THE UNNAMABLE: DENEGATIVE DIALOGUE

Abstract

I am he who will never be caught, never delivered, who crawls between thwarts, towards new day that promises to be glorious, festooned with lifebelts, praying for rack and ruin.- Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable. . .even unnamable is word calculated to enmesh us.- George Bataille, Molloy's SilenceThis paper presents reading of Beckett's The as neither modernist nor postmodernist text per se, but rather as poised within highly productive gap between these categories, insofar as they are shorthand, respectively, for contest between ontological and epistemological imperatives. Through close analysis of unravelling of its discourse, I read radically negative and often self-contradictory language of this novel not terms of dialectic but dialogue. To this extent logic and function of negation Beckett's text is revalued and shown to be neither determinate - and therefore somehow recuperative - nor nihilistic, but determinedly negative. The dialogue text, I argue, is one between self and Other only insofar as both positions are reduced, by end of narrative, to functions of endlessly speaking voice.The Unnamable, final third of Beckett's trilogy, is paradigmatic antinovel, and therefore most typical of modern novels.1 But contrast to Tristram Shandy, Sterne's flagrantly self-conscious anti-novel from genre's formative period, Beckett's work is far less obviously about being novel. There is also book's extreme and distinguishing negativity, which is not as absolute as Beckett makes it out to be. In Th e Unnamable, he claims, there is complete disintegration. No 'I,' no 'have,' no 'being,' no nominative, no accusative, no verb. There's no way to go - typical self- appraisal apophatic mode of ironic denial that nevertheless leaves unexamined exemplarily non-determinately negative-even denegative-text of this novel.Of three novels comprising trilogy, Molloy is account of two different quests, two different trajectories which may converge into single body, but of this convergence remains undecidable. Ma lone Dies, on other hand, is radically negative narrative. How, then, to describe The Unnamable? The formal questions raised by this third and final novel remain inadequately addressed forty years after its initial publication. This failing may have to do with fact that most fundamental of these questions pertain to narrative generally, and Beckett's novel foregrounds them like perhaps no other work. To echo Maurice Blanchot:4 who (or what) is 'speaking'? Who (or what) is subject of narrating, of recit? To put it slightly different terms: narrative (histoire) aside, does presence of narration (recit) necessarily entail or presuppose narrator? Do these terms have any value for an analysis of The Unnamable? Despite feature of text one critic calls a mockery of presence of voice, fundamental significance of speaking - speech represented, imaged, writing - whether to affirm or negate, would seem undeniable.5In The Beckett employs peculiarly negative logic to determine language of paradoxically expressive density - grounded both Greek and Christian apophatic and non-apophatic texts, from Plotinus to Augustine to Dionysius to Meister Eckhart.6 The of the Unnamable expresses kind of apophatic irony itself: if this name names narrator/speaker, it/he cannot logically be said to exist outside of or precede or exceed language, for, although unnamable, he is nevertheless named, denegatively. The is paradigmatic of what Shira Wolosky calls in gen eral... [the] double impulse toward invention and refutation or, terms of this discussion, 'denegation.'To see significance for Beckett scholarship of an enhanced appreciation of apophatic or denegative dimension of his writing, one need only recall traditional association of Beckett with high modernist trope of an absurd, Godless, even nihilistic, universe. …