Foucault and Derrida in Samuel

Foucault and Derrida in Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable

The narrator of Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable exists in a liminal space, neither wholly real nor non-existent, and he represents the kind of unsubjectified consciousness that is the ideal citizen of Michel Foucault's theoretical panopticon. By utilizing Jacques Derrida's theory regarding the construction of the subject and the role of the proper name in identification and signification, this essay demonstrates the extent to which the unnamable narrator is surveyed and controlled by the dominating power of the society in which he finds himself, and each attempt to subvert or escape this society only serves to further diminish his limited agency, such that even the ability to claim the status of 'I' is demonstrated to be an illusion, provided by the panopticon to facilitate the continued subservience of the narrator to its whims.

Introduction

Since its publication in 1953, Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable has confounded casual readers and critics alike with its richly convoluted narratorial voice and the intentionally ambiguous time and space. The title refers to both the character of the narrator and the narrative itself; the ambiguities created by the narrator's contradictory, mysterious, and intertextual claims render both the narrator and the story 'unnamable,' in the sense that neither can be positively identified, described, or defined, at least not to the extent that they might be sufficiently named. Thus, both the novel and the narrator are The Unnamable, and though initially daunting, this conflation ultimately points the way to an intelligible reading of the text because of what it reveals about the narrator's position. In short, by applying a consideration of the importance of naming to literature first formulated by Jacques Derrida to the inherent difficulties presented by the text, one is able to see the unnamable narrator as the "model" citizen of the kind of society described by Michel Foucault's metaphorical panopticon, an entirely circumscribed consciousness attempting to reach beyond the constraints of its position but ultimately failing in the face of overwhelming surveillance and oppression.

By deploying certain conventions of interrogation from the pulpy 'secret agent' and crime genres, the novel describes a panopticonic society from the perspective of its victim, who serves as the unnamable, ultimately unknowable center of a totalizing oppression. In this way, the narrator's creation of (potentially) alternate identities and allusions to previous Beckett novels can be read as an attempt to escape from the constraints of the novel (and the all-seeing eye of the reader) by utilizing the liminal role of the narratorial voice to 'teleport' (for lack of a better word) his agency beyond the limits of societally (and generically) imposed restrictions. However, these attempts actually serve to diminish the little agency the narrator has, so that the more he speaks the more he reduces himself to a shell of a character, present only as a puppet-like embodiment of the panopticon's ability to impose its control through the thought processes of its prisoners without having to expend the usual kinds of power associated with a totalizing force.

Before exploring The Unnamable in more detail, it will be necessary to review the critical tools which will allow for an accurate understanding of the novel. Firstly, a look at Jacques Derrida's consideration of the 'name' of literature in his essay "Who or What Is Compared? The Concept of Comparative Literature and the Theoretical Problems of Translation" will offer a means of understanding the novel and narrator's most prominent feature (or lack thereof). Ostensibly a consideration of the phenomena that is the comparative literature department, Derrida's essay actually reveals the importance of names as they relate to meaning, because according to Derrida, proper names "cannot be translated […] because they have no meaning, no conceptualizable and common meaning" (Derrida 36). What he means by this is that "they only have a referent, as one says, a unique referent, and when they are pronounced one can designate [viser] only a single, singular individual, one unique thing."

This claim demands interpretation because of the implications it has for Beckett's unnamable narrator, because as will be seen, the narrator's struggles are ultimately an attempt to become that "single, singular individual," which is an irreducible identity, standing apart from any generalized mass of humanity, and precisely the thing quashed by the kind of oppressive society described by Foucault's panopticon and the novel itself. Furthermore, the fact that the narrator is not simply unnamed but rather unnamable suggests the terrifying implications of the novel's society, and subsequently, human society in general.

If proper names have no meaning, then conversely, that which is unnamable would seem to have the potential for infinite meanings, such that the unnamable object is only ever visible in brief flashes, and never in its totality, like the quantum state of an electron only ever existing as a potentiality until observed by an outside entity. To give a brief preview of this fact's importance to the narrator of The Unnamable prior to the work of demonstrating it within the novel, one may consider the panopticon of the narrator's interrogators as the observational force temporarily fixing the narrator's identity (and meaning) via its gaze, and because the narrator is unnamable, unable to define himself individually and singularly, the overwhelming oppression of the narrator's condition fixes him solidly in the grasp of the interrogators, such that he can only ever be defined as a prisoner, and even then only as the space of the prisoner, devoid of actual content. As Federico Bellini notes in his essay "Beckett's Ticklish Characters: reading

Beckett through Zizek," the character of the narrator is "a conceptualization of the human subject as the place of an original void," or put another way, is the human subject prior to subjectification, because "if we consider naming, in accordance with most deconstructionist critique, as a precedent to subjectification," then the unnamable narrator "is the condition that every nomination presupposes, the rooting of the name in the being" (Bellini 2-3).

