All posts tagged Zen Buddhism

Maria Bartuszová @ Tate Modern

Born in Prague, Slovak artist Maria Bartuszová (1936 to 1996) spent most of her career in the central European Slovak city of Košice, the second-largest city in Slovakia near the borders of Hungary and Ukraine. Here she developed and experimented with relatively small-scale abstract sculptures, the overwhelming majority of them using white plaster cast in organic rounded shapes. To enter the four rooms of this retrospective is to enter a world of whiteness, comprising scores of mysterious, self-contained ovoid shapes, some incorporating metal or wood, but the great majority a pure, smooth, round whiteness. At first glance they might almost be bones or fossils in a natural history museum.

Installation view of Maria Bartuszová @ Tate Modern

The four rooms of this exhibition bring together works rarely exhibited before in the UK to create an light and airy survey of Bartuszová’s career from the early 1960s, when she began her experimentation with casting, to the late 1980s, when she was making bigger, more varied and more site-specific art.

During her working life Bartuszová created around 500 sculptures, ranging from numerous small organic forms to larger commissions for public spaces, as well as works designed to be integrated into landscapes. They have titles like ‘egg’, ‘drop’, ‘folded figure’ though many are so pure and abstract they can’t even manage a title and are simply labelled ‘untitled’.

‘Folded Figure’ by Maria Bartuszová (1965) Collection of Amy Gold and Brett Gorvy

Filling balloons with plaster

They look like this because in the 1960s Bartuszová began experimenting with taking balloons or even condoms, and pouring plaster into them in order to create smooth, white balloon shapes. Because the plaster obviously weighted down and distorted the balloons, creating a smooth flowing ‘blobby’ effect, she called this playful approach ‘gravistimulated shaping’.

As an experiment she sometimes dunked the setting plaster in water which also had the effect of smoothing the surface. The early sculptures made using this method evoke natural and living forms, such as drops of water and, above all, eggs, although other biological or anatomical shapes may suggest themselves to the viewer.

‘Untitled’ by Maria Bartuszová (1973) Tate © The Archive of Maria Bartuszová, Košice

Casting balloons in plaster

In the 1980s Bartuszová inverted her practice, so to speak. Instead of blowing wet plaster into balloons, she started doing the (more obvious) approach of blowing up the balloons and casting the plaster around them. She called this ‘pneumatic casting’.

The most obvious change was in the surface texture of the casts which went from being beautifully smooth to becoming relatively rough and textured. But there were other implications, the most striking of which was that, having made the case, because it’s so fragile, you can crack or fragment it, and suddenly create a completely different psychovisual impact. Instead of smooth completeness, you have fragmentation and craggy edges. And she went on to discover that, the bigger the balloon (she took to using meteorological balloons), the more holes you could make, and the more strange and evocative the resulting shape would appear.

‘Egg, but not Columbus’s’ by Maria Bartuszová (1987) Courtesy Slovak National Gallery, SNG

Endless eggs

This turned out to be a highly resourceful strategy, in that:

  1. It can be scaled up: you can make massive cracked shell sculptures this way and the bigger the sculpture, the more elaborate the sense of shells within shells within shells.
  2. She also discovered that you can add together these balloon-shaped fragments to create ‘multicellular’ shapes and, insofar as they are cracked and exposed, allowed her to explore countless types of empty space and ‘negative volumes’. She described each result as ‘a tiny void full of a tiny infinite universe’.

Looking at them now it suddenly occurs to me they look a bit like the clotted balls of frogspawn, but somehow frozen and cracked. Or maybe the models of complex molecules I saw in school chemistry lessons and you see in scientific literature. She referred to them as ‘endless eggs’. Here she is in her studio, in the 1980s.

Maria Bartuszová in her studio with sculptures, Košice, Slovakia 1987 by unknown photographer

The damaged eggs really have a very different vibe from the balloon casts. The latter feel smooth and complete, and very sensuous to look at. Freud says that looking is an evolutionary advanced form of touching, and you can feel the smoothness and calming weight of the earlier shapes in your mind’s eye. But the cracked shells, obviously enough, feel jagged and damaged, empty and lifeless and, somehow, spent.

Add wire

The next step down this route was to introduce metal wire. If you look closely at the photo above, you can see that that’s what she’s doing: finalising the arrangement of twines of fine wire in, around and through a complex congeries of cracked egg shapes.

‘Untitled’ by Maria Bartuszová (1985) Tate © The Archive of Maria Bartuszová, Košice

This apparently simple addition adds a whole new layer of complexity to the works. The untitled piece I’ve shown, above, is the work that Tate has used on the poster for this exhibition and it is certainly very characteristic of this phase or branch of her work, but I’m not sure I like it.

