BREWER, M. Posmodern Narrative and The Nucleous Telos

Samuel Beckett: Postmodern Narrative and the Nuclear Telos
Author(s): Mária Minich Brewer

Source: boundary 2, Vol. 15, No. 1/2 (Autumn, 1986 - Winter, 1987), pp. 153-170
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/303428
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Samuel Beckett:
PostmodernNarrativeand the Nucleartelos
MdriaMinichBrewer
A time between civilizations
Denis Johnson, Fiskadoro

Unthinkable last of all. Unnamable. Last person. I.
Samuel Beckett, Company
Not I
Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable'bears its title as the testimony
of a thoroughgoing paradox. Whoever or whatever bestows the title
writes from the position of author or authority,the position of one who,
unlike the unnamable, can be named and who therefore can in turn
name. Yetthis title and the text that lies beyond its frametogether create
an upheaval in the relation of author to writing, a radical shift unsettl-
ing the narrative ground of late twentieth-century fiction, the diverse
effects of which are still being registered.
In the tradition of Beckett criticism, The Unnamable is taken as
the last volume of a trilogy that begins with Molloy, continues with
153
Malone Dies, and concludes with The Unnamable. But, significantly,
this novel is also the first of Beckett's narratives after Murphy,Watt,
and the first two volumes of the trilogy from whose title the propername
is missing, an absence that has continued in all his subsequent prose
works. The name, however, is not simply absent here, nor has it just
disappeared without trace from the heading of the text. Instead, the
name that names the impossibility of being named persists, visibly, in
the title at once as an affirmationand a negation, presence and absence,
name and non-name. Jacques Derrida,in his article "Prejuges, devant
la loi," proposes that a title, by reason of the place it occupies and the
context that it structures, is at the same time the proper name of the
discourse or work that it entitles as well as the name of what the work
speaks of or deals with:
For by law any title is the proper name of the text or
work that it entitles, although it is also an original part
of it; and from a place prescribed by a coded law, the
name that entitles must show, indicate, if it can, that
which it names.
(Car en droit tout titre est le nom propre du texte ou

