Beckett, Lacan and the Voice

Nota

Translations from French sources are our own, unless a specific bibliographic reference indicates otherwise.

Lacan with Beckett: Departures

Let me begin by quoting two sonnets written in French and dated from 1929/1930. The first one goes like this:

Tristesse Janale

C’est toi, o beauté blême des subtiles concierges,

La Chose kantienne, l’icone bilitique;

C’est toi, muette énigme des aphasiques vierges,

Qui centres mes désirs d’un trait antithétique.

O mystique carquois! O flèches de Télèphe!

Correlatif de toi! Abîme et dure sonde!

Sois éternellement le greffé et la greffe,

Ma superfétatoire et frêle furibonde!

Ultime coquillage et palais de la bouche

Mallarméenne et emblème de Michel-Ange,

Consume-toi, o neutre, en extases farouches,

Barbouille-toi, bigène, de crispations de fange.

Et co-ordonne enfin, lacustre conifère,

Tes tensions ambigues de crête et de cratère. (CPo, 44)

(Janal Sadness

It is you, o wan beauty of crafty concierges,

The Kantian Thing, the icon of Bilitis;

It is you, mute enigma of aphasic virgins,

Who gathers my desires with a contrarian shaft.

O mystical quiver! Arrows of Telephus!

Of you the correlative! Abyss and hard fathom!

For ever be the grafted and the graft,

My superfluous and slim fury!

Ultimate shell and mouth palate,

Mallarmean palace, emblem of Michel-Angelo,

Burn, o neuter, in fierce ecstasies,

Smear yourself, twice-born, in convulsive mud.

And at last coordinate, lakeside conifer,

Your ambiguous tensions of crest and trough)

Here is the second sonnet:

Hiatus irrationalis

Choses, que coule en vous la sueur ou la sève,

Formes, que vous naissiez de la forge ou du sang,

Votre torrent n’est pas plus dense que mon rêve;

Et si je ne vous bats d’un désir incessant,

Je traverse votre eau, je tombe vers la grève

Où m’attire le poids de mon démon pensant.

Seul, il heurte au sol dur sur quoi l’être s’élève,

Au mal aveugle et sourd, au dieu privé de sens,

Mais, sitôt que tout verbe a péri dans ma gorge,

Choses, que vous naissiez du sang ou de la forge,

Nature,—je me perds au flux d’un élément:

Celui qui couve en moi, le même vous soulève,

Formes, que coule en vous la sueur ou la sève,

C’est le feu qui me fait votre immortel amant.

(in Allaigre-Duny, 29)

(Hiatus Irrationalis

Things, whether sweat or sap flow in you,

Forms, whether begotten from forge or flood,

Your stream is not denser than my dream;

And if I do not beat you with unceasing desire,

I cross your water and fall to the shore

Pulled by the weight of my thinking demon

Left alone to fall on hard ground from which being rises,

On evil blind and deaf, on god meaningless,

But, no sooner have words perished in my throat,

Things, whether begotten from blood or forge,

Nature,—than I lose myself in elemental flux:

Fire smouldering in me, the same fire lifts you

Forms, whether sweat or sap flow in you,

It’s the fire that makes me your eternal lover.)

If we did not know who the respective authors of these sonnets were but just knew the dates of their composition, between 1929 and 1930, it would be tempting to attribute them to the same poet. Perhaps not the most gifted poet, but still a writer capable of displaying an astonishingly wide range of philosophical allusions and of coining startling metaphors. Some mistakes in diacritics betray the fact that the author of the first sonnet was not a native speaker, which is not the case for the second. The signature of the author of the second poem gives it away immediately, for it follows the text: it is signed Jacques Lacan, whereas the first poem is by Samuel Beckett, and has remained uncollected (in an anthology) for a long time.

‘Tristesse Janale’ belongs to the cycle of Beckett’s work on an imaginary poet and philosopher named Jean du Chas, the immortal inventor of a movement called concentrism. This means that the sonnet is pure parody. The second poem, however, is serious and comes from a moment when Lacan was flirting with mysticism, Jakob Bœhme’s kind in particular. The two poems posit seriously—and in a very similar manner—important themes for the work to follow: the primacy of desire and the domination of irrationality in our lives.

