This study has thus far shown just how extensively Beckett’s works were influenced by a Joyce who exercised a much greater role in determining the structure, style, and aesthetic underpinnings of Beckett’s own writing than critics have heretofore recognized and acknowledged. Of course, it is Beckett’s own choice of Joyce that is decisive in this regard; from the very beginning in ‘Assumption,’ Beckett committed himself to an in-depth dialogical engagement with Joyce, in particular his Portrait, in order to determine what direction his own aesthetic thinking might take. As we have encountered in a telling number of instances, Beckett’s fundamental dilemma might be characterized as a classic case of approach-avoidance: drawn to Stephen Dedalus’s aesthetic precepts as an obvious point of departure for his own speculations, Beckett began by formulating his own critique of such modernist theories, only to discover in his early works through Watt that he had nothing of substantive import to replace them with. Arsene as a Joycean composite was vouch-safed a visionary experience that could not, however, sustain itself, and its aftermath plunged him back into a world devoid of any transcendental significance. This is Beckett’s most powerful critique of the theoretical aporias inherent in the modernist aesthetics that he grappled with in his early fiction and his critical study of Proust. On the other hand, Watt’s failure to experience any such revelatory experience results in a series of what might be termed negative epiphanies in which he loses touch with even the most mundane and commonplace of objects, such as Mr Knott’s pots. Such failures of comprehension and expression did, however, at least hold out the theoretical possibility of new syntheses whereby various negatives might themselves be transformed into affirmations in the creation of new worlds of the imagination.
Indeed, this is exactly what occurs in Beckett’s works after Watt; in a miraculously short period of time, in a handful of years between 1945 and 1949, Beckett produced the major works that for many readers still constitute the basis of his reputation as a writer of the first rank, namely, the Trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable) and his most famous play, Waiting for Godot. Beckett went to a great deal of trouble to ensure that this outburst of creative production would be regarded as intimately conjoined with, indeed dependent upon, a visionary experience in his own life, what he persistently referred to as the ‘revelation.’ As the story was told by Beckett to various friends and associates over the years, his quintessential experience of a world-changing shift in perspective came about as a recognition that the ‘dark’ which he had heretofore tried to suppress was in fact the very area in which he now had to seek the reality of his own artistic explorations and that henceforth he would dedicate himself to contriving means for its expression (DF, 352).1 This ‘revelation’ – or rather a variant thereof – famously appears in a satirical rendering in Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) in which the protagonist is much more concerned with locating a recording of a very different kind of epiphany concerning a moment of love in a boat;2 in passing, Krapp does offer, however inadvertently, a description of the visionary experience he underwent at age thirty-nine (the same age at which Beckett had his):
until that memorable night in March, at the end of the jetty, in the howling wind, never to be forgotten, when suddenly I saw the whole thing. The vision, at last … What I suddenly saw then was this, that the belief I had been going on all my life, namely – (Krapp switches off impatiently, winds tape forward, switches on again) – great granite rocks the foam flying up in the light of the lighthouse and the wind-gauge spinning like a propeller, clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most – 3
Filling in the blanks involves much more here than simply adding Beckett’s own comments to friends such as Ludovic Janvier that the dark he had sought to keep at bay was ‘ultimately to become the source of his creative inspirations.’4 It also entails much more than debunking the crapulent Krapp’s romantico-mystical rendering of storms and lighthouses (symbols where intended?).
In the two most suggestive accounts of Beckett’s ‘revelation’ – those of Richard Ellmann in Four Dubliners (1986) and James Knowlson in his Beckett biography (1996) – it is underscored that Beckett’s ‘vision’ is to be sharply distinguished from Krapp’s, occurring as it does without a romantic mise en scène in Ireland in the summer of 1946 at his mother’s house, New Place, across the road from the old family home, Cooldrinagh (DF, 352).5 This accurate placing of Beckett’s ‘revelation’ is, of course, only a preliminary step – albeit an essential one – in beginning to determine just what significance should be attributed to this self-styled visionary experience, which Beckett has repeatedly proposed as the very basis of his being as a writer. Beckett’s own insistence upon the decisive significance of this ‘revelation’ obviously entails a much more complex investigation of the art-life nexus than that which Beckett peremptorily curtailed in his ‘Foreword’ to Proust: ‘There is no allusion in this book to the legendary life and death of Marcel Proust, nor to the garrulous old dowager of the Letters’ (followed by three more ‘nors’ that further ‘purify,’ supposedly, Beckett’s commitment only to the Proustian texts themselves). But in Beckett’s particular case his promotion of the ‘revelation’ as a turning point in his artistic life does indeed necessitate an ‘allusion’ to his ‘legendary life.’ To unpack the various critical assumptions that have grown up around the so-called ‘revelation’ – aided and abetted by Beckett’s own propagandizing – is an essential first step in order to see how Beckett’s works after Watt are of a visionary nature and afford complex readings of ‘source and influence’ that go well beyond the very often oversimplified versions of a negative world view attributed to him.
Ellmann’s first comment on Beckett’s ‘revelation’ implicitly draws a contrast with Dante’s Vision: ‘Unlike most revelations, this one offered no new heaven or new earth. If anything, something like a present hell.’6 As we will see, Mercier and Camier is saturated with Dantean references and the ‘vision’ afforded can by no means be simply consigned to a ‘present hell.’ Beckett’s own ‘revelation’ will proceed to a complex purgatorial ascent of its own whereby the Beckettian ‘I’ is afforded a complex new perspective on the contingent relationship between fiction and reality, life and death. (This remarkable development – one of the most startling in all modern literature – was foreshadowed, as we have already seen, in the very first paragraph of his ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce.’) Moreover, from the very beginning of his writing career Beckett has identified Dante and Joyce, reaffirming in the last years of his life how he regarded Dante as a ‘Joycean writer.’7 The reasons for this critical oversight with reference to Beckett’s own visionary writing are, however, revelatory of the nature of Beckett studies and the deeply engrained assumptions that have determined so many of its guiding judgments. As Kevin Dettmar has very provocatively argued in ‘The Joyce That Beckett Built,’ many of Ellmann’s views in the late chapters of his James Joyce are indebted to a paradigm of Beckett’s own devising, as evidenced in his various comments and anecdotal reconstructions when interviewed by Ellmann.8 Implicit in Beckett’s summary reflections on Joyce for Ellmann are the views that were soon to be made explicit in the ‘interview’ with Shenker, in particular that Joyce’s god-like vision afforded him an embarrassment of riches for which he, as a heroic organizer of materials, could and would find the appropriate formal accommodation in language.
For Beckett ‘revelation’ carries the idea of the imagination making known new worlds; for example, Beckett referred in 1983 to his ‘Dante revelation’ and added, suggestively, ‘This I seem to have managed on my own.’9 The famous ‘revelation’ at his mother’s could be seen as the creative distillation and synthesis in surprising new combinations of Beckett’s understanding of both Dante and Joyce and their influence upon him. And this ‘revelation’ was indeed something that he was not able to manage solely on his own. Joyce had an integral role to play in Beckett’s development throughout his early works; in fact, it would not be an exaggeration to say that without Beckett’s long drawn out and in-depth dialogical engagement with Joycean aesthetic theory from ‘Assumption’ to Watt there would not and could not have been the ‘revelation.’ Hence Beckett’s ‘dark’-ness is arguably not so much antithetical to Joycean aesthetics as complementary to it; the Beckettian project might then in some important respects be regarded as an extension of the Joycean.
