‘A form that accommodates the mess’: Degeneration and / as Disability in Beckett’s Happy Days

Abstract

The essay begins with Max Nordau’s theory of degeneration, which intact form signals cultural health and broken form cultural deterioration, to show how Samuel Beckett de-pathologized the indices of degeneracy by finding a form to “normalize” the messy feelings of non-normative experience. Beckett uses disability as aesthetic principle by formalising affect, thereby universalizing divergence from ideals of embodiment.