GLENN CLIFTON

Pain without Incarnation: The

Unnamable, Derrida, and the
Book of Job

Diverse, bizarre, and unnerving images of physical pain are a

distinctive trait of Samuel Becketts work, figuring a bold sense
of embodiment in his sometimes abstract literary landscape. Some
of the pains in Becketts work resemble the sores and cysts which
perennially afflicted the author himself; Molloy has been bristling
with boils ever since [he] was a brat (Beckett, 1955, 81). But pain
also comes upon Becketts characters in outlandish or impossible
forms, as in the whole dominion of torturers and victims depicted
in How It Is. While a few critics have parsed Becketts treatment of
pain, this aspect of Becketts work generally receives less scholarly
attention than it might, in part because it remains resistant to
theorisation.1
Becketts representation of pain is connected to his widespread
use of biblical allusion. While the Bible most often appears in an
ironic or deflated mode in Becketts work, it is also frequently
mined for its resonant phrases concerning pain and suffering.2

Journal of Beckett Studies 20.2 (2011): 149171

Edinburgh University Press
DOI: 10.3366/jobs.2011.0019
The editors, Journal of Beckett Studies
www.eupjournals.com/jobs
150 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

Beckett knew the Authorised Version well enough to have at his

disposal an encyclopaedia of such phrases.3 As Kristin Morrison
has noted, scripture appears in Becketts work in two different
modes: he often makes direct allusions which tend towards irony,
but he sometimes inserts less obvious echoes of biblical language,
evoking a passage less ironically by using only one or two words
(Morrison, 1983, 912). In the novel The Unnamable, the division
between these two modes of allusion also roughly corresponds to
the division between two different biblical figures. Christ is figured
in The Unnamable primarily through direct and ironic allusion,
whereas the figure of Job is evoked through subtler methods of
echo. This in turn represents a division between two kinds of
suffering. The imagery of Christ, with his precise, piercing wounds
occupying specific points on the body (thorns on the brow, nails in
the hands, a spear in the side), dominates the imagination of the
novels speaker, but must ultimately be rejected as an inaccurate
representation of his pain and his subjectivity. Christ is too much
of an exemplar, and as such too stable a character; the precision
of his wounds ultimately correlates to the promise of a punctual
relationship to the body, where the body and the mind totally
coordinate at specific points.4
The subtle echoes of Job in the novel, however, adumbrate
another, less certain relationship to the body and to pain. One
of the paradoxes of The Unnamable is that it insists on images
of bodily suffering, but also continually denies the existence of
the body. The speaker offers curious and grotesque images of
bodily pain, claiming they represent his own suffering, but then
quickly disowns them. In The Unnamable, the body is an obdurate
ghost; it will not finish vanishing. The biblical echoes in the
novel demonstrate that Beckett looked to Job as a figure for
the condition of subjectivity he was depicting and perhaps for
a certain kind of relationship between language and the body
associated with the Old Testament rather than the New. Rather than
approaching the relationship between the body, pain, and the Word
through the Christological imagery of incarnation and crucifixion,
The Unnamable deflates the imagery of Christ, while subtly
gesturing to Jobs more diffuse experience of the relationship
between words and pain. The punctual imagery of incarnation and
crucifixion drops away as a relevant image in the novel, and what
 The Unnamable, Derrida, and the Book of Job 151

steps in to replace it is a cluster of echoes of Jobs endurance, and

of the disembodied voice from the whirlwind that he hears. These
allusions in turn offer a new angle on the relationship between
Beckett and Derrida, as the imagery of punctual incarnation is one
of the principal targets of critique in Derridas philosophy.
Beckett had an especial affinity for the figure of Job, a character
who is afflicted with boils as Beckett was, and who suffers for no
clear reason, cursing both his birth and the night he was conceived
(Job 3: 3).5 There is perhaps no more Beckettian book of the Bible:
Job is a story of inexplicable, nearly causeless suffering, as Job is
tortured for what is essentially a bet between Satan and God. It
is an unsettling text that opens up the question of the meaning of
pain, because it doesnt introduce the cosmic necessity associated
with Christs suffering. It can also be read as a story of marooned,
isolated subjectivity. Beckett alluded to Job throughout his career
as an image of a lonely sufferer; in Murphy, he suggests that Job
has invented his tormenters, asking But what is Bildad the Shuhite
but a fragment of Job, as Zophar and the others are fragments of
Job? (Beckett, 1957, 70). In his later career, Beckett seems to have
turned to Job not only for images of suffering but also images of
vocality. Job is a book of voices Job and his interlocutors argue
and curse each other in words, before being answered by another,
divine voice from the whirlwind. On the back of one page of an
abandoned manuscript simply entitled The Voice (dated January
1977) Beckett drew out an elaborate chart coordinating phrases
of complaint from Job with grammatical functions (Murphy,
1992, 72).6 This association between Job and the voice is prefigured
by The Unnamable, where Becketts speaker, like Job, is beset from
all sides by the voices he hears.
Job is an appropriate intertext for The Unnamable not only
because it examines suffering and vocality, but also because it
combines certainty and uncertainty. Job is harassed, broken in
pieces with words, by his interlocutors reassertion of traditional
certainty that if he is suffering, he must have sinned (Job 19: 2).
Job is thrown into exile from the traditional doctrines in which he
believed, and the repetition of those doctrines therefore becomes
a source of pain and a deep incongruity. Job suffers every kind
of loss, including the loss of an established understanding of
the relationship between the human and the divine. If Job had
152 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

