SOURCE: Boxall, Peter. “‘The Existence I Ascribe’: Memory, Invention, and Autobiography in Beckett's Fiction.” The Yearbook of English Studies 30 (2000): 137-52.

[In the following essay, Boxall maintains that “First Love” signals a turning point in Beckett's writing style with his employment of the monologue form as well as his “oscillation between remembrance and invention as a form of storytelling.”]

BECKETT, MODERNISM, AND AESTHETIC AUTOBIOGRAPHY

This essay takes as its starting point what I suggest is a seminal moment in Beckett's fiction. In his 1946 novella, “First Love,” the narrator draws attention for the first time to an opposition between two categories of thingness which persists as a foundational structural distinction for the remaining four decades of Beckett's prose writing career. Talking of the objects, people, and places that from the subject matter of his stories, the narrator claims: ‘I have always spoken, no doubt always shall, of things that never existed, or that existed, if you insist, no doubt always will, but not with the existence I ascribe to them.’¹ From this point on, the movement of Beckett's writing is structured around this reluctantly conceded distinction. His narrators repeatedly claim absolute imaginative control over the non-existent world that they invent, whilst equally repeatedly, if unwillingly, allowing that the things of their stories share their existence with objects that are located in a remembered world beyond them. It is this vacillation that becomes one of the most characteristic features of Beckett's fiction. The prose is caught, from “First Love” onwards, in a ceaseless oscillation between remembrance and invention as a form of storytelling, and this oscillation controls the peculiar mode of reference that Beckett develops throughout his mid and late work. As the narrators vacillate between memory and invention, they seek both to refer to a remembered landscape, and to invent a new landscape that owes nothing to a reality that precedes it or constrains it. The things of the stories are both identical with the ‘existing’ things to which they partly refer, and different from them, as the narrators declare their simultaneous belonging to and freedom from the world of which they write.

This adoption, in “First Love,” of a mode of reference which is to become a major characteristic of Beckett's fiction coincides with another sea change in his writing: the adoption of the monologue form in which almost all his remaining prose is written. These departures in Beckett's writing are finely interwoven, and are related in turn to the tenacious but subtle autobiographical register that stretches throughout his fiction. The narrator's claim that he invents the things of his stories, his insistence that he is able to drag the objects on the storyscape to a new literary geography where they are freed from the reality that they share with things that exist, is complicated by the monologue form. As the narrator himself acts as an object upon the storyscape, his tendency to deny his own existence as character threatens to undermine the very reality effect upon which the primacy of his narrating voice is based. The freedom of the narrator's vacillating movement between memory and invention as a mode of storytelling is compromised and limited in important ways by his own presence as character upon the storyscape whose mimetic status he seeks to manipulate. This freedom is further compromised by the relationship between the writing of memory as a formal strategy, and its characteristic autobiographical connection with the geography of Beckett's own memory. The autobiographical status of Beckett's fiction, at least from Watt onwards, is always subject to narrative uncertainty, but that the remembered selves and objects that people the majority of his landscapes have some autobiographical content is beyond serious doubt. This essay seeks to address the political implications and possibilities of the relationship between memory, invention, and autobiography as it plays itself out in Beckett's fiction. If the things of his stories both share their existence with a political reality, and negate political referents in a statement of the narrator's imaginative freedom to invent a non-existent world, what is the political value of this dialectical movement between statement and denial? If Beckett's prose moves from reference to an autobiographical self to a form of aesthetic self invention, to what extent can this writing of identity be understood to be politically motivated? Can we read the “First Love” narrator's promise to ascribe his own existence as contributing anything to the ongoing attempt to understand the promise and limits of the literary in re-imagining the post-colonial consciousness?

The semi-autobiographical mode of self-invention that Beckett appears to adopt in the stories of the Novellas [Four Novellas] is not, of course, unique to him. The difficulties and possibilities of a modernist aesthetic of autobiographical self-creation are well marked out by the major modernists before him. Proust's monumental exploration of the relation between remembrance and aesthetics, Yeats's preoccupation with the contradiction between worldly self and mystical, poetic anti-self, and Joyce's partial self-portrait in Stephen Dedalus, exemplify a form of writing which is dedicated to an exposition of the relationship between non-fictional autobiography and fictional self-creation. This writing is driven by irreconcilable but irreducible certainties: the certainty that one is bound to the political world, and the certainty that one is free from it. The modernist autobiographical aesthetic is both formed by the contradiction between these certainties, and, in the form that results, gestures towards a resolution of the contradictions that generate its becoming. A politics of modernist literary representation can thus be found in the movement of the writing between the poles of non-fictional reference and fictional self-invention. The shift in register between autobiography and fiction controls the movement of the writing from the faithful representation of existing relations of production to the invention of a literary space which resists cultural inscription. The contradiction between memory and invention functions as a struggle between an existing false consciousness, and a creative imagination that remains beyond the reach of ideological inauthenticity, and it is partly in this struggle that the political value of modernist self-fashioning is to be found.²

