I've returned! The grad school dilemma has been solved, for the most part, so now I'm back to writing these rambling little entries on literature and life.
I've inadvertantly encountered a number of discourses concerning identity and language in the past weeks, from very different sources: Samuel Beckett's novel The Unnamable, an interview on NPR, and the final chapter of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way. The essential question at hand is, what is the relationship between narrative and identity? And a subset of that is, what is the function of names in constructing an identity? Can there be a narrative without names?
I have asked these questions on this blog before, but these are questions to which I must return, continuously.
Each source provides a very different answer. The scholar on NPR insisted that there is no essential relationship between narrative and reflective consciousness; humans are not naturally narrative, and should not always use narrative as a tool in the process of reflecting on their experiences. He cited Sartre in the claim that narratives distort reality, and that reminded me of a post I had written earlier, in the particular distorting power of names. As soon as a thing is named, its identity pinned down to a consistent signifier, the name fails to address the thing's reality. A name cannot contain the thing itself, and neither can a narrative-- even a six volume narrative consisting of thousands of pages.
This notion of unnamability relates closely to Beckett's The Unnamable. The narrator of this strange novel, which has no real plot to speak of, is constantly beset by many voices, which define him and control him, forcing him to speak through a voice that is not his own, in a language that is not his own. The Unnamable longs and strives to find his own voice in this bewildering narrative, but he also desires silence. He seems to recognize that any narrative will fail to constitute an identity, or worse, will only impose on him a false identity. He yearns to recover his authentic voice, rather than continue to speak through their voices, and say something final about himself so that he may stop speaking altogether, fall into silence, and exist in pure selfhood. The tension between speech and silence is paradoxical; the only way, in the Unnamable's mind, to achieve full selfhood is to speak himself into silence, to recover his voice and then stop. I think that this is because the authentic self is so fleeting, that if he were to speak more than that single, definitive word or phrase, the voice of the other would inevitably resurface and he would have to begin the process of recovering himself again. If he could only identify when he has spoken something true of himself, and then fall silent, he would achieve ontological consistency.
According to Maimaitiming Aila, however, Beckett's characters are unwilling to entirely relinquish narrative because, without it, they sink into irrevokable oblivion. They cease to exist outside of the language that they use, especially the Unnamable, who seems to exist only as a voice. That language, though, is very inconsistent and confusing; names shift and metamorphosize, highlighting the tension between identity and anonymity. Characters have names, but they are temporally influenced; the names change over time, and through different places, suggesting that identity is not stable. Rather than the proper name functioning as "a reliable sign to designate a person, the narrators in the trilogy [of Beckett's novels Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable] hold it as a sign of the existence of a particular discourse, a moment in the stream of consciousness, and an expression of certain perceptions and ideas" (Aila, "Nothing but Dust: A Philosophical Approach to the Problem of Identity and Anonymity in Samuel Beckett's Trilogy," p. 129). This harkens back to the opening lines of The Unnamable: "Where now? Who now? When now?" These are three questions of identity; the "who" follows "where," is inseparable from "when." Time and space, then, determine identity, and because these are constantly in flux, identity is never stable.
Names are used to designate objects. In Beckett, the object changes, and the subject too, with time and place, with every possible world in which the object exists, and often, so does the name: "Beckett's practice of renaming characters reflects the idea that language obscures the reality it is attempting to depict. A name brings with it a superficial sense of a person's identity" (Rubin Rabinovitz, "Repetition and Underlying Meanings in Samuel Beckett's Trilogy," Rethinking Beckett, p. 52). The commentator on NPR would likely agree with Rabinovitz's assessment here; that language, and narrative in particular, obscures reality and is therefore inessential to the creation of an identity, perhaps even detrimental.
In The Unnamable, the difference between self and other erodes and the two become indistinguishable; the narrator is Mahood, Molloy, Worm, and all of the others who make up the shifting "they," whose voices he cannot stop from blending with, and overpowering, his own. Gradually, all of the distinguishing factors that comprise identity fall away: physical deterioration and uncertainty of the physical characteristics of one's own body (the Unnamable first says, for example, that he feels his hands are stuck to his knees, then later claims that he has no limbs at all), memory, and name, including the pronoun "I." The Unnamable questions his identity so radically that he claims that he can just as easily replace "I" with "they" or any other pronoun, any other word for that matter, and it would make no difference, because it is not he who is speaking.
