Abstract/Summary

The city is one of the defining subjects of modernism. If realism humanised and naturalism scientised the ‘real city’, modernism replaced it with the ‘unreal city’ of unresolved and plural impressions. Scholars plunged the depths of the cities of Stendhal, Balzac, Dickens, and Zola, those of Baudelaire, Eliot, Proust, Döblin, Bely, Woolf and Joyce, but they have neglected Beckett’s cities, ascribing the ‘universality’ of his writing to an alleged ‘placelessness’. Recent studies have in many ways corrected this view, showing how his work responds to social and political changes. Yet, in reassessing Beckett’s relationship with his own time, scholars have not taken into account his engagement with the cradle of modern life: the city. Such an investigation can shade further light on the extent of his social awareness, but more importantly, bring to the fore Beckett’s negotiations with the complexity of ‘the real’ and his search for a form that could accommodate it. This thesis aims to fill the gap, mainly focussing on the prose work from Dream of Fair to Middling Women to The Unnamable. An important detour is made to investigate Beckett’s struggle with a realistic medium in his only film Film. While the thesis generally centres on the English version of his work, the French is taken into account when it enriches the discussion. For example, the study of the French Murphy reveals that key elements that characterises the alleged ‘placelessness’ of Beckett’s post-war work are already present in his 1938-1940 translation of his great novel of the city. This study identifies translation as a central yet unexplored cause of Beckett’s move to a less located writing. Beckett’s theatre is only dealt with in passing. ‘Cities Bereft of Light’: Metropolis, Self, and Form in Samuel Beckett’s Prose shows that Beckett’s struggle to find a literary form that can ‘accommodate the mess’ of modern life is closely linked to his representation of complex systems such as cities and city dwellers, even when his narrators become historical tramps. Ultimately, it presents Beckett as a post-Joycean modernist wrestling with some kind of realism.