1 Beckett’s comment to Lawrence Harvey; see Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1970), 247–9.
2 Umberto Eco, ed., History of Beauty, trans. A. McEwen (New York: Rizzoli, 2004), 415.
3 Wendy Steiner, Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001), xvi.
4 The term ‘epiphany’ does not occur in Portrait; there are numerous references, however, to the term – both parodic and serious – in Ulysses; for instance, Stephen’s exemplum of Mr Deasy’s ‘manifestation of God’ as a ‘shout in the street’ (34).
5 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teaching of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (Champaign: U of Illinois P, 2000), xii; this dual function is developed throughout her study.
6 Kevin J.H. Dettmar, ‘The Joyce That Beckett Built,’ in Beckett and Beyond, ed. B. Stewart, Princess Grace Irish Library Series 9 (Gerrards Cross, UK: Colin Smythe, 1999), 81.
7 Ibid.
8 James and Elizabeth Knowlson, eds., Beckett Remembering Remembering Beckett (New York: Arcade, 2006), 47. Beckett then goes on to critique the ending of Portrait: ‘He got pompous about his vocation and his function in life’; this ambiguous ‘he’ is another example of Beckett’s conflation of author-character roles in Portrait.
9 Paul Jay, Being in the Text: Self-Representation from Wordsworth to Roland Barthes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1984), 122.
10 The epigraph ‘E fango è il mondo’ (‘the world is mud’) is taken from Leopardi’s ‘A Se Stesso’ (‘To Himself’).
11 Jacques Aubert, The Aesthetics of James Joyce, rev. English language edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992), 109.
12 Ibid., 122.
13 Ibid., 125.
14 Cited in John Pilling, Beckett before Godot (Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1997), 36, from Beckett’s letter to Charles Prentice, 17 February 1931.
15 Hutcheon, 110.
16 Ezra Pound, ‘Joyce,’ in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T.S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1918), 410. Beckett would also have been attracted to what Pound termed in this essay Joyce’s ‘swift alternation of subjective beauty and external shabbiness, squalor, and sordidness’ (412).
17 Lois Gordon, The World of Samuel Beckett (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1996), 58. Gordon refreshingly concludes her third chapter, ‘James Joyce,’ with the judgment that ‘Beckett and Joyce have much more in common than Beckett’s comments suggest’ (81).
18 M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. M. Holquist, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P, 1981), 74.
19 Samuel Beckett, letter to Sighle Kennedy, in Disjecta, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove, 1984), 103.
20 Beckett critics have not recognized the importance of Portrait in Beckett’s early works. One obvious reason for this is the fact that Beckett’s own work is contemporaneous with Joyce’s Work in Progress and there is hence a tendency to identify the two, a linkage aided and abetted by Beckett’s efforts in Dream to imitate Joyce’s new style. Vivien Mercier’s judgment in Beckett/Beckett (New York: Oxford UP, 1977), is representative in this regard: ‘His greatest folly consisted in attempting to imitate James Joyce: not the earlier work, either, but Work in Progress, the drafts of Finnegans Wake’ (36).
21 Cited in James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, London: Bloomsbury, 1996, 351–3.
22 Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 44; John Pilling, Companion to ‘Dream of Fair to Middling Women,’ special issue of Journal of Beckett Studies 12, nos. 1 and 2 (2004): 366–7; C.J. Ackerley, Obscure Locks, Simple Keys: The Annotated ‘Watt,’ special issue of Journal of Beckett Studies 14, nos. 1 and 2 (2005); C.J. Ackerley and S.E. Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove, 2004), 451.
23 Barbara Gluck, Beckett and Joyce: Friendship and Fiction (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1979); Gluck also develops a number of more detailed structural comparisons, for example, her discussion of Beckett’s first story in More Pricks Than Kicks (‘Dante and the Lobster’) and Joyce’s last story in Dubliners (‘The Dead’), 57–60.
24 Ed Jewinski, ‘James Joyce and Samuel Beckett: From Epiphany to Anti-Epiphany,’ in Re: Joyce ‘n Beckett, ed. Phyllis Carey and Ed Jewinksi (New York: Fordham UP, 1992), 160.
25 Ibid, 170.
26 Friedhelm Rathjen, ed., In Principle, Beckett Is Joyce (Edinburgh: Split Pea Press, 1994), 100 (in his own chapter 7, ‘Maximal Joyce Is a State of Beckett: Joyce, Beckett, and Bruno’s Coincidentia Oppositorum’).
27 Ibid., 101.
28 X.J. Kennedy et al., Handbook of Literary Terms (New York: Pearson Education, 2003), 6.
29 Kevin J.H. Dettmar, ‘The Illusion of Modernist Allusion and the Politics of Plagiarism,’ in Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a Post-modern World, ed. Lise Buranen and Alice M. Roy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), raises a number of provocative questions about the function of modernist allusion that stem from T.S. Eliot’s famous justification of the practice: ‘The poet must become more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning’ (99).
30 Israel Shenker, ‘Moody Man of Letters,’ New York Times, 6 May 1956, sec. 2, x, 1, 3.
31 Dettmar, ‘The Joyce That Beckett Built,’ in Beckett and Beyond, ed. B. Stewart, Princess Grace Irish Library Series 9 (Gerrards Cross, UK: Colin Smythe), 85.
32 Daniel Katz, Saying I No More (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1999), 186. Katz’s argument is discussed in more detail in my chapter 6. An interesting variation on this identification of Beckett and Joyce approach is Eyal Amiran’s argument that both writers appropriate the Neoplatonic tradition, in Wandering and Home: Beckett’s Metaphysical Narrative (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1993), especially the last chapter. Both approaches are, in my opinion, too reductionist in nature.
33 See Barbara Gluck, Beckett and Joyce, 12; Hugh Kenner, The Stoic Comedians: Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett (Berkeley: U of California P, 1962): chapter 2, ‘James Joyce: Comedian of the Inventory’; chapter 3, ‘Samuel Beckett: Comedian of the Impasse.’
34 Colleen Jaurretche, ed., Beckett, Joyce and the Art of the Negative, European Joyce Studies 16 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 11.
35 Ibid.
1 The opening sentences of Beckett’s Joyce essay and his short story ‘Assumption’ neatly complement each other: ‘The danger is in the neatness of identifications.’/’He could have shouted and could not.’
2 John Pilling, Beckett before Godot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 15.
3 Beckett states of Joyce in ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce’: ‘He is conscious that things with a common numerical characteristic tend towards a very significant interrelationship’ (32). Beckett would seem to be employing this concept in his five-paragraph version of the five chapters of Portrait.
4 Beckett’s postcard response to Terence McQueeny’s queries concerning the writing of ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce’ reads: ‘The subject was suggested by Joyce. He had no part in the writing. The texts were available in the Library of the Ecole Normale. He found me short on Bruno.’ In Terence McQueeny, ‘Samuel Beckett as Critic of Proust and Joyce,’ unpublished PhD dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1977.
5 Beckett employs this term in his discussions of the nature of the purgatorial at the end of ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce’ (33). ‘Obligation to express’ is an echo of Beckett’s ‘Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit’ (1949); for Beckett the boundaries between the critical and the creative (so called) are freely crossed.
6 Terence McQueeny discusses in detail the major ‘borrowings’ of Beckett from the above-named critics, and it would be a great service to Beckett criticism if that part of his dissertation dealing with ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce’ could be published in the Journal of Beckett Studies (the section on Proust has been in part superseded by discussions by Nicholas Zurbrugg and others, but the lack of a detailed commentary on the ‘Joyce essay’ is still one of the most glaring omissions in Beckett studies). The particular page references for my citations from McQueeny run from page 57 to the end of his first chapter on page 81.
7 McQueeny points out that Beckett here adopts Joyce’s own characterization of Vico as ‘roundheaded’ (10). McQueeny goes on to point out that Beckett was original in his identification of Bruno and Vico, that in this instance he is not indebted to his ‘sources’ (16). It is, however, interesting to note that in Portrait Stephen wrangles with ‘the plump roundheaded professor of Italian’ (168) and later in his concluding diary entries mentions another dispute with ‘little roundhead rogue’s eye Ghezzi. This time about Bruno the Nolan’ (215).
