Marcin Tereszewski. The Aesthetics of Failure. Inexpressibility in Samuel Beckett's Fiction

The Aesthetics of Failure

The Aesthetics of Failure: Inexpressibility in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction

By

Marcin Tereszewski

The Aesthetics of Failure: Inexpressibility in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction,

by Marcin Tereszewski

This book first published 2013

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2013 by Marcin Tereszewski

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or

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ISBN (10): 1-4438-5043-8, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5043-8

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Beckett and Theory

Chapter One ............................................................................................... 11 Towards Negativity

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 41 The Inexpressible as the Invisible

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 65 Ethics of Negativity

Conclusion ................................................................................................. 89

Bibliography .............................................................................................. 93

Index ....................................................................................................... 101

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book would not have been possible without the assistance and patience of Ewa K b owska- awniczak, who read and reread these chapters more times than she would like to remember. I’m also grateful to the Institute of English Philology at the University of Wroc aw for granting me the possibility to carry out this research.

Special thanks go to my parents and Paulina for their infinite support and encouragement.

INTRODUCTION

BECKETT AND THEORY

What is different about Beckett is not that he provokes a critical response... but the protean, open-ended, ‘undecidable quality of the challenge he offers. In this, it seems to us, he is the poet of the post-structuralist age. Not that he was not the poet of other ages too for he was – Beckett as the quintessential nouveau romancier, Beckett the Cartesian, Beckett the Existentialist, these have rubbed shoulders with Beckett the nihilist, Beckett the mystic and Beckett the explorer of the limitations of language. (Butler and Davis 1988: ix)

The futility of classifying Beckett into any philosophical or literary category is now a commonplace sentiment shared by many Beckett scholars and is one which explains the multiplicity and variety of critical approaches undertaken throughout the years. Notwithstanding the variety of philosophical contexts in which Beckett has been read, the question which has most visibly stood out is whether Beckett is to be classified as a modernist or as a postmodernist writer. Beckett criticism indeed stands at a theoretical crossroads, as it seems that Beckett has served critics as both a paradigmatic modernist and a paradigmatic postmodernist, the poet of existential humanism and also the deconstructionist par excellence. The question of where to locate Beckett within these paradigms has been one of the most enduring fixtures in Beckett scholarship with no valid consensus being even possible due to the divergent understanding of the terms in question. This debate between a modernist Beckett and a postmodernist Beckett, according to David Pattie, “should be thought of as a divide between those who used literary texts to uncover the essential truth of human experience, and those who used texts to uncover the contingent nature of reality” (227) and he concludes that “there is ample evidence in Beckett’s work to support both cases” (227). The former approach would adhere to the essentialist bias of existentialist humanism, whereas the latter would be more in line with the linguistic focus of poststructuralist theories.

This first approach is connected to the first period of Beckett criticism inaugurated in the 1960s with the publication of Martin Esslin’s Theatre of

Introduction 2

the Absurd (1961) and Hugh Kenner’s Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study(1961). Both of these books established Beckett studies within the paradigm of existentialist humanism, wherein Beckett’s work was read primarily in terms of a search for a foundation of human experience confronted in its naked authenticity. For these critics, Beckett is a modernist not only because of the themes they locate in his work but also because of the experimental nature of his work, especially in regards to language and style. This experimentalism breaks with the conventions of the traditional novel and proceeds to question the ‘essential’ subjectivity underlying language and the narrative. The idea of a reliable narrator or I speaker is thus thrown into question, thereby breaking with the convention of a stable voice constituting the center of a narrative. Along with the destabilization of authorial voice, language becomes the subject of inquiry. This break in both narrative and theatrical conventions places language and style at the forefront of the debate.

The dissolution into incomprehensibility and paratactic language seems to have been one of the salient features which defined Beckett as modernist writer, first associated with the French nouveua roman. AsAlain Robbe-Grillet explains:

Things must take place within the text itself. It is impossible to write a text which, as a narration, is based on the old established order when its purpose is to show that this order is wavering. On the contrary. Everything must happen within the text so that severances, faults, ambiguities, mobilities, fragmentation, contractions, holes must be enacted. It is the text which must display them. (24)

The text then becomes not a vehicle for any coherent meaning or story as such, but the object of interrogation. The emphasis on style, itself a defining feature of a modernist writer, relegates the “story” to a secondary position of importance, as style is no longer seen as an innocent medium of the story, but is itself implicated in its construction.

The second period of Beckett criticism, beginning in the 1970 until today, developed as a result of literary studies becoming more theoretical, interdisciplinary, extending their scope to philosophy, psychoanalysis, postcolonialism and feminism, 1 to name just a few of the disciplines

1 All these various theoretical approaches are outlined and examined in Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett’s Studies and Samuel Beckett in Longman Critical Readers. Philosophy deserves special attention, because it seems to be the most developed theoretical context in Beckett studies, evidenced by such publications as

Beckett and Theory 3

employed for the purposes of studying literature. With the development of poststructuralism in literary studies and postmodernism as a general cultural and literary paradigm shift, critics began to extrapolate postmodern tendencies in the themes and theoretical tenets underlying Beckett’s work, especially his prose. They employed theories and terminology connected with poststructuralism, thus setting themselves apart from Esslin’s humanist existentialism by pursuing an interest in linguistic indeterminacy, destabilization of subjectivity and meaning.2 Some of the major deconstructive readings of Beckett – Connor (1988), Hill (1990), Tresize (1990) – do not attempt to deconstruct Beckett, but rather read him as a self-deconstructive author, demonstrating that his own poetics is already parasitically working on/against itself. This closeness between deconstruction and Beckett’s own language is the affirmed reason why Derrida himself had never attempted an analysis of Beckett’s work.

Whereas the humanist existentialist reads Beckett’s work in terms of a search for the authentic subject and a confrontation with existence, the poststructuralist would undermine the very conditions in which a subject and reality could be represented in the first place. Despite the vast differences between these two approaches, it would seem that both critical theories express a skeptical attitude towards language: the former seeing it as an artificial impediment cloaking the essential and ultimately inexpressible truth of the human condition, the latter seeing language more in terms of its inherent presuppositions and narratological determinations which coincide with a logocentric bias always already at work in writing. The proponents of both approaches to Beckett would therefore agree that he was writing against language, aware of all the contingencies and pitfalls traditional narratives hold for a writer. Beckett’s writing thus exposes to full view the mechanisms and presuppositions defining literature.

Another important focal point identified by critics of the poststructuralist persuasion addresses the question of foundationalism. Whereas modernists and humanist existentialists would rather see the breakdown of language and narrative as serving the overall pursuit of an essential foundation of truth and the human condition, the poststructuralist sees it more as a destabilization of the possibilities of representation, a complete break with the idea of a transcendental signified which would exist outside the

Beckett and Philosophy, which outlines the various philosophical influences on Beckett. 2 This poststructuralist tendency in Beckett criticism is further exemplified by publications devoted primarily to this topic. Eric Migernier’s Beckett and French Theory: The Narration of Transgression and Anthony Uhlmann’s Beckett and Poststructuralism.

Introduction 4

materiality of an endlessly deferring language. It would seem that Beckett’s work offers ample evidence in support of both readings; however, the poststructuralist interpretation would read Beckett as putting into question the whole concept of the essential truth, self and reality, seeing them as linguistic constructs adhering to a logocentric constitution. Beckett’s work can thus be read as an evolution from modernist intimations of ‘depth’ existing beneath the materiality of language.

Consequently, Samuel Beckett occupies an ambiguous place in the history of literature. To label Beckett a modernist, postmodernist, avant-gardist, or any other “–ist” would be a gross simplification of the philosophically ambivalent nature of his work. Whether or not Beckett can be considered a modernist or a postmodernist is therefore beside the point, as his work extends to a remarkably wide field of philosophical thought. Neither modernist, nor postmodernist, Beckett’s work is an example of the kind of writing that resists a totalizing interpretation. Accordingly, the main difficulty faced by anyone attempting a critical account of Beckett’s work is the inadequacy of any theoretical boundaries within which an interpretation could be proposed. Because Beckett’s texts do not yield themselves readily to interpretations, all interpretations ventured on behalf of any philosophical methodology seem in the end to be impositions on his work. In this sense, Beckett’s texts resemble what Barthes calls “writerly” texts, texts which draw attention to themselves as textual constructs and require the active participation of the reader. For decades now Beckett’s work has afforded inspiration to adherents of various philosophical trends. Indeed, it would seem as though the whole history of philosophy can be read (or rather written) into Beckett’s texts.

One important critic who establishes a theoretical link between the modernist and postmodernist model of Beckett criticism is Ihab Hassan. Not only is he one of the first critics of postmodernism, Hassan also contributed to Beckett criticism with his book, The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett (1967). What separates this study from the prevailing existentialist interpretations is the shift Hassan makes from describing a meaningless and absurd world towards establishing language itself as being meaningless and silence thus being the only possible outcome and goal of a writer like Beckett who “may be considered the author who wants to seal the lips of the muse” (31). In his focus on silence, Hassan introduces one of the defining themes of postmodernism: a distrust of language as a means of conveying meaning. Of the eleven “defiens” of postmodernity that Hassan famously lists in “Pluralism in Postmodern Perspective”, one – The Unrepresentable – stands out as crucial for this study. He develops this term, stating that “Postmodern


literature, particularly, often seeks its limits, entertains its ‘exhaustion’, subverts itself in forms of articulate ‘silence’. It becomes liminary, contesting the modes of its own representation” (197) and later goes on to quote J-F Lyotard: “the postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself” (197).

The aesthetic dimension of inexpressibility and its ethical consequences will be the primary focus of this study. Inexpressibility, as evidenced in the essays collected in Ineffability, is not merely a modernist or a postmodernist concern, but is a topic that has spanned literature from religious discourse to Beckett. The Judeo-Christian interdiction against naming/representing God becomes the basis for the poststructuralist impossibility of representing the center of any given structure, be it religious, political, ideological or philosophical. And thus God is impossible to represent within the confines of the system of which he is the center as much as the subject who replaced God as the center of what had become the center of a humanist (instead of theological) model of reality. As Derrida points out in his famous “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences” the center is what is at once in and outside the structure it defines.

The failure to express and represent in Beckett’s work is the guiding theme of this book. The trope of ineffability, inexpressibility, unrepresentability is not new to literature, and is certainly not the creation of the postmodern, as Hassan’s criterion might have suggested; inexpressibility, as a trope and topic, has been present in Western literature, philosophy and religion since ancient times. Inexpressibility spans the modernism/postmodernism debate and it could be argued that it is one of the central questions of both approaches, which is why it also holds a central place in this dissertation.

Philosophy has always been a veritable force in Beckett criticism. As Simon Critchley notes, “Beckett’s work seems to offer itself generously to philosophical interpretation only to withdraw this offer by periodically reducing such interpretation to ridicule” (143). Indeed, Beckett’s work is a reservoir of philosophical allusions and traditions which have given birth to a staggering array of comparative studies. Starting with a broad existentialist framework, Beckett criticism later moved to identifying concrete philosophical influences on Beckett in the works of René Descartes, Arthur Schopenhauer, Arnold Geulincx, Fritz Mauthner, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to name but a few. This study is no different in this respect, as it also takes philosophy as its context for reading Beckett and to this end brings Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas as a context. The notion of ethics developed by Levinas has been a major

Introduction 6

philosophical influence in the approach represented in this dissertation, especially in the third chapter, which deals almost exclusively with the notion of alterity. Blanchot’s philosophy of literature, seeing writing as negation, the writer as the neutral voice of exteriority, has provided this dissertation with an illuminating, though by no means exhaustive, framework. Though critics have commented on the affinity between Beckett and Blanchot (most notably Simon Critchley and Leslie Hill), there is, however, no one critical body of work which would develop the philosophical themes permeating the work of these two writers.

Not much is known about Blanchot’s life. Before the outbreak of World War II, Blanchot was a Parisian journalist who contributed essays on literary and political matters to various journals. Blanchot’s writing can be divided into four types: political journalism, literary reviews, novels and a hybrid style of writing which escapes classification, often referred to as recits written in an enigmatic and aphoristic style. It is quite difficult to reconstruct the philosophical context of Blanchot’s literary theories, as they were developed mostly through his many reviews commissioned by French journals such as the Journal des Debats, Critique and La VouvelleRevue Francaise. These reviews did not adhere to rigid academic standards in the sense that neither footnotes nor a works cited page was employed. Furthermore, Blanchot rarely makes any references to his contemporaries, even when he is directly commenting on their theories.

Nevertheless, it is possible to establish key ideas and philosophical tenets which guide the reading of Blanchot’s work. What is at the heart of Blanchot theory “is the link between language and negativity, where negativity describes the power of language to negate the reality of things through the insubstantiality of the word” (Hasse and Large 25). It can be seen that Blanchot’s work often questions the possibilities of literature itself. This study will attempt to contextualize Beckett’s work within Blanchot’s theories of literature, emphasizing the way in which Beckett’s texts are in many ways a demonstration of Blanchot’s tenets. Though there was no personal relationship between Beckett and Blanchot, there certainly was an artistic kinship. By the time Beckett was working on his trilogy, Blanchot was already established in the literary community as an influential critic. His favourable review of The Unnamable was, in the words of Beckett’s biographer Anthony Cronin, “a milestone in the progress of Beckett’s reputation” (436).

The first chapter explores the place negativity holds in Beckett’s prose, especially The Unnamable and Texts for Nothing, in terms of its linguistic (aesthetic) expression and philosophical backdrop. Beckett’s own texts dealing with literary theory, serve as a starting point for the discussion of


the place language has in his own work. Such pieces as “The German Letter of 1937” and his essay, “Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce”, though never directly about his own work, nonetheless provide insight into his poetics, which will be presented as a poetics of negativity and failure. It must be made clear that this negativity is far removed from the nihilism so often ascribed to Beckett’s work. This negativity will be read more as a denial of the constraining force of language and is in line with the dominant modernist paradigm of negativity being an escape from the materiality of language towards a metaphysical essence found beyond representation. Beckett’s trilogy provides a remarkable example of a work, in which both subjectivity and language become the subjects of negative subtraction. The final volume of the trilogy, The Unnamable, presents the self as language with only a voice questioning its own existence. The means of representing the self are put in question with the only outcome being an infinite regress of paradoxical language and aporetic self-contradiction. Beckett’s subsequent prose work, Texts for Nothing, further develops this experiment in linguistic implosion and draws even more attention to the negative capacity of literature.

Blanchot’s theory of literature will offer a framework in which to read Beckett’s fiction, as an affinity can be discerned between the negative direction Blanchot was to take with the proposal of neutral speech as the anonymous and disembodied voice of literature and Beckett’s negative poetics. Language will be the main focus of this chapter which will trace the philosophical impetus generated by Stéphane Mallarmé and Blanchot regarding the place of negation in relation to literature.

The second chapter focuses on the visual aspects of Beckett’s work, seeing in them a reworking of the inexpressibility topos. It can be observed that Beckett at a certain point in his career moved from writing prose towards a more visual medium; first, there was the theatre, then there was work indented for television (Film). Furthermore, even in his earlier narrative work, Beckett was extremely meticulous about visual details to the extent that certain fragments can be read as linguistic snapshots of events, so visually stimulating are the details. For example, certain scenes in Ill Seen Ill Said, Company, and Imagination Dead Imagine are comprised of descriptions of an image.

Beckett’s biographers (James Knowlson and Anthony Cronin) have also portrayed Beckett as a lover and a patron of the arts, frequently visiting art galleries, befriending and supporting local artists, both famous and amateur. There is a vivid connection to be discerned between the arts and Beckett’s work, an influence that has not gone unnoticed by Beckett critics, especially Lois Oppenheim whose book-length study, The Painted

Introduction 8

Veil, is devoted to the subject. In this book, Oppenheim sought not only to extrapolate the influence the visual arts had exerted on Beckett’s creativity but also to offer a theoretical link between the visual arts and Beckett’s particular sensitivity to the visual medium. Notwithstanding the various connections particular works of art have to particular scenes in Beckett’s work or to the theatrical imagery employed on stage, there is also a philosophical affinity linking Beckett’s conception of art with that of surrealism and expressionism, as evidenced in his own comments on famous painters and the arts found in Disjecta.

What this chapter seeks to portray is not so much the relationship between the arts and Beckett’s writing, but how inexpressibility remains one of the most dominant themes in the visual dimension of such pieces as Ill Seen Ill Said and Imagination Dead Imagine. The way absence and invisibility, ill-seeing, is employed coincides with the general discussion of inexpressibility in the previous chapter in that both have at their source a concern for the preservation of alterity; both approaches, the linguistic and the visual, are predicated on the presupposition that the failure to represent is a necessary failure, one which is responsible for the ethical relation with the inexpressible Other.

The third chapter serves as a synthesis of the two previous chapters in the sense that it binds the notions of inexpressibility and negativity in both the linguistic and visual medium with the notion of ethics as it is understood by both Blanchot and, especially, Emmanuel Levinas. The questions raised in this chapter will concern the relation inexpressibility and language has to alterity and what figures as the Other in literature. This question of remaining silent in relation to alterity has already been approached within the context of negative theology whose links with Derrida’s deconstruction will be briefly explored for the purpose of fleshing out the affinity between deconstruction and Beckett’s art.

This chapter will take Beckett’s How It Is as its focal point and will explore it in terms of ethics, especially in respect to how the notion of the witness is utilized in relation to alterity. It will be necessary to draw on Levinas’s philosophy, as the relation a subject has towards this unnamable Other is for Levinas the basis of ethics. It has been noticed by such critics as Ewa Plonowska-Ziarek and Alain Badiou that Beckett’s work, starting with How It Is, shifts its attention from the solipsistic questioning of itself as a narrative towards a confrontation with alterity. This chapter goes some way in locating Beckett within the postmodern paradigm in so far as the postmodern is understood as a current of thought that maintains an irreducible distance to alterity.


The choice of these particular novels and recits by Beckett was dictated primarily by the salience of the themes under discussion. Though theatrical and television works are referred to on occasion, the intention of this study was to focus on Beckett’s prose works, as they have received relatively little attention from critics. Compared to the critical attention Waiting for Godot and Endgame have received, works such as Texts for Nothing, Ill Seen Ill Said and Imagination Dead Imagine have been mostly ignored. Two works in particular – The Unnamable and How It Is – stand out as they represent a culmination, or turning point, in Beckett’s poetics and thus merit particular attention. The topic discussed in this dissertation is deeply entrenched in the philosophy of Levinas and Blanchot and thus much of the content is devoted to an extrapolation of the philosophical context within which Beckett’s work can be discussed.

My readings of the selected texts by Beckett locate inexpressibility in the junction between the ethical and the aesthetic significance of a relation to alterity. This study will attempt to show that inexpressibility in Beckett’s texts is not only a modernist aesthetic criterion, whereby language is put to the limit, but also an ethical necessity imposed by the relation maintained with alterity. The aesthetics of failure is bound with an ethical obligation imposed by the impossible demand to write the inexpressible.

CHAPTER ONE

TOWARDS NEGATIVITY

The theme of nothingness in Beckett’s work has gained critical currency mostly as an example of the moribund nihilism pervasive in existentialist readings, though the scope of this theme extends further beyond existentialism to include both ancient as well as modern philosophy.1 The two primary questions I will attempt to answer in this chapter are: how does Beckett attempt to present nothingness and what is the philosophical context of this endeavor? To answer the first question, I will present the negative imperative as it exists in Beckett’s critical writing, the importance of which has become increasingly visible in Beckett criticism due to the publication of Disjecta, a collection of miscellaneous writings, letters and essays, which give much insight into the theoretical background of Beckett’s work. Furthermore, I will present the various textual strategies employed by Beckett as a way of destabilizing, or perhaps “detextualizing” the work. This will lead us to the second question of the philosophical conditions of such writing, as well as to the significant place of nothingness in Texts for Nothing, which will be approached within the context of Beckett’s contemporary and critic, Maurice Blanchot. Both these questions will be discussed within the framework of the inexpressibility topos binding Beckett’s work.

In “The German Letter of 1937”,2 Samuel Beckett states that language is “like a veil that must be torn in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it” (Beckett 1984: 171). This statement seems to reveal a pivotal declaration; namely, that the direction of Beckett’s artistic program is informed by an essentialist bias which locates authentic reality as existing behind the obfuscating appearances of language. Moreover, this authentic reality, as this statement declares, might also be construed as

1 Ackerley traces this theme of Nothingness, stressing the references Beckett has made to Democritus, Geulincx and Schopenhauer (409-410). 2 This letter, written in German (translated by Martin Esslin) on July 9, 1937 to Axel Kaun who he had met in Germany three months prior to writing the letter. This letter in German and its translation (51-54; 170-73) was included in Disjecta.

Chapter One 12

Nothingness. Therefore, in order to reveal this “Nothingness” behind the words, Beckett had to first compose the necessary textual fabric which would then be meticulously dismantled, thereby exposing the metaphysical presuppositions and grammatical entanglements which rendered the project an impossibility ab initio. Indeed, much of Beckett’s work, from The Unnamable onwards, resembles a textual structure encasing nothingness, mathematically engineered patterns leading to an exhaustion of the very figures and signs constructing the structure.3 This is evinced in Beckett’s predilection for the use of exhaustive permutations and aporetic logic. It has now become commonplace to view language in Beckett’s fiction as an obstacle on the path to silence and ideal apperception. 4 This approach owes much to the intentional fallacy of accommodating Beckett’s own comments on language and his artistic obligation “to bore one hole after another in it [language], until what lurks behind it – be it something or nothing – begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today” (Beckett 1984: 172). The metaphysical notion of exposing the something or nothing behind the artificial nature of language is what strongly links Beckett to the modernist notion of inexpressibility. Language, or rather the distance that Beckett hoped to achieve from language, guides the aesthetics of his work, which is an aesthetics of inexpressibility.

The Philosophical Origins of Nothingness in Beckett

Beckett’s imperative to express the nothingness preempting the materiality of words is (despite the professed impossibility of fruition) the driving force behind much of his work. Yet, little consideration has been given to the tradition from which the concept of nothingness in Beckett’s work originates. It would be impossible within the limits of this study to provide a survey of the vast philosophical tradition permeating Beckett’s work, for one would have to start with pre-Socratic philosophy and work one’s way up to Derrida; however, the theme of nothingness – already present, as we have seen, in Beckett’s critical work – can be distilled to a

3 A mathematical awareness informs Beckett’s writings. Permutations, serial themes and logical exhaustion can be found in Watt. Geometry and accurate spatial coordinates construct the images in Imagination Dead Imagine. Logic and mathematics are frequently utilized for either comic purposes or to prove their ineffectiveness as epistemological tools. Paradox and exhaustion are the results of logic and mathematics, not conclusions. 4 This approach is visible in critical studies which are based on existentialism (cf. Esslin 46) and on negative theology (Wolosky 90-92).

Towards Negativity 13

distinct philosophical pedigree alluded already to in a letter to Sighne Kennedy in which Beckett stated that “if I were in the unenviable position of having to study my work my points of departure would be the ‘Naught is more real . . .’ and the ‘Ubi nihil vales . . .’” (Disjecta 113). Both these quotes refer to the works of two philosophers, Democritus and Arnold Guelincx respectively.5 Though Beckett was responding here to a letter concerning Murphy, I believe that these points of departure are also relevant for a study of Beckett’s later work.

Beckett directly draws from Democritus when he has Malone say, “nothing is more real than nothingness” (1973: 193). Nothingness in Democritus’ atomism bears a relevant relation to Beckett’s conception of the void. Democritus was the first to argue for the constitutive force the void has over atoms, which, in other words, translates to the constitutive role of non-being in relation to being. Empty space became a necessary element in the constitution of atoms and “was postulated as required for motion, but was characterized as ‘what is not’, thus violating the Eleatic principle that what is not cannot be” (Taylor 204). For Democritus the void was understood as a necessary place for atoms to exist and be in motion, and thus the void, no longer conceptualized as nothingness, began to function as space; that is, as a constitutive condition for being to exist. “Naught is more real than nothing”, because without the void as space there would be no atoms, no tangible being. As will be seen later, the void as a positive constitutive force is also present in the literary theories of Beckett and Blanchot.