The first poem was intended as an exhibit, a proof that someone like Jean du Chas existed and wrote poetry. Of course, Beckett had invented him so as to present his work as a spoof of French literary criticism. His witty essay, ‘Le Concentrisme’ (Dsj, 35–42), was read by Beckett at the Modern Language Society of Trinity College in 1930. Inspired by Normalien canulars (their farcical practical jokes), ‘Le Concentrisme’ sends up the mannerisms of contemporary literary criticism. The verve with which it sketches the career of Jean du Chas, a fictional nobody with a strong suicidal bent, is infectious. Sharing Beckett’s date of birth, Du Chas functions as a parodic alter ego in a satire reminiscent of André Gide’s soties. Du Chas’s literary movement, concentrisme, is loaded with puns (con: ‘cunt’ or ‘moron’) while tending towards its own disappearance. Du Chas’s invented ‘Discours de la Sortie’ (‘Discourse of the Exit’, 41) would provide a reductio ad obscenum that would send up academic discourse and not even spare Proust, quoted as saying that he never blew his nose before six a.m. on Sundays! Jean du Chas’s concentrism also rhymes with the concierges of the first line: these Parisian janitors or doorkeepers are presented as an obsessive theme in his work. Du Chas calls up chas (eye of a needle)—a term for the feminine sexual organ in libertine literature. With extreme gusto Beckett debunks the tired tropes of French biographical criticism, while conveying doubts about the very essence of literature.

Beckett mimes and debunks the logorrhœa he had observed among the disciples of transition, a magazine in which the genre of the manifesto had been raised to the heights of self-parody. However, he participated in this genre when he co-signed the 1932 manifesto ‘Poetry is Vertical’, as if a fictional concentrism then gave birth to a parallel verticalism. Du Chas would have brought the touch of humour lacking among the avant-gardist apostles of the revolution of the word. Du Chas, born in Toulouse—because he was destined from birth ‘to lose’—launches an inverse verticalism well limned in the author’s biography:

[…] une de ces vies horizontales, sans sommet, tout en longueur, un phénomène de mouvement, sans possibilité d’accélération ni de ralentissement, déclenché, sans être inauguré, par l’accident d’une naissance, terminé sans être conclu, par l’accident d’une mort. (Dsj, 38)

([…] one of these horizontal lives, without a summit, all drawn out lengthwise, the phenomenon of a movement that cannot accelerate or slow down, triggered without being inaugurated by the accident of a birth, terminated without being concluded by the accident of a death)

Du Chas sums up his wisdom as ‘va t’embêter ailleurs’ (‘Go get bored somewhere else’). This plebeian turn of phrase tells us that if tædium vitæ cannot be eliminated, at least one can always go elsewhere, which rephrases Baudelaire’s aspiration to go ‘Anywhere out of the world’ (356–7) while anticipating its own exhaustion.

In the thirties, Beckett had not yet opted for the vernacular of the Paris concierges. He was still stuck in academic verbiage, no matter how close he felt to concierges, already thematically linking Descartes and Du Chas in quest of paternity.[2] The hesitation between the high and the low returns in ‘Les Deux besoins,’ a serious 1938 manifesto written directly in French. It splices together Racine, Proust, and Flaubert, beginning with an ironical epigraph from The Sentimental Education. Astutely distinguishing between the need to have and the need to need, Beckett offers a diagram inspired by Pythagoras, in which the infinity of human desire leaves room for art (see Rabaté, 1996, 153–4). There again, the style is epigrammatic: ‘Préférer l’un des testicules à l’autre, ce serait aller sur les platebandes de la métaphysique. À moins d’être le démon de Maxwell’ (‘To favour one testicle over the other would mean trespassing on the flower-beds of metaphysics. Unless you are Maxwell’s demon’, Dsj, 55–6).

