Samuel Beckett And His Representation Of Language

Title: "You would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what it is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery" (Beckett). Discuss.

The narrator of Murphy says that

"The nature of our outer reality remained obscure. The men, women and children of science would seem to have ways of kneeling to their facts as any other body of illuminati. The definition of outer reality, or of reality short and simple, varied according to the sensibility of the definer."

The 'sensibility of the definer' is a notion that strikes to the heart of Beckett's presentation of language, of words, in Murphy (1938), Molloy (1955), Malone Dies (1956), and The Unnamable (1958). Richard Begam suggests that most critics agree that self-reflexivity and 'the breakdown of the signifying chain, and the deferral of meaning' are a recurrent feature of postmodernist writing that is informed by an 'implicit anti-Cartesianism'. In this, forms of self-reflexivity undermine the mimetic notion that literature 'mirrors what lies beyond the world'. As the narrator of Murphy suggests when he tells us that, 'the definition of our outer reality.varied according to the sensibility of the definer', Beckett challenges Descartes' assumption that reality is effectively transparent. In this exact instance he suggests that our perception of reality is, as Begam puts it 'through linguistically and historically determined schemas' always with reference to a cultural code. Thus, 'The nature of our outer reality remain[s] obscure', it is impossible to find a knowledge that is true in itself, independent 'of the languages and institutions that human beings invent.' Simplistically speaking, Beckett creates discourse built on the fundamental understanding that there is no truth in language. This essay looks to examine the ways in which Beckett undermines the method of writing, to make 'the whole ghastly business look[s] like what it is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery.'

As Bran Nicol and Richard Begam examine in their efforts to define 'postmodernist' literature, a defining characteristic of this discourse is self-reflexivity. The flow of narrative prose in Molloy and Malone Dies is punctuated by phrases like 'But perhaps I'm remembering things' , or more aggressively disturbed by the narrator's interjection and judgment, as in Malone Dies, 'This is awful' . Intrusive commentary of this kind exposes the 'ontological distinctness of the real and fictional world, the literary conventions that disguise this distinctness' . There are, however, more subtle ways Beckett goes about undermining the method of writing in these texts, centred more significantly around the 'plot' development in the trilogy. The narrator in The Unnamable tells us towards the end of the novel,

".no point telling yourself stories, to pass the time, stories don't pass the time, nothing passes the time, that doesn't matter, that's how it is, you tell yourself stories, then any old thing, saying, No more stories from this day forth, and the stories go on, it's stories still"

This is significantly said after revealing that the characters of the three prior novels are in fact inventions of the narrator in The Unnamable ("All these Murphys, 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 and of me alone." ). The most obvious contradiction, or undermining of language, might be that 'stories don't pass the time' is an actual untruth ("A lie" ), realistically, by reading a story, time actually passes. We see in Malone Dies that in telling stories, Malone passes the time to his death - if we presume the end of his discourse to indicate his death. In waiting for his death, Malone talks of

".the voice of that silence which, like the dark, would one day triumph too. And then all would be still and dark and all things at rest for ever at last."

Malone, the character invented by the narrator of The Unnamable is able to achieve this silence, ".he will not hit anyone any more, he will not touch anyone any more, either with it.or with his pencil" where as his creator, who we take to be the narrator of The Unnamable, cannot,

".perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."

Here Beckett presents perhaps his most powerful critique on words: arguably the trilogy, and Murphy, have been climactically building, as each of the characters dies, or is 'silenced,' or 'abjected', to the 'ending', wherein the narrator of The Unnamable is able to achieve "the last words, the true last" , which we find out in the last sentence, is unachievable, "you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on". But of course, the narrator doesn't "go on," because the discourse ends. This is a contradiction, or perhaps more accurately a paradox that exemplifies Beckett's 'filling in the holes of words till all is blank and flat'.

