Taking Beckett at His Word: The Event of The Unnamable

Abstract

The many achievements of Beckett scholarship in recent years, exploring drafts and notebooks, tracking sources, investigating the biography and mining the letters, run the risk of losing sight of the reason why he merits this degree of attention: the singularity, inventiveness and power of his work, on the page, stage and screen. Starting from Derrida's brief comments on Beckett, in which the philosopher expresses a fascination for what is left over when we have digested (or failed to digest) the content of the writing, this essay takes The Unnamable as an example of a work whose strangeness has often been reduced by accounts of its thematic substance or its various contexts. Addressing primarily the English text but dipping into the French where appropriate, it focuses on the way the work happens: the sequencing of elements, the build-up and relaxation of tension, the enigmas and their resolutions, the withholding and unfolding of information. What, it asks, does this work offer for our enjoyment? What makes it, sporadically, so funny? A short passage from The Unnamable is discussed, with attention to its rhythms, its deployment of expectations aroused and satisfied, postponed, or disappointed, its sometimes recondite diction, and its modulation of tone and register. To read The Unnamable with full appreciation, it is argued, is to participate in the voice's dilemmas, to follow its tortuous reasonings, to take part in its ironic musings, to share its anger and frustration, to laugh at its absurdities, to savour its sheer energy and persistence. All this arises from the event of reading, the experience of the text as it unfolds its words and sentences. Taking advantage of language's capacity to unmake what it has made, Beckett invites the reader to participate in its paradoxes as oscillations and self-cancellations that occur in the reading experience to produce an engaging and entertaining work of literature rather than the mental exercise or verbal puzzle that it can sometimes seem in the hands of its critics.