James Knowlson’s version of the ‘pivotal moment in his entire career’ (DF, 351) is particularly interesting in terms of the Joycean context of Beckett’s work. Like Ellmann, Knowlson begins with Beckett’s tendency to speak of his ‘revelation’ in terms of a preoccupation with impotence and ignorance and tellingly adds that Beckett ‘reformulated’ this idea ‘while attempting to define his debt to James Joyce’: ‘I realised that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realised that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding’ (DF, 352). Here we can see Beckett appropriating his biographer’s text, stressing that Knowlson underline how his ‘revelation’ must be distinguished from Joycean aesthetics. But any serious appraisal of Beckett’s account is bound to make a number of ‘subtractions’ of its own. The rhetorical sleight of hand of setting up Joyce’s work so that it can then be played off to the advantage of the successor’s texts cannot be uncritically accepted. Texts such as Jean-Michel Rabaté’s Joyce Upon the Void and Joseph Buttigieg’s study of Portrait in a ‘different’ light are just two obvious examples from a host of recent studies that have dealt with a radically destabilized Joyce. Joyce as ‘author-god’ is no longer accepted as a matter of course, most notably perhaps in terms of Beckett studies in Daniel Katz’s Saying I No More, about which there will be more to say in the next chapter. Knowlson does not query Beckett’s judgment, returning to this point two more times in his two-and-a-half page discussion of the ‘revelation,’ repeating Beckett’s rejection of ‘the Joycean principle that knowing more was a way of creatively understanding the world and controlling it’ and concluding with the point that Beckett knew with ‘certainty that he had to dissociate himself at an early stage from Joyce’s influence’ (DF, 353).10 That two such influential scholars, the principal biographers of Joyce and Beckett, should so comprehensively underestimate Joyce’s influence and active presence within Beckett’s oeuvre, particularly in the early period from ‘Assumption’ to Watt, further reinforces the need to rethink and reconfigure the very assumptions whereby Beckett’s work has been read.
The ‘revelation’ is only of real value if its vision is embodied through access to new worlds of the imagination, or, as Beckett put it in his discussion of the Proustian revelation, the ‘assumption’ must be accompanied by an ‘annunciation’ (Pr, 51). While this is precisely what has not transpired in Beckett’s prose from ‘Assumption’ through Watt, there is in Beckett’s early poetry a remarkable anticipation, at least in a paradigmatic fashion, of the forms of representation Beckett’s ‘revelation’ might indeed take. As I argued in Reconstructing Beckett, the very first poem of Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates (1935), ‘The Vulture’ (CP, 9), has played just such a seminal role in outlining the components of a creation myth that Beckett is only able to put into practice in his prose of the post-’revelation’ period.11 This six-line poem warrants foregrounding in our discussion of this key transition point in Beckett’s writing career; the issues, questions, and challenges raised in the poem, taken in conjunction with the lessons learned by Beckett in his often incredibly detailed rewriting and reworking of Joycean works through Watt, are vital determinants in his ‘original’ departures in Mercier and Camier, Stories, and the famous Trilogy itself:
dragging his hunger through the sky
of my skull shell of sky and earth
stooping to the prone who must
soon take up their life and walk
mocked by a tissue that may not serve
till hunger earth and sky be offal (CP, 9)
The artist-vulture is depicted in the first lines as weighed down by the material reality of hunger, and the rhythm of the poem conveys a descent into the world (‘stooping to the prone’), thus associating the artist in an affirmative way that Belacqua of Dream never envisaged with Vega, ‘the falling vulture.’12 The interchange of possessive adjectives in the first lines (‘his hunger’/’my skull’) also indicates that it is in the art of poetic creation that an authentic relationship of subject and object may take place.
The major achievement of the poem is that Beckett has effected the coincidence of form and content in an ontologically significant way: ‘the one is a concretion of the other, the revelation of a world’ (42), to adopt Beckett’s words from Proust, where, as critic, he could only vicariously praise his author’s achievement. While the skull of the artist-vulture is hermetically sealed, the correspondence of the outer and inner realms precludes any solipsistic interpretation. The process of transfer is not simply mentalistic: the physical world is not suitable material for the artist until it becomes ‘offal’ – this is not the superficial art of the naturalists or pseudo-realists whom Beckett scornfully dismissed as ‘worshipping the offal of experience’ (Pr, 59). The artist-vulture cannot feed upon his creatures until living ‘tissue’ is metamorphosed by the organic cycle of decay, which would strip away the conventional surface and reveal the underlying reality. But, as the second stanza relates, he can, however, still stir them into being (‘the prone who must/soon take up their life and walk’). The enigmatic last line suggests that the ‘tissue’ will not be of use for the artist until ‘hunger earth and sky be offal,’ which need not imply an extinction of the poetic microcosm; the cyclical structure of the poem and the subsumption of ‘hunger earth and sky’ by the ‘skull’ suggests that the final identification of the artistic quest with its appropriate subject matter occurs in the endless rhythm of life, decay, and regeneration.
Read in the context of Beckett’s early prose through Watt, ‘The Vulture’ is a remarkable achievement that does supply an at least paradigmatic solution – however abbreviated – to central literary questions Beckett had been struggling with. Long before the well-publicized ‘revelation,’ it incorporated the idea of an interior world of darkness somehow in conjunction with the light of the world: ‘my skull/shell of sky and earth.’ Beckett, as a realist of a new sort, will investigate just what is the relationship between ‘his hunger’/’my skull’/’their life.’ How are they somehow all one, yet things apart? How can this tripartite division of ‘the absolute predicament of particular human identity’ (Dis, 38) be accommodated within a literary whole? Indeed, how might a fictional creation even be legitimately deemed to have ‘a particular human identity’? Where does authority for the creative act ultimately reside: with ‘his,’ or ‘my,’ or ‘their’? An even more fundamental question is what type of stories could these three potentially diverse voices tell that might satisfy their different needs. What words, what type of language, would each need in order to corroborate its claim of a being or a life of its own?
Beckett’s artist-vulture figure as the demiurge behind the works after Watt is, above all, concerned with determining the nature of the real within literary worlds and finding the appropriate modes of representation. In these works, the most vexed terms of all are ‘real,’ ‘reality,’ and its various cognates, and while the problem Beckett has set himself as an extension of his critique of the aesthetics of Joyce and Proust admits of no simple resolution it remains an abiding concern and driving force in his writing. Certainly, any romantic sense of untrammelled joy and religious transcendence is debunked immediately in the image of a vulture slowly circling its prey – no skylarks, nightingales, or, for that matter, hawks or eagles of more conventional poeticizing are invoked here. Beckett informed Lawrence Harvey that the ‘starting point’ for his poem was the opening stanza of Goethe’s ‘Winter Journey to the Harz Mountains,’ which depicts a vulture (‘Geier’) seeking its prey.13 Harvey’s commentary on Goethe’s poem depicts its author ‘in his joyful moment of expectant creativity,’ adding that ‘Goethe’s “Geier” might well be a hawk.’14 Beckett’s depiction reinforces a certain literalism of the imagination: a vulture is a vulture is a vulture, as the three stanzas of Beckett’s poem ‘stoop’ downwards towards its prey.
