"Just enough still to joy" : Beckett, Lacan and the jouissance of writing a little real

Abstract

This thesis approaches Samuel Beckett's late prose works through the Lacanian question of Real writing. Following Jacques Lacan's insistence on the ex-sistence of Borromean logic in the unconscious, the thesis isolates and analyses the various ways in which Beckett writes the Real unconscious as a textual impasse. Beckett's use of mathematical logic and counting are of particular interest here, given Lacan's emphasis on the matheme in inscribing the impossibility of the Real. Considering the manifold implications of the Lacanian Real for the field of writing, the thesis foregrounds numerous underexplored aspects of Beckett's work such as serial logic, co-existence of solitude and company, corporeal inscription and counting. Arguing that Beckett's texts stage writing as a symptomatic construction on the Real, it shows how the psychoanalysis-literature interface can be fruitful not only in consolidating but also depleting the Symbolic unconscious, whilst simultaneously demonstrating how literature and psychoanalysis function as each other's Real on the basis of their shared boundary of writing. Through close textual readings of How It Is, Company, Worstward Ho, Malone Dies, All Strange Away, Imagination Dead Imagine and Enough (among others), it demonstrates how the Beckettian text produces a Real by making the body of the signifier (the Lacanian letter) write against its sense. Corporeal inscription and mathesis emerge as modes of writing the Real unconscious. A mathematized presentation of the fragmented moving body, combined with a mental counting which produces a material passage through numbers, force sense with jouissance and the signifier with the letter. The Beckettian uncoupling of knowledge from language underlines Lacanian lalangue and the "endlessly ending" Real of the text signals a movement from literature to Lacanian lituraterre. Beckett's Real writing is also approached from the field of the sexual via Lacan's formulation of sexual non-relation. What emerges from this chronological movement from How It Is to Worstward Ho (with throwbacks to the shorter prose and Malone Dies) is a trajectory of material writing via the letter. As the Beckettian text gradually attains more purchase on the Real, it invents a "knowhow" to contain and localise it in a mathematical minimum. Beckett is finally able to fix the Real of the symptom by making it work as material inscription.

Date of Award	2016
Original language	English