All of Beckett’s major productions in the early period of 1929 to 1945, from ‘Assumption’ to Watt, reveal in progressively more complex and detailed ways attempts to come to terms with and move beyond the aesthetic theory formulated in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. ‘Assumption’ establishes the basic pattern that will be repeated with variations in the other works of this period: an initial assumption that the modernist moment of revelation is fundamentally inadequate as an authentic means of mediating and expressing the full complexity of contemporary life and art; hence Beckett’s starting point is a dramatization of the aporias of a modernist aesthetic, such as his opening gambit of ‘He could have shouted and could not.’ The initial series of critical reservations about the theory of the epiphany is not developed in any viable fashion and quickly terminates in an impasse of one sort or another: the nameless ‘he’ of ‘Assumption’ is torn asunder; Belacqua is inconclusively abandoned at the ‘conclusion’ of Dream of Fair to Middling Women (what is the point of going on pointlessly?); the tiresome Murphy is blown up, hoist by his own petard, so to speak; and Watt, who fails to fathom his own ‘whatness,’ or that of anyone or anything else for that matter, ends up in an asylum. The last words of Watt – ‘no symbols where none intended’ – can also stand as a judgment on all these early works in which a critical probing of modernist aesthetics as exemplified by Joyce and Proust and their handling of the symbol as a means of expressing various realities is the crux of Beckett’s own speculations.
Another characteristic of Beckett’s writing throughout this early period is announced in ‘Assumption’: the recourse to a mystical transcendence of some sort that would absolutely cancel out the perplexing question of determining what is indeed real and the search for the means of expression for the same. Beckett’s own position is quite clearly self-contradictory in terms of that put forward in Portrait where Stephen Dedalus, after a ‘long period of bafflement,’ determined that claritas could not be taken for a ‘light from some other world,’ could not be regarded as a ‘symbolism or idealism’ pointing towards or standing for transcendent spiritual realities. Beckett’s desperate manoeuvring from one extreme to the other is dramatically foregrounded in ‘Assumption’ with the assertion ‘the highest art reduces significance’ being later replaced by the protagonist’s apotheosis whereby ‘he was released, achieved the blue flower, Vega, GOD …’ Here we have an encapsulation of the major theoretical dilemma Beckett confronts in a number of increasingly complex and pressing ways throughout these early works: the competing claims of ‘sign’ and ‘symbol’ for the field of expression in a literary ‘text’ or ‘work.’ To reduce significance is to move towards words as ‘signs’ in a semiotic configuration in which they have only formal relationships with each other, as distinct from any referential connections with the commonplace or, for that matter, a transcendental beyond. The other strategy is to invoke a cluster of ‘symbols,’ beginning with the talismanic ‘blue flower’ of Novalis’s distillation of Romantic idealism, moving through Vega, the brightest star in Orpheus’s constellation of Lyre and hence a most fitting symbolic expression of the artist’s other-worldliness, thereby leaving only – and in capital letters at that – ‘GOD’ as the ultimate expression of literary transcendence and deification.
Such extremist formulations allow for a ‘literary’ way out in Beckett’s first short story, but they do not advance any rigorous probing beyond the recognition of the central problem itself in terms of the competing claims of ‘sign’ and ‘symbol.’ Nevertheless, from the very beginning, in prototypical fashion, Beckett has placed himself in the midst of the defining literary debate of our time, engaging in the ‘sign’ versus ‘symbol’ debate as an inherent feature of modernism itself and as a preliminary version of the ‘linguistic turn,’ which has constituted the most influential paradigm shift within contemporary thought. This shift has taken place so thoroughly that in a representative textbook such as Studying Literature: The Essential Companion (2001), edited by Paul Goring et al., one will find in the ‘Glossary of literary and theoretical terms’ under SYMBOL the entry: ‘See SIGN.’ Cross-referencing yields: ‘A Symbol is anything which stands for something apart from itself.’1 What distinguishes Beckett’s literary enterprise over the sixty years of his writing life is how his avant-garde experimentalism inhabits a middle position of sorts: his writings, both theoretical and creative in this early period, are driven by an in-depth critique of modernism itself as most prominently embodied by Joyce’s writing, and, to a lesser degree, by that of Proust. But Beckett never completely allows for the subsumption of the possibilities of larger claims to signification by the play of signs, and it is this ‘middling’ position that sets his writing apart, thereby challenging the orthodoxies of both modernism and postmodernism.
Both Beckett’s Proust (1931) and his Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932; published 1992) explore in quite different ways the question of symbolism as a means of conveying certain inescapable and essential realities of the human and literary conditions. Indeed, the key word in Beckett’s monograph is ‘real,’ with its many cognates, such as ‘reality,’ ‘realisation,’ ‘realisable,’ etc. Thirty-odd references of this sort strive to sort out what can be deemed the authentic reality, to be sharply distinguished from the mock or pseudo-reality of the naturalists ‘worshipping the offal of experience’ (28). Throughout Proust a whole series of value-added adjectives are at work to underline this distinction between the genuine realities and other ersatz substitutes: for example, the repeated emphasis upon ‘the essence – the Idea’ (11), the numerous variations of an ‘essential statement of reality’ (22), as afforded by the ‘mystic experience’ of Proustian involuntary memory that breaks through the defensive barriers erected by habit. At one level Beckett’s declared opening focus on Proust’s ‘dualism in multiplicity’ (1) comes down to a vision of human creatures trapped in time as ‘victims and prisoners’ (2) being dramatically contrasted with their liberation as miraculously vouch-safed in a totally unpredictable way by the mysterious workings of involuntary memory. Another variant of this dualism casts the human dilemma in terms of a fundamentally melancholic spectacle in which we are imprisoned and ‘deformed’ by ‘yesterday,’ and such pleasures as remain can only rarely be experienced via the Proustian revelation of involuntary memory, which ‘for a moment’ (a repeated modernist phrase throughout Beckett’s discussion) allows a glimpse of ‘freedom.’ This is the forlorn spectacle Beckett describes in his first two explicit references to the ‘reality’ that will be his topic throughout Proust: ‘we are other, no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday. A calamitous day, but calamitous not necessarily in content. The good or evil disposition of the object has neither reality nor significance. The immediate joys and sorrows of the body and the intelligence are so many superfoetations. Such as it was, it has been assimilated to the only world that has reality and significance, the world of our own latent consciousness’ (3).
In Proust there is a sense at times that Beckett is still primarily engaged with Joyce and that the ostensible subject under discussion is in some instances a circumlocution for this. Even the brief commentary above on Beckett’s passage in Proust on ‘we are other, no longer what we were’ foregrounds Beckett’s critical distinction between Joyce’s and Proust’s aesthetic premises. Beckett regards Joyce as dealing fundamentally with the ‘whatness’ of the real, as accepting a conflux of realities as already present, whereas for himself (‘Assumption’ made this clear) and for Proust the antecedent question is, more problematically, ‘what is real?’ Hence Proust’s recognition and depiction of the multiplicity of selves that coexist throughout the workings of time does allow Beckett to extend his own critical probing of a series of fragmented and oppositional selves as posited in his opening sentences of ‘Assumption.’ But it is also worth noting that Beckett often pointedly invokes Joycean terms in his discussion of Proust’s aesthetic. For example, in the final paragraph of the opening section of Proust: ‘At the best, all that is realised in Time (all Time produce), whether in Art or Life, can only be possessed successively, by a series of partial annexations – and never integrally and at once’ (7). Portrait’s first stage in aesthetic apprehension, the recognition of wholeness or integritas, is thus dislocated in Proust, only to be miraculously not so much reinstated as at last brought into being by the alchemy of involuntary memory, specific incidents of which Beckett lists in the fourth section of his study: ‘It appears for the first time as the episode of the madeleine, and again on at least five capital occasions before its final and multiple investment of the Guermantes Hotel at the opening of the second volume of Le Temps Retrouvé, its culminating and integral expression’ (22–3, my italics). Moreover, such a sacred moment or peak experience ‘clarifies the most humble incident of its ascent’ (22, my italics), which sounds indeed as if Beckett is paraphrasing Portrait’s concept of claritas rather than focusing solely upon Proust’s own terminology. Claritas as ‘radiance’ is explicitly identified with Beckett’s description of Marcel’s first sighting of Albertine by the Sea, ‘absorbed in the radiance of the “little band” at Balbec’ (31). Nevertheless, Beckett’s commentary on the nature of Proustian moments of revelation emphasizes their kinetic nature – they are ‘intensely violent’ (24) or, in Proust’s own words, ‘carved, as by a thunderbolt, within me’ (28) – thereby distinguishing them in kind from the ‘luminous silent stasis’ of Stephen Dedalus’s theory of the final stage of aesthetic apprehension.
Beckett clearly found aspects of Proust congenial in that he is able to use them to extend his critique of Portrait’s ‘static’ presentation of ‘Beauty,’ which he emended in ‘Assumption’ to the ‘pain of Beauty.’ A critical qualification is in order here, however; once again, as in our discussion of ‘Assumption,’ it needs to be emphasized that there are two distinct Beckettian approaches when it comes to his engagement with Joyce’s work. Beckett realizes, of course, that Stephen Dedalus’s aesthetic pronouncements in Portrait cannot be taken as fully equivalent to Joyce’s own views. This is made abundantly clear in ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce’ when Beckett, employing the key word that underlies the aestheticizing of Portrait, states categorically that ‘the Beauty of Work in Progress is not presented in space alone’: ‘There is a temporal as well as a spatial unity to be apprehended’ (28). Beckett is obviously aware that Joyce’s vision in Portrait, and all his work for that matter, cannot be reduced and vastly oversimplified by seeing it as existing in essentially spatial terms only, an argument which possesses certain persuasive powers, to be sure (see, for example, Joseph Frank’s influential argument about the defining spatial dimensions of modernism). 2 But there is also the other Beckett, the would-be writer as distinct from the critic, who, in order to get started, needs leverage, both critical and creative, to set himself apart from the overwhelming presence (and influence) of the master, the portrait of the artist as a fully fledged creator. Hence, as we have seen in ‘Assumption,’ Beckett wilfully ‘misreads’ Joyce à la Harold Bloom’s description of the ephebe’s struggle to resist, challenge, and alter his master’s voice.3 This does not exclude the fact that Beckett also raises legitimate concerns about Stephen Dedalus’s trinity of aesthetic principles (integritas, consonantia, and claritas), but to identify such criticisms with Joyce himself is obviously more a rhetorical strategy on Beckett’s part than a serious critical assessment. Nevertheless, it is by means of this misprision that Beckett begins to work his way through and finally beyond Joyce to his own aesthetic theories, and, as Proust exemplifies, Beckett has also adapted specifically Joycean terminology in order to develop his exposition of the Proustian moment of revelation, thereby allowing Beckett to deal with the subject at hand, as well as by indirection with Joyce (just as, for example, Beckett had circuitously engaged Joyce via Meredith in ‘Assumption’).
The climax of Beckett’s critical investigation of Proustian aesthetics through the filter of Joycean terminology is the penultimate, sixth section of his Proust, what Ruby Cohn has termed ‘The Epiphany in the Guermantes Library’ (without, however, focusing on any particular parallels with Joyce in her brief discussion of this episode).4 This section is much anticipated and is almost as well advertised as its more famous successor, the sixth section or chapter of Murphy which deals with the portrait of the eponymous hero’s mind, so-called. The narrator of that novel is quick to point out: ‘Happily we need not concern ourselves with this apparatus as it really was – that would be an extravagance and impertinence – but solely with what it felt and pictured itself to be’ (107). In other words, symbolic expression is the central issue in both of these sixth sections. The vexed and problematical nature of the symbol as a means of expression as highlighted in Proust and soon after in Dream of Fair to Middling Women will lead to the narrator of Murphy ironically distancing himself from any such discussion, and in even more ambiguous and self-contradictory fashion the last words of Watt caution, ‘no symbols where none intended.’ In section six of Proust the symbols are, however, definitely intended in a particular way as Beckett finally delivers his exposition of the Proustian moment of revelation, which was announced as early as the topic sentence of the second paragraph of his monograph in the tantalizing reference to the narrator’s experience in the library of the Princesse de Guermantes. Section six of Proust critically engages the role of the symbolic as the means of expressing, of conveying that sense of the integration of various temporally dislocated realities and the concomitant radiant vision. In other words, the symbol is the proposed means of identifying, and of harmonizing, the realities and idealities of the aesthetic experience.
The unifying thesis behind Beckett’s necessarily somewhat fragmented approach to Proust’s massive work is ‘dualism in multiplicity.’ The two explicit references to symbol (and cognates thereof) before section six draw out a certain dualistic, if not contradictory, situation: the first emphasizes the use of symbol as a means of conveying a heightened and expanded significance of the actual when Marcel hears his grandmother’s voice over the phone – ‘this strange real voice is the measure of its owner’s suffering. He hears it also as the symbol of her isolation’ (15); the second points in quite a different direction, towards the spiritual realm, as Marcel tries to harmonize, as it were, the various Albertines who all fulfil in some way his sense of her ‘reality’ – ‘And the pleasure he takes with Albertine is intensified by the reaching out of his spirit towards that immaterial reality that she seems to symbolise, Balbec and its sea’ (33). How can such very different meanings of the word ‘symbol’ be reconciled, harmonized? Indeed, it is just such a question that constitutes the fundamental aporia of modernism.
