Possibility of Sublimation in the Works of Samuel Beckett and Marguerite Duras

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Facing The Music: The (Im)Possibility of Sublimation in the Works of Samuel Beckett and Marguerite Duras

A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY

François-Nicolas Vozel

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Co-Advisers: Mária Brewer and Bruno Chaouat

December 2016

i Acknowledgments:

During the long process involved in finishing a dissertation there are many people whose invaluable support and friendship helped me more than I can express with words. First and foremost, I would like to thank my two advisers, Dr. Mària Brewer and Dr. Bruno Chaouat, for the help, support, and guidance that they have given me over the years. I have had the privilege to work closely with them throughout the M.A. and the Ph.D. and they have set an example of excellence as researchers, mentors, and instructors. They have offered many insightful comments and suggestions through their careful readings of my chapters and articles. I am very grateful to them for giving me the opportunity to carry out this project and experiment with a wide range of literary, philosophical, psychoanalytic, and political problems. I would like to thank the chair of my committee, Dr. Daniel Brewer, who has been a kind and generous mentor. His high standards and commitment to excellence were a constant source of inspiration and working with him was a real pleasure. Dan also provided many insightful readings of my chapters and devoted a lot of time to help me with scholarship and job applications. I would like to thank Cesare Casarino who has served has the external member of my committee since the M.A. Cesare has always been available to me and offered unfailing support and intellectual guidance over the past eight years. I would also like to thank my dear friends Justin Butler, Andrea Gyenge, Deborah, Evan and Hugo Lee-Ferrand, Florence Loubière, Brendan McGillicuddy, Niels Niessen, and Agnès Schaffauser for their support, encouragement, friendship, and patience throughout the years. Last but not least, I would like to thank my family for their generosity and support. Special thanks to Jo Bertiaux, Patrick Vozel, Emilia Bertiaux, Stephanie Vozel, Toni Judez, Laurine Vozel, Emma, Melina, Noham and Lakhdar Benbelkacem.

Support for the research and writing of this project came from many sources, for which I am deeply grateful. The University of Minnesota’s Department of French and Italian, College of Liberal Arts, Institute for Advanced Study, Center for German and European Studies, and Graduate School each provided assistance in the form of fellowships. Through her generous giving to the University, Hella Mears also made possible significant summer research that allowed me the time to make important progress on my research.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Reinventing the Tragic in the Era of Consumer Culture 1

Part I: Samuel Beckett’s Reinvention of the Tragic, Sublimation or Destruction? 85

Chapter I: Sound as a Bell: Samuel Beckett’s Musical Destruction of Aristotelian 86 Tragic Drama

Chapter II: Understanding Beckett’s (Absolutely Modern) Revival of Tragedy 127

Part II: “Musicalize She Said”: Marguerite Duras’ Deconstruction of the Realist Novel 203

Chapter III: Moderato Cantabile, or Music as the Last Veil that Hides the Monstrous 218

Chapter IV: Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein: When the Music Stops… 266

Conclusion: The (Im)Possibility of Sublimation, an “aesthethics” 305

Bibliography 316

Introduction:

Reinventing the Tragic in the Era of Consumer Culture

Jacques Lacan’s 1959-1960 seminar, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, opens a new stage of political and ethical thought for psychoanalysis. The whole seminar consists in Lacan’s effort to devise a radically modern conception of the tragic that is to be articulated “from the point of view of the location of man (sic) in relation to the real” (11), the “real” being that which is left out in the formation of the subject of knowledge (symbolic) and narcissistic identification (imaginary). Lacan looks to tragedy to unearth an ethics more older, more original, even more important than the philosophical ethics that has dominated Western morality since the time of Plato and Aristotle, which may be broadly described as an ethics of the Good. In Seminar VII one of Lacan’s objects of criticism is

Aristotle’s Poetics, the text that laid the foundations for subsequent interpretations of tragic drama. Tragedy literally means “goat song” (from τράγος “goat” + ωδή “song”).

The connection may be via satyric drama, from which tragedy later developed, in which actors or singers were dressed in goatskins to represent satyrs. Some theories advance that a goat was to be sacrificed during representations or that singers competed for a goat

2 as a prize. Yet, another interpretation comes from the idea of tragedy as a ritual of purification, the goat being the embodiment of Dionysus, the god of excessiveness and intemperance. This reading is, in all likelihood, the one retained by Aristotle who puts forward a vision of tragedy as a process oriented towards the “catharsis” (purification) of dangerous excess. Indeed, tragedy for Aristotle should achieve a process of purification analogous to the one produced by Socratic persuasion; for the Stagyrite, tragic drama should stir up extreme affects so as to better mitigate and remove them. By allowing the spectator to briefly experience the perils of transgression, tragedy functions as a cautionary fable, which enables the citizen’s cultivation of αρετή [arête] (virtue, excellence) through the inculcation of φρόνησις [phronesis] (practical wisdom, prudence) and σωφροσύνη [sophrosune] (moderation). Purification occurs when the spectator feels

έλεος [eleos] (pity) in her compassion for the hero undergoing pathos, or when she experiences φόβος [phobos] (fear) when she identifies with the hero undergoing dissolution. As in Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle encourages moderation in all things.

As an expedient of homeopathic medicine, tragedy offers an arena wherein people can experience overwhelming emotions and learn to gain better control over them. In this light, the purpose of tragedy would be to lead the spectator to the aurea mediocritas, the middle path of virtuous life that, Lacan believes, only confirms socially accepted values and norms.

In Seminar VII Lacan sets out to “demystify the Platonic and the Aristotelian view of the good, indeed of the Supreme Good” (216), which has plagued Western philosophy for more than two millenia. “The good as such,” which Lacan qualifies as “the eternal

3 object of the philosophical quest in the sphere of ethics” and “philosopher’s stone of all the moralists,” is “radically denied by Freud” (96). The overarching goal of Aristotelian ethics is εὐδαιµονία [eudaimonia] (happiness, well-being), the highest good and the end towards which all our activities should ultimately aim. Aristotle claims that the ἔργον

[ergon] (function, work) of the ethicist consists in perfecting the activity of the rational part of the soul in accordance with virtue (Nichomachean Ethics 1097b22–1098a20).

Whereas Aristotle depicts the ethical subject as consciously seeking pleasure in moderation, firmly linking εὐδαιµονία with conscious desire, Lacan articulates a concept of desire that is in constant synergy with the irrational force of the drives. Lacan advances that this “radical repudiation of a certain ideal of the good is necessary” because “the good erects a strong wall across the path of our desire” (Seminar VII 230). Ultimately,

Aristotle’s vision leads the individual to give ground relative to her desire (319), that is, to the consolidation of neurotic symptoms.1

As Lacoue-Labarthe argues, Lacan’s choice of Greek tragedy and Antigone is not accidental, for tragedy is “the decisive test of philosophy […] tragedy lies ‘prior to’ philosophy; that is to say, prior to Plato who erects philosophy against it.”2 This interpretation is consistent with Lacan’s assertion in Seminar XIX that philosophy is

“ontology,” that is, a systematic Weltanschauung founded on the presupposition that being is substance, an ultimately consistent, immutable, and unbroken One (...Ou pire,

1 For instance Lacan asks us to look at Aristotle to “consider how far that notion of nature is different from ours,” because Aristotle’s is one to support an ethics which believes it can legitimately involve “the exclusion of all bestial desires” from the field of morality, as if nature were innately inclined to foster “happiness” and “human fulfillment” (Seminar VII 13). 2 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “On ethics: A propos of Antigone,” Journal of European Psychoanalysis 24 (2007), http://www.psychomedia.it/jep/number24/lacoue.htm

4 session of June 21st 1972). As Lacoue-Labarthe argues,

Depending on the emphasis brought to bear on this “against” and the interpretation it is given, either tragedy potentially bears hidden in it the entire unfolding of philosophy (this being the dialectical version); or tragedy is a document more ancient or archaic than philosophy, before which the latter serves as a screen (ibid.).

To be sure, Lacan follows the latter interpretation, elaborating on Heidegger’s idea that the object of philosophy’s primary repression is death. As he puts it unequivocally, tragedy displays the “triumph of death” (Seminar VII 313). The ethics of psychoanalysis critiques the metaphysical conception of death perpetuated by two metaphysical postures: first, the theological idea of death to be found in the belief in the afterlife, a life to be valued higher than that of being-in-the-world; second, the humanist conception of death, which regards death as an peripheral eventuality that is linked in a purely extrinsic way with existence.

While Aristotle bases his ethics on experimentation and, to a certain extent, finitude, his rationalism led him to assume that happiness or well-being is not entirely vulnerable to the blows of fortune and, when reached, is “something permanent and by no means easily changed” (Nichomachean Ethics 1100b2-3). According to him, “no function of man has so much permanence as virtuous activities” (1100b12-13). If Aristotle certainly acknowledged the importance of death, his dialectic of species and individual, or universal and particular, clearly gives prominence to the former, preserving the immutability of universal forms in an eternal cosmos. In Physics, Aristotle describes a physical universe characterized by the eternal recurrence of the same Forms, a universe whose ontological consistency is guaranteed by the overarching presence of an unmoved mover. To be sure, the ethics of psychoanalysis begins with the loss of an alleged,

5 original and timeless ethical substance, and with the recognition of the fundamentally decentered and unanchored essence of human existence.

While for Heidegger and Lacan death is constitutive of existence, it is a notion bound to remain empty, void, in the sense that we do not know how to relate to death. As a transcendental condition of existence, death is a possibility that cannot be actualized, conjured positively, and that remains indefinite. In order to face death authentically, one should not consider it as a circumscribable event, but as a Noch-Nicht, a “not yet” that splits every moment and every second of my existence. When death is anticipated or expected as an actual event, it no longer appears as possibility, but as something that can be realized, arrested as a determinable event. As Heidegger writes, “in expecting, one leaps away from the possible and gets a foothold in the actual” (Being and Time 306).

Thus, death always remains a possibility, a perpetual deferral that guarantees that there can be no self-presence or self-contained identity. To put it in Derrida’s terms, death guarantees the messianic structure of existence, the division of a subject that remains open to the coming of an entirely ungraspable and unknown other. As opposed to the messianism of organized religions, the messianic refers to a radically atheistic and never- ending openness towards a future that may never be encompassed by the horizons of meaning and significance.3

Hence, happiness could not be a goal for psychoanalysis, which rather seeks to elicit the Stimmung (feeling, mood) of anxiety (Angst) that reveals being-for-death.4 As

3 In Specters of Marx Derrida advances the “quasi-atheistic dryness of the messianic,” calling for a “messianism without religion, even a messianic without messianism” (211). 4 “In anxiety […] Dasein finds itself face to face with the “nothing” of the possible impossibility of its existence” (Being and Time 310).

Lacan liked to say, borrowing from Queneau, “there is no Sunday of life.”5 In this new stage of political and ethical thought that emerged with the late 1950s, Lacan’s teaching is conceptualized as an attack on the political and economic fantasies that promise happiness and well-being that can never be achieved and that hide the real relations of domination and exploitation in society. Lacan’s ethics was defined in the aftermath of

World War II, after the failure and dissolution of the grand narrative of the

Enlightenment, and the spread of nationalism and fascism. At least since the early 17th century, the project of rational enquiry was inextricably bound up with the neo-

Aristotelian assumption that reason, human happiness, and autonomy were consubstantial. This assumption is conspicuous in Kant’s essay Was ist Aufklärung?

(1784) where enlightenment is conceived as the emergence of humanity from immaturity, and immaturity as the failure to use one’s own understanding and the powers of reason.

Like Aristotle, Kant posits that “practical progress” towards the summum bonum, the sovereign good, is “the true object” of a “morally determined” will (Critique of Practical

Reason 93). Lacan’s turn to ethics occurs at a peculiar time in the history of the West, a period of transition that sees society moving almost instantaneously from nationalist and conservative regimes to consumerist, “libertarian” ones. The 1959-1960 seminar on ethics opens a decade of cultural criticism that culminated with the 1969-1970 seminar,

L’Envers de la psychanalyse, where Lacan conceptualizes the “discourse of capitalism” as a refined, more insidious, and more efficient version of the discourse of the master.

5 With this expression Lacan criticizes Hegelian dialectic’s belief in absolute knowledge that betrays the power of negativity: “Elle ne nous suffit pas, elle ne nous satisfait pas, cette néantisation dont les philosophes font leur dimanche, et même leur dimanche de la vie – voir Raymond Queneau – vu les usages plus qu’artificieux qu’en fait la prestidigitation dialectique moderne” (Seminar VI, Le désir et son interpretation 413).

Like Adorno and Horkheimer, Lacan considered both fascism as a popular movement and the culture industry as a producer of mass entertainment as examples of what Leo

Lowenthal called “psychoanalysis in reverse” (“Recollections of Theodor Adorno” 186), that is, discourses fostering regression, dependence, and compulsion instead of emancipation. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, consumerism liquidated cultural memory in the name of the commodity form, fomenting the destruction of history and the coordinated development and rationalization of the eternal present of consumption. As the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) put forward, the fulgurant advent of the consumerist utopia squandered the opportunity to confront the deadlock at the heart of the Aufklärung, a deadlock that directly led to the disaster of fascism, Nazism, and the two World Wars.6 Wedged between the threats of fascism and consumerist hedonism, the ethics of psychoanalysis takes stock of the impasse of the universalist emancipatory program of the Enlightenment, advancing an ethics of singularities as a third way between liberal-capitalist universalism and identity politics.

In Seminar VII Lacan unambiguously embraces Heidegger’s idea in Being and

Time that everything that results in a forgetting of death is inauthentic. The aim of analysis is to bring the analysand to confront the question of human existence as it is posed by the question of the “true being-for-death” (Seminar VII 309). Unlike Heidegger,

Lacan defines not one, but two deaths. The first death refers to the biological cut, which stems from the fact that humans are sexual as opposed to asexual beings (i.e., Freud’s

6 For instance, Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s The Inability to Mourn (1967) points out that the frenzy of capitalist production and consumerist hedonism prevented the working through of the horrors of Nazi Germany and the reconciliation with the past.

8 idea that death is a consequence of “the anatomical distinction between the sexes”7). The biological section (“sex” and “section” share the same etymology) is the first cut that undermines self-identity and wholeness. Thus, the sexual being, “by being subject to sex, has fallen under the blow of individual death” (Seminar XI 205). If since Plato sex has been understood as the consequence of the division of a fundamental unity (e.g., the myth of the Hermaphrodite as told by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium), psychoanalysis dwells on the idea that sexuality testifies to a fundamental default of origin, a lack of original unity, which makes that “il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel,” there is no sexual relationship as the adage of Lacanian psychoanalysis goes. For Freud and Lacan, sexuality is the repressed of Western thought, the ontological difference that exposes logocentric thinking to the dangerous logic of supplementation.8 Most important for

Lacan, the gap opened up by sexuality may never be filled, it remains indifferent to our existential investments and our facticity. The second death is operated by the linguistic cut, the fact that “the subject depends on the signifier and that the signifier is first of all in the field of the Other” (205). This idea is dramatized by tragedy; for instance, Oedipus and Antigone are born into the world with the curse of the Labdacides that predetermines their fate.

What is the point of returning to tragedy in the age of consumer culture and triumphant individualism? As George Steiner agues, “there is no welcome to the self.

This is what tragedy is about” (“Tragedy Reconsidered” 3). The tragic dwells on what

7 See “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes,” The Freud Reader, p.670-678 8 Because sexuality entails a logic of supplementation that is expressed in the infinite metonymy of desire, sexuality can be seen as Lacan’s version of what Derrida calls différance: “the disappearance of any originary presence, […] the condition of possibility and impossibility of truth” (Dissemination 168).

Steiner calls “ontological homelessness” (2), defining itself against what Lacan describes in “L’agressivité en psychanalyse” (1948) as the modern cult of the ego and the “ever more advanced realization of man as an individual” (Ecrits, a Selection 26). In “Some

Reflections on the Ego” (1953), Lacan puts forward that the fundamental problem of modern culture is that “present-day man” is “held spellbound by his ego,” constrained by an egotic “inertia” that checks the “dialectic process of analysis.”9 For Lacan, the ego is understood as an imaginary formation, which is in great part constituted at the moment of the mirror stage when the subject first recognizes and falls under the spell of its own image.10 The ego gains consistency through “the assumption of the armor of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development”

(Ecrits, a Selection 6). Hence, the conatus of the ego lies in the reinforcement of a fundamentally narcissistic experience of unity and continuity, the production of a coherent version of the self that represses the anarchic and polymorphous drives of the material body. Still, as Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis has it, such an idea of ontological consistency is consistently undermined by the subject’s inherence in the symbolic order.11 Freud’s analyses of the formations of the unconscious (symptoms, parapraxes, dreams, jokes, etc.) revealed that the ego is no master in its own house; rather, it is governed, unbeknownst to itself, by an articulated network of signs, ideas, and images that the conscious mind fails to recognize as its own, which is why Lacan defines

9 “Some Reflections on the Ego,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 34 (1953), p.12 10 “The subject is no one. It is decomposed, in pieces. And it is jammed, sucked in by the image, the deceiving and realized image, of the other, or equally by its own specular image.” (Seminar II 54) 11 Lacan argues that “the fact of being born with the signifier, the subject is born divided. The subject is this emergence which, just before, as subject, was nothing, but which, having scarcely appeared, solidifies into a signifier.” (Seminar XI 199)

10 the ego as a “paranoiac structure” seeking to perpetuate “the stability of the paranoiac delusional system” (“Some Reflections on the Ego” 12).

In Seminar VII Lacan asserts that tragedy is the art form the closest to the process of analysis, advancing that only a lucid confrontation with death may save existence from ethical renunciation. Building on Heidegger, Lacan posits death as the ownmost potentiality (die eigenste Möglichkeit) of existence. In this period of his teaching, Lacan operates the critical turn from mirror image to anamorphosis, or from the imaginary to the real, where death appears as the terminus ad quem and the terminus ad quo of desire.

The theory of the mirror stage states that between the age of 6 to 18 months the infant creates an ego by identifying with the fantasy image that it perceives in the mirror. When the infant looks at its mirror image, it encounters an image of itself as whole, which triggers a “jubilant assumption” that contrasts with the fragmentation of bodily drives that she experienced previously.12 The image is illusory because it fails to reflect the child’s real helplessness, the bodily lack of coordination and fragmentation caused by the prematurity of human birth. The imaginary strives for the whole, completeness, and an eradication of difference. The image is described by Lacan as the moi idéal (Ideal ego), an ideal image preserved in the imaginary order that plays a primordial role in the subject’s lifelong longing for selfhood. This assumption marks the primordial recognition of the infant as “I”, although it happens before it begins using language. The imaginary order continues to exert its influence throughout adult life and is not merely supplanted in

12 “Unable as yet to walk, or even to stand up, and held tightly as he is by some support, human or artificial, he nevertheless overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant activity, the obstructions of his support and, fixing his attitude in a slightly leaning-forward position, in order to hold it in his gaze, brings back an instantaneous aspect of the image.” (“The Mirror Stage” 79)

11 the child’s entry into the symbolic order. By erecting imaginary defenses, the ego becomes an

essential resistance to the elusive process of Becoming, to the variations of Desire. This illusion of unity, in which a human being is always looking forward to self-mastery, entails a constant sliding back again into the chaos from which he started; it hangs over the abyss of a dizzy Ascent in which one can perhaps see the very essence of Anxiety (“Some Reflections on the Ego” 15).

Thus, satisfaction through imaginary coherence is permanently haunted by an anxiety that undermines well-being and is the fundamental source of aggressivity throughout the subject’s existence.

For Lacan, the essential reality obscured by a defensive ego is death. In Seminar

VII Lacan shifts from the model of the mirror image to that of anamorphosis.

Anamorphosis allows us to escape the pull of the specular ego and the desire for narcissistic completion. This idea is further developed in Seminar XI where Lacan distinguishes between the eye’s look and the gaze. The gaze refers to the uncanny sense that the object perceived by our eyes is somehow returning the gaze as if it were animated by a will of its own. Lacan contends that the fantasized presence of a gaze observing us is as old as the world. It finds its archetype in God’s panoptic gaze that was imagined to observe us from behind the veil of appearances or in religious icons which function as “a go-between with the divinity” (Seminar XI 113). In the realm of art, Lacan’s paradigmatic example for the gaze is Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533), a painting organized according to classical perspective where the point of view of the viewer is aligned with the vanishing point of perspectival geometry. When we look at the painting, we feel as though we are in control of the field of vision; however, anxiety

12 surges as soon as we notice a mysterious stain at the bottom of the canvas. This opacity can be made out only if one looks at the painting from the side. One realizes that the stain actually is an anamorphosis, a skull staring back at the onlooker. As Lacan puts it, the anamorphic skull “reflects our own nothingness, in the figure of the death’s head”

(Seminar XI 92). The skull not only makes us aware of our own finitude, it also reveals the incompleteness of the symbolic order. Indeed, the symbols of knowledge and power that the ambassadors have collected around the world (art, science, wealth, ambition) appear in all their vanity.

In that regard, the psychoanalytic understanding of catharsis is diametrically opposed to Aristotle’s; it finds its expression in the possibility of death, which is not one possibility among others, but rather the possibility of our own impossibility. For Lacan tragedy is the art form that opens up the ethical field, proceeding by way of anamorphoses that purify us from the illusions appertaining to the imaginary order.

Through this cathartic process, we come to experience the recognition (anagnorisis) of our “true being-for-death.” In Seminar VII Lacan describes Antigone as “the advent of the absolute individual” (278). Yet, the kind of individualism in question is not the one aided and abetted by capitalist society. Tragedy is an experience that pushes the individual to the outer limits of existence, beyond the relatively secure, comfortable, and egocentric world created for us by (consumer) society. As such, the tragic cannot be dissociated from the idea of a limit-experience that wrenches the subject from itself, taking it beyond the pleasure principle into the lethal territory of jouissance. In Seminar

XI Lacan remarks that the pleasure principle cannot be made the basis of an ethics, “by

13 situating itself purely and simply in the register of pleasure, ethics fails” (242); the pathological, imaginary object only hides the tragic relation of the subject to desire.

Tragedy is an art form that concerns “the response of a being […] at the approach to a center of incandescence or an absolute zero that is physically unbearable” (Seminar VII

201). The ethical act frees the individual from the anonymity and reassurance of what

Heidegger calls “the they” (das Man), which Lacan identifies in the “order of goods,” the

“servicing of goods” (303), or the good of the marketplace that characterize the “post- historical” world of consumerism.

To put it in terms of the Foucault of L’Herméneutique du sujet, Lacan’s turn to ethics seeks to redefine the world as a “testing ground” (17). Contrary to traditional misconceptions, the tragic hero is not a powerless marionette swaying to the strings of fate. Rather, tragedy introduces us to individuals who transgress the destiny that was assigned to them by social laws and customs, which is one definition of what Lacan calls the Other as the symbolic field of individuation. As Lacan put it in “The Function and

Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” in the order of goods, “culture pursues its course in the shadowy regions beyond creative subjectivity.” Yet, the ethical act shows that “creative subjectivity has not ceased in its struggle to renew the never- exhausted power of symbols in the human exchange that brings them to the light of day”

(Ecrits, a Selection 71-72). This idea echoes Lacan’s statement that analysis “is less a matter of remembering than of rewriting history” (Seminar I 14). Death is thus not simply castration, the biological and linguistic cut that deprives us of self-presence, it is also the point towards which we have to go in order to reach the beyond of the pleasure principle,

14 to attain the ethical field of creative subjectivity. As in the case of Aeschylus’ Orestes, the end of tragedy does not necessarily lead to the protagonist’s ultimate ruin. Rather, it explores possible ways in which one may not give ground relative to one’s desire.

Confronting insurmountable perils, the tragic determination to overcome subordination often leads to devastating outcomes; at the same time, however, it discloses the unexpected resources of human potential, raising the self above the pettiness of everyday life. In this ethical framework, culture is then conducted not by an industry that creates entertainment, stereotypes, and compulsion—but by artists. Hence, the tragic cannot be dissociated from an ethics of desire, which Lacan associates with the subject’s refusal to give ground on the radical singularity of her desire.

Tragic Drama in the Age of Consumer Culture

To put it in a candid manner, what is the point of posing the question of tragedy in the so-called “post-historical” world of consumerism? Put differently, what does it mean to test freedom in the so-called “free world”? In The Death of Tragedy (1949), George

Steiner announced the demise of tragic drama, diagnosing two main causes of death. The first is to be found in the Christian hope in redemption and the afterlife, which cancels the subversive essence of death: “where there is compensation, there is justice, not tragedy”

(4). According to Steiner, the tragic requires a world bereft of eschatological consolation where redemption appears as a pitiful illusion, a world that ensures the “alienation or ostracism from the safeguard of licensed being” (“Tragedy Reconsidered” 3). The second

15 cause is to be found in the modern triumph of rationalism and a secular worldview that have liquidated the metaphysical grounds for tragedy: “In Greek tragedy as in

Shakespeare, mortal actions are encompassed by forces which transcend man. The reality of Orestes entails that of the Furies; the Weird Sisters wait for the soul of Macbeth. We cannot conceive of Oedipus without a Sphinx, nor of Hamlet without a Ghost” (The

Death of Tragedy 193). Depicting life as a mystery beyond human control and understanding, these tragedies “instruct us how little of the world belongs to man” (194).

Against the ideal of tragic dispossession, the modern world of the Cartesian cogito, with its scientific positivism and skeptical reason, has fully invalidated the superstitious belief in the unseen realm that was characteristic of classical tragedies. Building on Steiner’s diagnostic, I propose to add a third cause to tragedy’s demise, a cause that is the direct consequence of the second one. It is to be found in post-World War II consumerist capitalism, which praised itself for achieving the reconciliation of individual and society, a reconciliation that has fully affected tragedy’s aesthetic decline. As we are going to discuss, however, this so-called reconciliation did not occur because of an enlightened mankind, fully aware of the contradictions within civilization, but rather, following

Lacan, in the fetishism of the commodity form that falsifies the inherently tragic “relation of man (sic) to desire” (Seminar VII 318).

In this study I propose to shed light on the persistence of the tragic mode in capitalist modernity. The works of Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) and Marguerite Duras

(1914-1996) point to the paradoxical endurance of tragic themes in a consumer-centered universe where pleasure and happiness constitute the horizon of existence. More

16 specifically, Beckett and Duras devise a specifically modern sense of the tragic, which is indissolubly bound up with the exploration of the modern psychoanalytic subject of desire. To a certain extent, both writers revive the tragic idea of life as a mystery beyond human understanding. In agreement with Steiner’s diagnostic, however, they both reject belief in an other world where the alienation of desire, torn between the incessant pressure of the drives and the ideal need for closure, would be redeemed. Rather, both writers explore the depths of the mundane world, exposing the brokenness of life and the isolation of modernity. Unlike in Aristotle’s taxonomy, for both writers tragedy no longer falls on someone of high status. In Beckett it happens to ordinary persons slowly worn to death by habit, compulsive behaviors, disease, or petty problems. In Duras tragedy happens to housewives, forlorn women, or young women without a future of their own.

The tragic model for Duras is Racine, whose characters’ uncontrollable passions take them unavoidably on the path of self-destruction. If Corneille’s characters somehow manage to retain control of their emotions, Racine’s heroes are incapable of forging their destiny through a deliberate and rational act of will. Love comes upon them as an irresistible force that destroys them. For both writers, tragedy is tied to an ethics of desire that explores how far art may break with norms and conventions in order to carve out a space for the expression of the real of desire in opposition both to the narcissistic imaginary and the desire of the Other.

Marc de Kesel rightly points out that Lacanian ethics is “not just limited to the space of the psychoanalytic cure, but can also offer a contribution to the wider domain of a universal, cultural Bildung” (Eros and Ethics 164). In Seminar VII Lacan opposes

17 symptomatization to sublimation, presenting the latter as kind of a psychological transfiguration, a way to appease the discontent inherent in civilization. Sublimation is an operation that can be linked to what Nietzsche called “revaluation” or “transvaluation” of values (Beyond Good and Evil 46), viz., the creation of values that do not turn against life but enhance and intensify it.13 Sublimation operates by raising an imaginary object to the dignity or, as Lacan playfully underlines, the “Dingnity” of the Thing (das Ding being the noun used by Freud to describe the Thing as the absolute object of desire that escapes symbolic and imaginary capture) (Seminar VII 112). Through this elevation the sublimated object of desire appears in its “Thing-ness,” freed from what Kant called the pathological, that is, the limitations of the narcissistic imaginary, which creates a barrier to the Thing and hides the tragic relation of the subject to desire. Through the sublimatory act, the imaginary no longer represses the unrepresentable Thing but confronts us with an irreducible emptiness, which is what remains of the Thing once it has been symbolized.

Sublimation is anamorphic in the sense that it enables a new understanding of the imaginary that no longer forecloses the real, but actually represents the Thing, i.e., the imageless, real object of desire that lies beyond meaning, in the “beyond-of-the- signified” (Seminar VII 54). Hence, sublimation enables a new, non-repressive relation to the real, that is, to what escapes the formation of the subject of knowledge (symbolic) and narcissistic identification (imaginary).

13 We thus agree with Tim Themi who perceives a great affinity between Lacan’s ethics and Nietzsche’s project of revaluation of all values (Lacan’s Ethics and Nietzsche’s Critique of Platonism 2). Alenka Zupancic also advances a similar argument when she writes that “what is at stake [in sublimation] is the creation of values, not simply the act of adhering to already existing values” (The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two 76).

Most important, as Alenka Zupancic argues sublimation is a rebellion against the reality principle, or the limits imposed to enjoyment by processes of socialization (The

Shortest Shadow 76). Sublimation contributes to a cultural Bildung insofar as it creates new values that both transgress accepted norms and enrich the social sphere. Thus, for

Lacan desire is not merely subjective and irrational but forms the basis for culture, its values and ideals. If, as de Kesel puts it, society can be conceptualized as a “field of sublimation” (186), we ask what happens to ethics and the notion of “cultural Bildung” when the universal is only encountered in the form of exchange value or, as Adorno put it, when “the whole is the false [Das Ganze ist das Unwahre]” (Minima Moralia 50) and when “wrong life cannot be lived rightly [Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen]” (39)?

I propose that Beckett’s and Duras’ revival of tragedy directly confronts this issue insofar as their works call into question the possibility of sublimation in the world without transcendence of consumerism. For Lacan, there is more to the causes of tragedy’s demise than Christianity and science, there is the consumerist Other against which

Beckett’s and Duras’ art is embattled. In the chapters of this study we will analyze

Beckett’s Endgame (1957) and Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) as well as Duras’ Moderato

Cantabile (1958) and The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein (1964). The timespan that encompasses those publications is the locus of a turning point in French society. After the deprivations of a long war and occupation and during the decade in which France tried to recapture its pre-war prestige, the nation was entering the frantic world of consumerism and mass media. In 1957 Barthes published Mythologies, a collection of fifty-three short texts written between 1954 and 1957 that analyze the myths of popular culture and

19 consumer society. Barthes’s book reflects well how France was torn between a nostalgic desire to restore nationalist pride, holding onto its colonies in North Africa and Southeast

Asia, and the pull of capital’s latest transfiguration: consumerism. At a time of increasing middle-class prosperity the nation was entering a world of roaring consumption. The task of the mythologist was to uncover the “ideological abuse” concealed in bottles of liquid detergents and soap-powders, countering myths by exposing them as lies. More recently,

Kristin Ross’ Fast Cars, Clean Bodies also showed the impact of the decade from Dien

Bien Phu to the mid-1960s where France embraced the ideology of modernization, shifting rapidly from a principally agrarian, protectionist, and empire-oriented society to a decolonized, “Americanized,” and fully industrial one. In parallel to Barthes’s analyses,

Galbraith wrote The Affluent Society in 1958, exploring the genealogy of consumerism as a way of life, a new religion with a raison d’être all its own. Galbraith’s work describes the hegemony of an industrial model founded on consumption that appeared at the beginning of the 20th century in response to the limits of the productivist model of the

19th century. While the first phase of capitalist hegemony relied on Protestant “work ethic” and delayed gratification, the second phase opened the gates of unlimited satisfaction in a biopolitical apparatus that William Davies recently called the “happiness industry” whereby “the ideal of bringing the invisible realm of emotions and desires into the open was now bound up with the ideal of the free market” (57). As capitalism seeks to break new ground, enjoyment becomes the main target and source of profit, and the capture of libidinal investment becomes central to the reproduction of capital.

Beckett and Duras are astutely aware of the desacralization of the art object in capitalist modernity. In consumerism, art enters the total system of marketability and thus abjures its autonomy, its Kantian “purposelessness” or its Adornian “functionlessness.”14

Consequently, as Adorno and Horkheimer underline, art can no longer promise freedom from socially dictated uses (Dialectic of Enligthenment 127). I propose that both Beckett and Duras envision the novel or the play as a counter-fetish, that is, a fetish that out- fetishizes commodity fetishism by tearing away the art object from the short circuit, the immediate gratification of consumption. The artwork becomes autonomous, a cipher, a sublimation that creates a long circuit operating as a counterforce to the normalized reifications of desire in the new morality of enjoyment. Hence, the reassertion of the tragic in Beckett and Duras has to be read against what Adorno diagnosed as the formulaic character of the products of the culture industry, the commodification of culture, and the narcissistic tendencies in capitalist societies.

In The System of Objects (1970), Baudrillard described the shift from an ascetic model of ethics organized around sacrifice to a new morality of enjoyment:

The status of a whole civilization changes along with the way in which its everyday objects make themselves present and the way in which they are enjoyed […] The ascetic mode of accumulation, rooted in forethought, in sacrifice […] was the foundation of a whole civilization of thrift which enjoyed its own heroic period (172).

Yet, this ascetic paradigm gave way to a more permissive system revolving around the object of consumption. Like Baudrillard, in 1970 Lacan diagnosed “the rise of

14 “Insofar a social function can be predicated for artworks, it is their functionlessness. Through their difference from a bewitched reality, they embody negatively a position in which what is would nd its rightful place, its own” (Aesthetic Theory 227).

21 the object to the social zenith.”15 As the title of his seminar D’un Autre à l’autre indicates, since Freud’s time we have moved from a society of the Other, with a capital

“O”, to that of the small other. One interpretation of Lacan’s seminar title is that the traditional Other is no longer the organizer of social discourse; the ideals, ideas, prohibitions, taboos, and repressions of Freud’s era have waned in the era of consumerism. It is now the object that organizes discourse, placing society under the commandment of what Lacan calls “surplus jouissance,” a term which will be explained momentarily.

As the Barthesian semiologist has it, the imposed “freedom of choice” is the hallmark of industrial ideology. In late capitalism, “freedom,” “free market,” “purchasing power” and so forth are examples of master signifiers that sustain the consumerist Other.

While consumerism seems to broaden individual freedom, it also channels libidinal investments towards predetermined types of behavior; its effects are thus as constraining as they are empowering. The desiring economy fostered by advertising implies the swaying of the subject’s desire to the desire of the Other, which is no longer the Freudian

Other (the patriarchal, prohibitive Other), but what Lacan calls the “alethosphere”

(Seminar XVII 182). With this neologism Lacan refers to the world administered by techno-science, a transparent world without transcendence where the rational and the real are fused in the purely instrumental nature of technological rationality. In the alethosphere, desire is channeled into apparatuses of capture, subordinated to a means- ends calculation in the extraction of labor-power and enjoyment. Derived from αληθής

15 Jacques Lacan, “Radiophonie,” Autres Ecritś , p. 403

[alethes] “true,” literally “not concealing,” the term illustrates Lacan’s own version of

Max Weber’s vision of the rationalizing and disenchanting spirit of capitalism. The alethosphere is the demonstration of how technocratic societies have gained monopoly over reason and culture, producing, to use Marcuse’s words, a one-dimensional world and one-dimensional beings.

For Lacan, tragedy celebrates desire’s power to reopen the gap between the prevailing order and the second, salvatory dimension, which, for Marcuse, is to be expressed in the role of culture as critique. Tragic art is especially exemplary in that regard for it promotes tragic heroes that are frustrated with the values of the present world. In Antigone the gap emerges from the distance between the heroine’s ethical values and the existing reality of a polis subjugated by the dictator Creon’s tyrannical

Good. The opening of the gap between the two dimensions is crucial for the possibility of social change, for it allows us to distinguish the possible from the merely actual and think beyond the system’s frame. According to Marcuse, in capitalist modernity the gap has been closed by a process of quasi-totalitarian social integration, through the rise of consumerist and administrative thought. Consumerism is the utopia of a perfected, “post- historical,” and harmonious social order without antagonisms that seeks to maintain the consumer in state of indolence without lassitude by multiplying the comforts of affluence and the gratification of appetites. In the late 1850s, Marx foresaw the fact that production does more than create consumption: “the object is not the only thing which production creates for consumption. Production also gives consumption its specificity, its character, its finish.” As such, production also produces the subject for the object: “the object is not

23 an object in general, but a specific object which must be consumed in a specific manner”, production thus produces “not only the object but also the manner of consumption, not only objectively but also subjectively. Production thus creates the consumer” (Grundrisse

92). After basic needs have been met (housing, food, clothing) new demands are created by advertisers and, as Galbraith writes, by the “machinery for consumer-demand creation,” yielding a dependence effect by which “wants are increasingly created by the process by which they are satisfied” (129). Whereas in industrial capitalism workers only received the minimal wage that was needed to maintain their labor power and reproduce their conditions of existence, in the consumerist world any object of consumption becomes a “means of subsistence,” a compensation that workers purchase in exchange for the sale of their labor power. As consumption becomes the necessary and only recompense for the tedium of productive labor, the circle of domination appears to be closed. As opposed to this, Beckett’s and Duras’ works preserve critical and utopian capacities in a society where oppositional forces are consistently coopted, ignored, or marginalized.

Lacan’s imperative not to cede on one’s desire goes against the North American tradition of psychoanalysis that has chosen narcissism as the essential axis of the cure in promoting a strong ego, an individual in tune with a mercantile and consumerist society.

In this configuration, the analyst serves as the analysand’s ego ideal. According to Lacan, this posture leads only to an insidious form of moral control and the creation of a unified and integrated individual confirming social relations and values. Such a relationship is based on the illusory goal of “happiness” and the production of a “solidly autonomous

24 ego” or “the ego free of conflict” (Seminar XVII 73). Yet, the desiring subject cannot be entirely integrated into the “order of goods” where the “common man” treads the

“common path” and passively participates in the “servicing of goods,” conforming to the consensual and conventional objects that people the field of culture (Seminar VII 321).

For Lacan consumerism or the ideology of the free, independent consumer is a negation of the tragic essence of desire. Instead of confronting the real of desire, consumers displace their desires onto material goods as a means of defending themselves against deeper anxieties and conflicts. Commodities are used as substitute gratification leading to compulsive behavior and various types of addiction. Consumerist hedonism caters only to the human being’s desire for pleasure, fulfillment and a sense of containment and identity. It is no wonder that consumerism became a hegemonic discourse by means of its appropriation of psychoanalytic principles. The founder of advertising and public relations, Edward Bernays, was Sigmund Freud’s nephew. Bernays was the first to apply psychoanalytic theories and techniques to advertising, public relations, and market research. Drawing on Freud’s “General Introductory Lectures,” Bernays realized that in order to sell products the advertising industry had to avoid appealing to rational consciousness and tap into emotion and desire. In Propaganda (1928) Bernays went so far as arguing that by understanding the mechanism of group mind, it is possible to manipulate consumers’ behavior without their even realizing it. The advertiser, as a strategist of desire, should “engineer consent,” to use the infamous title of Bernays’ books.

What are the effects of decades of advertising and consumption on the psyche? In

Eros and Civilization Marcuse agued that in the aegis of consumerism we witness the

“automatization of the superego” (94). In consumer society the status of the superego changes, which has a direct impact on the development of the ego. Freud demonstrated how the ego is torn between two powerful entities: the id and the superego, the former being the impulsive and unconscious part of the psyche that responds directly and immediately to the drives (Triebe), the latter being the values and morals of society that are learned from one’s relatives and others. While the infant is subjected entirely to the id, it progressively develops an ego and a superego. According to Freud, maturity comes with the consolidation of the superego and the capacity to sublimate the id. In this psychic double bind, the subject resorts to sublimation (Sublimierung) as a way to reconcile the demands of the drives with that of the superego. Through sublimation, sexual and aggressive drives find some measure of gratification through socially productive endeavors. In Seminar VII Lacan takes the example of courtly love as a refined form of sublimation, which imposes a long circuit made of detours and lures between the subject (the knight) and the object of enjoyment (the Lady). Sublimation is thus an elevation meant to establish “the inaccessibility of the object as object of jouissance” (Seminar VII 203). At the end of the 1960s in Seminar XVII Lacan asks what happens to desire when the object rises to the social zenith, that is, when the object of desire is put within reach in shop windows all over the world. Where courtly love displays the function of desire as deferral of jouissance, consumerism fosters a world that confines the subject to the solipsism of a surplus jouissance that feeds the consumerist

26 machine. Lacan’s concept of surplus jouissance is indispensable to understand what is at stake in the psychoanalytic ethics of desire. In the Lacanian framework, desire is constituted in a dialectic between lack and excess. If lack is generated when the individual enters language, surplus jouissance is what remains of the Thing (la Chose / das Ding) after it has been integrated in the symbolic order. In Lacan the Thing is the absolute object of desire, the Ur-Eine of pre-Oedipal symbiosis that is associated with the body of the mother. Excess is the ever-failing effort to regain the fullness of the Thing, it only takes the form of supplementary and paltry surplus jouissance.

Indeed, in Television Lacan argues that our own “way of enjoying,” “can no longer be situated except on the basis of surplus jouissance” and is “no longer spoken of in any other way” (54). The function of civilization, at least traditionally, is to palliate the absence of sexual relationship through the inventions of values and symbols that create social bonds. In Freud’s time, the inhibition of jouissance was deemed necessary to make sexual relationship exist, yet the consumerist Other creates a universe that no longer believes in sublimations of the sexual object whether they be romantic, courtly, or mystical. As Lacan underlines in the “Milan Discourse” (1972), unlike the four discourses of the master, the university, the hysteric, and the analyst, the discourse of capitalism is a paradoxical discourse that thrives on the abolition of social bonds. As opposed to the couples of the master and the slave, the professor and the student, and the psychoanalyst and the analysand, the discourse of capitalism only couples the consumer with her objects of consumption.16 In the same way, Baudrillard proposes that “the

16 Discourse of Jacques Lacan at the University of Milan on May 12, 1972, published in the bilingual work: Lacan in Italia, 1953-1978. En Italie Lacan, Milan, La Salmandra, 1978, pp. 38

27 humans of the age of affluence are surrounded not so much by other human beings, as they are in all previous ages, but by objects. […] We live by object time […] to the rhythm of their ceaseless succession” (The Consumer Society 25). Object time emerges with the proletarianization of desire, if by proletarian is meant someone “qui n’a nul discours de quoi faire lien social, autrement dit semblant.”17 Consumerism has spawned a new series of symptoms (addiction, compulsive consumption, internet-compulsion, anorexia, bulimia, hoarding, anxiety disorders, etc.) that differ from those that Freud and even Lacan treated (hysteria, obsession, phobia). The particularity of these symptoms is that they are not addressed to the Other, they do not seek to produce meaning or signify.

Addiction is exemplary of this trend. Where the traditional neurotic symptom involves the support of the Other, addiction seems to be a symptom in which the Other no longer materializes as a mediator of jouissance. The consumerist Other is an unprecedented instantiation of the symbolic Other. In Lacan the symbolic Other refers first to the transindividual socio-linguistic structures underpinning the field of inter-subjective interactions that not only structures the subject but also the relations between the subject and all other subjects (i.e., the Hegelian idea that the subject is constituted in the locus of the Other, that is, in the intersubjective dialectic to be found in Lacan’s Schéma L). The symbolic Other is what Lacan later calls “discourse” broadly defined as a “social-link,” that is, “stable relations” established through “the instrument of language” (Seminar XVII

13). The consumerist Other thrives on the destruction of social bonds, that is, of the dialectics of subject and society. In other words, from the Lacanian perspective, consumerism produces proletarians qua in-dividuals (from in- “not, opposite of” +

17 « La troisième », Lettres de l’Ecole freudienne, n° 16, 1975, p. 187

28 dividuus “divisible”), subjects that seem no longer divided, but completed by their solipsistic relation to surplus enjoyment.

The move from a two-dimensional to a one-dimensional society results from the decay of culture as a form of economy premised on desire to a form of economy organized around drives. As Lacan put it, “desire comes from the Other, and jouissance is located on the side of the Thing” (Écrits 724). Lacan’s Chose is derived from Freud’s das

Ding which Lacan describes as “fremde, strange… the first outside,” the “prehistoric

Other” (Seminar VI 54). The Thing designates the space of the lost object that lies beyond signification: “the absolute Other of the subject, [which] one is supposed to find again”

(52). In other words, das Ding is that which predates the infant’s entry in the symbolic order. Lacan insists that there are two words in German for “thing”: das Ding and die

Sache. The latter belongs to the symbolic realm, it is “ a product of industry and of human action as governed by language.” While die Sache is the symbolic representation of a thing (i.e., an object), das Ding is the thing in the real, a radically unconditioned object that lies in “the beyond-of-the-signified” (54). In the life of the infant, the Thing comes into existence through the process of primary repression when the subject first articulates its desire at the level of the Other. In this traumatic stage of ontogeny, the infant finds itself unable to enunciate what Lacan calls “demand,” that is, to retrieve a state of primordial symbiosis with the mother, which is the paradigm for the “absolute

Other.”

Unlike the drive, desire thus lies on the side of Vorstellung, which in Seminar VII, is the Symbolic itself. Whereas desire is premised on delay, deferral, and symbolic

29 valorization of the object, drive is based on immediacy, impatience, and indifference to symbolic valuation. In Seminar VII Lacan describes jouissance as “not purely and simply the satisfaction of a need but as the satisfaction of a drive” (209), whereas desire emerges from the split between this need and the demand for it to be satisfied, which is addressed to the Other. The drive (Trieb) differs from biological needs (eating, breathing, sleeping, defecating, etc.) precisely because it can never be satisfied. Lacan argues that the

Triebziel, the purpose of the drive, is not to reach a goal (Objekt) but to follow its aim

(Ziel), which is to compulsively circle around the object. Unlike desire, the drive does not search for some mythical full satisfaction; the real source of its enjoyment is to be found in repetitive movement, in the circular path around the object.

Psychical life is entirely regulated by the equilibrium between desire and drive, delay and gratification, an equilibrium that consumerism seeks to destroy in favor of the drive. The duality of desire and drive forms the two facets of what in Seminar XI Lacan first introduces as object a. Object a designates what remains of the Thing after it has undergone the process of symbolization, which Lacan calls l’entrée en Je, “entrance in the I / in the game.” Lacan argues that object a has two interdependent dimensions: on the one hand it is the cause of desire, on the other it is the object of the drive. In Seminar

VIII Le Transfert (1960–1961) Lacan describes objet a qua object cause of desire in terms of the agalma, a precious object concealed in a worthless box. While the box may take an infinite number of forms, all of which being unimportant, what truly matters lies in the ever elusive content the box, viz., the enigmatic cause of desire. Throughout Lacan’s early teaching, the object cause of desire had an imaginary status; nevertheless, in

Seminar X Lacan links it with the real. Object a is a hole at the center of the symbolic order that demands to be filled, a hole around which revolves the symbolic movement of interpretation. When the neonate enters the field of language and acquires an ego, it forever loses any adequate or “natural” relationship to any object, even, and foremost, to its own body as a libidinal object. The signifier bores holes in the density of pure jouissance that is the organic body. This unadulterated jouissance, while forgotten, returns as a retrospective fantasy whose effects are decisive in the development of the desiring subject. Thus, the linguistic cut is the keynote whose overtones reverberate throughout the various phases of ontogeny. The subject comes into being through trauma and develops through a lifelong process of mourning that takes place in relation to object cathexes. While Freud argued that the lost object actually existed (the breast of the mother), for Lacan it arises only as a fantasy, a posteriori, when the infant develops an ego and learns to differentiate between itself and objects. Consequently, any object will be a re-found object that will always fall short of the original “mythical” Thing. In

Lacanian topology, this enigmatic Thing has the function of a hole, a semiotic void that constitutes the real cause of desire, a hole that precedes the fantasmatic formations that attempt to fill it. If jouissance remains beyond what Freud called Befriedigungserlebnis, the experience of pleasure and satisfaction, the illusion that jouissance may be regained through the function of the pleasure principle leads the metonymic function of desire in the direction of a mythical plenitude to be regained; so much so that one of the goals of analysis is to dispel the belief in the ultimate object of desire, the One and the unique that would put an end to the metonymy of desire. Through this process, the analysand comes

31 to accept the irreducible gap between the unattainable Thing and the objects of the world.

It is worth underlining that, as opposed to the discourse of the analyst, advertising constantly appeals to this original, intense, and unfathomable jouissance that is located in the space of fantasy.

If desire, through the operation of the (linguistic) cut, finds its condition of possibility in the loss of jouissance, the drive nevertheless persists in the search for surplus jouissance. This leads Lacan to posit that object a is not only the cause of desire, but also the object of the drive. The constant, reckless pressure of the drive is to be differentiated from the biological instinct: “the constancy of the thrust forbids any assimilation of the drive to a biological function, which always has a rhythm.” The drive

“has no day or night, no spring or autumn, no rise and fall. It is a constant force”

(Seminar XI 165). As the ego develops the Drang (pressure) of the drives is subject to

Verdrängung (repression). While values, symbols, forms allow desire to find relative stability, the konstante Kraft, the relentless pressure of the drives keeps subjectivity in a state of disequilibrium. The Befriedigung (satisfaction) of pleasure is not able to appease

(from Friede, “peace”) this excess jouissance or surplus vitality, it is always prey to the warring force of the drives. It is this view of drive as immortal insistence that leads Lacan to identify the “death drive” as the force that underlies every drive.18

It must be noted that Lacan does not locate castration safely within the Other (i.e., the Oedipus complex, identifications, norms, mores), he also situates it within the field of the drives. Contrary to a common misreading of Lacan, it is not the law of the Other that constitutes the first, fundamental prohibition. In Seminar IX Lacan argues that the Law of

18 “Every drive is virtually a death drive” (“Positions de l’inconscient” in Ecrits 719)

32 the Other is not the cause of prohibition so much as a metaphor for prohibition

(Unpublished seminar, session of April 14 1962). While jouissance is “prohibited to whoever speaks [....], it is not the Law itself that bars the subject’s access to jouissance— it simply makes a barred subject out of an almost natural barrier.” What appears to be prohibition from the Other is only a physical impossibility of accessing the jouissance of the Thing, the fact that drives only rotate around the object without ever coming into contact with it. Lacan refers here to the experience of jouissance: there is a limit in pleasure that we cannot reach without experiencing pain, a limit named “castration”.

Thus, the law of the Other only regulates the effects of castration, it makes castration livable through the invention of forms, symbols, and values.

The decline of sublimation coincides with what Adorno called Bilderlosigkeit, or the scission of the past and the present, the loss of historical grounding that is the expression of a society that has lost its capacity to create values and to mitigate the effects of castration. In a drive-based society, the individual gains neither structure nor the means to sublimate the drives. As Marcuse argues, desires are “desublimated,” they can find social expression but only in a repressive way which eliminates the broader aspiration for liberation. The only freedom seems to be the freedom to adapt and conform. While Marcuse contrasts the “performance principle” of capitalism to a libidinal state of nature that he believes can be recovered from capitalist reification,

Lacan firmly rejects the idea of a total liberation of libido, opting rather for a pharmacology of repression that ponders how to deal therapeutically with the excess jouissance of the drives and move beyond neurotic repetition. Lacan concurs with

Deleuze’s idea that “we do not repeat because we repress, we repress because we repeat”

(Difference and Repetition 130). Through his theory of sublimation Lacan positions himself against what Deleuze calls “the traditional theory of the compulsion to repeat in psychoanalysis,” which subordinates repetition to “a principle of identity” (128). The question for Deleuze as for Lacan becomes: how to create a life-enhancing, transformative repetition, what Deleuze calls “clothed” repetition, which produces difference, as opposed to the “naked,” bare repetition of the status quo (36-37)?

Consumerist biopolitics lull people into the repeated rhythms of factory work and mass consumption, fostering the feeling that there is literally no future, no possibility that anything will ever change or improve through the passage of time. If this “bare” repetition thrives on the reification of surplus jouissance, psychoanalysis seeks means to resist the atrophy of desire, offering analysands ways to loose themselves from automatization and standardization.

Lacan borrowed Marx’s notion of surplus value (Mehrwert) to develop the notion of objet a as surplus jouissance (Mehrlust). Surplus jouissance was central to courtly love insofar as it refers to the supplementary pleasure provided by the detours in the subject’s effort to attain pleasure. The Lady is the sublime object a that remains firmly beyond grasp, an object holding the promise of a gratification that remains unattainable. Objects a are fantasmatic objects playing the role of fantasy insofar as they help us both approach and avoid jouissance. While they do not grant us direct access to jouissance, objects a produce surplus enjoyment, whether it be the courtly Lady or a can of coke. The structural difference between the Lady and the basic consumer product qua object a is

34 that, in a consumerist order, surplus jouissance is not only fettered to the reproduction of surplus value, it is also spurred by it. If in pre-consumerist times jouissance constituted a threat to the smooth functioning of the social order, in late capitalism it loses its subversive potential as it is continuously reinvested into the consumerist machine. As

Lacan put it, surplus value has become “the cause of desire of an economy which makes it its principle.”19 The long circuit of medieval sublimation has been replaced by the short circuit of consumerism where the delay between demand and gratification has been considerably reduced. In the consumerist Other the subject dedicates itself fully to what

Lacan calls the servicing of goods, thus participating actively in the circulation of commodities and the reproduction of relations of domination. The desire of the consumer is constantly spurred and teased by the unceasing production of goods. It is an endless process since jouissance is like the “insatiable tonneau des Danaïdes” (D’un Autre à l’autre 15). In the “Milan Discourse” Lacan asserts that the capitalist discourse is “the cleverest discourse” ever made since it feeds on castration.20 Consumption only leads to disappointment—the object is never “it.” The consumer is thus compelled to purchase ever-newer commodities to fulfill the superego’s imperative to enjoy. Hence, the consumerist machine seems to be able to work indefinitely. Object-time is tied to the production of surplus enjoyment, which, as Kiarina Kordela puts it, “enables infinity to conquer lived life in the act of shopping—a central biopolitical frustration machine that sustains (the illusion of) immortality” (“(Psychoanalytic) Biopolitics and BioRacism”

19 « La plus-value, c’est la cause du désir dont une économie fait son principe : celui de la production extensive, donc insatiable, du manque-à-jouir. Il s’accumule d’une part pour accroître les moyens de cette production au titre du capital. » (« Radiophonie » 435) 20 Discourse of Jacques Lacan at the University of Milan on May 12, 1972, published in the bilingual work: Lacan in Italia, 1953-1978. En Italie Lacan, Milan, La Salmandra, 1978, p. 35

19). Object-time creates a metaphysical temporality, an “alethospheric” system that fosters the illusion that the Eversame of commodity consumption cannot be broken. The consequence is that, as Baudrillard writes, “enforced happiness and enjoyment” becomes the equivalent of traditional imperatives to work and produce (The Consumer Society 80).

In “Freud and the-Political” Mladen Dolar emphasizes the way the repetitive compulsion of drive cannot simply be construed as a homeostatic force but must be understood as kind of creative disruption, a force of negativity that makes politics possible. Dolar underlines the ineradicable ambiguity of the drive, which is both

“conservative” insofar as it “constantly forces its way back to the site of satisfaction, endowed with a compulsory nature which inexorably drives towards ‘more of the same’”, and a “disruptive alterity” that implies that the drive is never simply “a force of adaptation, of homeostasis ruled by the pleasure principle, but produces the unsettling, the derailment, the excess, the surplus” (22). For Dolar, the compulsive wieder zu finden of drive thus indicates the excess, fissure, or negativity in the social order that represents an “opening for the political” (22). This view of drive is indebted to Lacan’s affirmation of the “death drive” as the force that underlies every drive. The death drive is an irrepressible, immortal, or indestructible life, a perpetually destabilizing force that may

“untie the glue of social bonds, in the hope of establishing the possibility of another kind of relation in the social non-relation” (22).

Still, Lacan’s diagnostic is more pessimistic. The rise of the object coincides with capital’s harnessing of the revolutionary force of the drives, and the subsequent fettering of libidinal energy to capital’s endless circular movement of expanding self-reproduction.

In late capitalism the subject’s superego finds little release from the hold of the consumerist Other and therefore loses its disruptive potential. The traditional Victorian civilization where Freud developed his theories used prohibition to reduce the effects of the drive in society. If “postmodern” civilization seems to be a world where the Freudian

Other, with its ideals and prohibitions, no longer exists, the consumerist Other institutes a more insidious kind of prohibition. Consumerism thrives on a drive-oriented economy where the frenzied and ever accelerated industrial production of objects teases and caters to the drive’s insatiable need for satisfaction.

Consumerism is psychoanalytically regressive in the sense that it abandons the mature form of the superego, which Freud describes in Civilization and Its Discontents as a sublimation of the drives, to return us to the primordial form of the superego where the infant is helpless in the face of overpowering drives. As Adrian Johnston remarks, this protypical form of the superego is to be found in the drives qua “internal dictators from which the nascent subject-to-be cannot flee” (Time-Driven 296). The short-circuiting of sublimation makes it that under the aegis of consumerism, we are no longer dealing with the classical Freudian superego that prompts subjects to live up to their ideal ego, but with what Lacan calls “the imperative to enjoy”: “the superego is the imperative of jouissance - Enjoy!” (Seminar XX 3) We witness a complete reversal of the discourse of the master: whereas in the discourse of the master the superego is prohibitive, in the discourse of capitalism the superego commands us to enjoy. When the object rises to the social zenith, desire reaches its nadir as objet a becomes the master signifier and, as a

37 consequence, the target of the superego to enjoy.21 Hence, the discourse of capitalism eventually performs the same fundamental operation as the discourse of the master insofar as it masks “the division of the subject” (Seminar XVII 103). Consumerist ideology, which revolves around the master signifier of “freedom,” only repeats the master’s injunction, albeit in a disguised manner, displacing the real locus of enunciation of power, thereby ensuring the perpetuation of the master’s power.

Sublimation is undermined by the automatization of enjoyment and the standardization of objects. As Marcuse underlined, the superego is no longer the product of interpersonal relationships but of mechanical conditioning processes. In “On

Narcissism,” Freud describes the superego as a regulation and deferral of jouissance through the intervention of the parental voice. If the superego is no longer an agent of prohibition but a command to enjoy, it is no longer to be found in the feeling of guilt experienced when moral codes are transgressed; rather, the superego is located in our compulsion to enjoy, in the almost overwhelming compulsion to consume. The more we obey this imperative to enjoy, the guiltier we feel and the more ferocious the superego becomes. Walter Benjamin predicted this regressive process when he argued that capitalism is a religion that “serves to allay the same anxieties, torments and disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers.”22 Benjamin distinguishes three features to this new religion: first, capitalism may be the most extreme cultic religion that ever existed insofar as it is without dogma; second, this cult is without truce, it is permanently confronting the subject; third, “the cult makes guilt pervasive. Capitalism is probably the

21 The rise of the object creates a short circuit between S1 and a, which is also the matheme for the discourse of perversion. 22 Walter Benjamin, “Capitalism as Religion,” Selected Writings vol.1, p.288

38 first instance of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement” (288).

As a happiness industry, consumerism seizes on the human inclination for idealization, producing scenarios and fantasies in which the consumer is supposed to recognize herself. The conceptualization of consumer goods as “personal” hides the fact that they only serve the reproduction of surplus value. Advertising seizes on largely unconscious identification processes escaping the limits of rationality to foster a culture of narcissism that encloses individuals in the realm of the imaginary. Freud underlined that identity is fashioned through object cathexes or identifications. As Lacan argues, the object of our drives is established on the basis of our own self-image, that is, through “a narcissistic relation, an imaginary relation” or a “mirage relation” that hides our true being-for-death. Lacan’s point is that a subject chooses an object that “is perpetually interchangeable with the love the subject has for its own image” (Seminar VII 98). As such, we love an object primarily because we believe that it reflects our self-image, our past identifications and the ideals that we have incorporated through them. Thus, consumerism follows the model of the mirror image. The imaginary objects of consumption offer unlimited specula, mirrors in which the subject (mis)recognizes the object-relation as a reflection of his or her real relation to the world. By appropriating the authority of parents and relatives and replacing them with commoditized relations, late capitalism consolidates the process of Bilderlosigkeit, fragmenting the interpersonal, dialectical relations essential to the development of autonomous selfhood.

As Adorno remarked, the products of the culture industry are fundamentally regressive, “it is baby-food: permanent self-reflection based upon the infantile

39 compulsion toward the repetition of needs which it creates in the first place.”23 The closed circle of production-consumption perpetuates a state of dependence, thwarting the realization of potential freedom. Its effects are similar to a “psychoanalysis in reverse” in the sense that they captivate the consumer in order to channel her libidinal energies in the service of the industry. Consumer culture fosters an apparently friendly outside world that bestows every satisfaction, thriving on an infantile wish for unaltered repetition and engendering a culture of adaptation as opposed to creation. Desire suffers from the reduction of what Laplanche calls the “contingent object” of sexuality to the “adaptive object” of need (Problématiques III: La Sublimation 51). The contingent object is, to quote Jacques-Alain Miller, “what is of the order of the event […] what cannot happen: everything that is outside the circle of the possible. This is the exact sense that Lacan gave to contingency.”24 Capitalist production tends to reduce contingency to need, robbing individuals of their spontaneity and autonomy through the creation of automatized reactions that contribute to the organization and anticipation of experience.

For Adorno, Marcuse, and Lacan sublimation appears as the antidote to domination.

Sublimation takes us beyond the adaptive apathy of the dialectic of the pleasure and reality principles, which assures that we follow the paths created for us by the consumer industry. Beyond the moderate but safe and reliable satisfactions of consumption, the ethics of psychoanalysis indicates that we can recover the radical contingency of the libidinal object and the risk that it implies.

23 Adorno, “The Schema of Mass Culture,” The Culture Industry, p.67 24 Jacques-Alain Miller, “Introduction à l’érotique du temps,” Revue La Cause freudienne n°56, (Paris : Navarin/Seuil, 2004), p. 72

If “there is no sexual relationship,” it is precisely because human sexuality is not supported by a program, which is why “sexuality makes a hole in the real.”25 The child’s first experiences of jouissance lead to the creation of the first fantasies as protective screens from the traumatic hole. The human condition differs from the animal condition in the sense that in the latter sexual relationship is inscribed in a genetic program that bears the name of instinct, which is why the animal realm does not know of sexual perversion. In human libido this original non-rapport, this haunting gap, leads to unceasing supplementation, and the metonymy of desire is the ever-failing attempt to correct this defect. In Seminar VIII, L’Angoisse, Lacan states that “l’amour est la sublimation du désir” (209). Here desire is synonymous with lack, desire being always un désir de désir. What Lacan means is that love sublimates the gap of sexuality. Love’s specificity is to make castration livable by palliating the absence of sexual relationship through the creation of an object a, the lover: “ce qui supplée au rapport sexuel, c’est précisément l’amour” (Seminar XX 44). This “ratage en quoi consiste la réussite de l’acte sexuel” (Télévision in Autres écrits 532) is “quasi-transcendental” in the sense that it is both the condition of possibility and the condition of impossibility of love. Most important, love creates a social bond that saves the in-dividual from the solipsism of jouissance. Miller writes that love is what creates a mediation between “les uns-tous- seuls.”26 As Lacan put it, l’amour is also l’amur,27 precisely because the object of love implies a necessary failure. While love mitigates the absence of sexual relation, it does

25 Jacques Lacan, Preface to Wedekind’s L’Eveil du printemps, p.12 26 Jacques-Alain Miller, “Une Fantaisie” Mental n°15, février 2005, p.18 27 In the seminar entitled Le savoir du psychanalyste Lacan refers to the fiction of la lettre d’(a)mur in reference to Antoine Tudal’s verses from Paris en l’an 2000: “Entre l’homme et l'amour / Il y a la femme / Entre l’homme et la femme / Il y a le monde / Entre l’homme et le monde / Il y a le mur.”

