THE STONINESS OF MOLLOY’S ANXIETY: AN ATTEMPTED PETRIFICATION IN SAMUEL BECKETT’S MOLLOY
THE STONINESS OF MOLLOY’S ANXIETY: AN ATTEMPTED PETRIFICATION IN SAMUEL BECKETT’S MOLLOY

Summary/Abstract: The Stoniness of Molloy’s Anxiety: An Attempted Petrification in Samuel Beckett’s Molloy. As an ardent admirer of Jack Butler Yeats’s petrified aesthetics, Samuel Beckett redirects his attention to affective strategies that would ultimately block the possibility of conventional engagement with his post-war work. Permeating the text and serving as a structural buffer for the reader’s emotional resonance, anxiety becomes the emergent property of the writing itself, as well as the primary affect associated with Beckett’s attempt to foreground the inorganic, the stillness and inertness quieting his world. By focusing on the modalities in which the Yeatsian mechanism of dispassionate perception operates in Beckett’s first post-war novel, Molloy, this paper investigates the eponymous protagonist’s fascination with the mineral state and the affective potential contained within his sustained interaction with stones, as well as the strategies by which his responses to these encounters are attuned to the overall tone of the novel and its constitutive affect – anxiety.

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