The Unnamable (8 page)

of my navigation. And my family could have moved to other quarters during my absence,
and settled down a hundred leagues away, without my deviating by as much as a
hair’s-breadth
from my course. As for the screams of pain and wafts of decomposition, assuming I
was capable of noticing them, they would have seemed to me quite in the natural order
of things, such as I had come to know it. If before such manifestations I had been
compelled each time to turn aside, I should not have got very far. Washed on the surface
only by the rains, my head cracking with unutterable imprecations, it was from myself
I should have had to turn aside, before all else. After all perhaps I was doing so,
that would account for my vaguely circular motion. Lies, lies, mine was not to know,
nor to judge, nor to rail, but to go. That the bacillus botulinus should have
exterminated
my entire kith and kin, I shall never weary of repeating this, was something I could
readily admit, but only on condition that my personal behaviour had not to suffer
by it. Let us rather consider what really took place, if Mahood was telling the truth.
And why should he have lied to me, he so anxious to obtain my adhesion, to what now
that I come to think of it, to his
conception
of me? Why? For fear of paining me perhaps. But I am there to be pained, that is
what my tempters have never grasped. What they all wanted, each according to his particular
notion of what is endurable, was that I should exist and at the same time be only
moderately, or perhaps I should say finitely pained. They have even killed me off,
with the friendly remark that having reached the end of my endurance I had no choice
but to
disappear. The end of my endurance! It was one second they should have schooled me
to endure, after that I would have held out for all eternity, whistling a merry tune.
The hard knocks they invented for me! But the bouquet was this story of Mahood’s in
which I appear as upset at having been delivered so economically of a pack of blood
relations, not to mention the two cunts into the bargain, the one for ever accursed
that ejected me into this world and the other, infundibuliform, in which, pumping
my likes, I tried to take my revenge. To tell the truth, let us be honest at least,
it is some considerable time now since I last knew what I was talking about. It is
because my thoughts are elsewhere. I am therefore forgiven. So long as one’s thoughts
are somewhere everything is permitted. On then, without misgiving, as if nothing had
happened. And let us consider what really took place, if Mahood was telling the truth
when he represented me as rid at one glorious sweep of parents, wife and heirs. I’ve
plenty of time to blow it all skyhigh, this circus where it is enough to breathe to
qualify for asphyxiation, I’ll find a way out of it, it won’t be like the other times.
But I should not like to defame my defamer. For when he made me turn and set off in
the other direction, before I had exhausted the possibilities of the one I was pursuing,
he had not in mind a shrinking of the spirit, not for a moment, but a purely
physiological
commotion, followed by a simple desire to vomit,
corresponding
respectively to the howls of my family as they grudgingly succumbed and the subsequent
stench, this latter compelling me to beat in retreat under penalty of losing consciousness
entirely. This version of the facts having been restored, it only remains to say it
is no better than the other and no less incompatible with the kind of creature I might
just conceivably have been if they had known how to take me. So let us consider now
what really occurred. Finally I found myself, without surprise, within the building,
circular in form as already stated, its ground-floor consisting of a single room flush
with the arena, and there completed my rounds, stamping under foot the unrecognisable
remains of my family, here a face, there a
stomach, as the case might be, and sinking into them with the ends of my crutches,
both coming and going. To say I did so with satisfaction would be stretching the truth.
