Destitution as an Expenditure: Beckett's Literature of Poverty

소모로서의 궁핍: 베케트의 빈궁문학

Representation of destitution may be considered as an expression of a social desire toward forging a bond or solidarity with the impoverished. However, political and ethical demands of the solidarity force the formulaic framework structuring the form of representation to its limits. The thesis aims to examine the responses to such demands within the tradition of modernist literature that can be traced from Charles Baudelaire, Knut Hamsun to Franz Kafka and that somehow culminates with Samuel Beckett, and to analyze how the issue of destitution that weaves through Beckett's works criticizes and inherits such a heritage. Whereas destitution in 19th century Realism is structurally fixed and its potential for change is inherently excluded, for these writers, destitution is no longer the state of rigid reality in which any possibility is limited. It is destitution as an imperative that calls for exploitation of possibilities that can be recuperated from the impoverished condition of destitution. What these writers consistently resist against is destitution that leads to compensation and reward. Since occupying a superior position toward the other as the subject of description or sympathy can be seen as one form of profit or reward, they have persistently pursued absolute solitariness and austere conditions rather than prematurely simulating a sense of solidarity and community. The ultimate goal of destitution as an imperative is to pursue destitution in order to worsen it by identifying and then excluding and expending possessions and assets to a state of penury. This is a paradoxical process that opens up the realm of possibilities of destitution and redefines it as abundance and wealth. Destitution for Beckett as seen in the writers above is the objective of literature. But, what he focuses on is to amplify the shreds of economic world that still remain in a state of poverty and to reveal extreme poverty as a state of odd affluence and to transform it into a pursuit of accumulation and profit. One of his famous axioms, "less is more", contains the essence of such a paradoxical strategy. In a sense, such approach is a twist on the strategy that identifies and uses any remaining potential hidden in destitution as was pursued by other writers. It also expands on the imagination of the destitute described by Hamsun. But Hamsun and Beckett are diametrical opposites. Unlike Hamsun, Beckett does not link imagination with a sense of guilt. Imagination is not intended to overcome the destitute reality nor to culminate in artistic martyrdom as in the case of Kafka's hunger artist. The imagination of the impoverished in Beckett is simply a hilarious game and not an escape that ends in a sense of guilt. This game formulates a "rhetorical question" or derision at the ironical situation where the pursuit of hunger and art as the disinterestedness has been turned into symbolic capital. It is inherently a fundamental critique at the aestheticization of destitution that has been pursued by Modernism. Beckett's efforts at divulging falsehood inherent in non-profit acts such as charity, donation and hospitality are dissections of social fictions in which aestheticization of destitution remains a part of the whole.