Suffering – why, this is the sole cause of consciousness.
(Fyodor Dostoevsky)
From the very first pages of The Unnamable the reader is made aware that the work’s narrative voice1 is immersed in a radically sceptical and unforgiving reflexive encounter with virtually all the prerequisites of its narrative existence: ‘Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that. Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on’ (TN 286). The difficulty of these opening lines, as readers of Beckett’s work have long since recognised, is that the narrative voice that speaks them has, from the start, hijacked the labour of interpreting the work’s formal and thematic components that readers standing outside of the fictional world of The Unnamable require if they are to productively engage in a critical intervention into the text. The Unnamable immediately presents itself, in other words, as a self-hermeneutic enterprise committed to articulating the limits and measuring the conditions of the life of its voice in narrative. One of the drawbacks of these opening lines is that they preclude the possibility of authenticating (unquestioning, unbelieving) that the voice is or was present as the author or witness of the testimonial fictions that the inhospitable architecture of its subsequent narrative goes on to compel it ceaselessly to give. The rhetorical status of these three questions, which is underscored as quickly as it is undermined by the (ironic) assertion, ‘Unquestioning’, leaves the reader virtually paralysed with having to consent to the implication that there is no definite ‘where’ situating the narrative voice, there is no identifiable ‘who’ grounding the voice’s narrative subjectivity (and thus also authorising the veracity of its speech), and, perhaps most damagingly to the coherence of the entire narrative structure, there is no trace, no archival evidence of ‘when’ the stories and events of which the voice speaks, ‘knowing that it lies’, could be said ever to have occurred precisely and paradoxically in the midst of its very occurrence (TN 301).
Blanchot was one of the first serious readers of The Unnamable to address the significance that these questions have on the work as a whole: ‘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? What does the author, who must be somewhere, hope for? What do we hope for, when we read?’ (BC 210). Blanchot is right to pause on these opening questions and to risk proposing an answer to what they ask. Noting the threatening position The Unnamable assumes in reducing the methods and aims of literary critique to little more than exercises in meta-hermeneutical redundancy, Blanchot nevertheless goes on to propose that ‘what speaks’ in The Unnamable is a form of neutral (or neutered) speech that is as radically disintegrative as it is constitutively productive of what and how language and literary forms of representation seek to communicate. In The Unnamable, ‘language does not speak, it is; in it nothing begins, nothing is said, but it is always new and always begins again’ (BC 216).
Accordingly, with The Unnamable we are privy to a work of literature that contains within its textual structure the beginning and end of narrative speech. The Unnamable opens itself onto ‘the pure approach of the impulse from which all books come, of that original point where the work is lost, which always ruins the work, which restores the endless pointlessness in it, but with which it must also maintain a relationship that is always beginning again, under the risk of being nothing’ (BC 213). Blanchot’s analysis of the fragility of the speaking presence that grounds the narrative discourse of The Unnamable as it enters into a tenuous, radically unworkable literary existence is indispensable for subsequent critical encounters with this voice that dwells so disastrously in Beckett’s writing. Blanchot’s attention is not only on the question of how The Unnamable functions as a work of literature, or on the necessity that the author behind this work (i.e. Beckett) efface himself before the anonymous event of the narrative that outlives him, but also on how the narrative voice inside The Unnamable speaks and exists in this place in narrative where there should be no possibility of speech or existence. Dividing his analysis between the work (of writing) and the voice (of narrative speech) of The Unnamable enables Blanchot to operate at two levels of reading simultaneously, and to do so precisely because The Unnamable itself unfolds according to the illusion that there is no distance separating these two dimensions of the work’s compositional architecture. Blanchot interrogates the voice and the void of language into which the voice is plunged, and out of which the voice speaks: ‘what is this void that becomes the voice of the man disappearing into it? Where has he fallen?’ (BC 210).
Blanchot’s investigation is therefore an investigation into this space where speaking subjectivity is silenced, effaced and essentially destroyed, but where it somehow (coerced of its own volition) goes on speaking (and goes on suffering) nevertheless. The emphasis of Blanchot’s reading, in other words, is not solely on language and the language of literature and narrative, but rather on the voice that shoulders the unbearable responsibility of continuing speaking where speech itself articulates as the purest modality of torture and torment. Accordingly, one of the consequences of Blanchot’s critique of The Unnamable is that by zeroing in on the figure of the narrative voice tasked with surviving the unending (because etiologically indeterminate) trauma of its textual imprisonment, it indicts the desire to read The Unnamable simply as an ethical or rhetorical testament to perseverance: ‘there is nothing admirable in an ordeal from which one cannot extricate oneself, nothing that deserves admiration in the fact of being trapped and turning in circles in a space one can’t leave, even by death, since to be in this space in the first place, one had precisely to have fallen outside of life. Aesthetic feelings are no longer appropriate here’ (BC 213). This is not to deny that the figure of the unnamable is not a subject predicated, at least partially, by its ethic of perseverance, or that Beckett’s (ironic) use of the rhetorical device of aporia, as Amanda Dennis reminds us, is designed and deployed in the textual space of The Unnamable in order to ‘spur a creative endurance that entails an aesthetic of survival – a going on (if not forward)’ (2015: 181; italics in original); rather, Blanchot is expressing a sensitivity to the suffering figure of The Unnamable, but in the process of doing so will have to concede that whatever modality of suffering the unnamable is obliged to endure will be a modality of suffering that the unnamable itself has been rendered complicit in orchestrating. Implicit in Blanchot’s analysis of The Unnamable is the cautionary demand that subsequent encounters with The Unnamable avoid the temptation of revisionist readings of its textual ethics as an ethics of aesthetic perseverance. To properly understand the unnamable’s conditions of narrative survival would require a critique of how it is that the unnamable is circumscribed, and circumscribes itself in turn, in the terror of dying interminably, speaking interminably, and thinking interminably in the space of Beckett’s writing.
The purpose of this chapter is to begin the task of mobilising the conceptual resources of Blanchot precisely for understanding how it is that The Unnamable stages the limits and establishes the preconditions for its narrative voice to become embroiled in the terrifying convergence of radical protocols of suffering with radical protocols of thinking. The phenomenon of suffering in The Unnamable is not reducible to an experience or an image that the work’s narrative voice is in a position to communicate analytically or internalise phenomenologically. What is required on behalf of the figure of the unnamable, accordingly, is a way not only of traversing the disquieting link between suffering and thinking, but also, to borrow from Gilles Deleuze, of learning how to think by way of ‘trespass and violence’, whereby thinking is severed from its paralysing convergence with such unthinkable modalities of existence as radical suffering reflected in The Unnamable (Deleuze 1994: 139). What readers of The Unnamable have to contend with is the analytical impasse that the narrative voice erects to thinking through the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ of this ‘labyrinthine torment that can’t be grasped, or limited, or felt, or suffered, no, not even suffered’ (TN 308). This phenomenon in The Unnamable of a torment that cannot be conceptually grasped, of a suffering that cannot be phenomenologically suffered, demands that we reimagine what suffering is, or rather what suffering becomes, precisely when it is experienced according to these epistemological, phenomenological and ontological deficits and restrictions.
Things would be altogether easier if Beckett had made The Unnamable adhere to the generic requirements of a personal narrative or a testimonial account of a traumatic experience, a survivor’s recollection of an event that is separated temporally by the distance that ordinarily obtains between the traumatic event that happened then, and the memory, the testimonial event of narrative as it is happening now. This erasure of epistemo-phenomenological distance between event of suffering and narrative of suffering sets up a situation where the failure to narrate suffering doubles as the suffering that instigates the event of narrative in the first place. It remains to be determined just why it is that this erasure operates so pervasively and incessantly in the narrative world of the unnamable, and also just why the unnamable is so riveted to the tragic position of overseeing and experiencing – as tormentor and tormented simultaneously – this unendingly repetitive metamorphosis of narrative into suffering and suffering into narrative. In other words, what is the nature of the suffering that the unnamable can neither remember nor communicate, the suffering, it comes to pass, of the failure to remember (or forget) and the impossibility to communicate (or be silent)? The emphasis on the unnamable’s (ontologically inscrutable) identification with a subjectivity predicated on suffering is ubiquitous in the text, so much so that a close reading of The Unnamable would be ethically, epistemologically and hermeneutically irresponsible if it did not attempt to address the questions of how and why the unnamable suffers in the disconcerting way that it does.
In The Infinite Conversation Blanchot posits the existence of ‘a suffering that has lost time altogether. It is the horror of a suffering without end, a suffering time can no longer redeem, that has escaped time and for which there is no longer recourse; it is irremediable’ (IC 172). As with so many other notions in Blanchot’s work, ‘suffering’ becomes a relevant category for understanding the work of literature when literature too is divested of access to a conscious, nameable subjectivity that would experience and contemplate its suffering in the space and time of suffering’s phenomenological apprehension. What Blanchot describes as the (non-) experience of ‘suffering without end’ is not a worldly or corporeal experience of suffering. It is not derivative of physical suffering and does not have bodily or psychological afflictions as either its cause or manifestation. Accordingly, it is imperative that we distinguish between two forms of suffering that inform Blanchot’s reflections on suffering, particularly as it is the more radical experience of suffering, of a suffering that is not vulnerable to phenomenological capture, that for Blanchot represents a site that it is the singular responsibility of literature and narrative to interrogate (and perhaps, terrifyingly, reproduce).
The radical experience of suffering that occupies Blanchot’s reflections on voices of narrative and spaces of literature is not detached altogether from the suffering that remains experientially and conceptually accessible to historical and philosophical consciousness; they are not ‘worlds apart’, as it were. ‘The horror of a suffering without end’ does not substitute or negate, and it certainly does not minimise or discredit the stakes involved in the imperative to investigate, articulate and ultimately alleviate the finite experiences of corporeal and psychic suffering experienced daily all over the world. The point that Blanchot emphasises in juxtaposing these two forms of suffering – radical suffering and finite suffering – is that the radical modality of suffering without end, the suffering essentially bereft of temporality and detached from all hope of redemption or expiration, only becomes operational where its migration from the ontological context of finitude goes unnoticed precisely by the subject whose suffering has hit such an extreme pitch of weariness and affliction that this self-same subject ‘is no longer there to undergo’ its suffering ‘in the first person’ (IC 173).
Radical suffering is circumscribed, for Blanchot, according to a fragmentary logic whereby it is subtracted from ontological oversight in the space-time of the present, and in this modality of subtraction it deconstructs the phenomenology of diachronic experience that is at the root of linking before with after and the subject with its subjectivity.2 Radical suffering signals for Blanchot an epistemological disaster of thinking no less than an ontological disaster of subjectivity:
if I had recourse to the thought of such suffering, it was so that in this un-power, the I excluded from mastery and from its status as subject (as first person) – the I destitute even of obligation – could lose itself as a self capable of undergoing suffering. There is suffering, there would be suffering, but no longer any ‘I’ suffering, and this suffering does not make itself known in the present; it is not borne into the present (still less is it experienced in the present). It is without present, just as it is without beginning or end; time has radically changed its meaning and its flow. Time without present, I without I: this is not anything of which one could say that experience – a form of knowledge – would either reveal or conceal it. (WD 14–15)
So long as the act of philosophical thinking is constrained by seizing conceptually on its objects of analysis, radical suffering is by definition an unthinkable concept. Thinking philosophically through the dialectical logic (and language) of negativity on which concepts are constitutively predicated requires that a phenomenon like radical suffering somehow be divested of its resistance to philosophical conceptualisation. However, because Blanchot does not desire to think suffering other than in its most radical, that is to say, unthinkable form, he decides to turn to alternative modes of thinking that are not necessarily beholden to the conceptual laws of negativity as are ways of thinking philosophically.
Radical suffering is an object of critique and a modality of experience accessible only to the perspective of literature and literary writing. This becomes clearer still through Blanchot’s encounter in The Infinite Conversation with Robert Antelme’s concentration camp memoir L’Espéce humaine/The Human Race.3 Looking at Blanchot’s critique of radical suffering in the context of Antelme’s concentrationary internment necessitates a discussion of how radical suffering is a real-world phenomenon that paradoxically demands expression only through the language and perspective of literature and fiction. Because radical suffering dispossesses the subject of suffering of its consciousness and subjectivity, of its power to say ‘I’, Blanchot tells us, any recollection or memory of suffering will have to be translated as though it was lived through vicariously outside of historical and phenomenological reality. Like the disaster, Blanchot writes in The Writing of the Disaster, radical suffering ‘is outside history, but historically so’ (WD 40).
It is through Blanchot’s notion of radical suffering that we can begin to understand Antelme when he struggles to explain that ‘in those first days’ of liberation from the camps, ‘we saw that it was impossible to bridge the gap we discovered opening up between the words at our disposal and that experience which, in the case of most of us, was still going on within our bodies. [. . .] No sooner would we begin to tell our story than we would be choking over it. And then, even to us, what we had to tell would start to seem unimaginable’ (Antelme 1998: 3; italics in original). The experience of surviving the targeted destruction of his humanity places Antelme at an infinite distance from the narrative of destruction still playing itself out in his body and in his consciousness, and so despite his intimate proximity to this narrative of destruction, Antelme cannot straightforwardly translate it through the language of autobiographical recollection. Antelme’s The Human Race is a work of autobiographical fiction, and the reason why it must be a work of autobiographical fiction is that Antelme can only write from the ontologically foreign vantage point, paradoxically, of posthumous survival, and not from the vantage point of the one who was there, targeted for destruction by the profoundly unimaginable events and experiences that Antelme has knowingly tasked himself with only ever vicariously recounting.