At this point one must necessarily engage in a brief diversion into psychoanalysis, because this is where Zizek and subsequently Bellini find the origins of subject formation. In short, the subject arises out of a split (found most obviously in the example of Lacan's mirror stage but elucidated elsewhere) when it recognizes itself in opposition to not-itself and thus is defined (with this not-itself being commonly denoted as the Other but appearing in any number of formulations within psychoanalytic theory).

The details of this theory are not so important to require reiteration here, as it suffices to note that subject formation occurs as the result of an event, such that one may note a before and after. For the unnamable narrator, however, the possibility of this event is precluded by his position in the novel, established immediately as definitively indeterminate, because "in The Unnamable there is no phenomenon of the other, except for a system, (the system of language) which" ultimately only serves to confuse the identity of the narrator through various linguistic tricks without ever allowing him a true Other that might offer him the chance for true subjecthood (Uhlmann 134).

The narrative begins with a series of breathless dialogic questions and delusional answers: "Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning. I say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that" (Beckett 285). These questions and answers may be read as the terrified queries of a (seemingly) impossible conscious non-subject, existing within a contradictorily undefined and entirely enclosed space and time and without the ability to consider itself as a subject but burdened with the knowledge of this inability. "I say I" can be read as the narrator's first (failed) attempt to establish an identity and subjecthood for himself, in a pitiful, almost farcical reversal of Yahweh's omnipotent "I am that I am." However, whereas the eternal god of Exodus by definition has the power to define himself, the narrator's attempt only succeeds in the tautology of 'I,' reiterating the fact that the 'I' can only ever refer to the 'I' in a single instance of uttering 'I.' Thus, "the voice of the text, despite an obligation to speak, refuses to continue speaking in any way -- to adopt any worldview, essentially -- that would promote its entrance into the world as an individual" (Jones 5). Furthermore, the answers reveal that "the question, and the entire authority it seeks to establish in the name of knowledge, is undermined" by the narrator's inability to formulate genuine answers, but rather only "hypotheses" (Armstrong 190). To see why this is the case, one must examine the work of Michel Foucault, and specifically his consideration of the panopticon, because it will reveal precisely how the narrator is able to exist in this state of non-subjecthood.

In his seminal work Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault uses the image of the panopticon to describe the effects of society on the individual. Originally, the panopticon was a kind of prison in which a central observation station was surrounded by prisoners, such that no prisoner could ever be certain as to whether or not he or she was being observed. The panopticon centralizes the space of the observer while simultaneously mystifying the act of observation, such that the threat may be ever-present even if an actual prison guard is not. In the same way, Foucault's conception of the societal panopticon imposes its standards on the individual, who must conform to the standards of society due to a fear of the possibility of discovery and punishment. According to Foucault, "the Panopticon is a privileged place for experiments on men, and for analyzing with complete certainty the transformations that may be obtained from them" (Foucault 204). The space the narrator finds himself in at the beginning of The Unnamable functions in this same way, except that in this case the object of the panopticon's gaze has not undergone the process of subjectification prior to finding itself there.

The narrator simply exists upon the reading of the novel, and is subsequently unable to undergo the process of subjectification over the course of the novel because he has already been locked into place as the void of humanity constrained by a society that has so totally permeated everything that it need not ever reveal itself. In a normal formulation of subjecthood (as discussed in psychoanalytic terms), "the parental gaze both assures the infant of its subjective existence and threatens to stare it into submission by its stern surveillance," but in this case, the narrator experiences the stern surveillance without the subjecting gaze (Moorjani 44). This is why the only character to ever be 'seen' in the novel is the narrator; just as the prison panopticon gains its power from the assumption of power given to it by the prisoner, so too does the panopticonic society implied by the novel gain its power by the narrator's own enactment of it through his narration. Thus, the narrator's attempt at subjectification by uttering "I say I" fails because there actually is no Other for him to orient his 'I' against, or put another way, there is no one or no thing to call the narrator 'you.' This fact is integral to any understanding of The Unnamable, because it informs the entirety of the subsequent narration, as the narrator attempts again and again to establish a subject for himself, first by inventing additional identities and then by attempting to obtain the role of author by alluding to Beckett's previous works. Thus, having established the necessary critical tools and demonstrating their overarching importance to this analysis of The Unnamable, it will be possible to examine the novel in greater detail to see how this dynamic plays out to its tragic end.

