Writing and Reading Beyond the Wordable Perec's la Disparition and Beckett's l’Innommable

Abstract

This thesis brings together two writers, Georges Perec and Samuel Beckett, with particular focus on their struggle to bring us closer to realities that cannot be translated into words. In Perec's case that struggle is with the Shoah, whereas Beckett grapples with what he sees as the inherent ineffability of 'being'. Chapter One explains why 'reality' and 'self' can be perceived as unwordable, and why the Shoah too must be considered to be a truth beyond words. It also outlines twentieth-century developments in the human relationship to the word, focusing upon the conflict between the Sartrean belief that words must be used as 'signs', to help us make sense of the world, and the contrasting conviction, inspired primarily by Nietzsche, that words can never be more than 'things' and that they can therefore be used only to make art, not truth. I hold that neither of these approaches enables the writer to touch the reader with the full force of the 'real' ineffables that weigh upon us still. I suggest that in two key works, Perec's La Disparition and Beckett's L'Innommable, the writers harness the potential of the word as both materiality and sense-making tool in such a way as to enable the unspeakable to emerge in the tension between the two. Chapter Two explores the writerly paradox that results because Perec and Beckett refuse to shy away from the unsayable. This paradox, the battle between the obligation to express and the impossibility of expression, drives their work. Chapters Three and Four consist of close readings of La Disparition and L'Innommable respectively. I read both novels as works written 'under constraint' and demonstrate that in both cases the constraint invites us to read the word as 'sign' and 'thing' simultaneously. This 'doubleness' draws us into an ethical and emotional dilemma that cannot be resolved, and we therefore become vulnerable to the unwordable human truths with which Perec and Beckett do battle. Although their stated approaches to language are diametrically opposed, in these two works Perec and Beckett extend the boundaries of language and literature to create remarkably similar reading spaces. My concluding chapter brings the two works together in order to explore this reading dimension and to posit that Perec and Beckett reconcile the forces of engagement and play in such a way as to make possible a literary equivalent of the physical Theory of Everything.