As Alys Moody writes, in Samuel Beckett’s texts, hunger is “a pervasive theme, an underlying condition experienced by almost all the protagonists” (2012, 261). Food is scarce, eating is often associated with violence, and images of force-feeding, starvation, and geophagia (with all their historical resonances) abound. This paper explores Beckett’s depiction of relationships between the human and more-than-human by examining these uncanny images of eating. I read Beckett’s images of fasting, force-feeding and earth-eating as an attempt to escape what Derrida calls the ‘sacrificial structure’ of subjectivity, in which the human subject in Western thought is created and enforced by the violent ingestion of the non-human other (1991, 113). In other words, not only must we disavow the animal and “negate [the] likeness” between animals and humans in order to “cook and eat animals in good conscience” (Tompkins, 31), but we must cook and eat animals in order to negate that likeness: we must kill the animal in order to insure our own humanity. Beckett’s hungry, refusing figures reject this violent structure in favour of a non-relational autonomy, but are unable to escape eating entirely, since in these texts even death is presented in terms of consumption by worms, parasites, and other lifeforms. This imagery repudiates human exceptionalism which would position humans as eaters who are never themselves eaten, repositioning the human instead within ecosystems, bound up in networks of feeding. In particular, this article explores Beckett’s images of parasitism as a form of eating which insists viscerally on the interdependence of the self and other, problematizing the idea of the self as singular, discrete, and autonomous and instead understanding bodies as porous, dependent; inhabited by and inhabiting other creatures.

Moody notes that the description of Beckett’s texts as “anorexic”—sparse, melancholy, masochistic, refusing—has become a critical commonplace (2018, 104). In passages that do pay close attention to food, eating tends to provoke disgust, or else stands for a terrible violence. Mary Bryden draws attention to the poem “Serana I,” which describes a rat being eaten by an adder, continuing with an “Our Father” that suggests, for Bryden, the inherent violence of life on earth, “a devastating indictment of God” that punctures Romantic conceptions that viewed nature as a manifestation of God’s love (319). In “Dante and the Lobster,” even the nominally vegetarian is presented as violent. Making a sandwich, Belacqua removes his bread from its “prison” and finds it “spongy and warm, alive […] by God but he would very quickly take that fat white look off its face” (1970, 11). He cremates the bread, “done to a dead end, black and smoking” (12), and entombs the “cadaverous tablet of cheese between the hard cold black boards of the toast” (14). In a satire of the virile carnivorous subject who would ensure his own humanity by ingesting the non-human, Belacqua imagines “devour[ing] it with a sense of rapture and victory […] He would snap at it with closed eyes, he would gnash it into a pulp, he would vanquish it utterly with his fangs” (12–13). This comic passage foreshadows a bleaker conclusion, in which the titular lobster is boiled alive in a cruelty more terrible for its mundanity: “lobsters are always boiled alive. They must be. […] Now it was going alive into scalding water. It had to” (22). This passage highlights the cruelty of what Derrida calls the ‘sacrificial’ structure of subjectivity, as well as the apparent inevitability of this violence, the authorised killing of the non-human animal who can be put to death but not murdered (1991, 112).

For Derrida, eating meat affirms our humanity in a relationship he calls “carno-phallogocentrism,” in which the category of the human is created and enforced not only by the violent disavowal of the bodily and the feminine, but also the killing and eating of the animal (112). In this formulation, humanity is constructed in opposition to nature through the ingestion of non-human others. However, rather than signifying mastery over the natural world, the act of eating is often experienced by Beckett’s characters as an invasion that destabilises rather than affirms the subject, as in his repeated depictions of forcefeeding. Malone Dies describes how “when they cannot swallow any more someone rams a tube down their gullet, or up their rectum, and fills them full of vitaminized pap, so as not to be accused of murder” (1994, 254–255). This vitaminized pap recalls Knott’s food, “soup of various kinds, fish, eggs, game, poultry, meat, cheese, fruit […] insulin, digitalin, calomel, iodine, laudanum, mercury, coal, iron, camomile and worm-powder […] well mixed together in the famous pot and boiled for four hours,” (2009, 72) which in turn recalls later descriptions of the force-feeding of the Irish political prisoners during the Troubles: “They throw whatever they like into the food mixer; orange juice, soup or cartons of cream if they want to beef up the calories” (Miller, 200). The image of force-feeding appears again in Watt:

if he were on hunger strike or in a catatonic stupor […] whether taken voluntarily or involuntarily, with pleasure or pain, successfully or unsuccessfully, through the mouth, the nose, the pores, the feedtube or in an upward direction with the aid of a piston from behind […] without [food] life as it is generally understood would be hard set to continue.