Beckett is also implicitly drawing a distinction here between Stephen Dedalus’s ‘fear of symbols and portents, of the hawklike man whose name he bore soaring out of his captivity’ (P, 195) and his own more down-to-earth and realistic art of hunger as outlined in his own figure of the artist-vulture. Even though Beckett pointed Harvey towards Goethe’s poem, Joyce’s Portrait is arguably the more important background text. Beckett was much more forthcoming about Joyce’s influence on his poetry than he ever was about his impact on his prose; in a promotional description of himself for some poems published in The European Caravan (1931), Beckett declared that he had ‘adapted the Joyce method to his poetry with original results.’15 This is certainly the case with ‘The Vulture,’ where Beckett has taken Joyce’s use of mythical analogues and realistically adapted them to the contemporary artist’s situation. This description of Stephen Dedalus’s mythical namesake in Portrait is finally much more influential in Beckett’s ‘The Vulture’ than the reputed ‘starting point’ found in Goethe:
Now, at the name of the fabulous artificer, he seemed to hear the noise of dim waves and to see a winged form flying above the waves and slowly climbing the air. What did it mean? Was it a quaint device opening a page of some medieval book of prophecies and symbols, a hawklike man flying sunward above the sea, a prophecy of the end he had been born to serve and had been following through the mists of childhood and boyhood, a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being? (P, 149)
Beckett’s central images in ‘The Vulture’ are indeed formulated as being inherently antithetical to those proposed by Stephen Dedalus, most obviously in the concluding lines of the poem in which the subject matter for the artist is of no use until it has been metamorphosed by the cycle of decay to reveal its underlying nature, until it is ‘offal,’ whereas for Stephen the artist ‘forges’ from ‘the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being.’
The artist-vulture has to forage or scavenge for his subject matter. And in this context Beckett is perhaps also implying an ironic indictment of himself, for in ‘adapting’ Joyce’s ‘method’ Beckett is feeding off scraps of Joyce’s great work, even as he is beginning to develop his own aesthetic views, which will allow him after Watt to produce works that could be regarded as legitimate rivals to Joyce’s. Later in Portrait, Stephen laments the fact that ‘the monkish learning, in terms of which he was striving to forge out an esthetic philosophy, was held no higher by the age he lived in than the subtle and curious jargons of heraldry and falconry’ (158). Stephen’s ‘monkish learning’ refers to his interpretation of Aquinas’s theory of the beautiful, which we have seen Beckett’s critiques of from ‘Assumption’ through Watt. And the artist-vulture ‘stooping to the prone’ (my italics) also invokes the jargon of falconry. It is therefore particularly appropriate that when Beckett is on the verge of translating his own ‘revelation’ into art his formulations should rely on an adaptation of his own early aesthetic speculations as found in ‘The Vulture,’ which was in part an adaptation of Joyce’s ideas as found in Portrait. Stephen’s romantic effusions about ‘a new soaring impalpable imperishable being’ are qualified by the ironic presence of Joyce’s invisible narrator, who is recording the young artist’s fledgling sense of self. Moreover, it could be argued that Stephen’s fundamental mistake in his quest for artisthood is to seek a ‘prophetic’ or ‘symbolic’ equation of himself with the ‘fabulous artificer’ of myth whose name he bears (minus the diphthong). In Beckett’s ‘The Vulture,’ the artist-figure is distinct from the realms of ‘my skull’ and ‘the prone’ who will ‘soon take up their life and walk.’ This complex series of interrelationships whereby the poetic cosmos is sustained is to be distinguished ontologically from Stephen’s romantic longings for fusion of subject and object (namely, of himself with his mythical forefather).
Surprisingly, Beckett’s commentators have not discussed his next novel, Mercier et Camier, in conjunction with his ‘revelation.’ His biographers have also found it difficult to make any meaningful connections between this novel and Beckett’s visionary experience. Knowlson focuses primarily upon Beckett’s move to French and various particulars of language play contingent upon this, with no mention at all of the ‘revelation’ experience that occurred only a couple of months before he started writing the novel (DF, 360–1). Anthony Cronin does draw attention to the conjunction of the two events, but only to deny that there is any meaningful interconnection: ‘It would be much more dramatic and nicer all round if we could associate this change of language on Beckett’s part with the revelation which he seems to have had at Killiney Harbour in 1946. [T]he clean and satisfying pattern we might establish of an immediate change of mode as well as language, and of progress through the Nouvelles to the great trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, is marred somewhat by the composition of another novel, Mercier et Camier, in French in 1946.’16 On the contrary, Mercier and Camier (published in French in 1970, in English in 1974) is a visionary work in a number of seminal ways and preparatory for the great breakthrough in Beckett’s writing career that was soon to follow. The word ‘vision’ itself is prominent throughout the text and in the summaries that follow every two chapters. Most of the novel transpires in shadow or darkness, or in waiting for the same. The very last summary entry for the final chapter 8 reads: ‘Dark at its full.’ All the key ingredients of the ‘revelation’ are foregrounded in Mercier and Camier. Cronin misreads the very nature of this process of incorporation when he states that there is no ‘immediate change of mode as well as language’ in Mercier and Camier; in fact, over the course of the work there are some dramatic turning points that have proven decisive for all of the later works, foremost of which is a ‘fall into fiction’ whereby the narrator by the end of the novel becomes his own central character.
Sam in Watt was only a pseudo ‘I’ in that he wrote on behalf of, and behind, the figure of Watt. Beckett’s first authentic ‘I’ as self-creator appears in the nouvelle ‘La Suite’ (later re-titled ‘La Fin’), written two months before Mercier et Camier was begun. But it is in the novel that we can actually trace the very means by which such an ‘I’ as author comes into being within the fiction. The process entails a complex interrelationship of Beckett’s two most abiding literary influences – Dante and Joyce. We know from Beckett’s manuscript notes for Murphy that he initially envisaged a Dantean design for that novel, one which was to be kept ‘out of sight’ of the reader’s recognition.17 This plan was dropped and what Dantean shaping elements there are in Murphy are very clearly signposted, such as ‘the Belacqua fantasy.’ It is the Joycean elements that are kept ‘out of sight’ and that, in my reading, prove decisive in the structuring of that work. In Mercier and Camier, the Dantean elements are heavily foregrounded for the reader’s consideration (multiple references to things ‘hellish,’ heavy cues such as ‘station of the damned’ and ‘all hope abandoned,’ to name only the most explicit); the Joycean ones are much less pronounced but are nevertheless significant in determining the visionary elements in Mercier and Camier. This is particularly important for an understanding of Beckett’s work after Watt since Beckett went out of his way to underline to Knowlson that his new literary program as foreshadowed in his ‘revelation’ had nothing to do with Joyce’s. In the following discussion, we will see that from the very beginning of Beckett’s efforts to translate his ‘revelation’ into his writing practice Joyce still continued to play a number of important roles in determining the shape and direction of Beckett’s own work.
