BECKETT’S DEDALUS
Beckett’s Dedalus was conceived as both a complement and a supplement to my earlier study of the post-Trilogy prose, Reconstructing Beckett: Language for Being in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction (1990). It is a complement in so far as the emphasis now is upon an in-depth discussion of Beckett’s early works from ‘Assumption’ through to The Unnamable, encompassing the first twenty years of his writing career (1929–49); only the final chapter now deals with the period that was the primary focus of the earlier work. More importantly, Beckett’s Dedalus is also supplementary in that it pursues a very different route towards the same set of revisionist readings that I put forward in Reconstructing Beckett. Foremost among these was the view that radically new interpretations of Beckett’s prose would be possible if we proceeded upon the ultimately more defensible assumption that Beckett is trying to devise new means of integrating self and fiction and word and world, rather than being fundamentally guided by the need to deny the power of words to express – the so-called art of failure that has enthralled so many Beckett critics. More specifically, I argued, via Peter Bürger’s theory of the avant-garde, that rather than directly trying to integrate art with life, Beckett sought, particularly in the post-Trilogy works, to bring life to his art, to ‘let being into literature’ through what he calls the ‘proper syntax of weakness.’1
That other route is by means of an aesthetic debate concerning Beauty which Beckett engaged at the very beginning of his writing career through his critical investigation of the theory of art promulgated by Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This dialogical engagement with Joyce over such traditional aesthetic questions as the nature, form, and significance of Beauty may indeed sound strangely out of place in a Beckett criticism that has almost solely emphasized Beckett’s aesthetics of negation in various formulations, thereby largely excluding any serious consideration of alternative dimensions of his work of a more affirmative nature. This more traditional aspect of Beckett’s aesthetic theorizing has been largely neglected and generally unrecognized in critical readings, which is hardly surprising in that it is a commonplace judgment that twentieth-century art no longer concerns itself with the question of Beauty. In a comment on avant-garde art in his History of Beauty (2004), Umberto Eco stresses that such ‘art is no longer interested in providing an image of natural beauty, nor does it aim to procure the pleasure ensuing from the contemplation of harmonious forms.’ Instead, art is designed ‘to teach us to interpret the world through different eyes’;2 or – as might be said with more particular reference to Beckett – it raises questions regarding how such worlds are brought into being and their ontological status. Wendy Steiner from a feminist perspective states the case in even more dramatic terms in Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art (2001): whereas in the nineteenth century female subjects symbolized artistic beauty, ‘the twentieth-century avant-garde, by contrast, could barely bring itself to utter “woman” and “beauty” in the same breath.’3 The same trends are evident in literary art, but not in such extreme terms. In Joyce’s Portrait, whose very title suggests a linkage between the pictorial and literary arts, the questions about Beauty and the roles of Venus are prominently foregrounded in Stephen Dedalus’s theorizing. Similarly, the title of Beckett’s very first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (written 1932; published 1992), highlights a preoccupation, no matter how ironically phrased, with just such central matters of more traditional aesthetic speculation. The disrupted sequence of publication for Beckett’s prose works has perhaps made it more difficult to see such obvious starting points, a situation admittedly made more complex by the emergence of Beckett as a major writer in the 1950s at a time when existentialist readings were in vogue and the subsequent development of his career throughout a period generally dominated by various post-structuralist interpretations of his work.
Beckett’s Dedalus will trace in detail how Beckett’s critical encounter with Joycean aesthetics plays a heretofore unrecognized and vital role in the development of his own theories. We will see that Portrait is the most important and influential Joycean text for Beckett, who, of course, also possesses a thorough knowledge of Dubliners, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. While there are some important references to these works, the most telling reference points in terms of the structuring of key ideas in Beckett’s own fiction are to Portrait (with the final story of Dubliners, ‘The Dead,’ a transitional work marking Joyce’s new style in Portrait, also a recurrent focal point). The critical point of our investigation concerns Beckett’s reservations about the modernist moment of revelation, what Joyce termed in Stephen Hero the ‘epiphany.’ In his first published work of fiction, ‘Assumption’ (1929), Beckett very carefully delineated what he regarded then as the fundamental distinctions between his approach and Joyce’s to matters aesthetic. Beckett’s approach proceeds from the premise (or ‘assumption’) that it is the ‘pain of Beauty’ (CSP, 4) that should now concern the modern artist: ‘Before no supreme manifestation of Beauty do we proceed comfortably up a staircase of sensation, and sit down mildly on the topmost stair to digest our gratification: such is the pleasure of Prettiness’ (4). The full-scale discussion of ‘Assumption’ in the first chapter of this study will detail how it is a cento, a complex interweaving of references from Portrait, with special reference to the final episode of the second chapter, Stephen Dedalus’s encounter with the prostitute. In the reference to Beauty cited above, Beckett rewrites a key aesthetic passage of Portrait in which Stephen Dedalus refers to the ‘supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image’ (P, 186) as the ‘supreme manifestation of Beauty.’ ‘Manifestation’ is indeed carefully chosen: the epiphany was explicitly defined as a ‘sudden spiritual manifestation’ in Stephen Hero (215).4 From ‘Assumption’ to ‘What is the word’ (1989), Beckett’s development of his own aesthetic theory repeatedly targets his rejection and subsequent revision and rewriting of Stephen Dedalus’s more traditionalist view that the supreme manifestation or quality of Beauty is ‘the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure’ (P, 186). For Beckett the aesthetic experience is from the very beginning characterized as kinetic in nature: it is the pain and disorder of lived life that art must somehow accommodate. His first major prose work, the greatly undervalued ‘Assumption,’ suggests key points of departure from such Dedalian theorizing at the same time that it makes clear to just what degree and just how very detailed these echoings and revisions of Portrait often are. Beckett has chosen Joyce as his starting point. From the very beginning, Beckett has displayed a complex relationship with Joyce (a veritable Joyce complex), one whose twofold nature is perhaps best described by Linda Hutcheon’s definition of modern parody as combining a critique of as well as a homage to the targeted literary reference point.5
Beckett’s choice of Joyce as a means of initiating his own writing focuses primarily on one figure, namely, Stephen Dedalus, would-be author-hero of Stephen Hero (surname replete here with diphthong), Portrait, and, even more problematically, Ulysses. In Beckett’s first published piece of criticism, ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce’ (1929), commissioned by Joyce for Our Exagmination … defence of Work in Progress, Beckett writes as if Stephen Dedalus’s views were indeed somehow conterminate with his creator’s. Kevin Dettmar in ‘The Joyce That Beckett Built’ comments pointedly on this very questionable assumption: ‘Elsewhere in the essay we find Beckett inaugurating what was to become a frequently repeated fallacy in Joyce criticism: he was perhaps the first critic to use the system of aesthetics set out by Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a yardstick by which to measure the success of Joyce’s later fiction, and certainly the first to apply it to Finnegans Wake, then Work in Progress.’6 Dettmar concludes that Beckett’s failure to recognize Joyce’s attempts to distance himself from Stephen’s views is ‘disingenuous at best.’7
There are two very different aspects to Beckett’s misprision of Stephen Dedalus for Joyce that warrant further comment. First of all, Beckett most likely read Portrait in 1927, when he was twenty-one, the same age as Stephen at the conclusion of the novel. James Knowlson points out that in the same year Beckett was enthusiastically promoting Joyce’s delicately lyrical and earnestly self-important Pomes Penyeacb (DF, 98). These first readings of Portrait (as will be extensively corroborated) made a very powerful and lasting impression on the young Beckett, and, as with many readers of the same age, he would have naturally enough identified more closely with Stephen than with his ironically detached narrator or creator. As a prototypical artist-figure, Stephen Dedalus would have at least resided within Beckett’s own realm of possibilities. Such a point of comparison was reinforced by the fact that Beckett from the very beginning also adopted a highly critical attitude towards Stephen’s theories of art, even as he adapted these ideas to his own writing. Regarding Stephen’s theories as if they were equivalent to Joyce’s own was then perhaps not so much ‘disingenuous’ as a rhetorical and psychological strategy necessary for Beckett to undertake his own writing. The heavily ironized depiction of Portrait pointed towards one James Joyce, master novelist of modernist experimentation circa 1927, whom Beckett would meet the following year and with whom any such comparisons must have seemed then to be virtually unimaginable. In 1989, the last year of his life, Beckett told Knowlson that he ‘admired Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. There was something about it.’8 The following discussions will try to explicate just what this indefinite pronoun entailed and how its significance revealed itself over a lifetime of writing.
The second aspect of Beckett’s misreading of Dedalus-Joyce relations is more complex in so far as it implicitly does admit what Dettmar claims Beckett had intentionally overlooked: that Joyce’s theory of art had quite clearly progressed by the time of Portrait to a point well beyond those views that Stephen so laboriously formulates. To some degree, Beckett could not help but be aware of how Joyce is aesthetically distancing himself from his own past by fictionalizing it through Stephen Dedalus. Paul Jay, who has explored in depth this complex issue of distancing in Portrait, proposes that Joyce gave birth to himself as the author of Portrait by exploiting the deconstructive reversals, gaps, and discontinuities between an earlier version of his former self (Stephen) and his mature authorial self.9 Inscribing his own authority through the representation of Stephen’s failure to become an artist in his own right is the definitive instance of Joycean différance: the identification of Daedalus the ‘fabulous artificer’ with Dedalus the would-be modern artist will indeed be indefinitely deferred. As a virtuoso logo-daedaliast, Joyce uses Stephen for his own ends and then abandons him; on the other hand, Beckett will take up in a complex fashion Stephen’s cause at a number of key junctures in his own writing. As I argued throughout Reconstructing Beckett, the fundamental dynamic in Beckett’s fiction is the struggle between an ‘author’ and his ‘other’ (whether depicted as fictional or otherwise) and the search to find ways of accommodating their competing interests. To this power struggle now needs to be added Beckett’s relationship with Joyce and the seminal implications of his contestatory adoption/adaptation of Stephen Dedalus’s theories of art.
