I’s pensum, as a writer, is – in the words of Text 6, Texts for Nothing – to name “this unnamable thing that I name and name and never wear out, and I call that words.” The I of The Unnamable has to write a new kind of content – that which is impossible to write, and yet urgent, more urgent than love. And yet, what is this “unnamable thing”? “I have been here, ever since I began to be, my appearances elsewhere having been put in by other parties.” (287, 288) I is “here” – “here, in the dark, I call that the dark, perhaps its azure, blank words, but I use them.” (401) There is mention of Malone, Murphy, Malloy – they are “there,” not “here.” “Why did I have myself represented in the midst of men, the light of day? It seems to me it was none of my doing. We won’t go into that now. I can see them still, my delegates.” (291) “All these Murphy’s, Molloys and Malones do not fool me. They have made me waste my time, suffer for nothing, speak of them when, in order to stop speaking, I should have spoken of me, am speaking of me.” (297) “It is now I shall speak of me, for the first time.” (297) All appearances “above” in the light are not-I, I doesn’t experience himself as “adhered” to a named being or body. As to Basil: “Is he still usurping my name, the one they foisted on me, up there in their world.” (292) “No, no, here I am in safety.” (292) I says: “Perhaps it is time I paid a little attention to myself, for a change…. At first sight it seems impossible. Me, utter me, in the same foul breath as my creatures? Say of me that I see this, feel that, fear, hope, know and do not know?”

I’s pensum – he must write. “It all boils down to a question of words… I have to speak in a certain way, with warmth perhaps, all is possible, first of the creature I am not, as if I were he, and then, as if I were he, of the creature I am.” (329) Schopenhauer writes, “life in no way presents itself as a gift to enjoy, but as a task [a pensum], a lesson to be worked through, and accordingly we see – in things both great and small – universal need, restless toil, constant stress, endless struggle, forced activity with the uttermost exertion of all mental and physical powers.” The World as Will and Representation (“WWR”), Volume II (372) – I use the edited and translated version by Norma, Welchman, and Janaway. The pensum seems to arise out of a cosmic debt or cosmic crime. I states: “Perhaps one day I’ll know, say, what I’m guilty of…. Let them put into my mouth at last the words that will save me, damn me, and no more talk about it, no more talk about anything. But this is my punishment, my crime is my punishment, that’s what they judge me for, I expiate vilely, like a pig, dumb, uncomprehending, possessed of no utterance but theirs.” (362) “Unless I try once more, just once more, one last time, to say what has to be said, about me, I feel it’s about me, perhaps that’s the mistake I make, perhaps that’s my sin, so as to have nothing more to say, nothing more to hear, till I die.” (387) Schopenhauer states elsewhere: “Life presents itself as a task [a pensum]…. This is why everyone tries to get through it as well as he can: he gets through life like bonded labour to pay off a debt. But who has contracted this debt? – The one who begot him, in the enjoyment of sensuous pleasure. And so, for the pleasure of the one, the other must live, suffer, and die.” WWR, Volume II (583)

I’s pensum is (perhaps) a spiritual journey. I wonders. It is as if I is in purgatory, stuck like Belacqua in Dante’s Purgatorio, “who seemed so very weary, was sitting with his arms around his knees, his head pressed down between them.” (Hollander & Hollander translation, 84) “Brother, what’s the good of going up?” (85) Not tempted by earthly pleasures, they aren’t so pleasurable, not by earthly love, making it to purgatory with words but unable to proceed further on a mountain path.

This predicament, this pensum, includes I’s struggle with a dialectic that insists I is alive while I insists he is not, at least I cannot believe; it continues through Mahood’s stories, through Worm, etc. I must tell the truth, but knows no truth, knows he knows. “The essential is never to arrive anywhere, never to be anywhere, neither where Mahood is, nor where Worm is, nor where I am, it little matters thanks to what dispensation.” (332) He remains in the predicament: “The essential is to go on squirming forever at the end of the line, as long as there are waters and banks and ravening in heaven a sporting God to plague his creature, per pro his chosen shits.” (332) On the other hand, God or the word God tries to catch him into life: “I’ve swallowed three hooks” (332). The third: “The third line falls plumb from the skies, it’s for her majesty my soul, I’d have hooked her on it log ago if I knew where to find her.” (333) I says that “brings us up to four, gathered together” (333) – Mahood, Worm, I’s soul, the fourth being to hook I himself; but I is not there, here but not there, in spite of words, they will always “be short of me.” (333)