de I'oeuvre qu'il intitule, bien qu'il en soit aussi une
partie originale; et depuis une place prescrite par un
droit code, le nom intitulant doit aussi montrer, indi-
quer, s'il le peut, cela qu'il nomme.)2
Thus, the meanings of the words in Beckett's title stand in a contradic-
tory and self-cancelling relation both to the conventional referential
function of frame as name, and to the indexical function of pre-figuring
the text that it points towards. (The first words of the text: "Wherenow?
Who now? When now?" confirm by their questions the perturbation
that was already implicit in the double referential function of the title
as name and designation.) The title as the text's proper name is put
into question since the unnamable simultaneously confirms its
necessary relationto the propername and negates its capabilityto name
or be named. Addressing the reader immediately with its paradox, or
ratherits aporetic 6nonciation of an impossible 6nonc6, the title opens
up a field of undecidability whose radical effects extend to the entire
text and possibily to our understanding of literature in general.
This textual whirligig derives from the fact that the title names
an impossibility of naming, but it does so improperlybecause the no-
tion of the unnamable can only be actualized on the condition that it
be named, noted, or written. This process of inscription can only oc-
cur in language , that is, within a system of signification that willy-nilly
presents as re-presentablethat which the title states is neither namable
nor representable within any language that names.
That title's aporia points beyond any simple duality that opposes
presence and absence, body and spirit, name and thing, the percepti-
ble and the intelligible,the signifier and the signified. And despite much
154
Beckett criticism that has long applied to his texts cartesian dualities
with which they are increasingly incompatible, this title, above all,
should be read as a signal to interpreters that such metaphysical solu-
tions will not hold. Indeed, the title works to block the metaphysical
aspirations of interpretation; it renders problematic any attempt and
temptation to reduce the title to an indicible,3a mystical unknown that
would lie beyond the process of naming and reinscription. Anything
on the order of autonomous being, existing as Meaning, Truth,Spirit,
or a transcendental Signified, is negated as much by the title's
polyvalence as by the way it unsettles the (im)position of the proper
name at the "origin"or "end"of the text. Whereas the voice of the scribe
in the novel will go on to insist that it is also something else, beyond
its parodic and derisory representation in language, its only access to
that mythical outside of language is across the threshold of language
itself. The Unnamable, as title, text, and voice can only arise in the
discursive instance that names its own impossibility, in the traces of
its own disappearance.
Thus, beginning with the title itself, the situation of the reader
is made equally problematic in that the activity of (re)naming,(re)con-
ceptualizing, and (re)inscribing that reading and interpretation
presumably deal with is here in the process of being undermined. As
readers we tread on the most unstable of grounds, for the title and text
disrupt what we think of as the fixed, minimalelements of the rhetorical
situation involvinga narrator,reader,and writer.Yet readers have blithely
proceeded to nominate the Unnamable as the prime and ultimate nar-
rator.4 Filling the breach in name-giving and representation that
Beckett's work holds open, they have elected the Unnamable to repre-
sent not only the principal character and the subject of utterance, but
its narrativeand authorialvoice as well. They capitalize the Unnamable's
name, of course, precisely in the way that a proper name or a title con-
ventionally would. In other words, interpreters have sought to occupy
the place of the author,the place of one who has not only the task but
also the obligation and authority to bestow upon one's work a title that
entitles a text to be a text. In Beckett's case, interpreters have rushed
in where the author feared to tread, for he never arrogates for himself
the power to release the "voice" of the text, itself a figure of speech,
from its irremediable anonymity. Despite The Unnamable, then, inter-
preters have not taken seriously the repercussions of its problem of
naming as they affect reading and the interpretive process. The text
creates a perturbance in the interpretive relation as a whole because
what is said to be unnamable must, by the same token, be unreadable
as well as unwritable.The very foundations of the traditionalinterpretive
contract between text and commentary, writing and reading, are
thoroughly jolted. Any reading that would give a name to the
"unspeakable, unthinkable,"even if it does so purely for the sake of
convenience or at the dictates of convention, and even if it calls that
character elusive and paradoxical,is necessarily on the side of nomina-
tion and representation. Such commentary can only be in excess of
The Unnamable's own aporia of naming, an excess that represses what
155
Beckett's text shows us is a discursive impasse, as inevitable as it is
problematic, for what kind of writing or reading would not attempt to
name its object and in so doing name itself?
Let me note that the English title remains considerably more
abstract and conceptual than the French; although they both signify
that which cannot be named, the French title carries another, more dis-
quieting, semantic range:innommable is that which is too vile, ignoble,
disgusting, or abject to be designated. The word marks the retreat of
language in the face of its own function of designation while at the
same time it names what it determines to be unfit to be named. Julia
Kristeva's exploration of the notion of abjection in modern literature
proves to be relevant here, for the abject lies on the borderline between
subject and object, perturbingidentity, system, and the symbolic order
in a world in which the Other has collapsed.5 The title and text of
Beckett's workarticulatethe potential foreclosure of the symbolic order,
that is, of language as a system of difference organizing our represen-
tations under the logos of the Law of the Father.The unnamable may
be understood as that which the paternallogos cannot or will not name;
the unnamable negates the power of naming that is vested in the
