After a war spent in hiding in the south of France, and a period spent working at a Red Cross hospital in Saint-L?, Samuel Beckett returned to his apartment in Paris at the beginning of 1946 to try, like so many others, to resume his life. He had been writing for fifteen years and had to his name a short critical essay on Proust (1931), a book of short stories (More Pricks than Kicks, 1934), a volume of poems (Echo's Bones, 1935) and a novel (Murphy, 1938), of whose fortunes he had had no word during the war, and which he discovered had been allowed to go out of print in 1943. He also had the manuscript of a novel written in Roussillon, the wildly weird Watt, which began a long career of rejections by baffled publishers in 1946. If these were not entirely inspiring prospects, there seemed no reason either why Beckett should not be able to resume, on the same terms as before, his place as a minor participant in the literary and artistic circles that were beginning to come back together in Paris, eking out the allowance he received from his mother with work as a jobbing reviewer and translator.
Two things occurred to change all this. The first was a realisation that suddenly came to Beckett, probably during a trip back to Ireland to visit his family in May 1946, that the way for him to write might not involve trying to emulate the constellatory omnicompetence of James Joyce, but rather exploring the opposite condition, of impotence, ignorance and weakness. The second was the practical and philosophical enactment of this renunciation as, returning to Paris, Beckett began writing, not in the English of which he had made himself such a perplexing and exhibitionist virtuoso, but in the French of his adopted country. This was not quite such an abrupt or overnight decision as is sometimes thought, for Beckett had in fact begun writing in French before the war, producing a short critical essay ('Les deux besoins') and a sequence of poems. More significantly, perhaps, he had also completed a translation of his novel Murphy into French, partly in collaboration with his friend Alfred Péron, in 1940. Beckett would speak often and consistently in later years of the salutary effects of writing in a language which was less sumptuously stuffed with stylishness as English was, for him at least. But it is likely that significant encouragement for his beginning to write in French was also provided by the fact that, at the end of 1945, he had signed a contract with the publisher Bordas for the French version of Murphy, along with all future work both in French and in English. In the event, Bordas would show no interest in any of the work Beckett was to offer them over the next six years, leading him eventually, and after some painful wrangling, to extract himself from his contract with them in 1951; but the signing of the contract must initially have provided a considerable boost to his sense of the possibility of being able to establish himself as a writer in French.
Whatever the impetus may have been, there then followed a remarkable torrent of writing in French, beginning with four long stories or 'nouvelles', and another novel in French, Mercier et Camier, both of which were completed in 1946, and a play, Eleuthéria, written in a single month at the beginning of 1947. Then followed the sequence of three novels of which The Unnamable is the culmination, all substantially completed over the next three years, along with the play that would make Beckett suddenly famous, En attendant Godot.
Molloy was written in seven months, between 1 May and 1 November 1947. Its sequel, Malone meurt, was begun almost straight away, on 27 November, and completed six months later, on 30 May 1948. A pause of ten months then ensued, and it seems clear that Beckett had no thought of a third novel in the sequence at this point. He wrote to Thomas MacGreevy in January 1948, referring to Molloy as the second last in a sequence of works beginning with Murphy, on the last of which (Malone meurt) he was currently at work (Pilling 2006, p. 102). It was not until 29 March 1949 that Beckett began work on L'Innommable. His principal diversion during this lay-off was the writing of En attendant Godot, in a four-month streak between October 1948 and January 1949.
The third novel took longer than either of its predecessors. Beckett worked on his first draft for nine months, from March 1949 to January 1950. Pressure of other commitments, notably the translations he was preparing for the Anthology of Mexican Poetry that would eventually appear in English in 1958, kept him from completing L'Innommable until he took the manuscript with him to Ireland in June 1950, where he would remain until September, typing it up. Meanwhile, his partner, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, had been active on his behalf, trying, in the absence of any interest from Bordas, to interest the recently formed éditions de Minuit in Beckett's French novels, of which there were now four in the queue: Mercier et Camier, Molloy, Malone meurt and L'Innommable.
