The closing words of the Trilogy pose a perplexing challenge: how to proceed when an ethical imperative is set in direct opposition to a negative that decries any such action and then, contrariwise, accedes to that very directive – ‘you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.’ This final ‘sentence,’ over three thousand words long, fittingly begins ‘Enormous prison,’ an apt structural description of what becomes in the process of articulation an embodiment of a veritable life sentence. The impasse of this would-be closure is inherent in the Unnamable’s desperate opening decision to ‘stay in,’ to shut out the world: ‘you think you are simply resting, the better to act when the time comes, or for no reason, and you soon find yourself powerless ever to do anything again’ (291). But words, as if by tropism, drag the self irresistibly towards fiction and the world. The decision to ‘stay in’ has become a part of a much larger question about the nature of language and the culturally sanctified fictions it engenders, such as the individuation of the ‘I,’ a God-figure, and the twin ideas of guilt and innocence (the ‘Enormous prison’ is, for example, immediately likened to ‘a hundred thousand cathedrals’).
The Unnamable does not try to make these existential fictions real because he does not want to accept being in time and, moreover, does not have a language whereby he can speak of himself without being entangled in a world of deceit and illusion. The truly remarkable feature of Beckett’s prose fiction in the last forty years of his writing life (1949–89) is the unprecedented investigation into the very syntactical foundations of language as he attempts to forge what he termed ‘the proper syntax of weakness’ which would let ‘being into literature.’ I regard the impasse with which the Trilogy brings itself to a provisional close as the starting point for Beckett’s search for the means of finding a way out of the dilemmas that confound the language of The Unnamable. In Beckett’s prose from ‘Texts for Nothing’ to ‘Stirrings Still,’ there is a turning towards the world and the underlying problem of relocating and reconfiguring the self that has fallen into the no-man’s-land of fictional non-being. These post-Trilogy works will, I believe, come to be recognized as Beckett’s most important and original contributions to the literary tradition. In this pursuit, Beckett is paradoxically the most derivative of writers and the most original. We have seen how in the extensive and wide-ranging network of allusions in Beckett’s work Joyce occupies a privileged position of influence in terms of Beckett’s own aesthetic development. Joyce is still present in a number of important echoes and contrapuntal patternings, even if these intertextual references now function primarily as a means of counterpointing Beckett’s departures from Joyce. The controlling strategy now is one of incorporation as Beckett has assimilated particular aspects of Joyce’s work and adapted them to his own writing.
Beckett’s major challenge is to formulate a new language of his own that will allow for a way out of the rhetoric of failure surrounding the dislocated and dysfunctional pronouns of The Unnamable. Beckett has disclaimed any connection between his own work and that of later Joyce in which he saw an ‘apotheosis of the word.’ Indeed, Joyce’s ‘revolution of the word’ stems from a veritable cornucopia of lexical inventiveness, morphological and phonological.1 On the other hand, Beckett’s project in his post-Trilogy works turns decisively upon the forging anew of a ‘proper syntax of weakness.’ Whereas Joyce could claim to have ‘split the etym,’ it is Beckett who dismantles the conventional syntax of the English (and French) sentence. A commonplace of Joyce criticism is that one of the frames Joyce left intact in Finnegans Wake was the standard syntax of the English sentence. Thus when it comes to an ontological investigation of the very foundations of language in terms of subject-object (predicate) relationships, it might now more accurately be stated of Beckett himself what he had earlier said of Joyce: ‘His writing is not about something; it is that something itself’ (Dis, 27). Beckett’s ‘forgings’ may indeed still echo a Joycean usage in which wordsmithing and counterfeiting are both implied, but it is Beckett who, beginning with How It Is, adopts ‘a revolutionary attitude toward word and syntax’ (my emphasis), thereby fulfilling one of the precepts of the manifesto ‘Poetry Is Vertical’ (1931), to which he was a signatory. In the following discussions of the post-Trilogy prose, the main focus will be on those Joycean elements which counterpoint Beckett’s attempts to formulate a new language for being that would let being into literature. The fully detailed analyses of these works were the subject of my earlier study, Reconstructing Beckett; here the primary emphasis will necessarily be on the Joycean elements as a supplementary feature challenging more traditional readings of Beckett and thereby enriching our understanding of the development of his fiction.
The first of the ‘Texts for Nothing’ shows Beckett’s ‘I’ dialogically engaging earlier formulations of the ‘voice’ as well as entering into an intertextual dialogue with Joyce. The first sentence of ‘Text 1’ virtually recapitulates the last phrases of the Trilogy, ‘I couldn’t any more, I couldn’t go on,’ and this narrator seems to be answering the Unnamable, ‘I can do nothing any more, that’s what you think’ (CSP, 100), even affirming that ‘we seem to be more than one, all deaf, not even, gathered together for life’ (100–1, italics mine). But this intended escape from what Beckett termed the ‘attitude of disintegration’ that characterized the status of language at the end of The Unnamable ‘failed in ‘Texts for Nothing.’2 To substantiate the claims for being enunciated in ‘Text 1,’ a new language is needed to corroborate a vision redirected towards the world. And, in this regard, Beckett is engaged in a dialogue with Joyce in which the underlying import is to distinguish this new perspective from Joyce’s; in short, to echo Joyce and then to reply in his own voice: ‘All mingles, times and tenses, at first I only had been here, now I’m here still, soon I won’t be here yet, toiling up the slope, or in the bracken by the wood, it’s larch, I don’t try to understand, I’ll never try to understand any more, that’s what you think, for the moment I’m here, always have been, always shall be, I won’t be afraid of the big words any more, they are not big’ (102–3, my italics). This echoes Stephen Dedalus’s comment to Mr Deasy in the ‘Nestor’ chapter of Ulysses: ‘– I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy’ (U, 31). ‘History’ is, of course, another such ‘big word’ that Stephen is afraid of – a ‘nightmare’ from which he is trying to awake. Beckett, on the other hand, is not afraid of the ‘big words’ because ‘they are not big.’ Like Joyce, Beckett is concerned with history (‘times and tenses.’) Moreover, he is in ways very distinct from Joyce also focused on the ontological dimensions of language whereby such a self (or selves) might come into being by integrating its various ‘times and tenses.’ Moreover these ‘big words’ are indeed ‘not big’: the key words are ‘here’ and ‘be.’ The little words of language, the deictics such as ‘above’ and ‘below,’ ‘here’ and ‘there,’ constitute on the linguistic plane ‘all my little company’ (103). The ‘here,’ however, varies, as the narrator is all too painfully aware, and any clarification of the mingling of tenses and times necessarily depends ‘on what I meant by here, and me, and being’ (101).
For Beckett the specifics of how these terms are connected necessitate a reconfiguration of the syntactical foundations of the sentence. For Joyce the mingling of times and tenses is celebrated as a joyful multiplicity of selves; for example, in that principal figure and function HCE (Here Comes Everybody), replete with the virtually endless metamorphoses of the words that constitute the all-including, all-encompassing ‘farraginous chronicle’ that is Finnegans Wake. For Joyce the chronicling can proceed as expansively as it wants on the assumption that the conventional syntax of the English sentence allows for the registering of events, however palimpsestically overlaid with the echoing effects produced by morphological and phonological play with the fluidity of words within that syntactical frame. For Beckett, however, the inability to determine who is who, what is what, and – above all – who is speaking results in a linguistic impasse; as ‘Text 6’ puts it, ‘this farrago of silence and words, of silence that is not silence and barely murmured words’ (125). The question of to whom the voice belongs is raised in the first sentence of ‘Text 4’: ‘Where would I go, if I could go, who would I be, if I could be, what would I say, if I had a voice, who says this, saying it’s me?’ (114). A perfectly balanced formal construct, any content it might express is drained away by the final query. The last sentence of this ‘Text’ pretends to resolve this problem: ‘That’s where I’d go, if I could go, that’s who I’d be, if I could be’ (116). But the pronoun ‘that’ is no longer demonstrative since it lacks any clear antecedent. The reasonable ‘I’ is the common term that relates ‘he who neither speaks or listens’ and ‘he who moves.’ As a consequence, this ‘I’ becomes literally an ‘excluded middle,’ not refined out of existence as in the Joycean ideal of the artist propounded in Portrait, but simply reasoned away as a logical impossibility.