The second quoted dictum: Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis (“Where you are worth nothing, there you should want nothing”) is ascribed to the Flemish Cartesian Occasionalist, Arnould Geulincx, whose works Beckett read in their original Latin. The influence of Geulincx’s philosophy is both covertly (Murphy, The Unnamable) and overtly present (Molloy) in Beckett’s novels leading up to Texts for Nothing. For Geulincx, the mind, unlike the body, was outside God’s sphere of influence. Much of the mind/body dualism present in Beckett’s work owes to Geulincx’s philosophy. Occasionalists, notably Melanbranche, developed their theory of divine causation on the basis of the Cartesian mind/body dualism. The physical world and the mental world are thus completely separated in terms of mutual influence and God is seen as the supreme intervening force of events. In his Ethics (1675), Geulincx praises the meditative efforts exerted within the microcosm of the mind, as only within the

5 Arnold Geulincx’s Ethics has only recently been translated into English from its original Latin read by Beckett.

Chapter One 14

confines of the mind does the human will enjoy unbridled freedom. The Beckettian obligation to express can be traced to Geulincx’s ethical imperative of renouncing materialism in favor of introspection. Along with materialism language too had to be overcome, and it is at this point that Beckett’s work comes closest to the practices of negative theology.

Though Beckett never refers directly to any other philosophers as he had done to Democritus and Geulincx, the problem of nothingness in modern philosophy and in Beckett has been addressed through the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Hegel, Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. As Lance St. John Butler’s arduously researched book, Samuel Beckett and the Meaning of Being: A Study in Ontological Parable,demonstrates, the philosophical tenets of the three aforementioned philosophers can be successfully extrapolated from Beckett’s work. However, the most important aspect of Beckett’s invocation to nothingness is the degree to which it differs from nihilism understood as a voiding of meaning and value. It is precisely this hypostatic nothingness in Beckett’s work that makes meaning possible and constitutes the primary imperative underlying his fiction.

The negative imperative in Beckett’s critical writing

Beckett’s critical writing emerges from the initial phase of his career and, though never explicitly about his own literary work, it nonetheless offers insight into his artistic endeavors, providing as it does a gloss and framework of the themes found in his subsequent work. I am not suggesting here that his rather scant critical output should be treated as a key to a systematic philosophy or aesthetic theory which could be directly applied to Beckett’s drama and fiction, yet it is impossible to ignore the multiple clues in the form of philosophical allusions, aesthetic concerns, and artistic assumptions found in the essays, letters and dialogues accumulated in Disjecta. Considering Beckett’s reticence about his work, the publication of such critical texts offers the reader what must be treated as a tentative, though helpful, intellectual backdrop to his work. The two seminal critical texts to be considered here – “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce” (1929) and “Three Dialogues with George Duthuit” (1949) – have been chosen on account of their preoccupation with the themes in question: negativity and inexpressibility. Before continuing to those essays, it would be beneficial to outline the literary origins of this preoccupation.

A brief comparison of Beckett’s work with that of Joyce’s will suffice to shed some light on the formation of Beckett’s poetics, particularly his


preoccupation with negation. Indeed, the influence that Joyce had on his protégée has already been the subject of numerous studies,6 which is why only one aspect of the Joyce/Beckett relationship will be of interest here; namely, the understanding that each of the writers had of language. Though Beckett’s poetics was greatly indebted to and influenced by the few years in the late 20s he spent helping Joyce7 write Finnegan’s Wake, it becomes clear that a radical separation did occur. This struggle with the Joycean legacy is evidenced in an interview assembled by Israel Shenker and quoted by Gontarski:

. . . the difference is that Joyce was a superb manipulator of material, perhaps the greatest. He was making words do the absolute maximum of work. There isn’t a syllable that’s superfluous. The kind of work I do is one in which I am not the master of my material. The more Joyce knew the more he could. His tendency is toward omniscience and omnipotence as an artist. I’m working with impotence, ignorance. I don’t think that impotence has been exploited in the past. (1985: 232)

The rejection of knowledge and power for the sake of impotence opens for Beckett a type of writing that depends on negativity for its ‘structure.’ I use the term structure loosely, as Beckett’s disintegrating texts and grammar offer testimony to his anti-systematic and anti-structural conception of writing, yet within this disintegration, the negative imperative does offer a principle on which composition is based.

“Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce”, a tribute and interpretation of Joyce’s “Work in Progress” (Finnegan’s Wake), is a crucial starting point to a reading of Beckett’s work. Here, Beckett addresses the melding of form and content in the Work in Progress, an aim that is arguably fulfilled in Finnegan’s Wake and one that finds its continuation in Beckett’s work. About Work in Progress, Beckett writes: “Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not to be read – or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His [Joyce’s] writing is not about something; it is that something itself” (Beckett 1984: 27). Indeed, musicality and an onomatopoeic rendering of content were to remain a constant element in Beckett’s work; however, in

6 The 16th edition of European Joyce Studies, Beckett, Joyce and the Art of the Negative is a collection of essays exploring the issue of the Beckett/Joyce relation. Dirk van Hulle’s essay entitled “‘Nichtsnichtsundnichts’: Beckett’s and Joyce’s Transtextual Undoings” deserves special attention due to its emphasis on this relation. 7 Knowlson remarks that Joyce’s influence on Beckett was primarily a moral one, making Beckett realize that indeed writing, not teaching, was his calling (111).

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other aspects, such as the aesthetic deployment of negativity, Beckett distanced himself from his mentor’s poetics.

Linda Ben-Zvi draws attention to the influence of Fritz Mauthner’s linguistic skepticism and nominalism exerted on Beckett’s poetics, identifying him alongside Descartes and Schopenhauer as key figures in Beckett’s thinking (1985: 194). Mauthner’s emphasis on the metaphorical nature of language and its inability to represent anything beyond itself may have led Beckett to refute Joyce’s “apotheosis of the word” (Beckett 1984: 172). For Joyce language was capable of encapsulating history and could be utilized to compile an encyclopedic repertoire of phenomenal experience. Joyce strove for a realistic and teleological depiction of consciousness afforded by the “immediacy” of the stream of consciousness technique, a technique already laden with the lyricism and verboseness Beckett sought to avoid. Instead, Beckett opted for an ascetic approach – not a mastery of language, but its rejection and reduction. Commenting on the aesthetic ambivalence present in the Joyce/Beckett relationship, Gontarski writes: “Although Beckett spent considerable energy imitating and defending Joyce, his own aesthetics was shaped mostly in recoil” (1985: 232). Yet this recoil into negativity is nonetheless a form of potency, as the progression towards inexpressibility and nothingness propels the text, if not forward, then simply “on”.

“The Three Dialogues with George Duthuit,” most likely fashioned upon Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, are famous for containing one of the most famous of Beckett’s dicta regarding the primary aesthetic dilemma of art which, “weary of its puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little bit further along a dreary road” (1984: 139) should instead opt for “the expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express” (1984: 139). This oft-quoted passage, made in reference to Bram van Velde’s paintings, has gained critical notoriety, not only because it rather exhaustively expounds Beckett’s “aesthetic of nothingness” (Murphy 1991: 49), but also because it combines both ethical concerns connected with the obligation to express and with the purely aesthetic notion of inexpressibility. Both the ethical and the aesthetic dimensions of art meld here as they do in his later work. This passage is, therefore, evocative of the impotence that a writer deals with when expressing what is not merely a product of language. Though negativity seems to be the axiomatic trajectory of Beckett’s work, Gontarski reads the “nothing to express” as an active phrase: “what remains to be expressed is nothingness, even


though that needs to be done with the faulty system of language” (1985: 236).

Furthermore, this “sweeping distinction” is reiterated during the conversation on Bram van Velde, where the topic falls on the condition of the artist: “the situation is that of him who is helpless, cannot act, in the event cannot paint, since he is obliged to paint. The act is of him, who, helpless, unable to act, acts, in the event paints, since he is obliged to paint” (142). Beckett’s work is replete with protagonists who are thrust into an involuntary relation with alterity which demands a response, whether it be waiting as is required by Godot, writing as is required by the mysterious Godot-like Youdi in Malone Dies, speaking as is required by the “they” in The Unnamable, and remembering as is required by Krapp’s recorded voice from the past in Krapp’s Last Tape, to name just a few examples. It becomes clear that the actions of the protagonists, however inconsequential and circular they may be, are precipitated by the demand set forth by this inexpressible and invisible source. It must be added that this is a common Modernist “aporia”, referred to also by Blanchot in “From Dread to Language”: “The writer finds himself in this more and more comical situation – of having nothing to write, of having no means of writing it, and of being forced by an extreme necessity to keep writing it…. Whatever he wants to say, it is nothing ” (345).

Based on a real conversation between Beckett and George Duthuit, “The Three Dialogues” express what could be read as an artistic manifesto, with a clear declaration of the negative mode his fiction and drama were to assume in the future. Furthermore, “The Three Dialogues” themselves are a dramatic dialogue structured in a way that reflects the negative imperative it advocates. This rhetoric of self-negation and false logic will become familiar in the trilogy. David A. Hatch, in his study on “The Three Dialogues”, develops the assertion that the two speakers, B and D, construct an argument with undefined assertions, (such as void), instead of demolishing a proposed argument in the Platonic fashion by questioning the assertions (454). The feebleness of this construction is exposed by B with his last lines, “Yes, yes I am mistaken, I am mistaken” (Beckett 1984: 45). The character B often contradicts his assertions, occupying the role of the fool, consigning B to failure.

Beckett’s critical essays can be used to make the case that his preoccupation with inexpressibility of nothingness evolved in opposition to Joyce’s poetics and in response to Fritz Mauthner’s skeptical view of language that draws attention to its own paucity as a means of expression. Beckett noted that some form of Nominalist irony is necessary to his project of the “unword” (Beckett 1984: 173). The sense of having to

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continue writing, despite the impossibility of doing so, is a theme that permeates much of his later work, starting with the trilogy and onwards. Moreover, the methods for how this “going on” would be carried out is prefigured in these critical statements which give a clear indication of the negative direction his work was to take.

Negativity in The Unnamable

The trilogy as a whole could be seen as representing a culmination in Beckett’s fiction, where many of the themes of his earlier work are brought to fruition and where most of what was to follow draws much on the themes found therein. In one of the few recorded interviews (with Isreal Shenker) Beckett said “in my last book – The Unnamable – there’s complete disintegration. No ‘I’, no ‘have’, no being’. No nominative, no accusative, no verb. There’s no way to go on.”8 In essence, The Unnamableis a language experiment based on pure reason, wherein self-referential language is employed for the purpose of a subject establishing himself. In the course of this experience, the basic oppositions of subject/object, origin and representation, and same and other, are disintegrated, leading towards, though never reaching, the inexpressible source of literature. Every name is later negated and any stable linguistic referent is discarded, thereby creating a subjectless subject as the first-person narrative. The themes can be further distilled, as Beckett’s narrator tells us that “in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that what I’ve had to make the best of” (400).

Much of what could be seen as the premise of The Unnamable can be construed as an amalgamation of various philosophical notions pertaining to subjectivity. The reference to Descartes’ method of self-apperception is unmistakable, as is the reference to Locke’s tabula rasa. If subjectivity is conceived as a result of the ability to think self-reflexively, thus recognizing oneself as a sentient being by means of sensory experience and language, then The Unnamable is the proper thought experiment in attempting to conceive of such a consciousness. Severed from an outside phenomenal existence, the unnamable speaking “I” can refer only to itself for validity. This self-reflexive reference to “oneself” becomes one of the most engaging problems in the novel, as it tests the philosophical theories

8 William Hutchings, “The Unintelligible Terms of an Incomprehensible Damnation”: Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, Sheol, and St. Erkenwald,” Twentieth Century Literature 27, no.2 (1981): 111.


of Descartes. The starting point for The Unnamable’s self-constitution is the premise that the cogito, the thinking self, is an antonymous, stable, and self-sustaining entity. Without a body, without the certainty of seeing anything outside the self, the unnamable first-person speaker is in the position of interpreting itself without the aid of external sensory impressions necessary for the constitution of self-consciousness. The speaking “I” of The Unnamable attempts to deploy Cartesian logic in order to constitute a stable ego cogito, the result being a circular and prototypical mise en abyme structure.

The Unnamable begins with three questions: “Where now? Who now? When now?” Answers to these three key narratological questions would enable the I speaker to define himself within the space of his narrative. These questions are, of course, left unanswered and the I speaker has to find his bearings with only what is at hand, which in this case seem to be figments of either memories or imagination (mostly characters interwoven from Beckett’s previous texts). The process of coming to terms with this situation of an-archic subjectivity and (re)constructing a stable subject takes the form of exhaustive deduction, through which the speaking I succeeds in establishing but the barest facts of his existence: that he is sitting in the middle of a circle with characters (taken from previous works) orbiting him as planets would a star or electrons a nucleus. Sometimes these particles collide, but the speaker for the most part is left untouched and unnoticed by the passers-by. The association with clocks, time passing in space, movements at regular intervals allows the unnamable to measure time. There is at all times a sense of rhythmic and systematic progression that binds this fictional space. In keeping with Beckett’s other works (e.g. Endgame, Imagination Dead Imagine), the association with being inside a skull is well founded. The texts give us no indication as to how long he has been there or for how long he will have to be there, though there are indications of gradual degeneration or entropy associated with the time spent in this state of waiting.

Attempts to constitute a stable ego cogito amount to little more than a parody of the Cartesian method, as logical deduction and induction reveal their circular logic. More specifically, the attempt to constitute subjectivity within a strictly textual context presupposes for its stability a final referent. Descartes’ methodology is important, not only because of Beckett’s academic interest in the philosopher, but because of the establishment of the modern subject which is attributed to Descartes, as the primary question leading, or, in fact, engendering, The Unnamable as a novel does not concern solely where and when, but who the I speaker is and how this consciousness comes to be. It is this question, pursued relentlessly by the I

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speaker, that unravels the certainty traditionally accorded to the Cartesian subject, who is brought to existence by his ability to appropriate himself in and through not so much thought as language. It is also the answer to this question that remains inexpressible and beyond the scope of the textual constitution of the I speaker.

In The Unnamable and, to an ever greater extent, in Beckett’s subsequent work, Texts for Nothing, the status of language as an Orphic mode of expression is radically brought into question and with it is suspended the idea of an extralinguistic or preontological source in which meaning is anchored. This is most clearly present in The Unnamable,where the protagonist in an attempt to isolate himself textually produces an endless array of names and “delegates” which speak on his behalf. The characters of Molloy, Malone, Mahood, Worm, Murphy are avatars of himself, created in spite of himself. “All these Murphys, Molloys and Malones do not fool me. They have made me waste my time, suffer for nothing, speak of them when, in order to stop speaking, I should have spoken of me and of me alone” (1973: 305). This “me” would have to be the essential self, free from any fictionalized characterization; however, as it becomes clear, this essential self is itself a fiction, the unrepresentability of which perpetuates the novel. Whatever their names may be, these characters are referred to by Beckett as “caricatures, latest surrogates, moribunds, manikins, next vice-existers, miscreated puppets” and are seen as standing in place of something else, the speaking I, the self, the transcendent signified, the source of the narrative, which remains unnamable or ineffable.

The attempt at reduction to the pure “I” proves to be both self-contradictory and self-defeating in the most literal sense. Having divested the self of everything, every figment, every figure and voice, one finds no center, no unity; instead, one is left with nothing at all, no self at all. For beyond these pronouns, characters, names, there is no self. If the I resists this multiplicity, the I itself disappears. One is left then not with nothing as truth, but with truly nothing. (Davies 128)

I have chosen this quote because it seems to articulate a common understanding of Beckett’s negativity. The self is reduced to nothingness through the rejection of the “delegates” and names that the I speaker takes on and later discards. Indeed, the notion of language and names being artificial constructs deferring the “true” logocentric self can be fleshed out by the essentialist bias at work in the novel and would be in line with the negative theological approach to Beckett. The narrator of Company


conveys this idea laconically and succinctly: “The unthinkable last of all. Unnamable. Last person. I” (17).

With the aim of assembling or reassembling consciousness with questions and contradictions the narrative unfolds, or rather implodes onto itself. The unnamable, unable to utter anything that would sustain its validity, as everything is invalidated as soon as it is uttered; the unnamable voice can only speak for the sake of speaking. The absent source of subjectivity, manifested through the disembodied and misappropriated voice, assumes the central focus of the novel. “But it’s entirely a matter of voices, no other metaphor is appropriate, they’ve blown me up with their voices, like a balloon, and even as I collapse it’s them I hear. Who, them?” (327). The concept of voice has a long philosophical history and is one of the most prevalent themes in Beckett’s fiction.9 This is a concept that Ackerley calls Beckett’s “most profound literary creation” (607).

Because it is impossible to determine whether this voice comes from inside or outside the subject, the relation between what is heard and the hearer, a common theme in Beckett criticism, remains irresolvable. By the end of the novel, the speaking voice is disembodied, belonging to no-one, neither to the subject (if the term is still applicable to the unnamable) nor to any character catalogued during the course of the novel:

It is not mine, I have none, I have no voice and must speak, that is all I know, it’s round that I must revolve, of that I must speak, with this voice that is not mine, but can only be mine, since there is no one but me, or if there are others, to whom it might belong, they have never come near me. (1973: 309)

Despite being dispossessed, this non-diegetic voice does assume a function. Not only does it impose itself upon the consciousness of the unnamable, but it also imputes an obligation to speak of oneself. The narrator, “possessed of nothing but my voice, the voice, it may seem natural, once the obligation has been swallowed, that I should interpret it as an obligation to say something. But is it possible?” (1973: 313). This desire to go on, to speak despite there being nothing to speak about, despite there being nothing to speak with, seems to be the only condition

9 A detailed entry on the topic of the voice in Beckett’s work can be found in TheGrove Companion to Samuel Beckett, 607-19. In this well-researched entry, which can also be found in the form of an article, “The Uncertainty of Self: Samuel Beckett and the Location of Voice”, Ackerley describes the presence of this theme through Beckett’s work, citing that “the search for the voice is the great theme of The Unnamable” (611).

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for the existence of the story and the “character” as textualized consciousness. The same situation of negativity generating desire is represented in Molloy as the search for the titular character’s mother, which, analogically, seems to constitute the determining force of Molloy’s existence. Once at his mother’s empty home Molloy recoils into a fetal position and the story ends. The same pattern of returning to the empty origin takes place in The Unnamable, where the search for the source of the voice does not reach its fruition, the story simply lingers on.

The search for the origin of the voice is itself a logocentric construct and thus initiates the mise en abyme that constitutes the core of Beckett’s inexpressibility. This endless regress can best be illustrated with reference to the myth of Echo and Narcissus. What links Narcissus to Echo is reflection, in its visual and acoustic dimensions, as a constitutive force in the formation of the subject. The figure of Echo, on the other hand, is an example of a subjectivity with no origin, as her voice, at the same time, belongs and does not belong to her. Much like Beckett’s characters in TheUnnamable and How It Is, she can only repeat the words of others, which disassociates her words from her subjectivity. This uncertainty in effect precludes her presence as a speaking subject, as she is nothing more than a sounding board for other people’s words. It is only by means of appropriating the other’s voice that she can become present; only by speaking with the words of the other can her presence reveal itself. In other words, her presence in the world takes on a metaphorical form of a reflection, a mirror reflection of Narcissus’ words.

The origin of the voice is thus deferred onto another subject, whose voice is, in turn, deferred further back. The myth of Echo is thus an expression of one of the most prevalent aporias encountered in Beckett’s fiction: the origin as repetition. Being able to repeat only what has already been said, Echo and the Beckettian subject defer the moment of original evocation. Echo’s death, described as an eternity of repeating the voices of others, with neither body nor voice of her own, is analogous to the protagonist of The Unnamable. Both are deprived of a material body and are consigned to exist solely as dispossessed voices. Like Echo, Beckett’s characters claim to be only repeating or citing what has already been said, unable to say anything new, anything that would ultimately belong to them. Their existence precludes the possibility of distinguishing between reflections and the thing reflected.

The Echo-like subjectivity without origin is interestingly represented in Krapp’s Last Tape. In this one-man play we see what seem to be the last days of Krapp on his 69th birthday performing his annual ritual of reminiscing with the aid of a taped recording of himself from his 39th


birthday. The tape recording serves a mediating purpose between the different selves from various times. The sourcelessness of the subject is represented by Krapp listening to himself who earlier listened to yet an earlier version of himself. The discontinuity of these selves is emphasized further by lapses of memory, as when Krapp of sixty-nine has trouble recalling the definition of a word he used at thirty-nine. Much like in The Unnamable, the voice from the tape recorder as the phonocentric source of subjectivity is problematized here by repetition and the condition of iterability, a concept Derrida argues is the condition of all language, written as well as spoken. It is “the possibility of extraction and of citational grafting”, he writes, “which belongs to the structure of every mark, spoken or written, and which constitutes every mark as writing even before and outside every horizon of semiolinguistic communication” (1982: 320). This idea of repeatability as a source is the subject of Connor’s analysis of this play in the sixth chapter of his Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text. The introduction of the tape recorder provides Beckett with an opportunity to transfer the iterability of the written word to spoken language, thus undermining the traditional privileging of the voice over the written word. In this play, as in TheUnnamable, there is no presence behind the voice, which is a disembodied echo of a former self or a non-self, a ghostly image of a character on the stage.

Negation in Texts for Nothing

Few pieces of Beckett’s oeuvre have attracted less critical attention than Texts for Nothing, written in French mostly in 1951 (the English translation by the author was published in 1967) after the famous impasse Beckett encountered upon completing the trilogy. H. Porter Abbott calls them “a succession of misfires” or “last sputterings from the trilogy”, an irregularly assembled “aftertext” (1994: 107). James Knowlson in his monumental biography of Beckett, Damned to Fame, mentions them only in passing. Exceptions to this critical silence have surfaced relatively recently and include the considerations by such Beckettian scholars as H. Porter Abbott, Shira Wolosky, and Susan Brienza. On the whole, however, critics and biographers have given Texts for Nothing only a cursory glance, relegating the work to Beckett’s “post-trilogy vacuum” and seeing it as largely derivative of the themes occupying the trilogy. This attitude is understandable considering Beckett’s own comments about this work found in Israel Shenker’s interview from 1956, in which he goes on to state that Texts for Nothing were meant “to get out of the attitude of

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disintegration” but ultimately failed in this endeavor (qtd. in Murphy 1991: 34).

The meaning of failure becomes a critical point of departure for Beckett’s trilogy and Texts for Nothing, in particular. Far from being a failure in the traditional, negative sense of the word, Texts for Nothingaffirm the necessity for such a failure; that is, the ways in which the Texts for Nothing fail to expose the underlying paradox of language grappling with its metaphysical origin and, in so doing, refuse to accommodate the traditional requirements of fiction, such as character, plot and linear narrative. This is just one way of reading the title, which would suggest the futility and purposelessness of the texts; however, as will become clearer further on in this chapter, this futility is written into the text as a necessary condition of its being. To “fail better” is the aim of each subsequent work, to fail in such a way as to render saying/writing no longer necessary.

Since well saying is impossible, the only hope lies in betrayal: to attain a failure so complete it would elicit a total abandonment of the prescription itself, a relinquishment of saying and of language. This would mean a return to the void – to be void or emptied, emptied of all prescription in the end, the temptation is to cease to exist in order to be. In this form of failure one returns to the void, to pure being. (Badiou 2003: 91)

This imperative to fail not only runs counter to the already expressed “obligation to express”, but, more specifically – as analyzed by Alain Badiou in his highly original book, On Beckett – it aims at “subtracting oneself from the imperative of saying” (91).