previously lived a life wherein he avoided sinning with his lips

(Job 2: 10), this is because he lived in a world where words and
justice had a close connection, and where one could be upright
in word and deed. In exile from the language that he believed
preserved his relationship to God, Job laments that if I justify
myself, mine own mouth shall condemn me: if I say, I am perfect,
it shall also prove me perverse (Job 9: 20). The speaker of The
Unnamable, desiring silence but unable to stop speaking, is similarly
condemned by his own mouth. The speaker experiences similar
pain and confusion in the absence of traditional doctrines; he
also demonstrates a similar sense of endurance. Both Job and
the speaker are lonely, suffering figures who experience a strange
mix of confusion and certainty; for Job is ultimately vindicated
in his claim not to have sinned, and his endurance and self-
certainty prove justified in comparison to his interlocutors attacks.
The speaker of The Unnamable, though he makes no claim to be
upright, experiences a parallel mixture of doubt and certainty, as
his confusion about the body (indeed, about virtually everything)
is accompanied by an indubitable, definite experience of the union
of pain and vocality.

All my Life Ive Compared Myself to Him!

The Unnamable is the monologue of a speaking voice that cannot

fall silent, seemingly because it also cannot stop hearing something
outside of itself which it is condemned to repeat. Because talking
about voices directly is difficult, the speaker continually falls into
first describing, and then confusing himself with, his characters,
mainly Mahood and the inert Worm. This confusion is paralleled
with a number of references to Christ in the form of direct and
obvious allusions; it is in the act of confusing himself with his
characters that the speaker also begins to think of Christ. Most
references to Christ in the novel are salient, pat, and farcical, giving
full rein to Becketts famous irony and wit. The speaker envisions
his life as Mahood, a limbless torso living in a jar in Paris; in
this state he introduces playful religious references, claiming to
be able to see from his jar a bust of the apostle of horses meat
(Beckett, 1958, 327), who he later refers to as hippophagist Ducroix
(Beckett, 1958, 340). Mahood is tended by a woman named either
 The Unnamable, Derrida, and the Book of Job 153

Marguerite or Madeleine (covering all the sonic range of Mary

Magdalene), and the speaker doubts at one point whether or not
this woman knows he exists. He then proclaims, the moment is
at hand when my only believer must deny me (Beckett, 1958,
344). The reference to Peters denial of Jesus is clear, but it is also
preposterous; Mahood is doubting whether or not the woman who
feeds him (as he hangs in a jar) is aware of his existence. Before
losing all his limbs, Mahood is described as possessing one leg:
A single leg and other distinctive stigmata to go with it, human to
be sure, but not exaggeratedly (Beckett, 1958, 315). The association
of stigmata with human embodiment is clear, but any sense of
earnest evocation of Christ is destroyed through association when,
a few lines later, the speaker claims they could clap an artificial
anus in the hollow of my hand and still I wouldnt be there, alive
with their life (Beckett, 1958, 315). The stigmata returns but now
Christs most iconic wound is deflated perhaps as far as it could be,
as the suggestion of an anus in the hollow of the hand implicitly
renders Christs blood as faeces.
In addition to these plays of wit, Christ imagery tends to
be associated with identity and character, which the speaker
experiences as impositions that come to him from outside, forcing
upon him a stable selfhood. Following the example of Christs
wounds is a way of taking on an identity, as the speaker clearly
believes someone wants him to do. Thus in the stigmata passage
quoted above, the speaker feels that even the wounds of Christ
would not make him alive with their life. Mary Bryden has noted
that though Beckett has little interest in Christ as a redeemer, he
takes great interest in Christ as a figure of human suffering (Bryden,
1998, 140). But uncharacteristically, Christ is not allowed to figure
in The Unnamable as an instance of genuine torment. Instead, Christ
is a locus for suspicion, associated with the very temptations that
the speaker tries to avoid: character, narrative, and teachings. The
imagery of Christ forms a portion of what has been drilled into the
speaker from outside:

There was perhaps a time I could, in the days when I was

bursting my guts, as per instructions, to bring back into the
fold the dear lost lamb, Id been told he was dear, that he was
dear to me, that I was dear to him. (Beckett, 1958, 380)
154 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

When Mahood first appears (he is briefly named Basil), he seems

to be some kind of teacher charged with the dispensing of religious
doctrine; he and his delegates gave the speaker:

the low-down on God. They told me I depended on him, in

the last analysis. They had it on reliable authority of his agents
at Bally I forget what, this being the place, according to them,
where the inestimable gift of life had been rammed down my
gullet. (Beckett, 1958, 298)