Through his assessment of the post-war significance of Antelme, Blanchot considers that Antelme’s is a lesson that was not possible to teach or anticipate prior to the ontological crisis of suffering brought on by the catastrophic events of the Second World War. The enigmatic lesson that Blanchot draws from Antelme’s autobiographical reflections of his internment in Dachau and Buchenwald is that ‘man is the indestructible. And this means there is no limit to the destruction of man’ (IC 135). Put more aphoristically, the lesson is that ‘man is the indestructible that can be destroyed’ (IC 130). Far from asserting that humanity is invulnerable to all human attempts at annihilating the human, Blanchot’s emphasis falls disconcertingly on humankind’s infinite vulnerability to (and propensity for) destruction and violence. This reserve of vulnerability is only exposed in rare (but not rare enough), unimaginable situations like the one endured by Antelme. When it is exposed, however, it reveals something not only about the vulnerable fragility of being human, but also about humankind’s infinite capacity for perpetrating violence, extortion and torture against others. It is this other capacity – the capacity of humankind for perpetrating violence, extortion and torture without end by feeding so insatiability and indeed creatively on humankind’s essential indestructability – that Blanchot is concerned primarily if not impossibly with investigating through the encounter with Antelme.
Can suffering this radical be inscribed in the texture and language of narrative (autobiographical or fictional)? What are the demands on composing (recounting) narratives of radical suffering in order not to violate the law of the disempowerment of subjectivity that modalities of suffering such as this always already induce in the suffering subject? In ‘the neutral space’ that writing circumscribes through the voice of narrative, Blanchot writes, ‘the bearers of speech [. . .] fall into a relation of self-nonidentification. Something happens to them that they can only recapture by relinquishing their power to say “I.” And what happens has always already happened: they can only indirectly account for it as a sort of self-forgetting, the forgetting that introduces them into the present without memory that is the present of narrating speech’ (IC 384–5). The subjectivity of radical suffering and the voice of narrative as such converge at the point where they expose us to the abyssal recesses of times we can neither imagine nor recount, and therefore experiences we can neither remember nor forget. In suffering and in narrative we are withdrawn from the world, but denied the gift of death. How are we to predicate the narrative voice in its convergence with the subjectivity of radical suffering, particularly as this would be an existence demanding of predication precisely through its resistance to predication? Blanchot hazards an answer for what this existence would be if predicated through the work of literature:
Let us (on a whim) call it spectral, ghostlike. Not that it comes from beyond the grave, or even because it would once and for all represent some essential absence, but because it always tends to absent itself in its bearer and also efface him as the center: it is thus neutral in the decisive sense that it cannot be central, does not create a center, does not speak from out of a center, but, on the contrary, at the limit would prevent the work from having one; withdrawing from it every privileged point of interest (even afocal), and also not allowing it to exist as a completed whole, once and forever achieved. (IC 386)
Radical suffering introduces us to a relation, not with the exuberant affirmation of Heideggerian finitude nor with the unstoppable productivity of Hegelian negativity, but with the outside of all ontological or metaphysical possibility. This is a relation with the impossibility of dying that captive existences like Antelme’s, like the unnamable’s, like the spectral, narrative voice’s that have been displaced into death itself open up. Before seeing how the Beckettian figure of the unnamable negotiates its inscription in its narrative of suffering, we need to accompany Blanchot through his reading of Antelme in order to appreciate just how ontologically as well as hermeneutically severe the narrative situation of The Unnamable might be.
Blanchot’s reading of Antelme develops according to three interpretive movements before concluding (provisionally) with the disquieting, utterly inhuman revelation that ‘man is the indestructible that can be destroyed’ (IC 130). The first movement involves tracing the descent of a subjectivity, of an ‘ego cogito (understood as the inalienable foundation of every possibility of being alienated)’, into the phenomenological darkness of radical suffering experienced by Antelme, a movement which passes in its first account as a straightforward critique of finite affliction (IC 130). Blanchot cites Antelme as a biographical index of the subjectivity – the person and prisoner named Robert Antelme – reduced at the hands of the SS to this subject of the narrative of suffering that remains when all remnants of Antelme’s pre-war subjectivity have been eviscerated by the gradual intensification of what he was forced to experience in the camps. This first movement begins with (the strategic ideological illusion of) admitting the relative ontological stability of Antelme’s pre-war subjectivity as a productive citizen of France and ends with Antelme’s arrival at an existence of utterly abject inhumanity. ‘In affliction – and in our society affliction is always first the loss of social status – the one who suffers at the hands of men is radically altered’ (IC 131; my italics). Names are reduced to numbers, faces are deprived of personality, and humans are denied their belonging to humanity. In this regard Antelme, who was imprisoned not as a Jew (Antelme was French Catholic), but as a member of the Resistance to the Nazi Occupation of France, was no exception to what subsistence in the camps entailed. Indeed, the nightmarish transformation that the SS sought to perform was of persons deported from their homes and communities in cities and societies all across Europe (and perhaps eventually the world) to what Blanchot reads as ‘essentially deported’ persons. The ‘essentially deported person’, Blanchot explains, is ‘the one who no longer has either a face or speech, the work he is forced to do is designed to exhaust his power to live and to deliver him over to the boundless insecurity of the elements. Nowhere any recourse: outside the cold, inside hunger; everywhere an indeterminate violence. “The cold, SS”, Antelme says profoundly’ (IC 131).
Once the ‘essentially deported person’ arrives where there is no longer any reason or prospect to seek shelter from the harshness of the natural elements, when the violence of the elements is indistinguishable in its irrationality and relentlessness from the physical violence and murderous neglect meted out daily by the SS, ‘at this moment when he becomes the unknown and the foreign, when, that is, he becomes a fate for himself, his last recourse is to know that he has been struck not by the elements, but by men, and to give the name man to everything that assails him. So when everything ceases to be true, “anthropomorphism” would be truth’s ultimate echo’ (IC 131). At the bottom of Antelme’s degradation, which relates inversely to the apex of the violence and inhumanity of the SS, all that remains is this presence of ‘man’ in which coheres the penchant of humanity for executing radical violence, and the vulnerability that humanity represents and confronts as the victim of this very same violence. The common denominator between Antelme and the SS is simply this category called ‘man’ that can suffer as much as it can cause to suffer. While, we need hardly point out, there is a vast ethical divide between Antelme and the SS, ontologically speaking they are indistinguishable. The first movement of Blanchot’s reading of Antelme, then, concludes with the confirmation of anthropomorphism that neither the SS nor Antelme can evade: the SS, the violence of anthropomorphism; Antelme, the anthropomorphism that cannot be stripped away in the suffering imposed by the violence of the SS.
In the experience of radical suffering that Antelme’s autobiographical narrative circumscribes, the one afflicted so radically that he cannot remember what the experience of this suffering truly involved is faced with the phenomenologically unworkable realisation that it is ‘man alone who kills him’ and ‘man’ alone that he irreducibly remains: ‘the nature of affliction is such that there is no longer anyone either to cause it or to suffer it; at the limit, there are never any afflicted – no one who is afflicted ever really appears. The one afflicted no longer has any identity other than the situation with which he merges and that never allows him to be himself; for as a situation of affliction, it tends incessantly to de-situate itself, to dissolve in the void of a nowhere without foundation’ (IC 131–2). This is the end-point of the first movement that guides Blanchot’s reading of Antelme, and which of course signals the transition of his reading into the second movement. There is no doubting that ‘man’ can be destroyed and that there is no finite limit to either the quality or quantity of suffering that ‘man’ can be made to undergo. ‘But, there is no ambiguity’, and here Blanchot turns things over to Antelme, that ‘we remain men and will end only as men . . . It is because we are men as they are that the SS will finally be powerless before us . . . [the executioner] can kill a man, but he cannot change him into something else’ (IC 130; italics in original). Antelme’s disquieting revelation here is that the anthropomorphic facticity of humankind that neither prisoner nor SS can disavow is precisely what is responsible for humankind’s vulnerability and attraction to the dehumanising use of violence, extortion and torture.
While there is no dialectical transfer of power from the torturer (master) to the victim (slave) in the universe of the camps, nevertheless in the ‘situation of affliction’ where torturer and victim congregate through the inhumanity of their interrelatedness, the limitless application of violence cannot altogether negate ‘the simplicity of a presence that is the infinite of human presence’ (IC 132). It is in this, the second movement of Blanchot’s reading of Antelme, that we are exposed to a non-anthropomorphic conception of human presence to which the ontologically exiled situation of radical suffering gives voice. What violence and torture cannot annihilate is the indestructability of what makes humankind so vulnerable to destruction in the first place. Humankind can always be made to speak and to scream. This is humankind’s fundamental right, Adorno tells us in Negative Dialectics, but it is a right and a basic physiological fact that is forever positioned as grist for the mill of a violence that capitalises on the inexhaustibility of humankind’s ontological susceptibility to destruction. As we will see at length in later paragraphs, the Beckettian unnamable is doubly instantiated in the positions of victim and tormentor through the relation its narrative orchestrates of an extorted subjectivity and an imperative of inquisition that tirelessly extorts speech on the basis of its indestructible alterity. One of the more dominant thematic concerns of The Unnamable is indeed this thematic of limitless destruction and unending extortion that exposes the narrative existence of the unnamable to the terror of its indestructibility.
The victim that is forced by extreme acts of violence to speak and to suffer can be made to speak and to suffer again and again so long as it continues to occupy the place of its victimisation:
Hence the furious movement of the inquisitor who wants by force to obtain a scrap of language in order to bring all speech down to the level of force. To make speak, and through torture, is to attempt to master infinite distance by reducing expression to this language of power through which the one who speaks would once again lay himself open to force’s hold; and the one who is being tortured refuses to speak in order not to enter through the extorted words into this game of opposing violence, but also, at the same time, in order to preserve the true speech that he very well knows is at this instant merged with his silent presence – which is the very presence of autrui himself. (IC 132)
The inviolable trace of indestructibility in the self having become other (of having become autrui) through the execution of torture articulates as the ‘silent presence’ of the ‘true speech’ that merges with the subjectivity of the one who is thereby reduced (broken down) to nothing but its refusal to speak (and therefore no longer there to undergo the experience of its suffering). The subjectivity that remains of radical suffering gives voice to the ‘silent presence’ of this self become other, of the presence of autrui. Up to this point in The Infinite Conversation Blanchot is still in tacit agreement with Levinas on the value that autrui represents in an historical and philosophical context that continues to thrive on dehumanising, (self-) destructive metaphysical investments in logics of negation: the indestructible presence of the voice and trace of autrui ‘bears in itself and as the last affirmation what Robert Antelme calls the ultimate feeling of belonging to mankind’ (IC 132; italics in original). In this second movement of Blanchot’s reading of Antelme we see how ‘man’ merges with the limit-experience of radical suffering, and in this experience is exposed to the affirmation of its ultimate indestructibility, which translates as the imperative that autrui not disappear without a murmur or a trace, as it were. This second movement, in other words, details the transformation of the biographical subject that says ‘I’, Robert Antelme, into the anonymous voice of autrui that has been exiled from Antelme’s autobiographical narrative to the outside of the radical situation of its suffering, of its coerced refusal to speak over the voice of its silence.
Blanchot’s diagnosis of the situation of autrui turns in this second movement on the recourse that the prisoner Antelme takes to an impersonal attachment with need. With this development in Blanchot’s reading of Antelme we find ourselves in territory likely familiar to readers of The Unnamable and to Beckett’s aesthetic programme as it is famously laid out in the ‘Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit’. Like autrui, the eponymous narrative voice of The Unnamable ceaselessly speaks in spite of all that would silence its speech because of the extreme and non-locatable obligation it is under simply and inexorably to speak (and to write and to think): ‘you must go on, I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on’ (TN 407). Blanchot confronts the phenomenon of obligation and need in the essay on Antelme by asking the very pragmatic question, ‘what happens nonetheless to the one who is no longer a presence – a terrifying transformation – in the first person? Destroyed as a Subject, that is, in this sense, essentially destroyed, how can he respond to this exigency that is the exigency of the presence [of autrui] in him?’ (IC 132). It is one thing to speak coherently at the level of philosophical discourse about the convergence and substitution of one’s identity with the anonymous (im)personality of autrui, but it is another thing entirely to return these considerations back into the historical and phenomenological (experiential) contexts where they in fact originated and are ceaselessly played out and negotiated. Blanchot tentatively holds that this can be accomplished through a second-order critique of obligation and need, since it appears that through its commitment to obligation and need, autrui keeps in contact with the world in order to discredit the totalising successes of the world’s murderous recourse to violence and torture. The way that autrui does this, Blanchot learns from the life and writing of Antelme (and others), is through its presence as the indestructible remainder that murderous violence cannot absolutely negate.
‘Here again’, according to Blanchot, ‘Antelme’s book gives us the right response, and it is the book’s most forceful truth. When man is reduced to the extreme destitution of need, when he becomes “someone who eats scraps,” we see that he is reduced to himself, and reveals himself as one who has need of nothing other than need in order to maintain the human relation in its primacy, negating what negates him’ (IC 132–4). This pure reduction of suffering subjectivity to the alterity inscribed in need manifests as an infinite obligation to reinforce need in its most radically irreducible form. Devoid of pleasure, devoid of the excesses of living that make of need a conduit to satisfaction and enjoyment, the need that Antelme recollects ‘is immediately’ and exclusively ‘the need to live’ (IC 133). Such a feeling of need becomes not ‘my’ need, but the abstracted need of all who participate in Antelme’s ultimate feeling of belonging to humankind via precisely this indestructability of need. This need, stubbornly attached to ‘an egoism without ego’, is a need that ‘becomes the impersonal exigency that alone bears the future and the meaning of every value or, more precisely, of every human relation’ (IC 133; italics in original).
