Beckett and Politics by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030471101
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

© The Author(s) 2021

W. Davies, H. Bailey (eds.)Beckett and PoliticsNew Directions in Irish and Irish American Literaturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47110-1_10

10. Waiting for Godot and the Fascist Aesthetics of the Body

Hannah Simpson1

(1)St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

Hannah Simpson

Email: [email protected]

The fascist politics of National Socialist Germany and Vichy France found expression in an ideology of bodily perfection.1 In the increasingly fascist-inflected reconstruction of Europe following World War I, the bodily health of the individual citizen became entwined with the promise of national renewal and stability, generating what Judith Surkis terms a “physiological politics”, whereby the problem of post-war reconstruction became fixed rhetorically and legislatively on the individual bodies of the national community (104). Physical health was no longer simply “a desired state” but “an ideological position” (Metzl 2). The fit, healthy and unblemished citizen’s body was increasingly venerated in French and German society as visible proof of national well-being and political obedience; the injured, invalid or otherwise impaired body was eliminated both formally and literally from art and society as undesirable and unruly entities, unable to perform adequately as their nation state demanded and menaced by eugenicist thinking.

Within this context, Samuel Beckett’s pained and impaired post-war bodies offer a quietly radical rejection of this historically constituted ideology of the able-bodied. Beckett’s weakened and damaged bodies have received critical attention in the past, but primarily with reference to Beckett’s philosophical scepticism or, more recently, his own medical history.2 Little scholarly work to date has attempted to read these damaged bodies in the context of the wartime moment of Beckett’s formative years, despite his having been exposed to both the German and French fascist aesthetics of the body before and during World War II. We have thus failed to recognise fully how Beckett’s post-war theatre, in which “disability is the norm” (Davidson 112), resists the ideology of corporeal human perfection. The pained and impaired bodies that populate Beckett’s earliest stage-spaces are significant as starkly visible examples of both the type of bodies that fascist aesthetics would censor from the art-world during the 1930s and 1940s, and the types of socially censored bodies that French and German political ideology would attempt to erase from their society. In contrast to the reified physically perfect and socially obedient fascist body, Beckett’s 1952 play, Waiting for Godot (his first staged piece following World War II), presents a range of impaired human figures that are politically resistant in their refusal to be neatly contained within a prescribed social choreography.

This chapter draws on disability theory and aesthetics, alongside historical detail of the fascist ideology of the body, to explore how the post-war physical forms in Waiting for Godot refuse the “dark side of power, control and fear” that haunts the ideology of able-bodied health (Davis 1). When the individual citizen is coded as the literal embodiment of national strength, governing powers typically take a heightened interest in regulating the appearance and functioning of those individual bodies, in order to ensure that they reflect the desired vision of the country. In the

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