One can understand James Joyce, with all the obscenities that permeate his writings, as the ultimate Catholic author, “the greatest visionary of the dark underground of Catholicism, an underground embodying a pure transgression, but one which is nevertheless a profoundly Catholic transgression.” [1] Catholicism is legalistic, and, as Paul knew it so well, the Law generates its own transgression; consequently, the staging of the obscene underground of the Law, the travesty of the Black Mass (or, in Joyce’s case, the elevation of Here Comes Everybody into Christ who has to die in order to be reborn as the eternal Life-Goddess, from Molly Bloom to Anna Livia Plurabelle), is the supreme Catholic act.
This achievement of Joyce simultaneously signals his limit, the limit which pushed Beckett to break with him. If there ever was a kenotic writer, the writer of the utter self-emptying of subjectivity, of its reduction to a minimal difference, it is Beckett. We touch the Lacanian Real when we subtract from a symbolic field all the wealth of its differences, reducing it to a minimum of antagonism. Lacan gets sometimes seduced by the rhizomatic wealth of language beyond (or, rather, beneath) the formal structure that sustains it. It is in this sense that, in the last decade of his teaching, he deployed the notion of lalangue (sometimes simply translated as “llanguage”) which stands for language as the space of illicit pleasures that defy any normativity: the chaotic multitude of homonymies, word-plays, “irregular” metaphoric links and resonances… Productive as this notion is, one should be aware of its limitations. Many commentators have noted that Lacan’s last great literary reading, that of Joyce to whom his late seminar (XXIII: Le sinthome) [2] is dedicated, is not at the level of his previous great readings (Hamlet, Antigone, Claudel’s Coufontaine-trilogy). There is effectively something fake in Lacan’s fascination with late Joyce, with Finnegan’s Wake as the latest version of the literary Gesamtkunstwerk with its endless wealth of lalangue in which not only the gap between singular languages, but the very gap between linguistic meaning and jouissance seems overcome and the rhizome-like jouis-sense (enjoyment-in-meaning: enjoy-meant) proliferates in all directions. The true counterpart to Joyce is, of course, Samuel Becket: after his early period in which he more or less wrote some variations on Joyce, the “true” Becket constituted himself through a true ethical act, a CUT, a rejection of the Joycean wealth of enjoy-meant, and the ascetic turn towards a “minimal difference,” towards a minimalization, “subtraction,” of the narrative content and of language itself (this line is most clearly discernible in his masterpiece, the trilogy Molloy – Malone Dies – L’innomable). Beckett is effectively the literary counterpart of Anton Webern: both are authors of extreme modernist minimalism, of subtracting a minimal difference from the wealth of material.
Beckett’s Texts for Nothing (first published in French in 1955 as Nouvelles et texts pour rien) is the fourth term which supplements the trilogy Molloy – Malone Dies – The Unnamable – Beckett himself referred to Texts as “the grisly afterbirth of L’innomable,” the “attempt to get out of the attitude of disintegration /of the trilogy/ but it failed.” [3] The obvious link is that the first line of the first text (“Suddenly, no, at last, long last, I couldn’t any more”) echoes the famous last line of The Unnamable (“you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on”), a true Kantian imperative, a paraphrase of Kant’s Du kannst, denn du sollst (“You can, because you must.”). The voice of conscience tells me “you must go on,” I reply, referring to my weakness, “I can’t go on,” but as a Kantian, I know this excuse doesn’t count, so I nonetheless decide that “I’ll go on,” doing the impossible.
Since, for Beckett, what “must go on” is ultimately writing itself, the Lacanian version of the last line of The Unnamable is something that ne cesse pas a s’ecrire, that doesn’t cease writing itself – a necessity, the first term in the logical square which also comprises impossibility (that which ne cesse pas a ne pas s’ecrire, doesn’t cease not writing itself), possibility (that which cesse a s’ecrire, ceases to write itself), and contingency (that which cesse a ne pas s’ecrire, ceases not writing itself). It is crucial to note here the clear distinction between possibility and contingency: while possibility is the opposite of necessity, contingency is the opposite of impossibility. In Badiou’s terms of the attitudes towards a Truth-Event, necessity stands for the fidelity to Truth, impossibility for a situation with no truth, possibility for the possibility of a truth-procedure to exhaust its potentials and to stop, and contingency for the beginning of a new truth-procedure.
