The ethico-politics of homo-ness: Beckett's How It Is and Casement's Black Diaries

Abstract

In recent years, Beckett studies has taken an ‘ethical turn’ as critics have given increased attention to the status of the Other and otherness in the writer's oeuvre. How It Is, a key text for these critics, was written as Beckett was reading the newly published Black Diaries of Roger Casement, a volume that contains homoerotic content long considered scandalous for the Irish republican icon and yet offers a remarkable vision of social relations structured around sameness or what Leo Bersani calls ‘homo-ness’. Reading Beckett's novel alongside Casement's diaries reveals the significance of How It Is for thinking an ethico-politics that depends neither on the ideological foundations of the nation-state nor on critical perspectives that emphasise the primacy of difference, but rather on a fundamental reorientation of sociality. In this regard, Beckett's anti-redemptive narrative may be considered a work of penetrating utopian writing, which nonetheless reminds us of the hazards of utopian thought.

Keywords:

• Beckett
• Casement
• homo-ness
• ethics of alterity
• postcolonial novel

Notes

 1. Quoted in Cronin, Samuel Beckett, 495. That Beckett was struggling with his last novel may be something of an understatement. As Edouard Magessa O'Reilly's bilingual genetic edition reveals, Beckett began work on the French text of Comment c'est (translated as How It Is in 1961–62) in December 1958, but after abandoning a series of failed attempts he commenced again on 11 March 1959 with what would become the manuscript proper – and only with this, his ninth effort, did he sustain composition to the end of the narrative. O'Reilly notes that the opening pages of the novel exist in some fourteen pre-original versions and that the manuscript proper contains many amendments and reworked passages. We know, in addition, that Beckett's work on the first of the manuscript's three parts continued for several months, because the beginning of the second part (in the third of five notebooks) is dated 27 May 1959. The last date found in the notebooks is 6 January 1960.

 2. Quoted in Quoted in Cronin, Samuel Beckett, 495. That Beckett was struggling with his last novel may be something of an understatement. As Edouard Magessa O'Reilly's bilingual genetic edition reveals, Beckett began work on the French text of Comment c'est (translated as How It Is in 1961–62) in December 1958, but after abandoning a series of failed attempts he commenced again on 11 March 1959 with what would become the manuscript proper – and only with this, his ninth effort, did he sustain composition to the end of the narrative. O'Reilly notes that the opening pages of the novel exist in some fourteen pre-original versions and that the manuscript proper contains many amendments and reworked passages. We know, in addition, that Beckett's work on the first of the manuscript's three parts continued for several months, because the beginning of the second part (in the third of five notebooks) is dated 27 May 1959. The last date found in the notebooks is 6 January 1960 ibid., 495.

 3. Gibson, Beckett and Badiou, 119.

 4. Badiou, On Beckett, 15.

 5. Gibson, ‘Badiou, Beckett, and Contemporary Criticism’, 134.

 6. Weller, Beckett, Literature, and the Ethics of Alterity, 193.

 7. Uhlmann, Beckett and Poststructuralism, 156–86.

 8. Badiou, Ethics, 25.

 9. Badiou, Ethics, 25, 18–29.

10. Badiou, On Beckett, 18–36, 46–55.

11. Badiou, On Beckett, 18–36, 46–55, 46; Badiou, Ethics, 27.

12. Bersani has been labelled a misogynist by some who see his focus on male homosexuality as dismissive of women and lesbians in particular. Though he has responded to this criticism in Homos by addressing the complexities of speaking for gay men and women across a range of demographic categories, his anti-communitarian thinking, his reluctance to recognise the feminine in gay male sexuality, and his willingness to point out hazards of sexuality for any emancipatory project make allegiances with these groups a problematic prospect at best. Of course, Bersani has also defied the principles of much queer theory in so far as he holds that there is something fundamentally anticommunal, even antisocial, in homosexual desire.

13. Bersani, Homos, 10.

14. Bersani and Phillips, Intimacies, 59–60.

15. Bersani, ‘Sociality and Sexuality’, 645; Bersani and Phillips, Intimacies, 60.

16. Bersani, Homos, 150.

17. Bersani, Homos, 150, 150. Elsewhere, Bersani has written at length on Beckett, though not in relation to the issues of homosexuality or homoeroticism. See, for instance, Bersani, The Freudian Body, 7–12; Bersani and Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment, 11–92. Calvin Thomas and Peter Boxall have written on Bersani, Beckett, and homosexuality, but neither critic takes up the case of How It Is. See Thomas, ‘Cultural Droppings’, 169–96; Boxall, ‘Beckett and Homoeroticism’, 110–32.