That Beckett had come to think of the last three as forming a coherent sequence is indicated by the fact that when he did eventually sign a contract with Minuit in November 1950 it was for publication as a whole of what would in time become known simply as the Trilogy. However, the novels were published separately, Molloy in February 1951 and Malone meurt later that year, in November. There then followed almost a two-year gap before L'Innommable appeared in July 1953. It would sell 476 copies in the first year, a pretty decent sale and one no doubt buoyed up by Beckett's new fame as the author of En attendant Godot, which had premiered in January 1953.
The huge outpouring of work written in French from 1946 to 1950 had left Beckett with the bleak aftermath of having to produce English translations, to catch up with himself. Somewhat oddly, given that Beckett had not sought much assistance in writing or revising the original texts in French, his initial idea was to give the job of turning his work into English to somebody else, and the young writer Patrick Bowles was selected for the task. But if this was the idea, it did not last long, for Beckett was soon wrestling with the text alongside Bowles, working closely on each sentence. The fact that Minuit announced that it expected Bowles to be Beckett's translator for two more years suggests that Beckett initially intended to collaborate with him on translating all the novels in the Trilogy. But Beckett seems initially to have found it more efficient, and less trying, for Bowles to produce first versions of the text for him to work over, and subsequently, following the translation of Molloy, to take sole responsibility for later translations. Work on the translation of the next novel in the sequence, Malone meurt, occupied him almost continuously for much of 1955, and he expected to be able to begin work on translating L'Innommable the following year.
As with its original composition, translating L'Innommable gave Beckett much more trouble than the previous two novels in the sequence, tough going though they had been. He began the job in March 1956, but then abandoned it. He wrote guiltily to Thomas MacGreevy in July, telling him that he knew he should be getting on with the translation, but that it was an impossible job. All the time, new work was beginning to make demands, including of course further translating demands. These were intensified by the fact that Beckett seems to have considered at this point in his life that he might have to be responsible for the German translations of his work as well: he had already worked closely with Erich Franzen on the German translation of Molloy. By January 1957, the gloomy prospect lay before him of translating All That Fall, a radio play he had written in English for the BBC (and his first work in English for over ten years), and of working on both the German and English translations of the play Fin de partie and the German translations of Malone meurt and Echo's Bones. Beckett eventually began to translate L'Innommable in his country cottage at Ussy in February 1957, but wrote in March to Aidan Higgins that he doubted being able to complete it. Just as he had written the whole of En attendant Godot in the intermission between Malone meurt and L'Innommable, he now completed the English translation of Fin de partie into Endgame in a few weeks between May and June 1957. There was another protestation of the impossibility of translating L'Innommable in a letter to Ethna MacCarthy in November, and he told Mary Hutchinson in December that he had only got just beyond halfway through it. He resumed the task on 21 January 1958 and was able to complete a first draft by 23 February. Working on The Unnamable coincided with a bout of writing in English – first of all on his radio play Embers, and then on Krapp's Last Tape, which, glimpsing the finishing line perhaps, he began three days before completing the first draft of The Unnamable. But he would not complete the revision of the translation until June 1958, more than two years after he had started on it, the translation thus taking twice as long as writing the novel in French in the first place.
