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Lloyd Meadhbh Houston, ‘Sterilization of the mind and apotheosis of the litter’: Beckett, Censorship, and Fertility, The Review of English Studies, Volume 69, Issue 290, June 2018, Pages 546–564, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgy010
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ABSTRACT
The recent Hibernicizing turn in Beckett Studies has linked the author’s lifelong abhorrence of reproductive sexual activity to his opposition to the Free State’s 1929 Censorship of Publications Act, which prohibited all printed matter relating to birth control. Previous criticism has presented Beckett’s response to censorship and pro-natalism in Ireland as an ethically valorous and politically subversive rejection of confessional identity politics and state-regulated fertility. Through a close-reading of ‘Censorship in the Saorstat’ (written c.1934–1936, published 1983) and Murphy (1938), this essay complicates this picture by emphasizing the debts which this strain of Beckett’s work owes to a eugenically-inflected strand of Irish sectarian agon which both contributed to and was intensified by the drafting and passage of the Act. In doing so, it demonstrates the ways in which, through the Act, discourses of sexual health, eugenics, and population control became bound up with a broader competition for political influence and cultural capital between intellectual, governmental, and confessional factions within the Free State. Finally, it explores how, in Premier amour/First Love (written c.1946, published 1970, self-translated 1973), Beckett subjects this sectarian eugenics to pressure by linking the Ireland of the Censorship Act to the landscape and policies of Nazi-occupied Vichy France.
An Act to make provision for the prohibition of the sale and distribution of unwholesome literature and for that purpose to provide for the establishment of a censorship of books and periodical publications, and to restrict the publication of reports of certain classes of judicial proceedings and for other purposes incidental to the matters aforesaid.
Censorship of Publications Act, 1929: Preamble
This phrase is chosen with care, lest the filthy censors should lack an occasion to commit their filthy synecdoche.
Samuel Beckett, Murphy
I
To claim that Samuel Beckett was opposed to censorship is unlikely to raise many eyebrows. From the goading of the ‘filthy censors’ in Murphy (1936), to the withdrawal of All that Fall (1956) and Endgame (1956) from the Dublin International Theatre Festival following the suppression of a proposed stage adaptation of Ulysses (1922), Beckett’s distaste for publications control was forthright and thoroughgoing.1 As the deliberate ‘care’ with which the narrator of Murphy seeks to provoke the censor and ‘debauch the cultivated reader’ suggests, Beckett’s prose repeatedly engages with and responds to the implicit and explicit threat of suppression.2 The recent historicizing and Hibernicizing turn in Beckett Studies has done much to root this opposition in an Irish context.3 Central to such accounts has been the Free State’s 1929 Censorship of Publications Act, which, in an effort to combat the circulation of ‘evil literature’ in the young nation, prohibited all printed matter which advocated ‘the unnatural prevention of conception or the procurement of abortion or miscarriage’.4 John P. Harrington has shown how ‘Che Sciagura’ (‘What a Misfortune’, 1929), one of Beckett’s earliest pieces of published prose, and ‘Censorship in the Saorstat’ (written c.1934–1936, published 1983) seek to satirize and scandalize what he presents as Ireland’s ‘agenda for cultural exclusivism’.5 Patrick Bixby argues that this climate of censoriousness, and the coercive collocation of Catholicism, fertility, and Irish identity which he claims the Act mandated, were key catalysts for Beckett’s antagonistic rendering of post-independence Irish political and cultural self-fashioning.6 More recently, Seán Kennedy has offered a reading of the short story Premier amour/First Love (written c.1946, published in French in 1970 and in an English self-translation in 1973) which emphasizes Beckett’s opposition to the pro-natalism of the Censorship Act, a thesis reinforced and extended in Paul Stewart’s study, Sex and Aesthetics in Samuel Beckett’s Work (2011), in which resistance to reproductive sexual activity is identified as central to the Beckettian aesthetic.7
While these critics are correct to assert that the Censorship Act, and the investment in fertility it seemed to reflect, remained ‘problems of Irishness’ with which Beckett grappled throughout his career, the accounts they offer of the nature of that problem and the manner of Beckett’s responses to it are often limited.8 To begin with, each of these studies is staked upon a straightforward opposition between Beckett and the repressive Catholic sexual culture that the Censorship Act is taken to embody. In such readings, Beckett emerges as the defiant modernist par excellence, following in the footsteps of his master James Joyce in scandalizing all those who sought to place aesthetic or moral constraints on his work. On the one hand, such an account risks replicating the ‘enlightened Irish artist transcends benighted Erin to join the liberal European avant-garde’ narrative which studies of Irish modernism have been keen to problematize in recent years. On the other, it overlooks moments in which Beckett remained silent on the question of censorship (particularly the Irish suppression of More Pricks Than Kicks), or expressed anxiety over projects which he felt might tarnish his reputation with the ghettoizing label of ‘obscenity’, an impulse most visible in his deliberations over a commission from Jack Kahane’s Obelisk Press to translate de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom (written 1785, published 1904) in 1938.9 Perhaps more significantly given the Foucauldian account of sexuality upon which the majority of these accounts are staked, in presenting Beckett’s obscenity, anti-natalism, and the often grisly tone of his depictions of sex as intrinsically valiant repudiations of the conservative sexual culture of Ireland, such analyses risk conforming to the logic of precisely the ‘repressive hypothesis’ that Foucault’s account of the history and deployment of sexuality was intended to problematize.10 At the very least, these exculpatory accounts of Beckett’s sexual politics downplay the most troubling features of his engagement with sex, offering a paradoxically sanitized image of Beckettian obscenity.
Where previous criticism has presented Beckett’s response to censorship and pro-natalism in Ireland as an ethically valorous and politically subversive rejection of state-mandated fertility and confessional identity politics, in this article I emphasize the debts which this strain of Beckett’s work owes to a eugenically inflected strand of Irish sectarian agon which both contributed to and was intensified by the drafting and passage of the Censorship Act. In doing so, I demonstrate the ways in which, through the Act, discourses of sexual health, eugenics, and population control became bound up with a broader competition for political influence and cultural capital between intellectual, governmental, and confessional factions within the Free State. Finally, I explore how, in Premier amour/First Love, Beckett subjects his earlier sectarian eugenicism to pressure by linking the Ireland of the Censorship Act to the landscape and policies of Nazi-occupied Vichy France. I argue that, as an artist whose oeuvre has been held up as the ‘only fitting reaction to the situation of the concentration camps’, Beckett’s interrogation of his own participation in eugenicist discourses merits close and sensitive scrutiny, and should not be overlooked in an effort to position him uncomplicatedly as a champion of free speech and reproductive rights.11 To offer such an account, it is first necessary to examine the ways in which the Act has been interpreted in Irish historiography and to identify the implications of such accounts for an analysis of Beckett’s response to censorship in Ireland.
