Perversely, considering the novel’s refusal to stop, The Unnamable arrived at the end of a beginning for Samuel Beckett, or of a second beginning anyway. Having commenced his scratchings under the influence of Joyce’s literature of accumulation – and toiled in the trenches of the unpublished as a result – Beckett was overdue his own great “revelation” by its advent in 1946. Fictionally memorialised as occurring on Dún Laoghaire’s East Pier, in Krapp’s Last Tape, Beckett’s actual Damascene moment occurred in his mother’s room when it suddenly became clear to him that Joyce’s technique was proving more hobble than help – that reaching deeply into his own sense of ignorance, impotence, folly and repression was the grist his mill required instead. This reversion to a literature of diminishment, and peeling away, led to Beckett’s most prolific phase, the so-called “siege in the room” which spawned The End, Mercier and Camier, Waiting for Godot, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. Each was originally written in French – all the better to prevent the richness of Irish English infecting his new linguistic impoverishment with any trace of the dreaded “style”.
So, from the revelation on, it was plot, character and even the vaguest nod to social realism, begone! While he may not have shed all these elements at once, by the time he got as far as The Unnamable, in 1953, his prose had been stripped to the bone and the bone itself boiled white. Never again were the literary curlicues of reasoning or plausibility to be indulged in, while even time and place – the basic security blankets of novelists everywhere – were thenceforth made redundant. With this massacre of critical expectation complete, The Unnamable’s sole remaining vehicle was voice and, in finding it, the writer arrived at his ultimate form. In the 1960s, Beckett is said to have exclaimed to the poet John Montague, who was just then struggling with the structure of a particular poem, “Ah, Montague, what you need is monologue – monologue! That’s the thing.” And monologue is certainly the easiest feature of The Unnamable to identify but, after that, it gets a lot murkier.
Explicitly – or as explicit as it’s possible to be when characterising a voice which rejects its own definition – The Unnamable is the monologue of an unnamed, monodical being who is, seemingly, forever compelled forwards by the imperative of its unverifiable, yet unfortunately un-discontinuable, and un-silenceable, existence. Or, as he says himself, “Ah, if only this voice could stop, this meaningless voice which prevents you from being nothing.”
What can be gleaned, thanks to his fixatious reiteration of various preoccupations – although one shouldn’t be foolish enough to believe these assertions signal any objective truth – is that “he”, for want of a name, has always been there; or if he hasn’t, he can’t remember where else he might have been before. There was a mother: “I am looking for my mother to kill her.” A place of birth: “Bally I forget what.” And intimations of God denied: “Yes, God, fomenter of calm, I never believed, not a second.” He says he lives in a jar, sometimes beneath a tarpaulin, with his hands on his knees, or maybe his stumps. That his nose, penis, ears and “all the things that stick out” have fallen off. That later, on discovering his penis has surprisingly not fallen off, he now lacks the arms to wring anything from it. He is also increasingly menaced by an equally unnamed “they” who may be out to get him, or might just have expectations of him, either of which he’d really rather do without. Further confusing matters, the entire text is constructed from contrapuntal claims like “it’s life trying to get in, no, trying to get him out” and “I’m a big talking ball, talking about things that do not exist, or that exist perhaps…”.
Assertion, followed by denial, sometimes followed by reassertion, forms what central thesis The Unnamable recognisably contains. For, while our man may be caused to suffer from “little attacks of hope from time to time”, he is most often preoccupied by questions of whether he does or does not, has or will ever, exist at all. And if he is, or is not, currently in the process of dying or of being born. However, even if either were to be the case – and he’s not saying they are – he doubts such ephemeral activities could imply greater existential meaning anyway. Because who am I? No one. What’s happening? Nothing. What’s the point of all this? There isn’t one… probably. What he really wants is for it all to stop. The talking. The being. The having to go on. But, whenever it does, it just starts again. This is a novel that’s less “life finds a way” than “unfortunately, life finds a way”.
At first glance, The Unnamable is Beckett at his most bleak, oblique and anti-participatory. Although there is plenty of the writer’s almost Wildean black humour – “To have lost one’s limbs and preserved one’s dentition, what a mockery!” – as well as his fondness for scatology – “… it’s like shit, there we have it at last…” – the pervasive tone of impotent despair is unignorable. Technically speaking, the novel even advances itself through a process of collapse. Beginning as a fairly traditional-looking text, with paragraphs and punctuation, it gradually breaks down under the weight of its own uncertainty into gigantic strings of speculative subclauses. Eventually, it declines into an almost continuous sentence which reflexively, and repeatedly, denies its meaning before it can even shuffle across the finish line of its own full stop. As he himself says, “To tell the truth, let us be honest at least, it is some considerable time now since I last knew what I was talking about.” A position which is largely impossible for the reader to dispute. That is until, on closer inspection, covert attempts at connection begin to show themselves.
There is the cyclical return to the potential personae of Mahood – Beckett’s original title for the novel – and Worm. But are they him, or aren’t they? He says they are and aren’t. And even if they are, who are they anyway? Is Mahood, with his relentless going forwards, a foreshortened relic of the 19th-century Irish immigrant MacHood? Unanswered. And Worm? That squirming, famously eyeless invertebrate, why does he find himself here transformed into a huge lidless eye? A symbol of abjection? Or perversity? A revelation as to the deferent nature of our man? Unconfirmed. There is the repeated suggestion that he may simply be a reincarnation, compound or mere fragment of characters from Beckett’s previous novels. Malone is cited, Molloy, Murphy, even Watt. Frequent references to history and mythology also give lie to his argument for the non-existence of a world outside his own. The eternal torment of Prometheus’s punishment serves as a model for his own compulsive journey through endless speech while William the Silent’s motto Je maintiendrai (I will maintain) is invoked and everyone from St John of the Cross to Toussaint Louverture is put to work. So, for all the insistence on his state of gratuitous isolation, that isolation becomes increasingly populous. It’s tempting to suggest that Beckett himself couldn’t quite bear to leave the novel out in the cold it claims to exist in. Rather, his revelation’s internal logic required an externalisation of the connection between his works. Therefore the inexpugnable anti-hero of The Unnamable cannot escape his genetic debt to his predecessors any more than he will, one day, resist providing parentage for the characters of Play and Endgame. In this way, all the wilfully vivisected parts – trunk in a jar, severed limbs and disembodied eyes – are ultimately returned to a body once more, wherein they will be made whole again, whether they wish to be or not…
If this makes the novel sound like a voyeuristic spectacle of existential suffering though, fear not: the reader suffers too. In classic modernist fashion both voice and reader are abandoned to their respective experiences with little authorial concern for their ensuing discomfort. Certainly, the reader’s omnipresent fear that they too are clawing their way through the text towards nothing never entirely dissipates. However, a clammy awareness does slowly dawn that a point is being made about how inadequate the clubbable comforts of identity are for understanding the deepest nature of self – the self we truly are beneath the dress-up and linguistic razzamatazz of individualism.
The Unnamable asks us to be without ourselves, to allow ourselves to be less. To ask this deflated self, ungarnished by social selfhood: what is left? And what will always remain? Or, when faced with our essential nothingness and the inevitability of suffering, who will we be then? What will we do? “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on,” the voice says, re-embarking on his purgatorial continuance, while leaving us behind to mull our own.
Samuel Beckett’s “The Unnamable”, introduced by Eimear McBride, is published by Faber & Faber
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[See also: David Hockney writ large]
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This article appears in the 10 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Spring Special 2025