Imperfect Mastery: The Failure of Grammar

in Beckett’s L’Innommable

Juliette Taylor-Batty
Leeds Trinity & All Saints, UK

Samuel Beckett, in his famous letter to Axel Kaun, denounced grammar as “irrel-
evant,” yet the third novel of the Trilogy, L’Innommable, is characterized by a style
that frequently mimics the forms and formulations of the grammar drill. This article
examines the function of such grammatical formalism in the context of the speaker’s
sense of imprisonment within an alien and alienating language and argues that
Beckett here makes use of the discourse of language learning for subversive intent.
The ostensible function of grammar is to prevent confusion, to ensure clarity; in
L’Innommable, however, repetition and rote learning tend to empty words of mean-
ing, and the grammar drill is as much a source of confusion as of clarity. Indeed, as
this article demonstrates, Beckett in this novel might be seen to be subverting gram-
matical form not only to undermine language, but in order to work towards his aim
“[t]o find a form that accommodates the mess.”

Keywords: Samuel Beckett / L’Innommable / The Unnamable / language learning /

grammar

W
riting to Axel Kaun in 1937, Beckett expressed his dissatisfaction
with “Grammatik und Stil” (“Grammar and Style”), berating their
irrelevance, and declaring them to be no more than “Eine Larve” (“A
mask,” Disjecta 52, trans. 171)1. Beckett once stated that he turned to French in
order to write “sans style” (“without style,” Cohn 58), a comment which nicely
reflects the disdain of his comment to Kaun. It would be natural to assume
that Beckett wanted to throw off grammar as well as style, and indeed error
and misuse play a crucial role, particularly in Beckett’s French prose.2 But in
164 Journal of Modern Literature

L’Innommable, the fascination with error is combined, not with an open disdain
for grammar, but with an obsession with correctness and with the forms and
formulations of the grammar drill. Indeed, L’Innommable, as this article will
demonstrate, is infused with the discourse of language learning: in explicit
references to the otherness of the speaker’s language, in the grammatical obses-
sions apparent in the text, and in a self-conscious formalism which calls to
mind the grammatical insecurity of the foreign language learner. Grammar
may well be arbitrary and irrelevant, but it is also clearly a point of fascination
and obsession in this novel.
The overall argument of this essay is that Beckett makes use of the dis-
course of language learning to subvert grammar, to expose it as a “mask.” The
ostensible function of grammar is to prevent confusion, to ensure clarity; form
is imposed upon experience. In L’Innommable, however, repetition and rote
learning tend to empty words of meaning, and the grammar drill is as much a
source of confusion as of clarity. Beckett, in this novel, sets in motion subversive
processes of grammatical play and excessive formalism which undermine the
efficacy of linguistic form, revealing it as both arbitrary and ineffective. But
Beckett’s intent here is not merely deconstructive. Beckett purportedly told
Tom Driver that “[o]ne cannot speak anymore of being, one must speak only
of the mess” (Driver 23). If form and order are illusory, and grammar merely
a “mask” over the “mess,” then art, according to Beckett, needs to find “a new
form . . . of such a type that it admits the chaos and does not try to say that the
chaos is really something else. . . . To find a form that accommodates the mess,
that is the task of the artist now” (Driver 23).3 As this article hopes, ultimately,
to demonstrate, Beckett’s manipulation of the discourse of language learning
and grammatical play might be seen not only to undermine grammar, but to
signify the chaos, thus providing a means by which Beckett might “find a form
that accommodates the mess.”
Beckett was himself a consummate linguist, and participated in language
learning at various times in his life: as a schoolboy, as a student at Trinity
studying modern languages (see Knowlson 26, 31, 41, 47–54), and in his life-
long interest in learning and maintaining languages. On the other side of the
fence, he taught English as a lecteur in Paris and French as a schoolmaster in
Belfast and as lecturer in modern languages at Trinity (Knowlson 77–79, 88–89,
120–26). It is perhaps knowledge of this aspect of Beckett’s experience that
led Vladimir Nabokov to make the following criticism of Beckett: “Beckett’s
French is a schoolmaster’s French, a preserved French, but in English you feel
the moisture of verbal association and of the spreading live roots of his prose”
(172). The Beckett afficionado will of course exclaim, in his defence, that he
wrote in French precisely to avoid that “moisture of verbal association” and
those “spreading live roots” so valued by Nabokov, whose judgment is evidently
based more on the literary values revealed by his own skilfully exuberant and
The Failure of Grammar in Beckett’s L’Innommable 165