So what do Texts for Nothing register, a possibility or a contingency? A possibility, definitely – a possibility to “cease writing,” to betray fidelity, to cease going on. The failure of Texts is thus good news: Texts are failed betrayals, failed attempts to get rid of the ethical injunction. They are a comical supplement to the great triad – an opportunist’s attempt to squeeze out of the call of duty, somehow like Kierkegaard’s “sickness unto death,” where a mortal human being attempts to escape immortality, its unbearable ethical burden/injunction. In this sense, Texts are an optimistic work – their message is that one cannot but “go on” as an immortal bodiless drive, as a subject without subjectivity: “No, no souls, or bodies, or birth, or life, or death, you’ve got to go on without any of that junk”…
Jonathan Boulter thus got it right – on condition that we strictly distinguish between subject and subjectivity. The whole of the trilogy can be read as a gradual getting rid of subjectivity, a gradual reduction of subjectivity to the minimum of a subject without subjectivity – a subject which is no longer a person, whose objective correlative is no longer a body (organism), but only a partial object (organ), a subject of DRIVE which is Freud’s name for immortal persistence, “going on.” Such a subject is a living dead – still alive, going on, persisting, but dead (deprived of body) – undead. Texts are a comical attempt to resubjectivize this subject – among other things, to provide him with a body, to travel back the road from Cheshire cat’s smile to its full body. Boulter is right to correct Alvarez who claimed that Texts are written in the same “breathless, bodiless style” as The Unnamable :
“One of the things the reader notices about Texts from its outset is that the body (of the narrator/narrated) has made an uncanny return from its near obliteration in The Unnamable : the narrator of The Unnamable is disembodied (it may be that “he” is merely a brain in an urn). At the very least, the issue of subjectivity is a complex one in the trilogy because the relation between voice (of narrator) and body (of narrator) is continually called into question. We may in fact argue that the trilogy in toto is about the dismantling of the physical body: in Molloy, the body is ambulatory but weakening; in Malone Dies the body is on its last legs, immobile and dying; in The Unnamable the physical body may in fact have ceased to be an issue as the narrator floats between personalities and subject positions. All of which is to indicate that in Texts, the body has made /…/ an unexpected comeback.”(333-334)
The subject without subjectivity, this “living dead,” is also timeless – when we reach this point, “time has turned into space and there will be no more time till I get out of here” (note how Beckett repeats here Wagner’s precise formula of the sacred space of the Grail’s castle from Parsifal “time become here space,” which Claude Lévi-Strauss quotes as the most succinct definition of myth). The subject we thus reach, a subject without subjectivity, is a subject which
“cannot maintain with any certainty that the experiences he describes are in fact his own; we have a narrating subject who cannot discern if his voice is his own; we have a subject who cannot tell if he has a body; and most crucially, we have a subject who has no sense of personal history, no memory. We have, in short, a subject whose ontology denies the viability of mourning and trauma, yet who seems to display the viability of mourning and trauma.”(337)
Is this subject deprived of all substantial content not the subject as such, at its most radical, the Cartesian cogito? Boulter’s idea is that, for Freud, trauma presupposes a subject to whom it happens and who then tries to narrativize it, to come to terms with it, in the process of mourning. In the case of the Beckettian narrator, on the contrary,
“there is no hope of establishing a link between his own present condition and the trauma that is its precondition. Instead of having a story seemingly given to him unawares – as in the case of the victim of trauma who cannot recognize his past as his own – the Beckettian narrator can only hope (without hope /…/) for a story that will reconnect his present atemporal /…/ condition to his past.”(341)
This is the division of the subject at its most radical: the subject is reduced to $ (the barred subject), even its innermost self-experience is taken from it. This is how one should understand Lacan’s claim that the subject is always “decentered” - his point is not that my subjective experience is regulated by objective unconscious mechanisms that are decentered with regard to my self-experience and, as such, beyond my control (a point asserted by every materialist), but, rather, something much more unsettling: I am deprived of even my most intimate subjective experience, the way things “really seem to me,” that of the fundamental fantasy that constitutes and guarantees the core of my being, since I can never consciously experience it and assume it. One should counter Boulter’s question “To what extent do trauma and mourning require a subject?”(337) with a more radical one: to what extent does (the very emergence of) a subject require trauma and mourning? [4] The primordial trauma, the trauma constitutive of the subject, is the very gap that bars the subject from ITS OWN “inner life.”