For a perfect and synthetic analysis of ‘Les Deux besoins’, let me refer you to the book that follows. Brown shows expertly how Beckett states once and for all a fundamental irrationality that will be the foundation for his entire œuvre, and that he will begin exemplifying with his first two ‘heroes’, Belacqua and Murphy. The French essay mentions an ‘enfer d’irraison d’où s’élève le cri à blanc, la série de questions pures, l’œuvre’ (‘hell of unreason whence arises the blank cry, the series of pure questions, the work’, Dsj, 56). One might say that Beckett’s work is underpinned by an ‘hiatus irrationalis’, a yawning gap that can generate the ‘chaos’ in which Murphy disappears before engulfing Watt, Molloy, Malone and all the other ‘creatures’.

At the same time, by an interesting and not so surprising chiasmus, the spurious mythological allusions of Beckett’s poem lead us back to Lacan. In the sonnet he might have attributed to Jean du Chas, Beckett displays his culture, from the two-headed Roman god Janus to the songs of Bilitis made famous by Pierre Louÿs’s Lesbian hymns. He includes, moreover, the Telephus who appears in the first page of the Proust book and Mallarmé’s famously erotic poem, ‘Une Négresse’, along with other allusions. The sequence of mythological characters peters off in an anti-climax, a desperate call for order facing a feminine chaos of drives, which reminds us of Murphy’s initial request that Neary should help him appease the terrifying jumps of his ‘irrational heart’ performing ‘like Petrouchka in his box’ (Mu, 4). A few years later, using a different mythological figure, but with similar overtones in mind, Lacan would slip a hidden, cryptic poem at the end of one of his lectures—‘The Freudian Thing’, subtitled ‘or Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis’, a highly rhetorical speech given in German in Vienna in 1955. Lacan sounded the leitmotiv of a ‘return to Freud’ against the deviations in Freudian doctrine or the drift to ego-psychology then prevailing in the United States. When the lecture was published in 1956, it ended with a paragraph concealing a submerged quatrain, again those rhyming alexandrines, but this time disguised as opaque prose:

Actéon trop coupable à courre la déesse,

proie où se prend, veneur, l’ombre que tu deviens,

laisse la meute aller sans que ton pas se presse,

Diane à ce qu’ils vaudront reconnaîtra les chiens…[3] (Lacan, 1966, 436)

Using Bruce Fink’s translation, one would have this:

Actaeon, too guilty to hunt the goddess,

prey in which is caught, O huntsman, the shadow that you become,

let the pack go without hastening your step,

Diana will recognize the hounds for what they are worth. (Lacan, 2006b, 362–63)

It is easy to recognise the invocation to universal desire deployed in ‘Hiatus irrationalis’, but undercut by a weird humor that erupts here and there. Acteon was changed into a stag when he saw the naked goddess of love, and was devoured by her hounds. Lacan hints that classical psychoanalysts, too prudish to even dare look at her, did not realise that they had been turned into her hounds. A joke transforms the expression ‘reconnaîtra les siens’ (‘tell her own from the others’) into ‘reconnaîtra les chiens’ (‘recognise the hounds’). The obscure ‘trop coupable à courre la déesse’ echoes with ‘chasse à courre’ (‘fox hunting’) and ‘coureur de déesses’ (‘womaniser seducing goddesses’). Lacan takes his favorite posture as a joking poet-philosopher of psychoanalysis, a Heideggerian thinker of the Unconscious progressing via opaque and multi-layered epigrams, his opened-ended and literary mode of writing being a pre-condition for a programme aiming at revolutionising psychoanalysis.

Let us return to ‘Hiatus irrationalis’, a poem dated August 1929 but published in 1933 in the last issue of the surrealist journal Le Phare de Neuilly (see Barnet). The journal only saw three issues from 1931 to 1933 and was edited by Lise Deharme, mentioned as ‘The Lady of the Glove’ in André Breton’s Nadja. Lacan’s Petrarchan sonnet in well-balanced alexandrines does not look like a Surrealist text, often marked by wild metaphors and free verse. Its classical rhyme scheme adds an interesting constraint: the B rhyme echoes with the author’s name, which immediately follows the text. It looks as if ‘Lacan’ provides an extra rhyme to ‘amant’.

