Beckett, Lacan and the Voice

The voice traverses Beckett's work in its entirety, defining its space and its structure. Emanating from an indeterminate source situated outside the narrators and characters, while permeating the very words they utter, it proves to be incessant. It can alternatively be violently intrusive, or embody a calming presence. Literary creation will be charged with transforming the mortification it inflicts into a vivifying relationship to language. In the exploration undertaken here, Lacanian psychoanalysis offers the means to approach the voice's multiple and fundamentally paradoxical facets with regards to language that founds the subject's vital relation to existence. Far from seeking to impose a rigid and purely abstract framework, this study aims to highlight the singularity and complexity of Beckett's work, and to outline a potentially vast field of investigation.



Llewellyn Brown is professeur agrégé and teaches French literature at the Lycée international de Saint-Germain-en-Laye. He has published Figures du mensonge littéraire: études sur l'écriture au xxe siècle (2005), L'Esthétique du pli dans l'œuvre de Henri Michaux (2007), Beckett, les fictions brèves: voir et dire (2008), Savoir de l'amour (2012). He directs the 'Samuel Beckett' series for publisher Lettres modernes Minard (Paris).



Brown shows expertly how Beckett states once and for all a fundamental irrationality that will be the foundation for his entire œuvre […]. A remarkable book. - Jean-Michel Rabaté, PhD, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania



"In Beckett, Lacan and the Voice, Llewellyn Brown delves deeper, in a rigorous and convincing manner, into his study of the voice, by means of which Beckett points out the inadequacy of the signifier/signified couple, in order to account for the subject’s articulation with language."—Sibylle Guipaud, Savoirs et clinique, no. 23, 2017