Piette, A.C. (2014) Ending the Mother Ghost: Beckett’s Ill Seen Ill Said and Rockaby. Complutense Journal of English Studies, 22. pp. 81-90. ISSN 2386-3935
Abstract
This paper looks at two late texts written in 1981 by Samuel Beckett, the novel Ill Seen Ill Said and the play Rockaby, and reads them as difficult Oedipal elegies for his mother May Beckett who had died thirty years previously. The close reading of the texts brings out the conflicted psychoanalytic contradictions of the representations, especially the son’s strange identification with the mother brought on by the fact Beckett was himself approaching his mother’s age when she died. The close readings also argue for a ‘sentimental’ reading of the lyric patterning of both novel and play at key moments, using Simone de Beauvoir’s work on old age and her mother’s death as reference points. The article ends with a definition of the Oedipal identification as a Memnon complex, where the son and mother fuse together as writing and dying subjects.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | The originals published in this journal are the property of the Complutense University of Madrid and any reproduction thereof in full or in part must cite the source. All content is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 use and distribution licence (CC BY 4.0). |
Keywords: | mother love; Oedipal desire; life and death writing |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Sheffield) > School of English (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 17 Apr 2018 09:12 |
Last Modified: | 17 Apr 2018 09:13 |
Published Version: | https://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/CJES/article/vie... |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Universidad Complutense de Madrid |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:129513 |