“GRÂCE AUX EXCRÉMENTS DES CITOYENS”: Beckett, Swift and the Coprophagic Economy of Ballyba

Critics have long acknowledged the relationship between the work of Samuel Beckett and Jonathan Swift without necessarily locating Beckett's predilection for Swiftian satire within a specific historical context. Turning to a scatological passage from the third Molloy notebook, this article reads Beckett's interest in Swift alongside the reception of the latter's economic writings during the Anglo-Irish Economic War of the 1930s, which Beckett encountered in J. M. Hone and M. M. Rossi's Bishop Berkeley: His Life, Writings and Philosophy (1931) and Swift: or, The Egotist (1934). The article proceeds to read this passage as an index of a paraliptic politics, wherein the inscription of a political writing occasions its own effacement.