playfully multilingual work than on a truly Beckettian aesthetic. Nevertheless,

Nabokov is on to something here, particularly in the context of the grammatical
obsessions that are rehearsed in L’Innommable. By referring to the “preserved
French” of a “schoolmaster” rather than to that of the language learner, Nabo-
kov’s criticism implies not only that the schoolmaster is teaching a language
that is not his mother tongue (in reference, of course, to the fact that Beckett is
indeed writing in a second language), but also that that language is too correct,
too formal, too consciously grammatical. Just as the image of the schoolmaster
invokes images of formal discipline in the classroom, so the reference to the
schoolmaster’s French implies a French that is constrained (and disciplined)
by strict grammatical knowledge.
Despite the bravado of his invocation of “efficient misuse” in the letter to
Kaun, when Beckett first started to write prose in French he was purportedly
afraid of making grammatical and idiomatic errors, consulting Mania Péron
regarding his French on the text of Mercier et Camier and throughout the 1950s
(Knowlson 361–62). Watt might happily have spoken “with scant regard for
grammar, for syntax, for pronunciation, for enunciation, and very likely . . .
for spelling too” (Watt 154) in English, but in French Beckett needed to be
particularly careful to make his “misuse” stylized and fully intentional rather
than a catalogue of unintentional blunders. So, the intellectual fascination
with error and linguistic incompetence has its flipside: the artist’s need first
to master the language against which he might wish to sin. By the time of
writing L’Innommable, Beckett presumably would not have been beset by the
same linguistic doubts that troubled him in his earlier French compositions,
though he may well have still felt the constraints of grammar and the desire for
correctness — qualities that themselves reveal the competent language learner’s
distance from native ease. Indeed, mastery can itself become a form of imper-
fection: as Nabokov’s comment suggests, the learner’s language can become
too correct, too “preserved.” Such complex tensions between misuse and mas-
tery are crucial to L’Innommable, a novel whose speaker expresses a consistent
alienation from language and a desire to misuse that language, in language
that might have come straight out of a schoolmaster’s grammatical(ly-correct)
nightmare.
L’Innommable repeatedly invokes the context of language learning, the-
matically and stylistically, in the speaker’s complaints regarding the otherness
of his language, as well as in the grammatical obsessions apparent within that
language. He complains of having to speak in “une langue qui n’est pas la
mienne” (33) (“a tongue that is not mine” [308]), of having “rien que les paroles
des autres” (46) (“no words but the words of others” [316]). That this is the only
language that the speaker has — “je n’ai que leur langage à eux” (64–65) (“I have
no language but theirs” [328]) — means that such statements do not literally
signify the actions of the language learner, but instead serve to indicate a more
166 Journal of Modern Literature

general linguistic malaise, a sense of the alienating nature of language per se.
Nevertheless, the allusions are there and play an important role in indicating
that malaise. When, for example, the speaker states that “[i]ls parlent la même
langue, la seule qu’ils m’aient apprise” (83) (they “solicit me in the same tongue,
the only one they taught me” [339]), he indicates that this is a language that
he has been taught; elsewhere this is reinforced when (in an unusual and self-
contradictory fit of confidence) he refers to himself as “un bon élève” (200)
(“a good pupil” [411]). His discourse is subject to “l’esprit de méthode” (27)
(“the spirit of method” [305]) and is referred to at various times as “ma leçon”
(32, 33, 40) (“my lesson”), “ces colles” (136) (“futile teasers” [372]), and as a
“pensum” (39, 40). The latter term, “pensum,” emphasizes the atmosphere of
obligation and work by recalling Schopenhauer’s notion of the “task” of living
(see Ackerley and Gontarski 431); in French, though, it primarily signifies
additional work assigned to a pupil as punishment. We might also add that a
“pensum” often takes the form of writing lines — a mundane, repetitive activity
that bears no little resemblance to traditional methods of learning a language in
the first place. It is not surprising, then, that the speaker gets the learning and
the punishment mixed up: “J’ai parlé, j’ai dû parler, de leçon, c’est pensum qu’il
fallait dire, j’ai confondu pensum et leçon” (39). (“I spoke, I must have spoken,
of a lesson, it was a pensum I should have said, I confused pensum with lesson.”
[312]) Rote learning, drills, and repetition are thus brought to the fore in the
unnamable’s narrative, in the context of the imposition of authority (he has
been forced to learn this language — the experience of many schoolchildren),
and the threat of punishment: “si j’ai un pensum à faire, c’est parce que je n’ai
pas su dire ma leçon” (40) (“if I have a pensum to perform it is because I could
not say my lesson” [313]).
If language learning and punishment are inextricably bound, this also
reflects the unnamable’s relation to language more generally. The overriding
sense imparted by his narrative is of an imprisonment within language, of a
desire to escape or evade the meanings produced by language. The prescrip-
tive grammar and authoritarian echoes of the lesson/pensum provide us with
a clear way of conceptualizing the speaker’s sense of alienation from language
and from the cultural meanings embedded in a foreign language. But the
alienation felt by the speaker of L’Innommable is much more far reaching than
that relatively simple experience of cultural alienation in language. Language
in general is restrictive, defining, controlling. As Foucault writes:
Exprimant leurs pensées dans des mots dont ils ne sont pas maîtres, les logeant
dans des formes verbales dont les dimensions historiques leur échappent, les
hommes qui croient que leur propos leur obéit, ne savent qu’ils se soumettent à
ses exigences. Les dispositions grammaticales d’une langue sont l’a priori de ce
qui peut s’y énoncer. (310–11)
The Failure of Grammar in Beckett’s L’Innommable 167