Before considering the narrator's various attempts to establish an identity for himself, it will be useful to address the framework in which these attempts are made. The narrator of The Unnamable is an undercover agent who has a secret, and keeps that secret from reader and his supposed interrogators throughout the novel. The existence of such an undercover character like this is not a new subject in Beckett's work, because there have been a number of such characters before. For instance Knott, Watt and Moran in Beckett's earlier novels can all be seen to embody this characterization. However, the narrator in The Unnamable embodies this trope to its extreme, as he engages the conventions of the secret agent genre, and in doing so uses suspense, tension and excitement as a means of simultaneously engaging his interrogators (and readers) while confounding their questions and interests. He repetitively employs the tropes of investigation, whodunit, mind games, confinement and death traps and by putting himself in the role of an anonymous agent under the torture, he implicitly describes the Foucaultian panopticon.

In his description and comments regarding the Secret Agent Society, the narrator echoes the Foucaultian model of panopticon by describing the harsh surveillance operations and intelligent code cracking systems which are utilized to control the narrator's behavior. This is revealed when the narrator describes the nature of his surveillance, which closely mirrors the constituent relationship which makes a panopticon work. He notes that "perhaps they are watching me from afar, I have no objection, as long as I don't see them, watching me like a face in the embers which they know is doomed to crumble" (Beckett 301). The narrator describes an awareness of ever-present but only occasionally recognized surveillance, such that the possibility of surveillance supplants the actuality of surveillance as the means of control. Even his description of his secret agent training reveals this connection, as he notes that:

They gave me courses on love, on intelligence most precious, most precious. They also taught me to count, and even to reason. Some of this rubbish has come in handy on occasions, I don't deny it, on occasions which would never have arisen if they had left me in peace (Beckett 293).

Thus, even his secret agent back-story and the abilities he gained from it only serve to reinforce the power of the panopticon, because they are only useful within the framework of that society, such that the little knowledge and agency the narrator has actually serve to reinforce his impotency. In this way, the narrator confirms Foucault's idea that in the modern and postmodern word, people no longer need actual humiliation, torture, or surveillance by visible authorities in order to create socially disciplined bodies. However, the narrator continually attempts to escape from this control in the only way possible for a subjectless consciousness; he fakes it, or otherwise appropriates the agency of others in place of his own lack.

Before examining the narrator's attempts to establish an identity for himself, it is important to note how he is able to conduct these attempts, reliant as they are upon a kind of intertextuality available to the narrator role in general but constrained in the case of this particular narrator. The narrator of The Unnamable intermittently shifts back and forth between the position of (pseudo-) subject and object, author and narrator, narrator and character, the voice of 'I' and the voice of other, named characters, and finally between the position of investigator and investigated. In reality, however, he is none of them, and instead exists in a state of constant flux, a liminal entity only ever on the verge of existence.

In his final words the narrator addresses this liminal nature, and locates himself as somewhere suspended at the threshold of narrative embodiment by wondering if his words (or the words of another of which he is only a part):

"…have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on"(Beckett 407).

With no event to mark a transition to subjecthood, time has no meaning for the narrator such that he is always already on the threshold of all times, so that the end of his story leads him to the beginning. Even this hope of silence, following an entire novel's worth of nonstop speech, is illusory, as the conclusion of the story only bears him to its beginning, such that his admission that he will "never know" nonetheless leads back to the questions which began the novel.

Furthermore, one may recall the conflation of time and space at the beginning of the novel, with the questions "Where now?" And "When now?" so that the narrator's temporally liminal quality extends to a special liminality. The narrator remarks that "I'm neither one side nor the other, I'm in the middle, I'm the partition, I've two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that's what I feel my self vibrating," and he calls himself "the tympanum," considering himself somewhere between "on the one hand the mind, on the other hand the world," but ultimately belonging to neither (Beckett 376). Thus, "as we have learnt from Derrida's paradoxes, the threshold (the tympanum) is where negation and affirmation meet and coexist" so that the narrator is never able to fully realize himself nor does he ever fully disappear (Nojoumian 391).

