Playing Beyond Historicism and Trauma: A Matrixical Feminist Reading of Beckett’s ‘Art of Fugue’.
By Ruth Skilbeck
As an arts journalist who has often sought to come to a deeper meaning of a text through interviewing its creator, and through reading the text in the context of the author’s life and times, it would be disingenuous to pretend that I can approach the dual proposition of the critical concept of Beyond Historicism and the texts of Samuel Beckett, with an entirely virgin gaze. But I have an open mind to the project of going beyond historicism, as I am not enamored of what I see as New Historicism’s heavily biased male perspective that led to an over determined focus on concepts of, male-defined, power tending to concentrate on, for example, punitive gazes of surveillance and panopticon. Instead I bring to this project of re-reading Beckett, ‘beyond historicism’, a critical perspective that I will term matrixical feminism. My reading of a selection of Beckett’s prose works, focuses on the musicality and play, and ‘notional worlds’ of exiled writer Beckett’s performative texts, and on what he does with language that goes beyond verbal language to the “pre semiotic chora” (Kristeva) the felt yet ‘grown beyond’ body of the mother, where the mother is also the internalized yet absent, and ‘left behind’ mothertongue that resonates, fugally, in his texts. In this paper I read Beckett through literary trauma theory impacted by colonialism and exile, fugal critical analysis, and referring to Badiou, but return to a literary critical matrixical feminist reading that draws on post-Freudian feminist psychoanalytic theory and goes beyond historicism.
Dr Ruth Skilbeck is a Lecture in the Journalism and Media Research Centre and staff member of the Global Irish Studies Centre at The University of New South Wales.
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