Paradox and conflicting meanings lie at the heart of Beckett's language agenda, in unmasking the falsities of language and narrative. Alternatively, another example of the way Beckett undermines language and words through paradox is in the title of the final novel in the trilogy, The Unnamable. The writer of this title is in the position of authority, who unlike 'the unnamable' can be named. As Maria Minich Brewer suggests, 'The title as the text's proper name is put into question since the unnamable simultaneously confirms its necessary relation to the proper name and negates its capability to name or be named.' But more significant than this is the idea that something 'unnamable' can only be asserted as 'unnamable' on the condition that it is named. The ascribing of a name can only be achieved by language, 'within a system of signification' that paradoxically presents that which we are told is 'non representable' ,or rather, 'unnamable'. It seems important to note, as Brewer does, that the French title carries a different level of meaning than the English title, 'innomable' is 'that which is too vile, ignoble, disgusting, or abject to be designated' , whereas the English title carries the much more abstract notion of resisting being named whilst in reality being named.

This leads to another way in which Beckett attempts to undermine truth-telling in language, in the process of self-translation. In the opening to Murphy, the only of the novels being discussed here to be written first in English and then in French, we are told

"The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new."

This extract serves as a good example of the different devices Beckett uses that expose the multiplicity of language. Firstly, the phrase is a re-working of Ecclesiastes (1:9), "There is no new thing under the sun", 'revised aphorism' that is a device frequently employed by Beckett. In rephrasing a familiar aphorism, Beckett contradicts the sentiment of 'nothing new' by making it 'new'. This is particularly emphasised by the act of translating Murphy, in translating the text, arguably a new text is created. However, rather than entering into the discussion of translation (the idea of translation as being 'supplementary' to the original text, compared to Scleiermacher's 'radical distinction between translation and original work' ) I want to emphasise that in the act of translating, Beckett demonstrates the potential multiplicity of language, denying fixed meaning or interpretation. This is best shown in Murphy; at the beginning of chapter 8, Murphy makes the pun "Celia, s'il y a, Celia, s'il y a" which is the presumably the only phrase that exists identically between French and English 'translation' in any of the novels. The pun and the name are able to resist non-fixed meaning, which seems to exemplify perfectly Beckett's exposing language for what it is; even in the case of translating, he manages to contradict the act of translating itself, by finding a phrase that works perfectly in both French and English, and still achieves the same effect: of a comical pun.

The final way I want to show how Beckett uses language to undermine the method of writing, is in his noticeable and intriguing use of the cliché, or as Rubin Rabinovitz more accurately describes it, the 'revised aphorism'. In chapter 10 of Murphy, the narrator says

"Women are really extraordinary, the way they want to give their cake to the cat and have it. They never quite kill the thing they love."

The part of this extract, Beckett uses the familiar phrase 'to have one's cake and eat it too' amends it, firstly directing the criticism at 'women' and then extrapolating that instead of 'having one's cake' , women want their cat to have the cake, and instead of wanting also to 'eat it', women instead want to 'have it'. These changes are unexpected modifications that both amuse and unsettle. In the second part, 'yet each man kills the thing he loves' from Oscar Wilde's 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' is made into 'They never quite kill the thing they love.' In this manner, Beckett takes the cliché and reinvents it, 'revitalizing thinking without risking the complacency of a truth claim' . In repeating the familiar phrase with a consciously made change, it works to comment upon and 'rejuvenate the medium of language' .

Beckett's significant use of cliché and aphorism show an acute awareness that although language, as a device for truth telling, is a flawed device in communicating thought, it is inevitably the only one available. Beckett uses a part of language that is associated with degeneration, one that indicates 'a fundamental problem with thinking itself' , in that it represents unreflective thought that is reproduced merely out of habit. In the same way, he turns to another language, French, to attempt to dismantle "the terrible materiality of the word surface" and "create the literature of the unword." . Moving past the method of writing itself, the way in which Beckett reveals meaning to us is that which the discourse itself proposes. The text, Molloy, tells us that "Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong." This leads to the final and most pertinent assertion that Beckett offers in the opening to The Unnamable, writing "By aporia, pure and simple". The understanding that frames this groups of texts, that Beckett, and the narrator, are faced with the unsolvable problem of finding a way to express something when words serve as both subject and object.