Politics of transtextual influence: on Angela Moorjani's Beckett and Buddhism

Abstract

This article focuses on Angela Moorjani’s book Beckett and Buddhism (2021) to advance a transtextual framework for understanding Beckett’s Buddhist and non-European influences. Though ‘transtext’ is mentioned by Moorjani, it is not elaborately theorized by her. I theorize this idea from Gérard Genette’s narratology to account for the mediated, multi-layered influences Moorjani reads in her book. I posit the transtextual operation as an outside-in movement where the context pushes the text from its surroundings and build on the political aspect of this transtextual influence by importing Edward Said’s orientalism into the discussion. In the process, I offer micro-readings from Beckett’s Murphy and How It Is that respond to Moorjani’s readings to highlight Beckett’s oblique critique of the orientalist discourse. The objective is to address the neglected political regime of representation in Beckett’s unconscious borrowings and disavowals around Buddhism and Indian thought. I further the political inquiry by invoking Ambedkarite Buddhism in India and its mobilization of the Buddhist non-self as a tool for emancipation from the oppressive identitarian discourse of ‘caste.’ This invocation along with the third and final micro-reading from the novella ‘The End’ shows how Beckett’s appeal to the Buddhist non-self has a political undercurrent with a critique of identitarian discourses.