Conclusion

Abstract

Hawkes’s Travesty concludes somewhere on the border between life and death. Speeding toward the stone wall just beyond the reach of his car’s headlights, Papa shows no sign of deviating from his planned “private apocalypse,” and there is nothing to suggest that he or his captive passengers have any chance of surviving the collision that looms only moments away—but the crash never comes. Instead, Travesty presents its reader with a collision of a different kind—a collision between two distinct but related perspectives on the novel’s aborted end. On one hand, it is possible to read the end of Papa’s narrative as an affirmation of the pleasure of death deferred—the pleasure, that is, of the signifier. By refusing to depict the world-ending jouissance it has promised throughout, Travesty becomes, in this light, a lesson in the cultural value of sublimation, offering a meditation on the role of language as that which always buffers the subject from that final confrontation with the Real, death itself. In this reading Papa fulfils his metaphoric and structural role as an authoritative Name-of-the-Father: his private apocalypse becomes, on this reading, a threat to those who have offended him—his daughter, his wife, his nation—but one that takes place, as he consistently maintains, under his own authorial control.