Samuel Beckett and the Impasses of Sexuation in How It Is

Abstract

The confusion of sexual identities in How It Is testifies to the collapsing of the imaginary register that situates male and female as distinct and complementary in society. The body as a specular whole thus gives way to a relationship to language, where the universal ‘phallic’ register inscribes irreducible feminine alterity. The tormentor/tormented couplings, as well as the serial expansion of crawlers compose fictional attempts revealing a fundamental failure to institute sexual complementarity. The sexual is thus shown to reside within speech itself, pointing to the text’s very engendering. The impossible “sexual rapport” is thus the source of creation.