Reclaiming the cyclops: A study of Samuel Beckett's inversion of James Joyce's mythic typology

One of the uniting aspects of Beckett's writing with Joyce's is their use of a lexicon distinguished by bestial significations. As this study will demonstrate, the base animal signifiers serve to collapse symbolic archetypes. During this process, the human identity in the text is rendered into an objective form. The exchange of disassociated signification with traditional referents produces, in Beckett's esthetic, a "negative" region that denies direct representation. As the symbolic associations of the text implode with failed representation, the fragmentary mythic typologies offer new symbolic archetypes removed from the former contexts of time and culture. Joyce's and Beckett's distortion of archetypes calls for the formation of new textual identities. In the dramatic style, these identities are directly stated, and representation is restored once more for new associations. Symbolic power returns to reinvented mythic types for a modern age.