Post Category → Beckett

Beckett: TEXT 5 of Texts for Nothing. The Life and Experience of Inner-I, by Pamela Dickson

Text 5. The Inn, In the Village

Here, the mood, the question, the concern, this evening: what are the consequences for a life – for the life of one like I – if the world of phenomena, the embodied I, is illusion, mere appearance, mere representation (of a mind)? Or perhaps to put it like this: what is the experience of and what might be the sense of guilt in failing to believe in a world, failing to believe in a body, failing to believe in words reporting on (all lies) a world, saying none of it, world, body, words, exist? Countless ancient and modern religious and philosophic texts grapple with the idea that the world is an illusion, say Schopenhauer’s idea of world as representation (see also post on Schopenhauer in Beckett’s The Unnamable), or the Buddhist’s idea of Maya. Here, in Text 5, I – this inner-I that I call I – is less concerned about the other, about the life of I that is above and embodied as a separate being, that I call the other. (Here, I looks at the body, the hand “A little creepy crawly it ventures out an instant, then goes back in again, the things one has to listen to, I say it as I hear it.” (119)) Here, too, the words, the voices, try to convince I that he is among the living, as in The Unnamable, i.e., that I is in fact the other; here I is arguing, hearing the case. But I is not born so as to begin to die; to be among the living he would be able to die, he would be among the dying. To a graveyard//My journey has brought me.//I’ll turn in here, I thought to myself. O unmerciful inn,//You nonetheless turn me away? In Text 5, I looks inward, at his experience of illusion, and he tries to find himself, inside a head perhaps?

I is at vigil, dutifully making a record: “the vigil is in vain, [the voices, words tell him] that I’d be better advised to take a little turn, the way you manoeuvre a tin soldier.” (118) And: “The first thing would be to believe I’m there, if I could do that I’d lap up the rest, there’d be none more credulous than me, if I were there.” (119) It would be so simple, if I – I call him I – could believe that that other existed, that embodied man, the whole world would come in too, but without belief? – then where, who? what? 

I is tired of all of this, his predicament, the hopelessness of it. “It’s a game, it’s getting to be a game, I’m going to rise and go, if it’s not me it will be someone, a phantom…” (120) I’m tired enough to collapse. But to do that, to go and mingle with air and earth, I would, in fact, only be even more “in exile.” (120) 

The Text is structured (by I or the words) as a criminal trial. I or the words say that I is “in the dock.” This brings to mind Schopenhauer’s idea of life as guilt, a debt to work off. As discussed in a post on I’s pensum in The Unnamable, and in a post on The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, by Machado de assis, Schopenhauer describes life as a debt to pay off, a crime. One gets through life “like bonded labour to pay off a debt.” WWR, Volume II (583) 

In Text 5, here, I looks “inside the head, to try and see inside, to look for me there, to look for someone there…” (117) He’s in the dark “where I will in vain to see there can’t be any willing.” (117) There is willing even here – I exists as a willing creature, willing to see “there can’t be any willing,” willing still. I is an individual, the art of the Texts is a universal expression of an experience. I is not Schopenhauer’s artist, say Proust, without will in the moment of contemplation of a thing, and, as Schopenhauer says, losing all individuation in the moment, not being an individual man. No, I is an individual, in spite of everything, in spite of nothing. But I is not the embodied individual narrowly serving the will, caring for narrow interests, desires, survival. I is the willing individual looking on, attempting to illuminate himself and the world, a “form of life” in itself (see Text 6). In Beckett’s art, I illuminates the individual and world in a new light.

In this phantom world, inside this “imaginary head,” (120) I says he must have “noted many a story with them [sky and earth] as setting… Between them where the hero stands a great gulf is fixed, while all about they [sky and earth] flow together more and more, till they meet, so that he finds himself as it were under glass, and yet with no limits to his movements in all directions…” (118, 119) I creates those others between earth and sky.

I says – “[T]his evening I’m the scribe. This evening, it’s always evening, always spoken of as evening… it’s to make me think night is at hand, bringer of rest.” No rest for I, no end to his journey, never to reach anywhere, a light, the light, for instance. Oh then now, only onwards “I’m tired of it, I’d be tired of it, if I were me.” (120) And “another evening, all happens at evening, but it will be the same night, it too has its evenings, its mornings and its evenings… it’s to make me think day is at hand, disperser of phantoms.” (120) No light of day will disperse phantoms. Bark me away, you watchful dogs,//Don’t let me rest in the hour of sleeping!//I’m at an end with all dreams – //Why should I linger among the sleepers?

VI. Reflections, Aporia. The Unnamable’s Dialectic of Nothing, a Journey going Nowhere, by Pamela Dickson

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.

Beckett: TEXT 4 of Texts for Nothing, by Pamela Dickson

Text 4. On the River

This is an intimate text, a present moment between I and himself, dense, hardly any air or space between them. As with most of the Texts, there are two separate beings, I and he; one has to read the Text as if I and he are separate beings. 

As an initial matter, I (alone) is both father and son: “Yes, I was my father and I was my son, I asked myself questions and answered as best I could, I had it told to me evening after evening, the same old story I knew by heart and couldn’t believe….” (Text 1, 103). At the beginning of Text 4 I asks himself: “Where would I go, if I could go, who would I be, if I could be….” (114) I gives a kind of unanswered-answer at the end of the text. 

He, the other, is writing about I, but I is writing this Text: he, the embodied other, the one who is “living and bewildered,” is thinking, trying to find I, “yes, living, say what he may.” I insists that he will never find I: “I’m not in his head, nowhere in his old body, and yet I’m there, for him I’m there, with him, hence all the confusion.” (114) My heart, in this river//Do you now recognize your image?//Under its crust does it//Swell to bursting in the same way?

He and not I, I says (but the voices are not I’s either), is the one who “tells his story every five minutes, saying it is not his.” (115) I complains: he wants to foist a story on me, he doesn’t even dignify me with the third person, like his other figments, Molloy or Malone. “That’s how he speaks, this evening, how he has me speak, how he speaks to himself, how I speak, there is only me, this evening, here, on earth…” (115)

But I relents. The other, the man above, is a mere figment of I’s (i.e., because, besides the rest, it may be he, the other, is mere figment or appearance), and words not I’s not his. “What am I doing, talking, having my figments talk, it can only be me.” (116) I half-admits to having a life: “There’s my life, why not, it is one, if you like, if you must, I don’t say no, this evening. There has to be one, it seems, once there is speech, no need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life, that’s the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.” (116) Life is a dream, but it is compulsory, and if he, on the one hand, is mere appearance, I is ever more phantom like.

