Impossibilities of Screening the Vanishing Minds and Selves in Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable

Abstract

In this article, I explore the Beckettian ‘arrival’ at being through writing, which is also a process of continuous self-emptying. This non-art and implosion within language position subjectivity in the zones of loss and invisibility. The paper further seeks to identify the cinematic impossibility of filming The Unnamable, since all attempts of displaying an id-entity (Basil/Mahood), a worm, or a thing, would culminate in associating visual borderlines against the effulgence of the ‘imperceptible’ narrator. The essay locates the ‘unnamable’s’ failures to return to the primordial site of the undifferentiated, and the independent narration of the voice of its indefinite histories and transcendences from spaces beyond symbolization. The moment one strives to ‘frame’ the void from which the speaker articulates and to which it returns, or locate the subject without subjectivity, the multiplicity and effluence of being get erased.