8 John Pilling, Beckett before Godot, 23.
9 ‘Prospects’ is a key cue word for Beckett in describing or alluding to the Terrestial Paradise; for example, the ironic uses in the first of the ‘Texts for Nothing,’ ‘glorious prospects,’ and in Waiting for Godot’s ‘inspiring prospects’ (not to mention the ironically dubbed Dublin cemetery mentioned in the ‘Hades’ chapter of Ulysses).
10 The sonnet paradigm is perhaps not so far-fetched when the Joyce essay and ‘Assumption’ are read in tandem; Beckett rewrites his short story in part as a burlesque Shakespearean sonnet no less in Dream of Fair to Middling Women (70). Prominently displayed is ‘the birdless cloudless colourless skies’ of ‘Assumption.’
11 Beckett might be making play with this question in the first two paragraphs of ‘Assumption,’ if we extend my ‘bifocal’ critical reading of them as in virtual conjunction: ‘Assumption’ consists of 51 sentences – 14 in the first paragraph, 13 in the second, 21 in the third, dwindling dramatically to 2 in the fourth and 1 in the fifth.
12 The references from which Beckett paraphrases here are found on 187 of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Note the Joycean punctuation in Beckett’s paraphrase: the ‘: and’ construction is a stylistic feature of Portrait.
13 Portrait, 213.
14 Portrait, 169.
15 Portrait, 184. Terence McQueeny also points out this ‘error’ and deems Beckett’s interpretation at best ‘questionable’ (44).
16 The only two critics I am aware of who have drawn parallels between Portrait and ‘Assumption’ are David Hayman, who in ‘A Meeting in the Park and a Meeting on the Bridge: Joyce and Beckett,’ James Joyce Quarterly 8, no. 4 (1971): 373, refers to the echoes from the end of chapter 2 in ‘Assumption’ and James Acheson, who in ‘Beckett and the Heresy of Love,’ in Women in Beckett, ed. Linda Ben-Zvi (University of Illinois Press, 1990), also briefly mentions a few echo phrases (69–70). Neither sees the centrality of Joyce’s text to Beckett’s.
17 Childhood or early adolescence doesn’t seem to particularly interest Beckett, hence the lack of references to Joyce’s first chapter of Portrait. Compare this absence, however, with the opening of Dream of Fair to Middling Women and the images of a very young Belacqua. The hellfire sermon of chapter 3 is not directly referred to, but the prison imagery and the ‘irruption of demons’ could be seen as Beckettian adaptations.
18 ‘Apostolic fervour’ would also seem to be another of Beckett’s muffled echoes of Portrait. In chapter 5 the dean of studies, just before he asks Stephen, ‘When may we expect to have something from you on the esthetic question?’ (163), has been described by Stephen as lacking a soul fired ‘with the energy of apostleship.’ Beckett’s narrator in ‘Assumption’ and, of course, Stephen Dedalus himself are indeed fired by ‘apostolic fervour’/‘energy of apostleship’ when it comes to aesthetic questions.
19 See particularly chapters 2 and 5 on ‘Texts for Nothing’ and ‘Enough.’
20 John Pilling in Beckett before Godot cites Massimo Verdicchio’s argument on this point: ‘In The New Science the conception of poetry that Beckett valorizes is only a moment, and a primitive one at that, of history in progress. Vico views the poetic languages of the first peoples as a lack, a defect of the primitive intellect incapable of expressing itself in concepts’ (20).
21 Note also the ironic parallels here with the last sentence of chapter 3 of Portrait: ‘The ciborium had come to him’ (131).
22 John Pilling in Beckett before Godot, 30, also makes this point. This is the determining factor distinguishing Beckett’s seminal critical probe from Joyce’s masterpiece: Joyce’s third-person narrator creates an ironic ambiguity throughout, but also generates a sense of control behind the scenes (compare Beckett’s statement to Shenker that ‘the more Joyce knew the more he could do’ and that in his view Joyce was moving towards ‘omniscience’ with the first sentence of ‘Assumption,’ ‘He could have shouted and could not’).
23 Claude Melnotte is the hero of Bulwer-Lytton’s romantic drama The Lady of Lyons.
24 George Meredith, The Egoist, ed. with an introduction by George Woodcock (London: Penguin Books, 1968), 43.
25 The Egoist, chap. 50, ‘Upon Which the Curtain Falls,’ 602.
26 George Meredith, ‘An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit,’ in The Egoist: An Annotated Text, ed. Robert M. Adams (New York: Norton, 1979), 446. The Joyce-Beckett relationship as mediated by Meredith warrants further investigation; in Murphy Mr Willoughby Kelly borrows his first name from Meredith’s central character in The Egoist, and the famous epigraph for chapter 6, ‘Amor intellectualis quo Murphy se ipsum amat’ (adapted from Spinoza), would also seem to echo as ironic counterpoint the ‘epitaph’ of the ‘comic drama of the suicide’ with which Meredith concludes his ‘Prelude’ to The Egoist: ‘Through very love of self himself he slew.’
27 ‘Absorption’ is a key Lawrentian word and is prominent in the ‘Strife in Love’ section of Sons and Lovers in which Paul Morel sees Miriam as trying to ‘absorb’ him. ‘Absorption’ is also a key word in the sexual power politics of The Egoist.
28 P.J. Murphy, Reconstructing Beckett: Language for Being in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1990), 8.
29 See John Pilling, Beckett before Godot, 26–33; Phil Baker, Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis (London: MacMillan, 1997), 110–12; Laura Barge, God, the Quest, the Hero: Thematic Structures in Beckett’s Fiction (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1988), 76–88; Lois Gordon, The World of Samuel Beckett (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1996), 42–5; Murphy, Reconstructing Beckett, 7–9.
30 J.D. O’Hara, “‘Assumption’’s Launching Pad,’ Journal of Beckett Studies 8, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 42. O’Hara’s interpretation emphasizes the mystical elements in Beckett’s story, via references to Balzac’s ‘Etudes Philosophiques’ and their Swedenborgian elements; hence O’Hara asserts ‘Louis Lambert is Beckett’s basic structural model for “Assumption”’(31). The textual evidence indicates that the Balzac work should be regarded as distinctly secondary to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
31 There are a number of other reasons why Beckett might have been particularly attracted by the Battle of Vimy Ridge. One is the Joycean obsession with dates and numbers: the Battle of Vimy Ridge took place on 9–14 April 1917 (some historians regard the battle as completed by April 12) and hence encompasses Beckett’s own birthdate. Another is that the stunning victory of the Canadian Corps bears a number of uncanny resemblances to Beckett’s protagonist being ‘pitched breathless on the peak of a sheer crag.’ See Pierre Berton, Vimy (Toronto: Anchor Canada, 2001), 131–2.
32 James Knowlson in Damned to Fame identifies the green eyes and hat of the Woman with Peggy Sinclair, Beckett’s cousin and early love (110). The references to Peggy Sinclair are, as I have suggested, mediated by references to Meredith’s The Egoist; more simply, Beckett’s whore/Madonna imagery appears to be a play on ‘Sinclair’ as conjoining two distinctly contradictory elements – ‘sin’ and ‘clair.’ The admixture prevents any clear-cut conception of claritas or ‘radiance’; instead, there are ‘pools of obscurity.’
33 The first major series of entries in Beckett’s Dream Notebook are from J.G. Lockhart’s The History of Napoleon Bonaparte (1829). See 1–11 (entries 2–78) of Beckett’s ‘Dream’ Notebook, ed. John Pilling (Reading, UK: Beckett International Foundation, 1999).
34 Lawrence Harvey, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1970), 3. Cohn supplies a useful survey of major critical analysis in A Beckett Canon (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 13–15.
35 Cohn, A Beckett Canon, 5.
36 Ibid., 6.
37 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teaching of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (Champaign: U of Illinois P, 2000), xiii. This homage/critique double structure of parody is developed throughout her study.