41 not simply foreclose the gap but sublimates it. The beloved Other is characterized by an indeterminate je ne sais quoi, an un-specifiable “x” that eludes being apprehended by a list of determinate empirical attributes. As such, it keeps desire infinitely alive.

While the contingent object of love sublimates the failure of sexual relationship, the commodity qua fetish forecloses the hole of castration. As Lacan put it, the capitalist discourse achieves the “verwerfung, le rejet en dehors de tous les champs du symbolique

[...] de la castration. Tout ordre de discours qui s’apparente du capitalisme laisse de côté ce que nous appelons les choses de l’amour...”28 This idea is well exemplified in The

Arcades Project where Benjamin in reference to Baudelaire writes:

“Je t’aime à l’égal de la voute nocturne” —nowhere more clearly than in this poem is Sexus played off against Eros. One must turn from this poem to Goethe’s “Selige Sehnsucht” to see, by comparison, what powers are conferred when the sexual is joined with the erotic (357).

Benjamin remarks that Baudelaire contemplated the severance of Sexus and Eros as a fundamental trait of capitalist modernity. As clinicians of civilizations, Baudelaire and Benjamin ask to what extent sublimation is possible in a world dominated by capitalism, to what extent art may open up a space of struggle against dependence and desublimation. The psychoanalytic theory of sublimation posits that objects of culture are supplements to the necessary failure in the object of love. The re-sublimation of existence is the capacity to rebuild an economy of desire in which individual and collective engagement advance new forms of being in common, new ways of sharing, experiencing, and recreating the world. As opposed to this, the consumerist Other follows the age-old

28 Jacques Lacan, “Le savoir du psychanalyste,” Je parle aux murs, Ed. Seuil, Champs freudien 2011, p. 96

42 axiom “divide and conquer.” Consumerism divides by celebrating the victory of Sexus over Eros, privileging solipsistic jouissance rather than establishing the relations that may sublimate or eroticize it.

While the satisfaction of basic needs is very important, hyper-consumption does not seem to make us happier. Consumerism only creates feelings of discontent and guilt that emerge from the repression of the tragic dimension of existence. Lacan argues that,

“from an analytic point of view, the only thing one can be guilty of is having given ground relative to one’s desire” (Seminar VII 318). Commodities are the products of the alethosphere, objects of science whose aim is to sustain the hunger of the subject. For

Lacan capitalist production produces fake objects a, fetishes that foster the illusion that they are able to suture the gap of subjectivity and foreclose the real.29 If advertising seeks to stimulate and cause our desire, it does so by articulating a mythological or phantasmatic construction around the product. Advertising constantly appeals to an original, intense, and unfathomable jouissance that is located in the space of fantasy.

Thus, commodities repress the cause of desire, namely, the Thing that Lacan qualifies as an “impenetrable void” (Seminar VIII 13). In Seminar XVII, L’Envers de la psychanalyse,

Lacan begins to refer to the object of mass industry with the peculiar name of “lathouse.”

Lacan tells us that lathouse sounds like “ventouse,” a suction pad, which has no other use value than to faire jouir. The tendency to regression is exploited by a channeling of libido towards objects that offer the best possible yield. This curious designation is a compound of lethe (oblivion), and the object a. The problem with the lathouse is that with it, “la

29 For Freud, fetishism comes from the child’s refusal to face the trauma of female castration (i.e., when confronted with his mother’s missing penis, the fetishist disavows this lack and finds an object as a symbolic substitute which Freud called the fetish).

43 vérité n’est pas du tout dévoilée” (Seminar VII 188).

Le monde est de plus en plus peuplé de lathouses. […] les menus objets petit a que vous allez rencontrer en sortant, là sur le pavé à tous les coins de rue, derrière toutes les vitrines, dans ce foisonnement de ces objets faits pour causer votre désir, pour autant que c’est la science maintenant qui le gouverne, pensez-les comme lathouses (Seminar VII 188-189).

The object is prêt-à-jouir (ready-to-enjoy), coming with the promise of unlimited yield or productivity of surplus jouissance. The lathouse can only create sad passions and boredom: “les moyens de production, c’est-à-dire ce avec quoi on fabrique des choses qui trompent le plus-de-jouir, et qui, loin de pouvoir espérer remplir le champ de la jouissance, ne sont même pas en état de suffire à ce qui, du fait de l’Autre, en est perdu”

(D’un Autre à l’autre 103). The lathouse is a machine that extracts surplus jouissance, freeing and enslaving consumers in the same movement: “elle les libère on ne sait pas de quoi, mais une chose est certain, c’est qu’à toutes les étapes elle les enchaîne. A toutes les

étapes de la récupération, elle les enchaîne au plus-de-jouir” (116). Advertising companies spend billions of dollars every year on psychological research in order to manipulate people’s emotions and desires, exploiting human all too human needs (our fears, insecurities, need for social validations) to transform individuals into customers.

Unlike the lathouse, the contingent object a contains the inevitable failure linked to the absence of the relationship between the sexes (Lacan always indicated that the a contained the “minus phi” of castration as the limit of the imaginary). Capitalist economy and techno-science, through the discourse of advertising, maintain the illusion that object a, as cause of desire, can be reduced to the consumer object that provides enjoyment and well-being. Against the proletarianization of desire, the isolation, automatization, and

44 standardization of modes of enjoyment, the ethics of psychoanalysis puts forward the real of sexuality as the fundamental site of resistance to the discourse of capitalism. The real affirms that there is no (predetermined) sexual relationship, meaning that ethics occurs in the modality of the encounter, outside the domain of the possible, in the emergent space of the event that is antagonistic to the stability of the (consumerist) Other.

Sexuality opens up an ontological void that remains indifferent to our existential investments and our “facticity,” in Heidegger’s sense of the term. Facticity signifies all of the concrete facts of existence that both structure and limit human freedom (i.e., our time and place of birth, a language, a social class, our previous and current object cathexes, etc.). Lacan’s conceptualization of the ontological negativity of sexuality echoes with

Sartre’s remark in Being and Nothingness that every hole we encounter reminds us of our constitutive nothingness. In so doing, Lacan goes beyond Freud. Whereas the Freudian model makes the anus, the vagina, or the womb, “original” holes that turn subsequent holes into mere metaphors,30 Lacan follows Sartre in positing that the ontological gap of sexuality is a radical default of origin. Thus, any particular hole triggers anxiety and fascination not simply because it echoes an original, actual hole but because it confronts us with the basic ontological issue of our being-for-death. Because sexuality precedes and sunders our facticity, which is socially constituted, the lucid confrontation with the void of desire allows for the realization that the Other is lacking and that there is no stable and

30 “One day I saw a Freudian mother gazing tenderly at her little daughter crouched on all fours under the table. She was convinced that this liking of the child for dark hidey-holes was a desire to return to the pre- natal state [..] as if the child [..] wished to return to the intimacy of her womb [..]” “Or elsewhere: “The vertiginous thrill of the hole comes from the fact that it proposes annihilation [..] This nothingness is the attractive element in what is properly termed ‘vertigo’. The abyss is a hole, it proposes engulfment. And engulfment always attracts, as a nihilation which would be its own foundation.” (Sartre, War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phoney War, November 1939-March 1940, p.150).

45 coherent universe of meaning that predetermines our fate. Analysis ends with the realization that there is the possibility for the subject not to plug the hole in the Other, but precisely to become that very lack in the Other. Indeed, in 1964 Lacan argues that the desire of the analyst is to obtain “absolute difference” (Seminar XI 276), that is, to free the subject qua singularity from it dependence on the Other. Lacan implies that separation

(se- “apart” + parare “make ready, prepare”) is also se parere, a process whereby one gives birth to oneself (from parere “bring forth, bear”). Such a process of singularization takes place on the edge of the abyss where one detaches from the semblants, the recognized values and goods of the Other.

To oppose the contingent object of sexuality to the adaptive object of consumption is to affirm the singularity of one’s mode of enjoyment in breach of social norms, it is also to oppose sublimation to symptomatization. By positing the importance of Lacan’s reformulation of sublimation as an antidote to the automatization of the superego in the era of consumerism, we will be able to rethink the radically oppositional and sublimatory essence of Beckett’s and Duras’ works.

Beyond the Automatization of the Superego: Sublimation as Ethical Act

In Freud, sublimation is the key process of negotiation between the Id and reality.

The concept of sublimation is of primary importance in the critique of consumerism since it addresses how the autoerotic jouissance of the drives becomes articulated to the desire of the Other. To put it in Kantian terms, sublimation balances between (universal) duty

46 and (particular) inclination, offering the possibility of a non-neurotic relation to the

Other. If, as Lacan put it, the “duty” of analysis is to cancel the command of the “obscene and ferocious figure of the superego” (Seminar VII 7), sublimation may not only play a key role in the subject’s liberation from the anarchic urge of the drives, but also in the cancellation of the ideological captivity that binds the drives to normative structures that frame our destiny as “consumers.” Sublimation may therefore be described as a therapeutic treatment of the uncontrollable excess of the drive and jouissance.

Inspired by the discovery of the laws of thermodynamics and the development of the steam engine at the end of the nineteenth-century, Freud often described the functioning of libido in energetic terms. If blocked, libidinal energies require release in alternate ways: for example, through regression and the return to former fixations

(Fixierung) at the oral or anal stages. When the ego represses such desires, like a steam engine, the libido’s cathexis builds up until it finds substitute channels, which can lead to sublimation or to the formation of often disabling symptoms. Freud’s conception of sublimation is a solution to renunciation and compulsion: “sublimation is a way out... without involving repression” (The Standard Edition 14:95). According to Freud, sublimation enables the subject to respond to sexual frustration by taking a new aim

(Ziel) that is no longer explicitly sexual but social, making the sexual drive unrecognizable through a sort of dream-work. In this way, civilization has been able to place “social aims higher than the sexual ones, which are at bottom self-interested” (The Standard

Edition 16:345). Freud’s own assessments of sublimation are contradictory, fragmentary, and scattered throughout his works. In most cases he defines sublimation as a creative

47 substitution, as in his analyses of Goethe and Leonardo; in other cases he describes it as a forced renunciation of the Trieb. Yet, overall, Freud is largely responsible for giving a reactionary coloration to sublimation. In the Lectures on the Introduction to

Psychoanalysis and “The Poet and the Imagination,” Freud posits that literary works achieve little more than the conversion of the artist’s improper impulses into socially valorized and respectable artifacts whose aim is to elicit an innocuous Vorlust (fore- pleasure) in the reader. In this sense, sublimation seems merely compelled by the reality principle and, as Adorno put it, “adaptation to reality becomes the summum bonum”

(Aesthetic Theory 9).

Lacan’s reformulation of the problem of sublimation in his seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis seeks to give a sharper distinction between sublimation and renunciation of the drives. For instance, Freud argues that sublimation results in the production of socially acceptable or recognizable objects. In this case, sublimation and renunciation seem almost equivalent and it is hard to tell whether it is not the reality principle itself that compels sublimation.

Lacan describes his theory of sublimation as a new addition to the Freudian corpus.31 Unlike Freud, Lacan unambiguously opposes sublimation to symptomatization.

Drawing on Marx, whom he hails as the inventor of the symptom, Lacan describes the symptom as “a sign of what does not work in the real” (Seminar XXII, session of

December 10 1974) (i.e., in Marx the capitalist’s spoliation of the proletariat). The symptom, as a pathological formation, stems from the subject’s incapacity to detach its

31 This idea is clearly expressed in his “Hommage à Marguerite Duras” where he talks about “cette sublimation dont les psychanalystes sont encore étourdis de ce qu’à leur en léguer le terme, Freud soit resté bouche cousue.” (Cahiers Renaud -Barrault, n° 52, Ed. Gallimard, décembre 1965, p.56)

48 desire from the Other, that is, to break free from libidinal renunciation and compulsion.

According to Lacan’s reformulation of Freud, sublimation operates by “raising an object to the dignity of the Thing” (Seminar VII 112). The sublimated object is itself a creation that has the function of stand-in for the impossible Thing; as such, it is an object that is non-fungible and irreducible to the goods of the Other. In so doing, sublimation momentarily lifts the subject from the utilitarian world of means-end calculations, the disenchanted world of familiar concerns, and “rediscovers the relationship to das Ding somewhere beyond the law” (Seminar VII 84) (i.e., the law of the Other that imposes prohibitions and regulations on enjoyment).

In Seminar VII Lacan describes three kinds of sublimation: art, religion, and science. Each kind refers to a clinical structure that stems from the specific relationship that each has with the void of desire: artistic sublimation is similar to hysteria insofar as it is organized around a repressed void; religious sublimation is a form of obsessional neurosis that both avoids and displaces the void; scientific sublimation resembles paranoia since it refuse to believe in the void that it forecloses. While sublimation requires an elision of the Thing, Lacan insists that “in every form of sublimation, emptiness is determinative” (Seminar VII 130, my emphasis).

In Seminar VII Lacan displays a clear preference for artistic sublimation, posing anew the question of the possibility of art in the age of what Marcuse calls “repressive desublimation.” Lacan advances a vision of art that resembles the one proposed by the theoreticians of the Frankfurt School, most notably Marcuse and Adorno. For Marcuse, the commodity (lathouse) satisfies particular desires through systemically produced

49 means that lead to the elimination of the subversive potential of sublimation. Although desire finds social expression, it only does so in a repressive way that eliminates the broader aspiration for liberation:

In contrast to the pleasures of adjusted desublimation, sublimation preserves the consciousness of the renunciations which the repressive society inflicts upon the individual, and thereby preserves the need for liberation. […] To be sure, all sublimation accepts the social barrier to instinctual gratification, but it also transgresses this barrier (Eros and Civilization 75).

For Adorno art qua sublimation is also a reminder of what does not exist, a

“constant indictment of the workaday bustle and the practical individual” (Aesthetic

Theory 328). Successful integration cannot be the goal of sublimation, for art would lose the force by which it transcends the given: “If art is sanctioned exclusively as sublimation, as a means for the maintenance of psychic economy, its truth content is contravened and art lingers on only as pious deception” (340-41). If sublimation is to retain its subversive character, then it must retain the negativity from which it sprung.

Sublimation is to be comprehended as what Adorno calls, borrowing from Stendhal, une promesse du bonheur (311), a promise of fulfillment and compensation of loss. The future of the promise, however, is necessarily empty, always already yet-to-be, Noch-

Nicht. As opposed to this, desublimation lies in “the immediate and momentary gain of pleasure that is demanded of art” (319). At best the entertainment industry functions according to the laws of a process of repetition compulsion that seeks to assuage suffering; at worst it simply erases the possibility of death. Likewise, for Lacan authentic sublimation gives expression to a suffering that is irreconcilable with the status quo. In

Seminar VII sublimation is defined as a radical act that no longer guarantees the

50 conformity of the subject’s behavior to prevailing norms. Through sublimation desire no longer remains safely within the limits of the Other where the radical otherness of jouissance is gentrified and integrated in the play of sameness of the pleasure principle.

Most important, sublimation reintroduces jouissance in the field from which it has been cast out and, in so doing, opens new pathways for individuation.

In order to achieve this reconceptualization, Lacan links unambiguously sublimation to the death drive, presenting the latter as a kind of “creationist sublimation,” which implies that authentic creation can only be a symbolic creation ex nihilo.

Paradoxically enough, Lacan presents the death drive as the ownmost possibility of the subject. As in Heidegger, death does not appear as pure nothingness but as possibility: “it is in effect as a desire for death that [the subject] affirms himself for others” (105). Thus, ethics begins with “the acceptance of death” (Seminar VII 189), the recovery of the

“tragic sense of life” (313).

Until the elaboration of the three registers (Symbolic, Real, Imaginary) in the

1950s, Lacan follows Freud in describing the death drive as a nostalgic desire to come back to the pre-oedipal symbiosis with the mother’s breast. The death drive is thus related to narcissism and the imaginary order. In the 1950s, however, the death drive is associated with the symbolic order. It is this systemic shift that makes possible a reconceptualization of sublimation freed from the limitations of the narcissistic imaginary that forecloses the real of the Thing. In Seminar II, for example, Lacan posits that the death drive is “only the mask of the symbolic order” (Seminar II 326). Lacan refers here to the symbolic order as a subterraneous force “in travail,” that is, a process that follows

51 its own laws independently of consciousness, beyond the pleasure principle, disturbing therefore the “whole domain of the imaginary, including the structure of the ego.”32

While Freud saw in the death drive the fundamental tendency of every living creature to return to an inorganic state, Lacan removed it from the realm of animal instinctuality.

Such an operation can be understood only through the Freudian distinction between Trieb

(drive) and Instinkt (instinct). The “object” of the drive “is not the same as that which is aimed at on the horizon of the instinct” (Seminar VII 98). While the latter is immutable, the former is “already deeply marked by the articulation of the signifier” (293). Lacan embraces Saussure’s idea that language is a differential structure without positive terns, that words are purely arbitrary and thus divorced from natural meanings or signified.

Drives are thus radically severed from any relation of necessity to any “natural milieu”

(90) or from any relation of necessity tout court.

Drives are not fixed instincts but are subject to the dérive (drift) of signification.

As such, they are always partial, or potential rather than actual. Lacan’s theory of the death drive can be seen as a variation on Heidegger’s overturning of a metaphysics that subordinates possibility to actuality. According to Heidegger, this metaphysical way of thinking is to be found in Aristotle, in whose metaphysics the question of being is predominantly thought through the idea of actuality. In Metaphysics, Aristotle

32 The symbolic order “isn’t the libidinal order in which the ego is inscribed, along with all the drives. It tends beyond the pleasure principle, beyond the limits of life, and that is why Freud identifies it with the death instinct. [...] The symbolic order is rejected by the libidinal order, which includes the whole of the domain of the imaginary, including the structure of the ego. And the death instinct is only the mask of the symbolic order, in so far—and this is what Freud writes—as it is dumb, that is to say, in so far as it hasn’t been realized. As long as the symbolic recognition hasn’t been instituted, by definition, the symbolic order is dumb. The symbolic order is simultaneously non-being and insisting to be, that is what Freud has in mind when he talks about the death instinct as being what is most fundamental—a symbolic order in travail, in the process of coming, insisting on being realized” (Seminar II 326).

52 distinguishes δυναµις [dunamis] and ενεργεια [energeia], or potentiality and actuality, giving ontological priority to the latter. For Aristotle, potentiality is merely partial, existing in relation only to its final completion as an actual being. For Heidegger, such an approach outlines the question of being in terms of “presence” (Anwesenheit). Yet, following Nietzsche’s precept that “man” is the “as yet undetermined animal” (Beyond

Good and Evil 264), the reversal of the metaphysics of presence implies the privileging of possibility over actuality as the most essential determination of being. Dasein is “not yet,” an existential potentiality, “a constant unfinished quality [eine ständige

Unabgeschlossenheit]” (Being and Time 227). Therefore, Dasein is never whole and can never be totalized. To put it in Lacan’s terms, the unremitting drift of the drives is a being-toward-death that throws the subject to an ever-futural possibility, or a destinerrance to use Derrida’s term.

The problem with Freud’s conception of the death drive is that it tends to subsume repetition to a principle of identity, namely, a return to the inorganic. As opposed to this,

Lacan argues that “the problem of Sublimierung must begin with a recognition of the plasticity of the instincts [i.e., the drives]” (Seminar VII 91). Sublimation offers a release from the command of the obscene and ferocious figure of the superego. Instead of repressing the disruptive force of the death drive, sublimation harnesses its revolutionary power in order to produce new forms and symbols, that is, to participate in a kind of

Nietzschean revaluation of values. On the one hand, the drive is intemporal, eternally returning, or “conservative” as Dolar put it, precisely because it constantly forces its way back to the locus of satisfaction. On the other, the drive is a disruptive heterogeneity that

53 produces derailment, excess, surplus. This duality is what leads Lacan to say that “every drive is virtually a death drive” (Ecrits 719). In chasing object a, every drive pursues its own extinction although it perpetually fails, condemning the subject to compulsive repetition in the attempt to reach the beyond of the pleasure principle where the Thing lies. As irrepressible, immortal, or indestructible life, the drive is a perpetually destabilizing force that opens up the space for the work of sublimation and the creation of the new. What may appear to be an impediment to stability, identity, and presence now constitutes the subject’s ownmost possibility.

In Seminar VII Lacan lays the emphasis on the real as opposed to the symbolic, defining the former as what resists symbolization. The drive is considered “as such,” namely, as “a destruction drive that has to be beyond the instinct to return to the state of equilibrium of the inanimate sphere,” because “it is articulated at a level that can be defined only as a function of the signifying chain” (Seminar VII 211). Through his reading of Sade Lacan associates the death drive with what the libertine called “second death,” which coincides with the destruction of the symbolic network that sustains the subject. As a creationist sublimation the death drive opens up the realm between-two- deaths (i.e., between biological and symbolic death) (Seminar VII 270) where everything and nothing becomes possible. While the death drive produces a tabula rasa, the onus of creation is placed on sublimation. The void is the locus where the unexpected power of invention can reach beyond the limits of accepted idioms and logics to set a new direction. Sublimation is an ethical act that results from an effort to avoid giving ground on one’s desire, “ne pas céder sur son désir,” which is the categorical imperative of

54 psychoanalysis. In the specific context of sublimation, not to give ground on one’s desire is to be understood as the attachment to an ineradicable structural lack, that is, “pure desire” qua void. Under the auspices of sublimation, the death drive becomes the condition of creation, the disruptive force that opens up the space for sublimation to resume the work of creation. Thus, the death drive is “a creationist sublimation, and it is linked to that structural element which implies that […] there is somewhere […] beyond the [signifying] chain, the ex nihilo on which […] that chain is founded and is articulated as such” (Seminar VII 212). The archetype of creationist sublimation is to be found in the opening line of St. John’s Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word.” According to Lacan this performative statement represents nothing but “the entrance of the signifier into the world” (Seminar IV 48). Yet, Lacan radically breaks with the Christian tradition by arguing that the death drive affirms ontological non-identity and reinstates desire as the metonymy of being. Religious sublimation gives the symbolic order a sense of consistency and coherence by displacing the constitutive void at the heart of any symbolic system and by putting God in the very place of this void as a way of hiding it.

For Lacan, the only authentic experience is that of a lucid face to face with the fundamental deadlock of the symbolic order. Lacan defines the end of analysis as traversing the fantasy and overcoming the belief in the Other. To stop believing in the

Other does not mean relinquishing the symbolic, but relating to the symbolic in a new, non-neurotic way: separere equals se parere. Yet, Lacan states that the goal of psychoanalysis is to bring the analysand to the brink of the ethical act, “if analysis prepares us for it, it also in the end leaves us at the door” (Seminar VII 21). Thus, analysis

55 is but a prelude to moral action. When the Other loses coherence, when it is no longer supplemented with the fiction of an omnipotent figure guaranteeing order and ontological consistency, one abandons the fiction of a necessary world. Thus, the tragic face to face with the monstrous void of desire does not imply a cynical outcome (often attributed to

Lacan) that every attempt to create a new symbolic universe is illusory and that it conceals this fundamental lack itself.

At the end of Seminar XI Lacan argues that analysis is to produce a désillement, a biblical term that refers to a dramatic realization, an “eye-opening” experience. What is this désillement about? It is a prelude to the advent of absolute difference, which may be obtained with the crossing of a limit: the subject “may adumbrate [its] situation in a field made up of rediscovered knowledge only if [it] has experienced the limit within which, like desire, [it] is bound” (Seminar XI 276). Sublimation takes the form of a limit- experience that wrenches the subject from the grasp of the Other without falling into psychosis. When the void is revealed, at the moment when the subject is in a state of sublime helplessness (Hilflosigkeit), there arises the possibility of shaking off the chains of the narcissistic imaginary and actualize the death drive as the subject’s ownmost potentiality. Ethics happens with the brief disclosure of pure desire, of the void of the symbolic qua absent cause, which is a precondition for new symbolization. Yet, Lacan remarks that this face to face happens at a “limit that human life can only briefly cross”

(Seminar VII 262–3). The void is thus characterized by an insurmountable ambivalence, it both represents a space of limitless freedom that empowers the subject-artist while at the same time it is an unfathomable abyss threatening to engulf her.

In Seminar VII Lacan draws a parallel between tragic drama and psychoanalytic ethics, depicting sublimation as the invention of beauty. The close encounter with the

Thing is an experience of the psychoanalytic sublime that necessitates the invention of the beautiful object in order to avoid falling into psychosis. Lacan proposes that sublimity is a first movement to be countered by the invention of a beautiful object that is the subject’s answer to the horror of the void. While Lacan draws from Kant, he does not seem to refer to the Critique of Judgment but to the Anthropology from a Pragmatic

Point of View. Whereas in the third Critique Kant separates the beautiful and the sublime, the former being related to the sensible and the latter to the supersensible, in the

Anthropology Kant underlines the contiguity between beauty and the sublime, even addressing the latter from the point of view of art, a domain which he restricted to the beautiful in the Critique of Judgment. Kant claims that beauty prevents the sublime from turning into horror:

The representation of the sublime can and should nevertheless be beautiful in itself; otherwise it is coarse, barbaric, and contrary to good taste. Even the presentation of the evil or ugly (for example of personified death in Milton) can and must be beautiful whenever an object is to be represented aesthetically, and this is true even if the object is a Thersites. Otherwise the presentation produces either distaste or disgust (138-139).33

Accodring to Kant, sublimity without beauty only yields horror, enclosing us in the traumatic experience the Ungeheuer (the monstrous) where imagination utterly fails to frame the infinite.

The experience of the sublime thus constrains the subject to act through a reflective judgment, by attributing a transcendental object to the void, that is, a content

33 Kant also explains that a beautiful sublime exists and can be found a “splendid starry night” or St Peter’s in Rome (Anthropology 143).

57 that will define its moral law. For Lacan, “the moral law, the moral command, the presence of the moral agency in our activity, insofar as it is structured by the symbolic, is that through which the real is actualized—the real as such, the weight of the real” (20).

The real is the field where Lacan locates the Thing, the impossible object that the Other lacks and that eludes the possibility of being signified. In Seminar XI Lacan argues that the moral law “is simply desire in its pure state, that very desire that culminates in the sacrifice, strictly speaking, of everything that is the object of love in one’s human tenderness” (275). Lacan envisions a notion of transformative ethical and political agency that is based on what Kant called a “non-pathological” act that enables the subject to break with the given. With the theory of sublimation psychoanalysis gestures toward a critique of pure desire, describing Kant’s elaborations on the moral law as initiating “the great revolutionary crisis in morality” (Seminar VII 70). Kant was the first to distinguish between moral law and the good, the former being conceived as a sublime Thing and the latter as inextricably pathological, relying on subjective inclination. Whereas Aristotelian ethics presented the good as pleasurable, Kant introduces a difference in nature between the good and the moral law, the latter sacrificing pleasure and being situated beyond the pleasure principle. Even though it is not characterized as a form of sublimity in the

Analytic of the Sublime, the moral law entails a sublime feeling, one that is analogous to the aesthetic response to the sublime in nature. As in Kant, the sublime elevates us from the particular to the universal. But what is the psychoanalytic universal? This universal is nothing, a void, the Ungeheuer qua radical absence that coincides with the Thing lurking behind the veil of appearances.

Through the ethical act, the subject determines its ethical will, becoming the author of its own law. In Kant “the will is a faculty of [thought] determining itself to action in accordance with the conception of certain laws” (Foundations of the

Metaphysics of Morals 44). The ethical act yields the creation ex nihilo of a new subjective reality, which implies the reconfiguration of the subject’s fundamental fantasy whereby one may desire anew. It must be noted that fantasy is not opposed to reality; fantasy is not an illusory product of the imagination that would hide an “authentic” or

“legitimate” perception of reality. As Lacan put it, there is no Other of the Other; since reality is itself discursively constructed, there cannot be a metalanguage, a single objectively correct way of interpreting. Fantasy is not only a scenario that stages desire, it is an imaginary formation that a fortiori enables the subject to desire. For Lacan “the subject of alienated desire […] is the desire of the Other, which is correct, with the sole modification that there is no subject of desire. There is the subject of the fantasy.”34

Because it is embedded in the signifying chain as the locus of the Other, every desire is de facto alienated. Hence, the goal of analysis is not the abolition of fantasy, for that would be the death of the subject, but the “traversal of the fundamental fantasy” (Seminar

XI 273). Such a traversal coincides with the abandonment of the content of the law that used to regulate the subject’s desire. Only the traversal of fantasy may produce a change in the fundamental mode of defense, enabling the reformulation of fantasy on a non- neurotic basis. Tragic de-subjectivation is thus followed by a salvatory re-subjectivation in sublimation.

34 “Responses to Students of Philosophy concerning the Object of Psychoanalysis.” Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman. October Vol. 40 (Spring, 1987), p.110.

“Pure desire” may only come to view in the imaginary purification of the subject, that is, in subjective destitution. Sublimation is a clearing away of the field of desire, an untying of what in “The Mirror Stage” Lacan calls “the knot of imaginary servitude”

(Ecrits, a Selection 9). Lacan describes sublimation in terms of a tragic recognition

(anagnorisis), a change from not-knowing to knowing:

In the definition of sublimation as satisfaction without repression, whether implicitly or explicitly, there is a passage from not-knowing to knowing, a recognition of the fact that desire is nothing more than the metonymy of the discourse of demand. It is change as such. I emphasize the following: the properly metonymic relation between one signifier and another that we call desire is not a new object or a previous object, but the change of object in itself (Seminar VII 293).

Recognition is not the unveiling of, and identification with, some underlying substance; rather, recognition comes with imaginary destitution and the move away from identity-thinking to embrace metonymy or “change as such.” Sublimation reopens the possibility of change, enabling the analysand to come back into contact with “the elusive process of Becoming, to the variations of Desire” (“Some Reflections on the Ego” 15).

To untie the knot of imaginary servitude is to reintroduce becoming, fluidity in existence.

If desire is nothing but the metonymy of the discourse of demand then knowledge, or anagnorisis, lies in the clearing away of the belief that there is a necessary formula of desire. Formula is to be understood in its etymological sense as “form, draft, contract, regulation”; if there is not only one right way of formulating desire, then one has to abandon the belief in the right semantic object to fulfill the metonymy of demand. Ethics

60 thus allows for the introduction of new ways of formulating desire that are not oriented towards the consolidation of identity but the exploration of non-identity.35

Lacan also warns of the ambivalent potential of sublimation, which can lead to a repression of the true being-for-death. Indeed, sublimation is “a space of relaxation” where, through the intervention of beauty, the subject can “delude itself on the subject of das Ding” (Seminar VII 99). Sublimation can conjure up imaginary products that blind us toward our inmost desire, products that “colonize the field of das Ding with imaginary schemes,” and where what Lacan calls “the a elements, the imaginary elements of the fantasm come to overlay the subject” (99). If sublimation is fundamentally delusory, it nevertheless produces redemptive illusions. One should keep in mind that for Lacan fantasy does not dissimulate reality: rather, fantasy serves as a screen, an interface that enables us to confront the void, mediating between (symbolically structured) reality and the monstrous real. As a supreme example of sublimation, Lacan takes the example of courtly love, which is “fundamentally narcissistic in character” (151). Sublimation happens with the raising up of an object (the Lady) to the dignified level of das Ding.

Sublimation creates a “vacuole” at the center of signifiers (150); it is an “empty ideal”

35 This interpretation of sublimation as central to Lacan’s ethics of desire rejects Alenka Zupancic’s proposal for an “ethics of the real” in her eponymous book. For Zupancic desire becomes pure at the moment of the ethical act when it turns into drive: “Pure desire is the moment when desire, in its metonymy, comes across itself, encounters its cause among other objects. At the same time, pure desire coincides with an act. This act is accomplished in the frame of the subject's fundamental fantasy; but because what is at stake is nothing other than this very frame, it ends up ‘outside’ the fantasy, in another field: that of drive” (244-5). In the moment of the ethical act, the subject is no longer divided; rather, “the subject passes over to the side of the object. The ethical subject is not a subject who wants this object but, rather, this object itself. In an act, there is no ‘divided subject’: there is the ‘it’ (the Lacanian ça) and the subjective figure that arises from it. We may thus conclude that the act in the proper sense of the word follows the logic of what Lacan calls a ‘headless subjectification’ or a ‘subjectification without subject’” (104). I object to the idea that the ethical act yields the subject’s identification with the object, beyond self- division; such a position is purely psychotic, completely beyond the symbolic. Only the subject of the symbolic can be ethical, otherwise the ethical act only produces terrorism.

61 elevated above the domain of goods and values, a pure signifier that signifies only itself.

The long circuit of sublimation makes that the path to the Lady is strewn with detours, verses, and poems. The rites of courtly ethics produce a signifying chain that circles and adumbrates the central emptiness. By ascribing the Lady a variety of sublime qualities, the poet not only affirms the inaccessibility of the feminine, he also illustrates or adorns the void of desire, attributing a multiplicity of “contents” that circumscribe this lack without filling it. Like the Thing, the Lady is impenetrable, inaccessible, absent, and distant. As Lacan writes, “courtly love is, for man […] the only way to elegantly pull off the absence of the sexual relationship” (Seminar XX 69). The canonical courtly lady evokes an object “that I can only describe as terrifying, an inhuman partner” (Seminar VII

150). Sublimation confronts the real of the Thing, a confrontation in which the subject is saved by the “mirages” or “phantasms” of the imaginary (99). Lacan opposes the

“function of the beautiful” to the “function of the good,” advancing that sublimation is a healthy kind of hysteria that does not give way to repression: “the beautiful in its strange function with relation to desire doesn’t take us in, as opposed to the function of the good.

It keeps us awake and perhaps helps us adjust to desire insofar as it is itself linked to the structure of the lure” (Seminar VII 239). If we are not “taken in,” it is because beauty is, as in courtly love, an experience of dispossession that keeps desire infinitely alive. Lacan seems to advance, however, that courtly love only has a weak ethical value. Unlike the radical act, the code of amour courtois is nothing other than a “scholastics of unhappy love” (146), an art form where the love object is always already lost and mourned by the courtly lover. Hence such a form of sublimation functions without putting the individual

62 at risk, offering a safe and satisfying solution to the instability of the drives.

The strong ethical valence of beauty resides in the fact that it results form a limit- experience. Both “the (moral) good” and “beauty” are barriers to the realization of our desire and what leads us towards it: “on the scale that separates us from the central field of desire, if the good constitutes the first stopping place, the beautiful forms the second and gets closer. It stops us, but it also points in the direction of the field of destruction”

(Seminar VII 217). Beauty is a limit-experience where one finds the appropriate distance to the Thing. Going too far in transgression may lead to psychotic breakdown or suicidal passage à l’acte. It is because the subject comes close to the point from which his desire originates that the function of the image, in its brightness, emerges as a barrier. The minimal difference displayed by the dazzling glow of beauty brings us at the threshold of the void from which desire is born. Sublimation “represents the existence of the emptiness at the center of the real that is called the Thing” (121). The glow of beauty

“coincides with the moment of transgression or of realization” (281). Lacan defines the beautiful in terms of a Bataillian limit-experience: “the beauty effect derives from the relationship of the hero to the limit” (286). The beautiful still inheres in the signifying chain even as it resides on the edge of the real, bringing us “closer” to the abyss of “pure desire” (216).

Since sublimation is a limit-experience, the danger lies in annihilating oneself. As the archetype of tragic sublimation, Lacan looks to Sophocles’ Antigone. By elevating the body of her dead brother to the dignity of the Thing, the heroine goes against the law of the polis. As she transgresses the limit at which human existence sustains itself,

Antigone embraces the radicalism of her desire at the price of her very own annihilation:

“Antigone is borne along by a passion” that takes her beyond self-preservation (254). Her ethical act is an act of sublimation whereby she contests the values of a corrupted society.

Most important, by choosing Antigone as an example Lacan goes against Freud’s belief that women have a weaker power of sublimation than man. Antigone is the heroine who combats everything that constitutes her destiny, her unsurpassable fate. Antigone’s tragic choice is the archetype of the ethical act that approaches the lethal domain of jouissance.

For Lacan tragedy is an art form that “concerns the response of a being, whether reader or writer, at the approach to a centre of incandescence or an absolute zero that is physically unbearable” (201). This “central emptiness” is the form in which jouissance “presents itself to us” (202). The recovery of the tragic sense of life thus occurs through an experience of limits through which both the symbolic Other that supports customs and conventions and the subject that bears the symbolic Other risk disappearing.

At the beginning of Sophocle’s play, Antigone’s two brothers, Eteocles and

Polyneices, kill each other during the Theban civil war. The newly anointed king of

Thebes, Creon, chooses to grant Eteocles a proper burial and to leave Polyneices’s uncovered body on the battlefield to be consumed by vultures. Against Creon’s edict

Antigone demands that her brother Polyneices receive a proper burial. Ensuing Creon’s refusal, Antigone proceeds to bury him on her own. Lacan singles out a specific scene of

Sophocles’ tragedy where Antigone is caught standing on the edge of Polyneices’s grave.

At this point she stops trying to justify herself and talks only about the uniqueness of her dead brother. We witness Antigone raising the object of her desire (the corpse of

Polyneices) to the dignity of the Thing, sacrificing every ideal of the Other (even her life) in order to sanctify the object cause of her desire as an absolute exception. The dire consequence is that Creon condemns her to be buried alive. Through her dissidence

Antigone goes 'εκτος 'άτας, beyond “atè,” which, Lacan contends, “has the meaning of going beyond a limit in the text” (Seminar VII 270). Lacan simply translates the word as

“limit,” the limit that Antigone transgresses as she breaks through the prevailing order.36

Antigone conquers her own law by opposing and rewriting her entrée en Je, this

“something that began to be articulated before [her] in previous generations, and which is strictly speaking atè” (300). The etymology of her name (from anti- “opposite” + gone

“womb, childbirth, generation,” from root of gignesthai “to be born” related to genos

“race, birth, descent”) implies that she breaks free from the determinism of the linguistic and cultural Other. The tragic affirmation of desire takes the hero beyond the calculi of the pleasure and reality principles. In the case of Antigone, sublimation takes the tragic hero beyond the lived and the livable, at the limit between life and death, beyond human time and desire. In so doing, she reaches the pureness of her desire, “that purity, that separation of being from the characteristics of the historical drama he has lived through, is precisely the limit or the ex nihilo to which Antigone is attached” (279). In so doing,

Antigone embraces the death drive, which takes the form of the “second death”: symbolic death, the annihilation of the symbolic network in which the subject is inscribed, namely, the curse of the Labdacides.

36 Crucially for Lacan, Sophocles does not say that such transgression is Antigone’s hamartia, her mistake; it is the refusal to give ground on her desire that leads her to stand at the limit of the symbolic order and its law. Antigone is fully conscious of the limit she is transgressing, unlike Creon whose decision to become an autocrat is described in terms of hamartia.

Creon, who wants to promote the good of the city, is the guardian of the first barrier, that of the ideals of the Other. Antigone’s choice not to follow his edict takes her beyond the order of collective norms that sustain and limit the citizens’ satisfaction. As

Lacan underlines, Sophocles describes her as αυτονόµος [autonomos], a reference to her being the bearer of the signifying cut,37 a law unto herself, a self-legislating individual that rejects the law of the polis. For Lacan, it is the beauty of Antigone's choice of a Good beyond all socially recognized values and goods, beyond the pleasure principle, that gives her a colossal stature and makes her a model for an ethics of creation as opposed to conformity.38 Most important for Lacan, as an autonomous individual, Antigone is not only in breach with Creon’s order, but also with Aristotle’s ethics, which, Lacan argues, is oriented towards a metaphysical understanding of the Good as the condition of the self- realization of human beings. Aristotle opens the Nichomachean Ethics with the “noble” claim that “the Good is that at which all things aim” (1). There is a transcendental order to which human beings should conform, “a knowledge of the supreme Good” that is “of great importance for the conduct of life” (3). In Aristotle’s view, happiness, or pleasure in the psychoanalytic lexicon, is “the guiding pole of human fulfillment, insofar as if there is something divine in man, it is in this bond with nature” (Seminar VII 13). Unlike the

Kantian moral law, the Aristotelian moral law legitimizes itself in reference to an ontologically true version of reality that states that human beings are part and parcel of

37 Lacan ties the ethical figure of Antigone to the limit of the ex nihilo, which “is nothing more than the break that the very presence of language inaugurates in the life of man” (SVII 279). 38 This reading of Lacan goes against Judith Butler’s main point of contention in Antigone’s Claim where she claims that Lacan’s definition of a transcendental symbolic order prevents us from thinking the alterability of the social qua normative. Against Lacan’s so-called transcendentalism, Butler proposes a concept of kinship “understood as a socially alterable set of arrangements that has no cross-cultural structural features that might be fully extracted from its social operations… [organizing] the reproduction of material life” (Antigone’s Claim 72).

66 the autotelic and rational development of nature. In this teleology, Lacan remarks, “a whole large field” of what constitute the sphere of sexual desires is simply classed by

Aristotle in the realm of “bestiality” (5).39 Aristotelian ethics refers to a set of moral laws that predicates an ορθός λόγος [orthos logos], a right, truthful, and legitimate way to enjoy. As opposed to this, psychoanalytic ethics no longer relies on a moral measure of action, but embraces desire as the “incommensurable measure, an infinite measure”

(316). Desire is undermined by an uncompromising insistence that relentlessly orients it towards the beyond of the pleasure principle and the partial objects that people its field, partial objects that never meet the abyssal demand of infinity.

Unlike Hegel who saw in Antigone the conflict between family and state, Lacan argues that

Antigone reveals to us the line of sight that defines desire. This line of sight focuses on an image that possesses a mystery which up till now has never been articulated, since it forces you to close your eyes at the very moment you look at it. Yet that image is at the center of tragedy, since it is the fascinating image of Antigone herself. We know very well that over and beyond the dialogue, over and beyond the question of family and country, over and beyond the moralizing arguments, it is Antigone herself who fascinates us, Antigone in her unbearable splendor (247).

Antigone both attracts us and startles us; her entry into the realm between two deaths is indicated by the “violent illumination, the glow of [a] beauty” whose paradoxical function is both to point to the lethal domain of jouissance beyond communal goods and to bar access to that realm. Through her transgression Antigone produces an

39 Aristotle even advances that the good may remain out of reach only for a person with “bestial character,” with “disease” or “arrested development.” (Seminar VII 171)

67 anamorphosis that makes pure desire qua void appear.40 The mirror that Antigone holds up to the spectator does not return us to our self-image; rather, it produces an anamorphosis that points us towards the monstrous void that dwells within us. Tragedy produces a mysterious image that “forces you to close your eyes at the moment you look at it” (247). Beauty is at the limit yet it produces an object a, a sublime object—Antigone in her “unbearable splendor (247)—that triggers our awe. The ethical power of catharsis lies in the fact that through it we are “purged, purified” of “the order of the imaginary”

(248). On the one hand, catharsis purifies us from the order of the imaginary, from our narcissistic inclinations, which are related to the self-image through which we believe to be masters of desire. Through catharsis we are purged from the imaginary through the intervention of one anamorphic image that has “dissipatory powers” (247). On the other, such an extra-ordinary image arrests the play of signifiers and lets the void shine through, viz., desire in its all its purity, the desire for the Other Thing that reveals the symbolic order to its constitutive emptiness. By not ceding on her desire, Antigone enters the field of radical desire, which is not nostalgic, “a longing for return” to a pristine origin, a desire to recuperate “what has been lost,” but a desire for the always already Other.

Lacan carries on the project of the Heideggerian Entwurf, or the assuming of one’s own death as one’s innermost possibility. Death implies the breaking away from the imaginary attachments that have locked desire in static relations.

For Aristotle the effect of catharsis produces a form of reconciliation between the subject and the Other. It is in this sense that Aristotle relates the end of a tragedy to what

40 This is how Lacan interprets Sophocles’ imeros enargeia as the making visible of desire. (Seminar VII 268)

68 comes with the sudden, unexpected appearance of something beautiful and he defines beauty as a common characteristic of all tragedies. In Lacan, however, beauty is subversive, “closer to evil than to good” (Seminar VII 268).

In capitalist times, the disappearance of the moral ideal of the Good that Creon pretended to represent makes way for the unrestricted development of “the economy of goods” (239) that sustained it. In the consumerist Other the competition for goods fosters compulsive, drive-based behaviors that imprison the subject in what Benjamin perceived as the Eversame of commodity production.41 The rise of the object yields desublimation through the production of industrial, anonymous, and solitary, modes of enjoyment that isolate the subject in the solipsism of jouissance. In this context, is art still capable of groundbreaking sublimation such as the one Lacan identifies in Antigone? As we are going to discuss, the experimental writing of Beckett and Duras ventures into the territory opened by Lacan’s conception of sublimation and catharsis as a process of purification of the imaginary, achieving a leveling of aesthetic categories that may enable us to imagine anew. Far from reconciling the spectator with the Other, the works of Beckett and Duras estrange us from the status quo, offering a challenge to imaginative and critical faculties.

Both writers create immense detours on the way that leads to the drive’s satisfaction, producing jouissance texts that infinitely delay gratification and reassurance, which only foster an illusory confirmation of the reader’s identity and the stability of her world.

41 The discourse of the capitalist is this “implacable discours, qui en se complétant de l’idéologie de la lutte des classes, induit seulement les exploités à rivaliser sur l’exploitation de principe, pour en abriter leur participation patente à la soif du manque-à-jouir.” (« Radiophonie », Autres écrits, 435)

Beckett, Duras, and the (Im)Possibility of Sublimation

Lacan says that artistic sublimation is organized around a repressed void, a void that nevertheless remains “determinative” (Seminar VII 130). Sublimation explores the tragic relation of the subject to the real of desire. It instigates a relation in which the imaginary no longer suppresses but facilitates the coming closer together of the symbolic and the real. The duty of modernist art is not to represent the world but to give expression to the distortions created by the Thing, the ominous black hole created by the signifying cut. In Seminar XI Lacan takes the example of Cézanne’s apples, a series of paintings that subvert the geometry of classical perspective not by deepening the field of vision but by flattening it. In these paintings, the vanishing point of perspective is no longer aligned with the spectator’s point of view. Such artworks testify to the untamable presence of jouissance insofar as they refuse to gratify the onlooker with an illusion of visual pleasure and mastery. As in Barthes’s notion of the jouissance text, the artwork is no longer a confirmation of the subjective integrity and the stability of the onlooker’s world. In

Cézanne’s paintings, the void alters or falsifies realist representation, and the anxiety deriving from the proximity of the Thing is not redeemed into a perfectly harmonious form. What subsists is an uncanny sense of estrangement.

In Seminar VII the two arts that Lacan uses as paradigms of sublimation are painting and architecture. Painting puts something in the place of the void, whereas architecture creates a void, which brings the latter in greater proximity to the real than the former, which is firmly anchored in the imaginary order. Painting organized according to

70 the rules of perspective domesticates and neutralizes the impenetrable emptiness of the

Thing: “painting progressively learns to master this emptiness, to take such a tight hold of it that painting becomes dedicated to fixing it in the form of the illusion of space”

(Seminar VII 140). Yet, commenting on the invention of anamorphosis in the 16th century, Lacan underlines that at the very time when painting mastered perspective and produced the perfect illusion, “a sensitive spot, a lesion, a locus of pain, a point of reversal of the whole history” comes into view (140). After all, the real could not be domesticated so easily.

Seminar VII introduces the distinction between the mirror image, which implies the spectator’s identification with a coherent and harmonious form, and the anamorphosis that reveals the real, the irreducible remainder that is necessarily left aside by the mirror model. According to Lacan, anamorphosis is the fundamental operation of artistic sublimation:

the interest of anamorphosis is described as a turning point when the artist completely reverses the use of the illusion of space, when he forces it to enter into the original goal, that is to transform it into the support of the hidden reality—it being understood that, to a certain extent, a work of art always involves encircling the Thin (Seminar VII 141).

With this reversal of the illusion of space, object a comes into view, hollowing out the artwork and triggering the anxiety of the onlooker.

Lacan asserts that there is a “primitive sublimation” of architecture (175), implying that architecture creates a form of emptiness that is more resistant to the power of the imaginary. In Seminar XI Lacan takes Heidegger’s example of the jug, arguing that architecture’s only aim is to present the very void around which it is organized. Lacan is

71 drawn towards architecture precisely because it constitutes an archetype for the way the subject is envisioned in psychoanalysis. Following Heidegger, Lacan advances that the process of sublimation paves the way for an abolition of the metaphysical way of thinking, which forecloses the centrality of the void (120). The vase is not an object created by a sovereign subject, but by a Seinsgeschick, meaning that the being of the vase is located in emptiness, and its form only results from a fashioning of the signifier. The object of sublimation thus gives body to the void at the heart of desire, it points to “the beyond-of-the-signified” (57).

If capitalist economy, through the discourse of advertising, maintains the illusion that object a, as cause of desire, can be gentrified and reduced to the consumer object that provides enjoyment and well-being, the modernist artwork proves otherwise. In Beckett and Duras, the codes of realist representation explode; art is no longer a mastery of emptiness, a tightening of the hold of the artist, but an art gesturing towards poverty and failure. Beckett and Duras produce jouissance texts that affirm an absolutely intransitive void. Against the narcissistic relation to the consumer product, tragic art releases an unsublatable negativity that defies rules and conventions and thwarts all identificatory processes. Aesthetic experience becomes the antithesis of narcissistic gratification. To use Beckett’s words, the artist should “fail like no other dare fail” (Proust and Three

Dialogues 125). Both writers ask whether the artwork can be freed from its dependence on the consumerist Other, thereby subtracting it from the homogenizing dialectic of consumption.

For Lacan there is a dialectic between the Other and sublimation, a dialectic

72 which de-sublimation threatens to destroy. Culture is no longer seen as necessarily repressive, thus generative of discontent, but as what de Kesel calls a “field of sublimations” that keeps us from falling into neurosis (Eros and Ethics 186). However, while sublimations defy the mechanistic movements of habitual and institutionalized forms, they nevertheless fall rapidly into passionless automatism.42 Art is thus caught in the dialectic of conformity and transgression. As Lacan writes, “you don’t paint in

Picasso’s time as you painted in Velazquez’s; you don’t write a novel in 1930 as you did in Stendhal’s time” (Seminar VII 107). What Lacan calls culture is a process of Bildung, the site where freedom is negotiated and new forms of individuation created, where

“creative subjectivity” struggles “to renew the never-exhausted power of symbols in the human exchange that brings them to the light of day” (Ecrits, a Selection 71-72). Art extricates itself from society while at the same time producing forms in which society may perhaps find satisfaction.

In the post-revolutionary world of consumerism, the fundamental question may be how art may break the spell of the commodity form, that is, how it may survive what

Adorno calls the process of Entkunstung, the “de-aestheticisation of art” (Aesthetic

Theory 22)? Through such a process, art becomes subordinated to technical rationality and takes on the formal qualities of the commodity. Following Lacan, Beckett and Duras renew the subversive essence of art by affirming the artwork’s proximity to the unexchangeable, das Ding, thus securing a place for das Unbedingte, the unconditional, that which outdoes all symbolic and imaginary determinations. Art appears as the

42 Such is the case of the realist novel for Duras and Beckett. In the 19th century realist mimesis posited itself as a self-conscious alternative to the dominant Romantic style. It was subsequently depicted by Barthes, Robbe-Grillet and the nouveaux romanciers as the epitome of the bourgeois style.

73 determinate negation of the consumerist Other, a negating monad that resists being consumed or understood. Art appears not as a consensual cultural commodity that suppresses any negativity in the finished work. To put it in Adornian fashion, if the artwork is conceived in terms of successful integration, it renounces the force by which it exceeds the given and becomes mere daydreaming. In Beckett and Duras art bears witness to desire as a force that tends towards the absolutely other, the death drive as that will for “the Other thing” (Seminar VII 206).

For both writers the only way to remain faithful to beauty in art is precisely to destroy it. As Beckett wrote to Axel Kaun, literature should practice “word-storming in the name of beauty” (Letters of Samuel Beckett I 518). Sublimation now appears as an act of self-sabotaging, a tearing of the beautiful veil, a drawing near the non-existent. Adorno argues that in modernist art “the emancipation from the concept of harmony has revealed itself to be a revolt against semblance [Schein]” (Aesthetic Theory 100). It is not that art has no semblance, that it is not mimetic, but that it resembles nothing actual. As such, art qua sublimation is “the promise of non-semblance” (Negative Dialectics 405). Thus, the modernist semblance is “constituted out of the empirical world and in opposition to it”

(Aesthetic Theory 103). By destroying beauty and therefore preserving it, Beckett and

Duras attempt a “redemption of semblance” (107) from commodification. As Adorno put it, “[Beckett’s] nihilism implies the contrary of identification with nothingness. To

Beckett, as to the Gnostics, the created world is radically evil, and its negation is the chance of another world that is not yet. As long as the world is as it is, all pictures of reconciliation, peace, and quiet resemble the picture of death…” (ND 381) The same can

74 be said about Duras who claimed that “la perte du monde [est] la seule democratie possible” (Marguerite Duras à Montréal 32). Their works are ever renewed efforts to bring to completion “the loss of the world,” to find a way out of the suffocating immanence of capitalist exchange, which, as Marx demonstrated, functions as a transcendental subject uniting the manifold of individuals, activities and products. The crisis of beauty in modernist art has to be counterposed to the process of reification, which means that commodity exchange, and the commodity form, has become the nexus rerum, the fundamental organizing principle of society.

As Jameson argues, the “crisis and the agony of aesthetic appearance” diagnosed by Adorno (Late Marxism 168) expresses the conflict between the nominalist desire for particularity and the domination of the commodity form as the new “universal,” the inescapable reality of commodification in modern society. Beckett and Duras write in a world that Adorno describes as Tauschgesellschaft (exchange society) where exchange value has become the measure of all things. In such a world, identity thinking is the rule as the capitalist, quantitative universal—universal equivalence—has subsumed the qualitative and non-identical particular. Where logos has become program, calculation, and appropriation, art enshrines the alogos, the unspeakable and incalculable beneath or beyond that which is spoken. In so doing literary practice seeks to adopt a position outside the capitalist circuit of valorization, producing an affective experience that resists the capture of libidinal investment in the reproduction of capital.

As a result, the highly individualized artwork does not take the form of “grand

75 style,”43 but of destruction, refusing to gain universal acclaim by accentuating qualitative distinctness to such as point that it becomes almost unrecognizable. The artwork enacts the non-identity between subject and world that is the antithesis of the culture of adaptation, confronting us with the void that underlays ideology, discourse, fantasies, and meaning. In this catharsis of the imaginary, as in Kant’s theory of the sublime, we move from the particular to the universal, yet this universal is the Nothing, an unqualifiable void, the unfathomable abyss that coincides with the Thing lurking behind the veil of appearances. To put it in Derrida’s terms, art becomes an experience and experiment of the aporia that may lead one to invent “the only possible invention, the impossible invention” (The Other Heading 41). The modern tragic does not seek to produce positive meaning, eschewing reconciliation and redemption with the Other; as such, it does not foreclose the possibility of the impossible. Therefore, for Beckett and Duras, the possibility of sublimation lies in its impossibility. Since sublimation is a creation ex nihilo, it contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. The condition of impossibility of sublimation is the void that persists in the conditions of its expression, the Nothing that undermines and exceeds any possible articulation. Kant coined the term condition of possibility (Bedingungen der Möglichkeit) to describe the a priori structures of experience, the transcendental conditions that allow for the synthesis of appearances

(Schein), the continuity of perception and conscious experience. Beckett and Duras

43 Adorno subscribed to the great ideal of the artwork as the expression of what Nietzsche called “great style,” which has become obsolete in consumer culture. Instead of an artwork envisioned as a vital, organic whole constituted of elements that are dynamically intertwined, elements that evolve in accordance with the development of the larger whole, the commoditized work becomes an aggregate of discrete contents, lichettes (licks) of jouissance to use Lacan’s expression, each of them appreciated for the effect it brings about.

76 explore the “condition of impossibility” of experience, the exploration of relations that do not rest on totality and linearity, but on the failure of idealization. The idea that any condition of possibility relies on a condition of impossibility opens up the messianic space of the promesse du bonheur, what Derrida calls the “messianic and emancipatory promise as promise” (The Other Heading 75). Beckett’s and Duras’ works are

(im)possible sublimations that foreground the moment of the real, the remainder or the gap in the sublime object (i.e., the play or the book), namely, the gap that separates the object from the Thing. As limit-experiences, these works confront the void inherent in desire, the impossibility of disengaging the possible from the impossible, the utterable from the ineffable, and, ultimately, the impossibility of the effort to carry out this endeavor.

Beckett’s and Duras’ works are animated by the desire to advance a literary practice that escapes the commodity form. In a world dominated by the practical language of communication and advertisement, both writers set out to destroy language, uncovering the void at the heart of symbolization. In 1937 Beckett describes himself as a

“logoclast,” advancing a program for the destruction of language: “the idea is ruptured writing, so that the void may protrude like a hernia” (Letters of Samuel Beckett I 521).

For both writers language appears as a kind of veil covering an unnamable aporia, a veil that must be punctured. Beckett’s desire “to bore one hole after another” in language

(Disjecta 172) finds its counterpart in Duras’ search for the “word-hole” which also stems from a desire to face the ontological gap opened up by the absence of sexual relationship. The epiphany of the void in the literary space functions as a type of rupture

77 or pause in the temporal grind of commodity production. Beckett’s and Duras’ taste for destruction does not fall outside sublimation but is sublimation as destruction where, unlike in reified works, the void’s plea to have its vacancy filled is resisted. To cite the title of one of Beckett’s very last works, Imagination Dead Imagine, the duty of the artist is to achieve a tabula rasa, to shatter aesthetic categories in order to finally be able to imagine anew.

In coming to terms with the reification of desire, Beckett and Duras “face the music,” taking the measure of contemporary alienation. Art foregrounds its negativity and its refusal to be communicative, willingly calling attention to its lack of utility, its purposelessness. In their dismantling of fossilized language and worn out conventions, both writers look to music as a way to liberate the negativity repressed by communicative and pragmatic language. Actual music is the source of sublimation par excellence by means of which the literary work is to be transfigured. Duras compares music to a “divine injunction” as in L’Amant where “l’éclatement de la musique de Chopin sous le ciel illuminé de brillances” overwhelms her “comme une injonction du ciel dont on ne savait pas à quoi elle avait trait, comme un ordre de Dieu dont on ignorait la teneur” (123).

Beckett often depicted absolute music as a pure medium, a sublime art form, as

Schubert’s String Quartet in A minor in which the playwright identified “more nearly pure spirit than in any other music” (“Beckett and the Sound of Silence” 42). Both writers converge in opposing the referential language of words to the self-referential language of music, using the latter to question representation within language itself and make room for the unthinkable and unspeakable. Musicalized language secures a place for bearing

78 witness to the impossible and the unnamable, to what can only be “ill-seen, ill-said,” that is, what the practical language of communication only domesticates, falsifies, or ignores altogether.

While through numerous interviews and critical writings Duras issued a rather clear critique of entertainment, the same cannot be said about Beckett. To the exception of Adorno, most Marxist critiques have failed to identify the political import of his works. In the unremitting apathy and inertia dramatized by his plays, Lukács perceived the epitome of a modernism that refuses to see history as a “dynamic and developmental” process (“The Ideology of Modernism” 143). Yet, the theatre of the absurd constitutes an archetype of what Adorno calls art as the “social antithesis of society” (Aesthetic Theory

8). In Endgame and Krapp, Beckett presents us with a world of atrophied desire, where the sense of connection with other beings and our social and natural worlds as well as the pursuit of deeper truths has been annihilated. The squalid scenery of the plays comprehends the alienating condition of modernity. In 1968 during the opening session to Seminar XVI, D’un Autre à l’autre, Lacan refers to the age of the object as an age of the dustbin, namely, “times dominated by the genius of Samuel Beckett” (11). Beckett confronts us with the blunt reality of a desolate universe where desublimation reigns supreme.

If the void in Beckett’s plays uncovers the vanity of the desire for meaning and self-presence, in Duras the void marks the violent entry of unnamable jouissance that interrupts the course of the world. Duras’ first experimental works, Moderato cantabile and Le Ravissement, focus on the event of devouring love that led the writer to embrace a

“general economy” of literature where expenditure (passion, waste, sacrifice, or destruction) is considered more fundamental than the economies of production and utilities. Writing is a limit-experience where l’écrit becomes synonymous with les cris, that is, the screams released by her characters as they reach that point of intensity and impossibility that takes them beyond what Deleuze calls “the lived and the livable”

(Critical and Clinical 1). Duras’ heroines reach a point of no return that releases them from the static, anesthetized, and suffocating masculine and bourgeois world in which they are imprisoned, a point of no return which Duras calls an “accident,” a contingency superior to all necessity, a moment of madness upon which they escape the determination of existing imperatives of utility. Through her destruction of narrative conventions, Duras follows the Beckettian trajectory of “undoing,” “unwording,” and “unworking” of language. By confronting the coercive intelligibility of the atomized world with the enigmatic incomprehensibility of the artwork, Duras exposes the reader to the pain of jouissance and forbidden desires. Writing is not about laying the foundations for a new identity and narcissism, but for an objectal disinvestment that opens onto an unnamable jouissance. To put it in phenomenological terms, unlike pleasure jouissance is not the noema of a noesis, it is not the object of a thought process but what exceeds intentionality, project, and meaning, what may even lead to subjective dispossession and destitution.

Beckett’s and Duras’ works can be seen as tragic anamorphoses where the void

“protrudes like a hernia,” to use Beckett’s expression. As much as Lacan praised

Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors for placing an anamorphic skull in the forefront,

Beckett reproduces a skull as the décor of Endgame and Duras places the “word-hole” at the center of Le Ravissement.

This dissertation falls into four chapters through which I explore how Beckett and

Duras take us to the limit of sublimation, producing anamorphoses where the void is not filled with the meaningful presence of language. I propose that the relationship between the beautiful, the sublime, and the monstrous can be traced back through Beckett’s and

Duras’ engagement with music. Both writers conceive of music as literature’s other, an irreducible and inassimilable alterity against which new aesthetic criteria can be invented.

For both writers, music is the “last veil” that hides the monstrous.44 To be more precise, art becomes a Nietzschean Versuch, an experiment that asks to what extent the monstrous may be incorporated in the work.45 Through the affirmation of the void, Beckett and

Duras testify to the essential violence of art, defining art as a form of “counter-violence” against the violence of society. While both writers venture in the field of destruction, the artwork is itself an (im)possible sublimation, an anamorphosis of the void, the expression of unsubordinated desire.