When the desire to satisfy need can be manifested exclusively in the obligation to keep need alive, when need as such becomes the only end in sight, it is then not I that need sustains, but the I’s obligation and responsibility to this neutral need of autrui that the I has all of a sudden and without knowledge of its metamorphosis become. This affirmation of need, which coincides with the limitsituation of radical suffering, represents the second movement of Blanchot’s reading of Antelme, and with the emphasis that it places on the indestructible exigency of obligation this interpretive movement alone would suffice to legitimate a comparative reading, via Blanchot, of Antelme and Beckett, all three of whom are writing in the midst and in the aftermath of the Nazi Terror (though Beckett, like Blanchot, was never personally present to the horror of the camps). The structural affinities between, on the one hand, the obligation that Antelme internalises to somehow continue existing through an (unwilled) act of convergence with the need of autrui, and, on the other, the obligation that keeps Beckett’s the unnamable trapped in narrative, the unnamable ‘I who am here, who cannot speak, cannot think, and who must speak, and therefore perhaps think a little’, circulate interminably around the affirmation of this strange presence of autrui that simply subsists in the depersonalising situations of radical historical suffering and unredeemed narrative anonymity.
However, with Blanchot, and the same goes for Beckett, things are never as simple as submitting to Antelme’s one ‘last affirmation’ of belonging to humankind through merging one’s subjectivity with the spectral universality of the need to live and to speak – signatures of the indestructible presence of autrui. To Antelme’s heroically depersonalised affirmation of belonging, in spite of all, to humankind, one of Blanchot’s interlocutors in The Infinite Conversation again raises the objection that ‘for such a movement to begin truly to be affirmed, there must be restored – beyond this self that I have ceased to be, and within this anonymous community – the instance of a Self-Subject: no longer as a dominating and oppressing power drawn up against the “other” that is autrui, but as what can receive the unknown and the foreign, receive them in the justice of a true speech’ (IC 133–4). This reservation brings us to the third and final movement of Blanchot’s encounter with Antelme, and in this movement Blanchot is hesitant to locate in radical suffering the grounds for one final affirmation of the true speech that would confirm once and for all the irreducibility of belonging to humankind. Blanchot’s consistency as a thinker inheres in this uncompromising refusal not to enlist his thinking on the road to transcendence or redemption, however appealing such a road looks in the philosophically competent and historically wizened hands of Antelme. Where affirmation verges on the possibility of overcoming subjective destitution and suffering, Blanchot never tires of suspecting, is where nihilism begins and begins to make its metaphysical presence permanent.
Blanchot’s interlocutor is therefore right to ask if, after all that has been said about radical suffering, it is now in a position to present radical suffering as a form of knowledge and as a phenomenological concept of experience. Blanchot concludes his reading of Antelme with the following indecisive exchange between the two fictional interlocutors through which Blanchot has been speaking:
– That man is the indestructible that can be destroyed? I continue to be wary of this formulation.
– How could it be otherwise? But even if we are to delete it, let us agree to keep what it has most plainly taught us. Yes, I believe we must say this, hold onto it for an instant: man is the indestructible. And this means there is no limit to the destruction of man.
– Is this not to formulate a radical nihilism?
– If so I should be quite willing, for to formulate it would also perhaps already be to overturn it. But I doubt that nihilism will allow itself to be taken so easily. (IC 135)
Nihilism is resurrected, if not at the genocidal endpoint of the destruction of humankind, then precisely where the indestructability of humankind is turned around as the point of commencement for the endlessness of humankind’s vulnerability to destruction. We can neither endorse nor condemn this ambivalent condition of being human, for to endorse it would be to endorse destruction, and to condemn it would be to belittle what remains of humanity when the destruction of humankind nears completion. Nihilism persists precisely in this fragmentary space of detour, or turning, from one impossibility to the other, and that Blanchot, in the very next chapter on Nietzsche and fragmentary writing, describes as nihilism’s ‘final and rather grim truth: it tells of the impossibility of nihilism’ (IC 149): ‘nihilism is this very turning itself, the affirmation that, in passing from the No to the Yes, refutes nihilism, but does nothing other than affirm it, and henceforth extends it to every possible affirmation’ (IC 150).
What is so epistemologically as well as ontologically disorienting about Blanchot’s encounter with radical suffering in the autobiographical writing of Antelme is that positing it as an object of reflection, as a conduit of thinking, has to presuppose that the subjectivity of thinking, the ego cogito of Blanchot’s reflections, has crossed the threshold of what is thinkable – the threshold of radical suffering – with its own subjectivity intact, in which case the unthinkable phenomenon of radical suffering is nihilistically effaced as the knowable, thinkable experience of finite affliction. However, because radical suffering, as we have already seen Blanchot insisting in The Writing of the Disaster, is strictly speaking as unthinkable as it is unspeakable (unimaginable, says Antelme), Blanchot is logically committed to searching out a new protocol of thinking that can encounter radical suffering without recourse to the dialectical knowledge of a concept that would thereby sacrifice radical suffering to radical nihilism, i.e. to the nihilism of negativity and transcendence. The problem first and foremost, then, is this: what is a non-philosophical protocol of thinking, a protocol that remains a protocol of thinking in the encounter with radical suffering? Only if Blanchot can uncover a non-philosophical protocol of thinking can the fragmentary detour (the fragmentary qua detour) of radical nihilism be deferred (but never decisively blocked) in the analytic encounter with radical suffering.
In The Book to Come, Blanchot uses the occasion of commenting on Antonin Artaud’s fascinating epistolary exchange with Jacques Rivière to suggest that what the writing of Artaud says, which places his work in the literary constellation that is formed around Blanchot’s pantheon of writers that includes Sade, Hölderlin, Mallarmé, Kafka, Joubert, Char, Celan and of course Beckett, ‘is of an intensity that we could not bear. Here speaks a pain that refuses all profundity, all illusion, and all hope, but that, in this refusal, offers to thought “the ether of a new space”’ (BC 40). Blanchot continues teasing out the broader implications that Artaud’s writing has on its encounter with the act of thinking, which desires to encounter in this writing something other than the impossibility of reading and thinking, something other than the anguish that these activities provoke the instant that they confront, as they do in Antelme (and Beckett) no less than in Artaud, ‘what one is forbidden to read’ (WD 10):
the act of thinking can only be deeply shocking; what is to be thought about is in thought that which turns away from it and inexhaustibly exhausts itself in it; suffering and thinking are secretly linked, for if suffering, when it becomes extreme, is such that it destroys the capacity to suffer, always destroying ahead of itself, in time, the time when suffering could be grasped and ended, it is perhaps the same with thought. Strange connections. Might it be that extreme thought and extreme suffering open onto the same horizon? Might suffering be, finally, thinking? (BC 40)
Without simply conflating the difference that obtains to the relation of thinking and suffering, which even if thinking and suffering are synonymous, is a relation of veiled symmetry that is maintained by the dissymmetry of a repetition (thinking becomes suffering in the act of thinking), Blanchot is nevertheless committed to respecting the limit that radical suffering imposes on the analytical approach of thinking. The intermediary status of writing in the dissymmetrical repetition of thinking as suffering is absolutely indispensable. Artaud demands that thinking be suffocated by its encounter with writing, and in this suffocating encounter it becomes inextricably linked to radical suffering.
Even before Blanchot comes up against the experience of suffering that mobilises the indestructible ontological surplus of autrui in Antelme’s autobiographical text, it is perhaps the case that without this more intrinsic encounter with radical suffering that Artaud’s writing exposes, the act of thinking could not possibly commence as an approach onto the literary space of fiction and into the outside of historical disaster that Antelme’s memoir bridges. Perhaps the threat of radical nihilism that works to undo all of the advancements Blanchot makes into his reading of Antelme is predicated on Blanchot failing to reconsider in the essay on Antelme in The Infinite Conversation the lesson he learned from reading Artaud in The Book to Come, namely that suffering and thinking perhaps converge around ‘the same horizon’ (BC 40). Perhaps, in other words, it is not so much the case that radical suffering is unthinkable and unspeakable, so much as it is that thinking is the exigency of radical suffering where thinking is overtaken by the fragmentary imperative of writing. In the same way that Antelme’s narrative of suffering reveals anthropomorphism as ‘truth’s ultimate echo’ (IC 131), so too is the act of thinking obliged by the fragmentary imperative of writing to merge with the exigency of radical suffering, thereby always destroying ahead of itself, in time, the time when THINKING could be grasped and ended.
Whereas Blanchot’s reading of suffering in Antelme develops according to successive logical movements that culminate in the philosophical impasse of thinking in its convergence with the phenomenon of radical suffering, the reading of Beckett’s The Unnamable developed here unfolds first by juxtaposing two contradictory modalities of suffering – Mahood’s and Worm’s – and then, second, by suggesting that the reason why the suffering experienced by the narrative voice of The Unnamable is so intractable in its resistance to conceptualisation is that it unveils precisely this strange link between suffering and thinking that Blanchot first diagnosed in the poetics of Artaud. The Unnamable stages the terrifying convergence of the imperative of suffering with the imperative of thinking, which implicates the hermeneutical encounter with Beckett’s writing in this disconcerting constellation as well.4 Leslie Hill worries that too ‘much published criticism’ about Beckett ‘makes little claim upon the reader, not because commentators are insufficiently discriminating or because they discriminate too much, but because they necessarily always run the risk of falling victim to the infantile disorder of all literary criticism – which may be the fate of all criticism in general – which, in the guise of enabling access to the text, is to domesticate and normalise it, to reduce it to the horizon of expectation of the already known’ (2010: 12). This chapter’s strategy for avoiding precisely this disorder of criticism is to focus on the convergence of suffering and thinking in The Unnamable, and specifically on the terror that arises when the act of thinking converges with and precipitates the ordeal of radical suffering. What this chapter is naming the terror of thinking in The Unnamable, in other words, is a reflection of the narrative circumscription of this convergence through the fragmentary protocols of Beckett’s writing.
Accepting the argument that thinking and suffering are ‘secretly linked’ through a relation of terror and advancing through our reading of Beckett with the hypothesis that this link accounts for much that is going on in The Unnamable entails that in the critical encounter with this narrative and its narrative voice, hermeneutical subjectivity is obliged to negotiate with the demand that it too undergo an ordeal of metamorphosis through the suffering of thinking. It is not just that thinking is linked to suffering, but that through this link with suffering, thinking is subject to the imperative of its own unending withdrawal from its established epistemological securities. The Unnamable, as a site of narrative disorientation and ontological disintegration, instantiates what Deleuze identifies as the ‘terra incognita’ of thinking (1994: 136). When thinking is circumscribed in spaces like The Unnamable where the laws of thinking as well as the laws of reading are suspended, it faces up to the disquieting truth, continues Deleuze, that ‘the conditions of a true critique and a true creation are the same: the destruction of an image of thought which presupposes itself and the genesis of the act of thinking itself. Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter’ (1994: 139; italics in original).5
Deleuze is substituting the dialectical relation of destruction and creation with an event of thinking that fundamentally dislocates or exiles the act of thinking from the enlightenment narrative of its accumulating knowledge. Thinking begins, accordingly, only by subtracting itself from all the hard-won logics, laws and knowledges that thinking suddenly, unpredictably renounces as it is made by a ‘fundamental encounter’ to trespass into the aleatory future of thought. When this trespass is staged in the space of literature, however, thinking is precluded from subtracting itself absolutely from the archives (the indelible memories, the dialectical narratives) of these logics, laws and knowledges. As it stages an encounter between thinking and suffering, The Unnamable precipitates an experience of the suffering of thinking that is no less severe in its ontological consequences than the ordeal of radical suffering that Blanchot encounters through Antelme. This experience is one that links the inquisitorial imperatives for memory, speech and existence that drive the narrative discourse of The Unnamable with the desperate desire of the work’s narrative voice to end its condemnation to the ontological nightmare of always failing and of therefore always returning to the place before this imperative. When the vicious economy of this relation is accepted as the a priori of how the unnamable is condemned to make its way through the torturous narrative passageway of The Unnamable, we finally begin to approximate what it perhaps means when the unnamable explicitly states that the act of thinking in The Unnamable begins only by crossing the incomprehensible threshold of terror: ‘I only think, if that is the name for this vertiginous panic as of hornets smoked out of their nest, once a certain degree of terror has been exceeded’ (TN 344; my italics). Thinking is trespass and violence, but so too is it ineluctably traversed by the impossibility of transcending the words, memories and responsibilities that keep thinking riveted to the logics, laws and knowledges that precede and legislate the event of its commencement and the narrative of its continuation. The terror of thinking inheres in this space of incommensurability between what thinking demands of itself as the demand for a rupture with itself, and what, in compelling the act of thinking in the space of literature, precludes this demand’s fulfilment as a project that would inaugurate (and with the promise of redeeming) the future of thinking: the eternal return of language, memory and history through the fragmentary imperative of writing.
Beckett approaches the exigency of radical suffering primarily from a literary perspective, rather than from an autobiographical (Antelme) or philosophical (Blanchot) perspective. Consequently, the problematic of radical suffering that this perspective negotiates is positioned so as to take the insight that radical suffering dispossesses subjectivity of its power to say ‘I’ as its a priori point of narrative departure, rather than as an autobiographical or philosophical endpoint of disastrous revelation. Radical suffering and the narrative voice of literature, Blanchot suggests in The Infinite Conversation, converge precisely around the ontological site of the subject being dispossessed of its subjectivity.Assuming that what Blanchot calls ‘radical suffering’ is indeed an apt characterisation of the peculiar modality of existence of the Beckettian unnamable, then perhaps a productive way to begin an interpretive critique of the image of thinking operative in The Unnamable is to ask what is, in the context of The Unnamable, a patently unanswerable question: after ‘radical suffering’, what comes next? One of the signatures of radical suffering is that it throws the metaphysics of diachronic temporality into irredeemable confusion. Accordingly, framing the question of what comes after radical suffering must be done outside of the metaphysical prerequisites of a beginning and end paradigm of narrative development: ‘One can be before beginning, they have set their hearts on that’ (TN 346). This is where Blanchot’s hypothesis of a secret link between suffering and thinking becomes relevant for a reading of Beckett’s The Unnamable, where there is indeed a subtle and perhaps even untraceable narrative transition from out of the unnamable’s immersion in its situation of radical suffering and into its sudden appearance before the problematic of what it means to be continuing speaking and thinking amidst the ongoing ontological disaster of its indestructible subjectivity (and therefore vulnerability to limitless destruction).
