Book contents
- The Persistence of Realism in Modernist Fiction
- The Persistence of Realism in Modernist Fiction
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Fables of Autonomy in Late James
- Chapter 2 “She Will Drown Me with Her”
- Chapter 3 “Innumerable Slight Changes”
- Chapter 4 “I Was Always Sentimental”
- Chapter 5 “He Forgot His History”
- Conclusion
- References
- Index
Chapter 4 - “I Was Always Sentimental”
Beckett’s Scenes of Sympathy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 November 2022
- The Persistence of Realism in Modernist Fiction
- The Persistence of Realism in Modernist Fiction
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Fables of Autonomy in Late James
- Chapter 2 “She Will Drown Me with Her”
- Chapter 3 “Innumerable Slight Changes”
- Chapter 4 “I Was Always Sentimental”
- Chapter 5 “He Forgot His History”
- Conclusion
- References
- Index
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.
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- The Persistence of Realism in Modernist Fiction , pp. 138 - 168Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022