The artistic expression in The Unnamable is an inversion of Plato’s Republic: what experience is, what life is like, to know nothing (The Unnamable) versus what experience and life are when one can know much (the Republic). (See also Post V.) It is an odd inversion, or mirroring: in one (the Republic) one can know so much, but in the other (The Unnamable) one knows so much what one doesn’t know, perhaps the latter is even more boundless.

In the Republic, according to Socrates one might journey to the end of the intelligible realm, beyond what is visible, by means of words used in dialectic exploration – i.e., by traveling (by necessity) without the aid of sense-perceptions. Socrates says, whenever someone tries, by means of dialectical discussion and without the aid of any sense-perceptions, to arrive through reason at the being of each thing itself, and does not give up until he grasps what good itself is, with understanding, he reaches the end of the intelligible realm. (Republic, Book 7, 532a, translated by Reeve) Traveling in this way one reaches “what is” – one sees as far as one can, if not to fully understand, if never to know the “good” in full, one can know truths, one can know a world, the best way of life of man, the best city, or civilization. One can know how to live.

This (no sense-perception) journey is itself the dialectic, and the dialectic is the means to work through aporia. Aporia, a word used in the first paragraph of The Unnamable, is a blockage on one’s journey forward. Dialectic in the Republic breaks through aporia – Then the release from bonds and turning around from shadows to statues and the light; and then the ascent out of the cave to the sun (Republic, Book 7, 532b5) – but in I’s case in The Unnamable, I fails to break through, and so I is stuck in a dialectic of nothing going nowhere. In inverse to Socrates in the Republic – I’s understanding and knowledge in The Unnamable only reveal the depths of what he doesn’t know or understand. Is this difference between I and Socrates a fault in I? is it due to different given natures, is it, rather, due to the time (I’s modern dilemma)? Does one have a choice? – between living in all-light versus all-dark? It may not be a choice if one is sincere, if one does not have the experience of a revelation, or even if one has this experience (from God!) but fails or can’t believe; in the life today, one might not be capable of believing even in an experience of revelation.

I, in many ways living like Socrates, experiencing the same mystical-experiential speaking I of Socrates, looking on, attempting to engage in a dialectic, in his failure to see knows a vastly different world and so has a vastly different experience and life from Socrates – because I can’t break-through aporia, I is blocked by or stuck in aporia. I is in purgatory. If Socrates and I of The Unnamable share the mystical quality of words, of speaking, of a dialectic, the experience in the moment of being: yet, one sees and so knows the vast world and even aspects beyond, the other sees and only knows a darker vast. The consequences to a life of I revealed in this difference might be, must be, shattering.

I – in a cave-like darkness, seeing shadows, not even of real men or things but of those characters I created in imagination – he is still I, still embodying what Socrates describes as the inner-eye worth more than 10,000 eyes. (Republic, Book 7, 527e5 – see Post V on The Unnamable.) I speaks, or engages in a “dialectic” argument, but has no truth to speak about, knows nothing and knows that he knows nothing (“Questions, hypotheses, call them that,” The Unnamable, page 286; see discussion in Posts II and IV on The Unnamable). 

I states: “I speak without ceasing, that I long to cease, that I can’t cease, I indicate the principal divisions, it’s more synoptic…” (The Unnamable, page 382.) Plato’s dialectic in the Republic is “synoptic,” a view of many parts, an argument that builds on itself in parts until there is a whole. In The Unnamable, the use of the term is humorous, a kind of building of nothing, parts of arguments on nothing building on nothing to reach nothing, nothing out of nothing to reach nothing.

Socrates describes the journey, the path of dialectic. The intelligible, through thought, through the power of dialectical discussion, treating its hypotheses not as first principles but as genuine hypotheses (that is, stepping stones and links in a chain) in order to arrive at what is un-hypothetical and the first principle of everything, having grasped this principle, comes down to a conclusion, making no use of anything visible at all, but only of forms themselves, moving on through forms to forms and ending in forms. (Republic, Book 6, 511b)

I has no dialectic path but must speak; it is speaking, or words, that journey nowhere. “Where now? Who now? Unquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that.” (286, first sentences) “[I]t’s about him who knows nothing, wants nothing…. who cannot hear, cannot speak, who is I, who cannot be I, of whom I can’t speak, of whom I must speak, that’s all hypotheses, I said nothing, someone said nothing, it’s not a question of hypotheses, it’s a question of going on, it goes on, hypotheses are like everything else, they help you on….” (397) Hypotheses, it turns out for I, help him go on with words but extend no further, help no further. I’s doubt extends out and out – he doesn’t believe he has lived in the ‘light’ above or even that he was born. (See other posts on The Unnamable, specifically Post VII (a way an inner I is born).) As seen in the discussion of plot in Post II, in I’s dialectic, or argument, which counters Mahood’s stories or argument(s) that I has lived above in the light, I fails, continues to fail to believe in life above, in Mahood’s claim that it is I’s life, fails even to believe in Worm’s stories told by the words (Worm who, in the story, or stories, is never properly born, an attempt, I believes, by the words to sound “closer to I” and so to trick him into believing it is him). The words – dialectic without aid of sense perception – do not reach anywhere or anything (no place, no space, no time), and are not even I’s words. He can’t believe. He has lost everything – an entire world, even words – he is left entirely in the dark.

Socrates, in the Republic, questions the nature of poetry and, as to the matter of style in a deeper sense, wonders whether it is right to imitate another or, rather, whether it is best to speak in one’s own voice. Socrates claims that the moral poet speaks and does not try to make us think that the speaker is anyone but himself. Guardians must not imitate anyone. The stakes are high: one’s soul and the good of the city itself. The stakes could not be higher (for Plato): one must not imitate, this is part of a training to experience the impossible, to have (the possibility of) contact with reality, to reach that path at the end of the intelligible and so know, experience a bit of reality, the good. In The Unnamable, it is as if I has the task of attempting to speak without imitating others, not inventing characters (this time), if others intrude, if others and the words invent characters that are meant to be I (so he still doesn’t violate the injunctive to speak only about himself), but the words themselves are never and can’t be his. Words in The Unnamable are, can only be, imitation, false, lies – trying to make one like I believe they “speak” truth. (Of course, one might note, both Socrates and I might be called fictional characters in the Republic and The Unnamable, respectively, speaking in their own voice, so “an imitation” by the “poet” or author of Socrates and I, respectively – and yet I of The Unnamable might speak directly as himself, as much that is that he can, and he is not Beckett exactly, see Posts I, III, and IV on The Unnamable; and the I of Socrates too might be himself, because he is not Socrates the man, he is the I.) 

I of The Unnamable attempts to tell his own story: but on the threshold of his own story at last the novel ends. Like a Tristram Shandy comedy, I who sets out to speak of himself fails to say a word that is his own; I fails to tell his story, I has nothing to say (still). 

In a sense, there is a big laugh – I must speak in his own voice, with his own words, about himself – about “I” – but even the words are not his, he has nothing he can say, nothing he knows, I doesn’t even believe in the I of I. (“I say, I. Unbelieving.”) The novel ends – not in silence, as some say, but in a pause, like the pauses of silence noted by I all along in The Unnamable. I will speak as he (always) must – he goes on in Texts for Nothing, for instance, and on. I will keep on saying nothing, as deeply as he can, the nothing so full of knowledge, insight, wisdom, so full of the deep on-going human experience, life, to call it life, and, one might say, the nothing so full of the great big spiritual journey or the tragic way of life for the one stuck in or by aporia, a failure on the journey’s (possible) path. And whose fault? – I say it is not I’s fault.