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From Dispossession to the Grotesque: Deterritorializing Human Identity in Cobra, El Obsceno Pájaro De La Noche and the Unnamable

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From Dispossession to the Grotesque: Deterritorializing Human Identity in Cobra, El Obsceno Pájaro De La Noche and the Unnamable Western University Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository 9-16-2016 12:00 AM From Dispossession to the Grotesque: Deterritorializing Human Identity in Cobra, El obsceno pájaro de la noche and The Unnamable Sandra Paola Preciado The University of Western Ontario Supervisor Calin-Andrei Mihailescu The University of Western Ontario Graduate Program in Comparative Literature A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree in Master of Arts © Sandra Paola Preciado 2016 Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd Part of the Comparative Literature Commons Recommended Citation Preciado, Sandra Paola, "From Dispossession to the Grotesque: Deterritorializing Human Identity in Cobra, El obsceno pájaro de la noche and The Unnamable" (2016). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 4181. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/4181 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Abstract The following text engages the concepts of the grotesque, the self, and language through a reading of three novels: Severo Sarduy’s Cobra, Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable and José Donoso’s El obsceno pájaro de la noche. The novels introduced here find themselves in the position of contributing to the theory of the self, of language and the grotesque through their own experimentations with these concepts, and whose method and creativity align with particularly critical movements in theory, including but not limited to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Just as theorists such as Mikhail Bakhtin and René Descartes engage with problems like ‘what is the self?’, ‘what is language?’ and ‘what is the grotesque?’, so too do Beckett, Donoso and Sarduy; and the purpose of this text is broadly to frame these relations and contribute an analysis. The novels discussed throughout this thesis show that identity can be rethought and redefined. They deterritorialize human identity by evincing different ways of behaving and different ways of understanding the self, or even by showing that there is no necessity to hold subjects to such a construction. Keywords José Donoso, Severo Sarduy, Samuel Beckett, Grotesque, Language, Self, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, M.M. Bakhtin, René Descartes Table of Contents Abbreviations ...................................................................................................................... i Introduction ......................................................................................................................... ii Chapter 1 1 Variations of the grotesque in Cobra and The Unnamable ........................................... 1 1.1 The grotesque ......................................................................................................... 3 1.2 Cobra cadabra, Cobra macabre ........................................................................... 11 1.3 The Unnamable: Human as a grotesque entity ..................................................... 20 Chapter 2 2 A note on language ...................................................................................................... 33 2.1 He wrote his did ................................................................................................... 36 2.2 Beckett’s literature of the unword ........................................................................ 41 2.2.1 Becoming nomadic ............................................................................................. 43 2.2.2 Becoming unnamed ............................................................................................ 44 2.3 Cobra: Forked tongue, forked language .............................................................. 46 2.4 Muted speeches in El Obsceno ............................................................................ 51 2.4.1 Witch(like) old women ...................................................................................... 52 Chapter 3 3 Dissolution of the self: the way of the becoming ........................................................ 57 3.1 Fixed I: the form of the individual, the law and the self ...................................... 58 3.2 Unfixed I: the form of the collectivity, the postulates and the becoming ............ 62 3.3 Dissolving the self: towards an unfixed I in The Unnamable and El obsceno .... 66 3.3.1 Becoming-unnamable ........................................................................................ 69 3.3.2 Becoming-Mudito .............................................................................................. 73 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 78 References ........................................................................................................................ 80 Curriculum Vitae .............................................................................................................. 84 Abbreviations Becket, The Unnamable The Unnamable Deleuze, Essay Critical and Clinical ECC Deleuze, The Logic of Sense LOS Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus ATP Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus AO Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, Toward a Minor Literature Kafka Donoso, El obsceno pájaro de la noche El obsceno Donoso, The Obscene Bird of Night The Obscene i Introduction The following text engages the concepts of the grotesque, the self, and language through a reading of three novels: Severo Sarduy’s Cobra, Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable and José Donoso’s El obsceno pájaro de la noche. This intersection between these novels and the conceptual theories marks a space for the contribution to each of the respective discourses. In other words, it maintains the questioning movement inherent to these discourses and offers an opportunity to re-think the self, to rethink language, to rethink the novel, to rethink Beckett, etc. The novels introduced here contribute to the theory of the self, of language and the grotesque through their own experimentations with these concepts, and whose method and creativity align with particularly critical movements in theory, including but not limited to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Each chapter presents the imposition of competing discourses of these concepts and not only positions the related novels within those discussions, but the novels are also shown to put the limits of these concepts to the test. Thus, just as theorists such as Mikhail Bakhtin and René Descartes engage with problems like ‘what is the self?’, ‘what is language?’ and ‘what is the grotesque?’, so too do Beckett, Donoso and Sarduy; and the purpose of this text is broadly to frame these relations and contribute an analysis. The Grotesque, Language and The Self Chapter one engages with the problem ‘what is the grotesque?’ and reviews the contributions and differing stances from Mikhail Bakhtin, Wolfgang Kayser, and Geoffrey Harpham, among others, which is followed by three characteristics of this aesthetic category that were selected for further analysis and implementation: the coexistence of contraries, the irresolution of this tension and the deformed body. The inclusion of Severo Sarduy’s Cobra and Samuel Beckett ‘s The Unnamable evokes these characteristics in an instructive manner. ii In the first discussion of the grotesque, Severo Sarduy’s Cobra is reviewed for the presentation of the grotesque as on the one hand a collection of numerous clashes of opposites (violence/eroticism, comedy/tragedy, obscenity/decency) which are left as ambivalent elements and, on the other hand a protagonist whose body is restlessly morphed. The argument is then made that the body of the main character, Cobra, is grotesque because it can be fused with other entities, deformed to bizarre limits and removed from its regular functions. Sarduy’s Cobra, therefore, by presenting distortions on both social and physical levels, challenges the normalcy and normativity which fathom society’s core. In the second case, the grotesque is presented in Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable as the deformation of the body of the protagonist along with the ‘deformation of his thoughts’ (and his language). This interconnected deformity shows a grotesque entity that loses all human shape (physically and intellectually speaking), with a subsequently parallel discussion about the Cartesian definition of the human being. Beckett’s grotesqueries in The Unnamable conjure the destabilization of our ideas about how we give meaning to concepts such as humanity. Further, the bringing together of these two novels and the concept of the grotesque leads to the discussion that both Cobra’s and the unnamable’s bodies become a Body without Organs (BwO), a concept based in the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia that Deleuze and Guattari published in the 1980’s. This occurs as Cobra is in crisis, decentered, chaotic, open, multiple, and excessive, whereas the unnamable has reconfigured the organization of his organs placing himself at a limit of existence. The second chapter approaches the question ‘what is language?’ and links it with the paradox of introducing elements of novelty in a linguistic system. This link is constructed by relating the ‘grammatically correct’ to majoritarian discourses which aim to remain unchanged and impose their
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