Beckett’s Proust is a locus classicus of a number of theoretical impasses inherent in modernism itself. It is revealing and illuminating – even if only negatively – to see how Beckett describes this enterprise and to note the degree to which at this very early point in his career he is willing to accept or reject the implications of such theorizing in which the very nature of the symbol itself is of central importance. The decisive turn in Beckett’s deliberations comes in the middle of the tenth page of section six as he presents a theoretical description of the various syntheses brought about by involuntary memory and then follows with his interpretation and critical reservations about this ‘model of duplication’:
The identification of immediate with past experience, the recurrence of past action or reaction in the present, amounts to a participation between the ideal and the real, imagination and direct apprehension, symbol and substance. Such participation frees the essential reality that is denied to the contemplative as to the active life. What is common to present and past is more essential than either taken separately […] But, thanks to this reduplication, the experience is at once imaginative and empirical, at once an evocation and a direct perception, real without being merely actual, ideal without being merely abstract, the ideal real, the essential, the extratemporal. But if this mystical experience communicates an extratemporal essence, it follows that the communicant is for the moment an extratemporal being. Consequently, the Proustian solution consists, in so far as it has been examined, in the negation of Time and Death, the negation of Death because the negation of Time. Death is dead because Time is dead. (At this point a brief impertinence, which consists in considering Le Temps Retrouvé almost as inappropriate a description of the Proustian solution as Crime and Punishment of a masterpiece that contains no allusion to either crime or punishment. Time is not recovered, it is obliterated … (55–6)
Beckett’s summary of various Proustian syntheses via the miraculous workings of involuntary memory climaxes at the end of the first sentence in the passage cited above with the pairing ‘symbol and substance’ (yet another example of Beckett’s central thesis of Proust’s ‘dualism within multiplicity’). But how can ‘symbol and substance’ really be said to be integrally connected if both elements in this ‘communion’ are regarded as somehow directly apprehended (as Beckett throughout Proust has painstakingly emphasized)? When Beckett lists the various Proustian epiphanies in section four of Proust, he prefaces his tabulation this way: ‘the elements of communion are provided by the physical world, by some immediate and fortuitous act of perception. The process is almost one of intellectualised animism’ (23). As with the discussion of Joyce’s language in ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce,’ Beckett here also endorses a primitivist strain in high modernism whereby a direct, unmediated vision is touted as the only real and authentic goal of the artist.
That Beckett is not fully satisfied by the ‘symbol and substance’ pairing is made abundantly clear in the seventh and final section of Proust, where he has cobbled together a whole series of comments about Proust and art without any convincing or unifying argument; indeed, the reason for the eclectic grouping of various aperçus about Proust’s art and the role of the artist may be due to Beckett’s uneasy gyrations around how ‘symbol’ should be regarded in Proust’s world. Proust is said not to deal in concepts: ‘he pursues the Idea, the concrete. He admires the frescoes of the Paduan Arena because their symbolism is handled as a reality, special, literal and concrete’ (60). And further to the point: ‘For Proust the object may be a living symbol, but a symbol of itself. The symbolism of Baudelaire has become the autosymbolism of Proust’ (60). This is a sleight of hand as Beckett juggles words to mask the fact that he doesn’t really know how to make sense in a coherent critical fashion of Proust’s use of symbols, and it leads to a final throwing up of his hands in failure, as he, in self-cancelling fashion, places Proust’s ‘point of departure’ in Symbolism ‘or on its outskirts,’ quickly following with: ‘he recedes from the Symbolists – back towards Hugo. And for that reason he is a solitary and independent figure’ (61). So much for would-be old-fashioned source and influence study approaches – they are clearly no more forthcoming in terms of a genuine clarification of where Proust stands and what his symbols stand for than Beckett’s preceding attempts at literary theorizing.
In some strangely appropriate ways, the concluding movement of Beckett’s only major extended critical work echoes ironically the ending of Joyce’s Portrait: the voices of Stephen Dedalus’s ‘kinsmen’ call out to him to join their ‘company,’ and he answers back in his last words with a prayer that such father figures would ‘stand me now and ever in good stead.’ For Beckett in ‘Assumption’ and Proust, his two major literary forebears, ‘kinsmen,’ are found seriously wanting in terms of aesthetic theory and practice. In the final analysis, Beckett seems progressively more perplexed about the critical issue of Proust’s ‘symbolism’ (whether the capitalised variety or not), and for reasons that we will later examine more closely he clearly does not buy into the mystical transcendence of Proustian-type modernism as he depicts it in his Proust. And Joyce as ghost-presence is invoked by Beckett as a sort of framing device for the key passages of section six under scrutiny. Section six opens with a litany of negatives as Beckett describes Marcel’s sense of irrevocable losses, which have rendered his life ‘devoid of reality’ (59); foremost among these losses is Marcel’s sense that even art, which he had regarded as ‘the one ideal and inviolate element in a corruptible world’ (59), is also part of the encompassing world of null and void. Additionally, the materials of art are dismissed ‘as vulgar and unworthy as Rachel and Cottard, and pale and weary and cruel and inconstant and joyless as Shelley’s moon’ (50). Beckett is here pairing his two great modernist predecessors – Proust directly with the reference to two of his characters of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Joyce much more indirectly, as is often the case with Beckett: the moon of Shelley’s fragment plays an important role in Joyce’s Portrait, and Beckett’s choice of adjectives in Proust to describe it is directly indebted to Joyce’s commentary in Portrait.5
The Shelley fragment is first invoked in Portrait at the time of an overt rivalry between young Stephen and his father.6 The second Joycean reference is not so much ‘borrowed’ from Joyce as simply expropriated and comes at the end of the long passage cited above, which draws an analogy between the appropriateness of the titles for Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Proust’s Le Temps Retrouvé. Beckett was, in fact, Richard Ellmann’s source for another instance of father-son rivalry of the ostensibly literary sort, this time between Giorgio Joyce and his father James: ‘Giorgio liked to display in argument an obstinacy of the same weave as his father’s, informing him for example that the greatest novelist was Dostoevski, the greatest novel Crime and Punishment. His father said only that it was a queer title for a book which contained neither crime nor punishment.’7 A ‘brief impertinence,’ indeed; Beckett adopts/adapts as his own Joyce’s words on Dostoyevsky in order to effect a transition via analogy to an outright rejection of Proust’s climactic title for the decisive revelations whereby the writing of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu itself becomes possible: Le Temps Retrouvé.
Before examining the implications of Beckett’s judgment in this instance, it is worthwhile summarizing his position as it stands just prior to delivering his ‘brief impertinence.’ Beckett is, to adapt the words of Shelley’s fragment on the moon, ‘wandering companionless’: his ‘kinsmen’s voices have beckoned but their ‘company’ rejected for various reasons. The Shelley reference in section six of Proust is identified with the failure of artistic vision and allows Beckett to distance his aesthetic views from both Proust and Joyce – these ‘Old father[s], old artificer[s]’ will not stand in good stead the emerging portrait of Beckett himself as the artist as a young man, not ‘now’ and not ‘ever,’ since the nature of being in time is itself the crucial issue. In ‘Assumption’ the unnamed protagonist is left for dead in the final sentences, which recount the escape of the ‘other’ within him, his ‘prisoner.’ Stephen Dedalus’s theorizing in Portrait is shown to be sorely inadequate for the Beckettian vision of a divided self. The vision of a potentially endless series of epiphanies is greeted with a thoroughgoing scepticism for Beckett is preoccupied with the more fundamental question – in a philosophical sense – of determining the very grounding or foundation whereby such modernist moments of insight might be determined to be even a possibility. Neither Beckett nor his first protagonist in the short story has any sense of how such moments of revelation might be validated. The only solution, as we have seen, is one of dissolution, of a mystical transcendence that vainly mimics such epiphanies and ends in death, in self-annihilation. And Beckett proposes a similar reading of Proust’s peak modernist moment in the epiphany of the Guermantes Library. Beckett argues that this ‘mystical experience’ must logically imply ‘that the communicant is for the moment an extratemporal being.’ But what words could convey an ‘extratemporal essence’? None, of course, would be the logical answer. However, as we have seen, Beckett’s vexed but fruitless critical oscillations around the term ‘symbol’ (particularly as writ large in the Symbolist Movement) try to make sense of this fundamental questioning of the means of expression by seeing the symbol as primarily focused on a supposedly ‘higher’ and ‘deeper’ and ‘more authentic’ spiritual reality, yet somehow still connecting with its material manifestations.8 The fluctuation veers wildly between the ‘GOD’ of ‘Assumption’ – all letters in upper case – and the later formulation of a diminished ‘God’ – definitely consigned to a suffixed diminutive case: a veritable ‘Godot.’
This is a decisive moment in Beckett’s early thinking on aesthetics, one which is crucial for his later development. In ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce,’ Beckett underscored how he regarded Vico as anything but a mystic, negotiating the extremes of the transcendental and the materialistic by means of what Beckett termed the ‘rational.’ A variation on this middle position is implicit in Proust, perhaps best recast as the ‘critical.’ Beckett subjects the symbol, Symbolism, and the modernist moment of revelation in Proust to a thorough scrutiny, in an effort to evaluate its validity in terms of its own ‘poetic logic,’ to adapt Vichian terminology. Beckett recounts how after Marcel leaves the Guermantes Library ‘Time is recovered and Death with it’ (57), thereby acknowledging how both dimensions of time need to be taken together if justice is to be done to Proust’s vision of man’s temporality. But there is a fundamental contradiction in Beckett’s argument in Proust: although Beckett does acknowledge Proust’s ‘dualism in multiplicity,’ he also exhibits an underlying tendency in Proust, via Schopenhauerian Idealism, to short-circuit this complex vision by giving ultimate priority to a Transcendental realm of Platonic Ideas. This philosophical dimension of Beckett’s Proust in many ways ends up endorsing that mystico-spiritual dimension of the symbol, thereby going against the very grain of Beckett’s avowed critical reservations about such literary judgments. Beckett’s key aside in the decisive section six of Proust in which he terms Le Temps Retrouvé a most ‘inappropriate’ title is a case in point. As Rupert Wood has pointed out, in this instance ‘Proustian involuntary memory becomes Schopenhauerian aesthetic experience,’ proceeding then to show how the analogy is inaccurate in so far as for Proust ‘time in its pure state is regained through involuntary memory, whereas for Schopenhauer time is merely obliterated in the rapture of the aesthetic experience. Beckett, therefore, admits that he cannot understand the title of Proust’s final book, Le Temps Retrouvé.’9 Beckett is deemed ‘more of a Schopenhauerian than a Proustian’ and hence ‘filters the whole of Proust’s theorizing on time, memory and habit through the aesthetic system of his favourite philosopher.’10 But not all of Proust’s theorizings are filtered through Schopenhauer; as we have seen, Beckett does strive to see Proust’s work within its own terms of reference in so far as he does justice to the ‘dualism in multiplicity’ thesis. Schopenhauer might be regarded as Beckett’s ‘favourite philosopher’ in that certain images and aspects of his philosophy appealed to him, perhaps above all his stylistic elegance; but Schopenhauer was not the most important of philosophers for Beckett. That designation would, as I have argued elsewhere, belong to Immanuel Kant, to whom Beckett returned for careful rereadings throughout the thirties, in large part, I believe, because of his dissatisfaction with the Schopenhauerian elements superimposed upon his argument in Proust and which were not assimilated with the other more rigorously examined aspects of his study.11
Schopenhauer’s unfettered Idealism collapses the Kantian categories upon which the distinctions between what is known and what cannot be known are established. No wonder Beckett was so dissatisfied with Proust and regarded its argument as stillborn and fundamentally inauthentic – a particularly scathing term of dismissal since Proust was to have been about determining the authentic reality rendered by Proust’s aesthetic. An uncritical imposition of Schopenhauerian readings in Proust at key junctures is what undoubtedly led Beckett to dismiss his first major critical study as betrayed by the use of a ‘cheap flashy philosophical jargon.’12 Beckett’s choice of terminology is particularly striking here since the heart of Proust is a would-be critical investigation of modernist moments of being; the abstractions of ‘philosophical jargon’ are the antithesis of an authentic aesthetic reality communicated with an inspired and original language of one’s own.
Such instances of ‘philosophical jargon’ are easy to tabulate in Beckett’s Proust for they are presented in such a way as to stand out:
(i)‘Unfortunately Habit has laid its veto on this form of perception, its action being precisely to hide the essence – the Idea – of the object in the haze of conception – preconception’ (11).
(ii) ‘the essence, the Idea, imprisoned in matter’ (57).
(iii) ‘his contempt for the literature that “describes,” for the realists and naturalists worshipping the offal of experience, prostrate before the epidermis and the swift epilepsy, and content to transcribe the surface, the façade, behind which the Idea is prisoner’ (59).
(iv) ‘When the subject is exempt from will the object is exempt from causality (Time and Space taken together). And this human vegetation is purified in the transcendental aperception that can capture the Model, the Idea, the Thing in itself’ (69).