Father-the name of the Father and the Lawof the Father.Such a rela-
tion to the logos may explain why interpreters,obeying an internal logic
of which they are themselves unaware,have called the unnamable "he,"
despite textual signs that the scribe never manages to arrest the un-
namable's pronominal drift through all the pronouns, masculine,
feminine, neuter, singular and plural.The subject of the symbolic order,
through his identification with the Name of the Father, remains a
masculine subject in his relationto language and representation. When
interpretation proceeds to name, something it cannot avoid doing
without also ceasing to perform reading and writing, it enters into the
symbolic order and the process of naming under conditions analogous
to those of authorship. One might ask, however,whether this situation
of reading is inevitablybound to be one of paternity,governed by a desire
for mastery that dutifully mimes the law of the father who imposes the
"proper"name for the text? Must reading be Oedipal or can interpreta-
tion forego the desire for a mastery that it bestows on the character,
on Beckett, on authorship, on the paternal logos, and ultimately on its
own interpretiveagency? What effect would this other reading have on
institutions whose symbolic order it may then question and not mere-
ly confirm? Beckett's The Unnamable challenges its readers to pose
these interlocking questions.
Endgame
Comparing Beckett's title with mine, I note that mine names ex-
cessively. It seeks to articulate the notion of the postmodern as a nar-
rativefunction, and then relates that narrativityto an historical concern,
the modern imaginaryof nuclear destruction. Both postmodern narrative
and recent history are thus linked with Beckett's name and work,
together providingwhat I see as a new possibility for reading his texts
156
in an historical and narrative frame. In Theodor Adorno's famous
historical interpretationof Endgame, he writes that Beckett "has given
us the only fitting reaction to the situation of the concentration
camps-a situation he never calls by name, as if it were subject to an
image ban. What is, he says, is like a concentration camp." For Adorno,
"ourmetaphysical faculty is paralyzedbecause actual events have shat-
tered the basis on which speculative metaphysical thought could be
reconciled with experience" In the genocide that exterminated human
beings as "deviationsfrom the concept of their total nullity,""Auschwitz
confirmed the philosopheme of pure identity as death."Adorno claims
that when Beckett writes in Endgame that there is really not so much
to be feared any more, he is reacting to the ideological concept that
lurks in the practice of the concentration camps, the destruction of
nonidentity. History displaces metaphysics by producing its concepts
of nonidentity as a ghastly reality;or, as Adorno writes, "the course of
history forces materialism upon metaphysics."6 In "Discussions, ou:
phraser 'apres Auschwitz,' " Jean-Frangois Lyotardtakes up Adorno's
understanding of recent history's undoing of metaphysics. He
radicalizes Adorno's negative dialectics of death by showing that after
Auschwitz death cannot at all be thought of as a resolution or result,
a "belle mort."He designates in the name Auschwitz the "impossibili-
ty of the we,"the absence of a plural subject because "that which or-
dains death is exclusively otherthan that to which the order is destined."
Death without reparationis, for Lyotard,an absolute incommensurability
of two universes of phrases that brings "phrasing,"that is, the possibility
of any dialectical narrative,into crisis. While Lyotarddoes not return
to Adorno's example of Beckett's play, his argument in "Discussions"
and his elaboration of the notion of diff6rend in his work Le Diff6rend
remain significant for any attempt to read Beckett in the aftermath of
post-war history.' If, as Adorno affirms, "since Auschwitz, fearing death
means fearing worse than death," then such a recognition of the im-
pact of genocide on a philosophy and history of the subject also leads
us to recognize that another (the other?) historical markerof our time
is the horizon of the total nuclear destruction of humanity.Analogous-
ly, both Auschwitz and Hiroshima program an absolute destruction
without remainder that forces the historical upon the contemporary
mind as a thought of closure without identity and without resolution.
Beckett's ongoing experimentation with the limits and implica-
tions of narrativeprovides us with exemplary insights into the relation
between postmodern narrativeand our nuclear situation. In fact, his
work brings us to the threshold of understanding the narrativecharacter
of the nuclear. It may be claimed that there is some risk involved in link-
ing contemporary artistic experimentation with the normalizing and
dangerously banalized post-nuclear topi that are all-pervasivetoday. Yet
we cannot simply ignore the extent to which diffuse nuclear narrative
structures span the supposed gap between high art and popularculture.
Literature,the visual arts, music, theater, film, rock videos, television
cartoons, and children's toys reproduce these narrativestructures on
the symbolic and imaginary order with vastly different degrees of con-
157
ventionality andor reflexivity.Yet to avoid the possibility of falling back
upon vulgar historicism, it must be made clear that I am not claiming
that some totalizing explanation or unified historical Cause can be deter-
mined in culture and its representations, nor that Beckett's work in par-
ticular can be reduced to a reflection of an historical situation. On the
contrary,the allegorizations of the post-nuclear in contempory writing
cannot be read as realist representations of a fictionalized world
"beyond thunderdome." More radically, I want to argue that in
postmodern writing the very structure and concaternation of narrative
as well as its content have undergone fundamental mutations whose
significance can really be perceived only when etched against the
nuclear horizon and the unique problem of telling the story of nuclear
annihilation.
For many contemporary novelists, experimentation with writing has
involvedquestioning the limits and possibilities of narrativemodes. The
commitment they share to renewing narrativetechnique and content
may be seen as neither arbitrarynor ahistorical, for across a broadspec-
trum their writing is profoundlymarkedby a catastrophic teleology. Cer-
tainly,the stability of character, identity,and meaning, as a given within
