"Himself He Devises Too for Company": Self-Making in Samuel Beckett's Company

During the twentieth century, traditional psychological concepts of the self as well as conventional literary conceptions of character, which used to be the mainstay of the realistic novel, disintegrated. However, postmodern autofiction offers new ways of thinking about the self, both within and outside of literary texts. Autofictional texts are fictional autobiographies in which the narrator is the main character. These texts are conscious of the important role that narration has on the continuous self-construction of a tentative identity. If traditional characters are believed to preexist the story that represents them, autofictional subjects come into being through the stories they tell about themselves. They generate what Paul Ricouer terms "narrative identity," neither a quintessential personality nor a random conglomeration of external social-cultural influences, but a dynamic process that does not decenter and dehumanize all sense of self.¹ However, Ricouer and his followers fail to specify what kinds of narrative techniques or dynamics are used to construct this identity, and thus their use of the term narrative remains vague. Through a reading of Samuel Beckett's novel Company, I will specify the narratological processes that come into play in postmodern literary acts of self-construction. I will give the term narrative an inward turn, in order to delineate the work of the various internal voices that carry on an intrapsychic dialogue.

In contrast to realistic novels, which strive to represent substantial human beings, contemporary experimental novels offer anonymous scattered voices that do not derive from any personal source. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, along with many other critics, judges this development to be a result of an antihumanistic tendency. The authors of these texts, she claims, try to displace the human subject from the center of the literary stage and replace him or her with impersonal metafictional themes pertaining to language and the work of art.² I believe that the very narrative techniques that have been interpreted as serving the purposes of dehumanization can also be read as serving the purposes of personal generativity. A new idea of the self that is dynamic, rather than centered and unified, can accommodate the fragmentation characteristic of the experimental novel.

The internal splitting of the subject found in Company performs significant work in narrating a self. In this extremely experimental work, the traditional conventions of character portrayal are undermined, even abolished.The novel opens with the words "[A] voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine. To one on his back in the dark."³ Some sort of "One" is lying all alone, totally disconnected from the world; voices come to him and talk him out of his desperate darkness, loneliness, and silence. One voice uses the second person while the other speaks in the third person. The second-person voice, which is distinguished by its lyrical style, tells episodes from the One's past. The third-person voice reflects on his present restricted existence in a "flat tone" (13). The text shifts, in alternating paragraphs, from one voice to the other. There are no proper names in Company on which to hook attributes and deeds.⁴ There are no continuous events that unify into a plot. The text never explicitly explains what led the One to his unfortunate condition. And yet, surprisingly, within the scattered voices, many readers recognize a person speaking and interpret his situation. For example, one interpretation views this narrative as voices coming to a fetus in the womb.⁵ Another reading attributes this narrative to someone suffering from the disabilities of old age, someone very close to death.⁶ I shall explore how a self arises in this very unconventional text and describe the way that it differs from a traditional character.

Even though this is not a first-person narrative, the second- and third-person pronouns do not imply an external narrator, as they would in a realistic novel.⁷ Company is narrated only...