Despite the thematic and strategic overlapping between Texts for Nothing and the trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, Unnamable), I would not consider them merely reiterative of The Unnamable’s aporetic disintegration towards the “unword”, but rather its radicalization and refinement. This sentiment is shared by Knowlson, who sees Texts for Nothing as a more pared down version of The Unnamable:

For the primary difference between the Texts and The Unnamable, which helps to account for almost all the other disparities between them, is obviously the reduction of format that enables Beckett to delimit the area of his investigations, and to concentrate on specific problems that got shelved, or simply lost, in the turbid prose of The Unnamable. (Knowlson and Pilling 1980: 42-43)

Shifting the focus away from the dispossession of the subject and placing it on a hypostatic void, Beckett once again engages the “unwording”


of the work, but in a more focused and unrelenting manner. As H. Porter Abbott notices, Beckett’s oeuvre up to and including The Unnamable is still entangled in a teleological and linear form of narrative which has produced similarly end-oriented interpretations (1994: 106). Even though the trilogy ends with disembodiment and dispossession, it was led to that point in a linear manner. Texts for Nothing mark the secession of teleology, which aside from inscribing the abovementioned theme of failure, is also a step forward from the trilogy in that the text per se is the sole object of focus instead of the disintegrating subjectivity of the trilogy.

Similarly to The Unnamable, Texts for Nothing are bereft of a central character and plot capable of serving as a unifying principle. As Brienza states the only cohesive element in Texts for Nothing is the production of character, a character is created so that he can later be destroyed (1987: 21). I would suggest, however, that the idea of character as it appears in Beckett’s work is first and foremost a manifestation of linguistic materialism and is dissolved as a matter of course, making it thus no more a cohesive element than the dissolution of any such manifestation, such as subjectivity, verisimilitude, temporality, and space. Once again, here as in The Unnamable, it could be argued that language assumes the central position in a spectacle of self-erasure and aporetic logic. “With Texts for Nothing, language itself arises as Beckett’s main subject, as his creatures weigh each unit of thought, question nouns, and revise phrases, all the while wandering along strange syntactic paths” (Briezna 19). What is brought into being is just as easily denied; language vacillating between affirmation and denials is exposed as immaterial and unreliable. Not only is Beckett here repeating the notion that language can only recreate false images and fictions deprived of an extralinguistic and logocentric anchor, he also attempts to reify the gaps coalescing these fictions. When language is reduced to such impotence, as it is in Texts for Nothing, absence protrudes from under the jumble of words and, in turn, becomes the focal point of the texts.

Indeed, these thirteen texts, devoid of order and interdependence, draw attention to the breaks between the texts. These empty gaps represent the nothingness and silence that the texts disturb and defer. In support of this argument one can use the title itself: “Textes pour rien”, which refers to a musical concept, measure pour rien - pauses in a piece of music (cf. Ackerley 2004: 562 and Hill 1990: 125). It is through this concept of a musical pause, a period of silence that is, nevertheless, part of the music, that we might search for a similar strategy behind Beckett’s literary lacunae. In the “German Letter of 1937” previously quoted, Beckett asks:

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Is there any reason why that terrible materiality of the word surface should not be capable of being dissolved, like for example the sound surface, torn by enormous pauses, of Beethoven’s seventh Symphony, so that through whole pages we can perceive nothing but a path of sounds suspended in giddy heights, linking unfathomable abysses of silence? (1984: 171)

It is clear from this quote that the writer’s emphasis is on silence and absence, not on the text whose raison d’etre is to bridge the silent gaps. This approach is reminiscent of John Cage’s musical experiments of the 1930s, where silence served as elements of his musical pieces. In the Bridge and the Bachelors, Calvin Tomkins devotes a chapter to Cage’s art, which at one point focuses its attention on significance of silence. Speaking of Cage, Calvin writes that “he used it [silence] not simply as a gap in the continuity or a pause to lend emphasis to sounds, but in much the same way that contemporary sculptors were using open space, or ‘negative volume’ – as an element of composition in itself (87).

If speech is construed only as the material shell encasing and also deferring the silence at its source, the familiar Beckett reduction and paring down of language is justified; however, Beckett’s art is one of willed failure in which silence and nothingness are intuited by means of the only resource available to a writer, namely language, even if that language resembles an asymptotic equation approaching, but never reaching, zero. As Wolfgang Iser observes, Beckett’s project of the ‘unword” involves “a relentless process of negation, which in the novels applies even on the level of the individual sentences themselves, which follow one another as a ceaseless rejection and denial of what has just been said” (126). This paring down of language and disintegration of even the grammatical structure of sentences was a manifestation of this attempt to “bore holes in language” and see if something or nothing seeps out.

Perhaps Beckett’s assertion that words belong to a material structure which must be disassembled in order to make way for what must logically precede it makes it possible to consider his artistic project as being metaphysical. Locatelli, however, raises an important question in regard to this approach. She claims that by ascribing the notion of authenticity to metalinguistic silence, such an approach reveals its logocentric bias. “However, this way of posing the issue of authenticity here remains within a logocentered and metaphysical thought, one that predictably conceives silence as the opposite of language” (2001: 27). Perhaps, instead of treating Beckett’s silence as the opposite of language, a teleological progression towards authenticity silence would embody, silence should be treated as its condition of possibility in line with Democritus’s atomism.


But how is this sense of absence achieved? In terms of rhetoric, Beckett utilizes three techniques in order to draw attention to this absence: rhetorical questions, self-canceling logic and repetition. Rhetorical questions set up the possibility of an answer only to leave it unfulfilled. No question is ever answered in Texts for Nothing; instead, these questions serve as a means of suspending the text from any final affirmation of anything beyond the fact of its existence. Affirmations and negations (self-canceling logic) is only the first step, for negation alone would relate the experience of a singular loss. For there to be infinite regress and the sense of absence overwhelming the moment, repetition must also be utilized. Repetition and negation, which take the form of reflections and echoes, serve as a technique that rids language of substance and consciousness of subjectivity.

Only when all three techniques are in concert do the texts come close to purging themselves of content, as is the case in the following passage from Texts for Nothing: “How many hours to go, before the next silence, they are not hours, it will not be silence, how many hours still, before the next silence?” (104). On a purely textual level, this short fragment reflects the characteristic thematic perseverance in the midst of disintegration. Despite the introduction and immediate cancellation of “hours” and “silence”, the speaking voice inaugurates words which are deleted, thereby leaving behind traces of what could have been concrete and real. Like most Beckett’s characters, so the speaking voices in Texts for Nothingoscillate between silence and speech; they wait for nothingness, be it in the form of silence, emptiness, or death, to engulf them once again. What can be regarded as Beckett’s brand of negative eschatology, a continuing theme from the trilogy, achieves in Texts for Nothing a new level of urgency, as each text seems to be on the verge of collapsing onto itself.

These rhetorical “voiding” or “unwording” techniques can be extended to include the treatment of the I speaker, or, more precisely, the voice of the I speaker. Throughout the thirteen texts one of the main foci is the issue of the speaking voice’s place and ontological integrity. “Where would I go, if I could go, who would I be, if I could be, what would I say, if I had a voice, who says this, saying it’s me?” (1967: 91). This confusion as to who is speaking creates a situation where the “I” does not speak but is spoken by the voice, a voice whose being is predicated on the incessant questioning of its own presence. The voice multiplies itself, assuming a pronominal linguistic form, which leads us to an interesting problem. Deprived of referents, however, these pronouns play off each other and are, in turn, reduced to vestiges of meaning. Pronouns thus become empty capsules recruited to the service of sustaining the texts without imbuing it

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with any semantic content. In this process, the speaking subject is fused with the spoken subject, with multiple shifts occurring from “I” to “you”to “he”. This constant pronominal shifting succeeds in dislocating the speaking subject from the narrative, thereby opening a space of absence as the source of the voice.

Negation in Texts for Nothing only seemingly brings the voice closer to its professed goal of silence and finality. A quote from Text 11 gives brief hope that there is yet a way out from this impasse:

No, something better must be found, a better reason, for this to stop, another word, a better idea, to put in the negative, a new no, to cancel all the others, all the old noes that buried me down here, deep in this place which is not one, which is merely a moment for the time being eternal, which is called here, and in this being which is called me and is not one, and in this impossible voice . . . (1967: 130-131)

As we see here, the project of negation and self-erasure, predicated as it is on the hope of finding the right word that would put an end to the “incessant and interminable” voice, is frustrated by the very logic of its enterprise. To find a word, an idea, and a reason that would silence the voice via negativa implicitly affirms what is negated, and so the voice must continue despite itself. The voice’s continuing despite there being nothing left to say, that is continuing as a condition of its own survival, moves to the forefront of the narrative, where it is not a story of any kind that is being told. The progression of words lays bare the space in which stories can potentially take place. As Knowlson and Pilling have noticed, “there is little attempt made here to tell a narrative in the manner which the speaker of The Unnamable finds himself unable to resist, and hence much less temptation to invent ‘vice existers’ and subsume the self under the rudimentary biography of someone else” (Knowlson 1980: 44). The movement away from constitutive language is not only a step towards the linguistic transcendence Beckett sought (cf. “The German Letter of 1937”) but is also indicative of the negative movement as an originary movement of language. This step back from narrative, characters, and plot brings the text to the originary space of literature, exposing the props and strings which are employed for the purpose of not only constructing a fictional world but constituting our experience of reality.

Negativity in Blanchot

Having discussed Beckett’s The Unnamable and Texts for Nothing, I will call upon Blanchot’s thoughts on the implicit negativity of literature


in an attempt to rearticulate the role language occupies in Beckett’s aforementioned works. In his considerations of the inherent negativity in language, Blanchot refers to Marquis de Sade (whom he considers the quintessential writer), Stéphane Mallarmé, Gustaw Flaubert and the surrealists. Blanchot only briefly refers to Beckett in The Infinite Conversation, but devotes a more developed analysis, entitled “Where Now?, Who Now?”, found in a collection of critical essays entitled TheBook to Come. Reading Blanchot’s work makes it clear that he does not present a coherent philosophical system which could be applied to Beckett’s writing; in fact, much of what Blanchot had written, from political commentaries, literary and philosophical exegeses, and works of fiction, indeed blurs the distinction between literature and philosophy, and moves towards fragmentary and multivocal writing, a practice which was to become commonplace with Blanchot’s commentator, Jacques Derrida. Before revisiting Beckett’s The Unnamable and Texts for Nothing, I would like to outline, first the general concerns present in Blanchot’s writing, such as the ontological status of literature, and then the more specific philosophical elaborations pertinent to our discussion on Beckett. Many of the main philosophical elements discussed in relation to The Unnamableand Texts for Nothing, especially the voice and subject, find their correlative formulation in Blanchot’s work. However, the overarching focus of this chapter will be Beckett’s writing as a manifestation of the Blanchotian notion of literature.

“Literature and the Right to Death”, an essay which provides an introduction to Blanchot’s critical vocabulary and philosophy, starts with the question of the possibility of literature. “Let us suppose that literature begins at the moment when literature becomes a question” (1995: 300). Though Blanchot admits that it is not by any regard a new question, he is, nonetheless, not satisfied with any of the answers provided hitherto. And thus this essay becomes, on one level, a polemic with Sartre’s concept of literature being engaged in the socio-political circumstances in which it is born, and on the other hand, it is an elaboration of Hegelian negativity (cf. chapter one, p. 42) at work as the source of literature. Blanchot elaborates on the idea that the reason why the question of literature’s meaning has received only “meaningless” answers stems from the form of the question. Not only does the ‘what is’ question take away all the seriousness from literature, as Blanchot writes, but also, as Rodolphe Gasché notices, it presupposes “an essence or substratum for its object” (34) as though the answer would provide an archeological foundation for literature itself. The self-reflective approach implied by this question is not applicable to literature which disintegrates in response to such a question in a futile

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attempt to prop itself upon baseless assumptions. Thus, instead of asking the question “what is literature?”, Blanchot asks “how is literature possible?”. When not imposed upon by reflective and cognitive inquiries, literature thrives precisely as a question of its own possibility. This becomes essential in Blanchot’s concept of literature, as only when literature becomes a question does it truly aspire to the status of literature. Thus, in its essence, literature exists as its own negation, perpetual self-questioning that renders impossible a revelation of any kind, as the answer to how is literature possible is that it is not and yet “literature continues to be, despite the internal absurdity that haunts it, divides it, and renders it properly speaking inconceivable” (Blanchot 1995: 304).

The second point of our analysis of negativity involves the Hegelianism permeating Blanchot’s “Literature and the Right to Death”. It has been widely acknowledged that Hegel was the primary influence on this text, though it is important to emphasize that this text does not present a reading or an interpretation of Hegel. Instead, Blanchot performs a deconstructive reading, one which Leslie Hill on the topic of Blanchot’s reading of Hegel describes as “accompany[ing] the text along a certain trajectory in order to propel it into an aporia of its own making” (1997: 109). Following the Hegelian negative dialectics that organizes everything into a totality, negativity for Blanchot is by definition tied to the act of writing, a writing that is understood as radically exterior to the world, to culture, and to possibility as a logical category. In other words, writing for Blanchot is alterior to all forms of totality and is, thereby, anarchic, in the sense of being outside all forms of principle and integral rationality (1993: 347).

It is possible to discern that the anarchic quality of literature, embodied in Beckett’s The Unnamable, is based on the radical movement of negation, which overturns and questions the grounds of knowledge to the point of exhaustion. These moments of absolute negation and questioning Blanchot, following Hegel, calls Revolution, an event linked to absolute moments of freedom and terror (1995: 318). In this way, Blanchot, speaking of Sade, sees sovereignty as based upon a transcendent power of negation, where what is negated is not only the recognizable mindscape of subjectivity, but the totalizing imposition of knowledge itself. The power to say everything and to exhaust the possibilities of language manifest this transcendent power of negation. And so, perhaps, Beckett should not be approached as a writer who attempted to say nothing, but as one who attempted to say everything.

The point at which Beckett and Blanchot seem to be at their closest is in their language, or in the role and limit language plays in their work. For both writers, the subject of writing is oftentimes language at its limit, the


extent to which language can be pushed. Language here becomes its own limit, dividing the expressible from the inexpressible. At this point it is necessary to keep in mind that there is a distinction to be made between the Blanchotian concept of language and literature. This distinction takes shape in Blanchot’s appropriation of Heidegger and Mallarmé, as both these thinkers, in their respective attempts to revolutionize our approach to the relation between being and language, exerted an indelible mark on Blanchot theory.

As Gerald Bruns observes, the first section of Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” called “Thing and Work” provides valuable insight into Blanchot’s assessment of the role of negation (46). In this work, Heidegger attempts to place the role of the indefinable and unnamable Das Ding in the context of language whose attempts to name the thing are seen as “assaults upon the thing” (Heidegger 32), which must always remain outside of language. Heidegger’s 1936 lecture, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry” inaugurates the distinction between ordinary language and poetic language (Dichtung), where the latter is understood as preceding all language. For Heidegger and for Blanchot poetry belongs to the realm of the unnamability of the thing, where to refuse light and clarity corresponds to Blanchot’s ideal of literature which is “to say nothing, to speak in order to say nothing” (Blanchot 1995: 324). For Blanchot, therefore, language belongs to the day, where logic is clear and the project is one of enlightenment. Literature, on the other hand, belongs to the night “the intimacy of the unrevealed” (1995: 326).

Mallarmé’s influence on Blanchot during the 1940s is comparable to that of Heidegger’s, as evidenced by the number of references and articles devoted to the poet. Blanchot’s choice to contribute to the Journal des debats articles on Mallarmé were in most part due to his general project of implicitly introducing his own literary theory. Language for Mallarmé was the basis and substance for poetry, not an instrument or conveyor of meaning. Because nothing precedes language to undermine its primacy, poetry exists as itself and is its own foundation. Thus, Mallarmé’s poetry, as analyzed by Kathleen Staudt, denies language the capacity to “express any ineffable or transcendental truth. Far from developing a poetic technique that could mediate an ineffable ideal, Mallarmé’s poetics seeks a new language that would free itself altogether from mediation and become an end in itself” (147). Mallarmé thus draws attention to the notion of language as opaque, self-reflexive rather than referential. Gerald Bruns in his commentary on Mallarmé identifies his poetry with the Hermetic mode (as opposed to the Orphic mode of poetry which sees language as a medium of expression). Seeing the role Mallarmé assigns to language, one

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could see him as the “spiritual ancestor of a group of modern poets and critics who have sought a radically self-referential, autonomous language, transcendent in itself” (Staudt 147). Paul Valery, Ferdinand de Saussure and Derrida with their radical questioning of the transcendental signified are seen as descendants of this “spiritual ancestry”. To this list of kin, I would also add Beckett and Blanchot.

What particularly interested Blanchot in Mallarmé was his placement of absence as the source of the demand of writing. Mallarmé’s “Igitur” is an attempt to make the work possible by grasping it at the point where what is present is the absence of all power, impotence” (1982: 108). This fundamental lack, thematized often by Blanchot as death and the time of dying, is seen in Mallarmé as inextricably bound to literature, an association emphasized also in Beckett’s treatment of language and negativity. This concept of language is also close to Hegel whose influence on Blanchot can be evidenced in The Infinite Conversation:

Language is of a divine nature, not because it renders eternal by naming, but because, says Hegel, ‘it immediately overturns what it names in order to transform it into something else,’ saying of course only what is not, but speaking precisely in the name of this nothingness that dissolves all things, it being the becoming speech of death itself and yet interiorizing this death, purifying it, perhaps, in order to reduce it to the unyielding work of the negative through which, in an unceasing combat, meaning comes toward us, and we toward it. (1993: 35)

Language is thus of a divine nature, not only because it brings something into existence by the act of naming but because naming annihilates the being of the named thing. This idea is not Blanchot’s, as it can be found in Mallarmé’s famous excerpt from “The Crisis in Poetry”, where in a similar vain he expounds on the annihilating capacity of naming: “I say: a flower! and outside the oblivion to which my voice relegates any shape, insofar as it is something other than the calyx, there arises musically, as the very idea and delicate, the one absent from every bouquet” (76). This thought is almost paraphrased by Blanchot:

For me ably to say, ‘This woman,’ I must somehow take her flesh-and-blood reality away from her to be absent, annihilate her. The work gives me the being, but it gives it to me deprived of being. The word is the absence of that being, its nothingness, what is left of it when it has lost being – the very fact that it does not exist. (1995: 332)

In the same way that Blanchot owes a debt to Mallarmé, Mallarmé draws his inspiration from Hegel’s comment in The Phenomenology on Adam’s


first act of naming animals by means of which the animals ceased to exist as real creatures and came into existence as ideas. And thus meaning and language for Blanchot are always borne out of death; they are a “deferred assassination” that plunges the subject “into a nothingness in which there is no existence or presence” (1995: 323). As Hill states in his work on Blanchot, “To supply any name is always tantamount to erasing a name; and any name, it would seem, can only ever exist in response to a prior absence of name, which is also a demand for a name” (130). It is, therefore, this condition of namelessness and semantic void that elicits the demand to name, though the paradoxical logic subtending this condition is that any name is a replacement, or a provisional name, of this original state of namelessness.

The state of namelessness as an absent center of the subject plays an integral part in Beckett’s The Unnamable. As mentioned earlier, much of The Unnamable is organized on the basis of a failed attempt at constituting self-consciousness. This self-constitution would necessarily have to involve the process of conferring a name onto the source of the speaking voice, an action that entails the imposition of language onto a pre-linguistic, and therefore semantically empty, self. This originary non-identity plays in The Unnamable the role of the infinite reflection, the mise en abyme, of subjectivity. It is this idea of the deferred apperception of self-consciousness that constitutes the narrative as well as what is often paradoxically interpreted as being the manifestation of self-consciousness. The title itself – The Unnamable – is precisely this designation of an empty space, where the possibility of signifying mainly asserts itself but without meaning and content to follow suit. Blanchot summarizes this point in “Literature and the Right to Death”:

When literature refuses to name anything, when it turns a name into something obscure and meaningless, witness to the primordial obscurity, what has disappeared in this case – the meaning of the name – is really destroyed, but signification in general has appeared in its place, the meaning of the meaninglessness embedded in the word as expression of the obscurity of existence, so that although the precise meaning of the term has faded, what asserts itself now is the very possibility of signifying, the empty power of bestowing meaning – a strange impersonal light. (1995: 329)

This ‘strange impersonal light’ can be construed as the voice of the “they” that imposes itself on the unnamable I speaker. And, again as in the case of the possibility of literature, the important question here is not what or who the “I speaker” is, but how it is possible that it is. The possibility of

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literature merges with the possibility of subjectivity being borne in language and should be thought of simultaneously.

The answer to this question is once again double, as the “I speaker” is and is not at the same time, much like the ghostly figures dominating Beckett’s later plays. Some light on this point is shed by Blanchot who in the first chapter of The Space of Literature, called “The Essential Solitude”, deals with the solitude encountered by the writer upon entering the literary work. For Blanchot, one of the essential conditions of the work is that it must be separated not only from the world but also from the self: “to write is to break the bond that unites the word with myself” (1982: 26). This notion, again, can be traced back to Mallarmé’s “Crisis in Poetry”: “The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, yielding his initiative to words, which are mobilized by the shock of their difference” (Mallarmé 75). In addressing the role of solitude of the writer who loses authoritative control over his work, Blanchot conceptualizes literature as containing statements which

state nothing, that is not the repose, the dignity of silence, because it is what is still speaking when everything has been said, what does not precede speech because it instead prevents it from being a beginning of speech, just as it withdraws from speech the right and the power to interrupt itself. (1982: 26)

It is language that is supposed to speak in literature, not the author whose link with the reader must be severed if such an unveiling of language is to take place. Moreover, it should be remembered that, according to Blanchot, the writer does not put language to use for the purpose of expressing “the exactitude and certainty of things and values according to the sense of their limits” (1982: 26) but instead must “surrender to the interminable” (27). Therefore, the disappearing I speaker, the authorial voice, must recede into the background if language is to speak in a voice disposed of its owner.

The question of the speaking voice and its relation to subjectivity in Beckett’s trilogy is elaborated in Blanchot’s essay the title of which comes from the first sentence of The Unnamable, “Where Now? Who Now?”. This is the only text devoted to Beckett’s work, as other works are mentioned only in passing.10 As is the case with other articles by Blanchot, the purpose of this one is not solely to offer an interpretation or commentary on the work of another writer, but to showcase the application of his own theories on literature. One of the predominant considerations in

10 A short analysis of How It Is can be found in Infinite Conversation.


Blanchot’s theory – one that bears relevance to Beckett’s writing - is the question of the neutral voice speaking from behind the text. Blanchot starts his article with a question, already considered earlier in this chapter: “Who is speaking in the books of Samuel Beckett? What is this tireless ‘I’ that seemingly always says the same thing? Where does it hope to come?” (2003: 210). Blanchot is using this question to make a case for his concept of the neutre. This question of the absolute loss of subjectivity in the process of writing recalls the fascination that Blanchot sees in literature. With the loss of the I, the narrative voice slips into a neutral space, which is neither the voice of the author (who for all extensive purposes is dead) nor the voice of the narrator, who has dissipated. This is precisely the situation one finds in The Unnamable, where the “speaking I” recedes and merges into the neutral background from which it emerges. Blanchot quotes Mallarmé who “having reached the horrible vision of a pure work” is now perfectly dead, meaning that “I am now impersonal and no longer the Stéphane whom you know” (1982: 108). Writing of this kind not only “yields him up to the impersonality of death” (109), but also to the experience of irreducible exteriority, an effect of negativity that in Blanchot’s works is called neutrality.

I have already mentioned that the speaking voice in Beckett’s The Unnamable is analogous to an echo without a source. Blanchot’s analogy would be that of a circle without a center – “a speech, one that is not deprived of meaning, but deprived of center, that does not begin, does not end, yet is greedy, demanding, will never stop, . . .” (210). This incessant speech of The Unnamable is not concealing anything more essential and primal than itself, as “when it does not speak, it is still speaking, when it ceases, it perseveres, not silently, for in it silence speaks eternally” (210). The fundamental question is, however, “[w]hat is the void that becomes speech in the open intimacy of the one who disappears into it?” (210).

