In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Tasteless Beckett: Towards an Aesthetics of Hunger
  • Alys Moody (bio)

The language of starvation is a commonplace in discussions of Samuel Beckett’s writing. His texts are described as emaciated and skeletal, as famished and anorexic. His language, characters, plots, settings, form, content, bodies, style, structure, syntax, and contextual reference are all open to charges of being starved, deprived, or wasted, of going hungry. Terry Eagleton is concurring with a majority view, and making exemplary use of a common metaphor, when he speaks of Beckett’s “anorexic texts,” crafted from “[s]tarved words, gaunt bodies and sterile landscapes” (25).1 Such language is at once pervasive and under-examined, signaling a relationship between hunger and Beckett’s writing that has received much passing acknowledgement but surprisingly little sustained attention. It implies a connection that goes far beyond a simple thematic interest in starvation, infiltrating the very structure of his texts, working its way into their very bones. This essay will argue that this critical intuition actually identifies a central element of Beckett’s postwar aesthetics, in which Beckett uses hunger and related experiences as a way of thinking through his ideas about art and language. In this sense, Beckett’s postwar work develops gropingly towards what might be termed an “aesthetics of hunger”—an aesthetics that takes its structure from hunger.

Starvation becomes pervasive in Beckett’s work after the Second World War. Living out their lives against a backdrop of constant, grinding deprivation, his characters of this period almost never have enough to eat. In Waiting for Godot (1953), only Pozzo is genuinely well-fed; Lucky, Vladimir, and Estragon can only beg for his leftovers and trade an ever-diminishing stock of root vegetables. The characters of Endgame (1957) are similarly deprived, inhabiting a world of gradual depletion, in which there are no more sugar [End Page 55] plums, no more pap, and no more pain killers. The characters of the post-war novels are similarly starved. In Molloy (1951/1955), the title character famously sucks stones to pass the time and to “forget his hunger, forget his thirst,” while Moran, Molloy’s “other half,” gradually loses his hearty appetite over the course of the novel, reduced to his double’s lack of taste and lack of appetite. The expiring protagonist of Malone Dies (1951/1956) survives on a bowl of soup once every two or three days, until even this meager diet disappears in the latter half of the novel.

This essay will show that this omnipresent starvation is not merely a thematic concern, but rather lends its structure to Beckett’s aesthetic theory and practice in this period. My primary concern here, therefore, will be with two central texts that develop this aesthetic of hunger most explicitly, by drawing hunger into a direct dialogue with art and language. The “Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit,” a 1949 piece of experimental art criticism, provides the first such text. Often read as one of Beckett’s key statements on art and aesthetics, these dialogues rely on the figure of starvation in their promotion of a new art without an object. The “Three Dialogues,” therefore, offer a theoretical manifesto for an aesthetic of hunger. If this aesthetic is realised or aspired to in all the hunger-wrought texts of this era, The Unnamable (1953/1958), the final novel of Beckett’s Trilogy, is the only postwar text to stage a sustained confrontation between issues of food consumption, and language itself. This novel therefore offers a unique analysis of the relation of such an aesthetic to literature as such—and of its pitfalls and impossibilities. It brings Beckett’s aesthetic of hunger to a crisis. The abstinence and absolute deprivation of the “Three Dialogues” is confronted with the obtrusion of language and the “obligation to express,” both figured as external objects forced upon the helpless narrator. By figuring language and the world as precisely the kind of force-feeding that is commonly used to break a fast, The Unnamable stages the point at which the aesthetic of hunger is forcefully violated. This novel therefore dramatises both the struggle to realise an art of hunger in a literary medium that seeks to force...

pdf