Article Critique on "Samuel Beckett's the Unnamable the Story of Unavailing Conduct Under Harsh Interrogation System"

Article Critique 18 pages (4937 words) Sources: 22 Style: MLA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Foucault and Derrida in Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable

The narrator of Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable exists in a liminal space, neither wholly real nor non-existent, and he represents the kind of unsubjectified consciousness that is the ideal citizen of Michel Foucault's theoretical panopticon. By utilizing Jacques Derrida's theory regarding the construction of the subject and the role of the proper name in identification and signification, this essay demonstrates the extent to which the unnamable narrator is surveyed and controlled by the dominating power of the society in which he finds himself, and each attempt to subvert or escape this society only serves to further diminish his limited agency, such that even the ability to claim the status of 'I' is demonstrated to be an illusion, provided by the panopticon to facilitate the continued subservience of the narrator to its whims.

Introduction

Since its publication in 1953, Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable has confounded casual readers and critics alike with its richly convoluted narratorial voice and the intentionally ambiguous time and space. The title refers to both the character of the narrator and the narrative itself; the ambiguities created by the narrator's contradictory, mysterious, and intertextual claims render both the narrator and the story 'unnamable,' in the sense that neither can be positively identified, described, or defined, at least not to the extent that they might be sufficiently named. Thus, both the novel and the narrator are The Unnamable, and though initially daunting, this conflation ultimately points the way to an intelligible reading of the text because of what it reveals about the narrator's position. In short, by applying a consideration of the importance of naming to literature first formulated by Jacques Derrida to the inherent difficulties presented by the text, one is able to see the unnamable narrator as the "model" citizen of the kind of society described by Michel Foucault's metaphorical panopticon, an entirely circumscribed consciousness attempting to reach beyond the constraints of its position but ultimately failing in the face of overwhelming surveillance and oppression.

By deploying certain conventions of interrogation from the pulpy 'secret agent' and crime genres, the novel describes a panopticonic society from the perspective of its victim, who serves as the unnamable, ultimately unknowable center of a totalizing oppression. In this way, the narrator's creation of (potentially) alternate identities and allusions to previous Beckett novels can be read as an attempt to escape from the constraints of the novel (and the all-seeing eye of the reader) by utilizing the liminal role of the narratorial voice to 'teleport' (for lack of a better word) his agency beyond the limits of societally (and generically) imposed restrictions. However, these attempts actually serve to diminish the little agency the narrator has, so that the more he speaks the more he reduces himself to a shell of a character, present only as a puppet-like embodiment of the panopticon's ability to impose its control through the thought processes of its prisoners without having to expend the usual kinds of power associated with a totalizing force.

Before exploring The Unnamable in more detail, it will be necessary to review the critical tools which will allow for an accurate understanding of the novel. Firstly, a look at Jacques Derrida's consideration of the 'name' of literature in his essay "Who or What Is Compared? The Concept of Comparative Literature and the Theoretical Problems of Translation" will offer a means of understanding the novel and narrator's most prominent feature (or lack thereof). Ostensibly a consideration of the phenomena that is the comparative literature department, Derrida's essay actually reveals the importance of names as they relate to meaning, because according to Derrida, proper names "cannot be translated […] because they have no meaning, no conceptualizable and common meaning" (Derrida 36). What he means by this is that "they only have a referent, as one says, a unique referent, and when they are pronounced one can designate [viser] only a single, singular individual, one unique thing."

This claim demands interpretation because of the implications it has for Beckett's unnamable narrator, because as will be seen, the narrator's struggles are ultimately an attempt to become that "single, singular individual," which is an irreducible identity, standing apart from any generalized mass of humanity, and precisely the thing quashed by the kind of oppressive society described by Foucault's panopticon and the novel itself. Furthermore, the fact that the narrator is not simply unnamed but rather unnamable suggests the terrifying implications of the novel's society, and subsequently, human society in general.

If proper names have no meaning, then conversely, that which is unnamable would seem to have the potential for infinite meanings, such that the unnamable object is only ever visible in brief flashes, and never in its totality, like the quantum state of an electron only ever existing as a potentiality until observed by an outside entity. To give a brief preview of this fact's importance to the narrator of The Unnamable prior to the work of demonstrating it within the novel, one may consider the panopticon of the narrator's interrogators as the observational force temporarily fixing the narrator's identity (and meaning) via its gaze, and because the narrator is unnamable, unable to define himself individually and singularly, the overwhelming oppression of the narrator's condition fixes him solidly in the grasp of the interrogators, such that he can only ever be defined as a prisoner, and even then only as the space of the prisoner, devoid of actual content. As Federico Bellini notes in his essay "Beckett's Ticklish Characters: reading

Beckett through Zizek," the character of the narrator is "a conceptualization of the human subject as the place of an original void," or put another way, is the human subject prior to subjectification, because "if we consider naming, in accordance with most deconstructionist critique, as a precedent to subjectification," then the unnamable narrator "is the condition that every nomination presupposes, the rooting of the name in the being" (Bellini 2-3).

At this point one must necessarily engage in a brief diversion into psychoanalysis, because this is where Zizek and subsequently Bellini find the origins of subject formation. In short, the subject arises out of a split (found most obviously in the example of Lacan's mirror stage but elucidated elsewhere) when it recognizes itself in opposition to not-itself and thus is defined (with this not-itself being commonly denoted as the Other but appearing in any number of formulations within psychoanalytic theory).

The details of this theory are not so important to require reiteration here, as it suffices to note that subject formation occurs as the result of an event, such that one may note a before and after. For the unnamable narrator, however, the possibility of this event is precluded by his position in the novel, established immediately as definitively indeterminate, because "in The Unnamable there is no phenomenon of the other, except for a system, (the system of language) which" ultimately only serves to confuse the identity of the narrator through various linguistic tricks without ever allowing him a true Other that might offer him the chance for true subjecthood (Uhlmann 134).

The narrative begins with a series of breathless dialogic questions and delusional answers: "Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning. I say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that" (Beckett 285). These questions and answers may be read as the terrified queries of a (seemingly) impossible conscious non-subject, existing within a contradictorily undefined and entirely enclosed space and time and without the ability to consider itself as a subject but burdened with the knowledge of this inability. "I say I" can be read as the narrator's first (failed) attempt to establish an identity and subjecthood for himself, in a pitiful, almost farcical reversal of Yahweh's omnipotent "I am that I am." However, whereas the eternal god of Exodus by definition has the power to define himself, the narrator's attempt only succeeds in the tautology of 'I,' reiterating the fact that the 'I' can only ever refer to the 'I' in a single instance of uttering 'I.' Thus, "the voice of the text, despite an obligation to speak, refuses to continue speaking in any way -- to adopt any worldview, essentially -- that would promote its entrance into the world as an individual" (Jones 5). Furthermore, the answers reveal that "the question, and the entire authority it seeks to establish in the name of knowledge, is undermined" by the narrator's inability to formulate genuine answers, but rather only "hypotheses" (Armstrong 190). To see why this is the case, one must examine the work of Michel Foucault, and specifically his consideration of the panopticon, because it will reveal precisely how the narrator is able to exist in this state of non-subjecthood.

In his seminal work Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault uses the image of the panopticon to describe the effects of society on the individual. Originally, the panopticon was a kind of prison in which a central observation station was surrounded by prisoners, such that no… READ MORE

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