Decomposing the asylum in Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies: Genetic criticism and the author

James Little

doi:10.18778/1505-9057.60.04

Authors

James Little Postdoctoral researcher; Masaryk University, Department of English and American Studies, Faculty of Arts, Brno https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5555-7998

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/1505-9057.60.04

Keywords:

Samuel Beckett, asylum, genetic criticism, manuscript, biography

Abstract

This article focuses on Samuel Beckett’s use of the asylum in his novel Malone Dies to explore the role of non-textual elements in genetic criticism (the study of a writer’s creative process through the analysis of their compositional manuscripts), as well as the function of the author in genetic analysis. Taking as its starting point Iain Bailey’s challenge to genetic critics to account for the biographical author which underpins the discipline’s study of written traces in authorial manuscripts, the article contends that genetic criticism must be used in tandem with other approaches such as historicism when studying spaces like Beckett’s asylums. Though Beckett took a scholarly approach when integrating such material into earlier work, making research notes which can be regarded as part of the genetic dossier, the asylum in Malone Dies – based on Dublin’s Saint John of God Hospital – leaves no such trail of textual breadcrumbs. Therefore, we must pay particular attention to the historical function of Saint John of God’s in order to understand how the asylum works in composition and reception. In doing so, an author existing beyond the written traces they leave behind can retake their place in a necessarily incomplete empirical field over five decades after Roland Barthes prematurely declared their death.

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Author Biography

James Little, Postdoctoral researcher; Masaryk University, Department of English and American Studies, Faculty of Arts, Brno

James Little is a postdoctoral researcher at Masaryk University, Brno and Charles University, Prague. Author of Samuel Beckett in Confinement: The Politics of Closed Space (Bloomsbury, 2020), his work can also be found in Text and Performance Quarterly, the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, the Journal of Beckett Studies, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, the Irish University Review and Litteraria Pragensia. His second monograph, The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Not I / Pas moi, That Time / Cette fois and Footfalls / Pas, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury and University Press Antwerp (2021) as part of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project.

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