The relation of Beckett's work, however, to the politics of modernist autobiography is ambiguous. To draw a politics of representation from the relation between memory and invention in Beckett's writing presents the critic with difficulties that may be different from those posed by the work of Joyce or Proust, and that seem to be related in some degree to the uncertain location of Beckett's writing in the distinction which is in any case uncertain between modernism and postmodernism. Where the relationship between memory and invention in Joyce's semi-autobiographical work displays a contradictory tension typical, for some critics, of a modernist aesthetic that is partly generated by the dialectic between binary oppositions,³ in Beckett's writing the two modes of representation do not seem so ready to engage in a dialogue that could yield a political content. Whilst the work of modernists such as Joyce, Proust, Yeats, Stein, and Woolf has conventionally been read as being engaged with a set of political concerns, even if that engagement is regarded by some as critical or dismissive of certain political practices,⁴ Beckett's work has been widely received as denouncing the political altogether. This perceived resignation from any form of commitment to or interest in the cultural politics that fuelled the work of his major influences has contributed to the characterization of Beckett as a nascent postmodernist who is a central figure in the drift away from modernist literary production. A symptom and a cause of this renunciation of the political, it could be argued, is the failure of the opposition between memory and invention to engage in a generative dialogue. The pairing of memory and invention in Beckett's work is perhaps characteristic, in Frederic Jameson's terminology, more of the postmodern antinomy than of the contradiction that is the driving force in modernist literature.⁵ For Jameson, contradiction is distinct from antinomy in that the former names an opposition whose antithetical halves are held in place by a tension which has the potential to lead towards resolution, whereas the latter consists of two statements whose opposition is so complete and fundamental as to defy any attempt to find even a notional common ground or covert compatibility. Consequently, ‘contradictions are supposed, in the long run, to be productive; whereas antinomies—take Kant's classic one: the world has a beginning, the world has no beginning—offer nothing in the way of a handle, no matter how diligently you turn them around and around’ (p. 2). Joyce's work, at least up to Ulysses, can be seen to be driven by what Jameson regards as modernist contradictions: his writing has one foot planted in the intricately described autobiographical geography of Dublin, and another foot in a geography of pure literary invention. The writing pulls hard in these contradictory directions, but this antagonism is organized around the push towards a new place where the antagonists can come together. In Beckett's writing, however, this opposition arguably loses such dialectical tension; the writing of memory and the writing of invention fall into antinomial halves whose difference from each other is such that it is inconceivable that they should move towards resolution. It is indeed difficult to imagine a Beckett narrator promising to forge any form of racial authenticity in the luke-warm smithy of his soul. The narrator moves between recounting past lives and denying their reality with an abandon which may suggest a loss of faith in the transformative power of art to bridge the distance between the creative mind and the political world. Memory and invention as oppositional modes of writing seem to drift from the moorings that, in Joyce's work, hold them both apart and together. Just as the narrator's memories seem not to plant him firmly in a space which has reference to a specific non-fictional geography, so the shift of register to the writing of pure invention seems not to introduce any oppositional tension into Beckett's writing. Rather, memory and invention can appear as empty categories that are drained of their political energy, and merely mark the failure of a residual autobiographical aesthetic to offer any potential release from the problem of the self's simultaneous belonging to and freedom from the world of which s/he writes.

A sign that the relation between memory and invention in Beckett's writing may indeed exemplify antinomy rather than contradiction is the tendency of thesis and antithesis to collapse into each other. For Jameson, antinomy names a relationship between concepts that are so extremely and abstractly opposed that, in their opposition, they betray a sameness which brings any dialogue to a standstill. Jameson's example is that between identity and difference, the ‘grandest and most empty of all abstractions’ (p. 7): when these concepts have been released from any specific content and thought to their abstract limits, absolute sameness becomes indistinguishable from absolute difference, just as the concept of continual change collapses into the absolute stasis that is its direct opposite. As Estragon wryly observes of the geography of Waiting For Godot, where space tends towards abstraction in its denial of contingency or content, ‘everything oozes [but] it's never the same pus from one second to the next’: the constantly changing meets, as it reaches the limits of its constancy, the constantly the same.⁶ This dizzying movement between implacable opposition and sudden conflation characterizes the relation between memory and invention as it is developed in Beckett's fiction. The distinction represents an absolute opposition that forms the structural framework upon which several of the fictions are based, but the coherence that the distinction offers is repeatedly undermined as the poles both move too far apart to sustain any form of narrative tension, and collapse into each other as they reveal their identity. The “First Love” narrator's distinction between two categories of thingness, things as they ‘exist’ and things as they are ‘ascribed’ by the narrator, persists as a structural device from the Novellas to the short fictions collected in the Nohow On trilogy. The device is set up partly to allow the narrator as creating unself to free himself from narrator as remembered self. But as Beckett's fiction forces the writing of invention further and further apart from the writing of memory, as the halves of the distinction are pushed to the limit of their difference from each other, each insists upon folding back into the other as memory becomes invention, and invention becomes memory. The narrator of Molloy, for example, seeks to separate memory from invention by writing a novel whose circular structure closes around a remembered landscape, and seals it off to allow the creating unself to sever the bonds that hold him to the partly autobiographical self. The second section of the novel, in which the quasi-detective Moran sets out to track down his quarry Molloy, opens with the first words of Moran's ‘report’ on the progress of his search: ‘It is midnight. The rain is beating on the widows.’⁷ At the end of the novel, as Moran comes to the close of his report, he finishes his narrative with a description of his coming to write the beginning of his report: ‘I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining’ (p. 162). This hijacking of the reality effect upon which the truth value of the entire narrative is based has two consequences. It serves, in one register, to allow the narrative voice that has been speaking as Moran throughout the report to close his narrative with a flourish that dispatches Moran, Molloy, the country that they share, and even the report itself to the realm of falsehood, leaving the unnamed voice that reveals the fictionality of Moran's report to emerge as the only survivor of the novel's wreckage. The report, which by its very nature is a faithful, journalistic record of events, closes upon itself to free the inventing ‘I’ from the yoke that had chained it to reportage. In another register, however, the narrator's attempt to separate report from invention clearly has the effect rather of collapsing altogether the distinction between the two forms of writing that provides the structural basis of the novel. As the unnamed narrating ‘I’ moves beyond the reach of the ‘I’ in whose name he narrates, it simultaneously transgresses and undermines the limit that sustains the distinction in the first place. The narrative device by which inventing consciousness appears in extreme opposition to remembered self leads equally to the loss of narrative energy by which invention is able to fling itself clear of memory.