I very much like abstract art, and geometric shapes and I know what they mean when the curators point out that many of the balloon ones are small enough to imagine cradling in your hands. But something about the ragged asymmetricality, the unpredictability, and the jagged surfaces of the broken shells made me uneasy. If my mind’s eye warmed to the smooth curves of the full-bodied balloon shapes, it recoiled from the broken, barbed feel of these works.

In the country

In the 1980s Bartuszová moved to a house in Košice with a studio and a large garden on a hillside. There are photos which show a rambling sloping garden with small trees into which she has inserted some of the multiple balloon works.

Tree by Maria Bartuszová (1987) consisting of a plum tree, plaster, string, plastic, foil and paper, in the artist’s garden in Košice, Slovakia © Center for Contemporary Arts (NCSU), Bratislava, Slovakia. Courtesy the Archive of Maria Bartuszová, Košice and Alison Jacques Gallery, London. Photo by Gabriel Kladek

After the Soviet crackdown on the Prague Spring of 1968, many artists retreated from political or social statements and found refuge in nature and spirituality. Bartuszová took to spirituality, reading about Zen Buddhism (as so many people did in the early 1970s) and, more to the point, began incorporating natural objects in her work.

Here is a large branch half-drowned in plaster to create the impression of snow. I liked these ‘snow casts’ because they look like branches in snow such as I saw just a few months ago when London had heavy snowfall, and because I love trees. She called the series of works exploring this approach ‘Melting Snow’.

‘Tree’ by Maria Bartuszová (photo by the author)

Metal sculptures

So far I’ve followed Bartuszová’s work along one particular avenue of development but there were, in fact, other strands and threads to her work. For a start there’s a whole different strand made up of works case in metal which obviously have a very different vibe from the cool white plaster works.

Folded Figure II (Haptic) by Maria Bartuszová (1967) © The Archive of Maria Bartuszová, Košice. Photo courtesy Michael Brzezinski

Ordinarily, I like small, geometric, metal abstract sculptures very much indeed but somehow these cold metal objects felt so far removed from the warm mental feeling given by the plaster casts – from the central logic of her development – that I recoiled from them, in the same way that I wasn’t sure whether I liked the cracked eggshells or their barbed wire finish meshes.

Bound and tied sculptures

More in line with the soft mood of the plaster casts was a kind of hybrid form she developed, where smooth, gloop plaster casts interacted with metal or wood. Most often this took the form of wire, or sometimes string, twined round eggs shapes to make them bulge, very much into the shape of cells at the earliest stage of cell multiplication when the nascent life form consists of only 2 or 4 or 8 cells. You can see examples on the table in the first photo at the top of this review, or in the photo below.

Untitled by Maria Bartuszová (1986) © The Archive of Maria Bartuszová, Košice

Again, I didn’t like the use of the thin wire or twine. Inexplicably and irrationally, they made me feel tied up in wire, made me feel breathless and constrained. According to the curators, these many objects tied and bound and wired symbolised for Bartuszová ‘the bonds and constraints of human relationships’. The curators only mention in passing that she experienced  ‘challenges in her marriage’ which eventually broke down and ended in 1984. Quite.

The curators make these works out to be sophisticated and complicated meditations on or expressions of the way personal and familial relationships are interconnected with nature, they way they capture the trace of a moment in solid form, in a tactile fragment of time. That her work is a thinking-through of sensual shapes, an extended exploration of feeling through sculptural practice. Fair enough. But the wire-snagged endless eggs made me feel like I was ripping my hand on barbed wire and the wire-bound cells made me feel asphyxiated.

On the other hand, I liked what you could call the ‘belted’ works, where the constraining force isn’t wire but more like a belt. Her work along this line of investigation, in the 1980s, continued with the themes of binding and pressure but incorporated many more materials such as acrylic, string, bronze, rubber and wood. Basically, I found these funny and charming.

Untitled by Maria Bartuszová (1972 to 1974) Courtesy of Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Social art

Bartuszová left a legacy of some 500 sculptures which stimulate, please or disturb in their quiet but steadily experimental, abstract way. About 80 are on display in this exhibition. But there are (at least) two other distinct aspects of her practice.

In the mid-1960s Bartuszová had branched out to experiment with small sculptures composed of interlocking shapes, many from her trademark plaster (such as ‘Folded Figure’, 1965) but also series cast from bronze and aluminium. These were conceived as 3-D jigsaw puzzles which could be taken apart and reassembled.

