To apprehend the complex and vexed underpinnings of the Joyce-Beckett relationship, we need to go back to Beckett’s first two published works, the essay ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce’ and the short story ‘Assumption,’ and read them anew; that is, with a hitherto unrecognized awareness of the extent to which these two so ostensibly very different texts are complementary. These two works need to be read together, as companion pieces, as a sort of palimpsest (keeping in mind, however, that ‘the danger is in the neatness of identifications,’ Dis, 19). 1 Both of these pieces appeared in the double issue of transition, numbers 16/17, June 1929, an ironically fitting conjunction in a number of ways, for we will see that there are a number of doubling effects that draw them together intertextually. The first point to make about Beckett’s doubleheaded debut as writer is that we do not know the order in which these first two works were composed. James Knowlson in his Beckett biography states what appears to be a straightforward chronology: ‘Inspired by Joyce and MacGreevy, Beckett started to write in Paris, first the essay on Joyce, then “Assumption”’(110). In conversation and correspondence with Knowlson, it was, however, made clear that we do not know in what order the works were actually composed. Knowlson’s sequencing seems to be based simply on the fact that in the double issue of transition the Joyce essay precedes ‘Assumption.’ This is a point Beckett critics have not belaboured since there seemed little to be gained by even posing the question; both works were obviously composed within the same brief period in 1929, so let’s just leave it at that. However, if we recognize that these first two Beckett texts reveal radically different ways in which Beckett approached Joyce at the very beginning of his career, then the question certainly is at least worth posing.
And this is, in fact, the case: in ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce,’ a piece commissioned and overseen by Joyce as part of Our Exagmination … defence of Work in Progress, one of Beckett’s strategies, as pointed out by John Pilling in his close reading of the work, seems to involve putting off as long as possible his ‘duty of writing in praise of Joyce’;2 moreover, when that praise does duly appear, it seems implicitly qualified by the suggestion that Beckett doesn’t really know what to make of Joyce’s so-called ‘direct expression’ and that perhaps he harbours with respect to Joyce some of the same critical reservations initially voiced about Vico, namely, that concerning ‘hoisting the real unjustifiably clear of its dimensional limits, temporalizing that which is extratemporal’ (19). Beckett’s circling about the relevance of Vico to Joyce – for over half the essay – appears designed to avoid direct engagement with the job at hand. The impact and significance of this strategy are doubled when we realize that ‘Assumption’ has not yet been recognized by Beckett critics for what it essentially is: a text that is supersaturated with Joycean references from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, that at its centre is a quite incredibly detailed rewriting of the last two and a half pages of section 5, chapter 2, of Portrait, Stephen’s visit to the prostitute. But the degree of Beckett’s indebtedness to Portrait is much more extensive than a reliance on this one scene. In fact, ‘Assumption’’s five rather eccentric paragraphs might be regarded, to borrow a phrase from Beckett’s ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce,’ as a ‘quintessential extraction’ (28) of the five chapters of Portrait.3 Basta! Joyce and Beckett are here, and more substantially than would appear from this swift survey of the question.
What we have then at the very beginning of Beckett’s career is the very odd conjunction, virtually simultaneous, of a critical essay on Joyce, the topic for which was, as Beckett said, ‘suggested’ by Joyce, 4 even though the structuring of the piece was left to his own devising, with Beckett’s first published creative piece of writing, the very short story ‘Assumption,’ which is riddled with Joycean references, to such an extent that one might again be tempted to adapt one of the chestnut phrases of Beckett’s Joyce essay to the effect that the commissioned piece is merely about Joyce whereas the short story ‘is that something itself’ (27). Yet to do so would be to fall prey to the ‘danger’ of the ‘neatness of identifications.’ The reality of the situation is much more complex and untidy. Faced with the ‘obligation to express’ in the Joyce essay, employing a critical terminology with which he is obviously ill at ease (or unsure of), Beckett, it would seem, released his ‘spirits of rebelliousness’ in a more direct way by writing a sort of pastiche/parody, 5 however condensed and elliptical, of Portrait in his ‘Assumption,’ a rewriting of Joyce that is also a rewriting, in part, of Beckett’s own views as imparted in ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce.’ It could be speculated that Beckett’s ‘Assumption’ in fact grew out of his resistance to the dutiful act of required homage to a literary master that the Our Exagmination piece demanded and that ‘Assumption’ was in some ways a type of subversive literary game-playing, a sort of hoax or joke, whereby Beckett, by pushing Joyce’s ideas in Portrait to extremist positions, would begin to find the direction his own voice might take. These first two works of Beckett are intimately intertwined, and unravelling these interrelationships is vital to our rethinking of Beckett’s early views on art and his relationship with Joyce.
A central characteristic shared by both of Beckett’s first published works is their highly derivative nature, their dependence upon the works and ideas of others (acknowledged or not), in conjunction with a highly original restructuring of those ideas in ways that allow Beckett, in varying degrees, to appropriate these as his own. Terence McQueeny in his unpublished dissertation ‘Beckett as Critic of Proust and Joyce’ (1977) has brilliantly brought to light the extent of Beckett’s ‘borrowings’ in ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce.’ He details the extent to which Beckett has relied on secondary sources, often translating from various critics with little or slight modification (and without any scholarly apparatus whereby this might be credited), namely, Croce and Michelet for Vico, McIntyre for Bruno, and De Sanctis for Dante. What might today with a less charitable eye be termed simple plagiarism, McQueeny generously overlooks by terming the essay ‘primarily an assignment written quickly with a good deal of help from Joyce’ and by concluding that it is a ‘brilliant mosaic of secondary sources done by a rushed apprentice,’ one which, nevertheless, is ‘valuable in spite of defects’ as it does supply the ‘basic needs for even a rudimentary understanding of Work in Progress.’ In short, McQueeny regards the work as exhibiting ‘weakness in composition, not comprehension.’6
Be that as it may, when one comes to read this essay anew, some seventy years after its publication, it is indeed what McQueeny terms ‘obvious defects in composition’ that are, in fact, most revealing about Beckett’s attitude to an ostensibly academic exercise on Joyce’s Work in Progress. These ‘defects,’ in addition to the essay’s ‘derivative’ nature, would obviously include its highly elliptical nature, delaying tactics in terms of an actual engagement/commentary on Joyce’s work, and the interpolation of various vehement denunciations of a philistine audience that fails to recognize and appreciate Joyce’s ‘direct expression’ in Work in Progress – all of which serves to draw attention to the writer, that all this is ‘by Samuel Beckett.’ Beckett is indeed anything but direct himself in his exposition in ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce,’ though the use of the first-person pronoun in the first paragraph might initially mislead a reader to think so: ‘And now here am I, with my handful of abstractions, among which notably: a mountain, the coincidence of contraries, the inevitability of cyclic evolution, a system of Poetics, and the prospect of self-extension in the world of Mr Joyce’s Work in Progress’ (19). And now here are we, rereading Beckett’s first published paragraph, a paragraph, moreover, that, in the huge mountain of Beckett criticism does not appear to have been read critically so much as glossed over. Something is very strange here in terms of the sequencing of the items in the thesis statement (‘handful of abstractions’). We all know that the title of the essay, with its eccentric use of ellipses, is meant to schematize the historical order of the principal authors to be dealt with, and not the actual order in which they are discussed. But Beckett’s ‘handful of abstractions’ would, with one notable and striking exception, seem to outline the actual order of the key ideas in his essay (just as a student in a freshman composition course might learn to set up an outline for his ‘pensum’). That is to say, with the exception of the striking and perplexing first entry, ‘a mountain,’ Beckett does give us the actual order of his essay’s development: ‘the coincidence of contraries’ of Bruno is dealt with (albeit very briefly) in paragraphs two and three, almost en passant, as Beckett begins his discussion of Vico as ‘a practical roundheaded Neapolitan’ (paragraph 2, topic sentence) and as a ‘scientific historian’ (paragraph 3, topic sentence). 7 No wonder Joyce found Beckett ‘short on Bruno’! And the rest of the essay, in an even more clearly signposted way, does then, in turn, deal with the remaining three items – ‘the inevitability of cyclic evolution, a system of Poetics, and the prospect of self-extension in the world of Mr Joyce’s Work in Progress.’