18. Bersani, Homos, 81; Bersani, Intimacies, 65–6.

19. Bersani, Homos, 150.

20. In Samuel Beckett and the Postcolonial Novel , I investigate the manner in which Beckett's early and middle fiction, from Dream of Fair to Middling Women to The Unnamable, negotiates the potentialities of cultural difference, along with the emergence of new forms of meaning and new strategies of identification, which challenge the metropolitan discourses that have defined otherness in opposition to capitalist modernity. From the position of a minor literature, his writing is aimed primarily not at the formation of the universal subject of humanism or the communal subject of nationalism but rather at the production and preservation of cultural difference, which offers a sustained critique of canonical literary forms and canonical forms of identity. In the present essay, I am seeking to shift the emphasis to Beckett's interest in the potentialities of sameness in order to better understand the ethico-political dynamics at play in How It Is, as well as the development of his response to the problem of othering in colonial and postcolonial contexts.

21. Leo Bersani takes up the question of Michel's service to the state in Homos, 113–25.

22. A good deal of recent scholarship has been dedicated to these themes. See, for instance, McDiarmid, ‘The Posthumous Life of Roger Casement’; McCormack, Roger Casement in Death; Dudgeon, Roger Casement; Conrad, Locked in the Family Cell; Daly, Roger Casement in Irish and World History.

23. Sedgwick, Between Men, 201.

24. Kathryn A. Conrad suggests that homosexuality threatens the stability of the nation for two reasons: the historical contingency of the category of homosexual calls into question the stability of all such categories, including national identity, and the homosexual threatens ‘the reproduction of the heterosexual family cell that serves as the foundation of the nation-state’ (Locked in the Family Cell, 21).

25. ‘Book on Casement Held by Customs’, 1.

26. ‘Casement Diaries’, 9.

27. ‘Casement Diaries are Quite Genuine’, 9.

28. Casement, The Black Diaries, 267.

29. Bersani, Homos, 6.

30. Hulme, Colonial Encounters, 141.

31. Mullen, ‘Roger Casement's Global English’, 562.

32. Badiou, Ethics, 13.

33. Casement, The Black Diaries, 214.

34. Casement, The Black Diaries, 214, 235.

35. Bersani, Homos, 123.

36. Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’, 222.

37. Boxall, ‘Beckett and Homoeroticism’, 117.

38. Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 328.

39. Bersani and Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment, 11–92.

40. Beckett, How It Is, 7.

41. Beckett, How It Is, 7, 14, 37, 38.

42. Badiou, ‘What is Love?’, 44.

43. Badiou, On Beckett, 65.

44. Badiou, On Beckett, 65, 28.

45. Beckett, How It Is, 54.

46. Badiou, ‘What is Love?’, 47.

47. Badiou, ‘What is Love?’, 47, 53.

48. Bersani and Phillips, Intimacies, 57–88.

49. Beckett, How It Is, 53.

50. Beckett, How It Is, 53, 62.

51. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 16.

52. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 16, 268.

53. Jenny Sharpe, qtd in Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 53. Both Sharpe and Loomba argue that Foucault's notion of modern power, with its insidious mechanisms of punishment and control, does not apply to the spectacular violence practised by European colonialists in India and Africa. This is made quite clear in Casement's writings about the Congo and the Putumayo, as well.

54. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 161.

55. Beckett, How It Is, 63. Shane Weller has argued that How It Is is a work ‘inconceivable’ without Beckett's earlier reading of Sade's Les 120 journées de Sodome, but he goes on to suggest that the novel ultimately denies the Sadean imperative (and belies what Weller sees as an opening to the Other postulated by Badiou's reading) in an anethical negation of the Two. See ‘The Anethics of Desire’, 108–16.

56. Beckett, How It Is, 75.

57. Beckett, How It Is, 75, 108.

58. Beckett, How It Is, 75, 74.

59. Badiou, On Beckett, 28.

60. Bersani, Homos, 7.

61. Beckett, How It Is, 75–6.

62. Beckett, How It Is, 75–6, 139.

63. Badiou, On Beckett, 26.

64. Beckett, How It Is, 112.

65. Gibson, Beckett and Badiou, 87–8.

66. Beckett, How It Is, 122.

67. Beckett, How It Is, 122, 143.

68. Bersani, Homos, 10.