And yet, I is also somehow this other, or has access to the body, is by necessity adhered to the other – the one who comes and goes on earth – even if I stays here, “to breathe is all that is required, there is no obligation to ramble, or receive company, you may even believe yourself dead… what more liberal regimen could be imagined….” (116) These words a failed resistance to or failed justification for words about the exhausting “obligations!” above, Text 3 (112).

I says, “Yes, there are moments, like this moment, when I seem almost restored to the feasible.” I is almost a whole man, above, below. And, as stated in Annotations, perhaps I is also almost restored to the feasible in art, close to being able to write about “a man” as a whole, as the man is able to do in Winter’s Journey. But then “it goes, all goes, and I’m far again….” (116) The text ends ambiguously as if in answer to the questions of the first sentence, “That’s where I’d go, if I could go, that’s who I’d be, if I could be.” I sense I does not care to be above, I would rather be here, far, if I has to be anywhere, and I does. (Why are they always trying to foist a life, a man, on me, on I?)

V. Beckett’s Darkness in The Unnamable: an inversion of Plato’s Light in the Republic, by Pamela Dickson

Socrates states that there is an instrument that is like an inner eye, an instrument more important than 10,000 eyes, since only with it can the truth be seen. (Plato’s Republic, Book 7, 527e5, translated by C.D.C. Reeve (2004)) The instrument like an inner eye radiates truth and informs everything in the Republic. 

In Schopenhauer, the eye opens, the understanding transforms dull, meaningless sensation – and in one fell swoop a visible world is formed. (See The World as Will and Representation, V.1, 33 translated by Norman, Welchman and Janaway (2010)). The existence of the whole world is dependent on the opening of a first eye. (WWR, V.1, 52, 53) But Schopenhauer, too, speaks of something like an “inner eye”: in the first paragraph of WWR, Schopenhauer states: “‘The world is my representation’… if [a human being actually brings this to abstract, reflective consciousness] he has become philosophically sound. It immediately becomes clear and certain to him that he is not acquainted with either the sun or the earth, but rather only with an eye that sees the sun….” In Schopenhauer, a human being – perhaps with an instrument like Plato’s inner eye – can come to know that he is not acquainted with the sun but only with an eye that sees a sun; the I can “look” as if from a distance and understand that an eye sees a sun, that an eye (sensation with understanding) creates a world. 

It may be that if one comes to be “philosophically sound,” in Schopenhauer’s view, the entire world falls away; one might no longer believe or trust in a world that is formed by senses and a mind (like a dream), it might be one would feel as if there is something more essential to seek than what is in a visible world, or it might be that there is a different way to see, to approach seeing, to approach looking.

Beckett shifts the center of “I” from the I who sees a visible world to something like Socrates’ inner eye in the Republic, or like this “philosophically sound” Schopenhauerian. The “I” is no longer Schopenhauer’s “eye opening on a world, forming a world,” but is an I or an inner eye acquainted with an eye that sees a sun, with eyes (and an understanding) that (might) form a world. And yet, Beckett’s I, unlike Socrates’ inner eye, is in the dark, he loses a world, but fails to believe in or know the expansive truth that Socrates’ inner eye reveals.

I note: here I, that is me, or this I that I am or might be, write reflections – reflections of reflections of light and dark, light versus dark, dark versus light – illuminating an inverted experience, the way different worlds might be formed when an inner-I is in the dark versus in the light, each I making or inhabiting a world that is the best one he can make or inhabit.

An experience like this – Socrates’ inner eye, able to know and grasp truth, informs the entire life and work, the entire discussion of how to live and how to structure a city, even how to limit words of poetry; the experience informs and is crucial to every act of being. (See for instance the first line of Book 7 of the Republic, Socrates says, “Next, then, compare the effect of education and that of the lack of it on our nature to an experience like this.”) It is an experience obtained by effort that radiates like the sun over the Republic, backward and forward; the Republic is concerned with how to seek an experience like this, how to discover and engage in the difficult path to experience an experience like this. You would devote your life – hours, days, years, to have an experience like this. Society, culture, civilization – would be structured to give the best chance for human creatures to have an experience like this.

But in The Unnamable, I’s experience, if I is still an “inner-eye,” is in inverse to the “experience like this” of Socrates’ inner eye. In Republic, all that which is seen and so known “in the light,” and/or “in the dark” by way of the analogy of the sun – city, man, god – is heard about or studied by “I” in The Unnamable (because I has undoubtedly read the Republic, for instance) but not known, not believed and so not lived. I remains in the dark and his life – every way of his life, of ‘looking,’ thinking, is profoundly informed by his inability to believe or know or see in the dark. What Socrates sees and so knows enables him to engage in a dialectic to arrive at truth, enables him “to know” all that he seems to know, all that he can or might know, but in The Unnamable, I – if he must speak, engage in dialectic, assert hypotheses, he cannot arrive at truth, has nothing to speak about but must speak. This is I’s predicament. Both books are about an experience, a core experience which is a way of looking, an entire way of life, everything for Socrates and for I. 

A great mystery hangs between these two books, a mystery or dilemma which has profound consequences to a life – each book grapples with the one question we need an answer to in order to best live our lives, the ultimate unanswerable question. It is a question or dilemma which still, even if unanswered, can send us on a journey, a dive into depths, is still the question that matters.

Plato’s Inner Eye in the Light

Socrates says: in everyone’s soul there is an instrument that is like an inner eye, an instrument more important to preserve than 10,000 eyes, since only with it can the truth be seen. (Republic, Book 7, 527e5.) This inner eye can “see” and so know unintelligible things. It can see beyond mere hypothesis, beyond what is made visible by the sun. 

Socrates says, what gives truth to things known and the power to know to the knower, is the form of the good. Like the sun which enables one to see in the light, the good enables the inner eye (very much the inner I) to see that which is dark, is in the dark. Socrates says, As the cause of knowledge and truth, one must think of it [the good] too as an object of knowledge [like the sun itself]. In the visible realm, light and sight are rightly thought to be sunlike, but wrongly thought to be the sun. So, here it is right to think of knowledge and truth as goodlike, but wrong to think that either of them is the good – for the status of the good is yet more honorable. (Republic, Book 6, 509a)

In the Republic, the path to see with the inner eye involves a long education, and, more, a kind of learning which goes beyond sense perceptions (i.e., such as mathematics), a practice in seeing with the inner eye. But, ultimately, it is dialectical discussion which “sings” this theme. (See Post on Dialectic: Republic vs. The Unnamable) Sight tries to look at animals themselves, the stars themselves, and, in the end, at the sun itself. In the same way, 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 itself, he reaches the end of the intelligible realm, just as the other reached the end of the visible one. (Republic, Book 7, 532a) 

This journey is dialectic. 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)

The Republic is joyful. Understanding and knowledge enable one to understand the mirroring of man and city, the best and worst of each, and how one should live, the very details in the movement on the path of life. But I of The Unnamable only weeps, the eye (Socrates’ inner eye) weeps – I sees and knows deeply and clearly only the vastness of what he doesn’t know.

