Naming Beckett's Unnamable

Rating:
Summary: Kafka, the Holocaust, excavating into B's narratives
Review: Gary Adelman, a professor at the University of Illinois, offers a much-needed serial explication of the later prose, too often overlooked in favor of the drama. He writes engagingly and accessibly, and his passion comes through clearly. Often overshadowed by Martin Esslin's mislabelling of Beckett as among the ranks of the existentialist-inspired "theatre of the absurd" of Ionesco, Sartre, and mid-century French rivals, the fictions Beckett hammered out of his skull onto paper from 1946-50 that became known as the "trilogy" of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable announces a spectacular performance of its own. He wrote Godot as a witty break from the rigours of forming the last book of these three, so you can imagine how difficult this process might have been!

Adelman starts by looking over the four short stories Beckett wrote after the war, known as the Nouvelles, and then dives into the trilogy. Some of his book has been published as a series of articles in the earlier '00's, and these portions do not seem to have been changed. I had heard about his argument that The Unnameable contains testimony of a Holocaust survivor before I first read that novel; as with any attempt to package Beckett into compartments, Adelman's connection works as well as can be expected. He makes a convincing point, but since the trilogy itself reaches towards its own narrative dissolution, no voice in it--especially by the third installment--can be reduced to a single "character" for long.

Adelman, clearly honed by decades in the classroom, attacks the prose and chips away at its edifice. He uncovers the lineaments of care and craft to argue for-beneath the experimental narrative style-redemption within. I agree here, contrary to many who have delved into the same shafts, that Beckett cannot be placed totally within the atheist camp. He, like Joyce, wavered. He lived and died, honestly, among the uncertain.

Furthermore, the attention paid by the critic to torture within the prose might underscore the appeal Beckett's works have had for prisoners. When I encountered Beckett's final installment, after which he could truly go no further (How It Is being I think an aborted try), I tested Adelman's reading (known to me from an earlier article) against my fresh one. It works for some of the novel, but as the narrative itself fractures, one narrator is not enough to address the impact of the Shoah. Adelman realises that his efforts to extract strivings for the sacred out of what many readers have determined to be godless texts has its limits, and he appeals to Kafka for support, a similarly tenuous figure for the past century's spiritual seekers and deniers.

I just finished Anthony Cronin's biography of Beckett, and in its 600 pages I could not find any direct statement by Sam on Franz. In James Knowlson's biography, three citations emerge: in 1982, he'd been reading K, and mentions his diary once; nearer his death he had Kafka near his bedside shelf. Both Beckett's biographers, therefore, document no primary connection by K made by SB in the period Adelman covers, 1946-70, but, of course, this is not to discount K's influence. Adelman cites a NY Times interview with Israel Shenker from 1956 in which Beckett discusses his reading of Kafka, and it's a bit surprising that this eluded or was elided by both Cronin and Knowlson. Considering that Knowlson and John Pilling in an earlier work derided looking to Kafka as an analogue for Beckett, or that "In the Penal Colony" unlocks, as Adelman insists, "The Lost Ones."

In such a comparison, Adelman must rely on a lot of "might have been" and "had in common" to support his thesis. For such a thin book, a great deal of it previously published in journals. Adleman spends many pages summarizing Kafka before he can return to Beckett. While this is convenient for the reader, I did feel like I wanted chapters more solidly rooted in tangible, proven relationships established intentionally by Beckett that derived from Kafka rather than suppositions, however helpful they were to Adelman in unlocking the secrets within Beckett's mature prose.

However, critics apply Marx and Freud and Derrida and Jesus to all sorts of texts no matter the direct inspiration, and Adelman makes his points without jargon, trendiness, or special pleading. His concern to express himself clearly and carefully means he does not pad his pages with theoretical blather or secondhand insights. For an advanced reader of Beckett, a recommended work that corrects earlier takes on the author and suggests new perspectives. For an author as scrutinized as Beckett, to come up with fresh enthusiasms as Adelman has makes for intriguing and thoughtful re-encounters with knotty texts.