In contrast to these views questioning the utility of narrativity is Proust. For Proust's narrator, language and narrative, and in the last chapter of the first volume, names are essential to comprehending reality. Language is an important part of reifying internal experience; although speech is part of the life of the mind, it also provides a link to sensual experience and physical reality. Speech is symbolic, but it's inseparable from the physical manipulation of the mouth and vocal chords; when the narrator seeks any opportunity to speak the name Swann, it's to bring Gilberte from the unreachable fantasy world she occupies in his imagination and into the concrete reality of his world. He is aware that saying words associated with her and repeating her name do not impact her at all, but they do bring something of her essence into his sphere and bridge the gap between them.
Proust does not promote the idea that the name is fully stable, however; when the narrator falls in love with Gilberte, every word and name connected with her is endowed suddenly with new meaning. His reaction to the names changes, even if the names themselves do not; the objects themselves also remain constant, uneffected by the referential shift the narrator experiences. The important thing is that the narrator's consciousness has changed, and this is why, in the final pages of Swann's Way, he laments the inability to fully recover the past; the physical relics of the past are insufficient, and so are linguistic re-tellings of past events. What he seeks to recapture is his consciousness at the time. Like the Unnamable and other characters in Beckett, the narrator is not the child whose experiences he recounts, although he remembers them. He cannot return to the consciousness of that particular moment, waiting for Gilberte in the Champs-Elysees, or to catch a glimpse of Madame Swann's carriage passing under the trees in a park. He continues to search for lost time, but he knows that it must remain, at least in part, permanently, irrecoverably lost, because he can never be that boy again. Time and place have changed, and so must he.
On that point, Proust and Beckett appear to agree (keep in mind that Samuel Beckett was a Proust scholar); a past consciousness cannot possibly be recaptured. In Krapp's Last Tape, the titular Krapp bears some resemblance to Proust's narrator; he searches his memory (for Krapp, it's recorded on spools of tape) and attempts to comprehend his past self. At times, Krapp does not recognize the voice on the tape, even though it is his own; there are considerable gaps in his memory. And there are things that he wishes he did not remember and impatiently skips over portions of his former self's narrative. At the end of Swann's Way, Proust's narrator appears to experience a similar kind of alienation from the former self. This narrator's memory is more reliable, perhaps, than Krapp's, but he nevertheless fails in the same task of recovering something of the past: "how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer existed... The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our convenience. They were only a thin little slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years" (Proust, p. 606).
This is how Swann's Way ends, with a tinge of regret that the years can never be brought back to life, that places changes and the moment that has passed is gone forever. The narrative of memories that the narrator presents, however, seems to be at least a partial remedy for the impossibility of recapturing moments in the senses; he can, it seems, recapture these moments, even his former consciousness, through the act of constructing a narrative. This is where the debate arises; the NPR guest would claim that the narrative is falsifying and that he is never recapturing anything of the past, but only imposing a pseudo-reality onto his experiences. For the characters in Beckett's Trilogy, narrative adds to confusion and the oblivion of self, not the establishment of an identity. The characters' identities gradually disintegrate, and in The Unnamable, the monologue also deteriorates, slipping into contradiction and tormented uncertainty, culminating in the final words, "You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on." While Proust's narrator can revisit and experience the entirety of his consciousness, "Beckett implies that our consciousness at its most fundamental level is elusive and anonymous, and that there will always remain an unthematic, unreflective, and opaque spot in the life of the subject" (Aila, p. 138).
Yet the narrative continues; the characters are not completely anonymous, not even the Unnamable. There is a measure of self-awareness that allows for narrative and prevents them from slipping away entirely into opaqueness. Language is an essential component of retaining a sense of self; Aila writes that "there is no point outside of language from which we come to express ourselves... the power of language becomes more and more a case of excess to such a degree that it anonymously speaks in the void: It speaks solitarily with itself in the end" (Aila, p. 141). Later, it is claimed that "Beckett thinks there is no 'I' prior to stories, to narrative, and, above all, to language. The self is a mere abstraction and fictional entity created in and through the effect of language, narrative, and self-perception" (Aila, p. 143). I'm not sure that I agree with that interpretation; language is important in Beckett, but silence, I think, is infinitely more important. On a metatheatrical level, as soon as the words end, the characters meet their demise; the curtain falls after they lapse into silence. But throughout the plays, from Hamm to Vladimir and Estragon to Krapp, the characters feel that there is something essential and authentic in silence, and so they strive toward it. It may be the end of this fabricated self created through narrative, but there could be a more genuine self, a pure experience of being without the falsifications of language, in the silence.
And what about the actor in Catastrophe? Like The Unnamable, the actor is bombarded with commands and manipulated by words, he is molded into something he is not; but then, he defies the narrative. He raises his face when he was told to keep it bowed. This is an act of self-assertion, I think, and it is wholly non-linguistic.
This post has rambled on to excessive lengths, so I think that I must lapse into silence and let this monologue end. I won't go on here, but I will be back to speak more of other things.
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