38 Allan Pasco, Allusion: A Literary Graft (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1994), 183.
39 George Meredith, ‘An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit,’ in Adams, The Egoist: An Annotated Text, 433.
40 Portrait is riddled with parodic structures of all sorts, drawn from various high and low cultural references. Stephen, who bears the brunt of the narrator’s cunning silence, which virtually implies a parodic rewriting of all his youthful effusions, is a talented mimic in his own right; Heron suggests that Stephen in his role of the ‘farcical pedagogue’ in the school play should ‘imitate’ the rector since ‘you can take him off rippingly’ (75).
41 The introduction and notes to ‘A Portrait of the Artist’ are by John Whittier-Ferguson. Joyce requested a copy of the essay from his brother Stanislaus in 1928 to present to Sylvia Beach. It is therefore not inconceivable that Beckett might have seen a copy of the essay. In any case, there are indeed a number of striking similarities between Joyce’s essay and Beckett’s short story that are worthy of further investigation.
42 Gordon, World of Samuel Beckett, 49.
1 Paul Goring, J. Hawthorn and D. Mitchell, eds., Studying Literature: The Essential Companion (New York: Oxford UP, 2001), 303, 295–6.
2 Joseph Frank, The Widening Gyre (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1963). See pages 16–19 for Frank’s critical estimation of Portrait in these terms.
3 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford UP, 1973). Bloom emphasizes throughout his influential study ‘that anxiety and desire are the antinomies of the ephebe or beginning poet. The anxiety of influence is an anxiety in expectation of being flooded’ (57).
4 Ruby Cohn, A Beckett Canon (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2001), 18.
5 The three descriptors derived from Shelley’s ‘To the Moon’ are italicized in my citation of the first stanza of the fragment:
Art thou pale for weariness
of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth, –
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?
‘Constancy’ might also be included in the list since the negative framing of the question suggests the moon being ‘inconstant.’ That Beckett is playing off Joyce’s references to the poem in Portrait is underlined by the appearance of the adjective ‘cruel’ in the sentences leading up to Joyce’s citation of the first three lines of Shelley’s poem: ‘Nothing stirred within his soul but a cold and cruel and loveless lust’ (P, 92, my emphasis). The repetition of ‘ands’ in lieu of punctuation is also reminiscent of Joyce in Beckett’s cataloguing of adjectives in Proust. This is yet another example of the often incredibly detailed and micro-level echoes of Joyce that Beckett has gone to the trouble of incorporating into his own writing.
6 This rivalry is most explicit in the pub scene in the trip to Cork that Stephen takes with his father: ‘His mind seemed older than theirs [his father and his cronies]: it shone coldly on their strifes and happiness and regrets like a moon upon a younger earth’ (P, 91).
7 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, new and rev. ed. (New York: Oxford UP, 1982), 485. Joyce’s misprision of Dostoyevsky’s classic is most likely based on his adoption of Raskolnikov’s point of view, which maintains that since there was no real crime no punishment could ensue. This is interesting in terms of the Joyce-Beckett relationship for Beckett at times writes also as if Stephen Dedalus’s views could be identified with those of his creator.
8 It is indeed Beckett’s emphasis upon still somehow maintaining the material connections that distinguishes his engagement with the theory of symbolism from that espoused by Arthur Symons in The Symbolist Movement in Literature (New York: Dutton, 1958): ‘It is all an attempt to spiritualise literature, to evade the old bondage of rhetoric, the old bondage of exteriority’ (5).
9 Rupert Wood, ‘An Endgame of Aesthetics: Beckett as Essayist,’ The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, ed. John Pilling (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), 5.
10 Ibid.
11 See my “Beckett and the Philosophers,” in The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, particularly 229–37.
12 Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978), 109. Bair writes: ‘several years ago, a copy surfaced in a second hand bookstore in Dublin with comments and emendations in Beckett’s handwriting scattered throughout.’ Beckett wrote on the title page the comment I have cited: ‘I have written my book in a cheap flashy philosophical jargon.’
13 Samuel Beckett, ‘Le Concentrisme,’ in Disjecta, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove, 1984), 42.
14 See John Pilling, ‘Beckett’s Proust,’ Journal of Beckett Studies I (1976): 24.
15 John Pilling, Beckett before Godot (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 36. Pilling documents that Beckett on 14 October asked Charles Prentice of Chatto and Windus ‘if it would be possible to add some five or six pages at the end.’ This supplement would have dealt with Dostoyevsky.
16 For a complex variation on this argument see Michael D’Arcy, ‘The Task of the Listener: Beckett, Proust, and Perpetual Translation,’ Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 12 (2002): 35–52. D’Arcy argues that the ‘conception of music as intrinsically other than phenomena or representation that Beckett derives from his reading of Schopenhauer and Proust’ is ‘important for his indictment of notions of the symbol descending from eighteenth and nineteenth century literary aesthetics’ (35).
17 Nicholas Zurbrugg, Beckett and Proust (Gerrards Cross, UK: Colin Smythe, 1988), 3. This point is pervasive throughout Zurbrugg’s analyses. With regard to the issue of how effective Beckett’s study is as introduction, it would be interesting to compare it with Edmund Wilson’s contemporaneous chapter in Axel’s Castle (1931), which is approximately the same length and focuses on Proust as ‘the first important novelist to apply the principles of Symbolism to fiction’ (131).
18 John Fletcher, ‘Beckett et Proust,’ Caliban I (January 1964), 95; Terence McQueeny, ‘Samuel Beckett as Critic of Proust and Joyce,’ unpublished PhD dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1977, chapter 2 ‘Proust.’
19 Ruby Cohn, A Beckett Canon, 20.
20 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 18.
21 Cited in John Pilling, Beckett before Godot, 36, from Beckett’s letter to Charles Prentice, 17 February 1931.
22 Samuel Beckett, ‘Poetry Is Vertical,’ in Sighle Kennedy, Murphy’s Bed: A Study of Real Sources and Sur-Real Associations in Samuel Beckett’s First Novel (Lewisbury, PA: Bucknell UP, 1971), 304.
23 Sighle Kennedy, Murphy’s Bed, ‘Appendix A, Text of Samuel Beckett’s Letter,’ 300. Beckett’s letter to Kennedy is also to be found in Disjecta, 113.
24 Ibid., 205.
25 Ibid., 206.
26 Ibid., 301, 302. Kennedy’s letter to Beckett is reprinted as the second entry in ‘Appendix A,’ 301 and 302.
27 Geoffrey Hartman, The Unmediated Vision: An Interpretation of Wordsworth, Hopkins, Rilke, and Valéry (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1966 [originally published by Yale UP, 1954]), 128–9.
28 Ibid., 129.
29 Ibid., 173.
30 John Pilling, Companion to ‘Dream of Fair to Middling Women,’ special issue of Journal of Beckett Studies, 12, nos. 1 and 2 (2004): 366–7.
31 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teaching of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (Champaign: U of Illinois P, 2000), 26.
32 Ibid., 110.
33 The reference is, of course, to Bakhtin’s theory of the dialogical nature of literary forms, the novel in particular. Hutcheon points out how Bakhtin rejected much of modern parody, which he saw as derivative in a limiting manner, seeking instead, in Hutcheon’s words, ‘a deep or true parody of a genuinely revolutionary nature’ (26).
34 Ruby Cohn, A Beckett Canon, 19.
35 The Portable James Joyce, ed. Harry Levin (New York: Viking Penguin, 1975), 663. ‘Ecce Puer’ is the last entry in Collected Poems, under the subheading ‘Other Poems.’
36 John Pilling, Beckett’s ‘Dream’ Notebook, Reading, UK: Beckett International Foundation, 1999, entries 335 (47) and 410 (57); see also the entry in Companion to ‘Dream of Fair to Middling Women,’ 17.