Expressing their thoughts in words of which they are not the masters, enclos-
ing them in verbal forms whose historical dimensions they are unaware of, men
believe that their speech is their servant and do not realize that they are submitting
themselves to its demands. The grammatical arrangements of a language are the
a priori of what can be expressed in it. (324)

Grammar both dictates and controls meaning. Time, for example, that noto-
riously unquantifiable aspect of experience, is always grammatically ordered
into past, present, and future tenses, while subjectivity in language involves
the speaker’s appropriation of grammatical categorizations of subjectivity in
the form of personal pronouns. Benveniste’s analysis of the pronoun and of
subjectivity in language leads him to conclude that subjectivity is a linguistic
construct that affects (rather than merely describing) reality: “L’installation de
la ‘subjectivité’ dans le langage crée, dans le langage et, croyons-nous, hors du
language aussi bien, la catégorie de la personne” (263). (“The establishment of
‘subjectivity’ in language creates the category of person — both in language and
also, we believe, outside of it as well.” [227]) This sense of language’s defining
and ordering power is acute in Beckett, and especially in L’Innommable, where
the narrative is rendered particularly disorienting via the unnamable’s recur-
rent problem with pronouns (an important topic to which I will return later
in this article).
The unnamable, unlike Foucault’s deluded “master” of language, is perfectly
aware that language defines him and thus precludes self-expression:
Ce qui empêche le miracle, c’est l’esprit de méthode, auquel j’ai été peut-être un
peu trop sujet. (27)

What prevents the miracle is the spirit of method to which I have perhaps been
a little too addicted. (305)

The desired “miracle,” like everything else in this novel, rather escapes precise
definition, but what is clear here is that, whatever the solution or desired out-
come, formalism, or “l’esprit de méthode,” is a problem. Precisely how it is a
problem is rendered ambiguous by the nature of its use: the construction “être
sujet à” can mean that the unnamable is “susceptible” to “l’esprit de méthode,”
or that he has been “subjected” to it.4 Beckett’s translation of this passage into
English changes the meaning somewhat into an admission of addiction to
formalism. On closer inspection, this translational shift reflects the different
parts played by formalism in the mother tongue (English) and the adopted
tongue (French) and can thus shed light on Beckett’s own French formalism
in L’Innommable: it is the mother tongue (in Beckett’s case, English) which
most fosters the illusion of “mastery” of language and control over its forms,
and hence an “addiction” to that illusion as well as the comforting definitions
168 Journal of Modern Literature

imparted by linguistic orderliness. Addiction, however, is itself a form of sub-

jection, of slavery to the object of addiction: the illusion of mastery allows
language to define the subject. In the second language, French, the alienation
is more explicit (in that the speaker could be seen to have been subjected to the
dictates of the foreign tongue) and the addiction merely at a nascent stage of
susceptibility; the subject is thus perhaps more able to resist the temptations of
illusive mastery. Hence Beckett’s own fascination with linguistic incompetence
and error as ways of evading the defining power of language, the grammatical
ordering of experience. But in Beckett, as always, resistance is not so simple,
and the prose is not defined by a simple oppositional rejection of “correctness.”
Instead, both English and French texts are characterized by both an exces-
sive formalism (i.e., addiction to “l’esprit de méthode”) and a simultaneous
resistance to that formalism, a desire to escape its strictures and punishments.
Such concomitant addiction and resistance is encapsulated in a particu-
lar dilemma that troubles the speaker of L’Innommable: he will be allowed
to remain in silence (and hence evade the defining power of language) only
when he has mastered his lesson and pensum (and hence allowed himself to
be defined by the dictates of grammar):
lorsque j’aurai fini mon pensum il me restera à dire ma leçon, et qu’à ce moment
seulement j’aurai le droit de rester tranquillement dans mon coin, à baver et a vivre,
la bouche fermée, la langue inerte. (40)

when I have finished my pensum I shall still have my lesson to say, before I have
the right to stay quiet in my corner, alive and dribbling, my mouth shut, my tongue
at rest. (313)

But the speaker is a bad learner and has no idea what the correct lesson or
pensum might be, or even which is which, making the whole process of search-
ing for correctness a rather random process of “brasser les vocables” (literally,
“mixing words up” 40).5 Later, he refers again to this deficiency in learning:
Je dis ce qu’on me dit de dire, . . . . Seulement je le dis mal, n’ayant pas d’oreille, ni
de tête, ni de mémoire. (98)

I say what I am told to say, . . . . The trouble is I say it wrong, having no ear, no
head, no memory. (348)

He evidently hasn’t got an ear for languages, to the extent that he misuses the
idiom “je n’ai pas d’oreille” (meaning “I don’t have an ear for [music/languages,
etc.]”), using it to indicate a literal absence of ears, head, memory. Misuse
renders his meaning unclear (is he saying that his hearing, comprehension,
and memory are bad, or is he affirming the actual lack of ears and a head?)
but it also emphasizes his difficulty with the lesson. As he later affirms, his
The Failure of Grammar in Beckett’s L’Innommable 169

language is merely “du petit nègre” (152), a term which, colloquially, means
“bad French,” and which specifically invokes the non-native’s limited mastery
of a language.
The apparent solution for inadequate mastery of language is further recourse
to rote learning and meaningless repetition — the form of the schoolboy’s pun-
ishment for a badly-learned lesson, but also the means by which the learner
hopes to assimilate a language. Thus, the unnamable’s early declaration that he
is going to complete his lesson:
Mais maintenant je m’en vais la dire, ma leçon, si je peux me la rappeler. (32)

