Hell any positivist can tell you ‘does not exist.’ There is no such place. But I feel there is an area of act that is hell . . . a place of naming.
(Amiri Baraka)
As discussed at the beginning of the preceding chapter, many Beckett scholars agree that How It Is represented something of a turning point in Beckett’s oeuvre away from the ‘attitude of disintegration’ that was responsible for the impasse of The Unnamable and Texts for Nothing. The impasse took the form of Beckett’s refusal to write in prose for nearly a decade, during which time he focused largely on his dramatic writing (Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape and Happy Days). Beckett’s sojourn from prose came to a decisive end, however, with the publication of Comment c’est in 1961 (translated under the title How It Is by Beckett and published in English by Grove Press in 1964). Although it is ‘ultimately a little-known work’, explains Badiou, its publication signalled nothing less than ‘a major mutation in the way that Beckett fictioned his thought. This text breaks with the confrontation between the torturing cogito and the neutrality of the black-grey of being’ that circumscribed the narrative totality of The Unnamable and Texts for Nothing (2008: 264). Through the introduction in How It Is ‘of alterity, of the encounter, of the figure of the Other’, Beckett’s writing finally ‘fissures and displaces solipsistic imprisonment’ (2008: 264). No longer able to sustain his compositional focus on the narrative subject’s unending paralysis brought on by the terroristic imperative of phenomenological self-mutilation, Beckett discovers through the writing of How It Is a mine of creative possibilities in the poetics and ethics of encounter. It is precisely the introduction of the alterity of the other into the narrative texture of How It Is that promises an end to the ‘reign of terror’ that Badiou ascribes to the ‘super-ego fury’ of The Unnamable and Texts for Nothing (2008: 261).
Badiou’s reading of How It Is places him squarely in the ‘ethical camp’ of Beckett studies by virtue of the emphasis he puts on the subversion of solipsistic terror by the evental encounter with (and care for) the alterity of the other. The encounter with the other that Badiou valorises in How It Is is an encounter that promises a decisive interruption of the vicious, autoimmunitary repetitions of speech and silence, pain and laughter, torture and tenderness that otherwise subsume everything said, illsaid, missaid and unsaid in what is perhaps Beckett’s most hermeneutically unaccommodating work of fiction. The presence of terror in Beckett’s writing no doubt signals a serious threat to the ethical paradigm of its critical reception in so far as terror exerts an oppressive pressure over the life-world of Beckett’s narrators and protagonists (often one and the same) that compels them to struggle continuously against the very conditions of vulnerability and victimisation that their weapons of struggle – images, memories, fantasies, desires, thoughts and words – paradoxically refortify. As the unnamable puts it, ‘the search for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech, is what enables the discourse to continue’ (TN 293).
One of the purposes of this chapter is to show that rather than refuse to go along with what Badiou disparages in The Unnamable as the ‘terrorist commandment to have to maintain what cannot be’ (2008: 261), How It Is capitulates more intensively than ever to precisely this terrorist commandment that eternally returns to demarcate what is simultaneously most ethically hostile and creatively regenerative in Beckett’s writing. It is within and against the ethical paradigm of reading Beckett that Blanchot’s account of narrative speech, surrounded and overshadowed by radical violence, ‘its fringe and its halo’ (IC 187), is indispensable for its fashioning of a non-ethical exigency for literature, one that is rooted in a sustained reflection on human relation and capable of explaining why How It Is, ‘our epic’ (IC 329), precludes overt attempts like Badiou’s at divesting Beckett’s narrative voices of the eternal return of terror they ceaselessly speak. With the continuous drama of speech and violence that it stages in the relation between its narrator and the figure of Pim, How It Is is the text most invit-ing of an ethical interpretation at the same time as it is the text that thwarts ethical readings most decisively. The argument here, in other words, is not that How It Is marks a repetition without difference of the traumatically unrelenting asceticism – the narrative protocol of terror – of The Unnamable and Texts for Nothing; rather, How It Is doubles down on the terror of literature with an intensity that is inversely proportionate to its desire to escape precisely the terrifying ‘solipsistic imprisonment’ of Beckett’s two previous texts.
As it concerns the question of ethics in relation to Beckett’s writing, contemporary Beckett studies has been most indebted to the ethical theories of Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas (and increasingly of Badiou) for arriving at the virtually unanimous decision that whatever else it is, Beckett’s writing is above all ethical in that it confirms, writes Jean-Michel Rabaté, ‘the ethical revelation of existence and otherness’, ‘which applies to the whole of Beckett’s work’ (2015: 169). In her influential reading of How It Is, Ewa Ziarek concurs with this comprehensive assessment of the Beckettian oeuvre, explaining that ‘there is no better way to describe the style of Beckett’s work than to call it, in Levinas’s words, an “interrupted discourse catching up with its own breaks”’ (1995: 169). The ethics of such a style is particularly apparent in the rhetoric of parataxis that Beckett uses for the peculiar composition of How It Is, the successful deployment of which ensures in advance of the encounter with the other that ‘although the body’ of Pim, the body of the other, Ziarek argues, ‘becomes an arena of subjection to language, this subjection, no matter how violent, fails nonetheless to assimilate the other into what Levinas calls “the order of the same,” because language constantly slides from the interior of consciousness to the exterior of the body, from the interiority of voice to the exteriority of writing’ (1995: 184). David Kleinberg-Levin voices a similar assessment of the ethical imperative that motivates Beckett’s writing, not just of How It Is, but across the entirety of Beckett’s post-Second World War creative oeuvre, explaining that ‘at stake for Beckett as a writer, as a storyteller, is – drawing, here, on the grammar of both the subjective and the objective senses of the genitive – language as the language of justice. Language holds the promise of happiness – holds it, however, in a structure of withholding’ (2015: 8). Beckett’s interminable paratactic prose exacerbates this ethical dimension of language by inscribing a ubiquitous network of unbridgeable fissures between what the narrator seeks to extract from and through Pim, and what the alterity of Pim stubbornly obstructs the narrator from acquiring: communication through coercion, and community through incarceration.
For Ziarek, Beckett’s paratactic deployment of dialogue between the narrator and Pim (the self and the other) acts ultimately as a tactic of resistance against the all-too-ready-to-hand solution of violence, torture and extortion to the problematic of the impenetrability of the alterity of the other. ‘The monstrous scene of communication’ between the narrator and Pim, Ziarek explains,
stages a violent, though no doubt ‘therapeutic’, attempt to mend the instabilities of discourse by overcoming the asymmetry between the self and the other. [. . .] Intertwined with the effort to overcome the opacity of the other, the violence of dialogue brings the other into the light of comprehension. In How It Is, violence becomes paradoxically measure of both the success and failure of this linguistic invention: success – because the necessary conditions of communication are inevitably produced and reproduced; failure – because ‘successful’ communication can no longer maintain the pretensions of reciprocity and openness. (1995: 180)
Faced with the stubborn incommunicability of the other, i.e. the refusal of the other to play the narrator’s game of communicative exchange, the narrator frantically resorts to violence against the other in order to more expeditiously ‘integrate alterity into the homogeneous socio-linguistic order’ that the narrator is so intent on establishing (Ziarek 1995: 187). How It Is instructs on the violence of dialogue by reproducing thematically the grisly endgame of a subject-driven construction of the space of communicative sociality. Fortunately for the prospect of salvaging the ethical core of language itself, the dialectical violence of linguistic reification that Beckett stages in Part II, ‘with Pim’, as the narrative centrepiece of How It Is is sabotaged in its third (and perhaps final) section, ‘after Pim’, which reveals how the deployment of a particular protocol of language, the perseverance from beginning to end of Beckett’s paratactic prose, can compensate for the violence of the dialectical appropriation of alterity by withdrawing alterity altogether from the impulse of integrating ‘otherness within the social and pedagogical apparatus’ (Ziarek 1995: 193). Beckett’s paratactic commitment to ‘discontinuity, indeterminate temporal and spatial distancing, and the “anxiety” of relation’ is taken by Ziarek as evidence that with How It Is Beckett is endorsing ‘a notion of sociality inaugurated by a perpetual retreat of the other from the common being’ (1995: 193). How It Is would thus represent a literary treatise on a Beckettian ethics of alterity and the advancement of a concept of community where the alterity that Beckett’s writing unveils might ethically and peaceably dwell.
One of the unspoken premises of Ziarek’s ethical reading of Beckett, however, is that in order for Beckett’s paratactic ethics of alterity to succeed, as Ziarek confidently believes that it does, it is imperative that it is reacting to a narrative situation that stages the conditions of nothing more (but also nothing less) severe than violence against alterity. In so far as violence consists ‘of a force’, writes Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘that remains foreign to the dynamic or energetic system into which it intervenes’, there will always be the possibility in the face of violence of bringing violence to an end and of returning the system that violence assaults to its functional state such as it was regulated before being targeted for violence (2005: 16). That the tormentors of How It Is were once victims, and that the victims of How It Is will once again become tormentors – ‘these same couples that eternally form and form again all along this immense circuit’ (HII 121) – suggests, however, that what is so unsettling about How It Is is that it stages the conditions of a relation that ends (interminably) where it begins (interminably) in a state of enthrallment before the threatening presence of alterity. This is a relation that is far more problematic from an ethical perspective than a relation that commences with violence against alterity and ends with the affirmation of the resistance of alterity against violence. On the one hand, it is comforting to join Ziarek (as do other Levinasian-inspired Beckettians like Peter Fifield1 or Carla Locatelli) in believing that thanks to Beckett’s paratactic vigilance, alterity is given a perpetual outlet of retreat from the violence implicit in the structures of communicative rationality and ontological totality that are made present in the narrative; on the other hand, there would be little comfort indeed if Beckett is in fact refusing us the knowledge that the destination of the retreat of alterity is not right back into the ontological thresher of coerced communication that precipitated the paratactic retreat of alterity in the first place. The eternally recurring catastrophe of How It Is is that there is nowhere for alterity to go where it would not be met yet again and always with violence. The eternal return of violence, the complicity of language and dialogue in perpetuating violence, and the figuration of violence in the narrative’s promise of ontological justice to all who inhabit the world of How It Is, oblige us to consider that what we are in fact dealing with in How It Is is nothing so banal as the writing of undecidability, but rather the writing of a violence in radical excess of violence.
Accordingly, calling the place in which the narrative situation of How It Is unfolds a place of terror is perhaps a more precise and altogether more disorienting diagnosis of just how thoroughly compromised its writing is by its unending descent into (and incitement of) violence, for as Hannah Arendt explains in On Violence, ‘terror is not the same as violence’; rather, terror ‘comes into being when violence, having destroyed all power, does not abdicate but, on the contrary, remains in full control. [. . .] The climax of terror is reached [. . .] when yesterday’s executioner becomes today’s victim’ (2001: 55). Arendt’s account of how violence morphs into terror by transcending its dialectical dependence on the resistance and power of the body and the state that violence targets can help us to begin mapping conceptually such relations in How It Is that are so subsumed by violence that the identities assigned to the perpetrators and victims of violence become nothing more than mere place holders to be circulated through unceasingly without any indication of when the violence that mediates these relations will stop: ‘what I for Pim Pim for me’ (HII 60).