The problematical status of the narrator is highlighted in the opening sentence of the novel, an ostensibly third-person narrator, even if he does insist upon preserving his right to the first-person pronoun: ‘The journey of Mercier and Camier is one I can tell, if I will, for I was with them all the time’ (7). Whose story is this to be, that of the ‘I’ of the opening sentence or that of Mercier and Camier? The relationship of the latter is finally of secondary importance; the decisive issue concerns the relationship between a narrator who progressively defines himself as the ‘deviser’ of this recounting and not merely its recorder – in short, as the authorial presence within the text – and his two dupes. The presence of a Mr Knott figure in earlier fictions obscured the fact that the central relationship to be deciphered is not Watt-Knott, but that of Watt-Sam. By dispensing with an ‘Endon-Knott’ figure in Mercier and Camier, Beckett takes a major step towards focusing attention upon the ‘not-within’ – Mercier and Camier have no destination because they are their own goals. Or rather they would be their own goals if they were not the puppets of an author who controls and thwarts their plans in order to further his own ends. The true ‘pseudo-couple’ (as The Unnamable will term them, 297) is not Mercier and Camier, but the narrator-cum-author linked with his two creatures/ creations. Mercier and Camier’s authentic revelation is the emergence of an ‘I’ that would disown adherence to fictional creations and the conventions of representation that accompany them.
The beginning of the novel returns to the ending of part 1 of Watt – a departure into the unknown, only this time there is a couple: ‘The day has dawned at last, said Camier, after years of shilly-shally, when we must go, we know not whither, perhaps never to return … alive’ (16). While there is no authentic epiphany for this couple that would reveal the nature of their quest and any particular goal, both do experience various ‘visions’; for example, Mercier whose inner ‘reflections’ are characterized as ‘a dark torrent of brooding’ (32) has what the narrator in the summary for chapters 1 and 2 terms the ‘Vision of the canal,’ in which he envisages the couple throwing themselves into the canal. Camier’s most striking ‘vision’ is his rejection of that melodramatic old reprobate Mr Conaire, which seems in some ways to be an ironic version of Beckett’s own ‘revelation’: ‘The truth is I suddenly saw my work was over, I mean the work I am famous for, and that it was a mistake to have thought you might join me here, if only for a moment’ (64). Just as the mythical Cartesian ‘conarium’ could not hold body and mind (let alone soul) together, the stock character Mr Conaire cannot any longer advance the plot of the ostensibly meaningless journey of Mercier and Camier.
The ‘visionary’ experience of the narrator is, however, quite a different matter; throughout the story he often coyly and ironically exploits the conventions of narratorial omniscience, at times falling back on the role of a mere reporter seeking verisimilitude and such certitudes. At times, however, his vehement denunciation of the horror of existence and the useless and pathetic pretensions of art is such that he speaks out in his own voice. There are minor outbursts along the way, but the major one occurs at the beginning of the last chapter (8), a page-and-a-half or so tirade on the human condition and all the outrageous things that can and ineluctably will happen. This spectacle is framed in terms of the ‘dark’ Beckett highlighted in his description of his ‘revelation’: ‘But one black beast is hard to keep at bay, the waiting for the night that makes it all plain at last, for it is not every night possesses this property’ (109).
The narrator coming out in the open and initiating the quest to find ways of making his way in the darkness can only be understood by realizing what has occurred in the previous chapter in which Mercier and Camier, after having killed the constable, leave the bourgeois necropolis, journey into the countryside and then into the mountains. Mercier and Camier are here led towards what appears to be an austere Beckettian version of Dante’s Earthly Paradise, atop the Purgatorial mountain, one of the most visionary moments in all literature. Almost imperceptibly an ascent has occurred: ‘All seems flat, or gently undulating, and there at a stone’s throw these high crags, all unsuspected by the wayfarer’ (97). Beckett’s ‘last word about the Purgatories’ in ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce’ helps clarify the relationship between the narrator-cum-author and the characters in this novel:
Dante’s is conical and consequently implies culmination. Mr Joyce’s is spherical and excludes culmination. In one there is an ascent from real vegetation – Ante-Purgatory, to ideal vegetation – Terrestrial Paradise: in the other there is no ascent and no ideal vegetation. In the one, absolute progression and a guaranteed consummation: in the other, flux – progression or retrogression, and an apparent consummation. In the one movement is unidirectional, and a step forward represents a net advance: in the other movement is non-directional – or multi-directional, and a step forward is, by definition, a step back. (Dis, 33)
Beckett’s Purgatory in Mercier and Camier combines essential characteristics of both the Joycean and Dantean purgatories: for the characters the journey is ultimately multidirectional (they do take one ‘step back’ to the city), but for the narrator/author a consummation of sorts does take place. The halfway measures of social alienation and madness are finally irrelevant to the strikingly simple equation: art=death. Beckett means this quite literally, just as he had foreshadowed such a transformation much earlier in his poem ‘The Vulture.’ Mercier and Camier on the mountaintop seem to be no more than spirits, partially purged agents who are susceptible to hallucinations and illusions. While they have penetrated the zone of creative consciousness, this is itself of little importance for they, after all, are not artists. What is important is that the ‘narrator’ has used them to transport himself to this point. The quirky banalities of the opening sentence of the novel thus take on a new and startling significance: he was with them all the time and therefore must also experience death. But for the artist (who must, after all, return to the world for his subject matter) a consummation of sorts has taken place. The consummation is also a transubstantiation in that it involves an apparent fusion of contraries: the mental with the physical, the past with the present (compare ‘for I was with them all the time’ with the narrator/author’s use of the present tense in chapter 7), the ideal and the real. All these changes are contingent upon one fundamental transformation – the narrator’s acceptance of the role of author as character. He must soon take up his life as a would-be authentic fiction and explore the paradoxes of language involved in trying to determine just what the being of a fiction might be.
This is also an important juncture in the reconfiguration of the Beckett canon. Those who like Cronin see Mercier and Camier as having ‘marred’ the progression to the great works soon to follow are fundamentally missing the point here; on the contrary, this novel has marked out the means whereby Beckett was able to attain the breakthrough of Stories and the Trilogy. Moreover, the dramatic turning point in Mercier and Camier is indeed a ‘revelation’ – a revisionist version of Dante’s ascent to the top of the Purgatorial mountain. Beckett criticism has been most reluctant to acknowledge this visionary dimension of Beckett’s writing. For example, Eric Levy, in an important instance of literary sleuthing in Beckett studies, has educed a host of specific parallels between Beckett’s novel and Dante’s great Vision, especially from the first two realms, foregrounding to just what extent Beckett’s text is indebted to Dante. Levy’s argument underlines, however, only the negative dimensions of such analogies: ‘It is not so much a case here of Mercier and Camier paralleling or mimicking the Divine Comedy as of the later work being superimposed upon the earlier spiritual voyage. Hence, at every moment we can see, under the wanderings of this Beckettian couple, the Dantean convictions which they cannot even glimpse. The gap between the two works makes Mercier and Camier at once pathetic and pointless.’18 But Levy’s identification of various echoes, allusions, and references large and small of various types is really only preliminary to a fully engaged critical analysis; positing an ironic gap between Dante and Beckett as the only mode of interpretation effectively curtails the possibility of seeing in certain instances, most notably the ascent of the mountain in chapter 7, what is actually there.