a coherent narrative perspective, has long been overtly challenged in
twentieth-century literature,if not long before. What distinguishes con-
temporary writers, however, has to do with their introduction of a nar-
rativityand figuralitythat question the basic preconditions of narrative.
In the most general sense, literature since WorldWar II is a literature
of survival.In some of its manifestations, one may associate it with the
humanistic "last man" fantasy of Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism,8 or
Andr6 Malraux'simaginary museum where Man survives himself so as
to survey and give humanistic significance to the ruins of past civiliza-
tions. Less overtly but no less compellingly, Maurice Blanchot's
hermeneutic in essays such as those in Le Livrea venir places the
essence of literature under aegis of its disappearance and the death
of the last writer.The ends of literature, he writes, are to go towards
itself, towards its essence which resides in its explosion, dispersion,
and disappearance.9In a recent issue of Diacritics devoted to "Nuclear
Criticism," Jacques Derrida proposes a further refinement of the
apocalyptic premise of all literature.To the extent that literature,and
other discourses as well, are hypothetically auto-telic and produce their
referent as a fiction or fable, they cannot reconstitute themselves in
the aftermath of their total destruction as archive.•
ContemporaryFrench writers whose work is written within such
an economy of annihilation and survival include Marguerite Duras,
whose Hiroshima mon amour is only the most explicit version of what
her texts figure as a void of identity and representation; Chantal
Chawaf's Retable la r6verie explores the condition of the subject sur-
viving war but emerging from its ruins as a non-subject, a woman; the
novels of Claude Simon insistently figure their narratorsas survivors
of cataclysms leaving them surrounded by the fragments of an archival
memory in ruins. Much recent American fiction, including Russell
Hoban's Riddley Walkerand Denis Johnson's Fiskadoro, recounts the
158
post-nuclear situation much more directly, representing it as a return
to pre-capitalist,decentralized, feudal society. Charactersinhabita land-
scape that is a sort of wilderness or marginal communal space assem-
bled by scavenging from the junk-heap of a technology that destroyed
even itself.
The narrative structure of such post-catastrophic writing is
thoroughly altered by a constant, though not always equally explicit,
reference to the future anteriorcondition of its own possibility. The tem-
porality of 'will-have-been' locates the end in the beginning, and all
subsequent local themes of dissolution, fragmentation, left-over,and
remainderare dependent on that origin as teleological finality.Frequent-
ly, language itself is in a state of disintegration, with words no longer
referringto a sound and coherent referentialworld. It is as if something
had eradicated the continuity of language with narrativehistory;mutated
and amputated both semantically and semiotically, language in these
works no longer functions as a coherent, unified system of signs that
guarantees meaning grounded in historical continuity.In Riddley Walker,
for instance, characters have invented a new language out of the shat-
tered remnants of English. The remarkableeffect of such writing is not
only to transform the role of the reader from passivity to activity, a
feature of modernist writing in general, but to make of the reader a sur-
vivor as well who must try to decipher and make sense of the discon-
tinuous fragments that reading encounters.
In postmodern writing, hierarchies that had previously governed
the representationof the real in terms of temporal,spatial, and linguistic
coherence appear as ruins and remainders of what was once a stable
narrativeedifice. These contemporary texts may not always thematize
this crisis in narrativein historical terms but they nevertheless situate
their readers in a textual space where fragments of histories of different
periods, bits of diverse literarytraditions and discursive genres co-exist.
Such a heterogeneity may also help to account for contemporary
theory's unbounded fascination with questions of bricolage and in-
tertextuality.We frequentlyfind, in literarytheory,the teleological history
of the unified subject set up over against the rich pluralityof intertex-
tuality which is celebrated as a liberationfromthe constraints of unified
sense!. Yet if intertextuality is thought of as a question pertaining to
history and not only to form, the confluence between recent nuclear
history and the fundamentally narrativeaspects of intertextuality can
begin to emerge.
Samuel Beckett's work since 1945 occupies an important place
in these forms of writing on the brink or in the aftermath of an un-
namable, unrepresentable event22 His characters invariably inhabit
closed, subterranean refuges or else wasteland spaces of barely dif-
ferentiated nothingness. Figured as mud and dust, light and dark,cold
and rain, solitude and radical physical and psychic deprivation, the
Beckettian world has more than a descriptive or incidental resemblance
to a post-nuclear condition. In Lessness, for example, the narrativesub-
ject, together with any pronominal substitute, has vanished along with
the logical and causal links of a narrativeand grammaticalsyntax. "Scat-
159
tered ruins same grey as the sand ash grey time refuge,"and "figment
light never was but grey air timeless no sound. Blankplanes touch close
sheer white all gone from mind."'3 Here language itself is in ruins; all
that remains is a writing that in its awesome nakedness works to
reassemble and permutate its surviving elements. And while Beckett's
work may not be immediately assimilated with the fuller, more
celebratory modes of intertextuality that affirm a rich multiplicity, it is
intertextual in a more fundamental way. His minimal writing, by not
camouflaging the void, persists in a form destitute of subject and
presence. Whereas much post-nuclear literature is work of restoration
seeking to reconstruct a survivor society in its full anthropological
presence, his work has avoided that lure. Yet, paradoxically, much
Beckett criticism has fallen into that trap because it has been devoted
precisely to restoring his work without question to the literary,
phenomenological, philosophical, theological, and rhetorical tradition
that his writing undermines and displaces.
Accomodating the mess