The endgame of The Unnamable is not one of playing out or giving testimony to the experience of suffering at its most radically traumatic or post-traumatic historical and psychological extreme. With very little historical or geographical points of reference in his writing of this work, the suffering, trauma and above all the terror that Beckett’s writing reflects is negotiated using a literary perspective that is not reducible to the task of recording or communicating ‘real’ historical configurations of disaster, catastrophe and ruin. The contribution that The Unnamable makes to the analytical discourse on radical suffering inheres in its experimentation with the unnerving possibility that in the exigency of radical suffering there can be no return to the time of non-radical or ‘worldly’ forms of suffering. Radical suffering represents the ontological condition par excellence of the existence that a life lived exclusively in the non-historical margins of literature and narrative retroactively exposes.6 Behind the endlessly aporetic repetitions and disavowals of discourse and words, through the incessant affirmation and negation of images and concepts in the imagination of the unnamable, there stands a narrative existence that is forever chained to the inhospitable space of literature where memory and logic have no ontological or epistemological purchase over the trial of suffering subjectivity. The subjectivity to which the narrative voice of The Unnamable desperately yet reluctantly clings is predicated on the imperative of continuing speaking and thinking in a time and a place where speaking is reduced to sounds signifying little more than babble, and where encounters with the blind spots of reflection and reflexivity trigger the unnamable’s submission to exhaustive, extortionist regimes of rote regurgitation and memory: ‘I shall submit, more corpse-obliging than ever’ (TN 343).
This situation leads the unnamable to describe itself as a caged beast whose existence is predicated solely on its unthinkable instantiation of a life interminably lived in the ongoing disintegration of its subjectivity. Without ever coming into phenomenological proximity with the exigency of its suffering – ‘where I am there is no one but me, who am not’ (TN 348) – the unnamable is nevertheless left to conclude, and it is a conclusion that serves only to perpetuate its suffering indefinitely, that its life in suffering is intertwined with the words and images it uses to fumble its way through understanding how it suffers in the way that it suffers:
I’m all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling, no sky for their dispersing, coming together to say, fleeing one another to say, that I am they, all of them, those that merge, those that part, those that never meet, and nothing else, yes, something else, that I’m something quite different, a quite different thing, a wordless thing in an empty place, a hard shut dry cold black place, where nothing stirs, nothing speaks, and that I listen, and that I seek, like a caged beast born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born in a cage and dead in a cage, born and then dead, born in a cage and then dead in a cage, in a word like a beast, in one of their words, like such a beast, and that I seek, like such a beast, with my little strength, such a beast, with nothing of its species left but fear and fury, no, the fury is past, nothing but fear, nothing of all its due but fear centupled, fear of its shadow, no, blind from birth, of sound then, if you like, we’ll have that, one must have something, it’s a pity, but there it is, fear of sound, fear of sounds, the sounds of beasts, the sounds of men, sounds in the daytime and sounds at night, that’s enough [. . .] (TN 380)
The terror imposed onto the narrative world of The Unnamable is succinctly captured in these lines. What this excerpt entails, by forcing into view the image of this caged beast, the progeny of caged beasts no sooner dead than born, is that the suffering experienced by the unnamable does not begin prior to the brute fact of an existence in suffering, nor does its coincidence with suffering end once this suffering has run its murderous course. By dying, the caged beast is born, ‘born in a cage and then dead in a cage, born and then dead’ (TN 380). Its cage is made up of words, but it is a cage that is not any the less claustrophobically constructed as a result. With nothing but the fear of what it might be, if it could be, what it might say, if it could speak, and what it might think, if it could think, the unnamable can do little else except pace back and forth between the words circumscribing its existence until its existence, circumscribed by words, is eroded down to nothing but words, at which point (a turn of the fragmentary) its pacing, its incremental disintegration, begins again anew: ‘it all boils down to a question of words, I must not forget this, I have not forgotten it. But I must have said this before, since I say it now. I have to speak in a certain way, with warmth perhaps, all is possible, first of the creature I am not, as if I were he, and then, as if I were he, of the creature I am’ (TN 329). This is not a figure that has entered, in time, the space of suffering; rather, this is a figure that has never been anywhere other than in the space of suffering. The implication of this revelation is that the figure of the unnamable is obliged to pursue its narrative trajectory as a being displaced from temporality and devoid of a narrative subjectivity empowered with the capacity of imagining what an existence lived outside of suffering was, is, or would be like if the unnamable were anywhere but here in the imprisoning words of The Unnamable.
The Unnamable does not hide the fact that the figure of its narrative voice, the figure of the unnamable, is in perpetual contact with suffering: ‘No one asks him to think, simply to suffer, always in the same way, without hope of diminution, without hope of dissolution, it’s no more complicated than that’ (TN 361). Suffering speaks through the unnamable’s speech with the pain of the one who is compelled to speak by an unidentified and indeed unidentifiable spirit of violence that demands nothing less of the unnamable than the torturous continuation of its unliveable narrative existence. It is important that we not misunderstand or devalue what is entailed by the Beckettian phenomenon of a voice that cannot go silent. Having lost the capacity to go silent, yet still being enlisted in the act of speaking the words that fiercely demand that speech become silence, the unnamable’s very existence is predicated on the ceaseless reminder that there is no recourse to death as the limit to the suffering through which its life in narrative is orchestrated.
According to Blanchot, Socrates was the first to invest the enlightened use of speech with the civilising power to ‘get the better of violence: that is the certainty he calmly represents, and his death is heroic but calm, because the violence that interrupts his life cannot interrupt the reasonable language that is his true life and at the end of which we find harmony, and violence disarmed’ (BC 152). If civilised humanity commences with the philosophical speech of Socrates, it hits its climax and aggressively begins to degenerate in the radical suffering of the Beckettian unnamable. In the inhuman world of the unnamable, where the ontological barrier that divides the within from the without, life from death, signified from signifier, speech from torment, torturer from tortured, is as ‘thin as foil’, and where, as a consequence, the unnamable thinks and speaks from ‘neither one side nor the other, I’m in the middle, I’m the partition, I’ve two surfaces and no thickness’, there is implanted in each and every word that the unnamable is compelled to speak a constituting violence the force of which is exponentially redoubled by the intractably repetitive movement of the work’s narrative inertia (TN 376).
Suffering in The Unnamable is not, therefore, an ethical or epistemological anomaly that arises because its speaker has not yet ‘let them put into my mouth at last the words that will save me, damn me’ (TN 362). Suffering is not a transitional pathway to silence, salvation and civilisation here, nor is it the refuge of the damned who at least have the knowledge, and thus do not threaten the ethical order of judgement, guilt, reason and hope, that their punishment is the etiological consequence of their crimes: ‘my crime is my punishment, that’s what they judge me for’ (TN 362). Rather, the unnamable contends with the truly unimaginable reality of a situation that balks at the very metaphysics of a causality of suffering. The unnamable’s is a situation that ‘reasonable language’ cannot recuperate, a situation wherein ‘reasonable language’ cannot overpower the suffering of the unnamable because the unnamable itself is that which eludes the dialectics of salvation that since Socrates has been the promise made by negativity and death, speech and death.
In the space of literature that the unnamable stoically inhabits, then, what speaks is a narrative voice whose fictional reality precludes predication by the metaphysical and phenomenological modes of existence requisite for a reconciliatory critique of suffering. To suggest otherwise would be to commit a fundamental misreading of the unnamable’s subjection to the exigency of radical suffering. Evidence of the sorts of misreading that an inadequate critique of suffering produces can be found in the work of such eminent Beckett scholars as Mary Bryden. Bryden claims that there is the possibility of salvation for Beckett’s suffering voices from the radical modality of their suffering, thus enabling us to see in what way Beckett’s writing is ceaselessly able ‘to generate a kind of recursive energy’, an energy capable of implementing ‘a switch of focus which brings sufficient relief’ from suffering and pain (2012: 211). The alleviation of suffering via what Bryden describes as a ‘continuance despite all odds’ is, unfortunately, not an equation that The Unnamable can unproblematically endorse given the extreme modality of suffering that plagues its narrative voice. While there undoubtedly is a thematic of continuation operative throughout the narrative discourse of the unnamable – ‘there is silence, from the moment the messenger departs until he returns with his orders, namely, Continue’ (TN 363) – there is little evidence in definitive support of the claim that the path on which the unnamable’s discourse continues is one that is any way traversable as a teleological route to the alleviation or redemption of suffering and pain by the narrative’s end. Seeing the Beckettian negotiation of suffering as a problematic immanent to the space of literature precludes joining Paul Sheehan as well in believing that from the ‘therapeutic heroism’ of Beckettian humour, for instance, ‘it is but a small step to an ethic of redemption’ (2002: 153).
Against Bryden and Sheehan, Garin Dowd and Sam Slote are more on track in arguing, as Dowd puts it, that although ‘in many respects Beckett’s oeuvre is an appropriate candidate for inclusion in [Elaine] Scarry’s category of literary works adding to the sum of a shared examination of pain and suffering’, nevertheless ‘one does not find in it the utopian opening which Scarry believes resides in the redemptive power of literature’ (2012: 87). Similarly for Slote, ‘if narration might be a palliative’, as Scarry optimistically suggests, ‘it is also an exacerbator. [. . .] Thus the unnamable continues on, perhaps even when it does not need to. [. . .] It exists in a state that conjoins compulsion with powerlessness, a state that cannot be rendered into language, which is to say, it exists in pain’ (2014: 57). The closer we get to penetrating conceptually into the inscrutability of radical suffering, however, the more radical suffering causes the act of conceptualisation, the act of thinking, to asphyxiate on what it is about radical suffering that conceptual thinking cannot digest: ‘I’ve got nowhere, in their affair, that’s what galls them, they want me there somewhere, anywhere, if only they’d stop committing reason, on them, on me, on the purpose to be achieved, and simply go on, with no illusion about having begun one day or ever being able to conclude, but it’s too difficult, too difficult, for one bereft of purpose, not to look forward to his end, and bereft of all reason to exist, back to a time he did not’ (TN 378). Narrative immobility and the permanence of suffering are what the unnamable is made ‘to make the best of’, but if the narrative goes nowhere, if it circles back endlessly to the melancholic site of its departure from the world of reason, memory and speech, and if the measure of suffering is as infinite and unthinkable today as it was yesterday and as it will be tomorrow, then the image of the existence that the unnamable projects becomes unworkable as a subject of analytic dissemination.
Bryden mistakenly presumes that from one end of the narrative structure of The Unnamable to the other, the suffering of its eponymous voice will either get worse or (hopefully) get better. The problematic so central to the narrative architecture of The Unnamable, the problematic that eludes Bryden, it would appear, is that the measure of suffering that the unnamable endures is not commensurable with suffering experienced in the historical and empirical world outside of literature (hence the recourse Bryden takes to Scarry’s The Body in Pain). This would be the suffering that commences, Blanchot explains, with ‘the loss of social status’ and the onset of physical and psychological pain (IC 131). This is not to say that The Unnamable permits of no recognition of finite suffering; on the contrary, the problematic of narrative as it articulates through The Unnamable is precisely that it is historical and finite suffering that the unnamable struggles so desperately and futilely to experience. The ontological catch in all of this is that it is only radical suffering that the unnamable, qua narrative voice dispossessed of the power to say ‘I’, experiences and knows, and such an experience of radical suffering, as we have already cited Blanchot defining it in The Writing of the Disaster, is ‘suffering such that I could not suffer it. [. . .] There is suffering, there would be suffering, but no longer any “I” suffering, and this suffering does not make itself known in the present; it is not borne in the present (still less is it experienced in the present)’ (WD 14–15). The problematic of radical suffering, in other words, is such that it not only precludes the ‘epistemological verification of pain by the nonsufferer’, as Ato Quayson writes in Aesthetic Nervousness (and he too cites Scarry for these insights into Beckett), but that it also interrupts ‘the epistemological certainty of the bearer of pain’, the bearer of radical suffering (2007: 80).
We can perhaps approach an understanding of the phenomenon of suffering in The Unnamable through Blanchot’s conception of the two slopes of literature in ‘Literature and the Right to Death’, such that Antelme and Beckett would represent two slopes of the pathway to and from radical suffering. Blanchot’s reading of Antelme maps out for us the first of these slopes, the one that begins in the painful light of affliction, the ‘loss of social status’ that elicits falling ‘not only below the individual, but also below every real collective relation’ (IC 131), and ends in the nocturnal darkness without end of radical suffering where ‘the person no longer exists in his or her personal identity. In this sense the one afflicted is already outside the world, a being without horizon’ (IC 131). Beckett sketches the narrative outline of what we might call the second slope of suffering. This commences in the permanence of radical suffering and proceeds towards restoring the metaphysical, etiological integrity of diachronic temporality in order to reconstruct the subject of consciousness – the subjectivity of the subject that thinks, speaks and exists through its belonging to humanity – that radical suffering by definition destroyed and, again by definition, keeps on destroying.