Beckett’s only extended critical study, Proust (1931), probes much further into the various aporias inherent in the modernist aesthetics of revelation that are highlighted in ‘Assumption.’ We will see that Beckett is also extending his critical engagement with Joyce in conjunction with his discussion of Proust, this Joycean subtext being indirectly announced in Beckett’s choice of one of Joyce’s favourite lines from Leopardi as his epigraph.10 Most of Beckett’s discussions focus on the vexed status of the symbol and the question of direct expression of the moment of privileged insight. Jacques Aubert in a rigorous and illuminating critique of the development of Joyce’s aesthetic makes a number of telling points that virtually coincide with Beckett’s extended critique of Stephen Dedalus’s theories as we will trace it throughout this study. Foremost among these points is the recognition that there are a number of contradictions Joyce ‘failed to negotiate and upon which his aesthetic was to founder: image versus symbol, nature versus grace, essence versus object, ethics versus ontology.’11 Beckett’s points of departure for his own aesthetic investigations are effected by means of what might then be refreshingly termed Joyce’s ‘art of failure,’ the dissonantia inherent in his founding principles. To begin with such a critical perspective would indeed be liberating for Beckett studies, which have developed for the most part under a number of stereotypical assumptions about Beckett’s own so-called art of failure. Aubert’s final judgment is that Joyce was compelled to admit the failure of his artistic theory and to move from it to the realm of ethics; ‘the final emphasis is on the love of life, of living, mortal, and erring beings.’12 Joyce came to ‘an acceptance of his own contradictions and necessities’ and this included his realization and acceptance of ‘the real as multiplicity, fragmentation, difference, that only art can adequately grasp.’13 Joyce’s aesthetic by the time of Portrait is, to be sure, difficult to characterize – most certainly his views cannot be equated with those of Stephen Dedalus; the ‘acceptance of his own contradictions’ entails a mature acceptance of the world that is well beyond Stephen’s level of insight as depicted in Portrait. It is crucial to recognize that Beckett begins his writing with a critical awareness of the various theoretical impasses inherent in modernist aesthetics. A generation after Joyce, Beckett takes up the challenges posed by the same set of very powerful ideas found in Stephen’s theorizing in Portrait, testing out the limitations of these theories as well as trying to find ways to overcome the aporias upon which Joyce’s aesthetic ‘foundered.’
Turning from criticism to his first novel, Beckett declared that his intention was to write something more ‘genuine’ and ‘direct.’14 Any reader of Dream of Fair to Middling Women is initially bound to be bewildered by such terms since this novel is so very heavily riddled with allusions from sources of all sorts, many of the obscure variety, as John Pilling’s studies in this area have so thoroughly tabulated. Beckett’s strategy for dealing with this apparently self-contradictory situation entails a complex extension of his deployment of parodic structures as first evidenced in ‘Assumption.’ Linda Hutcheon’s discussion of modern parody has shown that it can be ‘a source of freedom’ in so far as its repetitions with a difference allow the newcomer to deal with the ‘anxiety of influence’ by working through the words of others to find his own.15 Moreover, I will argue that this extensive network of allusions in Dream functions in many respects to camouflage the fact that Beckett is here still fundamentally engaged with a critique and assessment of the aesthetic theory formulated in Portrait and that these ideas are decisive in determining the structure and actual development of Beckett’s novel. Central again here is a debate over Beauty: Beckett’s principal character Belacqua is in some defining respects a latter-day version of Stephen Dedalus, his nickname ‘Bel’ making this thematic linkage even more obvious. His pursuit of his various ‘fair to middling women’ serves to underline these analogies. There is a scene in Dream in which the Syra-Cusa (the model for whom was Lucia Joyce) loses a copy of Dante given her by Belacqua; the text she mislays might have even more appropriately been Joyce’s Portrait. Although this would, of course, have been much too obvious, it would certainly have been poetically fitting in that this is indeed the ‘purloined novel’ at the heart of so many of Beckett’s aesthetic deliberations, not only in the early works but, in varying degrees, throughout his writing career, if in less obvious and pervasive ways. In this regard, Beckett could be added to those ‘few people’ for whom Ezra Pound said Portrait ‘has become almost the prose bible.’16 This is particularly ironic since Pound was openly contemptuous about Beckett’s real-life imitation of Joycean mannerisms and dress, the rudeness reaching such proportions that Joyce felt compelled to ‘constrain’ his friendship with Pound.17 The decisive point, however, is that when it comes to his writing, Beckett’s imitations of Joyce are of a much more complex and contested nature. If Portrait is indeed a sort of ‘bible’ for Beckett, the host of critical revisions of it throughout his career results finally in parodia sacra,18 as Bakhtin employed the term to refer to ‘doublings’ of various sacred works that can become canonical in their own right.