The first two chapters focus on Beckett’s destruction of Aristotelian tragic drama.

Beckett rearticulates Schopenhauer’s vision of music as a metaphysical form of art that may take us beyond the veil of appearances and the vanity of the human world. In the first chapter we will see how Beckett’s “musicalization” of language should be considered as an aesthetic program in its own right. I propose that Endgame (1957) and

44 I borrow from Zizek’s remark that Lacan’s vision of art is similar to Rilke’s thesis that “Beauty is the last veil that envelops the Monstrous” (The Fragile Absolute 160). 45 The only question that interests the Nietzschean psychologist is “to what extent can truth stand to be incorporated?—That is the question; that is the experiment” (The Gay Science 112).

Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) constitute a turning point in Beckett’s lifelong quest for a literature of the “unword.” Drawing from musical modalities of expression, both plays carry the project of destruction of language and extinction of narrative apparatus to a new level. Music is essentially brought about by the paring down of words, the precise timing of pauses or silences, and the shaping of sounds into an elaborate musical patterning of themes and variations. Throughout the essay I show how this process of musicalization stems from a methodic destruction of the Aristotelian definition of tragic drama in The

Poetics. Theatre appears as an exceptional form of the limit-experience. Against the traditional view that for Beckett language has no value and that his works constitute a celebration of nothingness, the artwork is nevertheless engaged in a process of sublimation whereby theatre remains a construction in opposition to the void. Whereas in the desolate universe of the plays there is no longer a memory that transmits ideas and a tradition or a system that arrange things, from the ruins of Aristotelian drama emerges a

“music of indifference” that gives minimal consistency to the void. Through this music, ultimately, the possibility of beauty and a remnant of positivity, however frail it may be, is revealed.

In the second chapter we will see how Beckett’s musical destruction of

Aristotelian drama is to be understood as “anti-dramatic” theatre, which gives uncensored shape to the negativity of existence. Traditionally Beckett’s plays are perceived as giving expression to damaged life, to its emptiness and isolation without trying to explain or develop the feelings that the characters themselves may seek to communicate. While

Endgame and Krapp’s Last Tape depict Aristotelian drama as an abstractness that is no

82 longer capable of experience, they offer a vertiginous meditation on theatre itself and, more specifically, on the relationship between the dynamics of the theatrical event and the representation of the dramatic text. Beckett’s destruction of tragic drama reveals the limits of a theatre based on the Aristotelian muthos (plot). Through a discussion of

Nietzsche’s and Wagner’s revival of tragedy, I evaluate how Beckett’s plays pose the question of whether the formal requirement of the Aristotelian form of drama may account for the modern experience of alienation for which that form may no longer be suitable.

The third chapter deals with Marguerite Duras’ Moderato cantabile, which is an immersion in bourgeois Anne Desbaresde’s vie tranquille. The wife of a rich industrialist,

Anne decides to take her son to piano lesson in order to escape the prison of her bourgeois existence. One of the piano lessons is interrupted by a piercing scream coming from a nearby café. We learn that a murder has occurred. Anne joins the crowd of people gathered in front of the café; they are observing the body of a dead woman and her killer, who was also her love, lying in grief on top of her. The next day, Anne ventures into the café with her son, sits at the bar and orders a glass of wine. This is when she meets the character Chauvin, and begins a daily ritual for the next six days. While her son is in his piano lesson, Anne drinks wine with Chauvin and discusses the relationship between the killer and the victim. Through intoxication and the recreation of the events that led to the murder Anne falls in love with Chauvin. In Duras, the fire of passion is an excess, an expenditure that carries Anne down the lethal path of jouissance. When the unrepresentable is articulated into language, it is inscribed in the logic of representation

83 that it exceeds. The appeal to music in Moderato Cantabile is an attempt to address this contradiction. While music has always been given pride of place in Duras’ works, it is with this novel that the writer first takes music as a model to unsettle realist narration and structure the novel. In particular, Duras transposes musical time onto literary narrative, exploiting the link between repetition and intensity as the singularity of the experience of music. Repetition is the stylistic medium that allows Duras to mark the presence of opaque, unbearable, and explosive jouissance, a repetition that music announces but barely contains.

The fourth chapter is a study of Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein, which goes further in the unsettling of the unity of plot and character and in its exploration of feminine negativity. The novel is the attempted narrative of Lola Valerie Stein’s fall into psychosis during a summer ball at the seaside resort of T. Beach. During the ball her fiancé is enraptured and taken away by the mysterious Anne-Marie Stretter. Lol is the helpless witness of the scene, which leads her in the throws of madness. We meet her ten years after the tragic event as she has reached apparent remission, and we witness the events that slowly lead to the return of madness. Le Ravissement is characterized by an elliptic writing whose uncompleted sentences with dots have a pronounced musical effect. Duras leaves behind energetically parsimonious forms, such as the form of the sonatina that served as a model for Moderato Cantabile. Through the rapture of Lol V.

Stein, literature now fixes its unblinking gaze at the unbearable and the unreconciled. The sublime feeling appears as an irresolvable conflict, as a limit-experience that displaces the boundary between what Bataille calls the profane and the sacred, and which

84 constitutes an attempt at exceeding the relative comfort of the beautiful, moving toward the properly inhuman, the monstrous.

In Moderato Cantabile and Le Ravissement, the ethical moment lies in the confrontation with one of the central paradoxes of bourgeois culture—namely, the fact that the bourgeoisie hallows a concept, that of Romantic love, which is utterly adverse to it. Love is the “impossible” of bourgeois society, if by impossible is understood the aporetic element that bourgeois ideology cannot take into account without shattering its epistemological and ontological foundations. With Duras literature becomes a limit- experience, an asymptotic approach of the lethal field of jouissance, where each work attempts to reach the point of life that lies as close as possible to the impossibility of living, beyond the lived and the livable, so much so that one may even go so far as proposing that it is the limit-experience, in place of a traditional narrative, that structures both novels.

Part I

Samuel Beckett’s Reinvention of Tragic Drama, Sublimation or Destruction?

Chapter I

“Sound as a Bell”: Samuel Beckett’s Musical Destruction of Aristotelian Tragic Drama46

The inexplicable depth of all music, by virtue of which it floats past us as a paradise quite unfamiliar and yet eternally remote, and is so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain…. How full of meaning and significance the language of music is we see from the repetition of signs, as well as from the Da capo which would be intolerable in the case of works composed in the language of words. In music, however, they are appropriate and beneficial; for to comprehend it fully, we must hear it twice. —Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation 264

What matters who’s speaking, someone said, what matters who’s speaking. —Samuel Beckett, Stories and Texts for Nothing 85

Music plays an important part in Samuel Beckett’s writings, not only through the abundant references to specific musical works, but as an influence on the structure of his plays and the orchestration of movement and sound made by characters and props.

Beckett was himself a dexterous pianist and had an extensive knowledge of music. His

46 This chapter is an extended version of “‘Sound as a Bell’: Samuel Beckett’s Musical Destruction of Aristotelian Tragic Drama.” Journal of Modern Literature 40.4 (Summer 2017), © Indiana University Press.

87 works and letters teem with references to composers, including Beethoven, Schoenberg,

Schubert, and Wagner. At the very beginning of his writing career, Beckett in Proust

(1931) follows Schopenhauer in casting music as a superior art form in relation to which literature appears impoverished and necessarily lacking. In his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1931—posthumously published in 1992), he expresses fascination with Beethoven’s compositions “eaten away with terrible silences” (138). Later, in a

1937 letter to Axel Kaun, he proposes to destroy language, arguing that he “cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today” (Disjecta 172). Literature, writes Beckett, has to be freed from the “old lazy ways” so long ago abandoned by music, going so far as using

Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony as a template for the development of a literature of the

“unword” (173). Beckett hints at the possibility of boring “one hole after another” in language “so that through whole pages we can perceive nothing but a path of sounds suspended in giddy heights, linking unfathomable abysses of silence” (172).

Recent works in literary criticism have underlined the importance of reassessing the role of music in Beckett’s plays. The collection of essays Samuel Beckett and Music

(1998) and Samuel Beckett and the Arts (1999) have brought invaluable insights into the musicality of Beckett’s works. Deborah Weagel’s Words and Music (2010) also devotes two chapters to Beckett’s engagement with music. While these writings focus on local case studies, this essay proposes to consider Beckett’s “musicalization” of theatre as an aesthetic program in its own right, exploring Beckett’s vision of music as an ideal and inassimilable “other” that paves the way for new literary and theatrical criteria. More specifically, I evaluate music’s importance in Beckett’s subversion of the codes of

88 classical tragedy as enunciated by Aristotle.

Throughout his career as a playwright, Beckett developed a highly idiosyncratic understanding of tragedy, digressing methodically from the dramatic conventions laid out in The Poetics, which give pride of place to the concept of muthos (plot). Beckett’s plays contain gaps and holes that cannot be accounted for in Aristotle’s reformulation of tragedy, which privileges logical, linear unfolding and unfailing teleology. By achieving what Schopenhauer thought “intolerable,” that is, bringing the “language of music” to bear on the “language of words,” Beckett disrupts, and eventually destroys, the chain of cause and effect that makes up the Aristotelian plot, which includes in logical order hamartia (tragic mistake), peripeteia (twists and turns), anagnorisis (a change from ignorance to knowledge), catastrophe (denouement), and catharsis (purging). The controlled and organized meaninglessness of Beckett’s plays take the project of the dissolution of language to a whole new level. Words are not only poised on the edge of being mere sounds, they are also orchestrated in a subtle web of sounds that moves away from what John Cage calls the “sacred” (i.e., traditional) understanding of music to embrace a “minor” or “minimalist” understanding of music as “organization of sounds”

(Silence 3).

Beckett claimed that he turned to theatre in 1949 to get away “from the wildness and rulelessness” of the “awful prose I was writing at the time” (Bair 381), that is, his trilogy of novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable). Thus, Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot with the firm intention to uphold the dramatic unity of time and place, which reveals his desire for more confined and better-controlled structures. I argue that

Endgame (1957) and Krapp’s Last Tape (1958—henceforth Krapp) constitute a turning point in the playwright’s experimentation with dramatic meticulousness and precision. In that regard, the recent publication of the third volume of Beckett’s letters reflects the playwright’s obsession with mime at the time of the composition of both plays. In a 14

January 1957 letter to Alan Simpson, Beckett writes that he first envisioned the mime Act

Without Words I as a “codicil” to Endgame (Craig et al. 64), but the “black act” was rejected by the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre in Paris, which was supposed to produce both plays on the same ticket. The mime was to be accompanied by music by John Beckett and

Samuel Beckett’s comments emphasize that the music is to be “very closely tied up with the action of the mime” (14). To be sure, Beckett’s interest in mime bespeaks an aspiration for greater precision in the choreography of movement that transpires in

Endgame and Krapp. In a 12 April 1958 letter to Jacob van Velde, Beckett explains that he wrote Krapp to replace Act Without Words I, “which no one seems to want” (131).

Krapp, which was to be played as a first part to Endgame, opens with a mime where the only protagonist, Krapp, treads and slips on a banana peel, nearly falls, stoops and peers at the peel and finally pushes it over the edge of the stage. We will see how the “precise and rhythmical” choreography of Act Without Words I (14) survives in the very scrupulous co-ordination of gesture, sound, and speech that animates Krapp throughout the play.

More generally, through a study of Endgame and Krapp, I will analyze the paradoxical modalities of Beckett’s expressionism because it seems predicated on a rejection of the notion of expressive center. Unlike Aristotelian drama, which centers the

90 subject as the causal force from which narrative unfolds (i.e., in Aristotle’s terminology: the “efficient cause”), Beckett’s dramaturgy fashions the subject as a result, or, to be more specific, a “reject” in the etymological sense of the term (from the Latin reiectare

“throw away, cast away”), deploying therefore a tragic understanding of existence based on a sense of irredeemable ontological homelessness.47 Beckett’s staging brings drama to its limit by depriving the characters of determinate capacities to act on matter and exhausting their capacity to idealize, so much so that they “see their light dying” as

Endgame’s Clov puts it (8).

Yet, this discussion should not be restricted to questions of vision. In Beckett’s post-Schopenhauerian universe, art tends to reveal a “musical unconscious,” to borrow

Schoenberg’s expression. Such an unconscious leads to a de-centering of the characters: they know nothing about it even when it is obviously “ordering” their actions and desires.

Composer Luciano Berio argued that “meanings, in Beckett’s plays, seem to take place and shape somewhere else, behind the shoulders of the speakers, of ‘narrators’ like

Hamm, Estragon, Vladimir, Krapp, and in spite of them” (190). This beyond is a place that literature and music share, one that lies in the connection between “the obsessive, pseudo-realistic descriptions of Beckett and the non-realistic, non-representational experience of music” (190). In the two plays under consideration, we will see that this place is not unlike Molloy’s “distant music,” which happens at “a lower frequency, or a higher, than that of ratiocination […] pure sounds, free of all meanings” (Three Novels

45). In Endgame and Krapp, this Pythagorean music, which sends Molloy “out in the

47 Beckett’s characters are not simply “thrown into the world” as Heidegger would have it, but thrown away. The paradigm of being “thrown away into the world” is well expressed in Beckett’s Act without Words I where the protagonist is literally thrown onto a stage from which he cannot escape.

91 heart again of the pre-established harmony, which makes so sweet a music, for one who has an ear for music” (57), loses its harmonious quality and drags the characters to the bitter or “intolerable” end, to use Schopenhauer’s word.

Towards a Musical Definition of Beckett’s Expressionism

Endgame and Krapp are not typically the first plays that come to mind when analyzing the role of music in Beckett’s corpus. One would first think about the radio plays, such as Words and Music (1962), with music composed by Morton Feldman, in which music appears in the guise of “Bob,” a human character in the play, and Cascando

(1963), with music composed by Michel Mihalovici. Play (1963) also comes to mind, with its chorus for three voices, orchestrated like a musical score (with directions for the tone, volume, and tempo) and its repetition of the play da capo; Ghost Trio (1976), which uses the Largo of Beethoven’s 5th Piano Trio, Opus 70, Nº1; or even Not I (1972) in which the actress Billie Whitelaw, whose mouth is the only thing visible on stage, recites for about twelve minutes a logorrheic monologue made of jumbled, fragmented sentences at a ferocious pace. As Whitelaw argued, “I’ve been practicing saying words at a tenth of a second… No one can possibly follow that text at that speed but Beckett insists that I speak it precisely. It’s like music, a piece of Schoenberg in his head.”48 Although Words and Music and Cascando, are highly innovative in making music appear as an autonomous member of the cast, they might lead us astray in our attempt to excavate the

48 James Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p.529

92 workings of the musical unconscious. In these two plays, music, in the traditional sense of the term, acts as a corrective to words. As Katharine Worth argues,

The experience of ‘hearing’ the text suggested that it could be taken as an oblique statement about the shaping power of music in poetic composition. The words of poem had their own source and force but stumbled till they followed the shape music dictated. Melody and rhythm were in the end what made them ‘right’ and released the meaning they were seeking. (16)

In Endgame and Krapp, this process is reversed. Beckett insists precisely on making words stumble, liberating them from their subordination to meaning-making strategies. Rather, spirituality turns into a kind of second-degree materiality. Words no longer have to be made “right” by the shaping power of music. When talking about dissolving “that terrible materiality of the word surface” (Disjecta 172), Beckett repeats

Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the veil of Mâyâ.49 As he put it, “more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it.” (171) If Beckett’s texts are full of ellipses and ruptures, those “unfathomable abysses of silence,” it is to persistently put to the fore the sensual, sounding, and rhythmic quality of words above their ideal, representational meaning. The dissolution of ideality allows for an obscure music to emerge from the blind materiality of words and from their articulation in the subtle web of rhythms that structures the plays.

In other words, Endgame and Krapp can be seen as works of sublimation where the void still belongs to a structure, however faint it may be.

49 Schopenhauer drew on the “ancient wisdom of the Indians” stating that “it is Mâyâ, the veil of deception, which cover the eyes of mortals, and causes them to see a world of which one cannot say either that it is or that it is not, for it is like a dream, like the sunshine on the sand which the traveler from a distance takes to be water, or like the piece of rope on the ground which he regards as a snake.” (World as Will and Representation, vol. I, 8)

In the dark world of Endgame and Krapp, the secret music of words has no redeeming powers. In a 1957 letter to Alan Schneider, Beckett explains that Clov’s remark on the fact that he sees his light dying is an allusion to Acts 2.17: “And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams” (Beckett, Letters 3 72). Beckett describes the light as an

“escape mechanism,” implying that Hamm and Clov “endure their ‘thing’ by projecting away from it” (72). And yet, the old men of Endgame and Krapp are not granted the luxury of “dreaming dreams.” As the Spirit of God fails to redeem their earthly vessels, their visions fade away, and what remains is this “last extremity of human meat—or bones […] thinking and stumbling and sweating under our nose” (64). In Beckett’s plays

Godot never comes, the Other is no longer “supposed to know” anything. While Beckett brings his characters to the edge of the void, his antiheroes do not appear to be capable of transgressing the limit at which meaning fully coincides with emptiness; rather, they collapse in front of it. Hamm, Clov, and Krapp cling to the debris of the imaginary order although their existence is clearly undercut by the presence of monstrous Nothingness.

For Lacan it is at that very limit, faced with the possibility of completely losing the support of the Other’s ideals that the tragic hero, as primitive architecture, comes unto itself.

Beckett’s revival of the tragic is diametrically opposed to Eugene O’Neill’s conviction that the playwright must “dig at the roots of the sickness of today – the death of the Old God and the failure of Science and Materialism to give any satisfying new One

94 for the surviving primitive religious instinct to find a meaning of life in, and to comfort his fears of death with” (Selected Letters of Eugene O’Neill 311). O’Neill urged writers to revive a religious vision in an all too secular world, claiming that his objective as a playwright was to depict the “transfiguring nobility … in seemingly the most ignoble, debased lives. … I’m always acutely conscious of the Force Behind – Fate, God, our biological past creating our present, whatever one calls it – Mystery, certainly – and of the one eternal tragedy of Man in his glorious, self-destructive struggle” (195). As opposed to this, the only fatum undergirding the Beckettian tragic is the psychoanalytic model of repetition-compulsion, that is, a sterile kind of repetition that produces no difference or has extinguished all potentials as in Endgame where nature has completely disappeared.

If God seems to have vanished, both plays nevertheless preserve the tragic vision of theatre as the site of a symbolic agôn between visible forms and invisible forces. The unfathomable will of the Gods that influenced the heroes’ fates in Greek tragedy gives way to a musica arcana, a secret music that emerges from the frail materiality of words, the grain of voices threatened by extinction, and the rusty movements of worn out bodies.

In that regard, Beckett produces an absolutely modern form of tragedy, applying what psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan considers “the true formula of atheism”: “God is not dead,

God is unconscious.”50 Indeed, for Beckett, as for Lacan, the idea of God as unconscious

50 “The true formula of atheism is not God is dead—even by basing the origin of the function of the father upon his murder, Freud protects the father—the true formula of atheism is God is unconscious” (Lacan 69- 70). Lacan expresses in nuce his reappraisal of Freud by advancing the idea that the unconscious is structured like a language. Following Lévi-Strauss, Lacan argues that the unconscious is not made up of desire or representations—it is always empty, merely consisting of the structural laws that it imposes on representations and desires, just as in Endgame where Hamm and Clov are subjected to the rules of chess.

95 implies the redefinition of the unconscious as an impalpable, non-substantial, and decentered ordering principle that, as we might say in the manner of Beckett, stirs the goings-on.

Hence, we shall see how the Beckettian unconscious emerges from a clinically orchestrated dissolution of language that proceeds according to musical, albeit minimalist, modalities of expression. Much like Schoenberg’s dodecaphonic music, which, Adorno argues, “finds all its happiness, all its beauty in forbidding itself the appearance of the beautiful” (1974: 127), Beckett’s musical minimalism does away with harmonious form, negating the possibility advanced in Dream of fair to Middling Women that “we could write a little book that would be purely melodic, think how nice that would be, linear, a lovely Pythagorean chain-chant solo of cause and effect, a one-figured teleophony that would be a pleasure to hear” (10).51 As Adorno cryptically remarked in one of his unpublished notebook,

in empirical existence there are innumerable situations which – detached from their pragmatic and psychological context – objectively assume an expression of their own. An old man takes a nap and pulls a handkerchief over his eyes. Completely harmless in natural life: the horror that emanates from it when isolated in a tableau vivant. B[eckett]’s method consists in releasing such situations and their expression, assembling them in a second, autonomous context. Affinity with the relationship between music and intentions. In a desultory way already in Kafka; in B[eckett] turned into a consistent principle (like serial music vis-à-vis Schönberg).52

51 It should be noted that Beckett does not allow for the development of a musical organic whole as halfway through the novel “the whole fabric comes unstitched, it goes ungebunden, the wistful fabric. The music comes to pieces. The notes fly about all over the place, a cyclone of electrons” (Dream of Fair to Middling Women, 113) 52 Adorno’s Notes on Beckett, Journal of Beckett Studies 19.2 (2010), p.159

In this excerpt it seems like Adorno concurs with the idea that the stylistic challenge of Beckett’s plays lies in the rearticulation of the ruins of meaningful speech and action in a second, autonomous context that resembles musical composition. Music was central to Beckett’s concerns when he wrote Endgame. As Knowlson remarks, the playwright attempted “to shape it into an intricate musical patterning of themes and variations” (384). Beckett argues that everything is absolutely necessary in the play: “No, there are no accidents in Endgame, it is all built on analogies and repetitions” (qtd. in

Gontarski xiii). The decomposition of meaning and ideality is conducted by the affirmation of an obscure, impersonal, and structural music, which signals Beckett’s new approach to writing, displaying ever-greater meticulousness and dramatic precision. As

Hamm put it, “the end is in the beginning and yet you go on” (Endgame 35). While, as

Beckett explains, this sentence points toward “the impossibility of catastrophe” (Letters 3

73), it can also be understood as a meta-commentary on the musical configuration of the play. Indeed, insofar as structure is concerned, Beckett’s play resembles Beethoven’s

Fifth Symphony where, as Adorno remarks, the whole symphony is contained in the first movement of the composition: “the Nothing of the first bars [makes] the Everything of the total movement” (Essays on Music 259).53 Beckett’s notebooks abound in very precise stage directions regarding the timing of pauses, rhythm, tempo, duration, tone, pitch, and audibility. The laconic pianissimo of Endgame’s dialogues, the seemingly random utterances, or the character’s noises should not be mistaken for a series of

53 This point is further substantiated by Beckett’s remark on the lack of musical sensibility of producers: “Producers don’t seem to have any sense of form in movement, the kind of forms one finds in music, for instance, where themes keep recurring. When, in a text, actions are repeated, they ought to be made unusual the first time, so that when they happen again—in exactly the same way—an audience will recognize them from before.” (Cited in Cohn, Back to Beckett, p.188)

97 unsystematic impulses arbitrarily brought together by the author. Such an interpretation overlooks what composer Morton Feldman calls Beckett’s “clinical understanding” (qtd. in Frost 51), which is to say the musical precision of the play that is expressed by Clov’s remarks on his kitchen: “Nice dimensions, nice proportions” (Endgame 3).

When an anguished Hamm asks what is happening, Clov cryptically answers

“something is taking its course” (9). While Clov may be hinting at the ars combinatoria of chess, a central motif in the play, this sentence may also be a meta-commentary on the musical structure of Endgame. This minimalist music, this “something” that would be

“taking its course,” takes concrete form in the goalless, pendular movement of the dialogues. We catch the characters desperately cling to old habits, like Hamm who tries to find comfort in repetition: “Ah the old questions, the old answers, there’s nothing like them!” (21)

Beckett’s characters are caught in a moto perpetuo and yet nothing seems to change. The repetition of the same words, the same questions and conversations, hinders the possibility of change. As Lois More Overbeck points out, “each time that Clov says

‘I’ll leave you,’ Hamm ignores the threat by initiating another gambit; he asks an old question and expects an old answer.”54 The dialogues are so worn out that they are emptied of content, lose their intentional character, and thus come close to the language of music. For, unlike intentional language, in music form cannot be separated from content: form and content become undistinguishable.55 Talking about the exchanges

54 Lois M. Overbeck, “’Getting On’: Ritual as Façon in Beckett’s Plays,” Myth and Ritual, p.22 55 This is at least Pierre Boulez’s argument: “in music there is no opposition between form and content, between abstract on the one hand and concrete on the other.” (Boulez on Music Today, 32)

98 between Nagg and Nell, Hamm’s parents, Lawrence Shainberg argued that “each

[exchange] was a measure, clearly defined, like a jazz riff, subordinated to the rhythm of the whole.”56 The endless, shady coming and going of dialogical interactions sunders the links between words and their referents. This has the effect of unfixing materiality from ideality, which is suggested in the characters’ incapacity to move beyond empty sentences and reach lyricism.57 The exhaustion of the denotative function of language, like the separation of utterances from the recondite topic of conversations, forces us to dwell in the liminal space that separates sound and meaning. As a result, characters and spectators become a tympanum; as the narrator of The Unnamable puts it:

…I’ll have said it inside me, then in the same breath outside me, perhaps that’s what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I’m neither one side nor the other, I’m in the middle, I’m the partition, I’ve two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that’s what I feel, myself vibrating, I’m the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don’t belong to either… (Three Novels 373)

In that in-between space, means and ends, form and content, structure and meaning collapse on each other, and therefore become indistinguishable.58 Thus,

Beckett’s dissolution of language introduces “a dissonance between the means and their use” (Disjecta 172), in other words, between the materiality and the ideality of words themselves. As a result, words survive only in a basic, decayed form and meaning loses

56 Lawrence Shainberg, “Exorcising Beckett,” The Paris Review, n°104, Fall 1987, p.119 57 The opaque materiality of words, which preexist the subject, makes language an alienating object that threatens to choke the characters. This fact is well expressed by Malone’s depiction of words as “nourishing murk” (Three Novels, 193), which upends the Romantic idea of language as the medium of self-expression, that one can elevate oneself with lyrical overtones. For Malone language is rather about digestive undertones. 58 This in-between space becomes the fundamental theme of Neither, the 56 lines poem that was composed at the request of Morton Feldman in order to be converted into an opera in 1961.

99 its capacity to cast its reifying shadow on materiality, for it no longer stands apart from the process of its own exhaustion. Whereas Proust’s impressionism made the most of the conflation between form and content, in Beckett’s plays this same conflation has lost the capacity to reveal new worlds; Vinteuil’s sonata can no longer revive a world of past sensations.59 It is in this sense that Beckett’s expressionism resembles a “musique de l’indifférence” as his eponymous poem goes.60 To be sure, Beckett’s poetics succeeds in blending the clarity of logic and the opacity of enigma, reviving therefore Leibniz’s view of music as “occult arithmetic.” The minimalist music avoids any sense of development and exposes the characters to the abstemious, detached, and impersonal machinery of the play, which may explain why Endgame’s characters are caught in a static penumbra.

Time does not progress, and yet it cannot be said to stand still. Rather, time unfolds like a metronome, producing a minimalist rhythm that is not dissimilar to the murmurs that nag the narrator of Texts for Nothing.61

While Proust’s search of lost time still harbors the Symbolist obsession with the redolent power of words to unveil hidden worlds of essences, Beckett’s depiction of experience, plagued by what the hero of the Unnamable calls “incomprehensible

59 “For Proust the quality of language is more important than any system of ethics or aesthetics. Indeed he makes no attempt to dissociate form from content. The one is the concretion of the other, the revelation of a world” (Beckett, Proust 67). 60 “musique de l’indifférence / cœur temps air feu sable / du silence éboulements d’amours / couvre leurs voix et que / je ne m’entende plus / me taire” (Poèmes : suivi de mirlitonnades, 13). The end of the poem suggests (“that I no longer hear myself hush up”) the incapacity to express together with the obligation to express. 61 “And were there one day to be here, where there are no days, which is no place, born of the impossible voice the unmakable being, and a gleam of light, still all would be silent and empty and dark, as now, as soon now, when all will be ended, all said, it sais, it murmurs.” (“Text 13,” 140)

100 damnation” (Three Novels 302), comes closer to Dante’s allegorical vision of the world.62

Endgame and Krapp present us with an absurd world where solitude, meaninglessness, obsessive behavior, and wearying repetition constitute the unsurpassable horizon of the tragic. Beckett qualified Proust’s style as impressionist because of its penchant for plurality, which rendered a present bristling with alternatives, a present in which the multiplicity of the past could be made vividly available. Beckett was interested in

Proust’s presentation of experience before the intellect’s imposition of a grid of intelligibility on phenomena, or, in other words, in the fact that he does not “raise himself artificially out of Time.”63 In Proust’s impressionist prose, the narrator comes into being through his self-perceptions, therefore creating himself through narration: “we are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other, no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday” (13). If in Proust’s impressionism one could still explore the unsuspected delights hidden in the infinite folds of time, in Beckett’s world there is no potential for recreation, even less for procreation because, as in Molloy’s testicles, “there was nothing more to be squeezed, not a drop. So that non che la speme il desiderio, and I longed to see them gone, from the old stand where they bore false witness, for and against, in the lifelong charge against me” (Three Novels, 31). As Beckett’s paraphrase of

Leopardi goes, there is no more hope (speme) and desire (desiderio), and Beckett’s plays

62 Unlike the Divine Comedy, Beckett preserves the mystery of the suffering of existence, which is uncoupled from transcendent meaning. As Mary Bryden argued, “in the Divine Comedy universe, the mental and physical are wedded together, with every punishment tailored to the nature of the sin, so that a physical assault has ‘meaning’ within the psyche of the recipient” (Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God 157). 63 In his encomium of Proust Beckett argues that the French “impressionist” is the opposite of the classical artist who “assumes omniscience and omnipotence [and] raises himself out of Time in order to give relief to his chronology and causality to his development.” (Proust, 62) In impressionist fashion, Proust does not simply explain his characters: “his explanations are experimental and not demonstrative. He explains them in order that they may appear as they are—inexplicable.” (Proust, 67)

101 further empty the “scene of presence,”64 to use Derrida’s words, giving expression to an irremediable sense of exhaustion.65

Hamm, Clov, and Krapp are not tragic heroes in the sense that, unlike Oedipus at

Colonus or Antigone, they do not reach what Lacan sees as the “tragic liberty” of the hero freely consenting to his malediction “on the basis of the true subsistence of a human being, the subsistence of the subtraction of himself from the order of the world” (Seminar

VII 306). Rather, Beckett’s anti-heroes seem to be tragic incarnations of what

Schopenhauer saw as the vain striving of the will-to-live (Wille zum Leben). For

Schopenhauer the human world is an endlessly repetitive universe where the entire history of humanity is but the blind re-enactment of the same events. The movement of history is but the product of a vain desire for novelty, which Schopenhauer describes as a form of self-affliction. Schopenhauer goes so far as to write that “the true sense of tragedy is the deeper insight that what the hero atones for is not his own particular sins, but original sin, in other words, the guilt of existence itself” (World as Will and

Rrepresentation I 254). The ascetic’s attitude of total renunciation, his voluntary poverty and chastity, seeks to overcome a less universal manifestation of the Will, namely, the embodied, desiring aspect, these “last extremities of meat and bones.” The philosopher should overcome his own humanity, which dwells in a finite desire restricted to spatial

64 Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophie, p.13. The proximity of Derrida to Beckett was acknowledged by the former. As he put it: “the composition, the rhetoric, the construction and the rhythm of his works, even the ones that seem the most ‘decomposed,’ that’s what ‘remains’ finally the most ‘interesting,’ that’s the work, that’s the signature, this remainder that remains when the thematics is exhausted.” (“This Strange Institution Called Literature,” Acts of Literature, 61) 65 Looking back, Marcel argues: “music, very different in this respect from Albertine’s society, helped me to descend into myself to discover new things: the variety that I had sought in vain in life, in travel, but a longing for which was none the less renewed in me by this sonorous tide whose sunlit waves now came to expire at my feet.” (“The Captive and The Fugitive”: In Search of Lost Time, vol. V, p.206)

102 and temporal forms of knowledge that only generate a constant passing away, continual suffering, and vain striving. For Schopenhauer finite desire only oscillates between two poles: lack and boredom. The oscillation may be stopped only through the radical annihilation of desire, the complete ataraxia of the ascetic.

In Samuel Beckett’s Real Silence Helen Baldwin rightly underlines that Beckett’s works are haunted by the desire to reach a “direct experience of the Absolute of

Unconditional Being,” arguing that his major works “may be seen as a cumulative metaphor for the mystic quest,” specifically the “negative way” of renunciation (16). In

Beckett this passion for the metaphysical takes the form of the quest for a “whisper of that final music or that silence that underlies all” (Disjecta 172). It is a quest contemplated through the destruction of language, a destruction of “human, all too human” epistemological and imaginative limitations. As such, Endgame and Krapp can be read as experiments in, or exploration of, the field of das Ding. According to Lacan’s reading of Freud in Seminar VII, the entirety of psychical life is limited to the domains of

Sache (object) and Wort (word) whereas das Ding belongs to an extra-psychical dimension. Die Sache belongs to the symbolic realm; it is “ a product of industry and of human action as governed by language.” If die Sache is the object of our unconscious desire, it belongs to a realm that is absolutely disjointed from that of das Ding. Das Ding is “that which I will call the beyond-of-the-signified and is constituted in a kind of relationship characterized by primary affect, prior to any representation” (Seminar VII

54). Beckett’s plays evacuate the world of objects; they are rather animated by a desire for the Thing as the lethal abyss, the pre-historical, unconditioned void that threatens to

103 engulf the subject. Yet, like Schopenhauer, Beckett believes that the Thing remains inaccessible to the human all too human and that intimacy with, or possession of, the

Thing can only be hallucinated through the fantasmatic object, the object a.

Despite the effort to destroy language in order to get at this beyond-of-the- signified, das Ding still eludes representation. Beckett often liked to dramatize the idea that the human world is governed by the symbolic, “that the things of the human world are things in a universe structured by words, that language, symbolic processes, dominate, govern all” (Seminar VII 45). In the French version of The Unnamable Beckett writes: “je suis en mots, je suis fait de mots, des mots des autres… des mots, je suis tous ces mots, tous ces étrangers, cette poussière de verbe, sans fond où se poser” (166). As in

Endgame, the existence of the speaking being is, to quote Derrida, limited to “this bottomless chessboard on which Being is put into play” (Dissemination 22).66 Eventually,

Beckett proves the impossibility inherent in the Schopenhauerian ideal of the longing for death. Between language and “that final music or that silence” there is the barrier of what

Lacan calls the death drive, which “is only the mask of the symbolic order” (Seminar II

326). In Seminar VII Lacan warns us not to confuse the death drive with Schopenhauer’s longing for death, which recalls Freud’s description in Beyond the Pleasure Principle of a yearning of life to return to an inorganic state (202). The death drive is not the effort to

66 Beckett might be referring to the pathos of l’entrée en je, the tragic atê that arises from the fact that the child is born into a network of symbols that shapes her destiny throughout life and beyond her death. In a conversation with Charles Juliet Beckett said that he has “always had the feeling that there was within [him] an assassinated being, assassinated before [his] birth” (Rencontre avec Samuel Beckett 14). The castrated condition of the speaking being is suggested in the advice given by Beckett during the staging of Company, which is that “special attention” should be paid “to words like terminé, for the accent on the last syllable is also heard in né” (qtd. In Ricks’ Beckett’s Dying Words 40). This fundamentally tragic outlook on existence is to be found in Beckett’s Sophoclean motto : “the only sin is the sin of being born.” (“Samuel Beckett Talks About Beckett”, interview with John Gruen, Vogue (December 1969), p. 210). Beckett repeats here Sophocles’ alleged statement: “it is best never to have been born.”

104 achieve ultimate equilibrium, the release from tensions, but the undead life-force that even the will-less ascetic may never get rid of. The death drive, as the mask of the symbolic order, is an impersonal machine following its own laws beyond the pleasure principle, a mechanism that, by means of its automatism, disturbs the subject’s imaginary coherence.67 While Schopenhauer’s ascetic annihilates his own will to make one with the universal Will, we may only speculate as to whether Beckett’s anti-heroes are ever able to hear a “whisper of that final music or that silence that underlies all.” Das Ding is the buried jouissance that hides beyond the fantasmatic veil, yet it is a jouissance that remains utterly inaccessible to language, however destroyed it may be. Hamm and Clov are stuck in an endgame that never ends while Krapp reaches the abyss only through death, at the very end of a life dominated by repetition.

The comic dimension of Beckett’s plays lies in the characters’ incapacity to face the Nothing. In Seminar VII, Lacan makes a distinction between comedy and tragedy, depicting them as opposite though not incompatible dimensions of human experience.

Both genres dramatize the alienation of desire owing to the subject’s inherence in the symbolic order. While tragedy implies a lucid face to face with death, comedy stems from the perpetual metonymy of desire, from the fact that “life slips away, runs off, escapes all those barriers that oppose it” (314). In Beckett there is neither the epiphany of knowledge, the embrace of the true being-for-death proper to tragedy, nor the hope of reconciliation characteristic of comedy. As Lacan puts it, even if the comic hero, in his

67 The symbolic order “isn’t the libidinal order in which the ego is inscribed, along with all the drives. It tends beyond the pleasure principle, beyond the limits of life, and that is why Freud identifies it with the death instinct. [...] The symbolic order is rejected by the libidinal order, which includes the whole of the domain of the imaginary, including the structure of the ego. And the death instinct is only the mask of the symbolic order...” (Seminar II 326)

105 hopeless pursuit of happiness, “trips up and lands in the soup, the little fellow nevertheless survives” (314). In Beckett, while the hero survives the absurdity of existence, he neither finds solace and reconciliation through meaning nor through the ethical act of sublimation.

To borrow Beckett’s comments on the work of the painter Tal Coat, it is fair to say that in the compulsive universe of both plays “there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express” (Proust 103). Eventually, Beckett’s expressionism does not give expression to the sublime “final music or that silence that underlies all”; rather, it resembles a “musique de l’indifférence,” as his eponymous poem goes,68 a minimalist music that avoids any sense of development and exposes the characters to the abstemious, detached, and impersonal machinery of the plays, which may explain why Endgame’s characters are caught in a static penumbra.

In a 29 December 1957 letter to Alan Schneider, Beckett writes, “my work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended), made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them” (Letters 3 82). The idea of focusing on the fundamental sound instead of the overtone expresses the economy of means displayed by Beckett’s music.69 In musical language, an overtone is an acoustical frequency that is higher than and simultaneous

68 “musique de l’indifférence / cœur temps air feu sable / du silence éboulements d’amours / couvre leurs voix et que / je ne m’entende plus / me taire” (Poèmes 13). 69 This tendency to go back to the fundamental sound is demonstrated by Ping (1966), whose meaningless title only refers to a quick sound, so instantaneous that it barely lays claims to existence. The fact that the names of several of Beckett’s heroes are crippled (Hamm, Clov, Nagg, Nell, Pegg, Krapp in the plays under consideration, or even more so Pim, Krim, Kram, Pam Prim, or Bom of How it is or Bom, Bim or Bem in the stage play What Where) also point to Beckett’s concern for fundamental sounds.

106 with the fundamental frequency of a given sound. By refusing “to be involved in exegesis of any kind” and insisting on “the extreme simplicity of dramatic situation and issue”

(82), Beckett breaks with the prophetic duty of the artist articulated in Plato’s Ion, that is, the idea of the poet as hermeneutes, interpreter of divine injunctions. Rather than linger with the message that is intended or signified, Beckett highlights the opaque materiality of words that resist semantic reification.

Wagner implies in Opera and Drama that the timbre of instruments is equivalent to vowels, that their attack is the equivalent of consonants, and that it is possible to compose with these analogies just as a poet plays with alliterations (227). The reverse is possible too; words can become purely musical. Composer Walter Beckett, who was

Samuel’s father’s first cousin, argues that Beckett viewed words as notes; in his works

“the music is largely brought about by his use of language, the paring down of words and the length of time given to pauses or silences, thereby creating a rhythmical whole”

(181). In this sense, silence is as essential as any other note, for silence is as structural. As he goes on to argue:

I feel that Sam, with his musical knowledge—he was a competent pianist—conceived and wrote his works in a rhythmical fashion as if they were music. Words to him were notes. They had to be clear to the ear and at the same time create a word picture. The sound was to be carried through one word to the next in the same way that an accomplished singer carries the sound, on the breath, through one note to the next. (Samuel Beckett and Music 182)

As Knowlson writes in his biography, the only cultural event absent from

Beckett’s diaries was opera, which Beckett loathed “because for him it was too grandiose and unsuggestive an art form” (186). It thus seems natural that Beckett preferred the

107 understated and impressionist music of Debussy to the pathos-enhancing works of

Wagner, whom he portrays as a “roaring Meg… against melancholy” (Dream of Fair to

Middling Women 38).70

The comparison between Wagner and Beckett is interesting for, like Beckett,

Wagner makes a substantial use of repetition. It seems natural that Wagner, who believed himself to be the modern Aeschylus, considered repetition central to his works. The fact that his characters keep recapitulating their situation is not the mark of a flaw in the narrative structure, as many critics have unjustly argued, but a token of Wagner’s fidelity to the original tragedies. While in Wagner’s works repetition serves the expansion of the tragic hero through speech techniques, in Beckett’s plays repetition only shrinks subjectivity away. Tragedy is no longer a matter of amplification, but exhaustion. Music no longer translates the intensity of feeling or the turmoil of pure subjective interiority, but rather the emptying out of the self. The Wagnerian ecstatic sea of pathos gives way to

Beckett’s static wasteland.

On the Musical Unconscious in Endgame and Krapp’s Last Tape

The change of mood from ecstasy to stasis is well expressed in Endgame and

Krapp. Both plays are variations on Dante’s inferno. Indeed, the characters’ world- weariness and eternally static routines suggest that they are stuck in a state of frozen

70 In Dream of Fair to Middling Woman Beckett appears in the guise of a reluctant Belacqua who accompanies the Wagner enthusiast Liebert to a representation of Wagner at the National Academy of Music.

108 immobility. At the very beginning of Endgame, Clov tries to solve a paradox as he wonders when individual grains become a “heap.” For Clov, the heap is “impossible” because any single grain is not a heap, and a “heap” is just an accumulation of single grains. When Hamm later considers how individual moments make up a life, he comes to the same conclusion: his life has been an “impossible” life, its duration has been shattered to smithereens. Similarly, Krapp is left to contemplate the field of ruins of his life, which is suggested by the tapes left in disorder on the way from the cubby-hole to the desk.

They leave him treading a ruin-strewn land. His tapes then appear as so many futile fragments that he shored against his ruins, to use T.S. Eliot’s words.71

Endgame marks Beckett’s full-fledged commitment to annihilate the possibility of stream of consciousness that we find in his earlier plays such as Waiting for Godot72 or prose-fictions like Murphy.73 The flow of memory is constantly hampered; no fulfillment, no attainment will be possible, a theme further developed in Krapp. While in Krapp the evocations of the past appear as organic, colorful, and exciting (especially the episode with the girl in the punt), in Endgame the past is evoked with very little enthusiasm. It is almost as empty, pale, and monochrome as the present. The past may be conjured only in an abrupt decrescendo evoked in this passage by the carefully orchestrated paring down of laughter.

NAGG: Do you remember— NELL: No.

71 “These fragments I have shored against my ruin” (The Wasteland, Prufrock, and Other Poems 42). 72 Although it should be noted that Godot was revised to meet the exigencies of Beckett’s aesthetics of exhaustion. The San Quentin production of Godot insists on formal symmetry and shows Beckett’s intention to simplify the gags and reduce them to “wriggles” (qtd. in Gontarski xxii). 73 Murphy, unlike Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, has a consistent and distinct past, present, and future which validate the power of memory.

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NAGG: When we crashed on our tandem and lost our shanks. (They laugh heartily.) NELL: It was in the Ardennes. (They laugh less heartily.) NAGG: On the road to Sedan. (They laugh still less heartily.) (10)

Hamm’s parents, Nagg and Nell, who live in separate trashcans, appear as a ghostly reincarnation of the tragic chorus (an entity consigned to the grave by Plato’s

Republic but resuscitated as a background figure by Aristotle’s Poetics). As this duet tells us, recollections of the past appear as vain and merely fantastical. Unlike Oedipus and

Antigone, Beckett’s characters have lost their history, their atè has been reduced to naught; they live in a world where the past is present only as a field of ruins and where the present is limited to a quasi-mechanical sense of repetition.

Beckett’s music dissipates the veil of fantasy and prevents the characters from finding a continuity with the past, confining them to a nunc stans, the eternal present of mechanical repetition. As such, the rigidification of lived experience derives from the fact that, in both plays, the past no longer gives consistency and thickness to the present, unlike in Proust’s impressionism, which renders a present bristling with alternatives, a present in which the multiplicity of the past can be made vividly available. Hence,

Beckett’s expressionism reduces dramaturgy to an extreme economy of means, to short monosyllabic dialogues, borrowing and bending the prodigal concentration of speech essential to classical tragedies.74 In tragic art, the formal purification and elevation of speech reflects the extreme upward pressure characteristic of the tragic encounter with

74 In tragic art, the formal purification and elevation of speech reflects the extreme upward pressure characteristic of the tragic encounter with the gods, a confrontation that was formally orchestrated by the practice of stichomythia, whose alternating lines combined with swift, cutting ripostes ushered in a strong sense of rhythmic intensity that tightened to the utmost the dramatic thread of the plays.

110 the gods, a confrontation which was formally orchestrated by the practice of stichomythia, whose alternating lines combined with swift, cutting ripostes ushered in a strong sense of rhythmic intensity that tightened to the utmost the dramatic thread of the plays. The reduction of dramaturgical thickness—the exhaustion of speech, gestures, sounds, the rarity of props, as well as the reduction of stichomythia to the expression of banalities—coincides with the intensification of rhythm as the tragic expression of unsignifiable suffering.

Endgame, based on an endless series of ritardandos, expresses a sense of infinite repetition that ridicules Aristotle’s notion of peripeteia (twists and turns). The endgame never ends, something we understand from Clov’s opening lines:

Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished. (Pause.) Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there’s a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap. (Pause.) I can’t be punished any more. (Pause.) (3)

The heap will never be completed and the game goes on. The falling grains may be a metaphor for the tedious rhythm of the play, this “something dripping” inside

Hamm’s head that reduces duration to atoms of time and occasions a joke about Hamm’s heartlessness.

HAMM: There’s something dripping in my head. (Pause.) A heart, a heart in my head. (Pause.) NAGG: Do you hear him? A heart in his head! (He chuckles cautiously.) (11)

Heartbeats are central to Beckett’s music of indifference. They are like sand dripping through an hourglass, and they symbolize the reduction of psychological

111 duration to the granules of insignificance, the mark of Beckett’s expressionism.75 As

Beckett puts it in Proust, music only divulges “the invisible reality that damns the life of the body on earth as a pensum and reveals the meaning of the word defunctus” (72). This

“something dripping” is the painful experience minute by minute, second by second, grain by grain, of the inexorability of time. If Adorno preferred Beckett over Brecht, it is because in plays such as Waiting for Godot, Endgame and Krapp temporality is destroyed. The artwork no longer attempts to master time, but allows for the expression of the dreadful suffering of time as irrecuperable negativity. The characters’ rigid rhythm, their “stirring still,” implies that music is bodied forth. This music, like the heart, compels them momentarily into being.76 Indeed, as Hamm puts it, imagining life after Clov’s departure, “If I can hold my peace, and sit quiet, it will be all over with sound, and motion, all over and done with” (36).

Hamm and Clov, these “last extremit[ies] of human meat—or bones,” are in the

“endgame” of their lives, that is, the “last days” of Acts 2.17 where the Spirit of God should “pour upon all flesh.” But the endgame never ends. In this world of relentless repetition there is no καιρός [kairos]. Unlike chronos, which refers to worldly time, in the

New Testament καιρός means the divine time when things are brought to crisis, the decisive time in the purpose of God, that is, the time when God acts. According to ancient Greeks, Kairos was the god of the “fleeting moment,” he was represented with a

75 In Proust, Beckett remarked that in Proust’s impressionism “the individual is the seat of a constant process of decantation, decantation from the vessel containing the fluid of future time, sluggish, pale, and monochrome, to the vessel containing the fluid of past time, agitated and multicolored by the phenomena of its hours” (4-5). Decantation makes habit a protection from the flux of time, which becomes “the suffering of being” (8). 76 This idea was exploited to the fullest in Beckett’s first radio play, All That Fall, which is replete with the noise of “dragging feet,” “panting,” “gasps,” and “sounds of effort” (18).

112 long lock of hair on his forehead that one could grasp when chasing him. Kairos referred to a favorable opportunity that could free the individual from her fate. Such a moment must be grasped otherwise the moment is gone and cannot be re-captured.

In chess, the “endgame” is the stage of the game when few pieces are left on the board. This idea is expressed by stage directions: “Center, in an armchair on castors, covered with an old sheet, Hamm.” The center is thus not simply a metaphor for Hamm’s longing for ontological consistency, which is to say for an illusory center. Hamm, whose opening line is “Me—(he yawns)—to play” (4), is the king, the most powerful and yet most vulnerable piece on the board. The endgame is a position in which the king can be used actively, unlike the middle game when he has to be protected by pawns, such as

Clov, because of the threat of checkmate. At one point Hamm refers to Shakespeare’s

Richard III when he declares “My kingdom for a night-man!”, therefore making an allusion to a chess piece’s capture. The chess player needs to seize καιρός, the opportune time to defeat the opponent. We are in the endgame and yet the play knows no accelerandos. Rather, the game ends in a draw, a game without victor that will have to be played again tomorrow. With Endgame theatre, or, to be more specific, the Aristotelian muthos, succumbs to an échec, a check-mate, that is, an orchestrated unwording of all narrative impulses.

The game turns out to be a compulsive ritual in which Clov and Hamm obsessively verify that the latter sits at the exact center of the stage.

HAMM: Back to my place! (Clov pushes chair back to center.) Is that my place? CLOV: Yes, that’s your place. HAMM: Am I right in the center? CLOV: I’ll measure it.

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HAMM: More or less! More or less! CLOV: (moving chair slightly) There! HAMM: I’m more or less in the center? CLOV: I’d say so. HAMM: You’d say so! Put me right in the center! CLOV: I’ll go and get the tape. HAMM: Roughly! Roughly! (Clov moves chair slightly.) Bang in the center! CLOV: There! (Pause.) HAMM: I feel a little too far to the left. (Clov moves chair slightly.) Now I feel a little too far to the right. (Clov moves chair slightly.) I feel a little too far forward. (Clov moves chair slightly.) Now I feel a little too far back. (Clov moves chair slightly.) Don’t stay there. (i.e. behind the chair) You give me the shivers. (Clov returns to his place beside the chair.) (15)

In this sequence, Beckett undoes Aristotle’s emphasis on muthos, a plot composed of actions of magnitude, by reducing drama to the stultifying banality of habit. For

Aristotle “tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude” (Poetics 31). From that point of view, Beckett’s plays are imperfect,

“episodic,” because action is incomplete, partial, and of a low magnitude. Beckett disjoints the tragic whole by reinstating the “inorganic,” that is, the trivialities of the anti- heroes’ lives, into the “organic,” replacing tragic action with a relentless and wearying repetition. The compulsion to keep playing makes that life shudder on in spite of itself.

As Beckett argues, Hamm is “only trying to postpone the inevitable end. Each of his motions is one of the last useless moves that delay the end. He is a poor player”

(Endgame 49). As in Waiting for Godot, the characters are prey to a ceaseless waiting, to the repetition and absurdity of being suspended in time instead of being able to project themselves forward in a meaningful direction. The play is about waiting for waiting and eventually being imprisoned in one’s head, listening to the granules of time dripping.

114

Hamm’s hopeless desire to be at the center is exposed as an illusory and compulsive endeavor. Derrida observed that the center of a structure serves as the source of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude. In psychoanalysis, this center is consciousness or the ego, as a stable, reliable, and fixed center, while the unconscious is the unstable, volatile, and lethal subterranean process. In Endgame and Krapp the unconscious becomes the center and the self becomes marginal at its core, a primitive architecture built around the void. As Godot never arrives, meaning never concretizes and the Other loses the fantasmatic supplement that previously gave ontological consistency, stability and plenitude to the self. Both the self and the Other now appear as inconsistent, decentered, and divided by an insurmountable antagonism.

The idea of the temporal loop is also prevalent in Krapp. Whereas Hamm and

Clov are caught in a loop that never allows final closure, Krapp has lost a sense of continuity with the past and reflects on the word “spool,” a palindrome of loops. Both plays thus work toward the suspension of Aristotle’s diegesis, the narrative totality. The

Aristotelian chain of cause and effect is disrupted; its logical progression is replaced by sounds coming from a scratched record because death fails to arrive and seal off life.

Thus, it is no wonder that the only character to actually die in the plays—Nell, Hamm’s mother—is also the only character that recognizes the absurdity of the situation. By preventing his characters from reaching anagnorisis or recognition, Beckett also thwarts the possibility of catharsis and resolution.

In Krapp, the sole protagonist of the play is a failed artist. Each year since the age of 24, Krapp records his impressions of the year’s events into a tape recorder. We meet

115 him on his 69th birthday listening to a 30-year-old tape of himself as he prepares to record his memories. As in Endgame, the past seems irremediably cut off from the present. In the Schiller production notebook, Beckett underlines that the change from the young Krapp, with his tone of self-assurance, to the old one, with his feeling of overwhelming loneliness, is a musical change from a major to minor key (Endgame 153).

Krapp fails to attune to his younger self and reacts with impatience and irritation to his claims. The young Krapp who declares himself to be “sound as a—” is interrupted by the older Krapp knocking over a pile of tapes on the floor before his phrase—“sound as a bell”—is completed. At one point, Krapp daydreams about his youth and starts singing

Sabine Baring-Gould’s religious hymn “Now the Day is Over,” but is interrupted by a fit of coughing:

Now the day is over, Night is drawing nigh-igh, Shadows— (Krapp’s Last Tape 21)

This hymn, which ends with a celebration of the Spirit, tells the story of rebirth and renewal. The sacred character of the hymn ascribes theurgic powers to music as the agent of transubstantiation of matter into divine spirit. And yet, Krapp’s aborted song reverses the message of the cantus firmus, signaling the death of spirituality and the impossibility of a recuperative dawn. What Worth calls “the shaping power of music” here fails to make words “right.” Beckett shows the aporetic nature of the search of lost time, for Krapp can be read as a Proustian experiment gone wrong. As Beckett writes,

“life is habit. Or rather, life is a succession of habits, since the individual is a succession of individuals…” (Proust 18). And yet, Krapp faces the discontinuity of existence as a

116 burden, a succession of life-denying habits that do not create the world, but glaciate it.

Unlike Proust’s, Beckett’s characters can no longer explore the unsuspected delights hidden in the infinite folds of time. The episodic nature of existence makes that life is not a smooth and continuous ode, but, to paraphrase Beckett’s comments on Beethoven’s

Seventh Symphony, a minimalist music torn by enormous pauses. Through the whole play we can perceive nothing but a “path of sounds” linking “unfathomable abysses of silence” (Disjecta 172). Krapp can be seen as the theatrical counterpart of Beckett’s

Textes pour rien (1955), which refers to the musical term “mesure pour rien,” namely “a bar’s rest.” The thirteen texts appear as variations on a theme where the narrative voice fails to explain why it keeps “trying to vary”: “you never know, it’s perhaps all a question of hitting on the right aggregate” (Texts for Nothing 133). Pauses in music are as necessary a part of the score as the pauses Beckett incorporates in Endgame and Krapp.

Krapp once deliberately sought solitude, but now he is more isolated than ever:

“Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited” (8). These lines, which come back three times, can be said to constitute the refrain of the play.

Krapp blinded himself with what he calls “the fire in me” (10), which made happiness and everything else look irrelevant. The fire may be an allusion to Ovid’s Narcissus, who not only died petrified but was “worn and wasted away with love, and slowly consumed by its hidden fire” (Metamorphoses 87).77 Narcissus’s self-love deprived him of a sensual love affair with Echo. This dualism is transposed in the aesthetics of the play. Indeed, as

77 From this perspective, the old Krapp fits the description of the worn out Narcissus: “His fair complexion with its rosy flush faded away, gone was his youthful strength, and all the beauties which lately charmed his eyes. Nothing remained of that body which Echo once had loved.” (87)

117 underlined in the Schiller notebook, Krapp believes in a fundamental dualism that opposes two warring drives: the spiritual (light) to the sensual (dark) (141). Krapp’s

αµαρτία [hamartia], his tragic mistake, might thus be his idealism, which is expressed by the younger Krapp boasting about his capacity to dissolve “storm and night with the light of the understanding and the fire [in him]” (Krapp 7). The memories that the last tape churns up leave him speechless and motionless: “Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No I wouldn’t want them back” (10). As he listens to those words, the disillusioned

Krapp remains silent, “he listens dead still till the end” (10), and the audience is left listening to the empty tape running on. This dramaturgic choice prefigures plays such as

That Time (1975), where the only character in the play, the “Listener,” sits still and listens without control to his own voice, which is broken down into three strands designated as “A”, “B”, and “C”; or Nacht und Träume (1982) with his dreamer sitting at a table and listening to Schubert’s eponymous lied. For the Schiller Theatre version, the curtain no longer closes on a lit stage, the light fades on Krapp; only the “eye” of the recorder survives this moment of frozen immobility: “the tape runs on in silence. Slow fade of stage light and cubby-hole light till only light that of ‘eye’ of tape-recorder” (10).

In this scene, the luminous and the numinous die away in the same movement. With this tragic ending, the play reflects Adorno’s idea that in Beckett “aesthetic transcendence and disenchantment converge in the moment of falling mute” (Aesthetic Theory 79).

Krapp unfolds like an abrupt decrescendo. Krapp’s memories appear more and more remote, to the point that the sixty-nine-year-old seems to have lost any relation to

118 his younger self. Whereas the older Krapp drones on and speaks with a flat mechanical tone, the young Krapp speaks with arrogance and spirit. While the past appears as organic, colorful, and exciting, the present is pale and monochrome. This idea is well expressed by the lyrical episode of the girl in the punt, which recurs like a refrain three times in the play:

We drifted in among the flags and stuck. The way they went down, sighing, before the stem! [Pause.] I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side (8).

While traditionally in the language of music the recurrence of a pattern implies a sense of restoration and relaxation, the recurrence of this lyrical passage evokes irredeemable loss. Here, Beckett plays with the structure of Romantic music, which is based on a cyclical mode of composition. The principles of Romantic music, especially the intensification and amplification of subjectivity, are kept in check by Beckett’s expressionism. As the spools unroll, the tape-recorder strips Krapp of his self-presence.78

The anti-hero is puzzled when he hears the word “viduity” used by his younger self.

Consulting his dictionary, Krapp (re)discovers the meaning of the word: “State—or condition—of being—or remaining—a widow—or widower” (6). Eventually, his last tape leaves him in a state of viduity, from the Latin viduus “bereft, void,” which changes drastically the meaning of “sound as a bell.” As implied by the double entendre, Krapp is now void, or empty as a bell. What remains, however, is the grain of Krapp’s voice, as a pure perceptive effect unfettered from ideality: “The grain, now what I wonder do I mean

78 It is worth noting that the word “strip” also refers to the tape-recorder itself. Indeed, the tape-recorder used in Krapp’s Last Tape records information on strips of plastic tape coated with particles of a magnetic substance.

119 by that, I mean . . . (hesitates) . . . I suppose I mean those things worth having when all the dust has—when all my dust has settled” (5). While for Roland Barthes the grain of the voice represents the singularity of the subject, its “signifiance,” and its distinctive voluptuousness (182), for Beckett, it only announces the exhaustion of Krapp’s subjectivity.

While Hamm counts the grains from the heap of his life, the younger Krapp pictures himself “separating the grain from the husks.” The word “crap,” which originally meant husks, implies that Krapp is literally facing the husks of himself. Decisively,

Beckett respects the rule of the nomen omen characteristic of classical tragedies. In this case, the name is an omen that conveys the thematic of ontological emptiness as exemplified by the characters of Endgame. “Clov” reminds of the garlic clove with its layering without core, but he is also a mutilated clown. From a phonetic and semantic point of view, “Hamm” refers to the ham actor, the showman hysterically hiding the fact that there is nothing behind his poses, although from an intertextual perspective Hamm may be the paronym of Hamlet who is also stuck in his head and converses with an empty skull. This Shakespearean association is further intimated by the fact that the décor of the stage is meant to evoke a caput mortuum, a skull with windows in place of sockets that represents the introspective dramatization characteristic of towering tragic heroes such as Orestes, Ajax, or Hamlet. The hollowness of the skull is representative of what we could call Beckett’s “metaphysics of spiritual enclosure,” and certainly a metonym of

Murphy’s mind, this “large, hollow sphere, hermetically closed to the universe without”

(Murphy 107). To use Heidegger’s terms, Hamm and Krapp both exemplify the

120 propensity of Dasein to escape its being-there, to find refuge in ideality and fantasy. Yet, death does not prize open the “arc of transcendence,” it does not offer the possibility to open up the present to the dimension of futurity as a direction toward the future that always contains the past, but is rather the source of relentless, empty, and wearying repetition.

In tragic fashion, the end of Krapp’s existence is brought about musically. Indeed, composer Walter Beckett argues that Krapp is one of Beckett’s most musical works.

From start to finish it is extremely rhythmical. […] In the passage beginning: ‘Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited. (Pause.)”, I hear at this point a diminished seventh chord F D B A♭, followed by an indescribable chord of F D♭ B G. This type of chordal color permeates this work. The reiteration of the vowel sounds with the short sentences and the pauses create a flowing melody broken by these chordal colors, giving a complete musical passage (W. Beckett 182).

Such a statement gives a new twist to one of Beckett’s most famous sentences:

“Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness” (Beckett in Gruen

210). Here, every word is a necessary stain, a sonorous materiality orchestrated in a mise- en-scène that has the precision of a musical score.79 Krapp’s every move was carefully calculated, and so were the speeches and noises he made, as in the rehearsal of the San

Quentin production in 1977 where Beckett insisted that it “bring rhythm into every detail” (Haerdter and Cluchey 131). As Knowlson puts it, for Beckett “pace, tone, and, above all, rhythm were more important than sharpness of character delineation or emotional depth. But it was not only a musical approach to theatrical language that he

79 According to Deirdre Bair, in 1962 Beckett went so far as to ask Stravinsky to help him devise a way of “notating the tempo of the performance of his plays, and was especially interested in timing the pauses” (547).

121 was adopting. He also needed to find an acting style that suited his vision. He sought to achieve this effect minimally, taking out rather than putting in” (Damned to Fame 448).

As such, greater simplicity gives more intensity to the plays and demands greater sensitivity to tone and rhythm, repetition and variation.

As in Endgame, repetition lies at the center of the structure of the play. Not only does Krapp execute a ritual he has performed over the past forty-five years, but repetition insinuates itself in each action. Krapp has been taken over by the machinery of habit, which Beckett castigated in Proust, writing that “Memory and Habit are attributes of the

Time cancer” (8).80 This conception of habit as mechanical behavior is rendered by

Beckett’s staging in which Krapp’s actions parallel the operations of the tape recorder.