In his essay "Les Peintres de I'em pechement," (1949)14whose ti-
tle may be translated as "obstacle painters," Beckett characterizes
modern painting as a "mourning of the object," an object whose
essence is to elude representation. His claim is that the history of paint-
ing excludes or barely allows such impediments to become part of the
representation, whereas for him modernity is precisely the painting of
that which prevents painting. TakingGeer van Velde and Bramvan Velde
to exemplify two modes of obstacle painting, he distinguishes between
the work of Geer van Velde where the obstacle is the object, and that
of Bram van Velde for whom the impediment is the eye itself. The
former's work, writes Beckett, finds its resolution in exteriority, light
and void. Abandoning weight, density, solidity, all that ruins space and
arrests light, Greer van Velde's work "absorbs the outside within the
conditions of exteriority."Bramvan Velde's art, on the contrary,where
the obstacle is the eye, works in terms of the inside, darkness, fullness,
and phosphorescence. For him, resolution is within the unmovable
masses of a being that is "isolated, closed up, and retracted forever
within itself, without trace, without air,cyclopean, with brief flickerings,
in the color of the black spectrum." Thus, while one art relies on a pro-
cess of endless unveiling, "veil upon veil, towards that which cannot
be unveiled,"until it encounters nothingness and the object once more,
the other is a form of "burialwithin the one, a space of impenetrable
proximities, cell painted on the cell wall, an art of incarceration."Paint-
ing's "mourning" of the object recurs here in the figure of burial,
ensevelissement, a closure with which Beckett's obstacle writing, or
the inclusion of that which prevents writing, has many affinities. For-
mulations and distinctions such as these, with their evocative
metaphoricity, help us to gain a better understanding of the difference
separating Beckett's work, which I would suggest is postmodern, from
modernist and avant garde aesthetics since the beginning of the
160
century. In an interview with Israel Shenker in 195615we get a sense of
the significant tension that Beckett discerns between two forms of
modernity.Comparing his work with that of FranzKafka,he claims that
whereas the latter's characters do not collapse, his own seem to do
precisely that. The word in French would be effondrer, suggesting a
collapse that has no ground, deprived of a foundation on which to rest.
Calling Kafka'sform "classical," he says that whereas it always seems
to be threatened, the horroris part of the form itself. In his own work,
"there is horrorbehind the form, not in the form."Beckett goes on to
distinguish his workfromthat of Joyce. He says that Joyce tends toward
omniscience and omnipotence as an artist, "the more Joyce knew the
more he could," while he himself works with "impotence, ignorance"
within an ever-decreasing number of possibilities. Such an essential
distinction might well be applied to the difference between Joyce's
modernism and Beckett's postmodernism.
In Three Dialogues, when discussing Bram van Velde, Beckett
resumes what he called the ultimate penury,the absence of occasion:
"the situation is that of him who is helpless, cannot act, in the event
cannot paint, since he is obliged to paint. The act is of him who,
helpless, unable to act, acts, in the event paints, since he is obliged
to paint."16His interlocutor, Georges Duthuit, attempts to recuperate
the negativity Beckett claims for the artist by making it into a new oc-
casion, a new positivity.Uncannily,Beckett's critics as well have sought
to make of his texts the occasion of a negative aesthetics in which the
work of art as creation retains without question its mastery, authority,
and legitimacy. His work is treated as humanistic art that imposes itself
despite negativity, but what Beckett pursues to the limit is essentially
an art of negativity whose radical penury is not merely a matter of form.
In an interview with Tom Driverin 1961, Beckett speaks of the
present "mess" and calls communication a "buzzing confusion."
Despite the broad suggestiveness of the terms he uses, they clearly
referto a reality beyond a purelyaesthetic closure. It is time, he claims,
to let the confusion enter the work of art. "The only hope for renewal
is to open our eyes and see the mess." Beckett repeats the word mess
in referring to Heidegger and Sartre who oppose being to existence.
Insisting that he is not a philosopher, he states that "we can only speak
of what is in front of us, and now it's only the mess... It is there and
we must let it enter." The distinction carefully elaborated in
phenomenology between ontological being and its actualization in ex-
istence collapses in the face of the mess that inhabits both. The con-
clusion that Beckett draws from this concerns not the content but the
future of form in art. Prophetically, he announces: "Therewill be a new
form and this form will be of a kind that admits disorder without claim-
ing that disorder is in fact something else," that is, something alien
to questions of form. His explanation for the contemporary preoccupa-
tion with form alone is that "form and disorder remain separate, the
latter is not reducible to the former"and form still exists as a problem
independent of the matter that it accomodates.
The far-reaching implications of these statements emerge most
161
clearly when we consider that formalism, which is not only a literary
problem, has indeed sought to separate the purity of its object, form,
from the pressure of referentiality.All our contemporary discussions
on self-referentialart are symptomatic of the profoundgap that persists
between formal considerations and extra-textualreference. Beckett, on
the contrary,contends that the task of the artist today is to "find a form
that accomodates the mess." This formulation places him as far from
any formalist closure as it does from a desire to represent the never-
never-land of the eternal human condition. The changes in form he
argues for are not changes that will represent the mess as a new con-
tent or as a new occasion for representation. But that clearly does not
mean that the mess transcends historical specificity of any kind.Thus,
the illusion inherent in formalism would be to teach us that the more
we jettison (subject, object, attributes, history,etc.), the more adequate
will be our readingof that pure and timeless form. For Beckett, however,
an unchanging form cannot be opposed to a changing content, the real,
in such a way as to exclude it. Narrativeform is itself an integral and
determining force in history, society, culture, and ideology28
Interpreters, in an attempt to out-Beckett Beckett, frequently
make their own discourse a mimetic criticism of incarceration by
limiting their inquiry to what they take to be Beckett's purely
epistemological, philosophical, and formal questions. Denis Foster has
suggested that such interpretationof Beckett is but a long paraphrase.
But when interpretersmime Beckett's apparentdiscursive limits, which
they take to be ahistorical ones, they incarcerate themselves so much
better equipped than he, for their work of mourning smuggles in am-
ple provisions consisting of the transcendental subject of con-
sciousness, authorial authority,and an unflinching belief in Beckett's
meta-discursive mastery of his own form.
No's Knife
No less than The Unnamable,Beckett's own readingof this work