In Beckett’s last two novels in English, the testing out of Stephen Dedalus’s aesthetic system is brought to a critical turning point. Murphy (1938) is structured around a tug-of-war between the eponymous hero and Mr Willoughby Kelly, a surrogate version of Joyce himself, with Celia the prostitute/Venus figure caught in the middle. This aesthetic debate over the role of Beauty is developed throughout the work by means of a number of specific correspondences in the parodying-travestying mode with Joyce’s Portrait again supplying the primary reference points. This more traditional dimension of the novel has been consistently overlooked in favour of the much more highly touted ‘nothings’ of Geulincx and Democritus pointed to by Beckett himself as privileged points of entry.19 But Beckett, like the ‘whispering prestidigitator’ (4) of ‘Assumption,’ is misdirecting his readers: the real sleight of hand takes place as Beckett rewrites in complex ways key scenes from Portrait that deal with aesthetic matters of a much more traditional sort.20 Most strikingly, chapter 13 is a complex revisioning of one of the most famous epiphanies in all of Joyce: the birdgirl encounter that comes near the end of chapter 4 of Portrait. The ending of Murphy is ‘Joycean’ and also ‘Beckettian’ in so far as Beckett’s parodic doubling generates its own distinctive poetry. And this conclusion we will later see is carefully set up at the beginning of Beckett’s novel and developed throughout in ways that have not thus far been fully appreciated.
Beckett wrote Watt, his ‘war novel,’ in Roussillon in southern France, where he had fled to escape the German occupation of Paris. The novel was begun shortly after Joyce’s death in 1941 and can perhaps best be regarded as Beckett’s hail (homage) and farewell to his friend/father-figure and literary mentor. In Watt the connections with Joyce are much more obvious than in Murphy, so obvious indeed that like Poe’s ‘purloined letter’ they escape recognition because they are, as it were, hidden in the open. Watt’s very name and his contingent problems with words and things are cognate with Portrait’s foundational tenet of quidditas or ‘whatness.’ For Watt, however, there is no accompanying sense of claritas or ‘radiance,’ rather only a series of unnamable entities (including himself) that issue forth only as a series of negative epiphanies; in short, it is the very absence of any modernist revelation that is at the core of Beckett’s investigation here. Such an ‘epiphany’ is reserved for Watt’s predecessor at Mr Knott’s, Arsene, a composite figure of one James Joyce, whose so-called ‘short statement’ about his experiences of transcendence is the key to the first part of the novel and the subsequent sections that underline (painfully so) Watt’s failure not only to duplicate such moments of visionary insight but even to hold on to mundane reality.
Mercier et Camier (completed in 1946) and the sequence of Nouvelles (Stories) that preceded and followed it are still greatly undervalued in terms of their role as decisive transitional works between the evacuation of meaning in Watt and Beckett’s imaginative breakthroughs in the Trilogy and his emergence as a major contemporary writer. Behind these developments reside Beckett’s statements about his own ‘revelation’: the sudden realization that the ‘dark’ which he had previously tried to suppress was in fact his real subject matter and that somehow or other he had now to find ways to accommodate its expression.21 Neither Beckett’s biographers nor his critics have made much of this experience, which Beckett has persistently maintained was the turning point in his career. I will argue that Beckett’s ‘dark’ revelation is nothing less than his own version of Joyce’s epiphany and that Beckett’s artistic vision is in many ways complementary to Joyce’s rather than being diametrically opposed to it.
If there is one area in which criticism has singularly failed to rise to the challenges posed by Beckett’s works, it is the refusal to acknowledge fully the visionary quality of his writing. In Watt and the other earlier works, Beckett’s engagement with Portrait’s theory of Beauty and its ‘supreme manifestation’ has also focused on Kant’s other type of beauty, the Sublime, which transcends any ‘bounding line’ and offers a vista of the immeasurable as inhuman and annihilating (witness Murphy’s ‘flux of forms’ and Watt’s reaction to the broken circles in Erskine’s room). Beckett’s vision of the ‘dark’ as his true subject matter is evident in Mercier and Camier and entails a revisioning of one of the most imaginative scenes in the Western canon: Dante’s ascent of the Purgatorial Mountain on his own after Virgil has guided him as far as he can. Joyce played a similar role in guiding Beckett to this new vantage point. For Beckett this new perspective affords ways of critically and imaginatively exploring how a newly emergent authorial figure within the text takes responsibility for connecting the world of the imagination with the world outside through the illumination of the ‘dark’ to probe the nature of this new reality. ‘The Calmative’ will be the major focus of our discussion here, for of all the Stories it is the one most directly engaged with the process whereby the perplexing issue of a fictional being and its relationship to various worlds or realities is brought to the forefront of Beckett’s writing. ‘First Love’ (‘Premier Amour’), the last of the Stories to be published, focuses on the question of what is the beautiful as it offers a revisionist history in literary terms of Beckett’s relationship with Lucia Joyce and the rift with her, which resulted in his banishment for a period from the Joyce household. This story ends on a note of ‘distant cries’ that reflect Beckett’s own fundamental aesthetic concern with pain and suffering, abiding issues that he has in various ways set in opposition to Joycean ‘distant music’ as most famously formulated in ‘The Dead.’