The stage directions clearly emphasize when Krapp has to speak or scream at the same time as the tape recorder. Even Krapp’s movements, with his repeated turns and returns, imitate those of the tape recorder. Most important, Krapp’s mechanical behavior is also the occasion for Beckett to question the valence of auto-affection. As he notes in the

Schiller notebook, “Tape-recorder companion of his solitude. Masturbatory agent”

(Krapp 181). Beckett specifies that Krapp is to keep his fingers on the play and rewind buttons when listening to the lake-episode, transforming the tape-recorder into the fantastical body of a woman. And yet, the tape recorder soon becomes the source of a radical hetero-affection, an alienating machine that turns the interiorizing anamnesis into a disseminating supplementary.

80 “The laws of memory are subject to the more general laws of habit. Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning-conductor of his existence. Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit. Breathing is habit. Life is habit.” (Proust, 8)

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First of all, the tape recorder destroys the fiction of identity and continuity—

Krapp’s power to recall instantly his own past turns against him and results in stark confrontations with his various selves, confrontations revealing how consciousness and ideality are not immune to the passing of time. Second, the recorded voice cancels the idealization inherent in what Derrida called phono-logo-centrism, in which auto-affective speech denies its subjection to spatial exteriority—in the play, the auto-affective nature of

“hearing oneself speak” loses its capacity to cancel difference. The tape-recorder opens up the closed circuit that constitutes what Derrida calls “living speech,” or the affirmation of voice as property of the speaking subject. In Derrida’s words, “repetition idealizes itself. Here, idealization is the movement by which sensory exteriority, that which affects me or serves me as signifier, submits itself to my power of repetition to what thenceforward serves me as my spontaneity and escapes me less and less” (144). Through this process Beckett methodically destroys the philosophical privilege granted to the voice as the prototype of logos, of human as opposed to animal expression, which dates back to Aristotle.81

Here, Beckett demonstrates how the power of repetition can also fail to idealize itself as difference reasserts its presence through the impersonality of the voice, literally making Krapp “out of tune,” the etymological meaning of the word “absurd.” Beckett shows the fragility of the homo clausus, the solipsistic self, through the assertion of a soundscape that breaks down the barriers of the self-enclosed subject. Krapp is no longer ab-surdus (from ab-, intensive prefix + surdus “dull, deaf, mute”), that is, he is no longer

81 The Stagyrite opposed meaningful voice (phoné sémantiké) to the sounds deprived of signification (psophoi) that animals make (De Interpretatione 16b).

123 deaf to the power of difference. Krapp is sound, or “sound as a bell” in the literal sense of the expression, confronted by a sonorous materiality with which he cannot identify, and the ghost of his organic self is made oblivion by the wash of sonic waves.82

In the end, who is speaking no longer matters so much as what: matter is speaking, “not a soul.” While Krapp could still relish the materiality of language before turning the tape-recorder on one last time (“Reveled in the word spool. (With relish)

Spooool! Happiest moment of the past half million”), the last tape leaves him forlorn. In

Krapp’s Last Tape the self-enclosed subject no longer holds water, or, to be more specific, sound. As the tape stops, one could say that, borrowing from the narrator of the

Texts for Nothing, “there won’t have been any life, there will be silence, the air quite still that trembled once an instant, the tiny flurry of dust quite settled” (137). And perhaps, like the narrator of Texts for Nothing, Krapp should have better forgotten what was

“suffered under that miserable light” (82), and should have not believed in that “ragbag” of former selves that are “still on their old prowl somewhere, passing themselves off as

[him]” (103).

The play ends with the silent, motionless, and huddled up figure of Krapp sitting at his desk. This last scene represents Beckett’s idea that “the artistic tendency is not expansive, but a contraction. And art is the apotheosis of solitude” (Proust and Three

Dialogues 47). At the very end the antihero unwillingly comes to terms with the knowledge of the impossibility that characterizes any attempt to face the emptiness that determines the function of desire. In the denouement of the play, Krapp discovers the

82 As such, Krapp might be the archetype of all Beckettian anti-heroes, which, borrowing Adorno’s remark on Hamm and Clov, are better described as “empty personae, truly mere masks through whom sound passes” (Notes to Literature 251).

124 death drive as he “disappear[s] from the [signifying] chain of what he is” (Seminar VII

295). In Endgame, the failure to idealize or sublimate makes that the characters face the nakedness of human condition, stranded on what Derrida calls “this bottomless chessboard on which Being is put into play” (Dissemination 22). While Krapp eventually returns ab nihilo, engulfed by the absolute void of existence, Hamm and Clov remain shackled to a compulsive repetition without end.

Conclusion: Repeat and Fade

We have only scratched the surface of how Endgame and Krapp deploy a secret music that emerges from the frail materiality of words, the grain of voices threatened by extinction, and the “stirring still” of the characters’ rusty bodies. While both plays display the clinical precision of Beckett’s renewed approach to stage direction, Krapp offers an alternative ending to the aesthetic program begun a year earlier with Endgame. As Krapp is eventually caught up by his tragic mistake, that is, his blinding and deafening self-love, he eventually fades into the unfathomable abyss of silence opened up by the musical unconscious. Tragic irony has Krapp end the play “sound as a bell,” emptied, deprived of his subjectivity, like the Schopenhauerian ascetic who faces the universal and necessary will. Conversely, in Endgame, Hamm and Clov only skate the abyss, but never completely disappear into it. Both characters stubbornly resist the pull of oblivion and life shudders on as the pointless game keeps repeating itself. Since the play ends without

125 narrative resolution, we surmise that the cycle of repetition will resume again the following day.

In both plays, Beckett expresses a fundamentally tragic worldview, insofar as, ever since the origin of tragedy, the tragic expresses an agôn between the phenomenal realm of appearances and something subterranean that secretly influences the heroes’ fate, something that seems far more extensive, and is revealed in the holes that puncture the veil of appearances. Beckett’s expressionism devises an absolutely modern kind of tragedy where the unfathomable will of the gods gives way to an abstemious, impersonal, and decentering mechanism that condemns the anti-heroes to existential doom. In so doing, Beckett accomplishes his program “to bore one hole after another in [language], until what lurks behind it—be it something or nothing—begins to seep through” (Disjecta

172). Through their own organized and controlled meaninglessness, Endgame and Krapp produce a theatre of the “unword” as language loses its metaphysical power and fails to provide meaningful content, although it survives in a basic, decayed form. What seeps through the holes bored into language is a “music of indifference,” that is, a millimetric organization of sounds that spells the ruin of Aristotelian drama. Whereas in the desolate universe of the plays there is no longer a memory that transmits ideas and tradition or a value system that arrange things and bodies, from the very ruins of Aristotelian drama emerges a secret music that gives minimal consistency to the void. Through this music, ultimately, the possibility of beauty and a remnant of positivity, however frail it may be, is revealed.

126

The fact that Hamm, Clov, and Krapp are no longer the efficient cause of their own actions undermines Aristotle’s understanding of tragedy as “drama,” meaning

“action, deed,” from dran “to do, act.” To put it in the words of Texts for Nothing, “the subject dies before it comes to the verb.” (The Complete Short Prose 106) Seen in this

(dark) light, Beckett’s theatre appears as a theatrum machinarum in which the characters are the spectator of a machine whose workings they can neither adjust nor readjust.

Ultimately, Beckett gives another turn of the screw to Schoenberg’s idea of “musical unconscious,” which seeks to achieve the “elimination of the conscious will in art.” As the composer puts it in a letter to Kandinsky, “Art belongs to the unconscious! One must express oneself! Express oneself directly! Not one’s taste, or one’s upbringing, or one’s intelligence, knowledge or skill. Not all these acquired characteristics, but that which is inborn, instinctive” (qtd. in Hahl-Koch 23). If Beckett’s plays are haunted by a musical unconscious, Hamm, Clov, and Krapp have not only lost the power to express themselves directly, but barely have a “oneself” to express. Hence, the Beckettian unconscious has lost all cathartic power, quartering the anti-heroes in an unsurpassable double-bind: there is obligation to express, yet there is nothing left to express. In the end, Beckett’s expressionism, this orchestrated dissolution of language, only edges us to the brink of nothingness, and makes us experience a whisper of “that final music or that silence that underlies all” (Disjecta 172).

127

Chapter II

Understanding Beckett’s (Absolutely Modern) Revival of Tragic Art

… that which we call “invention” (in metrics, for example) is always a self- imposed fetter of this kind. ‘Dancing in chains,’ to make things difficult for oneself but then cover it over with the illusion of ease and facility — that is the artifice they want to demonstrate for us. —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and his Shadow, p.140

Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to its vomit. —Samuel Beckett, Proust, p.19

Beckett’s “logoclast” expressionism consists in the methodic destruction of the codes of

Aristotelian theatre and, more specifically, the princeps concept of µύθος (muthos), which raises the text as the cornerstone of theatrical practice. Such an attack on the conventions of traditional narration certainly makes him a precursor of what Hans Thies

Lehmann called “postdramatic theatre.”83 Whereas Beckett’s plays shatter the taxonomy

83 Hans-Thies Lehmann argues that Beckett’s theatre, just like Handke, Muller, Strauss, and Kane’s, is postdramatic insofar as it is post-Brechtian theatre (Postdramatic Theatre, 33). By putting the Fabel (fable) at the center of his plays Brecht only reinforced the Aristotelian µύθος. While the theatre of distantiation and intelligence rejects the notions of identification and catharsis, it only leads to the undistorted

128 of Aristotelian poetics, which is to say of representation, they still preserve the frame, or the fourth wall that separates the audience from the stage. While Endgame and Krapp’s

Last Tape epitomize a progression toward immobility, which is to say toward the stasis of painting, still life, or, in Beckett’s vocabulary, “stirring still,” they offer a vertiginous meditation on theatre itself and, more specifically, on the relationship between the dynamics of the theatrical event and the representation of the dramatic text.

Beckett’s plays pose the question of whether the formal requirement of the

Aristotelian form of drama may account for the modern experience of alienation for which that form may no longer be suitable. Thus, Beckett belongs to a tradition that stages what Peter Szondi called in his Theory of the Modern Drama the “crisis of modern drama” (2). Such crisis results from the tension between the observance of the structural frame of Aristotelian dramatic form and the desire to integrate the socio-historical contents of modernity. Szondi interprets the history of modern drama from Ibsen to

Arthur Miller as a series of attempts to deal with this crisis, which “arose in Elizabethan

England […] came into being in seventeenth-century France and was perpetuated in the

German classical period” (5). According to Szondi this historical period gave birth to the neo-Aristotelian concept of “absolute drama” as a theory that upheld a strict adherence to the unities of place, time, and action, the dominance of dialogue and interpersonal relations (the fact that in modern plays characters talk more and act less), and the elimination of anything external to the action on stage (e.g., the audience that is reduced to silent spectatorship). Szondi writes, however, that this self-enclosed universe of drama

knowledge of reality, a knowledge which is pedagogical, dictated by the processes of “realist examination,” and not by the interplay between actors and audience.

129 was called into question at the end of the nineteenth-century. Playwrights like Ibsen,

Chekhov, Maeterlinck, or Strindberg sought to adhere to the form of drama while exploring new content, thus dialectically transforming the dramatic form itself. With

Beckett, nevertheless, it seems that this dialectical operation comes to a stop and

Aristotelian drama no longer has the resources to integrate the traumatic experience of post-World War II modernity.

As memento mori of Aristotelian theatre, both Endgame and Krapp are representatives of Beckett’s striving to depict “life and death in an extremely reduced space,” like those Dutch paintings from the 17th century that represent the vanitas of Saint

Jerome meditating next to a skull.84 The feeling of claustrophobia occasioned by

Beckett’s plays derives from the playwright’s reductio ad absurdum of Aristotle’s idea that “tragedy endeavors, as far as possible, to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun, or to but slightly exceed its limit” (The Poetics 23). If Beckett seeks to

“dedramatize” theatre, he does so by probing after truth in the lifeless, worn out, and exhausted, revealing theatre as an abstractness that is no longer capable of experience. In that regard, I would like to show how Beckett’s theatre is precisely antidramatic, rather than postdramatic. To illustrate this point I borrow Lehmann’s crucial distinction between drama and theater, which is to say drama as text and theater as performance. Postdramatic theatre, which emerged in the late 1960s, deconstructs dramatic theater’s formal enclosure and metaphorical “fourth wall” between stage and audience, imagining a

84 “[Beckett] évoque ces tableaux hollandais du 17ème siècle faisant fonction de memento mori. L’un d’eux représente Saint Jérôme méditant auprès d’une tête de mort. A l’instar des peintres qui nous ont laissé ces toiles, il aimerait pouvoir dire la vie et la mort dans un espace extrêmement réduit.” (Charles Juliet, Rencontres avec Samuel Beckett, 31)

130 theatre that extends beyond the theater, as an integrative event involving the audience in the spectacle and the action. Beckett’s antidrama is the expression of what Adorno perceived as that unbreachable “loneliness” that is the inner law of modernist artworks. In that regard, both Endgame and Krapp testify to the seemingly unsurpassable isolation of the individual and the decay of communal bonds in the modern world.

As a forerunner to the postdramatic shift, Beckett produces absolutely modern tragedies that spell the ruin of the dramatic form of theater that reigned throughout the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. In his plays, Beckett re-conceives the relationship between stage and audience by playing with a multitude of inherited theatrical genres and types that reappear as many ghostly haunting themes: Greek tragedy, Shakespearian and Racinian tragedies, the biomechanical theatre of Meyerhold,

Kleist’s marionette theatre, and the popular theatres of the grotesque, the vaudeville, the melodrama, clown circus, and even fairground-booth conventions.

Conjuring the Ghost of Tragic Art: Mimesis or Music?

For centuries Western thinkers have looked to tragedy as a forgotten origin to their cultural tradition, seeking in its vestiges the building blocks for a renewal of the alliance of aesthetics and politics. Such a tradition culminates in Wagner’s operas, in their attempt to revive tragedy as a response to the purported disappearance of tragic drama as an art form. Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872)

131 explored the causes of tragedy’s death and its supposed rebirth in Wagner’s artwork of the future. The Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) sought to transcend the limits of theatre and hammer out a sublime reunification of spectacle and masses, which is to say of art and life: “wafted beyond the temple-walls, the holy strains of Music fill each sphere of Nature with new life, teaching redemption-starved mankind a second speech in which the Infinite can voice itself with clearest definition.”85 In this second chapter, I analyze how Beckett’s “exhausted work of art” wrong-foots the designs of the Wagnerian “Tone- poet Seer” (250) by developing what George Steiner calls a “metaphysics of desperation” that depicts a world where music no longer fills the “spheres of nature” with a “new life” and where the infinite voices itself only with “big blooming buzzing confusion.”86 As

Steiner argues, the metaphysics of desperation, which he traces back to Greek tragic art, defines tragedy as an antidote to the meliorative discourses of Christianity and Marxism.

Indeed, tragedies depict a world in which rationality comes undone and in which “there is nothing democratic” (The Death of Tragedy 241).

The production of a tragedy requires a special mythology capable of supporting the tragic view of life, a mythology that, according to Steiner, only the ancient Greeks possessed, and which was based on a categorical imperative, an axiom of unredeemable human estrangement. The fall of the hero is not a felix culpa, a preamble to salvation, for

85 Richard Wagner, Religion and Art, p.249 86 “Neary came out of one of his dead sleeps and said: ‘Murphy, all life is figure and ground.’ ‘But a wandering to find home,’ said Murphy. ‘The face,’ said Neary,’ or system of faces, against the big blooming buzzing confusion. I think of Miss Dwyer’ (Murphy 4). This sentence is a direct reference to both William James’ The principles of psychology, where he describes the welter of sensations that besets us daily as a “great blooming, buzzing confusion” (The Principles of…, 488), and Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin who argues that we make sense of this welter only by distinguishing between the figure, the appearance of objects in themselves, and the ground, which is to say the background or environment in which the objects are situated. See Rubin’s Figure and Ground, in Yantis (ed.), Visual Perception, pp. 225-229.

132 tragedy depicts until the very end a world without “rational explanation or mercy,” in which “things are as they are, unrelenting and absurd” (9). Tragic art reminds human beings of their absolute powerlessness in the face of a cruel, unrelenting fate, and no matter how much knowledge and power they gain over the world, such gains only increase the height of their inevitable fall. The succeeding great mythologies of the

Western world, including the Christian and post-Christian, are fundamentally anti-tragic, for they share an investment in absolution, a contract with hope that stems from their faith in the justice of God or in empirical reason and progress. Most important, Steiner states that tragedy is “that form of art which requires the intolerable burden of God’s presence” (353), a burden which, in the end, allows the tragic hero to assume “a new grandeur” (10). It is this vision of human grandeur in the face of disaster that disappeared with high tragic art. While Beckett’s plays revive the essence of tragedy, depicting a world bereft of “painkillers” to propitiate suffering,87 we will see how they require not so much the burden of God’s absence but, more specifically, His intolerable unconsciousness.

While I agree with Steiner that Beckett’s plays cannot be seen as “high tragic drama,” for “high tragic drama is no longer a naturally available genre,”88 I argue that it is precisely Beckett’s point to make it unnaturally available. If Wagner purported his rebirth of tragedy to be a coming face to face with authentic Greek art unfiltered through

Roman, Shakespearian, or Racinian tragedies, Beckett’s tragic art rather consists in an anamnesis of theatre itself, where the essence of tragedy appears in a variety of ghostly

87 As Hamm compulsively and vainly asks: “Is it not time for my pain-killer?” (19) 88 “The works of Beckett and of the ‘dramatists of the absurd’ will not amend the conclusion that tragedy is dead, that ‘high tragic drama’ is no longer a naturally available genre.” (Steiner, The Death of tragedy, xii)

133 afterimages, which is to say filtered through both non-dramatic and dramatic forms of theatre. Thus, I would like to provide a corrective to Steiner’s conclusion that “the minimalist poetics of Beckett belong, for all their express bleakness and even nihilism, to the sphere of irony, of logical and semantic farce rather than to tragedy” (xii). If, indeed,

Beckett once wrote that “nothing is more grotesque than the tragic,”89 it was not to say that his plays were not grotesque or not tragic, but that they constitute an interrogation of the tragic form, which operates by way of ironic distance. As such, Beckett is doing much more than “showing with a kind of queer Irish logic that one can bar from the stage all forms of mobility and natural communication between characters and yet produce a play”

(350). The exhausted work of art precisely seeks to denature theatre. Here, aesthetic distantiation implies the reversal of Viktor Shklovsky’s theory of estrangement

(ostranenie), for it does not see dramaturgy as an effort to poeticize a prosaic reality, a continuous process of “disautomatization,” or an unhinging of frozen forms, but specifically as an untiring anesthetization of experience, which defines the tragic essence of modernity in terms of senseless isolation.90

While, in Steiner’s words, Beckett’s art certainly qualifies as “antidrama” (350), it nevertheless carries out three fundamental tenets of tragedy. First of all, Beckett forecloses any kind of meliorative option. While Beckett borrowed substantially from

Dante, the Divine Comedy was inherently comic, not tragic, for, as Steiner argues, the action of comedy is “that of the soul ascending from shadow to starlight, from fearful doubt to the joy and certitude of grace” (11-12). Rather, tragedy is “constant descent from

89 Letter to Roger Blin, in S. E. Gontarsky, “The No against the Nothingness”, in Endgame, p.xiv 90 Viktor Shklovski, “Art as Technique,” Theory of Prose, p.1-15

134 prosperity to suffering and chaos” (12). As such, unlike Dante’s, Beckett’s Inferno is tragic albeit absolutely modern, for his characters are plagued by an infinitesimally approaching death. Second of all, while for Steiner tragic drama arises from the idea that

“necessity is blind and man’s encounter with it shall rob him of his eyes, whether it be in

Thebes or in Gaza” (5), in Beckett’s plays the blind and subterraneous necessity never takes the form of an encounter, but of an endless, wearying, and blind sense of repetition, which has Hamm lose his eyes.91 Third, Beckett holds on to the tragic inevitability of disaster: “where the causes of disaster are temporal, where the conflict can be resolved through technical or social means, we may have serious drama, but not tragedy” (8). In

Beckett’s tragic art, just as in high tragic drama, the cause of disaster no longer seems temporal insofar as history has been completely evacuated and, as a result, disaster cannot be resolved by worldly means.92 In Beckett’s plays history has no end, and barely has means. To be sure, the playwright’s conception of tragedy stands at a far remove from Wagner’s Kunstwerk der Zukunft, the artwork of the future, and therefore offers an alternative approach to the modern revival of tragedy.

Unlike Nietzsche and Wagner, Beckett does not produce a politico-philosophical understanding of the death of tragedy, but a theatrical one. While Nietzsche, like

Wagner, sees the cause of the demise of tragedy in an “optimistic dialectic” (70) that corrupts the essence of tragedy, which holds that suffering is unfathomable and

91 “HAMM: Did you ever see my eyes? / CLOV: No. / HAMM: Did you never have the curiosity, while I was sleeping, to take off my glasses and look at my eyes? / CLOV: Pulling back the lids? (Pause.) No. / HAMM: One of these days I’ll show them to you. (Pause.) It seems they’ve gone all white.” (4) 92 Not to mention, Beckett does away with Christian finalism, which posits that history has a predetermined telos, something which did not exist in the pre-Christian Western world.

135 unsusceptible to rational explanation,93 his approach eventually violates historical facts and, ultimately, as Wilamowitz reproached him, places the philosopher in the position of a seer or a prophet. Both thinkers thus betray the tragic “metaphysics of desperation” by embracing the motif of redemption through love (Wagner) and world-transfiguration through music (Nietzsche). Wagner emphatically approved of the young Nietzsche’s account of the birth of tragedy from the spirit of music, which is predicated on the idea that redemption from the world of suffering can only be accessed through immersion in the Dionysian essence of Primordial Unity (Ur-Eine). In Dionysus, human beings overcome the principium individuationis, discovering that their existence was not limited to individual and conscious experiences alone. Human beings overcome their limitations by embracing the amor fati, which is to say the sublime self-oblivion in which one becomes one with the God. Nietzsche gives in to prophetic rhetoric, positing the

Dionysian as an eternal source of life and hope, a mobile substratum that must be recovered and tapped into, offering therefore an affirmative alternative to the salvation offered by Christianity, which demands self-mortification and renunciation of life on earth. Nietzsche also proposes a pseudo-historical explanation of how Dionysus’ influence on culture was entirely destructive before he came to Greece. In Nietzsche’s narrative, Apollo, the god of civilization, had a positive influence on Dionysus, making his destructive powers constructive, and giving the spirit of music the power to engender

93 In Nietzsche’s narrative, Socrates is the archetype of “the theoretical optimist whose belief that the nature of things can be discovered leads him to attribute to knowledge and understanding the power of a panacea, and who understand error to be inherently evil.” (The Birth of…, 74)

136 new myths.94 And yet, the spirit of music gradually disappeared, “music has been deprived of its world-transfiguring, affirmative character, [it has become] décadence music and no longer the [aulos] of Dionysos…” (Ecce Homo 62) According to

Nietzsche’s universalizing narrative, Socrates and Euripides were the great destroyers of tragedy, obliging Dionysus to seek refuge in secret cults. Thus, Nietzsche writes that the spirit of music already begins to wane with Sophocles who

no longer dares to entrust a main share of the effect to the chorus; instead, he restricts its territory so much that it almost seems coordinated with the actors, as if it had been lifted on to the stage from the orchestra; the effect of this is of course to destroy its essence entirely, even if Aristotle did give his approval to this conception of the chorus (The Birth of Tragedy 70).

By underlining the importance of the chorus—this “musical-Dionysian foundation of tragedy” (70)—in the disappearance of tragic art, Nietzsche’s project almost zeroes in on the causes of tragedy’s demise, but remains prisoner of its philosophical-conceptual approach. Whereas Nietzsche points to Aristotle’s endorsement of the mortification of the chorus (“even if Aristole did give his approval…”), he fails to provide a historically consistent answer and, ultimately, remains prisoner of the Aristotelian reification of tragic art. Indeed, the belief that tragedy occupies a privileged position in the Western cultural tradition goes back to Aristotle. In his Poetics, the philosopher gives pride of place to the tragic art form, deeming it superior to the epic and to comedy, praising the way that tragedy combines drama and music with story-telling, thus anticipating

Wagner’s argument about the superiority of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Whereas the epic

94 Nietzsche writes that if we “look at how the power of the Dionysiac manifested itself under pressure from that peace-treaty, we can see that, in contrast to the Babylonian Sacaea, where human beings regressed to the condition of tigers and monkeys, the significance of the Dionysiac orgies was that of festivals of universal release and redemption and days of transfiguration.” (The Birth of…, 20)

137 poem features story-telling alone, tragedy enhances story-telling with theatrical play acting, which increases tragedy’s “vividness,” and music “by means of which its pleasures are organized more vividly.” (Poetics 1462a) Tragedy is also superior to comedy because it has higher subject matters, for comedy only appeals to the instincts of lower people and encourages the imitation of base actions. And yet, despite the fact that

Aristotle’s Poetics salvages tragedy from the Platonic prohibition, it only preserves it by consigning it to the grave, executing a conceptual mummification of tragic art.

As Ulrich von Wilamowitz argued, Aristotle’s Poetics was not meant to define attic tragedy historically, but to create a conceptual, universal definition of tragedy.95

Aristotle removes the critic from the theatre and confines him to the library, going so far as to argue that production and scene-making are dispensable (The Poetics 1453b17-11).

Aristotle’s maxima culpa is to be found in his evacuation of the ritualistic essence of tragic art. In reality, tragedy was a ritual performance of the Great Dionysia, the ancient festival that was held in Athens every March in honor of Dionysus Eleutheros (Διονύσιος

ελεύθερος), Free Dionysus, and in which tragedy, comedy, and satyric theatre originated.

As Jean-Charles Moretti argues, Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides were called αοιδόι

[aoidoi] singers, not dramatists, and tragedy was not inserted in a dramatic contest, but a musical one, in which three αοιδόι were opposing each other.96 The adjective µουσικός

[mousikos] thus refers indifferently to theatre, poem, or song. The ceremonies of the

Great Dionysia displayed Athens’ wealth, power, and musical culture to foreigners, and

95 “Aristoteles hat nicht die attische tragödie geschichtlich, sondern die tragödie begrifflich definieren wollen, und nur weil sein einsiges beobachtungs material in attischen tragödien und ichen nachahmungen bestand, kann der modern sich leicht uber seine absicht täuschen.” (Wilamowitz, Einleitung in die attische Tragödie, p.107) 96 Jean-Charles Moretti, Théâtre et société dans la Grèce antique, p.27-97

138 celebrated its best citizens.97 The festival honored the longevity of the institutions of the city and the social reproduction of its citizens. It is no wonder that in Athenian tragedies, the action takes place in tragic Thebes, the civitas terrena, the άπολις [apolis].

In Greek tragedies the chorus was constituted of Athenian citizens who were by no means professional musicians, facilitating therefore the identification of the audience with the chorus, which is conveniently placed between them and the protagonists of the play. The fictional identity of the members of the chorus placed them in the margins of civic life: they were women, old men, barbarians, and slaves. Their alterity, which was imposed by the mask of Dionysus,98 had a ritual function, because a citizen does not sing so loudly and, especially, does not sing songs of mourning. The city only asked a certain class of citizens to disguise themselves and adopt the excessive behavior of mourning linked to the cult of Dionysus. According to Florence Dupont and John Winkler, this particular class is composed of the young ephebes (from the Greek epi “upon” + hebe

“early manhood”).99 From this point of view, tragedies are to be seen as rites of passage celebrating the coming of age of the male population of the city. As such, the µύθος, which Aristotle erected as the keystone of tragic art, appears as a mere pedagogical simulation having no political function, but a ritualistic one.100 As Dupont argues, in this

97 The festival begins in Spring, which is not merely the season of renewal, but also the opening of the navigation period, which is why foreigners from other cities could attend the spectacles. 98 Jean-Pierre Vernant has shown how Dionysos is the quintessential god of the mask in his Figures, idoles et masques, p.208 sqq. 99 John Winkler, “The Ephebes’ Song: tragodia and Polis” in Nothing to do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama and its Social Context, p.20-62; Florence Dupont, Aristote ou le vampire du théâtre occidental, p.293-300) 100 As Dupont remarks, when the Athenian tragedy is abstracted from its ritualistic context by Aritotelianism, that is when it becomes exportable, the chorus is played by professionals, losing thereby the cultural function it had in Athens. (Dupont, 299-300)

139 ritual the ephebe moves from the state of “black hunter,” Dionysus Eleutheros coming from savage lands, to the condition of hoplite, a citizen integrated in the city (297).

Hence, the spectators were responsible for the good progress of rituals and for the memory of the city, but they were not passive spectators awaiting catharsis. Dupont provocatively advances that there was no such thing as catharsis, which is Aristotle’s own invention. Catharsis replaced the singular ritualistic function of tragedy with a universal concept of purification of the passions, which became the τέλος [telos] of the text (61).

This upending of the nature of tragedy is reflected in Aristotle’s doctrine of the four causes (αιτίες), which can be mapped onto his etiology of tragic drama. First, the material cause is language, which is to say the ground and horizon of tragic representation.

Second, the “formal cause” posits that a tragedy is to be composed of six parts, with, in order of importance, µύθος (plot), ήθος [ethos] (characters, that is, nobles or heroes),

διάνοια [dianoia] (thought, i.e., the characters’ capacity to rationalize their predicament),

λέξις [lexis] (a high quality language), µέλος [melos] (the chorus’ songs), and ὄψις

[opsis] (spectacle, or how the play is staged). As such, µέλος and ὄψις become the ingredients of least importance, destined to be subordinated to µύθος. Third, the “efficient cause” makes the characters, and by extension the author, the expressive centers of the play, thus severing the bond between audience and actors. Fourth, the “final cause” assigns the narrative a specific teleology, which, as the Poetics goes, is to arouse fear and pity in the spectator following the “narrative arc” that is composed of περιπέτεια

[peripeteia], αναγνώρισης [anagnorisis], καταστροφή [catastrophe], and κάθαρσις

[catharsis]. The fact that µύθος precedes ήθος in the taxonomy of formal causes implies

140 that in Aristotle’s framework the universality of action has to prevail over the singular traits of the characters, which are not universally transposable.101

Aristotle adopts a formalist approach, something which is underlined by his understanding of the concept of mimesis, whose function is to induce pleasure, for the spectator takes pleasure in recognizing any intelligible form (µορφή) produced by the

µύθοι, without participating, however, in the creation of these forms.102 From this perspective, poetics can be seen as a universal instrument to serve the expansionist politics of the Hellenic State, repressing therefore the local and identitarian dimension of theatre.103 The text-centrism of Aristotle’s poetics implies that nothing can happen to a character outside what is prescribed in the textual necessities of the narrative, which is why it has no room for the kind of metatheatricality involved in the concept of καιρός

[kairos]. Indeed, Aristotle claims that the δύναµη [dinamis] of tragedy does not rely on representation and the actors (Poetics 1450b18-20) but on the literality of the universal text.

As Andrew Ford argued, the notion of καιρός was key to winning a tragic contest.104 Καιρός implies the opportune and decisive moment, the time when conditions are ripe for the accomplishment of a tragic action. As such, καιρός links tragedy to the ritualistic, historical, and political context in which the spectacle was taking place, a

101 Hence, drama replaces theatre within the Aritotelian aesthetics, action prevails over individuation, which is expressed in the etymology of the word “drama”, which means “action, deed,” from dran “to do, act, perform.” 102 It is worth underlining that Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, the tragedy that, Aristotle argues, best fits the criteria of the Poetics, did not win the tragic contest when it was produced. 103 The Macedonian kings aimed at restraining the freedom of the independent city-states whose tragedies were celebrations of the identity of the city. The fact that Alexander the Great was Aristotle’s tutor is tell- tale of the imperialist tendency in the philosopher’s work. 104 Andrew Ford, The Origins of Criticism, Literary Culture and Poetic Theory in Classical Greece, p.16- 17

141 context which does not allow for the universalist understanding of tragic art that we find in Aristotle’s Poetics.105 Tragedy is judged in relation to its social value in the hic et nunc, in its capacity to take into account the reactions of the audience, and thus cannot be seen as an objectifiable text.106 Critics such as Andrew Ford and Florence Dupont have convincingly argued that Aristotle’s Poetics sanctions the supremacy of text over spectacle, creating a universalist and literary doctrine of theatre that extracts tragedy from its ritualistic context.107 Moving the emphasis from music to poetry, Aristotle severed tragic poetry from the ritualistic context of the contests. The extension of tragedy’s temporality to the hic et ubique is related to the imperialist demands of the Athenian state.108 Theatre is reduced to the poem and the Aristotelian µύθος qua autonomous text replaces and erases the situatedness of theatrical performance. As a result, in Dupont’s words, “tragedy no longer needs to be represented to be a representation” (39). The coherence of spectacle is no longer given by the variety of its modes (music, poem, dance) and the involvement of the audience, but by the vision of the poet, the αοιδός turned ποιητής [poiètès], who becomes the “efficient cause” of tragedy. This change of paradigm is the one from the participative and ecstatic µουσική [mousikè] to the silent

105 Kairos demonstrates how tragic art was entirely dependent on the contingent circumstances of representation. It is not surprising to see that the Greeks, who had words for “good weather” (aithria, eudia) and words for “storm” and “winter,” but no generic word for “weather,” chose kairos to signify the latter in Byzantine times. It is also worth underlining that kairos will be referred to as Fortuna in the Roman comedies of Plautus and Terrence, which were also part of the rituals of the Roman games. 106 The criticism of tragedy was part of the spectacle by means of metatheatrical devices; it was practical rather than theoretical. Theatre was play, illusion in the etymological sense of the term (literally “to play with,” from in- “at, upon” + ludere “to play”), it was a de-realizing process that has nothing to do with the dramatic “illusion of truth” that replaces interplay with the passive contemplation of verisimilitude in modern dramatic theatre. 107 Andrew Ford, The Origins of Criticism, p.21; Florence Dupont, Aristote ou le vampire du théâtre occidental, p.22 108 Pace Wagner who dramatically declared in 1849: “hand-in-hand with the dissolution of the Athenian State, marched the downfall of tragedy” (The Artwork of the Future, 35).

142 and static µίµησις [mimesis] (47), where the Athenian citizen is replaced by the universal

θεατής [théatès], the passive spectator.

For Dupont, the elevation of µύθος as the causa finalis of tragic art is repeated and reinforced by the invention of mise en scène in the late 18th century, what Szondi calls “absolute drama,” which supposes that the text comes first (23). With the advent of modernism the word “drama” becomes a means to think theatre without the theatrical, ritualistic, and tragic,109 which is to say without καιρός.110 The spectacle is fully contained within the text and the mise en scène only deploys its potentialities on stage.

This point is expressed in Endgame where the members of the chorus (Nagg and Nell) only survive in separate trashcans. With this powerful image Beckett underlines the end of tradition, in the etymological sense of the term. In that regard, Beckett’s antidramatic theatre, because it sinks mimesis into the musical arcanum, can be defined as a “counter- modern modernism” that not only tears to pieces Aristotle’s universalist coding of tragedy, but also conjures the ghosts of both pre-dramatic tragedy and non-dramatic theatre, which we find in the commedia dell’arte, melodrama, or the vaudeville. If, indeed, in Beckett’s tragic art the µύθος is but a means, mere material that serves the creation of a spectacle guided by musical reason, it remains to be shown how much of the ghost of non-dramatic theatre can be seen, or rather heard, hovering over the ruins of the

Aristotelian edifice.

109 Dupont argues that in the middle of the 17th century the term “drama” replaces µύθος only to reinforce the prevalence of the text over performance (69). 110 It is worth underlining that André Antoine, who claimed to be the inventor of mise-en-scène, argued that mise-en-scène “should not only provide an adequate framework for action, but determine its true character and constitute its atmosphere” (cited in Dupont, 139-140). The unilateral determination of kairos, which is implied by the substantive “atmosphere,” by the author could not be clearer.

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Deconstructing Aristotle: The Music of the Skulls

It is only late in his career that Beckett offers his first interpretation of the modern doctrine of mise en scène, in his 1982 short play Catastrophe, which yields insight into how the staging of a play can go awry. Presenting theatre practitioners in the midst of a final dress rehearsal, Beckett shows how the protagonist (P) is treated as a mere prop, an insentient living-dead who bows to his fate and accepts his plight without demurral. As the stage directions go, (P) stands on an 18-inch cube dressed in a full length black gown, head bowed and hidden from view by a black wide-brimmed hat. He is perfectly still.

The play describes how the director (D) and his assistant (A) compulsively endeavor to find the recta ratio, to get it right. While Catastrophe was dedicated to Vaclav Havel, the imprisoned playwright, I argue that the play does not primarily deal with political issues but dramatic ones. In this play, Beckett homes in on the tyranny of a theatrical direction that attempts to concretize dramatic abstraction. Indeed, the subjugated (P) makes his only move at the climactic denouement of the play when (D), after the umpteenth reconsiderations, finally finds the perfect mise en scène. As the audience produces a

“distant storm of applause” to celebrate the work of the tyrannical director, (P) “raises his head, fixates the audience,” and reduces their applause to a deadening silence.111 If

Catastrophe is Beckett’s expostulation against dramaturgical methods that wallow in abstraction, how does non-dramatic theatre survive in other productions that do not

111 Samuel Beckett, “Catastrophe,” Collected Shorter Plays, p.301

144 address this issue frontally? Let us now ponder how Beckett’s plays come to terms with the imperialism of drama, performing a simultaneous exposition and deposition of the universal text, which now appears as an abstractness that is no longer capable of experience.

In that regard, Beckett stands as the negative of Tadeusz Kantor and Antonin

Artaud, two central figures of postdramatic theatre. Kantor who, as Lehmann argued, successfully blended predramatic and postdramatic theatre, created his spectacles with musical means and the participation of the spectators.112 For Kantor, theatre seeks to revive the spirit of shamanic and magic rituals, festivities, games, popular and street theatre. Kantor’s theatre is not mimetic, a mere copy of reality, but seeks rather to explode the confines of the possible, immersing itself in the fantastic and the unknown where art and life become one. To be sure, Beckett’s work does not allow for such reconciliation, even deeming impossible Artaud’s overcoming of the petrified formalism of “idolatry,” or the worship of lifeless forms.113 While Artaud blames modernism for confusing art with aestheticism, this “spiritual sickness of the West” that severs the forms of art from “the mystic attitudes they might acquire in confrontation with the absolute”

(69), Beckett’s theatre out-idolizes idolatry in producing what can be called an

“anaesthetics,” offering therefore an idiosyncratic take on what Derrida called the

“closure of representation.”114 For Artaud the theatre of representation is idolatrous, lifeless because in erasing concrete, physical language it has erased its double, which is to

112 Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p.71-74 113 Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, p.76 114 Jacques Derrida, “Le Théâtre de la cruauté et la clôture de la représentation,” L’Ecriture et la différence, p.341-368

145 say “poetry in space independent of spoken language” (40). In Beckett’s work, the idea of a reunification of art and life receives short shrift, and words do not have the ritualistic, mystic, and magical function of Artaud’s symbol. Art is no longer able to extract “what is communicative and magnetic in the principles of all the arts, […] states of acuteness so intense and so absolute, that we sense, beyond the tremors of all music and form the underlying menace of a chaos as decisive as it is dangerous” (50-51). If Beckett’s music testifies to the elision of the subterraneous threat of chaos, it nevertheless retains, albeit in a negative form, the tragic vision of theatre as the site of symbolic exchange between visible forms and invisible forces. Theatre is not a ceremony of the conjuration of life, but a confrontation with the musical unconscious, this orchestrated dissolution of language that leads us to the threshold of “that final music or that silence that underlies all.” Hence, Beckett adds a twist to Kantor and Artaud’s contradiction of modern

Aristotelianism, which posits µύθος as the source of all intelligibility, as the self- contained form of the interpretation of reality in which the characters are already embodied. Unlike Artaud, Beckett does not ascribe any therapeutic valence to theatre, but rather presses where it hurts, hitting the raw nerve of the Aristotelian concept of drama and its attendant pretensions to autonomy and closure—the text no longer gives flesh to the characters but disembodies them, turning them into cripples, or antitheses of Artaud’s

“total man” (123). As a result, the mise en scène no longer develops the potentialities of the text, but rather extenuates them. The text fails. The silent Aristotelian µύθος, which preserved theatre within the post-Platonic ideal State only by mummifying it, is in its turn vampirized by an arcane music. While Plato reproached tragedy for pandering to the

146 emotive part of the soul to the detriment of reason and self-mastery (σωφροσύνη),

Beckett’s music no longer enhances pathos, but articulates how human ruin is inwoven in human beings’ agonistic search for meaning and mastery over matter.

Commenting on Endgame, Beckett argued that “nothing is more grotesque than the tragic, and it has to be expressed until the end, above all at the end.”115 Here, tragic should be understood in the strongest sense of the term. As composer Morton Feldman argues, it is a mistake to consider Beckett as an existentialist hero, since one would completely miss the tragic nature of his personality.116 Beckett creates a modern tragedy, where the tragic is irredeemable insofar as it is inscribed ontologically in the heroes of the play, just as the members of the Labdacid family, which we find portrayed in the tragedies of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides. The mythical family is representative of how the temporality of tragic representation was successive, cumulative, and filial, because the reproduction of the πόλις [polis] was at stake. The family includes Laius, who fathered Oedipus, and Oedipus’ children: Antigone, Eteocles, Ismene, and

Polynices. Labdacus gives his name to the family, for he is the character at the origin of the curse. Crucially, the name Labdacus signifies “the limp.”117 In tragic fashion,

Beckett’s characters are stymied by various handicaps. While Krapp does not limp,

115 Letter to Roger Blin, in S. E. Gontarsky, “The No against the Nothingness,” in Endgame, p.xiv 116 “I never like anyone else’s approach to Beckett. I felt it was a little too easy; they were treating him as if he were an existentialist hero, rather than a tragic hero.” (Interview with Everett Frost, “The Note Man on the Word Man,” Samuel Beckett and Music, 51) Adorno concurs with Feldman, depicting Beckett as an anti-existentialist hero whose plays reduce existence to the bare minimum. As he put it, “Sartre even affirmed the freedom of victims of concentration camps to inwardly accept or reject the tortures inflicted upon them. Endgame destroys such illusions.” (“Understanding Endgame,” Notes to Literature I, 249) 117 As Vernant and Vidal-Naquet argued, in Ancient Greece the relationship of humans to Gods was expressed in terms of the tragic, which is to say in terms of a transcendence that is incorporated in the characters themselves, through the motif of boiterie, “limping.” (Mythe et tragédie en Grèce ancienne II, 48)

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Beckett’s stage directions devise him as a weak, failing old man.118 This wear and tear is evoked by the overwhelming darkness surrounding Krapp, a darkness that threatens to consume him, like the mound of earth that swallows Winnie in Happy Days. In Endgame

Hamm is blind and sits in a wheelchair and Clov has a “stiff, staggering walk.”119 Nagg,

Hamm’s father (the “accursed progenitor” that keeps nagging Hamm could be a reference to both Labdacus and Hamlet), has stumps, and Nell, his mother, is losing her hearing.120

Even Hamm’s three-legged stuffed dog is flawed.121 Beckett’s characters are exhausted, they certainly do not attempt to bend history to their will as ancient tragic heroes did— they barely have the wherewithal to endure any longer, and yet they go on. Beckett overturns the Aristotelian axiom stating that tragedy has to represent the actions of noble men; here, the characters are ignoble in the etymological sense of the term (from the

Latin ignobilis “unknown, undistinguished, obscure”), grotesque, or, to be more specific, banausic, “merely mechanical” (from the Greek banausikos “pertaining to mechanics,” from banausos “artisan, mere mechanical,” hence to the Greeks “base, ignoble”).122 As such, Beckett’s tragedies are absolutely modern in the sense that the absurd appears as the only relationship of humans to the world, which is to say that the tragic has lost any relation to transcendence, evacuating any possibility of human grandeur—tragedy only

118 Stage directions go like this: “Very near-sighted (but unspectacled). Hard of hearing. Cracked voice. Distinctive intonation.” (3) 119 Clov’s name might also be a reference to a horse’s cloven hoof; Clov would then appear as Hamm’s rider. 120 Hamm is also the figure of the tragic tyrant. His treatment of Clov and his parents are telling in that regard, he is perpetuating, passing down the curse inflicted on him by his parents. Indeed, Nagg tells him that when he was a young boy frightened of the dark they would let him cry: “We let you cry. Then we moved you out of earshot, so that we might sleep in peace” (29). 121 As Clov attempts to put a ribbon on it, he says “he isn’t finished, I tell you!” (22) 122 Beckett’s tragic art thus constitutes an addition to Georg Büchner’s unfinished Woyzeck (1837), which is the first tragedy to use lower-class speech and inarticulacy.

148 encounters its lack of transcendence in the grotesque, in the overwhelming meaninglessness of existence.123

Beckett’s antidramatic theatre upends the fundamental tenets of Aristotle’s depiction of tragic art and makes Aristotelian diegesis stutter. According to Aristotle, and following the doctrine of the “final cause” (i.e., to incite fear and pity in the spectator), in classical tragedies each hero has a specific αµαρτία [hamartia], which is often translated

“tragic flaw.” Yet, to the Greeks the word meant “mistake” rather than “flaw,” since, in the ideal tragedy, the hero brings about his or her own doom by mistake, simply because s/he does not know enough. This lack of knowledge leads to the series of blind actions referred to as περιπέτεια, which is the condition of tragic irony, and which refers to a series of actions that leads to consequences diametrically opposed to those that were intended. In the Aristotelian chain of cause and effect, περιπέτεια is resolved in

αναγνώρισις, which is the gaining of the basal knowledge that was formerly lacking, through the intervention of καταστροφή, a change of fortune that leads to the final scene of suffering. The Aristotelian concatenation is all geared towards the accomplishment of

κάθαρσις, which means “purging” in the medical sense of the term, or the successful taming of excess and intemperance, the reduction of passions to a healthy proportion.124

Conversely, Beckett’s plays turn Aristotle’s precepts on their head: the characters are left hanging in the void, never reaching αναγνώρισις, while περιπέτεια, which is reduced to

123 In Endgame tragic humor is conveyed by the idea that Hamm feeds “Spratt’s medium” to his father (i.e., a brand of biscuits for dogs), and by the fact that he keeps both of his parents in trash-cans filled with sand for litter. This relationship to descendants was unthinkable for ancient Greeks, for it threatened the possibility of collective anamnesis, which was the condition of the reproduction of the social order. 124 For Aristotle the simple plot only has katastrophe (change of fortune) as its climax, whereas in the best plots peripeteia (reversal of intention) leads directly to anagnorisis (recognition), which, in turn, makes possible the katastrophe (change of fortune) leading to the final “scene of suffering.”

149 the ritual repetition of habitual actions, is left without resolution, for καταστροφή never comes. Finally, the only αµαρτία of Beckett’s anti-heroes seems to have been born.

Indeed, as the playwright put it in Sophoclean fashion, “the only sin is the sin of being born.”125

Most important, Beckett shatters Aristotle’s model of tragedy by disarticulating its organic sequencing. For Aristotle, “tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude.”126 In Aristotelian terms, Beckett’s plays are rather “episodic,” not only because action is incomplete, partial, and of a low magnitude, but also because they disrupt what Aristotle calls the probable sequence.127 Beckett methodically disjoints the tragic whole, reinstating the “inorganic,” which is to say the trivialities of the anti-heroes’ life, into the “organic.”128 For Aristotle, tragedy is the

“imitation of an action” according to “the law of probability or necessity.” Tragedy

“shows” rather than “tells,” its medium being drama, not narrative. According to

Aristotle, tragedy is nobler than history because history remains within the realm of diegesis, merely relating what has happened, whereas tragedy dramatizes “what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity” (35). Tragedy synthesizes events into a cause-and-effect sequence (sunthèsis tôn pragmatôn) that reveals what may happen at any time or place, exposing therefore the hidden and immutable order of the

125 “Samuel Beckett Talks About Beckett”, interview with John Gruen, Vogue (December 1969), p. 210. Beckett repeat here Sophocles’ alleged statement: “it is best never to have been born.” 126 Aristotle, Poetics, p.31 127 “Of all plots and actions the episodic are the worst. I call a plot ‘episodic’ in which the episodes or acts succeed one another without probable or necessary sequence.” (37) 128 “As therefore, in the other imitative arts, the imitation is one when the object imitated is one, so the plot, being an imitation of an action, must imitate one action and that a whole, the structural union of the parts being such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed. For a thing whose presence or absence makes no visible difference, is not an organic part of the whole.” (Poetics 35)

150 universe that connects the musica humana to the musica universalis. By turning the fundamental classical concepts on their head, Beckett breaks the Aristotelian chain of cause and effect, and the human, the social world, and nature no longer compose a harmonious order. Beckett’s musical unconscious highlights another kind of concatenation, which is not so much a universal, Pythagorean music of the spheres, but a

“music of the skulls,” which gives expression to the metaphysical sense of isolation that plagues his characters. As Molloy put it, the head is both the place where the voice sounds and where it is heard: “It’s with your head you hear it, not your ears” (Three

Novels, 39).129

Hence, Beckett breaks with the Wagnerian idea that the theatre of the future should be conceived as a festival of monumental effects, a theatre detached from everyday life, which has the power to collectivize the individual and connect her to the universe. Indeed, Beckett’s plays not only delve into the pathetic banality of the quotidian, but also reveal a sense of unsurpassable world-homelessness. Beckett’s antidramatic plays appear as “negative” tragedies in the sense that they weaken the

µύθος, the fiction, only to enhance the ritual, which now runs idle and loses its playfulness to become a calcified machine, a fixion. We find here another example of how Beckett reverses Shklovsky’s notion of estrangement, which purports to disrupt the familiar by representing it in a rejuvenating light, thus countering the deadening effects of

“habituation.” If in Beckett’s plays ritual resuscitates as a living dead, it is to remind us

129 In Malone Dies, Malone speaks of being physically ensconced within a head: “You may say it is all in my head, and indeed sometimes it seems to me I am in a head and that these eight, no six, these six planes that enclose me are of solid bone.” (Three Novels, 203) Likewise, in the Unnamable, the narrator says: “Yes, a head, but solid, solid bone, and you imbedded in it, like a fossil in the rock.” (361-362)

151 that theatre is an abstractness that is no longer capable of experience. This idea is strongly suggested in the obsessive behaviors of the characters, in their compulsive habits that take on a ritual dimension.130 The characters’ habits are as absurd as Murphy’s masochistic ritual, which consists in tying himself naked to a rocking chair in his apartment, rocking back and forth in the dark. Such ritual only seems to bring the characters to the brink of nonexistence. Under the fantastical garb of fiction, Beckett reveals the factum brutum, the skeleton of fixion, or the deadening need for familiarity, causality, and control. While the familiar helps individuals to hold on to classifiable and repeatable events, Beckett shows us what happens when the classifiable and repeatable becomes the source of alienation, exposing what Nietzsche called the “instinct of causality,” which he borrowed from Schopenhauer’s critique of cause-and-effect series.131 In this pitiless light, habit becomes “a great deadener” as Vladimir put it

(Waiting for Godot 105). Beckett elsewhere revealed the catenary nature of habit, this

“ballast that chains the dog to its vomit” (Proust, 19), hinting at Pavlov’s dog and the idea of conditioned reflexes and depicting a life that gnaws away at itself, a life that is no longer reflective but reflexive to the point that it becomes purely drive-based,

130 Indeed, Beckett’s deconstruction of Aristotelian mise en scène is also carried out by means of a disarticulation of the mise en scène of fantasy, understood in psychoanalytic terms, as the regulative fiction that underwrites the behavior of the conscious subject. Fantasy is used by the subject to hire actors to perform a scenario, to direct them in order for them to conform to the script and satisfy the intention of the fantasy, which is to say the intention to obtain what is worth for the subject as the sign of its election. Hamm’s relation to Clov is very representative of how fantasy works, in the way that the illusory king mistreats his valet to reach his ends. 131 The recurrence of identical cases provides a sense of causality but as Nietzsche remarked “one is surprised, one is disturbed, one desires something familiar to hold on to—as soon as we are shown something old in the new, we are calmed. The supposed instinct for causality is only fear of the unfamiliar and the attempt to discover something familiar in it—a search not for causes, but for the familiar.” (The Will to Power, §551, 291)

152 pulsional.132 Fixion, in Nietzschean terms, is the ossification of the creative sovereignty of consciousness, which allows one to create a perimeter of control over one’s changing environment, enabling one to create a non-historical, forgetful space fixating the perpetual becoming of individuation. The banausic essence of fixion is fundamental to

Beckett’s expressionist aesthetics of exhaustion, which capsizes the impressionist fascination for fluent forms and laws of continuous transformations. Stillness seems to testify to an inorganic principle within the organism, as in Freud's version of the death drive. If the inertia of habit seems to be countered by a perpetual stirring that constantly unsettles stability, fixion subsumes repetition to a principle of identity that exemplifies the drive’s blind and stubborn urge to come back to the site of satisfaction. In order to move from fixion to fiction one has to muster the resources to transcend the given, viz., to sublimate. Sublimation redirect the disruptive power of the drive and introduces a caesura in space and time that shatters the bare repetition of the Same, breaking the spell of orthodox usage and opening the way to a novel future, a repetition with a difference. In

Deleuze’s words, sublimation is miraculous: “If repetition is possible, it is due to miracle rather than to law. It is against the law: against the similar form and the equivalent content of law” (Difference and Repetition 2). While Beckett’s plays are devoid of miracles, in Endgame the death drive insists in the present as Beckett seems to force

132 Beckett’s vision can be seen as twisting Schopenhauer’s depiction of the antagonism of the Will with itself in the realm of appearances. Human beings are representative of this antagonism for “it is one and the same will, living and appearing in them all, whose phenomena fight with one another and tear one another to pieces.” (WWRI, 253) And yet, Beckett depicts how the antagonism of the Will can be internalized in the individual will, which “in the fierceness and intensity of its desire it buries its teeth in its own flesh, not knowing that it injures only itself, revealing in this form through the medium of individuation the conflict with itself which it bears in its inner nature. Tormentor and tormented are one.” (WWRI, 353)

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“nature to start again from zero” (Seminar VII 260), bringing the characters to a state of near-total entropy against their will and in spite of their habits.

As such, Beckettian tragedy is quiet, dull, uneventful and the hero is an absolutely modern cruci fixus, for s/he lives in the imminence of a death that remains beyond representation, a death that is infinitesimally approaching and thus standing in stark contrasts with the σπαραγµός [sparagmos], the heart-rending death of classical tragedies.

The σπαραγµός nevertheless makes a ghostly appearance at the very end of Endgame where Hamm covers his face with his handkerchief, this blood-stained “old stauncher,” which recalls the suffering of Christ. Endgame articulates Beckett’s obsession with a ritual that no longer soothes, but causes agony, portending therefore the ritualized and wanton suffering of later works such as Comment c’est / How it is (1961/1962). Death fails to seal off life and Beckett’s anti-heroes skirt the abyss, but never enter it, perhaps with the exception of Krapp who surrenders to the “third eye” of the tape recorder at the very end of the play. Beckett’s dilatation of tragic time is both an aggravation of

Hamlet’s doubt and a contradiction of Aristotle’s praise of the economy of tragedy, which he considered superior to the epic because it accomplishes a similar end with greater economy of means: “what is more concentrated is more pleasant than what is blended into a long time” (Poetics 67). Hamm is the crippled counterpart of

Shakespeare’s crestfallen prince, whose destiny is to become a tragic tyrant knowing no compunction for his tragic mistake. Hamlet is shrouded in his “inky cloak” as much as

Hamm covers his face with his blood-stained “old stauncher.” Hamlet is an introspective and pensive scholar whose reflections only forestall the moment of revenge as long as

154 possible, just as Hamm is a poor chess player who keeps delaying the inevitable end.133

Even though Hamlet desires to see his father’s murderer, Claudius, pay for his crime, he realizes the unsolvable ambiguity of revenge, which is prompted by both “heaven and hell” (II.ii. 119). When confronted with the perfect opportunity to kill Claudius as he prays alone in his chamber, Hamlet tergiversates, arguing that the timing is not yet perfect. As a result, months have gone by between Hamlet’s meeting with the ghost and his actual decision to kill Claudius. Hamlet’s endless self-hermeneutic does eventually help him to overcome his anxiety. Upon his return from exile in Act V, Hamlet appears composed, rational, and unafraid of death. He has come to the realization that destiny is controlling his life:

Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting, That would not let me sleep: methought I lay Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly, And prais’d be rashness for it, let us know, Our indiscretion sometime serves us well When our deep plots do pall, and that should learn us There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will. (V.ii.4-11)

Hamlet becomes conscious of the “intolerable presence of God,” to use Steiner’s expression, and he is now prepared to live up to tragic ends. Unlike Hamlet, Hamm finds no resolution to the conflicting forces that slowly tear him apart, and he remains unconscious of the divinity that shapes his ends. Eventually, Hamm’s ends are so rough- hewn that they take the form of calcified ritual. Indeed, in Beckett’s tragedy the spiritual

133 In that regard, Hamm can be seen as Faust’s alter ego. Faust, an empirical scientist despaired by the finitude of knowledge, contemplated the idea of reaching an infinite, transcendent knowledge denied to the rational mind. Faust makes an arrangement with the devil. While the devil will do anything that Faust wants him to do while on he is on earth, in exchange Faust will serve him in Hell. While the shelter is Beckett’s version of Hell, Hamm’s dog may also refer to the stray poodle that follows Faust into his house and transforms into Mephistopheles.

155 comes to exhaustion and is replaced by banausic matter, so much so that, as Adorno put it, Hamlet is revised: “to croak or to croak, that is the question.”134

“Why this Farce, Day after Day?”: Inside Beckett’s Theatrum Machinarum

As Claude Lévi-Strauss argued, ritual is characteristic of la pensée sauvage, which defines “cold” societies, or societies “outside of history” that retain a cyclic and mythic mode of thinking. Lévi-Strauss ushered in an original distinction between myth and ritual, opposing the content-producing and expansive nature of the former to the formal and restrictive essence of the latter. Whereas myth “breaks down the world by means of distinctions and oppositions,” ritual strives to (re)create a sense of continuity,

“although the initial break with lived experience effected by mythic thought makes the task forever impossible.”135 Seen in this light, ritual appears as a coping mechanism that seeks to ensure the near total immobility of the social order, a “mixture of stubbornness and ineffectiveness, which explains the desperate, maniacal aspect of ritual” (689). As such, ritualistic practice is not an indefinite extension of the power of myth, but a means of containing excess and safeguarding meaning. If the ritualistic gesture, in all its meticulousness and fastidiousness, constitutes a gesture of closure, it is nonetheless animated by a vital impulse. Indeed, ritual is not a passive commemoration of mythical events but, to be more precise, their active reiteration. During a ritual, the protagonists of

134 Adorno, “Understanding Endgame,” Notes to Literature I, p.267 135 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Naked Man,” Mythologiques, vol. 4, p.679

156 the myth are made present and the participants become their very contemporaries. As such, one is no longer living in chronological time, but in what Mircea Eliade calls

“primordial Time, the Time when the event first took place.”136

As opposed to cold societies, “hot” societies are driven by a linear conception of time that dwells on the ideology of “progress,” which is associated with the positivist knowledge of science and constant technological revolution. Breaking with evolutionary anthropology, Lévi-Strauss argues that “hot” and “cold” societies do not assign radically different roles to science and imaginative thinking, for both types of society establish the same relationship between those two cognitive approaches, but for opposite reasons:

It only seems to me that in societies without writing, positive knowledge fell well short of the power of the imagination, and it was the task of the myths to fill this gap. Our own society finds itself in the inverse situation—one leading to the same results though for opposite reasons. With us, positive knowledge so greatly overflows our imaginative powers that our imagination, unable to apprehend the world that is revealed to it, has no alternative than to turn to myth again (The Story of Lynx xii).

The modernity of Beckett’s tragedies certainly lies in their depiction of a world bereft of the vivid imagination of cold societies. But the absolutely modern dimension of his tragedies is to be found in their depiction of a world where, unlike in Lévi-Strauss’ narrative, imagination can no longer turn to myth again. From this point of view, the entropic coldness of Endgame’s skull/shelter puts an abrupt brake on the progressive dialectics of modernity and spells the ruin of la pensée civilisée which, in its effort to demythologize and deconsecrate the world, has unveiled the absolute meaninglessness of existence.

136 Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, p.19

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Beckett depicts a world where entropy reigns supreme, a world that is nearing heat death and where ritual survives in skeletonized form, in the guise of pointless and obsessive behavior. In Endgame and Krapp’s Last Tape the stultifying banality of habit takes on a ritual aspect, so much so that the minimalist motions of the characters are reminiscent of the perfectio motus of Noh theatre, in which the most intense emotional level coincides with the near stillness of performers, the least physical movement with the greatest spiritual intensity.137 Although Beckett’s meticulous regulation of bodily movements preserves the precision characteristic of Noh ritual, the restrained economy of gestures only highlights the disowning of imagination and the entry of the mechanical within life. Commenting on Greek great style, Nietzsche wrote that what “we call

‘invention’ (in metrics, for example) is always a self-imposed fetter of this kind.

‘Dancing in chains,’ to make things difficult for oneself but then cover it over with the illusion of ease and facility — that is the artifice they want to demonstrate for us” (The

Wanderer and his Shadow 140). The ideal of Greek style as the conjugation of extreme constraint and extreme freedom seems impossible in the desolate universe of Beckett’s plays where constraint can no longer muster the resources of the beautiful illusion.

As Eliade put it, “sacred time appears under the paradoxical aspect of circular time, reversible and recoverable, a sort of eternal mythical present time that is periodically reintegrated by means of rites.”138 Sacred time is fundamentally negentropic,

137 The ritualistic essence of Noh consists in the pacification of an unappeased spirit that comes back to life and haunts the living. An unfulfilled passion (love, hatred, shame, grief, etc.) endows the dead spirit with an immortality that compels it to come back and seek reconciliation in the present world. As the tradition goes, the ghost tells his or her story to a nomadic priest, whose function is to pacify the spirit with his prayers. 138 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, p.70

158 for time is reversible and the mythical present can be periodically reintegrated. As Nicole

Loraux demonstrated, the Greek world was sundered by two temporalities: the time of

αιών [aiôn], which is the godly time of continuous recreation, and the human time of

τύχη [tukhê], which is dominated by chance and in which “always” merely means “the recurrence of life’s vicissitudes.”139 Both temporalities are exclusive of one another, but they nevertheless meet on very specific occasions. As Vernant and Vidal-Naquet argue, the aim of ritual is to allow for godly and human temporalities to intersect.140 Ritual is therefore the place where the infinite and the finite, eternity and the ephemeral, fixity and movement interact, which is to say where the fixed forms of non-dramatic theatre enter into play with the flowing temporality of the theatrical event. Like the Roman comedies of Plautus and Terrence, the Commedia dell’arte, the vaudeville, or the melodrama,

Greek tragedies used fixed forms, for Greek tragedies also relied on a unity and fixity of types in a purely formal sense. Indeed, the Creon of Sophocles’ Antigone is not the same as the Creon of Oedipus, for whereas the form remains, the content changes according to various representations. In Beckett’s tragic art, however, the theatrical ritual becomes a dead, formal repetition that can no longer usher in new content, for theatre testifies to its impotence to negotiate with the theatrical event itself. Beckett’s plays take note of the evacuation of καιρός: the empty types and routines run idle, the characters are abandoned by the Muses and are now condemned to endless repeating, resifting, and rehashing, or, in other words, to ordinary madness.141

139 Nicole Loraux, La Voix endeuillée, p.49 140 Jean-Pierre Vernant, Pierre Vidal Naquet, Mythe et tragédie II, p.163 141 Ordinary is here understood in the etymological sense of the term, from the Latin ordinarius “regular, usual, orderly,” from ordo “order.”

