Mouth: Trying to Tell It All, Failing

Abstract

While the preceding chapter examined the importance of listening for Beckett’s figures, here the focus is on the speech act itself and the orifice that enables it. This chapter will be attuned to the limit and tension between inner and outer as imaged in the tacky, productive orifice of the mouth. Sticky, tacky contortions of this organ produce speech and speech attempts to make sense of the self, of the body, of the surrounding material world. The organs of speech are paramount in Not I : the lips, the teeth, the vibrating folds of the throat, saliva, tongue, and all the contortions, as the mouth of that play puts it, without which no speech would be possible ( CSP, 219). The hollow internal spaces of Nancy’s resonant subject ¹ are realized by the opening of the mouth, which “can resume and revive resonance.”² The organs of speech—lips, teeth, tongue, and vocal folds—are tacky: red, wet, erotic, in contrast to the invisible and impalpable sonorous vibrations it produces. These vibrations, as Adriana Cavarero puts it, are “as colourless as the air, com[ing] out of a wet mouth and aris[ing] from the red of the flesh.³