Not I in the Irish context and beyond
Futoshi Sakauchi
Only recently voice of female inmates in welfare facilities of Ireland, which had been long suppressed, started to grip substantial public attention. Peter Mullan, a film director, unflinchingly depicted in his The Magdalene Sisters (2002), how voices of female residents in a church-run institute are muffled by patriarchal authorities, and how these women suffer from the lack of real care, the loss of family identity, and the absence of love. Stolen Child (2002), by two female playwrights, Yvonne Quinn and Bairbre Ní Chaoimh, pursued a similar theme and described the grave consequence of the chain reaction of rape and unwanted pregnancy, which ends in an unhappy adoption of an illegitimate child into an institute.

The same chain reaction was, in fact, embedded in Samuel Beckett’s Not I written as early as in 1972. The play could suggests how deeply a child of a raped mother suffers in her later years in an institution, and how desperately she, who is called “Mouth”, struggles for an alternative mode of her being even after she is dead. Defying discouraging gestures by “auditor” to bring her story to a close, Mouth, fragmental existence of a woman in a society, keeps on delivering her fragmental lines and demands endless revisits to her past and her devastated life. Thus Not I secured a zone, in which a relentlessly marginalized woman could display her subjectivity.

Not I is a fictional story that unfortunately happens to be too true in Ireland. Yet a challenging element might wedge itself in this reading when we face Beckett’s unlocalizing process in the creation of the play, in which the playwright charged the play with extremely minimalistic expressions. Here today’s readers of the play may be suspended between a concrete Irish context and a broader (or rather universal) context. Then where and how could we find the aesthetic location of this text?

In this paper, I will investigate the extent to which Beckett’s Not I could be interpretatively activated in the Irish cultural context as well as in more universal and then borderless landscape.
Postgraduate in University College, Dublin
Borderless Beckett:
International Samuel Beckett Symposium in Tokyo 2006
September 29 – October 1