“Unquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving.” (Beckett, The Unnamable)
A sentence with a subject, gasping for air between two without. But the
“I" is not so much a narrator piping up, laying claim to speech. It’s part of a
gambit (“try saying I, that might work”) or the object of a wearied imperative
(Speak, self!), issuing from a place before any “I”, a place from which the “I”
is cast into language.
Because this place is formless and silent, lightless and shapeless, it
is unnameable. This place, from which the “I” is thrown into language, is always
betrayed by language. Each time the self contracts into language it loses
something; each time if shrinks into a noun something slips away into darkness
We confront the same thing everywhere in Beckett. The moment the “I” is
pitched into language - the vocalised or written I - it is also adrift
in language, to some degree out-there, separate. It no longer bears the
defining watermark of the pre-linguistic self (for want of a better word): the
property of being before every object, silent, formless, ‘in recess’. It is now
a kind of object itself, posited not positing.
Ordinarily, we are happy to forget the distinction, between the “I” that
is posited and the “I” that is doing the posting. We shrink-fit ourselves into
the ‘I’; it catches us.
Indeed, for Lacan, this is the elementary gesture that
sets up the self - the ‘contraction’ of our being into the “I”. The gesture
whereby we assume an “I” (as we speak of ‘assuming responsibility') also then
becomes something assumed in the other sense – unconscious, already
presupposed, behind us. This is the gesture that Beckett refuses. Or the set-up
stalls at the crucial moment. What is ordinarily behind us is for Beckett out there in front, as a problem.
But to speak of an “I” pitched into language
is already a fatal concession. Again, Who or What introduces this gambit; who
or what wagers an “I”? Here’s the nub. This ‘who’ or ‘what’ has no positive
attributes – it is only a kind of vacant point or (in Yeats’s phrase) a mad
abstract dark. To call it ‘the self’, ‘the subject’ (or the anything) is
only perhaps a continuation of the same gambit.
In the ‘mad
abstract dark’ before the “I” strikes up and assumes sovereignty , what do we hear? Memories, intentions, thoughts, borne along by the impersonal circuitry
of the brain. The churning and chatterings of a kind of pre-language, a babble, without narrative, belonging to nothing that
could be called a self, an ego. This is what Beckett’s prose does, to tarry with
pre-utterance, the 'mutter' and 'murmur', the continuum of sounds before the
'contraction', the contractive force of utterance allows you to begin.