Installation view of Maria Bartuszová @ Tate Modern showing some of her interlocking 3-D puzzles (photo by the author)

Early in the show there’s a series of black and white photos recording how some of these works were used in innovative workshops for blind and partially sighted children. Rather than summarise I’ll quote the wall label in its entirety:

In 1976 and 1983 art historian Gabriel Kladek organised and delivered a series of workshops for blind and partially-sighted children. A key element was the use of Bartuszová’s hand-sized and enlarged sculptures. The sculptures could be handled and several of them taken apart and reassembled. Kladek photographed the workshops, capturing the young participants’ joyful exploration of the sculptures. The workshops encouraged the children to experience different shapes and textures through touch, differentiating between geometric and organic forms. Prioritising movement, the body, touch, action and active engagement with sculpture, the use of these sculptures highlights the artist’s forward-thinking, participatory approach.

Sweet, huh? But would only work with the smooth and rounded forms, not so much with the fragile eggs, let alone objects bound with wire and twine.

But Bartuszová got involved in a surprising number of public commissions. She lived in a communist country and all artists and writers were expected to make practical contributions to society. Since these are obviously site-specific and generally very big, none of these big public pieces are included in the exhibition, we have to be content with (generally old black-and-white) photos and explanatory wall labels.

Thus we are told about:

  • a bronze fountain she created for the Institute for Physically Disabled Children in Košice (1967 to 1971)
  • monumental reliefs she created for the Southern Slovak Paper Mill (1973 to 1975) and Eastern Slovak Steelworks (1974)

There are photos of her in situ at these locations supervising the creation of the works. In addition there are also photos of the futuristic models she designed for playground climbing frames and slides, and a set of photos recording the creation of a monumental public sculpture titled ‘Metamorphosis, Two-Part Sculpture’ (1982) at the entrance to the Košice crematorium.

These are sort of interesting mainly because they show how brutalist, post-war modernism was very similar either side of the Iron Curtain, suggesting that it had less to do with the creativity of individual artists than a certain design logic emanating from modern building materials, technologies and production methods. If you have lots of steel or pre-stressed concrete available along with large-scale factories and workshops for its production and design, then certain stripped down shapes and designs logically follow, whether you’re in Slovakia or San Francisco.

A photo of her at a large workshop, cleaning snow off one of her slides, and of a partially sighted child paying with one of her forms, can be see at the Tate magazine article, A Futurist of Form.

Related links

More Tate Modern reviews

More reviews of women artists

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by Simon on April 28, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on April 28, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/04/28/maria-bartuszova-tate-modern/

The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett (1953)

The Unnamable is the third and final part of Beckett’s Trilogy of novels, which begins with Molloy followed by Malone Dies. It was originally published in French as L’Innommable and later adapted by the author into English. Grove Press published the English edition in 1958.

To begin with it feels like the best of the three because it really does do what the others promised to, and drops the traditional novelistic apparatus of plot and character, story and events and dialogue.

Instead, it is one massive unbroken monologue by an unnamed character. What is immediately appealing about it is that whereas Molloy and Malone Dies have a real-world setting, and characters (the named narrator and then various people he interacts with) and quite a few locations (townscape, family farm, Moran’s nice house with its beehives and chicken run, mysterious forests, an asylum on a hilltop, a beach, the sea, an island and so on) The Unnamable is right from the start far more abstract.

The language is extremely abstract and pseudo-academic. The text proceeds by asking questions, as in an academic paper and then seeking to answer them, which is made perfectly clear from the opening sentences:

Where now? Who now? When now? … Questions, hypotheses

The narrator is embedded in some kind of physical structure and spends some time debating what this might be. He knows all about Molloy, Murphy and Moran, protagonists of the previous novel, and he keeps seeing Molloy progress like a clockwork toy past his present position and spends a huge amount of time debating how and why this comes about.

Having struggled hard to read the previous two books, I thought this one would be murder but it turns out to be the easiest and most enjoyable. I think it’s because it is the most Beckettian. Probably I’m thinking and reading this with the benefit of massive historical hindsight, but The Unnamable feels the closest in style to Beckett’s plays, with a bereft, degraded, mad narrator analysing his situation with disconcerting clarity and rigour and at interminable, repetitive length.

But it didn’t happen like that, it happened like this, the way it’s happening now, that is to say, I don’t know, you mustn’t believe what I’m saying, I don’t know what I’m saying, I’m doing as I always did, I’m going on as best I can…

It feels more of a piece, fully integrated. The style matches the ‘subject matter’ such as it is. It feels pure. The Unnamable is Peak Beckett.

The attack on the sustainability of language is there right from the start. ‘I say this, but what am I? Is there an I? Is there a this? Is there an is? It has been here forever, or at least since I started. But when did I start?’ The whole book is set in that style, and I struggle to put into words why I like it. I think the first two novels, despite all claims to the contrary, incorporated a surprisingly large amount of story, plot and character – whereas The Unnamable really has happily jettisoned everything except the meandering consciousness endlessly unfolding in an unending stream of discourse.