Beckett’s Inner I in the Dark

In The Unnamable, there is an implicit and explicit sense that I has read, studied, heard (vastly) the books or words of human knowledge. But the I in The Unnamable is a black hole of human knowledge or ideas, absorbing them only to reflect them back in a dark mirror. In the inversion, knowing or ideas disappear in the dark, if they hover there, invert to an unknown, a magician’s disappearing act – and yet, still, as a result of this inversion, the nature of human ideas/knowledge and a vast failure to know are each illuminated. 

I (the character) has swallowed and digested worldly knowledge and ideas, force fed perhaps, with the result (in his case) that he understands ever more deeply what he doesn’t know, acquires (in life, to call it life) a depth of unknowing, a rare understanding of what he doesn’t know. It is from this, out of this, long experience that I speaks, and I must speak, he doesn’t know why. I finds himself in a predicament: he must speak, but fails to believe even words are his, must use words, tools for speaking, when words not only seem to belong to a world above but to those with knowledge, or to voices who say they know things. But (I say) I exists in this sense: he knows what he doesn’t know; he can’t believe what words or his long education (his pensum) or even stories (of others or of the words themselves) try to force him to believe; I wants to believe, to know something, but something in him, he struggles, he can’t believe, fails to know, knows he fails to know, knows what he doesn’t know. It is about knowing. In his knowing of not knowing – his seeing and knowing deeply what he doesn’t know – in his predicament, I exists. In any event, worldly knowledge and ideas (in the light) hover in the dark in The Unnamable, knowledge and ideas in the light only serve to reveal and uncover an experience of being in an unknown vast or in a vast unknowabilty. One can find reflected in the dark (i.e., in I’s spaceless timeless existence) besides ideas or inverted ideas of Plato, those of Descartes, Schopenhauer, Buddhism, etc. (on and on).

I is (still) there somehow, relegated to an endless in-between state, existing in a sense (an inner eye-sense) to see, to look, but failing to understand, having to ‘speak’ or use words nonetheless, when he doesn’t believe even the words are his. Glaucon asks Socrates:

“So, tell us then, in what way the power of dialectical discussion works, into what kinds it is divided, and what roads it follows. I mean, it is these, it seems, that would lead us at last to that place which is a rest from the road, so to speak, for the one who reaches it, and an end of his journey.” (Republic, Book 7, 532d5)

No end to the journey, no rest from the road, stuck in the dark, in the cave of I, never to reach understanding: I will never come out into the sun, nor reach beyond what is dark, what is pure dark, never see the sunlike rays over everything. 

And this – moreover – due to faults of I himself, apparently, failures, lack in I’s understanding, I fails the “test” or pensum (see Post IV on the Pensum of the The Unnamable), if he strives on, if he must – he still fails to believe, to understand, to say the right word. He is not fully “born” (See Post on the Way an Inner I is Born: Republic vs. The Unnamable), does not reach the potential of the inner-eye; he is forced, because he must speak, must go on, to speak, to engage in a dialectic of nothing.

You can’t see anything – the world of men, in the dark, beyond, one’s self. But one experiences ever more clearly what I is not – what is not mine, what is nothing. And yet – I is there. I is something.

Beckett’s Texts for Nothing: TEXT 3. I like a Ghost goes on in the Dark, by Pamela Dickson

Text 3. Dream of Spring

“[T]his time it’s I must go.” (110) No return, no going on. And yet, there is going to be a departure, it’s just words, it’s a journey, an imaginary story forward, future-looking (above) not an imaginary memory backward (above) as in Text 2. I must go, and a man with body must come, but fails to come in this story, this mere story. My eyes woke up;//It was cold and dark

The words, voices, say there’s going to be a story. First, build a body, with “a cluther of limbs and organs” (109) “then back here, this inextricable place far from the days” (110). Again, the possibility or impossibility of adventure and return, a mere phantom story and return to here. Words build a body, feet, hands, skull. “I’ll wait for you here, no, I’m alone, I alone am, this time it’s I must go.” (110) I will build a man, he will be a man. He’ll have a nanny, no responsibility, “if only it could be like that.” (110) I dreamt of love returned. I must use words, or the voices speak, “it’s time to go, to say so anyway.” 

I wonders: “What matter how you describe yourself, here or elsewhere, fixed or mobile, without form or oblong like man, in the dark or the light of the heavens, I don’t know, it seems to matter….” (110, 111) It matters: there is a great difference between I here (here, without form, in the dark) and He there (mobile, oblong like man, under the light of the heavens) – if I and He are two sides of the same “being.” I and He live different lives, have different characters, if they are one body, a similar but not the same nothingness, man above mere appearance, moving about with arms and legs and motives, I below phantom-like, closer to reality perhaps or to nothing, but here, unseen, beyond what is or can be visible. The Mock Suns. I’d be better off in the dark.

And again, as in Text 2, I cannot go back above: “And if I went back to where all went out and on from there, no, that would lead nowhere, never 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.” (111) There led nowhere, the memory of it gone too; there a great flame (light), and then, here, after I recognized himself, blackness; there a great spasm (of motion) and then here, no weight or space (no experience of body, time, space).

“I’ll speak now of the future, I’ll speak in the future, as when I used to say, in the night, to myself….” (111) I or the voices invent a bare embodied I above and a “crony,” a friend, but no, a crony would “prevent discouragement from sapping my foundations.” This crony, by his encouragements, would distract I who otherwise, as invented man above, might be able to concentrate on his own no-horizons, “which might have enabled me to throw them under a lorry.” (112) But the obligations! of living a life, to call this living, no escape, even if one just stands in line at the bar to make a bet day after day. One has to always be somewhere above, doing something.