Daniela Caselli has proposed a much more sophisticated way of reading Dante and Beckett. Rejecting the approach found in most studies of simply identifying fragments of Dante in Beckett’s writing and then explicating their function in terms of their roles as so-called quotations, sources, and so on, she is more concerned with determining how Dantean intertexts affect the exegesis of Beckett’s texts on their own merit and how Beckett uses Dantean intertexts in the construction of authority within his own texts.19 This is much more promising and represents an important theoretical advance, even if Caselli does not seem to recognize the possibility that in privileged instances such as chapter 7 of Mercier and Camier Beckett might actually be reconstructing his own version of Dante’s visionary synthesis. Beckett’s very first paragraph in ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce,’ his first piece of published critical commentary, implied and arguably even embodied just such an act of creative reappropriation. Further intertextual support for Beckett’s re-creation of Dante’s Terrestial Paradise as his favoured trope for depicting the creative zone where the artist tries to make sense of the perplexing questions concerning fiction and being, word and world, will be evidenced as we work our way through Beckett’s prose works of the post-’revelation’ period.
In Mercier et Camier, there is a passage, omitted from the English translation, that refers in more detail to the ‘covenant’ of Mercier and Camier to forbid ‘dreams or quotes at any price’ (62):
Lo bello stilo che m’ha fatto onore, dit Mercier, est-ce une citation?
Lo bello quoi? dit Camier.20
The citation is from the first canto of the Inferno, as Dante acknowledges his debt to Virgil:
You are my teacher, the first of all my authors,
and you alone the one from whom I took
the noble style that was to bring me honour. (my emphasis)21
One might here substitute Joyce for Dante since it was Joyce’s style, not Dante’s, that was the primary driving force behind Beckett’s early explorations, in the same way as Dante acknowledges Virgil as his exemplar in the works preceding his Divine Comedy. From the very beginning of his writing career Beckett identified Dante and Joyce, in later years often citing Dante as a ‘Joycean’ writer. And Joyce’s presence is still a significant factor in Mercier and Camier, even if it is more obviously saturated with Dantean references. Mercier and Camier’s botched meeting at the beginning of their journey is jokingly framed in terms of a modernist aesthetic when the two do finally meet up: ‘Their joy was thus for an instant unbounded’ (8). This ‘epiphany’ is indeed short lived. Moreover, the whole sorry tabulation of their earlier failures to behold each other at the appointed rendezvous is dismissed as ‘What stink of artifice’ (9) in the way that Beckett had to admit that parts of Dream were undeniably redolent of Joyce’s influence. There are certainly residual traces of the ‘fabulous artificer’ of Portrait as our couple gets tangled up in the ‘maze’ and ‘quincunxes’ of the appointed meeting site. These two unfortunate middle-aged travellers still possess memories of when they were young and ‘loved art’ (11).
Echoes of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are numerous and significant, even if not nearly so much in evidence as those derived from Dante. Revealing examples include ironically recast variants of two of the most striking epiphanies in Portrait. First, the narrator describes the ranger who has been bought off by Mercier and Camier in these terms: ‘The ranger’s head appeared in the doorway. Believe it or not, only his head was to be seen’ (18), which echoes, however distantly, the reaction of Stephen Dedalus at his aunt’s place to the apparition-like appearance of Ellen – ‘Suddenly he became aware of something in the doorway. A skull appeared suspended in the gloom of the doorway’ (P, 69). Second, the odd ritual that Camier goes through before deciding whether to raise their umbrella, in which he ‘submitted the sky to a thorough inspection, turning celtically to the north, the east, the south and finally the west, in that order’ (73), is strongly reminiscent of Stephen’s observation and, memorably, ‘short laugh’ as ‘he thought of how the man with the hat worked, considering in turn the four points of the sky and then regretfully plunging his spade in the earth’ (P, 144). This latter incident is arguably a decisive epiphanic moment for Stephen in Portrait since it marks the vital decision to turn away from the call of the priesthood and instead to embrace his vocation as an artist.
Beckett’s distant echoing affords little solace in these instances. Some Joycean echoes are, however, much more musical in nature in Mercier and Camier, suggesting a poetic reconstruction in Becket’s own terms. The more subtle counterpointing of Joycean musical cadences contrasts with the extensive referencing of Dante’s Comedy, which tends towards more allegorical identifications of concept and image. Beckett plays off the ‘distant music’ of Joyce’s final story in Dubliners, ‘The Dead,’ by echoing its final words in a complex series of abridgments that have nothing to do with the heavy-handed symbolization Gabriel Conroy had initially tried to deploy when he sought to characterize his wife’s listening to the singing as a painting entitled ‘Distant Music.’ Camier at the beginning of the journey says that he hears ‘singing’ (25), a necessarily ‘distant music’ since Mercier does not hear it at all, and even though Camier adds that it sounds ‘For all the world a mixed choir,’ Mercier gets the last word in, suggesting ‘Perhaps it’s a delusion’ (25). The ‘mixed choir’ has been pointed to by several critics as a Dantean reference,22 hence in this particular instance Joycean and Dantean allusions are in a collaborative relationship. We will see that the poetic investigation of trying to find the right words to illuminate the ‘dark’ of Beckett’s ‘revelation’ and to give voice to the ‘murmurs’ owes more finally to Joyce than to Dante.
Here is where Beckett’s revisions of the last words of ‘The Dead’ in Mercier and Camier come into play, which is poetically fitting in a novel that is about death and the ‘afterlife’ of artistic visions in the dark. Fragmented yet recognizable echoes of Joyce’s phrasing in the ‘death sentence’ that concludes ‘The Dead’ – ‘as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling like the descent of their last end upon all the living and the dead’ – are distributed at several junctures in Mercier and Camier:
(i) when Mr Gast takes ‘civil leave’ of his customers from his bar, who head off into the rain (we have already seen in Dream and ‘A Wet Night’ how Joyce’s ‘snow’ becomes Beckett’s ‘rain’): ‘They were perhaps so pleased, who knows, for professional reasons, to see it fall, that they were pleased to feel it fall, wetting them through’ (48).
(ii) in the narrator-cum-author’s breaking through the paltry artifice of his story to speak in propria persona, near the end of chapter 7: ‘all ears for the footfalls, footfalls distinguishable from all the other footfalls, and they are legion, softly falling on the face of the earth, more or less softly, day and night’ (104). ‘Softly falling’ and ‘falling softly’ are prominent pairings in the last paragraph of ‘The Dead.’
(iii) in the very last sentences of Beckett’s concluding paragraph of Mercier and Camier: ‘Alone he watched the sky go out, dark deepen to its full. He kept his eyes on the engulfed horizon, for he knew from experience what last throes it was capable of. And in the dark he could hear better too, he could hear the sounds the long day had kept from him, human murmurs for example, and the rain on the water’ (122).
Listening to the rain (as Gabriel Conroy ‘had heard the snow’), Mercier can give thanks for small mercies, foremost of which is the fact that this particular story is finally over (even if the formulaic ‘Summary of two preceding chapters’ is still to follow). And by the ending of this novel Beckett has made the ‘dark’ of his ‘revelation’ his central subject in a way that is indeed a major departure from his previous work. The last paragraph of the novel also illustrates how Beckett’s ‘debt’ to Joyce can still be recognized, however distant the verbal music is, even as Beckett has incorporated Joyce’s legacy in order to fashion innovative works of his own.