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As Loraux argued, classical tragedies articulated a conceptualization of madness in terms of “rigid indeterminability,” which lies in the hero’s “fixation on αεί [aei]” (31), the time of “always” that does not belong to human beings. The devouring passion that animated the Greek tragic hero, the passion that “lives by claiming for itself aei,

‘always,’ as its temporality” (32), gives way to the pathetic banality of fixion, in a world where human time has congealed into a nunc stans, an eternal present that admits of no arpeggio ante lucem, which is to say any transcendence of what Ernst Bloch called the

“darkness of the lived moment.”142 Beckett deprives his anti-heroes of the capacity to seize what is “heroic” in the present moment, foreclosing therefore the possibility of what

Foucault called, in his reading of Baudelaire’s dandyism, the “ironic heroisation of the present,”143 or the poetic capacity to eternalize a moment in the flow of contingency of modernity. As a result, ritual no longer creates time, but rather kills time, as the characters contrive to kill time by making inventories, cataloguing the remnants of a life long gone, or by telling worn out stories, numbing themselves to the endless waiting in the hollowed out realm of the quotidian. As such, no renewal is in sight, the earth will not awake in

Spring, and the rivers and seas will not run with fish again.144 Hence, Beckett confronts us with a Rousseauist dystopia, a complete upending of the festival where, as Rousseau had it, happy people gather in nature and unite in bonds of pleasure and joy: “it is in the

142 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. I, p.264 143 Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits II, « Qu’est-ce que les Lumières ? », p. 1390 144 As Hamm said to himself: “But what in God’s name do you imagine? That the earth will awake in the spring? That the rivers and seas will run with fish again? That there’s manna in heaven still for imbeciles like you?”

160 open air, under the sky, that you ought to gather and give yourselves to the sweet sentiment of your happiness.”145

Against Rousseau, Schiller, and Hölderlin among others, Beckett sanctions the impossibility of reconciling nature and culture through the development of a secular ritual. In The Artwork of the Future, Wagner condemned the by then widespread idea of utility ushered in by the imperatives of the industrial revolution, championing instead human subjectivity’s supposedly innate creativity and harmony with nature. Wagner’s utopian vision of the artwork of the future is highly indebted to Romanticism but also to

Nietzsche’s program to “retranslate” man “back into nature”, back into “the basic text of homo natura” (Beyond Good and Evil 230). In Beckett’s universe, no secular ritual may reconcile human beings and nature. As such, in the post-apocalyptic shelter of Endgame, the only horizon of modernity appears to be ordinary madness. It is speculated that the word “rite,” from the Latin ritus (“religious observance or ceremony, custom, usage”), shares the same Proto-Indo-European root (i.e., *re(i)- “to count, number”) as the Greek word for number, αριθµός [arithmos]. Rite, which has to do with the imposing of order on chaos, can be conceptually related to λόγος [logos], which also means “to count.”

Beckett’s critique of logocentrism consistently mocked the capacity of both ritual and logic to order chaos, showing the endless reversibility of ratio into the irrational.146 As the

145 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles, p.267 146 Beckett criticized the logician’s position in Watt, where the eponymous hero attempts to apply the rational conceptualizations of his mind to the irrationality of experience, trying to break down the real into exhaustive series and categories. Beckett’s biting satire derives from his reading of La Logique ou L’Art de Penser (1662), known as “The Port-Royal Logic,” which was written by the Jansenist Antoine Arnauld. Beckett takes Arnauld’s Cartesian logic to the task and turns it into an anti-logic, an epitome of ordinary madness. Arnauld, who warned against the dangers of “incomplete enumeration” and nonexhaustive reasoning, find his caricature in Watt, who can never “penetrate the forces at play […] or perceive the forms they upheaved, or obtain the least useful information concerning himself…” (Watt 117)

161 narrator of How it is put it, oblivious of the fact that he spends his life flailing in the mud,

“I always loved arithmetic it has paid me back in full” (37). Such blindness to one’s circumstances testifies to the fact that λόγος has become fully instrumental and has lost the self-reflective valence it used to have for ethical philosophy. Having eradicated otherness, λόγος compulsively attempts to conjure up the meaning it has itself exhausted.

As Beckett demonstrates, reason as given birth to a Spinozistic dystopia, it has become short-sighted, self-centered, Narcissistic, it is the “amor intellectualis quo Murphy se ipsum amat” (the intellectual love with which Murphy loves himself).147 Likewise, the narrator of the Unnamable sees language as an infected, putrefying body, “bubbling with the blessed pus of reason” (Three Novels 325), complaining of having no choice but to use “the wrong words” (340), which reduce to a generality what is uniquely singular, judging things rather than knowing them on their own terms.148 Throughout his works,

Beckett has derided the claims of formalized reason, logic, and mathematics to raise themselves above worldly entanglements and the vicissitudes of experience. The Lost

Ones (1971), with its characters living in perfect cylinders and its parody of scientific observation, and the unpublished Long Observation of the Ray (1975-76), with its erasure of human subjectivity and its purely mechanical development, are perfect epitomes of this tendency. If Beckett’s use of formal structures reveals the geometrical and mathematical forms behind the material and phenomenal world, these objective laws of

147 Samuel Beckett, Murphy, p.6 148 The theme of the putrefying language of reason is also present in Company (1980) where the source from where language flows, an acousmatic voice that speaks in the third person, is “reason-ridden” (45), as if by a disease, and “cankerous” (9), therefore making the subject “reason ill” (15). The voice that “comes to one in the dark” does not hide its deceitful nature and “by far the greater part of what is said cannot be verified” (7-8). Like the magnetic somnambulists of Quad, who continually move towards and avoid the center, the voice speaking in the third person approaches yet turns away from a danger zone that must be avoided at all costs: “The unthinkable last of all. Unnamable. Last person. I” (32).

162 formal construction sanction the death of the imaginary and the elision of nature.149 Most important, like the perfect cylinders in which the characters of The Lost Ones live,

Beckett reminds us of how λόγος emerged from the necessities of self-preservation, underlining how self-preservation has reversed into self-destruction, reason into unreason. Indeed, Endgame and Krapp’s Last Tape bring to light the self-destructive tendencies of knowledge and mastery, underlining how the urge to create order where there is none also bears the mark of the Freudian death drive, this compulsion to get back to an inorganic and mineral state, a time before time.150And yet, the Freudian death drive is countered by the Lacanian one as habit becomes compulsive, automatic, wearying, and destructive.

The hyperbolic doubt regarding the scientific and metaphysical approaches comes from Beckett’s engagement with Arnold Geulincx, the 17th century ethicist. For

Geulincx our actions are not prescribed by habit and custom, but by the dictates of God.

Ethical life requires that one turn to God, therefore requiring the notion of despectio sui, or the overcoming of the distraction and limitation of one’s illusory sense of selfhood.

This “indifference to one’s personal circumstances,” this self-effacement and self-denial reminds of Schopenhauer’s ascetic ethics, even more so as Geulincx ties it to inspectio sui, which reveals the limits of the power of human activity in the face of the vicissitudes of experience. Geulincx’ ethical motto “ubi nihil vales ibi nihil velis” was dear to

149 Unlike in the futurism of the De Stijl movement, the work of art does not harbor utopian potentials, dematerialization fails to create the ideal society. 150 For Freud inanimate things existed before living ones and the death drive is the attempts to return to this primeval state: “If we are able to take it as a truth that knows no exception that every living being dies for internal reasons—becomes inorganic once again—then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death,’ and, looking backward, that ‘inanimate things existed before living ones.’” (Beyond the Pleasure…, 44)

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Beckett, who translated it as “wherein you have no power, therein you should not will, or in other words, do nothing in vain.”151 Only ethical introspection can liberate the mind, which has free will, whereas the body does not have a will of its own and only obeys the physical laws of nature. Beckett’s notes are revealing:

For if we should do nothing in vain, then we should not resist when God summons us, and releases us from the human condition, that is, announces our death; and this is the first obligation. If we should do nothing in vain, then we should not resist when God commands us to go on living, and continues to subject us to the human condition; and this is the second obligation. And if the latter is the case, then we must earn a living; and this is the third obligation. And if this is the case, then we must perform some function, and so on... (316)

The idea of being compelled to go on living is subjected to a reductio ad absurdum in Beckett’s works, to the point that his characters do not simply do nothing, but everything in vain. God’s summon never comes and death fails to seal off life. And yet, although the characters are trapped in an exit-less prison, they cannot commit suicide, a distinctive sign of Geulincx’s influence on Beckett, for in the latter’s ethics, and unlike in Schopenhauer’s, one cannot kill oneself, there is no per se exitus and one has to abide by the will of God even if circumstances happen to be utterly dreadful. In a

Godless world, habit might be the only thing left, the quasi-mechanistic, will-less, intention-less essence of human life. Like the narrator of the Unnamable who can no longer stir his limbs yet must go on, Beckett’s characters are forced to go on living. The unbearable absence of God defines an absolutely modern tragedy. Absolutely modern because, for Beckett, to use Lacan’s words, “God is not dead, God is unconscious.”152

151 Arnold Geulincx, Ethics, with Samuel Beckett’s Note, p.316 152 “The true formula of atheism is not God is dead – even by basing the origin of the function of the father upon his murder, Freud protects the father – the true formula of atheism is God is unconscious.” (Les Quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, 69-70)

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This idea is suggested by the prayer scene in Endgame. As Hamm attempts to pray, being constantly interrupted by his father’s incessant demand for plums, he eventually gives up saying, “The bastard! He doesn’t exist,” to which Clov answers “Not yet.” Indeed, the

Lacanian unconscious is precisely “not yet,” it is pre-ontological in the sense that “it is neither being, nor non-being, it is non-realized.”153 The temporality of the not yet is also that of the death drive as the mask of a symbolic order “in travail, in the process of coming, insisting on being realized.”154 For Beckett, as for Lacan, the idea that God is unconscious implies an impalpable, non-substantial, and decentered ordering principle that stirs the goings-on. From a purely symbolic point of view, insofar as “the unconscious is structured like a language,” subjects of language talk like puppets and behave like marionettes. Following Lévi-Strauss, Lacan argues that the unconscious is not made up of desire or representations—it is always empty, merely consisting of the structural laws that it imposes on representations and desires. For a speaking being, the symbolic order is like a second nature, a set of transindividual laws that influence the subject’s life, just as Hamm and Clov are subjected to the rules of chess.

The idea of being caught in the workings of an impersonal machine is carried to its limit in Beckett’s Quad, a “ballet for four people” produced as Quadrat 1+2 in 1981 by Süddeutscher Rundfunk. Quad is the reworking of an earlier version for “two players” written in 1963. The action on stage is limited to the geometrical space of a quincunx whose four corners are labeled as A, B, C and D in the stage directions. There is a fifth

153 “Ce n’est ni être, ni non-être, c’est du non-réalisé.” (Ibid., 38) 154 “The symbolic order is simultaneously non-being and insisting to be, that is what Freud has in mind when he talks about the death instinct as being what is most fundamental—a symbolic order in travail, in the process of coming, insisting on being realized” (Seminar II 326).

165 point, named E at the center of the quincunx that Beckett describes as a “supposed danger zone” (Collected Short Plays 293) to be avoided by the personae’s perambulations.

Quad’s characters look like somnambulists condemned to ambulate aimlessly and in spite of themselves. The monk robes worn by the actors, their obsessive compulsion to avoid the danger zone or central void, and their moving in geometrical patterns bespeak the ritualistic nature of their dance. The characters not only avoid touching each other, they compulsively avoid the center of the square, two features which are reminiscent of twelve tone technique where notes are independent of each other and where musical composition is devoid of a tonal center.155 Deleuze qualified this play as a “static fugue”, a “fantastic decomposition,” an “essentially motor refrain (ritournelle)”156, describing Beckett’s play as an art of exhaustion that relinquishes all goals and preferences so that nothing must be presupposed about what can happen next and no calculation made about the future.157 As such, one has to “s’activer à rien” (85), to actively become nothing. Beckett’s obsession with serialist technique began early on with Molloy (1951) and the sucking-stones episode in which Beckett parodies the technique of dodecaphonic music.158 The twelve-

155 Quad’s destruction of narrative thus fulfills Beckett’s musical experiment in Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932) in which he shows the folly of making narrative follow musical composition by having his narrator attempt to make his characters correspond to the twelve notes of the chromatic scale. Such a project soon proves to be totally impossible, resulting in “a cyclone of electrons.” The characters’ failure to be in-sync leads to a subsequent unraveling of the narrative: “We call the whole performance off, we call the book off, it tails off in a horrid manner. The whole fabric comes unstitched... The music comes to pieces. The notes fly about all over the place, a cyclone of electrons.” (112-113) 156 Gilles Deleuze, “L’Epuisé,” in Samuel Beckett, Quad, p.81 157 In exhaustion “one combines the totality of variables of a given situation, on condition that one renounces preferential orders, organization of goals and all signification” (Quad, 84) 158 As Molloy put it, “I took advantage of being at the seaside to lay in a store of sucking-stones. They were pebbles but I call them stones. Yes, on this occasion I laid in a considerable store. I distributed them equally between my four pockets, and sucked them turn and turn about.” (Three Novels, 63) This situation raises a problem because Molloy does not remember which stone he sucked last. Molloy’s solution to the problem parodies Schoenberg’s twelve tone technique. Molloy arranges the stones in his pockets in such a

166 tone system offered new narrative possibilities for Beckett’s experimentations, for it prevents the formation of a key and the persistence of a tonic note, leaving the composition without a center of gravity.

As such, Beckett gives another turn of the screw to Schoenberg’s “elimination of the conscious will in art,” which is to say to the assertion of a hymeneal relation between art and the unconscious. As the composer put it in a letter to Kandinsky, “Art belongs to the unconscious! One must express oneself! Express oneself directly! Not one’s taste, or one’s upbringing, or one’s intelligence, knowledge or skill. Not all these acquired characteristics, but that which is inborn, instinctive.”159 If Beckett concurs that art is wedded to the unconscious, one not only loses the power to expresses oneself directly, but, it must be noted, there is no longer a “oneself” to be expressed. Hence, the unconscious loses its cathartic valence, quartering the artist in an unsurpassable double- bind, which posits that there is nothing left to express together with the obligation to express. As such, the idea of God as unconscious has to be counterposed to C. G. Jung’s idea of a deus absconditus, of a God that lurks in the depths of the unconscious, an arcanum arcanorum that we are all capable of accessing.160 In Beckett, there are no mystical undertones to be unearthed and the plays are open to an endless hermeneutic,

way that the sixteen stones can be sucked the one after the other, without repetition, therefore creating a rigid sequence. But Molloy gets tired of this too formal game and throws away the stones. 159 Hahl-Koch, Jelena, ed. Schoenberg-Kandinsky: Letters, Pictures and Documents, p.23 160 As such Beckett corresponds to the tradition of interpretation that affirms play and discards ontotheology. For Derrida there are “two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of play. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign, and which lives the necessity of interpretation as an exile. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology [] has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play. (Structure, Sign, and Play, Writing and Difference, 369)

167 something which is obliquely suggested in Molloy. It is speculated that the Greek words for interpreting and interpretation— ερµηνεία [hermeneia]—can be traced back to the god Hermes, the tutelary divinity of speech, writing, and eloquence.161 Hermes is the mediator between the obscure other world and the well-lit intelligible world in which humans live; he is the messenger between Zeus and mortals, between Zeus and the underworld, and between the underworld and mortals. As Dieter Wellershoff remarked, there is a strong resemblance between Molloy and Hermes, a God known for his capacity to predict the future from the positions of pebbles.162 In Beckett’s hands, Hermes becomes Molloy, a grotesque vagrant with a hesitant speech who is incapable of answering a policeman’s questions. As the sucking-stone episode underlines, Molloy is incapable of foretelling the future, even less mediate between God and humans. Hermes becomes hermetic, like the universe of Endgame and Krapp’s Last Tape. The increased formalism of Beckett’s plays coincides with the reduction of imaginary content, which is expressed by the crippled bodies of the characters,163 and their shrunken names, which hint at their ontological emptiness. Their incapacity to tell stories and to remember also testifies to the evacuation of the imaginary. Beckett thus shatters the Romantic vision of human beings as “symbolic animals,” which celebrates the universal creative power of imagination to transfigurate the world. To convey this idea, Beckett develops a mode of acting that stands poles apart from the dominant tradition of vitalist expressionism in the

161 This is at least Heidegger’s point. See “A Dialogue on Language: Between a Japanese and an Inquirer,” On the Way to Language, p. 29. 162 Dieter Wellershoff, “Failure of an Attempt at De-Mythologization: Samuel Beckett’s Novels,” in Martin Esslin, A Collection of Critical Essays, p.97 163 Indeed, for Lacan, the ego is an imaginary formation as opposed to desire, which is a product of the symbolic. The driving-force behind the creation of the ego during the mirror stage is the prior experience of the fragmented body, which survives the assumption of the armor of an alienating identity.

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1950s, which stems from Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theatre, with its emphasis on naturalism, affect, and interiority. In Beckett there is no more nature, and interiority becomes an affectless prison. In the exhausted work of art, the mimetic presence of the actors is taken over by formalist abstraction. As a result, the mechanical elements of the actors’ gestures take over interior expression. Theatre has lost its double, the Apollonian form has constrained and petrified the overflow of Dionysian matter, and culture can no longer return to nature.164

French actress Delphine Seyrig, whom Beckett directed in Footfalls (1978), argued that to play Beckett one had “to talk and to act mechanically and precisely as if for a Bach partita. Enough talk of being supple and inventing all that you will from within.”165 Seyrig even goes so far as to say that Beckett’s mastery was akin to that of an orchestra conductor.

He is like an orchestra: he sets the tempo. Actors, it seems to me, are ever less inclined, or no longer inclined at all, to respect rhythms, and French actors no longer take into account the metrical structure as they used to. When you work with Beckett, you find yourself regretting not having this almost musical education. It’s a concrete, real kind of work that is quite distinct from the question of interpretation (20).

Seyring’s interviewer, Pierre Chabert, is surprised by her use of the term

“concrete,” for he believes music to be abstract, understanding music from the position of the passive listener. As Seyring goes on,

Maybe, what is musical is abstract for listeners, but for musicians music is a discipline both concrete and physical. When someone tells us, “There, you have to go Pam, Pam, Pam, Pam,” that’s concrete. Psychology, state of mind, emotions—for me, that’s the abstract part of Beckett’s music and theatre. Sam doesn’t try to explain what the play

164 If Hermes has become Molloy, he can no longer operate the fusion of darkness and light, conjoin the deepest mysteries of nature and the highest consciousness, let alone carry Dionysus to the realm of mortals. 165 Delphine Seyrig, “Interview with Pierre Chabert,” in Women in Beckett, p.20

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means—the invisible part of the play. He says you have to do that and that, you have to do it with your body, your voice, your lips. That’s what I mean by concrete… (20)

Beckett is not interested in giving flesh to meaning, to the imaginary, which

Seyrig calls the “abstract” part of his work, but in advancing the real, concrete formalization of the plays that deprives the anti-heroes of the status of expressive center, dooming them to “eff the ineffable.” From this point of view, all comes to show that, in

Beckett’s aesthetics of exhaustion, God takes the form of the musical unconscious. The radio play Embers (1959), which was written right after Endgame and Krapp’s Last

Tape, and which conspicuously plays on the word ineffable, can be seen as a pastiche of both Geulincx’ ethics and Beckett’s own methods.

MUSIC MASTER: (Violently) Eff! Eff! ADDIE: (Tearfully) Where? MUSIC MASTER: (Violently) Qua! (He thumps note) Fa! Pause. ADDIE begins again, MUSIC MASTER beating time lightly with rule. When she comes to bar 5 she makes the same mistake. Tremendous blow of rule on piano case. ADDIE stops playing, begins to wail. MUSIC MASTER: (Frenziedly) Eff! Eff! (He hammers note.) Eff! (He hammers note.) Eff! Hammered note, ‘Eff!’ and ADDIE’S wail amplified to paroxysm, then suddenly cut off. Pause. ADA: You are silent today. HENRY: It was not enough to drag her into the world, now she must play the piano.166

The title of the play might very well be a reference to the Narcissistic fire that burns inside Krapp. Indeed, there only remain embers of Beckett’s anti-heroes after their experience of the universal impotence and ignorance of the human condition in the

166 Samuel Beckett, “Embers,” in Krapp’s Last Tape and Other Dramatic Pieces, p.108

170 implacable formalist machinery of the plays.167 In line with Geulincx’s occasionalism, which posits the impossibility of knowing how something happens to us, Beckett places his characters in a position where they are no longer the efficient cause of their own actions.168 Indeed, the idea that our actions are diffused outside of us leads Geulincx to make a startling conclusion: “I am a spectator of a machine whose workings I can neither adjust nor readjust. I neither construct nor demolish anything here: the whole thing is someone else’s affair.”169 Beckett’s notes on Geulincx’ Ethics reinforce the idea of God as the musical unconscious, this “something” which is “taking its course” as Hamm put it, for they reveal Beckett’s interest in how Geulincx links the word ineffable to God, putting forward that the “how” of causation remains indefinable.170 In Embers God is replaced by the Music Master and Addie is substituted for Geulincx’ ascetic. Unlike the latter, Addie fails to achieve what Geulincx calls “diligence,” which is to say listening to reason. As Beckett’s notes go, diligence has two parts: “Turning away from external things (for they hinder listening), and turning into oneself (for Reason, which we have to listen to, has its dwelling place there)” (320). If Hamm and Krapp, like Geulincx’ quietist, do turn away from external things in order to turn into themselves, it is not to

167 In Embers music and narrative are opposed themes. While Henry tells stories to shut out the musical sound of the sea, his narrative turns out to be inherently musical. His painful and obstinate efforts to find the right word in his recounting of the story of Bolton and Holloway make the text very repetitive and rhythmic, bringing it closer to musical variations. 168 Occasionalism adds a fourth substance to Descartes’s epistemology. The third substance is the association of the mind and the body, which Descartes sees as the “living human.” While Descartes considered the pineal gland as the hinge between mind and body, occasionalism shows how the mind-body interaction is in fact mediated by a fourth, uncreated Cartesian substance, God, which is absolutely unknowable. 169 Arnold Geulincx, Ethics with Samuel Beckett’s Notes, p.34 170 “Something is said to be ineffable not because we cannot think or speak of it […] but because we cannot think about or encompass with our reason how it is done. And in this sense God is ineffable not only in Himself but in all His works.” (334)

171 experience the transcendence of an auditio beatifica, but to become trapped in their own head, for their mind is no longer Geulincx’ “innermost sanctum” in which the ascetic can

“consult the sacred Oracle of Reason” (320). Reason appears as a boat floating adrift and, as Vladimir put it, habit is the only thing left “to prevent our reason from foundering […] in the night without end of the abyssal depths.”171 One is stuck in the “how it is,” which reason cannot encompass,172 and one becomes a puppet in Geulincx’ “fascinating guignol world,”173 the spectator of a machine whose workings can neither be adjusted nor readjusted.

As evoked by Seyrig, the actors’ movements are imbued with a rhythm that is imposed from the outside. The acting style thus reminds of biomechanical acting, which posits that the actor behaves like a machine without interiority, a machine that reacts to stimuli such as the one displayed in Pavlov’s reflexology. And yet, Beckett’s theatrum machinarum subverts Meyerhold’s constructivist appropriation of the Taylorist idea that every superfluous and unproductive movement has to be eliminated. This idea is expressed in Eleutheria, a posthumously published play written in 1947, where Beckett besmirches what he calls the “sensiblerie taylorisante.”174 Rather, Beckett’s evacuation of

171 Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, p.91 172 The anti-hero of How it is is also a Geulincxian figure. As Beckett put it in a letter to Donald McWhinnie: “A ‘man’ is lying panting in the mud and dark murmuring his ‘life’ as he hears it obscurely uttered by a voice inside him. This utterance is described throughout the work as the fragmentary recollection of an extraneous voice once heard ‘quaqua on all sides.’” (quoted in Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 413) There is, to my knowledge, only one of Beckett’s character who does not suffer from his inner voice(s), Murphy’s Mr. Endon, whose “inner voice did not harangue him, it was unobtrusive and melodious” (Murphy 105). 173 Samuel Beckett, “Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 28 November 1956,” Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries, p.200 174 Samuel Beckett, Eleutheria, p.135. Biomechanical theatre was faithful to Russian constructivism in its attempt to anthropomorphize the machine, turning it into a site of human empowerment. As Krapp’s Last Tape makes clear, there is no metamorphic potential in the relation between the subject and technology. The play thus reverses the ends of constructivism, which posit that art’s alliance with technology and

172 history draws him nearer to Heinrich von Kleist’s conceptualization of acting expressed in the essay “On the Theatre of Marionettes,” which also posits that the actors have no volition of their own and that they must essentially respond to the stimulation of reflexes.

Kleist’s marionettes “know nothing of the inertia of matter,” which is the quality most resistant to dancing.175 And if Kleist’s marionettes are so graceful, it is precisely because they are not stricken by the plague of self-awareness, they haven’t lost the pristine innocence of youth. Indeed, Kleist argues that they incarnate the state of grace before the inevitable Narcissistic fall, which casts an “iron net” over human beings and restrains the free play of their gestures.176 Kleist’s “anti-gravitational” marionettes are characterized by the fact that “the force that lifts them into the air is greater than the force that binds them to the floor” (269). As such, they can be counterposed to Beckett’s anti-heroes, which are not only pulled downward by the weight of their own crippled bodies, but also by the inertia imposed on them by their self-awareness.177 Although the banausic figures

engineering has the capacity to usher in new forms of social organization. Beckett is again faithful to Steiner’s metaphysics of desperation in his rejection of the meliorative narrative of Marxism. Indeed, as the narrator’s reaction to the speech of a street-corner orator in “The End” reveals: “Union…brothers…Marx…capital…bread and butter…love. It was all Greek to me.” (Stories and Text…, 66) Most important, Krapp may actually be a reference to Victor Krap, the hero of Beckett’s 1947 play Eleutheria. Krap does not want to take part in society and therefore raises the annoyance of others: “At first I was a prisoner of other people. So I left them. Then I was a prisoner of myself. That was worse. So I left myself.” (147) As Jackie Blackman remarked, Victor Krap was very likely inspired by Victor Kravchenko, the Russian defector who portrayed the Soviet Union as a totalitarian system. (“Post-War Beckett: Resistance, Commitment or Communist Krap?”, Beckett and Ethics, 81) 175 Heinrich von Kleist, “On the Theatre of Marionettes,” in Selected Writings of Heinrich von Kleist, p.269 176 This idea is evoked in Kleist’s story of the graceful young man who once decided to stare for days at his mirror and who therefore “lost one charm after another. An invisible and unconceivable force, like an iron net, seemed to settle over and impinge upon the free play of his movements, and after a year had gone by, not a trace could be found of the charming allure that had once entranced all those whose eyes fell upon him.” (271) 177 Obversely, in Ghost Trio Beckett applies Kleist’s principles to the letter and the characters are imbued with anti-gravitational lightness. For more information see James Knowlson, “Ghost Trio/Geister Trio,” in Enoch Brater (ed.), Beckett at 80/Beckett in Context, p.193-203; and Anthony Paraskeva, “Beckett, Biomechanics and Eiseinstein’s Reading of Kleist’s Marionettes,” Journal of Beckett Studies 22.2 (2013), p.161-179

173 are the expression of Beckett’s precision in stage direction, which results in the autonomization of rhythm and formal constructedness, the musical unconscious cannot seize total control of Beckett’s characters, for the language of music never fully overcomes the language of words, even when the language of words is shortened to mere sound, for words can never really get free from the straightjacket of semantics. Beckett’s characters are like flailing madmen who are caught in a double-bind, torn between the musical unconscious that compels them into existence and their consciousness qua empty form, which is to say bereft of any means to make sense of the situation, only wishing that this calamity could all come to an end. This double bind is well expressed in this piece of dialogue:

CLOV: Do this, do that, and I do it. I never refuse. Why? HAMM: You’re not able to. CLOV: Soon I won’t do it any more. HAMM: You won’t be able to any more. (Exit Clov.) Ah the creatures, the creatures, everything has to be explained to them. (Enter Clov with gaff.) (23)

In this pitiless light Hamm appears as a tyrant, a pastiche of the reflexologist stage director à la Kleist or Meyerhold who despairs over the actor’s pretensions to consciousness.

The overcoming of reflectivity by reflexivity is suggested by the absence of myth to flesh out ritualistic formalism, by the fact that there is no more self-mythification, no more story, or, in other words, no more painkillers to alleviate the present calamity.

Whereas the narrated story has the power to “mythologize the present” (Molloy 22), the

Beckettian music demythologizes ritual, absolving it from the magic of making anything

174 happen. The emptiness of ritual is evoked in this dialogue where Hamm has trouble

“going on” with the dialogue.

CLOV: I’ll leave you. HAMM: No! CLOV: What is there to keep me here? HAMM: The dialogue. (Pause.) I’ve got on with my story. (Pause.) I’ve got on with it well. (Pause. Irritably.) Ask me where I’ve got to. CLOV: Oh, by the way, your story? HAMM: (surprised) What story? CLOV: The one you’ve been telling yourself all your days. HAMM: Ah you mean my chronicle? CLOV: That’s the one. (Pause.) HAMM: (angrily) Keep going, can’t you, keep going! CLOV: You’ve got on with it, I hope. HAMM: (modestly) Oh not very far, not very far. (He sighs.) There are days like that, one isn’t inspired. (Pause.) Nothing you can do about it, just wait for it to come. (Pause.) No forcing, no forcing, it’s fatal. (Pause.) I’ve got on with it a little all the same. (Pause.) Technique, you know. (Pause. Irritably.) I say I’ve got on with it a little all the same. CLOV: (admiringly) Well I never! In spite of everything you were able to get on with it! HAMM: (modestly) Oh not very far, you know, not very far, but nevertheless, better than nothing. CLOV: Better than nothing! Is it possible? (31)

What kind of relationship obtains between two characters that are compelled to stay together? Dialogue becomes a formality, conversation is deprived of its depth and dialogue is what “keeps the characters there.” Worse, it seems like it will happen anyway, even though the characters have nothing left to say. Speech no longer plumbs the depths of consciousness, but remains on the surface of words. There is no more poesis a se, narration no more coincides with self-creation, and self-consciousness becomes a curse, a cup of bitterness to be drained to the dregs. The desultory nature of Hamm’s story seems to be the effect of the dialogue, of the formalist arrangement of utterances, which imbues a precise rhythm in the characters’ speech and interaction that now look like mere impotent, pathetic reflexes. Hamm’s speech is bereft of motive and agency, and the ritual

175 of telling stories carries no eschatological overtones: it is just “technique, you know.”

Hamm is at great pains to contrive his words merely to give a direction to his story. The stage directions, which drastically suggest that Hamm speak with a “narrative tone,” only reinforce the idea that narration has become impracticable. The barren vestiges of narrative imply the present impossibility of birth, death, and historical time. Here, the intrusion of the language of music in the language of words breaks the forward moving arrow of time as musical modalities introduce a reckless sense of repetition into the narrative, hampering what Eliade called the “directed time of history” as opposed to the cyclic time of nature. Unlike in Nietzsche, music loses its capacity to give birth to new myths, for the heroes are unable to transcend the principle of self-preservation and release the collective, rejuvenating energies of Dionysus. Like the narrator of The Unnamable,

Hamm is merely brought to the “threshold of his story,”178 lacking the wherewithal for creation, something of which Hamm and Clov are very much aware:

HAMM: We’re not beginning to... to... mean something? CLOV: Mean something! You and I, mean something! (Brief laugh.) Ah that’s a good one! (18)

As Molloy’s narrator put it, narration is no longer an ars inveniendi: “you invent nothing.”179 The fact that there are no more stories to tell conveys the idea that there is no more painkiller. Just as the protagonist of the short story “The Calmative,” Malone on his

178 “…you must go on, I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, êrhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I…” (Three Novels, 414) 179 “Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept.” (Molloy, 13)

176 deathbed, or Watt seeking to make a “pillow of words,” Hamm and Clov attempt to give themselves solace with fictions.180

Traditionally, deathbed narration is tied to the idea of retrospection. The deathbed narrator reconstructs his life and determines life's real meaning, but in Beckett such meaning never materializes. Just as the protagonist of “The Calmative” is surprised to see remnants of nature (“trees, oh look trees”), the characters come to the conclusion that “we are needless to say in a skull.”181 Beneath the artificial diversity of storytelling is the radical isolation of the subject from the world and from others. While the impermeability of Murphy’s mind to the vicissitudes of his body allowed him to move through the various zones of his mind, Hamm, Clov, and Krapp experience how introspection no longer allows for such mobility, and no longer constitutes a medicina mentis. Unlike in

Proust’s impressionism, the phials of “The Calmative” remain closed and a perfume can no longer spark the recreation of entire worlds.182

Indeed, Beckett’s work is not about recreation, but decreation to borrow Simone

Weil’s expression. For Weil the purpose of decreation is to get out of the way of God, to let God’s will prevail over one’s own.183 And yet, if the self is no longer the expressive center of the work, it is only to be replaced by the cold, inhuman babble of language and the calcified habits of fixion, which never make way for “spiritual matters.” Following

180 As the narrator of “The Calmative” put it, “so I’ll tell myself a story, I’ll tell myself a story, I’ll try and tell myself another story, to try and calm myself, and it’s there I feel I’ll be old…” (Stories and Texts for Nothing 27) One could add to this non-exhaustive list the narrator of Enough for whom reasoning is also a calmative: “It is with this reasoning I calm myself when brought up short by all I know.” (First Love and Other Shorts 58) 181 Samuel Beckett, “The Calmative” in Short Stories and Texts for Nothing, p.38 182 As Malone put it, talking about a phial he once had, “Laxatives? Sedatives? I forget. To turn to them for calm and obtain diarrhea, my, that would be annoying” (256). 183 Simone Weil, La pesanteur et la grâce, p. 42

177

Geulincx, Beckett compares habit to a second nature that “keeps us in ignorance of the first” (Proust, 22), which is very likely why there is no more nature in Endgame: “the earth is extinguished.”

HAMM: Nature has forgotten us. CLOV: There’s no more nature. HAMM: No more nature! You exaggerate. CLOV: In the vicinity. HAMM: But we breathe, we change! We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom! Our ideals! CLOV: Then she hasn’t forgotten us. HAMM: But you say there is none. CLOV (sadly): No one that ever lived ever thought so crooked as we. HAMM: We do what we can. CLOV: We shouldn’t. (Pause.) HAMM: You’re a bit of all right, aren’t you? CLOV: A smithereen. (Pause.) HAMM: This is slow work. (Pause.) Is it not time for my pain-killer? CLOV: No. (Pause.) I’ll leave you, I have things to do (8).

This oblivious nature might be Geulincx’s God itself, or Godot, the unconscious

God who has forgotten the characters and yet constrains them to go on in vain. The disappearance of nature implies the absence of sanctuary, the lack of egress and escape

“leading in the words of [Lamartine] to nature’s sanctuaries [les asiles de la nature] giving access to a flue at the end of which the sun and other stars would still be shining.”184 In Endgame the sun is “zero,” but it is not night either, it is “gray,” which is a reference to the entropic nature of the characters’ world. And Hamm and Clov are like the madman Hamm mentions in passing, they see only ashes when looking at a field of wheat.185 The only thing that survives is petrified habit, which underlines the character’s mechanical inelasticity and their incapacity to contract new forms. Or in Clov’s words:

184 Samuel Beckett, The Lost Ones, p.18 185 “I once knew a madman who thought the end of the world had come. He was a painter—and engraver. I had a great fondness for him. I used to go and see him, in the asylum. I’d take him by the hand and drag

178

I say to myself— sometimes, Clov, you must learn to suffer better than that if you want them to weary of punishing you— one day. I say to myself—sometimes, Clov, you must be better than that if you want them to let you go—one day. But I feel too old, and too far, to form new habits. Good, it’ll never end, I’ll never go (41).

Beckett’s crippled are incapable of negentropy, insofar as they can no longer complexify life further. Beckett reverses Heidegger’s famous analogies: the human is no longer “world-forming” (weltbildend), but rather “poor in world” (weltarm) like the animal, or perhaps even “worldless” (weltlos) like the stone for, after all, the death drive is a compulsive attempt to return to the inorganic, which is to say to the mineral state.

The characters, stirring still as always, are like Bergson’s hunchback who has “contracted an ugly stoop. By a kind of physical obstinacy, by rigidity, in a word, it persists in the habit it has contracted” (Laughter 12). Hamm’s invocation of a first nature echoes

Bergson’s call for a revitalization of experience: “Abandon all your prepossessions; seek to recapture a fresh, direct and primitive impression. […] You will have before you a man bent on cultivating a certain rigid attitude—whose body, if one may use the expression, is one vast grin” (12). And yet, Hamm and Clov remain unable to access primitive impressions. The rejection of Bergson’s intuition is another proof of Beckett’s subversion of Schoenberg’s unconscious, which was based not on Freud’s, but on

Bergson’s idea of an opposition between intuitive and intellectual activity, the former being immediate, providing direct access to first hand impressions, the latter dealing with experience only second hand, through images, concepts, and symbols. Beckett’s musical

him to the window. Look! There! All that rising corn! And there! Look! The sails of the herring fleet! All that loveliness! (Pause.) He’d snatch away his hand and go back into his corner. Appalled. All he had seen was ashes.” (24)

179 unconscious does not give voice to direct, instinctive, and essential experience, but rather speaks to its impossibility.186

The skull/shelter that constitutes Hamm and Clov’s habitat is situated in a terra inhabilitabilis, a post-apocalyptic environment. Nothing is growing and there is no possibility of cambium, no Elysian Fields that bloom in death.

HAMM: Did your seeds come up? CLOV: No. HAMM: Did you scratch round them to see if they had sprouted? CLOV: They haven’t sprouted. HAMM: Perhaps it’s still too early. CLOV: If they were going to sprout they would have sprouted. (Violently) They’ll never sprout! (9)

Although Hamm and Clov are purposive, they are definitely without purpose.

Their compulsion to go on can be read as Beckett’s perversion of Kant’s idea of art as

“purposiveness without purpose,” which, according to Kant, is one of the conditions of possibility of beauty. The rigidity of fixion opposes the fluidity of art as fiction, which implies that art “must have the look of nature even though we are conscious of it as art.”187 Beckett capsizes the four categories that, Kant believes, are inherent to true judgments of beauty: that they are disinterested, universal, necessary, and purposive without a purpose.188 Indeed, the universal only gives expression to utter desperation; the necessary has reverted into the pathetic banality that pervades the plays; and Kant’s call for disinterestedness, which is based on the possibility of being completely intuitive, of

186 Beckett does not abandon the possibility of intuition, but rather testifies to its discontinuous and opaque nature. Intuition is no longer Bergson’s unbroken stream, but a jumble of obscure stimuli, or the incessant murmur that nags the narrator of Texts for Nothing. 187 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, p.174 188 Unlike rational and practical judgments, aesthetic judgments are not based on concepts, or things that can be known, but on intuitions. Pleasure is derived from the harmony and “free play” of the faculties of imagination and understanding that is triggered by the purposiveness of the work of art’s forms.

180 experiencing something through sensation alone without applying past experiences or previous knowledge, receives a blatant and categorical refusal: the “dulling effect of habit”189 hampers intuition, the free play of the faculties of imagination and understanding, and the experience of new sensations.

In light of Geulincx’ occasionalism, Beckett’s tragic aesthetics finds no redemption in what Badiou calls Beckett’s “powerful love for human obstinacy, for tireless desire, for humanity reduced to its stubborness and malice.”190 For the source of obstinacy is also the source of stasis and impotence. And it is worth recalling that, in

Schopenhauerian fashion, Beckett sheds a pitiless light what he calls our “smug will to live,” our “pernicious and incurable optimism” (Proust 4). If there is no more imaginary, no more story to tell, there is also no possibility of historical time, that is to say for the instauration of what Badiou calls a “truth sequence.” Like the narrator of The Unnamable who is merely brought to the “threshold of his story,” Beckett only brings us to the brink of the event, and thus never opens up what Badiou calls the gap between Being and

Event.191 Moreover, Beckett’s characters display a tragic desire for mastery over experience, and even for domination over the other as displayed in Hamm’s relation to

Clov and to his parents, which is incompatible with Badiou’s optimistic reading. To put it in Badiou’s terms, the character’s desperate attempts to tell stories and create narratives is coextensive with a yearning to impose finite forms, which is to say eradicate, on what

189 Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, in Three Novels, p.360 190 Alain Badiou, On Beckett, p.75 191 In Sartrian fashion, Badiou presents “Being” as the positive ontological order accessible to knowledge, a reduction of the infinite multitude of that which presents itself in our experience, which is categorized by genus and species. One cannot access the “pure multiple,” the not yet symbolically structured multitude of experience. One only catches a whisper of the actual infinite. As such, re-presentation is always a violent intervention that remains in excess over presentation, which is to say over what it structures.

181

Badiou calls “actual infinity,” borrowing from the vocabulary of set theory.192 Beckett humorously underlines the vanity of his characters’ attempts to create finite forms, exhaustive inventories, or a secure shelter in a world that is actually infinite. Beckett’s anti-heroes become figures of ordinary madness that lose themselves in the infinite regress of adding up and counting down any- and everything.193 Hamm’s disquiet about being positioned exactly in the center appears as a product of the anxiety caused by the incursion of actual infinity within finite schemas. As a result, the sameness, the banality of infinity that Badiou invokes, which is the condition of possibility of the universal qua truth “indifferent to differences,” a truth which is emphatically “the same for all,” is here treated as an aporia. Indeed, in both plays truth is reduced to the frozen monotony of entropy. Whereas Badiou precisely conceives the eruption of truth as an intrusion of pure negativity and inertia in the midst of reality, in Beckett truth remains hopelessly undistinguishable from the ruins, the waste matter of reality, for one lacks the wherewithal for creation.194 If Beckett disallows the Romantic concept of potential infinity, which culminates in Wagner’s idea of temporal ecstasy, it is not simply to reject

192 Actual infinity differs from potential infinity, which only seizes the infinite through time, as something that can never be completed, something endless. Potential infinity can only be thought as a whole through the figure of God, the ens perfectissimum, and, as such, nourishes what Badiou calls the “pathos of finitude.” 193 Beckett’s reference to Zeno’s paradox of the millet grain in Endgame testifies to the suffering caused by the incursion of actual infinity within the characters’ lives. As he was trying to prove the thesis of his teacher Parmenides that movement does not exist, Zeno argued that there is only unchanging Being. As such, the thoughts of finite beings, which exist in space and time, are incompatible with the reality of the infinite universe. 194 As such, to put it in Badiou’s terms, one is not a “subject to truth,” but a reject to truth. Andrew Gibson makes a similar argument: “Badiou and Beckett both structure their universe in terms of actual infinity, the event, and its remainder. Both shrink the scope of one of the three terms. But the two terms that they respectively diminish are different ones, and are diminished in different ways. On the one hand, whilst Badiou largely banishes the remainder to the margins of philosophy, as beneath thought, though without entirely annulling it, Beckett locates his work squarely within it, as the stuff of art. On the other hand, while a concept of the reality and truth of events is everywhere central to Badiou’s thought, one can hardly claim this of Beckett.” (Beckett and Badiou, 26)

182 what Badiou calls “the pathos of finitude,” but precisely to assert what can be called a pathos of infinitude. Such pathos reasserts the tragic dimension of existence precisely by not conceiving the infinite as a boundless exteriority, but by identifying it as something gnawing at the characters from the inside, something burrowing them from within like this “something dripping” inside Hamm’s head. Imprisoned in their own head, the characters lack the resources to initiate a truth sequence that would break the status quo— the music of indifference does not transfigurate the world, and even less reveals how the world should be,195 but simply plunges us in the darkness of the how it is.

Once more, Beckett capsizes the Wagnerian theodicy of music, which posits that, as opposed to the metaphorical language of words and the allegorical signs of other arts, music is able to state with divine economy and clarity “That is.”196 In Beckett’s godless universe, music loses its status as “pure form” of a “divine content” freed from all abstractions. Music is no longer a “world-redeeming” incarnation of the divine dogma of the nullity of the phenomenal world itself (346). Rather, if Beckett’s music is able to state

“how it is,” it does so as an impure form that only harbors the rubble of a human content, the ruins of senseless subjectivities in a post-apocalyptic universe. Beckett is no

Wagnerian doctor ecstaticus, his music does not stop “all strife between reason and feeling” by propagating “a tone-shape completely removed from the world of appearances, not to be compared with anything physical, but usurping our heart as by act

195 According to Jacques Attali, music foretells the evolution of society because changes in musical paradigms happen faster than in social organizations. The scope of possibilities is explored much more rapidly in music than in the social infrastructure. Therefore, the mutation in the organization of noise, in the nature of sounds, in its technology, helps one to understand and predict the evolution of the society as a whole. (See Attali, Noise) 196 Richard Wagner, Religion and Art, p.224

183 of Grace” (224). Rather, Beckett’s music loses its lofty properties as universalia ante rem to become gloomily physical, for it emerges from the banausic movements of exhausted bodies and from apathetic voices verging on extinction. The “music of the skulls,” which compels the anti-heroes into existence, prevents them from reaching “a final disembouchment to true Emotion, no longer hemmed and conditioned by the reflective

Understanding.”197 The musical unconscious accomplishes the program announced in

Worstward Ho, which reduces bodies and their actions to their “meremost minimum”

(91). Eventually, Beckett emphasizes the ontological ambivalence of the characters’ compulsion to go on, which is premised on the endless ontological reversibility of the

“on” into the “no,” the reflective into the reflexive, the inexhaustible into the exhausted.

Beckett’s characters do not display a heroic desire, as Badiou puts it, but are exemplary of an existence where desire is on the verge of destruction, a world where sublimation is no longer possible. The universe of the drive confines the tragic heroes to the solipsism of jouissance, even if this jouissance only expresses that “last extremity of flesh and bones.”

“Are you cold?”: On the Ghostly Persistence of Non-Dramatic Theatre in

Beckett’s Plays

The deadening nature of ritual in Endgame and Krapp’s Last Tape draws

Beckett’s antidramatic plays closer to avant-garde theatre and its assertion of the impossibility of popular theatre. This impossibility, according to Dupont, is rooted in a

197 Richard Wagner, Opera and Drama, p.324

184 rejection of tradition, for modernity abhors the characteristics of popular theatre: “a strong formal codification, the passion for detail and variation, the search for exploit and event, the emulation between artists, and, finally, the taste for consensus” (83). Greek tragedies, Roman comedies, the commedia dell’arte, melodrama, or the vaudeville operate with fixed forms and immediately recognizable characters. Contrary to our modern and neo-Aristotelian understanding of these spectacles, the plays are not uneventful, naïve, repetitive, but prone to variations if, and only if, the public cooperates.

For the author is not the sovereign architect, the dator formarum, but the actors play for and with the audience. Play is interplay, insofar as the audience is an active participant in the event that is theatre. While Beckett certainly sanctions the impossibility of theatre as a communal event à la Wagner where the individual can be collectivized, he does not fully concretize the abstraction, as popular theatre reappears in a ghostly, exhausted form.

Beckett’s work can thus be counterposed to the aesthetics of playful estrangement that can be found not only in Meyerhold’s, but also in the Ballet Russes’s or the Parisian avant-garde’s integration of the arts of the circus and cabaret, the grotesque and the commedia dell’arte.

Many critics have associated the gags in Beckett’s plays with the vaudeville and circus clowning.198 The props of both traditions are, indeed, omnipresent in both plays: the handkerchief, the gaff, the bike, the whistle, the dog in Endgame, the banana, the

198 Ruby Cohn, Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut (2011); Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment (1993); Alain Badiou, Beckett, L’increvable désir (1995); Mary Bryden, “Clowning with Beckett” in A Companion to Samuel Beckett (2010); Laura Salisbury, Laughing Matters, Comic Timing (2012).

185 purple nose in Krapp’s Last Tape.199 And if in both plays there are no more painkillers, there certainly are desublimating gags. Beckett makes use of, and aggravates, the percussive and recursive logic of slapstick routines that is traditionally used to disrupt the narrative and prevent the advancement of the storyline. Indeed, Beckett’s mise en scène hollows out such routines, depriving them of their spontaneity and extemporaneity, making the gags stammer. As such, the stammering gags recall the strategy of estrangement that Shklovsky describes as “laying the devices bare,” with the proviso that, here, estrangement offers no possibility of narrative rejuvenescence. The destruction of narrative progress is well expressed by the story of the “small boy,” the “potential procreator.” This “underplot” seems to be nothing more than a pretext for a gaff routine, which reminds prima vista of circus clownery and vaudeville routines.

CLOV: I warn you. I’m going to look at this filth since it’s an order. But it’s the last time. (He turns the telescope on the without.) Let’s see. (He moves the telescope.) Nothing... nothing... good... good... nothing... goo— (He starts, lowers the telescope, examines it, turns it again on the without. Pause.) Bad luck to it! HAMM: More complications! (Clov gets down.) Not an underplot, I trust. (Clov moves ladder nearer window, gets up on it, turns telescope on the without.) CLOV: (dismayed) Looks like a small boy! HAMM: (sarcastic) A small... boy! CLOV: I’ll go and see. (He gets down, drops the telescope, goes towards door, turns.) I’ll take the gaff. (He looks for the gaff, sees it, picks it up, hastens towards door.) HAMM: No! (Clov halts.) CLOV: No? A potential procreator? HAMM: If he exists he’ll die there or he’ll come here. And if he doesn’t... (Pause.) CLOV: You don’t believe me? You think I’m inventing? (Pause.) HAMM: It’s the end, Clov, we’ve come to the end. I don’t need you any more. (Pause.) CLOV: Lucky for you. (He goes towards door.) HAMM: Leave me the gaff. (Clov gives him the gaff, goes towards door, halts, looks at alarm-clock, takes it down, looks round for a better place to put it, goes to bins, puts it on lid of Nagg’s bin. Pause.)

199 The first Royal Court performance minimized the purple nose. In the 1969 Schiller production Beckett insisted that he didn’t want to overemphasize the clownish elements of Krapp’s personality, hence he removed the purple nose “elements of Krapp’s costume that recall the circus clown or music-hall were deleted: trousers too short for him, large white boots and capacious pockets in his waistcoat .” (1992, xvi).

186

CLOV: I’ll leave you. (He goes towards door.) (40)

The spectating audience makes an incursion into the play itself. And yet, it remains at a far distance, thereby replacing the gods of classical tragedy, those voyeuristic watchers who attended on the heroes’ self-destruction. Metaphysical isolation seems inevitable as the hearer’s fate at the end of Company tells us: “find yourself imagining you are not alone while knowing full well that nothing has occurred to make this possible” (Nowhow On 45).

We can make out the lineaments of the ritual nature of tragedy in Hamm’s story of the boy, who is also a distant image of the tragic ephebe reminding us that no renewal lies in sight.200 The incursion of metatheatricality testifies to the impossibility of excursion: the play appears as a self-contained whole, a distant and frozen planet, and the slapstick routine no longer unfolds as what Bergson calls “a uniformly accelerated rhythm, visibly intent upon effecting a crescendo” (Laughter 29). Rather, the characters’ routines evoke a decrescendo which tends towards an all-consuming sense of entropy.

If Kleist’s marionettes are so graceful, it is precisely because they lack self- awareness and that they are entirely unaware of a spectating audience. Here, self- awareness introduces a rigidity within life and, as in Kleist’s parable, the characters de facto lose the “free-play” of their gestures. The stammering routines shift the emphasis from the dramatic text to the actor’s body, summoning theatrical traditions that rely on masks, cabotinage, and improvisation. Hence, the anti-heroes’ banausic gestures convey

200 The small boy could also be a reference to Hamlet where a child is being born at the time of Hamlet’s death.

187 the idea that there is no more spiritus movens, no more room for spontaneous possibilities of change.

Despair seems to be sublimated only by laughter. Yet, it is not simply laughter, but an aggravation of Democritus’ laugh at the vain efforts’ of men, which Watt calls

“risus purus,” the mirthless laugh: “the laugh laughing at the laugh, the beholding, the saluting of the highest joke, in a word the laugh that laughs—silence please—at that which is unhappy.”201 The “laugh of laughs” is thus the “dianoetic laugh,” which is to say an “excoriation of the understanding” (48) in the face of the evanescent and nugatory nature of human existence. Laughter does not create euphoria, from the Greek ευφορία

[euphoria] “power of enduring easily.”202 Rather, the characters endure with difficulty, which is to say in a state of δυσφορία [dysphoria], an enduring in pain that knows no remission. Beckett, for whom, in Nell’s words, “nothing is funnier than unhappiness”

(11), derives humor from the disintegration of ordered purpose, from the spectacle of the frantic and unsuccessful pursuit of trivial gratifications. Laughter arises from the pompous and self-important preoccupations with illusory ambitions, from the recognition of the triviality and pointlessness of human strivings. As such, the essence of Beckett’s humor recalls Baudelaire’s conclusion as to why one bursts out laughing at the “sight of a man falling on the ice or on the road.”203 For the poet, laughter is “an involuntary spasm, comparable to a sneeze,” which is produced when the competing senses of “infinite greatness” and “infinite wretchedness” come up against each other (148). Laughter is a sign that our “unconscious pride,” which is born of a sense of superiority, is threatened

201 Samuel Beckett, Watt, p.48 202 From euphoros, literally “bearing well,” from eu “well” + pherein “to carry.” 203 Charles Baudelaire, “On the Essence of Laughter,” Selected Writings on Art and Life, p.146

188 by an encounter with forces that remain beyond our grasp and control. Most important,

Baudelaire notes that “the man who trips would be the last to laugh at his own fall, unless he happened to be a philosopher, a man who has acquired, by force of habit, the power to get outside of itself quickly, and watching as a disinterested spectator the phenomena of his own ego” (148). The acquired ability to perform a swift and mirthful self-division, to achieve a clear-sighted auto-analysis, as well as to think the coincidence of contradictory forces, is precisely what fails Beckett’s characters in Endgame, where the gray tonality of the play—neither black nor white—everywhere reminds us of this fact. Baudelaire announces Freud’s idea that laughter disrupts only momentarily the ordering processes of critical reason, which he later called the reality principle. Hence, Baudelairian laughter appears as a kind of “transgression” that, in the end, fails to make the reality principle tremble, for it only momentarily suspends its operations in order to reassert its authority later on. Baudelaire’s “heroic ironization of the present,” which implies the poetic capacity to turn meaninglessness into meaning, reflexivity into reflectivity, or, to put it in

Benjamin’s terms, Erlebnis into Erfahrung, is no longer available to Beckett’s characters.204 If Baudelaire’s dandyism succeeds in creating poetic resources to overcome the atrophy of experience and augment “the scope for the play of

204 Benjamin argued that in Baudelaire’s poetry the lived events of urban life (Erlebnis) are given the weight and depth of an Erfahrung, an experience otherwise repressed from the urban dweller’s consciousness. In remaining alert as a defense against stimuli, the individual safely lives though the shock impulses of an increasingly mechanical and hazardous urban environment, and thus remains confined to the sphere of Erlebnis. “The greater the share of the shock in particular impressions, the more constantly consciousness has to be alert as a screen against stimuli; the more efficiently it does so, the less do these impressions enter experience (Erfahrung), tending to remain in the sphere of a certain hour in one’s life (Erlebnis).” (Illuminations, 163)

189 imagination,”205 such process is no longer possible in Beckett’s work. Rather, his plays carry out a complete disowning of imagination, this “almost divine faculty which perceives…the intimate and secret relations of things, the correspondences and the analogies,”206 for Beckett’s antidramatic theatre does not give ground on the non- relationality of art. Indeed, if “nothing is more grotesque than the tragic,” it has to be expressed “until the end, above all at the end.”207 As a result, Beckett’s risus purus underlines the incapacity of the reality principle to solve contradictions: the illogical does not reverse into the logical, and oppositions are not reconciled into a higher synthesis— the paradox persists like an open wound and reality keeps skipping like a scratched record.208

The idea that “nothing is funnier than unhappiness” finds its aesthetic concretion in the intensification of form over content, which marks the anti-heroes’ imprisonment in the profane time par excellence, the nunc stans of the skull-shelter. If there is no more depth to be plumbed, if there are no more “moments of existence where time and space are more profound, and the feeling of existence immensely augmented,”209 the last

205 “The perpetual readiness of volitional, discursive memory, encouraged by the technique of mechanical reproduction, reduces the scope for the play of imagination.” (Illuminations, 186) 206 Charles Baudelaire, cited in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 285 207 My italics. Letter to Roger Blin, in S. E. Gontarsky, “The No against the Nothingness”, in Endgame, p.xiv 208 Beckett thus refuses Aristotle’s solution to Zeno’s paradox of the millet grain, this Parmenidean argument that one cannot trust one’s sense of hearing. As Aristotle put it, “Zeno’s reasoning is false when he argues that there is no part of the millet that does not make a sound: for there is no reason why any such part should not in any length of time fail to move the air that the whole bushel moves in falling. In fact it does not of itself move even such a quantity of the air as it would move if this part were by itself: for no part even exists otherwise than potentially. The argument is that a single grain of millet makes no sound upon falling, but a thousand grains make a sound. Hence a thousand nothings become something, which is absurd.” (Physics, 99) Beckett’s arcane music is the proof that consciousness cannot triumph over the unconscious and that, in Hamm and Krapp’s world, Aristotle’s solution that even inaudible sounds can add to an audible sound no longer obtains. 209 Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes I, “Fusées”, p.658

190 remnants of extemporaneity are to be found in the characters’ flaring up of affects, for example Clov’s compulsive laughter, which is but a “mode of ululation” as Watt put it

(48), and which can be read as a parody of how Sartre viewed human beings as coming to existence only sporadically, in brief flashes of negativity, before plunging back into the inertia of the practico-inert. Here, the ex tempore is but a jolt, the unreflective jerk of a life verging on exhaustion. The “music of the skulls” that compels the characters into existence is no impromptu,210 it unremittingly intensifies the reflexive and confined experience of Erlebnis, giving the impression that “time has turned into space and there will be no more time, till I get out of here,” as the narrator of “Texts for Nothing 8” put it.211 Here, Beckett most likely parodies a key scene in Wagner’s Parsifal, where

Gurnemanz tells Parsifal that time has become space.212 Gurnemanz, who has recognized in Parsifal the restorer of divine harmony, is determined to see if the Law will let him take part in the ceremony at the castle of the Grail. As they both approach the castle, bells start to ring, producing a lofty music that enables them to move into their inner, spiritual realm, and therefore pass into a higher state of consciousness that lies beyond the differentiation of space and time. As such, even though Parsifal still does not know what the Grail is, he remarks as they walk, “I scarcely tread, yet seem already to have come

210 I am referring here to Ohio Impromptu (1980), whose title alludes to the little solo pieces of Chopin, Schubert, or Schumann. Whereas the word “impromptu” refers to an improvised performance, the title of the play purposively fails to deliver on its promise, deploying a text that allows for no extemporaneous composition on the part of the actors. The play’s action focuses on two seated figures, Reader and Listener. The first reads aloud from a book while the second listens and scrupulously directs the reading process by knocking on a table. It looks like Listener is using Reader as a tape recorder, the first tap being “stop” and “rewind” button, the second, the “play” button. In this sense the play strikingly recalls Krapp’s Last Tape. 211 Samuel Beckett, Stories and Texts for Nothing, p.112 212 “Du siehst, mein Sohn, / zum Raum wird hier die Zeit”

191 far.”213 Gurnemanz explains that in this realm time turns into space, a transubstantiation that is described as a state of dreamy rapture, which has the heroes walk imperceptibly to the castle of the Grail. In opposition to Wagner’s musical theodicy, Beckett upends

Parsifal’s “only the spear that struck it heals the wound.”214 Art can no longer resolve the ambivalence of time, that “double monster of salvation and damnation,” and time does not heal the damage done by time, but only makes it worse. As a result, time reverses into space, and space turns into a prison, abolishing therefore Proust’s music of the Ideal, which is apprehended not in space but in time. As Beckett write,

Schopenhauer rejects the Leibnizian view of music as “occult arithmetic,” and in his aesthetics separates it from the other arts, which can only produce the Idea with its concomitant phenomena, whereas music is the Idea itself, unaware of the world of phenomena, existing ideally outside the universe, apprehended not in Space but in Time only, and consequently untouched by the teleological hypothesis. This essential quality of music is distorted by the listener who, being an impure subject, insists on giving a figure to that which is ideal and invisible, on incarnating the Idea in what he conceives to be an appropriate paradigm (Proust 70-71).

Beckett’s characters are no doubt poor listeners, impure subjects who never really manage to get free from the “teleological hypothesis.” Like Parsifal, they “scarcely tread,” and yet they do not seem “to have come far.” If the characters are never really able to delve into the aesthetic arcanum, it is because they can never reach Parsifal’s higher state of consciousness where the ordinary conceptions of time and space do not obtain. If Beckett reasserts the spatiality of music, it is primarily because his formalism verges more on the side of Leibniz’s understanding of music as “occult arithmetic” with its attention to “nice proportion, nice dimensions” as Clov put it. Indeed, Beckett

213 “Ich schreite kaum, doch wähn’ ich mich schon weit.” (Wagner, Parsifal in Full Score, 351) 214 “Die Wunde schliesst der Speer nur, der sie schlug”

192 contradicts Schopenhauer’s lionizing of music as the Art of the arts, the expression of the

“inner nature of the world,” which is predicated on the idea that only the universality of music can succeed in presenting intuitively the essence of the world, which is to say without relying on any abstract, rational concept. Rather, Beckett, like Leibniz, looks at music from its “lower standpoint,” which is to say regarded apart from its “aesthetic” or

“inner significance,” and looked at merely “externally and purely empirically.”215 If anything, Beckett’s aesthetics of exhaustion articulates in clinical fashion the rhythmic relations and ratios informing the concrete architecture of the plays. Indeed, according to

Deirdre Bair, in 1962 Beckett went so far as to ask Stravinsky to help him devise a way of “notating the tempo of the performance of his plays, and was especially interested in timing the pauses.”216 In Beckett’s plays, music no longer makes “every picture, and indeed every scene of real life and of the world, at once appear with higher significance”

(The World as Will and Representation I 340). If for Schopenhauer the composition of music discloses all the deepest secrets of human willing and feeling, for Beckett there is nothing left to be unveiled but the pathetic banality of fixion. The characters’ power to give shape to the ideal and invisible has been reduced to naught, caught as they are in the formalist net of Beckett’s mise en scène.

