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

Abstract

This study focuses on the persistence of the tragic 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. The specific works under consideration are 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 these 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. I advance that 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. More specifically, this thesis shows how Beckett and Duras devise a specifically modern revival of the tragic, which is indissolubly bound up with the exploration of the modern psychoanalytic subject of desire. I argue that Beckett’s and Duras’ stylistic experimentations need to be read in relation to Lacan’s turn to ethics in his 1959-1960 seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, which opens a decade of cultural criticism that culminated with the 1969-1970 seminar, The Other Side of Psychanalysis, where Lacan conceptualizes the “discourse of capitalism” as a refined, more insidious, and more efficient version of the discourse of the master.