As the novels of the trilogy progress, this insistent separation and conflation of remembered self and invented self becomes increasingly exposed, and increasingly compressed. In the last pages of The Unnamable, the narrator struggles inexorably towards the deadlock in which the contradictions that fuel a modernist aesthetic of self creation appear finally to freeze over. The narrator is driven to impasse by his frantic and impossible attempt to invent in his writing the place in which he writes. The moment he allows himself to speak by conceding the reality of the place and the body which contain him, he seeks to deny the reality of place and body as contingent to his freely creating consciousness. He allows that he is writing in a ‘place’, but immediately undoes his placedness, insisting that ‘I'll make [the place] all the same, I'll make it in my head, I'll draw it out of my memory, I'll gather it about me, I'll make myself a head, I'll make myself a memory’.⁸ The narrator's desperate push to cleanse his inventive powers of the contingency of memory leads to a blatant deadlock between I and not-I, where negation is so complete as to appear virtually indistinguishable from affirmation. The movement between statement and denial has become so stark and unproductive as to lead to the eventual, unbridgeable antinomy that closes the trilogy, and brings Beckett's prose writing to a virtual half for over a decade: ‘I can't go on, I'll go on’ (p. 382). It is perhaps at this point in Beckett's œuvre that the relation between memory and invention seems furthest from yielding any sort of politics. The gulf between things as they exist and things as the narrator invents them seems both too wide and too narrow to offer any movement away from an unbearable status quo, the representation of which many critics consider the sole purpose of Beckett's writing.

It is the central argument of this paper, however, that Beckett's dramatization of the struggle between memory and invention does not at any point constitute an abandonment of a political aesthetic. It is clear that the dialogue between created and remembered self in Beckett's fiction, as a residue of the more robust modernist self-fashioning of Joyce and Proust, nears the point of collapse. But to infer from this near breakdown of negotiations that Beckett's writing resigns and limits itself to an expression of a fundamental and unsolvable difference between self and world would be to consign it prematurely to a form of political redundancy. When reading Beckett as a pioneer of an apolitical postmodern aesthetic, his representation of the relation between memory and invention appears as an antinomial relation between empty categories. The struggle between I and not-I, drained of all contingency and content, exemplifies the ‘free play of masks and roles without content or substance’ that Jameson identifies as ‘postmodernity itself’ (p. 18). I suggest, however, that even at the barest and emptiest moments of the relation between self and unself, even during the last pages of The Unnamable, memory and invention are not in free play. Indeed, it is difficult to think of a less appropriate term to describe the frantic final throes of the unnamed narrator. The movement between worldly ‘I’ and invented ‘not-I’ is not entirely emptied out in a final ghastly parody of modernist self-invention, but remains held in place by a residual autobiographical vein that runs through Beckett's writing. The persistence of autobiography both energizes and constrains the relation between memory and invention, and provides the tension that keeps the unnamable narrator screaming. It is partly in this tense and difficult relation between memory and invention, as it is organized around a tenacious autobiographical referentiality, that I suggest the political promise of Beckett's work may be found. I do not argue that this relation leads to any form or promise of sublation or reconciliation in the fiction: on the contrary, it is necessary to understand the process by which progression by contradiction becomes unlikely in the Beckettian universe. But it seems equally important to understand how and why the inventing ‘I’ does not entirely succeed in abstracting itself from the autobiographical register which chains it to a non-fictional, culturally specific moment. The oscillation between affirmation and negation refrains from becoming a purely formal strategy, and negation maintains political potency in Beckett's writing, because the texts remain bound, however tenuously, to a political reality beyond them which prevents memory and invention from turning into each others' opposites.