But now I shall say my old lesson, if I can remember it. (308)

is immediately followed by what does indeed look like a repeated lesson — in

this case, an exercise on prepositions:
Sous les cieux, sur les routes, dans les villes, dans les bois, dans les chambres,
dans les montagnes, dans les plaines, au bord des mers, sur les flots, derrière mes
homuncules, (32)

Under the skies, on the roads, in the towns, in the woods, in the hills, in the plains,
by the shores, on the seas, behind my mannikins, (308)

which rapidly descends into failure:

je n’ai pas toujours été triste, j’ai perdu mon temps, renié mes droits, raté ma peine,
oublié ma leçon. (32)

I was not always sad, I wasted my time, abjured my rights, suffered for nothing,
forgot my lesson. (308)

The very act of repeating a lesson leads the unnamable, not to mastery of the
lesson, but to forgetfulness. As he later complains, “[u]n perroquet, ils sont
tombés sur un bec de perroquet” (82) (“A parrot, that’s what they’re up against,
a parrot” [338]).
The narrative of L’Innommable thus keeps coming back to a singular,
and paradoxical, tension between mastery and misuse: the speaker strives for
correctness — to complete the pensum, to get the lesson right — but the very
methods that should lead him to such correctness — rote-learning and repeti-
tion — lead straight back to the point of initial incomprehension and potential
misuse. This failure leads in turn to punishment in the form of a “pensum,”
e.g., writing lines, which merely perpetuates the problem, setting in motion a
cycle of futile lessons and punishments leading to further lessons and punish-
ments. This is not a paradox exclusive to Beckett’s warped linguistic world; it
is inherent to all language learning: the language learner is faced with words
170 Journal of Modern Literature

that are initially meaningless but which need to be converted into automati-
cally-signifying (non-arbitrary) entities. However, the business of interminable
repetition and rote learning risks turning those very words, conjunctions, and
syntactical structures into mere formulae. Ionesco understood this well when
he wrote his so-called “tragédie du langage,” La cantatrice chauve: this play,
which enacts a drama of nonsense and linguistic arbitrariness, was inspired by,
and apparently composed entirely from, an English language textbook from
which Ionesco was trying — and failing — to learn the language (Ionesco, “La
tragédie du langage” 155–60). Ionesco’s absurdist presentation of nonsensical
dialogue in La cantatrice chauve was designed to reveal social conformism and
linguistic automatism:
[La Cantatrice chauve] s’agit, surtout, d’une sorte de petite bourgeoisie universelle,
le petit-bourgeois étant l’homme des idées reçues, des slogans, le conformiste de
partout: ce conformisme, bien sûr, c’est son langage automatique que le révèle. Le
texte de La Cantatrice chauve ou du manuel pour apprendre l’anglais (ou le russe,
ou le portugais), composé d’expressions toutes faites, des clichés les plus éculés,
me révélait, par cela même, les automatismes du langage, du comportement des
gens, le “parler pour ne rien dire”, le parler parce qu’il n’y a rien à dire de personnel,
l’absence de vie intérieure, la mécanique du quotidien, l’homme baignant dans
son milieu social, ne s’en distinguant plus. (Ionesco, “La tragédie du langage”
159–60)

It is above all about a kind of universal petite bougeoisie, the petit bourgeois being
a man of fixed ideas and slogans, a ubiquitous conformist: this conformism is, of
course, revealed by the mechanical language. The text of The Bald Soprano, or the
Manual for learning English (or Russian or Portuguese), consisting as it did of
ready-made expressions and the most thread-bare clichés, revealed to me all that
is automatic in the language and behaviour of people: “talking for the sake of
talking,” talking because there is nothing personal to say, the absence of any life
within, the mechanical routine of everyday life, man sunk in his social background,
no longer able to distinguish himself from it. (Ionesco, “The Bald Soprano: The
Tragedy of Language” 51)

For Ionesco, language has reached a point of clichéd automatism and conform-
ism, which reflects and perpetuates the clichéd automatism and conformism of
society. Ionesco’s critique of language is thus of a different order than Beckett’s:
though language in Ionesco is detached from individuality and precludes
personal expression (and thus to a certain extent defines and controls behav-
ior), the problem is not with language itself but with the social codes that
underlie our use of it. If we break the clichés and the social automatism, then
language (and society) can perhaps be revived (in this regard, Ionesco echoes
Shklovsky’s notion of ostranenie or “enstrangement” [see Shklovsky 1–14]). In
The Failure of Grammar in Beckett’s L’Innommable 171

