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.If the subject could assume a past, with its memories, he would effectively have the pronoun I at his disposal: this past would be connected to his present, so that he could pass on his experiences to others.However, in the absence of an enunciation, the voice resorts to monotonous reiteration:As if willing him by this dint to make it his.To confess, Yes I remember.Perhaps even to have a voice.To murmur, Yes I remember.What an addition to company that would be! A voice in the first person singular.Murmuring now and then, Yes I remember.(Co, 9)The voice must repeat, as if it could thus penetrate the subject and compel him to recognise the episodes as belonging to his personal past: to make the subject the vector of an enunciation.Such a project is paradoxical, since the production of an I testifies to a failure on behalf of the emitter of the you: its function consists of silencing the voice.The narrator conceives this production of an I as a source of ‘company’: ‘What an addition to company that would be! […] In the end you will utter again.Yes I remember.That was I.That was I then’ (13).Certainly, but the idea of ‘company’ has a very different meaning from what these sentences suggest: if the subject could speak, he would not simply be the voice’s double; he would not imitate the latter by telling himself stories.On the contrary he would, as a subject, have a symbolic Other at his disposal; he would be liberated from his profound solitude.Despite his use of the pronoun you, and its function of occupying the subject, the voice remains anonymous, since it is devoid of any address.The subject is in no way capable of knowing if the voice is addressing him: ‘Of words murmured in his ear to wonder if they are addressed to him!’ (Co, 20).Indeed, the pronoun you alone does not permit him to determine with certainty if he is the true addressee of the message, an idea which leads him to ask himself if the voice is not speaking to another, or of another.For want of being able to recognise himself in the images evoked, the subject can hardly discern if the voice is actually speaking of him.In the same way, he fails to determine if the you is speaking precisely to him.Of course, the narrator corrects this error of appreciation, but the subject still feels this uncertainty: ‘For were the voice speaking not to him but to another then it must be of that other it is speaking and not of him or of another still.Since it speaks in the second person’ (6).Such an address would have been possible if a proper name had taken form: the latter, like the I, founds the subject, once and for all, within the coordinates that determine geometrical space.Indeed, the simple adding of a proper noun enables the subject to distinguish himself from other bearers of the pronoun you, to situate himself as a singularity: ‘You Haitch are on your back in the dark.[…] No longer any question of his overhearing.Of his not being meant’ (Co, 20).The proper noun offers the possibility of establishing coordinates: the apposition here posits the identity of the name (shared by a plurality of people, and so belonging to a generality) and the vocative you, which marks the address to someone singular, in the place of a third person discourse, where the other would have the status of an object.Were it to be effective, the apposition would confirm a binding of the singular and the universal, by which the subject could count himself as one among others: ‘So that faint uneasiness lost.That faint hope’ (20).However, this ‘hope’ concludes in failure, since the name Haitch/H does not remain, and the you itself is powerless to draw the subject out of his anonymity: ‘Then let him not be named H.Let him be again as he was.The hearer.Unnamable.You’ (Co, 20).If you is necessarily the receiver—the object—of the voice, he remains anonymous, powerless to appropriate the traits that define him from without.He conserves an impersonal dimension, since the emitter cannot express any desire: the part that is unknown to himself, and that would drive him to address another.Consequently, the subject has no access to the traits by which he could identify himself as me.As Lacan emphasises, the pronoun you has an imperative quality, as it is ‘the other insofar as he is caught in the ostentation with relation to this all [tous] that the universe of discourse supposes.But by the same token, when I take the other out of this universe, I objectify him’ (1981, 340).The you thus originally supposes an Other who remains master of discourse, an Other devoid of any lack and whose intervention can only place the subject on the same level as all impersonal words.[101]The subject of Company endeavours to invent the voice announced in the incipit.Of course, the latter is not addressed to him: he invents it, and it remains anonymous, since it ‘comes to one in the dark’ (Co, 3).If, however, according to this structuring, the voice aims to have him recognise a past that belongs to him, it is a matter, according to the terms of Beckettian creation, of bringing to life a subject that is ‘not born’.In other words, it is a voice that could be called ‘maternal’ and that, finally, would be capable of transmitting a desire regarding her child.The invented voice replaces the missing maternal one, since like the latter, it is situated: ‘Above the upturned face.Falling tangent to the crown’ (31).The analogy is made explicit: ‘A mother’s stooping over the cradle from behind.’ Of course, the failure that gave rise to this writing can only reproduce itself: ‘She moves aside to let the father look.In his turn he murmurs to the newborn.Flat tone unchanged.No trace of love.’ For want of a word of desire, the subject invents for himself ‘company’ that he has never known.By inventing the you pronounced by the voice, the subject seeks to be instituted by the Other in a desperate effort to produce an I by means of the pronoun he.In this way, he adopts the view point of the Other, observing his unspeakable being from above: ‘[…] without a word you view yourself to this effect as you would a stranger suffering say from Hodgkin’s disease or if you prefer Percival Pott’s surprised at prayer’ (Co, 41).In the absence of a symbolised subjectivity, the only possible discourse about the subject is the one that the latter must adopt to speak of himself.In this text, the one who is referred to by this third person is the prey of doubt: he is characterised by ratiocination and a vocabulary marked by logical terms, as in the following passages: ‘[…] the type of assertion he does not question’ (Co, 4); ‘But company apart this effect is clearly necessary.For were he merely to hear the voice […].Or of course unless as above surmised it is directed at another’ (5) [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]