프로이트의 문명론과 모더니즘의 맥락에서 바라본 베켓의 유아주의적 인물들

Abstract

A writer with his aesthetic principle highly influenced by that of the literary modernism of 1920s through 40s, Samuel Beckett shares in common with the historical movement unswerving emphasis on the individual as opposed to the social and collective. The stress on the individual in Beckett's case, however, goes further than other modernist writers such as James Joyce as his characters tend to pursue the state of ultimate solipsism. Their severest self-immersion, most times joined by the impulse to suicide, is pressed, however, to negotiate with the obligations and duties of the world. The primary goal of this paper is to examine this dilemma of Beckett's hermits and vagrants, trying in vain to run away from the collective calls of society, via Freud's pessimistic view of collective life in his Civilization and its Discontents published in 1930. It serves a periodically relevant frame to understand the general modernist antagonism to the collective values and order of the European civilization. Most significantly, it foregrounds the contemporary people trapped in a neurotic state torn between the instinctual pursuit of personal happiness and the demands of culture and society. Beckett characters' dilemma, oscillating between two opposite calls, one personal and the other social, almost equals the neurotic state Freud diagnosed to the people in the early 20th century Europe in their repression of the personal and instinctual. Although having started by pointing out a common ground shared between modernist writers and Beckett, that is, their stress on the individual and contrasting hostility to the collective, this paper ends its discussion adding how Beckett's "late" modernism differentiates itself from so called "high" modernism with his subjects getting rid of the whole epistemological confidence Joyce displayed in his novels. From the modernist origin Beckett's art seems to have branched out into something of impotence and ignorance, that is, the arena of postmodernism.