Beckett, however, it is not so much a case of language having reached a point

of automatism, but of language per se defining and controlling experience. For
Ionesco, the failed language lesson reveals a “tragic” disjunction between words
and individual experience; for Beckett, the authoritarian context of language
learning and the alienating effects of language mean that perhaps such a dis-
junction is something to be sought after. If it is impossible for the unnamable
to complete his pensum and lesson and thus be allowed to stop talking, then to
be a bad language learner might be a better strategy: the “leçon” itself renders
words meaningless, so to obey orders and repeat the lesson might become a way
of obtaining a rather more loquacious silence. In L’Innommable, “de parler pour
ne rien dire” (27) (“to speak and yet say nothing” [305]), is not mere clichéd
automatism, as it is in Ionesco, but active resistance to the defining power of
language.
A further dimension of the “addiction” to formalism is thus apparent in
L’Innommable: the unnamable’s narrative is frequently characterized by a per-
verse preoccupation with repetition and rote learning, whereby adherence to
language’s forms and rules becomes a way of undermining the efficacy of lan-
guage. So words are emptied of meaning through the semantic excess of lists:
dans un endroit dur, vide, clos, sec, net, noir (166)

in an empty place, a hard shut dry cold black place (390)

or through repetition and recursion:

à ce sujet, à mon sujet, au sujet de ma demeure (25)

on this subject, the subject of me and my abode (304)

Étrange, ces phrases qui meurent on ne sait pourquoi, étrange, qu’est-ce que ça a
d’étrange, ici tout est étrange, tout est étrange quand on y pense, non, c’est y penser
qui est étrange (193)

Strange, these phrases that die for no reason, strange, what’s strange about it, here
all is strange, all is strange when you come to think of it, no, it’s coming to think
of it that is strange (406)

il faut continuer, je ne peux pas continuer, il faut continuer, je vais donc continuer
. . . il faut continuer, je ne peux pas continuer, je vais continuer. (213)

you must go on, I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on . . . you must go on, I can’t
go on, I’ll go on. (418)

Instances of such repetition are far too numerous to cite here; ultimately, their
cumulative effect is to emphasize the strangeness of the repeated words or
172 Journal of Modern Literature

phrases, not only for the unnamable, but, crucially, for the reader, who, even if
reading the text in his or her native language, is forced to participate in that
perception of linguistic strangeness. The self-contradictory tendency appar-
ent in this last example is also a feature of the unnamable’s professed desire
to pursue a course of “affirmations et négations infirmées au fur et à mesure”
(7) (“affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered” [293]). Repetition and
recursion is also used to draw out contradictions in statements that were not
initially contradictory:
Non, personne ne m’a rien appris, je n’ai jamais rien appris, j’ai toujours été ici, il
n’y a jamais eu que moi ici, jamais, toujours, moi, personne (194)

no, no one ever taught me anything, I never learnt anything, I’ve always been here,
here there was never anyone but me, never, always, me, no one (407)

je ne suis pas dehors, je suis dedans, dans quelque chose, je suis enfermé, le silence
est dehors, dehors, dedans (206)

I’m not outside, I’m inside, I’m in something, I’m shut up, the silence is outside,
outside, inside (414)

Both of the initial statements in these passages make sense and do not sustain
any internal contradictions (though it should be noted that, in the context of
the novel as a whole, all statements are in some way contradictory). However,
the subsequent repetition of key words “jamais, toujours, moi, personne” in
the first example, and “dehors, dehors, dedans” in the second, as if the speaker
is trying to commit them to memory, serve to bring out oppositions ( jamais/
toujours; moi/personne; dehors/dedans) and imply contradictions, even though
the initial statements from which they have been taken were grammatically
correct and semantically coherent.
Such excessive formalism is particularly effective in exposing the strange-
ness, not only of words, but of linguistic structures — of grammar and syntax.
The uncertainty of the narrator and his self-contradictory impulses tends to
result in the expression of the sorts of permutations of possibilities that occur
in grammar drills. Thus, for example, he rehearses different tenses:
celui qui dure, qui n’a pas duré, qui dure toujours (213)

the lasting one, that didn’t last, that still lasts (418)

Such a statement, while perfectly acceptable as a grammatical exercise, is self-

contradictory and thus unacceptable as a semantically meaningful statement.
Beckett uses this paradox of grammatical correctness and semantic confusion
here effectively to undermine the efficacy of the grammatical rule (i.e., that
it can be grammatically correct but semantically nonsensical) and to suggest
The Failure of Grammar in Beckett’s L’Innommable 173

the speaker’s resistance to the control imposed by orderly and categorizing

grammatical tenses. Such grammatical play occurs frequently in the novel. The
following passage, for example, rehearses grammatical tenses, but to slightly
different effect:
Ces choses que je dis, que je vais dire, si je peux, ne sont plus, ou pas encore, ou
ne furent jamais, ou ne seront jamais, ou si elles furent, ou si elles sont, ou si elles
seront, ne furent pas ici, ne sont pas ici, ne seront pas ici, mais ailleurs. (24)

These things I say, and shall say, if I can, are no longer, or are not yet, or never were,
or never will be, or if there were, if they are, if they will be, were not here, are not
here, will not be here, but elsewhere. (303)

This can be broken down into three distinct and comprehensible statements:
Ces choses que je dis ne sont plus, ou pas encore, ou si elles sont, ne sont pas ici,
mais ailleurs. / Ces choses que je vais dire, ne seront jamais, ou si elles seront, ne
seront pas ici, mais ailleurs. / Ces choses ne furent jamais, ou si elles furent, ne
furent pas ici, mais ailleurs.