37 James Joyce, Exiles, in Levin, Portable James Joyce, third act, 605. Note also the echoing of scenes in Portrait such as: ‘Stephen sometimes went round with the car which delivered the evening milk and these chilly drives blew away his memory of the filth of the cowyard and he felt no repugnance at seeing the cow hairs and hayseeds on the milkman’s coat’ (66); and Stephen’s refuge when he flees the school theatrical: ‘That is horse piss and rotted straw, he thought. It is a good odour to breathe. It will calm my heart’ (84).
38 Two of the four chapter headings of Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo are ‘Why I Am So Clever’ and ‘Why I Write Such Excellent Books.’ Nietzsche’s mocking self-interpretations capture one aspect of Beckett’s attempts to declare his credentials in Dream by challenging Joyce.
39 Norma Bouchard in ‘Rereading Beckett’s Dream of Fair to Middling Women,’ Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 6 (1997) also argues that Beckett’s first novel ‘champions an alternative model of symbolization’; more particularly, ‘since the Beckettian literary space is kept in a constant state of over determination and regress, it clearly makes a departure from the stability of sedentary symbolization in forming the epiphanic moments of Modernist narratives’ (137).
40 Beckett’s rewriting of Stephen Dedalus’s statement in Portrait is so much longer and convoluted than the original because it develops at length the ‘true scholastic stink’ (186), as Lynch puts it in Portrait, replete with mock-philosophical categories and rhetorical gambits. Even Belacqua’s attempts to revise Stephen’s views are indebted to characteristics attributed to him in Portrait. S.E. Gontarski’s view that Dream aims for an enunciative voice ‘diametrically opposed to the one Joyce expresses through Stephen Dedalus’ is far too neatly antithetical; the reality entails a much more complex intertwining of voices. See Gontarski, ‘The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Art,’ Modern Fiction Studies 29 (1983): 28.
41 James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Blooms-bury, 1996), 148–56 (‘real life’ characters in Dream); 175 (Lucia Joyce).
42 John Pilling, Beckett before Godot, 56.
43 In Proust, Beckett refers to this concept in the midst of a discussion detailing the limitations of ‘voluntary memory’: ‘It insists on that most necessary, wholesome and monotonous plagiarism – the plagiarism of oneself’ (20). ‘Self-plagiarism’ as I am employing the term here implies a much more creative employment of various parodic functions.
44 In his Companion to ‘Dream,’ John Pilling points out that the Italian phrase (translation: ‘reading Meredith by candlelight’) is adapted from line 115 of Leopardi’s poem ‘Le Ricordanze’ (48). Pilling’s further annotation suggests that the text to be read here might be Meredith’s sonnet sequence Modern Love (1862) and adds that Beckett’s ‘youthful interest in Meredith’ is ‘apparently not maintained in later life.’ As we will shortly see, however, Beckett’s interest in Meredith is still maintained in a very significant way in Murphy. Just as the Meredith references in ‘Assumption’ were an indirect way of approaching Joyce, the reference in Dream to ‘supposititiously, in Dickens’s striking adverb’ (95) seems to be an indirect reference to Meredith, which Beckett has gone to a lot of trouble to concoct for his own amusement. Whereas Pilling’s annotation gives several probable sources in Dickens for this word, he has to admit that the word was ‘never used by Dickens in this adverbial form’ (189). But the word is indeed used in this very adverbial form in Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways (New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 2003), 39: ‘But supposititiously?’
45 John Pilling, Beckett before Godot, 64 and 65.
46 Beckett’s self-critique in his letter to Charles Prentice, cited in John Pilling, Beckett before Godot, 64.
47 James Joyce, ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle,’ in Levin, Portable James Joyce, 725.
48 John Pilling, ‘A Mermaid Made Over: Beckett’s “Text” and John Ford,’ in Beckett and Beyond, ed. B. Stewart (Gerrards Cross, UK: Colin Smythe: 1999), 212.
49 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 45.
50 John Pilling’s commentary on the epigraph in Beckett before Godot (58–9) points out how Beckett substitutes after the first two lines (‘A thousand sythes have I herd men telle/ That ther is joye in heven, and peyne in helle;’) his own ‘But – ‘ for Chaucer’s ‘And I acorde wel that hit be so.’ Pilling’s main point is that the ‘But – ‘ leads to the purgatorial world of Dream, the space for which has been opened up by Beckett’s word-wrenching rejection of conventional pieties in the Chaucer citation. The epigraph could, however, be regarded in a potentially more affirmative way. Beckett’s ‘But –’ might be viewed as an echo of Carlyle’s last word in the chapter on ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’ in On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History; such heroes may illuminate, punctuate the darkness of the night: ‘But – ! –’
51 See Eoin O’Brien, The Beckett Country (Dublin: Black Cat Press, 1986), 106–9 for a description of Jack’s Hole and a picture of the place where Belacqua and Alba were uneasily positioned (beached?) throughout so much of Dream THREE. O’Brien clarifies the actual siting of this scene: ‘At first it seems that the location for this love scene is the Silver Strand, a golden strip of sand and sea to the south of Wicklowtown, but on deeper scrutiny we find it is the small cove known as Jack’s Hole, further south again, closer to the popular resort of Brittas Bay’ (107). In ‘Gas from a Burner’ (1912), Joyce has his narrator comment on the use of actual place names: “It’s a wonder to me, upon my soul/He forgot to mention Curly’s Hole’ (PJJ, 661).
52 Ruby Cohn in A Beckett Canon supplies a useful charting of where some of Beckett’s early poems appear in Dream (40).
53 James Joyce, ‘A Painful Case,’ in PJJ, ed. Harry Levin, 122. Compare this with Belacqua’s downward experience of the epiphany when he hears the word ‘Alba’: ‘It was the descent and the enwombing, assumption upside down’ (181).
54 This phrase is recorded in Beckett’s ‘Dream’ Notebook, ed. John Pilling, item 281 (39), extracted from Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History. In the context of the actual passage in which it is inserted in Dream, the echoing of similar phrasing in Joyce’s Portrait seems to have been Beckett’s primary reason for deploying it in this instance.
55 Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, ed. Carl Niemeyer (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1966), refers to the ‘Three Nornas, Fates, – ‘ in Lecture I, ‘The Hero as Divinity’ (20).
56 Beckett’s conflicted response to Joyce is insightfully investigated in John Pilling’s ‘A Mermaid Made Over: Beckett’s “Text” and John Ford,’ 211–12.
57 D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, ed. H. and C. Baron (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1994), 464.
58 The birdgirl in Portrait is described as ‘gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither’ (151). It is her inspiration that helps transport Stephen Dedalus, in visionary terms at least, across the seas in the final words of the novel.
59 Kelly Anspaugh’s ‘“Faith, Hope, and – What Was It?”: Beckett Reading Joyce Reading Dante,’ Journal of Beckett Studies 5, nos. 1 & 2 (Autumn 1995/Spring 1996): 19–38, explores in greater detail than previous commentators Joyce’s role as a mediator between Dante and Beckett.
60 Adrian Hunter, ‘Beckett and the Joycean Short Story,’ Essays in Criticism 51, no. 2 (2001): 241.
61 Ibid, 238.
1 Harold Bloom, The Western Canon (New York: Harcourt Brace), 1994, 494–5.
2 C.J. Ackerley, Demented Particulars: The Annotated ‘Murphy’, special issue of Journal of Beckett Studies 7, nos. 1 & 2 (Autumn 1997/Spring 1998), ix. Subsequent references to this book will appear in the text.
3 Bloom, The Western Canon, 495.
4 Critics have begun to consider more seriously and in more depth the problematic nature of the real in socio-cultural terms in Murphy. For example, David Weisberg in Chronicles of Disorder: Samuel Beckett and the Cultural Politics of the Modern Novel (Albany: State U of New York P: 2000) states, ‘Beckett’s ambivalence toward the terms social realism offered, and toward political definitions of the outer world, lead him to an impasse. Aesthetic autonomy, imagined as a closed, self-sufficient system of mind and language, blocks rather than provides access to the liberation of the “real” (as he put it in Proust) from habituated modes of perception’ (41); Tyrus Miller in Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999) begins with a similar assumption: ‘Beckett situates Murphy within a definite ensemble of social institutions and forces, and his regressive withdrawal can be seen as a response to increasing pressures threatening the presumably autonomous subject of consciousness’ (186).
