Early in the nineteenth century, the planetary Earth emerged as a new object of fascination across the Western world, upending Biblical authority and intertwining the once-separate orders of human and natural history. The industrial and imperial energies released by the emergence of Earth into human consciousness launched chains of causality leading to the Anthropocene, chains that bind us to this earlier era even as the Anthropocene cuts us off from its grounding assumptions. As natural scientists from Buffon and Hutton to Humboldt, Lyell and Darwin elaborated Earth’s evolutionary development and the ecological interdependences of living systems, political economists wrestled with the resulting problem: Do human beings have planetary agency? Their epochal decision to admit such agency in theory even while denying it in practice would bequeath us an unresolved legacy of metaphysical terror – as well as a role for literary artists in reimagining the horizon of the human.

Beckett’s narrator in The Unnamable spurns both tragedy’s undeserved pains and the counter-tragic theology and philosophies (Christianity, Platonism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, Skepticism) that aim to rationalize or overcome pain. Beckett’s character tries and fails to negate his humanity, imagining devolution to insentience. This chapter challenges Beckett scholarship that understands the Unnamable to be in search of mystical wordlessness and self-dissolution. Against the grain, it contends that the more Beckett’s narrator wages war on embodiment and language, the more he severs himself from all attachment to the world. His strategies, I suggest, might kindle the opposite desire in readers. This chapter proceeds to argue that Beckett rewrites this nihilistic character in Company, revisiting his tactics but supplying an alternative to them. Company’s narrator admits the attraction of a suicidal narrative strategy yet opts to resuscitate bonds with others by way of lyrical moments of memory.