Is it altogether natural, that a man and a woman, isolated in nature, maybe in a mountain chalet, would make love? Lacan asks. No speaking being is exempt from the fact that sex and desire are not natural but have to go through discourse. This is true, even for those who make do without the common discourse.
Let us take Samuel Beckett's "First Love" ("Premier amour").1 Our mountain chalet is a bench by a canal. Later, we are in a small apartment on the top floor, from where one can see the mountains. We can therefore answer Lacan's question, by confirming that there will be some form of copulation between a man and a woman in the presence of mountains. But does it get there "naturally"? And what kind of nature is involved?
Beckett – whose "mind is confused" – has been thrown out of his parental home after his father died. He is 25, he thinks, and seems to be homeless, lying on said bench by the canal. Someone approaches, a woman, who forces him to make room for her next to him. He had stretched out, but now he has to sit up.
The woman sits down next to him and hums. They do not speak. She soon gets up and leaves, but returns evening after evening, until he asks her if she intends to disturb him every evening from now on, as he would rather like to stretch out on the bench. She tells him to put up his feet on her knees. This leads to a rather unwanted erection, which alas, a man of 25 "isn't spared", we learn. Lulu, later called Anne, notices it, because "women sense a standing phallus from 10 kilometres away". In such a state, "one is no longer oneself", Beckett observes, and that is even more embarrassing than being oneself, he adds. That is why "what one calls love, is exile". He tells Lulu not to come back, at least not often. But after that, he thinks of her, maybe "twenty minutes per day", and "that must be his way of loving".
When many months later, in her apartment, she takes her clothes off, Beckett's description universalises her in a kind of debasement: "when they no longer know what to do, they take their clothes off". When the phallus is required, the universal enters, and it becomes "women" and "they" in the place of giving meaning to a singular desire.
That night, sleeping on the sofa, he is holding a casserole dish that he asked for as a chamber pot. When he awakens, Anne is lying next to him, naked. He looks down at his genital, thinking "if at least it could speak", but no…. Indeed, it does not speak to him. This was his "love night", he concludes, and months later flees the scene before the result of this night is about to see the light of day, screaming.2 Both the bench and the apartment don't lack the evocation of a dead plant. Nature is thus rather "morte", in this case.
[1] Samuel Beckett, Premier amour, Paris: Les Éditions de minuit, 1970. Although Beckett also published a translation of the short story in English, the author of this text has chosen alternate translations of the French for all quotations.
[1] [Editor's note: In the story, the "result of this night" is a child. Beckett flees the scene of its birth.]