Taking a phenomenological approach to the art of writing, Blanchot saw the void as the source and essence of literature, an inexpressible beginning and end of writing. Though the negative implication is there, the concept of the void in regard to literature should not be understood as the emptying out of being but as a pre-ontological space of possibility, space beyond the dialectics of negation and affirmation, space which leads to one of the most significant concepts to have come out of Blanchot’s critical output: the neutre. However, similarly to the question of literature, asking ‘what is the neutre?’ will only yield insignificant answers, as part of the answer to this question resides in the very form of the question or, more precisely, in the copula “is”, whose inapplicability to the neuter

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reminds us that it is precisely the unsettled ontological status of the neuter that is at stake.

Similarly to Derridean differance, the neutre is not a concept in the strictest sense of the term, as it stands beyond conceptualization and is, therefore, neither definable nor stable. In other words, the neuter is what must lie outside the narrative and ultimately outside signification; it is what precedes language and what makes language possible. Blanchot in The Infinite Conversation states explicitly that:

The neuter is that which cannot be assigned to any genre whatsoever: the non-general, the non-generic, as well as the non-particular. It refuses to belong to the category of subject as much as it does to that of object. And this does not simply mean that it is still undetermined and as though hesitating between the two, but rather that the neuter supposes another relation depending neither on objective conditions nor on subjective dispositions. (299)

The neuter, therefore, occupies a pre-ontological place in which the very distinction between presence and absence or between subject and object is irrelevant. What is absolutely unknown, impossible to be known is the neutre and so it is not a site of possibility but of radical and infinite impossibility through which literature and writing can exist. In the same way that Heidegger posits the Das Nichts beyond negation, so the neutre is outside all consideration of the there/not there, I-Thou relation of intersubjectivity but is instead a relation to alterity. (Bruns 162). In that regard neither the Das Nichts nor the neutre can be treated as purely nothing.11

The paradox of speaking when there is nothing to say, discussed earlier in reference to The Unnamable and Texts for Nothing, constitutes the neutral silence that for Maurice Blanchot is the source of literature. It is this frantic search for the last word that allows silence to speak. In “Literature and the Right to Death” Blanchot writes:

One can, then, accuse language of having become an interminable resifting of words instead of the silence it wanted to achieve. . . . But this endless resifting of words without content, this continuousness of speech through an immense pillage of words, is precisely the profound nature of a silence

11 Blanchot’s thoughts on the neutre and nothingness would have been impossible without Heidegger’s “Nothing” (Nichts). Blanchot was familiar with both Being and Time and What is Metaphysics. Heidegger’s understanding that a Nothing prior to negation (Verneinung) coexists in moments of dread is intrinsic to the development of Blanchot’s thoughts on negativity.


that talks even in its dumbness, a silence that is speech empty of words, an echo speaking on and on in the midst of silence. (1995: 332)

The echoing effect of empty pronouns, the endless repetitions and “pillage of words” spurring the text on is precisely what Blanchot considers constitutive of silence in literature, the “speech empty of words”. Moreover, Blanchot’s project of dissolving the materiality of words is realized in this conception of silence, which underscores nothingness as the hypostatic and neutral space of literature. The greatest creative ambition for Blanchot is “to make literature become the exposure of this emptiness inside, to make it open up completely to its nothingness, realize its own unreality” (1995: 301). And thus transcending the materiality of language through literature entails putting literature into question, making it “null”. This is done through a language which submits itself to a double relation towards the inexpressibility of the unknown based on the necessity and impossibility to express, a theme already discussed in relation to Beckett and one that finds a direct correlation in Blanchot’s work.

What also makes the Blanchotian neuter such a relevant force in Beckett’s writing is its relation to the question of the subject in the narrative and to the discussion of the voice. Blanchot in “The Narrative Voice” meditates on the origin of “the impression that someone is speaking in the background and prompting the characters or even the events with what they have to say” (460). One possible explanation which comes to mind is parabasis – or the intrusive voice of the author. This possibility, suggested and rejected by Blanchot, leads him to another possible explanation concerning the impersonal and dispossessed voice carrying the narrative, as though “the center of the circle lay outside the circle, in back and infinitely far back, as though the outside were precisely this center, which could only be the absence of all center” (460). This position of alterity of the source of the narrative voice is for Blanchot constitutive of language. Therefore, as the source of language must lie outside its jurisdiction, so the source of the subject, which is a textual subject, must remain ineffable.

the voice set free from speech; it announces a possibility prior to all saying, and even to any possibility of saying. The voice frees not only from representation, but also, in advance, from meaning, without, however, succeeding in doing more than committing itself to the ideal madness of delirium. The voice that speaks without a word, silently – in the silence of a cry – tends to be, no matter how interior, the voice of no one. (1993: 258)

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It is the experience of the voice of the outside that constitutes the space of literature, a dispossessed voice, which prefigures speech and remains immune to negation or appropriation – it is “beyond mastery” (259).

As was mentioned before, the arbitrariness of naming is a central problem in The Unnamable and perpetuates a self-effacing withdrawal from all names and deictic markers. It seems that Blanchot could have been writing about The Unnamable when he said that “[t]he novelist is a person who refuses to say ‘I’ but delegates that power to other people; the novel is filled with little ‘egos’” (1999: 461). For Blanchot, the defining property of literature is the departure from the first person “I” towards the impersonal “he” (it should be pointed out here that in French “he” and “it” share the same pronoun “il”). In the trilogy, there is a similar withdrawal from the first person pronoun, as the characters of Molloy, Moran or other names these “delegates” adopted, no longer have corporeal presence, and are conceptualized only in the form of voices. These voices refuse even the pronoun “I”, opting instead for the impersonality of the third person: “I shall not say I again, ever again, it’s too farcical. I shall put in its place, whenever I hear it, the third person, if I think of it” (358). The neutral “he” should not be seen as representing yet another site from which the narrator can speak, it is not yet another mouthpiece for the writer; instead the neutral “he” is the alterior voice, speaking from beyond the limits of the narrative; its source is outside the narrative and outside language.

The consequence of such an approach of conferring names renders all names arbitrary and subject to constant revision and displacement, thereby – as Leslie Hill points out in his study on Blanchot, “the neutre is perhaps best understood as a movement of perpetual effacement and re-inscription that is logically prior to all conceptual distinctions” (132). Again, it is important to emphasize that the neuter as well as namelessness necessarily precede language and thus cannot be applied and subordinated to the logic of dialectics. Nevertheless, despite this conceptual marginality, namelessness and the neuter refer to the impossible limit of thought that is always already the “alterity that is at the origin of all thought as such” (133). For Blanchot this originary state of namelessness is precisely the domain of the neuter.

Beckett’s critical texts provide evidence of his negative direction in art, a direction taken by his later fiction; however, they fail to elaborate in greater detail on the extent and form this negativity was to take. The philosophy that Beckett draws upon in his formulation of the subject is too diverse to record concisely, leaving his own philosophical underpinnings in the realm of speculation. Blanchot’s innovative, albeit derivative, approach to literature and negativity does provide the conceptual


framework that is missing in Beckett’s critical writing, though it is a framework that resists framing of any kind. Much of Blanchot’s theory draws heavily on Mallarmé and Heidegger and in many ways is a reformulation of their approaches to language. In particular, the relation of language to the subject, the origin of speech, and the source of literature, are all questions which Blanchot developed to a large extent on the basis of Heideggerian phenomenology. Nevertheless, Blanchot’s commitment to developing a philosophically informed theory of literature yields numerous innovative and original thoughts on the negative aspect of literature, which is a context in which Beckett’s work can be elaborated with some insight into the structure and purpose of what has come to be regarded as his exhaustive minimalism and philosophical nihilism.

The Unnamable and Texts for Nothing have been singled out in this chapter, as they both exemplify the negative project Beckett hinted at in his critical work, especially in the “Three Dialogues with George Duthuit”. What becomes the salient point of analysis is the dispossessed subject in language, a subject that is assailed by an exterior voice whose presence is a reflection of his consciousness. The ensuing project of negation and self-erasure, predicated as it is on the hope of finding that right word that would put an end to the voice, can only be frustrated by the very logic of its enterprise. To find a word, an idea, a reason that would silence the voice via negativa implicitly affirms what is negated, and so the voice must continue despite itself. This paradox, which for Blanchot constitutes the demand of literature, takes the form of speaking when there is nothing to say. In this light, Blanchot asks us to consider that The Unnamable is not merely a book, but rather “the pure approach of the impulse from which all books come…” (213).

What becomes a major point of interest in the Blanchot/Beckett relation is the neutral space encountered as a result of the aporias, rhetorical questions, repetition, pronominal shifts permeating TheUnnamable and the Texts for Nothing. Though these two texts present language and subjectivity disintegrated to the bare minimum, they do this in different ways. The thirteen texts constituting the Texts for Nothing,instead of showcasing semantic and syntactic disintegration in the manner of the trilogy, tend to focus more succinctly on neutrality and vacancy. Therefore, it is not so much a question of difference of style, but a difference of intensity and consistency that separates these two otherwise similar works. Negativity still remains the primary underlying force of these texts, though it would be an overstatement and an oversimplification to claim that Beckett’s work endeavors towards a state of silence and nothingness, as such a teleological implication would be a distorting

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imposition on the texts. As was mentioned before, failure of expression is written into the text and, what is more, it is a necessary failure, because this aesthetics of failure requires that language finally betrays its materiality (this is in concord with Beckett’s project of “unwording” the text as stated in “The German Letter of 1937”); moreover, inexpressibility spurs the voice on in spite of the negativity and subtraction working against it. Negation in Beckett’s work is, therefore, constitutive of the ethical obligation to “go on”, to continue despite there being no reason to continue, nothingness being not the telos of the incessant writing but both the cause and effect of the repetitions and “syntax of weakness” precipitating the Texts for Nothing.

This paradoxical language of the neutre, which “discloses the unknown, but by an uncovering that leaves it under cover” (Blanchot 1993: 300), a language that neither discloses nor conceals but leaves the unknown in its otherness intact can be found in The Unnamable and Texts for Nothing, as we see the I speaker gradually receding into the background of language substituted by deictic markers. In the myriad of voices, the materiality of a single and definite referent is dissolved, which exposes the neutral space on which literature is founded. This neutrality serves the purpose of allowing the hypostatic nothingness to speak. However, in a Heideggerian turn, what is ultimately elevated by means of negation of being is being itself. Being is resuscitated by its negation.

CHAPTER TWO

THE INEXPRESSIBLE AS THE INVISIBLE

In this chapter inexpressibility will be analyzed in terms of its visual dimension as it is constructed in both the novels (Ill Seen Ill Said,Imagination Dead Imagine) and dramatic pieces (Krapp’s Last Tape). Taking into account Beckett’s turn towards a predominantly visual medium of television and film, I will analyze these works within the context afforded by critical studies in the field of visuality. Some of the issues I would like to discuss in this chapter regard Beckett’s concern with the visual aspect of his drama as well as the images found in his prose. Even before his turn to television and film, Beckett laid great emphasis on the visual details of the stage design, movement of actors, and the placement of props. The attention paid to the external visual integrity of his plays evinces a general concern regarding the extent to which the visual medium, much like language, should be treated as an instrument of knowledge. The details and themes to be examined here regard the image of the eye, the play of light and darkness and the ubiquitous emptiness found in both fiction and drama. Blanchot’s considerations on the gaze will also be utilized in this chapter, especially in relation to Beckett’s Ill Seen Ill Said. The primary theme to be analyzed here concerns the correlation to the strictly linguistic configuration of unnamability based on the necessity of retaining the invisible as a narrative site.

As Martin Jay argues, the primacy accorded to vision was challenged after the First World War and its hegemony, the “scopic regime” of Cartesian perspectivism, was at an end in the works of Surrealists. Especially in postwar France, where Beckett took up residence, “many intellectuals from a wide variety of different camps experienced a palpable loss of confidence in the eye, or at a very minimum, in many of its time-honoured functions” (Jay 212). One of the main points I will attempt to prove in this chapter is that Beckett’s work inscribes itself into the antiocularcentric thrust in literature and philosophy, where vision was undermined as a privileged mode of apprehension. Beckett concerned himself with the ways in which vision, operating as a metaphor for understanding and knowledge, conceals within itself an impetus to

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violently apprehend the perceived object, thus destroying it in its singularity. This ethical dimension of vision will be the subject of the analysis of Beckett’s Ill Seen Ill Said.

As discussed in chapter one, Beckett’s preoccupation with the insubstantial void beneath the materiality of language could be interpreted as a phenomenological sketching of the fundamental emptiness pervading language, which has by now become viewed as an inherent modernist stance and is the basis for a postmodern questioning of subjectivity as a textual construct. This preoccupation with emptiness later manifested itself in scenic displays, as Beckett’s craft shifted from predominantly narrative to dramatic and theatrical scenes of particular visual intensity. Beckett’s concern with the voice is paralleled by his concern with the visual correlatives of many of the same themes discussed earlier. The void discussed in chapter one is substituted by empty space, an abyss (abyme). Symbolist poets often referred to the concept of the abyss which was understood as an expression of essential nothingness, while Surrealists extended the concept to include the personal psyche, and thus the mise en abyme has served “as a spatially oriented rendering of what the Anglo-Saxon critical tradition has referred to as aesthetic self-consciousness” (Essif 43). Beckett utilizes the aesthetic spatial abyss in order to metaphorically represent the imaginary space of the thinking subject whose presence is preconditioned by the empty space which, in turn, becomes the object of its thought, thus instantiating the mise en abymewhich is to characterize the struggle of the Beckettian protagonist.

As Martha Fehsenfeld notices, since 1977 Beckett’s work shifted from a predominantly literary and dramatic form to explore “the possibilities of the visual image – both fixed and moving – within the framework of television, film and videotape” (222). This shift coincides with a more general repositioning of focus from language to the visual medium, where much of the same concerns and themes occupying the earlier prose are transposed and revisited. It is already a well-documented fact that Beckett’s work, especially his drama and television plays, were heavily influenced by the visual arts. 1 Numerous critics have attested to the analogy between paintings and Beckett’s later work. Knowlson writes: “If we could take X-rays of some of Beckett’s later plays, we would surely be

1 Oppenheim composes a list of the most influential: “Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Adam Elsheimer, and Gerrit van Honthorst among the Old Masters; Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, and others associated with the Die Brücke group; Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, and other German Expressionists; along with [Jack B.] Yeats, George Braque, Karl Ballmer, the van Veldes and other twentieth-century favourites” (73-74).

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able to detect some of the ghostly images of the Old Masters lurking beneath the surface” (187). Moreover, Ruby Cohn notes that “in his television plays, Beckett comes close to painting still lives in movement, so visually are the works conceived” (31). As a director Beckett took pains to “paint” images on the stage. Billie Whitelaw relates that when performing in Footfalls, she sometimes felt “as if he were a sculptor and I a piece of clay. At other times I might be a piece of marble that he needed to chap away at. He would endlessly move my arms and my head in a certain way, to get closer to the precise image in his mind.” And later she notes that “I felt I was being painted with light” (Whitelaw 144-145, qtd in Oppenheim 125).

Interestingly, the gradual movement to a more visual display of Beckett’s themes coincides in part with the amount of illustrations becoming a part of publications. Beckett never solicited artists for their work, but was often approached by various painters who asked Beckett for opinions and artistic feedback. Many artists, ranging from objective to nonobjective painters, found inspiration in the images Beckett conjured in his texts, especially in those that came after the trilogy, where more distilled and vivid imagery is to be found. These close collaborations are further evidence of the conceptual integration existing between visual and literary art. The result of these collaborations are the limited and illustrated editions, called livres d’artiste,2 where the texts are fitted with various illustrations.

Beckett’s fascination with the visual arts can be witnessed in the variety of references found in the scenic composition of the stage design and the images found in his early and late fiction. However, it is not only in the visual references to paintings that Beckett’s interest in the visual arts can be seen as influencing his work, but also in the philosophical themes buttressing the Surrealist movement in art. This is evidenced in the numerous essays and letters Beckett wrote on the topic of art and his befriended artists.3 From these essays it becomes apparent that what is of prime importance for Beckett is the ontology of art and the relation to the

2 Of the many artists to have contributed their illustration to Beckett’s books, Avigdor Arikha must be accorded a special place, as no other artist was as close to Beckett during his lifetime. However, Robert Ryman’s minimalist etchings (found in Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho) come extremely close to Beckett’s own aesthetics in terms of their self-reflexive questioning of the limits of art itself. Other notable contributing painters include the German artist, H.M. Erhardt, and Stanley William Hayter. 3 Disjecta contains Beckett’s earlier essays on painters, including Geer van Velde, Henri Hayden, Jack B. Yeats, Avignor Arikha.

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dialectic of visible and invisible that is the common tension between Beckett’s work and the work of the artists he admired.

To further study the proposition that Beckett’s art is a hybrid of literature and the visual arts, I would like to focus on two intrinsically related aspects of Beckett’s so-called paintings that merit discussion, if only for their ubiquity in his work: light (darkness) and space (emptiness). Darkness surrounding the central area of the play is one of the characteristic visual effects of Beckett’s plays and is reminiscent of Caravaggio and Rembrandt; for example, Rembrandt’s Parable of the Rich Man depicting an old man behind a cluttered desk, surrounded by darkness was a source of influence for the stage design of Krapp’s Last Tape, where we find in the stage directions a “table and immediately adjacent area in strong white light. Rest of stage in darkness” (481). Darkness in both the painting and the play constitutes more than mere background, but “the vessel for the lighted condition, the inner stated, depicted stories” (Oppenheim 1999: 167). In both the painting and the set design, the engulfing darkness both consumes and substantiates the small area of light at the center. It is precisely the indefiniteness of darkness and emptiness that becomes the central focus. Not only does darkness frame the scenes, but it can be seen as being an active element in the narration. Moreover, what also merits attention in The Parable of the Rich Man is that the center is illuminated by a concealed source of light, an effect that is reproduced almost identically in Krapp’s Last Tape. Beckett took pains to make sure that the source of light remained out of view, which is in keeping with the source of the voice (subjectivity) remaining beyond the structure it supports. Krapp spends most of the time in the illuminated space, moving away from the light toward darkness, which can be understood to symbolize the movement from reason to emotion (Brienza 128). Light, with its ancient associations with knowledge, is a metaphor that is put to use by Beckett for the same purpose as discussed earlier. If knowledge is illumination, language is construed as a concealing.

The last element connected with the use of light concerns the sharp contrast between the lighted stage and the surrounding emptiness. The chiaroscuro effect achieved by directing intense light at the main character to the effect of differentiating him or her from the surrounding void can also be noticed in Beckett’s narratives, such as Ill Seen Ill Said and Ohio Impromptu. The same type of effect was noticed by Jessica Prinz in Emile Nolde’s monochromatic painting Prophet, which relates not only to Beckett’s use of light, but also to the gaunt and skeletal figures so often portrayed in his work. It is this play of light and darkness that “allows the invisible to enter the perceptual field” (Oppenheim 2000: 42). Oppenheim


further notes that “[l]ight and darkness, color and the lack of it, in sum, are construct of the visual paradigm to the extent that they concretize the play of the visible and the invisible, more precisely, the rendering of the invisible visible” (2000: 43). The visual field became for Beckett a stage where the linguistic problematic of reconciling opposites is reappropriated into an ocular metaphor.

The second critical element in the visual portrayal concerns the use of space, specifically emptiness. In Beckett’s drama and fiction, emptiness, formlessness is placed alongside geometrical precision of objects moving in predictable, oftentimes repetitive, movements. Emptiness on the stage, much like darkness, acquires an intense presence and is itself part of a semantic code that draws on inexpressibility as the source of its expression. As Essif states, “perhaps the greatest contribution of twentieth-century dramatists to the historical evolution of theatre art has been the development of a new poetics of space for the text, one based on emptiness” (19). Emptiness is the destructured extension of silence, as it constitutes and foregrounds an operative, yet ultimately inexpressible, space. Beckett’s ultimate goal was not to eliminate either visual image or language, but to discover images as well as utterances, which, instead of telling a story, would “convey to the spectator a profound and complex sense of emptiness and silence” (Essif 61). The task was, therefore, to allow silence and emptiness to speak through words and images.

Beckett’s interest in minimalist stage design as a means of conveying emptiness was not an isolated case. As realism and naturalism gave way to the avant-guard and absurdist tradition, so detailed stage sets and psychologically viable characterization gave way to a more austere set design and a general emptiness of theatrical space. This shift was to lead to a realization of theatre as a manifestation of its own potential as a “more pristine signifier rather than a dictatorial signified” (Essif 20). One of the effects of anti-representational symbolism in drama and fiction was a shift to an emphasis from realism to the illusion of realism, to the evocative potency of the theatre, and its iconic presence. The Symbolist legacy extends to Beckett in its preoccupation with representing the non-mimetic ‘unrepresentability’ of emptiness, and thus theatre for Beckett became a metatheatre, where theatricality is staged and exploited as an object in itself. This awareness applies also to Beckett’s fiction, especially his later novellas, where the process of creating an image becomes the focus of writing (Imagination Dead Imagine) or where the process of writing is conveyed through a visual metaphor (Ill Seen Ill Said).

What this entails, in terms of how Beckett’s work can be interpreted, is a presentation of the inner life rather than a materialistic representation of

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the conditions encasing this inner space; and, indeed, the inner space becomes exteriorized on the stage within the context of emptiness. This inside/outside dichotomy was a crucial element in the theoretical backdrop to this development and was one that has become a constant point of contention in Beckett’s art. The way space is utilized to eliminate this inside/outside dichotomy in Beckett’s later fictions is bound with the mobility of the character presented. Whereas in Murphy and Molloy we are dealing with characters who inhabit a world which for the most part conforms to the expectations of realism and are able to maneuver in this world with little or no impediment, Beckett’s later fiction presents a gradual decomposition of both bodily mobility and space, which ultimately leads to the characters being enclosed and paralyzed. Molloy slowly loses his command of his body, finally being consigned to crutches, Malone is bed-ridden and Mahood in The Unnamable is kept in a jar; in Rockaby the woman is confined to a chair, in Happy Days the characters are buried neck-deep in sand, Krapp is confined to his den, rarely able to leave the vicinity of the lighted area. The realism of these enclosed dwellings varies significantly, but it can be said that with no exceptions, all Beckettian characters’ movements are either impeded or imposed.

The significance of the characters’ immobility is that it allows their corporeal presence to blend into the surrounding environment, becoming, as a result, its integral part. The body merges with its surroundings, physically uniting with its environment, becoming, in effect, a living prop. By being tied down to their surroundings (sometimes literally), the Beckettian subject becomes the place of struggle between materiality pulling the subject down in the mire and mud away from any form of idealism. This blurring of borders between the body and its surrounding can be noticed in Edvard Munch’s The Scream, a painting that shares many characteristics of Beckett’s later plays. The silent scream rippling centrifugally is the subject of the painting as it merges the background with the writhing figure, as what is being represented visually is an invisible scream. As Peter Selz writes, “Munch has painted what might be called sound waves, and these lines make the human figure merge with the landscape to express a total anxiety that evokes an immediate response from the observer” (52). This same anxiety can be found in Beckett’s plays, where the emptiness of the background merges with the immobile and finally silent figures, expressing the complete disintegration of the demarcation between inside/outside that is the defining feature of subjectivity.


Imagination Dead Imagine

Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation of Beckett’s language in “The Exhausted” is useful as a beginning of the present analysis of visuality, especially since language for Deleuze does not only refer to linguistic signification but to images as well. The notion of exhaustion is at the center of Deleuze’s analysis and should be understood not as fatigue but as an emptying of all possibilities. Deleuze explains this difference, claiming that “the tired person has merely exhausted the realization, whereas the exhausted person exhausts the whole of the possible” (152). The state of exhaustion is thus one where there are no possibilities left. Within this concept of exhaustion, Deleuze distinguishes three forms of language at work in Beckett’s art, all conforming to three different types of exhaustion.

Langue I refers to the language of Beckett’s novels where “enumeration replaces propositions and combinatorial relations replace syntactic relations: a language of names” (156). Words and grammar are manipulated in such a way as to “exhaust the possible through the elaborate extension of rationality into meaningless absurdity” (Critchley 152). The defining characteristic of this language is that exhaustion is carried out within the confines of rational thought; it is logical thinking (by means of permutations, as is the case with the famous sucking stones scene in Molloy) taken to its absurd extremes. Language here works within the boundaries of standard syntax in a manner that exhausts its own semantic possibilities.