In a peculiar way, it’s liberating. Insofar as there was a plot in the former two novels, the plot-detecting part of your mind had to focus on characters and events and puzzle out how they fit together and found it frustrating when the plot was interrupted by the narrator’s numerous divagations and distractions. The Unnamable is purer. Devoid of plot or significant incidents it simply flows, an endless and undemanding stream of rhetorical questions amiably undermining the possibility of questions or language or the narrator himself.

I get the impression that critics in the 1950s and the over-excitable 1960s thought Beckett was asking Big Questions about Human Life and Language and Being. Now that we post-modernists aren’t much bothered about such grandiose projects, and only worry about gender and the colour of people’s skin, Beckett feels more like a relaxing current of intelligent background noise.

The way the text continually stops to question itself might once have been taken as strict and stern expressions of Deep Integrity and a profound examination of blah blah, about language and identity, probably, or the possibility of communication, maybe the contingency of fiction or – as the narrator puts it – ‘all their balls about being and existing’ (p.320) or ‘all their ballocks about life and death’ (p.354).

  • It, say it, not knowing what.
  • I seem to speak (it is not I) about me (it is not about me).
  • it’s not I speaking, it’s not I hearing
  • it’s not I, not I, I can’t say it, it came like that, it comes like that, it’s not I
  • The subject doesn’t matter, there is none (p.331)
  • The fact is they no longer know where they’ve got to in their affair, where they’ve got me to, I never knew, I’m where I always was, wherever that is… (p.354)
  • But I really mustn’t ask myself any more questions (if it’s I) I really must not… (p.359)
  • But it’s not I, it’s not I, where am I, what am I doing, all this time, as if that mattered…

Once upon a time, back in the avant-garde 1950s, this must have felt wildly experimental but now, on this hot coronavirus afternoon, it feels like reassuring murmurs.

I remember the old joke that a lecturer is a person who talks in someone else’s sleep. Well, this text is driven forward by exactly the kind of rhetorical questions which a lecturer or academic delivers in order to drive their paper or lecture onwards, in order to structure it, in order to create it. The narrator himself comments on the process whereby discourse is created through a succession of questions.

But the discourse must go on. So one invents obscurities. Rhetoric.

The discourse must be created and continued, no-one knows why, and so one invents obscurities, questions everything, multiple questions requiring multiple answers, which must themselves be considered and refined and lead to further questions, ad infinitum. And all because the discourse must go on.

I have to speak, whatever that means. (p.288)

He asks some footling questions about the lights in the place where he appears to be, and then goes on to comment that he’s only doing so to keep things going, to have something to talk about.

But I shall remark without further delay, in order to be sure of doing so, that I am relying on those lights, as indeed on all other similar sources of credible perplexity, to help me continue…

And he is grateful when a new thought, a new line of enquiry, gives him a topic from which to spin more text

  • This represents at least a thousand words I was not counting on.
  • The search for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech is what enables the discourse to continue.
  • Nothing like issues. There are a few to be going on with…
  • let us first suppose, in order to get on a little, then we’ll suppose something else, in order to get on a little further…
  • would it not suffice to, to what, the thread is lost, no matter, here’s another…
  • My halts do not count. Their purpose was to enable me to go on…

He addresses topics in turn. He considers the ‘light’ in this place. Then he turns to the air, ‘that old chestnut’. He is scrabbling around for subject matter to keep it going, it, the discourse, the text itself

I know no more questions and they keep on pouring out of my mouth. I think I know what it is, it’s to prevent the discourse from coming to an end…

Maybe it’s worth pointing out that he introduces new subjects or scenes very casually, just as part of the flow of the enormous paragraphs, the wall of text. Topic changes are easy to miss. But I learned to spot them at the end of Malone Dies, where they become obvious, he simply flags them up by tagging a subject at the end of a long rambling paragraph. Here’s an example which tells the reader that the next subject is going to be ‘the noise’.

But let us close this parenthesis and, with a light heart, open the next. The noise.

I’m not reading the parodies of academic-speak into the text; its academic tone is emphasised right from the opening words, which are not even parodies of but might simply be quotes from a standard university lecture or presentation:

These few general remarks to begin with… I should mention before going any further…

As well as numerous other quotes from the academic stylebook:

Let us try and see where these considerations lead.

And mention of the fact that he attended a series of lectures or course (p.273). And thereafter follow hundreds and hundreds of amiably rhetorical questions, some answered, some not, all contributing to the gentle lulling rhythm.

What am I to do, what shall I do, what should I do, in my situation, how proceed? By aporia pure and simple? Or by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered, or sooner or later?