Another reason for misreading the direction and import of Beckett’s post-Trilogy writings is the quite incredible way in which Beckett’s ‘Three Dialogues’ (with Georges Duthuit, 1949) has been adopted by many Beckett commentators as if it were a programmatic description of Beckett’s guiding principles. Whereas the manifesto speaks of the ‘dream of an art unresentful of its insuperable indigence and too proud for the farce of giving and receiving’ (Dis, 141), ‘Text 13’ speaks of the ‘end of dream […] the end of the farce of making and the silencing of silence’ (154). Beckett declared at the end ‘Three Dialogues’ that he would not circumvent the ‘fidelity to failure’ by turning it into ‘an expressive act, even if only of itself, of its impossibility, of its obligation’ (Dis, 145). Yet this is arguably what he has done in the ‘silencing of the silence’ in ‘Texts for Nothing.’ The studied variation on the phrase from ‘Three Dialogues’ in ‘Text 13’ is dialogical in the critical sense and is a recognition on Beckett’s part of the rhetoric of failure in ‘Texts for Nothing’ and the degree to which this undercuts his ‘fantastic theory’ (as Duthuit terms it) of an art that is no longer ‘expressive.’
Another instance of Beckett’s third-party triangulation between himself and Joyce is lodged in the midst of the second dialogue on Masson and the critique of that artist’s ‘concern with the amenities of ease and freedom’: ‘The stars are undoubtedly superb, as Freud remarked on reading Kant’s cosmological proof of the existence of God’ (Dis, 141). This reference is an echo with variation of an anecdote about Joyce that Ellmann cites in his biography (the source is identified in the endnotes as Samuel Beckett): ‘Joyce attended a party in Zurich where the guests were brought out on the balcony to look at the stars, and a priest who was present embarked on a cosmological proof of the existence of God, adduced from the intricate order of the starry heavens. Joyce interjected “Schade dass alles von der gegenseitigen Zerstörung abhängt” (“What a pity that the whole thing depends upon reciprocal destruction”)’ (JJ, 648). Here Joyce is just as attuned to various dissonances in the music of the spheres as Beckett.
Later in the Masson dialogue D. puts forward a view of painting, of art, that strongly evokes Joyce’s view of history, minus the Vichian framework: ‘But must we really deplore the painting that admits “the things and creatures of spring, resplendent with desire and affirmation, ephemeral no doubt, but immortally reiterant,” not in order to benefit by them, not in order to enjoy them, but in order that what is tolerable and radiant in the world may continue?’ (Dis, 141).3 D’s final sentence in the Masson section concludes rhetorically, ‘Are we really to deplore the painting that is a rallying, among the things of time that pass and hurry us away, towards a time that endures and gives increase?’ (Dis, 141–2). B. cannot answer this and exits weeping. Joyce’s vision is obviously more openly affirmative than anything in Beckett, particularly around the time of the Trilogy and ‘Texts for Nothing.’ Nevertheless, we will see in our discussion of Beckett’s final works that as a result of the radical reconfiguration of syntax that begins with How It Is (Comment c’est) he also manages in his own way to portray a number of startling visions of a more affirmative nature.
The short story ‘From an Abandoned Work,’ Beckett’s only published prose work between ‘Texts for Nothing’ and How It Is, warrants a brief comment for it alludes to Portrait in a way that anticipates Beckett’s handling of Joycean materials in How It Is. This most recent avatar of the Beckettian portrait of the artist as an old man states: ‘Over, over, there is a soft place in my heart for all that is over, no, for the being over, I love the word, words have been my only loves, not many. Often all day long as I went along I have said it, and sometimes I would be saying vero, oh vero’ (CSP, 162). This is a geriatric updating of a very young Stephen Dedalus’s much earlier statement: ‘Words which he did not understand he said over and over to himself till he had learned them by heart: and through them he had glimpses of the real world about him’ (P, 64). For the Beckett narrator, it is the failure to ‘take his part in the life of that world’ (to transpose Stephen’s words in the sentence which follows that cited above) that has led him to fixate on the very word ‘over’ itself and the concept of ‘being over’ rather than the repetition of words in order to commit them to memory, to learn them by heart. For the narrator in Beckett’s tale the only truth to tell would appear as the result of an ana-grammatical reshuffling in which ‘over’ becomes ‘vero.’ The obvious differences between the Joycean ‘original’ and Beckett’s rewriting should not, however, prevent us from seeing a number of similarities, which, in any overall assessment of Beckett’s appropriation of Joyce, need to be taken into account. In both there is a love of words, even if the number of words might be greatly reduced in Beckett’s case – ‘words have been my only loves, not many’ – and many of these originate from Portrait, words which Beckett seems to have learned by heart.
The lifelong referencing of Portrait is again in evidence in ‘The Image,’ the first published piece en route to Comment c’est (How It Is). Written in 1956, it was first published in French (‘L’Image’) in the journal X in 1959 (Edith Fournier has translated it for S.E. Gontarski’s The Complete Short Prose). ‘The Image’ is not divided into the versets of Comment c’est; it is one continuous block of prose without punctuation, beginning with ‘The tongue gets clogged with mud’ and ending with a full stop to the ‘sentence’ well over twelve hundred words later. In a revised and reformatted version, ‘The Image’ is incorporated into the middle of part 1 of How It Is (28–31). Even when absorbed into the larger work, the original title is still appropriate since this development of an image from adolescence is the single longest and most extensively detailed portrayal of the ‘I’’s life above in the light to be found in the whole novel. The memory-image vouchsafed in the mud of this underworld depicts the ‘I,’ aged about sixteen, at a racecourse with a young girl and an ‘ash coloured terrier’ (CSP, 166); it is glorious spring weather (in April or May, the narrator is not exactly sure which month), and the couple is drawn towards mountains of ‘modest elevation’ (166) where they picnic. All three principals – the dog gets equal billing in this regard – are grotesquely depicted in this parody of a pastoral young love.
The scenes elaborated upon in Beckett’s ‘The Image’ strongly echo a number of features in a memory that an adolescent Stephen Dedalus suddenly experiences in the midst of the tram scene in Portrait’s second chapter in which ‘a voice within’ questions whether he ought to reach out for a kiss from E–C– (Emma Clery): ‘And he remembered the day when he and Eileen had stood looking into the hotel grounds, watching the waiters running up a trail of bunting on the flagstaff and the fox terrier scampering to and fro on the sunny lawn, and how, all of a sudden, she had broken out into a peal of laughter and had run down the sloping curve of the path. Now, as then, he stood listlessly in his place, seemingly a tranquil watcher of the scene before him’ (70; an earlier variant is found on 49). In addition to similar characters and settings, both scenes refer to an inner voice and, most importantly, a detached sense of watching an earlier version of the present self. Joyce’s vignette occurs in the midst of a complex web of micro-narratives beginning a few pages earlier with the visits he and his mother pay to various relatives, one of which depicts the senile Ellen mistaking Stephen for Josephine (a scene which we saw Beckett rewrite in Molloy I); and, in the scene following the intercalated memory of himself with Eileen and the fox terrier, Stephen is shown trying to transform the tram scene and the kiss not taken incident into a poem in which ‘all those elements which he deemed common and insignificant fell out of the scene’ (P, 71) (whereas in Beckett’s redaction in ‘The Image’ such elements are heaped on to the point of caricature). The rewriting is extensive in the elaboration of details, many of which, such as the racecourse (Leopardstown), refer to fixtures of his own Foxrock childhood. An obvious point of difference between Joyce and Beckett is underscored through the comparison of ‘The Image’ with its seminal starting points in Portrait; the fragmented and interpolated narratives in the Portrait segment challenge Stephen Dedalus (and the reader) to integrate the bits and pieces and are representative of that fracturing of the conventional linear narrative of Stephen Hero whereby Joyce transformed himself into a modernist writer. The temporal disjunctions still, however, hold out the possibility of a sense of wholeness, possibly even of an epiphanic experience that would reveal how the disparate points in time might be integrated. But in Beckett’s ‘The Image’ and throughout How It Is there is a radical ontological rupturing as evidenced by the dualism of a world above in the light and a world below in the excremental underground. The sense of a detached observation of self is taken to an extreme point at which there appears to be absolutely no means by which this absurdly contrived fictional underworld can ever be reconnected with any anterior life above.
