Samuel Beckett is best known for his play Waiting for Godot, the seminal ‘theatre of the absurd’ masterpiece that contains all of his humor, existential malaise, minimalism and insight. However, it is his Three Novels – Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable – that best exemplifies his work. Whereas Joyce explored the limits of linguistic expansion, most notably in Finnegans Wake, Beckett explores the limits of linguistic contraction. His minimalist style presents not only an economy of narrative, but a commentary itself on his notion of what exactly the symbolic order offers. Jacques Lacan conceives of the symbolic order as the realm of language, of communication, but most importantly of the signifier. As a writer, Beckett works entirely in the symbolic: novels, poems, plays and essays all operate on the symbolic level, communicating abstract concepts to the reader (or audience) via the word. Yet Beckett’s goal in almost all of his work, but especially in the novel trilogy, is to undermine that order, to present it naked in its absurdity, while being caught in the paradox of its use.
All words are signifiers. When one reads or hears the word ‘book,’ one is able to conceive a notion of book. Signifiers allow information to pass efficiently between consciousnesses through mutually accepted constructs. However, what one person conceives as they interpret the signifier ‘book,’ may be completely different from what another person conceives. The basic idea is the same, but there is a vagueness to the symbolic that opens itself up to critique – and parody. The gap between the symbol, the word ‘book’ and an actual, real book is a space Beckett occupies to great comedic and horrifying effect. Beckett stabs at the symbolic from page one of the trilogy, using meaningless terms like A, B and C to denote characters. He takes the idea of the unreliable narrator to the extreme. There is no question whether or not Beckett’s narrators are unreliable – they are. The question Beckett poses is can any narrator be reliable. Can any fragment of the symbolic order contain truth? Does truth even exist, and if so, so what?
Beckett does not seek to answer these questions, merely to pose them. In the spirit of post-modernism, Beckett stands at an ironic distance from such questions. If the very mechanism of conveying ideas – the symbolic order – is flawed and untrustworthy, what good is it to attempt communication at all? Beckett’s narrators and characters often ask themselves this. Molloy is both literally and figuratively crawling blindly through a forest. Malone continues to weakly and half-heartedly create narratives in his head as he slowly dies, unable to prevent himself from imagining and creating. The literally disembodied narrator of The Unnamable - a title which in and of itself speaks to its relationship to the symbolic - says in the famous last lines of the novel, “you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.”
The comedy – and the terror- comes from man’s inability to escape the symbolic, regardless of its absurdity. The narrator of The Unnamable goes on at length about the absurdity of communication, of imagination, of writing and speaking, yet all this is done through his voice, through his speech, through his writing, through his imagination. The only mechanism capable of communicating the flaw of the symbolic order is the symbolic order itself. It is not only an inescapable facet of our conscious awareness, but the most important, as Beckett explores in the three novels through a systematic dismantling of the real, the physical body.
There is a linear progression in Beckett’s Three Novels that binds the works together. One continuing theme is the dissolution of the physical body; another is a retreat into an ever-compressing solipsistic consciousness. As Slavoj Zizek points out in his Beckett With Lacan:
“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.”
Yet while the body dissipates, the consciousness remains strong. The aberrant, fevered continuance of narration powers on through even the final dismissal of everything outside of its own voice. It is a reverse Cartesian proof – a spiral narrowing down from the world until only thought, or doubt, remains. It is in this realm of pure thought that Beckett’s ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on’ comes to the fore. Like Camus’ Sisyphus, Beckett’s narrator must willfully continue to create, to be a sentient, aware creature. Man as consciousness exists only in the symbolic.
Being trapped in the symbolic does not prevent Beckett’s narrators from expressing their displeasure with it. It is this absurd and futile struggling, like Hamm’s struggle with God in Endgame (“He doesn’t exist!! The bastard,”) that produces Beckett’s unique blend of side-splitting comedy and keep-you-awake-at-night terror. Beckett has discarded all the façade of the novel, trimmed not only the fat, but the skin, the muscle, the organs - and all that remains is the skeleton of the human condition: suffering human awareness at its most vulnerable, its most bitter and its most humorous.
The question of whether it is or is not raining or midnight for the narrator of Molloy (both are said with conviction) is not the question. The point is that such facts do not exist outside of them being spoken. Detective Moran, in the second half of Molloy, does an especially good job of dynamiting his own symbolic utterances. He will speak one sentence, then contradict it entirely in the next. This is more than just Moran being a boob. It is Beckett toying with the idea of truth existing in the symbolic; it his affirmation of Lacan’s dictum, ‘the very foundation of interhuman discourse is misunderstanding.’
Mark Brendle is a writer living in Oregon. His short fiction is available on the web at http://brendlewords.blogspot.com
