Maurice Blanchot (b. 1907), French novelist and critic, has
published several novels, the best known, Thomas LObscur (1941); but he is particularly influential for such critical works as La Part du feu (1949), LEspace littraire (1955), Le Livr venir (1959), LEntretien infini (1969). Who is doing the talking in Samuel Becketts novels, who is this tireless I constantly repeating what seems to be always the same thing? What is he trying to say? What is the author looking forwho must be somewhere in the books? What are we looking forwho read them? Or is he merely going round in circles, obscurely revolving, carried along by the momentum of a wandering voice, lacking not so much sense as center, producing an utterance without proper beginning or end, yet greedy, exacting, a language that will never stop, that finds it intolerable to stop, for then would come the moment of the terrible discovery: when the talking stops, there is still talking; when the language pauses, it perseveres; there is no silence, for within that voice the silence eternally speaks. An experiment without results, yet continuing with increasing purity from book to book by rejecting the very resources, meager as they are, that might permit it to continue. It is this treadmill movement that strikes us first. This is not someone writing for beautys sake (honorable though that pleasure may be), not someone driven by the noble compulsion many feel entitled to call inspiration (expressing what is new and important out of duty or desire to steal a march on the unknown). Well, why is he writing then?
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Because he is trying to escape the treadmill by convincing himself that
he is still its master, that, at the moment he raises his voice, he might stop talking. But is he talking? What is this void that becomes the voice of the man disappearing into it? Where has he fallen? Where now? Who now? When now? He is strugglingthat is apparent; sometimes he struggles secretly, as if he were concealing something from us, and from himself too, cunningly at first, then with that deeper cunning which reveals its own hand. The first stratagem is to interpose between himself and language certain masks, certain faces: Molloy is a book in which characters still appear, where what is said attempts to assume the reassuring form of a story, and of course it is not a successful story, not only because of what it has to tell, which is infinitely wretched, but because it does not succeed in telling it, because it will not and cannot tell it. We are convinced that this wanderer who already lacks the means to wander (but at least he still has legs, though they function badlyhe even has a bicycle), who eternally circles around a goal that is obscure, concealed, avowed, concealed again, a goal that has something to do with his dead mother who is still dying, something that cannot be grasped, something that, precisely because he has achieved it the moment the book begins (I am in my mothers room. Its I who live there now.), obliges him to wander ceaselessly around it, in the empty strangeness of what is hidden and disinclined to be revealedwe are convinced that this vagabond is subject to a still deeper error and that his halting, jerky movements occur in a space which is the space of impersonal obsession, the obsession that eternally leads him on; but no matter how ragged our sense of him, Molloy nevertheless does not relinquish himself, remains a name, a site within bounds that guard against a more disturbing danger. There is certainly a troublesome principle of disintegration in the story of Molloy, a principle not confined to the instability of the wanderer, but further requiring that Molloy be mirrored, doubled, that he become another, the detective Moran, who pursues Molloy without ever catching him and who in that pursuit sets out (he too) on the path of endless error, a path such that anyone who takes it cannot remain himself, but slowly falls to pieces. Moran, without knowing it, becomes Molloy, that is, becomes an entirely different character, a metamorphosis which undermines the security of the narrative element and simultaneously introduces an allegorical sense, perhaps a disappointing one, for we do not feel it is adequate to the depths concealed here.
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Malone Dies evidently goes further still: here the vagabond is
nothing more than a moribund, and the space accessible to him no longer offers the resources of a city with its thousand streets, nor the open air with its horizon of forests and sea which Molloy still conceded us; it is nothing more than the room, the bed, the stick with which the dying man pulls things toward him and pushes them away, thereby enlarging the circle of his immobility, and above all the pencil that further enlarges it into the infinite space of words and stories. Malone, like Molloy, is a name and a face, and also a series of narratives, but these narratives are not self-sufficient, are not told to win the readers belief; on the contrary, their artifice is immediately exposed the stories are invented. Malone tells himself: This time I know where I am goingit is a game. I am going to playI think I shall be able to tell myself four stories, each one on a different theme. With what purpose? To fill the void into which Malone feels he is falling; to silence that empty time (which will become the infinite time of death), and the only way to silence it is to say something at any cost, to tell a story. Hence the narrative element is nothing more than a means of public fraud and constitutes a grating compromise that overbalances the book, a conflict of artifices that spoils the experiment, for the stories remain stories to an excessive degree: their brilliance, their skillful irony, everything that gives them form and interest also detaches them from Malone, the dying man, detaches them from the time of his death in order to reinstate the customary narrative time in which we do not believe and which, here, means nothing to us, for we are expecting something much more important. It is true that in The Unnamable the stories are still trying to survive: the moribund Malone had a bed, a roomMahood is only a human scrap kept in a jar festooned with Chinese lanterns; and there is also Worm, the unborn, whose existence is nothing but the oppression of his impotence to exist. Several other familiar faces pass, phantoms without substance, empty images mechanically revolving around an empty center occupied by a nameless I. But now everything has changed, and the experiment, resumed from book to book, achieves its real profundity. There is no longer any question of characters under the reassuring protection of a personal name, no longer any question of a narrative, even in the formless present of an interior monologue; what was narrative has become conflict, what assumed a face, even a face in fragments, is now discountenanced. Who is doing the talking here? Who is this I condemned to speak without respite, the being who says: I am obliged to speak. I shall never be silent. Never. By a reassuring