Scenes From a Happy Life. This inner and constitutive link between trauma and subject is the topic of what is undoubtedly Beckett’s late masterpiece: Not I, a twenty-minute dramatic monologue written in 1972, an exercise in theatric minimalism: there are no “persons” here, intersubjectivity is reduced to its most elementary skeleton, that of the speaker (who is not a person, but a partial object, a faceless MOUTH speaking) and AUDITOR, a witness of the monologue who says nothing throughout the play (all the Auditor does is that, in “a gesture of helpless compassion”(Beckett), he four times repeats the gesture of simple sideways raising of arms from sides and their falling back. (When asked if the Auditor is Death or a guardian angel, Beckett shrugged his shoulders, lifted his arms and let them fall to his sides, leaving the ambiguity intact – repeating the very gesture of the Auditor.) Beckett himself pointed to the similarities between Not I and The Unnamable with its clamoring voice longing for silence, circular narrative and concern about avoiding the first person pronoun: “I shall not say I again, ever again”. Along these lines, one could agree with Vivian Mercier’s suggestion that, gender aside, Not I is a kind of dramatization of The Unnamable - one should only add that, in Not I, we get the talking partial coupled/supplemented with a minimal figure of the big Other. – Here, then, is the text of this piece in its entirety:
Stage in darkness but for MOUTH, upstage audience right, faintly lit from close-up and below, rest of face in shadow. Invisible microphone. AUDITOR, downstage audience left, tall standing figure, sex undeterminable, enveloped from head to foot in loose black djellaba, with hood, fully faintly lit, standing on invisible podium about 4 feet high shown by attitude alone to be facing diagonally across stage intent on MOUTH, dead still throughout but for four brief movements where indicated. As house lights down MOUTH`S voice unintelligible behind curtain. House lights out. Voice continues unintelligible behind curtain, l0 seconds. With rise of curtain ad-libbing from text as required leading when curtain fully up and attention sufficient into:
MOUTH: … out … into this world … this world … tiny little thing … before its time … in a godfor– … what? … girl? … yes … tiny little girl … into this … out into this … before her time … godforsaken hole called … called … no matter … parents unknown … unheard of … he having vanished … thin air … no sooner buttoned up his breeches … she similarly … eight months later … almost to the tick … so no love … spared that … no love such as normally vented on the … speechless infant … in the home … no … nor indeed for that matter any of any kind … no love of any kind … at any subsequent stage … so typical affair … nothing of any note till coming up to sixty when– … what? … seventy? … good God! … coming up to seventy … wandering in a field … looking aimlessly for cowslips … to make a ball … a few steps then stop … stare into space … then on … a few more … stop and stare again … so on … drifting around … when suddenly … gradually … all went out … all that early April morning light … and she found herself in the–– … what? … who? … no! … she! … (Pause and movement 1) … found herself in the dark … and if not exactly … insentient … insentient … for she could still hear the buzzing … so-called … in the ears … and a ray of light came and went … came and went … such as the moon might cast … drifting … in and out of cloud … but so dulled … feeling … feeling so dulled … she did not know … what position she was in … imagine! … what position she was in! … whether standing … or sitting … but the brain– … what? … kneeling? … yes … whether standing … or sitting … or kneeling … but the brain– … what? … lying? … yes … whether standing … or sitting … or kneeling … or lying … but the brain still … still … in a way … for her first thought was … oh long after … sudden flash … brought up as she had been to believe … with the other waifs … in a merciful … (Brief laugh) … God … (Good laugh) … first thought was … oh long after … sudden flash … she was being punished … for her sins … a number of which then … further proof if proof were needed … flashed through her mind … one after another … then dismissed as foolish … oh long after … this thought dismissed … as she suddenly realized … gradually realized … she was not suffering … imagine! … not suffering! … indeed could not remember … off-hand … when she had suffered less … unless of course she was … meant to be suffering … ha! … thought to be suffering … just as the odd time … in her life … when clearly intended to be having pleasure … she was in fact … having none … not the slightest … in which case of course … that notion of punishment … for some sin or other … or for the lot … or no particular reason … for its own sake … thing she understood perfectly … that notion of punishment … which had first occurred to her … brought up as she had been to believe … with the other waifs … in a merciful … (Brief laugh) … God … (Good laugh) … first occurred to her … then dismissed … as foolish … was perhaps not so foolish … after all … so on … all that … vain reasonings … till another thought … oh long after … sudden flash … very foolish really but– … what? … the buzzing? … yes … all the time buzzing … so-called … in the ears … though of course actually … not in the ears at all … in the skull … dull roar in the skull … and all the time this ray or beam … like moonbeam … but probably not … certainly not … always the same spot … now bright … now shrouded … but always the same spot … as no moon could … no … no moon … just all part