2009, 43–44

This passage reveals that all feeding is essentially involuntary, since one has to eat to live—as Maud Ellmann puts it, “all eating is force-feeding: and it is through the wound of feeding that the other is instated at the very center of the self” (36). In The Unnamable, the ingestion of this Other and his ideas is unbearable:

They also gave me the low-down on God. They told me I depended on him […] the inestimable gift of life had been rammed down my gullet. But what they were most determined for me to swallow was my fellow-creatures. In this they were without mercy. I remember little or nothing of these lectures. […] Low types they must have been. Their pockets full of poison and antidote.

1994, 300

Not only is induction into civil life an episode of force-feeding, but life itself is presented as something which is force-fed into an unwilling subject by God, a force-feeding which then necessitates more force-feedings to keep the subject alive. As Watt describes, life “ram[s] her fish and chips down your gullet until you puke, and then the puke down your gullet until you puke the puke, and then the puked puke until you begin to like it” (2009, 36). In this passage, the status of humanity is not violently achieved by the carnivorous subject, but rather force-fed into an unwilling victim—as Ellmann writes, “In force-feeding the Hegelian economy of eating is inverted, because it is no longer the subject who consumes the object but the object that invades the subject” (34).

Beckett’s force-feeding imagery clearly has strong resonances with the Irish hunger strikers of the War of Independence. Malone’s remark that fasters are forcibly fed “so as not to be accused of murder” refers to Terence MacSwiney, the “Lord Mayor of Cork” (1994, 275), who was force fed by HM Prison Brixton in the final days of his life. For Moody, however, the food refusal of these characters cannot be brought comfortably inside political narratives (2018, 91), and it is clear that the hunger of men like Molloy and Malone is a more abject, more marginal, less legible hunger than the politically sanctioned hunger of the dissident. Their fasting does not distance these characters from the bodily, but instead seems to silence and dehumanise. For Ellmann, the relationship between words and flesh is parasitic, and “the thinner the body, the fatter the book” (22). However, in Beckett’s texts, as Emilie Morin suggests, as Beckett’s protagonists get hungrier they also get less coherent, “infantilized by the side effects of continuous hunger,” reverting “to babytalk” (142), deflating any sense that abstaining from worldly food might confer narrative control. In Derrida’s terms, the rejection of food dehumanises the faster, whose refusal to eat meat must align him with the bodily, the irrational, the feminine, and the animal as a being without speech.

Rather than hunger suggesting a penitent asceticism or devotion to a higher cause that would distance the human from the ravenous animal, fasting does not allow hungry characters like Molloy to transcend, and instead he sits down and sucks stones (1994, 69). Geophagia, or earth-eating, is a frequent image in Beckett’s writing. Along with Molloy and his sucking stones, Malone too describes how he “love[s] to suck” on pencils, and mentions that his brittle finger nails are caused by “want of chalk or is it phosphate” (223). Phosphate deficiency does indeed cause pica, at least in cattle, where it causes them to eat stones (Coleman, para 2 of 11), and Malone’s confusion over whether it is chalk or phosphate he really needs suggests just such a craving.