Most Beckett criticism has pre-emptively determined that Joyce’s influence as a significant factor ended well before the famous Trilogy, even if there is considerable disagreement over when exactly such ‘influence’ need no longer be regarded as important in the development of Beckett’s writing. But Beckett’s level of engagement with Joycean aesthetics is far too complex by the time of Molloy to be so simplistically and prematurely dismissed. The most obviously foregrounded reference to Joyce in Molloy is to the ‘distant music’ the eponymous narrator hears when he is stopped by a policeman who demands to see his papers. A comprehensive contextualization of this particular Joyce allusion as well as a network of other references that critics have not noticed will show that Beckett’s echoing of Joyce is indeed much more complex and reconstructive in nature: the Joyce references function as a significant means of counterpointing and hence of advancing Beckett’s own aesthetic investigations. Portrait is (again) the key textual counterpoint: it supplies Beckett with touchstone references for determining what an artist is and is not. The discussion of Molloy’s Joyce references will reveal that they are used in part I to show how Molloy is becoming an artist in his own right and in part II to show how Moran fails to attain such status. Such Joycean counterpoint should not be lost sight of in the midst of the perplexing and convoluted discussions of authority, origins (and ‘originality’), the fictional versus the real, not to mention the most striking and challenging factor of all, the radical questioning of language itself as an expressive medium. From the very beginning of his writing career in ‘Assumption,’ Beckett has proposed a critical investigation of such aesthetic-philosophical issues; the various conundrums and impasses should not in themselves be regarded as the desired result of the confrontation with such theoretical exigencies. Molloy is Beckett’s climactic encounter with Joyce; here, however belatedly, we have Beckett’s first full-length portraits of the artist. Given the very rich allusive texture of Beckett’s writing, it is easy to overlook the obvious, such as Watt’s ‘whatness’ (or quidditas) and Molloy’s ‘portraiture’ of the artist-figure. The Joycean counterpoint is vital to our critical understanding of Molloy, the rest of the Trilogy, and those remarkable prose works of his last forty years (1949-89), in which Beckett finds a way out of the linguistic impasses of The Unnamable’s conclusion and works towards finding new ways of letting being into literature.
In the post-Trilogy prose, Beckett has incorporated Joyce in a number of ways that are decisive in determining the structure and development of particular texts; even more importantly, Beckett at certain junctures collaborates with Joyce as ‘ghost writer’ to produce remarkable parodia sacra such as ‘Enough,’ ‘Still,’ and Ill Seen Ill Said. Tracing Joyce’s influence in these later works complements my earlier readings and speculations in Reconstructing Beckett, reinforcing my argument for the fundamentally critical and more affirmative nature of Beckett’s experiments with language. ‘L’Image’ (‘The Image’), the first separately published piece of what became Comment c’est (How It Is), is greatly indebted to a passage of Portrait that it extensively rewrites; ‘All Strange Away’ arguably takes its very title from references in Stephen Hero, as well as a number of particular doublings of Joycean images; and, perhaps most strikingly in terms of structural correspondences, the fifteen sections of ‘The Lost Ones’ (1970) can be compared with the fifteen stories of Dubliners, with particular emphasis upon Beckett’s long-delayed final section and Joyce’s late addition of ‘The Dead’ to complete his collection. ‘Enough’ is a hauntingly beautiful hail and farewell to Joyce, who might be regarded as the prototype of the ‘old man’ in this short story. ‘Still’ reveals in a very brief space how Beckett has finally managed in his own way to work the miracle of the Joycean epiphany. Through a fine-tuning of syntax and the music (now no longer so distant) of certain collocations of words, this text reconciles kinesis and stasis, the spatial and temporal inherent in ‘still’ as a Janus-word that incorporates both these dimensions. Beckett’s masterwork of his later prose is, in my opinion, Ill Seen Ill Said, which explores the life and afterlife of the hovering vulturine eye as it tries to grasp hold of the spectral old woman whose actions constitute the destabilized ontology of this work. Miraculously, a sense of being – however tentative for both perceiver and perceived – is at times glimpsed. On another plane, this is arguably Beckett’s fullest realization over a lifetime of writing of his relationship with Joyce. In his own way, Beckett has gone beyond the ending of ‘The Dead’ to explore the conclusions and implications of those final great paragraphs in order to create an original work only he could conceivably have written, but one which he could not possibly have attained without his contestation and collaboration with Joyce. This work is written under the sign of Venus – literally so: the text opens with ‘from where she lies she can see Venus rise.’ And Beckett’s text possesses a moving beauty that, again, would not have been possible without Beckett’s lifelong engagement with this concept, which is so alien to most of contemporary critical theory but which Beckett never fully lost sight of.