Beckett’s major problem is that the ‘I’ of ‘The Image’ and How It Is does not exist in time and can only authenticate his claims to being if he can find a way to return to the world above, where time is truly to be located. The ‘good moments’ – a veritable refrain throughout the novel – are drained of any ontological significance; these momentary illuminations of the world above puncture the world below but are then engulfed by the mud. Hence the obvious echoes of Vico’s cycles of history,4 and by association Joyce, are only a source of ironic mockery since the defining characteristic of How It Is is of a timeless realm. Such Joycean echoes as ‘abject ages each heroic seen from the next’ (HII, 10) serve primarily to underline the fundamental differences between his work and Beckett’s or to show how Beckett has incorporated Joycean elements for his own purposes. An example of the former is the reference to the Ballast Office in part 1 of How It Is (44). In Beckett’s reference it resolutely remains ‘an item in the catalogue of Dublin’s street furniture’ and is not revealed in its ‘whatness’ – ‘epiphanised’ (218), as Stephen Dedalus phrases it in Stephen Hero.5
Phyllis Carey has compared Shem the Penman in Finnegans Wake with Beckett’s Pim in How It Is: both writers employ Eucharistic imagery and both ‘find the common denominator of their respective approaches to artistic creation in the paradox of the cross.’6 These provocative points give way, however, to a series of statements in which Beckett’s use of Eucharistic imagery is termed ‘antithetical’ to Joyce’s and his handling of it labelled with a litany of negatives that echo the ready-made rhetoric of so much Beckett criticism. Beckett is deemed to have reduced life in the Pim episode to ‘meaningless words in a text,’ and, in terms of the vision afforded by the work as a whole, the illusory temporal divisions of past, present, and future are thought by Carey to ‘mask the unchanging, static paralysis of universal human impotence.’7 This last judgment could be taken, for example, as an accurate summary of many of the situations Joyce portrayed in Dubliners. But no one would seriously venture the naive critical judgment that because Joyce depicts this situation he must therefore be endorsing it; why then should such judgments be so uncritically applied to Beckett’s work?
Carey proposes that whereas Joyce emphasized ‘the sacramental quality of the Eucharist, Beckett focuses on the underlying sacrifice it represents,’ and the ending of How It Is ‘contextualizes the novel as a seemingly endless ritual of crucifixion.’8 As I argued in Reconstructing Beckett, a much more affirmative reading of the novel is possible if we consider how Beckett’s ‘proper syntax of weakness’ in this work allows for the possibility in the final pages of the ‘I’ (which Beckett referred to as ‘the narrator/narrated’) forging for himself ‘weak as me a voice of my own’ (HII, 35).9 If we trace the various contestations between the authorial self in How It Is and the ‘other’ in the excremental underworld, a dramatically different interpretation of the novel’s ending could be projected. The vulture aesthetic is vitally present in the last pages and helps the reader to realize imaginatively that the voice now also belongs to the narrator and is not solely at the disposition of the authorial self who has contrived the absurdly logical and grotesque literary paraphernalia of a great chain of being of torturers and victims, each supplied with his own sack of provisions. The ‘I’ narrator likens himself to the ‘prone who must soon take up their life and walk’ (in the words of ‘The Vulture’): ‘flat on my belly yes in the mud yes the dark yes nothing to emend there no the arms spread like a cross no answer LIKE A CROSS no answer YES OR NO yes’ (HII, 146). Christ on the cross is the human being moving towards the divine. The narrator with his cross of words is the fictional being moving towards historical being. In the former, the flesh is becoming word; in the latter, the word is becoming flesh. It is as if Beckett had to write in a radically different manner than Joyce before he could move towards an affirmation in his own way of a number of telling points about humanity and fiction-making that he shared with him.
How It Is is the major breakthrough text in Beckett’s post-Trilogy prose. Its quest for a ‘proper syntax of weakness’ enables Beckett in later works such as ‘Lessness,’ ‘Still,’ Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho, and ‘Stirrings Still’ to develop some startling affirmations of the connections between language and being. However, in tandem with these radical innovations there is another line of development in Beckett’s later work in which the failure to determine a means of accommodating the conflicting claims of the authorial voice and the ‘someone’ discovered in the ‘place’ of the imagination results in the authoritarian imposition of restrictive forms that silence the struggle for voicing by this ‘other’ presence. Beckett’s first work after How It Is, ‘All Strange Away’ (written in 1963 but not published until 1976), falls in this latter category. The ‘he’ and ‘she’ (and multiples thereof) discovered in the ‘place’ of the imagination are never substantiated as images of a living reality; instead, they are reduced to mere figures, abstracted personifications at the disposal of the authorial consciousness that rules this timeless zone of fiction-making. These images are avowedly not ‘real’ and are manipulated in a highly ritualized manner obsessed with geometrical and pornographic details, none of which conjures up a sense of an authentic ‘other.’
There are a number of ironic echoes of early Joyce in the sighting of the character Emma in the closed place of the imagination and the poking and prying that the author-narrator imagines the ‘he’ subjecting her to: ‘Imagine him kissing, caressing, licking, sucking, fucking and buggering all this stuff, no sound’ (CSP, 171). The sentence ‘Imagine lifetime, gems, evenings with Emma and the flights by night, no, not that again’ (171, my emphasis) harks back to that scene in Stephen Hero when Stephen Dedalus makes his ‘mad’ proposal to Emma Clery, whose eyes ‘shone like gems’: ‘Just to live one night together, Emma, and then to say goodbye in the morning and never to see each other again!’ (202). It is hardly a surprise that Stephen’s passionate espousal of the dictates of romantic youth is so unceremoniously rebuffed; as Emma walks away ‘with her head slightly bowed he seemed to feel her soul and his falling asunder swiftly and for ever after an instant of all but union’ (203). In Beckett’s revised version the ‘evenings with Emma and the flights by night’ sentence is followed by a description of Emma’s ‘vague bowed body’ (CSP, 171, my emphasis). Beckett’s Emma cannot, however, walk away or express her views for she is trapped in the crucible of the authorial voice’s own self-serving imaginings: her body is ‘bonewhite when light at full, nothing clear but ashen glare as imagined, no, attitudes too with play of joints most clear more various now’ (171–2). No wonder the flesh is ‘quite expressionless, ohs and ahs copulate cold’ (175); Beckett’s portrayal is soulless – there is no ‘whatness’ or claritas to be revealed when Emma (or her male counterpart Emmo) is merely ‘meat’ or ‘stuff’ at the disposal of the ‘deviser’ of this piece as a pornographer-cum-vivisector. There cannot be any ‘instant of all but union’ since time itself is devoid of any significance in this zone of fictional non-being. There will be no Mr Knightley for this Emma, no suggestion of a Flaubertian ‘c’est moi.’ In a post-mortem assessment of Stephen’s mad proposal to Emma, Lynch states ‘you went about the affair so strangely’ (204). Later Stephen concludes that she only turned down his proposal because of a ‘menial fear,’ adding that her eyes ‘just look strange when upraised to some holy image’ (214). All ‘strange’ away, indeed.