No, back to here, see “what’s happening here, where there’s no one, where nothing happens, get something to happen here, someone to be here….” (112) Story versus here, just words, voices. Wouldn’t it be nice – to have a head and the two legs, to “set out from Duggan’s door, on a spring morning of rain and shine, not knowing if you’ll ever get to evening, what’s wrong with that?” (113) “It would be so easy. To be bedded in that flesh or in another… what’s wrong with that? I don’t know, I’m here, that’s all I know, and that it’s still not me, it’s of that the best has to be made. There is no flesh anywhere, nor any way to die…. Here, nothing will happen here, no one will be here…. Departures, stories, they are not for tomorrow.” (113) And when the cocks crowed//My heart woke up;//Now I sit here alone//And think about my dream.

“And the voices, wherever they come from, have no life in them” – no body, no past, no future, a no-man’s land, as opposed to I, I here, if bare, having nothing to do with words, behind words.

Beckett: TEXT 2 of Texts for Nothing. I’s Ghost-Journey goes on, by Pamela Dickson. 

Text 2. Backwards Glance

I is here. But above: “ABOVE IS THE LIGHT, the elements, a kind of light, sufficient to see by, the living find their ways….” (105) Above is there, not here – “The things too must still be there, a little more worn…. Here you are under a different glass, not long habitable either….” (105)

I has come to know himself as here, recognizes himself as here before this journey in Texts for Nothing, before The Unnamable (i.e., this is not a journey to here, I is here with nowhere to go)  – “Go then, no, better stay, for where would you go, now that you know? Back above? There are limits. Back in that kind of light…. Seek, by the excessive light of night, a demand commensurate with the offer….” (105) I laments: “To have suffered under that miserable light, what a blunder. It let nothing show…. And now here, what now here, one enormous second, as in Paradise….” (106) The sun, the moon, the stars: they are all too bright, revealing nothing. Past it in the depths of night,//Even in the dark//I had to close my eyes. Here it is as if all dark, no experience of time or space.

Here, in Texts for Nothing as in The Unnamable, it seems to I that there are no others, no things, in “this place,” only I. Others, including the other I is adhered to, are above in the light. “And the absence of others, does that count for so little? Pah others, that’s nothing, others never inconvenienced anyone, and there must be a few here too, other others, invisible, mute, what does it matter.” (106) The lack of the experience or knowledge of others here – it might be like this: a kind of illumination in darkness, a wilderness, a vast, no image of self, no image of others, no image of people; individuation is blurred, nearer to nonexistence. And yet I is here, individuated to an extent, experiencing this vast dark in bewilderment as here, and not there. 

I has memories, useless, of little help, of others, of stories, words, his only spoils, nighttime images, daytime images, winter images. If he went above, if he tried to “seek” above again “by the excessive light of night,” what could he possibly hope to find? – see Mother Calvet again, creaming off the garbage with her dog. “She wavered through the night, a kind of trident in her hand….” (105) Above, if he were “to go” back above: “And beauty, strength, intelligence, the latest, daily, action, poetry, all one price for one and all.” (106) No, he cannot return: “If only it could be wiped from knowledge. To have suffered under that miserable light, what a blunder. It let nothing show.” (106) 

Still, I blends with I here and I above; he is one who once believed he lived above in the light and who now understands he lives here. He speaks to himself in the third person, the impersonal self. As to others: “It’s true you hid from them, hugged their walls, you miss that here, you miss the derivatives, here it’s pure ache, pah you were saying that above and you a living mustard-plaster.” (106) No, it’s all just words, “Utter, there’s nothing else, utter, void yourself of them, here as always, nothing else.” (106)

There are differences between here and there. He has a memory of Mr. Joly in the belfry on a Sunday. “Here at least none of that, no talk of a creator and nothing very definite in the way of a creation.” (107)

I has a last memory. Of Piers from Langland’s 14th century Piers The Ploughman, but as noted in Annotations, blended with the Red Cross Knight of the first line of Canto I of Spencer’s The Faerie Queene (1596), pricking his oxen o’er the plan, he raised his eyes to the sky. The night was black, soon snow. The night, even winter night, is bright, is still an excessive light. There is a kind of imaginary return: Piers’ return, but also I’s return to the “place” of Text 1, the den, the sea thundering from afar beneath the snow. “It was none the less the return, to what no matter, the return, unscathed, always a matter for wonder.” (107) An experience above, perhaps Piers’: “opposite the lamplit window. A glow, red, afar, at night, in winter, that’s worth having, that must have been worth having.” (107, 108) He is an outsider, in winter, looking in. Show him a bright, warm house,//And a beloved soul within.//Only delusion is the prize for me!

“A far memory….” (108) And above, a kind of longing in spite of the hopelessness, in spite of no-return possible: “How one hoped above, on and off. With what diversity.” (108) Last Hope

No Return, paltry spoils. Beckett’s story, The Calmative, inverts the old tale of the medieval knights: take the adventure and return as hero. In The Calmative, the man is (possibly) dying in bed – in horror of those assassins who will kill him (i.e., ordinary life). The “adventure” is a story in skull, a story he tells himself, an absurd headlong journey at night, to a walled city, to the sea where he encounters a boy with a goat, he finds “love” – a kiss with a disgusting man – he has spoils, memories, words said, sights, the phial the man gave him. Horses are “carcasses of the gutted horses hanging from hooks.” There is the story of Breem or Bream, a boy’s heroic journey in the sea and his return. In The Calmative, the true return is to the tragic sorrows of being alone in a terrifying death bed. Text for Nothing plays with the idea of the knights’ tale. In Text 2 there is “no return” to there, above. I lived above before recognizing himself as here, always been here. He has spoils from above: bits of memory, sights, words read, images. But these are paltry spoils. Where is he to go? he can’t return there, if he has a small hopeless longing. No, it was worse there. In Text 1 the knight’s horse is: I feels his body is like an “old hack floundered in the street, struggling no more.” (100) In Text 1, the story of Joe Breem or Breen “a knife between his teeth, did what was to be done and came back.” (103)

No return to the cave, after one’s journey, as in Plato’s Republic, to live in the city and teach and share what one knows. No return, like Jesus from the wilderness of the desert to the city to teach the crowds. No return, no going back to Ireland, Beckett’s homeland, “the city in its haze.” (Text 1 101 and The Calmative “there was never any city but the one”) No return above, no heroic return.

Beckett’s Texts for Nothing: TITLE and TEXT 1. I Goes On in a Ghost-like Journey, by Pamela Dickson

Glaucon asks Socrates: “So, tell us then, in what way the power of dialectical discussion works, into what kinds it is divided, and what roads it follows. I mean, it is these, it seems, that would lead us at last to that place which is a rest from the road, so to speak, for the one who reaches it, and an end of his journey.” (Republic, translated by Reeves, Book 7, 532d5) But for I in Texts for Nothing: no end to the journey, no rest from the road, no “place which is a rest from the road.”

