Dissonant Lineages: Adorno, Beckett, Blanchot, Kafka, Rosenzweig

Abstract

This essay explores linguistic dissonance in Adorno and Beckett as a dismantling of “Sprachontologie,” and the excavation of buried lineage as a principle of literary influence in Molloy. The first section exposes the connections between Adorno's notes for his “Unnamable” essay and his 1933 Singspiel, “The Treasure of Indian-Joe,” with its pre-Beckettian vision of the canon formed through plunder that “gives birth astride a grave.” The second section reads the multiple lineages of Molloy that explode any single national or literary origin for language and identity. The “langue d'Oc” Moran hears as “Oc” in “Molloy,” as well as the “oy” that suggests the vibrancy of Yiddish, are treated as part of Molloy's redemption of the expelled expressions of other languages that have been swallowed, though not entirely forgotten. This “Dissonanz”—as Beckett's “German Letter” calls it—enabled the French Beckett, as a precursor figure for Adorno, to parody linguistic ontology: using Blanchot, Kafka, Rosenzweig, and others to portray standard language as a linguistic overlay, burial, and recovery of plundered tongues.