In analysing ‘Sanies I’ and ‘Serena II’ meticulously, with special attention to the animal imagery, Conor Carville in this chapter links Otto Rank’s theory of the trauma of birth with Eric Santner’s recent idea of ‘creaturely life’ – the life that is exposed to biopolitical power at moments of trauma. Trauma is here considered as constitutive of the subject, not an exceptional phenomenon, and also as providing the raw material for biopolitical power. In the process of Carville’s analyses emerge hitherto uncharted networks concerning Beckett’s fixation on the trauma of birth and the contemporary biopolitical concerns with birth, reproduction and population in Ireland and Britain. Carville’s article not only provides original close readings of those difficult poems in the light of Rank but also illustrates how a highly personal unease about sexual identity caused by birth trauma can be connected to the biopolitical discourses by the use of Santner’s idea of ‘creaturely life’ that itself draws on the ideas of Benjamin, Foucault, Lacan, Agamben and other theorists.

Michiko Tsushima’s chapter discloses the relationship between trauma and skin in considering Watt as a ‘skin of words’ woven by Beckett—a psychic skin that he tried to rei—and, at the same time, as something that reveals the ‘force and truth’ of trauma. First, with the help of Didier Anzieu’s concept of ‘the Skin Ego’, Tsushima explores the possibility that Beckett’s act of writing Watt can be considered an attempt to rei the psychic skin by weaving a ‘skin of words’. This act of writing has a therapeutic aspect. She also argues that Watt explores the ‘force and truth’ of trauma which cannot be resolved or assimilated. Tsushima shows how the ‘force and truth’ of trauma manifests itself as a violence to the surface of language, a force that disrupts the apparatus of linguistic representation.

Shedding lights on biological episodes in Beckett’s writing, Julie Campbell in this chapter focuses specifically on the fear of diving that he experienced at six years old, which recurs from the early poem ‘For Future Reference’ to the later fiction Company, and analyses how and why it was traumatic for him. The incident, together with the shame and the sense of guilt he felt in mourning his father’s death, traumatised him. Beckett’s trauma, caused by his remorseful feeling that he had betrayed his father’s expectations, is perhaps most strongly reflected by the character Henry in Beckett’s radio play Embers. Henry is obsessed with the death of his father, who drowned at sea but whose body was not found. Henry denies his father’s death as if trying to expunge it from his memory. His distress, anger, bitterness, and confusion are expressed in his commands of his own actions and of the story of Bolton and Holloway. The radio listeners witness Henry’s inner feelings and share in his suffering.

In this chapter, Mariko Hori Tanaka focuses on how Beckett responds to the imagined nuclear winter inherent in the global competition in the production of nuclear bombs and energy during the Cold War years. Many of his post-war plays including Endgame and Happy Days are clearly set in a post-apocalyptic world, where the only human survivors are the onstage characters. The earth uninhabited and the landscape of ruins with the last remaining human beings barely alive are suggested in many of Beckett’s works. Our post-holocaust world is filled with repeated disasters such as wars, conflicts, and natural disasters, so that we endlessly feel a sense of apocalypse. Beckett’s sense of men and women living in worsening conditions towards the unseen ending is the global anxiety shared in the late twentieth to the twenty-first century. Beckett’s imagination of dead victims ruined and suffering in some traumatic event (which he never clarifies) reminds us, the audience and the readers, of those who suffered and died in apocalyptic disasters. This chapter thus deals with the recent cultural traumas globally shared in our age.

Nicholas Johnson in this chapter discusses and analyses trauma of actors in performing Beckett’s plays. In the rehearsal process, many actors report traumatic symptoms such as panic, fear, anxiety, and nightmare, but it can be difficult to disentangle the overdetermined origins of these feelings: are they ingrained in the source material, individual to the actor’s process, specific to the performance context, or simply authentic physiological responses to the physical demands? Working through these questions first in terms of contemporary acting theory, Johnson introduces qualitative data from both experienced and early-career practitioners of Beckett. Alongside historical and theoretical explorations of acting, the chapter emphasises the concept of the ‘void’ as one possible key to navigating the potentially traumatic terrain within Beckett, as well as naming it as one of the tools at the actors’ disposal. By connecting to urgent contemporary debates in the medical humanities and positing Beckett as core to a unified theory of acting that takes account of the ‘cognitive turn’, Johnson’s focus on the materiality of these experiences extends a discussion beyond the fictive space of the texts and the biographical, currently the two most common approaches to Beckett and trauma.

Building on his detailed discussion of the impossibility of speech in Beckett’s work in relation to Agamben’s account of testimony in his book Samuel Beckett and Testimony, David Houston Jones turns in this chapter to the question of the face, which Agamben himself left undeveloped after his article ‘The Face’. Jones considers the face as a vector of the expressive capabilities of testimony. He discusses a range of dramatic and narrative situations in which the expressive capabilities of the face are pitted against the epistemological problem of testimony, from the deterritorialised face of Not I to the inexpressive face in Wattand the later prose. This analysis of the face in Beckett constitutes a unique critique of Agamben’s idea of testimony and contributes to a rethinking of trauma theory with reference to the realm of the visual.

In this chapter, Yoshiki Tajiri focuses on the connection between trauma and everyday life: a traumatised subject needs to come to terms with everyday life and can find ordinary objects in it unexpectedly significant. By discussing such aspects of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, this chapter will illuminate the ways in which trauma and ordinary life are correlated rather than opposed. It also demonstrates that trauma theory and everyday life studies can stimulate each other: trauma is far from an everyday phenomenon, but it can shed light on the nature of everyday life after calamities of modernity as in the cases of Woolf and Beckett; conversely, there may be ways of enriching trauma studies by incorporating reflections on everyday life.