II
Due in large part to its infamous prohibition of all printed matter relating to birth control, the 1929 Censorship of Publications Act has become both a by-word for the sexual ‘repression’ of the Irish, and a focal point for critical efforts to interrogate and problematize this popular stereotype. This has resulted in the emergence of two relatively well-defined positions with regards to the Act and its broader significance as a reflection of Irish cultural attitudes to sex in the early twentieth century. The first, exemplified by the work of Tom Inglis (but a feature of responses to the Act from its inception), emphasizes its status as an archetypal legislative manifestation of the influence of the Catholic hierarchy in the administration of the Free State and the shaping of Irish sexual identity. For Inglis, the Act constitutes one facet of the Catholic Church’s ‘monopoly on morality’ in the emergent nation, establishing a social atmosphere in which ‘even the mildest suggestion of or allusion to sexual transgression encountered a rhetoric of shock, horror, and outrage.’12 In Inglis’s reading, this censorious climate becomes one of a range of social, cultural, and institutional forces which, from the late nineteenth century onwards, shaped the ‘Irish body’ into a template established by a ‘normative, particularly sexual, Catholic social order’.13 The second position, articulated in the work of Diarmaid Ferriter and Peter Martin, downplays the centrality of Catholic doctrine to the Act by situating its proscriptions in the wider field of contemporary European nationalism and the discourses of pro-natalism with which France, Italy, and others responded to a period of diminishing birth-rates and demographic decline.14 They argue that, when viewed in light of anti-Malthusian censorship policies such as the French Loi du 31 juillet 1920 which suppressed ‘provocations to abortion and contraceptive propaganda’, or the national ‘battle’ for fertility declared by Mussolini in his 1927 ‘Ascension Day’ speech, the Act seems less a uniquely Irish phenomenon than an idiosyncratic manifestation of a broader European trend.15 Furthermore, they caution against reading the Act in sectarian terms, noting that, despite being presented as ‘promoted exclusively by the Catholic Church against the spirit of Anglo-Ireland’, the Act was supported by representatives of all churches.16
Elements of both positions are detectable in ‘Censorship in the Saorstat’, Samuel Beckett’s essay-length response to the Act. Commissioned in 1934 by the soon-to-be-defunct Bookman, and revised in 1936 to note Beckett’s own inclusion on the Irish Register of Prohibited Publications, the essay is most commonly written off as a piece of hack-work ground out in response to an unwelcome deadline.17 However, read in its intended context as a British publisher’s guide to the logic and inner workings of the Censorship Act, it offers a valuable opportunity to politicize and historicize the rejection of reproductive sexuality which Stewart and others identify as a hallmark of Beckett’s work, and to test the applicability of Inglis and Ferriter’s accounts of the model of Irish sexuality the debates over censorship reflect.
Analysing the Act section by section, Beckett identifies Part IV—its proscription of birth control literature—as the ‘essence of the Bill and its exciting cause’.18 He argues that under the conditions of the Act ‘to waive the off chance of a reasonable creature is no longer a mere mortal sin, but a slapup social malfeasance’ (87). Like Inglis, Beckett perceives in the Act an effort to enshrine the ‘mortal sin[s]’ of Catholic fertility doctrine as the basis of the Free State’s independent national identity. In a performative pastiche of the rhetoric of the Act’s exponents, Beckett emphasizes the ways in which its restrictions on prophylaxis were justified under the rubric of a strained cultural nationalism: ‘France may commit race suicide. Erin will never. And should she be found at any time deficient in Cuchulains, at least it shall never be said that they were contraceived’ (87–8).
Beckett derived both the phrase ‘race suicide’ and the example of France from remarks made by Deputy J. J. Byrne, the Act’s most vocal parliamentary supporter (and Beckett’s most consistent target for derision), during the Second Stage Dáil debate on the Censorship Bill:
To the vast majority of the people the limitation, the control of births, or the infliction of race suicide upon this nation is one that is bitterly resented […] The French population actually exceeded the German population in 1850. To-day the German population stands at 69 millions and the French population at 39½ millions. Is that for the benefit of France? […] Does it make for the production of a better race[?]19
Beckett’s parodic appropriation of Byrne’s oratory mimics its histrionic tone to foreground the quasi-eugenicist fixation on producing ‘a better race’ which he feels underpins the Act’s prohibition of birth control literature. Like Ferriter and Martin, Beckett thus situates the Act in a wider European context of anti-Malthusian fertility policies, in which the Act’s blurring of public health and public morality in an effort to administer and direct sexuality becomes legible as one of the ‘techniques’ for the ‘subjugation of bodies and the control of populations’ which Foucault identifies as the basis of ‘bio-power’.20 However, where Ferriter treats the confessional and nationalist impulses which motivated Catholic action groups such as the Catholic Truth Association of Ireland (CTSI) to militate for censorship as coincidental to its drafting and operation, Beckett’s reference to ‘Cuchulains’ positions the Act’s implied pro-natal ‘bio-power’ agenda as the logical correlative of a well-worn nationalist cult of Gaelic hypermasculinity and cultural de-Anglicization.21
Taking Beckett’s analysis seriously, it becomes clear that neither Ferriter nor Inglis can offer a holistic picture of the social and political issues with which the Act was implicated. On the one hand, a mono-causal account of the Act in which the Catholic Church’s influence in a range of fields renders it omnipotent in its capacity to shape Irish sexual attitudes exaggerates the degree of Catholic hegemony in the Free State, and overlooks the ways in which legislation justified through a pietistic rhetoric could still participate in the operation of ‘bio-power’. On the other, a revisionist reading which reduces the Act to a parochial manifestation of European pro-natalism occludes the range of cultural, denominational, and ethno-national tensions which manifested themselves in its drafting and operation, detaching it from the broader history of Irish cultural nationalism. As Beckett’s critique of the Act suggests, only by establishing a dialectic between these positions does it become possible to appreciate the range of debates which the Act crystallized. One starting-point for such a synthesis is a consideration of the ways in which the Act and the controversy its passage generated reflect and participate in contemporary disputes over the role of the state within liberal political philosophy.
III
In their efforts to position Beckett as a champion of reproductive rights, accounts of his response to censorship have tended to downplay the extent to which Beckett’s horror of fertility was bound up with an anti-democratic animus shared by many of his contemporaries. This hostility reflected a wider uncertainty concerning the appropriate telos for an increasingly democratized state. Throughout the 1920s and 30s, the emergence of the institutional and intellectual apparatus of the welfare state placed classic liberal theories of government, in which the state remained neutral with regard to the physical and moral well-being of its citizens, under pressure. Amid such an identity crisis, the vocation of the state, and the role of democracy in its pursuit became unclear. Was the state’s duty to recognize and foster excellence, or was it to reflect the will of the masses? Such questions found influential expression in Ireland in the writings of W. E. H. Lecky, who echoed de Tocqueville in highlighting the apparent irreconcilability of democratic principle and meaningful notions of cultural excellence. For Lecky, modern democracy ‘level[led] down quite as much as it level[led] up’ and was unfavourable to the ‘higher forms of intellectual life’, offering only the ‘apotheosis of the average judgement’.22 It was to this apotheosis that George Russell (AE) was to object in his critique of the Bill in the Irish Statesmen for August 1928. For Russell, the appropriate response to the popularity of the British tabloid press in Ireland was not to homogenize the experience of readers through a lowest-common-denominator model of state-approved reading matter: ‘Instead of providing better reading, our moralists wish to bring about a national censorship, so that cultivated and uncultivated alike will be permitted to read only such books or papers as the State thinks are harmless.’23 This paradoxically undemocratic one-size-fits-all mediocrity was exemplified for Russell by the composition of the ‘recognized associations’, whose task it was to present obscene works to the Censorship Board in early drafts of the Bill. Russell argued that, rather than ‘associations of intelligent or cultivated men’, the Bill would recognize those ‘fanatics’ who had most vocally advocated for censorship, and whose fervour had manifested itself in a spate of armed raids on trains transporting English papers.24 Yeats concurred, decrying the ‘incredible ignorance’ and ‘lawless vulgarity’ of this ‘Society of Angelic Warfare’.25
In Beckett’s view, the anti-intellectual populism for which Russell and Yeats excoriated the Act was inseparable from its prudery and pro-natalism. For Beckett, the failure to recognize aesthetic value in the stipulations of the Act, and the push to appoint a non-academic Censorship Board, paradoxically resulted in a group of censors equipped only to read texts through the prism of sex. In ‘Censorship in the Saorstat,’ Beckett critiques this blend of philistinism and erotomania through a sexualized burlesque of the censorious reading process in which the Board’s engagement with texts is rendered in bodily terms. In Beckett’s parodic account, the Act ‘emits [its] definitions’ of indecency and obscenity as the ‘cuttle squirts ooze from its cod’ (84), transforming its proscriptions against material ‘inciting of sexual immorality or unnatural vice’, into an ejaculatory discharge from a metonymically evoked cod-piece. For Beckett, these ‘orduretight’ definitions will oblige the Censorship Board to disregard authorial intention and, by extension, considerations of literary value, in their assessment of texts. Beckett notes that a plea to distinguish between indecency ‘obiter’ (in passing) and indecency ‘ex professo’ (as an expressed intention) was disregarded by ‘a caucus that ha[d] bigger and better things to split than hairs, the pubic not excepted’ (84). Through a deliberately tired pun on bureaucratic hair-splitting, Beckett pastiches the ‘down-to-earth’ tone of the Bill’s supporters to link their anti-intellectual disregard for literary value to their equally cavalier desire to regulate the sexual practices of the Irish population.
