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mistakenly. Night, storm and sorrow, and the catalepsies
of the soul, this time I shall see that they are good.
The last word is not yet said between me and – yes, the
last word is said. Perhaps I simply want to hear it said
again. Just once again. No, I want nothing.”
And so on, until Malone dies. Well, almost dies,
we’re never quite sure, for how can death occur in
a first-person narrative? The Unnameable begins
without his support for the stories. So really, it cannot
continue.
It continues anyway. And according to current
understanding, this is where ‘the real’ author should
reveal himself, the one ‘behind the scenes’. Again,
it is no coincidence that when producers of ‘Reality
TV’ proclaim that nothing is hidden, they nonetheless
rely on spin-off books and DVDs promising details of
‘what really went on’ – endless promises of a definitive
intimacy. The Trilogy, on the other hand, doesn’t. In
The Unnameable phantoms and visions encircle a consciousness
stuck in an ornamental jar at the entrance to
a restaurant. Words circle on the page too, stumbling on
without even the relief of punctuation. For Blanchot,
this is the “malaise of one who has dropped out of reality
and drifts forever in the gap between existence and
nothingness, incapable of dying and incapable of being
born.” As readers we undergo:
BUY Maurice Blanchot books online from and
“[an] experience experienced under the threat of
impersonality, undifferentiated speech speaking in a
vacuum, passing through he who hears it, unfamiliar,
excluding the familiar, and which cannot be silenced
because it is what is unceasing and interminable.”
(trans. Sacha Rabinovitch)
This is the language of the future. It is “a direct confrontation
with the process from which all books derive”:
language itself. By asking the simple question of
who is speaking in the Trilogy, Blanchot reveals how
Beckett reveals language as a form of death, a place
where we meet the limits of subjectivity. In reading
the Trilogy, we confront the anonymity at the heart of
communication, and thereby the limits of our power
in the world. Liberal culture sees this as good up to
the point where we are taken to another world (“transported”
as so many naive readers put it, neglecting the
recent history of the word). Beckett’s Trilogy exceeds
this point. It exposes us to the infinite within the confines
of novel. The author’s great achievement is to
take us to the brink of complete breakdown and yet to
stay this side. To declare his work ‘absurdist’ or that it
‘mirrors the breakdown of religious belief’, as might
be heard wherever Beckett’s books are discussed, is
unwittingly re-inhabiting what is the novel is always
in the process of vacating. This suggests why the Trilogy
has never been accepted into our culture in the
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