is uncompromising: "Atthe end of my work, there is nothing but dust,
the namable ... there is complete disintegration. No I, no having, no
being, no nominative, no accusative, no verb.There is no means to con-
tinue."19 The author's title names the unnamable as its subject but the
text of its inscription proceeds to reduce that name to dust along with
the mainstays of narrativerepresentation, which Beckett encapsulates
here as a grammarof narrative.Yet however disseminated the narrative
and the subject become in The Unnamable, the traces of their dissolu-
tion involve a writing that intricately meshes discursive questions with
narrativedeterminations. When the speaker notes: "I. Say I. Unbeliev-
ing," or "Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on," the
discourse encounters or produces an obstacle of sorts from which it
doubles back upon itself self-reflexively. And in so doing the writing
cancels any meta-discursive position from which it may speculate upon
its narrative.The subject of utterance is split apart into a speaker and
another voice (also I)who addresses it in the imperative.The latterorders
162
the former to say again what it has just said. Using the vocabulary of
speech acts (J. L. Austin), we would say that in Beckett constative and
performative utterances are caught up in a process of repetition and
doubling. Any constative description presupposing cognition is no
sooner noted than it is threatened with erasure, for within the apparent
unity characteristic of the cognitive speech act affirming "1"there lies
already its immanent negation. The task of the performative,here the
prescriptive "Say I," is to short-circuit that negation by repetition.
Thereafter, the power of the prescriptive is in turn negated by actual
negatives when the scribe denies that it knows. These examples are
drawn from the opening sentences of the novel, but they recur in much
the same form at its close: "I can't go on. You must go on." The dif-
ference is that by the end the negation implicit in the constative has
become explicit, a negative statement of impossibility.If,as most critics
agree, the workobeys a structure of repetition that is interminable,then
the writing of the text would in fact have made no difference, and the
perfect balance between constate and performativelanguage would per-
sist despite the text's inscription. However, if we consider such
discourse in the context and frame of its writing, this interminability-
something on the order of the "endless unveiling" to which Beckett
a series of obstacles in view of which a different
referred--encounters
reading becomes necessary.
Soon the scribe calls upon the laws of logic in an effort to ex-
plain its contradictory activity: "By aporia pure and simple? Or by affir-
mations and negations invalidated as uttered, or sooner or later?" (p.
291)The aporia, a problem of logic, is placed within a discursive frame,
"as uttered," and then within a distinctly narrativeframe, "or sooner
or later."What is in question is therefore not a timeless logical aporia,
pure and simple, but a more problematic undecidability that has to do
with a discursive dispositif as well as a narrativeone. Both discursive
and narrativedeterminations undo the duality of logic; but because it
appears in discourse and writing, the aporia is caught up in a process
of deferral in which negation cannot simply stand opposed to affirma-
tion. Each is doubled by its other, as narrativeand utterance, in such
a way as to break down any simple opposition (I - not I). In Texts for
Nothing VIIIwe read:"ah if no were content to cut yes's throatand never
cut its own."20 The narrativeof The Unnamable is totally subject to this
double negative effect of negation due to whose recursive force the
scribe is unable to bring its story to an end. Affirming finality presup-
poses noting that finality, which in turn automatically implies and
precipitates another beginning, another story.Yetfrequentlyin Beckett's
writing there occurs the fantasy of an absolute negative, which, as an
admixture of both affirmation and negation, would itself constitute an
end, a telos: "a new no, to cancel all the others, all the old noes buried
me down here, deep in this place ... all the old noes dangling in the
dark and swaying like a ladder of smoke, yes, a new no, that none says
twice."'21
The scribe of The Unnamablemakes an importantdiscovery con-
cerning its narrative(which is also called a lesson, a pensum, a disser-
163
tation, a report),which is that the very process of narrationundermines
the ground on which to affirm its being, attributes, and certitudes. The
narrativeconcatenation or enchainement itself constitutes the major
impediment to self-presentation, self-identity, self-possession. The
opening questions "Where now? Who now? When now?" map out the
field in which space, identity, and time would together be locked onto
a present (now),the actuality of the narrativediscourse. Ifthe now could
be maintained, maintenant, then the unnamable could enter or emerge
from language.22 But the scribe's work of textuality, in revealing the fun-
damental narrativityof that present, renders that self-presence illusory
and dismantles in the process the narrativeas quest-for the unified
subject, its truth, its proper name, and its representation. Traditional
narrativityalways entails a quest for origins whose goal and accomplish-
ment determine the ends of the narrative quest. In Beckett's text,
however, it is instead negativity that permits the narrativeprocess to
continue. The obscurities of fiction are not exterior to the light of
knowledge and the clarity of truth but are constitutive of them. "Here
all is clear. No all is not clear. But the discourse must go on. So one
invents obscurities. Rhetoric" (p. 294).
Narrativity, in Beckett, is that which undermines the
metaphysical oppositions of being and non-being, presence and
absence, mind and matter,signified and signifier, origin and end. Thus,
while Raymond Federman is probably correct when he writes of
Beckett's "act of cancelling the story out of language,"23his claim is
justified only if that narrativeis understood as a story-telling or fiction-
making that is a supplement to language rather than as a more fun-
damental narrativityintrinsic to discourse and writing. The scribe in-
vents a number of related figures for such a narrativity,many of which
concern the problem of ending: "One starts things moving without a
thought of how to stop them. In order to speak. One starts speaking
as if it were possible to stop at will. It is better so. The search for the
means to put an end to things, an end to speech, is what enables the
discourse to continue" (p.299). Elsewhere, in Textsfor Nothing, the voice
says: "it's for ever the same murmur,flowing unbroken, like a single
endless word and therefore meaningless, for it's the end gives the mean-
ing to words. What right have you then, no, this time I see what I'm up
to and put a stop to it, saying, None, none."24But the means to end the
narrativeare precisely what are lacking, not so much because language
is somehow deficient but because the sense of an ending, or finality,
presupposes a unified discursive subject whose identity would
guarantee the grounding of narrative in an origin and end.
Discourse decenters the speaker; writing disseminates the
scribe. They are forever displaced within and from their narrative:"I
greatly fear,since my speech can only be of me and here, that I am once
more engaged in putting an end to both," (p. 302) notes the scribe, ad-
ding "I'mafraidof what my words will do to me, to my refuge, yet again"
(p. 203). Ending is not teleogical, or else it is so only in the sense that
it is irremediably caught up in a process of repetition and reiteration
in which endless ending is the constant ratherthan any possible finality.