This somaticized rendering of the reading process continues when Beckett disparagingly quotes the Minister for Justice, James FitzGerald-Kenney’s justification for disregarding authorial intention when considering the indecency of a book: ‘it is the effect which [the author’s] thought will have as expressed in the particular words into which he has flung (eyetalics mine) his thought that the censor has to consider’ (84). Through the corporeal caveat lector of his disdainful ‘eyetalics’ Beckett draws attention to FitzGerald-Kenney’s visible disregard for authorial craft and offers a punning reminder that, like Job, and the Irish citizens whose sexual conduct so concerns them, the Censorship Board must encounter a text through ‘eyes of flesh’ (Job, 10:4). In doing so, Beckett emphasizes the well-worn paradox at the heart of censorship as an intellectual project: that the censor must read and pass judgement on texts that they believe will ‘corrupt and deprave’ others, without themselves being corrupted or depraved.26 More damningly, Beckett also implies that the censor’s sensuous optic is in fact a by-product of the philistinism FitzGerald-Kenney’s remarks seem to flaunt.
Beckett’s use of this somaticizing rhetoric to critique the Board’s rejection of cultural merit in its deliberations reaches an obscene climax when Beckett addresses Deputy J. J. Byrne’s ideal Board member and the level of textual engagement expected of them. Byrne discounted the ‘literary crank’ in favour of the more ‘common sense’ figure of the ‘man broad minded and fair’.27 As far as Byrne was concerned, it was ‘not necessary’ for such a ‘sensible individual’ to read the ‘whole of a book’ to be able to reach a conclusion as to its moral and aesthetic worth. The Minister for Justice concurred, citing the example of Ulysses (1922) as a work ‘so blatantly indecent’ and infamously obscene that it would be ‘unnecessary for the members of the Board to read every line’.28 Beckett’s response to such anti-intellectualism is at once lurid and learned. Imagining the deputy’s ‘selection’ to the Board confronted with the ‘Secret Life [sic] of Procopius’ (an uncompromising account of the debauchery of the Emperor Justinian’s court) Beckett contends that ‘[h]is position would be as invidious as that of Jerome reading Cicero […] were it not that the man broad-minded and fair is at liberty to withdraw his purities from the pollution before they are entirely spent, that is to say almost at once’ (85). Through a series of pointedly ineffective euphemisms Beckett renders the censor’s engagement with Procopius’s text in sexual terms, linking it to the anti-contraceptive ‘essence’ of the Bill. In so doing, Beckett turns the Act’s logic against itself, figuring the process of censorious reading as an example of exactly the modes of non-reproductive sexual activity which the Act circumscribed. The Board’s ideal censorious reader (the ‘man broad-minded and fair’) must necessarily fail as the nation’s ideal self-censoring lover through the liberty he enjoys to ‘withdraw his purities’ from the polluting text ‘before they are entirely spent’. Beckett thus accuses the Censorship Board of encouraging its members to engage in the intellectual equivalent of coitus interruptus, a form of contraception prohibited by the Catholic dogma to which Beckett attributed the Act’s pro-natalist bent.29 Beckett implies that the anti-intellectual disregard for literary expertise which the remarks of Byrne betray will lead to the appointment of censors whose ignorance will leave them capable only of viewing Procopius’ text in pornographic terms, an anti-populist stance underscored by Beckett’s recherché frame of literary reference. In Beckett’s rendering, Byrne’s populist fetishization of the ‘average judgement’ lends legal backing to a reading process based on a partial and eroticized engagement with literature, that results in the premature intellectual ejaculation of a censorious judgement in which the Board member finds his purities ‘spent […] almost at once’ (eyetalics mine). In doing so, Beckett performatively undermines both the intellectual and moral authority of the architects of the Act and the Board they constructed, by showing how their democratizing fetish for ‘common sense’ and their disregard for literary excellence would result in a hypocritical and sex-obsessed mode of reading to the detriment of the nation.
IV
In highlighting the negative impact of the Act’s interimplicated cultural and sexual proscriptions, Beckett’s caustic critique strongly resonates with debates over fertility politics, the role of the state, and questions of cultural capital which were taking place in contemporary eugenics. The first decades of the twentieth century witnessed the proliferation of eugenics societies across Europe and America, with followers organizing conferences and symposia, lobbying for changes to public health and education policy, and publishing treatises on a range of social issues.30 While this ‘science of improving stock’ found a range of nationally specific expressions, advocates of eugenics shared an investment in the physical and mental improvement of humanity, a desire to regulate who reproduced with whom, and a set of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ eugenic strategies for doing so.31 ‘Positive’ eugenics sought to engender what Yeats, in his 1938 polemic On the Boiler, envisaged as ‘the best bred from the best’, by encouraging exemplary individuals to reproduce under optimal conditions.32 ‘Negative’ eugenics, conversely, sought to arrest the perceived ‘deterioration’ of humanity, by checking the proliferation of what F. C. S. Schiller dubbed ‘human weeds’.33 In its most extreme manifestations, this entailed the incarceration, sterilization, and extermination of ‘dysgenic’ individuals such as the mentally ill, the physically and mentally disabled, and those deemed to be of ‘inferior’ racial stock.
