“It all boils down to a question of words”

Abstract

The Unnamable confronts inherited narrative and linguistic forms with the incommensurability of recent genocide. Initially, the book performs this inadequacy by confronting novel tropes with distorted images cribbed from memoirs of Mauthausen concentration camp. Then it updates surrealist treatments of Parisian abattoirs, asking whether industrialized slaughter is also the sign and fulfillment of modern genocide. The Unnamable also confuses literary production and the biopolitical aspirations of authoritarian politics: Beckett’s narrator writes from a conviction that language can become wholly performative and has the capacity to incarnate and to kill. The narrator attempts to deconstruct language, but doing so ironically transcends literary and philosophical problems to reveal historiographical problems as well, the missing voices of those killed without trace. The chapter ends with a theoretical coda that productively contextualizes Beckett’s strategy with historiographical debate about narrative and genocide by Paul Ricoeur, Giorgio Agamben, Hayden White, and others.