Abstract:

Beginning with an overview of the late-Victorian theory of degeneration, this article aims, first, to explore how the belligerent climate of the first half of the twentieth century gradually dismantled the late nineteenth-century belief that mental disorders were genetically transmissible from parents to the offspring. In this frame, the role played by psychoanalysis was central. The latter in fact proved that the ever-growing number of cases of mental pathologies among combatants and civilians during the two World Wars was not the result of a pandemic, but the tragic outcome of the mind-shattering impact of the conflicts. With this historical panorama in mind, I will delve into two post-World-War-II literary works, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame and Wilfred R. Bion’s The Dawn of Oblivion, to concentrate on the issues of ‘change’–thought of as a process through which an individual conforms to the environment and hopefully evolve–and ‘human degeneration’. Engaged in a kind of long-distance dialogue about the end of the world, Beckett and Bion depict decaying universes doomed to failure, whose inhabitants are unable not only to survive the inflexible conditions imposed by modern warfare, but also to implement beneficial changes for their existence. What emerges from these two works is a deep terror that Beckett and Bion shared of ‘tomorrow’, conceived by both as the brink of the abyss.

摘要：

本文首先概述了维多利亚时代晚期的退化理论，首先探讨二十世纪上半叶的好战气候如何逐渐瓦解了十九世纪晚期的信念，即精神障碍可以通过基因从父母遗传给后代。子孙后代。在这个框架中，精神分析发挥着核心作用。后者事实上证明，两次世界大战期间战斗人员和平民中不断增加的精神疾病病例并不是流行病的结果，而是冲突造成的令人震惊的影响的悲惨结果。考虑到这一历史全景，我将深入研究两部二战后的文学作品：塞缪尔·贝克特的《终局之战》和威尔弗雷德·R·比昂的《遗忘的黎明》，集中讨论“变化”（被认为是个体顺应环境并有望进化的过程）和“人类退化”的问题。贝克特和比昂进行了一场关于世界末日的远距离对话，描绘了注定要失败的腐朽宇宙，其中的居民不仅无法在现代战争所施加的僵化条件下生存，而且也无法为他们的生活实施有益的改变。存在。这两部作品所展现的是贝克特和比昂对“明天”的共同的深深恐惧，两人都将其视为深渊的边缘。