6 "Tender Mercies":
Subjectivity and Subjection
in Samuel Beckett s Not I
john H Lutterbie
Fixed in representation, I seek myself in Beckett s play. In Not I, at
his invitation, I seek the outlines of my subjectivity, knowing that my
"self" is always beyond my grasp, revealing itself only in the gaps of
thought, in the intuition of presence. But the dream, the dream of
Artaud, is always to mitigate this distance, to reforge "the chain" between
"what is and what is not, between the virtuality of the possible
and what already exists in materialized nature" (Artaud 1958, 27). It
is a wish to transgress the limits of representation, to make manifest
what is beyond consciousness, to know the unknowable. But in this
enunciation I confront another discourse, one that eschews the metaphysics
of the immaterial and unveils the imprint of oppression on
"materialized nature." 1 It is the discourse of the "other," the discourse
of the unconscious, that forces me to recognize the subtle slip between
"my self" and "itself "-to understand that the desire to know
the other is political. Within the distance that defines the differences
between these two theories of the subject, the conscious subject and
the subject of the unconscious, there is no center in which I can locate
myself. Instead, there is the recognition that even if I were to
circumscribe the infinite boundaries of these disparate discourses, I
would not know myself.
I shall, nevertheless, attempt to define a strategy for talking about
subjectivity, and in the process read Beckett s play. Onstage appears,
in Beckett s writing, a disembodied mouth and a shrouded listener.
The Mouth relates to me, and to the Auditor, a tale about a woman,
"she; who has a catastrophic illness and attempts to recognize what
she knows to be life. In the telling I hear a discourse of the subject
that resonates with certain Freudian concepts of psychic organization,
that carries with it a certain existential angst. However, I hear another
story as well. It is spoken more quietly, creating a context for the
unfolding sonorities of being, providing the landmarks for navigating
a world foreign to my perceptual experience. The problem is that
those signposts are not innocent. They tell tales of difference, of margins
and peripheries, of oppressions that define the "other." My wish is
to amplify their voices by turning the play against itself, by using the
theory of subjectivity defined in the play to explore the subjective
values of the Mouth, the ideology of the speaking subject. The intent
is not simply to critique Beckett but to raise questions about strategies
used in theories of the subject, and to examine th~ costs exacted
when, inadvertently, ideologies of repression are reenacted.
The surreal staging described by Beckett-the elevated and faintly
lit mouth and the lower, shrouded Auditor-is sufficient to support
the claim that Not I is located in an interior, a psychic landscape. Even
if I were to read the speaker and the listener as discrete individuals,
any interpretation based in perceptual verisimilitude or describing a
system of external relationships would almost immediately be confronted
with a host of insurmountable contradictions. The fragmentary,
disembodied mouth and the occluded, desexualized body resist
reference to a materiality, virtually proclaiming, instead, a metaphysics
of alienation. A seemingly untransgressable distance separates the two
beings, who attempt communication through gesture and the pause,
but who are unable to make contact. They cannot span the gap that
marks their existential isolation. A sufficiently desolate picture when
conceptualized as pertaining to individuals, it gains in force when conceived
of as a metaphor for an intrapersonal dynamic.
Beckett s vision of the subject, within this static staging, is an image
of despair. The hopelessness implicit in this construction of the "I" is
the effect of an ordering that creates in spatial terms a hierarchy of
privilege. Dominant is the mouth, the speaking subject that, in its faltering,
streaming insistence, tells of the woman and her catastrophic
situation. The Auditor, the obscured hearing subject, can only receive
the verbal onslaught and respond weakly with "a gesture of helpless
compassion" (Beckett 1984, 215 ). This vertical relationship within a
basically horizontal composition defines a simple modernist model of
decentered subjectivity--that is, I seek myself in the imaginary distance
between what I say and what I hear myself say.
It is not, however, a matter of splitting that distance, of geometrically
bisecting a line constructed between two points. For the question
of subjectivity, even within the modernist framework, is not one
المادة المعروضة اعلاه هي مدخل الى المحاضرة المرفوعة بواسطة استاذ(ة) المادة . وقد تبدو لك غير متكاملة . حيث يضع استاذ المادة في بعض الاحيان فقط الجزء الاول من المحاضرة من اجل الاطلاع على ما ستقوم بتحميله لاحقا . في نظام التعليم الالكتروني نوفر هذه الخدمة لكي نبقيك على اطلاع حول محتوى الملف الذي ستقوم بتحميله .
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