MEMORY AND INVENTION IN THE ‘NOVELLAS’

In order to suggest ways that this relation between memory, invention, and autobiography in Beckett's writing may offer a handle on the political dynamic in his work, I will return to the Novellas. All four stories are organized around the narrator's depiction of his banishment and expulsion. They all start with a forcible expulsion of the narrator as character from his family home on the death of his father, and the main focus of the four ‘plots’ is the wandering of the homeless narrator across the geography of what he describes as the ‘city of my childhood’ in the search for a new shelter. But this exile takes two forms: the banishment of the narrator as character from his home within the geography of the story, and the banishment of the narrator/character from the narrator as narrator across the geography of the text itself. It is in the precisely choreographed economy of this four-way banishment, and in the nature of the relationship between the city of the narrator's childhood and the non-fictional city of Dublin, that the stories' engagement with a political landscape can be found.

The divide between the narrator and the narrator/character is structured around the relationship between memory and invention. The banishment from self that the narrator suffers upon the writing of the stories is banishment across the distinction between things as they exist beyond the narrator's reference to them, and things as they exist with the existence that he ascribes. In her essay on “First Love,” Julia Kristeva refers to this banishment in terms that are helpful, but which I think need to be adjusted. For Kristeva, the narrator's writing of the story is an ‘attempt at separating oneself from the august and placid expanses where the father's sublime Death, and thus Meaning, merges with the son's self’.⁹ In this schema, the narrator inhabits a geography of pure invention, which he shares with the unsullied spirit of his dead father. It is a post-mortem place, located beyond life and beyond contact with the story's grubby urban landscape. The moment of writing, however, is a moment of banishment from this space of serene selfhood to a material geography that tears the narrator away from his disembodied peace. Writing, for Kristeva, condemns the narrator to a ‘banishment robbing this sensible but always already dead, filial self of its silence on the threshold of a rimy minerality, where the only opportunity is to become anyone at all’ (p. 150). I agree that this expulsion of the writing and inventing narrator, from his primary location in a sublime literary geography beyond the horizons of the text to a secondary material storyscape in which he appears as character, is one of the directions in which the banishment between narrating ‘I’ and narrated ‘I’ takes place. The narrator of “The Calmative,” for example, refers rather proudly to this inaugurative moment of banishment when he announces, at the opening of his story, ‘I'll tell myself a story, I'll try and tell myself another story, to try and calm myself, and it's there I feel I'll be old’ (N [Four Novellas], p. 51). But, in “The Calmative” as in the other stories of the Novellas, the narrator's prioritization of writing self over self as character is shadowed and undermined by moments in the text when the banishment appears to be operating the other way around. Kristeva's emphasis on the movement by which the writing son is banished from a sublime negative geography into the ‘rimy’ world of the story makes light of the opposite movement in which the narrator as character casts himself forward, from the geography of the story, towards the space from which the narrator as narrator writes. Kristeva's suggestion, borrowed from the narrator of “First Love” himself, that the character to which the narrator is banished should be thought of as ‘anyone at all’, obscures one of the central difficulties of the novella: that the character with whose voice the narrator speaks is, by virtue of the monologue form adopted by the narrator, his own. The narrator is not banished, as he claims, to act as ‘any old one irredeemably’ (N, p. 15), but rather the monologue form condemns him to act, very specifically, as himself. Because in all the Novellas both narrator and character share the same pronoun, the narrator cannot comfortably sustain the primacy of his location in a negative geography of pure invention beyond the text. He has not, as Kristeva claims, always been already dead. Rather he is both the same as the character in whose name he speaks, and different from him; the character who wanders across the storyscape is both the narrator as he remembers himself at a former time, and an imaginary character that the narrator invents from the geography of his calm negativity. As a result of sharing the pronoun that designates them, the narrator as character and the narrator as narrator are mutually dependent: they are joined by the text which divides them. The narrator creates the story that he tells (without his narrative voice, the text would not come into being at all) but he is also created by it. Without the text and the pronoun that contain him, the narrator would be robbed of his means of speech. The act of writing may, as Kristeva suggests, banish him from the negative geography of his ‘paternal country’, his ‘dispeopled kingdom’. But he is equally banished to his magisterial position beyond the text from the rimy geography of the story that he shares with the ‘I’ of his creature.