Beckett, who was familiar with Bergson’s concept of intuition, probably borrowed the idea of spatialized time from the French philosopher. According to Bergson, the spatialization of time entails the erasure of duration, the entry of the mechanical into the

215 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol.I, p.264 216 Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography, p.547

193 living,217 where time is conceptualized as an ordered arrangement of defined events, a collection of measurable units, rather than as an endless flow of experience in an indivisible continuity that can only be known through intuition. In spatialized time one no longer hears “the strains of our inner life’s unbroken melody,—a music that is oftentimes gay, but more frequently plaintive and always original.”218 Put differently, in spatialized time one can no longer follow the real in all its sinuosities because, as Beckett put it in

Imagination Dead Imagine (1965), habituation inevitably weakens our powers of observation, transforming “variations of rise and fall” into “countless rhythms” (First

Love and Other Stories 64), the rhythms of a life dominated by the undead drive.219 This operation of discretization of duration, with its procedures of rhythmical desiccation, is exactly what Beckett’s expressionism does to musical impressionism. And this is precisely where the tragic becomes grotesque. In his essay on laughter, Bergson argues that laughter arises when we are under the impression that someone is a lifeless, which is to say purely spatial thing. For Bergson we laugh when the characters of a play are no longer “men of flesh and blood like ourselves,” when they have the appearance of “large rubber balls hurled against one another in every direction” (28).220 Like Baudelaire,

217 Bergson’s Time and Free Will established the notion of duration, or lived time, as opposed to what Bergson viewed as the spatialized conception of time measured by a clock that is employed by science. 218 Henri Bergson, Laughter, p.74 219 The fact that the narrator’s descriptions of sound, colour, time, temperature, light or movement read like an inspection report, a factual and detailed enumeration, bespeaks Beckett’s scorn for the pretensions of scientific, positivistic approaches. The third eye of reason is unable to discretize the world: “in this agitated light, its great white calm now so rare and brief, inspection is not easy.” (First Love and Other Stories, 65) 220 This image corresponds to what Althusser called in Lire le Capital “mechanistic, transitive or linear causality,” which he compares to a Cartesian billard balls model according to which the relation between cause and effect is external. Beckett’s vision of causality also goes against what Althusser calls Hegel’s “expressive causality,” which sees cause-and-effect relations as the expression of inner essence. Eventually, Beckett seems to agree with the Spinozian model of “immanent” or “structural causality,” which reads causes as immanent to their effects, implying that the cause itself can only be deduced from the network of its effects. Since the individual is not causa sui (unlike the Spinozian God/Nature), s/he can never be the

194

Bergson takes the example of a man falling down in the street in front of passers-by.

According to Bergson, the source of the comic is to be found in the presence of a rigidity in life, for life is defined as temporal elation, perpetual movement, flexibility, and agility.

Comic situations, such as that of a falling man, are situations where movement is no longer flexible: “Where matter thus succeeds in dulling the outward life of the soul, in petrifying its movements and thwarting its gracefulness, it achieves, at the expense of the body, an effect that is comic” (14). The grace of the soul thus contrasts with the stolid thickness of the body, the inertia of matter that rivets the individual to the hic et nunc, as expressed in Beckett’s inversion of Kleist’s marionette theatre. The comic thus emerges when the soul no longer imparts a portion of its “winged lightness” (14) to the body it animates, when there is asynchronicity between the rigidity of the body and the supposed elasticity of the soul, which is to say when the rhythm of the individual falls out of step with itself. Bergson concludes that “the attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine” (15).

Indeed, “lively life” is not supposed to repeat itself, for where there is repetition, we suspect that there is mechanism behind life.

Beckett’s banausic characters remain fast in the clutches of a deadening mechanism, struck by a disease that admits of no alleviation, so much so that their compulsive behavior is reminiscent of the tragic heroes’ “fixation on αεί,” the time of

cause of itself, but, at the very best, the quasi-cause. Beckett aggravates the tragic gulf that lies at the bottom of Spinoza’s conception of subjectivity, which posits that the subject is marked by a fundamental impossibility, or the non-coincidence of essence and existence. The natural state of the subject is unfreedom in the sense that the subject is only the partial cause of what occurs within itself and of what it does. Beckett’s Geulincxian guignol world sanctions the impossibility of reaching beatitude, which is the highest affect whereby the subject qua pars naturans produces in and by God the powerful and joyous real movement in which it auto-produces itself in an absolutely autonomous manner.

195

“always” as Loraux called it, which impinges upon the human time of τύχη, the time of the evanescent and fleeting. The spatialized time in which they are imprisoned reduces motion to immobility and persistently overlooks the pulsations of experience. More prosaically than their tragic ancestors, their ordinary madness underlines the hubristic vanity of human knowledge in its attempt to erase the drift of τύχη, which the Greeks compared to the blows of fortune that interrupt the most elaborate rational planning and make a mockery of any attempt at foreknowledge (πρόγνωση). If Beckett’s characters never abandon themselves to the power of τύχη, if they never lose themselves to its ecstatic oblivion, it is precisely because their world has been structured in elision of such power. And yet, their attempt to annihilate τύχη is met with biting derision as Beckett depicts a world where δυστυχία (unhappiness) cannot be reversed into ευτυχία

(happiness), a world where the pure meaninglessness of τύχη remains unresolved until the end.

According to Benveniste, αιών designates the “vital force,” the temporality of that which “maintains itself without end, in the freshness of the always new.”221 In

Beckett, the subsuming of human time to the endless repetition of fixion is the expression of the transmutation of αιών into the Freudian death drive, this mechanistic compulsion to solidify the mobility of life, which is to say to get back to an inorganic, mineral state.

For Freud too, this “compulsion to repeat,” which persists beyond the cycle of life and death, signifies the entry of mechanism within life. Such compulsion is expressed in

Hamm’s obsessive demands that Clov verify that nothing is stirring on the horizon

(Hamm orders him to espy any sail, gull, fin, or trail of smoke on the sea), that no rat is

221 Emile Benveniste, “Expression indo-européenne de l’immortalité,” quoted in Loraux, p.28

196 moving in the kitchen, that no little boy is looming in the distance, or that no flea or, for that matter, any insect upset the stillness of the skull/shelter. Even Nagg and Nell are condemned to keep quiet, as Hamm puts it: “The old folks at home! No decency left!

Guzzle, guzzle, that’s all they think of” (7). As such, the obsession with order seeks to eradicate the possibility of any form of life that would renew the cycle of generation and corruption. The characters’ small rituals, the insistence with which they make trivial inventories of their lives or, using Bergson’s terminology, their continual rearrangements between the parts of discretized duration, can be seen as a way to avoid the concrete duration of the vital impulse in which a radical recasting of the whole is always going on.

Indeed, as Clov argues: “I love order. It’s my dream. A world where all would be silent and still, and each thing in its last place, under the last dust” (30). Here, Clov refers to a world bereft of volubility, a world where time has turned into space, or even, perhaps, where time has never existed as Hamm suggests during his final monologue: “Moments for nothing, now as always, time was never and time is over, reckoning closed and story ended” (42). In such a world entropy is given free rein and the plummeting temperatures of the play make that life can only stir still. Indeed, as the second law of thermodynamics goes, the highest the entropy the lowest is the capacity of system to undergo spontaneous change. The loss of available energy in the closed system that is the skull/shelter is symbolized by the fact that there is no food left, except for one zwieback, which Nagg and Nell end up sharing.

As Simondon argues, stable equilibrium “corresponds to the lowest level of potential energy possible; it is the sort of equilibrium that is attained in a system when all

197 possible transformations have been achieved and no other force remains to enact any further changes. With all the potentials actualized, and the system having reached its lowest energy level, it can no longer go through any more transformations” (The Genesis of the Individual 301-302). Thus, the self-enclosed world of Endgame resembles a system that has exhausted its potentials and can no longer produce qualitative alterations of duration. What remains is the absolute zero of heat death and utter indifference. As

Hamm’s parents argue, the shelter is freezing:

NAGG: Are you cold? NELL: Yes, perished, and you? NAGG: (Pause.) I’m freezing. (10)

As James Clerk Maxwell argued, the second law of thermodynamics can not be transgressed. To demonstrate this fact, Maxwell invented a thought experiment centered on an imaginary creature, a demon able to prevent loss of heat in a fully closed system.

This demon sorts molecules one by one and therefore rearranges them to keep heat alive.

In his Whoroscope Notebook Beckett devoted a section to Maxwell’s demon where he underlines that

If the world tends toward uniformity, this is not because its ultimate parts, at first unlike, tend to become less and less different; it is because, shifting at random, they end by blending. For an eye which should distinguish all the elements, the variety would remain always as great; each grain of this dust preserves its originality and does not model itself on its neighbors; but as the blend becomes more and more intimate, our gross senses perceive only the uniformity. This is why, for example, temperatures tend to a level, without the possibility of going backwards. A drop of wine falls into a glass of water, etc…. One may shake it afterwards, the wine and the water do not seem to be capable of again separating. A grain of barley in a heap of wheat… the type of the irreversible phenomenon (Cf. Gibbs: Principles of Statistical Mechanics) (Whoroscope, 41-42).

198

Beckett’s characters live in a world that is closed on itself and, despite their efforts to count the grains (Clov) or separate the grains from the husks (Krapp), they are unlike Maxwell’s demon, they cannot sort molecules one by one and constrain the world to go backwards. Rather, the characters are prisoners of their “gross senses” and they never manage to lift the world into discernibility. If the characters are unable to experience the world of the infinitesimal, let alone order it (Beckett helped himself to

Gibbs’ demonstration in his Principles of Statistical Mechanics that the behavior of molecules is unpredictable), they certainly work off the pensum of an infinitesimally approaching death. The skull/shelter in which they live, and which symbolizes how they are imprisoned in their head, is an aggravation of Murphy’s “little world” which is exclusive of “nothing that it did not itself contain” (Murphy 107).222 The characters of the play become universal figures of humanity, figures of a life that gnaws away at itself, a life whose reflectivity has reversed into reflexivity.

As Laura Salisbury remarked, the closed universe of Endgame is faithful to the second law of thermodynamics, which posits that in a closed system “entropy increases as fast, hot molecules, and cold, slow ones, gradually settle into a homogeneous mixture denuded of local configurations of order” (Laughing Matters 132). And yet, Beckett does not concretize the abstraction and hints at the fact that the text can never be a thermodynamically closed system for, after all, the spectator brings his or her own subjectivity into the play. As Salisbury argues, “in the play text there is a strong implication that it is precisely audience laughter that produces something new for the characters—an awareness that they are comic objects” (133). As we have seen

222 Not to mention that Murphy reaches inertia as he frees himself from his body.

199 previously, the metatheatrical is a key feature of non-dramatic theatre because it associates spectators as co-enunciators of the play. Beckett clearly refers to such a metatheatrical dimension in Endgame.

HAMM: This is deadly. (Enter Clov with the telescope. He goes towards ladder.) CLOV: Things are livening up. (He gets up on ladder, raises the telescope, lets it fall.) I did it on purpose. (He gets down, picks up the telescope, turns it on auditorium.) I see... a multitude... in transports... of joy. (Pause. He lowers telescope, looks at it.) That’s what I call a magnifier. (He turns toward Hamm.) Well? Don’t we laugh? HAMM: (after reflection): I don’t. CLOV: (after reflection): Nor I. (He gets up on ladder, turns the telescope on the without.) Let’s see. (He looks, moving the telescope.) Zero... (he looks) ...zero... (he looks) ...and zero. HAMM:Nothing stirs. All is— CLOV: Zer— HAMM (violently): Wait till you’re spoken to! (Normal voice.) All is... all is... all is what? (Violently.) All is what? CLOV: What all is? In a word? Is that what you want to know? Just a moment. (He turns the telescope on the without, looks, lowers the telescope, turns towards Hamm.) Corpsed. (Pause.) Well? Content? (17)

Clov goes on to describe what he sees in the telescope. The light is “sunk,”

“nothing on the horizon,” the waves of the sea are “lead,” the sun is “zero.” In this dialogue Hamm and Clov clearly acknowledge metatheatricality, they are being watched and objectified. Although the “multitude” is “in transports of joy,” the metatheatrical nota bene only comes to underline the impossibility of theatre itself. The distance between the spectators and the actors is characteristic of the Aristotelian closure of representation— outside the skull everything is “corpsed” and distance is clearly emphasized: “that’s what

I call a magnifier.” As such, when Hamm compulsively and vainly asks for his calmative—“Is it not time for my painkiller?”, a demand that comes back six times in the

200 play—, it is not only to emphasize the irremediable inevitability of tragic suffering, but also to underline the evacuation of καιρός.223

Conclusion: “I shall hear it always”

While Beckett deprives his characters of the capacity to sublimate, Endgame and

Krapp are themselves acts of sublimation, primitive architectures, secret musics that give minimal consistency to the void. As sublimations the plays dramatize the gap that separates the form of dramatic theatre from a modern condition of suffering that cannot be represented mimetically. They are limit-experiences that transgress the limit of the lived and the livable. In diametrical opposition to Wagner’s and Nietzsche’s revival of tragic drama, Beckett’s mechanical theatre testifies to the modern experience of isolation.

In Endgame and Krapp laughter is not shared, for the audience laughs whereas the characters cannot. In Adorno’s words, the jokes are “damaged,” “they do not reach anyone; the pun, the degenerate form of which is there a bit in every joke, covers them like a rash.”224 Hence, the interplay, emulation, and complicity between actors, which is central to non-dramatic theatre’s freedom of experimentation with fixed types and forms,

223 To come back to the notion of καιρός, it is worth noting how such notion cannot be dissociated from the Greece of 5th and 4th century BC, a time when human actions started to be seen as autonomous, that is no longer depending on divine will. As Monique Trédé argues, it is at such a time that the observance of καιρός became prevalent in multiple domains, such as medicine. Καιρός is thus a word that Hippocrates and his followers used to refer to the notion of “crisis” as the critical moment when the diseased evolves toward cure or death, which is to say the moment when the doctor’s intervention becomes truly decisive (Trédé, Kairos, L’à propos et l’occasion 38). 224 Adorno, Notes to Literature I, p.258

201 results in a radical incapacity to communicate not only between actors themselves, but also between actors and audience. As a result, Beckett’s anti-heroes, with their self- enclosed existence that exhausts itself in pure self-positing, appear as metonyms for theatre itself. Through their own organized meaninglessness, Beckett’s plays occupy the nadir of Aristotelian drama, twitching beyond the closure of representation, only to underline the incapacity to transcend its horizon. Theatre is left to perform its own post- mortem examination. In the absurd, Aristotelian drama comes into its own: the universal text has been torn down, its ruins stretched over the post-atomic shelter that has become the stage, lying amid the pathetic details, the rubbles of the anti-heroes’ exhausted life.

Thus, in Beckett’s plays apriority and concreteness are wedded together as if by a

Faustian curse, which reveals the untruth of dramatic representation. In Goethe’s tragic play, Faust’s curse lies in his breach with normal life, which he has left to wallow in the vapors of infinite knowledge. The only remedy to Faust’s predicament is for him to find the resources to create a new life within himself. Unless he does this, he will be a victim of the delusion that he really can divorce himself from natural human existence. In

Faustian fashion, Beckett’s antidrama testifies to theatre’s incapacity to create a new life within itself. The existential imprisonment of Beckett’s anti-heroes evokes the tragic solitude of art, which contrasts with what Beckett elsewhere calls the “orgy of false being” (How it is 69). In Endgame and Krapp, the metaphysics of spiritual enclosure is given unprecendeted expression through the meticulousness of Beckett’s renewed dramatic formalism.

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Eventually, amid the ruins of Aritotelian tragic drama only one question remains:

Can laughter thus be said to constitute an intrusion, a flaring up of the real coming to disrupt the symbolic space of the plays, bringing contingent circumstances to affect the course of the game, or even unpredictable intrusions that may cut the game short? If the audience does bring something new to the characters, if comic pleasure releases new energy into the plays, preventing them from reaching absolute entropy, it only does infinitesimally so, for the music of the skulls is relentless, and the skulls unbreachable—

“I shall hear it always, Molloy says, no thunder can deliver me, until it stops” (Three

Novels, 39).

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Part II

“Musicalize She Said”

Marguerite Duras’ Deconstruction of the Realist Novel

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Introduction

Traversing the Realist Fantasy

Nothing is truer about the second phase of Duras’ works than Robbe-Grillet’s imperative that “each novel must invent its own form. No recipe can replace this continual reflection” (For a New Novel 12). Towards the end of the 1950s Duras begins to radically question the classical form of the novel, envisioning her texts as a series of limit- experiences producing a perpetual deconstruction of what the nouveau roman viewed as the “humanist” or “logocentric” desire of the realist novel. For Derrida, logocentrism names the desire for an ultimate guarantee of meaning, whether God, Truth, Reason,

Realism or any other master signifier. Following the ideals of the nouveau roman, Duras subverts that “omniscient, omnipresent narrator” who appears, Robbe-Grillet writes,

“everywhere at once, simultaneously seeing the outside and the inside of things […] knowing the present, the past and the future of every enterprise.” Such a narrator “can only be God” (For a New Novel 120-21). For Duras the novel must be wretched from

205 itself, from the “metaphysics of presence” that believes in the existence of some such ultimate guarantee of meaning, which is to be found in the objective narrator of the realist novel. Her texts deconstruct the desire for totality and organicism, defying the desire for cognitive exhaustivity and hermeneutical containment. The metaphysics of the classical novel lies in a desire for coherence and meaning, portraying reality according to a stable perspective, well-established points of view, and the linearization of time and causality.

To a certain extent, realism in Stendhal or the naturalism of Zola implies a representation of the “natural” world in all its manifest plenitude, where the word has a mimetic, intimate relationship with the “things” it symbolizes. As Barthes puts it, realism seeks “to arrange all the meanings of a text in a circle around the hearth of denotation

(the hearth: center, guardian, refuge, light of truth)” (S/Z 7). Although even the most sophisticated realist novel ultimately fails to make sense of the complexity and totality of existence, it succeeds in creating a “reality effect” that is nonetheless based on a teleology of mimetic closure that is apparent in how realist narration seeks to establish a solid framework of determinacy wherein events are not simply described, but also defined in terms of their relative significance to the plot as a whole. In short, realism can be seen as a fantasy that legitimizes itself by placing the question of mimetic symmetry at the center of representation. As opposed to this, Duras’ experimentations radically call into question the belief in a fundamental adequation between the real and representation, twisting and turning the codes of novelistic realism in order to produce an

“anamorphosis” of the novel through which the void at the center of representation is laid bare.

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To put it in psychoanalytic terms, what Duras calls écriture consists in the traversing of the realist fantasy in order to uncover the abyss, the fundamental asymmetry that lies at its core. For Duras, as for Lacan, “reality is precarious” (Seminar VII 19). Like the classical novel, human reality is structured around a horror of void and inconsistency that fantasies seek to foreclose. Still largely influenced by Faulkner and Hemingway,

Proust and Stendhal, the first phase of Duras’ writings, which contains Les Impudents

(1943), La Vie tranquille (1944), Un Barrage contre le Pacifique (1950), Le Marin de

Gibraltar (1952), Les Petits chevaux de Tarquinia (1953), and Des journées entières dans les arbres (1954), belongs to what we will call the “realist” or “classical” era of her literary productions. Moderato Cantabile is the first aesthetic turn operated by Duras, and like the main character of the novel, Anne Desbaresdes, it contemplates the possibility of committing suicide. Indeed, as Barthes puts it in “Literature and Discontinuity,” the traditional book is

an object which connects, develops, runs and flows, in short, has the profoundest horror vacui [...] to write is to secrete words within that great category of the continuous which is narrative; all literature [...should be a narrative, a flow of words in the service of an event which ‘makes its way’ toward its denouement or its conclusion: not to ‘narrate’ its object is, for the Book, to commit suicide (Critical Essays 173–74).

Duras defies the aspiration to symmetry, completeness, and closure of the classical novel. In logics, “completeness” implies the idea of a hypothetic and deductive system that contains no undecidable propositions. The realist novel’s search for “truth” is the search for “what closes, what completes” (S/Z 76). L’écriture, on the other hand, affirms that any text is haunted by what Derrida called the “undecidable,” or equivocations that prevent an author from foisting any stable meaning upon her readers.

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By foregrounding undecidability, Duras challenges the “kerygmatic” dimension of hermeneutic narrative, in which “truth predicates an incomplete subject, based on expectation and desire for its imminent closure” (S/Z 76). The work is now conceived as unworking, that is, as an affirmation of its undoing. In the late 1950s Duras’ writing style progressively comes to embrace a powerful absence at the center of plot and narration, an irreducible gap of non-representability that it cannot capture in a stable perspective or insert in a meaningful structure that develops its hermeneutic relevance.

The first stylistic break with the realist novel thus occurs with Moderato

Cantabile (1958), which was written after an almost lethal crisis in Duras’ life, a crisis triggered by the end of a passionate love affair that involved alcohol abuse (La Vie matérielle 19). If style is “la chose” of the writer, the expression of “un souvernir enfermé dans le corps de l’écrivain” (S/Z 13), Duras’ stylistic departure from realist aesthetics is intrinsically linked to the exploration of what she qualifies as “une experience érotique très, très, très violente” (Les Parleuses 59), which, artistically, is at the origin of “un tournant vers la sincérité” (59). With the end of classicism, Duras abandons the categories of genre to embrace the notion of écriture, destroying the theological concept of œuvre as an intentional work that expresses the individuality of an author. L’écrit bears witness to the traumatic experience of an unnamable jouissance that exceeds authorial control and whose traces, buried deep within the body, need to be excavated.

While the early texts gesture towards an abandonment of the codes of classical narrative (for instance, the narrator of Le Marin de Gibraltar attempts to write an

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American novel but fails), they do not reach the expressive freedom that later works like

L’Amour (1984) or Emily L (1987) display. With Moderato cantabile, a book commissioned by Robbe-Grillet for the Editions de Minuit, Duras’ writing begins to integrate the self-reflexive mode of the nouveau roman. Literature releases itself from its bondage to novelistic conventions and the mimetic tradition, perpetually reflecting on, and rewriting, its own structure. To use Barthes’ distinction, Duras operates a decisive turn away from the “readerly” (lisible) text or the texte de plaisir, which only repeats or recycles familiar codes and conventions, to produce “writerly” (scriptible) texts or textes de jouissance that frustrate the reader.225 In a nutshell, in the encounter with the writerly text the reader ceases to be a passive consumer whereas the conventional or “readerly” caters to the pleasure of passive consumption and the conventional. While Duras enjoyed reading and writing realist novels, she came to consider them to be too readerly, that is, too intelligible and too easily assimilable by the reader, a simple confirmation of the assumptions and conventions of bourgeois individualism.

If, paradoxically enough, Barthes preferred Duras’ classical texts, we will see how her post-1957 works constitute state of art texts of jouissance.226 For Duras, the jouissance text is intimately bound to the advent of an inherently feminine kind of writing. Duras’ heroines depict the tragic fate of women’s body repressed by phallogocentric society and Bovarian conformism. In an interview in Signs (1975) she contends that “the future belongs to women. Men have been completely dethroned. Their

225 Barthes makes the distinction between the readerly text and the writerly text in S/Z (4). This distinction dovetails with that between the pleasure text and jouissance text in The Pleasure of the Text (1, 4) 226 As Duras recounts, Barthes once asked her to go back to her earlier works which were “si simples et si charmants” (YAS 21).

209 rhetoric is stale, used up. We must move on to the rhetoric of women, one that is anchored in the organism, in the body.”227 In the same way that Virginia Woolf challenged woman’s place as an economic commodity exchanged among men through marriage in Three Guineas (1938), Duras urges women to reclaim their body as a site of erotic pleasure, rebelling against the libidinal suppression that has bound her as an economic commodity. The love that fascinates Duras has the valence of aneconomical expenditure, it testifies to a passion that cannot be reined in, mitigated, or represented.

The body entering the text bears the mark of an acephalous jouissance that disrupts the coercive totalization characteristic of the self-contained oeuvre: the feminine is the excess of eroticism and free-play that insists in the margins and gaps (as the repressed, the unconscious) of male-dominated culture. In the affirmation of their desire, Duras’ heroines follow the path of Melusine, which implies that as soon as women assert their difference, they must be excluded from the social order. As long as women do not endanger masculine values they are considered as innocuous or “safe,” their difference being safely contained within the self-same world of man. Feminist thought has qualified this neutralization of the feminine as the “specular otherness” of woman, which appears only as a mirror for man to rest his gaze in the safe contemplation of his confirmed masculinity. The ethical dimension of Duras’ work is that her heroines break the masculine mirror, ushering into the world of man a negativity that cannot be framed or contained. Duras’ works stage the tragedy of desire, which, according to the writer, is repressed by the masculine Weltanschauung: “on n’écrit pas du tout du même endroit que

227 Susan Husserl-Kapit,"An Interview with Marguerite Duras", Signs, Autumn 1975, p.434.

210 les hommes. Et quand les femmes n’écrivent pas dans le lieu du désir, elles n’écrivent pas, elle sont dans le plagiat” (Les Lieux de Marguerite Duras 102). Feminine writing calls into question the binary pair “man/woman.” In good deconstructive fashion, what appears to be an opposition between two independent terms turns out to be an opposition internal to one of the two terms, namely, “man.” Duras, like Woolf or Cixous, has encouraged women to write themselves out of the world of man, to transgress the socio- economic boundaries that are imposed on them.

Important studies have underlined the ethical dimension of Duras’ work. Leslie

Hill’s Apocalyptic Desires (1993) has shown how Duras conceives desire as a profoundly transgressive, catastrophic force that lays waste to the world. Hill underlines the importance of the body in Duras’ textual experimentations, advancing that corporeality is not envisioned as a figure of self-identity but a metaphor for what escapes identity, and which constitutes the groundless ground of her aesthetics. Martin Crowley’s Duras,

Writing and the Ethical: Making the Broken Whole (2000) demonstrates that the works of

Duras are constantly troubled by ethical inquiries. For Crowley, “Duras is not an ethical writer” (1), because she does not openly try to influence her readers to lead a good life or to solve ethical issues that arise from our daily life. Such an understanding of ethics is profoundly Aristotelian. Duras’ writing occurs at the limits of the ethical in the encounter with the overwhelming experiences of passion, violence, and loss. Duras explores the limits of human consciousness and behavior found within systems of reason, language, gender, and society. L’ecrit begins at the point at which the limits within these systems are transgressed and thus thrown into disarray by the uncontainable force of desire.

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In this study, I propose that Duras’ ethical writing precisely defies what I call the

“humanist” or “narcissistic” falsification of tragedy, affirming instead the tragic as an uncompromising confrontation with death. Duras’ tragic characters are acephalous in the very sense that they precede what she calls the “mode of reflection”: “si vous considérez mes personnages, ils précèdent tous ce mode, au moins ceux que j’aime, que j’aime profondément” (Les Lieux de Marguerite Duras 98). This pre-reflective dimension testifies to an affinity with what Duras calls “l’évènement de la jouissance” (La Vie matérielle 21) to which writing bears witness. In French the word “jouissance” has come to refer to an intense, orgasmic form of pleasure that entails an interruption of consciousness. Jouissance means “to die,” referring to an orgasmic climax, a death, a moment of self-oblivion at the height of sexual pleasure. In accounting for the event of jouissance, writing embraces the anarchic energeia that pushes us beyond the pleasure principle and, as a consequence, beyond the established boundaries of the realist novel. In psychoanalytic terms, the function of the pleasure principle is to mitigate the effects of jouissance, leading the subject “from signifier to signifier by introducing as many signifiers as is needed to maintain at the lowest degree of tension that regulates the functioning of the psychical apparatus” (Seminar VII 143). Lacan builds on Freud’s revolutionary insight that the mental apparatus works as an economic system whose primary aim is to reduce high levels of tension that are felt as displeasure. Thus, fundamentally, pleasure is nothing more than discharge, the diminution of displeasure. As such, the pleasure principle prevents us from going too far in the direction of what Lacan calls in Seminar XIII the “foyer brulant” of jouissance.228 Once we go down the path of

228 “…ce foyer brûlant de ce qui est à éviter pour le sujet pensant” (Seminar XIII, session of March 23

212 jouissance, we do not know where it will lead and no prediction can be made: “It starts with a tickle and ends up bursting into flames” (Seminar VII 83). Jouissance refers to the place where the Freudian ideas of Eros and Thanatos merge and become undistinguishable. Most important, jouissance in Duras’ text bears the quality of the sacred, which, as Roger Caillois argues, is both attractive and repulsive, tremendum and fascinans (Man and the Sacred 37). Indeed, Duras compares her feminine heroines to

Racine’s tragic women, they are “comme des soeurs d’Andromaque, Phèdre, Bérénice: martyr d’un amour qui les submerge, jusqu’à atteindre le sacré” (La Passion suspendue

102). Feminine jouissance is the tragic irruption of destructive negativity into everyday reality, an event that rises above, and does not seem to be conditioned by, the order from which it arose. The event of jouissance is characterized by an insurmountable ambivalence: if jouissance represents a limitless freedom that liberates women, it is also a threatening abyss waiting to engulf them. Hence, Duras’ tragic heroines are all animated by an obscure desire to transgress although they approach jouissance with a fascinated awe.

Duras’ first experimental works, Moderato cantabile and Le Ravissement, focus on the event of devouring love, which led Duras to embrace a “general economy” of literature where expenditure (passion, waste, sacrifice, or destruction) is considered more fundamental than the economies of production and utilities. Writing is a limit-experience where l’écrit becomes synonymous with les cris, that is, the screams released by her characters as they reach that point of intensity and impossibility that takes them beyond what Deleuze calls “the lived and the livable” (Critical and Clinical 1). Duras’ heroines

1966)

213 reach a point of no return that releases them from the static, anesthetized, and suffocating masculine world in which they are imprisoned. Duras describes this breaking point as an

“accident,” a contingency superior to all necessity, a moment of madness upon which they escape the determination of existing imperatives of utility. For instance, Lol experiences “un amour sans retour,” “un amour trop grand” (Le Ravissement 50), she is

“cette revenante tranquille d’un amour si grand, si fort, disait-on, qu’elle en avait comme perdu la raison” (80). The ethical moment in Duras lies in the confrontation with one of the central paradoxes of bourgeois culture—namely, the fact that the bourgeoisie hallows a concept, that of Romantic love, which is utterly adverse to it. Love is what Bataille calls the “impossible” of bourgeois society, if by impossible is understood the aporetic element that bourgeois ideology cannot take into account without shattering its epistemological and ontological foundations. Although Duras’ writing keeps returning to the enigma of love, the latter appears as an eternally new, forever untimely value, which is always contemporary with its own creation.

Thus, in order to shatter the shackles of masculine economy, Duras’ heroines go down the path of jouissance, which denotes the kind of aneconomical expenditure that

Bataille identifies in eroticism. Passionate love “touches the impossible,” bringing women to experience the vertigo of the void and the abyss. As Bataille puts it, eroticism is “assenting to life up to the point of death” (Erotism 11), and in order to experience it one has to leave the comfort zone of pleasurable libertinage in order to risk everything. In eroticism violence overwhelms us, “what happens is foreign to the received order of things, to which this violence each time stands in opposition” (Tears of Eros 32).

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Aesthetics becomes a question of how art may deploy the essential violence of jouissance while at the same time understanding art as violence that defies the very violence of reality. As a practice of “counter-violence” art pushes back against ordinary coercion, opening up a space for new, dissident modes of individuation to arise. Like Bataille,

Duras endows jouissance with the aura of the sacred, which is to be opposed to the profane domain of utility. Bataille reconceptualized Durkheim’s opposition between the profane and the sacred to describe the former as the realm of work and logos (reason) that sets prohibitions to contain the excess of jouissance menacing the survival of both the individual and society. While Durkheim advanced that the profane and the sacred were in a state of equilibrium, Bataille believed that the former came to dominate the latter in the capitalist world.

As we will discuss, Duras’ endeavor resonates with Bataille’s idea that desire is intrinsically linked to horror and death. Bataille refers to what he calls the “Phaedra

Complex,” in which he explores the link between horror and desire (The Accursed Share

95). In his analysis of the Greek myth, Bataille underlines that Phaedra’s love for her brother Hippolytus grows in proportion to the horror that arises from the prospect of committing incest. In Erotism, Bataille advances that it is this self-awareness that separates human eroticism from the animal instinct (11). Duras, who lavished praise on

Racine’s adaptation of the myth, certainly embraces the Phaedra complex, which is displayed in the forbidden passions endured by her key characters. It is precisely the awareness of prohibition, horror, and disgust that heightens the intensity of erotic pleasure. Like the sacred, the experience of jouissance is unrepresentable and cannot be

215 assimilated by language. As such, Duras’ feminine writing implies an embrace of the mystical drive towards negativity, which subverts the masculine desire for discursive coherence and authority. I propose that this mystical embrace of negativity entails a process of destruction of language that can be traced in the progression of Duras’ style from Moderato cantabile to Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein.

With Duras literature becomes a limit-experience, and each work attempts to reach the point of life that lies as close as possible to the impossibility of living. The limit-experience plays a crucial role in each novel, so much so that one may even go so far as to propose that it is the limit-experience itself, in place of a traditional narrative, that structures the novel. In the “Préface à la transgression” Foucault writes that transgression “is not about a generalized negation, but about an affirmation that affirms nothing—a total rupture with transitivity” (Dits et écrits I 756). The absence that hollows out the text leads towards the absence of work whose other name is madness. In Duras madness is understood as an experience of loss of the boundaries of the self and language that contaminates objective narration. With the affirmation of the intransitive event of jouissance, Duras brings representation to its limits, forcing literature to test the limits of aesthetic sublimation in the Lacanian sense of the term. In its constant efforts to revolutionize its means of expression, Duras’ style keeps getting closer to the limit where beauty falters and where the terror of sublimity might tip over into the monstrous where the self meets its dissolution.

In this essay I show how this movement from the beautiful to the sublime and the monstrous can be traced back through Duras’ engagement with music. Duras takes stock

216 of language’s profane limitations, “le langage tue toute passion, la circonscrit, la diminue” (La Passion suspendue 136). Her elliptic mode of writing, which privileges silence, interruptions, and narrative breakdown, often looks to music as literature’s other, as an inassimilable alterity against which new aesthetic criteria may be invented. While music has always been given pride of place in her works, it is with Moderato cantabile that Duras first uses a musical structure—Diabelli’s sonatina—to tear apart the realist fantasy. Music, whose seductive power has largely been treated by logocentrism as a siren’s lure, is central to Duras’ affirmation of bodily writing. Duras revisits a Romantic topos that links music to intransitivity, ineffability, and immediacy, that envisions music as a language of tones and affects standing in opposition to the referential and reflective language of words and ideas. To be sure, the musicalization of language is an ideal source of obtuse senses that contradict the profane use of language as communication where meaning produces obvious signs, fixed and stereotyped symbols. The affirmation of music’s intransitivity allows the novel to escape from the systematic obligation that adheres to language. Already in Barrage contre le Pacifique, Duras uses music as a metaphor for what remains beyond discourse (in that case it is the Ramona tune that is associated with the powerful hope that the injustice of colonialism will be overthrown).

Whether it is music with a text (program music) or music without a text (absolute music),

Duras ascribes musicality a specific and constant function in her works: music functions as a catachresis for what remains unrepresentable within the literary space, whether it be the power of the impossible, incestuous, and lawless love for the mother (Le Vice-

217 consul), the brother (Agatha), or the love of an adult for a child (Moderato cantabile,

L’Eté 80).

Whereas Moderato cantabile carefully approaches the burning heath of lethal jouissance through the veil of music, Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein begins when the music stops, that is, when the beautiful form explodes. To use Lyotard’s distinction, we will see how the passage from Moderato cantabile to Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein can be defined as a passage from “modern” to “postmodern” art, the latter denying itself “the solace of good forms” by attempting to show the unpresentable directly, the former casting it “as the missing contents” of a formally graceful artwork (The Postmodern

Condition 81).

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Chapter III

Moderato cantabile, or Music as the Last Veil that Hides the Monstrous

Les femmes ont accumulé des masses fabuleuses de cette énergie, qui est à l’instar de celle de la mer encore enfouie mais intacte, entière. —Marguerite Duras à Montréal 69

La musique, mon amour… —Moderato cantabile 12

In 1959 Duras argues that her goal is to “désencombrer la littérature du bavardage romanesque.” Her textual practice seeks to contest the novel’s desire for identity, coherence, and realism, offering a paradoxical definition of meaning as the undefined, the non-identical. What interests her in a situation is “son ombre ou celle qu'elle projette sur les êtres alentour.” The series of novelistic experimentations that began with Moderato cantabile (henceforth Moderato cantabile) is thus defined as “negative” novels.229 The book constitutes a turning point in her approach to writing: “... je rejette les livres qui plaisent le plus. Je vais peut-être déplaire à nos lecteurs: je rejette Les Petits chevaux de

229 Marguerite Duras, les Nouvelles littéraires, 18 juin 1959, p.4

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Tarquinia. Parce que c’est un livre plein de charme et de facilité.”230 Moderato cantabile is a complex text whose superimposition of several narrative threads forbids leasurely reading. Moreover, direct action is sparse, almost non-existent, and the enigma of what is not articulated expressis verbis looms over the work. Because it gives expression to a tragedy of unbearable passion through linguistic sobriety, the text has a Racinian dimension. Indeed, Duras’ elliptic writing seeks to reproduce what she elsewhere calls “la musique de Racine” (La Vie matérielle 82), which she derives from the overwhelming use of litotes, suspended sentences and words that edge the dialogues on the brink of silence.

Duras disarticulates the codes of novelistic realism, leaving the realm of the quotidian, the average, the commonplace, which reflect the preoccupations of the middle class and its daily struggles. In Duras’ universe, the tragic is an encounter with an inassimilable transcendence that elevates her characters outside of the realm of the ordinary and leaves them in a state of fascination. In Moderato cantabile the enigmatic scream of a woman being murdered is the source of great anxiety and uncertainty about the meaning of death. What turns out to be a crime of passion is the accident that draws away the main character, Anne Desbaresdes, from profane existence, which, according to

Bataille, is shaped by the techniques by means of which humans cope with the abyss of the chaotic and the unknown. (“Social Life and the Organization of Society” in Essential

Writings 40) If Moderato cantabile begins with a mysterious crime in a quiet coastal city, its narrative plays with, and undoes, the conventions of the detective novel, whose

230 Marguerite Duras, Hubert Tyssen, « Marguerite Duras, un silence peuplé de phrases », in Synthèses, août—septembre 1967, n° 254/255, p. 45.

220 teleology and positivistic detection are disrupted by an enigma that can not be unraveled.

Traditionally, the classic crime story is underpinned by a fundamental belief that the world can be known empirically through the eyes of the detective who eventually completes the puzzle after having brought all the evidence together. As Barthes puts it, the plot of a realist novel, detective or not, revolves around an opening enigma that throws the conventional world of meaning into a state of disequilibrium (S/Z 47). In a detective novel, the opening enigma is usually a murder that disrupts homeostasis, throwing the world into a paranoid state of suspicion where everyday signs (what

Heidegger calls Alltäglichkeit, “everydayness”) momentarily lose the obvious meaning they had before the crime. Quotidian signs make up the semiotic system in which individuals recognize themselves and where their symbolic and imaginary preservation lies. As Barthes underlines, the story must progress inevitably towards closure, setting up detours and snares all along the way. Eventually, the enigma is solved, the murderer is caught and harmony is reestablished, thus re-assuring the reader that the value system of signs that she shares with the author is not endangered. As such, the detective novel is the archetype of what Barthes calls le texte de plaisir. Politically speaking, the detective novel is therefore conservative; in trying to show us the world as it is, it often merely reaffirms the way things are.

The plot of Moderato cantabile revolves around the tragedy of unruly passion that invades and disrupts the quiet life of Anne Desbaresdes, the lonely wife of a rich industrialist who is referred to as the “directeur d’Import Export et des Fonderies de la côte” (32). The novel begins with Anne attending her child’s piano lesson in a downtown

221 apartment when the instruction is interrupted by a scream coming from a nearby café. We subsequently learn that a woman, mother of three children, has been killed by her lover.

The latter is seen crying over her dead body. We know nothing of the chain of events that led to this tragedy. As she becomes irresistibly attracted to the scene of the crime, Anne ventures into the café and meets a man, a member of the working class with whom she appears to fall in love. Moderato cantabile displays a circular structure of frequently repeated scenes through which a progression can nonetheless be traced towards an ending, the precise status and interpretation of which are left without resolution. The narrative begins with a murder and ends with the verbal re-enactment of that murder by another couple, Anne and “the man,” a proletarian whose name we learn halfway through the novel to be Chauvin (60). The circularity of the overall structure is mirrored in the different chapters, in which Anne and Chauvin reconstruct and invent the possible events that led to the woman’s murder. In each of their rendez-vous the unlikely couple rehearses the same elements in their dialogue, producing variations on the same theme.

Yet, instead of rationalizing the event, the dialogues cast more shadow on what happened, taking the characters and the reader into the unknown.

As we are going to discuss, the structure of the novel borrows some features from the musical form of the sonatina. This stylistic manoeuver not only allows Duras to musicalize narration, it also functions as an intertextual reference to Tolstoy’s The

Kreutzer Sonata (1889), which borrows its name from one of Beethoven’s most sensuous pieces. In this novella written after a spiritual crisis late in Tolstoy’s life, the Russian novelist exposes his religious and moral preoccupations, more specifically his

222 controversial view on sexuality and music. The main character named Pozdnyshev regards sexual intercourse as a perverted practice, a fall from ideal purity. Through this character Tolstoy tries to persuade his readers that “marriage nowadays is just a deception” that “usually either ends in infidelity or violence” (35). Pozdnyshev makes the curious claim that most cases of adultery are occasioned by music, which he perceives to be a shameful aphrodisiac. Music is said to exacerbate the “animal excesses” and

“swinish connection” that govern the relation between the sexes. In other words, for

Tolstoy music fans the fire of jouissance, it teases out what Bataille calls this “movement which always exceeds the bounds, that can never be anything but partially reduced to order” (Erotism 40). To make his point, Pozdnyshev explains that one day he invited to his house a musician named Trukachevsky who accompanied Pozdnyshev’s wife on the violin while she played the piano. Persuaded that they were having an affair, Pozdnyshev leaves for the country to participate in the meeting of a local council and decides to return home early, thinking that he would find the two lovers in bed. Instead he finds them sitting in the living room after they had played music. Incensed nonetheless, Pozdnyshev murders his wife after Trukachevsky has fled.

Another intertext is Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie, which, like Moderato cantabile, appears to be about an adulterous affair: that of A... and Franck. As in Duras’ novel, however, the adultery creates a central fissure in the narrative, a gap around which the work is constructed. In La Jalousie, we do not know whether A... and Franck are really having an affair and in Moderato cantabile the adultery is never consummated. As in

Robbe-Grillet’s novel, the story is told through the eyes of an anonymous, nondescript,

223 and objective narrator. While the narrative is written in the third-person omniscient point of view, the narrator offers only vague and indefinite accounts of what happens. The interior thoughts of the characters are revealed only partially and sporadically through their dialogues and the narrator offers no clarifications. As both novels demonstrate, the narrative voice can become shaky, unstable, and almost unreliable. Far from being the expression of a well-demarcated subjectivity, the narrative voice is a remarkably feeble guarantor of narrative unity, thus offering resistance to readerly cognitive demands. The masterful achievement of Duras’ novel is to give expression to the enigma of desire without relying on objective facts, allowing the reader to experience the same confused affects as the characters. In the manner of the nouveau roman, the elucidation of the structure of narration demands subjective efforts and simultaneous interpretation on multiple levels.

Like Robbe-Grillet, Duras subverts what Barthes calls the hermeneutic and the proairetic codes that govern the classical novel. The hermeneutic code refers to standard elements of traditional plot structure, which, in good Aristotelian fashion, relies on a tripartite process including exposition, climax, denouement. The function of this code is

“to articulate in various ways a question, its response, and the variety of chance events which can either formulate the question or delay its answer; or even, constitute an enigma and lead to its solution” (S/Z 17). The hermeneutic code works according to the subject and predicate structure of a grammatical sentence: “To narrate (in the classical fashion) is to raise the question as if it were a subject which one delays predicating; and when the predicate (truth) arrives, the sentence, the narrative, are over, the world is adjectivized

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(after we had feared it would not be)” (76). The proairetic code, on the other hand, refers to actions—those plot events that simply lead to other actions. In classical narration the proairetic is dominated by the hermeneutic code, the latter structuring the discrete elements of the former into larger interpretive wholes. The hermeneutic and proairetic codes are the two ways of creating suspense in narrative, the first caused by unanswered questions, the second by the anticipation of an action’s resolution. The hermeneutic code ensures that the reader’s interest is maintained, which is why the most basic effect of the hermeneutic code is expectation: “Expectation thus becomes the basic condition for truth: truth, these narratives tell us, is what is at the end of expectation” (76). The hermeneutic code works like the pleasure principle, it sets up detours, “delays (obstacles, stoppages, deviations) in the flow of the discourse; its structure is essentially reactive, since it opposes the ineluctable advance of language with an organized set of stoppages” (75).

The telos of the narrative is to reveal the truth that it has artfully hidden throughout its development. After the meaningful order of the world is threatened, order is restored by narrative teleology. Most important for Duras, such stories aim at rationalizing experience—the strange is made knowable, the once ambiguous events are reconstructed in the order in which they occurred, and the perpetrator, whose deviant behavior has eventually been diagnosed and comprehended, is finally punished. The profane world can at last be resumed.

Likewise, in Reading for the Plot (1984) Peter Brooks proposes that there is a certain affinity between the Freudian model of the psychic apparatus and the nineteenth- century novel of Conrad, Dickens or Flaubert. Brooks builds on Freud’s understanding of

225 the Todestrieb, arguing that desire is driven by the impulse of living matter to return to

“the quiescence of the inorganic, a state prior to life” (51). This drive for order is most fulfilling after the detours, twists and turns that we associate with plot. According to

Brooks, the ultimate goal of both desire and plot is to reach the “quiescence of closure.”

As Brooks puts it, “if at the end of a narrative we can suspend time in a moment when past and present hold together in a metaphor—which may be that recognition or anagnorisis which, said Aristotle, every good plot should bring—that moment does not abolish the movement, the slidings, the mistakes, and partial recognitions of the middle”

(92) If in The Poetics recognition (anagnorisis) is the gaining of the essential knowledge that was previously lacking, narrative desire is, therefore, “desire for the end” (52).231 For this reason, Brooks aligns the structural function of narrative closure with the Freudian death drive. This vision reminds us of Aristotle’s description of muthos in The Poetics: a good tragedy is a complete and unified action consisting of a beginning, middle, and end linked by necessary and probable causes. In Aristotle’s view, the ending gives meaning to the sequence of events of the “narrative arc.” In a tragedy, for instance, the end seems preordained and inevitable, a trajectory that leads towards an inexorable future. The end point of a story determines its meaning, and one of the main tasks a writer faces is to define the duration of a plot. Hence, fiction imagines for us a stopping point, a stable ground from which life can be seen as intelligible.

231 “The sense of a beginning, then, must in some important way be determined by the sense of an ending. We might say that we are able to read present moments—in literature and, by extension, in life—as endowed with narrative meaning only because we read them in anticipation of the structuring power of those endings that will retrospectively give them the order and significance of plot” (94).

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Moderato cantabile contests the teleology that posits the end point of the narrative as that which resolves the plot and produces meaning. In so doing, Duras refuses to falsify the tragic and sublate its negativity. This idea brings her close to the aesthetics of the nouveau roman. In “Nature, Humanism, and Tragedy” Robbe-Grillet argues that tragedy projects anthropomorphous qualities on things and nature. The nouveau romancier opens his essay by quoting Barthes’s affirmation that

tragedy is merely a means of “recovering” human misery, of subsuming it and thereby justifying it in the form of a necessity, a kind of wisdom, or a purification: to refuse this recuperation and to investigate the techniques of not treacherously succumbing to it (nothing is more insidious than tragedy), is today a necessary enterprise (For a New Novel 49).

For Robbe-Grillet, the post-Aristotelian understanding of tragedy is but a narcissistic falsification, “the last invention of humanism” (59). Duras follows Robbe-

Grillet in making the inhuman the impossible object of literature and, in so doing, saves tragedy from anthropomorphic recuperations. Tragedy is not a kind of wisdom or purification from excessive passions but a confrontation with the ultimate Other, namely, death. In L’Eté 80 Duras describes the tragic in terms that are reminiscent of Heidegger’s

Entwurf (project).

Le présent a toujours dû être vécu de cette façon par les hommes comme etant celui, evident, de la fin des temps. Le tragique est là, là où nous sommes, la peur, avant nous, personne ne la connaît. L’opacité de l’avenir a toujours troublé notre tête fragile et douloureuse, ce ratage poignant d’ordre divin. C’est cette opacité du lendemain qui a porté l’homme vers les Dieux et qui le porte encore corps et biens vers le culte de cette instance de l’Etat. (54)

Duras rejects the desire to gentrify “l’opacité du lendemain,” to give the project

(Entwurf) an object that would seal out the reality of death. For Duras, God, the State, or

227 the Party are different means to achieve the same end: the recuperation of human misery.

In order for literature to deconstruct the narcissistic falsification of the tragic, the writer must detach from what Lacan calls the symbolic Other. In Lacan the symbolic Other refers first to the trans-individual socio-linguistic structures underpinning the fields of inter-subjective interactions that not only structure the subject but also the relations between the subject and all other subjects (i.e., the Hegelian idea that the subject is constituted in the locus of the Other, that is, in the intersubjective dialectic to be found in

Lacan’s Schéma L). The symbolic Other is what Lacan later calls “discourse” broadly defined as a “social-link,” that is, “stable relations” established through “the instrument of language” (Seminar XVII 13). Second, the symbolic Other is always accompanied by an imaginary supplement, the fantasy of an anonymous authoritative power that does know what Duras calls “the opacity of tomorrow” (such figure may take different forms: that of God, Spirit, History, State, Party, Science, Nature, the analyst as the “subject supposed to know,” or the objective narrator as the instance that knows “the present, the past and the future of every enterprise”). As opposed to this, in Duras’ works the symbolic Other, whether it be the bourgeois-patriarchal Other in Moderato cantabile, Le

Ravissement and L’Amour or the colonialist Other in Le Vice-consul, falters and is confronted to its own constitutive emptiness.232

232 For Robbe-Grillet, literature must deconstruct the narcissistic falsification that he attributes to the tragic. First of all, the writer must detach from the idea of what Lacan calls the symbolic Other: “I call. No one answers me. Instead of concluding that there is no one there—which could be an observation, pure and simple, dated and placed, space and time—I decide to act as if someone were in fact there, and as if, for one reason or another, he were refusing to answer. From then on the silence that follows my appeal is no longer a real silence, it has become pregnant with content, with depth, with a soul—which immediately plunges me back into my own soul” (For a New Novel 60).

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As opposed to the texte de plaisir, Moderato cantabile does not seek to preserve the symbolic Other that makes life knowable and meaningful. Duras’ work challenges the readerly text that belongs to the realm of the profane, which guarantees the stability of meanings, definition, and order. As a texte de jouissance, Moderato cantabile defies modern processes of rationalisation and secularisation that strive to subsume the irrational to the rational, the unknowable to the known. Life threatens to lose all intelligibility. In Moderato cantabile Anne Desbaresdes goes down the path of jouissance, undergoing a limit-experience that cannot be reduced to that of pleasure. She is representative of the tragic stature of Duras’ heroines, which stems from the fact that they stand on the brink of the abyss where the profane world vacillates. Like Anne, they detach from the symbolic Other of social identification and containment in order to face social annihilation.

While the pleasure text clings to the symbolic order that makes life knowable and meaningful, the jouissance text opens onto the realm between-two-deaths, that is, the realm of the Lacanian death drive beyond pleasure. Indeed, Moderato cantabile can be read as Anne’s painful deliverance through an ethical act whereby she frees herself from her bourgeois existence and, so it seems, meets her destruction. Her slow abandonment to jouissance is marked by the traumatic repetition of an insistent demand that she keeps addressing to Chauvin, a demand that never finds hermeneutic closure: What is the meaning of the scream? and, most important, what is the meaning of this curious expression of bliss on the dead woman’s face? Anne is puzzled by the fact that the woman is still smiling: “Morte, dit-elle, elle en souriait encore de joie” (63). The crime

229 passionnel carries away Anne’s imagination. This striking image of joy in death seems to be a variation on Bataille’s idea that erotism is the “assenting to life up to the point of death” (11). L’amour fou of the couple is a tragic affirmation of life, even in death; it is an intensity that, it seems, Anne has never felt in her life.

The narrative of Moderato cantabile is an attempt to make sense of this enigmatic death; or rather, it is a narrative about the impossibility to account for the event of jouissance. Likewise, the narrative testifies to an incapacity to reach an objective point of view freed from the pathological inclinations of the narrator(s). In their interpretation of the enigmatic murder of passion, Anne and Chauvin begin to identify with the tragic couple. Their imaginative identification leads them to create a version of the murder that they have not witnessed but that enables them to relive the events that led to the murder.

It is precisely through this interpretation that the relationship between both characters evolves and intensifies. There are a number of elements in the novel suggesting that

Duras’ text is in dialogue with Bataille’s vision of erotism. The latter wrote Erotism in

1957 at the same time as Duras was writing Moderato cantabile. Considering the fact that both writers were friends, it seems fair to believe that the two exchanged on the subject.

Indeed, Anne is animated by a Bataillian desire to let go of her inhibitions in order to lead to a wider life, a more expansive life beyond the confines of her bourgeois existence. As

Bataille put it, the transition from the neurotic, normal state of desire to that of erotism presupposes a dissolution of the person as she exists in the “realm of discontinuity”

(Erotism 17). Discontinuous existence is predicated on the ideas of self-possession, self- mastery, and closure that are antithetical to the tragic.

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Most important, Bataille advances that erotism is animated by a will to rediscover and unlock the energies reified in institutionalized religions. Thus, the fundamental quest of erotism is to recuperate a fundamental religious drive that seeks the overcoming of the world of things and, to put it in Lacanian terms, the reunification with das Ding as the

“first outside” (Seminar VII 52). Indeed, Bataille’s turn to the sacred is an effort to retrieve this religious drive, which he considered to be the most powerful drive, from the objectification of the world: “Once the world of things was posited, man himself became one of the things of this world, at least for the time in which he labored. It is this degradation that man has always tried to escape. In his strange myths, in his cruel rites, man is in search of a lost intimacy from the first” (The Accursed Share 57). When humans created the first tool, they began to conceive the world in terms of subjects and objects that can be manipulated. Bataille underlines that one crucial consequence of this epistemological break is that human beings began to conceive of themselves as objects that can be manipulated and scrutinized. As such, the history of religions is a “long effort” to detach from “the poverty of things” and restore “the divine order” (57). In other

(Lacanian) words, the religious drive yearns to escape from the world of things to regain unity with the Thing. It is a drive that goes beyond all forms of institutionalized religion, a drive that reaches towards the liquid world of lost immanence where individuals are in the world “like water in water” (Theory of Religion 3), unsubjected to fundamental subject-object distinctions. It should be noted, though, that while for Lacan the Thing is mythical, a retroactive fantasy of wholeness, Bataille affirms radical immanence as primordial stage of phylogeny.

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For Bataille the liberatory potential of what Nietzsche called the death of God has been squandered by the capitalist commodification of existence, which has extended the grasp of utility to the sphere of enjoyment. Bataille blames Lutherism and Calvinism for championing the Protestant work ethic that has placed utility as the horizon of worldly existence.233 For Bataille, institutionalized religions are inherently profane, they have betrayed the true religious drive, which culminates in ecstasy where “there is no longer subject-object, but ‘open breach’ between the one and the other, and in this breach the subject and object are dissolved; there is passage, communication, but not from the one to the other: the one and the other lose their distinct existence” (The Inner Experience 59).

As opposed to the asceticism championed by institutionalized religions, Bataille puts forward that the sacred may be glimpsed in the immoderate excess of expenditure, which is a model of consumption that does not rely on profitability, utility, or calculability. Such expenditure characterizes Duras’ women. As modern Antigones or Phaedras, they are beings of excess, full of exorbitant energy, fantasies, and heterogeneous desires. Duras was astutely aware of the fact that capitalism never really freed women from masculine domination. In capitalism women were primarily constituted as subjects through their interpellation as consumers. For instance, one of Bernays’ most (in)famous advertising campaigns was to convince women to smoke. In Mythologies, Barthes shows how women were interpellated as detergent and soap-powder consumers, not as autonomous subjects. This subjectivation as consumer ushered women into the “free” world of

233 “If the faithful’s salvation is the reward for his merits, if he can achieve it by his deeds, then he has simply brought more closely in the domain of religion that concatenation that makes useful works more wretched in his eyes. Hence those deeds by which a Christian tries to win his salvation can be considered profanations. Even the mere fact of choosing salvation as goal appears contrary to the truths of grace” (AS 120-121).

232 consumerism. Yet women partake in this freedom so long as they do not hinder but facilitate the circulation of goods. In this drastically restricted economy, if women refuse to consume, they are deprived of the power and pleasure afforded by the consumerist

Other. In Duras, the fire of passion is an excess, an expenditure that carries Duras’ women down the lethal path of jouissance and clears the ground for new modes of individuation forbidden by bourgeois existence.

For Duras erotism takes us beyond the bourgeois-patriarchal Other; it is an instantiation of what Bataille in his essay on Genet from Literature and Evil calls a strong, powerful sense of communication. “Strong communication” reveals a quest for a possible continuance of existence beyond the confines of the self-contained ego. For

Bataille erotism is a dialogic experience that takes place between a man and a woman. In the process of dissolution the male partner has often an active role, while the female partner is passive, but, Bataille underlines, “for the male partner the dissolution of the passive partner means one thing only: it is paving the way for a fusion where both are mingled, attaining at length the same degree of dissolution” (17). In Moderato cantabile

Anne seems to rely on Chauvin to achieve transgression. Chauvin leads the conversation and pours Anne glasses of wine while she remains largely passive, frightened, and trembling. The violent fusion of passion is analogous to the fusion of intensive energetic continuity, a disorder so violent that it cannot be called pleasure, but resembles obscene jouissance that “upsets the physical state associated with self-possession, with the possession of a recognized and stable individuality” (17-18). Bataille compares the erotic dissolution of separate bodies, the fall into continuity, to “the ebb and flow of waves

233 surging into one another” (18). Erotic activity reveals the lovers’ “fundamental continuity, like the waves of a stormy sea” (22). As we will see momentarily, the sea has a looming presence in Duras’ novel, a presence that draws Anne towards another, more expansive, and freer existence.

Through her obsessive inquiry into the crime of passion, Anne is inexorably led towards the beyond of the pleasure principle, towards the dissolution of the symbolic order, which “designates the limit that human life can only briefly cross” (Seminar VII

262-63). Anne is both frightened and fascinated by the murder and she keeps questioning

Chauvin about the possible chain of events that led to the tragic outcome. To provide answers that may alleviate Anne’s curiosity and nascent fascination, Chauvin invents from the very little he knows about the couple. Through their exchanges Anne comes to embrace the Phaedra complex, which implies that the awareness of prohibition, horror, and disgust heightens the intensity of erotic pleasure. As the narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that Chauvin intentionally creates a parallel between the tragic couple’s story and their story to come. When speculating about how the tragic couple met, Chauvin says,

“Ils s’étaient connus par hasard dans un café, peut-être même dans ce café-ci qu’ils fréquentaient tous les deux. Et ils ont commencé à se parler de choses et d’autres” (42).

Through this obvious parallel we surmise that the relationship between the vicarious lovers is bound to tread the same tragic path. The idea that Anne and Chauvin’s story is woven into that of the tragic couple is metaphorized by the patronne, the bartender who observes the couple while knitting “sa laine rouge derrière le comptoir” (54). The knitting of the red wool illustrates that the story of the tragic couple and that of the nascent

234 passion between Anne and Chauvin constitute two themes superposed in unbearable tension.

The positivistic epistemology of the detective novel threatens to drown in the non savoir of passion, in the ecstatic agnosia where the self is sacrificed. Duras explores the theme of the impossibility of communicating the sacred, reintroducing a Bataillean sense of tragedy into the secularist nouveau roman. The dramatic tension derives from the fact that Duras’ work is torn between the Romantic temptation to represent a “beyond” (the impossible passion) and the attempt to make of art an event in its own right. In Moderato cantabile, it is precisely the incapacity to represent the event of jouissance that forces art to reinvent its codes, and the greatness of Duras’ endeavor lies in the sustaining of irresolution until the very end of the novel. In a traditional realist novel the narrator occupies the place of a third party, an objective eye that narrativizes the encounter between lovers, that is, turns the encounter between incommensurables as an object of knowledge. Following the ideals of the nouveau roman, Duras questions the capacity of novelistic representation to produce what Barthes calls “reality effects,” producing a negative aesthetic that accounts for the sublime feeling. Such feeling does violence to the imagination, which, to follow Kant’s definition, is the capacity to create images

(Einbildungskraft). Duras rejects the power of images, which she associates with the violence of representation, developing a negative novel that unfolds from the enigmatic scream of the murdered woman. Such an enigma cuts the threads of the text and the context, engendering a gaping abyss that can not be filled. Duras’ goal resembles what

Deleuze identifies as Bacon’s elimination of the sensational in favor of sensation:

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“l’horreur est multipliée parce qu’elle est conclue du cri, et non l’inverse [...]. À la violence du représenté (le sensationnel, le cliché), s’oppose la violence de la sensation.”234 As they reenact the story, Anne and Chauvin get carried away by passion and threaten to fall into the night of non savoir.

Like the tragic couple that Chauvin depicts, the vicarious lovers are like imprisoned beasts that do not know what is happening to them:

— Une certaine nuit, ils tournent et retournent dans la chambre, ils deviennent comme des bêtes enfermées, ils ne savent pas ce qui leur arrive. Ils commencent à s’en douter, ils ont peur. — Rien ne les satisfait plus. — Ce qui est en train de se passer, ils en sont débordés, ils ne savent pas le dire tout de suite. Peut-être qu’il leur faudra des mois, pour le savoir (56).

This description of the murderous couple reflects the incipient passion between

Anne and Chauvin. The repeated coming and going in the room, the impossibility of satisfying their desire, the feeling of being overwhelmed by a mysterious force testify to the uncontrollable power of jouissance. The surge of aneconomical jouissance threatens to tear down the boundaries of the realist novel, whose vast referential universe has now been reduced to the confined space of a cage. As Barthes underlines, “at the origin of

Narrative, desire. To produce narrative, however, desire must vary, must enter into a system of equivalents and metonymies; or, in order to be produced, narrative be susceptible of change, must subject itself to an economic system” (S/Z 88). As a jouissance text, Moderato cantabile verges on the aneconomical, hurling towards the burning heath of jouissance, yet it retains a kind of coherence and consistency, which is

234 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon Logique de la sensation, p 29

236 to be found in the circular structure of the novel, a circularity that Duras borrows from the musical form of the sonatina.

When the unrepresentable is articulated into language, it is inscribed in the logic of representation that it exceeds. The appeal to music in Moderato cantabile is an attempt to address this contradiction. In particular, Duras transposes musical time onto literary narrative, exploiting the link between repetition and intensity as the singularity of the experience of music. Repetition is essential to the establishment of motifs and hooks, that is, to the creation of symmetry and coherence. For instance, in the musical form chosen by Duras in Moderato cantabile, the sonatina, a melodic and rhythmic figure is repeated in dialectical fashion throughout the piece. Repetition is central to the unification of the melody, it allows for memorization, pleasurable complexification and intensification: on the one hand it allows us to remember the tones and phrases that we have just heard in order to associate them to the ones that are being played; on the other, repetition gratifies memory and provides pleasure through the intensification and controlled diversification of a melody. As Barthes underlines, the intensifying dimension of repetition is an erotic factor that may intensify pleasure and bring it to the threshold of jouissance: “the word can be erotic on two opposing conditions, both excessive: if it is extravagantly repeated, or on the contrary, if it is unexpected, succulent in its newness” (The Pleasure of the Text

42). Repetition is the stylistic medium that allows Duras to mark the presence of opaque, unbearable, and explosive jouissance.

