Beckett et Berio à l'écoute de voix innommables

This article proposes an intermedial dialogue between Beckett's L'Innommable and Luciano Berio's Sinfonia, which features recited passages from The Unnamable, in order to consider questions of voice, subjectivity, and their irreducible experience of heterogeneity to speech and language. Sinfonia ignites a non-narrative mode of listening to Beckett's French text, where a mad multiplication of sense confronts us, through Beckett's musical phrases, with the unsaid and unsayable. Dante's Purgatory features the "primitive scene" that gives rise to this fundamental disruption of linear sense and reading in Beckett. The article concludes by highlighting the echoing function of water in Sinfonia and L'innommable.