The sonnet’s main source is Alexandre Koyré’s book on Bœhme’s philosophy. La Philosophie de Jacob Bœhme (The Philosophy of Jacob Bœhme, 1929) comments on the theosophist’s sentence ‘In Ja und Nein bestehen alle Dinge’ (‘In Yes and No are all things constituted’). For the German mystic, nature was a dynamic synthesis of affirmation and negation, both implying each other dialectically. This monistic theory of Nature reconciled affirmation and negation via a universal Fire, in which one can see the agency of desire (Koyré, 393–94). Lacan’s sonnet, entitled ‘Panta Rhei’ in an earlier version from 1929, was rewritten for publication in 1933. The title had morphed from Greek to Latin, as if to signify that Heraclitus was to beget Bœhme.

‘Hiatus irrationalis’ evinces the influence of Paul Valéry’s neo-classical style, with echoes of Arthur Rimbaud. Indeed, one overhears ‘It is the fire that rises again with its damned soul’[4] (Rimbaud, 1986, 317) from Season in Hell. Lacan posits desire as a universal principle that runs through nature: both a Heraclitean stream and a Bœhmean fire. In order to attain the Mysterium Magnum, the poet undergoes a moment of muteness, which is why the first tercet evokes speechlessness. Bœhme’s mystical vision foreshadows an absolute Other. Its silence lets nature disclose its hidden secrets. ‘Hiatus irrationalis’ combines Heraclitus’ panta rhei (‘all things flow’) with Bœhme’s philosophy of fire, less to posit the domination of mutability than an all-consuming desire. Lacan’s starting point is Spinoza’s Ethics, with echoes of Descartes’ malin génie, which leads to the idea of a Natura naturans underpinned by a desire traversing all things.

‘Hiatus irrationalis’ is a phrase that appears in Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, an influential book published in German in 1923. It was read by Lacan along with Koyré’s work; at the time, Lacan was discovering both the Marxist tradition and German mysticism. Lukács examines the peasants’ rebellions in Germany, especially Thomas Münzer’s revolt. Münzer was executed in 1525. Lukács links his doctrine of a hidden god (deus absconditus) with religious utopias launched by thinkers who had an impact on Jakob Bœhme, born fifty years after the death of Münzer. Lukács notes that Münzer’s actions betray a ‘dark and empty chasm’, the ‘“hiatus irrationalis” between theory and practice’ that defines ‘a subjective and hence undialectical utopia’ (Lukács, 192). Lukács had discovered the expression in the works of Johann Gottlob Fichte. For Fichte, it referred to an irreducible gap between thinking and reality: a yawning abyss between theory and praxis. The visionary mysticism of Bœhme disclosed the truth about desire but stood as a theoretical displacement of the doomed pre-communist utopia.

Lacan’s sonnet was contemporary with his first attempts at allowing the insane or the psychotic to speak. Having frequented the surrealists, Lacan agreed with their thesis that everyday language is structured like poetry. This insight came to fruition in his observation of ‘inspired speeches’ produced by raving patients. In 1931, Lacan co-authored with Lévy-Valensi and Migault an essay entitled ‘Inspired Writings’. The three psychiatrists analysed the ramblings of a young female teacher who had been hospitalised at Sainte-Anne. She used to write in a psychotic style, inventing her freewheeling verses marked by bad puns. As the psychiatrists observed, the function of rhythm was dominant, with echoes from popular sayings, borrowings from famous poetic quotes, automatic expressions, proverbial idioms slightly distorted. Such stereotypic echolalia was self-consciously presented as ‘poetry’ by the psychotic patient.