In the first three examples, the Idea – writ large – is proposed as a Platonic ‘higher reality,’ à la Schopenhauer, pointing towards a transcendental beyond. Its definition is translated by means of its antithesis, the carceral world below in which the ‘essence’ is immured by matter, habit, naive mimetic theories of art, and so on. Such vaguely formulated concepts of an avowedly mystical nature constitute that Romantic legacy which modernism attempted to put in some type of critically focused order. Beckett, as we have seen, has fundamental reservations about the aesthetic premises of both Joyce and Proust; however, since he has no answer as yet of his own whereby he might find his own way, he, ironically enough, ends up invoking in a naive and critically unexamined way a number of positions that key modernist innovators such as Joyce and Proust had made a concerted effort to move beyond (the prime example being Stephen Dedalus’s rejection in Portrait of claritas having any suggestion of an idealist-symbolist’ interpretation). The fourth example cited above is a classic instance of Schopenhauer’s collapsing of the Kantian categories (here of Time and Space), with the result that a ‘transcendental aperception’ leads to ‘concretizing Kant’s thing-in-itself,’ which Beckett spoke so strongly against in the last sentence of his spoof lecture ‘Le Concentrisme’ (1930).13 Beckett might indeed be correct when he says the influence of Schopenhauer on Proust’s views regarding the significance of music is ‘unquestionable’ (70); however, the conclusion to this discussion as it issues forth in the very long last sentence of Proust is nevertheless open to serious questioning: ‘the ideal and immaterial statement of the essence of a unique beauty […], the “invisible reality” that damns the life of the body on earth as a pensum and reveals the meaning of the word: “defunctus’’’ (72). Schopenhauer does get the last word, and this is the crowning example of what Beckett later acknowledged as an ‘overstated’ emphasis on Proust’s pessimism.14
No wonder critics such as Nicholas Zurbrugg have been drawn into a highly polemical rejection of Beckett’s many distortions of Proust’s world. There is no convincing way that it can be argued that Beckett has written a balanced appraisal of being and time in Proust’s universe of A la Recherche. No reader of even parts of that massive work can feel that Beckett has done more than offer, in the final analysis, a very abbreviated albeit lyrical evocation of the Proustian moments of revelation in his study’s sixth section, while raising some probing questions about the communication of such mystical experiences; but the argument thereafter is sidetracked by an ever-increasing reliance on Schopenhauerian views that seem imposed on the argument and prevent its full engagement with the critical issues thus far raised. No wonder Beckett felt that his Proust as it stood was incomplete and that an eighth section should be added;15 that this was never written is hardly surprising: how could Beckett hope to synthesize his critique of the symbol and Symbolism with the Schopenhauerian elements that, in essence, support a Transcendental reading?16
A final assessment of Proust involves a debunking of a number of myths that have persisted throughout the history of Beckett criticism. Nicholas Zurbrugg was indeed justified in stating that it is one of the most puzzling enigmas of twentieth-century criticism that critics have for the most part accepted so uncritically Beckett’s Proust.17 We know, just as was the case with ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce,’ that Beckett pays scant attention to scholarly conventions such as acknowledging secondary sources. John Fletcher and Terence McQueeny, along with others, have shown how Beckett ‘borrows’ freely from Arnaud Dandieu’s 1930 study of Proust; primary sources are also undocumented, Beckett often paraphrasing Proust’s own words as if they were his own, thereby further blurring critical perspective.18 Nevertheless, certain myths have persisted and are neatly exemplified in Ruby Cohn’s summary judgment that ‘Proust remains talismanic reading for those interested in either Beckett or Proust.’19 Proust could, however, only be regarded as a ‘template’ if this idea is regarded in a deconstructive manner; the development of Beckett’s subsequent work is, in many decisive and critical ways, a working towards a refutation of the idealist aesthetics of Proust. For example, ‘Assumption’ and Proust are filled with references to the Idea imprisoned in matter, to the soul being imprisoned by the body. Through his developing critique of idealist aesthetics, Beckett moves by the time of L’Innommable (1949) towards the Foucauldian inversion of Discipline and Punish: ‘the soul is the prison of the body,’20 as various discourses would impose their ‘systems’ on a self that is linguistically as well as historically determined. Proust is definitely not a template for Beckett’s future work; almost immediately Beckett saw its fundamental weaknesses, a potentially promising critique of modernist aesthetics and the role of the symbol undermined by a ‘cheap flashy philosophical jargon.’
Beckett’s profound dissatisfaction with Proust’s confused and contradictory aesthetic speculations regarding what is the real and how it might be expressed led to his avowed declaration to write next ‘something more genuine and direct.’21 Beckett’s first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, written in Paris in 1932, but not published until 1992, three years after his death, was to have fulfilled this goal, though the results, as we will see, were of a very different import, to say the least. ‘Genuine and direct’ also harks back to Beckett’s ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce,’ in which Joyce is lavishly praised for his ‘direct expression,’ although what this might mean in terms of how language itself functions is left largely unexamined in any serious critical fashion. Beckett contents himself there with polemics against readers who are too benighted to appreciate what Joyce is up to, namely, that the words themselves embody their very meaning so that ‘form is content, content is form’; the words are ‘alive’ in that, to use Beckett’s examples, if the sense is ‘drunk,’ so, correspondingly with the words, ditto for ‘sleep’ – ‘when the sense is sleep, the words go to sleep’ (27). Every word of Work in Progress is in this regard a potential epiphanic moment – or moments, for in Joyce’s great final work words are ‘alive […] glow and blaze and fade and disappear’ (28), ready for another recycling. In Proust Beckett encountered a variant modernist aesthetic in which the moments of revelation were few and far between, vouchsafed only by the miraculous intervention of involuntary memory. Nevertheless, despite the obvious differences between Proust and Joyce, some of which we have already examined, the crucial and vital common factor they share is for Beckett a sense of immediate and direct communication of the visionary insight. What might, however, seem somewhat surprising is Beckett’s own rather naive declaration of intent to write ‘something more genuine and direct’ at the very point at which he had to confront in the impasse of his argument in Proust that such terms are indeed highly problematical, particularly if the question of language itself as mode of communication is rigorously investigated.
Another factor to take into account is Beckett’s identification with primitivist dimensions of modernism via his association with the avant-garde journal transition, in which he made his authorial debut and which published and promoted excerpts from Joyce’s Work in Progress. In the March 1932 issue of transition (at the time he was working on Dream) appeared the manifesto ‘Poetry Is Vertical,’ with Beckett as one of the nine signatories. Its central theme is that the function of a truly creative personality is ‘the delineation of a vitalistic world’; a ‘living imagination’ must supersede the merely pragmatic and mundane conceptions of the nature of creativity: ‘Esthetic will is not the first law. It is in the immediacy of the ecstatic revelation, in the a-logical movement of the psyche, in the organic rhythm of the vision that the creative act occurs.’22 Several of the key points in the manifesto echo views that we have already heard Beckett express in Proust, particularly with reference to the fetishized animism of involuntary memory and its ‘magical’ operations, which lie outside any operations of the intellectual or creative will. This is the only such public document ever endorsed by Beckett, and it deserves to be taken seriously for that reason alone; read in the context of Beckett’s early works to this point, it is also clear that in broad general terms what the manifesto professes is what Beckett has just been affirming, developing, and investigating in his own writings.
Most definitely, the determining common identification of Joyce and Proust in Beckett’s mind is their commitment to an aesthetic of direct expression, of immediacy of expression. Confirmation for this is found in Beckett’s reply (14 June 1967) to Sighle Kennedy’s letter enquiring whether ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce’ with its praise of Vico’s ‘rational’ thought could be regarded as ‘a valid yardstick for measurement of your later work’ (her focus is on Murphy). Kennedy was nonplussed by Beckett’s response in which he politely, almost apologetically, states that his answer to her question is a negative: ‘I simply do not feel the presence in my writing as a whole of the Joyce & Proust situations you evoke.’23 She was nonplussed less by his negative response than by the fact that her query letter to him had made no mention of Joyce except in so far as his name appeared in the title of Beckett’s 1929 essay, and Proust’s name was not even raised. Yet, as Kennedy astutely points out, the two authors’ names are presented as if they were one entity: ‘“Joyce & Proust” they are paired, as if forming a single firm name.’24 In Proust we saw how Beckett associated the enterprises of Proust and Joyce, but the Kennedy letter is the only example of Beckett not only mentioning them explicitly but presenting them as virtually an incorporated entity. Kennedy cannot make sense of this and finally settles, unsatisfactorily it must be said, upon the ‘solution’ to Beckett’s perplexing response as residing in his rejection of the works of Proust and Joyce in which the ‘craftsmanship’ was ‘at all times controlled and rational.’25 Beckett’s ostensibly unwarranted ‘Joyce & Proust’ coupling is really his acknowledgment of the implicit identification of these two great modernist predecessors throughout his Proust monograph, and the cues for such a joining together of these two authors are indeed to be found in Kennedy’s own letter to Beckett: in her first paragraph she refers to Vico’s ‘division of human expression into gesture, animism and abstraction,’ as discussed by Beckett in his Joyce essay, and in the third and penultimate paragraph she mentions ‘direct expression, of man’s successive visions of the universe’ in Murphy.26 Beckett couples together ‘Joyce & Proust situations’ because, as we have seen in our commentary on his Joyce essay and the Proust monograph, ‘direct experience’ and immediacy of revelation are the two guiding and essential points under discussion.
In reaction against his Proust study, Beckett sought in Dream to achieve ‘something more genuine and direct.’ Beckett’s efforts to attain this declared goal in his first novel bring home in a much more pressing manner the theoretical impasses of Proust that we have examined. The key issue that surfaced there and in his earlier essay on Joyce is that of an ideal of direct expression; the complex, convoluted (and, to be sure, sometimes confused) gyrations around the issue of what is real and the competing claims of the imaginative ideal and the empirically perceived return again and again in Proust to the modernist moment of revelation in which the quest for what is real, authentic, true is fulfilled through a supposedly pure representation, the direct sensuous intuition of reality. In short, the ideal to be realized might be termed the ‘unmediated vision,’ as used in Geoffrey Hartman’s 1954 study of modern poetry. The following summary description in Hartman neatly encapsulates the underlying theoretical dilemma encountered by Beckett in Proust, and which he proposed to resolve in Dream: ‘The mind, therefore, being most keenly aware through the dominant eye of that which is the cause of perception, pure representation will, at base, be the urge to construct that ideal system of symbols which relieves consciousness of the eyes’ oppression but assures it of the eyes’ luminosity.’27 Such was also the ‘ideal real’ as presented in Proust: the symbolic expression thereof is intended as an illumination, a means of accessing a luminous clarity. Hartman’s argument then develops the idea of pure representation as ‘the imageless vision’: ‘for poetry is at one with the other arts in seeking, though by varying means, visibility without image, audibility without sound, perception without percepts.’28 These ideas are much more in evidence in Dream than in Proust and are particularly identified with Belacqua’s theorizing in which there is an emphasis upon an ‘aesthetic of inaudibilities’ (141) and of imageless ideal expression such as is found ‘between the flowers that cannot co-exist’ (137).
Belacqua might be the central character of Dream, but he is by no means the central or abiding presence in the novel. That role is played by the narrator-figure, who is referred to at several junctures as a ‘Mr Beckett,’ who is an associate, if not sometime friend, of Belacqua, and who is perforce as the demiurge of this fictional universe also engaged in an aestheticizing effort to determine the very nature of what is going on in terms of his relationships with Belacqua and the other characters, in particular the ‘fair to middling women’ who embody and stand for various types of Beauty and are therefore central to any aesthetic debate. Above all, this is a mediated series of realities, and the narrator as would-be author in his own right is in the midst of things as the middleman, the intermediary who draws together the various characters and groupings within the novel as a whole. (Whether indeed the novel could be said to constitute a ‘whole’ rather than a chaotic series of lacunae or ‘holes’ is the question which the work proposes.) This unsettling conjunction of immediacy versus mediated, of authors versus characters, to name only two of the competing dynamics of Dream, foregrounds a dilemma that Hartman focuses on in the conclusion of his argument, that the modern poet who has committed himself to understanding experience in its immediacy or directness, and indeed as a result of this very commitment, ‘comes to know the need of mediation only the more strongly.’ The double-edged conclusion of Hartman’s argument about the modern artist’s commitment to an ‘unmediated vision’ is that ‘it is the artist who, acknowledged or not, pretends to the role of mediator,’ adding as corollary that ‘his real mediation is to accept and live the lack of mediation.’29
Here then is the fundamental perplex of Beckett’s Dream, simultaneously affirming and denying the opposing forces of order and disorder, immediacy and mediation. The narrator’s self-conscious commentary on his art most often employs musical imagery to convey his inability to control his characters and hence to shape them into the accepted forms of the so-called well-written novel. They are no longer ‘pure, permanent liŭs’ or pings’ but ‘the most regrettable simultaneity of notes’ (45). The novel is ostensibly out of control because the characters cannot be assimilated to any other system than their own: ‘But they will let us down, they will insist on being themselves as soon as they are called upon for a little strenuous collaboration. The music comes to pieces. The notes fly about all over the place, a cyclone of electrons’ (50). The narrator-author waxes rhapsodic over the poetic labours of the ‘ecstatic mind’ that would give expression to the ‘demented perforation of the colander’ of the ‘night firmament’ (51). The narrator, Mr Beckett, is torn between the desire to express this vision in its natural form, that is, incoherently, and a countervailing urge towards ‘architechtonics.’