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convention, we answer it: it is Samuel Beckett. Thereby we seem to
draw closer to what is of concern in a situation that is not fictional, that refers to the real torment of a real existence. The word experiment is another name for what has actually been experiencedand here too we try to recover the security of a name, to situate the books content at the stable level of a person, at a personal level, where everything that happens happens with the guarantee of a consciousness, in a world that spares us the worst degradation, that of losing the power to say I. But The Unnamable is precisely an experiment conducted, an experience lived under the threat of the impersonal, the approach of a neutral voice that is raised of its own accord, that penetrates the man who hears it, that is without intimacy, that excludes all intimacy, that cannot be made to stop, that is the incessant, the interminable. Who is doing the talking here then? We might try to say it was the author if this name did not evoke capacity and control, but in any case the man who writes is already no longer Samuel Beckett but the necessity which has displaced him, dispossessed and disseized him, which has surrendered him to whatever is outside himself, which has made him a nameless being, The Unnamable, a being without being, who can neither live nor die, neither begin nor leave off, the empty site in which an empty voice is raised without effect, masked for better or worse by a porous and agonizing I. It is this metamorphosis that betrays its symptoms here, and it is deep within its process that a verbal survival, an obscure, tenacious relic persists in its immobile vagabondage, continues to struggle with a perseverance that does not even signify a form of power, merely the curse of not being able to stop talking. Perhaps there is something admirable about a book which deliberately deprives itself of all resources, which accepts starting at the very point from which there can be no continuation, yet which obstinately proceeds without sophistry and without subterfuge for 179 pages, exhibiting the same jerky movement, the same tireless, stationary tread. But this is still the point of view of the external reader, contemplating what he regards as only a tour de force. There is nothing admirable in inescapable torment when you are its victim, nothing admirable in being condemned to a treadmill that not even death can free you from, for in order to get on that treadmill in the first place, you must already have abandoned life. Esthetic sentiments are not called for here. Perhaps we are not dealing with a book at all, but with something more than a book; perhaps we are approaching that movement from which all books derive, that point of origin where, doubtless, the work is lost, the point
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which always ruins the work, the point of perpetual unworkableness
with which the work must maintain an increasingly initial relation or risk becoming nothing at all. One might say that The Unnamable is condemned to exhausting the infinite. I have nothing to do, that is to say, nothing in particular. I have to speak, whatever that means. Having nothing to say, no words but the words of others, I have to speak. No one compels me to, there is no one, its an accident, a fact. Nothing can ever exempt me from it, there is nothing, nothing to discover, nothing to recover, nothing that can lessen what remains to say, I have the ocean to drink, so there is the ocean then. It is this approach to origin which makes the experience of the work still more dangerous, dangerous for the man who bears it, dangerous for the work itself. But it is also this approach which assures the experiment its authenticity, which alone makes of art an essential research, and it is by having rendered this approach evident in the nakedest, most abrupt manner that The Unnamable has more importance for literature than most successful works in its canon. Try listening to this voice that speaks, knowing that it lies, indifferent to what it says, too old perhaps and too humiliated ever to be able to say at last the words that might make it stop. And try descending into that neutral region where the self surrenders in order to speak, henceforth subject to words, fallen into the absence of time where it must die an endless death:the words are everywhere, inside me, well well, a minute ago I ha no thickness, I hear them, no need to hear them, no need of a head, impossible to stop them, impossible to stop, Im in words, made of words, others words, what others, the place too, the air, the walls, the floor, the ceiling, all words, the whole world is here with me, Im the air, the walls, the walled-in one, everything yields, opens, ebbs, flows, like flakes, Im all these flakes, meeting, mingling, falling asunder, wherever I go I find me, leave me, go toward me, come from me, nothing ever but me, a particle of me, retrieved, lost, gone astray, Im all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling, no sky for their dispersing, coming together to say, fleeing one another to say, that I am they, all of them, those that merge, those that part, those that never meet, and nothing else, yes something else, that Im quite different, a quite different thing, a wordless thing in an empty place, a hard shut dry cold black place where nothing stirs, nothing speaks, and that I listen, and that I seek, like a caged beast born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born of caged beasts [Translated by Richard Howard]
Allison B. Gilmore-You Can't Fight Tanks With Bayonets - Psychological Warfare Against The Japanese Army in The Southwest Pacific (Studies in War, Society, and The Militar) (1998)