Accounts of Beckett’s sexual politics have tended to situate him in uncomplicated opposition to this sort of eugenic thinking. Seán Kennedy presents ‘the rich cluster of abortions, abandonments[,] infanticidal urges and acts’ in Beckett’s mature works as a rejection of both the ‘coercive sexual mores’ of the Free State and the eugenicist drive to ‘reinvigorate the Irish Protestant tradition’ advocated by figures such as Yeats, Archbishop Gregg, and W. B. Stanford.34 Such a rejection would appear to underpin Beckett’s caustic précis of the aims and impact of the Irish Censorship Act at the rhetorical climax of ‘Censorship in the Saorstat’: ‘Sterilization of the mind and apotheosis of the litter suit well together. Paradise peopled with virgins and earth with decorticated multiparas’.35 Read in the manner Kennedy suggests, Beckett’s remarks function as a pastiche of the pseudo-scientific register of J. J. Bryne’s call for a ‘better race’. The nationalist ideal of a populous and sexually pure Ireland is to be bought at the expense of turning its (female) citizens into an army of continually pregnant mothers, stripped of their prophylactic skin. In such an analysis, the privileging of an idealized image of a ‘pure’ Catholic citizenry—the ‘virgins’—necessarily entails the inhuman treatment of the nation’s fully-realized population—the ‘multiparas’—whose task it is to ‘people’ a Paradise they will never inhabit. The corollary and condition of this ‘apotheosis of the litter’ is the ‘sterilization of the mind’ through censorship, paralleling and contributing to the growth of the population beyond the limits of sustainability. Read in this light, Beckett’s remarks appear to emphasize the ways in which the Censorship Act justifies the constraints it places on the Irish population by reference to the legal fiction of an ideal reader-citizen whom the censor in the act of protecting seeks to reify. The textual logic of censorship, which effaces or replaces ‘obscene’ passages in publications, is thus replicated at the level of the readership it constructs and the forms of citizenship it seeks to enforce. While Kennedy is correct to highlight Beckett’s opposition to such schemes of regulated fertility, the risk of such accounts is the presentist desire they manifest to place Beckett on the ‘right side’ of a history in which eugenics has become synonymous with the Holocaust. Thus, while elements of the above critique ring true, it is worth noting what it occludes. For one thing, it ascribes to the essay a feminist outlook which neither it nor the early Beckettian oeuvre ultimately reflect. For another, it takes little account of the ways in which Beckett’s contemptuous remarks resonate with a eugenically-inflected and pointedly sectarian strand of contemporary Protestant opinion.
Both Diarmaid Ferriter and Senia Pašeta have claimed that what gave the Irish debate over censorship and birth control its idiosyncratic character with regard to its European counterparts was the absence of a visible engagement with eugenicist anxieties over population decline which marked similar debates in France or Italy.36 However, an examination of responses to the Bill suggests that such concerns were not absent in Ireland, but instead became part of an overdetermined competition for cultural capital and legislative authority among the confessional, intellectual, and political factions of the Free State. While Pašeta is correct to assert that ethical and doctrinal issues were the most often discussed catalysts for Catholic opposition to birth control literature, that did not prevent the Irish Rosary from adopting a triumphalist tone when foregrounding the demographic decline of the Protestant population in the new state. The size of Ireland’s Protestant community had been on the wane since the late nineteenth century, a trend which reached its peak between 1911 and 1926, when it shrank by 34 per cent.37 For the Irish Rosary, the cause of this decline was clear: Irish Protestants had been ‘tainted with the modern mania of race suicide’—a ‘crime’ which they were relieved to report had gained ‘no footing […] among the Catholic people’. As a result, Ireland’s Protestants faced an ‘extinction’ which not even a desperate return to ‘Souperism’ could avert.38 Such emotive evocations of the Famine were not confined to Catholic responses to the Bill. In an idiosyncratic letter to the Irish Times, Dudley Fletcher, a prominent Church of Ireland Rector, deployed a surreal blend of Malthusian economics and speculative science fiction to criticize the Bill’s restrictions on information concerning family planning by inviting his readers to imagine a hypothetical future (the year 2198) in which a ‘Peace Pact’ and advances in medical science would render birth control the only means to avert apocalyptic overpopulation: ‘If more individuals are born than the food supply can sustain, the surplus must starve or be killed off’.39 Yeats wryly noted that, if such neo-Malthusian prophecies were accurate, the Catholic Church would be obliged either to ask married couples to live in celibacy, or to rely upon Swift’s ‘Modest Proposal’ to make ‘love self-supporting’.40 As this reference to Swift’s image of improvident over-breeders starving as a result of their ill-managed fertility makes clear, in the view of many Protestant commentators, Ireland had already offered a chilling vindication of Malthus’s work through the catastrophic events of the Famine.41 In the eyes of these critics, the Catholic members of the proposed Censorship Board had been denied the capacity to participate independently in such a discussion by the proscriptions of the Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of Prohibited Books), rubber-stamping Catholic clerical control over the intellectual life of Ireland.42 Only by shouldering the burden of intellectual responsibility their free-thinking religious background entailed and compelling the ‘fullest discussion’ of birth control, Yeats implied, could the minority dissuade Ireland’s Catholic population from conspiring in their own extinction.43
As these examples suggest, for a certain strand of Protestant and Anglo-Irish opinion, the Bill rendered it possible to offer a pathologized image of the cultural and numerical ascendancy of a hyper-fertile Catholic majority, while presenting the Protestant minority as bound to the nation by an intellectualized form of noblesse oblige upon which their claim to continued cultural and political relevance could be staked. Viewed in such a context, Beckett’s image of an ‘earth’ swarming with ‘decorticated multiparas’ takes on a different, more sectarian complexion. Rather than the unfortunate victims of a coercive state-mandated fertility drive, when viewed in the light of these press debates, Beckett’s ‘multiparas’ appear to constitute the same hyper-fertile Catholic horde whom Yeats and Fletcher had disparaged.44 In such a reading, Beckett’s position does not reject but in fact reflects and participates in precisely the noxious logic and implicit and explicit prejudices of the European and Irish eugenicism against which his work has traditionally been aligned. Where Kennedy and others would have Beckett seeking to topple Yeats from his ‘old boiler’ in his response to the Censorship Act, the ways in which ‘Censorship in the Saorstat’ resonates with both literary and popular Protestant attacks on the legislation make this opposition difficult to sustain. However, if this difficulty is embraced rather than elided, and this hagiographic approach to Beckett is set aside, it becomes possible to offer a fresh and more nuanced account of the political stakes of his obscene anti-natal aesthetic and his desire to affront Ireland’s ‘filthy censors’.
