Beckett transforming Sade/Sade transforming Beckett: violence, isolation, and sovereignty

Thesis

This thesis explores how Samuel Beckett’s career-long engagement with the Marquis de Sade impacted his works. It adopts a chronological approach to studying Beckett’s texts and their repeated engagements with Sade in order to expose the complexity of his continual literary conversation with this author, thereby demonstrating how Sade is figured as an amorphous dialogue breathing throughout Beckett’s œuvre rather than as a figure with a predetermined value and meaning. I draw particular attention to the ways in which Sade’s caustic vision of humanity at its most barbaric plays an integral role in shaping Beckett’s emotionally resonant portrayals of powerless, isolated, and non-sovereign figures emblematic of ‘humanity in ruins’ (Beckett 1995a, 278), as well as his textual configurations of violence and eroticism. My approach combines close textual analysis with consideration of Beckett’s correspondence, genetic material informing his texts (where appropriate), and performance details. I also accurately date, and study in detail, how the newly discovered translations of Sadean criticism which Beckett prepared for inclusion in the unpublished seventh issue of Georges Duthuit’s Transition in the early 1950s furnish the Irish author with new theoretical approaches to the issues of solitude, sovereignty, cognition, and the intrinsic violence of mankind which are then incorporated into his creative works. Furthermore, this period of intense critical work engaging with Sade has a profound effect upon his later textual concerns and aesthetics. Ultimately, I argue that Beckett is primarily interested in three connected aspects of Sade’s texts: violence, the essential humanity of violence, and the sheer isolation of man. Beckett defamiliarises Sade’s approaches to these topics in order to examine what remains in the wake of extreme violence. Beckett thus shifts Sade’s literary concerns away from the event of violence, instead focusing on the embodied and psychological impacts of violence.

Authors: Thursfield, D

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-aeb1grynp
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: absurdism; sovereignty; Marquis de Sade; isolation; Sadism; Samuel Beckett; violence
• Subjects: Second World War Literature; Literary Representations of Violence; Sadism; Modernist Literature; Romantic Literature Legacies; Literary Legacies; French Literature; Influence Studies; Irish Literature; Genetic Criticism; Late-Modernist Literature; Literary Representations of Sovereignty; Absurd Literature; Absurdism; Prose Studies; Nouveaux Romanciers; English Literature; Literary Representations of Isolation; Drama Studies; Post-War Literature