Everything is neatly tucked away in academic pigeonholes, except for the mountain. But the whole ‘handful of abstractions’ makes sense and indeed is in the proper order if we realize that Beckett’s approach in this ostensibly academic piece is based on an incredible assumption of poetic licence: when Beckett states disarmingly ‘And now here am I,’ he can only mean that he is already on Dante’s purgatorial mountain, at the point of the Terrestial Paradise, which, as I have documented in Reconstructing Beckett, is Beckett’s determining trope for that zone of the imagination and critical intelligence where the writer must work out the complex interrelationships of the real and its dimensional limits, while avoiding temporalizing that which is extratemporal. In other words, the very first paragraph of Beckett’s first published work has not been read aright so much as ‘skimmed’ over: we have theorized about it, but have not seen that ‘it is that something itself.’ Why have we missed this? Most obviously because of a sort of intentional fallacy – we do not expect a would-be scholarly elucidation in its opening gambit to subvert the very conventions of its discourse. Yet this first paragraph and, in particular, the ‘And now here am I’ sentence, with its ‘poetry’ and its ‘logic,’ is, if read anew from the perspective I am putting forward, the most successful embodiment of Vichian ‘poetic logic’ in the whole essay. John Pilling in Beckett before Godot has commented, with reference to the concluding paragraphs of ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce,’ which deal with Dante’s Purgatorial Mountain and a comparison of it with Joyce’s Purgatory, ‘But in the final paragraph of the essay Beckett wants, in his “last word about the Purgatories” – of which he is only too conscious that it is actually his first word on the subject – to drive a wedge between Dante and Joyce.’8 However, Beckett’s ‘last word about the Purgatories’ does make good sense if we have recognized the duplicitous poetic logic of his opening paragraph. The two sentences preceding the final sentence of the fourteenth and final paragraph of Beckett’s ‘essay’ on Joyce begin with ‘And,’ perhaps a doubling that is meant to return us to the first paragraph’s ‘And now here am I.’ The cycle, in a sort of Vichian fashion, has been completed, beginning and ending telescoped across the intervening discussions. ‘Prospects of self-extension,’9 namely, Beckett’s own, are suspended in any direct way after the opening paragraph; nevertheless, it is clear from the concluding discussion of Dante and Joyce that Beckett is, behind the scenes as it were, using them to clarify his own views. We will see later how these ideas are adapted to the ending of ‘Assumption,’ how key terms such as ‘a flood of movement and vitality’ and ‘the partially purged’ take on significance for Beckett within his own first published work of fiction.
The line of ellipses (or suspension points) that marks off Beckett’s first paragraph from the rest of the essay is a typographical means of underlining how the topography of this opening is at once separate from yet connected to what follows. Joyce employed such lines of demarcation in Dubliners, most often in order to foreground the transition to the epiphany in the story’s conclusion. A last word then about the structure of Beckett’s ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce.’ What Beckett calls his ‘painful exposition of Vico’s dynamic treatment of Language, Poetry, and Myth’ (26) occupies the first eight paragraphs; the concluding six paragraphs are made up of two long paragraphs on Joyce’s Work in Progress, followed by four final paragraphs that develop the Dante-Joyce comparison. Beckett’s fundamental point in this essay is to argue for an idea of form and structure that is not merely a frame on which to hang metaphysical generalizations such as Vico’s, which Beckett says were used by Joyce only ‘as a structural convenience – or inconvenience’ (22). Beckett endorses instead throughout this first critical venture a flexible, dynamic view of structure that is an ‘interior intertwining […] a decoration of arabesques’ (22). In short, an anti-’neatness of identifications’ argument as announced in the very first sentence and echoed throughout the discussion. Beckett’s own structure for ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce’ would seem, as with his first paragraph on the ‘mountain,’ to attempt to embody these very principles. Bizarre as it might sound, the essay is structured along the lines of an Italian (Petrarchan) sonnet, a form possibly suggested by the Italianate context of Dante, Bruno, and Vico, with Giacomo Joyce thrown in for good measure.10 The conventions of this form dictate that the octave states a problem (or expresses an emotional tension) that the sestet then answers or relieves. The two-part division is neatly marked by the topic sentence of the very short eighth paragraph, ‘Such is the painful exposition of Vico’s dynamic treatment,’ followed by the turn to the ‘sestet’ in the topic sentence of the next paragraph, ‘On turning to the Work in Progress we find the mirror is not so convex.’ Of course, this literary game playing could be taken as Beckett’s ironic way of reminding us that literary criticism is not mere bookkeeping (though mathematics is prominently displayed and is commented upon as an important means of accounting and recounting). The danger is indeed in the neatness of identifications; after all, taking into account the line of ellipses after the first paragraph, do we have thirteen or fourteen paragraphs making up ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce’?11
Another of the very odd features of Beckett’s Joyce essay – and a feature that is directly relevant to Beckett’s rewriting of Joyce in ‘Assumption’ – is that references to Ulysses are conspicuous only by their absence whereas there are four direct references to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, two paraphrases and two quotations. The first paraphrase comes in the midst of a diatribe against those ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’ who are ‘too decadent to receive it’ (namely, Joyce’s ‘direct expression’): ‘The title of this book [Our Exagmination …] is a good example of a form carrying a strict inner determination. It should be proof against the usual volley of cerebral sniggers: and it may suggest to some a dozen incredulous Joshuas prowling around the Queen’s Hall, springing their tuning-forks lightly against finger-nails that have not yet been refined out of existence’ (26–7).12
