Beckett`s Creatures, Anderton Joseph

In the shadow of the Holocaust, Samuel Beckett captures humanity in ruins through his debased beings and a decomposing mode of writing that strives to fail better. But what might it mean to be a creature or creaturely in Becketts world? In the first full-length study of the concept of the creature in Becketts prose and drama, this book traces the suspended lives and melancholic existences of Becketts ignorant and impotent creatures to assess the extent to which political value marks the divide between human and inhuman.

Through close readings of Becketts prose and drama, particularly texts from the middle period, including Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Waiting for Godot and Endgame, Anderton explicates four arenas of creaturely life in Beckett. Each chapter attends to a particular theme - testimony, power, humour and survival - to analyse a range of pressures and impositions that precipitate the creaturely state of suspension.

Drawing on the writings of Adorno, Agamben, Benjamin, Deleuze and Derrida to explore the overlaps between artistic and political structures of creation, the creature emerges as an in-between figure that bespeaks the provisional nature of the human. The result is a provocative examination of the indirect relationship between art and history through Becketts treatment of testimony, power, humour and survival, which each attest to the destabilisation of meaning after Auschwitz.