Beckett, however, has combined all three sentences into one, thus causing the
different tenses to play off each other in a process of formal patterning and
self-cancellation. So, rather than a fairly clear succession of three different
possibilities, as is the case when the passage is separated out into three sepa-
rate sentences, Beckett instead presents us with a phrase that manifests the
patterned repetition of the key tenses: sont/furent/seront/furent/sont/furent/
seront. Stylistically, the combination is orderly, rhythmical, and grammatically
correct; semantically, it is confusing: the juxtaposition of the different tenses,
alongside the very rhythmical patterning that renders the sentence so orderly,
means that the patterning is perceived to the detriment of meaning. The
ordering and defining impetus of grammatical tenses is thus undermined, not
through misuse or semantic confusion (indeed, the very confusion produced in
the reader is semantically appropriate in that the sentence refers to the other-
ness of the speaker’s language), but through an excess of grammatical form.
Form is used to undermine the formalizing impulse of grammar.
Such grammatical play subtly subverts the efficacy of grammar, and its
defining, authoritative nature. The unnamable might wish to escape the stric-
tures of linguistic correctness and the definitions imposed by grammar, but he is
bound to those rules that he might wish to escape and therefore must manipu-
late those rules such that they undermine themselves. It is only by mimicking
the “preserved,” excessively formal French of the schoolmaster that the speaker
can resist the distinctly authoritarian connotations of the French language, with
its association with the command of the schoolmaster, the pensum or lesson
written to order, the authority of grammar. With regard to the expression of
174 Journal of Modern Literature

identity in particular, such resistance is crucial: how can the unnamable resist
the authoritarian impositions of language? And, more specifically, how can he
express himself within a universal grammatical notion of subjectivity?
If Molloy is, as critics have long noted, Beckett’s first foray into the first
person narrative, by L’Innommable, the first person has been deeply problema-
tized: the unnamable, though ostensibly speaking in the first person, refers
to the referential inadequacy of “je” (“Dire je. Sans le penser.” [7] [“I, say I.
Unbelieving.” (293)]), and implies a resistance to the defining powers of the
first person pronoun. He thus frequently rejects the first person — “Puis assez
de cette putain de première personne” (93) (“But enough of this cursed first
person” [345]) — switching to telling tales in the third person, sometimes about
named characters, sometimes apparently about himself, but always maintaining
an ambiguity regarding to whom the pronoun might actually refer, and always
calling into question its efficacy:
quelqu’un dit on, c’est la faute des pronoms, il n’y a pas de nom pour moi, pas de
pronom pour moi, tout vient de là, on dit ça, c’est une sorte de pronom, ce n’est pas
ça non plus, je ne suis pas ça non plus, laissons tout ça, oublions tout ça (195)

someone says you, it’s the fault of the pronouns, there is no name for me, no pro-
noun for me, all the trouble comes from that, that, it’s a kind of pronoun too, it
isn’t that either, I’m not that either, let’s leave all that, forget about all that (408)

Though grammatically singular, the words je/moi by definition refer to a collec-

tive notion of individual subjectivity. This is an important facet of the speaker’s
unnamability and one that has been oft-noted by critics: although the first per-
son precludes the expression of any self that may lie outside language, without
the first person pronoun it is grammatically impossible to talk about himself.
His response to this conundrum in the above passage is to try using a dif-
ferent pronoun: ça. Although this ultimately doesn’t work, the process leads the
narrative into some interesting metalinguistic play: the unnamable says that
“ça” is a sort of pronoun, but that it isn’t the right one to use; the pronoun “ça”
is thus made to refer not only to itself — i.e., the word “ça” — but also to func-
tion correctly as a pronoun. Thus, when he says “ce n’est pas ça non plus,” the
sentence means both “ ‘ça’ isn’t the right word” and “that’s not the right solution
or definition.” Likewise with “je ne suis pas ça non plus,” which means both “I
am not that either” and “I am not [the word] ‘that’ either.” So, by implication,
the phrases “laissons tout ça, oublions tout ça” also suggest that it is specifically
the word “ça” that should be left or forgotten. The metalinguistic focus creates
overdetermination: the word “ça” refers to itself as well as to what it purports
to represent.
The effect of this overdetermination is to highlight the inherently ambigu-
ous and metalinguistic nature of pronouns: they are signifiers that function only
The Failure of Grammar in Beckett’s L’Innommable 175

by referring to other signifiers and do not have any meaning out of context. As
Ann Banfield argues, this is characteristic of Beckett’s late style, which “exploits
not language’s productive processes, but what linguists call ‘nonproductive’ or
‘closed-class’ lexical formatives — grammatical ‘function words’ like determin-
ers, pronouns, and so on, as well as inflectional morphemes like tense and plural
and the bound morphemes of derivational morphology” (16). Banfield goes on
to demonstrate that “Beckett’s late style is a result of an attempt to create an art
made largely out of the syntacticon, while scarcely exploiting the dictionary”
(17).6 Though her argument relates primarily to works later than L’Innommable,
the signs of such a stylistic development are clearly present in this novel. As we
have seen in the above example, the speaker is preoccupied with the efficacy of
pronouns to express his self; this preoccupation also extends, however, to other
forms of pronouns and their ability to cause confusion:
on lui a raconté des histoires, qui lui, le maître, qui on, on ne sait pas (147)

he’s been told a lot of lies, who he, the master, by whom, no one knows (379)

