ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Beckett's narrative monologue First Love and his drama Not I between them represent the carnivalized wreck of Christian civilization. Beckett's tragic irony achieves its maximal resonance when the son's tenacious love of Death is uttered through the mouth of a woman. The father's Death, which enabled the son to experience love, is still with us, at the end of the act, in these light beams, this void, but now it does not even lead to a pseudofictional narrative. Julia Kristeva's essay on Beckett makes much of the Lacanian notion of Woman as a being who does not exist in the masculine symbolic; and it sets that notion, which she sees as part of the language deployed by Beckett's characters, against her own version of woman as pre-eminently the maternal body, the dynamic, fecund, pre-symbolic source of significance.