Beckett employs a much more readily identifiable allusion to Portrait in the final sentence of ‘All Strange Away’: ‘Fancy dead, to which now add for old mind’s sake sorrow vented in simple sighing sound black vowel a’ (181, my emphasis). Compare this with Stephen’s thoughts about Emma (who in this work has been reduced to a set of initials or to simply ‘she’) as he watches her pass through the dusk after she leaves the library; Stephen feels ‘a trembling joy’ and wonders why this is so, whether it is because of her presence or because of the line of poetry running through his head (‘Darkness falls from the air’): ‘Her passage through the darkening air or the verse with its black vowels and its opening sound, rich and lutelike?’ (P, 201, my emphasis). Stephen admits that his desire for her conjures up memories of lubricious women, but affirms that ‘the images he had summoned gave him no pleasure’ and that ‘her image was not entangled by them’ (201). On the other hand, Beckett’s images of Emma in ‘All Strange Away’ strip away all mystery and call attention to their patent falsity, to sounds divorced from living sense – such as the ‘black vowel a’ in ‘Fancy,’ which Joyce borrowed from Rimbaud and which Beckett in turn adapted from Joyce.
‘Enough,’ originally written in French (‘Assez’) in 1965, is an anomaly in terms of the development of Beckett’s prose after How It Is. While it belongs to that sequence of works that deals with a modus vivendi between the competing interests of author/other, ‘Enough’ effects these new relationships not via experiments with a ‘syntax of weakness’ but by affording a vision which proceeds on the assumption that such reciprocal exchanges are possible. The story does not, however, begin this way; initially, the narrator is in a totally subservient position to the old man and ‘only had the desires he manifested’ – ‘When he told me to lick his penis I hastened to do so’ (CSP, 186). Over the course of their time together, the first-person narrator reflects movingly on travelling with the old man until one day ordered to depart; she now is also old and thinking back on the relationship with the old man pays homage to the fact that ‘all I know comes from him’ and that it was the time with him (‘Ten years at the very least’) that ‘I shall have lived then or never’ (CSP, 189). The story ends with a memory-image that is antithetical to the clinical debauchery of ‘All Strange Away’: ‘Nothing but the two of us dragging through the flowers. Enough my old breasts feel his old hand’ (192).
The tracing of Beckett’s relationship with Joyce affords another way of elaborating upon the situation depicted in ‘Enough.’ First of all, Beckett’s startled reaction – ‘I don’t know what came over me’10 –might in part be explained by synchronizing the biographies of Joyce and Beckett: Beckett wrote ‘Assez’/’Enough’ when he was fifty-nine, the age at which Joyce died. As we have seen throughout this study, Beckett has from the very beginning measured himself against Joyce’s corpus. The old man is on his last legs while the ‘I’ narrator ‘belonged to an entirely different generation’ (187) and ‘had only to straighten up to be head and shoulders above him’ (188). But now the narrator is also old and is ‘entering night’ (187), and, on another plane, Beckett and Joyce are meeting at a point of equilibrium that will soon be enshrouded by the passing of time. ‘Enough’ is in this sense both a homage to and a requiem for Joyce. There are a number of other factors that point to the Beckett-Joyce relationship as the underlying source for this text: for example, the reference to the narrator fulfilling the desires the old man ‘manifested’ (repeated twice) crudely and ironically brings down to earth the concept of the Joycean epiphany as a ‘sudden spiritual manifestation’; the ‘ten years at the very least’ they spent together is virtually the same time Beckett spent with Joyce (minus the period of ‘exile’ over the Lucia Joyce imbroglio and the period apart precipitated by the German invasion of France); indeed, the very phrasing of the narrator’s departure upon the old man’s command – ‘we were severed’ (188) – echoes Joycean phrasing we have seen Beckett employ in Murphy; ‘the notion of calm’ (192) that comes from the old man is indeed an accurate retrospective assessment, for we saw in ‘Assumption’ that the first ‘calmative’ in Beckett came, however circuitously, from Joyce; moreover, the Terrestial Paradise motif in which the weather ‘was eternally mild’ (191) and ‘we lived on flowers’ (192) might be regarded in some respects as a nostalgic reminiscence of Beckett’s ‘salad days’ when he first met Joyce in Paris in 1928. In short, we have in ‘Enough’ a balancing of the creative experience – an ‘assumption’ of the Joycean old man in conjunction with the ‘annunciation’ of the Beckettian narrator.
The gender ambiguity of the first-person narrator might also be regarded as an acknowledgment of Joyce’s theme of androgyny, which runs throughout his writing. And the many silences that punctuate their years of walking and talking together cannot help but bring to mind Richard Ellmann’s memorable references to similar encounters between Joyce and Beckett (JJ, 648). Images of sharing and communion are further suggested by the depiction of the old man looking at the constellations with his ‘little round mirror’ and ejaculating with joy when he spots the Lyre or the Swan. (Shades of Mr Kelly in the last chapter of Murphy.) The Lyre is the constellation of Orpheus and contains Vega, a syzgetic or paired star. Beckett certainly shares Joyce’s interest in Vega, as further evidenced by references in ‘Assumption’ and Dream. The scene in ‘Enough’ strongly echoes the ‘Ithaca’ chapter of Ulysses in which Stephen and Bloom scan the heavens as they relieve themselves in Bloom’s backgarden:
What celestial sign was by both simultaneously observed?
A star precipitated with great apparent velocity across the firmament from Vega in the Lyre above the zenith beyond the stargroup of the Tress of Berenice towards the zodiacal sign of Leo. (U, 656)
The oddly catechismal nature of ‘Enough’ and its use of mathematical calculations recall the format of ‘Ithaca.’ ‘If the question were put to me suitably framed I would say yes indeed the end of this long outing was my life’ (CSP, 188); this is followed by calculations that do indeed confirm that they ‘took flight in arithmetic’: ‘Say about the last seven thousand miles. Counting from the day when alluding for the first time to his infirmity he said he thought it had reached its peak’ (188–9).
Beckett’s short story is also characterized by a poetic apprehension of life in time, most obviously in ‘I see the flowers at my feet and it’s the others I see. Those we trod down with equal step. It is true they are the same’ (189, my italics). Here Beckett is rewriting the first line of the fifth stanza of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’: ‘I cannot see what flowers are at my feet.’ The fifth stanza effects a vital transition in which the ‘I’ enters a death-like state in an unsuccessful attempt to become one with the ‘immortal Bird.’ Beckett’s variant in ‘Enough’ is actually more affirmative in this regard than Keats’s original. As we have seen at several junctures in our discussion, Beckett has used allusions to Keats in order to refer indirectly to Joyce. Within the sense of loss and death, there is, nevertheless, a countervailing sense of reclaiming time lost by means of the duplicating and recreative powers of memory. The old man adopts the role of a mentor to the narrator, and because the vision passed on is a poetic one, it is necessarily depicted as sensual in terms of the love of words and the flowers of rhetoric, the ‘love of the earth and the flowers’ thousand scents and hues’ (190). Such an emphasis upon a series of Orphic affirmations of the living connections between word and world is perhaps poetic justice since Joyce had at one time considered naming the hero of Portrait Stephen Orpheus.11 Beckett in ‘Enough’ offers an alternative to Harold Bloom’s thesis that the newcomer’s anxiety of influence entails a repression of various ways and solutions arrived at in the tradition the newcomer must strive to rewrite. ‘Enough’ modifies in dramatic fashion the sixth and final phase of Bloom’s paradigm for dealing with the anxiety of influence: the apophrades, or return of the dead. Bloom depicts this phase as the ‘most cunning of revisionary ratios’ in which ‘strong poets’ make it appear that they are in fact ‘being imitated by their ancestors.’12 Instead of such retroactive appropriation, the overall impression in ‘Enough’ is of having certain experiences in common, even as each figure develops its different ways of combining words. Moreover, the discussion does not seem in the end to have been solely literary in nature. Ellmann records an instance of how Joyce ‘made clear to Beckett his dislike of literary talk. Once when they had listened silently to a group of intellectuals at a party, he commented, “If only they’d talk about turnips!”’ (JJ, 702).13 There is perhaps a nostalgic echo of this sentiment in the penultimate paragraph of ‘Enough’: ‘What do I know of man’s destiny? I could tell you more about radishes’ (192).