Beckett thus exploits an ambiguity which is already inherent in language and

draws out its thematic relevance: the contextual ambiguity of “on” here is used
to support the fact that the unnamable does not know who the referent of that
pronoun is.
This ambiguity extends to the novel as a whole — it is no coincidence that
the novel begins with three interrogative pronouns: “Où maintenant? Quand
maintenant? Qui maintenant?” (7) (“Where now? When now? Who now?”7).
Whereas pronouns in general gain meaning from the context in which they
are used, interrogative pronouns highlight the lack of a clear referent; their
referential function is to indicate inadequate understanding, awareness, and
knowledge. In L’Innommable, the text’s refusal to impart contextual clarity to
pronouns means that they at times become the locus of textual ambiguity and
thus function in a sense as interrogative pronouns. Take, for example, the fol-
lowing passage, which occurs fairly late in the novel, at a particularly striking
point of linguistic disintegration:
ça suffit, que je cherche, comme elle, non, pas comme elle, comme moi, à ma façon,
que dis-je, à ma manière, que je cherche, qu’est-ce que je cherche maintenant, ce
que je cherche, je cherche ce que c’est, ça doit être ça, ça ne peut être que ça, ce
que c’est, ce que ça peut être, ce que ça peut bien être, quoi, ce que je cherche, non,
ce que j’entends, ça me revient, tout me revient, je cherche, j’entends dire que je
cherche ce que ça peut bien être, ce que j’entends, ça me revient (167)

that’s enough, that I seek, like it, no, not like it, like me, in my own way, what am
I saying, after my fashion, that I seek, what do I seek now, what it is, it must be
176 Journal of Modern Literature

that, it can only be that, what it is, what it can be, what what can be, what I seek,
no, what I hear, now it comes back to me, all back to me, they say I seek what it
is I hear, I hear them, now it comes back to me (391)

There’s something here of the grammar drill, but one in which the unnamable
has succeeded more effectively in “brasser les vocables” by removing almost all
nouns to which the pronouns might refer (the exception here is “elle,” which
relates back to “l’air” just mentioned by the speaker). Indeed, the only nouns
here are grammatically unrelated to the pronouns, and in any case are under-
mined by the kind of self-correction suggestive of a language learner stumbling
over idioms: “à ma façon, que dis-je, à ma manière.” The sounds and patterns of
the phrases are emphasised by repetitions, thus, in a metalinguistic turn, serving
to highlight the semantic emptiness of words such as “ça.” The fact that the
pronoun “ça” here functions as the direct object of the transitive verb “chercher”
adds a further level of complexity: because the pronoun lacks semantic indica-
tors, it is consistently unclear for what or for whom the unnamable is search-
ing. Also bound up in this passage is the construction “je cherche . . . ce que je
cherche,” so that the verb turns upon itself. “Chercher,” though grammatically
transitive (and used correctly), thus in a sense becomes semantically intransitive,
in that the act of searching becomes an end in itself.8 Of course, the passage
itself, being about not knowing what the unnamable is searching for, is rendered
in a sense more semantically effective by such pronominal ambiguities. But that
still leaves us with no certainty, only questions; we are brought once again to
interrogative pronouns — what? who? why?
Again, Beckett’s grammar is subversive, it undermines itself. Just as Beck-
ett’s mixing up of tenses forms a resistance to the temporal categorization
inherent in grammar, so in this example, the grammatical permutations them-
selves resist the grammatical imperative to force “chercher” to be transitive.
Grammar dictates that we must always search for something; Beckett’s sub-
version of that grammatical rule suggests instead that it is possible to search
without knowing for what or for whom we are searching. Indeed, the above
passage effectively questions whether the act of searching can ever have a clear
direct object: if we’re searching for something, we don’t already have it; how,
therefore, can we know exactly what it is and name it so securely? To obey
the grammatical dictates of providing a clear direct object for a transitive verb
therefore “masks” the indeterminacy of acts such as searching.
Beckett’s ability in L’Innommable both to represent and to engender con-
fusion is striking. Ultimately, the grammatical obsessions of the unnamable’s
discourse push grammar to such an extreme that it produces apparently chaotic
effects. Moreover, it is the very process of searching for the answer, for correct-
ness — the unnamable’s search for his pensum; the reader’s search for meaning
in the text — that serves to further the representation, and the experience, of
The Failure of Grammar in Beckett’s L’Innommable 177

