Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War

ARGUMENT: THE ORGANIZATION OF INTIMACY

In Samuel Beckett's drama, wholly intertwined and wildly dysfunctional pairs of men populate a beleaguered world. Male friendship in Waiting for Godot (1954) is what survives the trauma of modernity – war, violence, history itself – and in turns becomes emblematic of such a condition. The two old and ragged friends, who hold an unsteady history in their persons and in their tense interactions, seem all that is left of a faded past. What I shall argue in the forthcoming pages is that this connection between male intimacy and the representation of modernity characterizes many literary works from an earlier moment, when these frameworks were established and tested: the English modernist period. Thus, Beckett – writing in the mid twentieth century, purveying an aura of numbness, desperation, and resilience following the Second World War, embodying a position of complex national affiliation – nevertheless displays in exceptionally sparse and skeletal terms an idea that preoccupied writers of an earlier generation, as they confronted their own historical and national situations.