SUFFERING FICTION IN
| Autor: | Paul Stewart |
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| Rok vydání: | 2014 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui. 26:165-177 |
| ISSN: | 1875-7405 0927-3131 |
| DOI: | 10.1163/9789401211635_013 |
| Popis: | "Suffering fiction" in The Unnamable implies two different, but intimately related, concepts. Firstly, the Unnamable is assailed by fictions throughout his narrative. The stories of Basil, Mahood and Worm are foisted upon an unwilling audience as the Unnamable is bombarded with supposed proofs of his "historical existence" (Beckett 2010, 36). Those fictions are themselves replete with suffering as characters are denuded, degraded and dismembered in what appears to be a purposeless catalogue. Throughout the novel, the question of who is responsible for these stories - whether they originate in the Unnamable, or whether he is merely their victim - is frequently at issue. Yet, even if the Unnamable is responsible for these stories, and hence responsible for the suffering they contain, he is never less than a victim also, as the stories rebound upon him in an attempt to gain his adherence and so circumscribe his existence and identity.Towards the end of his whirl of words, the Unnamable sketches out the bare plot of what appears to be a romantic, cliched story of a married couple. The man goes off to war, dies, and his widow remarries. The first husband has not died in the war, however, and returns only to die in a train "of emotion, at the thought of seeing her again" (125). Meanwhile, the second husband has hanged himself "with emotion, at the thought of losing her," leaving the widow who "weeps, weeps louder, at having loved him, at having lost him" (126). This melodrama has a pedagogical purpose: "there's a story for you, that was to teach me the nature of emotion, that's called emotion, what emotion can do, given favourable conditions, what love can do, well well, so that's emotion, that's love." As the Unnamable has to think through certain ambiguous details in the story it is also designed to "teach me how to reason" and, crucially, "to tempt me to go, to the place where you can come to an end."The melodrama highlights a number of key aspects of the various fictions that the Unnamable endures. For instance, its purpose is to bring the Unnamable into a form of being through a belief in and adherence to the fiction as told; for the fiction to be accepted as fact, as it were. In order to attain this end, the characters within the fiction are beset by all the details and accoutrements of a fictional world - "the nature of trains, and the meaning of your back to the engine, and guards, stations, platforms, wars, love" (126) - and are thus made to suffer. The final aspect is the application of reason, whereby the story's loose ends and inconsistencies are thought through and brought into a coherence that further encourages the Unnamable's belief.The relationship between the Unnamable's belief and suffering is amply demonstrated by the tale of Mahood, circling his family in the rotunda. The Unnamable's adhesion to Mahood's story and therefore to Mahood's identity - "I've been he an instant" (27) - is made possible by the increasing suffering of Mahood himself. Mahood begins the tale with a single leg, but, apparently at random, a further limb is lost: "Mahood must have remarked that I remained sceptical, for he casually let fall that I was lacking not only a leg, but an arm also" (33). By increasing the suffering of Mahood, which entails the further dismemberment of the body, it is hoped that the Unnamable will overcome his scepticism and accept an identification with Mahood. The physical diminution is a crucial part of the programme to bring the Unnamable into being, as he himself posits: "A single leg and other distinctive stigmata to go with it, human to be sure, but not exaggeratedly, lest I take fright and refuse to nibble" (27). By reducing the human in physical terms - or, putting it another way, making the body suffer - it is hoped the Unnamable will recognise himself, yet he claims that "they could clap an artificial anus in the hollow of my hand and still I wouldn't be there, alive with their life, not far short of a man, just barely a man, sufficiently a man to have hopes one day of being one, my avatars behind me. … |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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