Beckett’s Dantes: Intertexuality in the Fiction and Criticism

241 Pages·2006·1.02 MB·English

by  Daniela Caselli

Beckett’s Dantes
To Ruby Cohn, Carla Locatelli,

and John Pilling,

my ‘buoni maestri’
Beckett’s Dantes
Intertextuality in the fiction
and criticism
DANIELA CASELLI
Manchester University Press
Manchester and New York
distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave
Copyright © Daniela Caselli 2005

The right of Daniela Caselli to be identified as the author of this work

has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK

and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010,USA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

Distributed exclusively in the USA by
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Distributed exclusively in Canada by
UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall,
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for
ISBN 0 7190 7156 9 hardback
EAN 978 0 7190 7156 0
First published 2005
14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Typeset by
D R Bungay Associates, Burghfield, Berks
Printed in Great Britain
by CPI, Bath
Contents

Acknowledgements page vii

Introduction 1

1 Dantes in Limbo 10

Detecting Dante in Joyce 10

Recycling Dante in Proust 22

2 Belacqua does not observe ‘the rule of the road’ 35

There is no real Belacqua in Dream 36

Dante and Mr Beckett 45

Sordello is in the shade 50

3 Strata and mysteries: intratextuality in More Pricks Than Kicks 57

Quick deaths 58

Screechy flatfooted Tuscany peacocks 62

4 Fatigue and disgust: Murphy and Watt 81

Dante is kept out of sight: Murphy and the manuscripts 81

Addenda and excorporations 88

5 Who is the third beside you? Authority in Mercier and Camier 102

Vague shadowy shapes 105

No quotes at any price 112

6 Déjà vu beyond reach: from the Novellas to the Three Novels 120

The calmative effects of one’s classics 120

Odds and ends 132

Bits and scraps flickering on and off 138

7 Staging the Inferno in How It Is 148

A voice comes to one in the dark 149

‘E fango è il mondo’: the Inferno performed 154

Geometries of passion 162

The witness and the scribe 169
vi CONTENTS
8 ‘In the words of the poet’: The Lost Ones 183

Ravening eyes 184

Closed places 188

The sun and other stars would still be shining 194

Conclusion: farewell to the old lutist 201

Bibliography 206

Index 226
Acknowledgements

Many people have contributed to the making of this book. Carla Locatelli first
kindled my enthusiasm for Beckett, and her inquisitive mind has never stopped
being a source of inspiration. I am grateful to John Pilling for sharing with me
some of his staggering knowledge of Beckett, and for his academic thorough­
ness, high standards, and witty criticism, which have taught me a lot over the
years. Ruby Cohn’s insight and rigorous scholarship have guided my work, and
her friendship and generosity have made it all possible.
I would like to thank the expert staff at the Beckett International
Foundation Archive at Reading University Library, and especially Mike Bott and
Julian Garforth for their good humour and kindness, and the Library staff at
Trinity College Dublin. My gratitude goes to Edward Beckett for granting
permission to quote from unpublished material, to James and Elizabeth
Knowlson for their help in reading manuscripts, to Zygmunt Baranski for his
advice on matters relative to Dante, and to Anna Dolfi for her support over the
years.
Instrumental to the writing of this book was the climate of friendship and
real intellectual exchange created by Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, Jonathan
Bignell, Stephen Thomson, Ciarán O’Kelly, Sue Walsh, and all the other
members of the Cultural and Critical Theory Group at the University of
Reading. I am grateful to Jonathan Bignell at the University of Reading and
Erica Burman at Manchester Metropolitan University for their generosity and
infectious intellectual enthusiasm and to John and Christine Bolland, John
Sears, and Patricia Allmer for their advice and help when I most needed it.
The School of English, Sociology, Politics and Contemporary History at the
University of Salford provided me with a friendly, supportive, and stimulating
working environment, which helped me complete this book and plan others.
My gratitude goes to my mother, Maria Luisa Pustetto, and to my father,
Fulvio Caselli, for their unfailing support and encouragement to do what I liked
most and to stick to it. My sister, Silvia Caselli, has shared joys and anxieties to
do with this book and with much else besides, helping me by showing me how
integrity, energy, and lightheartedness can work together.
I would also like to thank those friends whose input contributed to the
making of this book in so many ways: Mara Zardini, Andrea Pappacena,
Gabriele Troilo, Barbara De Rigo, Marisa Basile, Rezzonica Castelbarco, Alberto
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Ottieri, Peter Buse, Núria Triana-Toribio, Cathy Gelbin, Riccardo Capoferro,
Paul Bavister, Laura Hubner, Kaye Mitchell, and Laura Salisbury.
This book could not have been written without Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, an
intellectual companion who constantly stretches my thinking and reminds me
what scholarship is really about, and a great friend who has always been there
for me.
To Emanuele Basile goes my love.
Introduction

There were ‘no pictures on the wall, no obvious amenities, only a narrow bed,
a desk and a table with several books, including a dictionary’. In the midst of
this spare impersonal setting, a single object seemed to stand on its own. One
book lay open on the table, close enough so that Gussow could see the nota­
tions in the margin. This book was, Beckett told him, his ‘schoolboy copy of
Dante’s Divine Comedy’.1
Dante is a strange object in Beckett studies; it stands out and stands for Beckett’s
greatness and isolation. This single object breaks the disquieting impersonality
of the setting; it evokes a nostalgia for times gone by, and it confirms the intel­
lectual rigour of the author. Dante’s presence is pervasive in Beckett studies.
The student edition of the Comedy appears not only in Beckett’s work as the
‘beslubbered Salani edition’2 but also – with remarkable frequency – in Beckett
biographies, which refer to the Trinity College years during which Beckett’s
tutor Bianca Esposito guided him through the thicket of Dante’s canticles,3 to
his rereading the Inferno ‘between bouts of sand and sea’ in Tangiers,4 and to
the last period of his life in the old people’s home in the rue Rémy-Dumoncel,
during which ‘Beckett was rereading Dante in Italian’.5 Most importantly,
however, references to Dante and the Comedy are scattered throughout the
Beckett oeuvre.
But what does Dante do in Beckett and for Beckett? This book hopes to
answer these questions by arguing that Dante’s presence in Beckett is part of a
critique of value and authority. ‘Quotation’, ‘source’, and ‘origin’ are notions
which are commonly read as positing the authority of a previous text, which
supplies a later text with meanings while remaining autonomous and stable.
This can be observed in most existing studies on Beckett and Dante which, while
theorising the instability of Beckett’s texts (often praised for lending themselves
to many complex and conflicting interpretations), oversimplify and ultimately
stabilise Dante as an authoritative predetermined meaning, reading him for
instance, as ‘symboliz[ing] the cultural heritage of Western civilization’, or as
‘a devout Christian’ whose values and theology are subverted by Beckett.6
Beckett’s texts, however, while placing Dante as authority, source, allusion, and
model to be parodied, also question the notions on which such concepts rely,
namely the opposition between outside and inside, memory and invention, and