This Basil-Mahood classroom scene develops into the speakers

identification of himself with Mahood through narrative (described
in terms that resemble the Son of the trinity issuing forth from the
Father): It was he told me stories about me, lived in my stead,
issued forth from me, came back to me, entered back into me,
heaped stories on my head (Beckett, 1958, 309). The teaching of
religious doctrine is cast as a form of interpellation, and flows
into the speakers mistaking himself for characters and telling
narratives. As the reference to the lamb makes clear, the practice of
relating to Christ, or taking him as an exemplar, forms the allusive
background to this pitfall. As Estragon says in Waiting for Godot,
comparing oneself to Christ is a matter of course: All my life Ive
compared myself to him! (Beckett, 1954, 57).
The speakers attempt to divest himself of character and
narrative is accompanied by a dismissal of the discrete body,
throwing embodiment into an undecidable state. The speaker
describes bizarre and grotesque states of body while imagining
himself as Mahood, but when he attempts to speak about himself
without character he is unsure whether or not he has a body at
all. At first he claims he is sitting with his hands on his knees, and
can count on [his] body alone (Beckett, 1958, 300). But he later
throws the body out altogether, claiming that discourse about the
body is only a dilapidated rumour, an after-effect of what he has
been told, like a child who believes he can remember which spot
in the cabbage patch he came from (Beckett, 1958, 324). The later
part of the text is permeated by an uncertainty about embodiment.
At points the speaker is certain he has no body, only to discover he
cannot then account for how he can speak or hear the same voice
only small, it sticks in the throat, theres the throat again, theres
 The Unnamable, Derrida, and the Book of Job 155

the mouth again, it fills the ear, theres the ear again (Beckett,
1958, 408). The paradox is staged in another way when the speaker
claims Mahood has an exposed skull covered in pustules and
bluebottles (Beckett, 1958, 328). This impossible relocation of a skin
ailment to the skull is one image the text uses to describe a pain that
seems bodily, but is diffused throughout consciousness.
This extreme doubt grants the body a different status in The
Unnamable than in most of Becketts other fiction, which helps
account for the way images of Christ are used. As Derval Tubridy
has noted, incarnation is never a simple matter in Becketts writing,
because the voice and the body never seem to perfectly align.7
But The Unnamable is demarcated by the radical degree to which it
doubts any point of contact between voice and body and I believe
that this is why it is also demarcated by a more complete irony
towards Christological allusions, as it steers away from any sense
that the Word can become flesh. In this sense, the novel belongs
in the realm of the Old Testament, where revelations come not
through the body of Christ but the voice of God, and where, as
Elaine Scarry has argued, the (divine) voice and the (human) body
are kept separate (Scarry, 1985, 192). Rather than being incarnated,
the voice of God in the Old Testament typically thunders from
nowhere, or speaks from whirlwinds.
Lacking in The Unnamable, therefore, is anything like the echoes
of Christs suffering that can be found in many of Becketts other
middle period writings.8 Perhaps most striking is the contrast
between The Unnamable and How It Is, the novel Beckett wrote in
the late 1950s but which he seems to have experienced as a still
very immediate attempt to go on from where The Unnamable left
him (Knowlson, 1996, 413). How It Is reintroduces the body with a
vengeance, exploring a wide set of possible tortures and generating
language out of the ensuing pain. The novel dwells with imagery of
pain and wounds that could be described as punctual. The wounds
in How It Is are not like Jobs boils they are like Christs wounds,
occupying specific places on the body, and descending on the skin
in sharp motions that themselves replicate the punctual precision of
the incarnation in which the Word was made flesh. Pain is located
on the body in the mode of two planes that meet at an exact point.
A routine of wounds is developed, in conjunction with a catalogue
of bodily sites:
156 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

table of basic stimuli one sing nails in armpit two speak blade
in arse three stop thump on skull four louder pestle on kidney
five softer index in anus six bravo clap athwart arse seven
lousy same as three eight encore same as one or two as may
be. (Beckett, 1964, 9)

The text suggests that these precise wounds generate the language
of the novel itself, unbroken no paragraphs no commas not a
second for reflection with the nail of the index until it falls and
the worn back bleeding (Beckett, 1964, 70). Through this imagery,
How It Is explores the possibilities of punctual pains to evoke and
distribute the energies of language and the body. It ends with a final
capitalised scream asking whether or not the speaker is positioned
LIKE A CROSS to which the answer is given in lower case yes
(Beckett, 1964, 146). The acknowledgment of this explicit, climatic
Christ-imagery has to be wrenched from the novels speaker, as
if he himself were alarmed by the texts use of such transparent
parallelism.
It is not my claim that Beckett discovered incarnation as a way
to go forward after the trilogy still less that the Christian imagery
of How It Is suggests any devoutness on his part. But it is clear that
he did associate Christs suffering with incarnation and the solidity
of the body, evoking it less ironically when he wanted to ground
language and pain on specific bodily locations, and more ironically
when the body he was describing seemed to dissolve. Leslie Hill
argues that the body is the main wellspring of both energy and
uncertainty for Beckett in his middle and late periods, and that
Beckett dissolves the body into language as the trilogy proceeds,
allowing language to take on the dynamism of the body (Hill,
1990, 120). In this model, The Unnamable sits in a peculiar place in
Becketts work, representing the point where the body reaches its
most diffuse and uncertain state, having given all its energy over to
language.9 But the novel is not just a novel of language it is above
all a novel of voices, and there can be no speaking voice without
some kind of body. The disembodied voice takes on the energy of
embodiment. And accordingly, crucifixion drops away as a relevant
image, leaving behind something much more like the voice from
the whirlwind of Job.
 The Unnamable, Derrida, and the Book of Job 157

