Abstract
This project is an attempt to reexamine the linguistic shifts that memory events force in Beckett and Joyce, specifically how spatialization and mapping affect memory in the work these authors. By considering the headway made by contemporary thinkers and writers, such as Bergson (and later writers such as Deleuze), we can come to understand better the complex and elusive approaches through which these authors transformed the way we use language and read texts today. This study is set up as a companion to how each of these authors deals with memory and its role in language—memory and language are not things, but events. Chapter two focuses on Beckett’s engagement with Bergsonian notions of space, time, and duration as they relate to the specific instances or events of memory (or a glissade or slippage) as we might read Beckett informed by both Bergson and Alain Badiou’s concept of “evental sites.” Chapter three examines the intent and impetus behind Beckett’s “language of the unword,” and how it relates directly to issues of memory and the brain. We will see how specific language acts (in this case serial repetition) unseat the received meaning or Bergsonian “habit-memory” of the word (in effect, creating a moment of slippage) to find the something or nothing that hides or lurks behind the barrier created by the word. As the memory event occurs, or rather fails to occur in Watt, we see a correlative shift in language. As memory is disturbed, so is Watt’s mental capacity to communicate. The operational memory (of words) turns his language into something nearly unintelligible. As a counterpart to Beckett’s approach to memory, chapter four discuses a specific (though endemic) instance of Joyce’s approach to transformative language, wherein as language is remembered, it becomes literalized first through text, and then through the consumed body as an attempt (and failure) of creating a permanently accurate memory through an act of concretized language, specifically writing. Chapter five, then, turns to Joyce’s vastly different approach to spatialized memory (specifically the act of forgetting), as he fraudulently inscribes it on the history of his nation.
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