Langue II refers to what has been discussed in Chapter One; namely the nameless voices that speak in order to stop speaking, voices which speak despite the impossibility to say what needs to be said in order for speech to cease. Langue II “is no longer of names, but that of voices, a language that no longer operates with combinable atoms, but with bendable flows. Voices are waves or flows that direct and distribute the linguistic corpuscles” (156). Exhausting the voices would entail exhausting the possibilities of discourse, something that can be found in The Unnamable, Texts for Nothing, and How It Is, where we have the voice of the Other creating an “inexhaustible series of all these exhausted beings” (157). These beings refer to the series of names the voices take on, Molloy, Malone, Mahood, Worm, an endless array of beings this voice inhabits.

The third category of language is of primary interest for this chapter, because it is Langue III “which is no longer a language of names or voices but a language of images, resounding and colouring images” (158). As

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Simon Critchley argues, this language attempts to exceed all categories of language by “aspiring to a pure image, an image that is no longer part of the imagination of names and voices, of reason and memory, as in Langue I and Langue II but is image without imagination” (153). This, of course, is a reference to Beckett’s Imagination Dead Imagine, a text which for Deleuze is exemplary of Langue III, though he does admit that “[i]t is extremely difficult to make a pure and unsullied image, one that is nothing but an image, by reaching a point where it emerges in all its singularity, retaining nothing of the personal or the rational, and by ascending to the indefinite as if into a celestial state” (158). Furthermore, as Deleuze notes, it is not only in images that Langue III operates but also in the representation of space. Quad, along with Nacht und Traume, marks Beckett’s complete break with language, presenting space with silence. Both plays present something of a moving picture, where the exhaustive movements take place on a filmed stage. As Critchley argues it is only in Beckett’s televisual works that the true expression of Langue III can be found, as it is a medium that allows the artist to overcome the limitations of words.

Imagination Dead Imagine (1966) reworks and refines the basic themes found in All Strange Away whose last image of the rotunda becomes the focus of this recit. As Knowlson and Pillig observe in Frescoes of the Scull, Imagination Dead Imagine is an improvement of All Strange Away, which he considers “shapeless and prolix”, as opposed to “the more coherent, more accessible and more moving”(145) piece of work we find in Imagination Dead Imagine. This assessment is one that Beckett might have shared, considering his reluctance to have All Strange Away published.

Unlike in All Strange Away, Beckett focuses here on only one image which he develops with both mathematical and poetic detail, the effect of which is a meditation on the process of imagination itself. The text can be roughly divided into two parts describing an image of a white rotunda containing two silent and motionless bodies facing each other. The first part concentrates on establishing the conditions in the rotunda, especially the temperature and space. The second part shifts to a description of the two bodies inhabiting the rotunda. In both descriptions, Beckett takes pains to offer precise measurements and geometrical parameters, giving us what seem to be instructions to reassemble the image in our imaginations. Time is measured only in the intervals between darkness and light. The reader/narrator takes the role of a camera zooming inside the rotunda, panning the interior with its inhabitants and then zooming out to inspect the rotunda from the outside. The eye carefully inspects the faces of the


two bodies and walls from all sides and angles; there is nothing that escapes the gaze of the narrator, even the regular intervals in which the two pairs of eyes open and shut. With our perception the image is created, guided by the narrator’s voice.

This is not the first piece of work in which Beckett undertakes a self-conscious narrative of perception and imagination; however, as Brienza notices, what differentiates the treatment of these themes in Imagination Dead Imagine from that of his earlier work is narratological distance. In other words, Imagination Dead Imagine does not present these themes, but instead it “stylistically enacts the cognitive processes” (Brienza 120) associated with imagination and perception. Authorial distance is thus eradicated for the sake of a vicarious experience of imagining in which we, the readers, are instructed through the construction of the image. This is done mainly by means of shifts to the imperative voice. Beckett commands the reader to imagine a blank world where even imagination is dead.

The narrative starts with the refusal to accept the death of imagination: “No trace anywhere of life, you say, pah, no difficulty there, imagination not dead yet, yes, dead, good, imagination dead imagine. Islands, waters, azure, verdure, one glimpse and vanished, endlessly, omit. Till all white in the whiteness the rotunda” (551). This is the imagination’s attempt to escape its own creation, to omit and eliminate the fantasies. An obverse situation can be found in Mallarmé’s “Les Fenetres” in which we have a bed-ridden, dying man dragging his decrepit old body from the banal whiteness of his room to the window to press

His white hair and the bones of his gaunt face On the windows that a fine clear sunbeam burns; And fevered, greedy for deep azure, the mouth, As, youthful, it would breathe its wealth away, A virgin skin of a long ago! befouls With a long, golden kiss the warm golden panes.

(Mallarmé 9)

In Imagination Dead Imagine, however, the eye looking through the window of the imagination is instructed to omit the warm familiarity of exteriority and focus its attention on the rotunda. “No way in, go in, measure. . . Two diameters at right angles AB CD divide the ground into two semicircles ACD BDA. Lying on the ground two white bodies, each in its semicircle. White too the vault and the round wall eighteen inches high from which it springs” (551). As Oppenheim notices, Beckett’s tendency toward minimalism utilizes a geometrization, which was the

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defining element of Cubism (127). With all the precise measurements and parameters of the rotunda, the rotunda is a fabrication and nothing more.

What is strikingly familiar in this image is that the source that illuminates and heats the rotunda is absent, “[t]he light that makes all so white no visible source, all shines with the same white shine, ground, wall vault, bodies, no shadow” (151). This raises once again the question of origin. As Rabinowitz notices, “In a number of works the narrator observes that there is no visible source of light, and the objects depicted are usually self-illuminated; this, of course, is a good description of the appearance of imagined entities (166-67). Self-illumination would mean that these “imagined entities” exist of their own accord, which puts in question the conjoined role of the observer/creator. With no source of illumination things exist independently of the author/reader. This would go against P.J. Murphy’s explanation suggesting that the author himself is the source: “He is the source that links heat and light, just as he is the source that links the authorial voice and the ‘voice’ of the occupants” (95). Such an explanation not only undermines Beckett’s insistence on authorial neutrality but imposes structural integrity in the form of an origin to a carefully crafted structure whose existence is meant to question the concept of origin and source. This would be more in line with Iser’s view of negativity being a predetermining force in Beckett’s work, where “imagination is to be negated as the source of such images” (126).

The two bodies which are to be imagined are in an embryonic state (a position taken by both fetuses and corpses, which reiterates Beckett’s conflation of death and birth); these bodies are motionless except for their eyes which open and shut at regular intervals, creating in effect an image which is both human and strictly mechanical. The narrator describes the two bodies in the negative as being “neither fat nor thin, big nor small” and that they “seem to want nothing essential” (1976: 554). It seems that the two bodies are alive, but just barely; however, in accord with the womb/tomb imagery, it remains uncertain whether they are barely alive or almost dead. Being that they are the only organic entities in an otherwise sterile and lifeless environment, it is justified to construe them as manifestations of a dying/nascent imagination at work in an inhospitable mindscape. The repetitious and cyclic movement of light and dark, hot and freezing inaugurates birth and death respectively. Within this dichotomy, the focus should be placed on the brief interval between light and dark, as this is where life takes place. “Then all vibrates, ground, wall, vault, bodies, ashen or leaden or between the two, as may be” (552). To clarify this point, in “Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce”, Beckett explores Vico’s development of his cyclic theory of history from Bruno’s ideas on


opposites. This theory suggests an approach to Beckett’s own constitution and resolution of opposites.

The maxima and minima of particular contraries are one and indifferent. Minimal heat equals minimal cold. Consequently transmutations are circular. The principle (minimum) of one contrary takes its movement from the principle (maximum) of another. Therefore not only do the minima coincide with the minima, the maxima with the maxima, but the minima with the maxima in the succession of transmutations. Maximal speed is a state of rest. (1984: 21)

The two states of hot and cold, dark and light described in Imagination Dead Imagine coalesce in one moment when they become one and the same. The vibrating fluctuation between these two states constitutes the tympanum, or limit, at which opposites merge.

The two bodies lying symmetrically next to each other in Imagination Dead Image are mirror reflections. This situation can also be found in a more developed fashion in Ohio Impromptu, which is why I would like to briefly outline this short play, as it more clearly extrapolates the self-reflective gaze that I believe is also present in Imagination Dead Image.The two identical characters “as alike in appearance as possible”, a Reader and a Listener sitting at a table are shown in black and white, with the contrast accented. Just like Imagination Dead Imagine, Ohio Impromptu isstarkly black and white. The play portrays a man who has lost a companion and to whom comes a man, the Reader, who reads him a story about a man who has lost a companion. The act of reading and hearing, like speaking and hearing oneself speak, is presented here not as ideal self-presence but rather as division and doubling, the two characters being two sides of the same ontological coin. This story of infinite regress and mirror doubling yields a rather surprising ending. When the Reader finishes reading the book, they both look at each other for five seconds in silence. This Narcissistic recognition of the self as the other ushers in the end of the play, the death of the physical character. However, the “Nothing left to tell” is both an end as well as a beginning, as Nothingness is, as it has always been, the primary theme of Beckett’s work, to which the play was but a prelude.

In Imagination Dead Imagine, the male and female are also two aspects of the human, the generic and sexless character of Mahood from The Unnamable. However, it is the gaze that deserves closer attention. Firstly, the narrator remarks that seeing is not always an easy task in the depicted conditions. The narrator comments that “in this agitated light, this great white calm now so rare and brief, inspection is not always easy”

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(553). The characters as well as the reader have difficulties with vision and, as a result, the imagination is frustrated in its attempt at constituting itself. Secondly, the gazes do meet at one point of the cycle: “Piercing pale blue the effect is striking, in the beginning. Never the two gazes together except once, when the beginning of one overlapped the end of the other, for about ten seconds” (553-554). I would like to emphasize the omission of the word “eyes” from this sentence, indicating perhaps the disembodiment of vision which characterizes the recit as a whole. A similar image can be found in The Unnamable: “I sometimes wonder if the two retinae are not facing each other” (301). This image of the reciprocated gaze, found in Ohio Impromptu, The Unnamable and in Imagination Dead Imagine, prompts a self-reflection that inaugurates a long-awaited respite, as it negates the difference that is the source of representation which, as Derrida writes, “mingles with what it represents... There is no longer a single origin. . . The reflection, the image, the double splits what it doubles. The origin of the speculation becomes a difference” (1976: 36). The reciprocity of the gaze shifts the origin of representation away from the two pairs of eyes, away from the two subjects, towards itself as the differentiating origin of the image.

In Imagination Dead Imagine one can find two distinct styles. The mathematical accuracy with which Beckett constructs, and, in turn, asks the reader to visually construct the two bodies facing each other inside the white rotunda, is juxtaposed with the stylized poetic language constructing the scene. These two styles both oppose and complement each other in much the same way that the materiality of bodies (words) would complement the ephemeral substance of consciousness and thought, a dualism which is present in most of Beckett’s work and is brought to the fore in the “Letter of 1936”. Imagination Dead Imagine, however, not only coalesces the poetic and mathematical, but also the visual and linguistic spheres. It seems that Rabinowitz would view the use of poetic and mathematical language as fruitless, claiming that “by attributing stability to images of the inner world we deny their intrinsic impermanence” (165). Indeed, as the narrative progresses, the scientific accuracy with which descriptions were rendered gives way to indeterminacy. “Wait more or less long. . . . More or less long, for there may intervene . . . pauses of varying length. . . .”(551). The rational mind uses geometry and quantifiers as a means of vying for dominance with indefiniteness and disintegration, whilst in effect achieving a balance akin to the cyclic exchange of light for darkness.

Language is here brought to the aid of visualization and in a similar way as in The Unnamable we bear witness to (or vicariously participate in)


what Rubin Rabinowitz observes is a Cartesian mind exercise where the ontological certainty of existence is put into question, and thus the world, bodies, heaven, earth and minds are relegated to the status of illusion. The one aspect of existence impervious to this negation is the thinking entity, the cogito itself. In Imagination Dead Imagine the same process can be observed, where we see the speaking voice attempting to imagine everything away, but unable to fully extinguish the imagination itself. In this context, imagination takes the place of the interminable voice of TheUnnamable, bearing testament to Beckett’s shift from the ontology of linguistic self-determination to visual self-objectification. The relentless voice is substituted by the relentless disembodied eyes found in Ill Seen Ill Said, in Film and in Imagination Dead Imagine.

The central paradox, however, remains the same as in The Unnamableand Texts for Nothing: the impossibility of negating that is needed for negation to be at all possible. Whereas in The Unnamable negation was conducted by means of paradox and exhaustion of logic and argumentation in an effort to achieve pure silence, Imagination Dead Imagine employs a visual metaphor for the same end, in which invisibility and pure “imagelessness” would be the product. In order to undermine the workings of the imagination, to effectively kill it, the narrator has to utilize imagination itself, and thereby instance an infinite regression, a mise en abyme, of images undermining themselves.

The Eye of the Other in Ill Seen Ill Said

Ill Seen Ill Said (1981), often classified, albeit against the intentions of the author, as belonging to Beckett’s second trilogy (Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho),4 is a text that, according to James Knowlson, “is best read as an exquisite prose poem” (1996: 558). Though the story is still written with an impersonal voice, a trademark of Beckettian style, it distinctly departs from the “midget grammar” and “camera images” of his earlier work, e.g. Lessness and Fizzles. Instead of embarking on what would ultimately amount to a futile interpretation of the text, I will instead focus on certain themes that I consider not only prevalent in Beckett’s texts but also indicative of a wider philosophical relation that exists between his works and the works of Maurice Blanchot whose philosophy

4 In the 1996 introduction to the Three Novels (the accepted title by the American and British editions of Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho), Stanley E. Gontrarski recounts that despite Beckett’s vocal apprehensions towards grouping the three novels under the title “Trilogy”, critics persistently refer to the three novels as a trilogy.

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will provide a conceptual framework for this analysis. 5 The title of Beckett’s text will serve as a starting point for an elaboration on the link between sight and speech and, by extension, between vision and writing. This will lead to a consideration of the Blanchotian concept of writing and its applicability to Ill Seen Ill Said. There is evidence supporting the claim that Ill Seen Ill Said is a self-referential account of the writing process and, when approached within the question of visuality, will yield a reading which is attuned both to Blanchot’s thoughts on the process of writing and to the antiocularcentric investment underpinning those thoughts.

Though the interrelations between visuality and understanding have occupied philosophers since antiquity, I will restrict my consideration to the 20th century and approach this vast question through the work of Maurice Blanchot, whose reflections on the matter are in line with Nietzsche’s anti-ocularcentrism. Blanchot asks: “Why, among all possible metaphors, does the optical metaphor predominate? Why this imperialism of light?” (1993: 162). Nietzsche recognized that the ubiquity of visual metaphors in our language testifies to the degree to which seeing has become the ultimate metaphor for understanding. Just as sight is capable of instantly embracing its field of vision, thus making the outside world “legible” for the perceiving subject, so linguistic understanding, in its aim to totalize the unknown, is also based on the mind’s capacity to create a comprehensible – and therefore closed – system within which the subject is posited as the Cartesian cogito. The stability of the seen world thus depends on the stability of the cogito, i.e. on the stability of the perceiving I/eye. In this respect the subject is defined not only in terms of its linguistic configurations, but also in terms of the visual metaphor which substantiates the presence of the self. The questions of epistemology and ontology pervading the linguistic turn of philosophy can be formulated within the visual idiom.

The title of Beckett’s work deserves a gloss, as its compressed structure, when developed, yields possible interpretive directions. Firstly, Ill Seen Ill Said not only indicates the existence of a relation between seeing and saying, but also the impossibility of either of them being fully achieved. Moreover, the order in which the two actions are placed in the title itself implies the primacy of seeing: there is sight before there is speech, and the relation is not one of equilibrium, but of speech being

5 Blanchot did write a short article on Beckett’s trilogy, particularly TheUnnamable, entitled “Where now? Who now?” which can be found in a collection of essays, The Book to Come. In this article, Blanchot focuses mainly on the question of the source of the speaking I, yet offers no developed articulation of Beckett’s work in more philosophical terms.


dependent on sight. We are familiar with Beckett’s distrust of language as a medium of expression; hence, the paring down of language, the gradual linguistic disintegration characteristic of Beckett’s post-trilogy texts. Though language and its limits occupy an essential place in Beckett’s texts, the ontologically constitutive role of visuality has always accompanied this linguistic investment, testifying to the influence Descartes and Berkeley had on his work.6 If language and visuality are linked in terms of their function as mediums for understanding, then both are shown to be ultimately flawed and riddled with aporias. Consequently, any kind of saying will necessarily and always be an “ill saying” and, conversely, any kind of seeing will be an “ill seeing”. As the narrator of Ill Seen Ill Said at one point sates: “The mind betrays the treacherous eyes and the treacherous word their treacheries” (78). Thus, against the grain of the Western ocularcentric tradition, established predominantly with the Cartesian cogito, “seeing” in this text is not commensurate with understanding. Light brings no clarity, only treacheries. The ambiguities and paradoxes of speech which figured in Beckett’s preceding novels are thus now presented as visual aporias.

In Ill Seen Ill Said, the contrast or clash between blackness and whiteness, between visibility and invisibility, as well as the role of light are emphasized throughout the text, where we are presented with a woman, simply referred to as “she”, who is clad in black (perhaps mourning), in a room where “she sits on erect and rigid in the deepening gloom (49). The only white is found on her face and hands, and later, as the narrative unfolds with her back and forth journey from her cabin located “at the inexistent centre of a formless place” (50) to a graveyard, where she kneels in front of a tombstone. Along the way, amid the “zone of stones” she is constantly followed by a hovering, disembodied eye, which, having “no need of light to see”, (50) relentlessly pursues her every step. Upon reaching the graveyard, this mysterious figure finds herself surrounded by twelve “figments” who silently stand afar “invisible were she to raise her eyes” (68).

What this journey to the tombstones constitutes is a repetitive movement of the narrative, a pendulum movement whose rhythm reflects the binary black and white construction of the narrated world. This rhythm suggests an interstitial zone situated between the two opposing states (light, dark; presence, absence); it is a place of indeterminacy, evidenced

6 Beckett’s fascination with Descartes dates to his early years as a writer with such works as “Whoroscope”. The influence Descartes’ philosophy had on Beckett’s work cannot be overestimated, even in the later prose works, such as in the trilogy, where Cartesian logic and the mind as camera obscura are brought into question.

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in the title itself Ill Seen Ill Said: what is seen by the woman or by the hovering eye is neither fully seen nor completely invisible, what is said is neither fully said nor silent. Indeterminacy, liminality and limbo are features of many Beckettian texts, where words never seem to attain finality, either in absolute absence or presence. This is also the situation of The Unnamable, where we have the subjective voice of the speaking “I” speaking from a place between life and death with nothing but the words of its consciousness keeping it company. Similarly, the narrative of IllSeen Ill Said, shrouded in haze and fog, is indicative of the visual indeterminacy pervading the text as a whole. Vision is often impeded by impenetrable darkness or fog to the point that there is nothing left to see but the darkness and fog themselves. “The eye will close in vain. To see but haze. Not even. Be itself but haze” (78). Never is the reader certain of the presence of anything, least of all the protagonist, whose ontological status is always in question, as she is repeatedly and mysteriously vanishing and reappearing: “But she can be gone at any time. From one moment of the year to the next suddenly no longer there. No longer anywhere to be seen. Nor by the eye of flesh nor by the other” (56). I would like to focus on this quote, as it brings together a few important elements: (1) the ontological significance of seeing and (2) the position of the eye. Firstly, what is significant about the woman’s presence is that it is completely separated from the gaze of the eye; neither is she constituted or “divined” by the eye nor does she seem to be under its power. The eye in vain pursues her, tries to capture her, but remains always impotently passive and independent of her. She is “no longer anywhere to be seen. Nor by the eye of the flesh nor by the other” (64). This raises questions concerning the position and relevance of the eye in regard to the woman. Are we to understand that there is another eye apart from the physical one used for vision, an eye of the poetic imagination perhaps? Or are we to understand that there is a physical eye belonging to one person and another eye belonging to another, the Other. This ambiguity is exacerbated if we take this to be another example of Beckett’s puns on the “I” as the subject and the “eye” of perception. Who is perceiving and who is perceived? This is a question (now posed within the visual paradigm) which harks back to the central dilemma haunting the trilogy: “Who speaks the “I” of the text?”

A similar relation to the one found between the writer (perceiver) and the woman (the perceived) can also be discerned in Beckett’s Film, where we see (or rather we are) a camera pursuing Buster Keaton’s character in an attempt to finally capture or seize him. A strikingly similar drama unfolds in Ill Seen Ill Said with the woman being pursued by the hovering eye (the narrator). And again, the eye of the narrator cannot seize the


object of its gaze, “but quick seize her where she is best to be seized. In the pastures far from shelter” (55), as the woman is always half-present, liable to disappear at any moment. A brief look at Film will yield more insight into answering the question of what the relevance and significance the eye has for Beckett.

Beckett wrote a screenplay for Film at the behest of his American publisher, Barney Rosset, who invited him, along with Pinter and Ionesco, to write a film script, though this does not mark the beginning of Beckett’s fascination with film as a possible artistic medium.7 According to Enoch Brater, “Beckett’s attraction to film, therefore, lies in the medium’s ability to evoke the ‘said’ by the ‘unsaid,’ quite the opposite of the ‘extraordinary evocation of the unsaid by the said’ he admired so much in Denis Devlin’s poetry of the thirties” (Brater 84). It was Beckett’s choice for this to be a silent film, evocative in its expressive potential to intimate the unsaid through the visual imagery afforded to him by the new medium.

The short story set in 1929 is quite simple in its narrative. Buster Keaton’s character, the object (O), is relentlessly pursued by the eye (E). The pursuit begins on the street and gradually progresses from an exterior environment to an interior one, the last scenes taking place inside a small room. The final frames of the film make it clear that the two perspectives involved have an identical source. O’s attempt to remove all forms of perception ultimately fails as one cannot escape self-perception and the last scene is that of the camera eye (E) finally catching sight of O. This catching sight is now a familiar image (see Imagination Dead Imagine, IllSeen Ill Said).

The title brings self-reflexive focus to the medium itself. Film is, as Linda Ben-Zvi writes, “a film about a film” (31). This work has been most commonly interpreted with the aid the Latin epigraph – esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived) – attributed to George Berkeley, whose maxim places ontology in the subordination to perception and thus the protagonist is dependent on the ocular for proof of his existence. The eye is, therefore, of utmost importance in Film, appearing in the first and last scene. The reference antiocularcentric thrust of the slit eyeball at the beginning of Unchien andalou by Dali and Buñuel is unmistakable. Further evidence of the

7 Beckett revealed an interest in the medium much earlier, when, in 1935, he wrote to Sergei Eisenstein in hopes of securing an apprenticeship for himself (Knowlson 1996: 212-213). It is ironic that Beckett’s aim at that time was to move out of silent black and white film and take advantage of the possibilities of colour film, when the only film he realized was black and white, and silent.

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importance of the eye as the central metaphor of the film is in the fact that the working title of Film was “The Eye”.8

Since the enucleated eye is given such a salient position in both Filmand Ill Seen Ill Said, its significance must be given further attention. The eye can be construed as the eye of the omnivoyant Other, whose pursuit to visually capture its object (whether it be the woman in Ill Seen Ill Said or (O) in Film) in its full presence is frustrated by the object taking flight or, as in the case of the woman in Ill Seen Ill Said, by fog, haze and her tentative corporeal presence. However, let us consider the alternative. It is equally possible to construe the woman as the other. Seeing her would entail defining her within the space of the eye’s visual field. Defining her, however, would in effect deprive her of her alterity. The eye’s gaze is directed at the woman, who is not aware of the eye’s presence. Despite this violent gaze, the woman’s alterity is ensured by our not discerning her and is further reinforced by our absolute ignorance of her thoughts and motives which lie outside the narrative and, therefore, outside our knowledge. Furthermore, the impenetrable haze and confusion surrounding her bar access to this knowledge, thereby securing her from the “objectifying gaze”. This distance – both visual and epistemological – is maintained between her and the eye, a distance which is the constitutive difference between writing and sight.