It is in the separation and convergence of these two mutually dependent and hostile ‘I's, that the storyscape comes into being. The details and objects that make up the story are all caught in the ripples caused in the reality effect by the narrator's attempt simultaneously to create the story and to be created by it. The story is told both as a memory and as a fable, and the ground of the story is caught in the mercurial shifting of the narrator between remembrance and fabulation. As the narrator seeks to ground the reality of his speaking voice in the story of which he speaks, whilst dismissing the story as a product of his own creative whim, the space of the story rhythmically hardens to a reality to which the narrator must make an accurate reference, and dissolves to a random figment of the narrator's restless imagination. So the ground upon which the “First Love” narrator first falls in love with Lulu/Anna fluctuates in this dizzying movement between memory and invention. The narrator/character and Lulu/Anna meet for the first time on a bench by a canal, and the geography of their meeting point is described in detail:

I met her on a bench, on the bank of the canal, one of the canals, for our town boasts two, though I never knew which was which. It was a well situated bench, backed by a mound of solid earth and garbage, so that my rear was covered. My flanks too, partially, thanks to a pair of venerable trees, more than venerable, dead, at either end of the bench.

(N, pp. 13-14)

This meticulously described landscape provides the stage for the drama of the narrator's loving. It is to this ‘beastly circumstantial’¹⁰ landscape that the narrator as character is banished upon his falling in love with Lulu/Anna. The narrator complains that, before falling in love, he had been able to indulge freely in the solipsism of which Murphy before him was so fond. Before meeting Lulu/Anna, the narrator claims:

What mattered to me in my dispeopled kingdom, that in regard to which the disposition of my carcass was the merest and most futile of accidents, was supineness in the mind, the dulling of the self and of that residue of execrable frippery known as the non-self and even the world, for short.

(N, p. 15)

On falling in love with Lulu/Anna, however, the narrator/character is robbed of his ability to spurn the world of bodies and things, and he ‘who had learnt to think of nothing’ is forced to think of her (N, p. 19). Thinking of Lulu/Anna means returning repeatedly to this bench by the canal, where he is trapped in a world of material surfaces that will not be blunted or dulled. The narrator's accurate reference to this material space to which the reluctant lover is banished, however, is repeatedly undermined by the slippage in his mode of reference from memory to invention. As the narrator/character drags himself to the bench for the ‘fourth or fifth time’ in pursuit of his loved one, the narrator as narrator writes ‘Let us say it was raining, nothing like a change, if only of weather’ (N, p. 22). At moments such as these, which recur throughout the text, the narrator as narrator can be felt, from the other side of the text, picking at the reality effect that holds it in place, reminding us that the bench, the canal, the love, the narrator/character's banishment, are all pure figment. The bench which holds the narrator/character unwillingly to his love suddenly wobbles and flickers as the narrator kicks out one of the props that hold it in place. As if to make up for this mischievous waywardness, the rain that the narrator adds as an afterthought is quickly absorbed into the register that casts the story as a remembered event. Three lines later, the narrator asserts, back in chaste reportage mode, ‘the bench was soaking wet’ (N, p. 22), and the effects of this invented rain falling over the landscape of the narrator's love crop up sporadically throughout the remainder of the story. Three pages and several hours later, as the narrator/character settles into his new residence with Lulu/Anna, he complains that ‘my hat was still wringing’ (N, p. 25).

Perhaps the most striking of these moments in “First Love,” in which a constraining material reality is made to carry within it the negation of its own constraint, occurs with the narrator's reference to the prostitute herself, for love of whom the narrator as character forsakes the peace of his solipsistic ‘dispeopled kingdom’. The woman herself that draws the narrator towards thingness is caught, like all the other objects in the story, in the shifting of register between memory and invention. This movement can be seen most precisely as the narrator first feels the yearnings of love. He realizes that he has fallen in love, he recognizes the symptoms most definitively, when he finds himself ‘inscribing’ the letters of her name in an ‘old heifer pat’ (N, p. 18):

Perhaps I loved her with a platonic love? But somehow I think not. Would I have been tracing her name in old cowshit if my love had been pure and disinterested? And with my devil's finger into the bargain, which I then sucked. Come now! My thoughts were all of Lulu, if that doesn't give you some idea nothing will. Anyhow I'm sick and tired of this name Lulu, I'll give her another, more like her. Anna for example, it's not more like her but no matter. I thought of Anna, then, I who had learnt to think of nothing.

(N, p. 19)

