Space and Place in DialogueThe Unnamable is generally regarded as one of Beckett's most placeless texts, with the consensus being that the novel is narrated by a voice who inhabits no place.1 However, recently published archival material - particularly the second volume of letters - places the novel in the midst of a long discussion between Beckett and Georges Duthuit on the nature and depiction of space in painting, specifically on the relationship between space and identity. Beckett's long dialogue with Duthuit between 1948 and 1950 involved him in a debate on space and painting which had been going on since the beginning of the century, and had included at various points Henri Matisse (Duthuit's father-inlaw), Andre Masson, and two almost forgotten philosophers, Camille Schuwer and Matthew Stewart Prichard, among others. During this period in which The Unnamable was written, in French as L'Innommable between March 1949 and January 1950, Beckett read Duthuit's work and discussed it with him; he also translated a great deal of it. For all Beckett's interest in them, though, Duthuit's published texts remain at best a footnote in Beckett scholarship, perhaps as a result of the apparent rejection of Duthuit's thought in Three Dialogues. However, the reality is much more complex than this. Beckett's engagement with Duthuit's work during the composition of L'Innommable was profound and wholehearted, - or especially - when he attempted to distance himself from that work. My argument here is that Duthuit's thought appears in L'Innommable/The Unnamable as the novel's excluded other - and a most significant and insistent one at that.The 'long dialogue' between Duthuit and Beckett began in earnest when the latter visited Ireland in the summer of 1948. With him on his trip, Beckett took - or Duthuit sent him - what appear to be the latter's five 1929-31 Cahiers d'art articles on Matisse and fauvism.2 As Remi Labrusse has shown, over the summer of 1949 Duthuit rewrote these five articles into a book-length study, Les fauves. As a result of Beckett's already longstanding knowledge of his work, it was natural for Duthuit, after a poor English translation of his book was produced by Ralph Manheim, to ask Beckett to undertake the task, which he accepted and carried out during the autumn and winter of 1949, the result becoming The Fauvist Painters in 1950.3 Concurrently, Duthuit composed Byzantine Space, which appeared in the same number of Transition as Three Dialogues. The dialogues themselves were written over the spring and summer of 1949, and appeared in December 1949. During the composition of this latter text, Duthuit first sent Beckett a summary of Masson's thought as expressed in his forthcoming article, Divagations sur l'espace (5 March 1949; Beckett 2011, 142-43 n.5), and then seemingly the published article, which appeared in Les temps modernes in June 1949.4 In the midst of this extremely close involvement with Duthuit's thought, Beckett wrote the first draft of L'Innommable between 29th March 1949 and 5th January 1950, ending within days of finishing the translation of Les fauves.5The common theme which Beckett would have found throughout Duthuit's published work, and which Duthuit finds supported in the work of Bergson, Prichard, Schuwer and Matisse, is the idea of existence as a continuum. Briefly, as I have treated this in depth elsewhere,6 Bergson compares time and being to a melody, arguing that we do not hear a tune note by note but as a totality: as we hear each present note, we retain the memory of the preceding ones, and it is this blending of past and present notes which constitutes our experience of the tune: even if these notes succeed one another, yet we perceive them in one another (100-01). Moments are blended with each other in a succession without distinction, a mutual penetration (Bergson, 101). But Duthuit extends this, arguing that objects, places and the subjects which inhabit them are also mutually penetrating. …
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