Texts for Nothing. Winter’s Journey

Texts for Nothing, this most beautiful and pure text, is (I believe) — in addition to the myriad and complex references and/or resonances to other texts or art forms (including his own works) — “embedded in” and/or an inversion of Schubert’s Winterreise – Winter Journey. 

In the annotations to Texts for Nothing, it states that the “title [Texts for Nothing] derives from the musical term, measure pour rien, a silent measure at the outset of a performance, ‘adapted from the phrase conductors use for that ghost measure which sets the orchestra’s tempo’….” See Samuel Beckett, Texts pour rien / Texts for Nothing, Annotations, Edition de Chris Ackerley et Llewellyn Brown (LA REVUE des lettres modernes 2018-7) (“Annotations”). The Texts of Texts for Nothing, are, I believe, a reflection and mirror – or like ghost measures – to the songs of Winter Journey. In Winter Journey, a man journeys “above” in a world, still able to believe in the life of a man, in himself as embodied man, still able to believe in love, in God, in the existence of things, trees, a world, in spite of loneliness and loss. But I – the I of Texts for Nothing – has lost the world, I cannot believe in the world’s existence, in the “reality” of phenomena, in the “reality” of body or words, let alone a God. The “I” in Texts for Nothing inverts the winter journey into a journey-less journey in pure darkness. The evolved “I” of The Unnamable sings a woeful song of a ghost-like journey that is going nowhere, that goes nowhere is nowhere. 

My thoughts, comments, focus on the ghost-like journey of I in Texts for Nothing. I add references to Winter Journey in italics, to note possible mirroring to the song.

Note: to better understand the posts on Texts for Nothing, it is best to read some if not all of the posts on Beckett’s The Unnamable first.

Text 1. Good Night

I sadly gives in: he doesn’t rail against being “adhered” to a body, a head (i.e., against being “gathered together for life” with the other, such as Mahood or Beckett) as he rails and denies in The Unnamable. I is still a separate being (i.e., character) distinct from the body, the head, the named creature (i.e., there are two, I and man, say Beckett or Mahood, this latter ‘man’ I call “other”). As noted, understanding the distinctness of I as a separate character in full is fundamental to understanding The Unnamable, and this is true for the Texts. “[I am] away from the body, away from the head…. Ah yes, we seem to be more than one, all deaf, not even, gathered together for life.” (Pages 100-101, The Complete Short Prose, Edited and with an Introduction and Notes by S. E. Gontarski (1995).)

I is here (still). The “same voice[s], the same ideas,” the same questions. “How long have I been here, what a question, I’ve often wondered. And often I could answer, An hour, a month, a year, a century, depending on what I meant by here, and me, and being.” (101) Being: here or there, either way, how describe it? and here, how describe it? “I’m here, always have been, always shall be.” (103) Why do they ask about my sorrows?

I no longer rails against the idea of having “been born” – with the other or perhaps initially as the other (until I recognized himself as distinct). “To change, to see, no, there’s no more to see, I’ve seen it all, till my eyes are blear, nor to get away from harm, the harm is done, one day the harm was done, the day my feet dragged me out that must go their ways, that I let go their ways and drag me here, that’s what possessed me to come.” (102)

In sensation, the other is there, the body, the life, the one living life above, having to go and come and move on in a body, “it’s himself all right.” (102) “I’m up there and I’m down here, under my gaze, foundered, eyes closed, ear cupped against the sucking peat, we’re of one mind, all of one mind, always were, deep down, we’re fond of one another, we’re sorry for one another, but there it is, there’s nothing we can do for one another.” (102) I came a stranger, / I depart a stranger.

The long night of the gods. “Yes, it will be night, the mist will clear… the whole night sky open over the mountain, with its lights, including the Bears, to guide me once again on my way, let’s wait for night.” (102) The curlews “crying when the darkness gathers” (101) – a haunting song of night, as stated in Annotations, foreshadows death and as in Yeats, O’ curlew (He reproves the Curlew), accentuates a lost passion. I cannot choose the time / of my journey: / Must find my own way in this darkness. / A moon beam goes along / As my companion, / And on the white meadows / I look for tracks of deer. There is a hint of winter, but I is not in time or space, or doesn’t experience time or space, doesn’t know what time is, the idea of night and of winter is an abstraction or a metaphor: “like buried in snow” (102), “the cold is eating me… at least I presume so” (102); his father read the story to him of Joe Breem or Breen “all the long winter through.” (103)

I is the (resistant) story teller, still having to describe “the place,” and to use the right tense, but failing, “All mingles, times and tenses, at first I only had been here, now I’m here still, soon I won’t be here yet, toiling up the slope…” (102) He has “given myself up for dead all over the place… the same old questions, the same old mutterings, the same old stories, the same old questions and answers, no malice in me, hardly any….” (103) “Yes, to the end, always muttering, to lull me and keep me company” – as when his father took him on his knee and read him the one about Joe Breem or Breen. I is “my father and I was my son, I asked myself questions and answered as best I could, I had it told to me evening after evening, the same old story I knew by heart and couldn’t believe.” In many of the Texts, as we’ll see, I is his father and his son, I asking himself questions, telling himself the same old story, evening after evening. I and other, I here, other above: “we walked together, hand in hand, silent, sunk in our worlds, each in his worlds, the hands forgotten in each other.” (103)

Good night. “I’m holding myself in my arms…. Sleep now, as under that ancient lamp, all twined together, tired out with so much talking, so much listening, so much toil and play.” (104) I won’t disturb you in your dream, / It would be a shame to disturb your rest… Softly, softly the door closes!

IV. The Pensum. Portrait of an Artist in Beckett’s The Unnamable, by Pamela Dickson

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)

III. An aspect of Schopenhauer’s World as Representation in Beckett’s I in The Unnamable, by Pamela Dickson

“Wake up, my friend, and leave childish things behind!” – Schopenhauer’s quote of La Nouvelle Heloise, V. I at the beginning of The World as Will and Representation (“WWR”), Volume I, First Book – for WWR I use the edited and translated version by Norman, Welchman, and Janaway.

I began going through Schopenhauer’s work and taking notes relevant to I of the The Unnamable – but the project overwhelmed me, I might as well have copied all of Schopenhauer, both volumes of WWR and his On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (“OTFROTPOSR”). I put my work aside, thought it an impossible undertaking. I return to it to note a few comments. As noted in regard to the Schopenhauer Log, I hope that the Log as a whole builds on itself and reveals more than any individual post.