V
An obvious starting-point for such an account is Murphy (1938). Composed between August 1935 and June 1936—only a year after More Pricks than Kicks (1934) had been placed on the Irish ‘Index of Forbidden Books’—Beckett’s first published novel has long been considered his most explicit literary response to the Ireland of the Censorship Act. Paul Stewart, among others, has highlighted the ways in which Murphy’s euphemistic ‘MUSIC’ is used to highlight the commoditized forms of sexual exchange which animate much of the novel’s plot, while at the same time positioning the ‘filthy synecdoche’ of censorship as a prominent effort by the state to regulate sexual activity.45 Wylie’s amorous encounter with Miss Counihan in Dublin is evinced as one such example of this trend, in which musical terminology, an avowed desire to deprave the reader, and a eugenicist narratorial perspective coincide:
A kiss from Wylie was like a breve tied, in a long slow amorous phrase, over bars’ times its equivalent in demi-semiquavers. Miss Counihan had never enjoyed anything quite so much as this slowmotion osmosis of love’s spittle. The above passage is carefully calculated to deprave the cultivated reader. For an Irish girl Miss Counihan was quite exceptionally anthropoid. Wylie was not sure he cared altogether for her mouth, which was a large one. The kissing surface was greater than the rosebud’s, but less highly toned. Otherwise she did. It is superfluous to describe her, she was just like any other beautiful Irish girl, except, as noted, more markedly anthropoid.46
As Stewart highlights, the passage is deliberately overladen with implicit and direct sexual references, from the juxtaposition of the elevated music of Wylie’s kiss with the grotesque exchange of ‘love’s spittle’, to the suggestive image of the ‘highly toned’ rosebud (slang for both the anus and the vagina) Wylie would rather have been kissing. Even Miss Counihan’s name, which collapses the non-sexual idealization of Cathleen Ni Houlihan into a French pun on ‘cunt’, seems to throw down a nationally specific gantlet to the Irish censor. However, what Stewart’s account overlooks are the ways in which this censor-baiting relates to the ‘markedly anthropoid’ character of Miss Counihan. In emphasizing the ape-like features of this warped embodiment of an idealized Ireland, Beckett is invoking a nineteenth-century discourse of Irish simianization used by British political cartoonists to caricature Home Rule agitators and physical force nationalists.47 In contrast to the ideal reader-citizen of the Censorship of Publications Act, obliged to remain an intellectually innocent ‘Virgin’ or a reproductively over-active ‘multipara’ in the name of producing a ‘better race’, Miss Counihan is presented as an evolutionary hangover whose most attractive feature (her ‘toned’ rosebud) is identified with non-reproductive sexual activity. Being generous to Beckett in this moment, one might argue that by collocating this anachronistic racist slander with the implied presence of the ‘filthy censor’ Beckett seeks to remind Irish readers of the toxic political tradition to which eugenically inflected moral hygiene policies such as the Censorship Act belong. Being less charitable, one might link this moment to the recurrent flashes of sectarian disdain for the institutional authority of the Catholic ‘Gael’ which occur throughout the early prose to reflect on the ways in which Beckett, in his desire to affront the censorious Free State in this period, risks replicating the logic and rhetoric of the Act and its sponsors.
Partly in recognition of this animus, Beckett’s emigration to France in 1937 has been characterized by scholars as the moment in which the artist transcended his native ‘prosodturfy’ for the ‘intellectual milieu’ of a European avant-garde to which he had always belonged, ‘despite his Irish roots’—a shift reflected in Beckett’s decision to begin writing primarily in French.48 However, as David Lloyd and Seán Kennedy have demonstrated, the 1946 novella Premier amour/First Love—one of the earliest prose pieces composed as part of this declaration of linguistic independence—is rooted in the Ireland of the Censorship Act.49 In this context, the narrator’s abandonment of his child and its mother appears to constitute an effort towards independence comparable to Beckett’s departure for France, or the obscene French idiom in which the novella is composed. However, as Kennedy emphasizes, though Beckett’s narrator may ‘leave’ his new-born child at the story’s close, he cannot ‘leave behind’ the pro-natalist claims and Irish context its cries represent.50 If Kennedy’s insight is extended to the aesthetic of Premier amour/First Love as a whole, it becomes clear that the harder Beckett works to transgress the limitations of Irish censorship, the more they come to shape the text he produces. Following his father’s death, Beckett’s narrator finds himself evicted from his familial home during a period of troubled defecation: ‘One day, on my return from stool, I found my room locked and my belongings in a heap before the door’ (64).51 His description of his faecal issues grows increasingly detailed and ultimately blasphemous:
At such times I […] just gazed dully at the almanac hanging from a nail before my eyes, with its chromo of a bearded stripling in the midst of sheep, Jesus no doubt, parted the cheeks with both hands and strained, heave! ho! heave! ho!, with the motions of one tugging at the oar[.] (64)
The narrator’s Christological qualification, ‘Jesus no doubt’, nestles snugly between two longer descriptive clauses, which it serves to part like the narrator’s ‘cheeks’. The physical and syntactic proximity in which Beckett places ‘Jesus’ to the narrator’s ‘heaving’ attempts at evacuation form part of a range of narratorial shock tactics that serve as provocations to censorship throughout the text. The narrator’s exile status and this obscene aesthetic intensify in tandem throughout the story. The narrator’s morbid preference for graveyards is explained with reference to the number of suitable locations they afford for a ‘piss’ (62), and the relief they offer from the stench of the ‘sticky foreskins’ (61) of the living. When the narrator seeks refuge in a cowshed after attempting to break off his relationship with ‘Lulu’, a prostitute and the eventual mother of what may be his child, he traces her name in the ‘dry and hollow cowclaps’ (69) that surround him. This act of faecal inscription prompts a reflection on his homeland, which the narrator presents as manured with ‘history’s ancient faeces’, dropped in steaming piles to be ‘sought after, stuffed and carried in procession’ by the nation’s ‘patriots’ (69). Finding himself in ‘Lulu’s company one evening, the narrator considers ‘kicking her in the cunt’ (66), but instead finds himself ‘at the mercy of an erection’ (67) which she helps to relieve. When ‘Lulu’ announces her pregnancy, the narrator advises her to ‘[a]bort, abort’ so that her darkened nipples may ‘blush like new’ (78). As this short summary emphasizes, Premier amour/First Love seems to take the Censorship of Publications Act as a schematic for its content, containing as it does obscenity, blasphemy, prostitution, references to contraception, vocal advocacy of abortion, and a cloacal obsession fit to rival Joyce at his most eye-watering.
For Kennedy, this intense obscenity, and the anti-natal outlook it reflects combine with the narrator’s quietism and social isolation to register a dual rebuke to the Catholic-nationalist imaginary as encoded in the Censorship Act and the equally fertility-driven programme of Protestant rejuvenation advocated by Gregg, Yeats, and Stanford. In doing so, Kennedy mobilizes the conceptual armature of Queer Theory to present the narrator’s abandonment of his new-born as politically, morally, and aesthetically preferable to the eugenicist and sectarian infanticide which conclude early drafts of Yeats’s Purgatory (1938). In Kennedy’s account, Beckett’s narrator embodies the naysaying ethical imperative of queerness by rejecting ‘the child’ as the heteronormative signifier of ‘reproductive futurity’ with reference to which Lee Edelman has argued all political discourse and activity is implicitly justified and regulated.52 While Kennedy is correct to emphasize the rejection of fertility both in Premier amour/First Love and the Beckettian oeuvre at large, in positioning Beckett’s as the ethically preferable response to the political and demographic twilight of Ireland’s Protestant population, his analysis of the story fails to address the misogyny of the narrator, the ambivalence with which his calls for abortion and his departure from ‘Lulu’ are depicted, and the ways in which these features link the Irish context in which Kennedy reads the novella to the immediate post-war French context of its composition. Significantly in this regard, it fails to register the ways in which the narrator’s rejection of reproductive sexuality jostles with the eugenic register in which he describes ‘Lulu’. This eugenicist perspective manifests itself when the narrator describes his first night in the home of ‘Lulu’ (whom he rechristens ‘Anna’). Despite his indifference to her appearance—she has a ‘face like millions of others’ (73)—as she undresses he is struck by her ‘squint’ (74). This realization, which occurs during a de facto strip-tease—‘Anna’ undresses with a ‘slowness fit to enflame an elephant’ (74)—undermines the impression of normalcy which he had previously held of her face (‘it seemed normal to me’ (73, emphasis mine)), implicitly identifying ‘Anna’ as one of the ‘human weeds’ Schiller and his fellow eugenicists had been so anxious to eliminate.