164
Throughout much of the novel, the scribe insists that its own story ex-
ists, as opposed to those it recounts of the "vice-existers," that it is
about to be told in response to a demand issuing from the master, or
"they" his deputies, who supposedly already possess the knowledge
of it. Yet the scribe admits that these are inventions of its own:
All this business of a labour to accomplish, before I
can end, of words to say, a truth to recover, in order
to say it, before I can end, of an imposed task, once
known, long neglected, finally forgotten, to perform,
before I can be done with speaking, done with listen-
ing, I invented it all, in the hope it would console me,
help me to go on, allow me to think of myself as
somewhere on the road, moving between a beginning
and an end, gaining ground losing ground,getting lost,
but somehow in the long runmaking progress. All lies
(p. 314).
The scribe has interiorized,along with the language of the Other,
and language as Other,the exigency of a quest and its accomplishment
which is ultimately no different from a traditional narrativestructure.
Yet Beckett's text goes further still to demystify that narrative,strip-
ping it down to its basic, minimal elements. Narrativeis figured as a
getting along, as a departure and arrival,as a going on. In Texts for
Nothing III,the identity between departure and narrationis intoned in
such a way as to by-pass the question of "who speaks": "Leave,I was
going to say leave all that. What matter who's speaking, someone said
what matter who's speaking. There's going to be a departure .. .there's
going to be a story, someone's going to try and tell a story."25A suc-
cessful departure presupposes a previous arrival,and the scribe at-
tempts to create, in the absence of a space and narrativeof its own,
at least a space of difference between inside and outside, self and other,
identity and language. At first this space of difference is figured as a
temporaldiscontinuity: "Thisinfinitesimal lag between arrivaland depar-
ture, this trifling delay in evacuation, is all I have to worry about" (p.
349). At another moment in the text, this space of difference becomes
a spatial figure of division which turns into a temporal one through the
metaphor of partition,that is, text: "perhaps that's what I am, the thing
that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other
the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I'mneither one side nor the other,
I'm in the middle, I'mthe partition, I've two surfaces and no thickness,
perhaps that's what I feel, myself vibrating, I'm the tympanum, on the
one hand the mind, on the other world, I don't belong to either" (p. 383).
Even the relative stability of that in-betweenness is eliminated once
the figure of separation, the I as partition, is recognized as being the
words of others which are themselves the fragments and particles of
the alienated I: "everything yields, opens, ebbs, flows, like flakes, I'm
all these flakes, meeting, mingling, falling asunder, wherever I go I find
me, leave me, go towards me, come from me, nothing but me, a particle
165
of me, retrieved,lost, gone astray,I'mall these words, all these strangers,
this dust of words" (p. 386).
Initially,the scribe insists that its story is controlled by others,
or by what it comes to recognize as the otherness of its discourse. Its
own aborted attempts at creation, where it assembles and disassembles
fragments of body and mind, desire and pain, attaching them to
creatures on whom it bestows the names of Mahood and Worm,derive
from an interiorizationof the myth of the master or creator.The demand
for testimony is attributed to the master who, like the scribe, demands
of its vice-existers a confirmation of its existence. Such an illusion of
mastery, of being able to mutilate and scatter the fragments of its fic-
tions, which the scribe at first toys with, is negated for the subject is
radicallydecentered, fissured by being disseminated among the traces
and ruins of its own narrative.The distinct positions of teller and tale,
speaker and master, identity and language threaten to collapse and
merge into in-difference. The scribe then falls back on a figure of
theatricality to restore a separation between stage and spectator, but
the same gesture that invokes theatricality also invalidates it in an
apocalyptic envisioning of its absence: "when you think what it would
be, a world without spectator, and vice versa, brrr!"(p. 375).
The theatrical structure of such a world rests on a scenario of
the last survivor narrative,which Beckett complicates by relating the
apocalyptic myth not to an event exterior to language but rather con-
stitutive of narrativityitself. In Texts for Nothing III,narrativedisplace-
ment or departure is tied to a return to some originary event, figured
as a catastrophic ending, when all went out: "Andif I went back to where
it all went out and on from there, no, that would lead nowhere, never
has led anywhere, the memory of it has gone out too, a great flame and
then blackness, a great spasm and then no more weight or traversable
space."26
The extreme compression of origin and end in Beckett's work
is inseparable from the scribe's inabilityto inhabit fully either language
or silence, to escape the temporality of its own simultaneous inscrip-
tion and erasure in narrative.More precisely, the notion of time is ar-
ticulated as that which cannot pass because its fragments persist
without being recuperatedby a transcendental signified, the immateriali-
ty of meaning. Such an intensification or materialization of time con-
stitutes another aspect of what I have referredto as the postmodern,
post-nuclear symbolic and imaginaryof intertextuality.Ratherthan allow
time to be transcended by meaning, Beckett's text questions the
possibility of any dialectical resolution in a history of sense:
why time doesn't pass, doesn't pass from you, why it
piles up all about you, instant on instant, on all sides,
deeper and deeper, thicker and thicker, your time,
others' time, the time of the ancient dead and the dead
yet unborn, why it buries you grain by grain neither
dead nor alive, with no memory of anything, no hope
of anything, no knowledge of anything, no history and
166
no prospects, buried under the seconds, saying any
old thing, your mouth full of sand, oh I know its im-
material,time is one thing, I another, but the question
may be asked, why time doesn't pass, just like that,
off the record, en passant, to pass the time (p. 389).
Time cannot be recuperated into a history of meaning, of the subject,
and of truth. Having made this limit statement, the scribe then calls
for resolutions, decisions which it articulates as a series of orders,
speech acts in the imperative form, as if prescriptives would somehow
get it out of the impasse of narrativityand back into the illusion of a
speech act performed in the present, effective because it would be
unified by the intentionality or the will of the subject. It charges itself
to carryon cheerfully as before.One might read this need for resolution-
as-decision as the scribe's retreat in the face of its own catastrophic
narrativeof a time at point zero, neither regressing nor progressing but
surely piling up fromthe lack of an Aufhebung.The scribe even attempts
to fall back on "things" or "nature"once it states that it has always
just been talking to itself ("theywere neverthere, there was never anyone
but you, talking to you about you,"[p. 394]).The explanation the speaker
offers for the absence of things, nature, is that "they took away things
when they departed, they took away nature"(p. 394) In the absence of
the other, the possibility of nature, which Beckett defined in Three
Dialogues as "a composite of perceiver and perceived," is also
