…

the literature of the unword

To be sure, to describe Joyce as the writer of surplus-meaning is misleading, for what is at stake, in his supreme artistry with words, has only in part to do with the overfl ow of meaning, it also has to do with the overfl ow of sounds. Language is taken, in one and the same gesture, as a machine for the endless production of meaning and as a web of infi nite sound-echoes, reverberations, words contingently echoing other words and finding a surplus of meaning in the very contingent consonances of sounds, in sound contaminations, intersections, cross-cuts, in endless punning. Finnegans Wake can be read as an interminable pun, running for hundreds of pages and folded on to itself, each pun breeding more puns, the end rejoining the beginning. Thus Joyce ultimately embodies, in a paramount manner, the Lacanian concept of lalangue, an inextricable web of meaning and sound, of the signifi er and the enjoyment, where language is not either taken to be the matter of the signifi er or simply sound echoes, but is apprehended precisely through their very difference, their incommensurability – their division and their union falling under the same heading in their very divergence. Hence Lacan’s own fascination with Joyce, his seeing Joyce as the incarnation of sinthome8 – the word which is itself a pun on symptom (just as lalangue is a pun, for that matter) and which immediately breeds more puns on saint-homme, sinthome madaquin (Saint Thomas d’Aquin), etc. It seems that Lacan wholeheartedly espoused Joyce as the showcase for a certain line of his teaching. But couldn’t one argue that following Beckett’s way would actually come much closer to the bone of Lacan’s teaching? This is the argument I will briefl y try to pursue here.

Beckett’s art, as opposed to Joyce’s, is the art of (n–1). The words have to be deprived of their magic, hollowed, their meaning has to be subtracted from them so that they become scarce and empty, like senseless sounds, reduced to clichés (dead words in a seemingly living language). What has to be explored is how much one can take away, how little will one make do: the vocabulary is contracted, the references reduced to the minimum, the encyclopaedia has to shrivel, and the grammar has to be reduced to the bare necessity (what Beckett called ‘the syntax of weakness’).

—

The art of apotheosis, the magic of the word versus the art of the senselessness, ‘the literature of the unword’, of the drained, barren, porous, meaningless word (as Beckett put it in the famous letter to Axel Kaun, written in German in 1937).

 And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it. Grammar and Style. [. . .] As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it – be it something or nothing – begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today.

Mladen Dolar