5 Samuel Beckett, letter to George Reavey (excerpt), 13 November 1936, in Disjecta, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove, 1984), 103.
6 Samuel Beckett, letter to Sighle Kennedy, 4 June 1967, in Disjecta, 113.
7 For a feminist critique of Stephen Dedalus’s assumptions about the power of the male artist’s gaze, see Bonnie Roos, ‘Refining the Artist into Existence: Pygmalion’s Statue, Stephen’s Villanelle and the Venus of Praxiteles,’ Comparative Literature Studies 38, no. 2 (2001): 95–117.
8 E.H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (London: Phaidon, 1972), 70–1.
9 The studied incorporation of key references to Portrait in Murphy’s opening chapters most likely explains Beckett’s comment in his letter to Thomas MacGreevy that the concluding Round Pond scenes of chapter 13 were ‘Very early on […] in my mind’ (Dis, 102); that is, the planting of the bird-girl parallels so early on in the story could have suggested to Beckett that his conclusion would be a rewriting of that scene in a much more complex way than was undertaken in Dream.
10 J.C.C. Mays, ‘Mythologised Presences: Murphy in Its Time,’ in Myth and Reality in Irish Literature (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP), 1977, 210. Mays reinforces the rider that ‘Endon is no more Thomas MacGreevy, nor is Mr. Kelly Joyce, than Murphy himself is Beckett. But it is true to say that each of the first two characters in the novel embodies values coincident with Beckett’s estimation of the two writers, as well as embodying a number of curious shared details’ (211).
11 Ibid.
12 William York Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to ‘Finnegans Wake’ (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1969), 22.
13 Chapter 6 of Murphy remains, of course, a rite of passage for any would-be Beckett critic. In this regard, see my ‘Beckett and the Philosophers,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, ed. John Pilling (Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1994), 224–9.
14 J.D. O’Hara, Samuel Beckett’s Hidden Drives: Structural Uses of Depth Psychology (Tallahassee: UP of Florida, 1997), 54.
15 Ibid., 68.
16 George Meredith, The Egoist: A Comedy in Narrative, ed. George Woodcock (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 33. All references are from this edition and are given in the body of the text.
17 The Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1959), 144 (from the ‘Paris Notebook’).
18 For a more thorough discussion of these three theories of comedy, see the entry on ‘Humour’ in The Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, vols. 3 and 4, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 90–3.
19 Sighle Kennedy in Murphy’s Bed: A Study of Real Sources and Sur-Real Associations in Samuel Beckett’s First Novel (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1971), does offer an explanation in terms of the mythological and astronomical analogues for the characters: ‘No joke about Hera, wife of Zeus and therefore Queen of Heaven, would ever “at the best of times and places” have amused Artemis [Celia is identified as a moon-goddess figure], who in her own way was also a Queen of Heaven’ (101). Ackerley dismisses somewhat too peremptorily Kennedy’s achievement and her particular insights, acknowledging, however, that she was the first to refer to Whitaker’s Almanac and Beckett’s use of it in Murphy (x).
20 The question of egoism and its value in terms of the Joyce-Beckett relationship could be discussed in broader philosophical terms by building upon the contexts laid out by Jean-Michel Rabaté in ‘Joyce the Egoist,’ Modernism/Modernity 4, no. 3 (1997): 45–65. Of particular relevance to my more narrowed focus in this chapter is the concluding section of his essay: ‘The Book of Egoism: “Cribbed out of Meredith.”’ In term of egoism writ large, the very young Stephen Dedalus’s acknowledgment in Portrait of a Higher Authority, ‘Only God could do that’ (27), is cribbed out of Joyce with studied irony in Murphy’s questioning of who could ‘turn a neurotic into a psychotic’: ‘Only God could do that’ (175–6).
21 George Meredith, ‘An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit,’ in The Egoist, ed. Robert M. Adams (New York: Norton, 1979), 434.
22 Ibid., 444.
23 Ibid., 446.
24 Meredith composed a sonnet, ‘The Star Sirius,’ which emphasized his identification with this bright star that illuminated the darkness: ‘Be thou my star, and thou in me be seen/To show what source divine is.’ The poem is printed in the critical edition of The Egoist, ed. Robert M. Adams, 450.
25 George Meredith, ‘An Essay on Comedy,’ 447.
26 Compare this sentence in which Murphy’s life unravels before him with the passage in Portrait, chapter 2, in which a young Stephen Dedalus also suffers a loss of self: ‘The memory of his childhood suddenly grew dim. He tried to call forth some of its vivid moments but could not’; the extenuation of the sense of self is then summarized in an image that might be regarded as the forerunner of the cinematic montage of the sentence in Murphy: ‘He had not died but he had faded out like a film in the sun. He had been lost or had wandered out of existence for he no longer existed’ (89).
27 Samuel Beckett, letter to Thomas MacGreevy (17 July 1936, excerpt), Disjecta, 102.
28 Brian Coffey, ‘Memory Murphy’s Maker: Some Notes on Samuel Beckett,’ Threshold 17 (1963): 33. Meredith also uses the phrase ‘intellectual fireworks’ in his ‘An Essay on Comedy,’ 437.
29 Donald Fanger, ‘Joyce and Meredith: A Question of Influence and Tradition,’ Modern Fiction Studies 6 (Summer 1960): 126.
30 George Meredith, ‘An Essay on Comedy,’ 433.
31 Ibid., 447.
1 Hugh Kenner, The Stoic Comedians: Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett (Berkeley: U of California P, 1962), 81.
2 Samuel Beckett’s letter to Axel Kaun is labelled ‘German Letter of 1937’ in Disjecta, ed. Ruby Cohn, 51–4; an English translation is given in the ‘Notes,’ 170–3. My citations are from 171–2.
3 Cited in Ruby Cohn’s introductory comments in the English translation of the letter to Axel Kaun, Disjecta, 170.
4 Israel Shenker, ‘Moody Man of Letters,’ New York Times, 6 May 1956, sec. 2, 1.
5 P.J. Murphy, ‘Beckett and the Philosophers,’ The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, ed. John Pilling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 222–41; 229–41 focus on the Kantian dimensions. The very much neglected Kant-Beckett relationship is beginning to receive more critical attention. John Pilling’s ‘From a (W)horoscope to Murphy,’ in The Ideal Core of the Onion: Reading Beckett Archives, ed. John Pilling and Mary Bryden (Reading, UK: Beckett International Foundation, 1992), documents Beckett’s reading of Kant in the Murphy notebook, 15–18. In Beckett and Philosophy, ed. Richard Lane (London: Palgrave, 2002), Steve Barfield in his introduction to his essay on Beckett and Heidegger acknowledges that in Reconstructing Beckett and The Cambridge Companion chapter ‘the thrust of both these works by Murphy is in uncovering a relationship between Beckett and Kant (much of which is persuasive) and in arguing that Beckett’s main theme is the way language relates to the world, rather than that of an emptying of meaning from language’ (155). Recently, John Wall’s ‘A Study of the Imagination in Samuel Beckett’s Watt,’ New Literary History 33, no. 3 (Summer 2002) 533–58, argues that Beckett adapts Kant’s transcendental imagination ‘and puts it to work in an exploration of the corporeal dimension of the generation of symbols’ (534); he concludes that ‘there is no reason to limit the ontological explication of the symbol in Beckett to the linguistic model, the basis of the theoretical notion of the self-consciously superficial imaginary of postmodernism’ (556). This approaches from a different angle some of my views on the symbol in Beckett, particularly as developed in chapter 2 of this study.
6 Interview with Michael Haerdter, cited in Dougald McMillan and Martha Fehsenfeld, Beckett in the Theater (New York: Riverrun, 1988), 230–1. Beckett also refers to lo scibile in his review of Pound’s Make It New (Dis, 78).
7 The poem is quoted in toto in Lawrence Harvey, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1970), 208.
8 Mary Ann Caws, Reading Frames in Modern Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1985). See in particular ‘V/High Modernist Framing,’ with its discussions of the later James, Proust, and Woolf.