Such an encompassing argument is radically at odds with the tradition of Beckett criticism, which has – with a couple of notable exceptions to be examined later – essentially dismissed at various points in the pre-Trilogy period the Joyce connection in terms of having any significant influence. Knowlson in the authorized biography basically dismisses the Joyce question before it can even become a factor, regarding ‘Assumption’ as proceeding on the premise that Beckett saw that he needed to turn away from Joyce’s influence from the very beginning. Pilling in his two studies of sources in Dream of Fair to Middling Women argues that Beckett purges himself of Joycean influences by turning to and embracing a host of other literary and cultural references; C.J. Ackerley’s annotated Murphy does not see Joyce as a major influence on Beckett and fundamentally regards Beckett’s strategy as one of resistance to Joyce’s writing; hence, by the time of Watt, virtually all critics agree that Joyce is no longer relevant to the Beckettian enterprise. (Ackerley’s recently published annotated Watt notes a number of Joycean echoes and allusions, but he no longer feels the need to argue that Joyce is not central to Beckett’s thought after Murphy.) It is hardly surprising, then, that in The Grove Companion to Beckett, which Ackerley co-authored with S.E. Gontarski, whose Intent of ‘Undoing’ had notably advanced the ‘resistance’ theory of Beckett-Joyce relations, there is a general dismissal of Joyce’s influence by the time of the Trilogy and an outright rejection of Stephen Dedalus’s theories of art and the artist being of the least relevance at this point, since romanticomodernist renditions of the artist’s grand calling are of no import within the post-structuralist paradigms that now generally hold sway for writers and their critics.22 All of the above position statements have in common a desire to close off much too soon a complex and challenging question that is central to our understanding of Beckett.
The three studies solely devoted to the Beckett-Joyce relationship highlight in different ways some of the major obstacles to be overcome when dealing with the difficult question of influence. Barbara Gluck’s Beckett and Joyce: Friendship and Fiction (1979) never fully engages its topic since its founding premise is that Beckett’s prose is struggling always to escape from Joyce’s theory of circular time, as if Finnegans Wake were to be regarded as Beckett’s fundamental reference point. The question of circular time is so vaguely and generally framed that it lacks any real critical value. Nor are ‘friendship’ and ‘fiction’ brought into any revealing critical alignment: we get the usual potted summaries of Beckett’s meeting with Joyce in 1928 (via the good graces of Thomas MacGreevy), Beckett’s various roles in the Joyce circle, his temporary banishment due to the Lucia Joyce imbroglio, and the various tidbits of their relationship, for which Beckett was the main source in Richard Ellmann’s Joyce biography. One can then certainly appreciate Beckett’s opening words in his ‘Foreword’ to Proust: ‘There is no allusion in this book to the legendary life and death of Marcel Proust’; there will be allusions in Beckett’s Dedalus to the ‘legendary life and death’ of Samuel Beckett, but only in so far as they are connected with his writing. In this regard, Gluck’s study does deserve more credit than it is usually given for its extensive tabulation of Joycean echoes and allusions in Beckett’s work.23 This documentation does at least point us towards the area where critical energies need to be focused in terms of influence: the recognition of particular and precise references to Joyce in Beckett, so that we can move beyond vague generalizations that might happen to appeal to certain critics.
On the other hand, in the final essay in his co-edited collection Re: Joyce ‘n Beckett (1992), Ed Jewinski advances a sophisticated argument about the Joyce-Beckett nexus, one that, albeit in elliptical fashion, anticipates provocative arguments by Dettmar and Daniel Katz. Jewinski believes that ‘the “influence” of Joyce on Beckett can best be understood by studying how these two writers have helped to “author” the postmodern desire to “rewrite” the very notion of “literature.”’24 Jewinski combines this notion of postmodernist rewriting with Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence and its guiding principle that great writing is dependent upon strong ‘misreadings.’ This does lead to some challenging conclusions; for example, Beckett’s well-known views on Joyce as modernist master of his medium as found in the Israel Shenker ‘interview’ (1956) – his preferred ‘misreadings’ – are in turn deconstructed by the various post-structuralist readings that now dominate Joyce criticism. For Jewinski this leads to a ‘curious paradox’ in which the more Beckett ‘separates himself from his precursor the more he brings his writing closer to Joyce’s.’25 This does indeed possess a certain theoretical symmetry: a postmodernist Joyce is neatly brought into conjunction with a postmodernist Beckett.