I refers to “they” or “them” – this is, I believe, in general a vague “expression” referring indistinctly to everyone, to the world of men and women above, teachers, the social structure, all those believing they exist and are living lives above, and to words and lectures and classes, to those who try to make I believe he is one like them including Mahood (or the man Beckett, say) but whom I realizes he fails to believe or fails to know what they seem to know, what they say they know. I fails to be that man above. The reference to “they” also, at times, refers to a potential God or to spirit like creatures who create words, who made and enforce the pensum. “They have told me, explained to me, described to me, what it all is, what it looks like, what it’s all for, one after the other, thousands of times, in thousands of connexions, until I must have begun to look as if I understood…. And man, the lectures they gave me on men, before they even began trying to assimilate me to him! What I speak of, what I speak with, all comes from them.” (318). But still, and yet, I has no other words but “their” words. “What I speak of, what I speak with, all comes from them…. It’s of me now I must speak, even if I have to do it with their language, it will be a start, a step towards silence and the end of madness, the madness of having to speak and not being able to, except of things that don’t concern me, that don’t count, that I don’t believe, that they have crammed me full of to prevent me from saying who I am, where I am, and from doing what I have to do in the only way that can put an end to it, from doing what I have to do.” (318) The “they” – “it’s entirely a matter of voices, no other metaphor is appropriate.” (319) And I, in turn, opposite or in opposition to the voices, wishes to go silent, he must write, it is a pensum, if pensum, in order that he may be silent – this is what he considers his predicament. “I have my faults, but changing my tune is not one of them.” (329) “Warmth, ease, conviction, the right manner, as if it were my own voice, pronouncing my own words, words pronouncing me alive, since that’s how they want me to be, I don’t know why, with their billions of quick, their trillions of dead, that’s not enough for them, I too must contribute my little convulsion, mewl, howl, gasp and rattle, loving my neighbor and blessed with reason.” (329)

How does I, an I not exactly of the body or embodied, not of the world above, write? “But I am here.” (295) Here here – not there, not in the light, not above in the light of the world. Here – “I have never been elsewhere.” (295) I asks: “How, in such conditions, can I write, to consider only the manual aspect of that bitter folly? I don’t know. I could know. But I shall not know. Not this time. It is I who write, who cannot raise my hand from my knee. It is I who think, just enough to write, whose head is far.” (295)

I notes: “Perhaps I shall be obliged, in order not to peter out, to invent another fairy-tale, yet another, with heads, trunks, arms, legs and all that follows, let loose in the changeless round of imperfect shadow and dubious light.” (301) Basil is re-named Mahood, the Beckett-like man, a man in the world above, sitting there writing, infringing, in this case, on I’s domain. (See discussion of Mahood’s stories in discussion of plot in another post.) “It was he [Mahood] told me stories about me, living in my stead, issued forth from me, came back to me, entered back into me, heaped stories on my head. I don’t know how it was done…. It is his voice which has often, always, mingled with mine, and sometimes drowned it completely…. Preventing me from saying who I was, what I was, so as to have done with saying, done with listening.” (303)

I senses the lesson, the pensum: “And what it seemed to me I heard then, concerning what I should do, and say, in order to have nothing further to do, nothing further to say….” (302) I says: “I must have spoken, of a lesson, it was pensum I should have said, I confused pensum with lesson. Yes, I have a pensum to discharge, before I can be free, free to dribble, free to speak no more, listen no more, and I’ve forgotten what it is. There at last is a fair picture of my situation. I was given a pensum, at birth perhaps, as a punishment for having been born perhaps, or for no particular reason, because they dislike me, and I’ve forgotten what it is.” (304) I has: “Strange task, which consists in speaking of oneself.” But it is all lies. “Having nothing to say, no words but the words of others, I have to speak.” (308)

I is not the person of the absurd stories, Mahood’s or others  – they are stories, and not even by I, and the words are just words, not even I’s words. 

Much of Beckett’s late prose work is most beautiful read like this, in its simplest form, a man, call him Beckett, sitting at a desk, the I in him or hovering near with a life of his own, a character of his own. One is not supposed to say a character in a work of fiction is “Beckett,” i.e., is the author himself; but here I is not the man, this is not memoir, I is not Beckett the man, even if one says Beckett is at his desk in The Unnamable, even if it is Beckett there at his desk. In many spiritual traditions the body is not real, the body is not substantial. I – there is no body, he has none, he recognizes that, I separates himself from the named man living the life of a body. I is in fact a unique personality. Still, true, Mahood, or Beckett, enters I’s domain – to write of Murphy, etc., a mirror writer to I, but, I notes (and proves by Mahood’s ridiculous stories), the stores are awful invention and lies. 

