Introduction

Abstract

Similar to Simone de Beauvoir’s perspective that the masculine is universal, Wittig attributes to masculinity a kind of transparency; we have always looked at the world as masculine; in fact, we have looked through this transparency as if it were natural. In regard to masculinity, Beckett scholars, too, have looked through Beckett’s texts as universal and transparent.

Gender is the linguistic index of the political opposition between the sexes. Gender is used here in the singular because indeed there are not two genders. There is only one: the feminine, the “masculine” not being a gender. For the masculine is not the masculine, but the general.

Monique Wittig¹

At the core of these stories, I would suggest, is thus a kind of double telling, the oscillation between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life: between the story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival.

Cathy Caruth²