Am I being irreverent to a Great Work of Art? Only as irreverent as the narrator himself.

Can one be ephectic otherwise than unawares? I don’t know. With the yesses and noes it is different, they will come back to me as I go along and now, like a bird, to shit on them all without exception.

According to Wikipedia, ephectic means ‘the general state of being given to suspense of judgement’. As far as I can tell, the sentence: ‘Can one be ephectic otherwise than unawares?’ means ‘can one practice consistent suspension of judgement in any other mode of mind than being unaware?’. To try to be more precise: ‘is utter suspension of judgement only possible if you are unaware of the thing you are trying not to judge’ or: ‘Is the human mind so structured as to judge everything it perceives and so the only way to achieve the condition of not judging anything is simply to be unaware of it?’ Does being aware of something instantly prompt judgement?

This is all very entertaining and/or thought-provoking, maybe, but the effort required to really understand many of these statements tends to be undermined by the narrator’s characteristically Beckettian answer – ‘I don’t know’, which has the tendency of throwing away any effort you made trying to answer the question. Thus negated, the sentence can be considered for its sound alone, and on this level it is delightfully euphonious because of its alliteration, because the open vowel sounds of ‘ephectic otherwise than unawares’, especially the last three words, are wonderfully lulling. And then Beckett’s favourite phrase, ‘I don’t know’, closes down discussion and rolls us along to the next rhetorical question.

So I am well aware that the text contains all kinds of questions, invokes all kinds of philosophical issues and probably makes countless literary references which I don’t, personally, recognise. But it is patently obvious that the text sets them up in order to knock them down, that at any point the degraded and forgetful narrator will lose track of his argument and stumble to a halt.

The fact would seem to be, if in my situation one may speak of facts, not only that I shall have to speak of things of which I cannot speak, but also, which is even more interesting, but also that I, which is if possible even more interesting, that I shall have to, I forget, no matter…

Not only is he a long-winded professor droning on, but he devotes a lot of time to wondering whether he even exists, whether what he says is worth saying, and then stumbles and forgets whatever he was going to say. The result is an entertaining drone, an unending sequence of lulling and soothing repetitions and inversions.

And things, what is the correct attitude to adopt towards things? And, to begin with, are they necessary? What a question. But I have few illusions, things are to be expected.

He’s so right. Things are to be expected, lots of things, but are they necessary? And what is the correct attitude we should take towards things? I forget. No matter. Relax.

People with things, people without things, things without people, what does it matter…

Exactly. Relax.

He mentions other ‘people’ but maybe these are just more ‘things’ he’s attached names to, whatever a ‘name’ is. Thus he refers to characters from the previous two novels, Molloy and Moran and Malone, as well as from the earlier novels Murphy, Mercier and Camier, and Watt. He thinks they ‘are are all here’, he thinks they’ve all been there forever. And he mentions a few other elements from the novels, for example that it was at Bally that ‘the inestimable gift of life had been rammed down my gullet’, Bally featuring in part two of Molloy.

For some readers no doubt this creates an interesting dynamic, a complex intertextuality. But it is also rather cosy, like meeting old friends. Murphy is blown up in the novel of the same name, Molloy isn’t in great shape when we left him and there’s the strong suggestion that Malone died at the end of his book. Maybe they’re all dead. Maybe they’re in the afterlife? There are no days here, he tells us. So where is ‘here’? I don’t know. No matter. The narrator mentions a few ‘puppets’ he will play with. Maybe all these ‘characters’ are toys, the toys of a collapsing mind.

The inconsequential contradiction

Which made me notice a major component of Beckett’s style, which is to state something then immediately negate it.

  • The best would be not to begin. But I have to begin.
  • Here all is clear. No, all is not clear. (p.269)

Learned critics may associate this with the via negativa, ‘a philosophical approach to theology which asserts that no finite concepts or attributes can be adequately used of God, but only negative terms’. But since there is no God there can be no approach to him or her or it, and so the technique or mannerism of stating something then immediately negating it, instead contributes to the sense of Zen inconsequentiality.

  • if I were never to see the two of them at once, then it would follow, or should follow, that between their respective
    appearances the interval never varies. No, wrong. (p.274)
  • So it is I who speak, all alone, since I can’t do otherwise. No, I am speechless.
  • I’ll try again, quick before it goes again. Try what? I don’t know

Or sly negations, negations negating negation, such as when he writes ‘No more questions’ and immediately asks a barrage of four questions.

Or just not giving a damn.

A short time, a long time, it’s all the same.

I’ll go on

Which all leads up to the book’s famous final phrases:

if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.

