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 14^th 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.

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)

I. An introduction (or an exercise in failing to introduce) the Innovative “I” in Beckett’s The Unnamable, by Pamela Dickson

‘The world is my representation’: — this holds true for every 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. – If any a priori truth can be asserted, then this is it; for this truth expresses the form of all possible and conceivable experience.
The World as Will and Representation, Volume 1, First Book, Section 1, (first paragraph) Schopenhauer, edited and translated by Norman, Welchman, and Janaway.

One might have a twofold existence: the I who is embodied, enslaved to the service of the will in Schopenhauer’s terms; the other I is the one who comes to understand that he is not acquainted with either the sun or the earth but rather only with an eye that sees the sun, with a hand that feels an earth. It is Beckett’s radical innovation to recognize this latter existence as a distinct and separate existence, and to shift the I to this existence. I note this I has a body by necessity, but perhaps it is utterly still, as if not there, not real.

The unnamable I of The Unnamable documents a life experience – in fictional terms, is an individual, a character. Beckett’s I, like Ahab, is the rare character who like a radical philosopher illuminates the world around him in a new light. I name the I of The Unnamable “I” for purposes of this discussion.

In the experience of life, there is or might be a self, as if a distinct self, looking on: looking on at a distance, looking on in a way that is distinct even in personality from the named self moving about in a world (i.e.,distinct from the engaged self who is immersed in all that is happening ‘out there’). I looks on as if separate from the body and named being in a world that I is apparently adhered to. Perhaps it can be said like this: in the long years of human work, human life reflected in words, the idea of “looking on,” the feeling of reflection or reflecting at a distance – perhaps it is Thoreau standing at lake, or the Stoic notion of judging fate swirling around one (the correct moral response to a threatening storm is to recognize that a storm and even death are indifferent) – is not new or even uncommon. Beckett’s innovation, as noted, one with an enormous expansion of insight, is to shift the “I” to the “one” who is looking on. Thus, I is not Thoreau standing at a lake, reflecting. I is (apparently, I wonders) an aspect of the body and life of Thoreau, peering on even at the life and body of Thoreau. I calls himself ‘I’ and looks. Thoreau’s experiences of being human might include I, but I as a separate being experiences and feels very differently from Thoreau. I might not even recognize Thoreau as himself (yes, the I of The Unnamable is a “him”), even if Thoreau claims, positively argues to the end, that “I is me, a truer me.” I doesn’t believe him. I experiences himself as separate from the life and body of Thoreau.

Understanding the nature of I is crucial to reading The Unnamable. That is, understanding the nature of I – his distinct existence – reveals, unveils aspects, one might say, of what can even be considered conventional aspects of the novel, the hilarious, outrageous nature of this novel. I will discuss this when discussing the plot – yes, there is a plot. The character ‘I’ is also, as noted, a revolutionary fictional technique, enabling one to see the nature of one who ‘looks on.’

In my experience, the more one (to say one) not only reflects on the part of oneself that seems to be looking on (in wonder in my case), as if at a distance from the passionate or banal, small or large events, being a body in a world, the more one not only reflects on the strange feeling of looking on, but even becomes I, dwells in I, lives as I looking on – shifts to being, living as I, immersing oneself in I, I’ll call her I. The more one immerses oneself in I the more one feels estranged from a world of phenomena, including the named creature I is attached to who is a body living a life “above,” who is in the world in the days experiencing time and space. Besides the rest, the more one is I, lives in or as I, the more questions arise. Nothing is clear. Everything becomes unclear. Nothing is even real (perhaps) or known or can help one know. It is unclear whether either I exists – I in the light or I in the dark – and if I in the dark exists, then where, and if not existing, whether I in the dark can die. In any event, I in the dark feels apart, a separate creature with different “life” dreams and goals, to call this life.

I is perhaps best illuminated by what he is not. He can see the man interacting in the world, a web of relations, moving and restless, one thing after another. But I is not that nature. I looks on. I might be closer to the Stoic view. The Stoics reflect on “what is not mine,” which includes, according to Epictetus, everything that others may say or do; everything that I have said and done in the past, as well as what troubles me because the thing is still to come; everything that happens to me, independently of my will, because of the body that surrounds me or my innate vital breath; everything which stirs the waves of the violent sea which bathes me. In I, being I, is an ever deeper reflection on and embodiment of “what is not mine” – the body, its hunger, thirst, desires, its voice, words, are not me, not mine.

In Jungian terms, the two, the I and the embodied I, might, perhaps, each have a distinct ego-consciousness and personality, and yet they are not Jung’s “dual personalities.” These two, in Beckett, are aspects of what is conventionally considered one ego, I believe; but in fact, if one dwells in I, one discovers I is a different being from the embodied I.

Perhaps this two-in-one seems like madness, or if not madness, on the road. Perhaps it is. The two-I’s-in-one is, perhaps, in part a kind of schizophrenic split due to a modern world. And yet, I believe the experience of I, the nature of I, is sanity, relief, an experience of one’s nature, an experience of a bit of reality – a reality one might linger with in The Unnamable, and other works of Beckett’s. Of course, this ‘I’ is in the background of many books of literature and philosophy. But in The Unnamable we delve into the experience of I himself, on his own terms, the life and travails of an I that is possibly (and impossibly) buried in ourselves, more deeply buried the more one fails to recognize I and take I out of the cave or prison of that self in a body in a world. I is born and comes to be in his own way, lives a unique existence, to call it living, and perhaps dies in his own way if he dies.