Arendt credits none other than ‘the Stalinist functionaries themselves’ for the realisation that a regime that has successfully converted violence into terror must be stopped at all costs because it would lead, ‘not to an insurrection, against which terror is indeed the best safeguard, but to paralysis of the whole country’ (2001: 55–6). Both politically and ethically speaking, Arendt is right to advise so vehemently against endorsing the descent of violence into terror, but the same does not necessarily hold when speaking about the capacities of literature and art in the face of violence and terror, particularly if we are on board with Nancy in maintaining that ‘art is not a simulacrum or an apotropaic form that would protect us from unjustifiable violence’ (2005: 26). Insisting that art and literature must, necessarily, represent spaces of ethical possibility is to risk hoping too optimistically that art and literature are not valuable precisely to the degree that they assume the burden of acquiescing to complicity (thus sacrificing their ethical pretensions) in such limit-experiences as terror that we would much rather be spared from experiencing (in the world outside as much as inside the space of literature).
Beckett’s writing of How It Is emanates continuously (returns and returns again) from a place of paratactic delay where violence against alterity becomes the only mechanism of defence against the very real prospect of alterity evaporating altogether in an unbroken nightmare of ontological paralysis. Beckett coerces his readers into unlocking the open secret that Pim’s vulnerability to violence and torture is the only available gateway to exposing Pim’s vulnerability to dialogue and speech. Beckett’s framing of the relation with Pim in the paratactic delay of terror – that is to say, in a space that is uncannily commensurate with ‘an area’, writes Giorgio Agamben, ‘in which [Primo] Levi succeeded in isolating something like a new ethical element’, a ‘zone in which the “long chain of conjunction between victim and executioner” comes loose, where the oppressed becomes oppressor and the executioner in turn appears as victim’ (2002: 21) – is the surest way of refusing the naive ethical impulse of immunising speech from violence, and alterity from naming. Russell Smith proposes that it is precisely the delineation of Agamben’s ‘zone of indecipherability’ that renders How It Is a narrative about the ethics of witnessing. The argument in this chapter departs from Smith’s (and Ziarek’s) through its insistence that the repetition of this zone of indecipherability, i.e. the eternal paratactic recurrence of the moment of its inscription, precludes the position of even an imaginary witness from articulating a place of visibility in proximity to the place of violence and suffering inscribed in the narrative. That narration from the place of suffering is explicitly denied in How It Is can therefore be submitted for evidence that this is not in fact a narrative first and foremost of suffering, but rather a narrative of what, in language, makes suffering possible, of what, in language, perhaps makes suffering necessary.
It is within this non-ethical2 paradigm of art and literature sacrificing their a priori ethical (but not necessarily ontological) allegiances to concepts like alterity, dialogue and unconditional justice that we can begin articulating how the writing of How It Is unfolds atop the threshold of violence morphing into terror. This is a threshold where the spaces and the identities that separate perpetrators from victims are under permanent ontological threat of indistinction, and where the dialectical energy ordinarily released when the force of violence that confronts the resistance of alterity dissipates (dialectically stalls) into an ever-worsening state of epic paralysis: ‘linked thus bodily together each one of us is at the same time Bom and Pim tormentor and tormented pedant and dunce wooer and wooed speechless and reafflicted with speech in the dark the mud nothing to emend there’ (HII 140). The closing of the distance and distinction between Bom (the narrator) and Pim, between being-speechless and being-reafflicted with speech, represents the imminent denouement in How It Is of terror. There is no place more demanding of analytic scrutiny than the instant before this denouement, for its passage would (and perhaps does) signal nothing less than the commencement of the ethical disaster of dialectical inoperability, which is intuited in How It Is in a place of language – the place of language par excellence – where the eternal return of violence threatens alterity with the spectre of its absolute effacement. Where there is the terror of a violence in excess of violence, there is no longer any access to the outside of violence from where ethical resistance against violence is to be surmounted. Where there is terror, in other words, outside collapses into inside, the security of transcendence morphs into the insecurity of immanence (the horror of the il y a), and there is no longer any place to go, no identity left to inhabit, and no words or names left to pronounce whereby subjects of terror would be either innocent or free of the repetition of violence that terror continuously perpetrates. How It Is obliges the uncomfortable realisation that the possibility of violence against alterity is a necessary corollary of the desire that there be alterity in the first place, and the way that it impresses this realisation upon its readers (and its narrator) is by threatening the denouement of terror in the place of language where alterity is most vulnerable to violence and speech.
Readers who have taken even a passing glance inside the pages of How It Is will intuit the difficulty that inheres in the structure and syntax of the work’s composition. This is a text that refuses to signpost its grammar, that is broken up into strophic paragraphs, and that reads with a musicality punctuated repeatedly by abrupt paratactic amendments to the speaker’s continuous recitation of the stream-of-consciousness-esque (and potentially infinitely reoccurring) discourse it is tasked with (re-)producing. Beckett compensates for the difficulties in stylising the prose of How It Is with a plot that is indeed not much more complicated than how he describes it in a letter to Barney Rosset dated 5 May 1959: ‘It all “takes place” in the pitch dark and the mud, first part “man” alone, second with another, third alone again. All a problem of rhythm and syntax and weakening of form, nothing more difficult’ (Letters III 230). How It Is begins with a ‘man’ crawling in the mud and in the dark, on his way to victimise one who patiently awaits his arrival. This is the action of Part I. In Part II, the crawling protagonist reaches his victim, Pim, and the violent ritual of victimisation begins. Part III consists of Pim crawling away from his tormentor (the narrator) in order to victimise another in exactly the same way as he himself has just been victimised. The abandoned narrator is now left lying prone in the mud awaiting his turn to be victimised by Bom in accordance with the infernal mathematical justice that ensures no victim will be deprived of its tormentor and no tormentor deprived of its victim in this ‘procession without end or beginning’ (HII 127).
What we are told about ‘the beginning of my life present formulation’ is limited in the opening pages of How It Is to the ‘certainties the mud the dark I recapitulate the sack the tins the mud the dark the silence the solitude nothing else for the moment’ (HII 8). And yet, the ‘moment’ of the narrator’s certainties quickly gives way to a series of images of a life that it is said to have once lived ‘above in the light’ (HII 9). Because there is no accounting for ‘how I got here no question not known not said’, readers of How It Is are left in the clumsy epistemological position of speculating not only on the catalyst, but also on the consequences for life here in the mud of the fact that the narrator cannot return to the life it imagines itself to have lived before its deportation (its disappearance) into the darkness down below: ‘how it was my vanished life then after’ (HII 20). The presence in How It Is of words resurrecting the time of this ‘life life the other above in the light said to have been mine’ inserts an ontological wedge into the consistency of life here in the mud, and it is on the basis of such a wedge of discontinuity that the narrator is able to produce the images of a life that is fundamentally unliveable in its present ontological condition (HII 8).
From the very outset of How It Is the narrator is struggling to conjure up an image of its life that would last long enough and that would be compelling enough to reconstitute how it sees and experiences its life going forward in the future of the mud: ‘that’s all it wasn’t a dream I didn’t dream that nor a memory I haven’t been given memories this time it was an image the kind I see sometimes see in the mud part one sometimes saw’ (HII 11). The content of these images includes the narrator watching ‘some creature or other I watched him after my fashion from afar’ (HII 9); scissoring ‘into slender strips the wings of butterflies’ (HII 9); seeing a woman who ‘stoops to her works’ as she ‘looks up looks at me the images come at the beginning’ (HII 10); sitting with his mother ‘on a veranda smothered in verbena’ (HII 15); spying on ‘a boy sitting on a bed in the dark or a small old man I can’t see with his head be it young or be it old his head in his hands I appropriate that heart’ (HII 18); and several other imaginings of the ‘rags of life in the light’ (HII 21). These images, which insinuate themselves as redemptive fictions of the imagination, are the narrator’s only weapons against the monotony of the crawl on the way towards Pim, but because they have been hijacked and infiltrated by the words that are murmured to the narrator in the mud, they are destined for failure as tokens of independent verification that its life in the mud can be lived otherwise than how the ‘ancient voice in me not mine’ tyrannically prescribes (HII 7): ‘the images come at the beginning part one they will cease I say it as I hear it murmur it in the mud the images part one how it was before Pim I see them in the mud a light goes on they will cease’ (HII 10).
The imminent cessation of images is unfortunate, for what it impresses on the narrator is the sober realisation that its ‘wish’ early on in Part I ‘to be less wretched a little less the wish for a little beauty’ will not be granted in so far as the images that it is able to produce in service of this wish ‘before Pim’ provide nothing more than mere moments of distraction and pause from ‘the need to move on the need to shit and vomit and other great needs all my great categories of being’ (HII 14). Subsisting so passively in the mud as ‘a monster of the solitudes’ entails that whatever possibility of resistance to the monotony of the crawl the narrator can envision will have to come from somewhere outside of its solipsistic horizon, and until its solipsistic horizon is breached by an external interventionary force capable of reimagining how life ‘down below’ is to be (re)constituted, it will persist in its myopic journey on this unbearable tract in the mud (HII 13). The ancient voice that murmurs the words signifying the narrator’s life down below is too adept at overwhelming the interrupted spaces of the narrator’s panting in the mud for the narrator’s images to have any lasting consequences on reimagining life otherwise than how it is lived in its present formulation: ‘the wish for a little beauty no when the panting stops I hear nothing of the kind that’s not how I’m told this time’ in Part I ‘before Pim’ (HII 12).
Throughout Part I ‘before Pim’ the narrator behaves as one who has suffered violence at some point in its past, though it is not at all certain that the past in which its subjection to violence occurred can be linked together with the temporal matrix that comprises the ‘present formulation’ of its life now lived in the mud (HII 8). Nevertheless, traces of the unnamed event of violence, which we can reasonably speculate is responsible for the narrator’s ontological displacement in this nightmarish narrative, live on in the narrator’s peculiar comportment as it is conducted in How It Is as a being whose reconstituted essence now consists in having once or yet again (but always for the first time) been violently assaulted. This applies to whether we opt for reading Part I ‘before Pim’ as the very first citation of life in the mud, that is to say, as the instant where ‘life above’ ceases and the narrator’s recording of ‘life below’ commences, or for reading it in medias res as the latest citation of an epic voice that has been speaking this life in the mud from time immemorial. Whether the narrator has journeyed ‘down below’ for the first time from ‘life above’, in other words, or whether it has just been released from its share of victimisation along this infernal tract in the mud, it speaks to us from a position after the singular experience of victimisation has occurred, in one (temporal) place or another: ‘a most remarkable thing when you come to think of it only the victims journeyed’ (HII 142). ‘From elsewhere or beyond’, writes Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘violence brandishes another form, if not another meaning’ (2005: 16), and it is the unfortunate though irreversible condition of this narrator to have to move forward as the embodiment of some new form, some new name, and with some new meaning of how life is to be lived according to ‘this new formulation namely this new life to have done with that’ (HII 142). Appearing in Part I ‘before Pim’ as a subject pieced fragilely together with the detritus of the life that remains in the wake of its traumatic victimisation, the narrator is forced to inhabit an ontological reality that obeys new laws and new regulations of how this post-violence, post-victimisation after-life is to be lived and relived according to the voice of its anonymous inscription.
