Samuel Beckett and the Colonial Gag

Abstract

Focusing on The Unnamable (1953) and Act Without Words I (1956), this chapter draws on Giorgio Agamben’s writings on “gesture” and the “gag” to illuminate the “peculiarly oblique forms of Beckett’s postcolonial political engagements.” Attending to Beckett’s characters, who depend on gesture to counter their muteness, the chapter suggests that Beckett’s postcolonial politics—his engagements with decolonization in Indochina, Algeria, West Africa, and Ireland—is muted, gagged, and indirect. In keeping with Agamben’s articulation of the prelinguistic power of the gesture, its “archetypal openness that points beyond nation, tradition and political domination,” the chapter argues that Beckett’s evasive and anagogic approach to postcolonial issues may announce an even more radical break with modernity and modern politics than those advocated by Beckett’s more avowedly political postcolonial critics. By means of the gesture and the gag, Beckett points the way not just beyond the postcolonial condition, but, potentially, beyond modern politics altogether.