According to Suzie Gibson, this liminal existence embodies what Maurice Blanchot calls "the neutral," that is, "a resilient yet variable horizon point that allows all forms of expression and endeavour to begin and end," acting "as an endless spindle that unfurls and overturns creation," and in this case, it infinitely unfurls by looping back on itself (Gibson 297). This fact, and the quest which results from it, is best summed up by Philip Solomon, when he describes the "mental space" of Beckett's protagonists, noting that "ever since Beckett's first novel, Murphy, whose now famous Sixth Chapter depicted the topography of the mind, the heroes of Beckett's novels have been aware that the essential self is aspatial," something that becomes especially relevant when considering the narrator's quest for an identity (Solomon 83-84).

What Solomon means by stating that "the essential self is aspatial" is that the protagonists of Beckett's novels "think of [the essential self] as a dimensional point lying within a void that is located, according to Beckett's mental geography, at the deepest level of consciousness," such that Murphy and each subsequent protagonist, including the unnamable narrator, "have all, in one way or another, sought to free themselves from space-bound reality by withdrawing deeper and deeper within the mental realm in the hope of attaining the essential self and thereby putting an end to the suffering and dissolution of existence (Solomon 84). The narrator of The Unnamable is unique among these characters, however, because he exists as the void without a point, unable to ever achieve "the essential self," because time and space are meaningless, such that the deeper he withdraws into the mental realm, the more clearly he finds himself having not moved at all. He is everywhere and nowhere, outside of time and present at every time, and this liminal nature allows him to adopt the voice and agency of other characters and even the author, although this same nature precludes him from ever becoming as singularly present as anyone with a name.

As the reader will recall, all the narrator can do is speak, and even then only with a subjectless voice. He makes himself busy with the flow of thoughts, questions, and uncertain expressions which have no pause and no power and as such refuse to produce a consistent meaning. He admits that "I am in words, made of words, other's words, what others…I am all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for settling…" (Beckett 380). Thus, he states that "I have nothing to do, that is to say nothing particular. I have to speak, whatever that means. Having nothing to say, no words but words of others, I have to speak" (Beckett 308). Furthermore, The narrator is only ever able to refer to himself as 'I,' and with the increasing proliferation of I's, the narrator attempts to take on a new identity as a means of escaping the Foucaultian nightmare in which he finds himself. This unbroken succession of I's reflects Foucault's theory of discontinuity as a result of the panopticon's dissasociative power, and also demonstrates the failure of the narrator's attempts to escape by appropriating the voices of his own created characters:

Is there a single word of mine in all I say? No, I have no voice, in this matter I have none. That's one of the reasons why I confused my self with Worm. But I have no reasons either, no reason, I'm like Worm, without voice of reason, I'm Worm, no, if I were Worm I wouldn't know it…Who make me say that I am he perhaps, as they are. Who make me say that since I can't be he I must be he. That since I couldn't be Mahood, as I might have been, I must be worm, as I cannot be. But it is still they who say that when I failed to be Worm I will be Mahood, automatically, on the rebound? (Beckett 341-342).

The voice of narrator attempts to attain subjecthood by vacillating between the attempted self (I-ness) and others such as Mahood and Worm. These other characters "intrude into the voice of the [narrator], [but] do not have specific identities and are not in real search for a substantial meaning because of their self-negating statements," thus precluding the narrative from benefiting from their presence (Ozum 1). This sews confusion as a result of the narrator's constant chattering, because he wants to place himself in the centermost authoritative spot and thus giving authenticity to his self-reported narration, but this chattering is complicated by the fact that his voice is relatively powerless: "I have no opinion, what would I have an opinion with, with my mouth perhaps, if it's mine, I don't feel a mouth on me, if only I could feel something on me, & #8230;" (Beckett 376). Thus, "the voice, which guides us through The Unnamable, is most often attributed to either Mahood or Worm. It is between them that the "I" shifts, in its vain attempt to establish its own identity," ultimately failing to utilize these two named characters and thus he must find his identity elsewhere (Szafraniec 128).

The narrator's appeal to named characters of his own creation fails to provide him with an identity and the agency that identity would grant him, so the narrator also attempts to take on the identity of the author himself, as a means of finally circumscribing the totality of his situation by taking on the authority of the author, who by definition is able to exist outside of the restrictive structures of the novel, and by extension, the panopticonic society. Thus, he refers to characters in the two previous novels of Beckett's Trilogy, as well other of his works: