Posts Tagged → the unnamable

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.

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.