British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime: For the Duration by Beryl Pong (review)

Abstract

808 This vestige is crucial to the inscription of the Real as a precise literal mark of the limit of the thinkable, where bits of language are suffused with the specific enjoyment that causes a subject. Lacan proposes the term lalangue for these bits of language as leftovers of enjoyment, and Chattopadhyay discerns this dimension in what he calls Beckett’s “phonological and morphological fluidity” (147), of which he offers many thoughtful examples that in some instances resonate with Lacan’s own play with signifiers through homophony and neologism. In its final chapter, the book examines sexuality, love, and non-relation, since they are importantly tied to the question of Real writing in Lacan, and, Chattopadhyay shows, also in Beckett texts such as “Enough” and Malone Dies. Certainly, sexuation for Lacan is not concerned with biological sexes, and it is based on what Chattopadhyay calls “a non-relational principle” that he also discloses in the Beckettian “pseudo-couple” (161). Yet the presence of a female character, regardless of her biological sex, in the striking passages from these two texts is not an indifferent matter. If feminine and masculine positions concern two modes of enjoyment, non-relation, and effects of the signifiers “man” and “woman” in carving out an erotic body, there is nonetheless something about the specific way in which the phallic signifier fails for the feminine subject. The analysis of “Enough” points in this direction, highlighting the female character’s act of narrating her memories of her love story as somehow evoking her jouissance. Yet it quickly turns to other perspectives, guided by the question of writing, which leads back into the enigma of feminine jouissance with the character Moll. Perhaps this limited engagement with feminine jouissance has to do with Beckett’s own texts. But perhaps the impossibility of ending that Beckett stages again and again pertains to a non-phallic excess. Could it be that Beckett grapples with constructing the sinthome in the feminine, precisely? In a quintessentially Beckettian gesture, the book closes by opening an endless question, that of feminine sexuality, where Chattopadhyay does not enter, perhaps because he is aware that the feminine side of sexuation involves an interminable residue and that, as Beckett shows, ending at last is a feat (195).