Geophagia tends to be associated with pregnant women, who famously can crave soil, but in Beckett’s texts the desire to consume earth tends to reflect a desire to be under it, rather than signalling new life. The mud-eaters in the bleak How It Is are barely alive: “Pim has not eaten […] if he’s still nourished it’s on mud” (1964:65), and later: “no more food and I live the air sustains me the mud I live on” (17). As Gottfried Büttner notes, Beckett linked his childhood preoccupation with collecting stones with Freud’s view that “man carried with him a kind of congenital yearning for the mineral kingdom” (163). Filling the body with earth is the first step in the process of the body’s interment in—and then transformation into—soil. In The Unnamable, dying is figured in geophagic terms as ingesting the sands of time, “buried under the seconds, saying any old thing, your mouth full of sand” (1994, 393). We have more soil eating in ‘The Image’, where the narrator’s “tongue gets clogged with mud only one remedy then pull it in and suck it swallow the mud or spit question to know whether it is nourishing” (1995a, 1). He is watching his “pimply” sixteen year old self with a girl,

again eating sandwiches alternate bites I mine she hers and exchanging endearments my sweet girl I bite she swallows my sweet boy she bites I swallow we don’t yet coo with our bills full my darling girl I bite she swallows my darling boy she bites I swallow

2

Here, the narrator’s diet of mud contrasts with this vision of sandwiches past. The references to birds and the phrase “I bite she swallows” recalls, unpleasantly, the way birds feed each other regurgitating food from mouth to mouth. This biting, swallowing, and exchanging of sandwiches becomes disgusting, the exchanging of words of endearment becoming disgusting, too, in its intimacy. The voice in ‘The Image’ has no more interest in sandwiches than he does in “endearments,” and this, like the phrase “your mouth full of sand,” links geophagia not only with the desire to return to a mineral stillness, but also to a mineral silence. Indeed, the practice of geophagia is a uniquely anti-social one, since it removes these characters both from the social world of food and from the social world of fasting, denying them both commensality and the solidarity of the strike. Moreover, since to eat dirt is to starve whilst eating, to eat earth is both the failure to starve properly and the failure to eat properly. If eating stands for contact with others and fasting stands for solitariness and silence, geophagia is both the failure to make meaningful contact and the failure to become truly autonomous.

We might also add to this collection of geophagic images the prominence of root vegetables in texts like Waiting for Godot, in which Edenic apples are replaced with carrots, turnips, and a lone radish (2006, 21, 63). Though still ambivalent—“funny, the more you eat the worse it gets,” notes Estragon of his carrot, while Vladimir, “get[s] used to the muck as I go along” (22)—these passages are in general quite positive depictions of food. Vladimir and Estragon share these rations quite tenderly, the dying man in “The Image” finds himself, unaccountably, “still smiling […] tongue comes out again lolls in the mud I stay like this no more thirst” (1995a, 2), suggesting that eating earth, in sparse worlds with narrow choices, is preferable to the violence of being force-fed real food.

It is important to note that geophagia is a social and political reality. While for Moody, Beckett’s images of starvation do evade historical readings, critics like Morin read Beckett’s hungry figures in strongly political terms:

The kind of distress portrayed in his work was not personal, and was not the kind of distress that one had to “look for.” This was the distress that is “screaming at you even in the taxis of London”, he said, in signs asking for help for “the blind”, “orphans” and “for relief for the war refugees”.

2017, 237

The depictions of pica in these texts not only speak to the practice of eating grass during the Irish famine that Patrick Bixby describes (2009, 166), but a widespread symptom of malnutrition (though geophagia is also practised for other, more obscure reasons). It is still reported in impoverished areas of the southern United States (Mylonas 2023), where it has historical roots amongst enslaved people; elsewhere in the Americas, enslaved people were made to wear masks to stop them from eating earth (Woywodt, 146). One doctor, who correctly suspected the—at the time, mysterious—condition was caused by malnutrition, described geophagia amongst enslaved people in Louisiana. He writes:

All they ask is to stay quiet and to lie down; very rarely they ask to drink or to eat. […] Most often they want to eat earth and some seem to prefer hard earth while others like clay. Any European unfamiliar with the picture would not believe his own eyes […] They will even develop such distorted cravings as eating their own stools. Later on they lose completely all desire to eat and one has to beg them to swallow something for their own good.