The second paraphrase of Joycean terms from Portrait carries on Beckett’s opening remarks in paragraph 11 on the Joyce-Dante comparison: ‘They both saw how worn out and threadbare was the conventional language of cunning literary artificers, both rejected an approximation to a universal language’ (30).13 The first direct quotation (and the very first reference to Portrait in ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce’) is used to buttress Beckett’s point that Joyce only adapts the Vichian ‘system’ as a ‘structural convenience’ and that it is in ‘no way a philosophical one’: ‘It is the detached attitude of Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist… who describes Epictetus to the Master of Studies as “an old gentleman who said that the soul is very like a bucketful of water”’ (22).14 The second quotation from Portrait is from the aesthetics section of chapter 5 and is by far Beckett’s most extensive and significant use of Joyce’s first novel and a foreshadowing of things to come in Beckett’s handling of the host of Portrait echoes, borrowings, and paraphrases in ‘Assumption.’ Beckett’s reference is to the opening remarks by Stephen on the ‘phases of artistic apprehension,’ via Aquinas’s ‘Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony and radiance.’ The excerpt Beckett chose for ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce’ deals with the first of these only, ‘wholeness’ or integritas: ‘Perhaps “apprehension” is the most satisfactory English word. Stephen says to Lynch: “Temporal or spatial, the esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as self-bounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which is not it … You apprehend its wholeness.” There is one point to make clear: the Beauty of Work in Progress is not presented in space alone, since its adequate apprehension depends as much on its visibility as on its audibility’ (27–8).15
What is most telling here is that Beckett has, of course, got it wrong; he has reversed Stephen’s terms, as is made clear by citing the sentence in Portrait immediately preceding the passage Beckett uses in his essay: ‘What is audible is presented in time, what is visible is presented in space’ (P, 184). Either Beckett has simply made a mistake (McQueeny’s ‘rushed apprentice’) or he has intended the miscue as an indirect critique of Joycean aesthetics, perhaps a further probing, however circuitous, of his opening critique of Vico (and, by association, possibly Joyce himself) and of the need to resist the temptation for ‘neatness of identifications,’ of tidying things up – ‘hoisting the real unjustifiably clear of its dimensional limits, temporalizing that which is extratemporal.’ Or perhaps Beckett is simply registering a critique of Stephen Dedalus’s theory of art (which is not, of course, equivalent to that of Joyce himself), one which clearly is much too ‘static’ for Beckett’s liking; for example, ‘Beauty expressed by the artist cannot awaken in us an emotion which or a sensation which is purely physical. It awakens, or induces, or ought to induce, an esthetic stasis’ (P, 180). This discussion, as we will soon see, is elaborated upon by Beckett in ‘Assumption’ with a much more violent wrenching of Joycean terms, about which there can be no doubt that they are indeed intended. The four detailed references to Portrait in ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce’ also supply some intertextual support for my view that ‘Assumption’ is essentially a rewrite of key aspects of Joyce’s first novel and is co-terminus with Beckett’s first critical venture in the essay commissioned by Joyce; we cannot fully read one without reading the other in conjunction with it.
Beckett’s fundamental strategy in ‘Assumption’ is lodged ironically in its title, and it has much more to do with the common usage of presumed ‘arrogance’ (literary or otherwise) than with the feast in honour of the raising of the Virgin Mary to the heavens. Beckett’s literary tactics here involved him pushing to the extreme a whole series of ideas about ‘esthetic philosophy’ as found in Portrait. First and foremost is the situation portrayed of a ‘he’ who is struggling to contain the ‘other’ within him (his ‘prisoner’) and who is also struggling to escape, to find expression in sound, a quest which is only finally realized through the mediations of a ‘Woman’ (and her sexuality) and then only at the price of a final ‘splendid drunken scream’ that destroys the host ‘he.’ This is indeed anything but that ‘neatness of identifications’ promulgated by young Stephen Dedalus as the basis of the aesthetic subject, ‘self-bounded and selfcontained.’ With ‘he’ and ‘other’ in deadly conflict, there cannot, of course, be any ‘wholeness’ (integritas), ‘harmony’ (consonantia), or ‘radiance’ (claritas); the very quidditas or whatness of the deeply divided protagonist figure is that very dilemma to which this short story has no answer.
The syntactical and logical impasse of the very first sentence underscores the problem to be somehow dealt with, or at least to be delineated in its major components, so that an aesthetic image might at least be projected: ‘He could have shouted and could not.’16 Here Beckett has pushed to the point of absurdity a phrasing that Joyce employs pervasively in Portrait: the ‘He could’ pattern, with a qualifying negative. For example, towards the end of chapter 1 of Portrait (the one chapter to which there is no explicit reference in ‘Assumption,’ by the way), 17 Stephen is on his way to state his case against his unfair punishment by Father Dolan to a higher authority, the rector. Stephen feels that he will not be able to utter the required words: ‘It was impossible: he could not’ (59). Of course, he does manage to negotiate this little ethical dilemma; he is temporarily ‘Stephen hero,’ until the deflationary irony of the next chapter, at least. Beckett’s dilemma is, however, quite different: it is a linguistic and ontological one. In short, Beckett is, in his opening move, challenging the central assumption of Stephen Dedalus’s aesthetic theory (and that of traditional aesthetics itself): Aristotle’s principle of non-contradiction, in which ‘the same attribute cannot at the same time and in the same connection belong to and not belong to the same subject’ (P, 181). Beckett’s first sentence therefore develops an explicitly anti-Aristotelian stance that abandons any reliance on the ‘neatness of identifications’ of conventional aesthetic theorizing.
The next two sentences of ‘Assumption’ attempt to explain the nature of the problem Beckett has set for himself, via Joyce, or more accurately via Joyce’s depiction of Stephen Dedalus’s theories. In Reconstructing Beckett, I employed the second cryptic sentence of ‘Assumption’ – ‘The buffoon in the loft swung steadily on his stick and the organist sat dreaming with his hands in his pocket’ – as a veritable refrain throughout my discussion of the later prose. The sentence neatly encapsulates the author (‘organist’) other (‘buffoon’) dilemma and the complexity involved in working out a modus vivendi between the two, something that is well beyond the reach of young Beckett in this early effort. But the central players are now at least onstage: the narrator of the work; the ‘he’ whose travails he records; that mysterious ‘other’ within the ‘he’ who is struggling for some type of expression; and the Woman, who detaches herself from the social context of the outside world to join the ‘he’ in his room. Here the principals are not fully in action – one swings ‘steadily,’ treading time metronomically almost, while the other ‘dreams’; the constituent elements have, however, been annunciated.