chaos. The subversive grammar of this novel thus allows for the representa-
tion of a rather more anarchic reality than our linguistic rules usually allow:
L’Innommable is disorientating, apparently chaotic, and presents an extraordi-
nary resistance to interpretation. Its language, however, is anything but chaotic:
the unnamable’s rant is excessively formal, self-consciously grammatical. What
Beckett provides, here, is a peculiar conjunction of formalism and chaos: the
efficacy of grammatical form to impose order is effectively undermined, not
only by overtly questioning the function of pronouns or tenses, but also by
pushing formalism to such an extreme point that the form itself produces
chaos. Beckett’s bewildering manipulation of linguistic form in L’Innommable
thus both provides a critique of the ordering and defining impulse of form
and itself constitutes a form which might well be seen to “[accommodate] the
mess” (Driver 23).
In L’Innommable, grammar is thus exposed as a mask, and an ineffective
one at that: grammar not only attempts to mask the chaos, it actually ends up
producing chaos. Beckett’s manipulation of the discourse of language learning
is crucial to this effect. On the surface, our sense of the speaker’s awkward-
ness with language, as is emphasized by his self-conscious application and
repetition of vocabulary and grammar, contributes to the sense of linguistic
unease and alienation expressed by the novel as a whole. The repetitions of rote
learning and the grammatical litany, as I have demonstrated, serve the further
paradoxical purpose of emptying words of meaning rather than imbuing them
with significance. But the most subtle effects occur where Beckett reveals the
chaos inherent in form by undermining the semantic efficacy of language and
its rules: pronouns in particular are rendered chronically arbitrary, not merely
through repetition, but through a form of metalinguistic commentary on the
inherent arbitrariness of pronouns. Likewise, the grammatically correct use
of a transitive verb fails to produce any coherent meaning, other than reflect-
ing the indeterminacy of the speaker’s search and exposing the grammatical
convention as inadequate to reflect experience. Such grammatical ambiguity
embodies the inherent ambiguity of the narrative as a whole, which leaves the
reader struggling for sense, trying to decipher an answer to those interrogative
pronouns that begin the novel. The formal excess of L’Innommable thus serves
to undermine itself, to expose its artificiality as form imposed upon chaos, much
as the language learner’s grasp of grammar fails to mask his or her linguistic
discomfort. Paradoxically, then, the unnamable’s sense of grammatical form as
an alienating imposition, a restriction which reflects an imprisonment within
language, is countered via adherence to those forms. To cite Beckett paraphras-
ing Giordano Bruno, “The maxima and minima of particular contraries are
one and indifferent. Minimal heat equals minimal cold” (Disjecta 21). And, in
L’Innommable, maximal formalism equals maximal chaos.9
178 Journal of Modern Literature

Notes
1. Beckett’s letter to Kaun is printed in Disjecta in the original German, but a translation by Martin
Esslin is provided at the end of the volume.
2. This is also a facet of his use of German in the letter to Kaun, where he celebrates his tendency
“gegen eine fremde Sprache unwillkürlich vergehen zu dürfen” (“[to sin] willy-nilly against a foreign
language”) (Disjecta 54; Esslin trans. 173). For a discussion of the function of error in Beckett’s French,
see my article “ ‘Pidgin Bullskrit’: The performance of French in Beckett’s Trilogy.”
3. It should be noted that Driver does not quote Beckett verbatim. As he admits: “I reconstruct his
sentences from notes made immediately after our conversation. What appears here is shorter than what
he actually said but very close to his own words” (22). Though Driver’s article relays Beckett’s general
ideas and opinions, we should be cautious of assuming the exact accuracy of the citations.
4. We might also note echoes of the grammatical subject here in the word “sujet,” which further
suggests that the speaker is defined by the alien language that he uses.
5. Beckett does not translate this phrase literally, preferring instead a more passive construction
whereby the speaker hopes to find the answer “somewhere in this churn of words at last” (313).
6. Banfield takes her terminology here from Joseph Emonds. As she explains: “Emonds subdivides
the lexicon into an open-class ‘Dictionary’ and a closed-class ‘Syntacticon.’ The closed-class members
lack highly specified semantic content, having only cognitive syntactic features” (17).
7. Beckett’s English translation changes the order of the questions to “Where now? Who now? When
now?” (293).
8. This manipulation of “chercher” is an example of what Elizabeth Barry has recently noted as
Beckett’s use of the “middle voice,” a form of the verb which is “marked in the grammar of classical
languages but long unmarked in most modern languages,” and which “denotes an action performed
by the subject but the effect of which is limited to that subject itself, rather than directed outwards to
another person or thing (active) or passively received from another source (passive).” As Barry argues,
the function of the middle voice in Beckett is to intensify “questions about cause and agency”; in the
case of Beckett’s manipulation of “chercher,” we might add that it also intensifies questions of effect.
(Citations are from an unpublished conference paper, and I am grateful to Barry for having provided a
written copy of this paper.)
9. I am grateful to the British Academy for having provided funding for me to present an earlier version
of this article at the conference “Beckett at 100: New Perspectives” in Florida (February 2006).

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.