This ‘can’t go on’ phrase actually occurs numerous times before it appears here, right at the end of the book i.e. it is a deliberate statement, carefully prepared for and repeated and so the reader is prepared for its use here at the book’s end. It has traditionally been seen as almost a cry of desperation, and it can certainly be read like that.

I am suggesting, however, that along with the text’s hundreds of other examples of negation, contradiction, uncertainty, hesitation, unknowing, forgetfulness and amnesia, these final phrases are not any kind of cry of despair, they are just more part of the flow and continuum, they contribute to the background hum. It is not a climactic cry, it is just the latest iteration of one of the many many oblique negative phrases which make up the text.

  • there was never anyone, anyone but me, anything but me, talking to me of me, impossible to stop, impossible to go on, but I must go on, I’ll go on…
  • perhaps I went silent, no, I say that in order to say something, in order to go on a little more, you must go on a little more, you must go on a long time more, you must go on evermore…
  • I notice nothing, I go on as best I can…
  • I can’t suppose anything, I have to go on, that’s what I’m doing…
  • it’s a question of going on, it goes on, hypotheses are like everything else, they help you on, as if there were need of help, that’s right, impersonal, as if there were any need of help to go on with a thing that can’t stop…
  • perhaps it’s azure, blank words, but I use them, they keep coming back, all those they showed me, all those I remember, I need them all, to be able to go on…
  • … I’m doing my best, I can’t understand, I stop doing my best, I can’t do my best, I can’t go on, poor devil…
  • Perhaps there go I after all. I can’t go on in any case. But I must go on…

Compare it to monks chanting. Or the chanting in a Catholic church. (Obviously the text isn’t quite as homogeneous as I’m making out, the more you look at it the more you see a riot of styles cropping up and disappearing all the way through, with quite a lot of crude swearwords, and droll Irish humour scattered about.) But the very fact that the ‘go on’ phrase occurs so many times before throughout the text can be turned against the ‘cry of anguish’ argument, the very fact the phrase has cropped up so many times means there is nothing particularly unique or special about it – that it can be seen as one among many components of the endless flow of repetitive devices and phrases which make up the unnamable narrator’s ramblings or monologue or stream of consciousness.

I.e. the text doesn’t build up to anything, it just ends… and the ending is quite arbitrary… it could have gone on forever. You could sellotape the end back to the beginning and create an eternal loop, which would just, well… go on…

I wait for my turn, my turn to go there, my turn to talk there, my turn to listen there, my turn to wait there for my turn to go, to be as gone, it’s unending, it will be unending, gone where, where do you go from there, you must go somewhere else, wait somewhere else, for your turn to go again, and so on, a whole people, or I alone, and come back, and begin again, no, go on, go on again, it’s a circuit, a long circuit…

Some ‘things’

That said, a discourse made out of words does, almost unavoidably, have to contain some meaning, refer to at least some things. So here are some of the ‘things’, discernable facts, that it contains.

The narrator remarks that Malone passes by at regular intervals. At least he thinks it’s Malone. It might be Molloy, though it’s wearing Malone’s hat.

Was there a time when I too revolved thus? No, I have always been sitting here, at this selfsame spot, my hands on my knees, gazing before me like a great horn-owl in an aviary.

The place is vast, It has pits. Is it hell? Apparently not, as he refers to hell as another place. But he does refer to his life ‘up there in their world’ (p.273)

He attended a series of lectures on love and intelligence. One of the lecturers was called Basil (p.273).

He appears to be in bed naked (aren’t all Beckett’s narrators, sooner or later?) and continually crying. All Beckett’s texts give extremely detailed descriptions of the precise posture of the body, with mock satirical intent, mocking the detailed descriptions of ‘realistic’ fiction, while, on another, philosophical level, asserting the crude primacy of the body over the endlessly-meandering mind.

I mention these details to make sure I am not lying on my back, my legs raised and bent, my eyes closed. It is well to establish the position of the body from the outset, before passing on to more important matters.

In fact, does he even have a body?

no, no beard, no hair either, it is a great smooth ball I carry on my shoulders, featureless, but for the eyes, of which only the sockets remain. And were it not for the distant testimony of my palms, my soles, which I have not yet been able to quash, would gladly give myself the shape, if not the consistency, of an egg, with two holes no matter where to prevent it from bursting, for the consistency is more like that of mucilage…I’m a big talking ball, talking about things that do not exist, or that exist perhaps, impossible to know, beside the point.

After much divagation, the narrator decides to rename Basil Mahood and tells us that Mahood’s voice has often mingled with his own. In some obscure way Mahood appears to be his master and the narrator develops references to a series of ‘them’ who administered lectures and courses to him.