9 Francis Doherty, ‘Watt in an Irish Frame,’ Irish University Review 21, no. 2 (1991): 190; Frederik N. Smith, Beckett’s Eighteenth Century (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 38. It is revealing to compare Doherty and Smith in terms of their views on Joyce’s influence/presence in Watt. Doherty only mentions a minor detail, suggesting that Mr Case the signalman might be intended to echo Joyce’s ‘A Painful Case’ – ‘a courteous and little jocular benediction to Joyce’ (197); but he concludes his discussion with a very strong reference to Joyce in terms of negative influence, arguing that Beckett’s refusal to be restricted to realism resulted in his ‘scrupulously avoiding the Joycean way or its path to the truly Beckettian use of Irish background and experience’ (203). On the other hand, Smith makes extensive reference to Joyce throughout his study and concludes that ‘Beckett’s embracing of the writers of the eighteenth century enabled him to escape the burden of Joyce and served in a sense to legitimize his own writing by connecting him to a long literary tradition’ (8). While acknowledging such influences, I argue that they are, however, still secondary to Joyce’s influence.
10 David H. Hesla, The Shape of Chaos: An Interpretation of the Art of Samuel Beckett (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1971), 63.
11 Ibid.
12 ‘Refuge’ suggests a flight from ‘suffering – that opens a window on the real and is the main condition of the artistic experience’ (16).
13 David Haymann, ‘A Meeting in the Park and a Meeting on the Bridge: Joyce and Beckett,’ James Joyce Quarterly 8, no. 4 (1971): 376.
14 Ibid, 384.
15 William York Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to ‘Finnegans Wake’ (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 64.
16 John P. Harrington, The Irish Beckett (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 119. Harrington does not present Joyce as a pervasive and abiding presence in Watt or in the oeuvre as a whole; he sees W.B. Yeats as a more extensive influence on Beckett. Harrington’s major discussion of Joyce and Beckett focuses on how Beckett’s 1934 short story ‘A Case in a Thousand’ can be compared to ‘A Painful Case’ of Dubliners (70–2), an instance, in my judgment, of a ‘false positive’ in terms of influence.
17 John Pilling, ‘From a (W)horoscope to Murphy,’ 15.
18 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, cited in ‘Immanuel Kant,’ The Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, vols. 3 and 4 (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 317.
19 Ibid, 318.
20 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. and intro., Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987), 74.
21 Ibid.
22 The Metamorphoses of Ovid, trans. and intro. Mary M. Innes (New York: Penguin, 1955), Book 8, lines 175–6.
23 See plate 1 in Frederik N. Smith’s Beckett’s Eighteenth Century (New York: Pal-grave, 2002), 118 (facing). Smith adds: ‘This relationship between Beckett and past authors is comparable to that between Dante and Virgil, caught in a doodle in the Watt manuscript; illustrating Canto 1, line 82 of The Inferno, Beckett shows Virgil and Dante locked in a sort of yin-yang figure. He even quotes Dante’s telling words: “Tu se’ lo mio maestro e il mio autore.”’ (9). My Joyce-Arsene/Virgil analogies give another critical dimension to Beckett’s graphic depiction of the end of the first part of Watt. Richard Begam in Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1996) also invokes the Dante-Virgil relationship at this juncture in Watt (71).
24 Watt’s playing with the lamp is said to make a ‘pretty picture,’ with ‘Watt’s scalp and the red-grey tufts, and the floor burning up, from below’ (37). These images bring to mind scenes in the Clongowes School Infirmary, where Brother Michael, who had ‘reddish hair mixed with grey and a queer look’ (P, 32), tended the feverish Stephen Dedalus. He is also ‘queer’ in Stephen’s estimation since he ‘would always be a brother’ and he wonders ‘why could he not catch up on the others?’ Brother Michael is bound to the Jesuit order by vows but not educated as a priest and hence usually would be assigned housekeeping duties. Beckett is by analogy perhaps implying that Watt also will never be fully initiated into the mysteries of Mr Knott’s house. Keith Haughton first drew my attention to these shared synecdoches.
25 Cited in John Pilling, Beckett before Godot (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 1997), 182. Interview with Beckett, Paris, August 1969.
26 Richard Ellmann reports how Joyce was interested in variation and sameness in time: Leopold Bloom, for example, consoles himself with the thought that every betrayal is only one of an infinite series. He then adds that Joyce was ‘interested also in variation and sameness in space, the cubist method of establishing differing relations among aspects of a single thing, and he would ask Beckett to do some research for him in the possible permutations of an object’ (James Joyce, 551). Ellmann’s comments occur in a complex discussion stemming from the idea of coincidence residing at the base of Joyce’s ideas of reality ‘as a paradigm’ (as stated to Ellmann by Beckett). Whereas for Joyce, according to Ellmann, reality ‘can only assume certain forms,’ Beckett’s research in Watt on the permutations of objects would reveal that at times, in a certain place, a pot is also not a pot, and that placing objects in a series (infinite or not) is not always all that comforting.
27 There is perhaps a suggestion of just such a post-Dedalian aesthetic, which would combine stasis and kinesis in Watt’s sighting of the strange figure who approaches him as he waits at the train station, after having left Mr Knott’s, and who then suddenly disappears. This doppelgänger is described as having for a hat ‘the likeness of a depressed inverted chamberpot’ (226), which is a doubling of the image of the boy who ‘had slung inverted on his head’ (184) a basket and to whom Stephen points in his development of his aesthetic theory.
28 C.J. Ackerley, ‘“Fatigue and Disgust”: The Addenda to Watt,’ Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, 2 (1993): 187.
29 Ibid.
30 See, for example, chapter 4 on Virginia Woolf: ‘Matches Struck in the Dark,’ in Morris Beja, Epiphany in the Modern Novel (London: Peter Owen, 1971), 112–47.
31 Mr Gorman might be an ironic reference by Beckett to Herbert Gorman, who wrote the ‘authorized’ Joyce biography that was published in 1939 – a hagio-graphic work that Joyce controlled ventriloquist-fashion. Richard Ellmann in his Joyce biography states that the effect of Joyce’s editing of Gorman’s manuscript was ‘to curb a sporadic cheeriness in Gorman’s book, and to render more solemn and sardonic its picture of the persecuted artist’ (726).
32 The Ballast Office epiphany follows immediately after the above citations; Beckett refers to it in How It Is, 44.
1 Finding means to explore the ‘darkness’ is, of course, the focus of a great deal of twentieth-century literature, perhaps most strikingly announced in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1901). Beckett has likened the act of writing fiction to ‘trying to find your way through a jungle, an area of utter lawlessness where no rules of any sort apply.’ Cited in Alec Reid, All I Can Manage, More Than I Could (Dublin: Dolmen, 1968), 20.
2 ‘Krapp’s Last Tape,’ in Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 60–1. The great irony here is that Krapp is searching for a romantic memory that is strongly reminiscent of Bloom’s memories of Molly’s first kiss (U, 167–8). Krapp’s memory reproduces a number of images from this scene in ‘Laestrygonians,’ particularly those of eyes. However, in Krapp’s memory it is the ending and not the beginning of the romance that is foregrounded: ‘I said again I thought it was hopeless and no good going on.’
3 Ibid., 60.
4 Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 351.
5 Anthony Cronin in Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (London: Harper Collins, 1996), 361, mistakenly identifies the ‘revelation’ as having occurred at Killiney harbour. Neither of the two major studies focused on this period of Beckett’s life makes mention of the ‘revelation’: John Pilling’s Beckett before Godot and Lois Gordon’s The World of Samuel Beckett: 1906–1946.
6 Richard Ellmann, Four Dubliners (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1986), 82.
7 Ruby Cohn, A Beckett Canon (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2001, 4.
8 Kevin H. Dettmar, ‘The Joyce that Beckett Built,’ in Beckett and Beyond, ed. B. Stewart, Princess Grace Irish Library Series 9 (Gerrards Cross, UK: Colin Smythe, 1999), 85–90.