The third sentence of the first paragraph of ‘Assumption’ contains a ‘buried’ allusion to Portrait, one so obscure – or apparently so commonplace – that the only person who could even have had a chance of recognizing it in the June 1929 double issue (16/17) of transition would have been James Joyce himself. The sentence deals with how the ‘he’ speaks (‘little’) and with what tone (‘low-voiced timidity’) and characterizes him as one ‘who shrinks from argument, who can reply confidently to Pawn to King’s fourth, but whose faculties are frozen into bewildered suspension by Pawn to Rook’s third’ (all of this qualified, if not contradicted, by the beginning of the next sentence, which states: ‘He indeed was not such a man, but his voice was of such a man’). Beckett is here echoing, however distantly, the scene towards the end of chapter 5 of Portrait when Stephen enters the library in search of Cranly and finds him having a chess problem read to him by a medical student: ‘Pawn to King’s fourth’ (196). This hardly ranks as an ‘allusion’ since it is a standard opening move. That Beckett is broaching an in-joke with Joyce, however, is further supported by the ironic counterpoints in Joyce’s scene vis-à-vis what Beckett describes in his first paragraph of ‘Assumption.’ The rule-breaking talking of Dixon, the medical student, and Cranly has irritated another reader who has gone to complain. Cranly certainly doesn’t shy away from argument and doesn’t speak timidly; he pauses on the stairway and shouts: ‘Pawn to King’s bloody fourth’ (197). He clearly does not have the faculty of ‘whispering the turmoil down’ that the ‘he’ of ‘Assumption’ is said to possess. What Beckett seems to be saying to Joyce (via his critique of Stephen Dedalus’s theories of art) is this: when I begin to write, I won’t be bound as your alter ego was by precepts of an Aquinas or an Aristotle, and I won’t make the standard opening gambit of Pawn to King’s fourth, but the much more unorthodox opening of Pawn to Rook’s third, the verbal equivalent of which is, ‘He could have shouted and could not’ (metaphorically a sort of ‘endgame’ before the game even properly gets under way).
The heart of the first paragraph concerns a commentary by the narrator of the story on the various psychological strategies employed by the ‘he’ in social contexts whereby he can subtly impose his will on others and hence ‘whisper the turmoil down.’ This is done in an academic style or tone – one that, in fact, might be more appropriate for a would-be scholarly essay such as ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce’ was intended to be. We are cautioned by the narrator ‘not to imply that the least apostolic fervour coloured what was at its worst the purely utilitarian contrivance of a man who wished to gain himself a hearing, and at its best an amused experiment in applied psychology’ (4).18 The last part of the first paragraph does, however, return to the dialogical encounter with Stephen Dedalus’s speculations in Portrait, though in a game of one-upmanship he takes it a step further: ‘To avoid the expansion of the commonplace is not enough; the highest art reduces significance in order to obtain the inexplicable bombshell perfection’ (4). Compare this with Stephen’s comments as he sits down to begin a youthful attempt at artistic distillation: ‘Now it seemed as if he would fail again but, by dint of brooding on the incident, he thought himself into confidence. During this process all those elements which he deemed common and insignificant fell out of the scene’ (P, 71). Then there follows a passage that employs Dantean imagery of the Purgatorial Mountain (as found in the first and concluding paragraphs of ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce’): ‘Before no supreme manifestation of Beauty do we proceed comfortably up the staircase of sensation, and sit down mildly on the topmost stair to digest our gratification: such is the pleasure of Prettiness. We are taken up bodily and pitched breathless on the peak of a sheer crag: which is the pain of Beauty’ (4). Beckett is specifically targeting here Stephen’s interpretation of claritas (radiance) in chapter 5: ‘The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state’ (185). Beckett is endorsing a crucial point he has already implied in his critique of Stephen’s aesthetics: that it is based on an adolescent case of arrested development, a state in which the aesthetic image is made safe and conventional as an emissary of a Beauty that is ‘static.’ In ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce,’ Beckett identified ‘hell’ and ‘heaven’ as such lifeless realms, to be dramatically contrasted with purgatory and its art of pain and suffering. (Certainly, as I have discussed in Reconstructing Beckett, Beckett is fond of painfully catapulting his characters – in medias res – to the ‘peak of a sheer crag’.)19 The art of hunger is much more complex and untidy than such an effete aesthetics, which Beckett contemptuously dismisses as one that allows us ‘to digest our gratification.’ Such would be merely Hallmark greeting card ‘Prettiness.’
To summarize, then, in the very first paragraph of ‘Assumption,’ Dante is thus obviously present; so is Bruno, whom Joyce found Beckett ‘short on’ in the essay on Work in Progress (Bruno is here with a vengeance in terms of the story’s basic structure of maxima coinciding with minima – the ‘whisper’ and the ‘great storm of sound’); so too is Vico, at least in the way that Beckett presented him (or rather misread or distorted) in the Joyce essay,20 that is, as a thinker who emphasized the primitive hieroglyphics and their ‘terribly real’ powers; and so of course is James Joyce’s Portrait, in a host of ways that we have only begun to enumerate. Beckett stated at the end of the first paragraph of ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce’ that ‘literary criticism is not book-keeping’ and should not succumb to the desire of the ‘analogymongers’ to modify a ‘certain system’ (here read Joyce’s Portrait) to suit the critics’ own ends. By the end of the first paragraph of ‘Assumption,’ Beckett seems to be rewriting himself as well as Joyce; his first creative venture in this very short story seems, in large part, to consist of ‘book-keeping’ and ‘analogymonger[ing].’
The second paragraph concentrates on the lonely struggle of the ‘he’: ‘In the silence of his room he was afraid, afraid of that wild rebellious surge that aspired violently towards realization in sound.’ This is the archetypal dilemma of Stephen Dedalus in Portrait, though Beckett, following his critique in the first paragraph of Stephen’s aesthetic, has made his situation much more ‘kinetic’ or violent. And the situation in Beckett’s parable is one of life and death, not the angst of an adolescent who seeks to ‘transfigure’ his sexual desires so that they merge with his ideal love object (e.g., Mercedes-Emma). Beckett’s literary lexicon, however ironically twisted, is in nearly every respect Joycean à la Portrait, namely, key words such as ‘wild,’ ‘rebellious,’ ‘murmurs,’ and ‘floodwaters’ of various types (an image so pervasive in Portrait it is virtually intertwined with its very telling, since it is identified with sounds and articulations of all sorts, for example, ‘His unrest issued from him like a wave of sound and on the tide of flowing music,’ 75). It is the image of flooding, of an overwhelming urge to at once let the caged prisoner free and to dam up the ‘flesh-locked sea of silence,’ that generates the sense of an incredible and irresolvable tension that was announced in the very first sentence (‘He could have shouted and could not’) and then lost sight of in the psychologizing and aesthetic lecturing of the rest of the opening paragraph. The second paragraph of ‘Assumption’ in its opening and its conclusion shows Beckett fragmenting Joyce’s sentence, which describes Stephen’s encounter with the prostitute at the end of chapter 2: ‘As he stood silent in the middle of the room she came over to him’ (95). Beckett’s paragraph begins with the phrase ‘In the silence of his room’ and concludes over three hundred words later with ‘At this moment the Woman came to him …’ (5).
Beckett’s main focus in his rewriting of Portrait is the last two and a half pages of the final part five of chapter 2, when Stephen visits the prostitute. Like the ‘he’ of ‘Assumption,’ Stephen ‘had tried to build a ‘breakwater,’ to ‘dam up’ the ‘powerful recurrence of the tides within him’ (94). Stephen’s efforts fail – ‘From without as from within the water had flowed over his barriers: their tides began once more to jostle fiercely above the crumbled mole’ (94) – just as do those of the unnamed protagonist of ‘Assumption’ – ‘By damming the stream of whispers he had raised the level of the flood, and he knew the day would come when it could no longer be denied. Still he was silent, in silence listening for the first murmur of the torrent that must destroy him. At this moment the Woman came to him …’21 The climax of this cluster of shared imagery in Joyce’s Portrait occurs just prior to Stephen’s actual encounter with the prostitute – a type of complex, verbal foreplay – and needs to be cited in detail so that Beckett’s rewriting of it can be gauged and evaluated in terms of its differentiations from it in the central and decisive third paragraph of ‘Assumption.’