More to the point, in terms of the actual composition of this ‘decomposition,’ how can so-called direct experience – literary or otherwise – be authentically conveyed when, as the text of Dream makes all too painfully obvious, its vision is filtered through and set in contrapuntal opposition to a host of other literary texts? John Pilling’s Beckett’s ‘Dream’ Notebook (1999) allows us access to Beckett’s more obscure allusions as a complement to the host of overt references to literary and artistic figures and their works that riddle the text, often in vertiginous name-dropping fashion. With the publication of his Companion to ‘Dream of Fair to Middling Women’ as a special issue of the Journal of Beckett Studies (2004), we now have an annotated vade mecum that details in over a thousand discrete entries how Beckett applied and exploited his very extensive and eclectic reading in his first novel. There is, however, the concomitant danger of the annotations obscuring rather than illuminating the structure of Dream, unless we bring to bear a critical assessment whereby we can keep in creative balance the multifarious source details and the encompassing vision evoked by the work as a whole. ‘To free himself from the overwhelming influence of Joyce,’ Pilling maintains that Beckett put himself ‘in thrall to a multiplicity of writers and writing in a desperate attempt to demonstrate it was not mastery he was after, but quite the opposite: weakness.’30 But, as we will see, Dream’s very complex structure is in fact determined by an in-depth engagement with Stephen Dedalus’s aesthetic as elaborated in Portrait (in this regard Dream is ‘Assumption’ writ large). Portrait functions here ‘as a structural convenience – or inconvenience,’ to adapt the words Beckett used to describe Joyce’s employment of Vichian ideas in Work in Progress. For Beckett in Dream such an adaptation is clearly more ‘convenience’ than ‘inconvenience’ in so far as Stephen’s ideas serve again and again as the starting points for the aesthetic investigations of Dream, not to mention particular narrative sequences and innumerable stylistic turns of phrase. Beckett is not ‘in thrall’ to the host of other writers mentioned in Dream; far from this being the case, such references function, in the main, to mask and camouflage the extensive and pervasive engagement with Portrait that, as we will see, is so decisive in the very formulation of Dream.
How then can such a modus operandi lay claim to its own authenticity, its own ‘genuine’ and ‘direct’ nature? The answer lies in the parodic structures whereby the extensive Joycean influences in Dream are transformed into complex appropriations that validate the authority of the materials ‘borrowed’ at the same time that their authority is brought into question. Or, as Linda Hutcheon puts it: ‘Parody is fundamentally double and divided: its ambivalence stems from dual drives of conservative and revolutionary forces that are inherent in its nature as authorized transgression.’31 Hutcheon distinguishes modern parody of the twentieth-century variety from earlier types dependent solely upon an ethos of ridicule that would mock into oblivion the original target material. Parody as employed in Beckett’s Dream employs a much more complex set of strategic manoeuvres; its simultaneous acceptance and rejection of the primary ‘source’ material points towards innovative ways of dealing with the ‘anxiety of influence’ and, as Hutcheon proposes, might even effect a ‘paradoxical strategy of repetition as a source of freedom.’32 Modern parody as a particular type of repetition that foregrounds differences holds out the possibility of critically working out one’s own views by working through the ideas and words of another. This is, in effect, the strategy Beckett began with in ‘Assumption,’ and such parodic manoeuvres are taken to a much more sophisticated level in Dream as Beckett through his dialogical encounter with Joyce begins to formulate his own aesthetic principles. Underneath the polyphony of references to other writers, the basic structure and development of Dream are determined by the ‘double-voicing’ of Beckett rewriting Joyce.33
The very brief ONE of Dream consists of only two short paragraphs (the first composed of 66 words, the second of 29). If Schopenhauer gets the last word in Proust (‘defunctus’), Joyce, who as we have seen is indirectly addressed at key junctures in that study, is accorded the first word of Dream: ‘Behold Belacqua an overfed child’ (1). Beckett’s very first move echoes Joyce’s poem written in 1932 on the birth of his grandson, an event which followed soon after his own father’s death, ‘Ecce Puer’ (‘Behold the child’). Here the child presented for our viewing is Beckett’s first major literary offspring. And just as the last word of Proust contained a pun, Ruby Cohn pointing out that ‘defunctus’ implies both ‘completion’ as ‘perfection’ and as ‘death,’34 the first word of Dream also suggests a doubling of meaning. The allusion to Joyce’s very moving poem about death, (re)birth, and guilt also brings to mind the definition of the epiphany as a ‘sudden spiritual manifestation’ or, to invoke Harry Levin’s memorable description, epiphanies conceived of as ‘mystical visions which link the beholder to the object beheld.’35 Beckett’s ‘Behold’ can, of course, only be regarded ironically within this context; nevertheless, this invocation of Joyce cannot be dismissed outright as merely parody in the negative sense of the word: Beckett is obviously also ‘beholden’ to Joyce in the sense of being indebted to him. Beckett’s opening ‘Behold’ raises a whole series of problematical issues about literary filiation/affiliation: to what degree can the reader take up the challenge of identification with Belacqua; to what degree is the narrator-cum-author of Dream to be identified with Belacqua; and to what degree is Beckett’s enterprise to be identified with Joyce’s? The seven ‘Beholds’ invoked at various points in Dream make clear enough (painfully so) that there is indeed no ideal (mystical) union of beholder and beheld. The second reference – ‘Behold how he loved her’ (103) – concerns the Mandarin (the Smeraldina’s father) trying, unsuccessfully, to convince Belacqua that his ‘Beatrice in the brothel’ perplex – the ideal and the real in irreconcilable opposition – is actually due to a naive misunderstanding of the issues at stake. The next two references involve the Alba, the most fair of the fair to middling women of Belacqua – ‘Behold it is she’; ‘Behold her gliding ahead of schedule’ (151) – but Belacqua, of course, fails to achieve any ‘union’ with her, mystical or otherwise (and when she beholds him it is decidedly as ‘puer’ not ‘homo’). The last cluster in this series neatly inverts the opening ‘Behold Belacqua’: ‘“Behold, Mr Beckett” he said, whitely, “a dud mystic”’ (186), thereby adding more variations on the author/ narrator’s relationship with Belacqua. Here Belacqua, now a martyred ‘ecce homo’ of sorts, gets to address the author/narrator who had first introduced him to us using the self-same word. But the running theme of a failed sense of any mystic union of beholder and beheld on the various levels referred to above makes it clear just how un-Joycean these proceedings are, at the same time that Beckett is beholden to Joyce for the very terms in which these proceedings are being framed, even if the name for his central character was purloined from Dante’s Purgatorio and smuggled into Dublin.
The degree to which Beckett is indebted to Joyce in ONE of Dream is, ironically enough, made clearer by those very references that would seem designed to supply alternatives or ‘antidotes,’ as it were, to Joyce’s influence. The opening scene of the first paragraph pictures Belacqua on his bike pedalling madly after Findlater’s van, cruising alongside and then hectoring the driver to beat his horse: ‘Whip him up, vanman, flickem, flapem, collop-wallop fat Sambo’ (1). From John Pilling’s Beckett’s ‘Dream’ Notebook we know that two references to William M. Cooper’s Flagellation and Flagellants are combined here.36 Yet these references (as well as the horse’s defecation) still ‘stink of Joyce.’ In Joyce’s play Exiles, Richard Rowan’s son Archie, who is ‘daft on horses,’ tells his mother that when he goes on deliveries with the milkman ‘I’ll make him go quick. You’ll see from the window, mamma. With the whip. He makes the gesture of cracking a whip and shouts at the top of his voice: Avanti!’37 The ‘gush of mard’ in Dream affords the only identification of beholder and beholden in ONE: an empathetic ‘Ah …!’ follows the horse’s excretion. This one-word phatic sentence signals perhaps the closest identification of narrator and narrated – and via a horse’s rump at that! – in all of Dream. The one-sentence final paragraph of ONE suddenly jumps ahead several years to an image of Belacqua ‘climbing the trees in the country and in the town sliding down the rope in the gymnasium.’ The opening of Dream with its five sentences may mirror ironically the five chapters of Portrait and as microcosm the five very uneven parts of Dream itself (uneven both stylistically and in terms of length); in effect, Beckett’s opening simultaneously announces an engagement with Joyce (the initial injunction: ‘Behold’) and a disengagement from a direct competition with Joyce at the same time since no one could for a second mistake these two opening aperçus as a serious rival to Joyce’s first chapter of Portrait or even to the opening baby tuckoo section. Whereas Joyce’s ‘Ecce Puer’ revises and draws upon the ‘Ecce Homo’/’Behold the man’ tradition of Christian iconography, Beckett’s ‘Behold Belacqua’ might be more appropriately regarded as in the alternative Nietzschean tradition of Ecce Homo in which a comic and ironic self-appraisal is at the heart of the critical enterprise.38
TWO deals with the relationship of Belacqua and the Smeraldina-Rima, from their meeting in Dublin to the break up of their relationship in Kassel on New Year’s Eve. From the very beginning, their relationship is framed by a number of correspondences with Joyce’s Portrait, all of which turn on the critical issue of somehow working out an accommodation between the ideal and the real. As the novel proper opens with Belacqua seeing off the Smeraldina-Rima at the Carlyle Pier, on her way to Vienna to study music, he thinks back to when they first met. He ‘encountered one evening’ what he took, mistakenly, to be a most ‘fair’ woman, whose face shone ‘with an un-earthly radiance’ (3), which echoes Stephen Dedalus’s claritas; but in this instance the ‘unearthly’ qualification distinguishes it from the vision that Stephen made a point of identifying with this world. The meeting with the Smeraldina would seem, nevertheless, to be a fulfilment, however ironic, of young Stephen’s desire ‘to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to seek it or how, but a premonition which led him on told him that this image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him’ (P, 66).
Stephen’s sense of his grand destiny becomes Belacqua’s more down-to-earth ‘as luck would have it’ (3). For now he sees her as a ‘slob of a girl’ with whom he is in love only ‘from the girdle up’ (3). But on that fatal evening encounter he had fallen under her charming aura and imagined her to be an embodiment of the ideal in her absolute devotion to the music of Bach and her plans to go to Vienna to study. Hence beholding the Smeraldina’s face led the awestruck Belacqua to ‘moor in the calm curds of her bosom,’ and ‘the result of this was that the curds put forth suckers of sargasso, and enmeshed him.’ Two particular Joycean images – two of the most famous in all his work – are present here in variant form. Smeraldina’s departure is a recasting of ‘Distant Music’ of ‘The Dead’ fame – literally so, since she is leaving ‘almost at once’ for Vienna. In short, she is a symbol writ large of ideal femininity; but – alas – Belacqua will soon have his eyes opened to her actual, complex being (just as Gabriel Conroy in a more serious vein learned of his wife Gretta’s love for Michael Furey and their ‘distant music’). The other reference is to the sighting of the birdgirl in the epiphany that concludes chapter 4 of Portrait. In that scene the girl’s legs were ‘pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself upon the flesh as a sign’ (151). In Beckett’s version in Dream, this situation has been grossly exaggerated – ‘the curds put forth suckers of sargasso, and enmeshed him’ – for Belacqua is actually involved with this woman, whereas young Stephen Dedalus simply projects a number of idealized, soulful visions upon his birdgirl. Fair dream visions set off by the encounter with the birdgirl are ironically and realistically brought down to earth, to the realm of the ‘fair to middling’ in Beckett’s revision.
After the Smeraldina’s departure, Belacqua goes through a complex series of mental gyrations that he hopes will issue forth in a ‘positively transcendental gloom’ (16). The climax of this opening scene telescopes a number of images from the beginning and ending of Portrait that underline the degree to which Joyce’s novel is the key reference work in structural terms in Beckett’s first novel. That night Belacqua prayed, we are told, ‘for no particular reason before getting into bed.’ His prayer repeats that taught to him and his brother by their mother: ‘That was their prayer’ (8). And this, of course, echoes baby tuckoo’s appropriation of his father’s story in the opening of Portrait: ‘That was his song’ (19). In Dream Beckett combines this syntactical pattern with a reference to the scene of Stephen praying in the dormitory at Clongowes school. But what is most interesting here is how Beckett in the same night scene makes a less obvious reference to the ending of Portrait. Belacqua talks himself out of a so-called ‘nice state of affairs when the son of Adam could quash the lover of the Smeraldina-Rima or any other girl for that matter and if that was all being in love with a girl from the girdle up meant to him the sooner he came off it the better. Thus he was crowned in gloom and he had a wonderful night’ (9). Compare this with the ending of the fourth last diary entry (15 April) on Portrait’s closing page. As Stephen rethinks his encounter that day with E–C– and his sharing of his plans for departure from Ireland, he rejects all his earlier convoluted thoughts about her and, self-mocking – for once – advises himself: ‘O, give it up, old chap! Sleep it off!’ (218). Both Belacqua and Stephen do then literally sleep it off, but the chiastic nature of their situations is much in evidence as well: in the opening of Dream Belacqua’s ‘beloved’ leaves him for her art, whereas at the ending of Portrait Stephen in quest of his artistic destiny leaves his ‘beloved’ behind, and with somewhat more generosity of spirit, it must be said, than that evidenced by the self-serving Belacqua. This larger pattern of reversal is mirrored in the micro-syntactical formulations of ‘came off it’ and ‘sleep it off’ (italics mine).
