Lyotard, Beckett, Duras and the Postmodern Sublime

Abstract

Andrew Slade's study is admirable in scope: it promises an account of Beckett's and Duras's work in the light of the postmodern sublime, a notion forever associated with Jean-François Lyotard. Slade uses Lyotard's différend as a way in to this central proposition, linking the experience of the sublime to the intractable dilemma of the dispute for which no viable solution can be found without harming the interested parties. The ensuing problem of unspeakability opens up rich possibilities, as Slade implies, in relation to postmodernism and narratives, like those of Beckett and Duras, which have been problematically classed as postmodern. The discussion of Beckett begins with the claim that ‘humanity’ is almost entirely absent from Beckett's work (p. 53); Beckett, Slade argues, relocates the human within the inhuman, in a move which sharply recalls Lyotard. Such a conception of the human is specifically attributed to Beckett's ‘The Capital of the Ruins’ (1946), a journalistic piece on the destruction of St Lô and Beckett's involvement in the Red Cross hospital founded there after the war. Slade disagrees with the relegation of the piece to a marginal position in the Beckett corpus: this is not just reportage, he argues, but exemplifies the ‘struggle for modern consciousness’ (p. 56). Slade's brief analysis (of just four pages) in fact confirms the journalistic nature of the text: the description of destruction has none of the dense structure of Beckett's literary work. The chapter on Beckett refers to two texts: ‘The Capital of the Ruins’ and Worstward Ho. The latter introduces one of Slade's most promising ideas on Beckett, that of ‘Beckettlessness’. Carrying Lyotard's preoccupation with rewriting over into analysis of Beckett, Slade claims that ‘many of Beckett's critics hope to accomplish what none of Beckett's works could — they hope to finish’ (p. 59). There are hints here of the problem of writing ‘after’ Beckett: given the insistent declaration of the end in Beckett's work, the critical enterprise is peculiarly disabled: attempts to bring about closure are pre-emptively thwarted. Unfortunately, though, the argument leads to aggressive and unsupported claims (‘Beckett's practice of criticism […] is a rambling, confused and unpleasant profusion of words’, p. 63), and reference to Beckett criticism is very thin. Leslie Hill and Thomas Trezise are invoked only as sufferers of the affliction of Beckettlessness. Slade's chapter on Duras, meanwhile, promises to extend the analysis of the sublime to the notions of witness and testimony which lurk behind Lyotard's différend. Duras's work, he argues, stands in a complex relation to survivor literature, dealing as it does with the atrocities of Hiroshima and Auschwitz: ‘in her narrations she becomes as a survivor due to the nature of the collective traumatisation involved in both sites’ (p. 88). The in-depth consideration of testimony which is promised here does not materialize, despite brief references to Agamben (p. 96), and Slade's readings of La Douleur and Hiroshima, mon amour are again weakened by their lack of focus and by the almost complete absence of reference to existing criticism on Duras. Many readers, then, may object not to the agenda which Slade pursues, but to its execution, which is only partly redeemed by an intriguing view of ‘the affliction of wanting to be done with Beckett’.