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 17^th 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 18^th 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.