Where the original manuscript notebooks of L'Innommable suggest that that text was composed easily, with few revisions, the three exercise books and subsequent typescript in which Beckett worked on his translation (held in the Humanities Research Center, Austin, Texas) show frequent deletions, insertions and revisions (Admussen 1979, pp. 60, 86–7). More than was the case with the preceding two works of the Trilogy, Beckett seems to have seen in the translation process an opportunity to make a considerable number of small but sometimes significant adjustments to the original, with the result that the English Unnamable is a rather different text from the French. This is apparent from the outset, where Beckett decides to change the order of the questions that open the text, 'Où maintenant? Quand maintenant? Qui maintenant?' (Beckett 1971, p. 7) being rendered (somewhat less logically?) as 'Where now? Who now? When now?' (Beckett 1959b, p. 293). Beckett was even uncertain to begin with about how to render the title into English, and we should certainly be grateful that he decided against the idea he briefly entertained of calling it Beyond Words (Admussen 1979, p. 87). A particularly large class of revisions involves what Beckett will later in Worstward Ho call 'worsening', the disimproving in various ways of his speaker's predicament, or intensification of his reaction to it. The annoyance at 'me trouver sur un terrain si peu solide' is sharpened to 'having to flounder in such muck' (Beckett 1959b, p. 326). The inoffensive 'Histoires …' becomes 'balls about being and existing' (Beckett 1959b, p. 351). Sometimes a phrase is omitted from the English translation for the purposes of weakening (though the effect is unlikely to be detectable to any but a reader aware of what has been omitted): the sentence 'for now we must speak, and speak of Worm' is made to do without the last reassurance that the French seems to give itself – 'il faut le pouvoir' ('it must be possible'). The sequence 'no vegetables, no minerals' is similarly truncated, dropping the 'pas d'animaux' of the French. '[M]y inexistence in the eyes of those who are not in the know' (Beckett 1959b, p. 347) ratchets up the simple 'existence' of the French. Beckett also often takes the opportunity to sharpen comic incongruity, for example in the opening words of the text in which the aside 'premier pas va', for which the straight-forward translation 'first step taken' would have held no surprises (though it would have sacrificed the play between the two meanings of pas, 'not' and 'step'), but is rendered in the queerly lurching 'off it goes on' (Beckett 1959b, p. 293). In the English text, Mahood's wife announces to her children, of her approaching one-legged husband, 'Oh look children, he's down on his hands and knee' (Beckett 1959b, p. 321), which gives a grotesque exactitude to the unexceptional but anatomically incorrect 'il est à genoux' of the French. Sometimes the move to greater specificity is harder to account for; the speaker describes himself halting at intervals to rub his stump not just with 'du baume tranquille', but with 'Elliman's Embrocation' (Beckett 1959b, p. 323). The protest that 'it's not my turn … my turn to live' renders 'mon tour de vie' as 'my turn of the life-screw' (Beckett 1959b, p. 403), thereby veritably imparting another turn of the screw to the original formulation. The cumulative result is an English text that seems (again if only to the comparing eye) angrier, more pained and more bitterly uncompromising than the French, and with greater and more sardonic switches of register ('c'est un beau rêve que je viens de faire là, un excellent rêve' – 'that's a darling dream I've been having, a broth of a dream' [Beckett 1959b, p. 382]).
One is able to see the process of transformation sometimes in the three early excerpts from the ongoing translation that Beckett published during 1958 in Texas Quarterly, Chicago Review and Spectrum (Beckett 1958a, 1958b, 1958c). The version of the first five paragraphs that appeared in the winter 1958 issue of Spectrum, for example, tells us that 'there will not be much on the subject of Malone, from whom there is nothing more to be expected' (Beckett 1958c, p. 4), which is not too far away from 'il sera peu question de Malone, de qui il n'y a plus rien à attendre' (Beckett 1971, p. 9). The final version of the text darkens this slightly, but perceptibly, to 'from whom there is nothing further to be hoped' (Beckett 1959b, p. 294). Other small changes move us from the relative plainness of the French to the slightly stickler-ish precision of the English, perhaps reversing a little the weakening that Beckett sought in writing in French. In the Spectrum version, Malone appears 'always at the same distance' (Beckett 1958c, p. 6) – 'à la même distance' (Beckett 1971, p. 12) – but, in the final text, 'at the same remove' (Beckett 1959b, p. 296); a little later 'I hope I may have occasion to come back to this question' – 'J'espère que j'aurai l'occasion de revenir sur ce question' (Beckett 1971, p. 12) – evolves into the slightly more bureaucratic 'I hope I may have occasion to revert to this question' (Beckett 1959b, p. 6).