Derrida and Ponctualit

If incarnation is problematic for Samuel Beckett, it is even more

so for Jacques Derrida. As such, the question of incarnation
throughout Becketts work, but especially in The Unnamable can
help situate the novel in the vocabulary of a philosophy of the
subject. It is clear that there are many aspects of Becketts work
that resemble the philosophy of Derrida, and accordingly there
is a considerable history to reading Beckett in Derridas terms.
Derrida is often quoted saying that he could not write about
Beckett because Beckett was too close to his own enterprise, so
that writing on him was both too easy and too hard (Derrida,
1992, 60). And Asja Szafraniecs Beckett, Derrida, and the Event of
Literature has recently demonstrated that there is still considerable
interest and value in exploring the connection between the two
authors, while simultaneously demonstrating that there are many
important differences between them.10
Derridas influential critique of self-presence is itself based,
to a larger degree than is usually noticed, on the dismantling
of a particular kind of experience of oneself: punctual self-
presence. Robin Durie has argued that Derrida is guided by a
punctualist imperative that leads him to read (and sometimes
misread) other thinkers as gathering up experiences of space and
time into single points so that he can then deconstruct those
points (Durie, 2008, 74). In Derridas early work on Husserl,
Speech and Phenomena, his demonstration that self-presence is
actually mediated by the signifier is grounded by the claim that
Husserl cannot represent that self-presence without presupposing
the instant as a point . . . instantaneously present to itself (Derrida,
1973, 60). Derrida claims that although Husserl himself reads time
as a continuum, his approach is ultimately undergirded by the
punctual now:

We cannot avoid noting that a certain concept of the now,

of the present as punctuality [ponctualit], of the instant,
discretely but decisively sanctions the whole system of
essential distinctions. If the punctuality of the instant is
a myth, a spatial or mechanical metaphor, an inherited
158 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

metaphysical concept, or all that at once, and if the present

of self-presence is not simple . . . then the whole of Husserls
argumentation is threatened in its very principle. (Derrida,
1973, 61)

The whole motion of Speech and Phenomena is towards opening

up Husserls punctual self-presence into the externality of space
(Derrida, 1973, 86). Derrida will go on to say in Structure, Sign, and
Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences that structures have
always been neutralised by referring them to a point of presence
(Derrida, 1978, 278). His claim in Of Grammatology that immediacy
is derived (Derrida, 1997, 157) a claim which is one of the central
guiding threads of his work is ultimately a reflection of the notion
that the subject is never gathered in a point.
Derrida has frequently made the connection between punctual
contact and metaphors of incarnation. He notes that while
Husserls description of the self-presence of the phenomenological
voice suspends incarnation in a physical form, it trades in another,
more idealised form of incarnation, as Husserlian intentionality
works on inanimate, written language and transforms the body
of the word into flesh (Derrida, 1973, 16). In one of his last
works, On Touching Jean Luc Nancy, Derrida returns to engage
with both Husserl and questions of incarnation, giving a sustained
consideration of physical touch and Christian metaphorics in
an attempt to keep a gulf between human touching and the
immediacy that seems to be promised by a point of contact. Derrida
dubs this false immediacy the pure psychic auto-affection of the
touching-touched and explicitly attacks its resemblance to the
incarnation of the Word (Derrida, 2005, 1812). His claim is that
even when one touches oneself, touch remains mediated, more a
marker of finitude than a guarantee of presence.
Taking note of the particular species of presence that Derrida
attacks helps one avoid excessive abstraction in the discussion of
his assault on the metaphysics of presence. If one treats Derrida
too hastily, there is a tendency to see presence itself as the villain;
but his enemy is absolute coincidence, not approximate presence,
in the sense that someone can be present in a room with someone
else. Any kind of touch or contact requires a species of presence,
 The Unnamable, Derrida, and the Book of Job 159

and as his late work on touch makes clear, Derrida has no objection
to the claim that certain kinds of contact occur. Nowhere does he
argue that touch somehow doesnt happen only that it is finite,
and never a pure incarnation of the self in her own sensations.
Touch is also a constant reminder of finitude in Beckett, and the
speakers uncertainty about his own body also reflects the falsity
of the auto-affection of the touching-touched, indicating that the
subject who has knees and the subject who touches his knees
are in some way divided. It might appear, therefore, as though
emphasising the mistrust of metaphors of incarnation would offer
yet one more area of overlap between Beckett and Derrida. But I
believe that a consideration of what happens in the absence of a
punctual incarnation in The Unnamable also leads to the recognition
of important divergences between the two authors. The Unnamable
is not giving us a point of incarnation, but this is not because it is
deconstructing incarnation so much as because it is moving toward
a different set of images and metaphors altogether. It is neither
a suitable target for deconstruction nor the expected result of a
deconstructive operation; to adjust Derridas words, it is both too
close and too far from his own enterprise.
One major difference between Beckett and Derrida becomes clear
if we ask what rushes in to fill the void left by the possibility
of the total incarnation of the subject in the voice. For Derrida,
this is differance, the field of play that is not quite the origin of
differences, but the motion of differing, the movement of play
that produces . . . these effects of difference (Derrida, 1973, 141).
Differance keeps the subject from the self-presence associated with
silence, but Derrida figures it consistently in images of play and
affirmation. But for the speaker of The Unnamable, what takes
up the space until the arrival of silence is pain. The Beckettian
speaking subject is in exile from self-certainty, but this brings about
a pain that Derridas own writings do not seem to have to struggle
against. The speaker of Becketts novel claims that if he is tempted
to create characters, it is because his characters allow him to break
off a piece of his pain and witness it (Beckett, 1958, 3034). That is,
the speakers pain is situated away from doctrines, teachings, and
characters in precisely the same field of activity that he operates
when he comes closest to speaking directly about voices. Pain is not
a result of the they outside rather, somehow, pain is the voice.
160 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