Writing on this second slope is arguably more dangerous than writing on the first. Because radical suffering precludes the faith that a subject can traverse radical suffering with its subjectivity intact, once radical suffering has been activated in the time and space of writing there is, logically speaking, no place or time for the subject of suffering to go. The problematic of suffering on this second slope is an incredibly disorienting and therefore discouraging one to negotiate:
suppose, instead of suffering less, as time flies, he continues to suffer as much, precisely, as the first day. That must be possible. And but suppose, instead of suffering less than the first day, or no less, he suffers more and more, as time flies, and the metamorphosis is accomplished, of unchanging future into unchangeable past. Eh? Another thing, but of a different order. The affair is thorny. Is not a uniform suffering preferable to one which, by its ups and downs, is liable at certain moments to encourage the view that perhaps after all it is not eternal? [. . .] Agreed then on monotony, it’s more stimulating. (TN 360–1)
Although the unnamable foregrounds the possibility of distinguishing between two forms of suffering, of suffering ‘less and less’ on the way to an ‘unchanging future’, and suffering ‘more and more’ from an ‘unchangeable past’, its adoption of the third person pronoun to diagnose the temporality one way or the other of how ‘he’ suffers, automatically precludes that the unnamable’s ‘prefer-ence’ for its modality of suffering will possess any transformative power over how the narrative situation of its suffering is in fact determined. The unnamable’s suffering, in other words, cannot be subjectively mediated through any measure of volitional narrative preference. The phenomenon of the unnamable’s pronominal splitting between first and third persons implicitly draws attention to an impersonal form of suffering that cannot be controlled, pacified or even intensified from either of these grammatical subjectpositions – from the ‘I’ or from the ‘he’ – of the unnamable itself. The narrative exigency of its suffering is permanent and permanently inscrutable precisely because it dissolves the metaphysics of the subject and of the temporality of the subject that are otherwise required for attributing to suffering a definite beginning and a definite end in the life and in the time of the subject of suffering.
The unnamable’s attempted escape from radical suffering (by converting it into finite suffering) is instigated in response to the imperative that it tell stories, that it write fictions. These stories, if they are not to further entrench the unnamable in the suffering that it can neither experience nor properly communicate, must be about a narrative existence other than that of the unnamable itself (assuming that the unnamable can be referenced at all as a singular narrative entity). These stories, in other words, must stake out a measure of distance between the teller and the told of the fictions and stories that the unnamable is compelled to construct. The unnamable is driven in these efforts by an avowed (and therefore misleading) desire for survival, escape and redemption just as fervently as it is held back by the knowledge that survival, escape and redemption are not realities that the unnamable can generate ex nihilo in the solitude of its suffering. Where the unnamable precipitates the appearance of Mahood and Worm into its narrative confinement, it is confronted with two (mutually exclusive) avenues of escape from its existence in radical suffering. The problem is that in order to do this – to be birthed into the suffering of the living so that it can begin its salvation in the rush towards death – the unnamable is in need of another’s judgement and gaze to be reflected back onto itself in confirmation that its punishment and its subjectivity are empirical and real, that however anonymous its identity remains in the spectral narrative space of radical suffering, however innocent it is of the infinitely punishable offence of its indestructible existence, its indestructible humanity, coming face-to-face with another unlike itself will engage it in the dialectics of recognition required for proclaiming the blessed gift of the death sentence that the work’s narrative order otherwise refuses to finalise.
Mahood is the first ‘vice-exister’ that the unnamable foists into the pathway of the encounter with recognition that it so desperately desires:7
Here, in my domain, what is Mahood doing in my domain, and how does he get here? There I am launched again on the same old hopeless business, there we are face to face, Mahood and I, if we are twain, as I say we are. I never saw him, I don’t see him, he has told me what he is like, what I am like, they have all told me that, it must be one of their principal functions. It isn’t enough that I should know what I’m doing, I must also know what I’m looking like. (TN 309)
The introduction of Mahood signals the ease with which the unnamable capitulates to an imaginary narrative authority in order to acquire independent recognition – from the perspective of knowing ‘what I’m looking like’ – of its narrative existence. Mahood enters the narrative and very quickly adopts the role of storyteller that interpellates the unnamable as the protagonist of his tale. Because all judgements of the unnamable’s existence are left undetermined as to their ultimate veracity, the unnamable is perpetually left wondering if it has ‘been in the places where [Mahood] says I have been, instead of having stayed on here, trying to take advantage of his absence to unravel my tangle’ (TN 309).
The unknowability attached to what Mahood says about the unnamable, the unknowability that surrounds Mahood’s existence as dependent or independent of the unnamable’s imagination, means that what the unnamable does in fact know is that whatever enters its zone of narrative visibility through the voice of Mahood cannot be disregarded as false. So long as the possibility persists that what Mahood says of the unnamable is true, that Mahood’s existence can be independently verified as being distinct from a creative projection of the unnamable, the unnamable has no choice except to subscribe wholeheartedly to the illusion that all is not false in the discourse of Mahood. This places the unnamable in the ontological position of being the object of Mahood’s narrative experiment, ‘the programme’, which consists in dressing up the unnamable as a convincing character in the story of his life. So it is that the unnamable considers its situation of temporary subservience to ‘Mahood and Co.’ accordingly:
The poor bastards. They could clap an artificial anus in the hollow of my hand and still I wouldn’t be there, alive with their life, not far short of a man, just barely a man, sufficiently a man to have hopes one day of being one, my avatars behind me. And yet sometimes it seems to me I am there, among the incriminated scenes, tottering under the attributes peculiar to the lords of creation, dumb with howling to be put out of my misery, and all round me the spinach blue rustling with satisfaction. Yes, more than once I almost took myself for the other, all but suffered after his fashion, the space of an instant. (TN 309)
Like the ‘dupe of every time and tense’ that the narrative voice becomes in Texts for Nothing, here the unnamable expressly acknowledges the illusoriness of the existence that Mahood is in the throes of imputing to it (CSP 85). Upon denigrating Mahood and Co., the ‘poor bastards’, for the farcical faith they have in being able to weave for the unnamable a fiction in which it would truly believe, the unnamable nevertheless musters the requisite modicum of strength to go along with the narrative that Mahood produces – ‘sometimes it seems to me I am there’ (TN 309). Through the questionable though no doubt appealing storytelling powers of Mahood, then, the unnamable is suddenly transformed into the protagonist of a fiction that involves him in circling around a home and a family, which produces the added benefit of transposing the unnamable from the meta-narrative heights of its tortured soliloquy – like a caged beast, in one of their words – to the fictional discourse of Mahood’s familial narrative.
Undertaking a close reading of the Mahood and Worm episodes is necessary if we are to responsibly investigate the possibility that the unnamable could begin accessing phenomenologically – vicariously through the (opposing) narrative perspectives of Mahood and Worm – the narrative ordeal of its suffering. Within the first site of the unnamable’s attempted extrication from suffering – the site of Mahood – there is a concerted effort to convincingly make the unnamable resemble something more ontologically substantive than the empty cipher of the anonymous subjectivity that it otherwise ineluctably is throughout the narrative. In the first instance in the fairy-tale of Mahood, which ultimately leads to ‘the panic of the moment’ that triggers the introduction of Worm, the narrative orientation that the unnamable adopts figures as an erratic, inverted and horizontally distributed spiral closing laboriously around a traumatic space populated by the rotting corpses of the unnamable’s family.8
The purpose of this movement is to get the unnamable to cross the threshold of the subjectivity that radical suffering denies it from possessing, i.e. the subjectivity that was always already destroyed by the unnamable being ‘alone, in the unthinkable unspeakable’ subjectivity of radical suffering, ‘where I have not ceased to be, where they will not let me be’ (TN 328). This movement adheres, we are told, to the promising teleological architecture of an ‘inverted spiral’:
I had already advanced a good ten paces, if one may call them paces, not in a straight line I need hardly say, but in a sharp curve which, if I continued to follow it, seemed likely to restore me to my point of departure, or to one adjacent. I must have got embroiled in a kind of inverted spiral, I mean one the coils of which, instead of widening more and more, grew narrower and narrower and finally, given the kind of space in which I was supposed to evolve, would come to an end for lack of room. (TN 310)
The narrowing spiral projects the image of an ideal point of narrative subtraction that would permit the unnamable to come to that blessed ‘end for lack of room’ (TN 310). This story is remarkable in the overall narrative context of The Unnamable because it is guided by a teleological line of flight. The story would come to an end if only the unnamable, taking ‘myself for Mahood’ (TN 311), could join its family in the comfort of its home, that is to say, if only the unnamable could convincingly retrieve ‘the historical existence’ it ostensibly left behind upon its entry into the ontological desert of The Unnamable (TN 312).
The affinities with the epic journey of Odysseus are perhaps too obvious to rehearse here, but what bears underscoring is that with the guidance of Mahood, the unnamable is given the chance to account once and for all for the identity that its life in narrative has so far precluded it from (re-)possessing: ‘without being quite sure I had seen it before, I had been so long from home, I kept saying to myself, Yonder is the nest you should never have left, there your dear absent ones are awaiting your return, patiently, and you too must be patient. It was swarming with them, grandpa, grandma, little mother and the eight or nine brats. With their eyes glued to the slits and their hearts going out to me they surveyed my efforts’ (TN 311). This movement proves to have been undertaken in vain, because ‘according to Mahood I never reached them, that is to say they all died first, the whole ten or eleven of them, carried off by sausage-poisoning, in great agony’ (TN 312). What matters here are not the details of this story; rather, it is that Mahood is up to one of his ‘favourite tricks, to produce ostensibly independent testimony in support of my historical existence’ (TN 312). The unnamable is even willing to go along with the ruse, but only so far as nothing other than the imperative to ‘keep going on’ in the direction that leads irreversibly out of radical suffering is expected of it. Needless to say, there is no basis to conclude that Mahood is something other than just an avatar of the unnamable, the fictional representative of an existence that the unnamable has devised in order to temper the ontological distress of its suffering and solitude.
The story that Mahood tells of the unnamable consists in a journey of the unnamable returning home and being reunited with his wife, children and parents. This story begins by detailing the exhausting experience of the unnamable struggling to approach his (soon-to-be-dead) family: ‘After each thrust of my crutches I stopped, to devour a narcotic and measure the distance gone, the distance yet to go’ (TN 310). Hardly has the story progressed beyond the point of introducing its protagonist’s struggles and desires than does it culminate in the untimely death of the unnamable’s family. The unnamable wastes no time stepping outside of the fictional space of Mahood. This story is being told on the basis of Mahood swearing on its testimony of what the unnamable experienced, the report of which Mahood whispers into the ear of the unnamable so that the unnamable can repeat it as accurately as is within his powers to do. That Mahood is the sole author of this fiction, however, is something that the unnamable feels compelled to repeat and that we should therefore be cautioned not to trivialise as an insignificant detail of the narrative: ‘According to Mahood’ (TN 312); ‘Still Mahood speaking’ (TN 314); ‘Mahood must have remarked’ (TN 315); ‘(Mahood dixit)’ (TN 315); etc. The unnamable is at the mercy of Mahood’s fictional conjectures only up to the point where Mahood all of a sudden goes ‘silent, that is to say his voice continues, but is no longer renewed’ (TN 319). Here the unnamable breaks free from the influence of Mahood and expresses his contempt over the recognition that ‘they consider me so plastered with their rubbish that I can never extricate myself, never make a gesture but their cast must come to life’ (TN 319). No sooner is the unnamable transported into one of Mahood’s family fairy-tales than does it find itself trying to get out and return back to the space of radical suffering from which it was speaking before Mahood crossed into the narrative territory of its essentially destroyed subjectivity.
Before this hostility towards Mahood asserts itself, however, the unnamable permits that Mahood’s fiction exercises a powerful hold over the images and words it selects in constructing its memory and existence in the text. The unnamable is all too aware – as is Beckett – that the subjectivity of whatever existence it adopts in the narrative will have to be constructed using words, images, concepts and metaphors, there being nothing else with which to construct a life, particularly a life in narrative, and so whichever of these it inherits from Mahood will be just as convincing and meaningful as any that it may itself devise. Whether its memories are embedded in its consciousness and are merely awaiting their retrieval in the narrative present, or if it is Mahood that implants them in the unnamable’s imagination and then violently brings them to the surface of their recollection, the conclusion is the same. Inducing and implanting memories and recollections is tantamount to the violence of manufacturing a consciousness and a subjectivity precisely where, in radical suffering, consciousness and subjectivity have been and, terrifyingly, are being targeted for destruction. The point, then, is not to attribute a distinct ontological presence to Mahood, one that either substitutes for the unnamable or demotes the unnamable to the position of protagonist. Mahood is a projection of the unnamable’s imagination, a reflection of the unnamable’s insatiable ontological desire to ‘suffer like true thinking flesh’ (TN 347). The unnamable even admits that while playing at being ‘Mahood I felt a little, now and then’, only to ask rhetorically, ‘can that be called a life which vanishes when the subject is changed?’ (TN 347).
Inventing Mahood as the teller to the unnamable’s told gives the unnamable a momentary glimpse into what it would be like to experience suffering like true thinking flesh, as the proprietor of a subjectivity obliged to encounter, remember and mourn the violent and painful death of his entire kith and kin. Mahood is supposed to represent an existence ontologically substantive and solid enough to present the unnamable with the possibility of transcending radical suffering by adopting the subjectivity, in narrative, of a subject that suffers with the memory intact of what its suffering and affliction has cost it. All that the unnamable desires is simply to suffer in accordance with all who remember their suffering, and therefore with all who can have their suffering memorialised in historical and phenomenological consciousness. Mahood represents the possibility (but only the possibility) of achieving this in so far as he operates as the unnamable’s only hope (so far) of transcending its existence and standing in as witness to the unnamable’s suffering. The fictional testimony that Mahood promises to provide of the suffering that the unnamable experiences in encountering the death of its family, however, never materialises, and this because the unnamable is ontologically complicit in its failure to suffer ‘like true thinking flesh’ (TN 347).