Similarly, the process of reasoning is made a little more ironically academic in the reflections on the speaker's position with regard to the orbiting figure of Malone: 'Car alors Malone' (Beckett 1971, p. 13) becomes 'For if I were [at the circumference] then Malone' (Beckett 195 c, p. 7), and then in the Calder and Boyars edition 'For if I were it would follow that Molloy' (Beckett 1959b, p. 297). It is possible that the change from 'Malone' to 'Molloy' is intended to be the warrant of the speaker's slight uncertainty about the character's identity, but it seems to me likely to be an error, and this edition reinstates the 'Malone' of the Spectrum text and the Olympia edition (Beckett 1959a, p. 409). However, there are similar variations in the naming of characters between the French and English versions, involving the substitution of Malone for Mahood. Reflecting on his idea of his 'master', the speaker in the French version remarks 'Ceci a tout l'air d'une anecdote de Mahood. Et pourtant non, toutes les histoires de Mahood étaient sur moi' (Beckett 1971, p. 43). The Calder and Boyars version of the English text gives 'This sounds like one of Malone's anecdotes', and omits the second sentence ('And yet all Mahood's stories were of me'), while the Grove text translates the French faithfully: 'This sounds like one of Mahood's anecdotes' (Beckett 2006, p. 306). A little later, during the description of Mahood's one-legged progress towards the rotunda, an aside in the French text, 'je cite Mahood' (Beckett 1971, p. 55), is rendered as 'I quote Malone' (Beckett 1959, p. 322); once again, the Grove edition translates the French exactly – 'I quote Mahood' (Beckett 2006, p. 313). A third example occurs when a remark regarding exhortations that the speaker hears which 'empruntent le même véhicule que celui employé par Mahood et consorts' (Beckett 1971, p. 83) becomes 'are conveyed to me by the same channel as that used by Malone and Co.', with the Grove version once more translating literally, with 'Mahood and Co.' (Grove 2006, p. 330). These variations are puzzling. Are they Beckett's own slips of concentration, or are they evidence of the deliberate attempt to compound the confusion of the speaker with regard to the voices that he hears? Three such mistakes certainly seem too many to be accidental. But, if the Grove press edition represents Beckett's own correction, it seems odd that he should have allowed the Calder and Boyars to retain the Malone references. Given the uncertainty, this edition retains the Calder and Boyars readings.
Similar transitions can be observed in the other excerpts. In the Chicago Review excerpt, from the section dealing with the narrator's life in a jar, 'my course is not a spiral' (Beckett 1958b, p. 82), translating 'Ce n'est pas une spirale, mon chemin' (Beckett 1971, p. 66), becomes in the 1959 version 'my course is not helicoidal' (Beckett 1959b, p. 329), and 'my eyes, free to roll at will', translating 'les yeux, qui ont une faculté de roulement autonome' (Beckett 1958b, p. 83), turns into the codlyrical 'my eyes, free to roll as they list' (Beckett 1959b, p. 329). In the Texas Quarterly extract, a dense passage from the close of the novel, the 'le petit matin' of the French text (Beckett 1971, p. 190) is rendered as 'the crack of dawn', but then sardonically screwed up to 'the dayspring' (Beckett 1959b, p. 404) in the final version.
Other changes of emphasis are necessitated by the impossibility of exact equivalence. The sing-song sequence 'd'histoires de berceau, cerceau, puceau, pourceau, sang et eau, peau et os, tombeau' – literally, 'stories of the cradle, hoop-skirt, virgin, hog, blood and water, skin and bone, gravestone' (Beckett 1971, p.152) – is expansively reinvented in 'tales like this of wombs and cribs, diapers bepissed and the first long trousers, love's young dream and life's old lech, blood and tears and skin and bones and the tossing in the grave' (Beckett 1959b, p. 382). One of the more substantial excisions is of a passage reflecting on the fly-catching skills of the figure in the jar outside the restaurant:
Des mouches. Elles ne sont peut-être pas très nourrissantes, ni d'un go?t très plaisant, mais la question n'est pas là, mais ailleurs, loin de l'utile, loin de l'agréable. J'attrape aussi les papillons de nuit, attirés par les lampions, quoique plus difficilement. Mais je n'en suis encore qu'à mes débuts, dans ce nouvel exercice, je suis loin d'avoir atteint mon plafond. (Beckett 1971, p. 76)
The flies. They are perhaps neither very nourishing, nor very pleasant to the taste, but it is not a question of that, but of something else, far from utility or pleasure. I also catch moths, attracted by the lanterns, though with more difficulty. But it is still early days in this new enterprise, I am far from having reached my peak. [My translation]
With the completion of his English translation, Beckett was now in a position to publish all three novels of the Trilogy together. He seems to have been rather ambivalent on this question of its collective designation. Although he wrote to Aidan Higgins in August 1958 that he had always wanted the three novels to appear in one volume, he also informed John Calder on two occasions, in January and December 1958, that he did not wish the word 'trilogy' to be used of the books (Pilling 2006, pp. 141, 143). He would write in similarly emphatic terms to Barney Rosset of Grove Press in May 1959. The three texts were first published in one volume by Olympia Press, under the title Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable – A Trilogy and by Grove Press, with the title Beckett himself suggested (Ackerley and Gontarski 2004, p. 596), Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. The English Calder and Boyars edition appeared in March 1960, though with a 1959 imprint, and, like the Grove Press edition, made no reference to the texts being a trilogy. Nevertheless, the inseparability of The Unnamable from the sequence as a whole, and its role in confirming it as a sustained and completed sequence is suggested by the fact that no separate edition of The Unnamable would become available in Britain until Calder and Boyars issued theirs in 1975.
