266
LEO BERSANI
help to make clear what I take to be in Beckett an exasperated sense
of the confusion between expression and invention. Flaubert, James and
Proust are nonrealistic to the extent that they eliminate or at least
undermine external occasions which their narratives might refer to and
claim to be reporting on. As if to get closer to their real subject, they
report more directly on the self, but the report itself becomes a verbal
and structural occasion which creates material-that is, a self--out of
strictly formal terms and relations. So that, in a sense, in his impatience
with the pretense of speaking about anything but the self, the novelist
comes up against a new kind of dependence: he's no longer "lost"
among the strangers spawned by his dramatic imagination, but he finds
himself reduced to the unpredictable roles the
play
of his language will
im–
pose on him. Having rid himself of the constraints of probability, the
novelist may experience, in his "freer" use of language, a threat to his
identity rather than a vehicle for directly expressing it. For inasmuch as
his own future is tied up with the future of a language no longer dis–
ciplined by the credibility of the experience it describes, the writer
discovers, along with new verbal possibilities, the
arbitrariness
of the
personalities words create. Language, instead of probing personality,
reveals the self's frightening superficiality.
Every expression is an invention: it's perhaps ·an intuition of this
sort that accounts for Beckett's ambivalent attitude toward language
as expression. Behind the theoretician's call for an inex;pressive, au–
tonomous art, there seems to be a deeper fantasy of literature as nothing
more than the passive receptacle for a self entirely independent of
literary inventiveness. The Unnamable throws off all the personae-–
from Murphy to Mahood and W.orm-whkh, he claims, have been
foisted on
him
in the hope that he will confuse himself with them,
in order, finally, to express only himself, "to be a little as I always was
and never could be." The setting of
The Unnamable
may, we are
told at the start, be "the place where one finishes vanishing," and the
image of some .one who is nothing more than a "big talking ball" (an
image which recalls Macmann's dream of being "a great cylinder en–
dowed with the faculties of cognition and volition") expresses the
anguished need of the Beckett hero to get rid of all the things "that
stick out" from some mysterious core .of being--everything from bodily
protuberances to fictional characters and anecdotes and, finally, verbal
inventiveness itself. The ultimate dream is the impossible one of a
language that would neither express nor invent, one whose anonymity
would, paradoxically, express a self no longer betrayed by
style.
But
Beckett's characters will always be disturbed by the possible distance
between their words and "how it really is" for as Moran remarks
,
,
,