This outrageous manoeuvre cuts across the reality effect of the story in a number of ways, and strikes at the heart of the text's ongoing concern with the relationship between writing and space, between existence and ascription. The correspondence between Lulu/Anna's name, and the bodily person to whom the name refers, is strung here across the economy of banishment that holds the story in place. The letters that make up her name appear both in the text, and as objects upon the storyscape, engraved in the shitty, miry ground of the geography to which the loving narrator is banished. As the narrator shifts register, these letters traced in the cowpat, and the printed letters that designate the prostitute in the text itself, metamorphose from Lulu to Anna, in a move that threatens to bring the space of the novella tumbling. The narrator's sudden decision to change the name works partly as his declaration of freedom from his memory, from the story, and from the text that contains and constrains him. His freedom to do so, the implied lack of a demand that he must refer accurately to a preexisting reality, points towards a collapse of the tension between remembered and invented selves that provides the foundation of the story. It is the truth value of the text that condemns the inventing narrator to share his pronoun with his earth-bound character. As the demands of accurate reference give way to narrative whim, in which it would be impossible for reference to fail, the narrator seeks to free himself to his prior space beyond the storyscape and beyond the text, where he is untroubled by shitty fields and inky letters. But even as the inventing ‘I’ declares his freedom from the text that he invents, he is forced to retract this freedom. The lurch towards pure invention promises to free the inventing ‘I’ altogether from remembered ‘I’, but it also threatens to collapse the reality effect that sustains them in different geographies. Even as the narrator chooses imperiously to change Lulu's name to Anna, in a display of his ability to make this story whatever he wants it to be,¹¹ he blends this demonstration of his inventive freedom with a concession to the demands of referential accuracy: the narrator changes Lulu's name to Anna, because he says it is more like her. The moment that he empties the text of reference to a remembered geography, he claims that his textual sleight of hand is geared towards an approximation of a reality to which the text is struggling to remain faithful. Of course, as soon as the narrator has made this concession to narrative fidelity, he seeks to undermine it with the disclaimer ‘it's not more like her, but no matter’, but the extent to which it matters whether the words of the text are involved in a referential relationship with an existence beyond them has already become clear. Despite the narrator's disingenuous reversals, he knows that it both matters and does not matter, as his freedom to deny is caught inexorably in the demand that he must affirm.

It is this comic but excruciating movement between affirmation and denial, between sustaining and undermining mimetic security, that leads eventually to the aporia that grinds the narrative of The Unnamable to a halt. The narrator of “First Love” already anticipates the unnamable narrator who starts his novel with the promise that ‘I will proceed by aporia pure and simple […]. Or by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered […] I say aporia without knowing what it means’ (p. 267). In “First Love,” the convergence and separation of inventing and remembered ‘I's has the effect of pulling apart the text that joins and divides them, consistently threatening to stall the narrative which continues, sometimes, only by virtue of pure momentum. Each statement that the narrator utters to explain or to describe or further to consolidate a narrative situation or moment is undermined by his desire to negate the text that holds him, to undo its demands and its constraints. His anxious attempts to make his story accurate and clear are shadowed by his equal insistence that he has no reason to care whether they are accurate or not. He sweats to ensure that his story is proof against inaccuracy or unbelievability, whilst demanding always that ‘there is nothing I wish to prove’ (N, p. 16). The possibility of remembered and inventing ‘I's, in a text such as this, engaging in any kind of dialogue that could generate a solution to the problem of their simultaneous difference and sameness, seems remote. The geography of the text seems to form and to dissolve in the space of a banishment between self and unself whose mutual difference is so extreme as to appear both unbridgeable and on the point of collapse. The narrator's resolute refusal to concede the purity of his inventing consciousness to the griminess of the text is countered by the narrator/character's demand that he must, and the fluctuating, unstable, consistently collapsing storyscape as I have described it is the result of these irreconcilable demands. In this absolute stand-off between memory and invention, Stephen Dedalus's youthful faith in the power of the artist to ‘forg[e] anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being’ seems a long way off indeed.¹² Memory and invention, as contradictory or antinomial modes of representation, consistently fail to enter into any form of progressive dialectic in this text that can sometimes appear above all to be a symptom of their absolute, incompatible hostility.

However, to draw from this apparent failure the conclusion that Beckett's writing abandons struggle in favour of resignation to undecidability and indifference, as many have, is, in terms of this argument, to privilege one economy of banishment over another.¹³ The storyscape may be formed in the space of the banishment between narrator as narrator and narrator as character, but the space of the story itself is a geography upon which the narrator as character suffers a different form of banishment. As the narrator/character is expelled from his father's house in “First Love,” to the bedsit that he shares with Lulu/Anna, the roofless wandering to which he is condemned takes him across a partly autobiographical landscape that is pitted throughout with details that make it poignantly recognizable as a Dublinesque geography of Beckett's memory. The site itself where the bench on which the lovers meet is situated, and which is subject to the forms of narrative uncertainty that I have described, is a space which has resonances as a Dublin space in Beckett's prose. The narrator says that he met Lulu/Anna ‘on a bench, on the bank of the canal, one of the canals, for our town boasts two, though I never knew which was which’ (N, pp. 13-14). Dublin has two canals running through the town, the Royal Canal and the Grand Canal, and these canals appear in several other of Beckett's works, such as Mercier and Camier, and Molloy, where they are made to designate a ‘Dublinness’ in storyscapes whose geographical location is otherwise uncertain.¹⁴ As the narrator makes his way from the bench to Lulu/Anna's flat, these Beckettian/Dublinesque features gain weight and resonance, until the moment at which she reveals to him that she is pregnant with their child, whereupon these autobiographical locating details burst in an extraordinary Proustian moment of remembrance. Lulu/Anna, in order to prove to the doubting, misogynistic narrator that she is indeed pregnant as she claims, stands in the light of the window, and the narrator in exile gazes past the pregnant woman whose physicality has deprived him of his solipsistic ease, at a Dublinesque landscape that is figured, throughout Beckett's writing, as home:

She had drawn back the curtain for a clear view of all her rotundities. I saw the mountain, impassible, cavernous, secret, where from morning to night I'd hear nothing but the wind, the curlews, the clink like distant silver of the stone-cutter's hammers. I'd come out in the daytime to the heather and the gorse, all warmth and scent, and watch at night the distant city lights, if I chose, and the other lights, the lighthouses and lightships that my father had named for me, when I was small, and whose names I could find again, in my memory, if I chose, that I knew.

