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  • Anonymity Writing Pedagogy: Beckett, Descartes, Derrida
  • Simon Morgan Wortham (bio)

One

As Peter Boxall has recently noted, Samuel Beckett’s Company cleverly contrives an autobiographical atmosphere, responding to an unanswerable demand for self-revelation or self-explanation on the author’s part. It does so by means of an ingeniously constructed fable in which it is an unknowable other (itself written by who knows whom) that effectively writes the subject’s biography, indeed the “self” itself. As Boxall notes,

The story of ‘one on his back in the dark’, to whom a ‘voice’ tells stories of a past, a present and a future, is a form of autobiography in several different modes, but each kind of autobiographical writing that is present here is also a denial of the possibility of writing a life, or inheriting a history. The personal stories that are included here . . . are interwoven, often seamlessly, with an attempt to produce a digest of the public Beckett, an attempt to bring into presence the entirety of Beckett’s oeuvre. There are snatches, echoes, snippets from almost every published Beckett work in this short piece, references even to work that was yet to be written when Beckett published Company.

(307)

Company, then, is “studded with images from Beckett’s life” (the “story of the hedgehog ruinously saved in a box, the father sheltering from his labouring wife in country walks . . . the child sheltering from his parents in a refuge on the outskirts of a city, poring over his Longman”), which also turn out to be drawn from the very “landscape of his writing.” (In particular, for Boxall, “the central image of the son walking across pastureland with the ghost of the father beside him” connects Company to Beckett’s entire oeuvre). Yet the formal character—the very grammar—of the text violently interrupts, complicates, and confounds the attribution of authorial identity in any reading we might undertake. [End Page 93]

Company is often described as a late work, one which S.E. Gontarski introduces by giving it the name of a “closed space” novel. This way of classifying the text draws on Gontarkski’s assertion of a profound shift in Beckett’s writing from the mid-1960s onwards, whereby the journey theme which had been a “mainstay of Beckett’s fiction from Murphy and Watt” (1996, vii) through to the Trilogy and beyond (a journey theme characterized by the “fact of movement rather than any particular destination that consoled” [viii]) is replaced or, rather, rethought by way of fictions which feature “stillness or some barely perceptible movement,” often entailing “little more than the perception of a figure in various postures, like an exercise in human origami” (vii). (Badiou tells us that Beckett’s closed space is a precise arrangement allowing “what is seen” to become coextensive with “what is said”—“under the sign of the closed” [2003, 5].) This shift of emphasis towards so-called closed space (the borders of which, however, frequently remain highly problematic in Beckett’s writing)1 thus operates as the fictional conceit, construct, or device for the reformulation of certain literary-philosophical problems in Beckett. Moreover, Gontarski notes that this rethought space of Beckett’s writing is accompanied by another “innovation,” that of a “new character,” one that is “devised” on the strength of “someone else’s imaginings,” thus emerging as a “him,” occasionally a “her,” sometimes a “one” or an “it” (viii–ix). Company, indeed, both establishes and puts into question its own fictional ground, space, or machinery by dividing its narrative and discourse according to the three classes of personal pronoun, whereby the “one on his back in the dark”—the figure supposedly at the center of the tale—is given in the third person as the apparent addressee of a “voice” that speaks in the second, a voice which says, for example, “You are on your back in the dark,” “You first saw the light on such and such a day,” “Your mind never active at any time is now less than ever so,” and so on (3–5).2 However, the uncertainty of this voice’s object of address is soon noticed:

Though now even less than ever given to...

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