Particular issues, of both the major and minor variety, get invoked in ONE and the opening sequence of TWO because Joyce has already done so, said so, and Beckett is now repeating them with variation in order to test them out for himself via a parodic doubling that entails both emulation and emendation. After the invocation of these Joycean references that supply the momentum for the opening section of TWO, the narrator/author confesses to us that ‘we do not quite know where we are in this story’ (9). For Dream is indeed not ‘that story’ told by the father which opens Portrait, though Beckett has clearly gone out of his way to set up various analogies between the two. The most obvious and decisive difference between Joyce’s story and Beckett’s concerns the role of the narrator, how the question of point of view is handled. Joyce’s surrogate figure is rendered invisible, virtually ‘refined out of existence,’ even if his irony is at times palpable, whereas Beckett’s narrator is most definitely of the hands-on variety as he comments overtly about the metafictional status of his would-be story, which has barely got underway but already threatens to go no further. The proceedings are threatened since the narrator acknowledges that some of his ‘creatures’ will simply not allow themselves to suffer gladly a role as a ‘symbol’ in someone else’s story or to be coerced into adopting such a role (‘be made to stand for something’).39 While Nemo is, of course, as his name implies, acknowledged as one of the intractables from the very beginning, this narrator will in short order have to admit that even those creatures he believes he can control more or less (such as the principal divas – the Smeraldina-Rima, the Syra-Cusa, and the Alba) are, in fact, anything but docile minds and bodies at his disposal. This overt metafictional speculation is, however, designed in Dream to broach from two very different perspectives the question of the role and status of the symbol itself, which is indeed a central Joycean question and one that Beckett theoretically wrestled with in Proust. In ‘A Painful Case’ and ‘The Dead’ in Dubliners, for example, and at key junctures in Portrait, especially in Stephen’s aesthetic theorizing, Joyce argues against turning complex human entities into soul-companions, idealized intellectual portraits, or merely reflections of a transcendental beyond. The whole business of creatures/characters as ‘pings’ or ‘liŭs’ (terms derived from Chinese music) in Dream is indeed a ‘Distant Music, ’ to adapt Gabriel Conroy’s would-be characterization of his wife Gretta.
On the other hand, Belacqua is identified from the very beginning as fixated by an idealizing characteristic; his women – fair or middling – are somehow or other expected to shine forth with ‘an unearthly radiance.’ Hence his view could be regarded as the symbolic writ large (as Symbolist). No wonder things go ‘kaput’ when he is ‘raped’ by the Smeraldina. The ‘tiffs’ escalate to the point that Belacqua finally has to make good his escape. But absence, as he says, would indeed seem to make the heart grow fonder; in fact, the Smeraldina-Rima in absentia is an even more powerful presence in the ‘young thought of Belacqua’ (34). And his ‘young thought’ is similar to that of another young man, namely, Stephen Dedalus, who as a would-be artist has to figure out what Beauty entails and means for him. Belacqua is not content merely to worship various embodiments of ‘unearthly radiance’; he must, it seems, compare them. The comparison of the Smeraldina-Rima with the Syra-Cusa is pursued in aid of determining ‘the quint-essential kernel and pure embodiment of the occult force that holds me up, makes me wax pagan and static, the kernel of beauty if beauty it be, at least in this category (skirts)’ (34). The soaring quest for Beauty is cast in ironic Daedalian-Icarian terms; ‘holds me up,’ ‘wax pagan,’ and ‘static’ bring to mind Stephen Dedalus’s view that the ‘esthetic emotion’ is ‘static’: ‘The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing’ (P, 179). For such a ‘static’ and fixated view of Beauty the young Belacqua is roundly chastised by the narrator/author: ‘Unfortunate Belacqua, you miss our point, the point: that beauty, in the final analysis, is not subject to categories, is beyond categories. There is only one category, yours, that furnished by your stases. As all mystics, independent of creed and colour and sex, are transelemented into the creedless, colourless, sexless Christ, so all categories of beauty must be transelemented into yours’ (35). Poor Belacqua does not, however, heed such critical commentary and ends up in an even more convoluted argument when he tries to reconcile the contrarieties of ‘the Beatrice in the Brothel’ problem via a series of mental acrobatics. Behind this strategic rationalization resides the fact that Belacqua is engaged in acts of symbolization, making the Smeraldina ‘stand for’ a number of idealized propositions. Belacqua’s initial assumption is that of regarding his beloved as only a ‘thought’ or ‘vision.’ Employing these idealized versions of her, Belacqua could then satisfy himself, in the usual way, in the brothel – the consequences for him being an experience of ‘peace and radiance’ (40). As for her: ‘She simply faded away’ (40).
The following description/summary of Belacqua’s duplicitous process of symbolic identification strongly echoes in parodic fashion that key passage in section 6 of Proust in which there is a ‘participation between the ideal and the real, imagination and direct apprehension, symbol and substance’ that ‘frees the essential reality’ (55): ‘The rare miracle of fulfilment that had been ascribed and referred to her, exclusively to her, with which she in his mind had been identified, the gift of magic from her, real and ideal, to the soul, about which his entire preoccupation with her was organised, whose collapse as an imminent recurrence, had that been thinkable, would have involved automatically the collapse of that preoccupation, this miracle and this magic, divorced from her and from thought of her, were on tap in the nearest red-lamp’ (40–1). Even Belacqua cannot swallow wholesale this symbolic rationalization because the brothel has sullied his pure conception of Beauty and violated his sense of his beloved’s integrity:
It was intolerable that she should break up into a series of whores simply because he, cursed by some displaced faculty of assimilation, by this demented hydraulic that was beyond control, found himself obliged to extract from the whore that which was not whorish, but, on the contrary, the fee-simple of the Smeraldina-Rima, who, as it seemed then to him, had either to remain one and indivisible, or else disappear altogether, become a neglible person. And the more intolerable as he was already braced against her disintegration, if not into the multiple whore, at least into the simple whore. One and indivisible. The booby would insist on that. (41–2)
Compare this with Portrait’s scene in which Stephen’s jealous anger leads to a disintegration and degradation of his beloved Emma’s ‘static’ beauty: ‘It broke up violently her fair image and flung the fragments on all sides. On all sides distorted reflections of her image started from his memory’ (P, 191).40 Moreover, all these images are ‘hoydenish’ or whorish in nature. In both instances, the fragmentation is a temporary and intolerable situation since both lovers are committed to the ideal integrity of beauty to which their homage is directed.
Even the ostensible digressions in Dream take a Joycean turn at this point. The narrator/author wonders out loud: ‘Why we want to drag in the Syra-Cusa at this juncture it passes our persimmon to say’ (49). One conditional response is that the Syra-Cusa is indeed the ‘middling’ woman and thereby allows for speculations on her relationship to the two ‘capital divas,’ the Smeraldina and the Alba: ‘From the extreme Smeraldina and the mean Syra you could work out the Alba for yourselves, you could control our treatment of the little Alba’(49). Knowlson’s biography has clarified the ways in which Dream is a roman-à-clef: Smeraldina is Beckett’s cousin Peggy Sinclair (also the model for the Woman in ‘Assumption’); the Alba is Ethna MacCarthy (of whom we will hear a great deal later on – and the ‘treatment’ of her is by no means so neatly prescribed); and the Syra-Cusa is no other than Lucia Joyce, daughter of one James Joyce, renowned paterfamilias. Knowlson informs us that Joyce was very anxious when he saw a character named Lucy in Beckett’s ‘Walking Out,’ one of the stories of More Pricks Than Kicks, the collection that was in part salvaged from the then unpublishable Dream. Joyce reassured himself that there was no attempt to fictionalize his daughter who had indeed ‘thought she had a lech on Belacqua [read Beckett in this regard]’ (50).41 What would have happened if Dream had been published and Joyce had recognized the satirical portrait of the Syra-Cusa as originating in his daughter? The earlier rupture of relations over Lucia’s obsession with Beckett would undoubtedly seem very minor when considered with the possible ramifications of Beckett’s characterization of Lucia in Dream. Joyce could have broken relations off completely, and who knows what this would have meant for the development of Beckett’s own work. The narrator/author announces the Syra-Cusa ‘digression’ with the belief ‘A paragraph ought to fix her’ (49) and ends up devoting three pages to her before he wishes her adieu (‘Be off, puttanina, and joy be with you’). In this context, the very non-literary Syra-Cusa/Lucia Joyce who carelessly misplaces Belacqua’s present of ‘a beautiful book’ (Dante’s Divine Comedy) could appear, however physically attractive, as a ‘cursed nuisance.’
Be that as it may, Dream TWO is indeed saturated with Joycean references in the sections following the Syra-Cusa ‘paragraph.’ This is especially so in the section published separately as ‘Sedendo et Quiescendo’ (64–73 of the Black Cat Press edition of Dream), which describes Belacqua’s train journey to join the Smeraldina as requested in her mother’s letter to him. The formal introductions of the central characters here – Smeraldina and Belacqua, in indented capital letters at that – does indeed make this episode sound as if it were the original starting point of what became Dream, what Beckett referred to at this time as the ‘German comedy.’42 Appropriately enough, then, Dream begins, as it were, in the ‘middling’ parts of TWO. What is most interesting here is that ‘Sedendo et Quiescendo’ is essentially conceived of as a burlesque version of ‘Assumption.’ Hence the spectacle afforded the reader might be characterized as Beckett rewriting Beckett rewriting Joyce. ‘Assumption’ we now know was a veritable cento, a stitching together of Joycean elements from Portrait in order to focus critically on Stephen Dedalus’s aesthetic theory and Beckett’s reactions and reservations about it; in short, a parody in both senses of the term as applied to modern literature by Linda Hutcheon: at once a homage and a burlesque. This parody of a parody might also be regarded as a form of ‘self-plagiarism’ on Beckett’s part since he is rewriting himself at the same time he is rewriting Joyce.43
The elements recycled from ‘Assumption,’ but now in an overtly comic manner, include the reference to the Smeraldina as his ‘douce Vega’ and ‘darling blue flower’ (70), the climax of these allusions being Belacqua’s love sonnet of the Shakespearean variety in which the two lovers are now ‘One with the birdless, cloudless, colourless skies,’ the martyred hero of ‘Assumption’ displaced by these comic caricatures who carry to ridiculous extremes romanticized views of a ‘rapturous strange death’ whereby they will be made ‘entire’ (71). Most of TWO may be regarded as a comic revision of ‘Assumption’: much earlier on in it we encounter the Belacqua-Vega connection mediated by the Smeraldina (16); the reference to Meredith as a calming influence after Belacqua’s ‘rape’ by the Smeraldina, ‘alla fioca lucerna leggendo Meredith’ (18);44 and characteristic stylistic features of ‘Assumption,’ as derived from the prostitute scene at the end of chapter 2 of Portrait: ‘He would not go out, though the girl still came, unscathed, from without’ (Dr, 26). This passage then goes on to elaborate as a veritable conceit the images first appropriated from Joyce’s Portrait in ‘Assumption.’ The first sentence, ‘He stood in the courtyard, doomed,’ echoes ‘He stood still in the middle of the roadway’ (P, 95), just before Stephen is ‘detained’ by the prostitute’s hand. Then Beckett takes the ‘breakwater’ imagery of the same passage and he rewrites it in comic hyperbole:
The fragile dykes were caving in on him, he would be drowned, stones and thickets would flood over him and over the land, a nightmare strom of timber and leaves and tendrils and bergs of stone. He stood amidst the weeds and the shell of the Hof, braced against the dense masses, strained out away from him. Over the rim of the funnel, when he looked up, the night sky was stretched like a skin. He would scale the inner wall, his head would tear a great rip in the taut sky, he would climb out above the deluge, into a quiet zone above the nightmare. (26–7)
Beckett’s use of Joyce here via his rewriting of his earlier rewriting in ‘Assumption’ hardly constitutes allusion in the traditional sense of the word as a specific reference to a particular text; its source becomes ever more elusive as it undergoes the metamorphoses of multiple rewritings and appropriations.
With reference to the ‘Sedendo et Quiescendo’ section of TWO, John Pilling argues that Beckett is attempting ‘to excrete the Joyce of Work in Progress from his system’ in an ‘explosion of narrative colic designed to eliminate from the body of this book the waste matter Beckett had accumulated from his close association with Joyce.’ Pilling goes on to add that this section ‘stinks with Joyce as the master who can be parodied to extinction’ and that after this ‘evacuation’ TWO ‘flows as if the dead weight of Joyce had been lifted from Beckett’s shoulders.’45 While some of the more superficial stylistic influences of Work in Progress might be so eliminated, the underlying reality of Dream is that its very structure draws upon Portrait for its leading ideas of ‘beauty’ and ‘radiance’ and ‘stasis.’ No, Joyce is very much alive and well throughout Dream, and Beckett is really only still in the preliminary stages of figuring out how to come to terms with Joyce, and this for Beckett will necessarily entail a much more complex process of assimilation and incorporation. ‘Parodied to extinction’ deals with the traditional role of parody; on the other hand, modern parody as Hutcheon has demonstrated involves an affirmation, however problematical, of the original target material. Far from having been killed off, Joyce’s key determining presence in the very conception of Dream of Fair to Middling Women is actually being further strengthened here. Far from having ‘excreted’ Joyce’s influence, ‘Sedendo et Quiescendo’ confirms just how deeply Joyce’s influence is embedded in Beckett’s thinking as the necessary starting points or assumptions for his own literary investigations. This is, in effect, only an early toilet-training exercise, to adapt Pilling’s metaphor.
