Posting something written many years ago:
Beckett’s oeuvre represents one of the most sustained meditations on the nature of writing (we could mention Derrida, Jabès, Blanchot, Queneau up to Perec, Barthes, Calvino or Borges, Barth, among many others). Maybe the 20th century should be called the Century of Writing, following the « lingusitic turn » in discplinary and philosophical concerns after Nietzsche and Saussure.
In general terms, the work « Texts for Nothing » (TFN) marks the moment in literature where writing can no longer be viewed as either representational (object-action-events) or expressionistic (conscious-unconscious self), or even an objet d’art in the neoclassical sense of Form or in the Parnassian concept of Art for Art’s sake. Hence, the mode of subjectivity « simulated » in TFN is one of bleak desperation (desespoir), and the textual « dynamic » one of self-contradiction (in all senses of the word as logical-linguistic conflict and mutual exclusion, as postulation and cancellation, as the proffering of one statement and its reverse, etc.). In syntactic terms, this can be seen in the paratactic and repetitive organization of the text, and in the exploitation of the comma to signify a continuous inconclusion or irresolution, or the lack of a teleological completion of thought or action. It is no doubt part and extension of the « stream of consciousness » technique in late modernism, a mode of utterance that the speaking «voice» deploys as a signature of its inscription as a dramatic monologist in search of narrative form.
In this condition, the fabula of TFN can be seen as basically that : the search for narrative form (or sjuzhet). It marks a later stage in the progressive obsolescence of narrative elements that had Sarraute and Queneau searching for their « characters» in terms of their « identity » or « presence ». As a search for narrative form, the dramatic monologist cannot therefore deploy narrative as a means to such an end. This implies that at the very outset, all rhetorical elements belonging to the repertoire of narrative would be either interdicted, suspended, or, if used, requalified and even contradicted. This explains the momentary lapses of TFN into some occasional « pockets » of recognizable « story » threads and its eventual abandonment of them. Furthermore, as a mode of desperate search for narrative form, the « psycho-emotive » state of the monologist would translate into various types of blocage : uncertainties or doubts, indefiniteness, hesitations, reluctance, dilemmas, impotence, apprehension, difficulties, scruples, misgivings, vaccilations, etc. These forms of blocage are the direct result of the realisation that the search for narrative form cannot escape using the elements of narrative for its initiation. Hence, the incipits are often not foundational commencements for a sjuzhet about to unfold, but periodic bursts of intense blocages. In other words, the search for narrative form outside of the narrative format cannot even begin, cannot even dream of beginning. (Is it not that a narrative is defined precisely by a quest, that it is in itself the modus operandi of any search ?)
How can the search for narrative form, which must take the narrative format as supposition, even begin when the fact of inaugurating the search activates the form immediately ? By this activation, the monologist translates his/her search into narrative, narrates his/her search as s/he searches for narrative form, and marks the site of the split of the subject into the multiple positions of monologist, author, narrator, figure, and narratee, and reader. The advent of multiplicity is probably not the greatest threat that ends the search and transfroms it into the object of the search ; the greatest threat is that, by incarnating narrative form at the moment of the search for form (by suspension of form, of course), the monologist abdicates or evacuates his/her position of priority as presence before form, and marks his/her inscription into and via narrative, terminates or executes his search, and, thus, heralds his/her non-presence as the prelinguistic space or origin of speech. The monologist, becoming plural, assumes the face of the other/s, resumes the speech and voice of the other/s, and most importantly, begins to inhabit the space of the other/s, which is the space of writing, the space of death and disappearance, atopia...
But our monologist stubbornly pursues a logic or ethic of refusal against a capitulation to the Other, to death, to Nothingness. It is the desperate cry of the dying nostalgia for a presence, that metaphysical Now and Here space of Being prior to the irruption of difference. And yet, how can one be in two places at the same time ? That would really be an alibi.
No comments:
Post a Comment