However, as the preceding summary of my argument in Beckett’s Dedalus was at pains to make clear, what is now needed in terms of exploring the Beckett-Joyce question is a very thorough grounding in specific textual realities from which theoretical positions can then be inductively drawn in a more convincing fashion. Jewinski’s seductive theorizing of the Joyce-Beckett relationship is detached from such textual groundings and instead proffers a number of aperçus that, even if suggestive and sometimes insightful in themselves, do not form part of a continuous argument. The problem, put simply, is that ‘Joyce’ and ‘Beckett’ are such complex entities that critics, in order not to be overwhelmed, tend to pick certain aspects of each that appeal to them and then set up comparatist models that often do not really tell us much about either author. Hence the refocusing in the present study from ‘Beckett and Joyce’ in order to concentrate on ‘Beckett’s Joyce,’ via Stephen Dedalus’s aesthetic theories; this narrowed focus will allow us to think our way through Beckett’s relationships with Joyce, without relying on the imposition of theoretical models upon the discussion. The Beckett who emerges in my readings is still concerned with issues of authorship, of authors and their roles, and over a lifetime of writing does, I believe, find his own ways of validating the modernist revelation or epiphany in terms of the ontology of the fiction and our relationship with such word-worlds. Moreover, despite the overlay of contemporary critical theories in so much Beckett criticism, the fundamental shaping of many critics’ views of Beckett appears to be largely predetermined by the ideology of negativity that underlies this tradition of scholarship from its very beginnings; the title of Jewinski’s essay, for example, is ‘James Joyce and Samuel Beckett: From Epiphany to Anti-Epiphany.’
The third study devoted exclusively to Beckett and Joyce, the collection edited by Friedhelm Rathjen, In Principle, Beckett Is Joyce (1994), takes the ‘anti-’ position to an extreme. According to Rathjen, Beckett’s efforts to avoid Joyce constitute an indirect Joycean influence:
The Joycean influence does not manifest itself in direct Joycean traces that can be found in Beckett’s work but rather in the absence of any superficial traces: Joyce was Beckett’s starting point not in the sense of Joyce’s showing Beckett where to go but in the sense of Beckett’s realising what to avoid: he had to avoid the Joycean ‘apotheosis of the word’ in order to create something of his own. Beckett’s work therefore is reciprocally connected with Joyce’s: the greater the impact of Joyce, the more it is left blank in Beckett’s work, and this is why there are relatively few allusions to Joyce in Beckett’s allusion-packed texts.26
We will see that there are indeed ‘direct Joycean traces that can be found in Beckett’s work,’ and, yes, we will see that in many ways Joyce did initially ‘show Beckett where to go,’ and that Joyce’s influence is not left ‘blank’ the greater its impact on Beckett. Beckett’s knowledge of Joyce’s work, particularly Portrait, is so detailed and thorough that we simply have not in many instances recognized these references. Such instances support Stephen James Joyce’s assertion that Beckett knew more about his grandfather’s work ‘than any person living or dead.’27
This strategic deployment of imitative allusions entailing detailed rewriting of a predecessor text should definitely not be mistaken for some self-serving game of literary ‘hide-go-seek.’ Allusions do imply ‘a common knowledge between reader and writer,’28 with the qualification, in terms of Beckett’s references to Joyce, that the reader has to work at the acquisition of a close reading knowledge comparable to that of the writer. Beckett’s primary intention in this regard is certainly not to withhold knowledge of what he is doing with Joyce from the reader. A certain opacity is, of course, to be expected in regard to such personal issues of ontogenesis, particularly in light of modernist anxieties about influence.29 Nevertheless, building in such specific textual references Beckett would have expected them at some point to be recognized. That it has taken so long to see the extent of these connections has more perhaps to do with the guiding assumptions of Beckett studies than it does with Beckett’s intentions in this regard. Since the prevailing view is that Beckett came to terms with Joyce’s influence at an early point in his career, most certainly well before the Trilogy in most estimations, critics could not see what they did not believe could be there. Nor should the extensive echoing of Joyce be misconstrued as some jejune game of literary cryptography. Beckett chose Joyce’s work as his starting point and returned to it again and again throughout his career for the decisive reasons mentioned at the beginning of this introduction: reading early Joyce, Portrait in particular, and then meeting Joyce led Beckett to work out his relationship with Joyce’s work through a complex relationship between himself and Joyce’s would-be artist figure Stephen Dedalus. Beckett appropriated and rewrote Joyce’s version of Dedalus primarily as a means to work towards his own aesthetic formulations. This relationship with Joyce via Stephen Dedalus is fundamentally dialogical in nature, a contestation that is in some ways also a collaboration. And the consequences of this rewriting can be recognized by readers without being privy to this Dedalian pattern of references; however, an awareness of this dimension should significantly expand our understanding of Beckett’s development through a reassessment of his relationship with Joyce.
Of the three studies devoted to Beckett and Joyce, the most suggestive remarks are found in Jewinski’s essay, none more so than those on Beckett’s often-cited statements to Shenker about the relationship of his writing to Joyce’s:
With Joyce the difference is that Joyce is a superb manipulator of material – perhaps the greatest. He was making words do the absolute maximum of work. There isn’t a syllable that’s superfluous. The kind of work I do is one in which I’m not master of my material. The more Joyce knew the more he could. He’s tending toward omniscience and omnipotence as an artist. I’m working with impotence, ignorance. I don’t think impotence has been exploited in the past. There seems to be a kind of esthetic axiom that expression is achievement – must be an achievement. My little exploration is that whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable – something by definition incompatible with art.