‘[T]hat of the four three quarters of our total life only three lend themselves to communication’ is no small detail of the narrative, for what the absence of any record or even, and perhaps especially, the possibility of a record of the narrator’s exposure to the violence it will commit against Pim implies is that in the space (in the time) of How It Is there is therefore neither place nor words through which the voice of victimisation might communicate its tale qua narrative of its victimisation (HII 131). The voice of the victim is too singular, too vulnerable and too catastrophic for the language that survives its victimisation to be welcomed, without violence, back into the place in discourse that was responsible for grounding the possibility of its victimisation in the first place. Having suffered a great loss – ‘losses everywhere’ (HII 7) – and being brandished in Part I ‘before Pim’ in another form, the narrator comes into How It Is with ‘the only thing’, as Paul Celan explains (ironically yet mournfully), that remains ‘reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through. It gave [. . .] no words for what was happening, but went through it’ (1990: 34).
While it would be a salutary thought to envision the narrative of How It Is occupying a time after the end of victimisation, that is to say, a time when language ‘could resurface’ and be used by the narrator, as it was hoped for by Celan, ‘in order to speak, to orient myself, to find out where I was, where I was going, to chart my reality’ (1990: 34), the sobering reality of How It Is is that with the ancient words at its disposal, it is riveted to a place in language – ‘it’s the place without knowledge’ (HII 123) – that foreshadows the horizon of only one outcome that will return and return again: ‘quaqua the voice of us all who all all those here before me and to come alone in this wallow or glued together all the Pims tormentors promoted victims past if it ever passes and to come that’s sure more than ever by the earth undone its light all those’ (HII 127). The time of this narrative is therefore not the time after victimisation when language, amidst the ruins of its irremediable destruction and decay, could begin the infinite task of reassembling itself by ‘those who’, like Celan, and ‘with manmade stars flying overhead, unsheltered even by the traditional tent of the sky, exposed in an unsuspected, terrifying way, carry their existence into language, racked by reality and in search of it’ (1990: 35); rather, it is a time that is circumscribed before victimisation has started (again) and after the time it has come (momentarily) to an end.
We can read the emphasis placed on images in Part I of How It Is as a symptom of the narrator’s distrust of the words that will have been complicit in its return to the place of victimisation. The wager on the ontological (re-)inventiveness of the image is a desperate one, for should its images fail in their promise of envisioning life otherwise, the narrator risks being left alone for the continuation of its journey in a place of language where its vulnerability to violence is perennially exposed. In The Infinite Conversation Blanchot refers to such a place as the place where thinking and speaking begin, but in doing so he does not intend to make of the discovery of this place a cause for celebration. This place is a place of fear ‘where searching for what is reached in fear, putting oneself at stake in the shaking that is fear’, brings ‘us closer to a decisive point that, if it escapes philosophy, does so because something decisive escapes philosophy’ (IC 50). What is decisive is that the one who inhabits this place without any tangible hope of escape comes face-to-face with the ‘violence that reveals itself in fear and that threatens to transform him from a frightened man into a violent man; as though he feared less the violence he suffers than the violence he might exercise’ (IC 50).
The failure of images to disrupt the journey wherein the narrator is condemned to ‘keep dying in a dying age’ (HII 17) nevertheless forces the recognition that pulsating throughout its narrative dwelling are glimmers of redemption – ‘the space of a moment the passing moment’ (HII 16) – that paradoxically flash brightest at the height of their impenetrability. The narrator does not have the inventive power to inscribe an image of life lived otherwise in the mud that the ‘voice once without quaqua on all sides then in me when the panting stops’ would not coopt into the machinery of words that propel the narrator forward on its panting, fatalistic way towards Pim, but it does at least have the desire that the image will glimpse the possibility of a life lived outside of the fear that would compel the exercise of violence against Pim (HII 7). This struggle between the voice – ‘in me not mine’ (HII 7) – and the image – ‘the kind I see sometimes see in the mud part one’ (HII 11) – over what will ground the narrator’s vision of what its life is and of what can be hoped for in its life in the mud is a struggle that, alas, the image in this case was set up to lose from the eternally recurring beginning of the narrative. The narrator’s images are too nostalgically conceived, too hopelessly pedestrian, and altogether too comprehensible to overturn the sheer incomprehensibility of how the narrator’s vision of its life in the mud is refracted by the words of the voice: ‘here confused reckonings to the effect I can’t have deviated more than a second or so from the direction imparted to me’ (HII 40). What is interesting here is not that the narrator’s images fail to extract it for ‘more than a second’ from down below in the darkness of the mud; rather, it is how and why they fail in this respect that demands articulation, particularly if we are to understand the consequences of the narrator’s imminent substitution of images with the body of Pim qua instrument of subverting the epic sovereignty of the ancient voice as it murmurs the narrator into the precarity of its existence from one paratactic interval to the next ad infinitum: ‘I hear me again murmur me in the mud and am again’ (HII 126).
In his essay ‘Image and Violence’, Nancy identifies the ‘essential link’ that binds the production of images to the phenomenon of violence (2005: 20). Only through acknowledging their reciprocally constitutive filiation with one another do violence and image stand a chance of embodying the essential aspiration of their respective forms:
If violence is exercised without responsibility to anything other than itself, without reference to any higher authority (including, of course, when violence invokes such a moment of authorisation and justification), this becomes apparent through the essential link that violence maintains with the image. Violence always makes an image of itself, and the image is what, of itself, presses out ahead of itself and authorizes itself. [. . .] Even when the image is mimetic, it must fundamentally, by itself and for itself, count for more than an image; otherwise, it will tend toward being nothing but a shadow or a reflection. (2005: 20)
Just as violence represents transformation through the self-aggrandising power of its excess, so too is the image defined by manifesting a break with the ground of representation from which the image is extracted, and through this break exposing the possibility that the ontological horizon of its representation can be reconstituted precisely according to the ungrounded possibility that preceded its representation in the first place. There is a definitive desire to transcend the ontological law that oversees the place and the manifestation of what violence and image target for constituting (presenting) otherwise, but alas, it is a desire that must go unfulfilled in the prospect of its satisfaction lest violence become the annihilation of life, and image become the optical obliteration of its own ungrounded horizon of possibility. Violence and image are in perennial, dialectical competition with what is, and rather than annihilate the being of what is so as to produce something altogether new, the success of violence and image is limited to realigning the coordinates of how that which is traverses the manifestation of its presence in the post-violence, post-image space of its representation. Violence obstructs the law of a person or thing’s ontological functioning so as to make that thing or person do, be or say what is contrary to its habit of existence. The image goes one step further than violence, for it is invoked not just to extract a thing, person or idea from the ground of its presence and expose it to the ungrounded possibility of its being repurposed in its very being, but is invoked in order to accomplish this process of extraction on itself as well. Every image is an image of violence that doubles as the violence of itself becoming image: ‘therefore being is torn away from being; and it is the image that tears itself away. It bears within itself the mark of this tearing away: its ground monstrously opened to its very bottom, that is, to the depthless underside of its presentation’ (Nancy 2005: 24).
Nancy’s reflections on the essential relation between image and violence give some indication of why the images conjured up by the narrator in Part I ‘before Pim’ were destined to fail. Because their very possibility qua images of seeing life otherwise (the optical precondition of being otherwise) was predicated on overcoming the optical status quo of life in the mud, they would have had to have manifested an unhealable rift in the ontological ground of the narrative. Juxtaposing itinerant images of ‘life above’ with the prevailing image of ‘life below’ is too dialectically innocuous a gesture to have any impactful effect on the ontological law governing the here and now of ‘life below’ in the mud, which is already predicated according to the paratactic repetition of rifts in the texture of the narrative. It is because of the weakness of images in How It Is that we read in Part III ‘after Pim’ a summary of life in the mud wherein images are unproblematically subsumed into the ontological totality that they had been ostensibly produced to subvert in Part I ‘before Pim’. The promise of discontinuity represented in the image is broken by the threat of its redundancy given that the paratactic law of discontinuity that the epic voice of the narrative has installed to oversee how life in the mud is structured is always already immune to what the image is constitutively tasked with provoking: ‘here in truth all discontinuous journey images torment even solitude part three when a voice speaks then stops a few scraps then nothing more save the dark the mud all discontinuous save the dark the mud / an image too of this voice ten words fifteen words long silence ten words fifteen words long silence long solitude once without quaqua on all sides vast stretch of time then in me when the panting stops scraps’ (HII 126). In an ontological regime where the paratactic law of continuous discontinuity is installed as the order of the day, a new image, a new violence is required for the possibility of transcending this law. Images must be violent if they are to unground the groundedness of the ontological regime against which the violent becoming of their presence is manifested. The image, like violence, comes into existence for the purpose of altering the organising principle of the place from which and against which it originates. Accordingly, images are doubly dangerous due to ‘the ambiguity of the image and of violence – of the violence at work in the image and of the image opening itself in violence’ (Nancy 2005: 25): ‘if no image can exist without tearing apart a closed intimacy or a non-disclosed immanence, and if no image can exist without plunging into a blind depth – without world or subject – then it must also be admitted that not only violence but the extreme violence of cruelty hovers at the edge of the image, of all images’ (2005: 24; italics in original).
The point here is not that an image about cruelty is a cruelly extreme image of violence, even though the image of the narrator having ‘scissored into slender strips the wings of butterflies first one wing then the other sometimes for a change the two abreast never so good since’ is undoubtedly an image of the narrator’s propensity for cruelty (HII 9); rather, it is that the very act of insinuating an image as a new optical modality of perception – life in the light – is to invoke the same impulses of denaturation and subversion that compel towards violence. The attraction of the image is its promise of overthrowing a regime of seeing, which is the first step to either directly or indirectly overthrowing a regime of being. This is the case even and especially when a particular optical or ontological regime is repressive, oppressive and altogether suffocating of life, and thus deserving of being targeted by forces of insurrectionary violence (imaginative or corporal).3 That the image exists on a continuum where it can engender either infinite suspension or infinite cruelty at the extremity of violence is, then, precisely the point. To risk the image is once again to risk the violence that surrounds the image. It cannot be otherwise; so, in the face of an ontological regime that presents as the monopolisation over the imperative of discontinuity that likewise compels the demand for the image, what is needed is not the momentary irruption of the image, but a wholesale annexation of the right to discontinuity that has hitherto been claimed as the exclusive prerogative in How It Is of ‘the ancient voice in me not mine’ (HII 7). The words of the voice must somehow be pre-emptively subjected to the terrifying silence of victimisation if the image is to triumphantly announce that ‘now it’s done I’ve done the image’ (CSP 168). Without having actually gone through the wordless ordeal of that one quarter of the life that bookends how it was ‘before Pim’ and how it will be ‘after Pim’, i.e. the narrative of how it is as Pim, there is, however, no guarantee that the silences inscribed throughout the paratactic delays of the text will be terrifying enough to open up a space in language for the image to sever the ancient voice from its murderous speech of ‘how it was I quote before Pim with Pim after Pim how it is three parts I say it as I hear it’ (HII 7).