9 Cohn, A Beckett Canon, 389.
10 Knowlson is reaffirming here a point made throughout his biography: he concludes his brief discussion of ‘Assumption’ by stating that the ‘young disciple’ is ‘perhaps already trying to distance himself from the master’ (111).
11 Reconstructing Beckett: Language for Being in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1990), 15–19. The later discussions of Mercier and Camier and ‘The Calmative’ also build on discussions from my earlier study.
12 Compare with Dream, 16.
13 Lawrence Harvey, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1970), 113.
14 Ibid.
15 Cited in John P. Harrington, The Irish Beckett (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1991), 8; the irony here is that Beckett has also ‘adapted’ Eliot’s description of Joyce’s ‘mythical method’ in his famous essay ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’ (1923).
16 Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist, 361.
17 See Ackerley, Demented Particulars: The Annotated ‘Murphy’, special issue of Journal of Beckett Studies 7, nos. 1 & 2 (Autumn 1997/Spring 1998), xxiii.
18 Eric Levy, Beckett and the Voice of Species (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1980), 41.
19 Daniela Caselli, ‘Dante and Beckett: Authority Constructing Authority’ (PhD diss., University of Reading, 1999), 12–15. I am indebted to Caselli’s identification of Dantean allusions throughout my discussion of Mercier and Camier and Stories.
20 Cited in Caselli, ‘Dante and Beckett,’ 186. Her chapter is entitled ‘“Lo bello quoi?”: Dante as (in)visible auctoritas in Mercier et Camier and Mercier and Camier.’
21 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, 3 vols. trans. Mark Musa (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), Inferno, Canto I, lines 85–7. All future citations are from this edition.
22 Ibid., 177. Note also the more explicit reference in Portrait to Stephen’s siblings taking ‘up the air until a full choir of voices was singing’; the choir is indeed mixed and Stephen ‘took up the air with them’ (145). This scene occurs shortly after his rejection of the priesthood as his vocation.
23 Compare the homosexual nature of this ‘encounter’ with Joyce’s second story of Dubliners, ‘An Encounter.’
24 Compare with Beckett’s attempts to place Proust in a particular literary tradition: ‘Proust’s point of departure might be situated in Symbolism or on its outskirts’ (my emphasis, Pr, 60). Beckett is perhaps echoing Proust in recognition of the difficulty he is having in ‘The Calmative’ in terms of designating his own new ‘point of departure.’ Note also that just before Marcel receives the ‘oracle,’ his ‘revelation,’ Beckett describes him as being on the ‘outskirts’ of the ‘futility’ (51) that is society.
25 Beckett told Peggy Guggenheim years later ‘he was dead and had no feelings that were human and that is why he had not been able to fall in love with Joyce’s daughter.’ Cited in Carol Loeb Schloss, Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 2003, 194–5. Schloss also adds that ‘Beckett was to remain Lucia’s most loyal friend’ (195).
26 Beckett’s summary of Mörike’s plot mentions how Mozart ‘helps himself (with a pensive smile) to an orange’ (Dis, 61), later adding that a ‘number of passages’ – ‘the orange exhaling its aria’ being one – ‘would be pleasant enough in a less pretentious context’ (62).
1 Phil Baker, Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis (London: MacMillan, 1997), xii. A revealing contrast with Baker’s study is J.D. O’Hara’s Samuel Beckett’s Hidden Drives, also published in 1997. O’Hara has a tendency to equate correspondences between Beckett’s work and ‘depth psychology’ in a one-to-one manner as the key to unlocking interpretations.
2 In Proust, Beckett characterized Marcel’s evaluation of art prior to his mystical experience in the Guermantes library as overwhelmingly negative in nature, regarding ‘the materials of art – Beatrice and Faust and the “azur du ciel immense et ronde” and the seagirt cities – all the absolute beauty of a magic world, as vulgar and unworthy in their reality’ (50). Molloy as artist is able to redeem some of these elements in his own way in his ‘magic world,’ even if it is obviously devoid of ‘absolute beauty.’
3 Baker, xiv.
4 Ibid.
5 J.W. Goethe, Faust Parts 1 and 2, trans. B. Taylor (London: Sphere Books, 1969), ‘First Part of the Tragedy, I, Night,’ lines 380–5, 36.
6 Milton, ed. Maynard Mack (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964), Paradise Lost, Book I, line 263, 111.
7 Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, ed. S. Barnet (New York: New American Library, 1969), 23–4, lines 20–1.
8 Daniel Katz, Saying I No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1999), 92.
9 Samuel Beckett, Molloy (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1951), 29.
10 Portait’s ‘distant music’ is much more central to Joyce’s method and vision than the version identified with Gabriel Conroy. John Gordon in Joyce and Reality: The Empirical Strikes Back (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 2004) discusses the importance of the ‘nebular hypothesis’ throughout Joyce, returning to it in his concluding remark: ‘Finnegans Wake, like Portrait, appears to instantiate a universal protocol of creation and destruction that applies equally to the formation of thoughts and the formation of stars’ (259).
11 Cited in Ruby Cohn’s introduction to Martin Esslin’s translation of the Kaun letter in the ‘Notes’ for Disjecta, 170.
12 K.J. Phillips, ‘Beckett’s Molloy and The Odyssey,’ International Fiction Review 11, no. 1 (Winter 84): 19–24. Although Phillips does point out some parallels between Molloy and Joyce’s Ulysses, his main emphasis is upon how Beckett ‘deepens many of the implications already present in Odysseus’s shifting identities’ (19) as found in Homer.
13 An interesting and provocative discussion of the Davin episode in terms of the Irish writer coming into being through a consciousness of desire (both erotic and political) is developed by Marian Eide in ‘The Woman of the Ballyhoura Hills: James Joyce and the Politics of Creativity,’ in James Joyce’s ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’: A Casebook, ed. Mark A. Wollaeger (Oxford UP, 2003), 297–318.
14 Beckett’s description of the writing of Molloy that he made to John Pilling. See his Samuel Beckett (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976), 53.
15 C.J. Ackerley and S.E. Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett: A Reader’s Guide to His Works, Life, and Thought (New York: Grove, 2004), 378.
16 Ibid.
17 Katz, Saying I No More, 73.
18 Ackerley and Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, 451. Beckett’s observation to Knowlson about how the ending of Portrait was ‘pompous’ about the artist’s ‘vocation and his function in life’ (in Knowlson and Elizabeth Knowlson, eds, Beckett Remembering Remembering Beckett [New York: Arcade, 2006], 47) cannot, of course, be applied directly to Joyce himself and hardly does justice to the depth and complexity of Beckett’s own relationship with the novel.
19 Note, however, that Stephen’s list of aesthetic questions is paralleled in Molloy II by Moran’s two lists of ‘certain questions of a theological nature’ (166–8). One of Stephen’s questions – ‘– If a man hacking in fury at a block of wood […] make there an image of a cow, is that image a work of art? (186) – might be echoed in Moran’s attempts to ease the growing anxiety of the Molloy affair by ‘hacking madly at an old chopping block that lay there’ (127). Moran’s narrative in a sense poses the same questions: namely, will his hack writing end up producing an actual work of art?
20 For statistical confirmation of this, see Michèle Barale and Rubin Rabinovitz, A KWIC Concordance to Beckett’s ‘Trilogy,’ 2 vols. (New York: Garland, 1988).
21 John Keats, The Complete Poems, ed. J. Barnard (London: Penguin Books, 1981), ‘Endymion,’ lines 12–13, 107.
22 Cited in S.L. Goldberg, Joyce (London: Oliver and Boyd, 1965), 69.
23 John Keats, Complete Poems, lines 9–11, 72.
24 Cited in Goldberg, Joyce, 81.
25 G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J.B. Baillie (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1967), 51.
26 Bruce Baugh, French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism (London: Rout-ledge, 2003), 176.
27 Hans-Joachim Schulz in ‘This Hell of Stories’: A Hegelian Approach to the Novels of Samuel Beckett (The Hague: Mouton, 1973) juxtaposes a strong critique of Joyce’s Hegelianism of the idealist system-builder (Author-God) with an endorsement of Beckett’s Hegelianism, which he reads in existentialist terms.