The Unnamable seems triumphantly to use the extreme conditions of inhibition and impediment that it has set for itself to generate a way of keeping going. But there is no doubt that Beckett did see The Unnamable as a genuine impasse, a point beyond which, for a long time, it seemed impossible for him to go. For this reason, Beckett himself seems to have seen the text as a defining point in his career. In an interview with Israel Schenker, published in the New York Times on 5 May 1956, Beckett referred to his predicament after The Unnamable or, as it still was at that time, L'Innommable:
I wrote all my work very fast – between 1946 and 1950. Since then I haven't written anything. Or at least nothing that has seemed to me valid. The French work brought me to the point where I felt I was saying the same thing over and over again … In the last book, L'Innommable, there's complete disintegration. No 'I', no 'have', no 'being'. No nominative, no accusative, no verb. There's no way to go on.
It would be unwise to assume that these are Beckett's ipsissima verba, since this is simply the report of an interview. But, if Beckett did indeed say that he had not written anything after L'Innommable, 'the last book', it is slightly odd that he should do so, for he had in fact published Textes pour rien in November 1955, and had completed early versions of both the play Fin de partie and a mime that would become Acte sans paroles. The Unnamable may have been particularly on Beckett's mind when he gave this interview in 1956 because he was at that moment struggling to make headway with the English translation of it. It seems as though the novel may have continued to function for Beckett as a kind of recurring limit, or ne plus ultra, even after he had in actual fact put it behind him.
Oddly enough, Beckett had found the escape route even before beginning to write what would become the third text of the Trilogy, for after completing Malone meurt he suspended work on fiction to compose En attendant Godot. This was by no means Beckett's first attempt at drama, for he had worked for some time on a play about the life of Samuel Johnson, of which only the fragment known as 'Human Wishes' survives, and had completed the play Eleuthéria, which he never translated into English and which would not be published until after his death. But it was Waiting for Godot that was to mark the beginning of his involvement in the theatre in earnest.
Beckett would report the sensation of not being able to go on, frequently, throughout the rest of his writing life, but the extreme challenge of finding a way of beginning again after The Unnamable seems to provide the template for these experiences. Nearly all commentators have agreed with Beckett in finding The Unnamable a kind of terminus: the ultimate point of paradoxical intensification, where narrative means have shrunk to nothing, but narration must go on, where there is nothing left to write with or about, and yet somehow the writing manages to continue, consumed by and subsisting only on itself.
Seeing it as, in Michael Robinson's words, 'the inevitable and terrifying end' to his work up to that point (Robinson 1969, p. 191), critics writing of Beckett's fiction up to the end of the 1970s tended to exhibit a certain stunned, respectful perplexity with regard to the novel. They seem unwilling to do much more than offer more or less simplifying explications or paraphrases of it, relying heavily on extended quotations. Of course such summaries, like those of John Fletcher (Fletcher 1964, pp. 179–94) or Eugene Webb (Webb 1970, pp. 123–9), offered very considerable and much-needed assistance to baffled early readers of the novel (I was one of them). But it was as though the novel's extreme and unremitting reflexivity, at once exhaustedly and tirelessly 'on the alert against itself', made it impossible for criticism to extract itself sufficiently from the novel's workings to get a critical fix on it from the outside. We might say that critics writing about The Unnamable through the 1960s and 1970s were forced to replicate the condition of Beckett himself, who in 1946 protested his inability to 'write about' (Gontarski and Uhlmann 2006, p. 20).