At the instant in Mahood’s family narrative where the unnamable is expected to be repelled by ‘the misfortune experienced by my family and brought to my notice first by the noise of their agony, then by the smell of their corpses’, i.e. where it is supposed to turn around and set out on another journey, the journey of mourning what it has just lost, is precisely where the unnamable refuses to cooperate any longer with the ontological conspiracy of Mahood: ‘from that moment on I ceased to go along with him. I’ll explain why, that will permit me to think of something else and in the first place of how to get back to me, back to where I am waiting for me, I’d just as soon not, but it’s my only chance, at least I think so, the only chance I have of going silent, of saying something at last that is not false, if that is what they want, so as to have nothing more to say’ (TN 315). The reasons that the unnamable subsequently gives for its momentary abandonment of the ‘tricks’ of Mahood have everything to do with its reluctant optimism that if it swallows the stories of Mahood lock, stock and barrel it will be assimilated into the historical existence that Mahood’s very presence in the narrative suggests it is possible for the unnamable to possess.
Whatever historical existence the unnamable inherits from Mahood will be purely an illusion of ontological security. To be sure, in the ontologically inverted world of the unnamable the illusion of its real historical existence cannot last long. There is no second long enough that would make the unnamable forget, with a memory that, alas, it is denied from having, 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’s what I’ve had to make the best of’ (TN 389). The unnamable cannot therefore sincerely tolerate what it is that Mahood says it must acknowledge and internalise: ‘that the bacillus botulinus should have exterminated my entire kith and kin, I shall never weary of repeating this, was something I could readily admit, but only on condition that my personal behaviour had not to suffer by it’ (TN 316). There are two options for interpreting this ‘condition’ (TN 316). Either the unnamable refuses to admit the extermination of his ‘entire kith and kin’ because the act of narrating this traumatic event would entail its integration into the re-traumatising event of narrative itself, or the unnamable is ontologically incapable of suffering with the words and with the tears that the fiction of its historical existence expects it to suffer. The unnamable is incapable, according to this second interpretive option, of being devastated by the misfortune of his family in so far as the suffering that would interrupt his ‘personal behaviour’ arrives too late, arrives after the unnamable’s ‘personal behaviour’ has always already been interrupted in the radical mode of suffering that neither Mahood’s discourse nor, as it comes to pass, Worm’s murmurings (obviously) can articulate. This tragic event cannot move the unnamable to commence a post-traumatic narrative of suffering because the type of existence that the unnamable possesses is disconnected so inexorably from the personality that its family, ostensibly independent proof of its historical existence, knows and remembers. The event of the death of the unnamable’s family cannot cause the unnamable to pursue the ontological trajectory that Mahood has set it on towards reclaiming the subjectivity of a subject that experiences its suffering as a phenomenologically accessible phenomenon.
Becoming the subjectivity of a worldly form of suffering, rebuilding the ontological (and metaphysical) structures presupposed by the capacity for mourning the deaths of this sausageinduced atrocity, would be to fulfil the expectations of what the unnamable once learned about how to belong to humanity. The unnamable even begins to recall the instructions it was given about the particulars of this belonging, which directs our attention to an unspecified biographical moment in the unnamable’s youth when the narrative shape of its existence may still have been that of an autobiographical bildungsroman: ‘the lectures they gave me on men, before they even began trying to assimilate me to him’ (TN 318). Earlier in the text the unnamable says that ‘I remember little or nothing of these lectures. I cannot have understood a great deal. But I seem to have retained certain descriptions, in spite of myself. They gave me courses on love, on intelligence, most precious, most precious’ (TN 292).
We may presume that in the context with Mahood the unnamable is being faced with one of those ‘occasions’ when ‘some of this rubbish has come in handy [. . .], I don’t deny it’ (TN 292). Mahood gives to the unnamable not more lessons on humanity, but rather the pedagogically expedient occasion of having to put these lessons into practice in light of the demand for an emotional response through which the unnamable might express its humanity amidst the horror and trauma into which Mahood has placed it. This too fails. Instead, the unnamable invites us to ‘consider what really occurred’ once it retracted its consent to be the mouthpiece of Mahood’s autobiographical fiction and the eternal pupil of its lessons on love, on intelligence, and on how best to belong to humanity:
Finally I found myself, without surprise, within the building, circular in form as already stated, its ground floor consisting of a single room flush with the arena, and there completed my rounds, stamping under foot the unrecognized remains of my family, here a face, there a stomach, as the case might be, and sinking into them with the ends of my crutches, both coming and going. To say I did so with satisfaction would be stretching the truth. For my feeling was rather one of annoyance at having to flounder in such muck just at the moment when my closing contortions called for a firm and level surface. I like to fancy, even if it is not true, that it was in mother’s entrails I spent the last days of my long voyage, and set out on the next. No, I have no preference, Isolde’s breast would have done just as well, or papa’s private parts, or the heart of one of the little bastards. But is it certain? Would I have not been more likely, in a sudden access of independence, to devour what remained of the fatal corned-beef? How often did I fall during these final stages, while the storms raged without? But enough of this nonsense. I was never anywhere but here, no one ever got me out of here. (TN 317–18)
Balking at Mahood’s not-so-secret intention of initiating it as a loving and caring, indeed a mournful son, grandson, husband and father, the unnamable revels in its utter incapacity to suffer, think and feel as ‘they’ expect it to suffer, think and feel, as it is expected to suffer, think and feel by all those who wittingly or unwittingly consent to belonging to humanity: ‘it’s a poor trick that consists in ramming a set of words down your gullet on the principle that you can’t bring them up without being branded as belonging to their breed. But I’ll fix their gibberish for them’ (TN 318), murmuring ‘what it is their humanity stifles, the little gasp of the condemned to life, rotting in his dungeon garrotted and racked, to gasp what it is to have to celebrate banishment’ (TN 319). With these remarks Mahood’s humanising experiment comes to a close and the unnamable turns its attention elsewhere in pursuit of extrication from the ontological cage of radical suffering.
Before turning to the unnamable’s encounter with Worm, we should not overlook the degree to which Mahood comes tantalisingly close to succeeding in providing ‘independent testimony’ of the ‘historical existence’ that the unnamable, alas, cannot inscribe for itself from the narrative position of pupil and protagonist of its suffering. One of the ‘tricks’ of Beckett’s writing, explicitly rendered through the figure of Mahood, is that the landscapes and contexts that it engenders and recalls in constructing its narrative and dramatic settings approximate so closely actually existing historical sites without ever permitting the imputation of a one-to-one mimetic correspondence between the literary and the historical. Perhaps the uncanniest of these is the ‘vast yard or campus’ that Mahood has the unnamable circle in the spiralling approach to the rotting corpses of his family. David Houston Jones takes this image as evidence that ‘the dominant narrative mode [of The Unnamable] is once more one of concentrationary camp innuendo: the allusion to a yard of “dirt and ashes” suggests a camp or compound, but subsequently softens into the unverifiable “campus”’. Jones concludes that, ‘once again, unlocalisable reference and indeterminate viewpoint combine the work’s unsituated suggestions of atrocity with a distressed ontology’ (2011: 32). The proximity of The Unnamable to historically determinate events of suffering and disaster, particularly the suffering associated with the concentration and extermination camps of the Nazi Terror, is justification for reading The Unnamable as a text that is very specifically historically inscribed even as it refuses any straightforward historical references and scoffs at the temptation of ascribing definite geographical locations to the narrative existence that the unnamable is ceaselessly (though futilely) at pangs to acquire. Jeff Fort is thus at risk of exaggerating the degree of attenuation of geographical historicity in The Unnamable when he writes that ‘in The Unnamable we are finally nowhere at all, certainly not on earth or in the light of day, but in an indeterminate space that is both enclosed and limitless, all-encompassing and featureless’ (2014: 321–2; italics in original).
The problem with Jones’s reading of the Mahood section of The Unnamable, however, is that he takes the atrocity narrative that Mahood tells to the unnamable, and that the unnamable passively (if not self-consciously) dramatises in the role of its witness, too literally and too exclusively relative to what supersedes it in the unnamable’s subsequent encounter with Worm. What Jones does not adequately consider is the fact that the material that comes out of the Mahood episode, and particularly its relevance for positioning the unnamable in the aporetic impossibility of bearing testimony to an unnamed trauma and atrocity that it was never ontologically present to witness in the first place, represents only a single stage in the overall narrative edifice of the text. This interpretive omission carries with it the consequence of regarding the unnamable only in its testimonial guise as a witnessing subjectivity forever struggling with the shame of desiring the recuperation of the presence of a past trauma: ‘realising that his narration has achieved nothing but a perpetuation in the narrative present of the trauma of the past, the narrator angrily demands “give me back the pains I lent them and vanish, from my life, my memory, my terrors and shames.” Shame, then, is the privileged figure of this deposition, associated with the desire “to witness it” and giving rise to an identification which is, in Agamben’s terms, both “absolutely foreign and perfectly intimate”’ (Jones 2011: 31). The image of the unnamable that Jones constructs is that of an archival machine or belated witness to an event that never makes its way definitively into the memory-text of the present. The unnamable’s ‘shame’ projects its narrative consciousness irreversibly into the past, except that with the introduction of Worm into the narrative, the unnamable’s backward-gazing attention is disrupted, and the thematic structure of witnessing and testifying to an event of the past is supplemented with the imperative of severing its relation to the past and of thinking its way into the future by way of an act of temporal trespass and transgression. In focusing exclusively on the phenomenon of shame as the dominant affective condition of the unnamable’s testimony, Jones misses out on reading the terror of the imperative that the unnamable continue speaking, start thinking, and stop suffering.
By basing his interpretation of The Unnamable almost exclusively on what transpires throughout the unnamable’s encounter with Mahood, Jones succeeds in providing a penetrating analysis of only one part of the unnamable’s relation to the exigency of its suffering. Again, the consequence of this omission is that it compels ignoring the fertile philosophical and hermeneutical ground the unnamable sows in its encounter with Worm, which demands that we interrogate how it is that the question what does it mean to think from one discontinuous, fragmentary encounter (with Mahood, with Worm) to the next becomes heavily implicated in the overall narrative architecture of The Unnamable. Ultimately, Jones mobilises his reading of The Unnamable as a stepping stone to invoking the figure of the ‘vanquished’ in Beckett’s The Lost Ones as a further illustration of how ‘Beckett anticipates a key strand of Agamben’s argument in Remnants of Auschwitz’, particularly ‘Agamben’s account of the impossibility of testimony [which] refers not only to the inevitable betrayal of the dead, who can no longer bear witness and are “spoken for” by survivors, but, more specifically, to the figure who incarnates that impossibility. That figure is the “Muselmann,” the concentration camp inmate who expresses death in life and the contamination of the human by the inhuman’ (2011: 36). Surely with respect to The Unnamable, however, the subjectivity of suffering that Beckett’s writing excavates is not as innocent in its responsibility for the ordeal of its suffering as Jones makes it out to be. It is with Worm that we will see how this is the case and what some of its consequences are for acquiring a more comprehensive idea of what is involved in the unnamable’s terror-stricken contact with radical suffering.
The unnamable fails with Mahood in so far as it pursues a dialectics of recognition and a nostalgic retrieval of its historical existence as strategies for exiting radical suffering. The narrative significance of the introduction of Worm is that Worm represents for the unnamable the possibility of disavowing altogether his search for a strategy of exiting radical suffering, and in its place pursuing the knowing embrace of the non-historical and non-phenomenological existence that in Blanchot’s diagnosis radical suffering constitutively prescribes. Worm is fundamentally unlike Mahood, and so we should be cautious in identifying the transition from Mahood to Worm as a linear or consecutive passage through what Paul Stewart calls the ‘wretch-circuit’ of the unnamable’s failed series of identifications (2006: 142). According to Stewart, ‘the Unnamable cannot entirely cohere with the identity of Mahood, as we have seen, and this gap in identification spurs him on to a further attempted identification with Worm in the hope that this will complete the project of being Mahood. The series is then fixed, with each new attempted identification set in motion by the failure of the last. The disjunction in identification between the Unnamable and his surrogates activates the necessity for yet further failed surrogates’ (2006: 143). There is little point disputing that the unnamable’s attempted identification with Worm does in fact lapse into yet another failed identification like the one with Mahood, which occasions the unnamable’s admission that ‘at no moment do I know what I’m talking about, nor of whom, nor of where, nor how, nor why, but I could employ fifty wretches for this sinister operation and still be short of a fifty-first, to close the circuit, that I know, without knowing what it means’ (TN 332). Arguing that the unnamable fails at being Worm just as he failed at being Mahood, that failing to be Worm he fails to finally be Mahood, is stated explicitly and repeatedly enough in The Unnamable so as to be rendered a moot point of contention. What matters, then, is not the conclusion that the unnamable fails throughout the series of its attempted identifications (with Mahood, Worm, etc.). What matters is how it fails in each of these discrete instances of ontological noncorrespondence.