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In The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of

Intermediality, Werner Wolf argues that intermediality between literature and music is more likely to happen in non-mimetic narratives. According to the author,

as opposed to ‘thematization’ as a main form of covert intermediality, there is a form in which an equally non-dominant ‘other’ medium informs (a part of) a work, its signifiers and/or the structure of its signifieds in a more substantial, though still indirect way: so that this work or a part of it, while retaining the typical aspect of its dominant medium is iconically related to the non-dominant one and gives the impression of representing it mimetically, as far as that is possible. The result in this case is a seeming ‘imitation’ or ‘dramatization’ of the non- dominant medium, its quality, structure or typical effects, in the mode of implicit ‘showing’ (44–45).

In Moderato Cantabile, Marguerite Duras borrows features from the form of the first movement of a sonata. During the music lesson that takes place in the first chapter of

Moderato cantabile, the child studies a sonatina of Diabelli, the Austrian music publisher whose waltz provided the theme for Beethoven’s thirty-three variations. The sonatina, a form particularly convenient for instruction, resembles the sonata, except that it is shorter and simpler. The choice of the sonata is central to the deployment of Duras’ anti-mimetic aesthetics. During the Enlightenment, the sonata was decried for being a mere exercice de style, an abstraction of thought that had no pretensions to mimesis and hence could not count as a medium for truth. Music that had lost touch with the simplicity of the song was to be condemned as degeneracy.235 In a sonata, two contrasting themes unfold their potentialities through the three stages (exposition, development, and recapitulation), and

235 For instance, against Rameau Rousseau considered music to be a written abstraction of thought, its form, harmony and structure being illegitimate and at best only an imperfect aide mémoire to assist in the performance of a live music in full-voice. The Encyclopédistes tended to accuse composers of writing a sonata, a term they used polemically as an insult. Fontenelle asked “Sonate que me veux-tu?”, Diderot criticized the language of music for being hieroglyphic, and d’Alembert understood the mathematical justification of music of Rameau as ridiculous.

238 end in a coda, or closing theme. Basically, the sonata is based on the following line of development: A-B-A. It returns to the beginning, but on a higher level. The sonata form is thus a purely dialectical concept, a kind of musical syllogism. This type of development is duplicated in each of the movements. There is also an overall development in which the conflicting themes are finally reconciled in a “happy ending.”

In the final coda we return to the initial key, creating the sensation of a triumphal apotheosis. The sonata is thus based on a principle of resolution and return that is characteristic of tonal harmony and, from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, of the pleasure principle. The sonata form also offers a formal analogy to the hermeneutic code. While some pieces of classical music have a unity of feeling, the sonata contrasts two emotional states that unfold like a drama where two characters express different emotions battling each other.236

In Moderato Cantabile, Marguerite Duras borrows the form of the first movement of a sonata. The narrative thus deploys two contrasting themes played in different keys, the first being the tonic, and the second the dominant. As in a sonata the two themes are resolved in a recapitulation by a modulation of the second theme in the key of the first theme, which gives the effect of resolution and closure. “Moderato” corresponds to the first theme, the tonic, which conveys the idea of measure and control. In the first chapter of the novel, Duras shows Anne as prisoner of this theme, which renders the orderly and tedious nature of an existence dictated by the time signature of the sonata, which is a square four-four. “Cantabile” defines the second theme, the emotional impulse that counters the monotony of the moderato. The cantabile is introduced in the second

236 For instance, Beethoven’s sonatas were often narrativized and published with stories and pictures.

239 chapter, where Anne begins her affair with “the man.” The two characters meet several times in the same café until the eighth chapter. Each time, they progress in the recreation of the crime passionnel. The eighth chapter constitutes a turning point where resolution eventually occurs. This is not an arbitrary choice on Duras’ part since in a sonata resolution occurs precisely with the eighth note of the musical scale, which is the same as the first, the tonic, only an octave higher. In the novel, it is only with the final resolution that the lovers achieve a symbolic reenactment of the murder that is first encountered through the irruption of the cry at the end of the first chapter.

The dialectic of the moderato and the cantabile is set in motion by the interweaving of two narrative threads. First, there is the music lesson and the exploration of the strong connection between Anne and her child. Second, there is the nascent love story between Anne and Chauvin.

First Theme: The Music Lesson

The novel opens with an immersion in Anne Desbaresdes’s vie tranquille. Anne appears as a prisoner of her bourgeois existence and we learn that one year earlier she decided to have her child, who remains unnamed throughout the novel, take music lessons. On the one hand, she decided to have him learn music because she hoped that a musical education would save her child from the prosaic world of the bourgeoisie, on the other she used the music lesson as an escape from her routine. Yet, from the very beginning of the novel, music is associated with bourgeois doxa, which is expressed in

240 the disciplining of the child’s body in the music lesson. As such, the child, who resists learning his scales, is said to wait for “la consummation de son supplice” (71).

L’enfant joua. Il reprit la sonatine au même rythme que précédemment et, la fin de la leçon approchant, il la nuança comme on le désirait, moderato cantabile. — Quand il obéit de cette façon, ça me dégoûte un peu, dit Anne Desbaresdes. Je ne sais pas ce que je veux, voyez-vous. Quel martyre. L’enfant continua néanmoins à bien faire. — Quelle éducation lui donnez-vous là, Madame Desbaresdes, remarqua la dame presque joyeusement. (15)

Like Isabelle Granger in the film Nathalie Granger (1972), Anne is a mother who tries to explain the value of a musical education to her child, but she encounters the latter’s resistance. However, the novel conveys the idea that his reluctance stems mainly from the teacher’s stern and severe attitude, which reflects very well what Duras perceives as the heartless mores of the bourgeoisie.

Elle frappa sur le piano. L’enfant abandonna sa tentative. — Ta sonatine maintenant, dit-elle, lassée. Quatre temps. L’enfant la joua comme les gammes. Il la savait bien. Et malgré sa mauvaise volonté, de la musique fut là, indéniablement. — Que voulez-vous, continua Mademoiselle Giraud, par-dessus la sonatine, il y a des enfants avec lesquels il faut être très sévère, sans ça on n’en sort pas. — J’essaierai, dit Anne Desbaresdes. Elle écoutait la sonatine. Elle venait du tréfonds des âges, portée par son enfant à elle. Elle manquait souvent, à l’entendre, aurait-elle pu croire, s’en évanouir (77-78).

Through the piano lesson Duras shows us the ordinary violence appertaining to ingrown reflexes caused by social conditioning, presenting us with a primordial scene where she links adult neuroses to childhood episodes. The teacher, Mme Gautier, represents the moderato of normativity that firmly represses the cantabile of desire, which Duras describes as a blind vital impulse which finds its most noble expression in

241 music: “l’homme, ou l’enfance de l’humanité, jusqu’à ce langage-là que nous ne pouvons pas décrypter, le langage de la musique, ce chemin me bouleverse” (Les Lieux de

Marguerite Duras 29-30). As in Nathalie Granger, Duras ascribes sublimatory qualities to music. Music is the only chance for her child to lift himself above the profane world of the bourgeoisie and stay in touch with the sacred. Music also appears to be a sublimation of the mother’s love for her child. This idea is conveyed by how the music teacher looks down on Anne’s affection for her son. Eventually, the music lesson gives expression only to the impersonality and inauthentic essence of bourgeois society. Moderato cantabile abounds with descriptions of the disaffection of bourgeois women, which results from the bourgeois education denounced by Duras:

Leurs épaules nues ont la luisance et la fermeté d’une société fondée, dans ses assises, sur la certitude de son droit, et elles furent choisies à la convenance de celle-ci. La rigueur de leur éducation exige que leurs excès soient tempérés par le souci majeur de leur entretien (103-104).

Music, like the incipient love story with Chauvin, appears as the only source of escape for Anne. The child has yet to discover the power of music, which remains, for now, inaccessible to him.

Anne Desbaresdes prit son enfant par les épaules, le serra à lui faire mal, cria presque. — Il faut apprendre le piano, il le faut. […] — Pourquoi ? demanda l’enfant. — La musique, mon amour... L’enfant prit son temps, celui de tenter de comprendre, ne comprit pas, mais l’admit (12).

Anne is at a loss for words. The only answer that she is able to formulate to her child is: “La musique, mon amour…” For Anne, unlike the piano teacher, it seems like music and love are consubstantial. As we are going to discuss, music initiates the novel to

242 the mystery of what Bataille calls “strong communication” (Literature and Evil 199).

Music thus appears as a mystery, that is, an “initiation” (in the etymological sense of the term, from Greek mysterion “secret rite or doctrine,” from mystes “one who has been initiated”) to an enigmatic realm of intensity and creation. Through music, Anne initiates the child in the rites of a secret absolutely foreign to bourgeois mores: the sacred reality of existence beyond utility.

The child’s reluctance to play music reaches a critical stage in chapter V where he refuses to recite his scales.

Mademoiselle Giraud déplia ses bras, frappa le clavier de son crayon, comme elle faisait d’habitude depuis trente ans d’enseignement, et elle cria. — Tes gammes. Tes gammes pendant dix minutes. Pour t’apprendre. Do majeur pour commencer. L’enfant se remit face au piano. Ses mains se levèrent ensemble, se posèrent ensemble avec une docilité triomphante. Une gamme en do majeur couvrit la rumeur de la mer (72).

The rumble of the sea marks the intrusion of the antepredicative realm of existence that lies beyond facticity and utility. The power of music lies in its transcendence of mere matter, in the fact that it stands halfway through immediate sensuousness and ideality. Unlike communicative or utilitarian language, music has not lost its footing in sensuous materiality. The failure of communicative language to redeem sensuality is expressed in Anne’s inability to answer the child’s protestation with anything but “la musique, mon amour...” If language plays a major role in all aspects of relating to and being in the world, it does not cover the whole range of possible human interactions with the real. Music recovers an affective, bodily mode of being in the world that connects us to what Bataille calls the sacred. Through the appeal to music, Duras

243 addresses the subject’s embodied experience in the sensible world, a material world that is only constituted ex post facto by the transcendental activity of consciousness; the jouissance ushered in by the experience of music appears as an undeviating defiance of the prerogative attributed to consciousness—and to narrative desire—of attributing meaning to each event.

As such, music is for Duras an epitome of what Bataille calls “strong communication”: “Communication, in my sense of the word, is never stronger than when communication, in the weak sense, the sense of profane language or, as Sartre says, of prose which makes us and the others appear penetrable, fails and becomes the equivalent of darkness” (Literature and Evil 199). For Duras the bourgeois-patriarchal Other functions according to the laws of weak communication, which relies on a profane use of language. For Bataille, “the profane is the world of reason, of identity, of things, of duration and calculation. Each thing, in this world, receives a meaning in a durable relation with an other: such is the intelligible world, where perceptible elements are reduced to operating signs and have value only in view of ulterior possibilities” (“Social

Life and the Organization of Society” in Essential Writings 40). In the profane world, we evolve within the safe confines of quotidian signs, within the realm of das Man, which imposes a grid of intelligibility and calculability on the future. This negation of

Heidegger’s Entwurf derives from the fact that “we want to establish humble truths which coordinate our attitudes and activity with those of our fellow human beings” (Literature and Evil 199). The penetrability of the other extends the dominion of consciousness, which attributes meaning and being to each thing and anticipates experience. So long as

244 we remain active and productive, so long as we understand each other and appear transparent to each another, we are penetrable. Strong communication emerges when the system of quotidian signs breaks down, “when subjectivity seems unintelligible in relation to the intelligibility of customary objects and, more generally, of the objective world” (200). In strong communication, we reach a state of impenetrability that paradoxically returns us to our original intimacy, to the continuum of radical immanence:

“I am sure of one thing: humanity is not composed of isolated beings but of communication between them. Never are we revealed, even to ourselves, other than in a network of communication with others” (198-99). The moment when strong communication occurs is “the instant when their impenetrability reveals itself to the consciousnesses which unite and penetrate each other unlimitedly” (201). In Duras’ novel, the purity of the child without name stands as a metaphor for this impenetrability of sacred life.

Yet, the severe attitude of the music teacher suggests that music has been reduced to the profane: “Vous n’avez rien à lui expliquer. Il n’a pas à choisir de faire ou non du piano, Madame Desbaresdes, c’est ce qu’on appelle l’éducation” (77). In the music teacher’s hands, music communicates with society, reflects it, and offers itself to the bourgeois order. Duras perceives in music a praxis that has no practical value and that vehemently resists society. When, in spite of his reluctance, the child ends up playing the sonatina, music appears as if by miracle: “L’enfant la joua comme les gammes. Il la savait bien. Et malgré sa mauvaise volonté, de la musique fut là, indéniablement” (78).

Whereas profane language separates the world into detailed, distinct pieces, Duras

245 suggests that music unifies the world into a whole thanks to its viscous materiality: “Le jeu se ralentit et se ponctua, l’enfant se laissa prendre à son miel. De la musique sortit, coula de ses doigts sans qu’il parût le vouloir, en décider, et sournoisement elle s’étala dans le monde une fois de plus, submergea le cœur d’inconnu, l’exténua” (79). The honey of music is uncontainable, overcoming boundaries as it now reaches Chauvin who is waiting in the café and is humming “la sonatine dans le même temps que l’enfant la jouait” (79). Like Henri Michaux, Duras underlines the capacity of music to liquefy the

“solide inhumaine matérialité” of the world (“La mescaline et la musique” 79). Like the child, the sonatina is impenetrable, eternally new, always contemporaneous with its own creation: “La sonatine se faisait sous les mains de l’enfant—celui-ci absent—mais elle se faisait et se refaisait, portée par son indifférente maladresse jusqu’aux confins de sa puissance. À mesure qu’elle s’échafaudait, sensiblement la lumière du jour diminua”

(80). The strong communication of music is also a metaphor for the powerful bond that unites Anne to her son: “La sonatine résonna encore, portée comme une plume par ce barbare, qu’il le voulût ou non, et elle s’abattit de nouveau sur sa mère, la condamna de nouveau à la damnation de son amour. Les portes de l’enfer se refermèrent” (78). The sublime nature of music not only sublimates the love Anne has for her son, it also lifts her from her disaffected and apathetic bourgeois existence.

In the first chapter, Duras portrays Anne as detached and unemotional, a mere spectator at her child’s piano lesson. Her entire life seems subjected to the constraints of routine and the bourgeois social roles she is forced to play. Duras hints that Anne is alienated by the moderato pace of her life as when she condones her son’s rebellious

246 attitude towards his piano lessons. When he obeys too readily she says, “quand il obéit comme de cette façon, ça me degoûte un peu” (15). The idea that she is prisoner of the bourgeois habitus is reinforced by the fact that the teacher’s room appears as a prison that keeps out the noises of the surrounding town, the brilliance of the sunset, and, most important, the murmur of the infinite sea. As in Nathalie Granger, Duras gives expression to the isolation of women as outer reality remains distant and can only be apprehended through the open window. On a thematic level, the sonatina appears as a conservative exercise, which is contrasted with the noise of the outside world. This idea is expressed by the omnipresence of the sea, which draws the characters to the outside to another existence: “La vedette eut enfin fini de traverser le cadre de la fenêtre ouverte. Le bruit de la mer s’éleva, sans bornes, dans le silence de l’enfant” (10).

The child is obsessed by the activities on the sea and fails to satisfy the stern piano teacher. A recurring motif in Duras’ work is the association of the figure of the child with innocence and proximity with nature, the symbol of an innocence about to be irremediably profaned by the affectlessness of bourgeois education. Like Lyotard, Duras sees in childhood a proof of the native indeterminacy of the human, an inherent inhumanity to which witness must be given. It is precisely this unprogrammed state at the moment when it is “thrown into the world” that makes childlikeness a potential site of resistance to domination. Anne’s relation to the child is an “enfantement sans fin” (16);

“L’étonnement de Anne Desbaresdes, quand elle regardait cet enfant, était toujours égal à lui-même depuis le premier jour” (36). The child is a figure so foreign to Anne’s bourgeois world that that “parfois, dit-elle, je crois que je l’ai inventé…” (188) In

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Moderato cantabile the child, whose contact with reality seems immediate and total, provides the only link to all that bourgeois existence has shut out. The sound of the sea continuously contrasts with his silence, so much so that the narrator says, noticing the distant noise of a motorboat, that la “vedette lui passait dans le sang” (9).

In Duras the child enjoys a strong intimacy with immanence. The child is representative of the adult’s lost continuity with the world, which Freud diagnosed in

Civilization and its Discontents. Freud argues that the recognition of an “outside,” the separation of the self from an external world, comes with the disengagement of the ego from the “general mass of sensations,” that is, from the

manifold and unavoidable sensations of pain and unpleasure the removal and avoidance of which is enjoined by the pleasure principle, in the exercise of its unrestricted domination. A tendency arises to separate from the ego everything that can become a source of such unpleasure, to throw it outside and to create a pure pleasure-ego which is confronted by a strange and threatening “outside” (Civilization and its Discontents 14).

For Freud the infant at the breast does not as yet distinguish its ego from the external world as the source of the sensations flowing upon him. Initially the ego includes everything, it is only later that it separates off an external world from itself. This distinction between inside and outside is the sine qua non condition for the introduction of the reality principle that is to dominate future development. Strong communication implies the overriding of the “unrestricted domination” of the ego drives and the return the “oceanic” universe in which the infant originally lives: “Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive — indeed, an all-embracing feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it (29). The weak communication of the adult world is only the “shrunken residue” that

248 constitutes the adult ego. Crucially, for Freud the boundless dimension never leaves us completely and can be brought to light again. In Freud’s view, the process of losing the sense of interconnectedness is largely somatic. For Bataille, it is possible to recover the intimate bond between the ego and the world around it through a process of subjective dissolution, and erotism is one way to achieve this reunification and dissolution in what

Nietzsche called the Ur-Eine.

The scream of the woman being murdered, with its echoes of madness, passion, and violence, reminds Anne of her only true experience of love, which she relates to the screams of her newborn child, “Une fois, il me semble bien, oui, une fois j’ai dû crier un peu de cette façon, peut-être, oui, quand j’ai eu cet enfant” (41-42). The scream reminds

Anne of the sacred experience of the mother’s love for the child. Because Anne is “sans défence devant son enfant” (105), her strong connection to her child links her to dimension of experience that precedes the bourgeois world of utility, production, and reification. While Anne is drawn towards the outside, she has had to renounce music (we learn that she does not know her scales), hence she can only live vicariously through her son’s apprenticeship. Music is only a prelude to the ethical act that will bring her to the brink of subjective destitution in her relationship with Chauvin, a relationship through which she will reach social-symbolic death.

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Second theme: Anne Desbaresdes and Chauvin

The second narrative thread is Anne’s nascent love for Chauvin. The enigmatic scream that interrupted the piano lesson becomes the subject of intense investigation on

Anne’s part. After the piano lesson, she enters a large crowd gathered around the cafe and observes the dead from afar. The woman’s husband and murderer is lying across her dead body in grief. As the police arrest the man, Anne begins to speculate about the motivations of the crime. As a woman from the upper bourgeoisie, Anne’s life is repetitive and constrained; she is fascinated and puzzled by the destructive power of unbridled passion. In the second chapter Anne returns the following day to the working- class café and orders wine. Alcohol takes an ambivalent role: one the one hand, it helps her manage her fear; on the other, alcohol inexorably takes her down the path of jouissance.

— Ce sera? — Je voudrais un verre de vin. Elle le but aussitôt servi. Le tremblement était encore plus fort que trois jours auparavant (38).

Anne is trembling profusely, probably because she is in forbidden territory for a bourgeois woman, a working-class café that is, to make matters worse, frequented by her husband’s employees. The only other customer in the café is Chauvin, a factory worker who seems to have taken a hiatus from work. As the latter approaches Anne, he asks her to sit at a table and they begin to converse about the dead woman and her lover. Anne

250 begins to show her own affinity with the irrational through her “silence stupéfié” (31), a tacet that bespeaks her nascent intoxication and love for Chauvin. Anne’s identity is a mystery neither for Chauvin nor for the other workers. As he puts it right after greeting her, “— Vous êtes Madame Desbaresdes. La femme du directeur d’Import Export et des

Fonderies de la Côte. Vous habitez boulevard de la Mer” (31-32). Anne’s presence in the café is not merely an anomaly, but an antinomy, in the etymological sense of the term, a transgression of the law. In the effort to reconstruct the chain of cause and effect that led to the murder, Anne and Chauvin enter a process of mythopoeisis or myth-making that is largely led by the latter.

— À l’avoir vu, on ne peut pas s’empêcher, n’est-ce pas, c’est presque inévitable ? — Je n’ai rien dit, répéta l’homme. Mais je crois qu’il l’a visée au cœur comme elle le lui demandait. Anne Desbaresdes gémit. Une plainte presque licencieuse, douce, sortit de cette femme. (34)

Chauvin answers Anne’s questions with poise. While the former provides knowledge, the latter reacts emotionally to his inventions. In many ways, Chauvin initiates Anne to the mystery of passionate love, helping her perform the ethical act that will free her from the confines of her bourgeois self. To a certain extent, the relationship between Chauvin and Anne resembles that of the confessor and the mystic. This idea is expressed by Chauvin’s role in dexterously orchestrating the pace, orientation, and content of the mythopoeisis, combining elements of their own lives with those of the tragic couple.

Chauvin remarks that Anne is prisoner of her bourgeois life and he pushes her to transgress. As he puts it, “vous allez aux grilles, puis vous les quittez, puis vous faites le

251 tour de votre maison, puis vous revenez encore aux grilles. L’enfant, là-haut, dort. Jamais vous n’avez crié. Jamais” (65). At some point in their third conversation, however, Anne betrays an incipient state of madness that results in a psychotic outburst that frightens both interlocutors:

—Dépêchez-vous de parler. Inventez. Elle fit un effort, parla presque haut dans le café encore désert. — Ce qu’il faudrait c’est habiter une ville sans arbres les arbres crient lorsqu’il y a du vent ici il y en a toujours toujours à l’exception de deux jours par an à votre place voyez- vous je m’en irai d’ici je n’y resterai pas tous les oiseaux ou presque sont des oiseaux de mer qu’on trouve crevés après les orages et quand l’orage cesse que les arbres ne crient plus on les entend crier eux sur la plage comme des égorgés ca empêche les enfants de dormir non moi je m’en irai (62).

Anne’s speech borders on screaming, which relates Anne to the murdered woman and announces Lol V. Stein’s psychotic breakdown in Le Ravissement. Paradoxically enough, the scream of the murdered woman appears as a call for emancipation. Beyond profane language, the scream is an instantiation of strong communication that shakes

Anne to the core of her being. The piercing scream is strong enough to fissure the envelope of social determinations that hold her prisoner. The landscape that screams is

Anne’s hallucinated description of the immediate surroundings of her house in which she is condemned to spend her days and nights, it gives expression to the cantabile that heretofore has remained unconscious, repressed by her bourgeois existence. It should be noted that in Duras screams always emanate from non-socialized beings: infants, children, Lol V. Stein, the vice-consul, or the lepers of Calcutta. The scream is the mark of the Nebenmensch als Ding, the inhuman excess that disturbs the stability of weak communication and reminds us of the raw impenetrability of the other. In Freud the

Nebenmensch reveals itself “wenn es schreit,” if it screams. The other appears als Ding

252 through the prelinguistic scream that exceeds representation and containment. The lack of punctuation and the run-on sentences reflect Anne’s confused thinking and her proximity with the irrational. This breakdown of syntax resembles an incipient state of psychosis.

As with Lol V. Stein, it seems that no grammatical or syntactic line has enough momentum to prevent another unruly “movement” from usurping it. In so doing Duras conveys the idea that Anne’s breaking away from her restricted existence seems ineluctable. On a literary level, syntax appears as a force that is at best a work in progress, a project that may only create the illusion of a structuring authority that it does not possess.

Anne relies on Chauvin to transgress. She remains largely passive. As in the tradition of the mystics, Anne’s erotism relies on the profane man to formulate her introspection and quest as a sacred ritual. Thus, Chauvin leads the action and the discussion in a quasi-ritualistic fashion. Chauvin’s erotic insinuations aim at intoxicating the vicarious Anne, pushing the inebriated mistress closer to the abyss where her social existence will dissolve:

Tandis qu’elle riait encore mais que le flot de son rire commençait à baisser. Chauvin lui parla d’autre manière. — Vous étiez accoudée à ce grand piano. Entre vos seins nus sous votre robe, il y a cette fleur de magnolia. Anne Desbaresdes, très attentivement, écoute cette histoire. — Oui. — Quand vous vous penchez, cette fleur frôle le contour de vos seins. Vous l’avez négligemment épinglée, trop haut. C’est une fleur énorme, vous l’avez choisie au hasard, trop grande pour vous. Ses pétales sont encore dures, elle a justement atteint la nuit dernière sa pleine floraison. . . . Elle s’occupa à tenir le verre très fort, devint ralentie dans ses gestes et dans sa voix. — Comme j'aime le vin, je ne savais pas. — Maintenant, parlez-moi. — Ah, laissez-moi, supplia Anne Desbaresdes. — Nous avons sans doute si peu de temps que je ne peux pas. (85-86)

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Although the two realities of the real couple and the ideal couple are still distinguishable by the use of the present tense for the former and the past for the latter, both characters progressively seem to lose their identity in that of the tragic couple. It becomes clear that passion, madness, and murder provide Anne with the possibility of escaping from the sterile order of her life, that is, of igniting “le feu” that will feed “son ventre de sorcière” (109). Passion for Duras is like Blanchot’s realm of “fire” that burns and consumes everything, a realm that defies and derails all hierarchies, calculations, and ordering.

In the hands of Chauvin the initiator, Anne becomes a figure of the sacred. As a mystic, Anne utters some kind of sacred speech that exposes her to impersonal forces over which she may exert little control. The name Chauvin can be broken down as

“chaud vin,” which implies the association of intoxication with the fire of passion. For

Duras as for Bataille, the presence of the sacred is manifest in extreme emotion as well as pointless activity found within play, non-reproductive sexuality, body exhalations or anything that a rational society would like to expel, such alcohol consumption (especially for women). The workers are quite surprised to see the wife of their employer come into the bar everyday and drink with the proletarians. Alcohol is the pharmakon at the center of the couple’s ritual:

— Si on ne buvait pas tant, ce ne serait pas possible? — Je crois que ce ne serait pas possible, murmura Anne Desbaresdes. (92)

Alcohol enables the transgression of taboos, if a taboo is what prevents the invasion of the sacred in profane existence. In the café, bourgeois Anne is “out of place”

254 not in the sense of simply being “misplaced,” but of defying containment and disturbing place: she becomes the embodiment of excess, the uncontainable, that against which borders are built in the first place. Alcohol helps her leave the confined realm of the moderato to abandon herself to the cantabile of passion: “une femme chanta loin, dans une ville étrangère. Ce fut Anne Desbaresdes qui se rapprocha de Chauvin” (115).

Moreover, the unpredictability of her affective relation with Chauvin threatens class distinction; she thus escapes the control of bourgeois strategies of discipline or normalization. Anne breaks free from the gregarious will that sustains her identity, she risks her social position in her pursuit of enigmatic jouissance. Anne is drawn towards the mesmerizing vision of absolute passion. She is caught between conflicting desires for jouissance and self-preservation, between attraction and repulsion, that is, between the tremendum and the fascinans which, according to Caillois, define the sacred (Man and the Sacred 37).

When in chapter VII she returns home late for the annual dinner that gathers her husband’s friends and collaborators, she is drunk and refuses to seat at the table with the other guests; instead, she sits at the piano without excusing herself (101). When she finally agrees to seat with the guests, the members of this “société quelconque” (103), she does not eat but continues drinking wine. Alcohol leads her to transgress everything that a bourgeois woman is supposed to be, “le Pommard continue d’avoir ce soir la saveur anéantissante des lèvres inconnues d’un homme de la rue” (105). Later in a highly sexual metaphor Duras writes: “Le vin coule dans sa bouche pleine d’un nom qu’elle ne prononce pas. Cet événement silencieux lui brise les reins” (109). From the very

255 beginning of the dinner, the reader is made aware of the presence of Chauvin who is prowling just outside.

Au-delà des stores blancs, la nuit et, dans la nuit, encore, car il a du temps devant lui, un homme seul regarde tantôt la mer, tantôt le parc. Puis la mer, le parc, ses mains. Il ne mange pas. Il ne pourrait pas, lui non plus, nourrir son corps tourmenté par d’autre faim. L’encens des magnolias arrive toujours sur lui, au gré du vent, et le surprend et le harcèle autant que celui d’une seule fleur (104).

Like the music during the piano lesson, the heavy odor of magnolia blossoms creates a sensorial link between the vicarious lovers. It is even suggested that the smell of the flower that Anne is wearing on her cleavage is reaching outside to Chauvin.237 The fire of passion is devouring Anne from the inside, an idea that is conveyed by the surprising fact that “Le magnolia entre ses seins se fane tout à fait. Il a parcouru l’été en une heure de temps” (111). Duras leaves us with this compelling image of her sacrilegious heroine burning with an all-consuming desire.

The use of the future tense at the end of the chapter underlines the inevitability of

Anne’s ethical transgression. When the man prowling outside will have left,

Elle ira dans la chambre de son enfant, s’allongera par terre, au pied de son lit, sans égard pour ce magnolia qu’elle écrasera entre ses seins, il n’en restera rien. Et entre les temps sacrés de la respiration de son enfant, elle vomira là, longuement, la nourriture étrangère que ce soir elle fut forcée de prendre. Une ombre apparaîtra dans l’encadrement de la porte restée ouverte sur le couloir, obscurcira plus avant la pénombre de la chambre. Anne Desbaresdes passera légèrement la main dans le désordre réel et blond de ses cheveux. Cette fois, elle prononcera une excuse. On ne lui répondra pas (112).

237 “Elle soulève une nouvelle fois sa main à hauteur de la fleur qui se fane entre ses seins et dont l’odeur franchit le parc et va jusqu’à la mer.” (108)

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Anne’s inebriation and subsequent vomiting after the formal dinner in her home signals the end of her acceptance of the vie tranquille. For the first time she does not apologize and no one answers her, she has definitely left the bourgeois Other that held her prisoner. Hence, Anne follows the path of Melusine, she is the witch burning with the fire of unsubordinated desire.

Anne’s vomiting is also a metaphor for her overflowing and transgressive passion for Chauvin. Like Nathalie Granger, Anne harbors an energy untapped and even repressed by her bourgeois education. For Duras, women “ont accumulé des masses fabuleuses de cette énergie, qui est à l’instar de celle de la mer encore enfouie mais intacte, entière” (Marguerite Duras à Montréal 69). It is as though the sea as a savage, antepredicative, and immemorial force were always there as a potentiality of the feminine body, ready to invade, unground, and carry the world of man away. The sea is a figure of a monstrous Other jouissance that does not conform to the acceptable, profane or

“phallic” forms of desire, that is, the signifiers of the desire of the Other. As in Nathalie

Granger, Duras introduces us to a feminine mode of relating to the event of passion.

Unlike Chauvin, who seeks to maintain control and hold on to language, Anne embraces uncertainty and silence, and learns to refuse all structure in a readiness to merge her identity with another.

In her relationship with Chauvin, Duras’ heroine slowly lacerates the boundaries of her restrained and subjugated self. Passion is the alcohol that enables her to inflict upon herself the cathartic violence of subjective destitution. Like Lacan, Bataille describes the ethical act as the brief crossing of a limit:

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As long as ipse perseveres in its will to know and to be ipse, anguish lasts, but if ipse abandons itself and knowledge with it, if it gives itself up to non-knowledge in this abandon, then rapture begins. In rapture, my existence finds a sense once again, but the sense is referred immediately to ipse; it becomes my rapture, a rapture which I ipse possess. [...] As soon as I emerge from it, communication, the loss of myself cease; I have ceased to abandon myself —I remain there, but with a new knowledge (Inner Experience 54).

The crossing of the limit and the consecutive abolition of ipseity is an experience of rapture that alone may give birth to new knowledge, to a deep transformation of one’s existence. In Anne’s case, the novel ends without a new positivization of the void, we do not know what will become of Anne. Does Anne’s rapture become her rapture? We do not know. In that regard, Duras seems faithful to Bataille’s argument that the movement of transgression has to begin again “without other end than exhaustion, without possibility of stopping other than collapse” (Inner Experience 55). This idea is conveyed in Duras’ text by the physical exhaustion that strikes Anne at the very end of the book.

Since it is Anne’s very first experience of rapture, we may surmise that it might not be the last.

Chapter VIII is the site of a turning point in the narrative, Anne tells Chauvin that she cannot go on with their erotic ritual, she tells him that her child will go to the piano lessons with someone else from now on. Knowing that she will not be seeing Chauvin ever again, she asks him to tell her the story of the tragic couple one more time. Tension has built to the bursting point. Anne is more scared than usual because she knows that until now they have both resisted reenacting the end of the couple’s story, which is the murder of the wife by gunshot to the heart. As we have reached the final stage of their

258 ritualistic reconstruction, the lovers’ hands are “figées dans leur pose mortuaire” (118).

The vicarious lovers have reached the inexorable impasse: How to stage the impossible?

How to make sense of the motivations that led a woman to be willingly killed by her lover? Faced with this aporia, Chauvin tries to gain composure in order to tame Anne’s uncanny insistence:

— Ce n’est pas la peine d’essayer de comprendre. On ne peut pas comprendre à ce point. — Il y a des choses comme celle-là qu’il faut laisser de côté ? — Je crois (119).

The novel thus ends in irresolution and the mystery of the crime remains whole.

The siren announces the proximity of impossible jouissance: “La sirène retentit, énorme, qui s’entendit allègrement de tous les coins de la ville et même de plus loin, des faubourgs, de certaines communes environnantes, portée par le vent de la mer” (121).

The setting sun and the red sky also indicate the intensity of the scene. The stage is finally set for the first and last kiss of the couple to take place: “Elle fit alors ce qu’il n’avait pas pu faire. Elle s’avança vers lui d’assez près pour que leurs lèvres puissent s’atteindre. Leurs lèvres restèrent l’une sur l’autre, posées, afin que ce fût fait et suivant le même rite mortuaire que leurs mains, un instant avant, froides et tremblantes. Ce fut fait” (121). The vicarious eroticism of the would-be lovers resembles a religious sacrificial ritual. We may find here another connection with Bataille’s vision of erotism as a limit-experience. Indeed, Bataille envisioned erotic transgression as intimately tied up with sacrifice, writing that eroticism is “a violation bordering on death, bordering on murder” (Erotism 17).

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It is Anne’s sublime fascination with the crime of passion that leads her, with the help of Chauvin, to transgress ordinary moral laws and embrace strong communication.

“‘Communication’, Bataille writes, only takes place between two people who risk themselves, each lacerated and suspended, perched atop a common nothingness” (On

Nietzsche 20-21). Anne is in search of what Bataille calls the summit, which “maximizes tragic intensity. It is coupled with the expenditure of energy without measure, to the violation of the integrity of beings” (42). The summit is not a goal, for it would be to

“reduce it to a search for profit” (57), a rational calculation of risk. Yet, at the approach of the summit, Chauvin recoils.

— J’ai peur, dit de nouveau Anne Desbaresdes. Chauvin ne répondit pas. — J’ai peur, cria presque Anne Desbaresdes. Chauvin ne répondit toujours pas. Anne Desbaresdes se plia en deux presque jusqu’à toucher la table de son front et elle accepta la peur. — On va donc s’en tenir là où nous sommes, dit Chauvin. —Il ajouta: Ça doit arriver parfois (122).

Anne insists that Chauvin accomplish the sacrifice, which brings Anne’s identification with the murdered woman to completion. At this very moment, the ritualistic recreation of the murder reaches completion.

― Je voudrais que vous soyez morte, dit Chauvin. ― C’est fait, dit Anne Desbaresdes (123).

Anne is not only dead metaphorically, she is also dead symbolically. Indeed, the

“femme adultère” (123) has reached social death under the bewildered gaze of the proletarians watching the scene at a distance. Eventually, Chauvin refuses to leave the

260 realm of utility and does not cross into the realm between-two-deaths.238 For Duras, absolute passion is what determines woman’s absolute difference. Chauvin is seduced into the experience of loss but recoils after the kiss, he remains within the bounds of pleasure, he refuses to lose propriety of his body and let himself be invaded by the radical otherness of jouissance. In that regard, Anne appears as the subject supposed to enjoy whereas Chauvin remains remains the position of the subject supposed to know, who guards himself against jouissance by deferring it to the feminine Other that endures it passively on his behalf.

Despite the daily progress made on the recreation of the murder, the novel does not reach real resolution. It is even implied that the cycle of repetition does not end with the very end of the novel.

Anne Desbaresdes n’arriva pas jusqu’aux larmes. Elle reprit une voix raisonnable, un instant réveillée. — Elle ne parlera plus jamais, dit-elle. — Mais si. Un jour, un beau matin, tout à coup, elle rencontrera quelqu’un qu’elle reconnaîtra, elle ne pourra pas faire autrement que de dire bonjour. Ou bien elle entendra chanter un enfant, il fera beau, elle dira il fait beau. Ça recommencera. —Non. — C’est comme vous désirez le croire, ça n’a pas d’importance (120-121).

Anne might be condemned to go through the same process again; like Lol V.

Stein, she might be doomed to endless repetition. Anne is involved with a passion that continues at the same intensity, never satisfied, never climaxing, never ending. We enter a world of passion and ceaseless wandering that contradicts what Duras sees as the model of male sexuality, which permeates masculine writing (i.e., the build-up of suspense,

238 This idea is conveyed by the etymology of the name Chauvin, which is a French form of Latin Calvinus and thus Calvinism and chauvinism are, etymologically, twins. We may find here a veiled reference to Bataille’s critique of Calvinism, which has placed utility as the horizon of worldly existence.

261 climax, and denouement that patterns the rythm of the traditional novel). Indeed, Duras rejects masculine sexuality, which “tourne autour de modèles de comportement bien précis, l’excitation, l’orgasme. Puis on recommence. Rien qui reste en suspens, non dit”

(La Passion suspendue 23).

Duras’ feminine writing thus subverts what she considers to be a masculine mode of thought that is based on tension, resolution, and hermeneutic closure. The sonatina form is the occasion for Duras to experiment with the novelistic form’s capacity to account for impossible passion. It is suggested that the moderato may eventually fail to discipline the untameable, which is associated with the cantabile. This is implied for instance in how Anne’s child eventually ends up releasing the constraints of the piano lesson: “L’enfant sautait par dessus des cordages en chantant la sonatine de Diabelli”

(Moderato cantabile 107). On a thematic level, the sonatina appears as a conservative exercise and a sedimented form. And yet, on a formal level, it plays a progressive role insofar as it is used to break another sedimented form, that of the realist novel. The cyclical structure of the sonatina, indicated by Anne initially (“ça recommence” 8) and by

Chauvin later (“ça recommencera” 120), is the beautiful form that destroys the linear understanding of time and enables Duras to give expression to the overwhelming passion and the insistence of the death drive.

Music, like passion, interrupts the course of the world and announces the coming of a new dawn: “[la musique] s’étala dans le monde une fois de plus, inonda le coeur d’inconnu, l’exténua,” adding that as the music built up “la lumière du jour diminua”

(80). In Détruire dit-elle music is also associated with darkness: “ce n’est que lorsque

262 l’obscurité est presque tout à fait complete qu’elle arrive clairement” (135). Music is like a measureless mass that comes over the listener, it comes into being without a tangible presence, as a coming forward that seems unmediated by any objectifiable given. It submerges and extenuates the heart with the unknown. While Moderato cantabile seems to replicate the dialectical structure of the sonatina, it presents a negative eschatology that posits closure to be unattainable. For Duras as for Barthes music is a language that cannot generate a predicate, a language that calls into check what Blanchot calls “la structure attributive du langage, ce rapport à l’être, implicite ou explicite, qui est, dans nos langues, immédiatement posé, dès que quelque chose est dit” (Entretien infini 567). Duras keeps suspense open and, to borrow from Barthes, music is not “adjectivized”, that is, the affect it unleashes maintains the loss of the imaginary. In “The Grain of the Voice” Barthes argues that music suffers from being adjectivized by discourse.239 The predication of an epithet has an “economic function” that is “always the bulwark with which the subject’s imaginary protects itself from the loss which threatens it” (Image, Music, Text 179).

Predication protects against the threat of jouissance. The adjective objectifies; its function is to reassure, to constitute the subject. The adjective is apotropaic, it protects against loss and jouissance.

239 “The adjective is inevitable: this music is this, this execution is that. No doubt the moment we turn an art into a subject (for an article, for a conversation) there is nothing left but to give it predicates; in the case of music, however, such predication unfailingly takes the most facile and trivial form, that of the epithet” (Image, Music, Text 179).

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Conclusion: Music as the Last Veil

The musical structure of Moderato cantabile refuses to pluck out the terrible mystery of passion and replace it with an intelligible reflection, a comprehensive imaginary. For Anne music is the source of sublimation, it is the last veil that hides the monstrous yet it preserves the mystery of jouissance. While beauty gives us access to the beyond of the pleasure principle, it also constitutes a barrier against it. This idea is analogous to Bataille’s statement that “together with an effort to reach continuity by breaking with individual discontinuity, the search after beauty entails an effort to escape from continuity” (Erotism 144). If music is beauty without image, it is beauty nonetheless.

In The Ethics of Psychoanalysis sublimation implies an ascension that elevates an object to the dignity of the Thing. Sublimation is identified with the act of “producing” the Thing in its very inaccessibility, in its sublime beauty, as well as in its monstrous dimension. The beauty that fascinates desire stands as a veil that implies something sublime, an impossible jouissance behind it without ever actually revealing it. It is the sublime nature of music that enables Anne to refuse all concrete content of desire, to leave every ultimate object as empty and unfilled as possible, and, most important, to humanize the destructive power of repetition that is the mark of jouissance. Music sustains the endless search for the impossible object, organizing the entire desiring trajectory around the void of jouissance so as to keep desire infinitely alive. Narrative

264 desire remains open. The fatal attraction to the black hole of das Ding, the site of a traumatic, vacuous horror, threatens to overflow Anne with terrible vitality and force. If pleasure strives for the release of tension and homeostasis, jouissance lies beyond the pleasure principle; it is tied to repetition and the unsymbolyzable kernel of the real. In

Moderato cantabile music frames an encounter with the infinite at the same time as it tames infinity. The musical Thing is experienced in the ecstatic surrender that remains beyond meaning, that is, beyond the symbolic law.

The reenactment of the murder, which brings Anne to the verge of dementia, makes Moderato cantabile the prelude to Lol V. Stein’s ravishing where we witness the total capitulation of the rational in favor of the irrational. There is, however, a crucial distinction between Moderato cantabile and Le Ravissement: music as a limit, a frame, a beautiful veil that hides the monstrous. In Moderato cantabile music surges with a qualitative difference of intensity that rushes with the approach of the unbearable limit that shakes the soul, yet the beautiful form survives. To put it in Kantian terms, the power of music is colossal because, through it, imagination is still able to adequately present its own inadequateness. In that regard, the sonatina can be seen as the frame of the novel, in both senses of the term: first as the “sustaining parts of a structure fitted together” insofar as the structure of the first eight notes of the sonatina constitute the structure of the novel; second, as a frame (parergon) for the impossible jouissance. As Lacan put it, art is fundamentally parergonal and comes unto itself by ornamenting the hole of the Thing.

The work of art becomes a fragile receptacle for something that is incommensurable with all framing. Moderato cantabile thus marks a transition from the classical novel to more

265 experimental forms. Eventually, the cyclical structure of the sonata proved to be too organic and Duras chose to go further with her next novel, completely abandoning the solace of good forms. As we are going to discuss in Le Ravissement, music has disappeared, both as an organizational form and thematic one. While Moderato cantabile moves the realist novel closer to the edge of the abyss, it does not jump into it. The ear- piercing scream that opens Moderato cantabile gives way to the hole that sunders the narrative of Le Ravissement.

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Chapter IV

Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein: When the Music Stops…

Cet arrachement très ralenti de la robe de Anne-Marie Stretter, cet anéantissement de velours de sa propre personne, Lol n’a jamais réussi à le mener à son terme. —Marguerite Duras, Moderato cantabile, p.50

…la limite où le regard se retourne en beauté, je l’ai décrite, c’est le seuil de l’entre-deux-morts, lieu que j’ai défini et qui n’est pas simplement, ce que croient ceux qui en sont loin : le lieu du malheur. C’est autour de ce lieu que gravitent, m’a-t-il semblé pour ce que je connais de votre œuvre Marguerite Duras, [vos] personnages… —Jacques Lacan, “Hommage fait à Marguerite Duras,” p.11

Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (henceforth Le Ravissement) goes further than Moderato cantabile in the unsettling of the Aristotelian unity of plot, action, place, time, and character. Through the exploration of feminine negativity Duras pursues the deconstruction of the hermeneutic teleology of closure that characterizes the realist novel.

While Duras’ elliptic writing truly begins with Moderato cantabile, in Le Ravissement the pandemic void of desire contaminates and unsettles novelistic stability and coherence on a whole new level. If music seems to have disappeared from the novel, the overwhelming use of repetition and the uncompleted sentences with ellipses have a

267 pronounced musical effect. With Le Ravissement literature leaves behind the energetically parsimonious form of the sonatina to fix its gaze unblinkingly on the monstrous and the unreconciled. While Moderato cantabile was painful to write, Le

Ravissement results from an even greater crisis in Duras’ life. From now on she writes with fear:

Ça avait commence avec Lol V. Stein. Là, il y a une période, je sortais d’une désintoxication alcoolique, alors, je ne sais pas si cette peur […] que j’ai connue en l’écrivant n’était pas aussi l’autre peur de se retrouver sans alcool. […] La peur a commence avec Lol V. Stein, un peu avec Moderato, je dois dire, elle a été très grande pour détruire, dangereuse un peu” (Les Parleuses 14-15).

In his “Hommage fait à Marguerite Duras,” Lacan points out that in Le

Ravissement the fear of the narrative voice may not be only the narrator’s fear, but that of the narrative as a whole.240 Duras insists that this fear also coincides with the experimentation with ellipses, pauses, and silence—“J’expérimentais ce blanc dans la chaîne” (15), arguing that she used to be a classicist, but not for Le Ravissement:

“d’habitude, quand je fais un livre, je sais à peu près ce que j’ai fait, j’en suis quand même un peu le lecteur… Là non. Quand j’ai eu fait Lol V. Stein, ça m’a totalement

échappé” (Les Lieux de Marguerite Duras 100). As such, a “seuil d’opacité” (101) was crossed with the writing of the book. The novel reaches a new threshold in the destruction of what Barthes calls the “readerly” (lisible) text, if “the moral law, the law of value of the readerly, is to fill in the chains of causality” (S/Z 181). With Le Ravissement Duras further disrupts the pretension to realism of the novel, exposing it to the uncompromising

240 « Hommage. fait à Marguerite Duras, du ravissement de Lol V. Stein ̄ (1965), Ornicar?, no. 34, p.8

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“gouffres insondables d’oubli” (Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein 99) that lie between “les jours de Lol V. Stein” (99).

The novel is the attempted narrative of Lola Valerie Stein’s fall into psychosis during a summer ball at the seaside resort of T. Beach. We meet her ten years after the tragic event as she has reached apparent remission, and we witness the events that lead to the slow return of madness. Lol was born and raised in the city of S. Tahla in a bourgeois family and she got engaged to Michael Richardson at the age of eighteen. The book opens with the fragmentary recounting of a ball during which Richardson leaves Lol for

Anne-Marie Stretter, an older, bewitching woman. In this traumatic scene Lol helplessly watches Stretter ravish an enraptured Richardson, the latter leaving Lola at once, without a word of explanation. After a difficult recovery, Lol marries John Bedford, a musician whom she meets on one of her daily walks. Lol subsequently leaves S. Tahla with her husband to settle in the nearby city of U-Bridge. Together, they have three children. Lol seems to have completely forgotten or repressed the traumatic event. After ten years of a quiet life, the couple returns to S. Tahla where Bedford is offered a promotion. Lol’s return to her native city triggers the slow reappearance of what appears to be a psychotic condition. During one of her daily walks, Lol reacquaints herself with her childhood friend, Tatiana Karl, who was standing next to her, holding her hands, during the tragic event of the ball. Tatiana is married to Pierre Beugnier but she also has a lover named

Jacques Hold, who strangely reminds Lol of Michael Richardson. Thanks to Jacques, Lol is able to get information about the events of the ball at T. Beach ten years before. Soon

Lol reveals to Jacques her interest in him but inexplicably forbids him to stay with her

269 instead of Tatiana. It soon appears that Lol wants to occupy the position of a third-party, a voyeur. She becomes strongly attracted to the adulterous couple and she starts following them obsessively. In one of the most fascinating and recurring scenes of the novel, Lol, lying in a field of rye, spies on them through an open window as they make love. Without noticing, Lol’s obsessions lead her to slowly recreate the scene of the ball through her relationship with the couple, which, through a striking act of transference, she now perceives as Richardson and Stretter: “Une place est à prendre, qu’elle n’a pas réussi à avoir à T. Beach, il y a dix ans.” (60) In Lol’s melancholic gaze, past and present, fantasy and reality come together as one.

The novel opens with uncertain accounts of the scene of rapture. We know from the narrator, whom we later learn to be Jacques Hold, that Lol’s mysterious “disease” had always been latent and had prevented her from “blooming” because of the love and affection of her family.241 We are told that Lol always gave the impression of a “quiet boredom” (12), as if she had been anesthetized by the confining context and moderato pace of bourgeois life: “jamais elle n’avait paru souffrir ou être peinée, jamais on ne lui avait vu une larme de jeune fille” (12). Throughout the novel Lol remains beyond grasp.

As Tatiana puts it, Lol was never là (there), something was always missing, which is implied in the uncommon diminutive Lol, instead of Lolà.242 During the event of the ball,

Lol remains transfixed, fascinated, but shows no emotion: “la souffrance n’avait pas trouvé en elle où se glisser, [...] elle avait oublié la vieille algèbre des peines d’amour”

241 “Tatiana Karl, elle, fait remonter plus avant, plus avant même que leur amitié, les origines de cette maladie. Elles étaient là, en Lol V. Stein, couvées, mais retenues d’éclore par la grande affection qui l’avait toujours entourée dans sa famille et puis au collège ensuite.” (Le Ravissement 12) 242 “Au collège, dit-elle, et elle n’était pas la seule à le penser, il manquait déjà quelque chose à Lol pour être - elle dit: là” (12).

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(19). The ravishing marks the entry of the incalculable jouissance that cannot be factored in by the “old algebra” of love’s sorrows. In other words, Lol does not find a limit to jouissance, no frame to make it consist, be it through jealousy or pain. Thus, the ravishing is the uncanny epiphany of a “souffrance sans sujet” (22), an utterly non-subjectivized jouissance. Duras writes that Lol’s incapacity to suffer is “un oubli” in the chain of cause and effect,243 a forgetting that unsettles the whole narrative.244 Like all of Duras’ main characters, Lol is acephalous, “before reflection” (Les Lieux de Marguerite Duras 98).

Lol’s enigmatic personality, this “divorce dans lequel nous sommes elle et nous” (106), is never clarified nor made whole. Like all of Duras’ key characters, she remains a mystery to us and, in the end, we are left to wonder who is actually ravished, is it Lol or the reader?

As in Moderato cantabile, Duras seems to be in dialogue with Tolstoy, more specifically with the scene of the ball in Anna Karenina (1877). Indeed, Lol’s fascination with Stretter is reminiscent of the young Kitty’s attraction for the older Karenina. Stretter is similar to Tolstoy’s temptress, whose power to seduce is a supernatural force, an

“obscure négation de la nature” (Le Ravissement 15). Stretter is the incarnation of the all- powerful femme fatale, a Janus-faced creature that conjoins Eros and Thanatos. On the one hand, she is portrayed as an “Eve marine” (16), which is most likely a reference to

243 Duras links the gap in causality to a strange phenomenon that can happen to a water that does not freeze: “Il y a un phénomène qui existe dans le gel. L’eau deviant de la glace à zero degré, et quelquefois, il se trouve qu’il y a une telle immobilité de l’air pendant le froid, que l’eau en oublie de geler. Elle peut descendre jusqu’à moins cinq. Et geler” (La Vie matérielle 32). 244 As Robbe-Grillet puts it, “wherever there is distance, separation, dichotomy, division, there is the possibility of feeling them as suffering, and then of elevating this suffering into a sublime necessity. This pseudo-necessity leads to a metaphysical beyond” (For a New Novel 61). In this sense Lol does not participate in the humanist falsification of the tragic. We shall see that Lol’s descent into madness is not recuperated by the conquest of a metaphysical beyond.

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Botticelli’s painting “The Birth of Venus,” the mother and patron saint of the forces of creation. On the other, she is described as exhibiting a “grâce abandonnée, ployante, d’oiseau mort,” which may be a reference to the slightly unusual dimensions of Venus’ body in Botticelli’s representation (i.e., the elongated neck and her overlong left arm).

However, another “intertext” may be drawn from mythology. Indeed, with her death-like stature Stretter appears as a negative image of Plato’s Eros Pteros, the feathery god of love who gives love the capacity to regrow the wings of the soul in order to reach the empyrean of eternal Ideas. Indeed, Stretter displays the features of Nyx (Night) who, in the Rhapsodic Theogonies, appears as a birdlike creature with black wings that parthenogenetically lays the first orphic egg. The latter is said to hatch Phanes (Light) whom the Greeks associated with Eros. Nyx was said to dwell in the Underworld during the day, and come out only at dusk. In the Iliad, Homer mentions that the only goddess feared by Zeus was Nyx, the “all-subduing Night” that threatens to engulf the world in the embrace of her wings. While Nyx gives birth to Phanes, the incarnation of the primeval deity of procreation, she is as much a mortiferous creature, like Stretter who in

India Song is said to have caused the death of her young lover in Vinh Long. The horrible majesty of Stretter testifies to her proximity with das Ding, which Freud described as the ultimate object of our desires in its unbearable intensity and impenetrability. As a lethal seductress, Stretter is a figure of sovereignty that carries her prey into what Blanchot calls the “other night,” where one experiences a jouissance that dissolves the boundaries of the self. This other night is the inassimilable alterity that disrupts what Blanchot identifies as the dialectic of day: “The first night is another of day's constructions. Day makes the

272 night; it builds up its strong points in the night. Night speaks only of day; it is the presentiment of day, day's reserve and its profundity” (The Space of Literature 167). The other night is no longer the dialectical other of day; rather, in Orphic fashion, Blanchot writes that the other night is “revealed as love that breaks all ties, that wants the end and union with the abyss” (The Space of Literature 168). If Lol is illuminée (i.e., mad), what illuminates her is not the light of day, but the uncertainty and excess of night, the

“lumière nocturne” (Le Ravissement 47) of madness that ensures the unworking of the novel, the forgetting or loss of the work.

Most important, Stretter and Richardson fall in love precisely when music stops, in a deafening silence: “ils s’étaient rejoints, n’entendant pas qu’il n’y avait plus de musique” (21). This suggests that, perhaps, unlike in Moderato cantabile, no aesthetic sublimation is possible as music no longer acts as a veil that sublimates the horror of jouissance. Lol is said to have stopped loving Richardson the second Stretter made her entry. Her unsettling absence of suffering upon losing her lover is clarified by an admission made ten years after the ball: “— Je n’ai plus aimé mon fiancé dès que la femme est entrée” (137). Lol’s only visible reaction is a scream: “Lol cria pour la première fois. Alors des mains, de nouveau, furent autour de ses épaules.” (22) Although

Lol is said not to have suffered, she remains “fascinée,” “suspendue” (18). When Michael

Richardson takes Anne-Marie Stretter in his arms, Lol is suddenly statufied, “figée par la rapidité du coup” (19). She reaches the zero degree of desire, entering a frozen state of catatonia that Deleuze and Guattari qualify an “affect that is too strong for me,” an affect that “sweeps away” and leaves her desubjectified, “perhaps to the point of death” (A

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Thousand Plateaus 356). Lol is ravished by the sublime event, which, as Kant put it, is an event that shatters all normal human boundaries. In Kant’s description, the sublime is conceived as a momentary suspension of the powers of imagination and understanding.

As imagination fails to make sense of the overpowering event, reason steps in to provide an idea that enables us to comprehend the incomprehensible. In Kant’s narrative, the sublime thus necessarily gives rise to “a feeling of a supersensible faculty within us”

(Critique of Judgment 81), a feeling that entails the production of an Idea of infinity, and in this we reach “infinity comprehended” (86). In the sublime the subject feels powerless or small because of something that is stronger or larger than itself. Nevertheless, if one experiences a loss of footing, losing any sense of grip, soon the disruption is replaced by a feeling of pleasure that is sublime when it results in happiness or understanding. In

Lol’s case, the sublime breach is not rationalized and jouissance can no longer be reterritorialized in terms of pleasure. As Kant remarks, the sublime can include affection, wherein the mind’s freedom is merely hindered, but not passion, in which its freedom is abolished (102). With Lol the initial stone-like fixity that overwhelms the subject in the sublime—the feeling of inhibition and arrest described by Kant—no longer gives way to a feeling of vitality and sovereignty. In keeping the sublime breach open, Duras prevents the conversion of affect into action. Perception is struck by an incapacity to seize or retain, if we follow Bergson’s understanding of perception, which denotes the capacity to arrest movement (from per “thoroughly” + capere “to grasp, take”), that is, to create a perception that enables a subject to react in a sensory-motor response or action to a movement. As such, perception is the opening up of a gap or an interval in becoming, a

274 gap opened by sensation and closed by reaction. With Lol, perception encounters an inassimilable void, it comes empty-handed as action is infinitely delayed. The eruption of jouissance creates a hole in the symbolic order, yet it appears that this hole cannot be sublimated. Lol remains transfixed, fascinated by what remains off limits, outside the frame.

At the time of the ravishing, Lol is said not to have felt anything, and the tremendous velocity of affect is felt like a suspension (epoche) of time, a vertiginous anesthesia: “Lol fait la morte” (Le Ravissement 37). In so doing, Duras reverses the nineteenth-century idealization of women, which, according to Starobinsky, results from the masculine development of “une image inverse et complémentaire d’une féminité idéale. La femme, selon ce mythe, est la grande tentatrice parce que sa nature la voue à ne pas s'absenter de son corps” (Portrait de l’artiste en saltimbanque 67). At a moment when laboring bodies were confiscated by machines, the feminine body was associated with untamed nature. Contrary to this, Lol absents herself from her body and becomes a wraith-like figure. Such a condition results from the failure to join Stretter and

Richardson in their rapture. The experience of this oubli makes that “un chaînon a sauté, ce qui fait que tout ce qui suit est faux…” (Les Parleuses 20). Even if Lol follows the dictates of the “phallic class,”245 she does so mechanically, surviving in a glaciated world where everything seems to stand still. Upon her return to her native city, “Lol V. Stein installa sa maison natale de S. Tahla avec le même soin très strict que celle de U. Bridge.

245 Duras insists that it is a class problem, in the Marxist sense: “C’est la classe phallique, c’est un phénomène de classe. Faut bien le dire.” About Lol, Duras argues that « on lui a appris à parler, à marcher, à se marier, à faire l’amour, à avoir des enfants […] je pense que beaucoup de femmes sont comme ça […] elles font leur métier comme il est dicté par l’homme » (Les Parleuses, 33).

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Elle réussit à y introduire le même ordre glacé, à la faire marcher au même rythme horaire” (Le Ravissement 35). The perfection of the order that Lol sets up in her house appears as a precarious defense against the return of the trauma of jouissance. Indeed, the house is “la scène vide où se jouait le soliloque d’une passion absolue dont le sens

échappait” (34). Bedford, her new partner, is scared by the dormant passion, and he is said to be on the lookout for “le premier craquemement des glaces de l’hiver” (34). As she slowly frees herself from the strictures of her ordered life, Lol moves from the

Freudian death drive to the Lacanian one, that is, when she breaks free from her frozen existence to face the abyss of jouissance. For Lacan the death drive goes against equilibrium and against the tendency to return to an inanimate state, which is Freud’s interpretation of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1922). As Lacan puts it, the death drive is a “will to destruction. Will to make a fresh start. Will for an Other-

Thing given that everything can be challenged from the perspective of the function of the signifier” (Seminar VII 212).

After her marriage to Bedford and her family’s subsequent return to S. Tahla ten years after the event of the ball, Lol begins a nomadic wandering through the city’s streets that recalls Anna’s voyages in Le Marin de Gibraltar, the vice-consul’s deambulations among the lepers in Calcutta, or the beggar’s chaotic journey in Le Vice- consul. In S. Tahla Lol walks like an automaton, and while she appears empty, devoid of consciousness, the memories of the oblivious peripatetician come alive with her daily walks:

Des pensées, un fourmillement, toutes également frappées de stérilité une fois la promenade terminée—aucune de ces pensées jamais n’a passé la porte de sa maison—

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viennent à Lol V. Stein pendant qu’elle marche. On dirait que c’est le déplacement machinal de son corps qui les fait se lever toutes ensemble dans un mouvement désordonné, confus, généreux. Lol les reçoit avec plaisir et dans un égal étonnement. De l’air s’engouffre dans sa maison, la dérange, elle en est chassée. Les pensées arrivent (45).

Of the nascent memories, the one of the ball is always carrying the day. With the rebirth of the ball, Lol’s madness returns: “le bal reprend un peu de vie, frémit, s’accroche à Lol, Elle le réchauffe, le protège, le nourrit, il grandit, sort de ses plis, s'étire, un jour il est prêt. Elle y entre. Elle y entre chaque jour” (51). The return of the ball opens a cycle of repetitions, which, so it seems, is led by a desire to reenact the scene of rapture.

Lol appears to be riveted to the scene of ravishing, which comes anew everyday like the tide:246

Elle ne peut pas faire de compromis avec le souvenir, elle est écrasée par le souvenir qui, chaque jour, chaque jour de sa vie est nouveau, reprend sa fraîcheur, une sorte de fraîcheur originelle. [...] Elle ne s’habitue pas à la mémoire. Ni à l’oubli, d’ailleurs. [...] C’est comme ça que je la vois, Lol V. Stein, elle apparaît à la surface des eaux et elle replonge (Les Lieux de Marguerite Duras 99).

The repetition involved is closely linked to the operations of jouissance. As Lacan writes, “what necessitates repetition is jouissance […] jouissance as repetition […] what goes against life” (Seminar XVII 45). Lacan adds that this destructive repetition is what

Freud believed to be “l’instinct de mort” and that Lacan renamed death drive (45). Lol’s attraction to the tragic scene of ravishing leads her to sink into madness again as one sinks into the sea. Through this attraction Lol seems to “délicieusement ressentir

246 The tide of memory is depicted: “la mer monte enfin, elle noie les marécages bleus les uns après les autres, progressivement et avec une lenteur égale ils perdent leur individualité et se confondent avec la mer [...]. La mort des marécages emplit Lol d’une tristesse abominable, elle attend, la prévoit, la voit. Elle la reconnaît” (Le Ravissement 185-6).