Writing at the beginning of The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot downplays the gravity of a phenomenon that he will proceed to render at once increasingly (predictably) pernicious and alluringly (enigmatically) salvific: the phenomenon of continuous speech. Blanchot enjoins us to ‘recall that, in modern literature, the preoccupation with a profoundly continuous speech is what first gave rise – with Lautréamont, with Proust, then with surrealism, then with Joyce – to works that were manifestly scandalous. An excess of continuity unsettles the reader, and unsettles the reader’s habits of regular comprehension’ (IC 9; italics in original). The frustration of comprehension and habit is unquestionably what makes modern literature so indispensable in coercing its readers to develop new pathways of thinking and new idioms of speaking whereby the infinite approach of the future does not calcify into the sterile repetition of the past. Literature dies with the succession of habit and comprehension, and so the discovery of a protocol of writing that breaks with habit and comprehension is necessary for the sheer strangeness and discomfort constitutive of literature to survive. Where there is nothing but continuity, however, where continuity ascends to a position of all-encompassing totality over the import and trajectory of language and speech, it is not the survival of literature and writing that is guaranteed, but the uncompromising tyranny of mythical decree. Continuity represents a double threat that it is imperative to know how to decipher. The supreme difficulty of reading Beckett’s How It Is, however, is that there inheres in the fragile latency of the murmuring voice precisely this ambivalent threat of continuity.
In the later fragments of How It Is, the ones preceding what many commentators take to be the greatest challenge in the text to the prospect of the salvation of alterity, namely that all the narrator’s previous utterances were ‘all balls from start to finish yes this voice quaqua yes all balls yes only one voice here yes mine yes when the panting stops yes’ (HII 144–5), the narrator resorts to a quasi-theological thought experiment aimed at somehow deferring all ontological responsibility for this life in the mud to a transcendental ‘intelligence’ (HII 137). It asks if the procession of victims and tormentors might be discontinued without sacrificing altogether their life in the mud. Needless to say, the thought experiment quickly fails, but not without exposing the narrator’s desire that the catastrophic scenario of the voice’s absolute sovereignty be avoided (the catastrophe of the narrator becoming the voice) and that the paratactic intervals driving the crawl, the torture, the company, the abandon, ‘it’s our justice in this muck’ (HII 112), will continue unabated. For there is nothing stopping ‘an intelligence somewhere a love who all along the track at the right places according as we need them deposits our sacks’ (HII 137–8), ‘without which no journey’ (HII 111), from thinking that perhaps it would be preferable for this journey to come to a halt and cease once and for all. Were this to happen, however, if such an ‘intelligence’ were to succeed, ‘God knows who could blame him’, ‘if to these perpetual revictuallings narrations and auditions he might not put an end without ceasing to maintain us in some kind of being without end and some kind of justice without flaw who could blame him’ (HII 139), then the memory, the archive, the ‘indelible traces’ that ‘with the nail then of the right index I carve and when it breaks or falls until it grows again with another on Pim’s back intact at the outset from left to right and top to bottom as in our civilisation I carve my Roman capitals’ (HII 70), would likewise have to be abolished – sacrificed to forgetfulness – in order that the narrative not simply be ‘frozen in injustice’ (HII 137). Such an intelligence, if it exists, would be free to stop depositing sacks and thus to absolve itself from any further complicity in the continuation of the epic citation that has been set perpetually into motion, but doing so will result only in the succession of this responsibility to the crawlers who ‘without food to sustain us’ will nevertheless continue to ‘drag ourselves thus by the mere grace of our united net sufferings from west to east towards an inexistent peace’ (HII 143).
‘Eliminating all journeys all abandons’, such an intelligence would thereby be committed to eliminating ‘at the same stroke all occasions of sacks and voices’ (HII 141), but would succeed only in ‘eliminat[ing] him completely and so admit him to that peace at least while rendering me in the same breath sole responsible for this unqualifiable murmur’ (HII 144; my italics). Beckett has structured as an unimpeachable mainstay of How It Is the very thing that its paratactic style of composition appears designed to preclude: the interminable murmuring of the ancient voice. According to Blanchot, Beckett’s writing unfolds at a peak of ethical ambivalence by embedding a mysterious script in works like The Unnamable, Texts for Nothing and How It Is that bespeaks a language that ‘is not in the least a spoken language’, but ‘the oral style of a non-written speech’ (IC 329). ‘Even though we are at the limit of effacement’ in How It Is, ‘a long way from all that makes din, and even though this murmur is close to monotony, saying in an even, equal manner the uneven equality of all speech, there is an essential rhythm, a modulation, a slightly accentuated movement or cadence marked by returns and at times by refrains. It is a tacit song’ (IC 329). The song that Blanchot detects in How It Is sounds remarkably similar to the incessant, albeit reconfigured continuation of the narrative speech that Blanchot first articulated in his reading of The Unnamable: ‘a wandering speech, one that is not deprived of meaning, but deprived of center, that does not begin, does not end, yet is greedy, demanding, will never stop, one couldn’t stand if it stopped, for that is when one would have to make the terrible discovery that, when it does not speak, it is still speaking, when it ceases, it perseveres, not silently, for in it silence speaks eternally’ (BC 210). The narrative speech that Blanchot extracts from Beckett’s writing is so overwhelming in its opacity, so unrelenting in its incessantness, that it successfully pulls off the delicate, improbable balancing act of displacing both Beckett (the biographical subjectivity of the writer) and the Beckettian narrator (the textual subjectivity of the fictional voice) from their respective seats of narrative authority. Here speaks a disquieting language that renders superfluous the subject of the subjectivity that speaks it, and the authority of the author who composed it. And yet, even in its position of superfluity, the narrator, above all, Blanchot argues, can never evade being ‘responsible for this irresponsibility’, this unqualifiable murmur of the voice (IC 330). ‘Even at the level of mud’, Blanchot continues, ‘this remains the exigency from which no being who hears can stand entirely apart. Strange, strange’ (IC 330).
What remains when author and narrator go silent in How It Is is the unmistakeable presence of a narrative voice that speaks the epic language of ‘biblical speech’ (IC 330), and far from being silenced by all the pauses and interruptions, all the absences and gaps in the texture of the narrative, it is a voice that inscribes its transcendental apotheosis precisely in the silence of the paratactic delays of the Beckettian mud. The epic narrative voice that speaks out of the fragmentary spaces of How It Is, however, is one that no longer ‘attempts to found a community or impart knowledge’, according to William S. Allen; rather, speaking out of the opaque depths of paratactic delay, it imparts ‘an essential lack of certainty over what determines knowledge as such and differentiates it from anything else’ (2016: 238). In so far as the paratactic delays of How It Is act as narrative outlets for the epic sovereign modalities of ‘biblical speech’, ‘extending from generation to generation’, the work’s ethical no less than its ontological responsibility ‘is not to prolong’ this biblical speech, ‘but to put an end to it, to bring the movement to rest’ (IC 330). Blanchot asks earlier in The Infinite Conversation that we ‘remember Hitler’s terrible monologues’, for they oblige us to recall that ‘every head of state participates in the same violence of this dictare, the repetition of an imperious monologue, when he enjoys the power of being the only one to speak and, rejoicing in possession of his high solitary word, imposes it without restraint as a superior and supreme speech upon others’ (IC 75). Biblical, imperious speech is not a speech that is inclined to mediate the ethical event of conversation and dialogue, but because it is the only speech that the narrative of How It Is permits its narrator unequivocally to possess, it is a speech that forces the narrator into a situation of desiring alternative methods of speaking – speaking in dialogue with Pim – whereby the dictatorial violence of the voice that circumscribes its existence in the mud would become vulnerable to an ethical protocol of cessation, silence and wordlessness that cannot be integrated into the totality of the voice’s narrative.
The hypothesis put forward in Part II ‘with Pim’ is that ‘with someone to keep me company I would have been a different man more universal’ (HII 67), but to test this hypothesis and to overcome the ontological distance that separates the narrator from this ‘dumb limp lump’ body of Pim lying ‘flat for ever in the mud’ (HII 52), the narrator must devise a way ‘to cleave’ to Pim (HII 62), to overcome the ‘problem of [Pim’s] training’ (HII 57), and to figure out how best to give Pim ‘a name train him up bloody him all over with Roman capitals gorge on his fables unite for life in stoic love’ (HII 62). The problem of Pim, in other words, is the problem of company, of the imperative of traversing the incommensurability of life in common. Pim’s presence in How It Is represents the problematic of human relation where it is predicated on the capacity of language to facilitate mediation between self and other. Overcoming this problematic, however, is not necessarily an end in itself in the context of How It Is. By shifting our perspective momentarily away from locating the confrontation with Pim as the nerve-centre of the text to the continuous catastrophe – the irreversible denouement of terror – of the voice muttering forever in the mud, this voice that simultaneously archives, dictates and predicts the narrator’s arrival in the place of Pim (as Pim), we begin to see that the violence committed against the body of Pim is an instrumental form of violence and therefore subject to the ethical limits of its finitude.
The real problematic of How It Is, in other words, is not the problematic of the violence committed against Pim, which is violence aimed (and therefore violence with a purpose) at precipitating the interruption of the voice, but the problematic of why this propensity for violence necessarily returns to the place that the body of Pim provisionally inhabits. The problem is not violence; it is violence’s return in the place of relation with Pim. Before it was the violence against Pim, the violence of How It Is was the violence of the image, and the question this violence poses is whether or not that which it targets for discontinuity – the terror of the continuity of the voice – is not in fact worse than the phenomenon of violence that is on explicit display in the episode with Pim. The passage from the aesthetic context of violence in the image to the ethical context of violence in the relation with Pim is far from insignificant, and there can be no doubting that the violence committed against the body of Pim is qualitatively distinct from the violence of the image. Nevertheless, what underwrites both instances of the narrator’s perpetration of violence (imaginative and corporal) is the spectre of violence’s eternal return, the horizon of the denouement of terror, and it is this dimension of violence that the coming into contact with Pim in the establishment of human relation is staged for the purpose of discontinuing. ‘This is a long labor’, writes Blanchot on the subject of human relation, and even assuming that this labour is accomplished, that ‘the reign of liberty’ succeeds in substituting ‘itself for the reign of necessity’ (IC 68), there must necessarily come an accounting of ‘what measure of blood, sweat, and tears is required for this’ (IC 68): ‘if he wants me to leave him yes in peace yes without me there is peace yes was peace yes every day no if he thinks I’ll leave him no I’ll stay where I am yes glued to him yes tormenting him yes eternally yes’ (HII 98).