Stephen is ‘listening eagerly for any sound’ (95), just as in the first sentence of paragraph 3 Beckett’s ‘he’ ‘was listening in the dusk when she came, listening so intently that he did not hear her enter.’ First, the experience that ensues for Stephen Dedalus:
He felt some dark presence moving irresistibly upon him from the darkness, a presence subtle and murmurous as a flood filling him wholly with itself. Its murmur besieged his ears like the murmur of some multitude in sleep; its subtle streams penetrated his being. His hands clenched convulsively and his teeth set together as he suffered the agony of its penetration […] and the cry that he had strangled for so long in his throat issued from his lips. (95)
Then, the experience as narrated about the ‘he’ of ‘Assumption’:
He clenched his hands in a fury […] She turned on the light and advanced carelessly into the room. An irruption of demons would not have scattered his intentness so utterly. She sat down before him at the table, and leaned forward with her jaws in the cup of her hands. He looked at her venomously, and was struck in spite of himself by the extraordinary pallor of her lips, of which the lower protruded slightly and curled upwards contemptuously to compress the upper, resulting in a faintly undershot local sensuality which went strangely with the extreme cold purity stretching sadly from the low broad brow to the closed nostrils. He thought of George Meredith and recovered something of his calm. The eyes were so deeply set as to be almost cavernous; the light falling on the cheekbones threw them back into a misty shadow. In daylight they were strange, almost repulsive, deriving a pitiless penetration from the rim of white showing naturally above the green-flecked pupil. (5–6)
Beckett’s revision of Joyce’s passage in Portrait, as with the previous rewritings we have foregrounded in this discussion, involves pushing things to an extreme point at which there seems to be no possibility of solution, except that of dissolution. Stephen does get to ‘sin with one of his kind,’ however ironically qualified the prostitute scene is in terms of his search for an ideal. There is a sense that Stephen might, finally, grope his way towards some balancing of the imaginary and the real. Joyce presents Stephen’s dilemma as an ethical and aesthetic one that the religion of art might, in modernist terms, mediate.
But Beckett’s protagonist faces a starkly ontological perplex: how can he coexist with that other struggling for an outlet, his ‘prisoner’ locked within? Stephen’s fragments somehow suggest at least the possibility of a whole, whereas Beckett’s hero is fundamentally divided in half (not to mention the third-person narrator who won’t let the ‘he’ speak in his own words, just as ‘he’ vainly tries to suppress the voicings of the ‘other’ whose ‘struggle for divinity was as real as his own, and as futile’).22 That this is fundamentally an aesthetic (literary) problem is acknowledged by Beckett in one of his most pointed and direct rewritings of Joyce. In the midst of ‘he”s discomfiture by the Woman, he talks of a brief respite: ‘He thought of George Meredith and recovered something of his calm.’ Compare this with Stephen’s self-reflection in the prostitute scene, when he pauses sentimentally over lost images of Mercedes and how ‘At those moments the soft speeches of Claude Melnotte rose to his lips and eased his unrest’ (94). Meredith, whose stylistic influence on Joyce is well established, is a much more appropriate adult reference than Stephen’s rather immature reliance on a Bulwer-Lytton melodrama;23 moreover, the substitution might also be an acknowledgment that Beckett is indeed essentially invoking Joyce – not Meredith – to recover something of his ‘calm,’ even if he has pushed the Joycean terms to the breaking point.
The references to Joyce via Meredith are, ironically enough, anything but examples of that ‘direct expression’ for which Beckett so lavishly, albeit problematically, praised Joyce in ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce.’ The beginning of the third paragraph of ‘Assumption’ (in which the explicit reference to Meredith appears about a third of the way through) contains an allusion to ‘The Young Sir Willoughby,’ chapter 2 of Meredith’s The Egoist: A Comedy in Narrative. The Woman’s worshipping praise of the ‘he’ of ‘Assumption’ – ‘the usual story, vulgarly told: admiration for his genius, sympathy for his suffering, only a woman could understand. …’ (5) – echoes the summary evaluation of the adulation of a woman admirer of Willoughby – ‘welcome if you like, as a form of homage; but common, almost vulgar.’24 And in the sentence that precedes the calming ‘He thought of George Meredith’ there is a detailed description of the Woman’s face that focuses upon ‘the extraordinary pallor of her lips, of which the lower protruded slightly and curled upward contemptuously to compress the upper,’ a portrait sketch which is an adaptation of the very last sentence of The Egoist: ‘But taking a glance at the others of her late company of actors, she [the Comic Muse] compresses her lips.’25
Just how the reference to Meredith in this instance enables the protagonist of ‘Assumption’ to regain ‘something of his calm’ is, however, very much open to questioning. One could speculate that there is some critical self-awareness implied here since the ending of The Egoist is a portrait of vanity and pretentiousness chastised. For, to quote from Meredith’s ‘An Essay on the Idea of Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit’, whenever men’s actions ‘wax out of proportion, over-blown, affected, pretentious, bombastical’ (characteristics that could indeed be justly applied to the ‘he’’s encounter with the Woman), the ‘Spirit overhead will look humanely malign, and cast an oblique light on them.’26 This paradoxical image of the ‘humanely malign’ brings to mind the compressed lips of both the Comic Muse and the Woman in ‘Assumption.’ Beckett’s short story is admittedly much too slight and elliptical to bear the full weight of these suggestive analogies, which are carefully embedded in the text, even if they are by no means fully developed. Hence it might be more judicious in the context of ‘Assumption’ to return to the central point that it is a complex revisioning of Joyce’s Portrait. Stephen Dedalus is calmed by the thought of Bulwer-Lytton, just as Beckett’s ‘he’ is calmed by the thought of Meredith; and within the context of ‘Assumption’ and its extensive borrowings from Portrait, the Meredith reference could most profitably be read as a very roundabout reference to Joyce. Nevertheless, it must also be kept in mind that the ‘Prelude’ to The Egoist clearly gave Beckett the very rationale for his ‘digest’ version of Portrait. Meredith there comments on how ‘wise men’ tell us how the Comic Spirit ‘condenses whole sections of the book in a sentence, volumes in a character.’ There are fifty chapters plus the ‘Prelude’ in The Egoist and fifty-one sentences in ‘Assumption.’ Creative writing as well as literary criticism would seem to entail for Beckett a type of ‘book-keeping.’