Mustacchi, 231

The resonances with some of Beckett’s bleakest portrayals of starvation and illness are clear. While I am not suggesting that Beckett was necessarily familiar with these descriptions of “real” geophagia, I do want to draw out the connections between Beckett’s portrayal of this highly specific symptom of malnutrition and its political and medical reality. Indeed, though I am calling it a symptom of malnutrition, geophagia is particularly interesting because as a phenomenon it blurs the boundaries between disease, starvation, and pathology, evading categorization in its slippage between anorexia and famine, neurosis and deprivation. It blurs cause and effect, creating confusion about whether earth eaters eat dirt because they are starving, or if they are malnourished because they eat dirt. Arguably, all starvation prompts these questions of agency—as Ellmann says, this question of agency “is built into the very structure of the verb ‘to starve,’ which can either mean to cause starvation or to suffer it” (1993, 92). Since eating dirt makes you starve all the more, the earth-eaters, like the force-fed, are victimised by what they eat. In Chel White’s ecocritical short film Dirt, the earth-eating narrator describes how his intense cravings for soil originated in his childhood. Soon, he explains, his consumption of earth caused plants and vegetables to grow from his body. He is able to live off these vegetables, and pronounces triumphantly, “I was my own ecosystem and this was what empowered me” (1998). However, for Beckett’s earth-eaters, this “empowered” autonomy is impossible. Rather than becoming a regenerative ecosystem, instead, as Moody writes, Beckett depicts “closed, self-contained systems that inevitably fail, collapsing under the pressure of their own impossibility” (2018, 104).

I read both geophagia and fasting as attempts to disengage from networks of exchange with other living creatures. However, these attempts to escape eating prove impossible, and to die and decompose, in these texts, is also to be eaten by the earth, consumed by worms; or else ingested as carrion by other small scavengers. While human exceptionalism would position us as the eaters of others who are never themselves eaten, a perspective which, as Val Plumwood asserts, “propels the environmental crisis,” Beckett’s uncanny images of consumption insist on what Plumwood calls the food/death perspective; namely “that we are food and that through death we nourish others” (324). In “From an Abandoned Work,” the narrator thinks longingly of being eaten by earthworms:

I too shall cease and be as when I was not yet, only all over instead of in store, that makes me happy […] love of this old earth that has carried me so long and whose uncomplainingness will soon be mine. Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth […] A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms, I believe it.

1995b, 98

This image re-imagines the human body ecologically, as part of a larger network of feeding, a fact which “Western modernity has structured out of life” (Plumwood, 324). While this image is notably gentle, “a wonderful thought,” even the more violent images of humans as prey animals serve this function. Elsewhere in “From An Abandoned Work,” the narrator considers suicide by ingestion: he evades, and then regrets evading, a peculiarly aggressive “family or tribe” of stoats who pursue him, later wishing he had just “lain down and let myself be destroyed, as the rabbit does,” and “bitten and bled to death, perhaps sucked white” (1995b, 98).¹ Likewise, Malone Dies, Malone worries that the hungry birds who wait at the window are eyeing him up, and he protests, “what are they waiting for? They are not vultures. Not only am I left here, but I am looked after!” (1994, 185), and in the The Unnamable, the narrator imagines himself pursued by wild animals that

prowl round me […] like hyenas, screeching and laughing, no, no better, no matter, I’ve shut my doors against them, […] perhaps that’s how I’ll find silence, and peace at last, by opening my doors and letting myself be devoured, they’ll stop howling, they’ll start eating

395

Though this threat of being eaten by worms or otherwise dehumanises Beckett’s characters, their hostile interaction with non-human animals also tends to demonstrate a “profound alienation from other animals” (Anderton, 192), excluding them from any alternative animal “family or tribe.” Instead, they belong to “a broader collective; a basic, organic group,” perceiving themselves “simply as living flesh” (203). Being outwith the “family or tribe” is one of the conditions of being edible, and so this broader collective which understands each other “as meat” (ibid) is a different kind of relationship altogether, an ecological relationship that is structured not by filial ties but by networks of consumptions.

