The Power of the Gift: Desire and Substitution in "Daurel et Beton"

The Occitan epic "Daurel et Beton" presents a vision of monologic masculinity which is soon fractured and revealed as an ideological dream. The themes of gifting, lack, and desire are fundamental to its social and narrative structure, and are played out through the metonymic relationship between the social and the individual body, their integrity and rupture, and the substitution of one body for another. Daurel's themes invoke the work of Freud, Lacan, and Derrida, and are explored with the aim of illuminating their fundamental importance to the structuring of psyche and society as well as narrative.