After the devastation and suffering inflicted on the human psyche post WWII, there was a shared acknowledgement of the inability for humans to produce or experience art in the same way. Samuel Beckett was somehow able to express the feelings of numbness and existential despair through his literature, allowing his readers to mourn through his post-war writings. To read Texts for Nothing solely through a historical paradigm of postwar or through a poststructuralist interpretation would be a hindrance. Rather, Beckett seems to use both historical and philosophical experiences of terror to express the terror of war in Texts for Nothing. Like Chris Langlois’ reading of Texts for Nothing,I argue that Beckett is not portraying the experience of terror through the narrator inTexts for Nothing, but rather he uses a reductionist, restrained style to demonstrate how it is ‘terror itself translated into the language of literature’ (Langlois, p93). This essay on terror in Texts for Nothing looks at how Beckett’s language engraves terror and trauma into literature, rather than reflecting it. By doing this, he attempts to use the terror of his writings to embrace the terror of thinking in order to try to resist the catastrophic threat of making terror imprinted into our history and into future discourse. The logos of terror can be seen through the language of inertia, the continuous uncertainty over the narrator’s existence and the question of solipsism.
The linguistic style of inertia is used throughout the thirteen chapters to express the protagonist’s dread of continuing to speak. The narrator experiences a cyclical torment of desiring silence, despite being unable to cease speaking since his voice is subjected to a world where the option to attain a state of finitude or to exist outside of his narrative is no longer possible. Essentially, the narrator expresses the paradox of continuing to cease, whereby he fails to continue to cease speaking, while holding the impossible desire for silence. The narrator states, “And were the voice to cease quite at last, the old ceasing voice, it would not be true, as it is not true that it speaks, it can’t speak, it can’t cease” (Beckett, 339). This dread of continuing to tell a story reflects Maurice Blanchot’s contradiction of literary terrorism. The engraved terror and mourning amounts to the narrator’s mourning of a loss of silence, a loss of something that amounts to nothingness. Essentially, the point of speech is to continue making noise, rather than to say something of significance. He says, “If I were silent I’d hear nothing. But if I were silent the other sounds would start again, those to which the words have made me deaf or which have really ceased.” (Beckett, 320)
The term nothing can be defined in several ways; something that does not exist, the absence of all magnitude, nonexistence, nothingness, someone or something of no importance or significance. When reading Texts for Nothing, it seems as though the narrator is progressing to the point of nonexistence, but ultimately he remains in a state of no importance. It seems to be a process of endless worsening or asymptotic worsening, where something remains at the end and we are never actually left with nothing. Beckett uses language to demonstrate the collapse of its own significance, manifested through a confrontation with its own nothingness. He says, “So long as the words keep coming nothing will have changed, there are the old words out again. Utter, there’s nothing else, utter, void yourself of them, here as always, nothing else… or it is the dread of coming to the last, of having said all, your all, before the end, no for that will be the end, the end of all, not certain.” (Beckett, 300) It is essentially a work which begins, it does not end, with the narrator constantly questioning why he even started writing. The texts end with the narrator erasing all light and speech and space, saying “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.” (Beckett, 339) By ending with the noise of a murmur, the reader is left in an abyss, lacking any finality or silence.
Beckett uses the erasure of narrative to nullify the narrator’s experience to go beyond terror to try to attain a state of nothingness or sublimity. This extreme existence of terror reflects a constant anxiety and uncertainty of death. The question of existence is seen both through the erasure of narrative and through the potential prefiguration of a character beyond life. In terms of the narrator’s erasure of narrative there is ultimately a contradiction between trying to hold onto his fleeting childhood in seemingly pathetic insertions of childhood anecdotes, alongside the dissolution of the body and voice. Initially, the narrator attempts to piecetogether memories of his childhood. He jumps from childhood to present to future through references to Nanny Bibby and Admiral Jericoe. Essentially, the narrator wants to recreate an image of his own past to convince both the reader and himself of his own existence. This pitiful attempt is ultimately destroyed by his erasure of story and body. The narrator questions why it is necessary to have a voice, a story or even a body, expressing “There has to be one, it seems, once there is speech, no need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life, that's the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.” (Beckett, 307) After ridding the narrator of his story and his mental state, he subsequently reduces his physical state to nothingness by stating, “I know what I mean or one armed better still, no arms, no hands, better by far, as old as the world and no less hideous, amputated on all sides, erect on my trusty stumps, bursting with old piss, old prayers, old lessons, soul, mind and carcass finishing neck and neck, not to mention the gobchucks...” (Beckett, 332) Alongside that,“I shouldn’t have began,” is repeated throughout the book, after which Beckett sporadically asserts that in fact “nothing can be told,” and then proceeds to tell it, while the “it” remains indeterminable.(Beckett, 332) By creating a contradiction between the creation of a story, alongside the subsequent erasure of narrative and language, Beckett turns language into an entity and replaces it with his own body or story.
Beckett creates a sense of internal confusion through the intermingling of textual and temporal space. The narrator mingles time, tenses and inner voices to create a confused inescapable scenario. This constructs a terror driven state whereby the narrator is trapped, “trapped in a world that can permit death, ostensibly as an event outside language, only if death passes into language as an event of temporality and negation.” (Langlois, 105) The loss of the idea of a death as a presupposition to his end of existence, means that the narrator must continue to negate and think of death as the indecipherable remainder. The voice holds onto the dream of living a life in finitude, until ultimately negating this fantasy due to his awareness of its unattainability. Beckett essentially rids language of its temporal support, thereby bringing the narrator’s voice outside of its habitable space, stating “all mingles, times and tenses” (Beckett, 297). Where no assumptions can be made of existence, since neither death nor temporality provide a sense of finitude or an accessibility to the voice, we are subjected to a repetition of narrative continuity and stagnation.