The Belacqua summoned by the Smeraldina’s mother to a joyful reunion with her daughter is a veritable portrait of the artist as a colicky baby. Beckett’s admission that the ‘Sedendo et Quiescendo’ section does indeed ‘stink of Joyce’ is, of course, redolent of Joyce’s own ‘true scholastic stink’ of Portrait fame.46 The bout of colic that precedes this episode (Belacqua is suffering from it when he receives the letter from her mother) and persists throughout it in terms of the byplay about the ‘collywobbles’ and what this means for the Smeraldina and her family leads back, yet again, to Joyce and Portrait, in particular the scene in the infirmary where Brother Michael comforts young Stephen over his case of the ‘collywobbles’ (P, 32). These are still early days in the Joyce-Beckett relationship, one which is, at this point, more mimetic than emetic in nature, since it entails a complex parodying and travestying approach. Moreover, Joyce had long ago anticipated such tactical manoeuvres against himself; in ‘The Holy Office’ (1904) Joyce casts himself as Katharsis-Purgative, who sets himself up as a target of those who are less honest and talented than himself:
But all these men of whom I speak
Make me the sewer of their clique.
That they may dream their dreamy dreams. (PJJ, 658)
The narrator’s very first words in the paragraph that follows the ending of the ‘Sedendo et Quiescendo’ section are the self-mocking ‘All that sublimen of blatherskite just to give some idea of the state the poor fellow was in on arrival’ (74). Certainly, the foolish chatter of Beckett’s tale of Belacqua’s journey to his Smerry’s arms can’t hold a candle to Joyce’s ‘O blazerskate!’ of the Anna Livia Plurabelle section of Work in Progress.47 The major Joycean presence in the rest of TWO is evident in one paragraph of about two hundred words, which, along with ‘Sedendo et Quiescendo,’ is the other extant piece of Dream to be published in Beckett’s lifetime, under the title ‘Text.’ John Pilling has argued that while these pieces could not have come into being without Joyce’s example, they also try to hold off Joyce’s influence or even to challenge it. In particular, Pilling sees ‘Text’ as ‘a semi-parody of the final chapter of Ulysses – Molly Bloom’s soliloquy,’ concluding that Beckett has indeed wisely chosen: ‘better the difficult Ulysses than the “impossible” Work in Progress.’ Pilling then goes on to show that Beckett in ‘Text’ is in fact weaving together a series of arcane references from the drama of John Ford and that this material ‘has nothing to do with Joyce and very little to do with Joycean practice.’48 Nevertheless, it must be pointed out that in this instance even as Beckett tries to circumvent Joyce he still ends up sounding as if he were imitating him. And this phenomenon is itself a case of déjà lu in that the opening of Dream (ONE), as we have seen, operates on the same principle (whether inadvertently or intentionally is a moot point): acknowledging Joyce’s influence at the very point that such influence is ostensibly being countered.
It is Joyce’s presence and influence that have supplied the driving force behind Dream to this juncture, as well as a coherence of sorts in terms of its investigation of certain aesthetic issues. It is when Joyce’s influence is not operating in this formative manner that the writing in Dream deteriorates most markedly and confronts the reader with some truly awful writing that seems to go on endlessly with very little in fact being achieved. Such is the painful case in the last twenty-five pages or so of TWO. For just as Belacqua feels sick at the end of TWO because of the messy nature of his break-up with the Smeraldina on New Year’s Eve and catches his last glimpse of her through ‘a veil of nausea’ (109), many readers of Dream (this one acutely so) cannot help feeling themselves to be in an unpleasantly similar situation. Beckett’s prose over the expanse of the last drawn-out episode of TWO is indeed now operating as an emetic of sorts. Without the benefit of Joycean reference points, the prose is virtually pointless – self-indulgent and self-aggrandizing. It skirts around personal and private matters that Beckett has clearly not yet assimilated emotionally, such as the break-up with his cousin Peggy Sinclair, upon which this ‘unsanitary episode’ is based, and thus he cannot find the combinations of words to imaginatively and critically shape the raw material. Beckett/Belacqua is on his own here, embarrassingly so, and it is not a pretty sight. When Beckett in Dream is engaged in the complexities of a dialogical encounter with Joyce that is essentially parodic in nature, there is, consequently, an energy, focus, and concentration that animates his writing; when, as in the last twenty-five pages of TWO, this critical dimension is almost totally absent, the result is a highly allusive style that seems to be striving to avoid any semblance of critical self-appraisal and understanding. As Linda Hutcheon has pointed out, there are many more reasons for alluding than there are for parodying: to parade one’s knowledge (a desultory spectacle in this section of Dream, even with respected champions of ‘discontinuity’ – Beethoven, Dostoyevsky, and Rimbaud – present); to circumvent criticism by citing various authorities (the name-dropping in this section of Dream is especially tedious); and to hint at painful subject matter without directly stating it (the inability to deal with the highly personal aspects of the break-up with the Smeraldina). A highly allusive prose also allows for the filling of pages, the killing of time, without exposing oneself to the possibilities of painful ridicule.49 No wonder the Smeraldina, who feels the brunt of most of these strategies of emotional and intellectual circumvention, intuitively counters the ad feminem attack by a form of parody of her own, one which would at least engage the issues in a more authentic fashion: ‘“He wants to look at my face” she mimicked’ (94). In short, the final episode of TWO is quite nasty, pretentiously brutish, and anything but short.
The thirty pages of UND function as an interlude on aesthetics in which the complex nature of the author-narrator’s relationship with his ‘characters,’ including his special relationship with Belacqua, is in the forefront, thereby supplying a coherence and critical focus sorely lacking in the concluding movement of TWO. These ideas have, of course, been foregrounded from the very beginning of Dream, but here in UND a critical-creative essay on the topic in more depth sets up the connecting link between the two major structural divisions of Dream, TWO and THREE, with ONE and the final few pages of AND acting as ‘bookends’ for the work as a whole. This postmodernist underlining of the competing interests of the author and the characters, as first foregrounded in the second sentence of ‘Assumption,’ is arguably the most distinctively ‘un-Joycean’ characteristic of Beckett’s early prose, particularly when compared to Joyce’s handling of narrative point of view in Portrait. For example, the narrator tells us that he has no faith in ‘the members of the Dublin contingent to perform like decent indivisibilities’ (113). And, he adds, the ‘taproot of the whole tangle’ is ‘our principal boy’s precarious ipsissimosity.’ Here the founding aesthetic principle of Stephen’s theory in Portrait, integritas, or wholeness, is being ironically evoked, as is the final revelatory experience of quidditas or whatness; but Belacqua’s ‘selfness’ is indeed multiple, ‘trine’ at least, so that there is ‘no real Belacqua’ (121).
The narrator-cum-author is of two minds: on the one hand, he casts aspersions on those ‘characters’ who will not behave as nicely disciplined ‘pings’; on the other, he advocates on behalf of the multiplicity of various selves who will rightly refuse to perform on cue the traditional expectations of well-ordered fictional existence. This abiding ambiguity is nicely caught in the phrasing of ‘But if at any time it happen that a passage does call for a different term, for another Apollo or another Narcissus or another spirit from the wombtomb, and if it suit and amuse us […] to use it, then in it goes’ (125). All the options here, whether of a formalistic or a nihilistic nature, depend upon a potential exercise of imperial power (hardly surprising in a section that opens with a reference to the Empress Wu extirpating rebellious peonies – shades of Belacqua as ‘taproot’ of a rhizomic multiplication – and, in the above reference, to Queen Victoria). However, in the disjointed world of Dream such musings are themselves bemused by the intransigence and inexplicability of the various characters, and with such unseemly goings-on the narrator is clearly not amused (invoking also his royal ‘we’ as ‘extenuate concensus of me’ [112]).
Belacqua is also presented as of two minds, a veritable bundle of contradictions. Putting aside the narrator’s theory of Belacqua as ‘trine,’ the underlying and defining antinomy is that at times Belacqua is (as we saw in TWO) parodied and pilloried by the narrator as a failed imitator of Stephen Dedalus’s theory of Beauty and at other times, such as here in UND, presented as an advocate of an avant-garde theory of art that would, ostensibly, appear to coincide with that at times advanced by the narrator when his musings have fluctuated from the Apollonian towards the Dionysian realm. Both of these opposing tendencies are foregrounded in UND. The following summary description of Belacqua (though, of course, we have just been told that such a summing up is not possible) presents him as the virtual second coming of one Stephen Dedalus, would-be artist: ‘The fact of the matter is, we suppose, that he desired rather vehemently to find himself alone in a room, where he could look at himself in the glass and pick his nose thoroughly, and scratch his person thoroughly what is more wherever and for as long as it chose to itch, without shame’ (128). Compare this with Stephen’s reaction after his efforts to write a love poem about his missed kiss with E–C– on the tram: ‘he went into his mother’s bedroom and gazed at his face for a long time in the mirror of her dressing table’ (P, 71) and, later, with his mortification of his senses – especially touch – following his confession attendant upon the hellfire sermons when he ‘suffered patiently every little itch and pain’ (P, 135), only to indulge fully such desires after he had rejected the Church’s teachings. But then, contradictory to the core, Belacqua, as Beckett’s portrait of the artist as a young man, proposes a type of writing that is markedly not of the Stephen Dedalus mode: ‘If ever I do drop a book, which God forbid, trade being what it is, it will be a ram-shackle, tumbledown, a bone-shaker, held together with bits of twine, and at the same as innocent of the slightest velleity of coming unstuck as Mr Wright’s original flying-machine that could never be persuaded to leave the ground’ (139–40). To which, the narrator responds: ‘But there he was probably wrong.’ Most definitely, Belacqua does seem to be haywired together as a would-be artist figure who cannot reconcile his views on Beauty in life with those he holds about art; he insists upon certain ‘stases’ whereby his ‘fair to middling women’ will fit into his categories as his ‘symbols simultaneously and contradictorily advancing a more liberating aesthetic: ‘The experience of my reader shall be between the phrases, in the silence, communicated by the intervals, not the terms, of the statement’ (137).
The portrait of Belacqua is indeed a botched one, perforce: ‘Yet, various though he was, he epitomised nothing. Sallust would have made a dreadful hash of his portrait’ (126). And so does the narrator of Dream in UND: after a six-page excursion dealing with shoes and Belacqua’s feet (his ‘pedincurabilities’), the narrator confesses that, whereas he had planned to give us the full portraiture (‘to speak of his belly […] his loins, his breast and his demeanour, and spell out his face feature by feature and make a long rapturous statement of his hands’ [133]), he has now tired of his task and simply refuses to deliver the promised goods: no habeas corpus, no fully figured Belacqua for the reader to behold. The self-justifying phrase is substituted instead: ‘Cacoethes scribendi, the doom of the best of penmen’ (133). Joyce, as the best of penmen, did however complete his Portrait in style; here, Beckett, via his narrator/author, can only admit his inability to try even to do so and thereby admirably fulfils the tag phrase that all writing is indeed ‘a gush of mard.’
But if there is a waning interest in Belacqua, there is obviously a corresponding increase in interest in the beautiful Alba, the fairest of them all in Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Her embodiment of an ideal Beauty has been announced since the introductory sections of the novel, and thereafter a number of tantalizing anticipations of her actual presence on the scene titillate the reader. We finally get to ‘Behold’ her in THREE, which she dominates in a number of decisive and definitive ways that are crucial for a reading of Dream. First of all, it is obvious that the narrator is just as enthusiastic about Alba as is Belacqua, and this mutual admiration society does indeed change the very ethos of Dream, which many readers have read as a misogynistic diatribe of sorts. The Alba is, however, most decidedly the exceptional exception; in fact, it could be argued that in the concluding sections of Dream (THREE and the final and very brief AND) Beckett is, in part, engaged in writing a palinode, a recantation of many of the views of women expressed earlier in the work. In this regard, the novel’s epigraph, drawn from Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, is indeed appropriate for that work is one of the foremost examples of this genre.50 The fanfare around the Alba’s entry is presented in mock-chivalric and mock-epical terms as both narrator and Belacqua, in their different ways, compete for her ‘gage,’ for the right to champion her cause.
THREE is full of poems of praise for Alba by both her champions. For example, consider this ‘Ode’ by the narrator to ‘Alba-ness’: ‘She reviled the need, the unsubduable tradition of living up to dying, that forced her to score and raid thus the music of days. The heavy gloom of carnal custom. To extirpate the need and remain light and full of light, to secede from the companies of the dutifully dying and go with them no more from heaviness to heaviness and from darkness to darkness according to their law, to abide, light and full of light, caught in the fulness of this total music of days …’ (166). As the embodiment of a timeless light, the Alba possesses a quality of wholeness unto herself that strongly echoes the radiance or claritas of supreme Beauty. Indeed, in the very next sentence that follows the above-cited rhapsody by the narrator, particular parallels between Alba and Stephen’s vision of the birdgirl that ends chapter 4 of Portrait are implied: ‘She was a rock, dayless, furled in a water that she was not doomed to harness. Alone, unlonely, unconcerned, moored in the seethe of an element in which she had no movement’ (166). Here is Stephen’s first sighting of the birdgirl: ‘A girl stood before him in midstream: alone and still, gazing out to sea’ (P, 151). Beckett’s revision here does, typically, two things: it echoes Joyce so that the very attentive reader will have both texts in mind and then inserts a number of changes and alterations in emphasis. In this instance, Beckett’s vision is once again much more kinetic in nature than Joyce’s (compare the Alba fixed amidst the ‘seethe’ with the birdgirl ‘gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither’ [151]) and Alba’s sense of self-contained ‘alone’-ness is much more pronounced, since in Portrait the birdgirl, at least according to Stephen’s point of view, ‘long, long she suffered his gaze’ (151). Herein lies the key difference between Beckett’s presentation of Alba and Joyce’s of the birdgirl: an epiphany, according to Stephen, has indeed occurred – a mystical identification of beholder and beheld: ‘Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call’ (P, 152) – whereas in Beckett’s revisioning the narratorcum-author can only admire Alba from afar and can never be one with her. And, as for Belacqua, Alba remains intact as an impenetrable mystery, except for one most notable occasion when, as we will see, he is vouchsafed a visionary encounter with her, albeit a thoroughly ‘terrifying experience’ (182).
THREE is essentially structured around a complex revisioning of the birdgirl epiphany that concludes the fourth chapter of Portrait (and THREE is, of course, actually the fourth section of Dream). Beckett’s controlling strategy here seems to be a series of delaying tactics whereby he continually puts off the actual Silver Strand episode with Belacqua and Alba. For, although the narrator tells us fairly early on in THREE (twenty-four pages in, to be exact) that ‘we are more or less all set now for Belacqua and Alba to meet at least, make contact at least and carry along for a time side by side’ (167), we do not, however, actually see them in such a position until much later (though the narrator had earlier boasted that nothing is simpler to arrange than a ‘collision’ of his various ‘characters’): ‘Side by side, touching, they recline in the shadow of a great rock, chosen by him for the shadow it gave, on the Silver Strand’ (187). And the narrator only finally ‘bring [s] down the curtain on this episode’ another eleven pages later.
The narrator’s original declaration, ‘it is now or never the time to sidetrack and couple those two lone birds,’ is followed immediately by a passage that really only makes sense when the reader realizes that it is an indirect critique of the birdgirl episode in Portrait wherein the narrator, ‘Mr Beckett,’ makes it clear how he is going to present his much more realistic version of Stephen’s self-induced sense of rapture:
would it not be idle on our part to temporise further and hold up the happy event with the gratuitous echolalia and claptrap rhapsodies that are palmed off as passion and lyricism and the high spots of the creative ecstasy […] and which, as a matter of fact, are nothing more or less, if any dear reader would care to come in on a good thing, than padding: the fall-back and the stand-by, don’t you know, of the gentleman scrivener who has no very near or dear or clear ideas on any subject whatsoever […] in the interests of whose convulsions clouds of words condense to no particular purpose. (168)
This harsh criticism of Stephen’s birdgirl epiphany would seem to make explicit what Joyce has only implied ironically in the Portrait scene; certainly, Beckett is even harder on that young man than Joyce said he had been when he came to reflect back on his treatment of Stephen Dedalus. ‘Clouds of words’ is an apt summary statement by Beckett’s narrator for a scene that is framed initially by clouds ‘drifting above him silently’ (P, 151) and ends with an inner vision of ‘some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed by cloudy shapes and beings’ (P, 152). Instead of ‘temporising’ in these so-called ‘poetic’ ways, Beckett’s version nevertheless does ‘temporise’ (as we have already pointed out). Beckett’s revision of what is arguably the most famous scene in all of Portrait is carried out in terms of a realistic portrayal; instead of the silent, mystical communion of Stephen Dedalus with his birdgirl, we get a more adult version in which the participants actually engage in a series of critical dialogues about art and life and love. Compare these two scenes: as Stephen Dedalus deals with the aftermath of his long-awaited encounter with ideal Beauty incarnate, he sings ‘wildly to the sea’ (P, 152); as Belacqua settles in beside the Alba, he is said by the narrator to have ‘proceeded wildishly’ (Dr, 170) in his floundering attempts to explain his visionary theory of poetry à la Rimbaud to the Alba, whose critical intellect at least equals his own and does not let him get away with any of the ‘claptrap’ nonsense that this parody of Portrait has highlighted.
Neither Belacqua nor Stephen Dedalus is allowed to escape from a critical and ironic authorial scrutiny. Stephen can indulge narcissistically his vision of the birdgirl, but he also notes the ‘emerald trail of seaweed,’ ‘a sign upon her flesh’ (P, 151) as a reminder that this particular version of Irish Beauty might be entangling – another of those ‘nets’ he will have to find means of soaring above. In Beckett’s more realistic recasting of this situation in Dream, the Joycean image is transformed into a much more down-to-earth series of entrapments: for example, ‘about them rises the marsh of granny’s-bends that is their relation’ (176); ‘bogged beside the royal Alba he wallows caught in the reeds of their relation’ (177). Indeed, what is a mere passing ‘sign’ in Portrait is transformed into a veritable conceit in Dream as the image expands through various metaphorical variations in order to describe a ‘relation’ (whereas in Portrait the only ‘relation’ that could actually be said to exist is in Stephen’s head alone). The critique is, again, of a double-edged nature: a parodying reassessment conveys a series of critical reservations as it also acknowledges as well those very qualities that make the original passage worthy of such attention (after all, the passage cited above in which Beckett’s narrator mocks the birdgirl scene focuses upon Stephen’s ‘cloudy’ views, not Joyce’s rendition of it through his invisible narrator’s free indirect style).
Beckett’s ‘Silver Strand’ episode, while referring to an actual Dublin locale, also takes its inspiration from a phrase in the last sentence of Portrait’s fourth chapter, ‘like the rim of a silver hoop embedded in the grey sand’ (152), conjoined with the earlier reference to the ‘long rivulet in the strand’ (151). The poetic nature of this ‘echolalia’ is commented upon by the narrator since the real name of the venue where Alba and Belacqua meet is finally identified as Jack’s Hole.51 Then, suddenly, in the midst of the temporizing over the Silver Strand episode, Beckett’s text surprisingly delivers the goods: at Frica’s mention of the name ‘The Alba,’ Belacqua is vouchsafed an epiphany of sorts that transports him from the here and now to a timeless realm. The description of this experience as a ‘miracle’ brings to mind Beckett’s description of the modernist revelation in Proust, and the particularities of phrasing are also directly related to Portrait. Just prior to Stephen Dedalus’s encounter with the girl ‘changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird’ (151), he thinks of how his soul has now abandoned its ‘faded cerements’; Belacqua’s ‘miracle’ transports him downwards, ‘sheathing him in the cerements of clarity’ (181) – the last phrase explicitly associating the death-rebirth imagery with claritas. This epiphanic revelation is, however, composed of a radiance that is a blanking out or voiding of reality rather than an illumination of it: a negative epiphany, in other words. The description of this state of idealized non-being is a prose version of Beckett’s poem ‘Alba’: ‘Plane of white music, warpless music expunging the tempest of emblems, calm womb of dawn whelping no sun, no lichen of sun-rising on its candid parapets, still flat white music, alb of timeless light. It is a blade before me, it is a sail of bleached silk on a shore, impassive statement of itself drawn across the strata and symbols, lamina of peace for my eyes and my brain slave of my eyes, pressing and pouring itself whiteness and music through blindness into the limp mind’ (181–2).52 Here is a way out of the theoretical dilemmas encountered in Proust about the nature and referential status of the symbol – a solution by dissolution in so far as it erases or whites out everything in aid of a mystical voiding.
A spacing blank between paragraphs follows this rhapsody on ‘timeless light’ and graphically embodies the point being made. The text of Dream now challenges the reader to come to terms with a number of apparent non sequiturs. We are told that ‘shortly after this terrifying experience’ of ‘albescence’ there is a story in the Twilight Herald announcing the death of Nemo (of whom we have had many reminders in situ, with Nemo poised on his bridge, ready to jump): ‘A finding of Felo-de-se from Natural Causes was found’ (183). Belacqua retires to a pub to drown his own sorrows and proceeds to convince himself that Nemo’s end was, in fact, ‘death by drowning by misadventure’ (184). Suddenly – lightning does strike twice – Belacqua is granted a second epiphany: ‘he felt himself heavenly enflamed as the Cherubim and Seraphim’ (184–5). But just as the experience of Alba’s ‘whatness’ was termed ‘terrifying,’ this second ‘miracle,’ in the final summation, also constitutes a negative experience, because it does not sustain itself and after its departure Belacqua is worse off than he had been before, ‘leaving him bereft and in his breast a void place and a spacious nothing’ (185). The first epiphany is downwards, the second upwards; nevertheless, the result is now felt by Belacqua to be a ‘post-evacuative depression’ (185), the consequence of the spiritual ‘enema’ which is the final product of the ‘ringing Amen’ that initiated his mystical trajectory.
This digressive episode within the series of equivocating delays in actually delivering the full story of Alba and Belacqua on the Silver Strand takes another major detour outside the very confines of the novel we are reading. Supposedly ‘years later,’ Belacqua and Mr Beckett, our narrator, meet, discuss, and put to rest the whole business of Nemo’s death. Belacqua now describes himself as a ‘dud mystic’ and ‘beholds himself’ (186) in a way that has given him new knowledge of himself through his reflections on Nemo. The narrator adds that now he was also able to view Belacqua as Belacqua saw himself. What is most interesting here is just how extensive Beckett’s reliance on Joycean models is throughout this whole deviation from the supposedly controlling narrative line of the Silver Strand episode, via two different experiences of epiphany and a post-mortem series of reflections on Nemo. Indeed, in the final scene of this extended interlude we are presented with our two gallants (in this instance, Mr Beckett and Belacqua) after the races (in this instance, the equine variety) discussing a painful case, namely, Belacqua’s reaction to Nemo’s death. The most important analogue, is, of course, with the Dubliners story ‘A Painful Case,’ in which Mr James Duffy in a pub reads in the Mail of the death by midadventure, ‘with no blame attached,’ of Mrs Sinico, his erstwhile soul-companion, whereby he had formerly assumed ‘he would ascend to angelical stature.’53
Why would Beckett bother to draw out such a detailed rewriting of Joyce’s ‘A Painful Case’ in order to deal with the resolution of Nemo’s death? The answer is that the James Duffy-Mrs Sinico relationship in the Dubliners story offers a number of telling parallels for the key issues Beckett is exploring in Dream as a whole and in respect to Belacqua and Nemo in particular. Mr Duffy is one of Joyce’s failed artist figures who is also a miserable failure in life (the two being intimately conjoined). Beckett’s Belacqua is another such failure in these two realms, although the Joycean model he is most closely aligned with is Stephen Dedalus of Portrait. Throughout Dream we have heard the narrator/author heap scorn on Belacqua for his obsession with ‘stases,’ with this own ‘systems’ whereby he would have others conform to his wishes, in short, turn them into idealized symbols (such as Mr Duffy attempted with Mrs Sinico and Gabriel Conroy with his wife Gretta in the famous ‘Distant Music’ analogy in ‘The Dead’). Such reasoning, such aestheticizing goes against the grain of the narrator’s long-running references to various ‘pings’ who refused to chime in tune with their would-be orchestra-tor. It is especially crucial here to keep distinct the points of view of the narrator/author and Belacqua: the former’s critique of the birdgirl epiphany of Portrait as composed of ‘gratuitous echolalia and claptrap rhapsodies’ could, of course, apply equally to Belacqua’s waxing lyrical over Alba’s ‘whiteness’; indeed, the echolalia here definitely surpasses Joyce’s in the targeted passage. The negative epiphanies experienced by both Mr Duffy and Belacqua bring them back to the mundane to face their limited understandings of the unknown depths and fundamental irrationality of those they would all too neatly pigeonhole in their personal systems. Even the statement in Dream that Belacqua could many years later meditate on the death of Nemo (‘on this emotion recollected in tranquillity’ [185]) and thereby gain some insight into the limitations and negations involved in his ‘theory of the mystical experience’ (185) is indebted to Joyce’s short story; Mr Duffy’s bookshelf, we are duly informed, contained a complete set of Wordsworth.
After the negative epiphanies induced by Alba and Nemo, the narrator finally gives the reader the much promised but very much delayed completion of the Silver Strand episode featuring the one and only Alba and Belacqua. Here the stylistic presentation continues in the mode of a realistic debunking and rewriting of the romantic excesses of Stephen’s birdgirl epiphany. Neither Belacqua nor Stephen can get away with such narcissistic rationalizations; for example, the former’s statement to Alba that she is ‘white music’ (193) is counterpointed shortly thereafter, with reference to his enquiry as to whether she plans to attend the Frica’s party: ‘“Hah!” she clapped her hands like a child “hah! the great greedy wild free human heart of him!”’ (196).54 Such a response is, to be sure, a far cry from Stephen’s religious revelation in which ‘no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy’ (P, 152); in fact, it is as if that remarkably self-contained young woman the Alba has read the scene in Portrait and is mocking young Belacqua in her studied outburst, which ironically echoes effusions such as this from Portrait describing Stephen as ‘young and wilful and wildhearted’ (P, 151). As in the ending of Joyce’s fourth chapter of Portrait, in Dream the solicitous Belacqua remarks that the tide is coming in and that it is time to depart, to which replies Alba: ‘Are we birds?’ (195). And the narrator in his closing remarks adds that the wooing on the Silver Strand that afternoon had occurred ‘with such good auguries, though it broke in no love storm after all’ (197–8).