He tries out some fictions, appearing in fictions, first as a one-armed, one-legged wayfarer on crutches, then as a bodiless head in a bucket kept by a woman who runs a restaurant and puts a tarpaulin over the bucket when it snows – but claims these fictions are imposed on him by ‘them’, the ‘others’.

For an extended period he appears to become this character ‘Mahood’, among other things being told off in class. Arbitrarily he renames Mahood, Worm.

Then he is the head in a bucket again. His protectress, Madeleine or Marguerite, keeps a restaurant. There is a brief and lovely, lyrical passage about the twilight hour in, presumably, Paris, as the first customers arrive at this restaurant for an aperitif (p.312).

He says he has died many times, but ‘they’ keep resurrecting him, dragging him back to life. In fact by the middle of the text, ‘they’ have become really dominant, a chorus of tormentors who the narrator is seeking to appease, both himself and in the form of the various avatars, Mahood and Worm. It is ‘they’ who seem to be putting him through all these torments, orchestrating his experiences, ‘they’ are the source of the endless requirement for there to be a voice, the ceaseless babble

  • If only this voice would stop, for a second, it would seem long to me, a second of silence.
  • Ah if only this voice could stop, this meaningless voice which prevents you from being nothing, just barely prevents you from being nothing and nowhere, just enough to keep alight this little yellow flame feebly darting from side to side, panting, as if straining to tear itself from its wick, it should never have been lit, or it should never have been fed, or it should have been put out, put out, it should have been let go out.

‘They’ loathe him, ‘they know how to cause suffering, the master explained to them’ (p.337).

I have endured, that must be it, I shouldn’t have endured, but I feel nothing, yes, yes, this voice, I have endured it, I didn’t fly from it, I should have fled,

He hopes one day they will leave, in Indian file, going up above to meet their master who will punish them (p.335), as he, the proper authority, will judge whether he’s said the correct words to be released.

This stuff about they and their master and the word ‘suffering’ dominate the middle of the piece, inescapably raising ideas of hell. And when he goes on to talk about being judged and feeling guilty, it drifts into Kafka territory, maybe he’s in a dungeon, always been in a dungeon (p.339).

Repetition

He repeatedly says he’ll ask no more questions, then promptly asks more questions –

  • I know no more questions and they keep on pouring out of my mouth.
  • Enough questions, enough reasoning…

Above all there is repetition, endless repetition with variations of the basic idea, a degenerated, degraded consciousness going on and on and on, struggling to speak, trying to talk, saying nothing. It’s amazing how many way he finds to express the same basic idea:

  • I feel nothing, know nothing, and as far as thinking is concerned I do just enough to preserve me from going silent, you can’t call that thinking.
  • it is I who speak, all alone, since I can’t do otherwise.
  • I have no voice and must speak, that’s all I know… (p.281)
  • I am doing my best, and failing again, yet again. (p.284)
  • And now let us think no more about it, think no more about anything, think no more. (p.309)
  • Having won, shall I be left in peace? It doesn’t look like it, I seem to be going on talking. (p.317)
  • Is there a single word of mine in all I say? No, I have no voice, in this matter I have none.
  • But why keep on saying the same thing?
  • Where I am there is no one but me, who am not. (p.326)
  • Yes, so much the worse, he knows it is a voice, how is not known, nothing is known, he understands nothing it says, just a little, almost nothing, it’s inexplicable, but it’s necessary (p.330)
  • Tears gush from it practically without ceasing, why is not known, nothing is known
  • Forward! That’s soon said. But where is forward? And why? (p.338)
  • What can you expect, they don’t know who they are either, nor where they are, nor what they’re doing, nor why everything is going so badly, so abominably badly
  • between them would be the place to be, where you suffer, rejoice, at being bereft of speech, bereft of thought, and feel nothing, hear nothing, know nothing, say nothing, are nothing, that would be a blessed place to be
  • you have only to wait, without doing anything, it’s no good doing anything, and without understanding, there’s no help in understanding, and all comes right, nothing comes right, nothing, nothing, this will never end, this voice will never stop, I’m alone here… (p.350)

Can you see how the precise semantic context of the sentences may vary a bit, but the basic form or structure doesn’t. Necessary impossibility. It’s impossible but I must do it. Now I will be silent. No, I can’t be silent. Now I will stop asking questions. No I won’t.

And he is humorously aware of it, too:

If only I knew what I have been saying. Bah, no need to worry, it can only have been one thing, the same as ever. I have my faults, but changing my tune is not one of them.

The funny thing about Beckett is that he made an entire career out of the notion that it is impossible to write, impossible to communicate, language is always failing and collapsing. The paradox is that he managed to wring half a dozen long dense novels, and scores of plays out of this idea, 20 or more plays in which the characters speak at length about how impossible it is to speak.

