Digital Manuscript ProjectL'Innommable / The Unnamable

[0942] it, I can't, I have no language but theirs, no, I'll say it per-
haps, 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 dispose of
silence,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, and then
no matter what, whatever they want, with a will,
till time is done, at least with a good grace.
[0943] First I'll say what
I am 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.
[0944] I am neither, need I 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 myself, not the slightest
connexion.[0945] I never desired, never sought, never suffered,
never experienced anything of that kind never knew
what it was to have, things, adversaries, mind, senses.
[0946] But enough
about that.[0947] There is no use denying, 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.[0948] Perhaps they
exist in the way they have decreed will be mine, it's possible, I
don't know and I don't care, if they had taught me how to wish I
would wish they did.
[0949] There's no getting rid of them without
naming them and their contraptions, that is the thing to be consider-
ed.[0950] I might as well tell one of Mahood's stories and no more about
it, to be understood in the sense I was given to understand it
it, namely as being about me.[0951] That's an idea.[0952] To heighten my disgust.
[0953]
I'll recite it.
[0956] I'll try and look as if I was
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L'Innommable / The Unnamable © 2013 Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project.
Editors: Dirk Van Hulle, Shane Weller and Vincent Neyt