Stephen and Beckett’s nameless hero both experience a sense of loss as a result of their encounters with women. Stephen at the beginning of chapter 3 comments that ‘at his first violent sin he had felt a wave of vitality pass out of him and had feared to find his body or soul maimed by excess’ (97); instead, Stephen later feels ‘a dark peace’ and ‘cold lucid indifference.’ Beckett’s ‘he’ is, in dramatic contrast, figuratively torn to pieces: ‘When at last she went away he felt that something had gone out from him, something he could not spare’ (my emphasis). The last part of the third paragraph piles up images of pain, suffering, and destruction until the ‘he,’ ‘in contemplation and absorption of this woman,’27 seems to reach a state of apotheosis: ‘he was released, achieved, the blue flower, Vega, GOD’ (6). The conclusion to this strange story, in which Beckett relies so heavily on Joyce and yet so radically alters the context or structure of the original, begins ‘Thus each night he died and was God, each night revived and was torn, torn and battered with increasing grievousness, so that he hungered to be irretrievably engulfed in the light of eternity, one with the birdless cloudless colourless skies, in infinite fulfillment’ (6–7), followed by a two-sentence fourth paragraph in which, finally, ‘he’ does ‘shout’ and the ‘great storm of sound’ destroys him and ‘fused into the breath of the forest and the throbbing cry of the sea.’ The one-sentence fifth and final ‘paragraph’ consists solely of a post-mortem bulletin that returns us from the isolation of the room to the social realm: ‘They found her caressing his wild dead hair’ (7). Beckett’s ending with its explosion of energy also reminds us of his ending to ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce’ and the ‘flood of movement and vitality’ that Beckett says characterizes Joyce’s Purgatory.
The first conclusion of ‘Assumption,’ the vision that ends the third paragraph – ‘one with the birdless cloudless colourless skies’ – would seem to be the climax of Beckett’s revisions and rewritings of Joyce in this, his first published short story (and by far the most condensed and elliptical). These phases of transcendence, rephrased as they are as a lessness, are a negative version of one of the most striking epiphanies in Portrait, the birdgirl scene that ends chapter 4 and is clearly set in opposition to the prostitute scene that ends chapter 2, and which was the core of Beckett’s rewriting in ‘Assumption.’ At the end of ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce,’ Beckett, possibly thinking of this scene in which Stephen is transported by his sighting of the girl ‘in midstream,’ a ‘wild angel,’ stated: ‘Mr Joyce’s Terrestial Paradise is the tradesmen’s entrance onto the sea-shore’ (33). Stephen’s epiphany – hedged heavily with irony, as he ‘sing[s] wildly to the sea to greet the advent of life that had cried to him’ (152) – is filled with numerous references to clouds, colours, and, of course, the birdgirl herself (depicted in blues and whites as a Virgin Mary figure who does not need to be ‘assumed,’ since her home is here on earth). Indeed, it was ‘A day of dappled seaborne clouds’ (147): ‘[Stephen’s] throat ached with a desire to cry aloud, the cry of a hawk or eagle on high, to cry piercingly of his deliverance to the winds. This was the call of life to his soul’ (150). For Beckett’s ‘he’ the ‘cry’ that is released is a death cry and the Woman is an odd mixture of sensuality and purity, a kind of Whore-Madonna. Beckett at this point would seem to be rejecting Joyce’s mediation between art and life and religion, and having set a no-win situation for himself – ‘He could have shouted and could not’ – for which he has no answers can only destroy his protagonist. Hence what transpires in ‘Assumption’ is the presentation of a vain dream of the reality that lies beyond the boundaries of art. As I wrote in Reconstructing Beckett, ‘this very short story has, nevertheless, set out the essential conflict inherent in artistic genesis for Beckett: a life and death struggle between the self and the other.’28 To that judgment now needs to be added the complex texturing of the Joyce-Beckett relationship as part of that struggle between self and other. Before we go on to add to the number of critical readings we already have of ‘Assumption,’ such as the Unanimist ones of Phil Baker and John Pilling, the Manichaean one of Laura Barge, the Surrealist one of Lois Gordon, or indeed the Orphean one of P.J. Murphy, we need to take into careful consideration the very foundations of Beckett’s engagement with Joyce as evidenced in ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce’ and its companion text, ‘Assumption.’29
To be sure, the most difficult and confusing aspect of Beckett’s first published short story is determining whether or not it affords a critical perspective whereby the reader can make informed judgments of value about the story’s development and thereby ascribe significance to it. Here the Joycean elements are crucial to such aesthetic and critical deliberations. Beckett’s very detailed references to Portrait throughout ‘Assumption’ all seem to focus upon a critique of the epiphany, that sudden revelatory moment of insight that Beckett and his narrator-surrogate in this story clearly see as a false assumption, so long as it is restricted by terms that would deny the kinetic and physical dimensions and instead promote only an aesthetic apprehension characterized by a ‘luminous silent stasis’ (185). Throughout ‘Assumption’ this critique is consistent and effectively developed in terms of the imagery of an armed struggle – at least until the final few sentences of the pivotal and decisive third paragraph. Here Beckett’s ‘he’ and by implication his narrator abandon such a critique and the attendant quest for a new aesthetic fitting for this more complex reality and instead, in a remarkable volte-face, move towards the realms of the mystical and transcendental and away from the ‘pain of Beauty.’ And, in effecting this retreat, the attack on Stephen Dedalus’s theories of art is abandoned.
Beckett’s short story now ironically appears to endorse uncritically some of those very positions Stephen had successfully worked his way through in order to reach a series of modernist tenets for his future artistic production. When Beckett’s ‘he’ is said to hunger ‘to be irretrievably engulfed in the light of eternity, one with the birdless cloudless colourless skies, in infinite fulfillment,’ this mystical quest would seem to fly directly against Stephen’s own version of claritas, which, after a self-confessed long period of bafflement, he affirmed in no uncertain terms as having nothing to do with ‘symbolism or idealism,’ a version in which he strongly rejected the idea of the ‘supreme quality of beauty being a light from some other world, the idea of which matter is but the shadow, the reality of which it is but a symbol’ (185). Stephen Dedalus can then go on to reject categorically any interpretation of Aquinas that would suggest ‘that claritas is the artistic discovery and representation of the divine purpose’ (185). The ‘he’’s apotheosis during his nocturnal vigils (‘each night he died and was God’) and his desire ‘to be irretrievably engulfed in the light of eternity’ would seem to be Beckett’s way in this story of underlining how, at this starting point, while he is able to offer a critique of some of the perceived weaknesses and omissions in Stephen Dedalus’s aesthetic theory, he doesn’t know what to do next, that the only way out of the impasse of ‘He could have shouted and could not,’ for the time being, is annihilation and a mystical desire for a transcendence that must perforce lie outside the boundaries of artistic discovery and representation. In other words, the critique peters out in the ending of this story as the ‘he’ (perhaps with the silent complicity of the narrator) would seem to endorse a ‘symbolism or idealism’ that Stephen had already quite rightly rejected as one that denied full significance to this world of ours and instead pointed to a ‘light from some other world.’ The turning towards a mystical reality beyond the boundaries of art (and language) at the end of ‘Assumption’ could be taken as Beckett’s own critical self-reflection that even though he has been able to isolate for himself a number of key questions that his art will have to investigate further, he doesn’t at this starting point have any answers about how to proceed beyond dramatizing such impasses.
