Iconic Spaces: The Dark Theology of Samuel Beckett's Drama

Chapter 4. Metaphor and Metonymy in Not I

77 C h a p t e r 4 Metaphor and Metonymy in Not I Beckett’s theoretical explorations of an expressionless art in the “Three Dialogues” do not remain without aesthetic and artistic consequences. A steady “neutralization” progresses throughout Beckett’s work, especially his late plays and prose writings. Colors, still used to startling effect in Happy Days, for instance, disappear in favor of shades of gray, and likewise acting and delivery are reduced to an increasingly neutral style from which all exuberance and emotion are excised while the prose itself tends toward increasingly pared down sentences. “Too much colour, no no, too much colour,” Beckett kept repeating to Billie Whitelaw when rehearsing with her for Not I. “By which he meant: ‘For God’s sake don’t act.’”1 And yet this radically minimalist, “expressionless” theater is intensely evocative. For Roland Barthes the neutral is “that which outplays . . . the paradigm , or rather I call Neutral everything that baffles the paradigm,” which he understands to be the binary framework of the sort that generates meaning in the West.2 Surveying vast intertextual fields Barthes quotes Lao-tzu, from Jean Grenier’s L’Esprit du Tao, which allows him explicitly to link the neutral to the colorless, the emotionless, and the will not to will: “I am as if colorless . . . neutral as the newborn who has not yet felt his first emotion, as if without project or will.”3 Barthes approaches the neutral in art through what it undoes—namely, the colorful—based as it is on the contrast of primary colors such as blue and red: “[I]t’s the opposition par excellence, the very motor of meaning (phonology),” he says, alluding, of course, to the voiced/voiceless binary . “[T]he monochrome (the Neutral),” on the other hand, “substitutes for the idea of opposition that of the slight difference, of the onset of the effort towards difference, in other words of nuance: nuance becomes the principle of allover organization . . . that in a way skips the paradigm: this integrally and almost exhaustively nuanced space is the shimmer . . . the neutral is the shimmer: that whose aspect, perhaps whose meaning is subtly modified according to the angle of the subject’s gaze.”4 The monochrome style of Beckett’s visual images itself—not just their material minimalism or “emotionless” acting style—undoes conceptual binarisms . The disorienting effect this has on the spectator contributes to the plays’ evocativeness as part of a multilayered network of nondual undecidabilities. This chapter approaches Not I through the visual image and narrative technique in order to determine how the ideal of “expressionless art” finds its way into Beckett’s own work and what it means for him artistically . I investigate how the horizontally metonymic and the vertically metaphoric dimensions in Beckett’s art interlock, relying for this purpose in part on David Lodge’s useful distinction, adapted from Roman Jakobson, between the metaphoric and metonymic poles of modern literature . Metonymy progresses along a horizontal axis of notional association or combination, metaphor along a vertical axis of substitution. The question is whether Beckett’s reduction is horizontal, secular, atheological , and moves primarily along the metonymic pole, or whether it tends more toward the metaphoric pole and toward a full-fledged vertical religiosity, or whether—and this I would like to suggest—the peculiar tension in Beckett’s work derives from pulling equally strongly in both directions. According to Beckett and Maurice Blanchot writing is a movement along a horizontal axis toward a point whose transcendental (vertical, metaphorical) implications come into existence and into focus only in the process of writing, that is, in the horizontal pursuit of 78 Iconic Spaces Metaphor and Metonymy in Not I 79 that point. Writing turns out to be an aporia of the metonymic and the metaphoric poles. We will see that the metonymic and the metaphoric form such an aporia in Beckett’s art. Lodge categorizes modern literature along the metaphoric/ metonymic divide. Metonymy and its cousin synecdoche are not both subforms of metaphor, that is, simply figurative transformations of a given statement. Rather, metaphor and metonymy are diametrically opposed because they are generated by opposing principles. Metaphor belongs to the selection axis of language and works by way of substitution. Lodge’s analogy here is dress: one selects just one item from a set (or paradigm) that is constituted by a range of tops. If one has already selected...