Beckett & the impossible voice

By intensely interrogating the line that divided discursivity and narrativity, the meta-textual procedures deployed by «Texts for Nothing» exposed the aporetic dynamic of the Beckettian oeuvre. As a failed voyager in a landscape that seems to impede progress at every turn, the Beckettian personnage never goes anywhere. The blocage seems to come from an essential difficulty: what is the difference between the speaking "I" and the narrating "I"?

The answer always sounds obvious. The first one does not tell a story and only speaks. The speaking "I" speaks because speech is done in the present, and the person saying "I" is the same person referred to by the word "I." This disambiguated state of the speaking "I" is its deictic advantage. When this "I" speaks, it cannot be part of a story. Even in a homodiegetic narrative, the speaking "I" cannot be part of the story without first becoming a narrator. In other words, I cannot tell a story at the same time as I am living its events. It would be magical to see the "I" realize the events of a story at the same moment it is spoken, like some kind of performative act. Towards the magical ending of One Hundred Years of Solitude, for example, the narrative time and time of narration coincide. If the "I" says "It is a Tuesday" and it is not really Tuesday, we start to think that this "I" is probably deluded or hallucinating. Or this "I" is probably not deluded at all or crazy, but is in fact telling a story in which the events that are being told are happening on a Tuesday. The "I" certainly cannot make the day a Tuesday just by saying it.

When "I" says It is a Tuesday when it is not a Tuesday, and if it is certain we are not hearing mad speech, then what we have is a memory or story. The question we then ask is: who or what or where is this "I"? Can a machine tell a story? If by "can" we mean having the physical capacity to produce words, whether as recording or as programmed strings, then we say Yes. But if "can" means to function as a narrator, dependable or not, real or not, then we tend to say No because we seem to require more from a narrator than just the ability to reproduce sound. (Another example: a grocery list is not a story primarily because we can't see any narrator in it.) However, the fact that anything can take the role of the narrator, living or not, already tells us about its indefinite nature. It is simply a linguistic function.

At the beginning of "Texts for Nothing," the homodiegetic speaker/narrator appears "suddenly." This instantaneous appearance on the scene is immediately followed by an assertion of the inability to "go on." On the second sentence, an indefinite "someone" addresses the speaker, forming a dialogical pair: "You can't stay here." This is quite understandable, and the contradiction is only apparent: the narrator function cannot have a deictic status in the here-and-now of discourse. But this situation is made more complex by the third line, which probably summarizes the whole aporetic dynamic of the text: "I couldn’t stay there and I couldn’t go on." This situational cycle repeats itself, and carries the speaker, strangely, for many more pages to come: " And were there one day to be here, where there are no days, which is no place, born of the impossible voice the unmakable being, and a gleam of light, still all would be silent and empty and dark, as now, as soon now, when all will be ended, all said, it says, it murmurs." The "impossible voice," "the unmakable being": don't these fit a good description of the narrator function? The weirdness of this voice comes from the fact that it is no one and nothing, and yet it speaks. "It’s not true, yes, it’s true, it’s true and it’s not true, there is silence and there is not silence, there is no one and there is someone, nothing prevents anything." Impossible, and yet cannot be unmade.

And who is the narrator's interlocutor? Is it another character? The indefinite nature of the interlocutor reveals the monological status of the text: "Someone said, perhaps the same, What possessed you to come?" Here we see one instance of the coincidence between the narrating "I" and the narrated "I." Often, too, this bipolarity extends to the problematic attempts of the narrator/speaker to include contextual orientation in the text, elements that would normally be deictic parts of discourse: "I’ll describe the place, that’s unimportant...." "How long have I been here, what a question...." "And now here, what now here...."

This aporetic movement may all seem to reaffirm the clear distinction between discourse and narrative, between the speaking "I" and narrating "I," but the substantial use of language items we normally associate with a speech situation coupled with the constant breakdown of any attempt to produce a progressive narrative line also seem to point out a difficulty that still requires resolution. The clear-cut distinction we thought we had between the two "I"s is always creating a problem: on one hand, a totally narrative "I" would be an impossible voice, a "someone" without place and time except in language; on the other, a totally discursive "I" with full deictic capacities would not be able to tell a story. In short, it becomes a choice between an impossible narrative which exists as a "nothing" ("Whose voice, no one’s, there is no one, there’s a voice without a mouth...") and a very restrictive speech that simply speaks but cannot ever progress without first falling into narrative, thereby losing its full deictic status and becoming another "nothing." 

However, if " to speak of once, is to speak of nothing," then any use of language that does not carry with it any trace of story-telling or any trace of re-citation cannot even begin to exist as speech. Even in a conversation that goes "How do you feel?"/"I feel better now, thanks" is presumably carried within a stream of history laid out as a narrative or memory. An absolutely unique speech that happens only once for the first time and once only cannot be repeated or remembered. It is a speech that can't go anywhere, a speech that we can't even imagine to happen. 

As the quandary of nothingness at every turn, this voiceless voice keeps turning, mute speech that echoes its absence again and again. Time without time, space without space, these texts for nothing outline a zone where language speaks when it narrates, and narrates when it speaks.