Abstract:

Despite their generic and formal differences, Samuel Beckett’s 1953 novel The
Unnamable and 1961 play Happy Days register complementary concerns toward the
relationship between embodiment and communication. Both texts exhibit aspects of
what media theorists and literary critics call the materiality of communication, going so
far as to imagine communication itself as re-embodiment: a process in which Beckett’s
compromised and sometimes indecipherable bodies discover new forms. Considering
themselves as observed objects (physical and discursive), Happy Days’s Winnie and The
Unnamable’s narrator reflect upon the material systems that constitute and shape them.
This reflexive strategy, both aesthetic and formal, illuminates both characters’ estranging
physicalities at the same time that it produces them, aligning communication itself with
a sense of embodiment.