Writing the Abyss: Beckett's Trilogy and the Essence of Literature

Niven Kumar

Literature, or writing, is an interplay of signs arranged more according to the nature of the signifier than to its signified content. No transcendental relationship exists between the two. Literature is, therefore, led by the signifier which, before it becomes thought or idea, chases after and latches on to another signifier which, in turn, does the same and so on without end. This chain of signifiers forms a spiralling matrix that is forever sliding outward, yet never unlocking presence. It is writing-in-absentia. Beckett’s Trilogy is such a writing, for the voice, or locus, is never grounded, never fixed, and never visible. The voice defies verification and is unnameable even to itself. The narrators in the Trilogy are themselves narrated, themselves part of the text. Such circularity keeps Literature from being pure Discourse, where the signifier is made to reach its pre-determined destination, its signified. What Molloy, then Malone, and then the Unnameable achieve in the Trilogy is not an exegesis of a Gnostic text, but a ‘failure’ to be measured by any standards of existential meaning. The Trilogy’s anonymity is borne out by the fact that the narrators themselves never escape being text-ualised. The struggle, coupled with the desperate need, to narrate binds both narrator and the narrated to a sequence of signifiers latching on to each other. The endless flux of the Trilogy’s narrators is achieved only through their constant birth/rebirth, their constant Kafka-esque resurrection in order to die again. This paper argues that the Trilogy’s anonymous locus is Literature’s own “space of death” where Blanchot locates writing, where Literature becomes what it is: the looking into the night to see what it is concealing. This gaze does not necessarily reveal ‘truth’ or ‘meaning’. The gaze itself, Molloy’s and Malone’s and the Unnameable’s narrating of themselves, is Literature’s essence.

PhD candidate, Macquarie University

Borderless Beckett: International Samuel Beckett Symposium in Tokyo 2006 September 29 – October 1