Slow Violence and Slow Going: Encountering Beckett in the Time of Climate Catastrophe

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter reads Beckett’s notable fascination with what Steven Connor has called ‘slow going’ alongside Rob Nixon’s description of the ‘slow violence’ of climate breakdown. Following Nixon’s suggestion that ‘slow violence’ does not register readily in narrative models concerned with spectacular events and the tempos and logics of crisis, I examine Beckett’s attention to what remains in a paradoxically stuck and ongoing time. Suggesting that Beckett’s work sticks with and witnesses catastrophe rather than the temporality of crisis, the chapter uses The Lost Ones to explore Beckett’s commitment to staying with a disaster that cannot be overcome, alongside the articulation of a giving up that is not a decision but part of a compulsion or drive to go on. Using Beckett’s interest in Freud’s idea of the death drive, I suggest that Beckett’s later texts work through materialisations of attachment and dependence as a way of thinking with and living with, rather than denying or repressing, the reality of the ‘nothing to be done’.