‘The Lost Ones’ (Le Dépeupleur) was written in 1966, but it was only with the addition of the fifteenth and final section in 1970 that the work was completed. This fable depicts a sealed cylinder, a veritable prison, from which 205 inhabitants, the ‘little people,’ vainly seek to escape by exploring with their ladders the various tunnels that are arranged quincuncially in the walls of their abode. ‘The Lost Ones’ is worlds apart from the vision vouchsafed in ‘Enough’; in dramatic contrast, it falls into the category of those writings in which Beckett critically reveals that if there is no accommodation possible between the needs of the author and his ‘others’ – those figures or characters discovered in the place of the imagination – then the authorial presence will impose his will upon them and shape them to meet his own requirements. In short, this is the argument I pursued in Reconstructing Beckett, with primary reference to the quincuncial patterns developed in Sir Thomas Browne’s The Garden of Cyrus.14 Browne educed a host of telling correspondences between such patterns and God’s intelligent design of the world; Beckett’s fundamental strategy entailed cutting the cylinder off from any connections with an outside world, thereby forcing the reader to deal with the ontological status of the inhabitants trapped within the lost world. They have no independent status and the narrator has adapted the reality of the cylinder to his own system, a move that leads directly to allegory, which Beckett in his early essay on Joyce pejoratively termed ‘a threefold intellectual operation: the construction of a message of general significance, the preparation of a fabulous form, and an exercise of considerable technical difficulty in uniting the two’ (Dis, 26).
Focusing on the Joyce-Beckett connection can add a number of supplemental considerations to our understanding of ‘The Lost Ones.’ The various references to ‘abode’ and the pervasive carceral imagery of the work bring to mind the hellfire sermons of chapter 3 of Portrait as an added dimension of the Dantean mise en scène,15 but the most telling references are to Joyce’s Dubliners. Joyce added the fifteenth and final story ‘The Dead’ to the collection during the period in which its publication had been delayed over a number of objections raised by his printers, foremost of which were the references to specific places and actual personalities. This additional story was also to make up for what Joyce deemed his insufficient acknowledgment of Irish hospitality in the preceding stories (JJ, 230–1). Beckett added his fifteenth and final section to ‘The Lost Ones’ after a self-imposed four-year delay, a hiatus brought about by the fact that the only way out of the textual world in which the narrator was trapped along with the inhabitants was to impose an allegorical final solution whereby his need for order superseded all other considerations. In this fifteenth section, the very last searcher is depicted as coming to his end: ‘There is nothing at first sight to distinguish him from the others dead still where they stand or sit in abandonment beyond recall’ (CSP, 222). After examining the face and eyes of one of the vanquished women, this hypothetical last searcher then enters the realm of the vanquished and ‘after a pause impossible to time finds at last his place and pose whereupon dark descends and at the same instant the temperature comes to rest not far from freezing point’ (223).
Beckett’s vision of the dead here could be compared with the great poetic vision in all its ambiguity with which Joyce concludes ‘The Dead’: the snow ‘faintly falling like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.’ In ‘The Lost Ones’ there are no living left, only the dead. Joyce moved dramatically from the ironic allegorical equations of his fourteenth story, ‘Grace,’ in which Mr Kernan and his friends settle down in church ‘in the form of a quincunx’ (PJJ, 187) to hear a comforting sermon from Father Purdon on how, without too much trouble, they, worldly-wise businessmen all, might put to rights ‘with God’s grace’ their accounts, the books of their spiritual life. Beckett in his fifteenth section moves towards allegory to resolve a host of complexities that cannot any longer be adequately managed or controlled; on the other hand, Joyce in his fifteenth story of Dubliners moved from a crass allegorical accounting to a complex poetic rendition of human realities encompassing the quick and the dead, thereby allowing for the possibility at least of a way out of the state of moral paralysis conveyed in Dubliners ‘for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness’ (JJ, 210). The narrator/deviser’s vision of ultimate stasis as the only abiding reality in the abode is, however, meant to be regarded critically. For the vanquishing of all the ‘little people’ is ultimately not only self-defeating but self-cancelling; without them the observer is also rendered null and void.
In the last twenty years of Beckett’s writing life there is a fundamental reconfiguration of modernist assumptions that Beckett from the very beginning has identified primarily with Joyce. Beckett in these later works finds new ways of accommodating stasis and kinesis, of temporalizing the moment of the modernist revelation. With the forging of various versions of a ‘proper syntax of weakness,’ Beckett is able to corroborate a vision of a subject-self co-existing in conjunction with an authorial self. From the very beginning, Beckett has contested the traditional distinction that Stephen Dedalus makes in Portrait between ‘proper’ art as ‘static’ and ‘improper art’ as ‘kinetic’ (whether pornographic or didactic). For Beckett, aestheticizing the experience of living (whether rejoicing or suffering) risks anaesthetizing it. ‘Fizzle 7: Still’ (1975) is a remarkable reconciliation of contraries such as motion and stillness, sound and silence, light and darkness by means of a syntax of weakness. It is the most recognizably human of Beckett’s works since ‘Enough’ and much more realistic in representation. There is no longer the complex and vexed questioning of the ‘something’ located in the room, box, rotunda, cylinder, et cetera, which has been the hallmark of many of Beckett’s writings since the Trilogy. By dispensing with the conventions of both first-person and third-person narration in ‘Still,’ Beckett is able to achieve a modus vivendi between the claims of the author and the other. The text opens with the sun going down at ‘close of a dark day’ (CSP, 240). Unlike Murphy, this protagonist does not sit out of the sun ‘as though he were free.’ The nothingness associated with the closing of his eyes must not be identified with a Murphean quest for the so-called inner void of the self. ‘Still’ involves aperception, the mind’s perception of itself as part of the ‘outside’ against which it can never be hermetically sealed. We saw earlier that the opening of Murphy could be seen as a complex rewriting of the passage preceding the birdgirl encounter of Portrait in which Stephen feels a sense of an impending transcendence: ‘His heart trembled; his breath came faster and a wild spirit passed over his limbs as though he were soaring sunward’ (P, 149–50). Over forty years later Beckett is again revising and incorporating this scene: ‘But casually in this failing light impression dead still even the hands clearly trembling and the breast faint rise and fall’ (CSP, 240). No matter where the man in ‘Still’ directs his sight, total absence of perceiving or being perceived is not possible: ‘Or anywhere any ope staring out at nothing just failing light quite still till quite dark though of course no such thing just less light still when less did not seem possible’ (241). Even the climactic meeting of head and hand in which they are brought into a tremulous equilibrium is not merely self-reflexive but recognizes a need for being that requires a relation of both inside and outside worlds: ‘As if even in the dark eyes closed not enough and perhaps even more than ever necessary against that no such thing the further shelter of the hand’ (242). However much this figure tries to cut himself off from the external world, such futile actions serve only to underline the impossibility of such escapism. The subject-self must come face to face with its bodily reality and with the world of nature outside the window.
