From Mental Interiority toBodily Exteriority: A Reading of Disgust in Beckett

Abstract

After the reading of “(W)Horoscope”, six poems from Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates and “La mouche”, in this article we will try to explain how the concept of disgust articulates the relationship that Samuel Beckett establishes between the outside world – the body, the degraded and deciduous– and the inner world of the melancholic subject’s mind and thinks about death. This contrast is crossed by different conceptions of disgust which affects not only the mind but also the body. We will analyze disgust concerning food, melancholy, and the deciduous corpse. These three points will provide an example of how the interior and the exterior are connected by the repulsive in Beckett’s poems.