(N, pp. 28-29)

To a reader familiar with Beckett's prose, and with the unnamed autobiographical Dublinesque landscape that grows in poignant resonance from text to text, this passage comes as a wave of yearning for homeland, for the end of exile. The music of the stone-cutter's hammers, which refers partly to the sound of stone-cutters working in the Glencullen granite quarries that Beckett could hear from his Foxrock home as a child, drifts from text to text, from Watt to Malone Dies and How It Is, carrying with it Proustian memories of childhood and home.¹⁵ The Dublinesque mountains studded with burning gorse, and the lighthouses and lightships given names and significance by the narrator's absent father, throw their shadows and their light in virtually every work of fiction Beckett has written.¹⁶ The narrator/character's exile to and from this evocative geography is controlled by the relationship that stretches across the story between his spiritual love for his dead father, and his sexual love for Lulu/Anna, whose physicality is connected at several points in the story with the father's corpse. The narrator loses his father's protection, upon his death, and as the paternal guiding spirit is withdrawn, he is condemned to wander across an unheimlich landscape that has become, as a result, both familiar and alien. It is in this landscape that the love for his father is written: the burning mountains and the clinking hammers are containers of the narrator's cherished identity that he shares with his father, that he was given and taught by his father. But as a gap opens up at the beginning of the story between the father's ‘great disembodied wisdom’ (N, p. 13) and his putrefying corpse, the landscape that presents such comfort and self-knowledge becomes simultaneously alien and threatening. As David Lloyd has convincingly and eloquently argued, this condition of alienation and inauthenticity is ‘equally the perpetual condition of the colonized: dominated, interpreted, mediated by another’.¹⁷ As the narrator as character is banished from his father's house to the arms of a woman who holds him to her and his own materiality, and to the materiality of the text, the landscape and storyscape across which he is banished is a political geography, whose features are both absolutely his, and absolutely not his.

It is in the story's manipulation of the layered relation between this banishment and the banishment that operates between inventing and remembered narrators, that the political meaning and potential of Novellas can be found. The two forms of banishment modify and inform each other, and prevent the agonizing relation between memory and invention, statement and denial, from drifting into indifferentiation and generality. The landscape is never designated by name as an Irish landscape, and the solidity of this space that is made to carry the weight of Beckett's remembrance of an autobiographical, Dublinesque geography of childhood, is caught in the fluctuation between the narrator who refers and the narrator who invents. The narrator's stretching and tearing at the limits of his imaginative control over the world he describes is organized around an impossible attempt to refer to a political geography, to absorb a loved country and a loved life into the space of his writing, whilst detaching it from that which the world dictates it should mean. A piece of verbal ingenuity in “The Calmative” economically and brilliantly captures the engagement of the narrator's tortuous movement between affirmation and negation with a nonfictional landscape that informs it and locates it. As the narrator as character approaches the city of his childhood, upon which his search for calm is to take place, his description of the familiar Dublin landscape is inhabited by the peculiar mixture of memory and invention that is so characteristic of Beckett's writing:

I was no sooner free of the wood at last, having crossed unminding the ditch that girdles it, than thoughts came to me of cruelty, the kind that smiles. A lush pasture lay before me, nonsuch perhaps, who cares, drenched in evening dew or recent rain.

(N, p. 53)

In this passage, the narrator refers to a remembered, partly autobiographical detail, with the very noun that dismisses the detail and negates its evocative power. The description here of the country that surrounds the Dublinesque city comes up time and time again in Beckett's fiction, most notably in Molloy, and the description of the pasture of nonsuch corresponds to the nonfictional geography that the narrator is partly describing and remembering: nonsuch is an Irish dialect term for a form of trefoil that is found abundantly on the grassy plains near the sea coasts of Wicklow and Dublin. But of course, the term nonsuch also suggests, as it names the damp, lush field through which the narrator as character prepares to walk, that there is no such field; it works, as so often, to remind us that the scene the narrator as narrator is describing is pure invention—hence the ‘who cares’. As also happens so often in these stories, the field of nonsuch re-emerges later in the story, stripped of some of its mimetic ambiguity. As the distressed narrator/character is stranded in the unfamiliar familiar urban landscape to which he has turned for solace, he admits that ‘I longed for the tender nonsuch, I would have trodden it gently, with my boots in my hand, and for the shade of my wood, far from this terrible light’ (N, p. 63).¹⁸