Beckett’s characters not only anticipate being eaten by earthworms, stoats, rats, and hyenas, but they also worry about being eaten from within. As Rachel Murray writes, “throughout the Trilogy, Beckett’s subjects relate the sensation of being invaded by vermin” (26), while in Watt, “worm powder” is added to Knott’s soup (2009, 72), and Watt speculates that a “diffuse ano-scrotal prurit” might be due to “worms” (157). Malone wonders whether he is alive, or whether, in a line that confuses earthworms and parasites, “in reality all that is perhaps nothing but my worms” (1994, 220). The narrator of The Unnamable describes convulsing like a dog “suffering from worms” (1994, 323), and, listing creatures that might eat him, considers flies (“hardly call for mention”), rats (“they are not yet reduced to me”), and finally the “lowly tapeworm” (336). Parasites like hookworm, of course, are contracted by ingesting soil, though interestingly in the 1950s it was thought that worms might also cause the desire to ingest earth (Mustacchi, 229). Audrey Wasser writes that Beckett’s images tend not towards “consumption and mastery,” but “uncertainty, and inability” (251), and the parasitic worm exemplifies this, since it articulates the fear that you might not have mastered what you have consumed, and it might yet consume you in turn.

When in Watt the compulsive eater Mary is said to exist in the “bowels of this unhappy home” (2009, 44), this might not imply that Mary is half digested food, but rather that she is a parasite. Leaning in a “stupor” up against the wall, her mouth always open, her skin covered in food as though she inhales it through that organ rather than her mouth (45–46), she resembles the tapeworms described by de Souza, who writes, “tapeworms are finely honed eating […] machines. They attach themselves to the wall of the small intestine […] As digested food passes through the gut of the host, nutrients are absorbed through the skin of the worm” (para 3 of 14). It is for this reason that Mary’s eating disturbs—she does not take periodic ‘meals’ like a human, or even like a mammal, instead she feeds like a parasite. Likewise, Molloy’s memory of having been “brought […] into the world, through the hole in her arse” (1994, 16), and the similar line in The Unnamable, “I like to fancy […] it was in mother’s entrails I spent the last days of my long voyage, and set out on the next” (326), might suggest, not (or not only), as Paul Stewart has it, Freud’s theory of the child’s belief in anal birth (236), but rather that the speakers imagine themselves as some species of gut fauna, one of the many animals that do genuinely live in—and live off of—our entrails. An oral fixation unites the narrators of the Trilogy, and their desire to “suck” comes up again and again. Molloy describes his desire to “embrace, suck, suckle” strangers (1994, 12), while Malone sucks his pencils, saying “I love to suck” (223), and in the Unnamable, the speaker has a “bellyful of mammals. […] Quick, give me a mother and let me suck her white” (340).

John Banville writes that, taken as a trilogy, “each successive volume […] consumes its predecessor, swallowing and negating it” (1992, 20). For Wasser, however, it is “as if some free-floating parasite were travelling from one book to the next” (247), suggesting not that each volume “negat[es]” the previous one, but rather that the previous volumes live on, parasite-like, inside the volume that consumes it. As Malone says, “sometimes it seems to me I am in a head […] But thence to conclude the head is mine, no, never” (1994, 221). Likewise, in The Unnamable, the speaker says “I draw on” a “mind. Not mine perhaps, granted”, adding, “rich matter there, to be exploited, fatten you up, suck it to the core, keep you going for years, tasty into the bargain, I quiver at the thought,” (313–314) in a line that unmistakably suggests a brain-eating parasite. In these texts the boundaries delineating the self are fragile and uncertain. In The Unnamable, the line “sometimes I don’t confuse myself with my jar, and sometimes do. It all depends what mood we’re in” (343) is echoed in Molloy’s statement that he sometimes “forgot who I was,” and “forgot to be,” and so “was no longer that sealed jar to which I owed my being so well preserved, but a wall gave way and I filled with roots and tame stems” (49). These novels highlight both the abject hunger of the parasite who longs to “suck,” as well as the pain of being invaded and consumed. In Ellmann’s analysis of J.M. Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K, she reads Michael K’s starvation as an act that frees him “from the roles of either host or parasite, sheep or worm.” By starving, she suggests, he is able to become not “a parasite who feeds upon the state” but merely “a gallstone who inhabits it, giving nothing and receiving nothing” (109). While Michael K’s starvation releases him from the parasite/host binary and allows him to become a (gall)stone, Beckett’s characters cannot escape this dichotomy, and attempts to starve their way to a longed-for mineral stillness and silence are repeatedly undermined both by parasitic invasion and parasitic hunger.