The grammatical analysis of mad utterances acknowledges pioneering work done by the surrealists a few years before. The authors, who quote Breton’s first Manifesto of Surrealism, could have looked at the many issues of transition, the avant-garde magazine edited by Eugène and Maria Jolas, for which Beckett translated texts regularly, and in which quite a number of his first essays and poems were published. Whereas Jolas and his friends were examining the medical literature about the verbal productions of psychotics, Breton and Éluard went further by imitating different types of delirium. This gave the five psychotic ‘imitations’ from The Immaculate Conception (1930), a text quoted by Lacan and his collaborators in a note (see Lacan, 1980, 379–80). In ‘Possessions’, Breton and Éluard (51–78) reproduce types of psychotic styles from ‘Mental debility’ to ‘Acute Mania’, ‘General paralysis’, ‘Interpretive delirium’, and ‘Dementia Præcox’. In the introduction, Breton and Éluard explain that they are not indulging in facile pastiches of clinical texts, even though they looked at authentic archives of ‘alienated’ or insane patients. Their aim is to prove that the poetic faculties of any so-called ‘normal’ writer will allow him or her to reproduce the most bizarre, paradoxical and eccentric verbal productions, the texts of those who are deemed to be ‘insane’. Breton and Éluard disclose a poetic programme, obviously a provocation addressed to literary critics: the ravings of the insane offer new criteria, new poetic forms that will replace traditional genres. They state:

Finally, we declare that this new exercise of our thought had brought pleasure to us. We became aware of new, up to then unsuspected, resources in us. Without anticipating the conquests of the supreme freedom that this practice can introduce, we take it, from the point of view of modern poetics, as a remarkable standard of value. Which means that we would gladly suggest the generalization of this exercise, and that for us the ‘attempt at simulation’ of the diseases of those who are locked up in asylums could advantageously replace the ballad, the sonnet, the epic, the improvised poem and other obsolete genres. (Breton, 849)

Thus, an identical point of departure is shared by Beckett and by Lacan. It led Lacan to state that the Unconscious was ‘structured like a language’, a motto repeated in countless seminars and essays. Such a thesis then found a confirmation in readings of poems by Victor Hugo, Paul Valéry, T. S. Eliot, Paul Claudel, and many others (Rabaté, 2001). All poetic metaphors disclose an ‘involuntary Surrealism’ which can inhabit the ravings of the mad, as Paul Éluard had said when praising Lacan for a dissertation in which he quoted the delirious writings of his patient whom he called Aimée. Poetry reveals the essence of language in such a way that there is no distinction between prose and poetry, since both are formations created by a general rhetoric of the Unconscious.

This is a view with which Beckett agreed, as the remarkable book by Llewellyn Brown amply shows. His effort at reading Beckett via Lacan leads him to highlight the theme of the voice, which proves to be most productive. As Maurice Blanchot and Michel Foucault saw, Beckett has changed our views about the links between the voice and writing, between the speaking subject and the notion of the author. I shall quote in conclusion the third ‘Text for Nothing’, which develops aporias explored at some length in The Unnamable:

What matter who’s speaking, someone said what matter who’s speaking. There’s going to be a departure, I’ll be there, I won’t miss it, it won’t be me, I’ll be here, I’ll say I’m far from here, it won’t be me, I won’t say anything, there’s going to be a story, someone’s going to try and tell a story. Yes, no more denials, all is false, there is no one, it’s understood, there is nothing, no more phrases, let us be dupes, dupes of every time and tense, until it’s done, all past and done, and the voices cease, it’s only voices, only lies. (CSPr, 109)

It may matter here that it should be Llewellyn Brown who articulates his pas de deux between Lacan and Beckett, and who manages to blend their voices, but never innocently, never naively. One cannot remain naïve about the issues of the voice, of writing and of the origin after one has read Lacan and Beckett. Lacan famously punned on his own discovery of the key to the symbolic realm, the Nom du Père, a. k. a. the Non du Père (the Father’s No, or the laying down of the prohibition of incest), when he pluralised it and let it resound as Les Non-dupes errent. Like Beckett before him, Lacan pointed to the fact that as soon as we are in language (and we always are, even when we are silent), no ‘lie’ is possible any longer, for truth obeys the structure of fiction. The illusion would be to try and get rid of the illusion; those who try to be ‘not dupes’ err all the more. What is the solution, then? Trust the voices, and first, listen to the voices: here is our true point of departure.

Jean-Michel Rabaté

University of Pennsylvania