I think anyone nowadays who pays the slightest attention to his own experience finds it the experience of a non-can-er. The other type of artist – the Apollonian – is absolutely foreign to me.30
Dettmar might be exaggerating for rhetorical effect when he says ‘these are perhaps the most influential 150 words in all of Joyce criticism,’31 but they certainly do constitute the single most influential statement on Beckett’s supposed relationship with Joyce in all of Beckett criticism. Such ‘maps of misreading’ must be critically assessed when working out the perplex of Beckett’s relationship with Joyce. Beckett’s Dedalus will show that Beckett’s characterizations of Joyce as modernist master are carefully formulated to divert attention away from any consideration that his own work might more rightly be regarded as complementary in a roundabout way to Joyce’s. This is a far cry from the mainstream view that takes its cue from Beckett’s own remarks (most often those to Shenker) that the contrasts between the two writers are most decisive.
Nor is my complementary-yet-different thesis to be confused with the argument proposed in Katz’s Saying I No More (1999), which is premised (as was Jewinski’s) on a number of would-be similarities between post-structuralist versions of both Joyce and Beckett. Such a comparison relies on a number of generalizations of a deconstructive nature rather than any specific network of textual echoes. Moreover, there still resides the persistent and unexamined assumption that somehow Beckett is still ‘secondary’ to Joyce, consigned to being an echo of an echo. Witness, for example, the last two sentences of Katz’s study that centres on Joyce and Beckett, even if only two of its six chapters are explicitly so designated: ‘No less than Joyce, Beckett gives us an inventory of the detritus from which we write ourselves, but without the lure of a circling, winding list, ever spiraling back toward itself as it curls away. Beckett instead offers variations of the possible rhythms of these possible inscriptions, as they extend, replace, and preserve themselves and us in their wake.’32 In so far as this conveys an argument, it is strangely déjà lu: Hugh Kenner’s view of the ‘inventory’ from The Stoic Comedians and Gluck’s view of the circular in Joyce as the key to defining the relationship to Beckett are now read deconstructively.33 However, the new critical paradigm adds little to the earlier approaches, except for the ‘coda,’ which underscores musical variations on a theme (‘possible rhythms of these possible inscriptions’). But we will see in Beckett’s Dedalus the startling degree to which Joyce’s texts are intertwined with Beckett’s, the truly surprising number of instances in which Joyce’s verbal ‘music’ is appropriated and rewritten by Beckett so that it is no longer so ‘distant’ but incorporated into original works of his own devising. ‘Original’ here signifies that it is via the very nature of Beckett being the most derivative of writers that he ‘reinscribed’ himself as arguably the most innovative and distinctly recognizable of contemporary writers following after Joyce.
A recent study directed – nominally, at least – to the Beckett-Joyce relationship also focuses on ‘absence as the chief condition (and therefore parallel) of Beckett’s and Joyce’s literary worlds.’34 Colleen Jaurretche, editor of Beckett, Joyce and the Art of the Negative (2005), categorically asserts, however, that her collection of essays most definitely ‘does not seek to draw comparisons between the authors’ (and indeed only one of the twelve essays deals with both Beckett and Joyce), declaring that ‘neither has a greater or lesser relationship to negation.’35 We need to come to terms in a much more encompassing sense with Beckett’s negative capabilities, and this entails a fully detailed rethinking of the Beckett-Joyce relationship from its very beginnings. Such an approach could help point the way towards an integration of new developments in Beckett studies to which the centenary celebrations of 2006 give an added urgency. Knowlson’s groundbreaking Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (1996) has supplied the inspirational impetus for two of the most promising advances in Beckett studies over the last decade. These are an enriched understanding of Beckett within a number of specific historical contexts and a concentrated focus upon Beckett’s manuscripts, notebooks, and the various sources for his writing. Two recent issues of the flagship journals of Beckett studies neatly exemplify these new directions: ‘Historicising Beckett,’ edited by Seán Kennedy in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui (2005), and ‘Genetic Beckett Studies,’ edited by Dirk Van Hulle in the Journal of Beckett Studies (Spring 2004). These approaches afford an opportunity for rethinking and perhaps even reconfiguring the ways in which we have framed our discussion of Beckett. Propaedeutics should precede further hermeneutics. Reassessing Beckett’s relationship with Joyce is one way of rethinking our first principles whereby we have read and interpreted Beckett’s fiction. Beckett’s dialogical engagement with the aesthetic theory of Portrait and his very detailed rewritings of Joycean materials constitute, in my estimation, one of the most extensive and remarkable instances of literary influence in the twentieth century.