The French rendering of this moment (‘je vis qu’elle louchait’) is even more suggestive. Syntactically, it highlights the narrator’s implicitly eugenicist perspective by juxtaposing his unimpaired vision (‘je vis’) with her straining sight (‘elle louchait’). Semantically, it plays upon the varied senses of ‘loucher’—the biological condition of ‘squinting’, the act of regarding someone in a deceptive manner, and the act of coveting something—to emphasize the hostility and suspicion with which the French narrator, the Vichy French government, and the eugenics movement more broadly regarded the sexual desires of those whom they perceived to deviate from the biological norm.53 The crucible for such ideas in occupied France was the Fondation Française pour l’Étude des Problèmes Humaines (French Foundation for the Study of Human Problems), established by Vichy decree in 1941.54 This institution, tasked with improving the French population by eugenic means, was overseen by the Nobel laureate, Alexis Carrel, whose best-selling 1935 popular scientific study Man, The Unknown, argued for a ‘voluntary eugenics’, in which ‘appropriate education’ would prevent the propagation of ‘contaminated families’.55 Confronted with ‘Anna’’s squint, the narrator of Premier amour/First Love engages in just such an act of ‘voluntary eugenics’, deflecting her sexual advances by refusing to undress and asking for a tour of the premises. Having been shown the parlour, he proceeds to eject its furnishings, creating a space of womb-like security in which only a single sofa remains. As he removes the final item of furniture into the now obstructed corridor, the narrator overhears the indeterminate word ‘fibrome, or brone’ (75), which, though he disavows recognizing it or understanding its meaning, he feels compelled to record. Phil Baker posits that the word the narrator most likely overhears is fibroma, ‘a benign tumour of the wall of the uterus’, which Paul Stewart reads as an analogue for the narrator, safely ensconced on his sofa beside the vaginal (and now impassable) doorway, in implied contrast with the ‘malign growth’ of the baby the narrator flees at the story’s close.56 Like Kennedy, Stewart thus presents this moment as a queer rejection of reproductive sexuality rooted in the Freudian death drive.57
While such resonances are available in the story, a solely anti-natal reading of Premier amour/First Love elides several key narrative details. The first is the relation the narrator’s reference to uterine tumours and his reluctance to consummate his relationship with ‘Anna’ bear to his reaction to her ‘crooked’ (73) eyes. Upon learning that ‘Anna’ is with child, the narrator conducts a survey of her physical condition—a deliberate restaging of the earlier strip-tease—in which the apparent obtrusiveness of her ocular impairment and the evidence of her pregnancy increase in tandem: ‘The more naked she was, the more cross-eyed’ (78). The register adopted for the narrator’s survey in the original French is equally eugenicist. The French narrator notes how ‘Anna’s nudity in this moment renders her ‘strabique’, a cognate of the diagnostic term strabismus and a reference to the congenital defect it denotes.58 This clinical survey of ‘Anna’, in which the medical gaze and the male gaze operate in unison, follows hot on the heels of the revelation that she lives ‘by prostitution’ (78). As the work of Judith R. Walkowitz, Philippa Levine, and Maria Luddy has shown, the figure of the prostitute was a focal point for eugenically inflected social hygiene discourse and public health policy throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.59 Legislative measures taken to regulate the spread of Venereal Disease targeted female sex workers as the most easily isolated (and morally censured) vector for infection. The most notorious of these measures in Britain were the Contagious Diseases Acts (1864, 1867, 1869), which permitted the medical inspection and incarceration without consent of any woman alleged to be living by prostitution in the vicinity of a military garrison who was accused of being infected. Ireland supplemented these Acts with an abusive network of ecclesiastically managed Magdalene Laundries and Mother-and-Baby Homes, in which ‘fallen women’ were ostensibly offered the opportunity to redeem their sexual transgressions through spiritually ennobling and financially rewarding labour, while at the same time being removed from a breeding pool and a public sphere it was feared they would contaminate.60 In contrast to the rosy image Kennedy and Stewart offer of the narrator’s advocacy of abortion and abandonment of ‘Anna’ in Premier amour/First Love, these actions, when read in such a context, take on a different complexion. Rather than reflecting a horror of reproduction qua reproduction, or an anti-eugenic strain of Protestant quietism, the narrator’s insistence that ‘Anna’ should abort the impending infant may instead be taken to indicate a desire to ensure that the sexually compromised and physically inferior ‘Anna’ does not perpetuate a tainted line. The narrator’s evacuation of the parlour, and symbolic obstruction of the corridor which leads to it, ‘making egress impossible, and a fortiori ingress,’ (74) thus become acts not of thanatic self-annihilation, but of sterilization intended to render birth (egress), and, indeed, penetrative sex of any kind (ingress), unfeasible.
Beyond their eugenic resonances, these acts also possess a sectarian character, hinted at in the ambiguous term ‘fibrome, or brone’. While Baker’s account offers a productive starting point for considering this moment of strategic obscurity, it does not engage with the specific national cues such a moment offers, nor the cultural resonances they engage. Thus, while Baker is justified in an Anglophone context to gloss ‘fibrome’, which has no direct parallel in English, with the medical Latin fibroma, he overlooks the fact that ‘fibrome utérin’ is the standard French term for a uterine tumour, disengaging the novella from the historical, political, and linguistic context in which it was composed. In doing so, he elides the ways in which the narrator’s actions, and the depopulated and nationalistic landscape in which the story is set, evoke the eugenic logic of the government of Vichy France, through which Beckett had fled in 1942.61 Moreover, while Baker accounts for the mysterious ‘fibrome’, he leaves the even more puzzling qualification ‘or brone’ unexamined. One suggestive homophonic resonance for this seemingly trivial syllable that presents itself in a Gaelic cultural context is the Irish word ‘brón’ (‘sorrow’ or ‘regret’), a common piece of diction in Irish-language verse.62 In contrast to the conventional expressions of sentimental Celtic heartache offered in aislings such as ‘Mo Bhrón ar an Bhfarraige’ (my grief is on the sea) or Pádraic Pearse’s ‘Bean Sléibhe Ag Caoineadh A Mhac’ (a woman of the mountains keens her son), the only ‘brón’ Beckett’s narrator appears to feel is that he may have conceived a child with a physically defective prostitute, whose unintelligible singing of ‘old folk songs’ (66), association with a fragment of unattributed Irish, and unwillingness to abort the child, suggest a Gaelic cultural affiliation and a Catholic heritage the propagation of which the narrator is keen to prevent for eugenic reasons.63
In contrast to the ethically valorous and politically subversive rejection of the nativist fertility drive with which Kennedy and Stewart identify the story, a sensitivity to these cultural resonances reveals that the enflamed elephant in the room in Premier amour/First Love is its deployment of a eugenically inflected and sectarian narratorial perspective far closer in logic and tone to the comments of Yeats, Gregg, and Stanford than has previously been acknowledged. This is not to suggest that Beckett’s perspective is identical with that of the narrator. It is, nevertheless, to acknowledge the presence of flashes of a eugenically inflected sectarian animus against, or, at the very least, anxiety about unchecked Irish Catholic fertility and its cultural and political ramifications in Beckett’s work which finds its roots in his experiences of and response to the Censorship of Publications Act. In the context of an author whose oeuvre is often read as an exemplary response to the horrors of the Holocaust and the eugenic logic through which it was justified, such resonances cannot simply be ignored or wished away.64 Indeed, it is in many ways a desire to highlight and subject this agon to self-reflexive critique which animates Premier amour/First Love and its blurring of the geographical and political terrain of post-independence Ireland and Vichy France. Through the lexical and cultural slippages facilitated by strategically ambiguous terms such as ‘fibrome’ and the liaisons they forge between the ‘positive’ eugenics of J. J. Byrne’s drive for a ‘better race’ or Yeats and Stanford’s push for a resurgent Protestant ascendancy, and the negative eugenics of Nazism at its most monstrous, Beckett renders his own anti-natalism at best a questionable political good. In this regard, the narrator’s closing reflections are doubly fitting:
[There] was no competing with those cries […] As long as I kept walking I didn’t hear them […] But as soon as I halted I heard them again, a little fainter each time, admittedly, but what does it matter, cry is cry, all that matters is that it should cease. For years I thought they would cease. Now I don’t think so any more. (79–80)
Just as the narrator can never fully escape the cries of his new-born, or the dysgenic, exogamous union to which they attest, so Beckett, in the first act of his apparent linguistic independence, revisits the Ireland of the Censorship Act to interrogate the ways in which its sectarian prejudices and cultural conflicts may have followed him across the Channel. In doing so, Beckett illustrates the potentially noxious social, political, and cultural outcomes of rooting a model of post-independence Irish national identity in a vexed politics of sexual health, even as he advertises the ways in which his own responses to the (mis)birth of an independent Irish nation participated in precisely this dynamic. As this rereading of Premier amour/First Love is intended to suggest, by following Beckett’s example and attending to the ambiguities and tensions which these cries represent—however uncomfortably they may jar with our received image of the author—we, as readers and critics, may arrive at a more complete understanding of his sexual politics and a fuller appreciation of the obscene aesthetic with which they are bound up.