Because the speaker cannot command his voice, he also cannot

fully take ownership of his pain: Labyrinthine torment that cant
be grasped, or limited, or felt, or suffered, no, not even suffered,
I suffer all wrong too (Beckett, 1958, 314). The very diffuseness
of subjectivity appears to increase its pain, so that the punctual
bodily pains of characters like Mahood appear almost as a promise
of relief.
Many of the more recent theoretical studies of Beckett do note
that this concern with pain is something that divides him from
at least some of the theorists that he is often read alongside; it
is starting to become a critical commonplace that while Beckett
may be helpfully read in poststructuralist terms, he lacks the sense
of free-play and positive joy evinced by Derrida or Deleuze.11
This is an important corrective to an earlier critical tendency
to read Beckett directly in Derridas terms, equating Becketts
perpetuation of language with Derridas own affirmations of the
birth of writing.12 Becketts speaker does not seem to be fully
present, but he does not seem to be an affirmative deconstructionist
either his tone is much closer to Jobs cursing of the night he was
born than to the celebration of the birth of anything.
I am not making the claim that Derrida does not have the
resources to take physical pain seriously. He does not mean to
criticise the idea that we receive valuable information from our
bodies; what he means to criticise especially in On Touching is
any project that would make of physical contact an absolute point
of certainty. Pain can, in fact, easily be taken for just such a kernel of
certainty, for when ones own body is in pain, the sensation cannot
simply be deconstructed away. In one important sense, pain is a
form of certainty; pain makes it difficult to think about anything
else, and this focus can be mistaken for the gathering of the subject
into a point. Accordingly, Elaine Scarrys The Body in Pain grounds
an entire theoretical edifice on the self-certainty of bodily pain.
Beginning from the seemingly innocuous claim that to have pain is
to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt (Scarry, 1985,
13), Scarry builds a model wherein the certainty of the sufferer
undergirds a highly atomistic model of mental life.13
This is not, however, how Beckett treats pain. As Eric P. Levy
notes, pain in Beckett is more often associated with the inability
to be a fully grounded, autonomous individual (Levy, 2001, 285).
 The Unnamable, Derrida, and the Book of Job 161

Indeed, Beckett deals with the possibility of just the sort of mistake
made by Scarry in his short story, First Love. The narrator
discusses his daily pains, and laments that though he understands
his pains best, even them, my pains, I understand ill. That must
come from my not being all pain and nothing else. Theres the
rub . . . To be nothing but pain, how that would simplify matters!
(Beckett, 1995, 32). A long catalogue of pains follows, proliferating
into absurdity: the club foot, duck foot, goose foot, pigeon foot,
flat foot, trench foot and other curiosities (Beckett, 1995, 33). This
list emphasises the oddity of the desire to become all pain by
pulling in the opposite direction to the simplification for which
the narrator longs. In naming specific ailments, Beckett suggests
the impossibility of even visualising a state of being all pain.
My pains are inevitably a kind of division within me, and my
consciousness of them is an interruption of the seeming continuity
of my body. A person whose toe hurts is consciously divided
from her toe, even at the same instant she is soldered to her toe
and granted a form of pre-linguistic certainty about it. The toe
becomes an object that resists her but also, even more insistently
and intimately than usual, a part of herself.
What Beckett does in The Unnamable is to take this sense of pain
and apply it to the voice. The speaker has a pain in the voice rather
than the toe and accordingly he is both divided from his voice
and absolutely certain he has one. What kind of pain arises directly
from speaking, without the intercession of a body, and yet makes
no reference to the kind of psychological content that would render
its pain legible as loss or trauma? This curious mixture of division
and painful certainty, without a punctual point of contact with the
body, shifts The Unnamable away from the New Testament sphere
of incarnation to the Old Testament sphere of voices, and especially
of Job.

