{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.034518289541473464, 'fraction_numerical': 0.005667181865018032, 'mean_word_length': 5.34640522875817, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Tasteless Beckett: Towards an Aesthetics of Hunger

The language of starvation is a commonplace in discussions of Samuel Beckett’s writing. His texts are described as emaciated and skeletal, as famished and anorexic. His language, characters, plots, settings, form, content, bodies, style, structure, syntax, and contextual reference are all open to charges of being starved, deprived, or wasted, of going hungry. Terry Eagleton is concurring with a majority view, and making exemplary use of a common metaphor, when he speaks of Beckett’s “anorexic texts,” crafted from “[s]tarved words, gaunt bodies and sterile landscapes” (25).1 Such language is at once pervasive and under-examined, signaling a relationship between hunger and Beckett’s writing that has received much passing acknowledgement but surprisingly little sustained attention. It implies a connection that goes far beyond a simple thematic interest in starvation, infiltrating the very structure of his texts, working its way into their very bones. This essay will argue that this critical intuition actually identifies a central element of Beckett’s postwar aesthetics, in which Beckett uses hunger and related experiences as a way of thinking through his ideas about art and language. In this sense, Beckett’s postwar work develops gropingly towards what might be termed an “aesthetics of hunger”—an aesthetics that takes its structure from hunger. Starvation becomes pervasive in Beckett’s work after the Second World War. Living out their lives against a backdrop of constant, grinding deprivation, his characters of this period almost never have enough to eat. In Waiting for Godot (1953), only Pozzo is genuinely well-fed; Lucky, Vladimir, and Estragon can only beg for his leftovers and trade an ever-diminishing stock of root vegetables. The characters of Endgame (1957) are similarly deprived, inhabiting a world of gradual depletion, in which there are no more sugar