Until the emergence of these transcendental elements, the most striking feature of the work in terms of its rewriting and recasting of elements from Portrait has been how they are restructured within an encompassing context of warfare imagery, which adds a kinetic dimension that differentiates Beckett’s views from young Dedalus’s. J.D. O’Hara points out how in the first paragraph of his story Beckett mistakenly refers to a ‘Vimy Light’ instead of a Very Light, a flare named for its English inventor and employed to supply a brilliant illumination of battlefields during the Great War.30 The Vimy (Very) Light reference comes into play as a means of advancing Beckett’s attack on Stephen’s aesthetic theory, targeting its key concept of claritas (radiance) as developed in chapter 5 of Portrait: ‘The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state’ (185). The ‘sudden brilliance’ (3) of the Vimy (Very) Light could be regarded as an ironic debunking of Stephen’s highly intellectualized aestheticism.31 What it allows to be ‘apprehended luminously’ are scenes of destruction and mutilation, discord and fragmentation; in short, the Vimy (Very) Light functions as a sort of negative epiphany.
In a revision of a passage from Portrait cited earlier, Beckett adds the kinetic image of warfare and the paradoxical formulation of an aesthetic based simultaneously on composition and decomposition: ‘the highest art reduces significance in order to obtain the inexplicable bombshell perfection’ (4). These images of war and destruction begin innocuously enough in ‘Assumption’ as a sort of comedy of manners associated with the unnamed central character, who is disconcerted by an unorthodox opening move in a game of intellectual combat. Against the ‘noisy violence’ of social discourse, he possesses the ‘remarkable faculty of whispering the turmoil down’ (3). It is this ‘whispering’ that is originally likened to ‘all explosive feats of the kind,’ in particular the Vimy (Very) Light that calls attention to itself by its ‘sudden brilliance.’ This ironic play with social mannerisms does, however, transform itself over the rest of the opening paragraph into a much more serious engagement with issues of war and combat. The ironic overkill of likening the ‘he’’s various social manipulations as ‘all finely produced and thrown into the heat of the conflict, so that the most fiercely oblivious combatant could not fail to be neatly and intolerably irritated’ gives way to a much more powerful statement of an aesthetic no longer dependent on such social trifling: ‘Before no supreme manifestation of Beauty do we proceed comfortably up a staircase of sensation […] We are taken up bodily and pitched breathless on the peak of a sheer crag: which is the pain of Beauty’ (4).
Within the very structure of ‘Assumption’ there is a dramatic contrast between a great victory gained at great risk and a series of humiliating and demoralizing defeats. Within ‘Assumption,’ the ‘he’ whose story the narrator recounts is totally incapable of scaling the lofty heights of any such dizzying victory. This ‘he’ has retreated from such engagements to seek refuge in his room as he tries to quell the ‘other’ presence/self within him and its ‘wild rebellious surge that aspired violently towards realization in sound’ (4). The imagery now switches in focus to the more personal domain, away from the pitched battle of the set kind in the first paragraph to internecine warfare in which the carceral image is now foregrounded. The ‘he’ feels his prisoner’s ‘implacable caged resentment, its longing to be released in one splendid drunken scream’ (4); it is, however, prevented from such, being encompassed by a ‘flesh-locked sea of silence’ (5). The profound ambiguity of this struggle, more accurately termed a ‘civil war,’ is put this way by the narrator: ‘he dreaded lest his prisoner should escape, he longed that it might escape; it tore at his throat and he choked it back in dread and sorrow’ (5). The essential confusion turns upon whether the ‘he’ regards this ‘other’ within himself as ‘friend’ or ‘foe.’ By the end of the second paragraph, the erection of various defensive barriers (the damming images derived from Portrait and Stephen’s struggle to find expression for himself in the prostitute scene) has only resulted in increasing the pressure of the forces tearing at him: ‘he felt he was losing, playing into the hands of the enemy by the very severity of his restrictions’ (5).
The encounter with the Woman makes it clear that sexuality as embodied by her is the fundamental means whereby the ‘it’ locked within can hope to achieve more than the previously mentioned ‘miserable consummation in driblets of sound.’ From this point on the imagery of warfare is reintroduced as the dominant pattern as the ‘he’ sees himself now in a pitched battle with the ‘it’ and ‘the Woman,’ who are somehow in alliance against him. In this demented comedy of manners, even the most casual and colloquial of expressions now take on a military bearing as a campaign of sexual warfare is waged. For example, the ‘noisy intrusive curious enthusiasm’ of women is likened to the ‘spontaneous expression of admiration bursting from American hearts before Michelangelo’s tomb in Santa Croce’ (5), with its buried reference to the American national anthem – ‘the rockets’ red glare/the bombs bursting in air.’ And the Woman’s voice itself would seem to be likened to the stuttering stall of a reconnaissance plane surveying a battlefield: ‘The voice droned on, wavered, stopped.’ The ‘he’ prepares to withdraw; ‘she turned on the light and advanced carelessly into the room’ and ‘scattered his intentness’ (italics mine). No revelatory ‘radiance’ or claritas is in evidence here; her eyes ‘were pools of obscurity.’32 Thanks to her ‘visitations’ he ‘lost part of his essential animality, so that the water rose, terrifying him.’ The war image is now of an ineluctable defeat, tediously drawn out, to be sharply distinguished from ‘we are taken up bodily and pitched breathless on the peak of a sheer crag’: ‘Still he fought on all day, hopelessly, mechanically, only relaxing with twilight, to listen for her coming to loosen yet another stone in the clumsy dam’ (6). Then there occurs a revelation of sorts as, after nightly bouts of being ‘torn and battered,’ the ‘he,’ alone in his room, would transcend the battle with both the human and the ‘it’ or ‘other self’ of an unknown nature within himself – a veritable doppelgänger – and ‘be irretrievably engulfed in the light of eternity, one with the birdless cloudless colourless skies, in infinite fulfillment’ (7).
The last two very short paragraphs describe the denouement: ‘Then it happened.’ The ‘it’ is ‘a great storm of sound’ that ‘swept aside’ the Woman, who was ‘contemplating the face that she had overlaid with death.’ The opening impasse of ‘He could have shouted and could not’ is now broken by a battle cry that is also a death cry, ‘shaking the very house with its prolonged, triumphant vehemence, climbing in a dizzy, bubbling scale, until, dispersed, it fused into the breath of the forest and the throbbing cry of the sea’ (7). The ‘triumphant vehemence’ is, of course, at best a Pyrrhic victory in which the prisoner caged within the ‘he’ is released and ‘fused’ within nature and the host himself annihilated. The final one-sentence fifth paragraph reads ‘They found her caressing his wild dead hair.’ The bizarre image of a shout emanating with such earth-shattering force that it literally ‘swept aside’ the Woman as a bomb would is indeed an ‘explosive feat’, but one very different from that which ‘whisper[ed] the turmoil down’ within the social contexts delineated in the opening paragraph. Here the ‘turmoil’ is such that it cannot be suppressed but must be let out. Throughout Beckett’s strange parable about the warring elements within his views of the aesthetic experience, the encompassing question that incorporates Beckett’s critique of Stephen’s theorizing in Portrait is the problematical relationship of inner and outer realities and the means of somehow authentically representing them.
