as shadowing Becket’s oblique experience of the war dead. Beginning with close readings of the pre-war poems and translations, I will move on to ‘Saint-Lô’ and the mirlitonnades to explore the absent presence of the war dead as haunting the spectral voices – familial, erotic, elegiac – of the poems. The chapter will explore the deep morbidity of Beckett’s encounters with the doubled mirror image and relate this to the inaccessible spectral other supposed by lyric language, and the erased trace of the dead of the Second World War. The poems occupy an abstract Mallarméan néant which shapes the way the dead are experienced, concealing the shades of the war dead who haunt the texts at radical remove.¹