The Unnamable (3 page)

Another way of resisting the epistemological vortex of
The Unnamable
is precisely by construing the text as epistemology itself, or some other more or
less formal philosophical exercise. This approach became popular in the 1980s, during
which Continental philosophers such as Blanchot, Derrida and Deleuze were drawn upon
to demonstrate that Beckett’s work was not only amenable to reading in the light of
this philosophy, but actually was itself, reciprocally, already a kind of philosophy.
This approach is a feature of the readings of Beckett’s trilogy offered by Leslie
Hill (1990) and Thomas Trezise (1990) and, I fear, my own efforts (Connor 1988).

One of the most extraordinary and percipient such readings
of The Unnamable
had appeared much earlier, but remained latent until reactivated by these philosophical
readers of the 1980s. It came from the French critic and philosopher Maurice Blanchot,
who had written to Jerome Lindon of Éditions de Minuit in May 1953, asking him for
advance proofs of
L’Innommable
, on which he was planning to write an essay. The essay appeared in the October 1953
issue of the
Nouvelle Revue
Française
under the title ‘Où maintenant? Qui maintenant?’ (Blanchot 1953). Blanchot saw
The Unnamable
as the work in which Beckett attained the quick or essence of writing, which for
Blanchot was something impersonal, indifferent. In order to reach this position, Blanchot
wrote, it is necessary for Beckett first to adopt and then to abandon the reassuring
masks or subterfuges of plot, character or person. The rudiments of these still survive
and reassure us in
Molloy
and
Malone Dies
. But in
The Unnamable
, Blanchot observes: ‘There is no longer any
question of characters under the reassuring protection of a personal name, no longer
any question of a narrative’ (Blanchot 2000, p. 96). More than this, we are even denied
the last resort of stabilising
The Unnamable
around the inviolable first person of Samuel Beckett, ‘where everything that happens
happens with the guarantee of a consciousness, in a world that spares us the worst
degradation, that of losing the power to say
I
’ (Blanchot 2000, p. 96). Rather, Blanchot insists,
The Unnamable
gets to the heart of things by pressing through, beyond or behind the first person,
to the anonymous, tormented space of writing itself, which animates all literature,
but is rarely, if ever, able to be grasped directly within the text. Perhaps this
means that even the idea of
The Unnamable
as a single, bounded work is dissolved:

But in seeming to disallow the fixing down or location in a specific source of
The Unnamable,
Blanchot nevertheless
assimilates
the text to his own philosophy, of the ‘neutral’, or the ‘indifferent’, anticipating
the moves made by philosophical critics of the 1980s and beyond.

For critics who tend towards the philosophical readings I have just been describing,
and who tend to see Beckett’s major achievement as concentrated in his prose,
The Unnamable
has a special status as a kind of abstract or encyclopedia of Beckettian themes and
feelings, the fullest and most unflinching enactment of the ‘issueless predicament’
that his work in general explores. Such critics tend to treat
The Unnamable
as the matrix, or
omphalos, around which all the rest of Beckett’s work, both before and after, inevitably
swirls, as though Joe, Winnie and all the rest of Beckett’s post-
Unnamable
creatures were destined to join Molloy and Malone in their concentric orbits around
this novel’s dubiously spectatorial speaker.

But there have been other readers who have seen the very extremity of
The Unnamable,
its maximum of minimality, as providing the decisive impetus for the thirty years
of new and improbably various ways of ‘going on’ that succeeded it. For such critics,
‘going on’ has meant ‘going beyond’, or even getting out from under,
The Unnamable
. Perhaps the most
influential
of these critics in recent years has been the philosopher Alain Badiou. Badiou agrees
with other critics in seeing
The Unnamable
as a climax in Beckett’s work. However, Badiou attempts to alter the centre of gravity
of Beckett studies, by directing attention to the kind of work that followed upon
The Unnamable.
For Badiou, this is work that is no longer skewered on the unresolvable excruciations
of what the subject is and how it is to be spoken, but deals instead with what he
calls the ‘occurrences’ of the subject, most notably in its encounters with otherness.
‘Instead of the useless and unending fictive reflection of the self’, writes Badiou,
‘the subject will be pinpointed according to the variety of its dispositions vis-à-vis
its
encounters
– in the face of “what-comes-to-pass”, in the face of
everything
that supplements Being with the instantaneous surprise of an Other’ (Badiou 2003,
p. 16).

Badiou describes himself as encountering Beckett through
The Unnamable
during the 1950s, and being captivated by the vision he found there of nothingness
and dereliction, a vision that ‘rather suited the young cretin I was at the time’
(Badiou 2003, p. 39). Forty years later, Badiou dismisses this view as ‘a caricature’.
In urging that we follow Beckett in moving beyond
The Unnamable,
Badiou is also urging a move beyond the kind of language-centred post-structuralist
criticism that finds in
The Unnamable
its most complete statement of principle, caught as it is in the same infatuation,
the same ‘Cartesian terrorism’
(Badiou 2003, p. 55). In writing that ‘[i]t was important that the subject open itself
up to an alterity and cease being folded upon itself in an interminable and torturous
speech’ (Badiou 2003, p. 55), and insisting that Beckett had in fact done so, Badiou
is also reproving a generation of critics who have found in
The Unnamable
what he sees as a sterile model for self-replicating and ultimately self-satisfied
scepticism.

Perhaps Beckett never again made such intense demands on himself or his readers as
he does in
The Unnamable.
When he turned back to prose in earnest, it was in a very different manner from what
he had discovered in
The Unnamable
, which, in this sense, at least, remains a kind of
ne plus ultra.
This is not quite to say that it had no issue, for in some ways the novel might be
said to have seeded many of the later works. The monologue
Not I,
for example, may be seen as another attempt to dramatise the obstinate abstention
from being that
characterises
the novel. In this sense,
The Unnamable
remains at the enigmatic heart of Beckett’s writing, and of critical writing about
Beckett.

Where unspecified, translations from French to English or vice versa are by Beckett.