Beckett went out of his way to emphasize to Knowlson that his new ‘vision’ of the ‘dark’ had nothing to do in his estimation with Joyce’s aesthetic program. That this is not the case is indicated by a number of developments in the ending of Mercier and Camier that prove decisive for future developments in Beckett’s prose fiction. The sudden appearance of Watt directly raises two vital questions, those of quiddity and artistic creation. Watt briefly reunites the two central characters, who had gone their own ways, and over a drink confides, ‘I too have sought […], all on my own, only I thought I knew what’ (113–14); then he adds, prophetically, ‘one is born of us, who having nothing will wish for nothing, except to be left the nothing he hath’ (114). This ‘one’ is no other than the narrator as author, the ‘I’ who speaks in his own voice at strategic junctures in Mercier and Camier and who will assume responsibility for the narration in the three Stories that follow and the famous Trilogy. But the Geulincxian aesthetic and ethic of ‘for nothing’ is immeasurably complicated by the ontological exigencies that accompany the illumination of new fictional worlds in the dark. Yes, they are, in some obvious senses of the word, ‘nothing’; still they are in some equally self-evident ways a ‘something,’ a verbal construct in which questions of being and reality need to be critically illuminated. Mercier’s final ‘vision’ before he is left ‘alone,’ ‘dark at its full,’ in the final paragraph is the ‘prospect’ in the ‘skywrack’ of ‘The ancients’ Blessed Isles’ (121), which for Camier are perceived, if at all, only as ‘a few pale gleams.’ Here we are, back again, to Beckett’s reappraisal of a major tenet in Stephen Dedalus’s aesthetic theory, that claritas, the defining quality of aesthetic apprehension, is not ‘a light from some other world, the idea of which the matter is but the shadow, the reality of which it is but a symbol’ (P, 185). Beckett agrees with Joyce on this most important issue of all concerning aesthetic judgment: to see the whatness of a literary thing is to apprehend its illumination by a light within – from our world here below and not as ‘representation of the divine purpose’ (P, 185).
An in-depth investigation of these and related issues occurs in ‘The Calmative’ (1946), second in the sequence of three Stories first published, but the last to be written. ‘The Calmative’ is the most complex and developed of the Stories for it is more directly engaged than the others with finding a modus vivendi whereby the narrator can deal with a number of perplexing questions concerning his fictional being and its relationship to other worlds and the words that accompany them. What is striking in this story, which is Beckett’s most thorough embodiment thus far of the significance of darkness in his artistic vision, is the degree to which it is, nonetheless, punctuated by flashes of a blinding radiance. For example, the narrator at mid-point in his story cannot determine what time it is, day or night, because of ‘the extraordinary radiance shed by the street-lamps and traffic-lights’ (CSP, 70); this shortly thereafter leads him to long for ‘the shade of my wood, far from this terrible light’ (73); but there is no escaping ‘the atrocious brightness’ (75), even though he hugs the walls ‘famished for shadow’ (75). Finally, however, the ‘I’ does elude the ‘brilliancy flooding the boulevard’ (76) as, ‘in a slow swoon, darkness fell about me’ (76), and he then falls first to his knees, then on his face in the midst of a throng of people. Here follows the most complex interrelationship of darkness and light in the whole story: ‘It was well with me, sated with dark and calm, lying at the feet of mortals, fathom deep in the grey of dawn, if it was dawn. But reality, too tired to look for the right word, was soon restored, the throng fell away, the light came back and I had no need to raise my head from the ground to know I was back in the same blinding void as before’ (76). But this narrator, while tempted to stay where he is, compulsively sets foot uphill and the story ends six sentences later with him unable to take his celestial bearings (literally and figuratively since he is looking for the Bears): ‘For the light I stepped in put out the stars, assuming they were there, which I doubted, remembering the clouds’ (77). The narrator has experienced at first hand some of the dangers inherent in posing profound questions of aesthetics as outlined by the dean of studies to Stephen Dedalus in Portrait: such as ‘Many go down into the depths and never come up’ (163) and ‘It may be uphill pedalling at first’ (166).
Throughout this image cluster, the Dantean references stand out; indeed, one might say that such references are overdetermined and constitute a surplus of allusion. All the various degrees of light are measured against the ‘little wood’ (62) from which the ‘I’ takes his departure at the beginning of the story. The second reference is even more directly an echo of Dante’s first canto of the Inferno: ‘But it was nothing, mere speechlessness due to long silence, as in the wood that darkens the mouth of hell, do you remember, I only just’ (66). This paraphrases Dante’s initial encounter with Virgil:
While I was rushing down to that low place,
my eyes made out a figure coming toward me
of one grown faint, perhaps from too much silence. (Inferno, Canto I, 61–3)
The repeated references to a blinding radiance and variants thereof are, on the other hand, most strongly reminiscent of a number of parallel incidents in the Paradiso in which the eyes of Dante the pilgrim are opened to the ultimate realities of the universe and God’s revelation of the True Light. Whereas Dante in several instances is first blinded and then strengthened in his vision so that he can endure the paradisial radiance, Beckett’s ‘I’ is ineluctably drawn towards a darkness where his hunger for determining his own being might be satisfied. The beatific radiance of the Divine Comedy no longer has a role to play. Beckett’s story takes its departure from the Inferno, and its imagery of a blinding radiance from its mid-point onwards strongly echoes the Paradiso; but the story as a whole transpires within the middle-ground of Purgatorio. The ‘skull’ within which we are told this whole fictional process is occurring is yet another variant of Beckett’s revisionist reconfiguration of Dante’s Terrestrial Paradise at the top of the Mountain of Purgatory as that zone of a critical creativity whereby the artist-figure can explore the connections between fictional being, our world (which is somehow contingent with it), the author-figure responsible for its very being, and, finally, the residual question of the historical author (reputedly one Samuel Beckett) who is ultimately behind it all. Above all, this is a dynamic mixture of elements and is to be distinguished sharply from what Beckett characterized as the static allegorical representations of Hell and Paradise in ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce.’
Some illumination is needed to see in the dark in which Beckett’s ‘revelation’ determined his authentic vision was to be sought. The very last sentence of ‘The Calmative’ is, next to the ‘little wood’ motif, the strongest allusion to Dante’s tripartite Vision of the after worlds: ‘For the light I stepped in put out the stars, assuming they were there, which I doubted, remembering the clouds.’ Each book of the Divine Comedy ends with a sighting of the stars as emblematic reminders of God’s powers. But in Beckett’s ‘The Calmative’ the light into which our author-as-character has ‘stepped’ emanates from within this fictional world itself. The very first reference to the Dantean focal point of the ‘little wood’ establishes in no uncertain terms that no matter where you stood in this wood, ‘you saw on every hand the gleam of this pale light, promise of God knows what fatuous eternity’ (62). Shades of Mercier’s vision of ‘a few pale gleams’ (MC, 121) of ‘the ancients’ Blessed Isles.’ In both Mercier and Camier and ‘The Calmative’ Beckett redirects the focus away from a supernatural intervention and back to the world at hand. In other words, Beckett once again replaces Dante’s Radiance with Portrait’s claritas. However, the ‘whatness’ of the reality Beckett is exploring in ‘The Calmative’ is much more complex than that encountered by that young theoretician Stephen Dedalus, for in this story Beckett is not merely talking about a theory of art but actually embodying its very principles. Beckett is able to implement the epigraph of Portrait in a way its protagonist never was really capable of: Et ignotas dimittit in artes, translated as ‘And he applies his mind to unknown [obscure] arts.’ This description of Daedalus in Ovid’s Meta-phorphoses continues, ‘and changes the laws of nature.’ Beckett’s ‘obscure’ or dark arts in his own brand of visionary writing do indeed change the very laws of nature as evidenced in the complex and ostensibly contradictory admixture of darkness and blinding void in its conclusion, so much so that the very nature of what is being described is only problematically and provisionally termed ‘reality, too tired to look for the right word’ (76).