A Whirl of Words
Near the end of The Unnamable, the speaker describes himself as a
tympanum-like surface:

Perhaps thats what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in

the middle, perhaps thats what I am, the thing that divides
162 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the
inside, that can be as thin as foil, Im neither the one side nor
the other, Im in the middle, Im the partition, Ive two sides
and no thickness, perhaps thats what I feel, myself vibrating,
Im the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the
world, I dont belong to either. (Beckett, 1958, 383)

As a vibrating partition, the speaker is situated between the mind

and the world, forming a surface of contact. That this surface is
extended, and not a singular point, is reinforced by the speakers
claim that he has no flesh, and so is in no place: theres no end
to me, I dont know what it is, it isnt flesh, it doesnt end, its
like air (Beckett, 1958, 399). So the speaker is, at least according
to this formulation, something like an infinite disembodied surface
of contact. In envisioning this kind of speaker, Beckett develops
an alternative to the punctuality of Christs incarnation in the
imagery of a more diffuse contact between the speaker, the voice,
and the body. And he does so alongside a number of subtle
echoes of the Book of Job. These echoes provide a scriptural
counterpoint: if Christ is associated with doctrine, identity, and
character in the novel, Job haunts the text in the background,
providing opportunities for Beckett to capitalise on the powerful
resonances of the biblical text he knew so well.
Ackerley notes ten echoes of Job in Becketts marked use of
words such as flakes and hook that appear in that text (Ackerley,
1999, 10814). But there are several others as well. Like Job,
the speaker wonders what sin he might have committed
(Beckett, 1958, 394). Job, in his uprightness, is unwilling to do as
his wife commands, and curse God and die (Job 2: 9). This option
is markedly absent for Becketts speaker, who lists cursing God as
one of many things that have no effect in this situation: talking
unceasingly, seeking incessantly, in yourself, outside yourself,
cursing man, cursing God, stopping cursing, past bearing it, going
on bearing it (Beckett, 1958, 385). Unlike Christs meaningful
wounds, the speakers are insignificant wounds, as perhaps were
Jobs wounds, caused by a bet between Satan and God (Beckett,
1958, 298). Job, like Beckett, suffers from boils all over his body
rather than from the punctual wounds of Christ the speaker
 The Unnamable, Derrida, and the Book of Job 163

punningly takes those boils and absorbs them into language in his
reminder to himself that it all boils down to a question of words,
I must not forget this (Beckett, 1958, 335). And as an attempt to
imagine himself into silence, he invents an inert and silent character
for himself named Worm, echoing the book of Jobs image of man
as an unclean and low figure man that is a worm (Job 25: 6).14
In one passage, the speaker describes his attempt to imagine a
body:

This eye, curious how it invites inspection, demands

sympathy, solicits attention, implores assistance, to do what,
its not clear, to stop weeping, have a quick look round, goggle
an instant and close forever. Its it you see and it alone, its
from it you set out to look for a face, to it you return having
found nothing, nothing worth having, nothing but a kind of
ashen smear, perhaps its a long grey hair, hanging in a tangle
round the mouth, greasy with ancient tears, or the fringe of a
mantle spread like a veil, or fingers opening and closing to try
to shut out the world, or all together, fingers, hair, and rags,
mingled inextricably. Suppositions all equally vain, its enough
to enounce them to regret having spoken, familiar torment,
a different past, its often to be wished, different from yours,
when you find out what it was. He is hairless and naked and his
hands, laid flat on his knees once and for all, are in no danger
of ever getting into mischief. (Beckett, 1958, 375; my italics)

Earlier, the speaker had claimed to be sitting with his hands on

his knees; now he returns to this image and reveals an elderly
male figure modeled on Job. The resemblance is made clear by the
unusual wording of a mantle spread like a veil, which echoes
the rent mantle of Job (1: 20). The passage echoes many aspects
of the description of Jobs body: Job is naked, has removed his hair
(Job 1: 20), and sits among ashes (Job 2: 8). This passage describes
the search for a face for the identity of the body and returns
finding only Job, who lurks in the background of the novel as an
example of how little can be gleaned from the body.
Eventually, the Book of Job restores Jobs uprightness through
the voice in the whirlwind, which comes to give the authoritative
164 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

words that will prove which speeches were just. This sense of
the restored, revelatory authority of words is an absence that
haunts The Unnamable. Jobs interlocutors continually attack him
for going on at length and being full of mere wind (Job 8: 2 and
15: 2; Job accuses his interlocutors of the same thing at 6: 26).
Their accusations are eventually answered by the voice from the
whirlwind, which demonstrates who can really use their voice to
whip up a wind. This contrast between human and divine speech is
evoked in The Unnamable in a passage where the speaker describes
the torment of voices outside himself:

They all say simultaneously the same thing exactly, but so

perfectly together that one would take it for a single voice,
a single mouth, if one did not know that God alone can fill
the rose of the winds, without moving from his place.
(Beckett, 1958, 356)

The rose of the winds invokes a windrose (God can fill the points
of the compass), and yet the archaic wording puts the accent on
wind, gesturing to the absence of a voice from a whirlwind that
could fill the voices with authority. As the speaker begins his last
gallop and attempts to run out his voice, he claims that all that
is needed is to wander and let wander, be this slow boundless
whirlwind and every particle of dust, its impossible (Beckett,
1958, 401). And again: from word to word, a labouring whirl
(Beckett, 1958, 402). The words whirl and accelerate towards the
end of the novel, pulling the speaker and the reader along in a
wind, and yet this only draws further attention to the lack of an
authoritative voice that could stop the movement of the windy
speaker. This whirl of words is increasingly identified with pain
and struggle as the text goes on, and the characters the speaker
has devised in order not to experience his pain vanish. The novel
ends in very much the spirit of Job, stressing not failure but
endurance in its famous final words: I cant go on, Ill go on
(Beckett, 1958, 414).
These parallels demonstrate not only that Beckett was drawn
to echoes of Job as he was writing about the voice, but also
that he was drawn to depict the struggle of his speaker in terms
 The Unnamable, Derrida, and the Book of Job 165

