WRITING TOWARD THE WORD

1992

... Title. Writing Toward the Word: Deconstruction and Negative Theology in Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable. Author. Annette Abma. Date of Award. 9-1992. Degree Type. Thesis. Degree Name. Master of Arts (MA). Department. English. Supervisor. David Clark. Language. English ...

This paper explores the main causes of character-narrator’s linguistic as well as “existential anguish” (Esslin, 1968, p. 29) in Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable. The paper argues that the Unnamable’s on-going and exhaustive quest for a real self leads in failure mainly because of his dissemination in the stories of the others as well as his only available medium or language. Although throughout the narrative the voice pretends to be able to deliver itself with either the thoughts of the others or their stories in order to obtain an independent self, the narrative is mainly a representation of the narrating voice’s failure in coming to terms with the arbitrary nature of language and the other voices. It follows that, the Unnamable, being a purely linguistic self and subjugating to the non-referential power of language, relentlessly searches for a true self throughout the narrative. The present paper thus examines The Unnamable as a poststructural narrative, investigating the function of self, language and their troubled relationship in the novel as well as exploring, as Lance Olsen puts, Beckett’s and Derrida’s joint questions concerning “the deconstructive turn” and “the dissolution of self, world, and language” (1956, p. 4). Accordingly, applying a poststructuralist approach, the present paper examines the Unnamable’s intramental (or private) perceptions regarding his existential and linguistic anguish within the narrative.

Nasleđe, volume XII, issue 30, 2015

The aim of this paper is to interpret Samuel Beckett's novel The Unnamable inside the framework of poststructuralist criticism, primarily that of Jacques Derrida. The first part of the paper is dedicated to exploring Beckett's specific, bilingual situation in relation to how The Unnamable is narratively constructed. The main analysis focuses on the novel's narrative structure as a process of endless discursive deconstruction of the narrator's self, which, nevertheless, continuously aspires toward that end, toward silence. Special emphasis is placed on the analysis of the discursive treatment of the body, narratively positioned as the cultural product and physical setting of such discourse, but also as an insurmountable obstacle in the process of self-deconstruction, which can only go so far. We come to the conclusion that it is via The Unnamable's stream-of-consciousness narration and its attempted dissolution of the self, established in the Western metaphysical mindset, that Beckett most radically criticized the ideological conception of identity.

Litteraria Copernicana

ISSNp 1899-315X ss. 35-45

Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd&# 039; hui, 2004

The Unnamable is the story of a search to define and name oneself. This article examines the role of language in this regard, elaborates the notion of 'beyond' and its possibility, and finally assesses the possibility of silence 'within' and 'beyond' language and being. I argue that silence is 'the promise' that the language of the novel constantly makes, yet is never able to fulfil. Silence (and death) paradoxically motivates language and becomes part of (inside) the language of the text while always pointing to the outside. In order to discuss the above 'signifying forces' of the novel, it seems inevitable to read the novel in the light of deconstruction.

The study of subjectivity is especially relevant to psychoanalysis since it avoids social and political qualifications, and focuses on the structure of the narrative voice. In this respect, Kristeva " s innovative psychoanalytic notion of melancholia, as an incapacitating desire not to let go of the Real m/Other, is applied in the present article to the ontological impasse of the impoverished figure of Samuel Beckett " s The Unnamable (1958, 2003). It can be formulated as an ontological shade lingering within this precarious state, cast between life and death, and seeking the unnamable Thing which would be the real silence, corresponding at last to a voice of his own, the voice of voicelessness. Kristeva " s solution for this suicidal predicament, adopted in this study, is an aesthetic resort to the poetical dimension of language retrieving traces of the dead m/Other, and the fundamental function of denegation at once affirming and rejecting the m/Other. A semiotic analysis of The Unnamable, considering, among others, the pronouns and commas will reveal a latent materiality in the text: formal derangement. We propose that, through the metaphorical dialectic of the semiotic process and the symbolic representation, the unnamable-reader achieves, on a trans-symbolic scale, a melancholy sublime, the jouissance of formlessness before the unpresentable presence of the m/Other. This will yield our interpretation of the unnamable as an idealized subject-in-process (sujet-en-process) in terms of a pure flow of words: novel as mere " going on. " Therefore, the study presented here is an attempt to bring together the Beckettian destitution of the novel and Kristeva " s black sun through a jouissant dynamism of signs undermining the laws of the very language in which they are continuously generated.