eliminated. The leaving of "they" is, significantly, another departure,
that is, another narrative.
The narrativeinfolding of the last pages is based on recurrent
figures of survival,remainders,what is left: "Inthe end it comes to that,
to the survivalof that alone, then the words come back, someone, says
I, unbelieving" (p. 402). The text turns back upon itself, ending only so
as to become the latest threshold of the unnamable's own story. Inter-
preters have invariablystressed the open-ended structure of the finale,
claiming that the unnamable's voice goes on forever in a quest whose
goal, the unnamable's story, may alreadyor never be accomplished. Yet
the textual repetitions at the close concerning "the words that remain"
appear incommensurable with the promise of such an endless process
of reading and writing:"tryagain, with the words that remain.... to have
them carry me into my story, the words that remain,my old story, which
I've forgotten, far from here, through the noise, through the door, into
the silence" (p. 413). Further,in the final passage's imperative urgency,
which is "you must go on" (in French "il faut continuer"), the necessi-
ty to speak words is tied to the condition "as long as there are any."
What we find here is a narrativepre-condition that concerns not only
the anonymous prescription inherent in language ("you must speak"),
but an obligation that is absolutely contingent on the survival of
language itself. Something seems to have shattered language, turned
words into dust, emptied them of their meaning and deprived them of
their ability to name the unimaginable, the unspeakable. Something
seems continually to be annihilating language which is drifting to a
167
destruction without remainder.What? Is our readingjustified in attempt-
ing to restrict the meaning of this dwindling stock of left-over words
to the sole agency of the scribe's or Beckett's self-searching and
nihilistic self-destruction? Is there not perhaps a much more general,
that is, historical significance in this unnamable?
As Derrida writes:
The only referent that is absolutely real is thus of the
scope or dimension of an absolute nuclear catastrophe
that would irreversiblydestroy the entire archive and
all symbolic capacity, would destroy the "movement
of survival,"what I call survivance, at the very heart of
life. This absolute referent of all possible literature is
on a parwith the absolute effacement of any possible
trace; it is thus the only ineffaceable trace.... This is,
if not the nuclear age, if not the nuclear catastrophe,
at least that toward which nuclear discourse and the
nuclear symbolic are still beckoning: the re-
mainderless and a-symbolic destruction of literature.
Literature and literary criticism cannot speak of
anything else, they have no other ultimate referent....
For simultaneously, that 'subject' cannot be a namable
'subject,' nor that 'referent' a namable referent.27
There is a particularlyunsettling way in which the nuclear for Derrida
is referred simultaneously to a specific historical present and to the
limits of literature per se. Yet what he writes should in no way allow
us to retreat into the luxuryof an archivalcomplacency, protesting that
nuclear narratives simply repeat all previous apocalyptic ones. The
nuclear horizonin postmodern thought and writingis the site of a radical
questioning of narrativitywhose historical specificity includes yet ex-
ceeds the limits of such apocalypses. Beckett's work exemplifies this
historicity and figures the limits of the unpresentable in terms of a nar-
rativitythat, like our world,has been turned almost absolutely inside out.
University of Minnesota
NOTES
1 Samuel Beckett, ThreeNovels by Samuel Beckett: Molloy,Malone Dies, The Un-
namable (New York:Grove Press, 1955).
2 Jacques Derrida,"Prdjugdsdevant la loi," in La Facult6 de juger, Jacques Der-
rida et al. (Paris: Minuit, 1985), pp. 90-91.
3 Olga Bernal,Langage et fiction dans le romande Beckett (Paris:Gallimard,1969),
p. 85.
4 A sound critique of this practice is proposed by Dennis A. Foster, "AllHere is
Sin: The Obligation in The Unnamable,"Boundary2,12:1(Fall 1983), pp. 81-100.
168
5 Julia Kristeva,Pouvoirsde I'horreur:Essai sur P'abjection(Paris:Seuil, 1980).See
Angela B. Moorjani'sdiscussion of Beckett's attempt to removewritingfromthe
control of the paternal logos and her analyses of the fort/da games serving to
fracturethe symbolic order by their abysmal play.Abysmal Games in the Novels
of Samuel Beckett, (Chapel Hill:NorthCarolinaStudies in Romance Languages
and Literatures:1982), pp. 67-120.
6 Theodor W.Adorno,Negative Dialectics, tr. E. B. Ashton (New York:Continuum,
1983), pp. 380-81, 362.
7 Jean-FrangoisLyotard,"Discussions, ou: phraser'apres Auschwitz,'" in Les Fins
de I'hommel partirdu travailde Jacques Derrida,(Paris:Editions Galil6e, 1981),
pp. 283-308;Le Diff6rend,(Paris:Minuit,1981),a chapter of which is translated
as "The Diff6rend,The Referent, and the Proper Name,"in a special issue on
Lyotard'swork in Diacritics 14:3 (Fall 1984).
8 Denis Hollier, "Humbles adresses," in Les Fins de I'homme, pp. 395-410.
9 Maurice Blanchot, Le Livreb venir (Paris:Gallimard,1959).
10 Jacques Derrida,"No Apocalypse, Not Now (full speed ahead, seven missiles
seven missives)," Diacritics, "Nuclear Criticism,"(Summer 1984), pp. 26-28.
11 For a celebration of intertextualityin opposition to history, see Allen Thiher's
discussion in Wordsin Reflection: ModernLanguage Theoryin Postmodern Fic-
tion (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1984), pp. 183 ff.
12 See Ross Chambers's 1963 essay on the "threshold situation" where he sug-
gests an analogy may be found between Beckett's brinkmanshipand that of Cold
War politics. "Beckett's Brinkmanship,"in Samuel Beckett: A Collection of
Critical Essays, ed. MartinEsslin (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:Prentice-Hall,1965).
13 Samuel Beckett, Lessness (London:Calder and Boyars, 1970) p. 7.
14 Samuel Beckett, "Les Peintres de I'empchement," Derribrele miroir,11-12(1948),
pp. 3, 4, 7.
15 Interviewwith Israel Shenker, New YorkTimes, May 6, 1956.
16 Samuel Beckett, Proust and ThreeDialogues (London:Calderand Boyars,1965),
p. 119.
17 Interviewwith Tom F. Driver,Columbia University Forum (Summer 1961).
18 I have discussed such narrativedeterminationsin "ALooseningof Tongues:From
Narrative Economy to Women Writing,"MLN Comparative Literature,99:5
(December 1984), pp. 1141-1161.
19 Interviewwith Israel Shenker.
20 Samuel Beckett, Textsfor Nothing in No's Knife:Collected Short Prose 1945-1966
(London:Calder and Boyars, 1967), p. 109.
21 Beckett, Texts for Nothing, p. 126.
22 In her discussion of language as an "ontological trap,"Olga Bernal proposes
that Beckett's work is fundamentally anti-Heideggerianin that it bears witness
to a "collapse of that which Heidegger calls the dwelling and shelter of man,
that is, language" Bernal, Language et fiction, pp. 80-81.
169
23 Raymond Federman, "Samuel Beckett: The Liar'sParadox,"in Symposium on
Samuel Beckett: The Art of Rhetoric, ed. EdouardMorot-Siret al. (Chapel Hill:
North Carolina Studies in Romance Languages and Literatures,1976), p. 131.
24 Texts for Nothing, p. 107.
25 Texts for Nothing, p. 81

26 Texts for Nothing, p. 83.
27 Jacques Derrida,Diacritics, p. 28.
170

BREWER, M. Posmodern Narrative and The Nucleous Telos

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Samuel Beckett: Postmodern Narrative and the Nuclear Telos

Author(s): Mária Minich Brewer

Denis Johnson, Fiskadoro

(Car en droit tout titre est le nom propre du texte ou

Accomodating the mess

No less than The Unnamable,Beckett's own readingof this work

24 Texts for Nothing, p. 107.

25 Texts for Nothing, p. 81

27 Jacques Derrida,Diacritics, p. 28.

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