Beckett in the Dock: Censorship, Biopolitics, and the Sinclair Trial

Abstract

Of all the actions of the Irish Censorship of Publications Board, one of the most often cited, but least critically examined, is the suppression of Samuel Beckett’s More Pricks Than Kicks (1934). This article aims to recover a fuller picture of how censorship of More Pricks affected Beckett, particularly in his attitudes to the biopolitical policing of ethno-national identity. To do so, it examines Beckett’s involvement in Harry Sinclair’s 1937 libel action against Oliver St John Gogarty, and the crucial role that the suppression of More Pricks played in discrediting Beckett as a witness. In contrast to previous, “personal” readings of the trial, it explores how the libellous passages of Gogarty’s As I Was Going Down Sackville Street (1937) offered an anti-Semitic portrait of Sinclair and his family in which ethnic alterity and sexual deviance are presented as synonymous, and how Gogarty’s barrister appropriated this rhetorical strategy to target Beckett. In the process, it offers a deep contextualisation of Beckett’s anti-natalism, anti-nationalism, and longstanding aversion to censorship, by emphasising their relationship to his experiences of the operation of biopolitics in the emergent Free State and a wider European context during the trial and its aftermath.