As with the Schopenhauer Log itself – Schopenhauer as a place to stand, to start, to jump off from and expand beyond Schopenhauer – here Schopenhauer as a place to stand, as a jumping off place, helps to understand the nature of I in The Unnamable, helps to see how Beckett himself might have (or might not have) used Schopenhauer and expanded beyond Schopenhauer to know and to formulate I.

As noted in the Introduction post, in the first paragraph of WWR, Book One, Schopenhauer writes: “‘The world is my representation’: — this holds true for ever living, cognitive being, although only a human being can bring it to abstract, reflective consciousness: and if he actually does so he has become philosophically sound. It immediately becomes clear and certain to him that he is not acquainted with either the sun or the earth, but rather only with an eye that sees a sun, with a hand that feels an earth, and that the surrounding world exists only as representation, that is, exclusively in relation to something else, the representing being that he himself is.” (23)

Later, in Book Three, Schopenhauer notes that time, space and causality are the structure of our intellect, and “The view of things made possible by (and according to) this structure is immanent; on the other hand, the view that becomes aware of its own condition is the transcendental.” (195) There is in these words, and in the Schopenhauer quotes above, an embryo of two kind of I’s, more particularly, in the latter, of an I that “becomes aware of its own condition,” an I who understands, at last, “that he is not acquainted with the sun or earth but only with an eye that sees a sun, with a hand that feels an earth, and that the surrounding world exists only as representation….” And yet, the first kind of I is an I in service of the will, buried in a body, and is ever present – both I’s might be said to be ever present. Beckett’s innovation was to recognize two separate I’s, and to shift, in his prose, the center, the I, to the latter kind of I, who, besides the rest, looks on the other I, the embodied I moving about in a world. This shift results in a completely new way of seeing, and in illuminating the world in a new light.

Beckett’s I is different from the Proustian-like “moments” of Schopenhauer’s Book Three of WWR. In Book Three, Schopenhauer has an idea that one can escape a mind which creates an entire complex, a world in time, space and causality, a mind that serves the will, only in moments that constitutes the experience which might be called aesthetic pleasure. In such moments, “cognition tears itself free from the service of the will so that the subject ceases to be merely individual and now becomes the pure, will-less subject of cognition, no longer concerned with relations following the principle of sufficient reason but instead resting and becoming absorbed in a steady contemplation of the object presented…” (200, 201) In this state, “we lose ourselves in this object completely, i.e., we forget our individuality, our will…” (201) “We devote the entire power of our mind to intuition and immerse ourselves in this entirely, letting the whole of consciousness be filled with peaceful contemplation of the natural object that is directly present, a landscape, a tree, a cliff, a building, or whatever it might be…” (201)

And yet, Schopenhauer goes on to state that “anyone who has become so engrossed and lost in the intuition of nature that he continues to exist only as the pure, cognitive subject will thus be immediately aware that as such he is the condition, which is to say the bearer of the world of all objective being….” (203, 204) This latter awareness is closer to Beckett’s I, to what Beckett’s I has become, how he was born, how he lives. It is an experience – an experience like this – brought to awareness, and so to knowledge, so I is born, I becomes the I who has always been there. I note that it is in prose, in Beckett’s prose, that Beckett can most fully explore this I (i.e., without a body on stage), why Beckett’s prose is (perhaps) his most important work.

To turn from the Proustian-like moment, to grasp a bit of what Beckett’s I in The Unnamable might experience, and so from experience to concept know, we might return to Schopenhauer’s OTFROTPOSR, or to WWR Book One on representation. I note that Beckett’s I is alive, he is not born of philosophy or concepts, is not a concept, is experiencing a way of being that is real and a predicament not only of I’s but of human life. 

When an I has experienced a feeling that the world is unreal, that even his body is not his, and when this knowledge comes to conscious awareness, I is aware that he is looking on, I comes into being. In the first class of objects for the subject in The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, Schopenhauer states that our understanding forms a union combining heterogenous forms of sensibility (including forms of time, space, and causality – each a product of a mind) into a complex, a totality of representations. In this complex this entire objective real world exists for us. One has formed the world, and the world exists in whole in each person, created by that person, mere appearance, a mere representation of objects and things but not essence, not “the thing in itself.” Schopenhauer states in WWR, Book One, that readers having grasped the four classes of the principle of sufficient reason will be convinced that the past and future are as unreal as any dream. He notes that the view is ancient – Heraclitus, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, age-old wisdom of India, Maya, the veil of deception, etc. (28) As noted, Beckett shifts the I itself, the center, to this view, the way of being that exists and is like looking on, wondering, doubting – seeing, experiencing aporia, as if outside of time, outside space, not embodied and yet an individual, filled with will, desire, doubt, the experience of an I.

I note, Schopenhauer states in a footnote of Book Four of WWR, in an attempt to help clarify, he says, the fact that the individual is only appearance, not thing in itself, how absolutely impossible it is, he says, to be aware of ourselves in ourselves independent of the objects of cognition and willing: “Rather, as soon as we try for once to understand ourselves and to do so by turning in on ourselves and directing our cognition inwardly, we lose ourselves in a bottomless voice and find ourselves like hollow, transparent spheres from whose void a voice is speaking, while the cause of it is not to be found within, and in wanting to grasp ourselves we shudder as we catch nothing but an insubstantial phantom.” (304) This sounds a lot like the unnamable I. But for me – this I is aware of so much, he has come to know he is not acquainted with the sky or earth, but merely with an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth.

II. Plot. The Outrageous Unnamables: H.P. Lovecraft’s The Unnamable/Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, by Pamela Dickson

Beckett’s prose work is often, perhaps always, embedded in a story or painting or musical piece (or even a genre) in a kind of “over-arching” way: his work is an innovative “comment” on art itself, on art as it must be or must “come to be” in his time. For instance, How It Is would seem to be not only embedded in the epic form, but a comment on the epic given the modern world; Texts for Nothing is a lonely song of an I on a ghost-like journey in the night I embedded in Schubert’s Winterreise (as discussed in posts on Texts for Nothing); his short story The Calmative is embedded, I believe, in the idea of an Arthurian knight’s adventure (take the adventure/return), in which the start is a man in bed, the return is to the man still in bed, the adventure a story in his mind. These parallels in Beckett’s work can be subtle and hard to spot, so subtle, perhaps, that in the case of Beckett’s The Unnamable we would be lost on this point – on its being “embedded in” Lovecraft’s The Unnamable – if Beckett had not given us a clue in the title (and even then…).