I am indebted to Anique Kruger, Michelle Kelly, David Dwan, Freyja Madsen, Zac Seager, Anas Sareen, and Hannah Simpson for their insights and comments at various stages of this article’s development.
Footnotes
Samuel Beckett, Murphy, ed. J. C. C. Mays (London, 2009), 50; James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London, 1997), 447–8.
Beckett, Murphy, 75.
Monographs and collections devoted to uncovering an ‘Irish’ Beckett include John P. Harrington, The Irish Beckett (Syracuse, NY, 1991); Mary Junker, Beckett: The Irish Dimension (Dublin, 1995); Emilie Morin, Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness (Basingstoke, 2009); Patrick Bixby, Samuel Beckett and the Postcolonial Novel (Cambridge, 2009); Jennifer M. Jeffers, Beckett’s Masculinity (New York, NY, 2009); Seán Kennedy (ed.), Beckett and Ireland (Cambridge, 2010); Andrew Gibson, Samuel Beckett (London, 2010); Rina Kim, Women and Ireland as Beckett’s Lost Others: Beyond Mourning and Melancholia (Basingstoke, 2010).
Dáil Éireann, ‘Censorship of Publications Act, 1929’, Irish Statute Book (pubd. online: July 2014), accessed 10 May 2017 <http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/1929/en/act/pub/0021/print.html>.
Harrington, The Irish Beckett, 21–7; 35–9; 22. See also David A. Hatch, ‘Samuel Beckett’s “Che Sciagura” and the Subversion of Irish Moral Convention’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, 18 (2007), 241–55.
Bixby, Samuel Beckett and the Postcolonial Novel, 9–14.
Seán Kennedy, ‘First Love: Abortion and Infanticide in Beckett and Yeats’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, 22 (2010), 79–91; Paul Stewart, Sex and Aesthetics in Samuel Beckett’s Work (New York, NY, 2011).
Morin, Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness.
Beckett confided to George Reavey his concerns over the effect this project would have on his ‘situation in England’ and how it ‘might prejudice future publications’ of his own work there. While Beckett did not ‘mind the obloquy’, he did not wish to be ‘spiked as a writer’, nor was he prepared to publish the translation pseudonymously. The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1, 1929-1940, ed. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge, 2009), 604.
Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge, vol. 1: The History of Sexuality (New York, NY, 1978), pts 2–4.
Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York, NY, 1973), 380.
Tom Inglis, ‘Origins and Legacies of Irish Prudery: Sexuality and Social Control in Modern Ireland’, Éire-Ireland, 40 (2005), 9–37, 27.
Tom Inglis (ed.), ‘The Irish Body’, in Are the Irish Different? (Manchester, 2014), 90.
Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland, 1900-2000 (London, 2005), 335–42; Diarmaid Ferriter, Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland (London, 2009), 185–91; Peter Martin, Censorship in the Two Irelands, 1922-1939 (Dublin, 2006).
Michael S. Teitelbaum and J. M. Winter, The Fear of Population Decline (Orlando, FL, 1985); Maria Sophia Quine, Population Politics in Twentieth-Century Europe: Fascist Dictatorships and Liberal Democracies (London, 1996); Angus McLaren, Twentieth-Century Sexuality: A History (Oxford, 1999), chap. 4; Franz Eder, Lesley Hall, and Gert Hekma, eds., Sexual Cultures in Europe: National Histories (Manchester, 1999).
A middle ground is struck by Senia Pašeta, who uses the broader European context outlined by Ferriter and Martin to analyse the ways in which the Act and the debates surrounding its passage allowed the Catholic Church to secure a substantial measure of cultural and administrative hegemony in the Free State. Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland, 340; Senia Pašeta, ‘Censorship and Its Critics in the Irish Free State, 1922-1932’, Past & Present, 232 (2003), 193–218.
Samuel Beckett to Thomas McGreevy, 28 [for 27] August 1934, TCD, MS 10402/62, quoted in The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume 1, 224, note 9.
Samuel Beckett, ‘Censorship in the Saorstat’, in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (London, 1983), 84–8, 86.
‘Censorship of Publications Bill, 1928 - Second Stage (Resumed)’, Pub. L. No. 26.6 (1928), Oireachtas Debates, (pubd. online: July 2014), accessed 10 May 2017 <http://oireachtasdebates.oireachtas.ie/debates%20authoring/debateswebpack.nsf/takes/dail1928101900003?opendocument>.
Foucault, The Will to Knowledge, 1, 140.
For discussions of the construction of masculinity in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Irish nationalism see Marjorie Elizabeth Howes, Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class, and Irishness (Cambridge, 1996), chap. 1; Susan Canon Harris, Gender and Modern Irish Drama (Bloomington, IN, 2002), chap. 1; Jeffers, Beckett’s Masculinity; Joseph Valente, The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880-1922 (Urbana, IL, 2011).
William Edward Hartpole Lecky, Democracy and Liberty, vol. 1 (London, 1896), 108.
George Russell, ‘The Censorship Bill’, Irish Statesman, 10 (25 August 1928), 486.
Russell, ‘The Censorship Bill’, 487.
W. B. Yeats, ‘The Irish Censorship’, Spectator (28 September 1928), 391; 392.
The Act defines the word ‘indecent’ as ‘likely […] to corrupt or deprave’ (I: 2).
‘Financial Resolutions - Censorship of Publications Bill, 1928—Committee’, Pub. L. No. 28.1, § sec. Committee on Finance (1929), sec. Committee on Finance, (pubd. online: July 2014), accessed 10 May 2017 <http://oireachtasdebates.oireachtas.ie/debates%20authoring/debateswebpack.nsf/takes/dail1929022000039?opendocument>.
‘Financial Resolutions - Censorship of Publications Bill, 1928—Committee (Resumed)’, Pub. L. No. 28.2, § sec. Committee on Finance (1929), sec. Committee on Finance, (pubd. online: July 2014), accessed 10 May 2017 <http://oireachtasdebates.oireachtas.ie/debates%20authoring/debateswebpack.nsf/takes/dail1929022100025?opendocument>, quoted in Beckett, ‘Censorship in the Saorstat’, 85.
