ON VOICES AND MEDIUMSHIP IN THE TRILOGY

Abstract

my sane and ordinary inner speech is itself likely to be a swarm of quotations, often from anonymous and vanished others. dead chatter away as inner speech of living.Jean-Jacques Lecercle and Denise Riley, Force of LanguageAll dead voices.Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot^What follows is not an attempt to avoid or plug epistemological vortex of Unnamable (Connor 2010, xix-xx), but to think about mediumship's role in forming this vortex. Voices are extremely important in trilogy - indeed, C. J. Ackerley suggests that mystery of may be profound literary creation (40) - and these acousmatic and disembodied voices often defy explanation. Yet, there are numerous references to voices in work that could be interpreted as forms of mediumistic channelling (that is, when a person channels voice of dead), such as in late television play Eh Joe. I want to suggest that this later exploration of mediumship is already present in a more obscured, vague, and spectral form in trilogy. Peter Fifield has analysed references to voices that persist after death, specifically protagonists of Unnamable, Malone Dies and The Calmative, in terms of Cotard's syndrome; as a supplement to this insightful neuropsychological analysis, I want to suggest that mediumship might also offer an appropriate frame for use of voice in these texts. was interested in possibility that strange, unknown, foreign voices might end up in one's brain; trilogy is testament to this enduring fascination.Numerous critics have linked writing to occultism, with varying degrees of playfulness. In The Death of Author, Roland Barthes suggests that writing itself begins when the voice loses its origin [and] author enters his own death (49). Although Barthes doesn't push this metaphor, skirts close to what we might term au dela - literally beyond, land of dead. is quite willing, where Barthes is not, to engage with these occult associations. Beyond Barthes, Nicholas Royle's Telepathy and Literature has suggested that literature and telepathy are deeply interdependent. As Pamela Thurschwell puts it, telepathic question par excellence is: whose thoughts are these, inhabiting my inner world (125)? This a question Unnamable asks with frantic urgency. Telepathy shares with mediumship an inexplicable transference of knowledge and voices, but of living rather than dead - and transferred content often remains internal rather than being externally channelled or performed through voice or automatic writing. Leon Surette has compellingly argued that occultism had an important influence on modernism, suggesting that Ezra Pound read T. S. Eliot's Waste Land (1922) as a text which shared certain traits (its seemingly random jumps in time and space as well as across multiple disembodied voices) with seances (69). But most prominent modernist with an interest in mediumship is W. B. Yeats, as evidenced in Words Upon Window Pane (1934).Beckett's voices raise many issues, as critics have long been aware. As Wilma Siccama observes: Beckett's characters hardly ever speak 'themselves': voices come to them, or they say as they hear it (175). Anthony Cordingley adds that: the narrators and characters of novels are increasingly haunted by sense that their voices are legacy of not only 'their' past selves/characters in earlier works by Samuel Beckett, but also of an estranged voice or voices inside them (135). Extending trope to author himself, Siccama suggests that Beckett does not 'speak' with his own voice: he is more like a medium, a receiver and transmitter of another voice, one that he hears in his head (186). Although this is a rather unusual proposal, numerous interviews suggest that consciously invoked trope of mysterious voices when discussing his compositional process. …