The Unnamable Read Free Page B

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