This point is implicit in the Joycean reference that is built into ‘Assumption’’s final sentence. ‘They found her caressing his wild dead hair’ echoes Joyce’s final sentence in his play Exiles; Bertha’s last words there are an appeal to her ‘husband,’ the artist Richard Rowan: ‘O, my strange wild lover, come back to me again’ (PJJ, 626). That Beckett intends an allusion to Joyce’s play is reinforced by the verbal correspondence in the stage direction leading up to her final theatrical declaration, ‘again caressing his hand’ (my underlining). Whereas in Joyce’s scenario the artist-figure has received ‘a deep wound of doubt which can never be healed’ (due to his doubts about his wife’s fidelity in her relationship with his friend Robert), in Beckett’s ‘closet drama’ the artist-figure is utterly destroyed and totally incapable of mediating the menage à trois of self, Woman, and that other being within characterized by a ‘wild rebellious surge that aspired violently towards realization in sound.’ Written immediately after Portrait, Exiles extends the investigation of Stephen Dedalus’s fundamental dilemma: how can the artist come to terms with personal relationships and the restraints and restrictions imposed by his society, yet somehow maintain his integrity? Beckett cannot escape the contingencies of inner and outer realities – indeed, it is the engagement with these issues that drives his artistic undertaking; however, the most pressing task at hand is to find a way of first ensuring the very survival of the self since Beckett in ‘Assumption’ has pushed the dilemma to a point of no return, an apparent dead end. From the very beginning Beckett has likened this to a battlefield, a literary campaign.33 The first two sentences of ‘Assumption’ have strategically cut off any possibility of a return to the imagined safety and security of a status quo ante bellum.
‘Assumption’ is a major Beckett text in that it reveals Beckett’s studied and concentrated engagement with Joyce at the very beginning of the young artist’s career, initiating a line of development that is extended and elaborated in surprisingly detailed ways in Beckett’s next three novels in English. ‘Assumption’ is truly Beckett’s ‘first important work,’ not the poem ‘Whoroscope’ (1930), which was so designated by Lawrence Harvey and echoed in a number of subsequent critical appraisals.34 Indeed, as we have seen, ‘Assumption’’s primary focus is upon a rewriting of Stephen’s visit to the prostitute at the end of chapter 2 of Portrait, thereby making it the first in a series of ‘whoroscopes’ in Beckett’s writing. In her recent summary evaluation of the Beckett canon, Ruby Cohn states: ‘Peter Murphy is virtually alone in viewing it [‘Assumption’] as a key Beckett text.’35 Cohn’s pronouncement does not, however, take fully into account my point that it is a key text only in so far as Beckett rewrites it in a host of innovative ways in later works; taken by itself, ‘Assumption’ is all too obviously marked by a number of stylistic and conceptual inconsistencies, as the present discussion has taken pains to acknowledge. With reference to my argument about the Joycean sources in ‘Assumption,’ Cohn concludes: ‘In fiction, however, feelings are only as deep as the words that convey them, and Beckett’s words are shallow through staleness, however they may echo Joyce.’36 This evaluation does not account for the literary properties of the text as an assemblage of Joycean allusions, a veritable cento, for this first Beckett fiction is a parody of the postmodern sort described by Linda Hutcheon in which the rewriting is both a critique of and a homage to the original,37 in this instance Joyce’s Portrait. Beckett’s primary focus is then first and foremost on coming to terms with the aesthetic principles put forward in Portrait; this critical exercise takes precedence over the more conventional assessment proposed by Cohn. In my own reading, the expanding recognition of the full extent and complexity of Beckett’s referencing of Portrait brought the text to life in new and illuminating ways. In the concluding paragraph of his Allusion: A Literary Graft, Allan Pascoe affirms that allusion has indeed a ‘virtually limitless potential’: ‘As long as the text exists, someday a reader may come with the proper fertile background and permit a new efflorescence. When this happens, the seed sinks new roots and the reader’s mind gives birth to a living text.’38
Most readers of ‘Assumption’ have understandably been bemused by its apparent lack of any indications about how to go about reading it. Is Beckett simply indulgently amusing himself in the exaggerated depictions of romantic angst, or is there a more concerted critical effort being exercised here? Above all else, the preceding discussions of the Joycean elements in ‘Assumption’ make it clear that Beckett’s intention at least was to pursue the latter option, even if the work itself is simply not developed at enough length and depth to resolve this issue satisfactorily. Nevertheless, the detailed Joycean references do raise the encompassing question of parody as a corrective form of mimicry and, more generally, the comic function of a critical rewriting. Two possible sources for the title of the story reinforce these points. The first is from George Meredith’s ‘An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit.’ Beckett’s reference in ‘Assumption’ – ‘He thought of George Meredith and recovered something of his calm’ – echoes a key statement in the essay where Meredith explains how those persons of the ‘exalted variety’ (a case in point being the unnamed hero of ‘Assumption’) necessarily ‘come under the calm, curious eye of the Comic Spirit’ (my emphasis); in this instance, it is the Comic Spirit that ‘assumes the saving grace’ (my emphasis).39 The second source is, fittingly enough, from Portrait, the master text behind ‘Assumption.’ In response to the director’s probing query as to whether he has a ‘vocation,’ Stephen acknowledges how he heard in ‘this proud address an echo of his own proud musings,’ adding: ‘In that dim life which he had lived through in his musings he had assumed the voices and gestures which he had noted with various priests’ (my emphasis, 141). In other words, Stephen’s efforts to assert his own voice necessarily involve an ‘assumption’ of a special sort as he takes on (‘assumes’) the identity of various priests he has encountered. When he turns away from this ‘vocation’ to embrace instead that of a ‘priest of the eternal imagination’ (192), he will again ‘assume’ the voices and identifying traits of the various literary figures he has ‘noted.’40 And Beckett, following in Joyce’s footsteps, will appropriate in his own right aspects of his master’s voice. Reading Joyce, most especially A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, was – undeniably – based on the overwhelming textual evidence, one of the major literary revelations of Beckett’s early years and warrants being considered in tandem with his early reading of Dante as instances of lifelong influence. ‘Assumption’ reveals some of the principles behind Beckett’s assumed identity as a Dedalus redux, some of which admittedly are problematical, if not contradictory, in nature. In this regard, Beckett’s first published work of fiction bears an uncanny resemblance to Joyce’s essay ‘A Portrait of the Artist’ (1904), which has been described as ‘an extraordinarily dense piece of writing’ that foreshadowed ‘the difficulties of Joyce’s later work,’ albeit ‘on a reduced scale’ (JJP, 203–4).41 Beckett must have felt both flattered and disconcerted by Adrienne Monnier’s characterization of him upon the publication of his two very different Joycean works in transition 16/17 as ‘the new Stephen Dedalus.’42