It is necessary, as a preliminary matter, in order to recognize the plot to see and recognize the strange nature of “I” in Beckett’s The Unnamable in order to separate I from “they” and “he” (or named others), which even when one follows the weird nature of “I” is difficult to do, as I blends (and parts) with he and others. If one tries to “attach” I to a body, to any named being, such as Mahood, or to a character in Mahood’s stories, one will lose track of I. However, once one teases out I and follows I in the text, the “plot” and its parallels  and humorous resonances (and complex mirroring) to Lovecraft’s The Unnamable come alive (brilliantly).

Lovecraft’s The Unnamable: writer on a tomb. Lovecraft’s The Unnamable, Written in 1923, published in 1925, two men sit on a 17th Century tomb speculating about ‘the unnamable.’ Carter narrates the story, tells “what happened.” Carter, a writer, tells us that he had made a remark about the “spectral and unmentionable nourishment which the colossal roots [of a giant willow] must be sucking in from that hoary, charnel earth,” when his friend, Manton, chided him for such nonsense and told him that since no interments had occurred there for over a century, nothing could possibly exist to nourish the tree in other than an ordinary manner. [Note that I as writer and narrator in Beckett’s The Unnamable mirrors Carter narrating the “tale,” but, more particularly, Mahood as writer mirrors Carter with Mahood’s purposely excessive language, his imaginative inventive nonsense.] Manton added that Carter’s “constant talk about ‘unnamable’ and ‘unmentionable’ things was a very puerile device, quite in keeping with [his] lowly standing as an author.” Carter, Manton says, was too fond of ending his stories with sights or sounds which paralyzed his heroes faculties and left them without courage, words, or associations to tell what they had experienced. We know things, Manton says, only through our five senses or our religious intuitions; wherefore, he says, it is quite impossible to refer to any object or spectacle which cannot be clearly depicted by the solid definitions of fact or the correct doctrines of theology – preferably those of Congregationalists, with whatever modifications tradition and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle may supply. Manton is a principal of a local high school, born and bred in Boston and “sharing New England’s self-satisfied deafness to the delicate overtones of life.” [Note that Beckett’s I mirrors Manton – I naively believing Mahood’s story, as Manton struggles against Carter’s story, trying to refute the truth of the story even in the face of evidence. Manton also mirrors in Beckett’s The Unnamable the ordinary man who thinks he knows the plan and structure of the world, whose “words” join the crowd of voices who teach and proclaim and insist on known ‘truths.’] It was Manton’s view, Carter says, that “only our normal, objective experiences possess any aesthetic significance, and that it is the province of the artist not so much to rouse strong emotion by action, ecstasy, and astonishment, as to maintain a placid interest and appreciation by accurate, detailed transcripts of every-day affairs.” Manton especially objected to Carter’s preoccupation with the mystical and the unexplained; for although believing in the supernatural much more fully than Carter, Carter tells us, Manton would not admit that it was sufficiently commonplace for literary treatment. Manton ruled out of court all that could not be experienced and understood by the average citizen. Besides, he was almost sure that nothing could be really ‘unnamable.” It didn’t sound sensible to him.

Beckett’s The Unnamable set-up: writer in the dark. Beckett’s The Unnamable, written in 1949, published in 1953, the narrator “I” is not only “a writer/author,” but the unnamable himself, who, like the arguing Carter and Manton, enters upon and engages in dialectic arguments with “others” (some of whom are aspects of “himself” but still “not-I), “others” including the words themselves, who, as inverse to Carter trying to convince Manton that the unnamable exists, try to convince him that he is a man (horror!) living a life on earth, above in the light, and that he has been born. But I – in a cave-like darkness, in the predicament of knowing nothing, but having to speak of himself, having, presumably the task of telling his story (“It is now I shall speak of me, for the first time.” (297)), not believing even words are his (“Nothing then but me, of which I know nothing, except that I have never uttered, and this black, of which I know nothing either, except that it is black, and empty.” (298)) – still, I gullible, in part (like Manton, a bit superstitious), wants to believe in the arguments/stories of Mahood and “others.” But I, unlike Manton, ultimately fails to believe. 

Lovecraft: the argument. Although Carter realizes the futility of imaginative and metaphysical arguments against the complacency of “an orthodox sun-dweller,” he begins his counter-attack, for he knew that Manton half clung to old superstitions, beliefs in the appearance of dying persons at distant places, and in impressions left by old faces on the windows through which they had gazed all their lives. Carter tells Manton that, because of these superstitions, he must have a faith in spectral substances on the earth – Manton’s superstitions argued a capability of believing in phenomena beyond all normal notions. Carter states: for if a dead man can transmit his visible or tangible image half across the world, or down the stretch of the centuries, how can it be absurd to suppose that deserted houses are full of queer sentient things, or that old graveyards teem with the terrible “unbodied intelligence of generations.” And since spirit, he goes on, in order to cause all the manifestations attributed to it, cannot be limited by any of the laws of matter, why should it be extravagant to imagine psychically living dead things in shapes – or absences of shapes – which must for human spectators be “utterly and appallingly ‘unnamable’?” They argue as twilight approaches, Manton remaining unimpressed by Carter’s arguments and eager to refute them. 

Lovecraft: evidence. Dusk falls. After Manton had finished his scoffing about ‘the unnamable,’ Carter tells him of the “awful evidence behind the story at which he had scoffed the most.” Carter’s “story,” appearing in a magazine, is, according to Carter, based on true accounts about the unnamable, even if critics stated, besides the rest, that Cotton Mather had indeed told of a thing as being born in his Magnalia Christi Americana (“the thing with the blemished eye”), but nobody, they said, but a cheap sensationalist would think of having it grow up, look into people’s windows at night, and be hidden in the attic of a house, in flesh and in spirit, till someone saw it at the window centuries later. But Carter tells Manton he found an old diary unearthed among family papers (which, besides the rest, told of a “blemished eye seen at windows in the night”), and the “reality of the scars on my ancestor’s chest and back which the diary described.” Carter also tells of a boy who entered an abandoned house and went mad, and of the long whispered lock on the door to attic stairs of a childless, broken, embittered old man who had put up a blank slate slab by a grave (and of the sightings of a “nameless thing”). No one unlocked the door when the old man died. Manton grows quiet, and Carter notes that his words had impressed him. Manton asks about the boy, the boy of Carter’s “story.” Carter tells him that the boy had gone to the deserted house to look at the windows in the attic, and had come back screaming maniacally. Manton thinks about this, but returns that even the most morbid perversion of Nature need not be unnamableor scientifically indescribable. Carter adds more evidence: further revelations collected among the old people, apparitions, etc. It had grown very late – and Manton now seems to come around in the dark, given especially that the abandoned house is right in front of them and that they sit on a grave stone. Carter continues with his first-hand evidence: he had gone to the attic and found bones, a skull with four-inch horns but otherwise human. Manton asks about the window panes, which were all broken. Manton asks to see the house. They hear a creaking sound – the opening of the broken frame of the window of the abandoned house, there is a rush of noxious air, a shriek; they are knocked from the tombstone. When they open their eyes, they are side by side in a hospital. They had been found at noon in a field, a mile from the old burying-ground, on a “spot where an ancient slaughterhouse is reputed to have stood.” The words of Carter’s story ends with Manton’s words: “it was the unnamable!”