For my feeling was rather one of annoyance at having to flounder in such muck just
at the moment when my closing contortions called for a firm and level surface. I like
to fancy, even if it is not true, that it was in mother’s entrails I spent the last
days of my long voyage, and set out on the next. No, I have no preference, Isolde’s
breast would have done just as well, or papa’s private parts, or the heart of one
of the little bastards. But is it certain? Would I have not been more likely, in a
sudden access of
independence
, to devour what remained of the fatal corned-beef? How often did I fall during these
final stages, while the storms raged without? But enough of this nonsense. I was never
anywhere but here, no one ever got me out of here. Enough of acting the infant who
has been told so often how he was found under a cabbage that in the end he remembers
the exact spot in the garden and the kind of life he led there before joining the
family circle. There will be no more from me about bodies and trajectories, sky and
earth, I don’t know what it all is. They have told me, explained to me, described
to me, what it all is, what it looks like, what it’s all for, one after the other,
thousands of times, in thousands of connections, until I must have begun to look as
if I understood. Who would ever think, to hear me, that I’ve never seen anything,
never heard anything but their voices? And man, the lectures they gave me on men,
before they even began trying to assimilate me to him! What I speak of, what I speak
with, all comes from them. It’s all the same to me, but it’s no good, there’s no end
to it. It’s of me now I must speak, even if I have to do it with their language, it
will be a start, a step towards silence and the end of madness, the madness of having
to speak and not being able to, except of things that don’t concern me, that don’t
count, that I don’t believe, that they have crammed me full of to prevent me from
saying who I am, where I am, and from doing what I have to do in the only way that
can put an end to it, from doing what I have to do. How they must
hate me! Ah a nice state they have me in, but still I’m not their creature, not quite,
not yet. To testify to them, until I die, as if there was any dying with that tomfoolery,
that’s what they’ve sworn they’ll bring me to. Not to be able to open my mouth without
proclaiming them, and our fellowship, that’s what they imagine they’ll have me reduced
to. It’s a poor trick that consists in ramming a set of words down your gullet on
the principle that you can’t bring them up without being branded as
belonging
to their breed. But I’ll fix their gibberish for them. I never understood a word
of it in any case, not a word of the stories it spews, like gobbets in a vomit. My
inability to absorb, my genius for forgetting, are more than they reckoned with. Dear
incomprehension
, it’s thanks to you I’ll be myself, in the end. Nothing will remain of all the lies
they have glutted me with. And I’ll be myself at last, as a starveling belches his
odourless wind, before the bliss of coma. But who, they? Is it really worth while
inquiring
? With my cogged means? No, but that’s no reason not to. On their own ground, with
their own arms, I’ll scatter them, and their miscreated puppets. Perhaps I’ll find
traces of myself by the same occasion. That’s decided then. What is strange is that
they haven’t been pestering me for some time past, yes, they’ve inflicted the notion
of time on me too. What conclusion, using their methods, am I to draw from this? Mahood
is silent, that is to say his voice continues, but is no longer renewed. Do they consider
me so plastered with their rubbish that I can never extricate myself, never make a
gesture but their cast must come to life? But within, motionless, I can live, and
utter me, for no ears but my own. They loaded me down with their trappings and stoned
me through the carnival. I’ll sham dead now, whom they couldn’t bring to life, and
my monster’s carapace will rot off me. But it’s entirely a matter of voices, no other
metaphor is appropriate. They’ve blown me up with their voices, like a balloon, and
even as I collapse it’s them I hear. Who, them? And why nothing more from them lately?