2018

The writing of Samuel Beckett is associated with meaning in the meaninglessness and the production of what he calls 'literature of unword'. The casual escape from the world of words in the form of silences and pauses, in his play Waiting for Godot, urges to ask question of their existence and ultimately leads to investigate the theory behind their use in the play. This paper proposes that these absences (silence and pause) in Beckett's play force to think 'beyond' language. This paper asks how silence and pause in Beckett's text speak for the emergence of poststructuralist text. It aims to identify the significant features of the philosophy of deconstruction in the play of Beckett to demystify the hostile complicity between literature and philosophy. With the interpretive paradigm of poststructuralism this research focuses on the text as a research data. It attempts to delineate the relationship between poststructuralist theoretical concerns and text of Beckett. Keeping in view the theoretical concerns of Poststructuralist theorist Jacques Derrida, the main concern of the discussion is directed towards the notion of 'beyond' language into the absences that are aimed at silencing the existing discourse with the 'radical irony' of this anti-formal art that contains its own denial and thus represents the idea of ceaseless questioning and radical contradiction in art and any text. This article asks how text of Beckett vibrates with loud silence and has disrupted language to demonstrate the emptiness of words and thus exploring the limitless void of absences. Beckett's text resonates with silence and pause that is neither negation nor affirmation rather a poststructuralist's suspension of reality that is ever changing with the undecidablity of all meanings. Within the theoretical notion of Derrida's Différance this study interprets silence and pause in Beckett's art. The silence and pause behave like Derrida's Différance and have questioned their own existence in the text to deconstruct any definiteness and finality of reality to extend an undecidable threshold of poststructuralists that aims to evade the 'labyrinth of language'.

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 1992

their eyes away when faced by the as yet unnamable [my emphasis] which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity. (Writing 293) This rather lurid descriptionÂ-suggesting a kind of creature from the deconstructive lagoonÂ-may sound more like science fiction than philosophy, yet its antecedents are to be located not in Hollywood B-movies but in the French avant-garde novel. For that species of a non-species, that mute and formless monstrosity waiting to be born, is immediately recognizable to readers of Samuel Beckett: he calls it, as does Derrida, l'innommable, or the "unnamable." "Structure, Sign and Play" is not the only place where Derrida evokes the "unnamable." Again and again in his work, the struggle to gain a position outside the Western philosophical tradition has the sarne effect: it points toward, opens onto, or glimpses at what cannot be named. Thus, in Speech and Phenomena, the effort to move beyond voice as self-presence leads "across the inherited concepts [of the West], toward the unnamable" (77); in "White Mythology," the Nietzschean acknowledgment of philosophy as metaphor is identified with an "unnamable articulation" (Margins 270, Derrida's emphasis); in "Plato's Pharmacy," the deconstruction of the "pharmaceutical 'system'" (167) of Platonism prompts the question, "into what general, unnamable necessity are we thrown" (Dissemination 168); in "La parole soufflée" the attempt to project oneself "beyond man, beyond the metaphysics of Western theater" looks toward the "unnamable Divine" (Writing 185); and in Of Grammatology the assault on Saussure and "the age of the sign" discloses the "crevice through which the yet unnameable glimmer beyond. .. can be glimpsed" (14). Derrida provides what we might take as a summary view for all this in Positions: To "deconstruct" philosophy, thus, would be to thinkÂ-in the most faithful, interior wayÂ-the structured genealogy of philosophy's concepts, but at the same time to determineÂ-from a certain exterior that is unqualifiable or unnameable by philosophyÂ-what this history has been able to dissimulate or forbid. .. (6)' BEGAM 875

2018

The writing of Samuel Beckett is associated with meaning in the meaninglessness and the production of what he calls 'literature of unword'. The casual escape from the world of words in the form of silences and pauses, in his play <em>Waiting for Godot,</em> urges to ask question of their existence and ultimately leads to investigate the theory behind their use in the play. This paper proposes that these absences (silence and pause) in Beckett's play force to think 'beyond' language. This paper asks how silence and pause in Beckett's text speak for the emergence of poststructuralist text. It aims to identify the significant features of the philosophy of deconstruction in the play of Beckett to demystify the hostile complicity between literature and philosophy. With the interpretive paradigm of poststructuralism this research focuses on the text as a research data. It attempts to delineate the relationship between poststructuralist theoretical conce...