Regressive (Im)Mutability and Human Degeneration in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame and Wilfred R. Bion’s The Dawn of Oblivion

Abstract:Beginning with an overview of the late-Victorian theory of degeneration, this article aims, first, to explore how the belligerent climate of the first half of the twentieth century gradually dismantled the late nineteenth-century belief that mental disorders were genetically transmissible from parents to the offspring. In this frame, the role played by psychoanalysis was central. The latter in fact proved that the ever-growing number of cases of mental pathologies among combatants and civilians during the two World Wars was not the result of a pandemic, but the tragic outcome of the mind-shattering impact of the conflicts. With this historical panorama in mind, I will delve into two post-World-War-II literary works, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame and Wilfred R. Bion’s The Dawn of Oblivion, to concentrate on the issues of ‘change’–thought of as a process through which an individual conforms to the environment and hopefully evolve–and ‘human degeneration’. Engaged in a kind of long-distance dialogue about the end of the world, Beckett and Bion depict decaying universes doomed to failure, whose inhabitants are unable not only to survive the inflexible conditions imposed by modern warfare, but also to implement beneficial changes for their existence. What emerges from these two works is a deep terror that Beckett and Bion shared of ‘tomorrow’, conceived by both as the brink of the abyss.