Attunement Space and Eco-Deconstruction in Malone Dies

Abstract

As exemplified by Timothy Morton’s argument, what is at stake in the discussion of the Anthropocene is the need to deconstruct the closedness of the anthropocentric world and recover the fundamental connection between the human and the nonhuman that has been suppressed by it. This essay attempts to examine how Malone Dies shows the possibility of eco-deconstruction, not in the sense of an idealistic or normative ethics of ecology, but rather in presenting us a uniquely imaginative ‘attunement space’ that allows for an alternative form of sensitivity to the profound and paradoxical intimacy between the human and the nonhuman. Beckett's vision in Malone Dies resonates with Morton's vision of ecological being, but takes it to a more enigmatic place that more fully takes into account both the violence and the receptivity within the ‘grey zone’ between human and nonhuman. In Beckett's view, it is necessary to descend to a limit (non-)place like the ‘attunement space’ presented in this novel, where ordinary sensory perception and temporal and spatial restrictions dissolve. The essay shows how this ‘attunement space’ unveils itself in several overlapping layers. First, there is the layer of something articulated in terms of the spiritual, a realm of what Malone calls ‘the soul’. Then there is another layer that involves the perception of the unperceivable, which is usually hindered by ordinary human sensory perception. In this realm something fundamental that exists prior to all phenomena and things is revealed – something that is inseparable from what Beckett calls the ‘buzzing confusion’, ‘the mess’, or ‘the chaos’. This unique perception takes place in the realms of both sight and sound. The attunement to an undifferentiated dimension in Malone Dies makes possible an ecological awareness of the already existing intimacy with nonhuman life, as Morton describes.