Beckett’s Dedalus grew out of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grant I received for a projected study of Beckett’s aesthetics. This quickly turned into a study of Joyce’s influence on Beckett, which remains one of the great unanswered questions in Beckett studies. My article ‘Portraits of the Artist as a Young Critic: Beckett’s “Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce” and the Rewriting of Joyce in “Assumption”’ in the Journal of Beckett Studies (1999) staked out this territory by showing the extensive degree to which Beckett was influenced by Joyce at the very beginning of his career. The chapter version is half again as long as the original article, moving beyond the descriptive identification of particular Joycean allusions and echoes to an encompassing argument about how to reread Beckett’s prose works in light of an abiding Joycean influence that progressed through a number of distinctive phases over Beckett’s lifetime of writing.
Above all, I have to acknowledge a special debt to the students in my English 416 class, Topics in Modern Irish Literature: Joyce and Beckett. I devised this course in order to test out whether or not there would be enough material to extend my JOBS article to a full-scale investigation of Joyce’s impact on Beckett’s prose. Several students made particular contributions to points in this study and deserve special acknowledgment: Jessica Michell for Mr Kelly’s folding and unfolding of his crimson kite, just as the crimson flower unfolds in Stephen Dedalus’s theory of artistic creation; Keith Haughton for locating Watt’s chair in Portrait; Jenna McManus for focusing on Arsene as a feathered biped whose epiphany can be compared to that of the birdgirl in Portrait; and Jean Nelson for noting parallel images in Davin’s tale in Portrait and in Molloy’s recounting of his stay at Sophie Lousse’s. I would also like to thank David Melnyk for his suggestion to me at a University of Reading Beckett Seminar (2003) that Beckett’s ‘It is not’ of ‘Dante and the Lobster’ fame had its source in Stephen’s aesthetic speculations in Portrait.
Jill McConkey, my editor at University of Toronto Press, supplied encouragement, much astute advice, and professional guidance as this study worked its way through the publication review process. The anonymous reviewers offered perceptive and challenging insights, especially with regard to maintaining the distinction between Stephen Dedalus’s aesthetic theories and those of his creator; further development of this fundamental difference proved critical in my revisions. Charles Stuart’s careful copy-editing was also greatly appreciated. Colleagues at Thompson Rivers University encouraged me in various ways during the work on this project. Nick Pawliuk was a most patient and tolerant sounding board for many of the ideas developed in this study, as well as a valuable source for bibliographic references on particular topics I was engaged with. Bruce Baugh pinpointed the exact reference in Hegel for Moran’s famous ‘It is midnight’/’It was not midnight’ conundrum. Robert Kroetsch was a source of inspiration when he was writer-in-residence at TRU several years ago. He remembered for me how each new Beckett book had acted as a kind of liberation for him, sanctioning how things could now be done in a new way (he was also pleased to have someone recognize his Beckett allusion in ‘Voice/ in prose: effing the ineffable’). My colleague Will Garrett-Petts’s discussion of the ‘frozen word’ trope in Kroetsch and other Canadian post-modern writers in PhotoGraphic Encounters offered alternatives to the rhetorical device of ekphrasis and counterpointed my own efforts to show how Beckett reconstructed and reconfigured the modernist revelation in order to allow for a sense of the temporal. Likewise, my colleague George Johnson’s Dynamic Psychology in Modernist British Fiction was a stimulating counterpoint to my discussion of the importance of kinesis in Beckett’s aesthetic. Finally, thanks to my friend and colleague Alex Forbes for his much appreciated encouragement over the years of my work on Beckett. And – as always – to Jennifer for her abiding support.