Beckett has finally attained a version of the Joycean epiphany, but in a way that deals with the impasses inherent in the modernist moment. Foremost among these reconfigurations are the avoidance of a syntax that enshrines subject-object divisions and the underlining of how the ‘presence’ depicted is ineluctably positioned in time. The meeting of hand and head in ‘Still’ could, for example, be regarded as Beckett’s fulfilment, in his own terms, of Stephen Hero’s definition of the epiphany as a ‘sudden spiritual manifestation’ realized by a perception, a gesture or a ‘memorable phrase of the mind itself.’ In ‘Still’ one such phrase might be found in ‘staring at some point on the hillside such as that beech in whose shade once’ (241). The phrase alludes to the first line of Virgil’s first eclogue (‘The Dispossessed’), ‘under the awning of a spreading beech,’ as well as perhaps bringing to mind the ‘beechen green, and shadows numberless’ of the first stanza of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ or possibly even a more personal reference to Sylvia Beach and her bookstore and the time of Beckett’s first meetings with Joyce in Paris.16 Beckett works the miracle by reconfiguring the words whereby a world can come into being in which a human subject can substantiate claims to being. Foremost among these is a sense of the temporal, however fragmented, in which such ‘moments’ persist within an existentialist continuum.17 Even though the often mis-cited passage from Finnegans Wake beginning ‘Sam knows miles bettern me how to work the miracle’ (FW, 467) has definitively been proven not to be a reference to Beckett since the passage was published in transition before Beckett even met Joyce,18 it could now be argued, over a half-century later, that Beckett has appropriated these words and indeed fulfilled their prophecy.
Beckett’s trilogy of works in the early 1980s – Company (1980), Ill Seen Ill Said (1981), and Worstward Ho (1983) – offer significant variations on this process of world creation and acceptance of being in the world, however attenuated that residual ‘leastness’ might be. Company is a great summary work in which Beckett orchestrates the various perplexities of competing selves and voices that the act of writing has always engendered for him. In many ways it might be regarded as Beckett’s own literary autobiography in so far as the text incorporates fifteen memories of a ‘you’’s life above, many of which were easily recognizable as Beckett’s own in light of the then recently published biography by Deirdre Bair. Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho do, however, make significant breakthroughs in the types of being possible for both the ‘deviser’ and the ‘devised.’ While references to Joyce in Company are few and far between, this is itself indicative of a counterpointing of the much more pervasive presence of Joycean materials in the unpublished manuscript ‘The Voice’ (1977), which is a forerunner of that work.19 Joycean elements still resonate powerfully with Beckett, as is underscored in the play Ohio Impromptu (1981), which Beckett wrote for a conference in celebration of his seventy-fifth birthday.
In Company Joycean allusions are strictly limited and the controlling pattern of reference as I pointed out in Reconstructing Beckett is Shakespearean.20 The early episodes of the ‘you’’s life above focus on how the hunger for communication and for love is continually frustrated, driving this self inwards to the light of his own imagination, in the dark of his own mind. There is, however, one major exception to this pattern of negation in paragraph 40, which deals with ‘Bloom of adulthood’ (NO, 28). In this Joycean paean of accommodation, two ‘memories’ are incorporated, that of the young boy in the summerhouse chuckling along with his father who retreats there ‘on summer Sundays after his midday meal,’ and that of the adult meeting his lover in the summerhouse: ‘you sit in the bloom of adulthood bathed in rainbow light.’ There is a bizarre communion of creator/created in the grotesque yet compelling coupling of ‘Dissolve to your father’s straining against the unbuttoned waistband. Can it be she is with child without your having asked for as much as her hand?’ (30–1). The juxtaposition of male and female pregnancy – a dimension of the androgynous theme developed by Joyce throughout his writing – suggests that they are both metaphors for literary creation as the privileged means of mediating the irreconcilable dualities of life in the world. So this anomalous episode – by far the longest single section in Company – is, like ‘L’Image’/’The Image’ in How It Is, strongly flavoured with Joycean associations. The scene closes with ‘you’ going back in his mind to remember – imagine sitting face to face with his lover ‘In that rainbow light. That dead still’ (31). The ending of Company – and indeed the work as a whole except for paragraph 40 and a last glimpse of an ideal unity between lover and loved in paragraph 40: ‘eyes in each other’s eyes’ (35) – embraces the negative world of loss, the foremost casualty of which is ‘love’: ‘And how better in the end labour lost and silence’ (46), the penultimate sentence of paragraph 58, which in turn is followed by the single word ‘Alone’ centred in the middle of the page.
It would seem that even when Beckett is focusing on his own life his lifelong tendency to compare himself to Joyce will often make its presence known. There are fifty-nine paragraphs, including the final ‘Alone,’ in Company, a number that corresponds to Joyce’s age when he died. Perhaps there is even a suggestion at the end of Company that Joyce’s name is being ‘whispered.’ Joyce’s poem ‘Alone’ in Pomes Penyeach sets up a romantic mise en scène in its first four-line stanza, and in the second stanza nature ‘whisper[s]’ in the dark ‘A name – her name – /And all my soul is a delight’ (PJJ, 654). Such sentimentality, except for the love scenes dealt with above, is rigorously repressed in Company. But in the play Ohio Impromptu (1981) Beckett does find ‘relief,’ an outlet for this Joycean material, and accompanying it is a very personal and highly emotional response to a lost lover, ‘the dear name,’ with whom once this ‘he’ was ‘so long alone together.’21 This lost one has, however, sent a messenger to read to her former companion to comfort him and it is within this framework that a number of specific allusions to the Joyce-Beckett relationship are developed.
Ohio Impromptu was commissioned for the Columbus, Ohio, Beckett Conference of 1981 by S.E. Gontarski in celebration of Beckett’s seventy-fifth birthday (and a year in advance of the forthcoming Joyce centenary). Those of us who were there for the premiere shared the frisson of recognition that this play was not only written for us but was also about us as critics. A gathering of Beckett scholars would be particularly attuned to issues such as Beckett’s relationship with Joyce – an issue about which Beckett was often questioned and with which Beckett criticism had often concerned itself. Beckett plays with such issues in a metafictional manner (the ‘Sad tale’ is read from the last pages of a well-worn but unidentified book) that is also metatheatrical as L (= Listener) and R (= Reader) confront each other across a table, as veritable mirror images (with the suggestion that L might be encountering his doppelgänger). Specific details identify the pair as latter-day versions of Beckett and Joyce. Beckett and Joyce used to take long walks to the Isle of Swans; the ‘old world Latin Quarter hat’ is, of course, a synecdochic reference to Stephen Dedalus in the ‘Proteus’ chapter of Ulysses. Most interesting in this regard is the fact that it is not clear to whom the hat belongs in this re-enactment. Beckett had been heralded as ‘the new Stephen Dedalus’ by Adrienne Monnier when he made his debut as a writer, and our study has shown in a host of hitherto unexpected ways just how seriously and thoroughly Beckett played out this role in his own writing, arguably becoming more ‘Joycean’ in this regard than Joyce himself. In Ohio Impromptu the two have grown ‘as one.’ More to the point, their bodies of work are also identified in a number of intriguing ways. For example, R’s ‘sad tale’ relates how the protagonist in his Latin Quarter hat would pause at the tip of the Isle of Swans: ‘How in joyous eddies its two arms conflowed and flowed united on. Then turn and his slow steps retrace’ (286). This could be taken as a minimalist Beckett summation of the ending of Finnegans Wake, ‘joyous eddies’ echoing Joyce’s name whereas the image of retracing or following in the steps of neatly summarizes Beckett’s early engagement with Joyce before he found his own way. The following description of ‘his old terror of night’ is a very strong reminder of what Beckett insisted on calling his ‘revelation,’ that self-declared turning point in his career when he discovered that the ‘dark’ he had formerly tried to suppress was in fact the real source of his own creativity, if only he could overcome, in the words of the play, his ‘fearful symptoms.’