277 l’éviction souhaitée de sa personne” (124). This eviction is coextensive to a symbolic and social death. At the same time, the destruction of Lol’s facticity coincides with the slow destruction of S. Tahla. Indeed, Lol’s compulsive walks achieve “la lente quotidienne glaciation de S. Tahla sous ses pas” (Le Ravissement 61). Thus, Lol’s condition cannot be simply defined as nostalgic. While nostalgia refers to a longing for a pleasurable memory

(as in Freud’s version of the death drive, which is an impulse to return to the lost harmony of the pre-oedipal fusion with the mother’s body), melancholia has no past or present object that may satisfy its longing for absoluteness, a longing that reveals itself to be a desire for destruction. No nostalgia may mitigate the frenzy of the Lacanian death drive. Hence, Lol’s melancholia ineluctably pours into the bourgeois world, introducing death and oblivion into the tidy streets of S. Tahla.

As opposed to Sartre, Duras gives melancholia a positive, paradoxically active dimension.247 “Sadness, Sartre argues, aims at eliminating the obligation to seek new ways, to transform the structure of the world by a totally undifferentiated structure… In other words, lacking the power and will to accomplish the acts which we had been planning, we behave in such a way that the universe no longer requires anything of us”

(The Emotions, 62-63). And yet, Lol’s incomprehensible illness goes beyond the traditional view of melancholia as the fantastical or hallucinatory capacity to maintain the

247 For Sartre, melancholia is merely a “behavior of oppression,” an evasion of political commitment. As such, Duras’ books already announce the politics of refusal that she was going to propound with Blanchot in the “Comité d’action étudiants-écrivains” during May 1968. According to one anonymous text published by this committee, a text later attributed to Blanchot, the movement sought to invent a new concept of the theoretical, which does not consist in the elaboration of “un programme, une plate-forme, mais au contraire, en dehors de tout projet programmatique et même de tout projet, à maintenir un refus qui affirme, à dégager ou maintenir une affirmation qui ne s’arrange pas, mais qui derange ou se derange, ayant rapport avec le désoeuvrement ou le désarroi ou encore le non-structurable.” (Numéro 1. Bulletin publié par le Comité d'Action étudiants-écrivains au service du Mouvement (octobre 1968), 137)

278 dead object alive. Most important, it is not that Lol attempts to change the structure of the world, but to do away with it, to wipe the slate clean. To return to the event of the ball is to return to the moment when the world stops, when jouissance erupts and creates a caesura in space and time, disrupting any pre-existing referential frames that could account for it. In this sense, Lol’s tarrying with the past is like a long, slow waltz with the event. Paradoxically enough, her daily walks make possible an on-going and open relationship with the past, giving loss a creative dimension. Through her aimless wandering, Lol activates what Keats called “negative capability,” which is the capacity

“of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”248 Lol does not attempt to grasp the event but seeks to perceive, think, and operate beyond any presupposition of the intellect, reliving and reinventing the scene of rapture. If Lol is caught by a “désir d’oublier” (41), it is to forget in order better to remember, to restage the impossible event of ravishing, to modulate it infinitely, and by the same token to put the narrative in a state of fugue in both the psychological and musical sense of the term. Oblivion de-sediments, levels the world, and sets the empty stage on which Lol’s drama is replayed every day like a piece of music interpreted with ever-renewed variations. Yet, we soon realize that the slow waltz is a diminuendo al niente that wears out the memory of the ball until nothing remains but the illumination, the nocturnal light of madness.

Duras destabilizes the traditional function of the objective narrator, which is to provide a framework for what is infinite in reality for the reader. By underlining the

248 John Keats, The Complete Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats, p. 277

279 uncertainty of the narrator and his recourse to imagination to fill up the gaps, the narrative framing is questioned and the unbounded nature of the event is affirmed. The scene of the ball is narrated in a fragmentary way, a fragmentation that gives expression to the shattering entry of jouissance in the monotony of the quotidian, or the invasion of the sacred in profane, orderly existence. The narrator says that the crucial instant of the ball occurs when Lol is definitely separated from the couple: “dans les multiples aspects du bal de T. Beach, c’est la fin qui retient Lol. C’est l’instant précis de sa fin, quand l’aurore arrive avec une brutalité inouïe et la sépare du couple que formaient Michael

Richardson et Anne-Marie Stretter, pour toujours, toujours” (46). In her anamnesis Lol tries to go back to the moment of separation, which begins with the coming of dawn and the return of the dialectic of day: “Lol progresse chaque jour dans la reconstitution de cet instant. Elle arrive même à capter un peu de sa foudroyante rapidité, à l’étaler, à en grillager les secondes dans une immobilité d’une extrême fragilité mais qui est pour elle d’une grâce infinie” (46). The recovery of infinite grace from the scene of ravishing coincides with the instantaneous return to a “zero degree” of the event, to an intense focal point. The zero is both the “O” between the two “L” (i.e., ailes “wings”) of desire and the scream “Ô” elsewhere described as “le doux cri aux ailes brisées” (i.e., l-ô-l, p.74). We know from a later cinepoem, Cesarea, that the “ô de l’orient” is a reference to queen

Berenice’s repudiation by Titus. Le Ravissement gives us a glimpse of the impossible jouissance that Lol desperately wants to isolate and revive: “il aurait fallu murer le bal, en faire ce navire de lumière sur lequel chaque après-midi Lol s’embarque mais qui reste là, dans ce port impossible, à jamais amarré et prêt à quitter, avec ses trois passagers, tout cet

280 avenir-ci dans lequel Lol V. Stein maintenant se tient” (49). The ship of light is illuminated by the nocturnal light of madness, which gives free rein to the uncertainty and excess of the other night. It is at the moment of separation, when the dawn sets in, that Lol stands “sans voix pour appeler à l’aide, sans argument, sans la preuve de l’inimportance du jour en face de cette nuit” (47). The scene is a paradoxical phenomenology of jouissance, a staging of this impossible at the limit of reference and representation. Lol’s extraction of the singularity of the event has led to a near total suspension of the world: “il ne reste de cette minute que son temps pur, d’une blancheur d’os” (47).

Lol’s ravishing is this absolute event that undoes all frames of reference. Even Lol does not remember anything about it, “elle ne dispose d’aucun souvenir même imaginaire, elle n’a aucune idée sur cet inconnu” (47-48). Hence, like the narrator she is constrained to imagine what could have happened through her hallucinatory reminiscences. The key moment that obsesses Lol is the fantasized undressing of Stretter, which coincides with the uncovering of das Ding in all its vacuous purity: “Il n’est pas pensable pour Lol qu’elle soit absente de l’endroit où ce geste a eu lieu” (49). Through her melancholic hallucination Lol morphs into Stretter, the apparation of whose body coinciding with the erasure of hers. In her vanishing, Lol paradoxically experiences the

“voluptuousness of the world”:

Le corps long et maigre de l’autre femme serait apparu peu à peu. Et dans une progression rigoureusement parallèle et inverse, Lol aurait été remplacée par elle auprès de l’homme de T. Beach. Remplacée par cette femme, au souffle près. Lol retient ce souffle: à mesure que le corps de la femme apparaît à cet homme, le sien s’efface, s’efface, volupté, du monde (49-50).

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The use of the conditional underlines that in Lol’s melancholia past and present, fantasy and reality, have become undistinguishable. It also implies that the encounter with das Ding would coincide with Lol’s subjective destitution and the dissolution of the boundaries of her self. Yet, in spite of herself Lol has never managed, until now, to disappear completely: “Cet arrachement très ralenti de la robe de Anne-Marie Stretter, cet anéantissement de velours de sa propre personne, Lol n’a jamais réussi à le mener à son terme” (50).

Lol’s madness is profoundly ambivalent. As often in Duras, insanity is seen not only as a breakdown but also as a breakthrough. Lol’s recreation of the event of the ball has an apocalyptic dimension: “Ce qu’elle rebâtit c’est la fin du monde” (47). Lol, who stands on the other side of Lethe, unleashes the power of oblivion into the bourgeois world: “Elle avait l’air de se moquer d’elle et de l’autre, un peu gênée mais amusée de se trouver de l’autre côté du large fleuve qui la séparait de ceux de S. Tahla, du côté où ils n’étaient pas” (42). Duras proposes a counterintuitive conception of oblivion as a positive principle that empties out and levels the world of utility, and which should be understood in the etymological sense of the term as a force that evens out, smoothes over, and effaces

(from the Latin ob “over” + root of levis “smooth”). Hence, Lol appears as the harbinger of death and destruction, a condition that is implied by her death-like appearance and the disappearance of her physical features: “ses cheveux avaient la même odeur que sa main, d’object inutilisé”; “une odeur fade, de poussière […] ses traits commençaient déjà à disparaître” (29).

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Lol’s attempt to disappear completely leads her to replace the present with the past, the real couple of Tatiana and Hold with Stretter and Richardson. Indeed, the union of Lol and Jacques recreates the mythic couple of Stretter and Richardson, not only in

Lol’s head, but also in the eyes of the enthralled narrator. At the moment when Lol and

Hold are about to make love the latter relates that

Au moment où mes mains se posent sur Lol le souvenir d’un mort inconnu me revient: il va servir l’éternel Richardson, l’homme de T. Beach, on se mélangera à lui, pêle-mêle tout ça ne va faire qu’un, on ne va plus reconnaître qui de qui, ni avant, ni après, ni pendant, on va se perdre de vue, de nom, mourir ainsi d’avoir oublié morceau par morceau, temps par temps, nom par nom, la mort. Des chemins s’ouvrent. Sa bouche s’ouvre sur la mienne (113).

The unknown dead man with whom Jacques Hold fuses is Michael Richardson.

Through her fusion with Tatiana Karl/Anne-Marie Stretter, Lol seems to believe that she will be able to become one with Hold/Richardson. This fantasmatic construction enables her to create an apparatus that gives relative consistency to jouissance. Her reenactments lead Lol to proceed to a mise-en-scène of the ball where, perhaps, she will finally witness the undressing of Stretter by her lover. In so doing Lol creates a perverse fantasy whereby jouissance can be partially experienced and recaptured. Unlike the neurotic, the pervert does not take as her horizon the metonymy of desire, which posits that the object is always already lost. The triangulation is precisely an attempt to bridge the gap between

Lol’s concrete situation and her abstract desire for the Thing. Later, as Jacques Hold and

Lol are about to make love in a hotel room, Lol’s identity merges almost completely with

Tatiana’s: “il n’y a plus eu de différence entre elle et Tatiana Karl sauf dans ses yeux exempts de remords et dans la désignation qu’elle faisait d’elle-même—Tatiana ne se

283 nomme pas, elle—et dans les deux noms qu’elle se donnait: Tatiana Karl et Lol V. Stein”

(Le Ravissement 189). Yet, in her recollections and her transference on Jacques and

Tatiana, Lol’s desire finds no resolution and, against a receding chaos, no clarity is taking place.

While the anéantissement de velour never reaches completion, Lol’s attempts to disappear completely are nevertheless reiterated throughout the novel, more specifically through the repetition of the scene of the field of rye. In this recurring scene Lol follows

Tatiana and Hold to the Hôtel des bois. The hotel is the only place in S. Tahla where adulterous couples can meet discreetly and rent rooms by the hour. Most important, it is where Richardson first told Lol that he loved her. It is also the hotel where she prepared for the fatal ball. Lol lies down in the field of rye at the back of the hotel. It is there that she recreates the scene of the ball. As she is about to spy on Tatiana and Jacques through the open window of their room, she begins to feel sleepy: “Elle ne se demande pas d’où lui vient la faiblesse merveilleuse qui l’a couchée dans ce champ. Elle la laisse agir, la remplir jusqu’à la suffocation, la bercer rudement, impitoyablement jusqu’au sommeil de

Lol V. Stein” (62-63). As Lol falls asleep, the narrative voice changes abruptly and Lol is now referred to as “la femme”: “Les yeux rivés à la fenêtre éclairée, une femme entend le vide - se nourrir, dévorer ce spectacle inexistant, invisible, la lumière d’une chambre où d’autres sont” (63). It is as if the narrator were contaminated by Lol’s disorientation and madness. Suddenly, as if by magic, the memory of the ravishing comes back to life:

“avec des doigts de fée, le souvenir d’une certaine mémoire passe” (63). The naked bodies of Tatiana and Hold pass by the window and we guess that they are about to make

284 love. At this point “la lumière se modifie, elle devient plus forte” (64) and the pale, blonde Lol has become but a “tache sombre dans le seigle” (65). The second time Tatiana and Jacques meet at the hotel, Lol is again lying in the field of rye and this time we know for certain that the adulterous couple makes love: “Cet instant d’oubli absolu de Lol, cet instant, cet éclair dilué, dans le temps uniforme de son guet, sans qu’elle ait le moindre espoir de le percevoir, Lol désirait qu’il fût vécu. Il le fut” (122). For a brief moment, it appears that Lol experiences absolute oblivion, yet when she comes to the hallucination has dissipated. At the very end of the novel Lol goes back to the field of rye a third time:

“Lol nous avait précédés. Elle dormait dans le champ de seigle, fatiguée, fatiguée par notre voyage” (191). These are the last sentences of the book. As in Moderato cantabile, the narrative remains open and we surmise that Lol will continue living the eternal recurrence of the fateful ball through Tatiana and Jacques or through another surrogate couple.

The idea of eternal recurrence is conveyed by the symbol of rye. Lol lies in “le jeune seigle du début d’été” (63). The field of rye can be seen as both an image of renewal and a metaphor for Lol’s world-destroying anamnesis. Moreover, rye is traditionally associated with Persephone, the Rye-Mother, that one etymology relates to

Persephatta (Περσεφάττα), which is considered to mean “female thresher of grain.” An alternative etymology is from φέρειν φόνον [pherein phonon], “to bring (or cause) death.” The two etymologies seem to coincide in Lol’s character. Furthermore, the idea of Lol’s ravishing reinforces the link between Lol and Persephone. The word

“ravissement” comes from the Latin raptus, which has given “rapture” and “rape” in

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English. Raptus implies the idea of “a carrying off, abduction, rape.” Like Lol,

Persephone experienced a ravishing when she was snatched away by Hades to the

Underworld to be his wife. When Demeter begged Zeus to demand the release of her daughter, Persephone was told that she could be freed from the Underworld so long as she did not eat any food while sojourning on earth. But when she supposed that nobody was paying attention, Persephone went into a garden and ate six pomegranate seeds. As a consequence, she was condemned to spend six months of the year in the Underworld, while the other six would be spent on earth with her mother. The myth advances that the time Persephone spends in the Underworld makes the earth cold, dark, and sterile, but when she returns, spring and summer rise with her. Lol’s affinity with Persephone is implied in the idea of cyclical corruption and generation. Lol’s return to life is accompanied by “le premier craquemement des glaces de l’hiver” (Le Ravissement 34).

Yet, the circle of repetition in Lol’s case seems to proceed towards a diminuendo al niente, a progression toward nothingness. Indeed, the more Duras’ oblivious heroine recreates the ball, the more the memory becomes uncertain and eventually crumbles, resulting in a blank nothing. Lol’s fountain of youth finds its source in the swollen waters of Lethe.

As Lacan argues, “On pensera à suivre quelque cliché, qu’elle répète l’événement.

Mais qu’on y regarde de plus près” (“Hommage fait à MD” 11). As for the repeated returns to the field of rye, why is it that somehow, almost magically, Lol ends up in a similar situation over and over again? Is she engaged in a classic process of repetition- compulsion? Lacan suggests that this is not the case. Martin Crowley concurs in arguing

286 that “Lol is repeating the event, however, inasmuch as the Durassian event is brought into meaningful existence only in its repetition” (76). As Crowley goes on to state, Lol exhibits the symptoms of a compulsion-repetition that cannot be perceived as a process of healing (76). Emma Wilson also argues that Duras plays with the “illusion that the text will enact the discovery of curative analysis” (“Mon histoire de Lol V. Stein” 176). Lol’s compulsion to repeat is not a process of perlaboration whereby she comes to assimilate the traumatic past in the symbolic universe. Lol does not revisit the trauma of the ball in an unconscious search of mastery and healing, she does not triumph and grow through the process. Instead of mastering the traumatic event and breaking the cycle, Lol’s reiterations extend the dominion of repetition on the ruins of the symbolic order and the bourgeois Other.

If we are to grasp what is at stake in Lol’s recreations of the event, we should envision Lol’s compulsion as the destructive, anarchic work of the death drive. The desire to relive the event is but an unconscious desire to forget, to produce a tabula rasa, a clean slate. As Duras writes, Lol no longer enjoys the separation of memory: “en quelque point qu’elle s’y trouve Lol y est comme une première fois. De la distance invariable du souvenir elle ne dispose plus : elle est là. Sa présence fait la ville pure, méconnaissable. Elle commence à marcher dans le palais fastueux de l’oubli de S. Tahla”

(43). Paradoxically enough, the emptiness of ob-livion coincides with fastuousness and purity. Through the repetition of the ball in the present, Lol destroys the past and levels the bourgeois world, which is now in pieces, trampled by her silky feet.

Le bal sera au bout du voyage, il tombera comme château de cartes comme en ce moment le voyage lui-même. Elle revoit sa mémoire-ci pour la dernière fois de sa vie, elle

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l’enterre. Dans l’avenir ce sera de cette vision aujourd’hui, de cette compagnie-ci à ses côtés qu’elle se souviendra. II en sera comme pour S. Tahla maintenant, ruinée sous ses pas du présent (175).

Through her desperate attempt to make good of her loss, Lol rediscovers the ex nihilo at the heart of symbolization. She uncovers the zero degree of representation, clearing the ground for the possibility of creationist sublimation, which may never come.

Indeed, as the unresolved denouement of the book indicates, Duras does not offer a new positivization of the void. In a dramatic climax Hold recounts what seems to be the very last resurgence of the memory of the ball:

Lol regardait. Derrière elle j’essayais d’accorder de si près mon regard au sien que j’ai commencé à me souvenir, à chaque seconde davantage, de son souvenir. Je me suis souvenu d’événements contigus à ceux qui l’avaient vue, de similitudes profilantes évanouies aussitôt qu’entrevues dans la nuit noire de la salle. J’ai entendu les fox-trot d’une jeunesse sans histoire. Une blonde riait à gorge déployée. Un couple d’amants est arrivé sur elle, bolide lent, mâchoire primaire de l’amour, elle ignorait encore ce que ça signifiait. Un crépitement d’accidents secondaires, des cris de mère, se produisent. La vaste et sombre prairie de l’aurore arrive. Un calme monumental recouvre tout, engloutit tout. Une trace subsiste, une. Seule, ineffaçable, on ne sait pas où d’abord. Mais quoi? ne le sait-on pas? Aucune trace, aucune, tout a été enseveli, Lol avec le tout (180-181).

The last remnants of imaginary evocations seem to have definitely vanished with the “vast and dark meadow of aurora.” At last, no trace seems to subsist, the swelling waters of Lethe have finally accomplished their design.

While she had sex with Hold, it is through her gaze that Lol attempts to restage the rapture of the ball. Lacan writes that Le Ravissement, like all of Duras’ works

(Lacan’s emphasis), is itself a sublimation addressing “la limite où le regard se retourne en beauté […] le seuil de l’entre-deux-morts” (11). In “le cinéma de Lol V Stein” (Le

Ravissement de Lol V Stein 49), the heroine does not identify with a gaze of mastery that

288 purports to domesticate the real. Unlike the mirror image of the mirror stage, which provides the child with an illusory mastery of her body, Lol’s cinema is anamorphic insofar as it does not repress the gaze. As an anamorphosis, the gaze qua object a remains perpetually beyond grasp precisely because it gives body to a void—object a “is what lacks, it is non-specular, it cannot be grasped in the image” (Seminar X 254). Lol’s perverse fantasy makes possible an encounter with the gaze by reaching the very limit of fantasy. Thus, fantasy loses its protective function to become a facilitator for Lol’s face to face with nothingness. If the perverse fantasy restages the site of a traumatic encounter with the real, in this restaging Lol fails to assume mastery and keep a safe distance from the gaze. Hold recounts that Lol is invaded by a desire to transgress that he compares to an uproar and a blinding light that dispossess her: “Elle essaie d’écouter un vacarme intérieur, elle n’y parvient pas, elle est débordée par l’aboutissement, même inaccompli, de son désir. Ses paupières battent sous l’effet d’une lumière trop forte” (131). In

Seminar XI Lacan describes the gaze as the limit point of vision, as an intense focal point, which, when reached, blinds the subject as if it were a strong light. In Seminar VII Lacan argues that this dazzling radiance signals the extreme proximity with the limit that separates the subject from the impossible Thing (281). Traditionally fantasy is perceived as a screen that neutralizes the gaze and preserves the integrity of the symbolic order.

Even though the scopic drive spurs the subject’s desire, this desire must stay at a safe distance from the object of the drive. This distantiation is made possible by fantasy, which produces the interface that preserves us from encountering the monstrous Thing without mediation. Through Lol’s perversity, however, Duras employs fantasy in a

289 radical way. Through her perverse fantasy, Lol reveals the truth that the bourgeois world would like to ignore, producing an experience of dispossession and de-subjectivation that is otherwise obscured by the system of quotidian signs and our experience of social reality.

Lol’s fascinated awe for the ravishing of Richardson by Stretter derives from the lovers’ intimacy with das Ding. As the anamorphic skull in Holbein’s The Ambassadors, the gaze is the harbinger of death. It is the monstrous void (Ungeheuer) that needs to be veiled by beauty if one does not want to fall into psychosis. The confrontation with the gaze implies the disappearance of the subject, the paradoxical aphanisis or fading of Lol in the blinding light of the ravishing. In Seminar XI Lacan relates the gaze to the idea of fascination. When you are fascinated by something, it is precisely you who disappears into that which you observe, as if hypnotized, which is likely why Lol’s eyes are said to be “crevés de lumière, morts” (India Song 32). Lacan says that the function of the gaze is to make all subjective subsistence vanish: “ce dont il s’agit dans le désir, c’est d’un objet, non d’un sujet […] un objet devant quoi nous défaillons, nous vacillons, nous disparaissons comme sujet” (Le Transfert 203). Lol’s confrontation with the gaze leads her to abandon herself to the other night, which is “revealed as love that breaks all ties, that wants the end and union with the abyss” (The Space of Literature 168). Blanchot adds that the other night is “in the night it is what one never joins; it is repetition that will not leave off, satiety that has nothing, the sparkle of something baseless and without depth” (168). We find here a striking similarity between the other night and the Lacanian death drive, this baseless repetition without depth. Throughout Le Ravissement, Lol

290 stands at the threshold of the realm between-two-deaths, oscillating between psychosis and neurosis: “elle apparaît à la surface des eaux et elle replonge” (Les Lieux de

Marguerite Duras 99). Through this perpetual coming and going, Duras sublimates Lol’s suffering, holding her back at the limit that can be crossed only briefly, “in front of the unspeakable field of radical desire” (Seminar VII 217). Like Lacan’s Antigone, Lol

“pushes to the limit the realization of something that might be called the pure and simple desire of death as such” (Seminar VII 289). Eventually, the crucial question posed by the novel is whether or not desire will return on the far side of the experience of apocalyptic annihilation.

Through her destructive anamnesis, Lol experiences bliss, moving away from the determinate memory of the ball to enter the nocturnal light of madness. The watery Lol can be seen as a modern Teresa of Avila, whom Duras read extensively.249 Teresa suffered serious illnesses and experienced frightening visions that some confessors attributed to the devil. Hold’s description of Lol as a statue with eyes like “minerai de chair” strangely recalls Bernini’s Transverberation of Saint Teresa which both Lacan’s

Encore and Bataille’s Erotism discuss: “De près dans le minerai, je reconnais la joie de

249 We may find in Lola, a diminutive of the Spanish name Dolores, a veiled reference to Teresa’s country of origin. In her writings, Teresa protested against a dogmatic reification of the Divine mystery that was drying up to the roots the lived experience of the believer. Like Duras, she was obsessed with water, even comparing it to God: “I don’t find anything more appropriate to explain some spiritual experiences than water; and this is because I am so fond of this element that I have observed it more attentively than other things” (The Interior Castle, IV, Ch 2:2). Moreover, Avila’s description of the activity of writing looks like a paraphrase of Duras’ vision of the writer as an echo-chamber (Les Parleuses 218): “As I write this, the noises in my head are so loud that I am beginning to wonder what is going on in it. As I said at the outset, they have been making it almost impossible for me to obey those who commanded me to write. My head sounds just as if it were full of brimming rivers, and then as if all the waters in those rivers came suddenly rushing downward; and a host of little birds seem to be whistling, not in the ears, but in the upper part of the head, where the higher part of the soul is said to be” (Interior Castle, 50). Beyond the topos of the writer as “echo-chamber,” Duras describes writing as a process of flooding: “la pretension, c’est de croire qu’on est seul devant sa feuille alors que tout vous arrive de tous les côtés.” (LMD 99)

291 tout l’être de Lol V. Stein. Elle baigne dans la joie. Les signes de celle-ci sont éclairés jusqu’à la limite du possible, ils sortent par flots d’elle- même tout entière. Il n’y a, strictement, de cette joie, qui ne peut se voir, que la cause” (165). While Freud unambiguously associated mystical experience with psychosis,250 in Seminar XX Lacan describes the same experiences as indicative of a condition not in itself psychotic, but experienced in psychotic terms due to psychical breakdown.251 Psychosis lies in the failure to distinguish between the imagined and the real. It is a process that leads to a dissolution of the ego, which is accompanied by delusions, inner voices, and hallucinations. The breakdown of speech is also characteristic of psychotic subjects.

Oftentimes, Lol’s psychotic breakdowns make the narrative stutter, rendering it almost completely unintelligible. The scene of the ball, which witnesses the fulgurance of the other night of passion, is not simply the starting point of the narrative, but what renders any narrative impossible. To a certain extent, the relation between Lol and Hold reproduces the relation between the female mystic and her confessor. In the traditional literature of confessions, the confessor is meant to guide the mystic in her ecstasy, producing an allegoresis of mystical desire that brings the mystic’s inspirations into conformity with orthodox theology. And yet, Duras shows us that the confessor always

250 See for instance Freud’s debate with Romain Rolland about the notion of oceanic feeling. In “The Ego and the Id” Freud describes mysticism as a narcissistic fantasy that attempts to recreate the unlimited narcissism of the pre-Oedipal fusion with the mother. (Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 19, p.46) 251 Lol resembles the mystics that fascinate Lacan in Seminar XX. The ravishing is an atheist experience that shatters the profane sphere of language that is based on phallic jouissance, which is situated between the symbolic and the real. Phallic jouissance is also called “out of the body” jouissance (Seminar XX 9). Conversely, the mystic experiences the jouissance of the Other, that is, the jouissance of the body, which is situated at the intersection of the imaginary and the real. Such jouissance is beyond the symbolic and cannot constitute an object of knowledge: “the essential testimony of the mystic consists in saying that they experience it, but know nothing about it.” (76)

292 threatens to be ravished by the exalted narrative of the mystic. Le Ravissement subverts the role of the male narrator as a sexual and discursive master who seeks to gentrify or arrest the irruption of female negativity. As the desperate Hold asks, “Qu’est-ce que vous voulez? Elle ne sait pas—je veux, dit-elle” (112). Like Chauvin in Moderato cantabile, the more Hold attempts to make sense of Lol’s intransitive desire and to control narration, the more he is led into logical contradictions. The masculine gaze’s efforts to remain at a distance, not to be bewitched, that is, to play (in Genette’s terms) the role of

“extradiegetic” narrator, the third person with an external view on events, does not prevent him from becoming a “homodiegetic” narrator, a protagonist drawn ineluctably into the drama and eventually sinking into the abyss of passion. Thus, Duras questions the positions of subject and object in the ambiguous “of” in the novel’s title, and, eventually, we are left to wonder whether is it Lol who is ravished or whether it is she who ravishes the narrator. Indeed, Jacques Hold revels in Lol’s shadowy state of indifference, he is fascinated by her “écrasante actualité” (14), her blinding absence that forces him to invent.252 Throughout the novel Duras makes use of ellipsis without any punctuation, which gives concrete form to the confusion of the heroine’s speech: “— Tu

écoutes toujours?/ — Presque toujours. Surtout quand je” (93). This same practice is repeated throughout the novel to express Lol’s incapacity to express her feelings. The breakdown of speech is characteristic of psychotic subjects. Hold cannot get ahold of Lol

V. Stein: “Mes mains deviennent le piège dans lequel l’immobiliser, la retenir de toujours

252 Bedford sees her as a “constant virtuality”. Lol is “cette dormeuse debout, cet effacement continuel qui le faisait aller et venir entre l’oubli et les retrouvailles de sa blondeur, de ce corps de soie que le réveil jamais ne changeait, de cette virtualité constante et silencieuse qu’il nommait sa douceur, la douceur de sa femme.” (33) In the novel, Lol’s appearance is remoniscent of Botticelli’s Venus, this incredibly beautiful woman with smooth, delicate skin and golden curls.

293 aller et venir d’un bout à l’autre du temps” (107). Lol is like the sea, she comes and goes, forever remaining beyond Hold’s grasp. She becomes the sublime object of Hold’s desire: a “géante aux mains d’enfant” (125). Hold seeks to aestheticize Lol’s negativity, always attempting to distance himself from the abyss of her desire, still “sa vue seule m’effondre. Elle ne réclame aucune parole et elle pourrait supporter un silence indéfini.

Je voudrais faire, dire, dire un long mugissement fait de tous mots fondus et revenus au même magma, intelligible à Lol V. Stein” (130). Lol speaks only the impossible language of jouissance where words melt into an unintelligible magma. She is no longer the object of the other (Hold) who seeks to possess her, nor the object of the Other insofar as she can no longer be ascribed a fixed identity. Jacques demonstrates a desperate desire for knowledge through the repetition of the unanswered “Pourquoi?” (112). Yet, his unrelenting hunt for new information is fuelled by the elusiveness of Lol’s character,253

“Son regard luit sous ses paupières très abaissées. Il faut s’habituer à la raréfaction de l’air autour de ces petites planètes bleues auxquelles le regard pèse, s’accroche, en perdition” (114).

The novel reaches an unprecedented peak of intensity when Lol talks about

Tatiana’s naked body. Tatiana becomes a stand-in for the Thing as she is despoiled of her symbolic and imaginary properties. She is the impossible representation of a jouissance that deprives her “du moindre sens possible” (116).

253 Jack Hold’s attempt to capture the essence of the feminine represents a recurrent theme in Duras’ work. Peter Morgan’s failure to write the story of the woman beggar in Le Vice-consul is another telling example. One could also mention Mr. Andesmas who seeks an omniscient perspective that will permit him to reconstruct the presence of his daughter, Valérie. One could also cite the Captain in Emily L. who attempts to prevent the “spilling” of Emily’s poem into the world

294

Elle ne bouge pas, les yeux sur le jardin, elle attend. Elle vient de dire que Tatiana est nue sous ses cheveux noirs. Cette phrase est encore la dernière qui a été prononcée. J’entends: « nue sous ses cheveux noirs, nue, nue, cheveux noirs ». Les deux derniers mots surtout sonnent avec une égale et étrange intensité. Il est vrai que Tatiana était ainsi que Lol vient de la décrire, nue sous ses cheveux noirs. Elle était ainsi dans la chambre fermée, pour son amant. L’intensité de la phrase augmente tout à coup, l’air a claqué autour d’elle, la phrase éclate, elle crève le sens. Je l’entends avec une force assourdissante et je ne la comprends pas, je ne comprends même plus qu’elle ne veut rien dire (115-116).

With this destruction of language Lol reaches a climax of psychotic breakdown.

Duras adds that “le vide est statue. Le socle est là: la phrase” (116). Le Ravissement does away with what Barthes calls the “exorbitant dignity to predicative syntax” that characterizes the classical novel (The Pleasure of the Text 50). Language vacillates and collapses as it is confronted with Tatiana’s naked body. The intensity of words increases and suddenly the air around them explodes, the sentence explodes, all meaning explodes.

Lol destroys syntax, she is reported to have said “naked under her dark hair, naked, naked, dark hair,” and the full sentence appears to be Hold’s reconstruction. Lol becomes the figure of the voice of feminine writing, which emerges with a “violent rejection of syntax.”254 As another one of Duras’ favorite writers, John of the Cross, puts it, one only stammers in recounting the absolute, one only says inadequately what must be said. The mystical confrontation with das Ding robs the subject of her ontological support in the profane Other of language.

The eruption of jouissance is not framed via the advent of a signifier, which is why Lol keeps falling back into a state of psychosis. Catatonia is considered to be a severe manifestation of psychosis, which takes the form of radical social withdrawal,

254 “C’est des blancs si vous voulez, qui s’imposent. Ça se passe comme ça: je vous dis comment ça se passe, c’est des blancs qui apparaissent, peut-être sous le coup d’un rejet violent de la syntaxe…” (Les Parleuses, 12)

295 bodily disorganization, and the loss of cognitive functions. Catatonia is characterized by the collapse of psychic reality due to the absence of psychical supplementation. The absence of a signifying prosthesis is catastrophic as the real remains unmediated by the symbolic. As psychoanalyst David Michel argues, Lol is the embodiment of the Lacanian matheme S(A), which represents the lack in the Other of language, the lack of representation and signifiers (L’Ecriture de la jouissance 74). The mediation of language could have given consistency to Lol’s suffering. Instead, Lol is left transfixed, desubjectified, anesthetized. Only a hypothetic “mot-trou,” which would have emerged

“au moment précis” of the ball, could have done justice to the event and prevented Lol’s psychotic fall.

Elle ne dispose d’aucun souvenir même imaginaire, elle n’a aucune idée de cet inconnu. Mais ce qu’elle croit, c’est qu’elle devait y pénétrer, que c’était ce qu’il lui fallait faire, que ç’aurait été pour toujours, pour sa tête et pour son corps, leur plus grande douleur et leur plus grande joie confondues jusque dans leur définition devenue unique mais innommable faute d’un mot. J’aime à croire, comme je l’aime, que si Lol est silencieuse dans la vie c’est qu’elle a cru, l’espace d’un éclair, que ce mot pouvait exister. Faute de son existence, elle se tait. C’aurait été un mot-absence, un mot-trou, creusé en son centre d’un trou, de ce trou où tous les autres mots auraient été enterrés. On n’aurait pas pu le dire mais on aurait pu le faire résonner. Immense, sans fin, un gong vide, il aurait retenu ceux qui voulaient partir, il les aurait assourdis à tout autre vocable que lui-même, en une fois il les aurait nommés, eux, l’avenir et l’instant. Manquant, ce mot gâche tous les autres, les contamine, c’est aussi le chien mort de la plage en plein midi, ce trou de chair. Comment ont-ils été trouvés les autres ? Au décrochez-moi-ça de quelles aventures parallèles à celle de Lol V. Stein, étouffées dans l’œuf, piétinées et des massacres, oh qu’il y en a, que d’inachèvements sanglants, le long des horizons, amoncelés, et parmi eux, ce mot qui n’existe pas, et pourtant est là : il vous attend au tournant du langage, il vous défie, il n’a jamais servi, de le soulever, et de le faire surgir hors de son royaume percé de toute part à travers duquel s’écoule la mer et le sable, l’éternité du bal dans le cinéma de Lol V. Stein (48-49).

If it were to exist, the word-hole would frame the ball and make sense of the truamtic event in its totality. The missing word is paradoxical; it is a word that in the same movement gives expression to the “plus grande douleur” and the “plus grande joie.”

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Here we find the definition of what Lacan understood as jouissance, which is the conjugation of pleasure and pain. The tremendous affect creates an experience of punctum, to borrow Barthes’s term, a pure, aconceptual affect that leaves a gaping hole in representation and frustrates the reader’s desire for mastery.255

Hence, the event of the ball cannot be arrested or contained. The mot-trou, this immense gong, spoils, contaminates all words, which lose their identity and univocality to become fragile resonant surfaces that vibrate with the afterglow, the tremors of a tremendous event. With the development of her elliptic style, Duras seeks to foreground the tenuous materiality of voices; words are poised between actuality and virtuality, floating at the limit of musicality. Indeed, the word-hole is compared to a “gong,” which has the capacity to intensify sound and increase the reverberation time of speech, bringing language to the brink of musicality. With the proliferation of ellipses and the intensification of repetitions, Duras encloses within language what surpasses language.

The Durassian language of the passions is apophatic, born into the world by fragile and fleeting voices, which preserve the vibrations of an earth-shattering event. The apophasis in question is not a negative theology, but a deconstructive atheology. As Derrida underlines, deconstruction is not to be confused with negative theology, which posits the ultimate presence of an otherwise inaccessible Other. The word-hole is not lack as a possible or opposable negative, a determinable or frameable absence, or even a substantial emptiness. The word-hole testifies to the impossibility of arresting jouissance

255 The punctum, Barthes writes, “is a kind of subtle beyond – as if the image launched desire beyond what it permits us to see” (Camera Lucida 59).

297 in its contour, of arraigning the heterogeneous event in a form, that is, of localizing lack, of making lack return to its proper place, equal to itself.

As we have argued, the crucial question for Lol is whether or not desire will return on the far side of the experience of apocalyptic annihilation. In La Femme du

Gange Duras writes that Lol’s “visage, c’est la plaie toujours ouverte du désir” (162). In

Lacan’s teaching, desire is conceptualized as a defense against jouissance. Whereas

Lacan describes jouissance as a traumatic force, he speaks of desire as a “défence d’outrepasser la limite dans la jouissance” (Ecrits 825). In Le Ravissement, the metonymy of desire, which is supposed to moderate and humanize jouissance, seems often overwhelmed by the latter. Traditionally, a neurotic subject articulates jouissance into demands that can be addressed to the Other but in Lol’s case desire falters and the ravished heroine utters only a scream, “le doux cri aux ailes brisées dont la fêlure n’est perceptible qu’à Lol V. Stein” (Le Ravissement 74). Throughout the novel Lol remains mostly silent and often utters unfinished sentences. The breakdown of language cancels the mitigating effects of the metonymy of desire, which Lacan links to the operations of the pleasure principle.256 Conspicuously, the word-hole finds its pictorial counterpart in one of the most troubling images of the novel, namely, the image of the “chien mort de la plage en plein midi, ce trou de chair” (48). In L’Amour the image recurs as Lol sleeps on the sand, in the desert of writing; she is said to be “pourrissante, chien mort de l’idée”

(125). The image of the dead dog is puzzling, almost incomprehensible. We may find

256 The pleasure principle leads the subject “from signifier to signifier by introducing as many signifiers as is needed to maintain at the lowest degree of tension that regulates the functioning of the psychical apparatus” (Seminar VII 143).

298 here an intertextual reference to the classical myth of Ganymede. The dog is a symbol of fidelity, but also of sensual or terrestrial appetites. Most important, it is an image of desire chasing its prey. In the Aenid, Ganymede is described as the most beautiful of mortals. He is traditionally considered a hunter, although some versions argue that he was a shepherd, and the dog that accompanies him is a hunting dog. As Zeus falls in love with

Ganymede, he takes the shape of an eagle and ravishes him. In all of the pictorial representations of the myth, the dog, howling at the sky, participates actively in the scene of ravishing, underlining the vertiginous effect of the rapture. Depictions of the scene create a tension between high and low, the celestial and the terrestrial. If the dog is indeed a metaphor for desire, then we may find in the image of the dead dog on the beach a symbol of a desire shattered by a jouissance too strong to be allayed, a symbol of Lol’s inexorable psychotic downfall.

The image of the open wound in the belly of the dead dog not only refers to the traumatic dimension of jouissance (from the Greek trauma “a wound”), but also brings to light the facies hippocratica of logocentrism, insofar as for Aristotle the dog, or the animal in general, symbolizes the organic ergon (work). The dog represents the totalizing and unifying conception of the whole, which is the totality of its parts. Indeed, Plato in

Phaedrus and Aristotle in The Poetics both compare literary criticism to the study of the anatomy of an animal. The structure of a text is compared to an animal’s body, which has all its parts in the right place, head, feet, and middle parts.257 By placing a gaping hole in

257 Aristotle submits the work of art to the Platonic dialectic of parts and whole. The critic asks the purpose of each part and analyses how it relates to the organic whole. One of Plato’s most striking examples is Midas’ epigram. Midas’ greatest memorial, in the Greek tradition, was his own tumulus, which was adorned by an epigram said to have been written by Homer: “I am a maiden of bronze and lie on the tomb

299 the middle of the dog’s body, Duras destabilizes the concept of unity, which is, arguably, the most ubiquitous criterion in the traditional understanding of art. The Aristotelian doctrine of artificial organic wholes survives in Kant’s aesthetics of the beautiful, and more specifically in the ergon/parergon dialectic, which Derrida deconstructs in La Vérité en peinture. The hole in the dog (ergon) evidences Duras’s adoption of an aesthetics of parergonality that places the abyssal oblivium at the heart of the work of art, which is now nothing but a “royaume percé de toute part à travers duquel s’écoule la mer et le sable.” (49)

The enigmatic image of the “chien mort de l’idée en plein midi,” the dead dog at the high (Nietzschean) noon, thus symbolizes the movement from oeuvre to text. Barthes writes that the text embraces the “infinity of the signifier” while the work “closes on a signified,” that is, an idea. The text asserts “the very existence of plurality, which is not that of the true, the probable, or even the possible” (S/Z 6). The opacity and elusive nature of the word-hole contrasts with the Sartrian vision of prose as a “pane of glass” through which one can look directly to the thing signified. In What is Literature? even though Sartre acknowledges the ambiguous character of language, he notes that “the ambiguity of the sign implies that one can penetrate it at will like a pane of glass and pursue the thing signified, or turn one’s gaze towards its reality and consider it as an object” (6). Sartre opts for the cognitivist understanding of prose, which reveals the world unambiguously. As such, he embraces what Barthes calls the “signified as conclusion”

of Midas; So long as water flows and tall trees grow, So long here on this spot by his sad tomb abiding, I shall declare to passers-by that Midas sleeps below.” Socrates remarks that the epigram on Midas’ tomb can be rearranged without really changing the argument as a whole (264c-d), thus there is no necessity tying the parts to the whole.

300

(171), as “profound or final truth” (172), if by truth is meant “what completes, what closes” (S/Z 76). Contrary to this model, in Le Ravissement words sometimes seem to break free from the syntagmatic chain, from the coercion of predicative syntax, thus liberating new possibilities of linguistic jouissance.

Conclusion:

Through the disruption of realist conventions Duras manages to evoke the

Thingness of Lol. L’illuminée Lol is the sublime object that thwarts the narrativistic desire for mastery. Through the pale glow of her skin, she shines with the luminosity of the objet a. While she ushers the power of ob-livion into the world, she remains a construction against the void, however frail, pale, and faint she may be. She is beauty, beauty as destruction. As Bataille puts it, “even profoundly ruined images belong in the field of possession” (Inner Experience 170). Like the Thing Lol remains impenetrable, inaccessible, absent, and distant. Still, in spite of everything, she remains a construction against the void that lures and fascinates the writer-narrator-reader. If Le Ravissement repeatedly brings the reader close to a dramatic encounter with the gaze, the narrative, no matter how broken and misleading it may be, makes the reader retreat from it. Thus, we follow Lol, absorbed, in a quasi-state of hypnosis, we come and go, lulled by Lol’s annéantissement de velour that never comes to completion. By persistently pulling Lol from oblivion, Duras preserves desire from disappearing in the abyss of jouissance. Yet,

301 at the same time, Le Ravissement is a profoundly tragic work that uncompromisingly confronts the deadlock of desire and avoids fantasmatic resolution.

Through the methodic deployment of elliptic writing, Duras reaches this beyond- of-the-signified that opens onto unnamable jouissance. As Lacan argues, in “la dimension de l’écrit comme tel […] le signifié n’a rien à faire avec les oreilles mais avec la lecture, la lecture de ce qu’on entend de signifiant. Le signifié, ce n’est pas ce qu’on entend. Ce qu’on entend, c’est le signifiant. Le signifié, c’est l’effet du signifiant” (Encore 34).

Hence, the relationship between signified and signifier is reversed, the former now appears as an effect of the latter. With the word-hole Duras confronts us with the vertigo of a signifier without signified. The novel is subtly unsettled by the enigma of Lol’s

“doux cri aux ailes brisées” that reverberates through the pages and, like the word-hole, hollows out the space of representation. Through the explosion of ellipses, Duras’ style refrains from imposing an interpretation on the reader, so that sentences remain open and words preserve all of their echoes. Once freed from the domination of predicative syntax, words are poised between actuality and potentiality, they are like fragile vibratory surfaces that resonate with infinite possibilities. Once we start to listen well to the thingness of words, we perceive a radical difference in reference, perhaps what Emily L. calls, borrowing from Emily Dickinson, “une différence interne au coeur des significations” (Emily L 114). With the affirmation of the negative mot-trou, this gong that contaminates and unsettles all actual words, Duras emancipates the material sonority of words, which take on an incantatory dimension.

302

Words become signs, as in the ancient meaning of sign, that is, harbingers to be deciphered, for, to put it in Saussurean terms, the sonorous side of the sign (the signifier, which is composed of phonemes) emancipates from the conceptual side of the sign (the signified, which is made of ideal content), the latter losing its capacity to assign an identity to a thing or an event. Like Beckett, Duras does not treat sound as “something ancillary, a material that language uses” as Saussure put it.258 Duras’ destruction of syntax favors an “indiscipline de la ponctuation,” which undresses words the one after the other, discovering “le mot isolé méconnaissable, dénué de toute parenté, de toute identité, abandonné” (Les Yeux verts 94). To borrow from Lyotard, it can be argued that Duras perceives words to be

au plus secret de la pensée, sa matière, son timbre, sa nuance, c’est-à-dire ce qu’elle n’arrive pas à penser. Les mots disent, sonnent, touchent, toujours avant la pensée. Et ils disent toujours autre chose que ce que signifie la pensée, et qu’elle veut signifier en les mettant en forme. Les mots ne veulent rien, ils sont le non-vouloir, le non-sens de la pensée, sa masse (L’Inhumain, 155).

Interestingly, Lyotard uses the musical property called timbre, which is notoriously resistant to definition. Usually classified in negative terms, it refers to the part of a musical score that is not the pitch or the rhythm or the harmony. Dictionaries tend to describe it, just as vaguely, as a quality distinguishing the sound of one instrument from the next. If you play the same note on a saxophone, a trumpet or a tuba, then the resulting difference is timbre. Fundamental to Saussurean linguistics, then, is the idea that “in

258 For Saussure, “sound is merely something ancillary, a material the language uses. […] Linguistic signals are not in essence phonetic. They are not physical in any way. They are constituted solely by differences which distinguish one such sound pattern by another. […] What characterizes those units is not, as might be thought, the specific properties of each; but simply the fact that they cannot be mistaken for one another. Speech sounds are first and foremost entities which are contrastive, relative and negative.” (Course in General Linguistics 116-117)

303 language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system.”259

For Saussurean linguistics, sound, just like timbre in music, represents a second-order concept, one whose meaning can be grasped only by reference to a prior form. The idea of a word’s timbre, on the other hand, affirms the radical heterogeneity of difference against the metaphysical logic of identity thinking, which only thinks difference in terms of opposition. As such, the Saussurean model implies that meaning emerges from signification rather than reference. A sign is always already caught up in the global play of language (langue) and meaning emerges as an effect of the linguistic structure, which is made of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes. Contrary to this, in Duras the sonorous materiality of words lends a sensible opacity to words, which loosens them from the purely differential structure of language.

As Duras shows, only a loss in readability can account for the event. Duras’ writing is thus characterized by a performativity that cannot be reduced to Austin’s distinction between constative and performative.260 In “Signature Event Context” Derrida points to how Austin shifts the focus of meaning-making strategies from truth to use by way of the foregrounding of the performative. Yet, Derrida underlines that Austin’s binary opposition between constative and performative is based on the flawed assumption that there exists such a thing as a constative statement, that is, a statement that can describe an event exhaustively, identifying it to its supposed literal meaning, which is to

259 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin, p.118-121 260 In How to Do Things with Words, J. L. Austin attempts to distinguish between a constative and performative utterance, while the former reports something, the latter does something.

304 be analyzed in the total determination of the context of performance. For Derrida the event resists the extraction of meaning, its full transposition into literality. In the same way, for Duras the audible force of the word, which is to say its vibratory nature, is not entirely lost to the pure extension of letters in the textual space. With Le Ravissement,

Duras measures thought by the extremity that eludes the concept, liberating the non- identical, or the undetermined, from the grasp of totalizing thinking, because, as Adorno put it, “if thought is not measured by the extremity that eludes the concept, it is from the outset in the nature of the musical accompaniment with which the SS like to drown out the screams of its victims” (Negative Dialectics 365). Ultimately, only the fragile music of words poised between actuality and potentiality may bear witness to that which cannot be named or framed.

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Conclusion

The (Im)Possibility of Sublimation, an “Aesthethics”

According to the ethics of psychoanalysis, art is a sublimative procedure that adumbrates the fundamental void of the impossible Thing around which it is organized. In Seminar

VII Lacan draws a parallel between tragic art and psychoanalytic ethics, depicting sublimation as a limit-experience that stimulates the invention of beauty. The psychoanalytic sublime proposes that sublimity is a first movement to be countered by the invention of a beautiful object, which is the subject’s answer to the traumatic encounter with the monstrous void of the Thing, the absolute object of desire that lies beyond the symbolic order. To put it in Kantian terms, the experience of the sublime constrains the subject to act reflectively, by attributing a transcendental object to the void, that is, an object a that will define its moral law. I have attempted to show how Lacan’s redefinition of Freud’s theory of sublimation makes possible an ethics of desire where the confrontation with the destructive power of the drive paves the way for a creation ex nihilo that coincides with the redefinition of the subject’s fantasy and the renewal of the imaginary object of desire.

In my reading of Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape, Moderato cantabile, and Le

Ravissement, I have attempted to show how these works put Lacan’s theory of

306 sublimation to the test. By envisioning sublimation as destruction, Beckett and Duras seem to step out of Lacan’s logic of the sublimative/ethical act, which implies the advent of the beautiful form and the concomitant elision of the monstrous void. I have tried to show, however, that both writers rethink art as the prolonged hesitation between sublimation and destruction of the object. Through this tarrying with the negative power of the death drive, art reveals the Nothing of pure desire, extending the ethical rupture by delaying the possibility of positivity that is inherent in the advent of creationist sublimation. Through their experimental writing, Beckett and Duras find strategies to foreground the moment of the real, to face the void as the impossible point that demands deferral and occultation outside the confines of the symbolic order. To use a neologism that appears many times in Lacan’s 1972 “L’étourdit,” what the Beckettian and Durassian tragic share in common is the attempt to account for the preeminence of “ab-sens.” This neologism designates the default of origin or the groundless ground on which dwells the reality of the sexuated and speaking being. In good deconstructive fashion, as much as there is no arche, there is no telos, no guiding pole of human fulfillment. Thus, Lacan’s theory of the ethical act overturns Kant’s categorical imperative, which posits the summun bonum as “the true object” of a “morally determined” will (Critique of Practical

Reason 93). The idea of the highest good not only presupposes that there is a “true object” of desire, it also forecloses the void of pure desire, reestablishing positivity in place of desire’s essential negativity. As opposed to this, tragic art enshrines the summum vacuum, the unconditional heteronomy that is the condition of possibility for the self- determination of the subject through the ethical act of creation ex nihilo.

307

As opposed to the longing for selfhood, the fundamentally narcissistic experience of unity and continuity that defines the order of the imaginary, I have proposed that

Beckett and Duras reveal the death drive as both the condition of possibility and the condition of impossibility of sublimation, exposing therefore the contiguity of aesthetics and ethics. The death drive is a will for destruction, the insatiable will for the Other-

Thing that challenges everything that exists. The works that we have studied offer a challenge to art’s capacity to represent and make sense of the tragic, depicting the traumatic force of the latter without resorting to the falsification of humanism. Therefore, art tests its limits by fixing an unblinking gaze at the real of desire and by developing the means to face and creatively sustain the destructive force of the drive; it is an experiment that asks, to paraphrase Beckett, how far the death drive may be admitted in the artwork, because it appears to be the very opposite of form and therefore destructive of the very thing that art holds itself to be.261

Through the deployment of what can be called “aesthethics” both writers disclose the void of desire beyond the symbolic and imaginary orders. The recognition of ab-sens as the origin and destination of the work of art entails the revelation of the “true being- for-death” and the primacy of Heidegger’s Entwurf. For Lacan human beings are well aware of the omnipresence of death and that is why they flee from that knowledge into the forgetfulness of das Man, which articulates Dasein’s “referential context of

261 Beckett argued that art should answer the demands of chaos: “How could the mess be admitted, because it appears to be the very opposite of form and therefore destructive of the very thing that art holds itself to be? […] What I am saying does not mean that there will henceforth be no form in art. It only means that there will be new form, and that this form will be of such a type that it admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else” (Cited in Roger Reynolds’ “Indifference of the Broiler to the Broiled,” Samuel Beckett and Music, 206).

308 significance” (Being and Time 125). The system of quotidian signs is a program that prescribes ready-made ways of interpreting Being-in-the-world and anticipating experience. In Lacan too, subject and object are differentiated through the mediation of the Other, in which individuals have a “they-self” that is constituted in relation to “they- objects” for which the they-self has desire. Ethics begins with the overcoming of irresponsibility, which inheres in the submissive belonging to the Other, in the passive obedience to das Man that deprives the subject of its accountability by judging and deciding in its place. I have argued that sublimation, as ethical act, takes us beyond the adaptive apathy of the dialectic of the pleasure and reality principles, beyond the moderate but safe and reliable satisfactions of consumption, which make sure that we follow the paths created for us by the consumer industry. Ultimately, for Lacan, Beckett, and Duras the cultivation of pleasure is a tepid and cowardly endeavor that only achieves the retrenchment of the self-preserving ego and the reinforcing of the pleasure principle, which only seeks out the appeasement of pleasure. The Lacanian approach testifies to aesthetic sublimation’s cathartic essence, to its capacity to liberate us from narcissistic fixations based on ego-strengthening processes. Sublimation is a process whereby the subject may learn to escape from itself, that is, from the desire to consolidate a unified subject and reality, from the desire for self-preservation in which a human being is always looking forward to self-identity and self-mastery.

Likewise, Beckett and Duras do not view literary language as the romantic expression of a subjective interiority, as a means to assert one’s individuality and self- possession, but as a move towards a more transgressive kind of freedom in which

309 subjective reality dissolves. Their works embrace the ex nihilo that opens up and uncouples the “quilting point” that sutures the signifier to the signified. The artwork is thus not born from language, but from the rupture in language, “the idea is ruptured language, writes Beckett, so that the void may protrude like a hernia” (Letters of Samuel

Beckett I 521). To use the title of one of Beckett’s last works, Imagination Dead Imagine, art seeks to achieve a tabula rasa, to shatter aesthetic categories that hold the artist prisoner in order perhaps to imagine anew. Thus, Beckett’s and Duras’ thirst for destruction does not fall outside sublimation but is sublimation as destruction where, unlike in texts of pleasure, the void’s plea to have its vacancy filled is resisted. Their works operate the breakdown of the pleasure principle, which is consecutive from that of the signifier, for, as Lacan put it, the pleasure principle is “nothing else than the dominance of the signifier” (Seminar VII 134). Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape, Moderato cantabile and Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein are jouissance texts that impose a state of loss on the reader. Borrowing from Barthes’s idea that the jouissance text “discomforts

(perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes” (The Pleasure of the Text 14), I have argued that both writers affirm the purposelessness of jouissance against the profane world of reason, of identity, of objects, of meaning and calculation. As Lacan put it in

Seminar XX, “jouissance is what serves no purpose” (10). Thus, the meaningless repetition of the drive has the dimension of what Bataille calls expenditure, which is the non-dialectical other of utility. If jouissance is useless, it is because it serves no further end but the reproduction of the rotary power of the drives. Yet, following Lacan, I have

310 shown that the aneconomical, anarchic, and blind nature of jouissance threatens to lose its subversive potential by being recuperated by consumerism in order to serve “the accumulation of capital” (Seminar XVII 177). Jouissance is invested in the consumption of ready-made objects, fake objects a that are offered or peddled as baits to the voracity of the drive.

Finally, I have proposed that Beckett’s and Duras’ works are extreme forms of sublimations that resist being incorporated in the drive-based economy of consumerism.

Through the destruction of beauty or beauty as destruction, art becomes what Adorno calls the “social antithesis of society” (Aesthetic Theory 8). The artwork defies capital by staging the shattering entry of the non-exchangeable into the symbolic order. Jouissance appears as the incalculable, which is rebellious to rule, heterotopic, and heterogeneous.

Jouissance connects us to our true being-for-death precisely because its irruption has something of the irreversibility of natural death, which the consumerist Other excludes and renders invisible. In the jouissance text the consumerist system loses its footing, suffering reversal and collapse. Beckett and Duras write against the hegemony of the homo economicus, or the individual, private, competitive, self-interested, calculating, and depoliticized subject. To put it in Derridean terms, the jouissance text functions as a gift or a sacrifice for which the system has no counter-move or equivalence.

Art experiments with symbolic codes in order to suggest communication while obstructing it, turning indeterminacy against the system. Artistic responsibility consists in attempting to answer the demands of what Derrida calls the tout autre (wholly other) and the more positivistic demands of language. While intransitive jouissance is affirmed,

311 radically putting meaning on trial, beauty nevertheless survives in the ruins of representation. One of my principal concerns has been to resist presenting Beckett and

Duras as writers who entertain what Derrida calls, in reference to Levinas, the “dream of a purely heterological thought” (“Violence and Metaphysics,” Writing and Difference

151). If in tragic sublimation being qua ab-sense or lack of being appears as such, desire as the metonymy of non-being is eventually reinstated. Hence, sublimation is revealed as

“deferred presence,” or différance, it happens in “differing: in delaying or in diverting the fulfillment of a ‘need’ or ‘desire’” (“Differance,” Speech and Phenomena 145).

Aesthethics pushes sublimation to the limit, maintaining the gap between any signifier and its presumed signified, an operation which tends to dissolve the intelligible ideality of words and poise language on the verge of being mere sound.

Both writers refuse an either/or logic, perpetually hesitating between the absolutely Other and the identical, infinity and sameness. Eventually, for both writers, as for Lacan, a pure or unmediated encounter with the wholly other is but a fantasy. As such, the tragic is an ethics of metaxy (µεταξύ), of the in-between. Writing occurs at a threshold where it falters on the very border of nothingness, disrupting and undoing the

Western metaphysics of language. In the metaphysical tradition, the sonorous materiality of language is the Other of rationality and intelligibility; it is the matter that is dominated and used up for the purposes of intending subjectivity. In the artwork, by contrast, this

Other is allowed its own expression and aesthetics is not absorbed within hermeneutics as a theoretical enterprise.

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Writing happens in the liminal or interstitial space between pure nothingness and meaning, which is the province of sound. As Duras argued, “J’écris des livres dans une place difficile, c’est-à-dire entre la musique et le silence. Je crois que c’est quelque chose comme ça. On rate toujours quelque chose, ça c’est forcé, c’est une obligation dans la vie, j’ai raté la musique.”262 If Duras failed to become a pianist, her writing nevertheless does away with the desire for accomplishment, attainment, and completeness. Duras would very likely agree with Lacan’s statement that “le style c’est l’objet” (“Jeunesse de

Gide,” Ecrits 740). Style is an art of failure, the never satisfied attempt to account for the ever-receding object of desire. As opposed to the imaginary defenses of the ego, style is a cathartic process that gives expression to “the elusive process of Becoming, to the variations of Desire” (“Some Reflections on the Ego” 15). Style is thus sublime in the sense that it gives expression to an incessant dynamism, a negative dialectic that unsettles the narrative desire for completion.

With Moderato cantabile and Le Ravissement, narration becomes a technique of permanent beginnings, a process marked by the destructive power of repetition that characterizes jouissance. In Moderato cantabile, music is the last veil through which to approach jouissance as the ostensible goal of the drive, which appears desirable only when concealed by a shroud that keeps the drive-object at a certain distance. While the realist narrative crumbles, the book retains a sense of development and coherence. Le

Ravissement steps further in the field of destruction in the sense that, to use Steiner’s words, there is no “recuperative dawn after the tragic night” (“Tragedy Reconsidered” 7).

262 Entretiens avec Michel Field, Le Cercle de Minuit, émission diffusé le 14 octobre 1993 et réalisée par Gilles Daude.

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The narrative is almost devoid of recollections of the trauma of the ball and consequently lacking in any time continuum of permanence. In both works impossible passion dissolves the network of symbolic determinations and obligations that fetter Duras’ heroines to the profane world of the bourgeoisie. Woman is the incarnation of a negativity that saves her from the reifying gaze of man, she is no longer the specular other and the fetish of the patriarchate. In her attempt to upend masculine domination,

Duras is not led by a search for a transcendental, idealist or Icarian realm of feminine discursivity. Feminine writing does not seek to replace patriarchy with matriarchy, that is, to replace one paradigm with another, but rather to shatter the hierarchical structures imposed heretofore on the bourgeois-patriarchal world.

For Beckett writing also takes place in the in-between space that separates pure nothingness and meaning, which is the grey zone where the characters of Endgame are trapped. In Beckett the nihil must be associated with the void of the Thing, whose advent is coeval to that of the signifier (Seminar VII 120). Through his experimentations,

Beckett shows us that das Ding is not some kind of primordial real that preexists the symbolic order. The Thing is thus not some kind of prelapsarian origin that can be recovered through the abolition of language. Beckett depicts a universe without beauty, a post-apocalyptic universe dominated by the death drive where Hamm, Clov, and Krapp are caught in a closed loop of repetition. While they used to find pleasure in the repetition of the same gestures, conversations, and habits, repetition has become painful, life- denying. In other words, Beckett confines his characters to the mechanical world of the profane, which makes existence intelligible through the imposition of sign and value

314 systems that liberate us as much as they enslave us. As Bataille put it, “it is to the extent that we are normally drowned in this world of mechanisms that a sacred element is completely other for us” (Essential Writings 40). The sacred element survives in Beckett as the longed for silence that always eludes his characters. His plays are animated by a desire for the Thing as the lethal abyss, the pre-historical, unconditioned void that threatens to engulf the subject. Yet, Beckett shows us that the Thing remains inaccessible and can be hallucinated only through the fantasmatic object, the object a. Despite the effort to destroy language in order to get at this beyond-of-the-signified, das Ding still eludes the writer and language survives in a basic, decayed form. For Beckett, the death drive is precisely what makes it impossible for the subject to return to the pre-symbolic

“inorganic” state, the nothingness that Freud describes in terms of the Nirvana principle in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. It is the unsurpassable horizon of profane existence.

By envisioning the artwork as an (im)possible sublimation, Beckett and Duras have created a literature whose jouissance is as opaque as that of the symptom and yet remains art, an object raised to the dignity of the Thing, no matter how destroyed it may be. By exploring the limits of language, signification, and reference, both writers reveal the hole in being around which all reality is but precariously organized. As readers and spectators, these works make us undergo a process of catharsis that “purifies” us from the order of the imaginary, from our narcissistic inclinations, which are related to the self- image through which we believe ourselves to be masters of desire. Far from reconciling the reader with the Other, the works of Beckett and Duras estrange us from the status quo, offering a challenge to imaginative and critical faculties. As sublimations, their

315 works create immense detours on the way that leads to the drive’s satisfaction, producing jouissance texts that infinitely delay gratification and reassurance, which only foster an illusory confirmation of our identity and the stability of our world.

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