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Beckett's Vessels and the Animation of Containers
- Journal of Modern Literature
- Indiana University Press
- Volume 40, Number 4, Summer 2017
- pp. 75-89
- 10.2979/jmodelite.40.4.06
- Article
- Additional Information
Samuel Beckett's novels and plays are filled with lively vessels: emergent sites of subjectivity that blur the borderline between the human and nonhuman. When Malone Dies is read next to anthropological theories of the homunculus, a protocol of container animation emerges. Vital to this process is André Breton's image of the communicating vessels, a visual metaphor Beckett revises in The Unnamable. By adopting material containers as surrogate bodies, or by imagining life in hollow vessels, Beckett's characters encounter a self that exceeds the limits of the body—a form of projective identification that anticipates psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion's theorizing of the "container-contained."