I struggles to escape Mahood’s false stories, to get back to himself, to the pensum or journey, to escape the story so he can complete the pensum, speak of himself as I and so escape the writing journey itself: “how to get back to me, back to where I am waiting for me, I’d just as soon not, but it’s my only chance, at least I think so, the only chance I have of going silent, of saying something at last that is not false, if that is what they want, so as to having nothing more to say.” (315) 

This is not a coming of age of a writer story, time doesn’t exists for I, nor space, and yet, in terms of time above, there was a time (before writing The Unnamable) when I came to recognize himself, when he came to know he was not acquainted with the sun or earth, but rather only with an eye that sees a sun, with a hand that feels an earth. I recognizes that he is (or was) in fact “adhered” with Mahood (or Beckett), until I understood or knew himself apart, knew what he didn’t know, knew he wasn’t the man, or that man wasn’t him – Beckett not him. “I’ve been he an instant, hobbling through a nature which, it is only fair to say, was on the barren side and, what is more, it is only just to add, tolerably deserted to begin with…. I say an instant, perhaps it was years. Then I withdrew my adhesion….” (310) And again: “At the particular moment I am referring to, I mean when I took myself for Mahood, I must have been coming to the end of a world tour…” (311) 

A writer’s life: inventing everything, everything is invention. “I don’t see him any more, Mahood, he was called… he isn’t there any more, he was never there, in his jar…. It is I invented him, him and so many others, and the places where they passed, the places where they stayed, in order to speak, since I had to speak, without speaking of me, I couldn’t speak of me, I was never told I had to speak of me, I invented my memories, not knowing what I was doing, not one is of me. It is they asked me to speak of them….. the thing demanded of me… a thing beyond my strength, and often for exhaustion I gave up doing it, and yet it went on being done…” (389) “Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that’s what I’ve had to make the best of.” (389)

Is it true? – in silence a writer might be a self. “I should have liked to go silent first, there were moments I thought that would be my reward for having spoken so long and so valiantly, to enter living into silence, so as to be able to enjoy it, no, I don’t know why, so as to feel myself silent, one with all this quiet air shattered unceasingly by my voice alone, not, it’s not real air, I can’t say it, I can’t say why I should have liked to be silent a little before being dead, so as in the end to be a little as I always was and never could be, without fear of worse to come peacefully in the place where I always was and could never rest in peace, no, I don’t know, it’s simpler than that, I wanted myself, in my own land for a brief space, I didn’t want to die a stranger in the midst of strangers, a stranger in my own midst….” (389, 390) 

If not a writer, I imagines. “If instead of having something to say I had something to do, with my hands and feet, some little job, sorting things for example, or simply arranging things, suppose for the sake of argument I had the job of moving things from one place to another, then I’d know where I was, and how far I had got, no, not necessarily, I can see it from here, they would contrive things in such a way that I couldn’t suspect the two vessels, the one to be emptied and the one to be filled, of being in reality one and the same, it would be water, water….” (390) Always Sisyphus, but still: “some little job with fluids, filling and emptying, always the same vessel, I’d be good at that, it would be a better life than this, no, I mustn’t start complaining, I’d have a body, I wouldn’t have to speak, I’d hear my steps, almost without ceasing, and the noise of water, and the crying of the air trapped in the pipes, I don’t understand, I’d have bouts of zeal.” (391) I, as writer, can’t even hear his own footfalls, since he has none.

A description of I’s “place” is impossible to write. “Help, help, if I could only describe this place, I who am so good at describing places, walls, ceilings, floors, they are my specialty, doors, windows, what haven’t I imagined in the way of windows in the course of my career, some opened on the sea, all you could see was sea and sky, if I could put myself in a room, that would be the end of the wordy-gurdy, even doorless, even windowless, nothing but the four surfaces… I’d say what it’s like, in my home… I feel no place, no place round me, there’s no end to me, I don’t know what it is, it isn’t flesh…none was ever mine.” (392)

I here: “all here is sin, you don’t know why, you don’t know whose, you don’t know against whom, someone says you, it’s the fault of the pronouns, there is no name for me, no pronoun for me, all the trouble comes from that, that, it’s a kind of pronoun too, it isn’t that either, I’m not that either, let us leave all that, forget about all that….” (397) “I never stirred from here, never stopped telling stories, to myself, hardly hearing them, hearing something else, listening for something else, wondering now and then where I got them from, was I in the land of the living, were they in mine and where, where do I store them, in my head, I don’t feel a head on me, and what do I tell them with, with my mouth, same remark, and what do I hear them with, and so on, the old rigmarole….” (406) It is I’s story that must be told: “his story the story to be told, but he has no story, he hasn’t been in story… he’s in his own story, unimaginable, unspeakable.” (406)