It is this engagement of the negativity of Beckett's prose with a characteristically evoked autobiographical political geography that has so far been largely overlooked by Beckett's critics. The political in Beckett's work remains situated, as Leslie Hill has recently commented, in a commitment debate derived from that between Lukács and Adorno: between a critique that accuses it of or congratulates it for complacent apoliticism, and one that sees it, in its resolute denial of a stable or recognizable political agenda, as bearing mute witness to ‘the deficient and tawdry emptiness of post-historical, post-political, even post-modern capitalist Europe’.¹⁹ David Lloyd's elegant and compelling essay on “First Love” exemplifies the persistence of these parameters, in that his reading does not progress beyond a certain parallelism that tends towards a universalization of the colonial situation and of Beckett's representation of it. Lloyd defines Beckett's writing as an ‘aesthetic [which] writes out the inauthenticity enforced upon the colonial subject’ by developing a ‘narrative mode which refuses any single model of integration’ (p. 55). This is indeed one of the powerful drives in Beckett's writing, but the potency and the poignancy of this rejection is found partly in its fundamental co-existence with an opposite drive towards integration and belonging. To free Beckett's writing from the terms of the commitment debate that has contained it for so long, I suggest that we need a politics of reading that can elucidate the process by which Beckett's aesthetic strains to release itself from memory whilst writing memory. Beckett develops a mode of reference that struggles to give expression both to the lure and to the constraint of an autobiographical, political geography, whilst allowing a voice to speak from a utopian space beyond the nation, the culture, and the text that produced it. A critical language that can cast light on this writing will contribute much to our understanding of the possibilities and limits of the contemporary aesthetic in re-remembering and rewriting the nation space.

Notes

1. First Love, in Samuel Beckett, The Four Novellas (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 19. Further references are given after quotations in the text, preceded by the abbreviation N.

2. For a sustained analysis of the capacity for works of art to give expression to a utopian ‘ideological surplus’ that ‘allows for a so-called true consciousness to form itself in the mere false consciousness of ideology’, see Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, trans. by Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), p. 36.

3. For a representative example of a dialectical reading of modernity and modernism, see Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982; repr. London: Verso, 1983).

4. Joyce's work, for example, has been widely read as being hostile to Irish nationalism in its championing of cultural pluralism, but has nevertheless been regarded as being concerned with the politics of Irish colonialism and postcolonialism. For a critical reading of the interpretative tradition that has (mistakenly) stressed Joyce's antipathy to Irish nationalism, see Emer Nolan's recent work, James Joyce and Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1995).

5. Jameson, rather dangerously, anchors his fragile distinction between contradiction and antinomy in the equally fragile distinction between modernism and postmodernism: ‘Contradiction stand[s] for the modernist option perhaps, while antinomy offers a more postmodern one’ (The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 4).

6. Waiting for Godot, in Samuel Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber, 1986), p. 55.

7. Molloy, in Samuel Beckett, The Beckett Trilogy (1950; repr. London: Picador, 1979), p. 84.

8. The Unnamable, in Samuel Beckett, The Beckett Trilogy, pp. 378-79.

9. ‘The Father, Love and Banishment’, in Julia Kristeva, Desire In Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. by Leon S. Roudiez, trans. by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), p. 149.

10. See Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938; repr. London: Picador, 1973), p. 12.

11. See Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies (1956; repr. London: Picador, 1979), where Malone, in a richly comic moment, asserts his imaginative control over the geography of his room, and concedes such control, in the same sentence: ‘After all, this window is whatever I want it to be, up to a point, that's right, don't compromise yourself’ (p. 217).

12. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916; repr. London: Paladin, 1988), p. 173.

13. The best study of Beckett's indifference is Leslie Hill, Beckett's Fiction: In Different Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

14. For example: ‘The canal goes through the town, I know I know, there are even two’ (Molloy, p. 26).

15. Beckett himself, in letters to Eion O'Brien among others, has located the stone-cutters as referring to workers at the Glencullen quarry. See, for example, Eion O'Brien, The Beckett Country (Dublin: Black Cat Press, 1986), p. 59.

16. For an example of these features coming together at another moment of intense autobiographical remembrance, see Malone Dies: ‘Lemeul watches the mountains rising behind the steeples beyond the harbour, no they are more / No, they are more than hills, they rise themselves, gently faintly blue, out of the confused plain. It was there somewhere he was born, in a fine house, of loving parents. Their slopes are covered with ling and furze, its hot yellow bells, better known as gorse. The hammers of the stone-cutters ring all day like bells’ (p. 262).

17. Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1993), p. 54.

18. The geography of this passage is given an extra resonance by the reference here to the wood in which Dante the pilgrim finds himself at the beginning of Inferno, contributing to a network of references to the Divine Comedy strung throughout The Calmative.

19. Leslie Hill, “Up the Republic!”: Beckett, Writing, Politics’, in MLN, 112 (1997), p. 909.