Levinas and Blanchot have expended much philosophical capital trying to explicate the human relation, and particularly in ways that converge with Beckett’s negotiation of the experience of it in How It Is. Given Levinas’s considerable influence over the question of ethics asked so frequently of Beckett’s writing, there is indeed much value in tracking where Blanchot deviates from Levinas on precisely the prospect of its ethical solution. Levinas’s point of departure for conceptualising the ethical transcendence of the human relation is his diagnosis of world history as a secular project where violence and war are the de jure (if not de facto) condition of the ontological totality that structures the contexts where everyday subjectivity lives and dwells in the presence of others. Levinas contrasts this secular vision refracted by war with an eschatological vision of ethical possibility that is predicated on enacting a protocol of speech and language that cuts into ‘the anonymous utterance of history’ and ‘breaks with the totality of wars and empires in which one does not speak’ (1969: 23). Speech is thus the eschatological weapon of ethics in the fight of resistance against war, but before it can be deployed (uttered) with an eye on breaking with the ontological law of totality that excretes war, a place of exteriority must be revealed – and this, ultimately, is for Levinas the philosophical task par excellence – where eschatological speech can resound: ‘we can proceed from the experience of totality back to a situation where totality breaks up, a situation that conditions the totality itself. Such a situation is the gleam of exteriority or of transcendence in the face of the Other’ (1969: 24). If, for Levinas, the way that the violence of totality (the ontology of war) is disarmed is by welcoming the alterity of the other that always already precedes totality (such would be the transcendental a priori of Levinasian ethics), and if, for Levinas, the way that this is accomplished is by opening up, in the discourse – the language – of totality, a place for the arrival of the other qua the face of the other (the otherwise than being), then it is necessary to posit a fundamental opposition between the ethical violence of language and speech and the paralytic violence of war and terror. The violence of ethics is a ‘violence which, for a mind, consists in welcoming a being’ in its opposition to ‘the ideal of autonomy’ (1969: 25). The ethical event of justice, then, occurs in ‘veritable conversation’ between the ideal of autonomy that defines the subjectivity of the self-identical subject – the subject produced in the totality and time of (perpetual) war – and the face of the Other that defines the infinite excess of alterity, an excess that uproots the autonomy of the subject from the ground of the totality that legislates its ontological continuity (1969: 70): ‘we call justice this face to face approach, in conversation’ (1969: 71; italics in original).
Levinasian ethics consists in the idea that coming face to face with the alterity of the other commands hospitality towards the alterity of the other. Such a commandment of hospitality is embedded in the image of the face in so far as through the idiosyncrasies of its visage – the face of the face – it ‘resists possession, resists my powers’ (1969: 197). If the encounter with the other is first and foremost an encounter that precipitates the negation of the alterity of the other, then it is the face of the other that guarantees that ‘in its epiphany, in expression, the sensible, still graspable, turns into total resistance to the grasp’ (1969: 197). The temporal dynamics of this encounter is significant. Levinas is not saying that the face represents a counter-force to the desire to enjoy, know and ultimately kill the alterity of the other. There is nothing ethical, in other words, in the other summoning the power to defy its objectification in the violent economy of encounter. There is no denying that the encounter with the other ordinarily unfolds as an encounter that begins with the violence threatened by comprehension, calculation and communication, and proceeds dialectically through the resistance and struggle that the other mounts in its labour to be withdrawn from this threat of being known, enjoyed and perhaps ultimately killed.
The ethics of resistance consists in something altogether different than the dialectics of resistance. It consists, rather, ‘not in a greater force’ that the other is able to produce in service of its resistance, ‘an energy assessable and consequently presenting itself as though it were part of a whole’, but rather ‘the very unforeseeableness of his reaction [. . .], the very transcendence of his being by relation to that whole; not some superlative of power, but precisely the infinity of his transcendence. This infinity, stronger than murder, already resists us in his face, is his face, is the primordial expression, is the first word: “you shall not commit murder”’ (1969: 199; italics in original). Ethics is inaugurated in the transcendence of the face outside the dialectics of the face-to-face. The expression of the face, the face that speaks the first word of ethical relation, is an epiphany that imposes an inviolable limit on how ontologically pervasive is the place of secular interiority where the economy of power, knowledge and violence constitutive of the dialectical encounter with the other is put into play. The face points to this place of exteriority from which the epiphany of ethics arrives. Levinasian ethics is therefore a cartography of transcendence that is committed to defending the sovereignty of the face over the place of its unkillable (though not untorturable) presence.
It is important that we understand the ontological division that Levinas imposes over the dialectical economy of struggle in the face-to-face encounter with the other, on the one hand, and on the other the place of transcendence from which this struggle is threatened with the dissolution of its reciprocal exchange of violence and power: ‘the epiphany of the face is ethical. The struggle this face can threaten presupposes the transcendence of expression. The face threatens the eventuality of a struggle, but this threat does not exhaust the epiphany of infinity, does not formulate its first word. War presupposes peace, the antecedent and nonallergic presence of the Other; it does not represent the first event of the encounter’ (1969: 199; italics in original). As important as what Levinas is saying here is what he is not saying, for there in the caveats that he places on what the face does and does not represent are the logical fault lines of Levinasian ethics, particularly as they pertain to the ethics of language that Levinas goes on to articulate as essential to the revelation of ethical transcendence. Levinas is clear: ethics is not a discourse of philosophical invention, subjective commitment, or political design. Ethics simply is by transcendental fiat, and it is as such in so far as Levinas can successfully build an ontological edifice of transcendence on the basis of the a priori presupposition that war is preceded by peace, that behind the face of the other is a trace of the absolute otherness of the face as such. Ethics is the ontological guarantee of its own illimitability as a discourse of transcendence. The tautology that grounds ethics in the presupposition of peace is avoided, Levinas insists, by attributing its constitutive possibility to the image of the face qua plenipotentiary of ethics in the finite struggle of relation. There is only ethics – the event of ethics, the event of justice – where there is dialectical struggle in the encounter with the other. There is no transcendent reality to ethics if it is not preceded, in the time of its epiphanic exposure, by the face-to-face encounter with the other. Violence is disarmed by the face of the other not because the body and person of the other cannot be negated and destroyed, but because it gestures to the transcendence of the outside, to the infinite alterity of the other that exceeds the mortal facticity of the other: ‘there is here a relation not with a very great resistance, but with something absolutely other: the resistance of what has no resistance – the ethical resistance’ (1969: 199).
Levinas is careful here not to rely solely on an ungrounded presupposition of the impossibility of annihilating the infinite alterity of the other. Although Levinasian ethics originates in a place of radical transcendence (a place of peace), it commences in time where there is violence and resistance between self and other: ‘infinity presents itself as a face in the ethical resistance that paralyses my powers and from the depths of defenceless eyes rises firm and absolute in its nudity and destitution. The comprehension of this destitution and this hunger establishes the proximity of the other. But thus the epiphany of infinity is expression and discourse’ (1969: 199–200). The ultimate determination that ‘language is justice’ is predicated on language being coterminous with the measurement of proximity that opens up between self and other in the face-to-face encounter of violence and struggle (1969: 213). Language is the displaced Other of self and other, the exteriority of place where the measurement of the proximity that separates self and the other, having come into contact in an economy of struggle, locates the terms and conditions of overcoming separation in a relation of nonviolent conversation. Language is the gaze of humanity that pinpoints the ethical relation as a relation mediated by words and speech rather than violence and death. Justice, for Levinas, is the possibility, mediated through language, of belonging to humanity and of participating in the widening gaze of its vision:
This is why the relation with the Other, discourse, is not only the putting into question of my freedom, the appeal coming from the other to call me to responsibility, is not only the speech by which I divest myself of the possession that encircles me by setting forth an objective and common world, but is also sermon, exhortation, the prophetic word. By essence the prophetic word responds to the epiphany of the face, doubles all discourse not as a discourse about moral themes, but as an irreducible movement of a discourse which by essence is aroused by the epiphany of the face inasmuch as it attests to the presence of the third party, the whole of humanity, in the eyes that look at me. (1969: 213)
What would literature have to do with opening up the space of this gaze, the presence in language of the whole of humanity? For literature to be ethical, its engagement with language must be aimed at precluding discourse from the closure of proximity, the cessation of dialogue, and the refusal of alterity by the violence and force of its attraction to signification. Levinas is suspicious of the ethics of literature, however, not because literature either distracts or precludes language from answering its essential call to justice, but because if literature were to act ethically on language in this way, literature would be in violation of what Levinas concedes is the essence of literature, its essential responsibility and dwelling in the space of its aesthetic sovereignty.
In one of the concluding sections of Totality and Infinity, Levinas reiterates the nonethical responsibilities of art and literature that he had first laid out in Existence and Existents. Writing under the sub-heading ‘Against the Philosophy of the Neuter’, Levinas charges Hegel, Heidegger and none other than Maurice Blanchot with foreclosing the transcendence of ethics by mobilising the concept of ‘the Neuter’ to announce ‘the end of philosophy. For they exalt the obedience that no face commands. Desire in the spell of the Neuter, said to have been revealed to the Presocratics, or desire interpreted as need, and thus bound to the essential violence of action, dismisses philosophy and is gratified only in art or in politics’ (1969: 298). Levinas accuses a line of thinking that culminates in Blanchot of establishing too cosy a relationship with violence to be able to separate violence from the essential nonviolence of philosophical thinking. Levinas is convinced that the ethical discourse he has constructed in Totality and Infinity has broken decisively ‘with the philosophy of the Neuter: with the Heideggerian Being of the existent whose impersonal neutrality the critical work of Blanchot has so much contributed to bring out’ (1969: 298). For the purposes of demonstrating the usefulness of Levinasian ethics for reading Beckett, we can take Levinas at his word in the distinction he maintains between his own thinking and the thinking of Blanchot (and before him Hegel and Heidegger), and therefore question if the thought of the Neuter does not in fact bring us into closer proximity with what is happening – with how it is – in a work like How It Is that is so manifestly about such questions as human relation, language and violence that likewise interest Levinas and Blanchot. The question is this: does the work of literature constitute an opportunity for interrupting the anonymous utterance of neutered speech (the narrative voice)? Has the writing of How It Is discovered a way out of the eternal return of terror wherein there is no resistance of alterity to the violence of speech? Does the writing of How It Is put an end to this speech, or does it prolong it? Is its desire to have done with this speech the very catalyst of this speech’s unending return?
Whereas Levinas predicates peace and justice on the ‘aptitude for speech’, i.e. on ‘the eschatological vision’ that ‘breaks with the totality of wars and empires in which one does not speak’, Blanchot is far more circumspect in recognising that through the simple act of refusing to have faith in ‘the eschatological vision’, speech cannot be abstracted from its inextricable link with violence (Levinas 1969: 23). This is perhaps what makes Blanchot a more perceptive thinker of twentieth-century modernity than Levinas given that as a distinct historical epoch the twentieth century consisted not so much in a repetition of discrete acts of violence, but rather in a fundamental transformation of violence into radical violence, of violence into terror. Levinas’s theologically overdetermined faith in the overcoming of violence is logically consistent with how the not-yet-terror of violence operates. Violence is a finite phenomenon, and as such it is the responsible task of a philosophical ethics to work out the conditions whereby violence can be repurposed as the violence that dethrones the subject of violence from the totality and ground of its ontological continuity. In a world overdetermined by violence, this is an important and realistic task (however difficult), but in a world overdetermined by war and terror, one that does not lend itself to the transcendental presupposition of nonviolence and peace, it is a task that must re-evaluate all of its conditions and methods of possibility, and particularly its faith in the ethical power of language, speech and discourse.