Can it be they have
abandoned
me, saying, Very well, there’s nothing to be done with him, let’s leave it at that,
he’s not dangerous. Ah but the little
murmur of unconsenting man, to murmur what it is their humanity stifles, the little
gasp of the condemned to life, rotting in his dungeon garrotted and racked, to gasp
what it is to have to celebrate banishment, beware. No, they have nothing to fear,
I am walled round with their vociferations, none will ever know what I am, none will
ever hear me say it, I won’t say it, I can’t say it, I have no language but theirs,
no, perhaps I’ll say it, even with their language, for me alone, so as not to have
not lived in vain, and so as to go silent, if that is what confers the right to silence,
and it’s unlikely, it’s they who have silence in their gift, they who decide, the
same old gang, among themselves, no matter, to hell with silence, I’ll say what I
am, so as not to have not been born for nothing, I’ll fix their jargon for them, then
any old thing, no matter what, whatever they want, with a will, till time is done,
at least with a good grace. First I’ll say what I’m not, that’s how they taught me
to proceed, then what I am, it’s already under way, I have only to resume at the point
where I let myself be cowed. I am neither, I needn’t say, Murphy, nor Watt, nor Mercier,
nor – no, I can’t even bring myself to name them, nor any of the others whose very
names I forget, who told me I was they, who I must have tried to be, under duress,
or through fear, or to avoid acknowledging me, not the slightest connection. I never
desired, never sought, never suffered, never partook in any of that, never knew what
it was to have, things, adversaries, mind, senses. But enough of this. There is no
use denying, no use harping on the same old thing I know so well, and so easy to say,
and which simply amounts in the end to speaking yet again in the way they intend me
to speak, that is to say about them, even with execration and disbelief. Perhaps they
exist in the way they have decreed will be mine, it’s
possible
, I don’t know and I’m not interested. If they had taught me how to wish I’d wish
they did. There’s no getting rid of them without naming them and their contraptions,
that’s the thing to keep in mind. I might as well tell another of Mahood’s stories
and no more about it, to be understood in the way I was given to understand it, namely
as being about me. That’s an idea. To
heighten my disgust. I’ll recite it. This will leave me free to consider how I may
best proceed with my own affair, beginning again at the point where I had to interrupt
it, under duress, or through fear, or through ignorance. It will be the last story.
I’ll try and look as if I was telling it willingly, to keep them quiet in case they
should feel like refreshing my memory, on the subject of my behaviour above in the
island, among my compatriots, contemporaries, coreligionists and companions in distress.
This will leave me free to consider how to set about showing myself forth. No one
will be any the wiser. But who are these maniacs let loose on me from on high for
what they call my good, let us first try and throw a little light on that. To tell
the truth – no, first the story. The island, I’m on the island, I’ve never left the
island, God help me. I was under the impression I spent my life in spirals round the
earth. Wrong, it’s on the island I wind my endless ways. The island, that’s all the
earth I know. I don’t know it either, never having had the stomach to look at it.
When I come to the coast I turn back inland. And my course is not helicoidal, I got
that wrong too, but a succession of irregular loops, now sharp and short as in the
waltz, now of a parabolic sweep that embraces entire boglands, now between the two,
somewhere or other, and invariably unpredictable in direction, that is to say determined
by the panic of the moment. But at the period I refer to now this active life is at
an end, I do not move and never shall again, unless it be under the impulsion of a
third party. For of the great traveller I had been, on my hands and knees in the later
stages, then crawling on my belly or rolling on the ground, only the trunk remains
(in sorry trim), surmounted by the head with which we are already familiar, this is
the part of myself the description of which I have best assimilated and retained.
Stuck like a sheaf of flowers in a deep jar, its neck flush with my mouth, on the
side of a quiet street near the shambles, I am at rest at last. If I turn, I shall
not say my head, but my eyes, free to roll as they list, I can see the statue of the
apostle of horse’s meat, a bust. His pupilless eyes of stone are fixed upon me. That
makes four, with those of my creator,
omnipresent, do not imagine I flatter myself I am privileged. Though not exactly in
order I am tolerated by the police. They know I am speechless and consequently incapable
of taking unfair advantage of my situation to stir up the population against its governors,
by means of burning oratory during the rush hour or subversive slogans whispered,
after nightfall, to belated pedestrians the worse for drink. And since I have lost
all my members, with the exception of the one-time virile, they know also that I shall
not be guilty of any gestures liable to be construed as inciting to alms, a prisonable
offence. The fact is I trouble no one, except possibly that category of hypersensitive
persons for whom the least thing is an occasion for scandal and indignation. But even
here the risk is negligible, such people avoiding the neighbourhood for fear of being
overcome at the sight of the cattle, fat and fresh from their pastures, trooping towards
the humane killer. From this point of view the spot is well chosen, from my point
of view. And even those sufficiently unhinged to be affected by the spectacle I offer,
I mean upset and temporarily diminished in their capacity for work and