As stated earlier, Ill Seen Ill Said, seen as an extension of the semi-autobiographical Company, focuses on the artistic process of writing rather than on biographical fragments of the artist’s life. “Already all confusion. Things and imaginings. As of always. Confusion amounting to nothing. Despite precautions. If only she could be pure figment. Unalloyed. This old so dying woman. So dead. In the madhouse of the skull and nowhere else” (1996: 58). The meaning and effects of writing will thus be recognized as occupying the salient theme of the text. If Ill Seen Ill Said is read in such a way, then the “poetics of naming” indeed becomes central to our analysis.

In the chapter entitled “Speaking is not Seeing” of his monumental book, The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot poses a challenge to the ocularcentric bias of Western philosophy by exposing the underlying reasons for such a privileging. The same reason why sight was elevated to the metaphor for understanding and thus given primacy over language is for Blanchot the reason for its incompatibility to neutrality. As mentioned

8 In his essay “On Directing Film”, Schneider mentions that the earlier draft of Film was titled “The Eye”, changed upon completion when it became clear that the appearance of the eye at the beginning and ending of the film suffices as a clear philosophical indication of the ocular emphasis.


earlier, seeing as understanding involves the violent act of grasping the object and assimilating it into the idiom of the subject and thereby destroying the alterity of the perceived object. Sight, due to the immediacy of the relation between the object and the subject, instantly reveals and exposes whatever precedes it. The same rule is applicable to writing, since it is also in danger of destroying the alterity of what approaches, if the purpose of writing is to “delimit” and “define”. For Blanchot – and I believe also for Beckett – writing is thus trapped in a double-bind, wherein the necessity of writing is linked with the impossibility of writing in such a way that would preserve the alterity of the object. In other words, seeing and writing, in their different yet ultimately violent ways, efface the perceived object as an Other. And thus Blanchot states that

. . . we find justified in Beckett’s case the disappearance of every sign that would merely be a sign for the eye. Here the force of seeing is no longer what is required; one must renounce the domain of the visible and of the invisible, renounce what is represented, albeit in negative fashion. Hear, simply hear. (1993: 329)

For Blanchot writing does not necessarily have to fall into the same imperialistic category as sight. He attempts to address the possibility of a language which would be separated from the ocularcentric metaphor, based on the unveiling of the thing said, “a speech such that to speak would no longer be to unveil with light. . . . Here what reveals itself does not give itself up to sight, just as it does not take refuge in simple invisibility” (1993: 29). By combining the sight metaphor with speech, Blanchot’s notion of light is anything but an agent of epistemological revelation. Here, the theme of indeterminacy, where something is neither visible nor invisible, defers from the encapsulating law of light.

One of the constitutive differences between vision and language is the extent of the limits the respective mediums possess. Whereas vision, grounded as it is in one perspective, is always bound by the limitations of a horizon which encircles the subject, language, on the other hand, has no such limitations and is capable of limitless perspectives. Blanchot writes: “The terrifying word passes over every limit and even the limitlessness of the whole” (1993: 28). The terror he writes of can be found in the absolute transgression of language, which “no longer presents itself as speech, but as sight freed from the limitations of sight” (1993: 29). What is more, visibility annuls the distance between the object and spectator, but in speech there is always a difference, a distance in the form of language.

Keeping this in mind, I would like to introduce Blanchot’s distinction between two types of writing; the writing of the day and the writing of the

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night. Writing of the day, also referred to as the first slope, refers to traditional prose, wherein language serves the writer in order to represent ideas clearly and realistically. This is the language of enlightenment, of comprehension and clarity; in short, it is a language dependent not only on mimesis but also on the metaphor of light; hence, what is named is known. The other form of writing is nocturnal; the writing of the night does not aim at a mastery of language but, instead, opens the writer and language to the impersonal voice that is at the source of writing. It is because of this irreducible distance between the writer and the writer’s work that Blanchot’s concept of nocturnal writing becomes the only “responsible” mode of writing, as only it is through it that a response to the other is possible. In the absence of the law of the light, the uncertain and ineffable can be approached.

This distinction is important, not only because Beckett also uses the night/day opposition to foreground the narrative in Ill Seen Ill Said. The protagonist moves between these two states, but only leaves the safety of her cabin when night descends. Encountering the others at the graveyard, the place of death, during the night would be evocative of Blanchot’s description of the nocturnal writer for whom ambiguity and silence, the two themes which invoke the infinity of a relation that can never be achieved, take precedence over the “enlightened” and ocularcentric model of language which totalizes, grasps, and comprehends. The ever-present darkness in Ill Seen Ill Said – for it is never day, just evening and night – reveals the difference and separation that would otherwise be eliminated by the clarity of light. Visibility is rejected in Ill Seen Ill Said for the sake of difference by which a relation with the unseen and ineffable is preserved.

For Blanchot writing does not seek to encapsulate the subject and, therefore, it breaks with all “empirical experience of the world” as well as “. . . with thought when thought gives itself as an immediate proximity” (1993: 261). And thus, writing, always engaged with the “non-manifest” and the unknown (understood by Blanchot as the neutral), will, as a result, always border on the incomprehensible and the ambiguous, and its determinations will strive not for full presence but, instead, will exist interstitially between the realms of speaking and seeing, between black and white. The woman of Ill Seen Ill Said exemplifies the subject of writing in her “vacillations” between the safety of the shelter (the writing of the day) and her nocturnal journey to the graveyard (the writing of the night); she is neither fully present nor fully absent and, therefore, occupies the position of the limit. Furthermore, the eye’s inability to assimilate her provides further indication of the unsurpassable distance Beckett establishes


between the subject and the object. The woman does not “give herself as immediate proximity” (62) and so will always remain beyond the totalizing grasp of language as well as vision.

Visuality and writing – as well as another familiar Beckettian and Blanchotian theme, namely, death – come together in Blanchot’s analysis of the myth of Orpheus entitled “Gaze of Orpheus”. As Martin Jay claims in his account of Blanchot’s analysis, “Orpheus’s gaze is the founding act of writing because it crosses the threshold of death and seeks in vain to return to an immediate of visual presence that cannot be restored” (Jay 553). A comprehensive examination of all the concepts involved in the “Gaze of Orpheus” would prove impractical within the scope of this chapter; therefore, I will limit my concluding consideration to a reading of this myth in the context of the possibilities and impossibilities of writing in Ill Seen Ill Said. My hypothesis will be that Orpheus’s descent to the underworld to retrieve Eurydice is a confrontation with the Blanchotian other night and parallels the dramatization of nocturnal writing found in IllSeen Ill Said.

Orpheus is granted permission by Pluto and Persephone to bring Eurydice back under the one condition that he may not turn around and look at her until they have both returned to the light of day. Of course, the pivotal moment of the myth is when Orpheus breaks this agreement and does glimpse at Eurydice at which point she disappears. If we consider Orpheus’s project to be, as Blanchot defines it, “to bring back [the work] into daylight and in the daylight give it form, figure and reality” (1993: 437) then this confrontation with Eurydice reveals an impasse which is at the heart of writing. In order to complete his Work, which is the retrieval of Eurydice, he must obey the law imposed on him, a law that forbids sight. The law of concealment thus constitutes the necessary limit in Orpheus’s work, but it is a limit that must be transgressed in order for Orpheus, or metaphorically the writer, to complete his work, that is, in order to fail. As Simon Critchley writes, Orpheus’s aim and the aim of nocturnal writing is not to make the “invisible visible, but to see the invisible as invisible” (43). This impasse defines the work for both Beckett, Blanchot and Orpheus and reveals the inevitable failure of the work. Sight, here being a metaphor for writing, is shown not only in its futility but also in its destructive capacity. Orpheus’s gaze is considered to be a movement of desire and inspiration and is thus inextricably linked to writing, which, in turn, “is related to the absence of the work...” (Blanchot 1993: 424).

In Ill Seen Ill Said, the act of looking directly and seizing the object, that is the woman, is also frustrated. The impossibility to see well in Ill

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Seen Ill Said corresponds to the impossibility of Orpheus’s gaze capturing Eurydice. The act of writing for Blanchot, and perhaps also for Beckett, is predicated on this impossibility of naming or seeing in a way that would once and for all master the object. For Blanchot, Eurydice is “the limit of what art can attain; concealed behind a name and covered by a veil, she is the profoundly dark point towards which art, desire, death, and the night all seem to lead” (1993: 437). The woman, who is also covered by a veil, profoundly dark, is for the writer’s eye the impossible end towards which seeing and writing leads.

Taking into account all that has been said thus far, it may be assumed that the violent power of language to subdue and destroy, a theme consistently revisited by Blanchot and Beckett, can be understood also to hold true for vision. To say or see something completely, not ill, but fully, would be to place it in a totalizing structure, thereby eradicating its otherness and reducing it to the context from which we see or name it. This imperialism of light, therefore, refers also to the word, which is used to comprehend and impose order. Beckett’s earlier distress regarding saying too much and yet not saying enough, can also be seen as bearing a relation to seeing. The power to see clearly in Ill Seen Ill Said is just as diminished as the power to speak comprehensibly, that is, in a way that would permanently fix and entrap meaning. “Seeing well” and “saying well” would thus only expose the imperialistic attitude towards the unknown that should always be present as an absence and spoken of in silence.

In conclusion, it is important to reiterate a few major points. Beckett’s interest in the visual arts extended not only to his occasional corroborations with painters, but an aesthetic kinship he discerned between his minimalism and the art of German Expressionism and Surrealism. His interest surpassed dilettantish fascinations with trends and fashions in contemporary art and was more concerned with the means by which art questions its own possibilities of expression, a theme that is one of the most conspicuous in his own art. These possibilities focused on the oscillating limits of visibility and invisibility, and it is this limit that becomes for Beckett the site of his art. This shift of focus from the purely literal to the visual coincides with the antiocularcentric inclinations discernable in the works of postwar French writers and philosophers, notably Bataille and Merleau-Ponty respectively. Nowhere in Beckett’s prose do we see a privileging of sight over any other mode of apprehension or apperception; quite to the contrary, both sight and language are seen as denigrated modes of understanding that only frustrate and bar the preontological silence and nothingness.


Though most of Beckett’s prose contains a strong visual element, it is in his post-trilogy work where visuality and the image act as a proxy for the linguistic entanglements found in the trilogy and Texts for Nothing.Indeed, Deleuzes’s classification of three languages is applicable to the difference of focus. Whereas the trilogy dealt with the exhaustion of logical means of expression, the later works, such as Imagination Dead Imagine and Ill Seen Ill Said, take on a more visual aspect of exhaustion. The former expresses the process of imagination at work within the impossibility of adhering to the call of self-annihilation. The latter work presents the impossibility of vision taking hold of the object in a way that would retain its otherness. Analogous to this theme is Blanchot’s description of Orpheus’s gaze which kills what it apprehends. This metaphor can be traced in Beckett’s presentation of the enucleated eye of Ill Seen Ill Said, Film, and Imagination Dead Imagine. This all-seeing eye, reminiscent of the Benthamite panopticon, figures as a camera lens or the imagination itself, and is depicted in its impossible pursuit of the object of perception. What must remain outside of view is the inexpressible otherness that engenders writing and sight.

The notion of inexpressibility is a bi-product of the subject/object dichotomy, and of the presupposition that Beckett is writing to say some “thing”. According to Alain Badiou, Beckett’s work is self-sufficient, self-constituent as it establishes its own internal interrelations. A similar claim could be made of abstract expressionism, as both forms of art do not appeal to anything outside their borders for either validity or meaning. In the same way that abstract expressionist painting is not a painting of something particular, so Beckett’s narratives are not about something, they are that something – to echo Beckett’s praiseful essay on Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake: “Here form is content, content is form” (1984: 27).

What is, therefore, so often termed as inexpressibility in Beckett’s work does not necessarily have to connote an unattainable source of enunciation, a totality and plentitude achieved in a teleological, and even theological, manner. Nor does it have to exclusively connote an aesthetics of failure which curtails the limits of language, though both interpretations are well-established and justifiable. As was already elaborated on in Chapter One, Beckett’s incessant impossibility to say the final “I” and achieve the long-desired silence in The Unnamable results from the self-reflexive movement lying at the origin of the Cartesian self-constitution. It is also from that impossibility to express that the obligation to express is borne. Inexpressibility is thus not the failed outcome of expression, but its origin. Likewise, the visual metaphor works in much the same way and perhaps goes some way in elucidating the logic of inexpressibility. With

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the emphasis on emptiness and darkness, it becomes clear that whatever is the object of perception exists precisely as a delimited abstraction of its background; in the same way words cut through silence, so a painter’s brush separates and divides space. Beckett’s art is one that is trapped between two extremes and these dichotomies operate against each other as a generating force of imagination and life. This event of birth/death takes place in the reciprocated gaze which, like Orpheus, kills, while, at the same time, constituting the possibility of art.

CHAPTER THREE

ETHICS OF NEGATIVITY

The first chapter proposed a reading of inexpressibility in terms of its linguistic manifestation, the second chapter approached absence and invisibility in its visual manifestation; both these visual and textual aspects of Beckett’s treatment of inexpressibility will in this chapter converge into an ethical reading, as what is sustained in Beckett’s texts, construed as either linguistic exhaustion or visual emptying, can be read as an encounter and tentative relation with alterity. This chapter, therefore, shall focus on the ethical reverberations of inexpressibility and will be in many ways an extension of what I have already outlined in the previous chapters; namely, the relation between Beckett and Blanchot approached through a common set of terms, such as neutrality, obligation and silence. To flesh out this relation further, it will be necessary in this chapter to refer to Emmanuel Levinas’s redefinition of ethics as the first philosophy, as it constitutes the basis of Blanchot’s philosophy and further develops the theoretical backdrop against which I will read Beckett’s How It Is.Although an ethical role of inexpressibility can be traced in apophatic discourse of negative theology and Derridian deconstruction, it was Levinas who developed and problematized the relation with alterity, which is the basis of ethics. Accordingly, I will show how these aforementioned apophatic traditions leading up to Levinas and Blanchot bear upon Beckett studies.

Though the place and significance of alterity have already been discussed in relation to negative theology and deconstruction, the usefulness of reading Beckett through Levinas and Blanchot has rarely been the subject of critical analysis. 1 With Levinas’s work being so intimately connected with the philosophical framework developed by Derrida and Blanchot, both of whom viewed Beckett’s work as expressing their

1 Connor’s “Beckett in the Face of Levinas” (Connor 1992) is devoted to the subject. Trezise and Locatelli (1990) briefly address this issue. There is also a chapter in Anthony Uhlmann’s Beckett and Postructuralism devoted to the relationship between Derrida, Levinas and Beckett in terms of ethics and language.

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respective philosophical tenets, it is surprising that more attention has not been paid to the ethical aspect of Beckett’s work. This chapter will attempt to address this question with respect to Beckett’s How It Is, which has been regarded as a turning point in Beckett’s prose writing after the ten year period following the publication of Texts for Nothing, during which Beckett concentrated on theatre work. How It Is marks a return to prose work and for the first time establishes a relation to alterity as its primary theme. The argument developed in this chapter is that the ubiquity of absence and silence pervading Beckett’s How It Is is tied to the ethical demand as posited in Levinas’s philosophy. The notions of il y a in a similar way as the Blanchotian neutre serve to establish the place, or rather non-place, in which How It Is is set.

How It Is is an attempt to address alterity without incorporating it into its own idiom, i.e. preserving its otherness by means of not only paratactic syntax, which frustrates cohesion and comprehension, but also through the theme of witness and testimony which I draw from Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz. The role of the witness and testimony will be selected as a focal point of the analysis because of its relation to the Holocaust experience referred to by Theodore Adorno, Agamben and Levinas. Speaking of the Holocaust has become a modern resuscitation of the apophatic tradition which confers upon the witness silence in much the same way in which the true protagonist of How It Is is a silent witness, on behalf of whom the narrator conveys the story.

In order to develop this argument, I will place it in relation to the apophatic tradition as it develops with Derrida and Levinas. Instead of arguing that Beckett’s work is yet another manifestation of this tradition, I do propose the thesis that ontology in How It Is is rather a manifestation of the obligation to respond to alterity, exteriority and the Levinasian il y a.

Inexpressibility in Negative Theology and Derrida

The trope of inexpressibility has long history, as it has for centuries been utilized in religious discourse as a means of positing the infinite divine and sacred beyond the finite materialism of language. The Cloud of Unknowing, the Hebrew prohibition to name God, Plato’s Timaeus,Eckhart’s sermons, to Dionysius’ hierarchies to Heidegger’s late unpublished lectures – what all these disparate works have in common is the attention they accord to the inexpressible source of their discourse proper to apophatic discourse. Apophatic discourse, or negative theology, is not a particular religion containing a set of tenets and prescriptions, but is a way of approaching God through via negativa. Instead of a revelation being the

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basis of religion, apophatic discourse, through subtraction and negation, intimates the metaphysical essence that is God. This approach is based not only on the tenet that language is a human construct, therefore a useless means of apprehending God, but also on the interdiction against graven images of God found in the Old Testament, an interdiction which, according to Jean-François Lyotard, Kant viewed as the most sublime fragment of the Bible (146).

This unmistakable strand of apophatic discourse in Western philosophy can certainly be detected in Beckett’s prose, especially in the dramatized tension of language at its limits. These affinities between negative theology and modernist literature have not gone unnoticed by Beckett scholars. Shira Wolosky goes as far as to claim that Beckett’s work in general “invokes a broad context and history of negative mysticisms as a framework” (165). Within the tradition of negative theology, apophatic discourse approaches that which, by definition, must remain outside language. If religious discourse approaches God through negation, so Beckett, through much the same techniques of negation and paradox, approaches self-consciousness, self-present subjectivity, and the foundation afforded to thought by the Cartesian tradition.

Although the aforementioned critics present an interpretation that justifies the deployment of negative theology as a lens though which to analyze Beckett’s work, it must be remembered that this can only be done to a certain degree; otherwise the interpretation becomes an imposition on Beckett’s texts. Indeed, inscribing theological discourse onto Beckett’s texts can provide a context wherein a meaningful pattern is revealed, yet this context nonetheless contaminates the text with surplus meaning, which is why the focus of this comparison should be directed solely on the rhetoric and techniques common for both negative theology and Beckett. Reading Beckett alongside negative theology is an exercise which yields results in the form of a topographical analysis of language patterns centered around paradox and negation; however, it would be unfounded to claim that references to negative theology are in any way privileged or more pronounced than other discourses applicable to Beckett’s texts, or that negative theology offers a more comprehensive context to analyze this work. How negative theology is important and relevant for this study can be summarized by focusing on one essential factor without which neither negative theology nor Beckett’s paratactic prose would be able to sustain themselves; namely, the tentative relation maintained with the inexpressible exteriority of the text.

The themes of impossibility of expression, failure of expression, and instability of the speaking subject have all given deconstruction grounds to

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become a productive theoretical tool in approaching Beckett’s writing. What is more surprising, however, is that for the same thematic reasons, critics turned to negative theology as a means of approaching Beckett’s use of paradox and insistence on the impossibility of giving expression to the inexpressible. It would, however, be an overstatement to suggest that it is some kind of divinity or godhead that is invoked, when Beckett’s characters are struggling with speech or when language itself is brought to exhaustion and absurdity. Negative theology is applicable in terms of methods but becomes counterproductive if the whole theological and ideological context upon which apophatic discourse is predicated is brought into play as a means of conferring meaning where there is none.

It should be mentioned that negative theology reemerged in philosophical discussion only after deconstruction had established itself in contemporary literary theory. Not only has Derrida’s deconstruction been linked to negative theology, but poststructuralist critics, such as Jean Luc Marion intentionally took up negative theology as their philosophical domain. Indeed, Derrida’s critique of the metaphysical bias within Western philosophy could be viewed alongside negative theology’s negation of language, especially in terms of the differential and deferring movement of the sign, which renders impossible the self-presence of the signifier. Because each signifier has to refer to another signifier for meaning, the final signified is kept at bay; the transcendental signified figures as the promise which can never be fulfilled in language. Similarly, the metaphysical kernel of theological systems is also kept beyond the system it purportedly supports.

Derrida made a point early on in his career to distance himself from the implicit relation deconstruction has with negative theology, but it was not until the publication of “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials” that he addressed the topic directly. In this essay, Derrida recognizes the “more or less tenable analogy” and “family resemblance” between negative theology and “every discourse that seems to return in a regular and insistent manner to this rhetoric of negative determination” (74) but refuses to equate deconstruction with negative theology. Whereas negative theology proposes identifying God with a hyperessential presence beyond any affirmative and propositional statements, deconstruction proposes disturbing the very ontological presuppositions which allow such statements to function in the first place. Derrida works on the margins of the ontological tradition, seeking pre-ontological infrastructures, instead of simply repeating metaphysics. This seems to be the reason why Derrida refuses to place deconstruction under the banner of negative theology: “No, I would hesitate to describe what I put forward under the familiar


heading of negative theology, precisely because of that ontological wager of hyperessentiality that one finds at work both in Dionysius and in Meister Eckhart” (1992: 78). In its negation, the hyperessential being that is God still figures as a presence, a being beyond being (epekeina tes ousias). This form of inexpressibility does not do justice to the ethical demand posed by a radically Other.

Now, since I have already discussed the link negative theology shares with Beckett and Derrida respectively, I will proceed to the third relation – Derrida and Beckett. Though Derrida’s writing has on occasion wandered towards literature, incorporating such writers as Joyce, Mallarmé, and Kafka, he has always refrained from writing about Beckett. The reasons for Derrida’s refusal to approach Beckett are discussed in an interview with Derek Attridge, where he admits that, apart from devoting some of his seminars with students to Beckett, he has never written anything about him, despite or indeed because of a deep affiliation with Beckett’s writing. Thus, it can be seen that Derrida has consciously distanced himself from both negative theology and Beckett’s work, albeit in different ways and for different reasons. Speaking about Beckett in the interview with Attridge, Derrida says:

This is an author to whom I feel very close, or to whom I would like to feel myself very close; but also too close. Precisely because of this proximity, it is too hard for me, too easy and too hard. I have perhaps avoided him a bit because of this identification. Too hard also because he writes – in my language, in a language which is his up to a point, mine up to a point – texts which are both too close to me and too distant for me even to be able to ‘respond’ to them. (1992: 60)

This closeness Derrida notices between his own work and Beckett’s has given a cue to many critics to pursue a deconstructive approach to Beckett’s work, viewing it as essentially self-deconstructive, thereby rendering impossible any deconstructive reading, as that would merely repeat the inherently deconstructive gestures found in Beckett’s texts. Such interpretations have very often relied heavily on the application of Derridean terminology to Beckett’s fiction with an emphasis on the now common themes of the subject’s absence from the text, the disappearance of authorial presence, and a denial of logocentricity.2 Though Derrida is reticent about this topic, he betrays one important thought:

2 Trezise’s book Into the Breach stands out as the seminal deconstructive interpretation of Beckett’s fiction.

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The composition, the rhetoric, the construction and the rhythm of his [Beckett’s] works, even the ones that seem the most ‘decomposed,’ that’s what ‘remains’ finally the most ‘interesting,’ that’s the work, that’s the signature, this remainder which remains when the thematics is exhausted (and also exhausted, by others, for a long time now, in other modes). (1992: 61)

Beckett’s work, so often viewed as a systematic exhaustion, has rarely been seen outside its technical and linguistic layer. It is here in the “remains” of what is left that the ethics of Beckett’s work can be extrapolated.3 As decomposition and fragmentation break down any means of meaningful discourse, the remains become of vital importance. According to Critchley, “such remains (reste) would be the irreducible idiom of Beckett’s work, its ineffaceable signature. It is this remainder that is both revealed through reading and resists reading” (145). Gary Banham takes up this line of though in “Cinders: Derrida and Beckett”, where the ‘cinders’ or remains link Derrida’s deconstruction with Beckett’s apophatic discourse. The cinder in question refers to the “nothing that can be in the world, nothing that remains as an entity. It is the being that [...] remains beyond everything that is, remains unpronounceable in order to make saying possible although it is nothing” (Derrida 1991: 73 qtd. in Banham 57). This cinder is a nothingness that cannot be expressed, it is, according to Banham, the place from which issues the voice of the unnamable, a limit between exteriority and the subject. Banham writes that, “when we reach the ‘edge of language’ through the encounter with that which defies naming we find that language itself is an edge which cuts between the world and the one who speaks” (58). To write of this place or for this place is to write at the edge of language, an edge separating the writing/speaking subject with alterity.

