/ / …perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two…: Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, relational modularity, and nationalism [Essay]
Abstract:
This essay explores relational modularity, drawn from a reading of Beckett’s The Unnamable, as a mode of insistence against the monologism of nationalism. For what is nationalism but a systematized, unmoving nation-self-myth formed from absences concretized in linearity? I propose a reading that sound, here, is integral to this concept of relational modularity as well as the protagonist’s apperception: “…I’m the partition, I’ve two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that’s what I feel, myself vibrating…” Relational modularity inevitably also illuminates the presence of absence, particularly in how it aims to counter the inescapability of selective illumination and attenuation in the construction of identity, in itself intertextual. Lastly, I propose the act of translation as excavation (for all language is already in itself translation) as a mode of engaging a text (and identity) from varying angles, here, giving an example of the act of translating “I” into Thai, the language of my native land, using a gender/class/age-neutral pronoun “rao” which implicates a contemporary social through the ongoing struggle of Beckett’s protagonist as a subject-in-process, ever-self-excavating. This act of translation as excavation as well as relational modularity thus involutes borders, borders of self, borders of language and silence, borders between bodies and systems, an embodiment of flux and situational identity, where our borders form and re-form—must reform—striving always to illuminate the shadows which form the borders around what we call us and our history to embody the quasi-presences that shape our present tense.
