Back To The Imaginary Order

It is mainly for his play Waiting for Godot that Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature, yet before he was reputed as a founder of the Theater of the Absurd, he had been the first important post-modernist novelist. In fact, the Swedish Academy never denied his great contributions to the novel of new forms: "Mr. Beckett is being honored for writing which, in new forms for novel and drama, acquired its elevation in the destitution of modern man." Since many of his enigmatic plays are actually fragments based on his preceding labyrinthic fiction, a penetrating study of such fiction seems indispensable to the insightful interpretations of his plays. Thus, Beckett's texts of fiction, especially the five major novels written around World War II, deserve primary critical attention. This fact partly accounts for the necessity of a new dissertation that aims first to reveal Beckett's revolutionary explorations of unconsciousness in fiction.A critical reader of Descartes, Schopenhauer and Proust, Beckett crisscrosses his novels with philosophical discourses on the subject, and argues that the self hardly has means of communication with the outside world. In his view, "to be an artist is to fail," and the realm of art is just "that failure," which is free from any outside value system. Hence, his fiction proves a literature of absolute failure and little hope, a literature that is radically different from even modernist fiction at its peak, and those commentaries produced in terms of existentialism, absurdism, humanism or nihilism seem somewhat irrelevant to Beckett's intention, because they are grounded on those value systems of the outside world, which Beckett has been trying to escape from. Relevant researches then may be those that, made in terms of psychoanalysis, bring to light both Beckett's theme of self-exploration and his trial of deconstructing traditional narrative as literature detained in the prison house of outside values. This inference leads to an attempted post-modernist psychoanalysis as another fruitful approach to Beckett's novels. Or, rather, Lacanianism, not yet commonly used in Beckett criticism, may well be adopted as the methodology of this dissertation.To probe into unconsciousness is to evade the censorship of pre-consciousness and...