Beckett’s writing challenges the theory of the transcendence of peace by holding the place of peace ransom in a narrative of ‘how there are three of us four a million and there I am always was with Pim Bom and another and 999997 others journeying alone rotting alone martyring and being martyred oh moderately listlessly a little blood a few cries life above in the light a little blue little scenes for the thirst for the sake of peace’ (HII 127; my italics). The difficulty of transcribing a Levinasian ethics of language onto the narrative sequence of How It Is inheres in the fact that the events recited in the narrative are being recited according to a voice that has not ever ceased speaking. Beckett pulls the ontological rug out from under the temporal (and therefore subsequently the spatial) dimension of Levinasian ethics where the expression, the first word, of the face is pronounced in an instant of temporal interruption. The place between self and other wherein language qua justice would intervene as the gaze of the humanity that mediates proximity in the face-to-face relation is a claustrophobic place in Beckett’s writing, for when the panting stops there is no persistence of proximity’s opening for veritable conversation to commence:
so many words so many lost one every three two every five first the sound then the sense same ratio or else not one not one lost I hear all understand all and live again have lived again I don’t say above in the light among the shades in search of shade I say YOUR LIFE HERE in a word my voice otherwise nothing therefore nothing otherwise my voice there my voice so many words strung together [. . .] (HII 95)
YOUR LIFE HERE long pause YOUR LIFE HERE good and deep long pause this dead soul what appal I can imagine YOUR LIFE HERE unfinished for murmur light of day light of night little scene HERE to the quick and someone kneeling or huddled in a corner in the gloom start of little scene in the gloom HERE HERE to the bone the nail breaks quick another in the furrows HERE HERE howls thumps the whole face in the mud mouth nose no more breath and howls still never saw that before his life here howls in the black air and the mud like an old infant’s never to be stifled good try again HERE HERE to the marrow howls to drink the solar years no figures until at last good he wins life here this life he can’t [. . .] (HII 96)
Beckett withdraws the possibility of speech from the place of conversation and replaces it with the materialisation of writing on the body of Pim. There is no doubting the desire for conversation here in the encounter with Pim. However, because the ancient voice is so adept at hijacking the place of conversation and subsuming it with the senselessness of its murmuring words, the narrator is denied the ethical luxury of conversing with Pim through the immaterial (the unmuddied) medium of speech. To speak, Blanchot writes, is ‘to give up breath (to run out of breath) rather than to breathe. To speak, in this sense, an ironic sense, is indeed to have the last word, to have it in order no longer to have it’ (SNB 90). For there to be ethics, then, there must be a last word, for only on the basis of the opening in speech that the last spoken word inscribes can the expression of the face interject the first word of ethics. Were it not for the imperious murmuring of the ancient voice, Beckett’s paratactic writing would be in service of the last word opening up a place for the epiphanic first word, but because the ancient voice is ubiquitously here, because the invitation of its dictatorial recommencement is signed at every instant of the narrator’s loss (its forfeiture) of breath when the panting stops, the only option still available in the dialogue with Pim for seizing on the last word is the act of writing. The narrator deploys the tactic of writing in order to usurp the last word of his speech, thereby preserving its ethical possibility. Paradoxically, Levinasian ethics has no place in How It Is because writing in How It Is spells out the place – to the bone the nail breaks quick another – of the impossibility of conversation. ‘Such is, then,’ according to Blanchot, ‘the dispersed violence of writing, a violence by which speech is always already set apart, effaced in advance and no longer restored, violence, it is true, that is not natural and that also prevents us, dying, from dying a natural death’ (SNB 90).
Blanchot is perplexed that for Levinas the ethical horizon of conversation is so philosophically comprehensible, and it is so because what mediates the otherwise unmediated relation of transcendence between self and other (autrui) in the face-to-face is for Levinas the accompanying presence of speech that equalises the ontological playing field of being in this relation. For Levinas, the threat of violence attached to relation is neutralised through speech, such that when the self is in the presence of the other, of the alterity of the other, turning to speech as the chosen method of being-in-relation becomes the signature of the ethical event par excellence. Before the self and the other enter into the ethical relation by opting for speech over violence, however, and this is really where Blanchot’s critique of Levinasian ethics begins, they are faced with the irrevocable realisation that subsuming the ethical encounter is a closed interiority that denies that the self and other are a priori equal in terms of either social or ontological status.4 Levinas presupposes the exteriority of peace as the asymptotic horizon towards which human relations that are otherwise ordinarily steeped in totality seek to revert. Blanchot denies precisely the a priori of exteriority. In the context of the human relation, Blanchot is committed to an ontology of juridical materialism, which trumps his undeniable sympathy with Levinas’s ethical transcendentalism:
it suffices, in whatever regime, to have heard the ‘dialogue’ between a man presumed innocent and the magistrate who questions him to what this equality of speech means when it is based upon an inequality of culture, condition, power, and fortune. But each of us, and at every moment, either is or finds himself in the presence of a judge. All speech is a word of command, of terror, of seduction, of resentment, flattery, or aggression; all speech is violence – and to pretend to ignore this in claiming to dialogue is to add liberal hypocrisy to the dialectical optimism according to which war is no more than another form of dialogue. (IC 81; my italics)
It is not at all certain, in other words, that the drive to equality and justice that Levinas attributes to ethical speech is not after all a benevolently unwitting precipitation of speech into violence. What determines the ethics or non-ethics of speech, i.e. speech as pathway to peace or speech as overture to violence, exceeds both the power and the responsibility of partners in dialogue to predict and control. To think otherwise is to risk attributing too much conscious control of subjects over the social, political and historical narratives of violence that precede and colour each and every one of their choices, acts and responsibilities. We fundamentally misunderstand complicity in acts of violence and injustice if we do not see that between self and other there presides powerful cultural narratives of inequality, suspicion and resentment, otherwise the worst acts of violence that humanity has committed would be all too easily attributable to the monstrously aberrant choices of individuals, institutions and states. We would fundamentally misunderstand, in other words, that the possibility of such choices remains lurking in the background of the continuing narratives we have in common. In a situation where the anonymous speech of a continuing narrative precedes the subjectivity of the subject, where the subject who speaks in How It Is appears only to speak by ‘lending their lips to an anonymous utterance of history’ (Levinas 1969: 23), all that can be hoped for is that the violence of writing intervenes so that the ethical possibility of human relation is kept alive and that the distance between the narrative and narrator does not capitulate to the genocidal terror of absolute commensurability. The promise of deploying language and speech as principles of equalisation between self and other cannot in fact guarantee that equalisation – a relation of the equality of differences between self and other – does not devolve into the catastrophe of neutralisation given that self and other never enter into relation freed from the a priori of inequality and violence that likewise precedes our being in social, political and historical existence with others.
According to Blanchot, it is because Levinas privileges speech (the act of conversation) over writing (the space of literature) that he is able to limit the danger that language exerts over both the body of the other and the place of radical exteriority wherein the face of the other is transcendentally inscribed. In writing, the essential question is not that of responding to the invocation of speech that the encounter with the other demands as the precondition of a conversational ethics; rather, it is a question of responding first and foremost to language as such, and not to either language or speech as the vanishing intermediary between self and other. Language circumscribes speech in the space of a solipsistic interiority where the only outlet of expression is the outlet called writing, the outlet, namely, that does not necessarily presuppose a relation outside of language. Literature and writing are indifferent to Levinasian ethics precisely because their relation is not primordially with the other, but with the presence and place of language qua this relation of non-relation that the encounter with the other only really exposes after the fact. Blanchot distinguishes himself from Levinas by substituting alterity qua other for alterity qua ‘presence itself; the presence of the infinite’, and this presence is the presence of a language that does not, or more exactly that cannot privilege ethical speech in conversation with the other over the perpetration of radical violence against the other that all speech risks precipitating (IC 59).
The human relation in its primacy, in other words, is not an immediate relation with the other. It is, more precisely, a relation with the place of the other, the place of a radical opening between the self and the other where there are not only no guarantees that the other is not a threat that must be confronted with violence, but also where it is necessary that the threatening horizon of the other be maintained so that the possibility of speech with the other can be presented precisely as a possibility. Where there is no possibility of violence against the other, there is no possibility of speech with the other:
– One would have to say, then, that man facing man like this has no choice but to speak or to kill.
– It is perhaps the summary brutality of this alternative that would best help us approach such an instant: should the self ever come under this command – speech or death – it will be because it is in the presence of autrui.
– But we should also have to say, then, that the absolute distance that ‘measures’ the relation of autrui to me is what calls forth in man the exercise of absolute power: the power to give death. Cain killing Abel is the self that, coming up against the transcendence of autrui (what in the other exceeds me absolutely and that is well represented in biblical history by the incomprehensible inequality of divine favor), attempts to confront it by resorting to the transcendence of murder. (IC 61; italics in original)
How do we approach the instant when sites of mediation between self and other dissolve and the human relation is exposed in the full splendour and strangeness of its naked vulnerability? It is when the self finds itself confronted with the presence of the other that it is forced to resort to the command that the other submit to either speech or death. Otherwise, the self will have before it a presence that threatens to usurp the very place of presence that the self and the other all of a sudden share. Without any laws of mediation, any codes of conduct guiding the self and the other in the sacred space of confrontation, the self comes before the other armed with nothing but language and violence to decide on how the relation will continue. The event of the presence of the other, the being-made-present of the other in the place of its sudden appearance, is thus what is most terrible about the human relation. What is so ‘terrifying’ about confronting this alternative, in other words, is the absence of external guidance – the absence of ethical or theological lodestars of transcendence – for deciding if the presence of the other is an occasion for speech or violence. ‘I stand before the other person’, explains Kevin Hart, ‘unmediated by anything in the realm of the possible, and must acknowledge that the situation is terrifying’ (2004: 208).
The instant of the human relation does not end here for Blanchot. Blanchot’s emphasis on the presence of the other, the substitution in the place of the other with the presence of the other’s alterity, fundamentally transforms the relation between self and other into a relation between self and the alterity of the other, its presence as radically unknowable and infinitely unapproachable. Suddenly, it is no longer the other who commands my attention, who solicits either a violent or a peaceful response, but the place of alterity in which the other stands as its bonded plenipotentiary. The instant of the human relation is marked not only by the abrupt encounter with the command to speak or to kill, but also by the substitution in the place of the other with the alterity of place wherein the other resides: ‘as soon as the presence of the other in autrui is not received by me as the movement through which the infinite comes to me, as soon as this presence closes around autrui as a property of autrui established in the world, as soon as it ceases to give rise to speech, the earth ceases to be vast enough to contain at the same time autrui and myself, and it is necessary that one of the two reject the other – absolutely’ (IC 61).
The human relation subsists in precisely this terrifying interval where the presence of the other precipitates the absolute power to speak or kill, that is to say, the absolute power to eliminate the presence of the other through either the annihilating ontological touch of language or the mortal violence of murder. The other’s refusal to speak opens it up to a vulnerability that necessarily risks the terrifying reply of absolute violence. The power that the human relation bequeaths to the self in relation to the other is a power that is nevertheless powerless to seize onto presence and eliminate it or signify it such as it is as such. The victim of power is the other, and not its place, not its presence. Because its presence persists, however, because the place of the other will return and return again in the place of language, there is no way of ceasing to enter into human relation with the prospect of radical violence against alterity as one of its constitutive possibilities.
Presence is immune to violence, but this does not mean that violence cannot still act on presence as a conduit for reintroducing violence back into dialectical relation with the signification of the other. Presence represents the infinite distance that separates self and other. It is this distance that is terrifying and that requires either speech or violence if it is to be crossed (if the abyss of presence is to be traversed). The instant of the human relation lasts only as long as it takes to decide if it will be violence or speech that intervenes between self and other. If violence overpowers speech absolutely, then the relation quite simply comes to an end, but if speech just so happens to win out, or if violence fails in silencing speech absolutely, the relation continues, but it continues by being subject to the threat of violence that continues to be meted out through the dialectical measurement of relation: ‘Such would be the speech that measures the relation of man placed face to face with man when there is no other choice than to speak or to kill. A speech as grave, perhaps, as the death it diverts. The alternative speech/murder is not the simple exclusion of the one by the other, as though it were a matter of choosing once and for all between a good speech and a bad death. What sort of speech is this?’ (IC 62).