R states that the ‘fearful symptoms’ are ‘described at length on page forty paragraph four’ (286). Joyce devised the publication of Ulysses on his fortieth birthday and in the 1922 Shakespeare and Company original edition (which by the time of Ohio Impromptu would indeed have been ‘well worn’) the reference to ‘My Latin quarter hat’ appears on page 41. A scholarly reader of Ohio Impromptu might be duly prompted to look this up, at which point the reader’s eyes might then turn to page 40 and in particular paragraph four in which there is the discussion of what could be termed ‘fearful symptoms’ and indeed ‘with redoubled force.’ Literally so, to begin with: the ‘Dringdring’ depicts the simultaneous elevations of the host in different ceremonies and how ‘their two bells […] twang in diphthong’. Stephen Dedalus speculates that despite the number of such celebrations there is ‘still only one body of Christ.’ We have traced how Beckett could not accept Joyce’s theory of the epiphany and that through his critique of it he finally discovered in works such as ‘Still’ the means whereby fictional selves could lay claim to a language that would substantiate and manifest their being. In Ohio Impromptu, L and R do ‘communicate’ in the various senses of the word. There is more than one way of doing or being, and in the end the two may seem ‘as one.’ And the one who draws the two male figures together is the woman – ‘the dear name,’ ‘the dear face.’ In his dreams we are told that Listener ‘heard the unspoken words, Stay where we were so long alone together my shade will comfort you’ (286), suggesting that the dearly missed is a Beatrice-type figure (or Everyman’s Knowledge as a Woman),22 as well as echoing the ending of part 1 of Beckett’s Watt in which the Joyce-Arsene composite takes his leave of Beckett-Watt. Here in Ohio Impromptu the two are united by the woman’s compassion. This is a ‘sad tale,’ not the Divine Comedy, and R tells L that he has had word from the ‘dear name’ and heard the ‘unspoken words,’ ‘No need to go to him again, even were it in your power’ (287), and the possibility of any future ‘reawakening’ is profoundly doubtful.
Ill Seen Ill Said (Mal vu mal dit) is in my estimation Beckett’s master-work of the post–How It Is period, as well as the culmination of his incorporation-cum-collaboration with Joyce. The text is fabricated under the sign of Venus as announced in its opening sentence: ‘From where she lies she sees Venus rise’ (NO, 49). Although the old woman whose sighting is at the centre of this ontological fable initially ‘rails at the source of all life’ (49), her story as it unfolds is about her love and devotion for a lost one whose tomb she regularly visits. The opening invocation of Venus also announces the aesthetic dimensions of this fable: what is Beauty and how is it to be expressed? These were, of course, the guiding questions behind the aesthetic theory passages of Portrait, and we have seen how from the very beginning Beckett challenged the static nature of this formulation and sought instead to accommodate the kinetic and the static; in short, a painful Beauty, or in Ill Seen Ill Said’s allusion to Yeats’ ‘Easter 1916’ in regard to the old woman’s appearance being ‘unchanged. Utterly’ (NO, 79), a ‘terrible beauty’ of a particularly Beckettian variety ‘is born.’23
The other constant feature of Beckett’s critical approach to the aesthetic question is to foreground the recognition of the role played by the authorial self vis-à-vis the depiction of the ‘other,’ in this instance the old woman in her zone of stones and in her cabin who makes the pilgrimages to the tomb. The opening of Ill Seen Ill Said depicts, yet again, the ‘hovering eye’ (76) of the ‘imaginary stranger’ (53) ‘stooping to the prone who must/soon take up their life and walk,’ in the words of ‘The Vulture.’ Conjured into being by the hungry eye, she nevertheless pursues an existence that is independent of the searching eye, which is variously ‘glutted’ or left to ‘digest its pittance.’ Ill Seen Ill Said is the story of the relationship between this insatiable ‘relentless eye’ and the other it seeks to fathom in an act of creation, which is, paradoxically enough, based on the death of a ‘figment’ who no longer had ‘the misfortune to be still of this world’ (50). This perceiver as narrator is led by his own self-interests to speculate ‘How simple all then. If only all could be pure figment. Neither be nor been nor by any shift to be’ (58). But the images of the old dead woman are anything but ‘pure figments.’ All would indeed be very simple if this were the case: she could then be manipulated for the narrator’s convenience, as was the case in authoritarian texts such as ‘The Lost Ones.’ There is, however, in Ill Seen Ill Said an ineluctable ‘shift to be’ – she is not a still life but a moving portrait. Once the figure is sighted, even though acknowledged as dead, it comes to life in the eye’s recounting of her in the present tense. In the final paragraph of this text, the ‘radiant haze’ of ambiguity about her status (fictional and real, dying, dead, yet alive, and so on) seems the only certainty to acknowledge about her ‘whatness.’ She most definitely does not possess either ‘the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure’ or ‘the clear radiance of the esthetic image,’ as theorized by young Stephen Dedalus in Portrait (185).
In Ill Seen Ill Said there is, however, a remarkable incorporation of Joycean elements, in particular from the ending of ‘The Dead,’ a revisioning which might more accurately be characterized as Beckett collaborating with Joyce. Not only is the physical geography of Ill Seen Ill Said obviously set in the Joyce country of western Ireland, but its literary topography is also Joycean for it retraces Gabriel Conroy’s ‘journey westward’ in the famous final paragraph of ‘The Dead.’ This ‘journey westward’ is represented both literally – the snow was falling on ‘the lonely church yard where Michael Furey lay buried’ – and figuratively – ‘his [Gabriel’s] soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead’ (PJJ, 241). The last sentence of the penultimate paragraph effects the crucial translation to this other ‘region’ in which Gabriel was ‘conscious of, but could not apprehend their wayward and flickering existence’ (241): ‘His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling’ (241–2). Where Joyce’s journey leaves off, Beckett’s begins. From the ‘vast hosts of the dead,’ the ‘imaginary stranger’ (NO, 53) will try to seize ‘the wayward and flickering existence’ of the old woman among the stones, try to find a means of accommodating their coexistence in this afterlife.
There is an echoing and reconfiguring of the most striking and resonant images of ‘The Dead,’ particularly its ending, in Ill Seen Ill Said. Most notably and most obviously, there is the snow which upon its introduction blanks out the vision of the authorial presence: ‘Where nothing to be seen in the grazing rays but snow. And how all about little by little her footprints are effaced’ (55). Whereas the climax of the snow imagery in ‘The Dead’ occurs in the poetic repetitions of ‘It was falling’ in the final paragraph, in Ill Seen Ill Said Beckett locates his at the very centre of his text:
Winter evening in the pastures. The snow has ceased. Her steps so light they barely leave a trace. Have barely left having ceased. Just enough to be still visible. Adrift the snow. Whither in her head while her feet stray thus? Hither and thither too? Or unswerving to the mirage? And where when she halts? The eye discerns afar a kind of stain. Finally the steep roof whence part of the fresh fall has slid. Under the low lowering sky the north is lost. Obliterated by the snow the twelve are there. Invisible were she to raise her eyes. She on the contrary immaculately black. Not having received a single flake. Nothing needed now but for them to start falling again which therefore they do. First one by one here and there. Then thicker and thicker plumb through the still air. Slowly she disappears. Together with the trace of her steps and that of the distant roof. (67–8)
The essentially unrealistic nature of Joyce’s final paragraph is also much more foregrounded in Beckett’s revision in which it begins snowing heavily right on cue.
