‘Till ooze again and on’: Textual Desire and the Subject’s Presence (Beckett, Deleuze, Lacan)

Abstract

It is well-known that Beckett’s prodigal sense of humour did not always draw the line at jokes and terms that were quite raw, at times rude, and occasionally scatological. On the contrary, sexual desire, sometimes lewd, sometimes inhibited, does not just show on the surface in an allusive manner in his writing, but is often described in terms that are either verging on the obscene or of great technical precision, as if the neutrality of the writing could evacuate all pleasure from sexual desire. Think of the many scabrous, half-aborted attempts by the characters in the trilogy — for example, the sexuality of the relationship between Molloy and Lousse as well as that of the narrator of First Love. Even worse, consider the status of the act of procreation in texts such as The Lost Ones and How It Is. Aside from Pim’s cruelty, it is in these cases nothing more than a physical interlocking of bodily forms for which geometrical problems have to be solved. In fact, it is in the first half of Beckett’s oeuvre that the themes and motifs of sexuality are most present. As the years went by, these themes gradually disappeared: the less the writing centres on a personified subject, the less sexuality, not to mention pleasure, shows in the text. It thus seems that eroticism and, beyond that, desire, is to be sought elsewhere, namely — and this is the hypothesis that will be developed here — in the writing process itself.