Exteriority, Alterity and Obligation

In “Tympanum”, an essay found in Margins of Philosophy, Derrida discusses how exteriority forces upon philosophy a reexamination of textuality. Derrida criticizes philosophy not for ignoring alterity, as “exteriority and alterity are concepts which by themselves have never surprised philosophical discourse. Philosophy by itself has always been concerned with them” (1982: viii), but for having done something far more

3 A hypothesis could be ventured here that when Derrida speaks of Beckett poetics in terms of a ‘remainder’ he is also referring to deconstruction, seeing in it an ethics in terms of what is left after the process has been carried out to the end.


violent; it “has appropriated the concept (of the other) for itself; it has believed that it controls the margin of its volume and that it thinks its other” (1982: x). Derrida argues that the coherence of scientific and philosophical discourse is maintained at the expense of alterity, its margins defined in such a way that alterity is kept at bay, unable to disturb the structurality it helps to create. It is this relation, a recognition without appropriation, that becomes the crux of the ethical demand. The notion of signifying alterity without determining it philosophically is what constitutes the question Derrida poses to Emmanuel Levinas. If one is to speak of alterity, one has to do the impossible task of shedding the ontological language used in philosophical discourse in favour of ethical interminability, silence and the inexpressible. Thus, the ethical dimension of inexpressibility has as its base the thought of the Other, or rather as a saving of the Other from expression which would entail its destruction, as through expression it would no longer be other than me. In other words, if the Other is to be viewed as the absolute Other, it must be infinitely separated from a language which seeks to identify it always in relation to itself by conferring an identity to it (naming) or by defining it and thus drawing a limit, thereby excising it from the unknown. To include the Other into the discourse of the subject while at the same time preserving or saving its otherness has been, as Theodor Adorno notices, the theme of post-Holocaust thought, a theme Adorno thought was best exemplified by Beckett’s negative poetics.4

Indeed, what binds the disparate postmodern theories is a concern for difference and a resistance to mastery and thematization of alterity and Adorno sees Auschwitz as the confirmation and horrific effect of identity-thinking which incorporates and thereby destroys alterity. For Adorno, “Auschwitz confirmed the philosopheme of pure identity as death” (1973: 362), as identity is formed only by eliminating what is Other. It is important to mention here that Auschwitz plays a significant role in the reformulation of the inexpressibility topos, having become a synecdoche of the inexpressible horrors of the Holocaust, where silence is the only possible means of conveying the enormity of destruction. To make the Holocaust intelligible by means of a narrative is to commit violence on an event which has become unspeakable. Therefore, this silence speaks not only of the limits of language in the face of inexpressible horror, but also of the distance that must be maintained.

It is not surprising then that ever since the nihilistic tendencies of metaphysics have been linked to the historical tragedy of the Holocaust,

4 Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory was to be dedicated to Samuel Beckett.

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critics have attempted to think of postmodern ethics in terms of the preservation of alterity in relation to our discourse. And thus literature, art and philosophy have oriented themselves around the notion of maintaining a distance to what has become the metaphysical Other, a distance that would save alterity from the integrative economy of enlightened and identity-oriented discourse.

This ethical distance takes certain artistic forms, silence being only one poetic manifestation of the abovementioned interdiction, yet, as Beckett’s work displays, there are other tools at hand which serve to manifest this distance. Fragmented, incoherent writing which rejects any form of totalizing rational comprehension is a technique readily utilized by Beckett in his post-trilogy years. Meaninglessness, not as an effect of linguistic inaccuracy, but as an expression of the futility and failure of language in the face of existence, becomes meaningful in itself. Indeed, only a literature which breaches the limits of meaning and meaningless is possible after the Holocaust; it is a literature of both necessity and impossibility.

Though Adorno leads the way to a reorientation in the way the Other is approached in post-Holocaust modernity, it is Emmanuel Levinas who is most credited for bringing the notion of alterity and ethics to bear on contemporary philosophy. Levinas goes against the tradition which has always reduced alterity into the order of what he, following Plato, calls the Same (le même; te auton) by approaching it in a dialectic manner, thus always treating the Other as the Other of the Same instead of the absolutely Other. This infinite distance between the Same and the Other is the foundation of his ethics. In his 1961 Totality and Infinity, ethics is described as “the putting into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other” (1987: 43). This exteriority that puts the subject into question bears the name of “face” in Levinas’s philosophy. Because the subject has a habitual tendency to ‘devour’ all that is other, totalizing it and stripping it of its alterity, it only achieves a violent manifestation of power over the Other. The violent notion of grasping (comprehending) is thus regarded in term of an imperialistic power relation towards alterity, because “if you could possess, grasp, and know the other, it would not be the other. Possessing, knowing, and grasping are synonyms of power” (Levinas 1987: 90). Ontology and epistemology have assimilated alterity through this comprehension and understanding. Being forced to respond to the face of the absolutely other interrupts this tendency and is the basis of ethics. Language and generosity are seen as instruments of this response (responsibility appears in his later works).

Levinas also warns us not to confuse this notion of alterity with mystical ecstasy, where “the subject is absorbed in the object and recovers


itself in its unity” (Levinas 1987, 41). There can be no unity, oneness with the other without destroying the distance which must be preserved if alterity is to be preserved. Without this distance and without the preservation of other in its otherness, the possibilities of an ethical relation are destroyed. Similarly, although tendencies of apophatic discourse associated with mysticism can be discerned in Beckett’s work, there is no final unity and coalescence of the divine and worldly found in Beckett’s writing, where final meaning is always deferred.

To further understand Levinas’s notion of ethics, certain key concepts have to be first defined. The enigmatic notion of il y a, similarly to Derrida’s differenace and trace, and Blanchot’s neutre, resists definition, as it refers to a preontological state which must necessarily remain beyond the grasp of language. Il y a is a notion which is very close to Heidegger’s es gibt as Being. To imagine the il y a Levinas asks us to conduct a thought experiment:

Let us imagine all things, beings and persons, returning to nothingness. What remains after this imaginary destruction of everything is not something, but the fact that ‘there is’. The absence of everything returns as a presence, as the place where the bottom has dropped out of everything, an atmospheric density, a plentitude of the void or the murmur of silence. There is, after this destruction of things and being, the impersonal “field of forces” of existing. There is something that is neither subject nor substantive. The fact of existing imposes itself where there is no longer anything. And it is anonymous: there is neither anyone nor anything that takes this existence upon itself. It is impersonal like “it is raining” or “it is hot.” Existing returns no matter with what negation one dismisses it. There is, as the irremissibility of pure existing. (1987: 46-47)

This exhausted and anonymous residue of what remains after negation has run its course is the il y a, which cannot be approached in any way but in a language of paradox in keeping with its “fundamental absurdity” (Levinas 1987: 51). Here we can find the connection between Banham’s analysis of Derrida’s deconstruction and the search of the remaining cinders. These non-concepts cannot appear in language of mastery and ‘light’, but can be discerned in the blanks between the words in the lacunae created by fragmented speech. It would seem, therefore, then that the Other and the il y a are one and the same thing, as both notions exist outside the bounds of rational discourse and resist incorporation into an identity-based idiom.

There is, however, a vital distinction that has to be made between the Other and il y a. This distinction is based on the irremissibility of the il y a, its irrevocability, and irreducibility, as it is always possible to kill the Other by way of appropriation, while the il y a will always remain outside

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the reach of language. The il y a is what remains beyond the dialectic of being and nothingness, it is “the absence of everything returns as a presence, as the place where the bottom has dropped out of everything, an atmospheric density, a plenitude of the voice, or the murmur of silence” (Levinas 1987: 46). The Other, on the other hand, can and has been violently incorporated into the order of the Same, and it is thus in relation to the Other that one can speak of a proper ethics. There can be no relation with the il y a; it is, indeed, the urgent necessity to escape the vacuous horror of the il y a that brings one into an ethical relation with the Other, which ultimately takes the form of responsibility for the Other, for the death of the Other. Therefore, we see that the escape from the il y a, which is neither being nor nothingness, demands a questioning, not of the ontological status of Being as was the case with Heidegger, but of the ethical relation between one and the absolute other. If alterity is reducible to anything, it is nothing more than this relation, which for Levinas can be mediated only through language and, more specifically, conversation. “We shall try to show that the relation between the same and the other – upon which we seem to impose such extraordinary conditions – is language. . . The relation between the same and the other, metaphysics, is primordially enacted as conversation. . .” (Levinas 39). It is this “infinite conversation” which Blanchot sees as the encounter with alterity and the source of literature.

What Levinas and Blanchot share is a focus on literature’s relation with alterity and a conception of ethical writing that challenges totalization. The Infinite Conversation takes up Levinas’s emphasis on language as a non-totalizing relation to the Other. The Blanchotian parole “is beyond the reach of the one who says it as much as of the one who hears it. It is between us, it holds itself between and the conversation is the approach on the basis of this between” (1993: 212). Blanchot’s earlier writings from the early 1950s, collected in The Space of Literature (1955), are an attempt to outline the claim that writing is always a response to radical exteriority. There Blanchot locates the il y a in the other night, the paradoxical site of the presence of absence. This is a being without light and without the possibility of passing into day. Blanchot compares this to the incessant night of the insomniac who in his restlessness must wait without expectation. However, the il y a should not be understood as a kind of condition or event which can be lived through. It is a space in which there is no coherent and tangible dimension to experience.

The difference between Blanchot’s and Levinas’s approach to the il y ais that where Levinas sees the subject attempting to escape the horror of the il y a through the ethical relation with the Other, Blanchot sees the il y


a in terms of the voice of alterity, the condition of literature. This voice is to be disclosed and pursued, as it is in Beckett’s Trilogy, Texts for Nothingand How It Is. As was already mentioned in the first chapter, this voice of alterity binds literature with an impossible obligation towards it.

Beckett’s famous dictum, discussed in the first chapter, concerning the impossibility of expression arrested by the obligation to express, has, as I have shown earlier, its correlative in Blanchot’s theory of literature. Whereas the first part of this dictum concerns the place of language within the trope of inexpressibility, that is, within this irrevocable impossibility to express, the second part concentrates on the pressing obligation to undertake this impossible task. To write in spite of the avowed impossibility of expressing requires more than a concession to the inexpressible as has been done, in varying degree, from romanticism to modernism, by way of evoking the inexpressible in the form of negation and silence Inexpressibility as it appears in Beckett’s and Blanchot’s writing constitutes not an illusory end in itself but a determining force calling one to write and thus invoking literature. What is more, one of the striking characteristics of this obligation is that it does not issue forth from anyone within the narrative, but is an obligation whose source lies outside the text itself, outside literature. When writing on Kafka, Blanchot construes writing as exigency and locates the demand of writing outside the writer. A writer like Kafka is under an obligation to write by an outside force. It is purely a voice from an unknown outside, which never directly manifests itself, but by way of proxy. The second characteristic of this obligation is that it can never be fulfilled, as the obligation is only an obligation to act, to talk, the recourses that the characters have at their disposal impede the fulfillment of this obligation. Because language is seen as an alien imposition on the subjectivity of the I speaker, it can never serve the purpose of expressing anything related to apperception or pure expression in the Mallarmean sense.

It is through a development of these characteristics as they appear in Beckett’s The Unnamable that a ‘meaning’ of obligation might be called to the surface. The first characteristic to be discussed is the radical alterity of the source of obligation, a source which remains unknown in its absence while exerting a perpetuating force on the narrative. Beckettian characters usually receive orders and assignments from an undisclosed source, usually by proxy. Waiting for Godot stands as a prime example of this structure, though in Molloy we find the character of Youdi who sends Malone on his journey to find Molloy. The Unnamable and Texts for Nothing present the most pared down version of this structure with the voice being called to account for itself by the other voices. Indeed, the

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common duality characterizing Beckett’s work is lost in The Unnamablewhere there is no certainty of what the other voices are in relation to the speaking voice. Though the pronouns I and ‘them’ are used, they fail to offer any determining location of the characters. In the fist two volumes of the trilogy, the source of the obligation is thus known only by name (Godot, Youdi), present only in name and as a name, whereas be the end of The Unnamable not even the name survives the exhaustive implosion of language.

The ethics of alterity in How It Is

During the period following the publication of the trilogy and Texts for Nothing, Beckett’s focus shifted away from prose work towards theatre, Waiting for Godot, Endgame and Krapp’s Last Tape being the most famous pieces of this period. Upon his return to Ussy-sur-Marne in 1959, Beckett returned to prose composition and embarked upon a tediously laborious project that was to become How It Is. It could be stated that HowIt Is, published in French as Comment c’est in 1961 and translated by the author in 1964, is partly a continuation of the familiar disintegrated prose, decomposed and fragmented further to rid itself of a speaking subject. Not as well known as the trilogy or his earlier work (Murphy, for instance), How It Is is nonetheless regarded by some critics as “the greatest of Beckett’s prose works” (Badiou 63) and a “turning point in Beckett’s art (Abbott 111) and yet many critics have either given it a cursory glance or have completely ignored it. Those, however, who did attempt an analysis of How It Is have almost exclusively limited themselves to the familiar interpretations involving the themes of self-expression and the search for identity, existentialist meanderings in search of an authentic self, and the impasse of language expressing the subject (cf. Abbott). Seeing language as the most unusual and innovative aspects of Beckett’s prose, certain critics, notably Brienza, have tended to base their interpretation primarily on the linguistic aspect of the prose. Those who chose a more philosophical approach did so primarily within the familiar context mentioned earlier. A good example of an analysis which takes, what will become clear later, an unethical approach can be found in Murphy’s Reconstructing Beckett. Murphy claims that “the essential drama of How It Is involves a struggle for being which turns decisively upon the issue of the ontological status of fiction, that is, what being can a character actually be said to possess?” (62). According to this reading “only when the character as ‘narrator/narrated takes possession of the ‘voice’ and proceeds as if it were his own do his words take on a meaning beyond the purely


formal contrivances necessary for the fabrication of a text” (62). This is an ideal example of a totalizing and ontological reading of a text that is seen as assimilating alterity in order to constitute the self as a character. What is significant about the voice, not only in How It Is, but in The Unnamable,Texts for Nothing, is precisely that it cannot be appropriated; it always exists outside of the knowing subject. And thus the interpretation which sees the struggle in How It Is in terms of the narrator’s struggle to “authenticate” his existence by “breaking away from the formal structures imposed by the authorial voice” (62) must in effect fall short.

What all the aforementioned interpretations fail to address or recognize is the role of alterity in How It Is and how the confrontation with an alterior exteriority not only structures the text on a linguistic level, but also supports it thematically. This ethical dimension in How It Is becomes the backdrop for critics such as Alain Badiou, Ewa Plonowska-Ziarek, and Russell Smith, who see the relation with alterity along with its appropriation by the narrative voice, as the basis for How It Is. As Plonowska-Ziarek comments, How It Is

stages almost obsessively a violent clash between the signification of alterity and the rationality inherent in communication, between the shock of otherness and absorption of this shock within a discursive community, has been read almost exclusively within the paradigms of self-expression or self-referential language. (171)

Alain Badiou considers How It Is “as the mark of a major transformation in the way that Beckett fictionalizes his thinking” (Badiou 15-16). Badiou notes that How It Is is grounded in the category of alterity, “of the encounter and the figure of the Other, which fissures and displaces the solipsistic internment of the cogito” (16). Therefore, it is the constant negotiation with the external otherness that becomes the guiding thread in How It Is, which is a clear break from the aporetic dissolution and obsessive questioning of the solipsistic subjective “I” one finds in the trilogy and Texts for Nothing. What How It Is seems to address for the first time is the confrontation with an alterity a self contained cogito excludes in the process of self-formation.

The problems of analyzing How It Is become obvious from the first pages. Even more so than Texts for Nothing, How It Is is devoid of any stylistic and grammatical syntax, there is no punctuation, verbs are sometimes omitted, pronouns are left suspended without referents: the whole work is consequently replete with seemingly incoherent and illogical statements, most of which reappear recontextualized throughout the text. To categorize How It Is into any literary genre becomes a

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daunting task, as it completely distances itself from fictive narrative, moving further towards poetry while preserving a semblance of prose. There is, as Badiou asserts, “a latent poetic matrix as work behind the prose, ensuring thematic unification and coherence” (17). A combination of both poetry and prose, How It Is negotiates the relation with the alterity it cannot directly address.

The text is quite neatly divided into three parts: “before Pim, with Pim, and after Pim”. These three parts present the journey of an anonymous being as he crawls through a mud-laden environment with only a sack with food tied around his neck. Only his words constitute the story. His progression towards Pim is depicted in part I. Part II depicts the relation between the anonymous character and Pim in what Ziarek calls “a gruesome master/slave dialectic” (172). The subject in this encounter is represented in the “tormentor’s position. Part III depicts the subject being abandoned by Pim and left immobile in the dark. As Brienza notes, symmetry demands that there be a fourth part in which the protagonist becomes the victim. “It is this fourth position”, claims Badiou, “that the voice is not able to say, thus leading to the axiom of the three quarters concerning the relationship between truth and speech” (26). It should also be remembered, as Badiou later points out, that despite the designations of “victim” and “tormentor” these relations between the characters are egalitarian, representing no hierarchy, as the positions and figures are only “generic avatars of existence; they are equivalent to one another, . . .” (26).

Structurally, the three parts are composed of versets or strophes, each constituting a beginning and an end in itself as well as contributing to the whole of the text. This structure is a departure from the long meandering sentences found in the trilogy and Texts for Nothing. These fragments create the impression that the text is constantly starting anew, trying again with each new verset. This impression would be in line with the French title, which exploits the homonym “comment c’est” (how it is) and “commencer” (to begin). Much like the protagonist himself, the language of How It Is cannot seem to get itself off the ground and its staccato tempo imitates the drudgery and sheer exhaustion of crawling in the mud with a heavy sack tied to one’s neck. Similarly to Beckett’s other prose work, notably Imagination Dead Imagine, How It Is is comprised mainly of images rendered in “midget grammar”, flashes of consciousness depicting the life “under the light” and it is in these images that Beckett’s language takes flight.

Mostly, however, the language is ascetic and undeveloped in terms of vocabulary and syntax, yet despite this and its seemingly hermetic distance from intertextual influence, the text is riddled with references and


allusions to literature and religion. Sometimes these allusions take the form of general aspects of the text, such as the setting which is taken from canto 7 of Dante’s Inferno:

The kindly master told me: Son, now see the souls of those whom anger has defeated; and I should also have you know for certain that underneath the water there are souls who sigh and make this plain of water bubble, as your eye, looking anywhere, can tell. Wedged in the slime, they say: 'We had been sullen in the sweet air that's gladdened by the sun; we bore the mist of sluggishness in us: now we are bitter in the blackened mud.' This hymn they have to gurgle in their gullets, because they cannot speak it in full words. (Inferno 7 115-126)

Similar conditions of slime and mud pervade How It Is with the main protagonist crawling, unable to speak in full words. In other instances, these allusions take the form of minute details, phrases and words which would not be relevant if not for their repetitive nature. Such is the case with the various references to the Bible which are readily visible, scattered as they are throughout the text, offering what might be construed as a framework in which to contain the protean semantics of the prose. For example, the narrator is often presented as a God figure who breathes life into his creations, “Pim never be but for me anything but a dumb limp lump flat for ever in the mud but I’ll quicken him you wait and see how I can efface myself behind my creature” (84). There are also instances where the image of Christ is raised with the repeated allusions to nails, crosses and the lamb with the narrator describing himself as “dead as mutton”, as well as a brief summary of Jesus “others knowing nothing of my beginnings save what they could lean by hearsay or in public records nothing of my beginnings in life” (50) and the end of the text reveals the narrator with his “arms spread yes like a cross” (146). Though these references never amount to anything substantiating a basis for predominantly theological (Judeo-Christian) interpretation, their presence does suggest that Beckett is working through a tradition of metaphysical inquiry, related to the notions of sacrifice, witnessing, and creation in general, all of which bear a relation to the notion of alterity; it is this notion that will constitute the focus of the following analysis. To this effect, two related questions will be presented in relation to How It Is. One overarching question concerns the ethical relation of the other taking place in language. The second question, which hinges on this ethical relation, deals with the role of the silent witness.

Ewa Plonowska-Ziarek construes Badiou’s “latent poetic matrix” as the relation between the I and the Other, which, according to her,

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“provides the narrative with the minimum of content and structure while at the same time undercutting all remnants of structural stability” (172). She proceeds to attribute the paratactic style of How It Is to the attempt to include what representation excludes; namely, the enigmatic and always anonymous Other. Much of her analysis depends on the assertion that the fragmentary nature of How It Is appeals to the alterity which cannot be admitted within the structural coherence of discourse. Concentrating mainly on the structural and linguistic aspect of the text, she asserts that “the rhetorical effects of parataxis expose a signification of alterityincommensurate with the coherence of discourse” [emphasis mine] (173). Parataxis, as a trope of disconnection and disruption, by undermining the aesthetic unity of the text, opens itself up toward the Other. Plonowska-Ziarek locates this relation with the Other not only in the dissolution of the syntax comprising the text, but also in the persistent destabilization of any possible synthesis. The main claim in her argumentation is that “the rhetorical effects of parataxis allow for the inscription of alterity in language and simultaneously prevent its assimilation into the present possibilities of signification” (174). This conclusion would be a very neat solution to the tension between expressibility and inexpressibility, between saying and not being able to speak which has been the foundational tension in Beckett’s poetics of failure, if not for the fact that a solution, any solution, would be detrimental to the poetics itself. More specifically, however, the trouble with this aspect of her interpretation can perhaps be found in the self-defeating language Plonowska-Ziarek employs. For example, the phrase “signification of alterity” (173) seems to be a glaring contradiction in terms. Furthermore, the analysis in an implicit and covert way reverts to negative theology and presents apophatic discourse this time in the guise of Levinasian ethics. It is, however, possible to take this analysis further and discern in How It Is not only a linguistic and structural indication of this relation to alterity but a thematic one as well.

As was mentioned earlier, Levinas conceived the authentic relationship with the Other in terms of a discursive relationship that takes the form of speech. In a conversation with Philip Nemo in 1981, Levinas says, “I have just refused the notion of vision to describe the authentic relationship with the Other; it is discourse and, more exactly, response or responsibility which is this authentic relationship” (Levinas 1985: 87-8). It is no longer vision that serves as the metaphor for the relation with the other, as vision is complicit in the act of incorporating the Other. Instead, conversation becomes a metaphor for this relation. What is important to bear in mind is Levinas’s distinction between the Said (the content of discourse) and the Saying, which is a response, a greeting to the Other. As Critchley states


(admittedly crudely) in his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, this distinction can also be drawn along the lines of the ethical and the ontological, where the Said would be ontological and the Saying ethical language (2002: 17). Further Critchley adds that the Saying is “a non-thematizable ethical residue of language that escapes comprehension, interrupts ontology and is the very enactment of the movement from the same to the other (2002: 18). The problem that inevitably arises from this distinction is one which has appeared numerous times in this dissertation; namely, the paradox of expressing that which by definition must remain inexpressible. Since the Saying is a “non-thematizable residue” that must remain beyond comprehension, how can it survive within the confines of philosophical exposition (the Said), which deals in ontological categories? In other words, how is it possible to ‘perform’ the saying without betraying it? Critchley suggests that one solution to this problem may be found in the process of reduction, of how ‘the said can be unsaid’ reduced thereby allowing the saying to circulate in the text. This would be analogous to what has already been discussed in the first chapter, when Beckett was quoted saying that his attempt is to reduce and exhaust language in order for the nothing beneath it to speak.