The answer that Blanchot’s interlocutor gives helps us articulate the value of ‘terror’ as it is distinguished in The Infinite Conversation from what is ‘most terrible’ in the human relation. If the human relation, such as it presented itself at the very beginning of the section titled ‘Keeping to Words’, was ‘most terrible, but without terror’, now that the conversation has progressed it becomes possible to extrapolate the implicit significance (marked by negativity) of terror to the human relation (IC 59). Terror, as Blanchot is using it here, would be the speech of measurement that is prompted by what is ‘most terrible’ about the sacred encounter between self and other. The human relation, the very neutrality of relation, is as terrible as it is intolerable, as unknowable as it is uninhabitable. For this reason, the human relation is just an instant (or instance) of unmediated relation, interrupted by the terror that speaks from out of the grisly alternative to speak or to kill:
– [. . .] What sort of speech is this?
– This isn’t the moment for us to give an account of it. But I will say two things: first, if speech is weighty, it is because, being bare presence, it is what lays presence bare, what thus exposes it to radical violence in reducing it to the fragility of what is without power. To speak at the level of weakness and of destitution – at the level of affliction – is perhaps to challenge force, but also to attract force by refusing it. And second: in this situation, either to speak or to kill, speech does not consist in speaking, but first of all in maintaining the movement of this either . . . or; it is what founds the alternative. To speak is always to speak from out of this interval between speech and radical violence, separating them, but maintaining each of them in a relation of vicissitude.
– From which we must conclude that if the relation of man placed in the presence of man is terrible, it is because it confines us within this alternative: either speak or kill, and because, in this alternative, speech is no less grave than death, with which it is conjoined as its reverse side. (IC 62)
Blanchot is not content with the diametric distinction between speaking and killing that the human relation nevertheless maintains in reserve. Through this exchange, which consists in one interlocutor pushing the other to articulate more precisely what is being proposed about the relation between speaking and killing, language and violence, a wedge is thrust between speech and speaking. Neutral speech, speech that comes from the abyssal outside (the most terrifying interiority) of non-relation, is transformed into an image of speech that crystallises the alternatives of speech and violence into a relation immune from dialectical separation. To speak without the possibility of violence is to presuppose a relation of unequal inferiority with the other. Either the other transcends my power to kill – i.e. the other is the absolute Other of divine transcendence – or the other is pathetically unworthy of my power to kill (a power that the self nevertheless maintains in reserve). The speech that preserves speaking and killing in ‘a relation of vicissitude’ is abstracted as much from its utterance by the self as it is from its retort by the other. Self and other, in the speech of the interval, in the desert presence of paratactic delay, designate the flesh and blood border posts between which this speech occurs. Blanchot calls this space Autrui, the space (the outside, the fragmentary) of dispossession and unworking, and it is ‘there where detour reigns. The presence turned toward me is thus still a presence of separation, of what to me is presence even as I am separated from it, distant and turned away. And, for me, to be facing autrui is always to be in the abrupt presence, without intermediary, of the one who turns toward me in the infinite approach of the detour’ (IC 62).
In relating the ubiquitous place of paratactic delay in How It Is to what Blanchot conceptualises later in The Infinite Conversation as the ‘delay that is the site of speech’ (IC 187; italics in original), we are likewise delivered over to a place in speech where speech is ‘infinitely hazardous’, that is to say, where ‘it is encompassed by terror’ (IC 187):
Radical violence is its fringe and its halo; it is one with the obscurity of the night, with the emptiness of the abyss, and so doubtful, so dangerous that this question incessantly returns: why the exigency of such a language? What have we to do with it? What does it bring us in the frightening silence that announces extreme violence but is also the instant at which violence goes silent, becomes silence? What is this communication without community that no power – that is to say, no comprehension – no human or divine presence can anticipate? Would it not be, alluring without attraction, desire itself?: the desire become song that opens hell up to Orpheus when what becomes embodied is the absolute of separation, all the while remaining the depth and detour of interval? (IC 187)
Blanchot identifies this place encompassed by terror as the place where ‘speech begins’ (IC 187), and although the beginning and the beginning again of speech is often cited as a necessary precondition of ending the mute brutality associated with violence, the implication of Blanchot’s linking of speech and radical violence precisely where speech begins, in the infinite approach of the detour, is that the commencement and recommencement of speech by paratactic fiat is condemned to complicity in consolidating the threat of violence wherever discourse reigns. There is perhaps no better expression of the terror of literature than the designation of writing as the act par excellence of vicissitudinal undecidability between speech and radical violence, and thus it is worth quoting Blanchot’s words again where he insists that ‘to speak is always to speak from out of this interval between speech and radical violence, separating them, but maintaining each of them in a relation of vicissitude’ (IC 62; italics in original). The desire of the anonymous voice that speaks incessantly in How It Is is the desire for the collapse of this relation of vicissitude, for so long as this relation remains open, the circle of victims and tormentors, crawlers and abandoned will not yet have been closed. Conversely, however, the demand for this relation of vicissitude is precisely the demand that there be radical violence.
Can such a demand be ethical? It most likely cannot, which is why it is perhaps more appropriate to affirm the terror that lives in it, the terror that precipitates its survival, the terror that encompasses it, the terror that doubles as the terror of literature. We can therefore diagnose How It Is as a narrative of terror in the sense that it not only exposes its speakers and its victims to their naked vulnerability in the place of language, but also that it renders their escape from this place complicit in the ontological necessity of this place’s return. To disavow this place is to give tacit approval to the imperiousness of the voice and of the narrative that it destines for recitation. Beckett’s paratactic writing of How It Is is the writing of the withdrawal but also of the return of alterity from and to the self-same place of the violence of written speech. How It Is presents us with a narrative situation torn between privileging the relation between self and other – tormentor and victim – and self and place: ‘never anyone never knew anyone always ran fled elsewhere some other place my life above places paths nothing else brief places long paths the quickest way or a thousand detours’ (HII 78). Entering into the place of the most terrible human relation is not a choice. We are always already enlisted (‘thrown’, in Heideggerian parlance) in such relations by virtue of our common belonging to humanity, our belonging to humanity through language, but it is because of this necessity of belonging that Blanchot impresses on us the ever-present threat and reality of violence in every relation in which our choices, our desires, our responsibilities and our dialogues in face of the other are subsumed. Because ‘the human relation, as it affirms itself in its primacy, is terrible’ (IC 59), and because what is so terrible about this relation is that it precludes predicating of either speech or language the ethical status of an intermediary between myself and the other, the only affirmation that can be made about this relation translates into ‘the hard language of exigency: one must speak’ (IC 65).
What is most terrible about How It Is, then, is not yet simply that a nameless figure should be given a name like ‘Pim’ so that it can be invited into the violence of dialogue. What is most terrible is what is poised to happen in How It Is if one like ‘Pim’ should refuse to identify with the name and to speak the words that have been assigned to it (etched into his back). Pim is nothing more than the name given to ‘a fellow-creature more or less but man or woman girl or boy cries have neither’ (HII 54). It is the name given to an anonymous body that before being nominated as ‘Pim’ ‘had no name any more than I so I gave him one the name Pim for more commodity more convenience’ (HII 59). Like the name ‘BOM scored by finger-nail’ into the back of the narrator during its time of victimisation (HII 60), so too is Pim’s name carved into his back ‘with the nail then of the right index in great capitals’ (HII 70). This is done not simply so that Pim will know his name, that learning to call himself by the name ‘Pim’ will appeal ‘to him he was calling him by it himself in the end’ (HII 59), but so that in having a name he will have a place in the arena of communication where his ontological training is being (has been and will be) conducted. What is most terrible, then, is that dialogue and the invitation to dialogue are complicit in circumscribing the anonymous other in the place of language where there is no protection against the violence of speech, and where the other is therefore most vulnerable to the possibility of its absolute negation.
The narrative of terror that How It Is enacts is the introduction of temporality into this instant of what is most terrible in the human relation, and what it reveals is that where temporality persists, there is no way of maintaining Blanchot’s relation of vicissitude on the threshold of the decision on speech or radical violence. In giving Pim his name, in taking advantage of Pim’s vulnerability to speech, the narrator invites what Blanchot calls the ‘mortal play of the word’ into the space of dialogue with Pim (SNB 38). The supreme catastrophe of How It Is remains the evacuation of the human relation and the accession to ontological sovereignty of the voice of us all, the anonymous voice of interminable utterance. The only hope left to the narrator for avoiding this outcome is the hope of company with Pim, but such a hope is irremediably dashed against the exigency that Pim must speak as a conversant in ethical relation. What is most terrible in the human relation is truly what is most unbearable. Not being able to tolerate the silence of Pim’s presence one instant longer, the narrator impatiently withdraws Pim from the exteriority of his presence and sets Pim’s pedagogical torture into motion. What does Pim gain by being nominated into discourse by and with the narrator? Blanchot might have an answer: ‘not the right to be there in person; on the contrary the terrifying obligation by which what would like to preserve itself in the name of a private unhappiness is drawn out into the public square, into the cold and the impoverishment of the outside, with nothing that can assure any refuge’ (SNB 38). If Pim (or more precisely Pim’s presence) does not comply with the wish of the narrator that he should speak as the narrator requires him to speak, then Pim will have become the embodiment of vulnerability to precisely the mortal play of the word as Blanchot so ominously articulates it.
That the narrator should retain control over the place of language in the aftermath of its torturous assault on Pim is therefore an unequivocally intolerable scenario, for it would entail accepting Pim’s continuous victimisation there where Pim’s vulnerability in the place of language is laid bare again and again in the demand for speech. At the same time, that the narrator should lose control completely over the place of language, that it should acquiesce to its forfeiture of power over this place to the epic murmuring voice that it continuously recites, would necessitate that what has happened to Pim and what will happen to the narrator be excluded from all memory and anticipation of its narrative (re)inscription. If it turns out that the narrator is alone, that the final words of How It Is come to a close by confirming that the narrator is without company as it quotes the words of the preceding narrative, and thus that its voice is after all synonymous from beginning to end with the imperious ‘voice of us all quaqua’, then the prospective ontological coup of this voice will have been irreversibly executed and the narrator condemned to the solipsistic hell of its eternal citation (HII 76). Should it transpire that ‘all these calculations yes explanations yes the whole story from beginning to end yes completely false yes’, then what we will have witnessed in reading How It Is is the absolute disaster of continuity triumphing over discontinuity, the totalitarian terror of the citational voice acceding to a position of absolute ontological sovereignty over life in the mud (HII 144).
