The Conflagration In Samuel Beckett's 'The Unnamable'

“It will be silence, where I am, I don 't know, I 'll never know, in the silence you don 't know, you must go on, I can 't go on, I 'll go on.”

-Samuel Beckett (1906 - 1989), The Unnamable

It was always dark in the ghettos where the Jews were kept. Night fell before anyone knew. Winter arrived and no one was told. The bones chilled in the silent darkness of the cold arctic air. The Jews died. Death came as a master from Germany. The men and women, packed like sardines in the gas chambers, spaceless, could not find their own shadows. They had lost their shadows, they had lost their names, their lord, their everything. Shadows were left only to be spoken about and even thirty years after the end of suffering, the echoes, for some, never went

Celan, writes Cid Corman, “has tasted the ash of language” and his poems are the just the evidence of the conflagration. The reticent is the most spoken in Celan. The white spaces of the page leave the reader as much terrified as the words do. Celan 's relation to the German language is similar to that of Norman Mailer 's Shrimp and the anemone - they destroy one another resulting poems that are, to use a biological analogy, autophagic in nature, for they degenerate into themselves becoming what Derrida calls the "universalizable singularity". We hear the poet 's stammering voice, helplessly screaming aloud to himself while futilely hammering at the gates of the impregnable heinousness of the holocaust in an attempt to ethically hack the language of murder and murderers and purge it off its monstrosity. In With a Variable Key,

Critic Jed Re Sula comments, “Very few writers have so openly allowed the language of their poems to be helpless, to be written from a condition of abrupt syntactic disintegration consciously attended to.” Here again, it may be understood that it is the magnum of the sublime that does not obey the rules of grammar and syntax. Only the quantum can be punctuated because it can be properly understood, it can be controlled. The Magnum, the sublime cannot. Celan’s poetry is slammed with stripped-down syntax, telescoped words, neologisms, and multilingual puns which were his attempts to conceptualize the ‘sublime’ phenomena of the holocaust and give it an almost physical shape whose poignant touch can be felt in the tone of