Читать книгу Beckett, Lacan and the Voice - Llewellyn Brown - Страница 14

The voice is thus one crucial psychoanalytical category developed by Lacan, whose theoretical elaborations, such as this one, have largely surpassed the notions used by other schools of psychoanalysis; the latter having, in general, adopted a number of Lacanian concepts. This situation is particularly true as a result of Lacan’s deepening of Freud’s findings and insights, oriented towards the real, that is to say, a dimension that resists any circumscribing by a subject’s personal ‘world view’, or by the regularity of fixed laws. While post-Freudian theories often remain caught up in the confined sphere defined by the ‘Name-of-the-Father’—the agent presiding over the family-centred Œdipal scenario—Lacan ended up reversing his own notions of the unconscious ‘structured as a language’ whereby strict rationality appeared capable of accounting for a subject’s destiny. Hence it would appear that to limit one’s scope to earlier theoretical elaborations would be comparable to studying physics from exclusively Newtonian laws. These considerations, alongside factors such as intellectual trends of the moment, have doubtless led a number of critics to integrate Lacanian findings into their works.

It is indeed true that a number of psychoanalytical notions—starting with Freud, but also including various aspects of Lacanian theory—are regularly quoted in academic publications. Surprisingly however, looking at critical studies on Beckett more closely, it seems clear that Lacan’s effective presence has been minimal. One reason for this situation in France is that Lacan did not devote full articles to Beckett, as he did to writers such as Marguerite Duras, Paul Claudel, Jean Genet or James Joyce. In spite of this, it can be asserted that Lacan’s work—particularly in its later developments—is singularly relevant to the reading of Beckett. Indeed, Suzanne Dow, for example, has seen in him a ‘silent partner’ of Lacan, ‘in the sense that he functions in the period 1968–71 as a figure aligned with psychoanalytic discourse as a “discourse without speech”—that is, the obverse of the discourse of the master […]’ (14).

A brief enumeration of points of convergence will give an overview of their affinities. Both were concerned with the part of existence that lies beyond the comforting fundamental fantasy—fiction, or world view (Weltanschauung)—that supports the ideals, the goals and meaning most people