And this is the way he does it. In the latter part of The Unnamable the syntax cracks and crumbles. There are some epic sentences made of 50 or more clauses, leading on from each other, contradicting, suggesting, denying, forgetting, one after the other, pell mell:

but it’s too difficult, too difficult, for one bereft of purpose, not to look forward to his end, and bereft of all reason to exist, back to a time he did not. Difficult too not to forget, in your thirst for something to do, in order to be done with it, and have that much less to do, that there is nothing to be done, nothing special to be done, nothing doable to be done. No point either, in your thirst, your hunger, no, no need of hunger, thirst is enough, no point in telling yourself stories, to pass the time, stories don’t pass the time, nothing passes the time, that doesn’t matter, that’s how it is, you tell yourself stories, then any old thing, saying, No more stories from this day forth, and the stories go on, it’s stories still, or it was never stories, always any old thing, for as long as you can remember, no, longer than that, any old thing, the same old thing, to pass the time, then, as time didn’t pass, for no reason at all, in your thirst, trying to cease and never ceasing, seeking the cause, the cause of talking and never ceasing, finding the cause, losing it again, finding it again, not finding it again, seeking no longer, seeking again, finding again, losing again, finding nothing, finding at last, losing again, talking without ceasing, thirstier than ever, seeking as usual, losing as usual, blathering away, wondering what it’s all about, seeking what it can be you are seeking, exclaiming, Ah yes, sighing, No no, crying, Enough, ejaculating, Not yet, talking incessantly, any old thing, seeking once more, any old thing, thirsting away, you don’t know what for, ah yes, something to do, no no, nothing to be done, and now enough of that, unless perhaps, that’s an idea, let’s seek over there, one last little effort, seek what, pertinent objection, let us try and determine, before we seek, what it can be, before we seek over there, over where, talking unceasingly, seeking incessantly, in yourself, outside yourself, cursing man, cursing God, stopping cursing, past bearing it, going on bearing it, seeking indefatigably, in the world of nature, the world of man, where is nature, where is man, where are you, what are you seeking, who is seeking, seeking who you are, supreme aberration, where you are, what you’re doing, what you’ve done to them, what they’ve done to you, prattling along, where are the others, who is talking…

And that’s less than one of the 110 or so pages of the Picador edition of The Unnamable. The motor, the engine for producing this vast amount of verbiage is remarkable.

Ezra Pound summed the same idea up in just one line back in 1917, a line translated from an old poem by the Chinese poet Li Po, from the 8th century:

What is the use of talking? And there is no end of talking…

(Exile’s Letter by Ezra Pound)

The whole ‘message’ can be summed up in a sentence, so it’s clearly not about the sentence. It’s about the extraordinary range and diversity of prose techniques Beckett uses to create this vast incantation, this huge, ramifying, multi-referential, prose leviathan which – I would argue – if you let your mind drift with it, if you are lulled and coaxed inside its endless flow – takes you to an entirely new place, a place never before known in literature.

The Unnamable feels to me hugely bigger and more mysterious than either Molloy or Malone Dies. They share many of its mannerisms but The Unnamable takes them to new heights. It really feels like a work of genius.

Someone speaks, someone hears, no need to go any further, it is not he, it’s I, or another, or others, what does it matter, the case is clear, it is not he, he who I know I am, that’s all I know, who I cannot say I am, I can’t say anything, I’ve tried, I’m trying, he knows nothing, knows of nothing, neither what it is to speak, nor what it is to
hear, to know nothing, to be capable of nothing, and to have to try, you don’t try any more, no need to try, it goes on by itself, it drags on by itself, from word to word, a labouring whirl, you are in it somewhere, everywhere, not he, if only I could forget him, have one second of this noise that carries me away, without having to say, I don’t, I haven’t time, It’s not I, I am he, after all, why not, why not say it, I must have said it, as well that as anything else, it’s not I, not I, I can’t say it, it came like that, it comes like that, it’s not I, if only it could be about him, if only it could come about him, I’d deny him, with pleasure, if that could help, it’s I, here it’s I, speak to me of him, let me speak of him, that’s all I ask, I never asked for anything, make me speak of him, what a mess, now there is no one left, long may it last

Credit

The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett was published in French in 1953. The English translation by Beckett himself was published in 1958. Page references are to the 1979 Picador paperback edition of The Beckett Trilogy.

Related links

Samuel Beckett’s works

An asterisk indicates that a work was included in the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.

The Second World War 1939 to 1945

*Waiting For Godot 1953 Play

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969

1 Comment
by Simon on November 16, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Irish literature, Literature, Novel
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Posted by Simon on November 16, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/11/16/the-unnamable-samuel-beckett/

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