Amid the intense theorising of ‘Three Dialogues: Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit’, one discovers what appears to be a reluctant admission, an acknowledgment, a summary of a materialist theory of art, even as it is dismissed: ‘The realization that art has always been bourgeois, though it may dull our pain before the achievements of the social progressive, is finally of scant interest’ (Beckett 1949: 123–4). Despite Beckett's casual dismissal, the statement seemed significant enough for him to revise and reprint it in two subsequent publications, one in French and one in English, tributes to the struggling painter Bram van Velde.1 In fact, Beckett leads his tribute essay with this simultaneous admission and dismissal, only the crucial subordinate clause, the quasi-Freudian acknowledgment of art's potential palliative effect, ‘to dull our pain’, omitted; that is, the admission of an aesthetic function to art is expunged in reference to van Velde. The relation of art to bourgeois culture may have been declared ‘of scant interest’ to Beckett as he focused on other features of the art work, particularly the paradoxical relation between artist and occasion, but Beckett's denial reinserts the denied into the equation and so constitutes something of a reaffirmation, the denial of occasion seeming to double back on itself to become something of a fresh occasion, a danger that Beckett acknowledged. Evading the material and bourgeois, Beckett recognised, may be futile, his evasion leading back to the terrestrial, the quotidian, the diurnal, the mundane.

The issue that Beckett skirts in his commentary, what amounts to a politics of art, its uneasy, often occluded association with commodity and commerce, is, of course, most evident in theatre, where property is rented from its owners, presumably an author (or designate), packaged, and resold to the public, but it remains a defining feature of all art. Like painting, writing in all its genres is inextricably tied to the quid pro quo world of commerce. Most literary publications and theatrical performances, especially in late capitalist societies, require investors, those bourgeois replacements for patrons who exhibit something less than altruism in their economic support for the arts.