Two Narrative Thrusts: Reading Malone Dies with Bergson and Blanchot

Abstract

Two Narrative Thrusts:Reading Malone Dies with Bergson and Blanchot Lianghui Li A key feature in Samuel Beckett's prose works is a gesture of negation from the middle period of his creative career. Brian Richardson names it 'denarration', and conceptualizes it as a narrative strategy characterized by an erasure of textual construction.1 In the rising genetic criticism of Beckett in recent years, the form of epanorthosis, meaning 'the rhetorical use of self-correction and word replacement', is extensively explored.2 The gesture of negation interrogates the coherence and rationality of the entire narrative and renders the text 'radically unquotable', as logical anomalies and confusion are conjured.3 Indeed, Beckett, in his German letter to Axel Kaun, advances the concept of 'literature of the unword' ('Literatur des Unworts'), which, as Dirk Van Hulle and Shane Weller put it, 'turns language against itself, in the hope that [. . .] that which lies beyond it may finally be glimpsed'.4 Moreover, the gesture of negation has a bearing on questions concerning the narrator and the entire project as searching for an end. In Malone Dies (1951), many narrative anomalies seem to eliminate the possibility of a narrator, such as the arbitrary naming of the self as Malone, the suspicious act of writing, and the pervasive negation of narration. With the assumption of a narrator undermined, a reading of the novel needs to anatomize the narrating force in order to make sense of narrative contradiction. Arguably, Malone Dies revolves around a central issue of the ending, in that a narrator insists from the beginning that its upcoming death will coincide with the end of its stories. Although the project's feasibility is subject to question, and although the doubt towards it is self-consciously featured throughout the novel, the ultimate goal to make an end does not change. Two features stand out within the ending project. Firstly, there is an emphasis placed on the process leading to the end. Owing to the unpredictability of death, the measuring process obtains as much significance as the end itself. The novel registers a radical exploration of time in procession. This concentration upon the process, as an indivisible state of consciousness in contrast with a perceptible object, is similarly formulated in Henri Bergson's [End Page 221] conceptualization of duration. Secondly, the desire to die a controllable death recalls Maurice Blanchot in terms of both the difference between suicide and the 'ungraspable' death, and the comparable domains of death and writing.5 Taking its cue from Bergson and Blanchot, this article suggests that the novel features two narrative thrusts, namely, the durational narration and a splitting attempt to secure a subjectivity in order to die. Durational narration asserts its temporal significance and its complete inaccessibility, whereas subjective perception derives from the narrative self-reflexivity. If duration as internal time suggests a being predicated solely on the continuous act of narration, it cannot be appropriated by any attempt at consciousness created from within the course of the narration. The bifurcated narration thus problematizes the first-person pronoun in Malone Dies. The 'I' cannot refer to the legitimate narrator in the novel. Likewise, Malone is not the valid name of the 'I'. It is a pseudo-narrator that seeks to claim the durational process of narration in order to consolidate a subjectivity. The proposal of two narrative thrusts also clarifies the paradox of the ending. The impossible task of matching death to the end of storytelling indicates the pseudo-narrator's failure to accommodate the contradictory objectives of self-creation and self-immolation in the process of narration. Introducing time into the study of Malone Dies adds another layer to the complicated relationship between the narrator and the narrated. This layer is exterior to the narrative and concerns the generation of words in its unidirectional progression. In this way, the unstoppable words present duration in a pure sense, whereas the narrative fragmentally represents a pseudo-narration. In turn, the paradoxical split permeating Beckett's works could be reconsidered as the conflict between the limit of a pseudo-narrator and the holistic words that mark duration. Invalid Externality: No Body, No Writing, Not Malone, Not I Of all Beckett's novels...