Texts for Nothing can be read as a labyrinth of never-ending openings and closures where the narrator is unable to progress. The tormented voice exists through the performative ceremonies that prescribe it to discuss and question its binding limits of entrapment. This internal suffocation becomes a sort of safe haven for the voice where it can live in a consistent world of contingency and denial. “It’s the dread of coming to the last, of having said all, your all, before the end, no, for that will be the end, the end of all, not certain.” (Beckett, 300) These feelings illustrate the voice’s desire to escape his uncertain and torturous life of terror. The ultimate tragedy of Texts for Nothing can be interpreted as the question of how far the narrative voice can fall into the vicissitudes of its failure to exist. The narrator earnestly begs the question, “Did I try everything, ferret in every hold, secretly, silently, patiently, listening?” (Beckett, 317)
The question of the protagonist’s existence is at the center of the story. As Langlois writes, “In Texts for Nothing, life at the extreme limit of what is unlivable is imposed as the permanent reality of its protagonist” (Langlois, 99). We are faced with the question of whether the narrator could be in a sort of afterlife or after-death state. He writes, “In my arms, I’m holding myself in my arms” (Beckett, 298) thereby figuring his life as it takes place in its grave. Furthermore, the narrator seems to be questioning whether he is in judgement state, stating “ill appear before the council, before the justice of him who is all love, unforgiving and justly so, but subject to strange indulgences, the accused will be my soul, I prefer that, perhaps someone will ask pity for my soul, I mustn’t miss that, I won’t be there, neither will God, it doesn’t matter, we’ll be represented.” (311) This reiterates the question of the narrator’s own existence as in a state of life, death or post-death. Alongside that the narrator expresses thoughts of suicide, stating “I tried throwing me off a cliff, collapsing in the street in the midst of mortals, that led nowhere, I gave up”(Beckett, 303). In a sense, one can also interpret the narrator’s state of idleness as a metaphorical death. The narrator introduces the ‘He’ character, in Chapter 4 to discuss the question of suicide and death.This internal, destructive voice in his head claims to want to kill him, to have him dead like him (Beckett, 306). The reader witnesses a switching in and out of consciousness stating “That’s how he speaks, this evening, how he has me speak, how he speaks to himself, how I speak, there is only me…” (Beckett, 307) He experiences shock, the effects of which linger and return in dreams, “it’s all the same dream, the same silence, it and me, it and him, him and me.” (Beckett, 338). This suggests the narrator’s lethal nostalgia for his trauma; lethal since it is both unwanted and unwilled.
Alain Badiou categorized the narration in Texts for Nothing as a reflection of solipsistic terror, writing, “The “I think” presupposes terror, which alone constrains the voice to over-extend towards itself in order to withdraw as much as possible, towards its point of enunciation.” (Badiou, 261) Badiou argues that the terror of this text partly arises from the terror of reason and thinking, whereby Beckett is frightened by the realization that after writing the Unnameable he could not go any further. Texts for Nothing seems to be judged by Badiou to be a failed paradigm and a result of Beckett’s “unsustainable narrative investigations of solipsistic terror” (Langlois, 98). This idea focuses on Beckett’s personal terror of thinking and reason to elucidate the terror faced by the narrator in Texts for Nothing. This interpretation fails to adequately interpret these texts by placing too much judgment on Badiou’s perceived failure of Beckett’s text. Contrary to Badiou’s interpretation, Beckett does not fail by rendering the narrator’s experience a reflection of his own personal solipsistic terror, but rather uses the terror at the soul of literature to express post-war European sentiment. It is the terror as a writer of expressing the terror of reason and thinking that places such a grave intellectual hardship on the writer, rather than the personal terror Beckett faced when not knowing how to continue writing after the Unnameable.
Through the close reading of Texts for Nothing it is terrifying to see how Beckett has let the terror of literature be infused into the narrator’s voice through terror linked to the deprivation of light, darkness, solitude, people, noise, silence, space, emptiness, life and death. We engage in the constant suffering of the narrator where the fear of the ‘It happens’ is continued throughout the texts. What emerges from this is a universal consciousness and a language of permanent suffering, reflecting the historical and psychological traumas of twentieth-century modernity. For Beckett’s protagonist, words, ideas, and images are instruments of torture, and in its reliance solely on these elements to escape its suffering, the voice becomes the agent of its own victimization; this becomes the ultimate situation of terror.Through the sustained dual internal movement of self-revelation and self-destruction, we see the voice become further isolated and depraved, falling into a dissolved subjectivity of the threat of “nothing can be told” (Beckett, 331). These contradictions, at the heart of Texts for Nothing, create a space for terror to fester. It seems as though self-torture of the mind in Beckett’s world is divided by language, resulting in contradictory drives that essentially secrete language uncontrollably.Ultimately, the style Beckett employs forces the reader to be placed into the anguish of the voice through the subjection to the torturous feelings of terror faced by the narrator.
Bibliography
Badiou, Alain. 2008. Conditions.Translated by Steven Corcoran. London: Continuum.
Blanchot, Maurice. 1986. The Writing of the Disaster. Translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Beckett, S. 2010. The selected works of Samuel Beckett Volume IV. New York: Grove Press.
Langlois, Chris. 2015.The Terror of Literature in Beckett’s Texts for Nothing. Twentieth-Century Literature, Volume 61, Number 1: Duke University Press.