Then follows Beckett’s most telling and resounding allusion to Joyce – his own version of Joyce’s uncanny opening sentence of the last paragraph of ‘The Dead,’ ‘A few light taps upon the pane made him [Gabriel] turn to the window’ (242): ‘Silence but for the imaginary murmur of flakes beating on the roof’ (68). As John Paul Riquelme has underscored, ‘the snow that Gabriel is said to hear at the end is clearly not literal snow […] such language, which is figurative, not referential, strenuously resists being translated as a single meaning.’24 In his heavy-handed naturalistic parody of this last paragraph of ‘The Dead’ at the end of Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Beckett resorted to a bathetic reduction since he could not hope to emulate in any convincing manner the poetically charged vision of the Joycean original. Now, a half-century later, he is able to not only incorporate Joyce’s original but to rival it. Beckett’s revisioning of Joyce here is an incorporation that is truly a re-creation: a veritable parodia sacra.
Beckett also distinguishes his writing from Joyce’s in the closing movements of Ill Seen Ill Said. ‘Winter night. No snow. For the sake of variety. To vary the monotony’ (73) could be regarded as Beckett’s intertextual disengagement from the snow of ‘The Dead’ descending ‘upon all the living and the dead.’ Beckett is no longer pursuing the ‘mocking attitude towards the word’ and the resultant ‘dissonance’ so that it might ‘become possible to feel a whisper of that final music or that silence that underlies All’ (Dis, 172). In Ill Seen Ill Said a new harmony is now possible: ‘The silence merges into music infinitely far and as unbroken as silence. Ceaseless celestial winds in unison. For all all matters now’ (NO, 74). What is this? Is this another version of the Joycean epiphany? Not quite. Wholeness (‘unbroken’), and harmony (‘in unison’) are prominently foregrounded, to be sure; but their synthesis does not issue forth in any definitive revelation of ‘radiance.’ Here the ‘radiance’ is ‘haze’ enshrouded. This is because the dead and dying old woman is not and cannot be an object of aesthetic stasis. There is hence no defining moment, Joyce’s ‘sudden spiritual manifestation.’ Time is not frozen in a moment of modernistic revelation; instead, however fluctuating and intermittent, time is still current, as in the old woman’s reappearance at evening: ‘Slowly with fluttering step as if wanting mass. Suddenly still and as suddenly on her way again’ (61). She cannot be reduced to a merely static picture by the self-serving gaze of the hungry eye of the narrator/author any more than Gretta Conroy could be reduced to the pictorial plane of ‘Distant Music.’ Here the silence and music merge and stasis and kinesis are brought into trembling equilibrium. The true revelations in Beckett are the glimpses of a world, however unstable, coming into being, dissolving, reconfiguring itself, and so on as the fading self of the authorial presence and the flickering existence of the old woman are somehow identified.
This situation is perforce ‘ill seen’ and bound also to be ‘ill said’ since words cannot hope to stabilize such a situation or impose any aesthetic stasis upon it. Instead of the perfectly balanced chiasmus of the final paragraph of ‘The Dead’ – ‘falling faintly […] faintly falling’ – we have the more typical Beckettian double-cross of ‘The mind betrays the treacherous eyes and the treacherous word their treacheries’ (78). Hence the observing eye (or implied ‘I’) in order to escape this impasse and to deny his interdependence with the old woman invokes a mock-apocalyptic closure in the last paragraph of Ill Seen Ill Said: ‘Grant only enough remain to devour all. Moment by glutton moment. Sky earth the whole kit and boodle. Not another crumb of carrion left. Lick chops and basta. No. One moment more. One last. Grace to breathe that void. Know happiness’ (86). The ‘sweet foretaste of joy at journey’s end’ (84) fails, however, to materialize. The very question of ‘to what journey’s end – what heart? – bearing what tidings?’ is posed in one of Stephen’s last diary entries in Portrait (217). Joyce is certainly present in a number of specific correspondences and revisions concerning ‘The Dead,’ and this homage to a literary lost one has produced one of Beckett’s most remarkable achievements. In the final reckoning, ‘deposition done’ (84), the situation remains a uniquely Beckettian one: how in the end to be. Joyce has collaborated as ghost writer on this question, but the means of going on are distinctively of Beckett’s own devising. Beckett’s very last prose work, ‘Stirrings Still’ (1988), in the last sentence of part 1 evokes this stoical sentiment: ‘And patience till the one true end to time and grief and self and second self his own’ (CSP, 261). We have traced in Beckett’s Dedalus the truly startling degree to which Beckett’s ‘second self,’ his various writing selves, have been indebted to Joyce. In arguably the most important as well as the most comprehensive case of literary influence in twentieth-century literature, Beckett, whose work mentions a host of writers whose work he admired and in varying degrees assimilated, almost always turned to Joyce as the writer who undeniably played the most important role in helping him to find his own way.
Beckett’s final work, the poem ‘Comment dire’ (‘What is the word’),25 can be read as a coda or postscript to our discussion of his relationship with Joyce. ‘What is the word’ is an enueg, that troubadour poetic form of which there are two long examples in Echo’s Bones (‘Enueg I’ and ‘II’ follow the opening poem ‘The Vulture’). According to Lawrence Harvey, the enueg deals with a number of vexing issues in a form that stresses the discontinuities of the various thoughts about them. The main unifying feature is the frequent repetition of a set word or phrase that conveys the writer’s attitude towards his subject.26 In Beckett’s enueg the perplexing issue to be commented on is the ‘folly’ of trying to find the word or words that would name a world and our presence in it. The discontinuities are evident in a number of ways: in the stuttering fragmentation characteristic of certain aphasic disturbances, in the dash that functions as a questioning mark at the end of the first fifty-two lines (only the final line ‘what is the word’ is exempt from this pattern and these last words are also further distinguished from the rest of the poem by a two-line blank spacing). These discontinuities do, however, manage to formulate themselves into an answer to the opening queries of ‘folly-/folly for to-’ by the midpoint of the poem (the twenty-sixth line): ‘folly for to need to seem to glimpse –.’ The ‘what –’ so ‘glimpse[d]’ must be the ‘world’ or ‘being’ or some such facsimile. The frequently repeated phrase ‘what is the word’ (seven times) supplies a counterpointing sense of some potential linkage of the disparate elements. The fiftieth line is the longest in the poem, and while it is still grammatically and ontologically incomplete, it does come closest to articulating the scope of the issues vexing the poet in his dying words in this his funeral elegy: ‘folly for to need to seem to glimpse afaint afar away over there what –.’ Within this phrasing can be detected the incorporation of Joycean echoes in ‘afaint afar away,’ poignantly reminiscent of both the endings of ‘The Dead’ and Finnegans Wake. The final response to this question of ‘what –’ is ‘what is the word,’ without a dash. We have here arguably Beckett’s most revealing comment on his debt to Joyce and how through his critique and revision of Joyce’s aesthetic he found his own ways and means to explore his own ‘folly.’ In this strangely beautiful incantation, the final revelation is that for Beckett the ‘what’-ness is the word itself as a process of saying (‘comment dire’) and making. Both Joyce and Beckett as word men would have associated ‘faint’/’afaint’ with ‘feign’ as the imaginative faculty, with ‘fiction’ as the activity of making or forming.27 Beckett’s last words as a writer are – after the pause, after the blank spacing – in the declarative mode: ‘what’ is indeed ‘the word.’ In the ending was the word …