The influence of Dante is pervasive in ‘The Calmative’ while Joyce’s is much less obvious even if it also plays an important role. This is most evident in the final visionary experience of the narrator. The ‘I’ is on his way through ‘the brilliancy flooding the boulevard’ (76) when ‘in a slow swoon darkness fell about me.’ He is vouchsafed then a visionary experience: ‘I saw a mass of bright flowers fade in an exquisite cascade of paling colours.’ He falls into a state of semi-consciousness in the midst of the ‘throng’ and finally emerges from his swoon, ‘sated with dark and calm, lying at the feet of mortals, fathom deep in the grey of dawn, if it was dawn.’ The light of the ‘blinding void’ returns and he is again on his way, the story ending very shortly thereafter with an ironic variation, as we have already noted, on Dante’s references to the stars at the end of each part of the Divine Comedy. The ‘swoon’ could be identified with Dante’s fall into unconsciousness at the end of Canto III of the Inferno, when ‘a reddish light’ extinguishes his senses and he ‘fell as one falls tired into sleep’ (134–6). Likewise, the ‘cascade’ of flowers might be regarded as a reference to Canto XXX of Purgatory and the ‘nebula of flowers’ that ‘poured down’ (28–30).
At this juncture, one could, however, also argue that the Joycean echoes are of even greater importance and that this visionary passage might best be regarded as a complex palimpsestic layering of Dantean and Joycean elements, whereby Beckett’s appropriations enable him to formulate his own vision through the words of others. Beckett’s visionary encounter contains strong echoes of the birdgirl epiphany that concludes chapter 4 of Portrait, an episode we have seen Beckett turn to again and again in earlier discussions of his fiction. Beckett’s visionary experience at the end of ‘The Calmative’ is preceded by failed attempts to see clearly a number of women; the narrator tries to conjure up Pauline, who had figured prominently in the story told by the man he met in his ‘little encounter,’23 but she ‘gleamed an instant and was gone, like the young woman in the street’ (75), a reference to an earlier sighting of ‘a young woman perhaps of easy virtue’ (71). He has to make do with a brief memory of the ‘little girl’ he had glimpsed earlier (69), a residual image in which she disappears ‘without having yielded me her little face’ (75). This is indeed a far cry from Stephen Dedalus’s encounter with the birdgirl, whose eyes ‘turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze’ (P, 151). Denied such an aesthetic reference point in the world without, Beckett’s ‘I’ is perforce drawn to the darkness within in order to pursue his own revelation of new literary worlds. This distinction having been made, there are still a number of striking similarities between the two visionary experiences. The Beckett narrator’s ‘swoon’ and vision of the cascade of flowers are also strongly associated with what Stephen Dedalus experiences after his birdgirl encounter, when he closes his eyes:
His eyelids trembled as if they felt the vast cyclic movement of the earth and her watchers, trembled as if they felt the strange light of some new world. His soul was swooning into some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed by cloudy shapes and being. A world, a glimmer or a flower? Glimmering and trembling, trembling and unfolding, a breaking light, an opening flower, it spread in endless succession to itself, breaking in full crimson and unfolding and fading to palest rose, leaf by leaf and wave of light by wave of light, flooding all the heavens with its soft flushes, every flush deeper than other. (P, 152)
‘The Calmative’’s ‘swoon’ also specifically echoes Joyce’s ‘fading’ and ‘palest,’ thereby identifying his revision more closely with Joyce’s not so distant music than with Dante’s heavenly music of the spheres. Further-more,’fathom deep’ in Beckett counterpoints Joyce’s ‘as under sea.’ Just prior to entering the interior world behind his eyes, Stephen Dedalus ‘felt above him the vast indifferent dome and the calm processes of the heavenly bodies.’ Beckett’s ‘I’ only achieves a comparable sense of oceanic well-being (‘It was well with me’) when he is transported within himself and is thereby ‘sated with dark and calm.’ While Beckett has gone to considerable lengths to distinguish at times his vision from Joyce’s, it is nevertheless evident that Beckett’s vision is still greatly indebted to him. After all, the very first ‘calmative’ in the Beckett canon – ‘Assumption’’s ‘He thought of George Meredith and recovered something of his calm’ – was a surrogate for Joyce himself. Dante and Joyce, in conjunction, assist Beckett in bringing his own light to bear on his new worlds of the imagination.
Beckett’s originality in this text entails the incorporation of the rewritings of Dante and Joyce within his own aesthetic program as outlined in ‘The Vulture.’ The aesthetic of death in the poem and implicit in chapter 7 of Mercier and Camier now becomes explicit. Only an understanding of what occurred in the novel prepares the way for the startling first sentence, ‘I don’t know when I died’ (61). By assuming responsibility for the creative process, this new author-figure undergoes a change that can be legitimately regarded as a death since it transports him into a new spatio-temporal zone in which there is no simple objective orientation towards what passes as the socially accepted definition of reality. This Beckettian manoeuvre involving the death and rebirth of the author is, needless to say, a far cry from the Barthesian version in which a scriptor or textual administrator replaces the traditional view of the author as originator. The death of the conventional pseudo-identity requires the fabrication of another in the story he tells in order to calm himself. The rebirth in the act of story-telling creates a new time (‘what I tell this evening is passing this evening’), which causes the speaker, thinking back on his old dead identity, to comment that he is now ‘older than I’ll ever have been’ (62). The ‘I’ unites two locales, a ‘here’ and a ‘there’; he is at once in his ‘ruins,’ the ‘refuge’ of disembodied creative consciousness represented (as in Mercier and Camier) by the ‘outskirts,’24 and in the ‘city’ to which the creative consciousness must return to find the concrete forms for its embodiment: ‘I wasn’t returning empty-handed, not quite, I was taking back with me the virtual certainty that I was still of this world, of that world too, in a way’ (69–70). A novel situation, indeed: where is so-called ‘reality’ to be located, and is this even any longer the ‘right word’?
Beckett would seem to be acknowledging the decisive role Joyce played in his own development in ‘Premier Amour’ (‘First Love’), the third of the four nouvelles written during 1946, but held back from publication until 1970. However circuitously, this short story might be regarded as revisionist literary history in which Beckett recasts the most traumatic event in his relationship with Joyce and his family, his expulsion from the family circle over the ‘misunderstanding’ between himself and Lucia Joyce, who was infatuated with him, as one of her first loves (one of her many dreams of fair to middling young men). The narrator of this story tells us that the events he will be treating belong to a distant time when he was twenty-five years old. This focus on youth is an obvious reason why Beckett chose not to publish it with the other Stories, all of which deal with the ‘I’ character at a much later point in his life-story, or, as in ‘The Calmative,’ his ‘afterlife.’ Beckett was in fact twenty-four when the rupture with Joyce took place over Lucia; in 1931 Beckett was in the midst of the excommunication which began in May 1930 and ended in early 1932.