1 Anne Banfield also makes this basic point in ‘Beckett’s Tattered Syntax,’ Representations, no. 84 (2004): 6. My reading of Beckett’s ‘syntax of weakness’ is more affirmative than hers with reference to various ontological issues of expression.
2 Shenker, ‘Moody Man of Letters,’ New York Times, 6 May 1956, Sec. 2, x, 1, 3.
3 The ‘beautiful sentence’ of Edgar Quinet, which Ellmann says ‘was one of the very few passages from other authors which Joyce honoured by quoting in Finnegans Wake in its original as well as in appropriately distorted form’ (664), is similar in import and sentiment to Duthuit’s sentence in this instance. The sentence translation from the French is given in Ellmann: ‘Today as in the time of Pliny and Columnella the hyacinth disports in Wales, the periwinkle in Illyria, the daisy on the ruins in Numantia and while around them the cities have changed masters and names, while some have ceased to exist, while the civilizations have collided with each other and smashed, their peaceful generations have passed through the ages and have come up to us, fresh and laughing as on the days of battles’ (664).
4 The ‘mute language’ theme of How It Is may also be indebted to Vico’s theory of the evolution of languages: ‘the language of the gods was almost entirely mute,’ that of the heroes ‘an equal mixture of articulate and mute,’ ‘the language of men, almost entirely articulate and only very slightly mute’ (446, ‘Book II, Poetic Wisdom’), in The New Science of Giambattista Vico, rev. trans. of 3 ed. (1744), ed. T.C. Bergin and M.K. Fish (New York: Cornell UP, 1961).
5 ‘L’Image’ was published in 1959 and the first impression of Comment c’est is dated 6 January 1961. Cited in Edouard Magessa O’Reilly, Samuel Beckett ‘Comment c’est ‘How It Is’ and/et ‘L’Image: A Critical Genetic Edition Une Edition Critico-Génétique (New York: Routledge, 2001), xi. Beckett, of course, would have noted the irony that this was the Feast of Epiphany, Joyce’s day of ‘The Dead.’
6 Phyllis Carey, ‘Beckett’s Pim and Joyce’s Shem,’ James Joyce Quarterly 26, no. 3 (Spring): 435.
7 Ibid., 438.
8 Ibid.
9 Beckett used the phrase ‘narrator/narrated’ with reference to How It Is in a letter to Hugh Kenner. See his A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 94.
10 Cited in John Fletcher, The Novels of Samuel Beckett (London: Chatto and Windus, 1971), 235.
11 Julia Kristeva, ‘Return of Orpheus,’ in James Joyce: The Augmented Ninth, ed. Bernard Benstock (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1988): ‘Joyce hesitated over calling his hero Orpheus rather than Dedalus’ (179).
12 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford UP, 1973), 141.
13 Ellmann, 702. Compare this with a much earlier statement in Portrait when Stephen in the midst of his aesthetic disquisition is interrupted by some students who are discussing exam results and career prospects (and are also self-declared members of the field club): ‘Bring us a few turnips and onions next time you go out, said Stephen drily, to make a stew’ (183). Compare also with the radishes and turnips of Waiting for Godot.
14 See my Reconstructing Beckett: Language for Being in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1990), 99–102.
15 Compare, for example, the following statements from the hell-fire sermons in chapter 3 of Portrait with Beckett’s imagery in ‘The Lost Ones’: ‘The particular judgment was over and the soul had passed to the abode of bliss or to the prison of purgatory or had been hurled howling into hell’ (105); ‘Hell is a strait and dark and foulsmelling prison, an abode of demons and lost souls, filled with fire and smoke’ (110); ‘Consider finally that the torment of this infernal prison is increased by the company of the damned themselves’ (112). Beckett’s ‘abode’ is definitely of a hellish nature in ‘The Lost Ones.’
16 In How It Was: A Memoir of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), Anne Atik notes that at her last meeting with Beckett at the nursing home, 16 December 1989, ‘We saw the paperback he’d been reading, on a chair, Sylvia Beach and the Last [sic] Generation by Noel Riley Fitch’ (127).
17 With reference to this key question of time and the moment of revelation, critics such as Lois Oppenheim in The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett’s Dialogue with Art (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2000) focus upon ekphrasis as a verbal representation of ‘a visual moment stopped in time’ (137). Since Beckett is, I believe, trying to bring kinesis and stasis together, this traditional trope does not seem fully appropriate in this critical context. In my argument, Beckett has reconceived the nature and function of the modernist epiphany. Ashton Nichols in The Poetics of Epiphany (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1987) points towards this reconfigured sense of the epiphany in contemporary writing: ‘The concept of epiphany becomes a way of momentarily balancing the dynamic opposition between the closure called for by traditional theories of literary interpretation and the openness demanded by recent approaches to verbal discourse. As the epiphany closes in on the determinate moment of verbal power, it opens out onto multiple manifestations of meaning’ (xii).
18 See the introduction to Re: Joyce ‘n Beckett: ‘Puzzled by the seeming applicability of the passage to Beckett, Carey [co-editor Phyllis Carey] wrote to Beckett, asking him to solve the mystery. He replied in his usual succinct fashion: “I first met Joyce late 28. The passage cannot refer to me”’ (xvii).
19 ‘The Voice’ is Reading University Library MS2910, consisting of seven manuscript pages and dated ‘Paris Jan. 77.’ See my ‘On First Looking into Beckett’s “The Voice”,’ in The Ideal Core of the Onion: Reading Becket Archives, ed. J. Pilling and M. Bryden (Reading, UK: Beckett International Foundation, 1992), 75.
20 See chapter 10 of my Reconstructing Beckett, ‘Shakespeare and Company: Beckett’s As You Like It,’ 144–53.
21 Beckett, Collected Shorter Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 286. Further references are to this edition. Joyce may figure as a character in Beckett’s drama and there are indeed a number of echoes of Joyce’s work in Beckett’s drama; nevertheless, Beckett’s full engagement with Joycean aesthetics occurs only in his prose. An obvious reason for this is that Joyce was not a dramatist, publishing but one play, Exiles. It is interesting to note, however, that when Beckett wrote his first play, Eleutheria, he started with a strategy similar to that which we have discussed with reference to his first prose fiction, ‘Assumption,’ namely, a rewriting of Portrait. Richard Ellmann in Four Dubliners (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1986) stated of Beckett’s first dramatic venture: ‘Beckett put the play aside, perhaps because it was too much a counterstatement to Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist’ (92).
22 Knowlson in Damned to Fame reports Beckett’s statement to him about the identity of the ‘dear face’: ‘“It’s Suzanne,’ he replied. ‘I’ve imagined her dead so many times. I’ve even imagined myself trudging out to her grave”’ (665).
23 W.B. Yeats, ‘Easter 1916,’ Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (London: MacMillan, 1969), 203. Compare with Patrick J. Keane’s Terrible Beauty: Yeats, Joyce, Ireland and the Myth of the Devouring Female (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1988). Beckett’s old woman in Ill Seen Ill Said is an intriguing counterpoint to the deadly archetype of Cathleen ni Houlihan as femme fatale, a seductive mother-lover.
24 John Paul Riquelme, ‘For Whom the Snow Taps: Style and Repetition in “The Dead,”’ in James Joyce: ‘The Dead’: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism, ed. D.R. Schwarz (New York: Bedford Books of St Martin’s Press, 1994), 224.
25 The poem was first published in limited and trade editions in 1989. I refer to Beckett’s English translation in the Beckett Circle in the year after his death (Spring 1990). Frederik N. Smith in Beckett’s Eighteenth Century (New York: Palgrave, 2002) suggests that the stuttering attempts to articulate the nature of ‘folly’ in Beckett’s last work could be an echoing of Swift’s dying words, ‘It is all folly’ (109).
26 Lawrence Harvey, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1970), 80–2.
27 John Paul Riquelme discusses in detail the etymological linkage of these words in ‘For Whom the Snow Taps,’ 225–6.