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12 In Short The Right Aggregate, the Grand Apnoea, and the Accusative of Inexistence For all the untenability of a singular character or a unified ego or coherent being, and the swallowing up of identity in a serial negativity, there is hardly a body of work in modern literature with so unitary a vision as Samuel Beckett's, along with the readily identifiable tonality of a perpetual voice, stuttering or aphasic, embracing dissolution, affirmed by abrogation. Thus: "Imagine a place, then someone in it, that again," knowing that whoever was there, if he was, he won't be, "Saying, Now where is he, no, Now he is here,"I wondering always, as now, where he's gone, "where been how long how it was,"2 or in the end if he'll ever be, no matter, be sure, no end. The corporeal body on the stage, even if just a mouth, is a slight impediment to what, manic-obsessively on the page, is the anomalous disclaimer of a compelling fiction that anyone can be, and if so, better not, including, presumably, the one who created or perpetrated the fiction, or to whom it happened, overheard, in being "dreamt away," letting himself be dreamt away, "listening trying listening," where there's nothing to be heard, "nothing to listen for no such thing as a sound," nor anyone to hear it if there were, in the vanity of listening, a self to be discovered, "where no such thing no more than ghosts...."3 In the incontrovertible absence of a "self so-called,"4 its gasps and spasms or dissociated logorrhea, the irony is self-evident: word by word, or a torrent of words, in all their actuated invalidity, Beckett's identity is there beyond question-"Unless another still. Nowhere to be found. Nowhere to be sought. The unthinkable last of all. Unnamable. Last person. I. Quick leave him"5-as singular in permutation as any identity can be. Who would fail to recognize its grievous incapacities or, failing thus, the failing better with such distinction that rupture, fracture, dislocation, or syntactical bits and pieces seem, through relentless denegation, the formal cause of authenIBo In Short / r8r ticity, and all the bereft or spectral figures, dubiously heard, maybe never seen, no more than accretions or aggregations of the Beckettian presence itself. When push comes to shove, Pim to Born, all the avatars of "I" and Other, or of the "I" in, out, and of itself, there is only one identity and that one is, by whatever name, or pronominally, still Beckett, first person, last person, Beckett still, "to and fro in shadow from inner to outershadow," to be sure "by way of neither," traversing the lapse of borders, while asserting , hedging, denying differences that might-were the sentence, the pensum , inflected another way-not exist at all. But then again they don't, except in the words that in asserting, hedging, denying, insistently posit a referent that, as none is, there is none, wasn't meant to be, though the words that say so are perhaps "too strong,"6 if not noiselessly breaking wind, or plaintively up in the air, or parsing the "unheeded neither,"7 syntax upended or gone to hell, "You know that penny farthing hell you call your mind,,,g or (Dante always remembered) the hell of unknowing at the center of thought-"Thoughts, no, not thoughts. Profounds of mind"9devoid of itself, pellucid, in an apotheosis of doubt. "Careful."10 There is in all this, with the discretest sublimations of an always potential violence, "gently gently" (Ill Seen 52), something circumspect, a quality often described in Beckett's own behavior, as if-along with the disarming courtesy and reserve-he had to be on guard against something abrupt, forbidding within, "a great wind suddenly rising," or the inclemency of being itself. "Nice fresh morning, bright too early," he wrote at the quickly unsunny beginning of From an Abandoned Work. "Feeling really awful, very violent." Which causes him (or the first-person, "young then," notquite narrative voice) to prefer to "all moving things," a bird, a butterfly, "a slug now, getting under my feet, no, no mercy," things without motion. "Great love in my heart for all things still and rooted, bushes, boulders" and yes, no doubt on certain days, "even the flowers of the field," which otherwise in his "right senses" he would never touch, no less pluck one. Soon he is talking of dying, but by nothing so...

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