The Church’s position on contraception in this period was outlined in the 1930 encyclical, Casti Connubii (Of Chaste Wedlock), which stated that those who frustrated the ‘natural power and purpose’ of the ‘conjugal act’ sinned against nature. Pope Pius XI, ‘Casti Connubii, Encyclical of Pope Pius XI on Christian Marriage to the Venerable Brethren, Patriarchs, Primates, Archbishops, Bishops, and Other Local Ordinaries Enjoying Peace and Communion with the Apostolic See’, The Holy See, (pubd. online: February 2016), accessed 10 May 2017 <https://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19301231_casti-connubii.html>.
Mark B. Adams (ed.), The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia (New York, NY, 1990). For an account of Irish eugenics, see Greta Jones, ‘Eugenics in Ireland: The Belfast Eugenics Society, 1911-1915’, Irish Historical Studies, 28 (1992), 81–95.
Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (London, 1883), 24–5.
W. B. Yeats, Later Essays, ed. William H. O’Donnell (New York, NY, 1994), 238.
F. C. S. Schiller, Social Decay and Eugenical Reform (London, 1932), 25.
Kennedy cites the pro-natalism of Yeats’s ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’ and the sectarian infanticide which concludes early drafts of Purgatory (1938) as examples of the poet’s aversion to mixed marriages and belief that Ireland’s Protestants needed to reproduce both ‘sexually’ and ‘socially’. As Kennedy notes, this strain in Yeats’s work resonates with both the remarks of Gregg—who vehemently opposed exogamous unions—and Stanford’s controversial 1944 pamphlet A Recognised Church. Kennedy, ‘First Love’, 84–5.
Disjecta, 87.
Pašeta, ‘Censorship and Its Critics in the Irish Free State’, 217; Ferriter, Occasions of Sin, 191.
Kurt Derek Bowen, Protestants in a Catholic State: Ireland’s Privileged Minority (Kingston, 1983), 20–1.
‘Delta’, ‘Race Suicide and Souperism’, Irish Rosary, XXXII (1928), 305–7, 305–6.
Dudley Fletcher, ‘Letters to the Editor: The Free State Censorship Bill’, Irish Times, 5 September 1928, 4.
Yeats, ‘The Irish Censorship’, 391.
In his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus presented ‘gigantic inevitable famine’ as the ultimate corrective for the imbalance between the earth’s material resources and the size of the human population. Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society. With Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet and Other Writers (London, 1798), 139.
J. W. Poynter, ‘Letters to the Editor: The Free State Censorship Bill’, Irish Times (16 August 1928), 4; G. W. Murray, ‘Letters to the Editor: The Free State Censorship Bill’, Irish Times (1 September 1928), 7; Yeats, ‘The Irish Censorship’, 391.
Yeats, ‘The Irish Censorship’, 391.
In this regard the ‘multiparas’ anticipate the Lynch family in Watt (1953), whose ‘(f)ive generations and twenty-eight souls’ pathologically flout the precepts of eugenicism by continuing to reproduce with élan, despite being afflicted with a litany of hereditary and acquired conditions. Samuel Beckett, Watt, ed. Chris Ackerley (London, 2009), 87; 84–7.
Stewart, Sex and Aesthetics in Samuel Beckett’s Work; Beckett, Murphy, 147; 50.
Beckett, Murphy, 75.
For an account of the fluctuating political ends to which these discourses were deployed, see Lewis Perry Curtis, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature, rev. edn. (Washington, DC, 1997); Michael Willem De Nie, The Eternal Paddy: Irish Identity and the British Press, 1798-1882 (Madison, WI, 2004).
Chris Ackerley and S. E. Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett: A Reader’s Guide to His Works, Life, and Thought (New York, NY, 2004), xv.
Beckett did not permit the story to be published in French until 1970, and reluctantly provided an English translation (First Love) in 1973. David Lloyd, ‘Writing in the Shit: Beckett, Nationalism, and the Colonial Subject’, Modern Fiction Studies, 35 (1989), 69–85; David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Dublin, 1993), chap. 2; Kennedy, ‘First Love’; Ackerley and Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, 454.
Kennedy, ‘First Love’, 89.
For ease of reference, all quotations are from Beckett’s English translation. References to French diction will be made only where marked divergences occur. Samuel Beckett, The Expelled / The Calmative / The End & First Love, ed. Christopher Ricks (London, 2009); Samuel Beckett, Premier Amour (Paris, 1970).
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, 2004), 2–3.
‘Loucher (verbe transitif indirect): Regarder furtivement, de biais, à la dérobée: Loucher sur la copie du voisin. Convoiter quelque chose, quelqu'un, avoir des vues sur eux: Loucher sur l'héritage d'un vieil oncle.’ (To squint (transitive indirect verb): To look furtively, sideways, stealthily: To glance at a neighbour’s copy. To covet something, someone, to have views on them: To eye up the inheritance of an old uncle.’) ‘Loucher (v.t. ind.)’, Larousse Dictionnaire de Français (pubd. online: March 2017), accessed 10 May 2017 <http://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/loucher/47870?q=louchais#47788>; Beckett, Premier amour, 40.
Gibson, Samuel Beckett, 104–5.
Carrel also sponsored a less ‘voluntary’ eugenics, in which the ‘insane and feeble minded’ would be sterilized and ‘small euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gases’ would be established where ‘defectives and criminals’ could be disposed of ‘humanely and economically’. Alexis Carrel, Man, The Unknown (New York, NY, 1935), 296–302; 388.
Phil Baker, Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis (New York, NY, 1997), 95; Stewart, Sex and Aesthetics in Samuel Beckett’s Work, 65.
Stewart, Sex and Aesthetics in Samuel Beckett’s Work, 65–70.
‘Strabisme (nom masculin): Déviation permanente résultant du défaut de parallélisme des axes visuels des deux yeux. (Dans le strabisme convergent, la déviation se fait en dedans, par opposition au strabisme divergent.)’ (Strabismus (masculine noun): Permanent deviation resulting from the lack of parallelism of the visual axes of the two eyes. (In convergent strabismus, the deviation is inward, as opposed to the divergent strabismus.) ‘Strabisme (n.m.)’, Larousse Dictionnaire de Français (pubd. online: March 2017), accessed 10 May 2017 <http://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/strabisme/74801>; Beckett, Premier Amour, 52.
Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge, 1980); Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York, NY, 2003); Maria Luddy, Prostitution and Irish Society, 1800-1940 (Cambridge, 2007).
James M Smith, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment (Manchester, 2008), chaps 1–2; Luddy, Prostitution and Irish Society, 1800-1940, chap. 3; Martin McAleese, ‘Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee to Establish the Facts of State Involvement with the Magdalen Laundries’, Department of Justice and Equality (pubd. online: February 2013), accessed 10 May 2017 <http://www.justice.ie/en/JELR/Pages/MagdalenRpt2013>.
Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 314–18.
I am indebted to Alan Graham of University College, Dublin, for drawing this linguistic echo to my attention.
For Beckett’s knowledge of Irish verse and his infamous dismissal of the ‘Victorian Gael’ and his ‘Ossianic goods’, see ‘Recent Irish Poetry’. Samuel Beckett, ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, in Disjecta, 70–6, 70.
To take but one recent example, Joseph Anderton asserts that ‘Beckett’s creatures’ are the exemplary figures of a post-Holocaust biopolitical world. Joseph Anderton, Beckett’s Creatures: Art of Failure After the Holocaust (London, 2016).