of the same wish to … torment … though actually in point of fact … not in the least … not a twinge … so far … ha! … so far … this other thought then … oh long after … sudden flash … very foolish really but so like her … in a way … that she might do well to … groan … on and off … writhe she could not … as if in actual agony … but could not … could not bring herself … some flaw in her make-up … incapable of deceit … or the machine … more likely the machine … so disconnected … never got the message … or powerless to respond … like numbed … couldn’t make the sound … not any sound … no sound of any kind … no screaming for help for example … should she feel so inclined … scream … (Screams) … then listen … (Silence) … scream again … (Screams again) … then listen again … (Silence) … no … spared that … all silent as the grave … no part– … what? … the buzzing? … yes … all silent but for the buzzing … so-called … no part of her moving … that she could feel … just the eyelids … presumably … on and off … shut out the light … reflex they call it … no feeling of any kind … but the lids … even best of times … who feels them? … opening … shutting … all that moisture … but the brain still … still sufficiently … oh very much so! … at this stage … in control … under control … to question even this … for on that April morning … so it reasoned … that April morning … she fixing with her eye … a distant bell … as she hastened towards it … fixing it with her eye … lest it elude her … had not all gone out … all that light … of itself … without any … any … on her part … so on … so on it reasoned … vain questionings … and all dead still … sweet silent as the grave … when suddenly … gradually … she realizes– … what? … the buzzing? … yes … all dead still but for the buzzing … when suddenly she realized … words were– … what? … who? … no! … she! … (Pause and movement 2) … realized … words were coming … imagine! … words were coming … a voice she did not recognize at first so long since it had sounded … then finally had to admit … could be none other … than her own … certain vowel sounds … she had never heard … elsewhere … so that people would stare … the rare occasions … once or twice a year … always winter some strange reason … stare at her uncomprehending … and now this stream … steady stream … she who had never … on the contrary … practically speechless … all her days … how she survived! … even shopping … out shopping … busy shopping centre … supermart … just hand in the list … with the bag … old black shopping bag … then stand there waiting … any length of time … middle of the throng … motionless … staring into space … mouth half open as usual … till it was back in her hand … the bag back in her hand … then pay and go … not as much as good-bye … how she survived! … and now this stream … not catching the half of it … not the quarter … no idea … what she was saying … imagine! … no idea what she was saying! … till she began trying to … delude herself … it was not hers at all … not her voice at all … and no doubt would have … vital she should … was on the point … after long efforts … when suddenly she felt … gradually she felt … her lips moving … imagine! … her lips moving! … as of course till then she had not … and not alone the lips … the cheeks … the jaws … the whole face … all those– … what? … the tongue? … yes … the tongue in the mouth … all those contortions without which … no speech possible … and yet in the ordinary way … not felt at all … so intent one is … on what one is saying … the whole being … hanging on its words … so that not only she had … had she … not only had she … to give up … admit hers alone … her voice alone … but this other awful thought … oh long after … sudden flash … even more awful if possible … that feeling was coming back … imagine! … feeling coming back! … starting at the top … then working down … the whole machine … but no … spared that … the mouth alone … so far … ha! … so far … then thinking … oh long after … sudden flash … it can’t go on … all this … all that … steady stream … straining to hear … make some-thing of it … and her own thoughts … make something of them … all– … what? … the buzzing? … yes … all the time the buzzing … so-called … all that together … imagine! … whole body like gone … just the mouth … lips … cheeks … jaws … never– … what? … tongue? … yes … lips … cheeks … jaws … tongue … never still a second … mouth on fire … stream of words … in her ear … practically in her ear … not catching the half … not the quarter … no idea what she’s saying … imagine! … no idea what she’s saying! … and can’t stop … no stopping it … she who but a moment before … but a moment! … could not make a sound … no sound of any kind … now can’t stop … imagine! … can’t stop the stream … and the whole brain begging … something begging in the brain … begging the mouth to stop … pause a moment … if only for a moment … and no response … as if it hadn’t heard … or couldn’t … couldn’t pause a second … like maddened … all that together … straining to hear … piece it together … and the brain … raving away on its own … trying to make sense of it … or make it stop … or in the past … dragging up the past … flashes from all over … walks mostly … walking all her days … day after day … a few steps then stop … stare into space … then on … a few more … stop and stare again … so on … drifting around … day after day … or that time she cried … the one time she could remember … since she was a baby … must have cried as a baby … perhaps not … not essential to life … just the birth cry to get her going … breathing … then no more till this … old hag already … sitting staring at her hand … where was it? … Croker’s Acres … one evening on the way home … home! … a little mound in Croker’s Acres … dusk … sitting staring at her hand … there in her lap … palm upward … suddenly saw it wet … the palm … tears presumably … hers presumably … no one else for miles … no sound … just the tears … sat and watched them dry … all over in a second … or grabbing at straw … the brain … flickering away on its own … quick grab and on … nothing there … on to the next … bad as the voice … worse … as little sense … all that together … can’t– … what? … the buzzing? … yes … all the time the buzzing … dull roar like falls … and the beam … flickering on and off … starting to move around … like moonbeam but not … all part of the same … keep an eye on that too … corner of the eye … all that together … can’t go on … God is love … she’ll be purged … back in the field … morning sun … April … sink face down in the grass … nothing but the larks … so on … grabbing at the straw … straining to hear … the odd word … make some sense of it … whole body like gone … just the mouth … like maddened … and can’t stop … no stopping it … something she– … something she had to– … what? … who? … no! … she! … (Pause and movement 3) … something she had to– … what? … the buzzing? … yes … all the time the buzzing … dull roar … in the skull … and the beam … ferreting around … painless … so far … ha! … so far … then thinking … oh long after … sudden flash … perhaps something she had to … had to … tell … could that be it? … something she had to … tell … tiny little thing … before its time … godforsaken hole … no love … spared that … speechless all her days … practically speechless … how she survived! … that time in court … what had she to say for herself … guilty or not guilty … stand up woman … speak up woman … stood there staring into space … mouth half open as usual … waiting to be led away … glad of the hand on her arm … now this … some-thing she had to tell … could that be it? … something that would tell … how it was … how she– … what? … had been? … yes … something that would tell how it had been … how she had lived … lived on and on … guilty or not … on and on … to be sixty … something she– … what? … seventy? … good God! … on and on to be seventy … something she didn’t know herself … wouldn’t know if she heard … then forgiven … God is love … tender mercies … new every morning … back in the field … April morning … face in the grass … nothing but the larks … pick it up there … get on with it from there … another few– … what? … not that? … nothing to do with that? … nothing she could tell? … all right … nothing she could tell … try something else … think of something else … oh long after … sudden flash … not that either … all right … something else again … so on … hit on it in the end … think everything keep on long enough … then forgiven … back in the– … what? … not that either? … nothing to do with that either? … nothing she could think? … all right … nothing she could tell … nothing she could think … nothing she– … what? … who? … no! … she! … (Pause and movement 4) … tiny little thing … out before its time … godforsaken hole … no love … spared that … speechless all her days … practically speechless … even to herself … never out loud … but not completely … sometimes sudden urge … once or twice a year … always winter some strange reason … the long evenings … hours of darkness … sudden urge to … tell … then rush out stop the first she saw … nearest lavatory … start pouring it out … steady stream … mad stuff … half the vowels wrong … no one could follow … till she saw the stare she was getting … then die of shame … crawl back in … once or twice a year … always winter some strange reason … long hours of darkness … now this … this … quicker and quicker … the words … the brain … flickering away like mad … quick grab and on … nothing there … on somewhere else … try somewhere else … all the time something begging … something in her begging … begging it all to stop … unanswered … prayer unanswered … or unheard … too faint … so on … keep on … trying … not knowing what … what she was trying … what to try … whole body like gone … just the mouth … like maddened … so on … keep– … what? … the buzzing? … yes … all the time the buzzing … dull roar like falls … in the skull … and the beam … poking around … painless … so far … ha! … so far … all that … keep on … not knowing what … what she was– … what? … who? … no! … she! … SHE! … (Pause) … what she was trying … what to try … no matter … keep on … (Curtain starts down) … hit on it in the end … then back … God is love … tender mercies … new every morning … back in the field … April morning … face in the grass … nothing but the larks … pick it up–
Curtain fully down. House dark. Voice continues behind curtain, unintelligible, 10 seconds, ceases as house lights up.
[1] Thomas J.J. Altizer, The Contemporary Jesus, London: SCM Press 1998, p. 101.
[2] See Le seminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XXIII: Le sinthome, Paris: Editions du Seuil 2005.
[3] Jonathan Boulter, “Does Mourning Require a Subject?”, in Modern Fiction Studies 50-2 (Summer 2004), p. 332. Numbers in brackets refer to pages in this volume.
[4] Judith Butler developed this point in detail, especially in her The Psychic Life of Power.
2 Comments
How is it that only Zizek manages to touch the Lacanian Real that cannot be touched? Wasn’t Jesus the ultimate Catholic author, obscene even before Joyce began stringing words together in a Gospel of complaint?
mark, your message is so unclear… where how is “Zizek touching the Lacanian real that cannot be touched?”
and about the obscene and the signifier and Jesus and Joyce…… how that they all came together