After the ontological debacle with Mahood, the unnamable comes into contact with this other unnamable not entirely unlike itself, but since there is apparently ‘nothing doing without proper names’, the unnamable decides to ‘baptise him Worm’ (TN 331):
I don’t like it, but I haven’t much choice. It will be my name too, when the time comes, when I needn’t be called Mahood any more, if that happy time ever comes. Before Mahood there were others like him, of the same breed and creed, armed with the same prong. But Worm is the first of his kind. That’s soon said. I must not forget I don’t know him. Perhaps he too will weary, renounce the task of forming me and make way for another, having laid the foundations. He has not yet been able to speak his mind, only murmur, I have not ceased to hear his murmur, all the while the other discoursed. He has survived them all, Mahood too, if Mahood is dead. (TN 331)
In a narrative that places so much emphasis on aporetic imperatives like being before beginning, dying after death, speaking the unspeakable, thinking the unthinkable, and suffering in the exigency of radical suffering, the relatively coherent distinction on which the unnamable insists in this excerpt between the murmuring of Worm and the discoursing of Mahood is worth bracketing off before the narrative continues on and threatens to elide the significance of this distinction in favour of Worm’s eventual convergence on the circuit with Mahood. Worm represents a peculiarly singular existence that only needs to be conceived in order to be: ‘Worm is, since we conceive him, as if there could be no being but being conceived’ (TN 340). Accordingly, we are made to presume that when Worm speaks, it is from a pre-linguistic, pre-ontological space (the space of the il y a of being before existence) where the essence of persons and things that words and concepts invariably negate is still (inconceivably) intact, pristine in its non-existence. This is why Worm calmly, incessantly murmurs, and Mahood only clumsily, occasionally discourses. The instant Worm appears in the narrative, however, its singular non-existence, ‘the first of his kind’, risks being violated through enlistment in the ongoing dialectical desire for recognition, the satisfaction of which the unnamable had already tried to extort out of its encounter and convergence with Mahood.
Acting against the irrepressible impulse to speak and to name, the unnamable elicits the non-existence of Worm as an antidote to the failed convergence with the existence of one like Mahood. Even as he inadvertently engages in the dialectics of substituting Worm’s non-existence with the existence of Mahood, an action that is once again initiated in the service of acquiring some form of conceptual or phenomenological mastery over its suffering subjectivity, the unnamable continues to optimistically insist that becoming Worm will lead it to glimpsing the horizon of transcendence on which the promise of Mahood failed to make good:
Tears gush from [his eye] practically without ceasing, why is not known, nothing is known, whether it’s with rage, or whether it’s with grief, the fact is there, perhaps it’s the voice that makes it weep, with rage, or some other passion, or at having to see, from time to time, some sight or other, perhaps that’s it, perhaps he weeps in order not to see, though it seems difficult to credit him with an initiative of this complexity. The rascal, he’s getting humanized, he’s going to lose if he doesn’t watch out, if he doesn’t take care, and with what could he take care, with what could he form the faintest conception of the condition they are decoying him into, with their ears, their eyes, their tears and a brainpan where anything may happen. That’s his strength, his only strength, that he understands nothing, can’t take thought, doesn’t know what they want, doesn’t know they are there, feels nothing, ah but just a moment, he feels, he suffers, the noise makes him suffer, and he knows, he knows it’s a voice, and he understands, a few expressions here and there, a few intonations, ah it looks bad, bad, no, perhaps not, for it’s they describe him thus, without knowing, thus because they need him thus, perhaps he hears nothing, suffers nothing, and this eye, more mere imagination. (TN 353)
In this excerpt the unnamable goes through the motions of its hypothetical convergence with Worm, tracing the movement whereby the tears of Worm begin to flow towards any number of perceptions and conclusions about the particularity of Worm’s suffering. We can say that Worm is on the threshold of vulnerability to the creatively destructive violence of ontological inauguration, of destructively creative thinking, on the basis that as of yet ‘nothing is known’ about why or from whence Worm will continue to suffer. His suffering, his tears, are an incomprehensible fact of his spectral existence, and it is this fact – ‘the fact is there’ – that is responsible for positioning Worm in the vulnerable position of being extorted into acquiring an existence outside of the timeless, pre-or post-ontological void of radical suffering. Terror’s denegative capacity (according to the fragmentary imperative of writing) for turning thinking against thought and speaking against speech is activated in this excerpt precisely at the point where the unnamable’s tone shifts around the exclamatory phrase ah but just a moment.
Worm’s reduction to an existence in passive ontological vulnerability means that anything and everything can hypothetically be said about and attributed to him so long as Worm continues to occupy such an existence always already torn down to the indestructibility of its nothingness. Terror is activated at the apotheosis of Worm’s measureless vulnerability in this state of ontological passivity where the unnamable begins to humanise ‘the rascal’ by ‘decoying’ him into the existence that he is expected to have, ‘because they need him thus’ (TN 353). Extorted speech, extorted thinking and extorted existence can only be extracted from a subject reduced by extreme acts of violence to the figure of a subjectivity permanently exiled from the context of the living. The unnamable, not knowing whether or not it is Worm in this scenario, or whether, through the power of its imagination, it is the one subjecting Worm to the (de)humanising violence that Worm’s ontological vulnerability invites, is permitted to conclude that perhaps, after all, Worm ‘hears nothing, suffers nothing’, and therefore continues to murmur from a place that the discourse of Mahood has not yet failed at miscomprehending. It is on the basis of Worm’s non-discursive murmurings (non-discursive in relation to Mahood), and not on Worm’s susceptibility to, or reflection of the unnamable’s terroristic methods of the extortion and extraction of speech and existence, that the unnamable does not regard Worm as the representative of ‘another trap to snap me up among the living’, a trap to ‘make me believe I have an ego all my own, and can speak of it, as they of theirs’ (TN 339).
On the contrary, according to the unnamable, it is through the murmuring presence of Worm that it acquires the perspective of one who does not need to feel or to think in the way that Mahood wants it to feel and to think as prerequisites of belonging to humanity. Worm’s spectral existence is appealing because, in stark contrast to Mahood, as the unnamable explains, Worm has
come into the world unborn, abiding there unliving, with no hope of death, epicentre of joys, of griefs, of calm. Who seems the truest possession, because the most unchanging. The one outside of life we always were in the end, all our long vain life long. Who is not spared by the mad need to speak, to think, to know where one is, where one was, during the wild dream, up above, under the skies, venturing forth at night. The one ignorant of himself and silent, ignorant of his silence and silent, who could not be and gave up trying. (TN 340)
As was the case for confirming that Antelme had slipped into radical suffering, here too the suffering of Worm is such that it predicates of Worm the anthropomorphically irreducible phenomenon of need. Just as Antelme experienced hunger as need, experienced the ubiquity of pain (the elements, the SS), so too is Worm suddenly predicated by the ‘mad need to speak, to think’ (TN 340). The mad need that overtakes Worm is not autonomously generated by Worm himself, but is the desire of the ‘others’, of the unnamable, who ‘conceive him’ thus and who, because of having to occupy with Worm so radical a state of ontological dispossession, need to see in Worm a reflection of the indestructible (because essentially destroyed) existence that they too possess.
The unnamable is the representative of these ‘others’ in this context, and what he needs to get out of Worm is simple: to acquire irrefutable proof, a neat formulation of the fact that an existence in radical suffering is not something that can be redeemed or transcended, but is simply suffered ‘outside of [the] life we always were in the end’ (TN 340). Although the anonymous voices that whisper into the ear of the unnamable the words that announce the presence of Worm are fixated on getting the unnamable ‘to be he, the anti-Mahood’ (340), the ontological project of inciting the unnamable to exist in the spirit of Worm that they are trying to coordinate on the unnamable’s behalf stalls before it begins, not only because the project has nowhere to go, no telos to guide its forward narrative movement, but also because ‘having no ear, no head, no memory’, the unnamable is not in a position to broker the continuity of the murmuring of Worm with the discourse of Mahood: ‘I’m Worm, no if I were Worm I wouldn’t know it, I wouldn’t say it, I wouldn’t say anything, I’d be Worm. But I don’t say anything, I don’t know anything, these voices are not mine, nor these thoughts, but the voices and thoughts of the devils who beset me. Who make me say that [. . .] since I couldn’t be Mahood, as I might have been, I must be Worm, as I cannot be. But is it still they who say that when I have failed to be Worm I’ll be Mahood, automatically, on the rebound?’ (TN 341).
With Worm, the unnamable reconfirms its earlier suspicion that its presence in the narrative context of The Unnamable is reducible ‘solely [to] a question of voices, no other image is appropriate. Let it go through me at last, the last one, his who has none, by his own confession’ (TN 340–1). So long as the unnamable’s attention is focused (by the voices) on becoming Worm, it is Worm that the unnamable decidedly cannot be. The existence of Worm is predicated purely on its coerced materialisation through the words and in the mind of the unnamable as it speaks and thinks in the narrative space of the present:
Yes, now that I’ve forgotten who Worm is, where he is, what he’s like, I’ll begin to be he. [. . .] Feeling nothing, knowing nothing, capable of nothing, wanting nothing. Until the instant he hears the sound that will never stop. Then it’s the end. Worm no longer is. We know it, but we don’t say it, we say it’s the awakening, the beginning of Worm, for now we must speak, and speak of Worm. It’s no longer he, but let us proceed as if it were still he, he at last, who hears, and trembles, and is delivered over, to affliction and the struggle to withstand it, the starting eye, the labouring mind. (TN 342)
What prevents the unnamable from becoming Worm, first and foremost, is that the unnamable is convinced of beginning to hear and understand the murmurings of Worm, murmurings ‘that will never stop’ (TN 342). To listen and above all to hear the constant droning of Worm’s murmurs is to be implicitly convinced that such murmurings can be translated into a comprehensible discourse of recitation, and thus to hear Worm amounts to not being able to be Worm: ‘I’m Worm, that is to say I am no longer he, since I hear’ (TN 343). The pretension to existing precisely as Worm exists is symptomatic of the illusion that momentarily convinced the unnamable of its existence in the fictional world and in the fictional mode of that of Mahood. The virtue of Worm is that the peculiarity of his faceless, anonymous existence does not permit the unnamable to go along with the ruse of identification for such an extended length of time as it had under the authorial auspices of Mahood: ‘let us call that thing Worm, so as to exclaim, the sleight of hand accomplished, Oh look, life again, life everywhere and always, the life that’s on every tongue, the only possible! Poor Worm, who thought he was different, there he is in the madhouse for life’ (TN 342). It is with the unnamable’s confession, delivered in this ironic and sarcastic tone, that he can never converge with the non-existence of Worm, that ends the project of experiencing the suffering of Worm’s incapacity to experience his suffering. Although the unnamable cannot pronounce this conclusion, nevertheless it is at this point certain that the unnamable, despite its desires and its capitulations, is very much in an analogous situation as Worm in so far as it too is not able to stave off the mad need to speak and to think amidst its seeming inability to do either outside of the painfully mute, ontologically inhospitable presence of its suffering.
According to Anthony Uhlmann’s description of the ontological aporia of Mahood and Worm, ‘Worm cannot properly speaking be said to exist until he comes to feel (and at this point he stops being Worm, who does not feel, who is only conceived). The opposite problem to that of Worm plagues Mahood. Mahood feels but, finally, he is no longer conceived, the others fail to believe in him and so he ceases to exist’ (Uhlmann 1999: 159). The virtue of Uhlmann’s reading of this section of The Unnamable is that it emphasises and therefore respects the ontological incompatibility of Worm with Mahood. The non-existence of Worm, Uhlmann insists, is not synonymous with the non-existence of Mahood (though Mahood, too, is ‘more mere imagination’). Conversely, the existence of Worm, as a fictional construct in a narrative situation composed of nothing but fictional constructs, is fundamentally different from the fictional existence of Mahood. Were the unnamable to go on continuing believing in the fictions of Mahood, it would not end up existing in the way of Worm, passing from one fictional node on the circuit of non-existence to another. Conversely, were the unnamable to give up once and for all on the prospect of existing like Mahood, murmuring ‘what it is their humanity stifles’ in the idiom of Worm, it would not be able to reconcile this existence with the discourse authored by Mahood. The aporetic impasse manned by Mahood and Worm is unbreakable: the unnamable cannot fail at one project of identification without reviving the other in its absence, and it is this structure of passing back and forth from Mahood and Worm that opens up the space in the narrative for claiming that what the unnamable does not know, what it cannot possibly know, is that its narrative existence is synonymous with an event of ontological disintegration occurring continuously in a past that cannot ever be recalled from the vantage point of the narrative present.
What thus forces the conclusion that in The Unnamable there is no way of returning to a time before the unnamable’s encounter with the event of its ontological disintegration is that what the unnamable is being compelled to search for is the beginning of an existence and the acquisition of a subjectivity that would betray no false illusions of resurrecting the existence and subjectivity that preceded its descent into radical suffering. The presence of Worm forecloses the desire to experience and recollect the subjectivity of a non-radical, finite experience of affliction instigated by the humanising fictions of Mahood. When reading The Unnamable it is therefore imperative to recognise that the movements the unnamable makes through the space of its narrative are evocative of its confrontation with new and contingently unpredictable problematics of suffering, subjectivity, speaking and thinking, i.e. problematics that, while advancing the discourse of the text in new directions, do not simply invalidate earlier problematics (like the episode with Mahood) that are nevertheless so quickly and easily forgotten: ‘Mahood I couldn’t die. Worm will I ever get born? It’s the same problem. But perhaps not the same personage after all. The scytheman will tell, it’s all one to him’ (TN 345–6). Whether the unnamable can ever exist in continuity with Mahood or Worm remains thoroughly undecidable, but nevertheless the desire surely persists for a violent, unpredictable shock that will disengage it from the liminal non-existence that its submersion in radical suffering prescribes. Such a shock, however, cannot come from the unnamable itself: ‘That’s why there are all these little silences, to try and make me break them. They think I can’t bear silence, that some day, somehow, my horror of silence will force me to break it. That’s why they are always leaving off, to try and drive me to extremities’ (TN 342).
