Chapter 4 - “I Was Always Sentimental”

Summary

Ranging across Beckett’s work before focusing, in particular, on the stories Malone tells in Malone Dies, I demonstrate the persistence of the emancipatory potential of sentimental fiction in this seemingly most anti-sentimental writer. Sympathy, for Joyce, held the promise of crossing class boundaries. Beckett, in contrast, reads class divisions as internal to the modern subject. Thus, the encounter between beggar and bourgeois that his work repeatedly stages – as in the structure of Molloy – is constitutive of capitalist modernity’s construction of subjectivity where freedom is always mediated by dispossession. Beckett’s subjects suffer alone. Seeing no way out of the infinite catastrophe his works present, Beckett nevertheless retains the possibility of human recognition. Sentimental fictions emerge, here, as one of the many conventions Beckett scrutinizes and inhabits, their persistence giving us an avenue into the history that has made its mark on his work, even as that work strives to efface its traces.