that would stress not so much the ironic failure of the Word to
become incarnate, but the endurance of a figure who is alienated
from the traditions that would guarantee the meaning of words.
The structure of the novel strips away character and identity as
mistakes: but by stressing endurance rather than free play, it also
stresses that there is some kind of certainty to what remains. Job is
a figure of confusion, but also of endurance and even of certainty;
the overriding thing about him is that he is convinced he did not
sin, and that he turns out to be right. Becketts speaker is Job-
like in that he is also caught between certainty and uncertainty,
absolutely certain of his contact with some kind of voice, but
uncertain of everything else. While the speaker of The Unnamable is
not fully present to himself in the sense that Derrida deconstructs,
he is also completely unable to get away from himself; the contact
between the speaker and the voice remains unquestionable. And
this non-punctual self-contact is the basis of an incongruously
bodily pain, the pain of a voice without a throat in which to get
sore.
This peculiar image of subjectivity is in no way what we would
expect of classical humanism or of Husserlian Phenomenology. The
contact of the voice and the speaker in The Unnamable does not
grant the self-presence of Husserls phenomenological voice, which
maps on to itself in a way that makes communication unnecessary.
Yet, operating beyond Derridas punctualist imperative, the
Jobean speaker experiences a definite union of pain and speaking,
a union imagined more like the surface of the (diseased) skin rather
than a single point of contact. This ungraspable, diffuse union sits
uneasily with deconstruction, as it suggests a definite contact of
the subject with itself that comes prior to conscious reflection or
intentionality; it thereby echoes at least one criticism of Derridas
thought.15 But it also insists upon something uniquely Beckettian:
a diffuse but a priori union of suffering and vocality. If the speaker
imagines characters with concrete ailments, this is ultimately to
give shape to the conjoined imperative of suffering and speaking
that, though imagined as an infinite flap of skin (the tympanum),
predates any specific embodiment.
The speakers contact with his voice mirrors Jobs contact with
his boil-ridden, suffering body. Job cannot, for the sake of piety,
give up his body by cursing God and dying. The speaker is
166 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

held just as inescapably despite his lack of piety, for he exists

at a remove from the body that makes suicide nonsensical
(Ah for a neck! Beckett, 1958, 313). Coming before signifiers
or pronouns, this contact with the voice can neither be owned
nor abandoned, and being diffuse rather than punctual, it also
cannot be definitively located. So pace Derrida, immediacy is not
derived it is diffuse. The speaker is diffusely embodied in his
vocality; he is cemented to his entire voice. The contact he has
with his voice does not occupy a precise point, but is rather a field
stretching in all directions, and yet impossible to name a field
that is always behind the speaker, no matter where he turns. And
however far he goes, speaking remains painful, though it becomes
more so as the voice attempts to describe itself directly. The fact that
the voice precedes the pronoun apparently goes hand in hand with
the pain of having to speak.
This form of subjectivity sits on the border of Derridas
philosophy, deconstructing some of the same punctualities but
introducing something entirely different: the painful inescapability
of an unlocatable certainty. As its allusive echoes suggest, the
subjectivity of The Unnamable is perhaps more properly a Jobean
subjectivity, composed of certainty without identity and endurance
without incarnation. The speaker is held between uncertainty
about all referential content and complete certainty about the
tyrannical presence of its voice. He resists the body not for the
sake of becoming pure, but rather because the body itself, like
narrative or character, would make too many promises, and would
start to suggest that the origin of the impulse to speak could be
named.

NOTES

1. For theorisations of Becketts use of pain, see Levy (2001), and Strong
(1998). Elaine Scarry incorporates Beckett into her own theory of pain,
claiming that his characters are close to intentional states and therefore
inhabit the neighbourhood of physical pain (Scarry, 1994, 9).
2. Some critics have claimed that Becketts use of scripture is almost
wholly ironic (Hokenson, 1971; Barge, 1998). Butler complicates this,
pointing out that while Becketts use of allusion is often deflating, he also
 The Unnamable, Derrida, and the Book of Job 167