The PLOT. Beckett’s The Unnamable. Argument and Refutation and Failure

Set up and structure. See above, writer in the dark. Note the comparison of these two texts would benefit from a long paper, perhaps it exists. (For instance, to delve into parallels involving the “blemished eye,” or into the meaning of the use of extravagant words, language.)

I’s predicament and argument. “I have to speak, whatever that means. Having nothing to say, no words but the words of others, I have to speak.” (308). We are launched, somehow, through I, into Mahood’s stories. “Here, in my domain, what is Mahood doing in my domain, and how does he get here?” Mahood tries to convince I that these stories are about I, that Mahood and I are, in fact, the same I. Something is required of I. Like Manton, I almost believes. He wonders if he should admit that he is Mahood after all and that “these stories of a being whose identity he usurps, and whose voice he prevents from being heard, all lies from beginning to end?” (305). I wonders about Mahood: “What if we were one and the same after all, as he affirms, and I deny? And I have been in the places where he says I have been, instead of having stayed on here, trying to take advantage of his absence to unravel my tangle? 

Notes and Digressions. Words, Mahood, Worm – they try to convince I that he is among the living. “A real little terrestrial! Choking in the chlorophyll! Hugging the slaughter-house walls!” (309, 310). Note: in The Life of Samuel Johnson, by James Boswell, Johnson says, “there were two sets of people, those who gave the wall, and those who took it; the peaceable and the quarrelsome” – the idea or image of hugging walls comes up in Beckett’s work (see, for example, The Calmative “I hugged the walls, famished for shadow” or Texts for Nothing “It’s true you hid from them, hugged their walls.”) And of course: in Lovecraft’s The Unnamable, after the encounter with the unnamable, the characters are discovered in what was an ancient slaughterhouse. Beckett uses “slaughterhouse” or reference thereto numerous times in The Unnamable in description of ‘the world above’ among the living (i.e., among the dying). Note too: Mahood tells of men “among the living,” but Worm is an embryo, a being not yet born, who perhaps never does get born. 

Mahood’s “argument” and I’s refutation. Mahood tells an absurd tale, saying it is of I himself, of I (a man) returning from a “a world tour” to his family, where I says to himself “Yonder is the nest you should never have left, there your dear absent ones are awaiting your return” etc. (311) His wife, in this tale, relates the man’s history to the children, I saying, “That’s one of Mahood’s favorite tricks, to produce ostensibly independent testimony in support of my historical existence.” (312) The story, ridiculous, boisterous, grotesque, is like an 18th Century novel (very much in parallel to The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentelmen), or in Rabelasian fashion, the whole family dying of sausage poisoning, the man himself (I) a creature revolving in the yard. This is laugh out loud funny, especially in the way I is drawn in, naïve, gullible (as ridiculous as the story is), almost believing like Manton in Lovecraft’s The Unnamable. I sorts out the evidence, but notes he must have remarked that he remained skeptical, for Mahood casually let fall that I was lacking not only a leg, but an arm also. This might have pushed I into believing that man was him. But Mahood’s suggestion that the misfortune experienced by I’s family had caused him to turn back, from “that moment on I ceased to go along with him.” (315) I gives analysis/argument why he is not the man in Mahood’s story. I says “enough of this nonsense. I was never anywhere but here, no one ever got me out of here.” (317, 318) But Mahood tells another story, saying it is I: of a man in a jar, without arms or legs. There is a lot of detail, again I almost believes (“This story is not good, I’m beginning almost to believe it”). In fact, I is not these characters in Mahood’s stories. I is and remains in the predicament: “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) It is I’s pensum, he doesn’t know what the lesson is, or why there is a lesson. At last: “The stories of Mahood are ended. He has realized they could not be about me, he has abandoned, it is I who win, who tried so hard to lose in order to please him, and be left in peace.” (339) I doesn’t cry out in horror at the end “It is me – a man!” Unlike Manton who believes in the end, who cries out “It was the unnamable!” – I remains unconvinced.

Worm – argument and refutation. The words move to Worm, trying to convince I that he is Worm, a fetus like creature, and that Worm (or I) was born. “Now I seem to hear them say it is Worm’s voice beginning, I pass on the news, for what it is worth. Do they believe I believe it is I who am speaking?” (339) “Another trap to snap me up among the living.” (339) The trap is that Worm might have similarities to I himself. Worm’s “senses tell him nothing, nothing about himself, nothing about the rest, and this distinction is beyond him.” In fact, Worm is or may be in a womb, not yet born, not knowing anything. But unlike I, Worm does not know that there is anything to know. To the contrary, I knows there is nothing he can know. (340) Again, in the words, there is a long absurd back and forth of evidence and refutation, I ultimately fails to believe he is Worm and refutes the argument.

And finally, nothing but I himself, and not even that. The words turn to other evidence of I having lived, documents, photos, records. At last, I (or the words) speaks of himself, what he is, where he is. But like Carter, whom Manton says he was too fond of ending his stories with sights or sounds which paralyzed his heroes faculties and left them without courage, words, or associations to tell what they had experienced – I’s novel ends as I is on the verge of telling his own story, but he cannot, the words themselves are not his. It is impossible – I can’t speak or tell of I.

I must still go on saying words until they “say me,” strange journey. Silent for a moment, I will go on, in Texts for Nothing for instance. I has the impossible task of being the unnamable, of living as the unnamable, of trying to believe, but failing to believe, he has been among the living. And yet in both Beckett’s and Lovecraft’s The Unnamable the characters have the task of trying to define, know, name that unnamable “thing,” which they cannot.

But in Beckett’s The Unnamable, that embodied worldly I, like those in Mahood’s stories, or Carter and Manton – those above, moving in the light under sun or moon, are in fact (in inverse to Lovecraft’s story) the strange alien creatures dying in the slaughterhouse.