Wandering abroad: British law, Irish independence, and Beckett’s vagrants

If there is something approximating a Beckettian social type it is doubtless the vagrant or tramp, those ostensibly idle and disorderly individuals. But too often (and for far too long) these figures have been understood only in terms of a metaphysical or metaphorized “homelessness”, as exemplars of existential despair, psychoanalytic banishment, modernist alienation or even a precondition of the posthuman condition articulated in his later work. This essay instead locates these figures in relation to the legal legacy of colonialism in post-independence Ireland, precisely to demonstrate how Beckett’s writing relates to this discourse. Most relevant in this regard is Section 4 of the 1824 Vagrancy Act passed by the Westminster Parliament–and still in force during the Irish Free State era–which indicates that the following classes of people shall be deemed “rogues and vagabonds”: “every person wandering abroad and lodging in any barn or outhouse, or in any deserted or unoccupied building, or in the open air, or under a tent, or in any cart or wagon, not having any visible means of subsistence and not giving a good account of himself or herself”. In all its particulars, the definition closely applies to the many vagrants found in Beckett’s fiction and drama, especially the narrators of his four nouvelles, whose very existence seems to be at odds with the legal ideology of the post-independence state. Acknowledging this legal legacy is key to recognizing the political significance of contradiction, aporia, and misunderstanding in Beckett’s writing, which disrupts the authority of such discourses (taken to be non-contradictory, systematic, and self-evident) not just to assert and maintain legal identities, but to separate some individuals from the ranks of legitimate subjects of the bourgeois nation-state.