“A Champion of the Right to Be Alone”: Beckett's Modernist Encounter with Rousseau

Abstract

Samuel Beckett reportedly read Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s autobiographies, Confessions (1781) and Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1782), praising him “as a champion of the right to be alone and as an authentically tragic figure” in a letter sent to his friend Thomas MacGreevy. James Knowlson tells in his biography that it contains a “remarkable” critique of the philosopher. Reading Beckett’s stories and plays along with Rousseau’s autobiographies and political writings, this article proposes that the writer may have gotten from the philosopher a moral support and philosophical rationale for “the right to be alone”—a modernist claim to autonomous solipsism which he depicted in his work as sieged by the calls of outside intruders and society. The discord between a reclusive individual and society is a key motif to Beckett’s reflection of the individualist politics of Modernism, a defense of which he may have discovered in Rousseau’s conceptualization of subjectivity in conflict with the formative principles of society. In addition, Rousseau’s idea of society, that it gives rise to the inextricable chains of social domination and servitude, and of slavery, that it should be applied to both masters and slaves due to their mutual dependence, offers a better frame of reference than Marx’s for Beckett’s representation of social subordination as an insoluble impasse.