‘The sounds that reach me’: On Deafness as Interface in The Unnamable

Abstract

This essay investigates deafness as an interfacial vehicle in Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable by extending original concepts in Deaf studies such as Deaf Gain, and DeafSpace. By looking at a Deaf-oriented rhetoric in the novel, the essay, firstly, explores the interfacial role of the half-deaf narrator in their textual oasis; and secondly, examines how the narrator would challenge the dominant binary of presence-absence within a phonocentric context wherein the deaf are mere anacoluthonic attendees. While the novel’s soundscape has attracted lavish criticism as a verbal chrysalis, its layers have rarely been examined for moments of audiological incommunicability wherein the deaf narrator, as the other, negates the text’s phonic democracy by adopting silence, internal monologue, and reversals as modes and means of Deaf Gain. To investigate the instance of deaf survival, the essay engages DeafSpace as an interstitial space of dwelling for an audiologically marginalised narrator who experiences deafness as a phasic, onto-phenomenological transformation.