ABSTRACT
In his novel, The Unnamable, Samuel Beckett creates a first person voice floundering with questions of identity, voice, and knowledge. What invades the mind as a voice or presence is strange and foreign, inescapable, a part of oneself and yet not oneself, ejected from meaning. Language changes in psychosis. Artists in psychosis make clocks, calendars, numbers, music, and scripts, the infinite unfolding of code, emerging incandescent alphabets. J. Lacan observes that the psychotic experiences a negative form of the imposed speech elements; suddenly there is no thought, no word, as if one's very thoughts have been stolen. In psychosis, perception of speech changes how one actually hears, as is evident in the following speech of a schizophrenic patient: When people talk to the author then it's like a different kind of language. One searches in vain for a lost code that will scan, deliver meaning to language as enigma.