The threat of Pim’s refusal to speak confronts the narrator as the threat of the voice’s continuation, which prompts it to expedite a method for the commencement of dialogue designed to avoid precisely this refusal. One such method is to ‘stab’ Pim ‘simply in the arse that is to say speak and he will say anything what he can whereas proof I need proof so stab him in a certain way signifying answer once and for all which I do therefore what an improvement how I’ve improved’ (HII 71). The narrator commences a methodical programme of violence and torture with the sole purpose of extracting ‘in the case of Pim a few words what he can now and then I am not a monster [. . .] merely that he sing or speak and not even this rather than that in the early stages merely speak what he will what he can now and then a few words nothing more’ (HII 64–5). Prior to the advent of Part II ‘with Pim’, however, the narrator can be sure of only one fact of its life in the mud: that the murmuring of the ancient voice is unceasing. Accordingly, if the ancient murmur is to cease, as indeed it must for the narrator to confirm that a denouement of terror like the one against which Arendt cautions has not yet transpired, it will have to be because in the approaching encounter with Pim, Pim has engaged the narrator precisely in a conversation to put an end to the imperious voice of epic citation. Part II ‘with Pim’ is about Pim’s capacity to interrupt the citational speech of the narrative voice, which the narrator is otherwise condemned to passively recite. In order to do so Pim must overcome the power imbalance through which he is victimised and tortured by this narrator who demands precisely that Pim speak in commencement of an ethical economy of conversation with the narrator. The narrator is reacting to a situation where proof of the possibility of a life that the ‘ancient voice in me not mine’ aspires to annihilate can only be predicated on extracting speech from the uncorpsed body of Pim in and at every instant of the paratactic delay of its iteration (HII 7).
Pim is not a lifeless corpse, and as such he is confronted by the narrator as a subject that is immediately vulnerable not only to violence, but also to the demand for speech that violence in this case is being implemented to pronounce. Pim’s vulnerability to violence is the common denominator in his presentation to the narrator as a victim of torture and a perpetrator of speech. Pim is nameless, faceless and mute at the instant he meets with the narrator. Torturing Pim only up to the limit where Pim would lose the power to speak and therefore become ‘a true corpse untorturable’ is the narrator’s tactical way of confirming that in crossing the narrative divide into Part II ‘with Pim’, the words at its disposal have not been divested of the power to coerce dialogue outside of the anonymous utterances of the ancient voice (HII 101). The narrator’s exchange with Pim is thus not ‘sadism pure and simple’ (HII 63). The paratactic unfolding of its textual dwelling in the presence of Pim – ‘suddenly like all that was not then is I go not because of the shit and vomit something else not known not said whence preparatives sudden series subject object subject object quick succession and away’ (HII 11) – ensures that every word spoken in conversation with Pim exposes the narrator to the ‘impenetrable dark’ of the intervals between words, which calls upon yet another word (we’re talking of words, after all) to jumpstart again and again the narrative of Pim’s ontological vulnerability (HII 26). Dialogue in How It Is thus begins with a discovery that is indeed far more terrifying than just that the ‘encountered companion can speak and sing’, as Ziarek argues (1995: 181). The terrible discovery that unveils the imperative of speech, the hard language of exigency, rather, is that the companion can speak and sing because the companion is vulnerable to violence and cruelty, and vice versa: ‘the voice extorted a few words life because of cry that’s the proof good and deep no more is needed a little cry all is not dead’ (HII 122).
We can read the paratactic delays that punctuate the narrative discourse of How It Is, ‘its paratactic rhetoric’, explains Smith, as enabling the work to ‘open a space for alterity to appear without being submitted to aesthetic or representational synthesis’ (2008: 357). Such would be the ethical trace that attaches itself to the unbroken series of paratactic delays in How It Is, the trace that keeps the place of language open to the unnamable, unrepresentable, and ideally the ontologically inviolable presence of alterity. But there is an alternative reading of the ethical significance of this place in language of paratactic delay, a reading obliging that we be attentive to the persistence of the ancient murmuring voice that the paratactic delays are powerless to muzzle precisely because they double as the unending source of its repetitive resurgence. This voice is pervasive, but its speech is not always perceptible. It is only heard, the narrator tells us, ‘when the panting stops’ (HII 113), and yet there is no doubting that behind the narrator’s panting in the mud is the murmuring persistence of what the narrator, even when it pants, can never convince itself of having delivered completely to silence. One of the reasons why the narrator craves the encounter with Pim is that dialogue with Pim is a possible way to suture the paratactic gaps in discourse wherein the narrator risks dwelling eternally and terrifyingly alone with nothing but the murmuring voice to keep it company: ‘only me yes alone yes with my voice yes my murmur yes when the panting stops yes all that holds yes panting yes worse and worse no answer WORSE AND WORSE yes’ (HII 146).
It is ominous enough that in all the little instants where Pim threatens to reply with silence to the narrator’s regime of ‘basic stimuli one sing nails in armpit two speak blade in arse three stop thump on skull four louder pestle on kidney’ (HII 69), there is the prospect, as Blanchot puts it, ‘that there is nothing but desert’, that ‘the desert is growing’ between the narrator and Pim (IC 171; italics in original). Worse than silence becoming ‘more and more longer silences vast tracts of time we at a loss more and more he for answers I for questions sick of life’ would be that the silence of Pim, the power not to speak that Pim holds in reserve, will disappear altogether and the ancient murmuring voice that impatiently awaits either Pim’s temporary departure or his permanent annihilation will re-usurp the place of speech and subject the narrator once and for all to the totalising violence of its murderously incessant speech (HII 73). The terror that the ‘Stalinist functionaries themselves’ feared, we will recall from Arendt, is reflected in the imperious ubiquity of this voice that never ceases (2001: 55). We can sanction the narrator for the method it adopts in extorting speech from Pim, but we should perhaps be cautious in sanctioning its desire that Pim must speak by whatever means necessary, for the alternative to Pim’s withdrawal from this dangerous place of speech is perhaps something far more disquieting. The paratactic delay exposes speech to the place in speech where speech is not yet decipherable from silence. Accordingly, ‘what I did to him’ can be met not just by ‘what he said to me’, but also by the return of the ancient voice that threatens me from the place where Pim is silent (HII 16). The threat of Pim’s silence, in other words, exposes the narrator to what Blanchot describes in the desert-space of language as the ‘decisive test’ of the human relation (IC 68), the test, that is to say, of maintaining the paratactic delay wherein we encounter ‘our companion in an infinite and infinitely deserted space where, by a marvelous chance, he had suddenly appeared at our side’ (IC 171). What is the decisive test? Blanchot: ‘Whoever has reached the desert where there reigns the absence of relations exposes himself to this test, and exposes to it the one he encounters: here you must kill the companion (or let him kill you, happily the choice exists) in order to recognize and verify his presence’ (IC 183). This is the test of language as such where language, speaking out of the silent interval of paratactic delay, ‘outside all power to represent and to signify, [. . .] does not push hell back, but makes its way into it, speaking at the level of the abyss and thereby giving word to it; giving a hearing to what can have no hearing’ (IC 183–4).
Through Blanchot, we are able to delve just a little deeper into the space of Beckett’s narrative where the refusal of the ethical redemption of the terror of literature is situated most intransigently. Let us understand by the terror of literature the imperative, following Blanchot, to preserve the act of writing in a relation of vicissitude between speech and radical violence, to plunge ever deeper into the abyss of presence where speech is not yet decipherable from violence (IC 62). This is an imperative that writing dwell at the threshold of the denouement of a terror that is not to be confused with (but nor is it to be decisively separated from) the terror of literature. It is an imperative demanding that violence be welcomed into language because it foresees the catastrophe that awaits language where there is no longer any possibility of violence, for this would be the time when violence, which does not cease, has won its victory over all possibility of resistance. The terror of literature is nothing to celebrate, because violence is nothing to celebrate, but surely the terror of the imperious continuity of speech that literature fears most is something to dread. Beckett’s paratactic writing of How It Is is a strategy that precludes the denouement of terror, but the price it pays for its success is to preserve the threat, or delay, of this denouement as the inevitable horizon towards which its writing is directed. Beckett’s refusal to be unburdened of the weightiness of the past (the archive of suffering), to refuse to redirect the temporal movement of a voice that speaks from the interminable nightmare of historical temporality, derives from his tragic awareness that neither the voice nor the past can be discontinued without in the same stroke disavowing the memory and narrative of all that survives in the light of their continuation. Looking forward to the narrator’s unnarratable suffering at the hands of his tormentor is the only alibi required for desiring to see this narrative and this voice terminated, but accepting that there is no outside of the time of the voice, that there is no outside of the narrative in How It Is – there is no outside of the catastrophe of history – commits Beckett’s paratactic writing of How It Is ultimately to thwart the desire it continuously resurrects, namely that there be an otherwise than being in How It Is.
1. Fifield begins his book Late Modernist Style in Samuel Beckett and Emmanuel Levinas by diagnosing what he sees as ‘the deafness of the ethical turn in literary studies to critical voices’ (2013: 2). Fifield is referring in this passage to critical voices like Levinas’s that do not a priori presume that literature is constitutively indebted to the ethical protection of alterity: ‘literature for Levinas is [. . .] unethical’ (2013: 2; italics in original). With this counter-intuitive proposition Fifield attempts to re-read Levinas in such a way that the poetics of his philosophical style of writing converges with Beckettian formalisms around the unspeakable presence in language of alterity and otherness. What distinguishes Levinas as a theorist of literature is that Levinas’s philosophical writing is designed specifically to supplement for literature’s unethical shortcomings. Through a comparison of stylistics in Levinas and Beckett, Fifield goes on to argue that Beckett’s proto-deconstructive credentials consist precisely in undermining Levinas’s suspicions about literature’s suitability for employing language ethically. In starting from what is unethical about literature according to Levinas, Fifield arrives at what is decidedly ethical in the work of Beckett.
2. Thanks to the work of Michael Marder, we do have the option of referring to the ontological discourse of the ethical in How It Is as the terror of the ethical in recognition of how the narrator’s intermediation of the ancient voice that murmurs the words recorded in the narrative, and the faceless, anonymous body of Pim, mimics how the ethical as such works, i.e. by merging the ‘redoubled work of the negative that struggles on two fronts: against the unnamed singularity of the Other and against the nameless generality of the void’ (Marder 2008). However, the way that Marder situates the ethical in relation to the terror of the ethical is through the temporalisation of the il y a, of ‘the nameless generality of the void’, and unfortunately it is not a modality of temporalisation that can be supported by the paratactic movement of How It Is. The temporality that Marder attributes to the terror of the ethical is closer to the diachronic temporality of the time of survival that Hägglund uses, as we have already noted, for establishing the ethics of finitude proper to deconstruction. The paratactic time of How It Is, rather, is more like the time of synchronic suspension to which Blanchot implicitly refers in circumscribing the primacy of the human relation.
3. In a richly detailed essay on how controversies surrounding human rights, torture, interrogation and the Algerian War informed Beckett’s writing of Comment c’est, Adam Piette notes that ‘when Beckett first started thinking about Comment c’est, voices were being raised in protest against the hypocrisy of a state that advocated universal human rights and practised torture in evil repetition of Gestapo brutality’ (2016: 158).
4. Levinas remarks in ‘The Proximity of the Other’ that it was Martin Buber who first ‘pushed me to engage in a phenomenology of sociality, which is more than the human. Sociality is, for me, the betterthan-human. It is the good, not the makeshift of an impossible fusion. Within the alterity of the face, the for-the-other commands the I. So it is a matter, finally, of founding justice – which hides the face – upon the obligation to the face, to the extraordinary exteriority of the face’ (2002: 215).