“I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On”: The Language and Grammar of Trauma in Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable

Abstract

Samuel Beckett is an author best known for his depictions of decrepitude (both physical and mental) and suffering. There has been much scholarly discussion around the ways Beckett’s depictions can be read. These discussions have found fruitful engagements with psychoanalysis as a means of reading the opaque pain in Beckett’s texts. In this research, I have drawn on these discussions in conjunction with more recent scholarship concerning trauma. I argue that trauma theory, a more recent scholarly innovation that draws heavily on psychoanalysis, provides an apt framework for reading Beckett’s opaque texts. For this examination, I have drawn on one of Beckett’s more opaque texts – The Unnamable. To demonstrate how trauma theory opens up Beckett’s dense prose, I had selected broad themes that are of importance to both literature and trauma theory: language, repetition and self, form, and presences and absences. From these broad concepts, I examine how each manifests at the intersection of fiction and trauma, and specifically the implications of these in Beckett’s novel. Language in the throes of trauma becomes strained between speech and silence, unable to properly manage either. Language is also the lifeblood of fiction, which finds itself complicated by the paradoxical logic of traumatised speech. Repetition is a significant concept within trauma theory, and an aesthetic device for fiction. In this section of my work I address the ways it is possible to read repetition in trauma fiction with both of these views in mind, and I look closely at the connection between repetition and a character’s sense of self, as these two concepts are closely related in trauma theory. Form is a significant topic for fiction, and one that is complicated by the presence of trauma. Trauma fragments, denying a novel a cohesive, linear structure. Finally, presences and absences are a subject of discussion and debate in recent trauma theory. In order to garner a nuanced view of trauma in Beckett’s novel, I examine a slightly different view of trauma, which ultimately leads to the same conclusion: there is a trauma rooted deeply in The Unnamable that is the cause of the opacities in the novel.