The final thirty-nine pages of THREE, like the last section of TWO, represent a major decline in the quality and intensity of the writing, for the reason that Beckett is not writing, in a concentrated and critical way, either with or against Joycean models. Certainly, in THREE there are some very general correspondences in the Frica’s party scenes, which occupy in one way or another most of the remainder of this section of Dream, to Joyce’s ‘The Dead,’ the final Dubliners story, as well as to the great party scenes at the Guermantes with which Proust concludes his epic work. That beldam Madame Frica who presides with her daughter over this social bedlam of the party terms herself ‘a weary exhausted old Norn’ (221), the very word used in Proust by Beckett to liken the Princesse de Guermantes to one of the three fates of Norse mythology (time past, present, and future).55 The satirical portraits generated by this carnivalesque comedy of manners possess a certain manic energy at times but do begin to flag badly. By the time the tardy Belacqua arrives, soaked by a pitiless rain, things are looking rather bedraggled at the party itself. To be sure, there is no epiphanic moment when his arrival is trumpeted by the Frica, which earlier had led to the fanfare of Belacqua’s first epiphany of the Alba’s ‘whiteness.’ Nor is there any suggestion of a Marcel-like miraculous duplication of ‘involuntary memory.’ This party isn’t going anywhere at this point and neither is Dream. The somewhat precipitate departure of Bel and his belle of the ball, Alba, parallels in some revealing ways the poem Beckett wrote in the spring of 1932, ‘Home Olga.’ The poem’s title refers to a husband’s shorthand code to his wife when it is time to de-camp a tedious social engagement. Beckett’s poem, an acrostic that spells out JAMES JOYCE, is at once a critique of Joyce and a homage to him. The last line does, however, seem to turn the criticism against the writer of the poem and away from its target; the reference to a ‘pick-thank agnus’ might suggest that Beckett regards himself as a poseur of sorts who would point out flaws in a great writer without in any legitimate way being worthy of comparison with him.56 The ending of THREE is cued by a veritable ‘Home Alba’ as Belacqua bellows out: ‘Will you come on, for the love of God, away out of this?’ (236). So ends THREE; but the ending is purely arbitrary at this point and there seems little compelling reason why the final two and a half pages should be given their own section entitled AND. These final pages are simply a continuation of the narrative in a linear way. Belacqua accompanies Alba home, has a drink before her fire, and then is sent on his way alone, the narrator confiding to the reader in an aside: ‘(you didn’t suppose, it is to be hoped, that we were going to allow them to spend the night there)’ (240). AND also includes the most obvious parodic treatment of Joyce in the whole novel, one which any reader familiar with his work could scarcely overlook: a deflationary naturalistic version of the ending of ‘The Dead’ in which Gabriel Conroy experiences a mystical identification with the body of humanity. Here, in more realistic Irish fashion, is an all encompassing rain: ‘It fell upon the bay, the champaign-land and the mountains, and notably upon the central bog it fell with a rather desolate uniformity’ (239). Beckett’s own words here fall with a dull uniformity, the intent of the parody being to counterpoint the poetic excesses of the ending of ‘The Dead.’
As a hobbling, colicky Belacqua departs Alba, he gazes forlornly into heavens without light, ‘no moon was to be seen nor stars’ (240). Against this backdrop appears the last reference to Joyce: to the query ‘What was that in his lap?’ comes the response ‘That was his hands’ (240–1). The more overt allusion here is to Paul Morel at the ending of Sons and Lovers looking at his hands as if they were disembodied fragments of himself, disjointed pieces amidst the cosmic dereliction, just prior to his decision to turn determinedly towards the light of the town.57 Poor Belacqua’s sodden state of disillusionment hardly bears comparison with that of Paul Morel’s much more precarious and desperate situation of dissolution. But even here the attempt to get away from Joyce’s influence, as we saw was the case from the very beginning of Dream in ONE, only serves to underline how extensive and deeply felt that influence was: ‘That was his hands’ is cast in Joycean syntax that echoes ‘That was their prayer’ (8) from the first pages of TWO, and which, in turn, echoes a similar phrase from the opening of Portrait, a very young Stephen Dedalus’s ‘That was his song.’ Belacqua’s problem is that he wants to be a Stephen Dedalus redivivus, but he doesn’t know how to go about it; the narrator’s problem is that he doesn’t want to be James Joyce, but he doesn’t know how to avoid this assumed identity except by means of returning with obsessional insistence to a recycling and revising of Joycean materials. Behind them both lies Beckett, who clearly is also of two minds with reference to Joyce’s influence but is committed nevertheless to working his way through Joyce to find his own way of going on.
More Pricks Than Kicks, the ten-story collection that Beckett published in 1934, is especially revealing in regard to this question of influence. Two stories are salvaged from Dream – ‘A Wet Night’ deals with the party scene at the Frica’s that concludes THREE, and ‘The Smeraldina’s Billet Doux,’ her love letter in mangled German-English to Belacqua – but the overall impression of the collection is fundamentally different than that produced by Dream. There are a number of striking reasons for this. First of all, Beckett, in the interests of getting published, has dramatically toned down the extravagant and often arcane language of its predecessor – readability was now clearly a consideration; secondly, this Belacqua is a much less complex character, his theory of ‘self-sufficiency’ now being based on ‘the belief that the best thing he had to do was to move constantly from place to place’ (36), as outlined in ‘Ding-Dong,’ the third story in the sequence; and, most tellingly of all, the Joycean elements that were so extensively developed in Dream are now, for the most part, conspicuous mainly by their absence. Belacqua seems to be commenting indirectly on this when he reflects on his earlier behaviour in ‘Ding-Dong’: ‘Was it not from sitting still among his ideas, other people’s ideas, that he had come away? What would he not give now to get on the move again! Away from ideas!’ (MPTK, 39) ‘Sitting still’ echoes the title of the first section Beckett wrote for what became Dream (‘Sedendo et Quiescendo’) – the section that he had admitted ‘stinks of Joyce.’ On the move again, figuratively speaking, in More Pricks Than Kicks, thereby fulfilling the literal injunction of the voice heard in the last sentence of Dream that ‘enjoined him to move on,’ Belacqua is, however, also fleeing from ideas that would needlessly complicate, in his view, his theory of motion, the most advanced version of which does not proceed beyond an aspiration for ‘pure blank movement.’
In reality, however, Belacqua never even approximates this goal of ‘a Beethoven pause’ (38): the stories, generally speaking, document in painful, sometimes comically grotesque fashion, how Belacqua’s various entanglements with women are what really keeps him on the move. But these contingent relationships reveal his solipsistic theory of ‘self-sufficiency’ to be just that, a theory, one moreover devoid of serious application. This Belacqua, lo and behold, turns out to be that most boring and earnest of all philanderers, the serial monogamist. These relations of short duration (his wives have a surprising habit of dying off) are a far cry from the aesthetic speculations around Beauty with reference to his ‘fair to middling women’ in Dream. ‘Away from ideas!’ indeed: this is a far cry from Stephen’s ‘Away! Away!’ as he prepares to join the voices that say ‘We are your kinsmen’ at the end of Portrait. Belacqua cannot afford any such grand flight; the Joycean phrasing of the first sentence in the following sequence is negated by his sorry plight: ‘Hither and thither on land and sea! He could not afford that, for he was poor’ (36).58 In short, in most of these stories, with the exception of the first (which had already been published in a slightly different version), ‘Dante and the Lobster,’ and the third, ‘Ding-Dong,’ Beckett is, as it were, going through the motions in the interval between novels.
The most significant specific references and allusions in More Pricks Than Kicks are obviously derived from Dante, as the first word of the title of the first short story announces. Nearly all the stories contain such references. Critics have also pointed out that Beckett’s handling of Dantean materials, particularly in ‘Ding-Dong,’ is, in calculated fashion, meant to engage Joyce in a game of literary one-upmanship as Beckett extends the disjunctions between Dante’s vision and contemporary realities, as Joyce had done in the penultimate story of Dubliners, ‘Grace.’59 Another way in which it could, however, be maintained that Joyce’s influence is still felt throughout More Pricks Than Kicks is to argue, as Adrian Hunter does, that ‘all Beckett’s early stories, in fact, can be read as counterpoints to Joyce.’ The counterpointing, according to Hunter, comes into play as Beckett, ‘in the treachery of apprenticeship,’60 reveals and hence debunks the nature of the epiphanic moment by underscoring just how such a privileged illumination is fabricated, either by the author or by the character himself, possibly as a self-deluding rationalization that leads away from any authentic ‘sudden spiritual manifestation’ of the inherent ‘whatness’ of the experience in question. One of Hunter’s examples focuses on ‘Hairy’ Capper Quin in the last story in the collection, ‘Draff,’ who feels, especially as a would-be writer, that he really should have some special visionary insight upon viewing the remains of Belacqua – this might be appropriate since he is making off with the aforesaid’s widow: ‘For he could not throw off the impression that he was letting slip a rare occasion to feel something really stupendous’ (181). Hunter is making the point – and it is one we have encountered in many of our previous discussions – that Beckett adopts a postmodernist type of relationship between the narrator and the narrated in which the former can comment directly on the metafictional goings-on in his narration; a suspension of the suspension of disbelief. For a reader of Beckett this is announced in the second sentence of his first published work, ‘Assumption,’ in which the author-character relationship is conveyed by the analogy of the ‘buffoon in the loft’ and ‘the organist’ and such byplay is, of course, the staple stock-in-trade of the narrator/author of Dream, ‘Mr Beckett.’
It is not then surprising to see this modus operandi in effect in More Pricks Than Kicks. What is particularly interesting, however, is to revisit its use in the final narratorial voice-over of ‘Dante and the Lobster’; this is the most dramatic employment of the technique in the collection and is one of the decisive reasons why the first story is regarded by most readers as the best of the bunch. Beckett carefully prepares readers for the epiphany concerning the lobster being boiled alive, which is for Belacqua an unforeseen event that throws into total disarray his earlier academic rationalizations around the ‘famous teaser’ from Dante about mercy and justice, and which had led to his own query: ‘Why not piety and pity together both, even down below?’ (21). Here the moments of revelation constitute a palimpsestic double-voicing:
Well, thought Belacqua, it’s a quick death, God help us all.
It is not. (22)
Hunter’s judgment of these two final sentences of ‘Dante and the Lobster’ is that ‘the intrusive “It is not” sums up the break [Beckett] is attempting throughout these early works with the aesthetic of the modernist short story as he inherited it from Joyce.’61 But, as we have already seen in a host of examples, Beckett’s relationship with Joyce is not to be so simply characterized; as Dream formulated it, nothing is easier (that is to say, all too easy) than setting up a series of antitheses.
That Beckett is intimately acknowledging his debt to Joyce’s writing in these early works is, in fact, nowhere else more tellingly demonstrable than in this instance of the narrator’s final rebuttal: ‘It is not.’ Beckett’s striking closure is in fact indebted to a particular passage in the aesthetic theory section of Portrait’s last chapter. Stephen is telling Lynch how he has defined pity and terror, something which, he asserts, Aristotle has not done. These two terms are certainly relevant to the ‘pity’ debate in ‘Dante and the Lobster’ and the sense of ‘terror’ that Belacqua professes at the thought of the lobster’s imminent demise. Stephen repeats the definitions to Lynch: ‘Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer,’ whereas ‘Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause’ (178). Stephen, the peripatetic philosopher, then offers his student Lynch an exemplum whereby he might fully apprehend the distinctions being made:
– A girl got into a hansom a few days ago, he went on, in London. She was on her way to meet her mother whom she had not seen for many years. At the corner of a street the shaft of a lorry shivered the window of the hansom in the shape of a star. A long fine needle of the shivered glass pierced her heart. She died on the instant. The reporter called it a tragic death. It is not. It is remote from terror and pity according to the terms of my definition. (my italics, P, 178)
Sorting out the correspondences that Beckett has carefully set up here by means of his appropriation and redistribution of Stephen’s ‘It is not,’ we arrive at the following ironic juxtapositions: the reports of two superficial observers are refuted; the first Joycean example deals primarily with aesthetic matters, the second Beckettian one with ontological matters. That Stephen is mainly concerned with literary affairs here is made perfectly clear in this rephrasing of himself: ‘I mean that the tragic emotion is static. Or rather the dramatic emotion is’ ( P, 179). Belacqua will never be able to achieve Stephen’s ideal of the mind being arrested by the aesthetic emotion and thereby being transported above the kinetic responses of ‘desire or loathing,’ which are deemed indicative only of ‘improper art.’
The Belacqua of More Pricks Than Kicks is no longer the would-be artist-figure of Dream. His theory of movement of some sort at all costs is perhaps Beckett’s most telling reminder to readers that Belacqua Shuah (finally he has received a surname – a legal requirement, surely, given his numerous marriages) is no longer the Stephen Dedalus redux whom we saw in Dream. Hence it is an instance of poetic justice in a story that shows no evidence of God’s or man’s mercy to invoke Stephen’s ‘It is not’ to revoke Belacqua’s self-comforting rationalization. There are, however, a number of other voices that also resonate in the final ‘It is not.’ We cannot forget that in addition to the narrator’s disruption of the text to express his own disapproval of Belacqua’s judgment the ‘It is not’ simultaneously echoes and parodies a Divine riposte mentioned earlier in ‘Dante and the Lobster’: the spots on the moon were in Dante’s reading the branded face of the dispossessed fugitive Cain, ‘seared with the first stigma of God’s pity, that an outcast might not die quickly’ (12). From this perspective, the final ‘It is not’ is simply a doctrinal repetition of God’s judgment as authenticated by Dante. Whereas Dante could reconcile world and book (it was, after all, a divine comedy), Stephen can only endorse in his ‘It is not’ the aesthetic reality, and Belacqua can only rather lamely attempt to accommodate himself to the ways of the world; even this is categorically rejected by the narrator’s final rupturing of such consolatory illusions in his ‘It is not.’ So it goes in Beckett’s literary world.