tends to allow much of the rich sense of suffering in the biblical texts to
seep into his work (Butler, 1992, 170). Bryden also pays attention to the
dual nature of Becketts use of the Bible, noting that while he has little
interest in the figure of Christ as a redeemer, he does admire him as a figure
of suffering (Bryden, 1998, 140).
3. Beckett won a prize for his ability to recite scripture as a child
(Cronin, 1996, 21). Ackerley (1999) lists 70 pages of biblical allusions in
Becketts work. None of this, of course, implies that Beckett is writing
pious texts. It is important to remember that, when asked in court if he
was a Christian, Jew, or atheist, Beckett claimed he was None of the three
(Knowlson, 1996, 258).
4. My use of the word punctual follows OED Punctual adj. I 3b: Of
or relating to a point in space; of the nature of a point, having position but
no spatial extent (OED 3rd ed. Online).
5. Cronin begins his biography by noting Becketts approval of this
verse (Cronin, 1996, 3).
6. This manuscript was later developed into the novel Company, but
most of the biblical echoes were cut as the text was made less centrally
concerned with vocality.
7. Tubridy notes that problematic status of incarnation in Becketts
oeuvre, arguing that the impossibility, yet necessity, of bringing together
the word and the body at a single moment of space and time is crucial
to Christian belief and . . . key to an understanding of Becketts prose and
drama (Tubridy, 2000, 94). Paul Davies has argued that incarnation is in
fact Becketts central myth, but Davies engages with a different model
of incarnation, as he reads Becketts work in terms of Eastern religions
(Davies, 2000, 34).
8. For a few examples: there is the well-known comparison between
Vladimir and Estragon and the two crucified thieves; Molloys complaint
that his leg problems constitute a veritable calvary with no limit to its
stations and no hope of crucifixion (Beckett, 1956, 78); and the first line of
Endgame which echoes the death of Christ in the gospel of St. John (John
19: 30), as well as the more elaborate parallels between Hamm and Christ
that were cut from Becketts early draft of the play (see Cronin, 1996, 458).
All these texts, though full of ironic use of the Bible, also have room to
evoke the suffering of Christ with minimal deflation.
9. Only Texts for Nothing, Becketts first attempt to move on after
finishing The Unnamable, describes the same kind of radical uncertainty
about the body (see especially Text 3, Beckett, 1995, 10913).
10. Szafraniec uncovers new life in the comparison of the two authors
by looking for broad surfaces of contact between them, rather than trying
to do a Derridean reading of Beckett. This approach yields some surprising
168 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

points, as her reading of The Unnamable argues cogently that Beckett

actually allows less power and responsibility to the subject than Derrida
does (Szafraniec, 2007, 11839).
11. Anthony Uhlmann, for example, notes in his discussion of Beckett
and Deleuze that there is an important tension to be bridged between
Becketts weary negations and Deleuzes role as a philosopher of
affirmation and joy (Uhlmann, 1999, 9). Much the same could be said
about Beckett and Derrida (I unfortunately do not have room here to
engage with the several recent studies of Beckett and Deleuze). Some
critics have even argued that Beckett should be read as an opponent
of Derridean deconstruction; P. J. Murphy claims that the impasse that
concludes The Unnamable represents the decisive point at which Beckett
realises the human point of reference in language is inescapable (Murphy,
1990, 31). In my own terms, Beckett does grant humans a form of contact
with language, but this contact is precisely not a point. Helga Schwalm
reads The Unnamable in terms that closely resemble my own, claiming
that the novel both deconstructs the subject and shows the limits of that
deconstruction in suffering (Schwalm, 1997, 1889).
12. The reading of The Unnamable in terms of the birth of writing is made
by Begam (Begam, 1996, 14983). For other deconstructive approaches, see
Connor (1988), and Tresize (1990).
13. The imagination functions for Scarry as a bridge that begins with
individualised experience and moves outwards to the community; she
tends, however, to describe the process of imagination in highly individual
terms, disregarding entirely the role custom and ideology have in shaping
what someone imagines. Because she starts with the certainty of the
sufferer in contrast to the witness, Scarry imagines all psychic activity on
the model of interiority-as-certainty. Pain does so much work for Scarry
as an inspiration for the activities of language, imagining, and material
making (which all aim to soothe pain) that the entire human subject comes
to attain for her the atom-like certainty associated with a sharp moment
of physical pain. For a longer critique of Scarry along these lines, see
Harpham (2001).
14. Ackerley glosses the name Worm as a reference to Psalm 22
(Ackerley, 1999, 111). Given Becketts knowledge of the Bible, it is not
necessarily the case that he has only one passage in mind. It is worth
noting, however, that the word worm appears five times in Job, and that
Beckett is fond of quoting Job Chapter 25; he does so in Murphy (Beckett,
1957, 701).
15. I refer to the critiques of Derrida launched by German philosopher
Manfred Frank. Frank argues for a pre-reflective contact of the self with
itself, such that deconstructions of self-presence as a pure self-relation
putatively lose their teeth, as self-consciousness unlike the linguistic
 The Unnamable, Derrida, and the Book of Job 169

form in which it articulates itself is not something relational at all (Frank,

1992, 232). The claim is essentially that the self does not need to be present
to itself in the propositional, thinking form of the Cartesian cogito in order
experience itself or its intentions. Frank uses the example of gazing at
a mirror: Derridas argument that the self-identity of the gazer and the
reflection cannot be guaranteed as an immediate coincidence misses the
point that I only look into the mirror and realise the mirror reflects me
because I have a form of pre-reflexive awareness that I am in the room
looking at a mirror (Frank, 1992, 230). As such, I must have some kind of
contact with myself that precedes reflection and pronouns. Frank does not
emphasise pain or vocality, but Becketts speaker resembles this argument
inasmuch as he seems to have some contact with himself he cannot isolate.
An expansion of Franks critique of Derrida is articulated in The Subject
and the Text (Frank, 1997, 12389). The possibility of a connection between
Beckett and Frank is also noted by Schwalm (Schwalm, 1997, 1889).

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