From this revisionist autobiographical angle, the opening sentence of ‘First Love’ – ‘I associate, rightly or wrongly, my marriage with the death of my father, in time’ (CSP, 25) – might be glossed as follows: Beckett’s exile from Joyce, his literary father (in accordance with the fosterage principle of paternity in Portrait), is likened to a ‘death’ and his marriage to Lulu (soon to be renamed Anna) is somehow akin to a poetic compensation of sorts since the woman in ‘First Love’ is in many ways strongly reminiscent of one Lucia Anna Joyce. Beckett in real life had made it clear to Lucia that he came to the Joyce household to see her father and that her romantic interest was not reciprocated, at which point Joyce, strongly encouraged by his wife Nora, made it all too abundantly clear to Beckett that his family came first and everything else a very distant second. In the aftermath of Lucia’s mental deterioration and subsequent confinement, Beckett felt guilt and remorse over his inability to love, more particularly, to give any love to, Lucia Joyce. In dramatic contrast, the very title of this story announces that the central topic at hand is ‘love’ and the very last sentence reaffirms the fatalistic nature of such engagements: ‘But there it is, either you love or you don’t’ (45).25 A certain poetic justice is evident then in Beckett’s phantasmagorical composite of his ‘break up’ with Joyce: it was Lucia Joyce who had made it known to all and sundry that she wanted to marry before her twenty-fifth birthday.
Moreover, specific features of ‘First Love’ would seem to be derived from Beckett’s earlier depiction of Lucia Joyce as the Syra-Cusa in Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932). Joyce’s daughter takes her name, as Knowlson has pointed out, from Dante: ‘in the Divina Commedia, Lucia is one of the “tre donne benedette” (three blessed women) and, one of [Beckett’s] student notebooks records, she comes from Syracuse’ (DF, 151). In the novel, Belacqua bestows a copy of the Divina Commedia upon her and she promptly proceeds to lose it in a café. In ‘Premier Amour,’ there is, ironically enough, an explicit mention of Dante in a context that also mixes up various high-culture/low-culture references, but in the ‘First Love’ translation the allusion to Dante is completely excised, lost for good, just as Syra-Cusa had lost Beckett’s favoured edition of Dante. Other distinguishing features shared by Lucia, Syra-Cusa, and Lulu-Anna are a squint (as the narrator of Dream admits, ‘Eyes – less good, to be frank, than we make out, our pen carried us away’ [50]), musical ability and an affinity for singing, and, above all, a highly sexualized presence, coupled with a persistent pursuit of her amorous prey. The last words accorded her in Dream are ‘Be off, puttanina, and joy be with you’ (51). Two and a half pages earlier at the beginning of the Syra-Cusa passage, the narrator remarks: ‘She belongs to another story, a short one, a far far better one’ (49). This could, of course, be a jesting reference to such ‘short’ works as Ulysses and the then Work in Progress in which Lucia Joyce served as a model for various fictional reincarnations. But it could also be regarded as a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby ‘First Love’ itself becomes that ‘far far better’ short story. The farewell to the Syra-Cusa – ‘Be off, puttanina’ – becomes the basis for the plot, such as there is, in ‘First Love’ in which Lulu-Anna is a prostitute and supports the narrator by the avails thereof. As in previous Beckett ‘whoroscopes,’ the underlying issue is an aesthetic one: what is beauty and what is its significance? Trying to decide whether Lulu-Anna is beautiful or not, but admitting ‘the eyes were crooked’ (37), this narrator confesses that he had no idea at all ‘in what beauty was supposed to consist’ (38), just as earlier he had not been able to characterize accurately his ‘first love’ (priapic, platonic, or a ‘different variety’ [34] altogether). The only affirmation now on such prickly issues would seem to be paradoxical: ‘And my father’s face, on his death-bolster, had seemed to hint at some form of aesthetics relevant to man’ (38). This reference immediately brings to mind Harry Levin’s comments on Joyce’s death mask and his identification of it with ‘the face of his Stephen Dedalus’ (PJJ, 2).
There is, however, no denying that this fair to middling woman Lulu-Anna is a variant on the Anna Livia Plurabelle of Finnegans Wake in so far as various shifting selves return to fundamental questions of beauty, aesthetics and, yes, love. Two scenes – one dealing with Anna’s wooing of the narrator, the other detailing his final departure from her – underscore how Joyce’s ‘music,’ however ‘distant,’ can still be heard, however faintly. In the first scene the ‘I’ asks Anna to sing him a song:
I thought at first she was going to refuse, I mean simply not sing, but no, after a moment she began to sing and sang for some time, all the time the same song it seemed to me, without change of attitude. I did not know the song, I had never heard it before and shall never hear it again. It had something to do with lemon trees, or orange trees, I forget, that is all I remember, and for me that is no mean feat, to remember it had something to do with lemon trees, or orange trees, I forget, for of all the other songs I have ever heard in my life, and I have heard plenty, it being apparently impossible, physically impossible short of being deaf, to get through this world, even my way, without hearing singing, I have retained nothing, not a word, not a note, or so few words, so few notes, that, that what, that nothing, this sentence has gone on long enough. Then I started to go and as I went I heard her singing another song, or perhaps more verses of the same, fainter and fainter the further I went, then no more, either because she had come to an end or because I was gone too far to hear her. (36–7)
For Beckett to strike such an allusive chord in a work that seems, among other things, to be a retrospective assessment of his relationship with Joyce and his family is hardly surprising.
Of particular interest here is how we might see via this passage Beckett’s own estimation of his relationship with Joyce at this juncture when he has found his own voice, however replete with Joycean echoes, and is no longer essentially rewriting Joyce in the hope of finding his own voice, which was essentially the case from ‘Assumption’ through to Watt. The key for gauging Beckett’s sense of his new relationship with Joyce, post-’revelation,’ is found in an obscure allusion in the above passage to an even more ‘distant music’: the song that Anna sings that had ‘to do with lemon trees or orange trees’ is a reference to a scene in Mozart’s life as dramatized by Edouard Mörike in his Mozart on the Way to Prague, which occasioned one of Beckett’s most savage reviews.26 Beckett scathingly dismisses Mörike’s slight lyrical novel as a dishonest and sentimental travesty that is ‘a violation of its subject’ (Dis, 62), Mozart as musical genius. In Beckett’s estimation, Mörike simply lacks the ability to make any sense of the great artist-figure who is ostensibly his subject matter; unlike the lamentable Mörike, Beckett is now able to hold his own with Joyce and is worthy of comparison with the master in that he too has found his own voice. The second scene referred to above, the one with which ‘First Love’ ends, might be taken as a corroboration of this since it is set in counterpoint to the passage dealing with Anna’s singing and creates its own ‘distant music,’ which is at once indebted to its source and yet also goes beyond it to exist in its own right. As the narrator relives the memory of Anna giving birth to their child, he hears again and yet again the cries that drove him away:
I began playing with the cries, a little in the same way as I had played with the song, on, back, on, back, if that may be called playing. As long as I kept walking I didn’t hear them, because of the footsteps. But as soon as I halted I heard them again, a little fainter each time, admittedly, but what does it matter, faint or loud, cry is cry, all that matters is that it should cease. For years I thought they would cease. Now I don’t think so any more. (45)
‘Distant music’ and ‘distant cries’ will be powerfully orchestrated in the Joycean counterpoint of Beckett’s great Trilogy.