One notable exception to this passivity is Hugh Kenner's brief account of the novel in 1973. While agreeing that this is a difficult, 'Zero book', which, 'of all the fictions we have in the world, most cruelly reduces the scope of incident, the wealth of character' (Kenner 1973, p. 112), Kenner nevertheless differs from most other critics, who find in the book a contagious terror, its language on the point of toppling over into pure scream or panicky babble. Kenner, almost uniquely, and perhaps even a touch perversely, finds a kind of extreme composure or 'calm excellence' (Kenner 1973, p. 113) in The Unnamable. Here, he thinks, there is none of the knowingness, the winking, slightly exhibitionist excess-to-requirements that is sometimes apparent in the earlier books. Instead, a 'weary persistence, like the low vitality of the heart that beats during surgery, is setting sentence after sentence with unwavering punctilio' (Kenner 1973, p. 113). Where others have found passionate intensity in the novel, Kenner focuses on the 'heroism without drama' which, more than mere naming, offers declaration, 'which detaches from the big blooming buzzing confusion this thing, this subject, this' (Kenner 1973, p. 114) – this being Beckett's way of combating the Nothing, 'by a moral quality, by the minimal courage that utters, utters, utters, without moan, without solecism' (Kenner 1973, p. 115).
Gradually, through the 1970s, another, somewhat more defensive kind of response to The Unnamable emerged. This avoided the temptation of being tugged helplessly into the epistemological vortex of the novel, by regarding it as a kind of allegory. Readings of this sort started to assume that the novel was not really about what it said it was, but teasingly was the staging, or indirect figuration, of some more general set of issues, of a recognisably religious, philosophical, psychological or political nature. Seeing The Unnamable as being about something else seems often to have helped to make it more docile and tractable, assisting the critic in his or her vocation of giving a name to Beckett's Unnamable, rather than having to be helplessly ventriloquised by it, a predicament that uncomfortably reproduces that of the narrator in the novel. Such criticism insinuates that the secret name of The Unnamable is not essentially inaccessible, but rather withheld. An example of this approach is Hélène Baldwin's study of religious mysticism in Beckett, which centres on the quest for what, seizing on a phrase from The Unnamable, she calls the 'real silence', of Beckett's work. Baldwin reads the novel as 'a metaphoric projection of the mystic way', confidently declaring, for example, that the dim, intermittently lit setting of the novel is 'undoubtedly the second Dark Night of the Soul' (Baldwin 1981, p. 69), while the mysterious 'master' spoken of in the narrative is 'undoubtedly Beckett' (Baldwin 1981, p. 72). And while we're about it, there can be '[n]o question but that the sealed jar is an analogue of the Crucifixion' (Baldwin 1981, p. 76). In a more recent example of this mode of reading Gary Adelman names the unnamed subject of the text as the Holocaust, finding in its narrator a 'new figure of epic grandeur for the age of Kafka and the death camps' (Adelman 2004, p. 84).
Another way of resisting the epistemological vortex of The Unnamable is precisely by construing the text as epistemology itself, or some other more or less formal philosophical exercise. This approach became popular in the 1980s, during which Continental philosophers such as Blanchot, Derrida and Deleuze were drawn upon to demonstrate that Beckett's work was not only amenable to reading in the light of this philosophy, but actually was itself, reciprocally, already a kind of philosophy. This approach is a feature of the readings of Beckett's trilogy offered by Leslie Hill (1990) and Thomas Trezise (1990) and, I fear, my own efforts (Connor 1988).