To expect of the unnamable that it will say something that will unlock the aporetic impasses of the text, that buried somewhere within its murmuring and its discourse is the image or word that will fill in the blanks with which the unnamable began its narrative misery, is to abdicate a responsibility that has no business being transferred onto the figure of the narrative voice of The Unnamable: ‘What doesn’t come to me from me has come to the wrong address. Similarly my understanding is not yet sufficiently well-oiled to function without the pressure of some critical circumstance, such as a violent pain felt for the first time’ (TN 343–4). The violent shock that the unnamable desires as the catalyst for it to commence thinking and suffering ‘for the first time’ is a shock that the unnamable is as yet powerless to induce by provoking the entrance of either Worm or Mahood into the narrative. The unnamable cannot begin thinking and suffering, ‘like true thinking flesh’, for the simple reason that only through the already established and already confirmed experience of thinking and suffering would it know and feel that what it is doing is what is called thinking and suffering: ‘they say I suffer like true thinking flesh, but I’m sorry, I feel nothing’ (TN 347).
Beckett ties a negative symptomology of suffering to a negative epistemology of thinking as the only conditions of the unnamable’s existence that are visible inside the narrative architecture of the text, and so responsibility for overcoming the unsublatable negativity of these conditions falls irrevocably on the external perspective of criticism engaged in coming to terms with the fact and in overriding the hermeneutically paralysing grip, as Wolfgang Iser puts it apropos the experience of reading Beckett, of being ‘locked out of the text’ (1980: 208; italics in original). The event of literature, the event of thinking in literature, can only be instigated in the encounter with the ‘critical circumstance’ that would unhinge the unnamable from its essential incapacity to think and to suffer as it is expected to think and to suffer as one who belongs to humanity. At this point in our reading of the narrative there is little choice in moving forward except to take the unnamable at its word when it says, ‘I only think [. . .] once a certain degree of terror has been exceeded’ (TN 344; my italics). The question that we must answer as we advance towards developing a critique of the terror of thinking is whether or not The Unnamable, qua unresolved narrative of radical suffering, represents, from a meta-narrative perspective, the maximal intensification of terror requisite for us to say that the unnamable is embroiled in the act of thinking. The wager here is that a critique of the experience of radical suffering in The Unnamable doubles as a critique of the terror of thinking.
The unnamable insists that its vigilance in the midst of its suffering is not a question of endurance but of condemnation, and as such it is an experience of condemnation that links its consciousness and its speech with the discursive prerogatives of terror: ‘In their shoes I’d be content with my knowing what I know, I’d demand no more of me than to know that what I hear is not the innocent and necessary sound of dumb things constrained to endure, but the terror-stricken babble of the condemned to silence’ (TN 348). As always, what drives the unnamable forward after pronouncements such as these is its utter disbelief that what it says about itself and about its situation is true. Reduced to being nothing more than the narrative voice of the ‘condemned to silence’, restrained by its condemnation to speak only the ‘terror-stricken babble’ of a language incomprehensible except through the terror that provokes it, the unnamable can nevertheless not discredit the suspicion that it is not alone, and that if it is not alone then there is still hope that its condemnation will come to an end and that the babble that it speaks will be substituted and salvaged by the discourse of the company that surrounds it. The unnamable turns to language and to the grammatical freedom that language bequeaths in order to try and extricate itself once and for all from its condemnation in radical suffering: ‘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. Anything to please them’ (TN 348). Even as the unnamable admits straightaway that this gesture of grammatical substitution ‘will make no difference’, it adds to this narrative of suffering the third-person perspective of the tormentor that pins the unnamable to its tormented existence (TN 348).
As it looks down at itself from this third-person perch, the unnamable wonders aloud about what it looks like in its situation and about the observations that can be made about how it makes its way through the narrative. However, the survey the unnamable provides about its physical attributions devolves into a reflection on what is occurring from the perspective of its imaginary tormentors and keepers, who observe the unnamable in what can only be described as a cage fit for the caged beast that the unnamable later in the narrative (as we have already seen) becomes:
There he is now with breath and nostrils, it only remains for him to suffocate. The thorax rises and falls, the wear and tear are in full spring, the rot spreads downwards, soon he’ll have legs, the possibility of crawling. More lies, he doesn’t breathe yet, he’ll never breathe. Then what is this faint noise, as of air stealthily stirred, recalling the breath of life, to those whom it corrodes? It’s a bad example. But these lights that go out hissing? Is it not more likely a great cackle of laughter, at the sight of his terror and distress? To see him flooded with light, then suddenly plunged back into darkness, must strike them as irresistibly funny. But they have been there so long now, on every side, they may have made a hole in the wall, a little hole, to glue their eyes to, turn about. And these lights are perhaps those they shine upon him, from time to time, in order to observe his progress. [. . .] No, in the place where he is he cannot learn, the head cannot work, he knows no more than on the first day, he merely hears, and suffers, uncomprehending, that must be possible. (TN 348–9)
That the unnamable ‘suffers, uncomprehending’ should not produce the conclusion that suffering and thinking, contrary to what Blanchot surmised, are somehow disjoined and reciprocally antithetical. Here it is imperative that we entertain the idea that Beckett selects his words conscientiously, and that ‘thinking’ does not necessarily equate with ‘comprehending’ in The Unnamable. The terror of thinking articulates as the expression of (metaphysical and epistemological) violence against comprehension, for what demands thinking most imperatively, what alibis literature’s (and writing’s) right to exist in the world as a discourse that autonomously, sovereignly speaks and thinks, is the unforgettable yet all too widely forgotten presence in the world of essentially unthinkable, unspeakable existences condemned interminably to incomprehension and silence. The terror of thinking is the imperative of thinking with such existences, but to do so in a way that does not shy away from plunging headlong into the crisis, the terror of what happens to thinking (and speaking) in its proximity with what is unthinkable (and therefore unspeakable, therefore unnamable) in the experience of such existences.
Blanchot writes that Artaud’s ‘“I cannot think, I cannot manage to think” is a summons to a more profound thought, a constant pressure, an oblivion that, never allowing itself to be forgotten, always demands a more perfect oblivion. Henceforth thinking is this step always to take backwards’ (BC 39). The act of thinking, in other words, always steps backwards into the destroyed ontological zone of radical suffering from which it had occasion to emerge in the first place. Literature is the preeminent space where this experiment with commencing and continuing thinking in the face of the incapacity to be extricated from radical suffering can be undertaken, and it is Beckett’s writing of The Unnamable that drives this experiment forward to its most terror-stricken extreme. That Beckett’s writing of The Unnamable is so intransigently embroiled in the problematic of what this chapter has termed the terror of thinking is precisely what makes it so laborious, so incomprehensible, so visceral, and yet so necessary to read as a principal instance of the terror of literature.
1. Daniel Katz is of course right that ‘to assume there is such a substance, or “voice,” in the book The Unnamable and to refer to it as ‘The Unnamable’ is already to violate the conditions under which the text tells us this phenomenon may be discussed. Perhaps such a violation is necessary, even programmed by the text, but even if this is the case, the implications and the economy of such a violation would need to be addressed. And any investigation of this question should recognise the way the prose of The Unnamable refuses not only the stability of reference offered by the proper name, but even that of the entire pronominal system with its built-in deictic distinctions between who is speaking and who is being spoken of’ (1999: 79; italics in original). Katz also recognises that ‘no discussion of Beckett’s refusal of subjectivity and the “I” can ignore Maurice Blanchot’s thoughts on this issue’, but like most Beckett critics, Katz worries that Blanchot tends towards rendering the neutered subjectivity that speaks through Beckett’s writing as one of absolute detachment from referentiality (1999: 24). ‘One of the great paradoxes of The Unnamable’, Katz writes, ‘is that although in many ways it seems the perfect model of Blanchot’s “neutre,” all the same it retains highly determinate relations to inscriptions of gender and also to the specificities of different languages, nationalities, and geographies’ (1999: 26). Part of what I want to do in this chapter is to refer Blanchot’s notion of the ‘narrative voice’, or the neutered subjectivity that speaks in Beckett’s writing, to a particular historical experience that Blanchot reads out of Antelme’s memoir. Blanchot is not as dismissive of referentiality as far too many Beckett critics make him out to be, even when they praise the value of Blanchot’s conception of the neutered voice of narrative speech for its capacity to articulate how the figures that inhabit the space of Beckett’s writing tend towards engendering impersonal structures of subjectivity that derive from the ontological emphasis in Beckett’s writing on textuality and language.
2. This is the experience of what Martin Hägglund advocates in Radical Atheism as the atheistic, diachronic temporality of ontological survival, which is derived from what Derrida describes as the work of ‘spacing’ constitutive of différance: ‘[T]he aspect that is most crucial for radical atheism [. . .] concerns the ontological status of spacing. Derrida repeatedly argues that différance (as a name for the spacing of time) not only applies to language or experience or any other delimited region of being. Rather, it is an absolutely general condition, which means that there cannot even in principle be anything that is exempt from temporal finitude’ (2008: 2–3; italics in original).
3. Christopher Fynsk reminds us that this section of The Infinite Conversation on Antelme, which Blanchot titled ‘Humankind’, is ‘coupled to another bearing the subheading “Being Jewish” (“Etre juif”) – the latter constituting what is one of Blanchot’s most significant statements on Judaism. The essays are joined with the chapter title, “The Indestructible.” Since “Being Jewish” may be construed as the description of a form of existence that bears witness to the exigency to which I have referred, the meaning of Blanchot’s gesture of coupling the essays should give us pause’ (2013: 35; italics in original). Fynsk is right to read ‘Humankind’ and ‘Being Jewish’ as (possibly) disjunctive statements on a single question – what is autrui? – and thus his work serves as an important reminder that Blanchot’s reflections on the concept of ‘the indestructible’ are part of a larger context and discussion involving Levinas that unfortunately this chapter does not have the space or indeed the mandate (as a reading of The Unnamable) to pursue in any serious way.
4. In his chapter on The Unnamable in Interpreting Narrative in the Novels of Samuel Beckett, Jonathan Boulter alerts us to a section in Beckett’s Proust where Beckett insinuates a relation between suffering and interpretation: ‘As Beckett suggests in Proust, suffering is more than a mere existential condition. It is a condition that tempers and perhaps articulates interpretation, the hermeneutical experience itself: suffering initially is a heuristic “device.” [. . .] Suffering – suffering of the Proustian character, the Beckettian character, the writer – thus articulates its own aesthetic, its own framing of specific experiences’ (2001: 95).
5. The question of how discrete discourses like philosophy, art and science engage in the act of thinking has been an abiding preoccupation of Deleuze’s beginning with Difference and Repetition and lasting all the way through to his collaborative work with Guattari in What is Philosophy? Accordingly, I am not claiming here that Deleuze is extending his critique of ‘true thinking’ to literature, at least not from the perspective of Difference and Repetition; rather, I am claiming that Beckett too is engaging with the question of what thinking is as such, though for Beckett distinctions of genre matter far less (which is not to say they do not matter at all) than they do for Deleuze. Indeed, Rodolphe Gasché treats this dimension of the Deleuzian oeuvre in The Honor of Thinking, where he argues that whereas Difference and Repetition was ‘intent on demarcating true philosophical thought from any image of thought, old and new’, ‘What is Philosophy?, by contrast, seems to reconsider the previous condemnation of the image. [. . .] But if Deleuze can thus reconsider the status of the image, is it not because the image of thought as “what thought claims by right” now characterises all philosophy, old and new? Is Deleuze not led to recognise in this later work that at least a minimal element of the nonphilosophical is essential to philosophical thought as such and that all philosophy thus comes with an image of thought?’ (2007: 251). The implication of Gasché’s reading of Deleuze is that the question of thinking must be asked not just for philosophy alone, but for all who would engage in the act of thinking, whether philosophically, aesthetically or scientifically.
6. This is not to say that writing in the ‘non-historical margins of literature and narrative’ commits Beckett to an anti-historical conception of suffering. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘minor literature’ is helpful for underscoring this distinction, particularly as they argue that literature’s contribution to subverting the dominant ideology of a repressive society and politics is to instruct on the possibility of inhabiting its language and its culture as a ‘stranger within’ (1986: 26): ‘this is the problem of immigrants, and especially of their children, the problem of minorities, the problem of a minor literature, but also a problem for all of us: how to tear a minor literature away from its own language, allowing it to challenge the language and making it follow a sober revolutionary path?’ (1986: 19).
7. There is also of course the earlier episode where the unnamable posits the presence of Malone and considers imagining for him a companion, as in ‘the pseudocouple Mercier-Camier. The next time they enter the field, moving slowly towards each other, I shall know they are going to collide, fall and disappear, and this will perhaps enable me to observe them better’ (TN 291). Accordingly, it may be mistaken to say that Mahood is the unnamable’s first companion. However, it is not mistaken in the sense that in the case of Malone, who with his hypothetical companion is positioned to enter ‘into collision before me’ (TN 291), imagines the unnamable, what the unnamable is projecting is an encounter that he observes – ‘in a word, I only see what appears immediately in front of me, I only see what appears close beside me, what I best see I see ill’ (TN 291) – but in which he does not directly participate. Unlike Malone, in other words, Mahood is posited as a ‘vice-exister’ alongside the unnamable, and it is for this reason that I am privileging the entrance of Mahood in The Unnamable.
8. In Spirals: The Whirled Image in Twentieth-Century Literature and Art, Nico Israel predicates the image of the spiral on the image par excellence of what it means to be thinking in The Unnamable. Israel cites Hugh Kenner in the process of arguing that ‘a special form of finding, and not finding, the center is at issue in the many spirals that play a significant role in Beckett’s writing. Nowhere is this more powerfully the case than in Beckett’s most sustained and yet arguably most “concentrated” novel, L’innommable. [. . .] The final novel of the trilogy of the mid- to late 1940s that, as Hugh Kenner notes, “carries the Cartesian process backwards, beginning with a je suis and ending with a bare cogito,” The Unnamable “concerns itself to no end with a baffling intimacy between discourse and non-existence.” It does so, at least in part, through the repeated presentation of spiralled journeys and spiralized thinking’ (2015: 163).