Worms, the larval, and especially parasites have been seen as symbols of atavism, or as embodiments of design failure. Indeed, for Darwin parasites provoked a serious crisis of faith. He wrote in one letter, “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [wasps] with the express intention of their [larvae] feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars” (para 1 of 4). The parasite is the ultimate image of violent eating, symbolising the violence inherent to the structure of the natural world. The parasite, then, is arguably the most frightening and abject possible image of the Other, embodying our fears of the invading, kleptomaniacal alien. Beckett certainly portrays the sense of horror that the feeling of being invaded provokes. But parasites also blur the boundaries between self and other in ways that are potentially transformative. Human bodies, after all, are colonies; we contain about as many non-human cells as human cells (Dinan, 491), and the total weight of the gut microbes is about one or two kilograms. It has become clear that the gut biome has a significant influence upon the brain (495), and the “reality is that we have co-evolved, and we are fundamentally dependent upon our colonisers for survival, as of course are they on us” (491). As Derrida writes, “one never eats entirely on one’s own” (1991, 115). When we die, this colony goes on without us, becoming the “necrobiome” (Benbow, n.p.). It is in this sense that, as Molloy says, “to decompose is to live too, I know, I know, don’t torment me” (1994, 25). The final line of ‘From an Abandoned Work’, “just went on, my body doing its best without me” (1995b, 2) is a biological reality. The scientific term for our relationship with these small lifeforms is “commensal”; those who eat together; a word also used to describe our relationship to animals like dogs, or rats. In biological terms, the designation “parasite” is not a discrete category: it cannot be clearly delineated from other commensal relationships (Rohde, 656–657). Derrida suggests that the difference between “a guest and a parasite” is a legal one: a parasite is a guest who, lacking “the right to hospitality, or the right to asylum” becomes “wrong, illegitimate, clandestine, liable to expulsion or arrest” (2000, 59–61); we might think of Molloy’s arrest for being at large without papers (1994, 21). Biologically speaking, parasitism exists on a spectrum with commensalism; the difference is whether harm is done to the host, and some relationships move between the two poles, depending, for example, on how much food is available (Rohde, 656–657). In this formulation, the difference between the parasite and the one-who-shares-our-table is a question of resource distribution. While Beckett’s texts are marked by an extreme scarcity that means that eating is often parasitic, often underwritten by violence, the mutable boundary between commensalism and parasitism might suggest the potential for transformation.

We can read the parasite, then, as an example of tendency Anderton identifies in Beckett to test “the elasticity and impermeability of the human, distressing the human being until its discreteness comes into question” (195). On a similar tack, Patrick Bixby has analysed How It Is in terms of Leo Bersani’s concept of “sameness,” arguing that this text requires a re-evaluation of human relationships, a re-evaluation which would

reconfigure the boundaries of the human body, so that the bounded system of one individual would be “glued” to the similarly bounded system of another individual, re-creating otherness as a necessary component of self-extension and thus revaluing difference not as a threat to be overcome but as what Bersani calls “a nonthreatening supplement to sameness.”

2012, 256

The parasite is clearly a still more radical form of the “glued” individuals Bixby describes above. We might read the parasite, then, as a relationship which, as Bixby writes of How it Is, suggests

the possibility of relinquishing the ego-project in a self-shattering disruption of the personal boundaries through contact with Others, approached not in their otherness but in their more fundamental sameness, their more profound equality.

2012, 257

While remaining highly attuned to the agony of being preyed upon and the abjection of boundaries sundered, the parasite image might allow us to understand the world as colonies of dependents that blur the boundaries between self and other, rather than as families or tribes of discrete, individual animals. Beckett repeatedly depicts the agony of subjects who, like Molloy, have the safety of their enclosing “jar” broken; bodies that are simultaneously threatened with parasitic consumption from within and engulfment from without, as well as depicting characters who feel themselves to be hungry parasites, sucking at an indifferent or indignant host. Without eliding the pain that these un-jarred, itinerant, vulnerable characters experience, these texts nonetheless insist on resituating the human within the environment and within these networks of feeding, acknowledging our intimate reliance on the human and more-than-human other.