One of the most extraordinary and percipient such readings of The Unnamable had appeared much earlier, but remained latent until reactivated by these philosophical readers of the 1980s. It came from the French critic and philosopher Maurice Blanchot, who had written to Jerome Lindon of éditions de Minuit in May 1953, asking him for advance proofs of L'Innommable, on which he was planning to write an essay. The essay appeared in the October 1953 issue of the Nouvelle Revue Fran?aise under the title 'Où maintenant? Qui maintenant?' (Blanchot 1953). Blanchot saw The Unnamable as the work in which Beckett attained the quick or essence of writing, which for Blanchot was something impersonal, indifferent. In order to reach this position, Blanchot wrote, it is necessary for Beckett first to adopt and then to abandon the reassuring masks or subterfuges of plot, character or person. The rudiments of these still survive and reassure us in Molloy and Malone Dies. But in The Unnamable, Blanchot observes: 'There is no longer any question of characters under the reassuring protection of a personal name, no longer any question of a narrative' (Blanchot 2000, p. 96). More than this, we are even denied the last resort of stabilising The Unnamable around the inviolable first person of Samuel Beckett, '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' (Blanchot 2000, p. 96). Rather, Blanchot insists, The Unnamable gets to the heart of things by pressing through, beyond or behind the first person, to the anonymous, tormented space of writing itself, which animates all literature, but is rarely, if ever, able to be grasped directly within the text. Perhaps this means that even the idea of The Unnamable as a single, bounded work is dissolved:
Perhaps we are not dealing with a book at all, but with something more than a book: perhaps we are approaching the movement from which all books derive, that point of origin where, doubtless, the work is lost, the point 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. (Blanchot 2000, p. 97)
But in seeming to disallow the fixing down or location in a specific source of The Unnamable, Blanchot nevertheless assimilates the text to his own philosophy, of the 'neutral', or the 'indifferent', anticipating the moves made by philosophical critics of the 1980s and beyond.
For critics who tend towards the philosophical readings I have just been describing, and who tend to see Beckett's major achievement as concentrated in his prose, The Unnamable has a special status as a kind of abstract or encyclopedia of Beckettian themes and feelings, the fullest and most unflinching enactment of the 'issueless predicament' that his work in general explores. Such critics tend to treat The Unnamable as the matrix, or omphalos, around which all the rest of Beckett's work, both before and after, inevitably swirls, as though Joe, Winnie and all the rest of Beckett's post-Unnamable creatures were destined to join Molloy and Malone in their concentric orbits around this novel's dubiously spectatorial speaker.
But there have been other readers who have seen the very extremity of The Unnamable, its maximum of minimality, as providing the decisive impetus for the thirty years of new and improbably various ways of 'going on' that succeeded it. For such critics, 'going on' has meant 'going beyond', or even getting out from under, The Unnamable. Perhaps the most influential of these critics in recent years has been the philosopher Alain Badiou. Badiou agrees with other critics in seeing The Unnamable as a climax in Beckett's work. However, Badiou attempts to alter the centre of gravity of Beckett studies, by directing attention to the kind of work that followed upon The Unnamable. For Badiou, this is work that is no longer skewered on the unresolvable excruciations of what the subject is and how it is to be spoken, but deals instead with what he calls the 'occurrences' of the subject, most notably in its encounters with otherness. 'Instead of the useless and unending fictive reflection of the self', writes Badiou, 'the subject will be pinpointed according to the variety of its dispositions vis-à-vis its encounters – in the face of "what-comes-to-pass", in the face of everything that supplements Being with the instantaneous surprise of an Other' (Badiou 2003, p. 16).
Badiou describes himself as encountering Beckett through The Unnamable during the 1950s, and being captivated by the vision he found there of nothingness and dereliction, a vision that 'rather suited the young cretin I was at the time' (Badiou 2003, p. 39). Forty years later, Badiou dismisses this view as 'a caricature'. In urging that we follow Beckett in moving beyond The Unnamable, Badiou is also urging a move beyond the kind of language-centred post-structuralist criticism that finds in The Unnamable its most complete statement of principle, caught as it is in the same infatuation, the same 'Cartesian terrorism' (Badiou 2003, p. 55). In writing that '[i]t was important that the subject open itself up to an alterity and cease being folded upon itself in an interminable and torturous speech' (Badiou 2003, p. 55), and insisting that Beckett had in fact done so, Badiou is also reproving a generation of critics who have found in The Unnamable what he sees as a sterile model for self-replicating and ultimately self-satisfied scepticism.
Perhaps Beckett never again made such intense demands on himself or his readers as he does in The Unnamable. When he turned back to prose in earnest, it was in a very different manner from what he had discovered in The Unnamable, which, in this sense, at least, remains a kind of ne plus ultra. This is not quite to say that it had no issue, for in some ways the novel might be said to have seeded many of the later works. The monologue Not I, for example, may be seen as another attempt to dramatise the obstinate abstention from being that characterises the novel. In this sense, The Unnamable remains at the enigmatic heart of Beckett's writing, and of critical writing about Beckett.