This saying is a response which, in Otherwise than Being, is construed as bearing witness to the Other: “No theme, no present, has a capacity for the Infinite. The subject in which the Other is in the same, inasmuch as the same is for the other, bears witness to it” (Levinas 1998: 146). Similarly, the ethicality of Beckett’s work does not lie in its thematizing or addressing the Other in any way, but in bearing witness to the Other. The protagonist of How It Is constantly repeats that he is only relaying what he has already heard. This places him at a distance from the alterior speaking subject, the one who is ‘really’ telling the story, a story which in the text effectually becomes a quote and testimony.

To further extrapolate the role of the witness and the significance of testimony, I would like to return to the Holocaust reference and draw upon Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, which focuses on the figure of the witness in the concentration camp. One of the preliminary claims Agamben makes is that in Auschwitz there were two types of prisoners: the typical prisoners who every day struggled to survive and the Muselmann. The first type of prisoner is motivated to survive in order to later become the witness of the unfolding tragedy. The prospect of retelling their story gave these people the will to live. Alongside these people, there are the Muselmann, the walking dead. These people who due to the trauma of experiencing the horrors of the concentration camp and the effects of malnutrition and destitution were

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bereft of speech and thus could not ever hope to give their testimony. The suffering they endured has brought them to “the extreme threshold between life and death” (Agamben 47) and they can no longer speak of their experiences. There is, however, a lacuna which, Agamben argues, calls into question the meaning of testimony and consequently the reliability of the witness, because to be a witness and give testimony means having survived. Primo Levi, therefore, in The Drowned and the Saved, advances the claim that indeed it is the Muselmann who is the true witness of the camp, though he is stripped of the ability to speak, write, and simply respond. The Muselmann, who experienced dying and death, “those who saw Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but they are the Muslims, the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance’ (33). Agamben sees here the central paradox in Levi’s claim and asks: “how can the true witness be the one who by definition cannot bear witness?” (Agamben 82). This paradox seems to be the one found in How It Is as well.

Testimony takes place where the speechless one makes the speaking one speak and where the one who speaks bears the impossibility of speaking in his own speech, such that the silent and the speaking [...] enter into a zone of indistinction in which it is impossible to establish the position of the subject, to identify the ‘imagined substance’ and the ‘I’ and, along with it, the true witness. (Agamben 120)

This ‘zone of indistinction’ is precisely what is being created by the paratactic nature of Beckett’s prose in How It Is. The speechless Muselmannneeds a speaking subject to give testimony in his stead, thereby deferring the origin of the testimony. The impossibility of positing the origin of enunciation and of distinguishing what is being quoted from what is being said confers authority to the testimony. Furthermore, this zone of indistinction renders possible the opening towards alterity without the attendant risk of synthesizising and incorporating it.

As the protagonist of How It Is utters, “a witness I’d need a witness” (23). The whole text is structured as a testimony given in place of an unknown subject. “I say it as I hear it” is a sentence repeated in all three chapters and presents the text as a quote of a silent witness. The story starts with “how it was I quote before Pim with Pim after Pim how it is three parts I say it as I hear it” (7). What deserves attention here is that this is a quote of a quote because the phrase “I say it as I hear it” can also be found in Text 5 of Texts for Nothing, “the things one has to listen to, I say it as I hear it” (97) or “my life last state last version ill-seen ill heard ill-


recaptured ill-murmured. . .” (7) [emphasis mine]. Thus, as Smith rightly asserts, the role of the witness is a recurrent almost integral theme in Beckett’s work and tends to take on two distinct forms: that of the listener and noter (writer), the writer merely transcribing what he hears. In previous works, such as the trilogy, characters (Molloy, Moran and Malone) are often presented as having to fulfill an obligation to write of their experiences, even the unnamable who at one point asks, “is it I who write, who cannot raise my hand from my knee” (233), is presented in terms of his ability to write. Further, Text 5 of Text for Nothing deals almost exclusively with this listening/noting dichotomy. Writing thus is inextricably linked in Beckett’s work with being in terms of both composition and decomposition, creation and doubling.

In How It Is witnesses are evoked only to be replaced by others in much the same way as the vice-existers in The Unnamable appear only to later make room for a new name. The narrator invents witnesses, as he is “all alone and the witness bending over me name Kram bending over us father to son to grandson yes or no and the scribe name Krim generations of scribes keeping the record a little aloof sitting standing it’s not said yes or no samples extracts” (80). Later, Krim and Kram, coalesce into Kram,“Kram alone is enough Kram alone witness and scribe” (67). The narrator has to invent these witnesses in order to constitute his own existence in accordance with Berkeley’s esse est percipi discussed in relation to Film.In much the same way witnesses were necessary to authenticate the sacrifice of Christ on the cross – sacrificial torture referenced in How It Is– so a witness is also necessary for the act of creation, as God ‘saw’ that what He had created was good. Similarly in How It Is a divine being, who “listens to himself and who when he lends his ear to our murmur does no more than lend it to a story of his own devising” (139) presides over the narrative.

Dante’s Inferno has already been quoted as a possible reference in regards to the setting of How It Is. The primordial mud through which the protagonist crawls also takes place in what Levi calls the ‘grey zone’.

It is the zone in which the ‘long chain of conjunction between victim and executioner’ comes loose, where the oppressed becomes oppressor and the executioner in turn appears as victim. A grey, incessant alchemy in which good and evil and, along with them, all the metals of traditional ethics reach their point of fusion. (Levi 21)

Though it becomes clear that the encounter between the narrator and Pim is established within the master/slave or God/creation dichotomy, none of the positions are fixed and stable. Pim is once the tormentor and once the

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slave. The tormentor becomes the tormented and the all-powerful God becomes the sacrificial lamb, which is why the biblical references juxtapose the creation myth of the Old Testament with the sacrifice of the New Testament. The all-powerful writer of stories with those who are incorporated to those stories and are left incapable to bear witness to their plight.

Further elucidation as to the setting of How It Is can be found in the tohu-buhu of the Old Testament. In reference to the anguish and shame of the Auschwitz survivors, Agamben quotes Levi who writes “the anguish inscribed in everyone of the ‘tohu-buhu,’ of a deserted and empty universe crushed under the spirit of God but from which the spirit of man is absent; not yet born or already extinguished” (Levi 85). The tohu-buhu also appears in How It Is, where the narrator speaks of the “world for me from the murmurs of my mother shat into the incredible tohu-bohu” (42). This is the place before God, before light, before creation and it is what links the speechless Muselman with the ‘real witness’ of How It Is, the one for whom the speaking subject is relating the story. The tohu-buhu is the non-place occupied by the Muselman and the Beckettian subjects from TheUnnamable onwards, a non-place where language is a foreign imposition unable to express the experience of ‘what lies beneath the light’. The tohu-buhu is the horror of the il y a, from which the consciousness flees and in which the protagonist finds himself immersed. As was mentioned before, the il y a is a “space without place”, and thus is a dimension where identity and language are in constant flux.

By the end of the narrative even these witnesses are disposed of: “all this business [...] of an ear listening to me yes a care for me yes an ability to note yes all that all balls yes Krim and Kram yes all balls yes” (145). As Russell Smith argues, the analysis of How It Is hinges on the validity of this one single declaration. Smith places particular focus on the final words of the text, where the narrator claims that everything written thus far, including the characters of Pim and Bom, Krim and Kram, the numerous encounters and solitude have been “all balls from the start to finish” and that there has only been “only one voice here mine yes”, not the constant quoting and ‘saying it as I hear it”. According to Smith, “this interpretive decision is ultimately about whether the text portrays a self-referential invention or a testimony to the presence of alterity” (356). If the whole text thus far has been predicated upon the insistent claim that the narrator is merely recounting what he hears, then the idea of authority and source of origin of the speaking voice are issues which have to remain suspended. This final negation would, in fact, reinstate a source and central character who devised the whole story. This is a decision which


remains suspended and no finality is evoked. On the one hand, there is no reason to privilege the final negation as having more weight than all the previous negations in the text. There is no evidence that would allow us to endow this negation with more value. Be that as it may, this final negation does succeed in suspending the text, for no conclusion can be drawn as to its validity. It would seem that no other conclusion could be more fitting for a text which addresses alterity. Any form of certainty granting signification validity would be incompatible with otherness and, therefore, the impossible obligation to express the inexpressible is framed here within the ethical demand towards the Other.

The ambivalence of writing as an instrument of destruction and torture is depicted in a poignant scene found in Part II, where the protagonist is torturing Pim by inscribing onto his body the Roman alphabet. “With the nail then of the right index I carve and when it breaks or falls until it grows again with another on Pims back intact at the outset from left to right and top to bottom as in our civilization I carve my Roman capitals” (70). This very short fragment is a metaphorical rendering of the crucifixion of the other (the nails being a direct reference to the crucifixion of Jesus) by the Roman civilization, an imposition of an imperialistic rule in the form of language. It should be noted that language here is represented in the form of the alphabet which has a limited set of permutations and serves the purpose of incorporating alterity into an understandable and comprehensible entity. In The Infinite Conversation, the ethical relation to the Other is understood as a relation to language, which can only ethically preserve the distance between the subject and the Other in the form of speech, not writing. This confrontation with the Other, as Blanchot writes, “that does not come about in the lighter space of forms belongs to the domain of speech” (1993: 55). Only speech in the form of dialogue can preserve this distance which sustains the conversation infinitely.

Much of postmodern theory deals with the questions of how to properly respond and take into account alterity in discourse. Weller goes so far as to argue that “hospitality to an irreducible other is the defining characteristic of the postmodern” (21). Levinas, Derrida and Blanchot work in a tradition where the infinite relation with the Other serves as the basis not only for ethics, but also for literature. The space of literature is for Blanchot located outside the reach of light, i.e. out of the reach of rational discourse, identity-thinking, and propositional language. Herein lies the connection with apophatic discourse that permeates the language of mystics, Derrida, Blanchot and Beckett. It is a language which draws on negativity and recoils from the faith invested in language’s ability to provide comprehensive revelation of the logos. And thus in the same way

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that Levinas rejects totality in place of the infinite relation with alterity, so Beckett’s fiction frustrates attempts at comprehension and instead instantiates an infinite regress of both subjectivity and meaning in general. Beckett’s fiction becomes the manifestation of Blanchot’s “space of literature”, a region which traverses ontology and ethics, as subjectivity is allowed to exist without the possibility to possess and control its surroundings and outside of the perspective of totality.

Inexpressibility as a theological construct and unrepresentability as an ethical one are both based on the question of how alterity should be approached. In negative theology, in Derridian deconstruction, as in Beckett’s How It Is, the unrepresentable and the unnamable are categories of the ethical deference of alterity. As has been discussed in this chapter the relation of the “I” and the Other is one of the central questions in How It Is; it is this question that provides the text with an underlying matrix sustaining its structure. This obligation to respond to the Other issued by the exteriority of the text puts the subject in an ethical relation not only to alterity, but what is most important, to itself, as it is through this process, that the self is brought into question. Indeed, the destabilization of the self has been one of the main features of Beckett’s fiction, noticeably pronounced in the trilogy, and can also be observed in How It Is. Because How It Is is constructed by means of paratactic syntax, proposition advanced only to be later negated, paradox and inconsistency, then we see that the idea of authority and source of origin of the speaking voice are issues which have to remain suspended. On this level, however, How It Isdoes not differ greatly from the trilogy and Texts for Nothing. The way in which How It Is advances this aesthetics of inexpressibility further is by placing the relation to alterity as the focus of the text, instead of the solipsistic self-questioning which governed the trilogy and Texts for Nothing. By bringing the Other to bear upon the self, Beckett instantiates what Levinas and Blanchot construed as the infinite conversation with alterity. Instead of reading this disintegration of language as a way to apophatically approach a presence beyond the propositional materiality of language, How It Is asks us to reposition a relation to alterity in such a way that would preserve it from the institutionalising force of linguistic dominion.

How It Is presents an encounter with alterity in a way that would be consistent with a Levinasian Saying. The effects of paratactic prose, which suspends the position of both the narrator and the confrontation with Pim, render possible an ethical questioning of the subject as the source of the narrative. In How It Is, Beckett succeeded in eliminating the speaking I, a project that obsessively haunted The Unnamable and Texts for Nothing.


With the multilayered intertextual quoting and self-referencing, the text refuses the invocation of presence, but instead invokes the non-thematizable remainder of the Said. In other words, Beckett is no longer operating within the ontological domain by attempting to establish a source of presence through via negativa, but has entered the ethical domain of the Levinasian Saying which has no end, no beginning and, most importantly, no content. The Saying circulates in the text as the indeterminate and silent witness which, much like the Muselmann, makes its voice manifest by proxy. Placing the subject in a Dantesque purgatory, or what amounts to an indefinite rendition of the il y a, with the protagonist merely quoting or speaking on behalf of the real witness, Beckett engages the liminality of the il y a, which Blanchot sees as the position of the writer who is brought into question only “when there is not more world, when there is no world yet” (1982, 33). This nothingness anterior to language and consciousness, of “my consciousness, without me” (1981, 47) constitutes the ethical relation insofar as it is divested of identity-thinking.

CONCLUSION

Beckett’s literary career can be described as one of gradual reduction of language, a striping away of the tools rendering expression possible for the sake of approaching the inexpressible. Like many artists of his time, including John Cage (in music), Bram van Velde and Tal Coat (in painting), Beckett opted to discard coherence and meaningful exposition in favor of an ascetic linguistic environment, fragmented, barren and relentlessly open-ended. By means of paratactic syntax the experience of a coherent narrativized reality is rendered impossible. Further, the experience of a coherent and stable I speaker, which would constitute the origin of the voice of subjectivity, is also frustrated for the purpose of evoking the mechanisms by which language brings forth the illusion of stability and coherence. In an attempt to create a self-sustaining linguistic reality, Beckett relied only on what language provided; namely, a self-referential network of signs with no recourse to extra-linguistic referents. Thus, neither a transcendental logos nor an origin, be it in the form of a controlling and stable Cartesian subject or a mystical and divine anchor, can be inferred from the narrative. What this absence of source creates in effect can be interpreted as a postmodern play of signifiers, a narrative questioning the fundamental assumptions of its existence, and, in so doing, exposing the conditions of its possibility.

Beckett’s language, in its pursuit of liminality, exposes and lays bare these mechanisms of generating a center-oriented (in this case phonocentric) subjectivity, where the voice is a byproduct of an imposed language, a language the voice strives to purge itself of in an attempt to achieve silence whilst remaining, by necessity, within the linguistic structure of which the subject is a construct. The aporetic tension can thus be defined as an impossible demand to express this inexpressible silence in language. Language is here treated in the Mallarmean sense, as an object in itself without the metaphysical and evocative treatment it had received from the Romantics. Language is something that Beckett’s narrators want to rid themselves off and they do so by exposing it to aporias, paradoxes and self-negations, thereby turning language and narrative in on itself.

However, far from being a mere metanarrative which comments on its own fictional status, Beckett’s fiction also inscribes itself into a confrontation with the limits of narrative fiction, of the possibilities of

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language. This limit has been construed in this dissertation as the limit with alterity, an alterity which cannot for ethical reasons be appropriated into the cognitive reality of the speaking subject. Visually, it must always remain outside the grasp of the inquiring gaze, as has been elaborated in the second chapter. The immediacy of sight serves as a metaphor of understanding and immediate apperception. Bypassing the rationalizing nature of linguistic exposition, vision grasps in one instant the totality of its object thus becoming for Beckett and Blanchot a prime target. This is staged most clearly in Beckett’s Film where the perceiving eye (“I”) pursues the object of its gaze, as if attempting to devour it by stripping it of its otherness. Not seeing well and not speaking well – i.e., ill-seeing and ill-saying – are activities occupying the grey liminal zone of perception, neither blind and silent nor all-encompassing and omni-vocal. This is an in-between zone which likens the conditions in which Beckett’s characters struggle to Dante’s Purgatory, from which he so readily drew (How It Is).

Similarly, Beckett’s characters are also never fully characters, never fully alive, yet they are also never fully dead – they are thus in the process of constantly dying. Again, the metaphorical limit thematizes the inexpressible not as an impenetrable great beyond but as a force which never ceases to exert its power on the linguistic and visual structure of Beckett’s fictional reality. The inexpressible, precisely because of its simultaneous demand/injunction, calls into question the self in its projections and the language by which the self is evoked, thus becoming the Levinasian Other which calls into question the language of the self, or the self in language.

Language takes the form of an asymptotic curve which can never completely achieve its desired silence. Negation is never completely fulfilled and a transcendental signified which would take the form of a silent Other, which is at the heart of the speaking subject, is always deferred with each word. Thus, in language there is always an excess and a lack which can never be resolved. Inexpressibility is a condition which can never be achieved and at the same time can be seen as the limit barring this achievement. It is the necessary injunction forbidding expression and the demand, the insatiable desire, to go on speaking that constitutes the condition of Beckett’s work. It is precisely from that impossibility to express that the obligation to express is borne; inexpressibility paradoxically becomes the origin of expression, not a teleological or theological ideal of unattainable plentitude, so often attributed to silence by way of mystical theology.

To ask what inexpressibility is in Beckett’s fiction would be the same as asking what literature is, a question which Blanchot rejected on the

The Aesthetics of Failure: Inexpressibility in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction 91

grounds that it presupposes a foundation radically antithetical to the object of the question. The question that should therefore be asked in line with Blanchot’s direction of thought would be “how is inexpressibility possible?” Just as literature is borne of its negation, so inexpressibility also exists as a radical negation of its own possibility. Hence the futility and failure that is intrinsic of this type of writing. Failure to succeed in the “unwording” of the text is a necessity if language and literature are to be possible. Inexpressibility is the Other that brings about the demand for language to affirm its desire to separate itself from the totalizing tendencies of language. Blanchot’s notion of neutral speech is especially evocative of this desire, as it proposes itself as an ethical language which leaves the otherness of the Other intact. However, it must be emphasized that an ethical subject and a neutral voice in literature are impossible. According to Derrida, “there is no “I” that ethically makes room for the other, but rather an “I” that is structured by the alterity within it, an “I” that is itself in a state of self-deconstruction, of dislocation” (2001: 84).

The aesthetics of inexpressibility is in this dissertation intrinsically bound with the ethics of inexpressibility, making inexpressibility as much an ethical concept as an aesthetic one. Both aspects have been explored to the conclusion that interminable disappearance of the speaking subject in language as it is presented in Beckett’s fiction and Blanchot’s writing portrays an ethical response to alterity which serves as the hypostatic prerequisite to literature as a self-questioning activity.

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INDEX

Abbott, H. Porter, 23, 25, 76 Adorno, Theodore, 66, 71, 72 Agamben, Giorgio, 66, 81-82 alterity, 6, 8, 9, 17, 36, 37, 38, 58-

59, 65-66, 70-80, 82, 84-86, 90, 91

Attridge, Derek, 69 Badiou, Alain, 8, 24, 63, 76, 77, 78,

79Banham, Gary, 70, 73 Barthes, Roland, 4 Beckett, Samuel

“The German Letter of 1937”, 7, 11, 28, 40

“Three Dialogues with George Duthuit”, 14, 39

Company, 7, 20, 43, 53, 58 Disjecta, 8, 11, 13, 14, 43 Film, 7, 53, 56, 57, 58, 63, 83,

90Happy Days, 46 How It Is, 8, 9, 22, 34, 47, 65,

66, 75-84, 86, 90 Ill Seen Ill Said, 7, 8, 9, 41-58,

60, 61, 62, 63 Imagination Dead Imagine, 7, 8,

9, 12, 19, 41, 45, 47-53, 57, 63, 78

Krapp’s Last Tape, 17, 22, 41, 44, 76

Malone Dies, 17, 24 Murphy, 13, 46, 50, 76 Ohio Impromptu, 44, 51, 52 Quad, 48 Rockaby, 46 Texts for Nothing, 6, 7, 9, 11, 13,

20, 23-25, 27-29, 36, 39, 40, 47, 53, 63, 66, 75, 76, 77, 78, 82, 86

The Unnamable, 6, 7, 9, 12, 13, 17, 18-22, 23, 24-25, 28, 29-30, 33-36, 38-40, 46, 47, 51, 52-53, 54, 56, 63, 75-76, 77, 83, 84, 86

Waiting for Godot, 9, 75, 76 Watt, 12

Ben-Zvi, Linda, 16, 57, 93 Berkeley, George, 16, 55, 57, 83 Blanchot, Maurice

“From Dread to Language”, 17 “Gaze of Orpheus”, 61 “Literature and the Right to

Death”, 29, 30, 33, 36 and Kafka, 75 The Infinite Conversation, 29,

32, 36, 58, 74, 85 The Space of Literature, 34, 74

Brater, Enoch, 57 Brienza, Susan, 23, 25, 44, 49, 76,

78Butler, St. John Lance, 1, 14 Cage, John, 26, 89 Cohn, Ruby, 43 Connor, Stephen, 3, 23, 65 Critchley, Simon, 5, 6, 47, 48, 61,

70, 80, 81 Cronin, Anthony, 6, 7 Dante, 7, 14, 15, 50, 79, 83, 90 Deleuze, Gilles, 47, 48

and exhaustion, 47, 53, 63, 65 Democritus, 11, 13, 14, 26 Derrida, Jacques, 3, 5, 8, 12, 23, 29,

32, 52, 65, 66, 68-71, 73, 85, 91 Descartes, René (and Cartesian), 1,

5, 13, 16, 18-20, 41, 53, 54, 55, 63, 67, 89

Esslin, Martin, 1, 3, 11, 12 Gasché, Rodolphe, 29

Index102

Geulincx, Arnold, 5, 11, 13-14 Hassan, Ihab, 4-5 Hegel, G. W. F., 14, 30, 32 Heidegger, Martin, 14, 31, 36, 39,

66, 73, 74 Hill, Leslie, 3, 6, 25, 30, 33, 38 il y a, 66, 73, 74, 84, 87 Iser, Wolfgang, 26, 50 Jay, Martin, 41, 61 Joyce, James, 7, 14-17, 50, 63, 69

Finnegan’s Wake, 15, 63 Kaun, Axel, 11 Kenner, Hugh, 2 Knowlson, James, 7, 15, 23-24, 28,

42, 48, 53, 57 Levi, Primo, 82-84 Levinas, Emmanuel, 5, 8, 9, 65, 66,

71, 72, 73, 74, 80, 81, 85, 86 Totality and Infinity, 72, 96

Locatelli, Carla, 26, 65 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 7, 29, 31-32,

34, 35, 39, 49, 69 Marion, Jean Luc, 68 Mauthner, Fritz, 5, 16, 17 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 5 mise en abyme, 19, 22, 33, 42, 53

Munch, Edvard, 46 Murphy, P.J., 16, 24, 50 negative theology, 66-69 neutre, 35-36, 38, 40, 66, 73 Oppenheim, Lois, 7, 8, 42, 43, 44,

49parabasis, 37 Plato, 66, 72 Plonowska-Ziarek, Ewa, 8, 77, 78,

79-80Rabinowitz, Rubin, 50, 52, 53 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 2 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 5, 11, 16 Shenker, Israel, 15, 18, 23 subjectivity, 18-19, 21-23, 25, 27, 30, 33-35, 39, 42, 44, 46, 67, 75, 86, 89Trezise, Thomas, 65, 69 Uhlmann, Anthony, 3, 65, 92, 95 van Velde, Bram, 17, 43, 89 voice, 2, 6, 7, 17, 20, 21-23, 27-28,

29, 32-35, 37-40, 42, 44, 47, 49, 50, 53, 56, 60, 70, 74, 75-78, 84, 86, 87, 89, 91

Weller, Shane, 85 Wolosky, Shira, 12, 23, 67

Documents

Marcin Tereszewski. The Aesthetics of Failure. Inexpressibility in Samuel Beckett's Fiction