222 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

Transcription

1 BOOK REVIEWS Daniela Caselli, Beckett s Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fiction and Criticism, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. ISBN: ; US$ Samuel Beckett had his schoolboy copy of the Divine Comedy at his bedside in the last weeks before his death: it was a love that had lasted a lifetime. There is scarcely a single Beckett work that does not carry some trace of Dante, however faint or indirect, distorted or inverted. To adopt the conceit of punctuation in Beckett s famous essay on Joyce, Dante...Beckett is one of the great intertextual relationships of literary history. There is already a vast literature tracing and explicating the quotations from and allusions to Dante in Beckett, and though it is not Daniela Caselli s task to catalogue these, readers seeking an overview and update of Beckett and Dante scholarship will not be disappointed. But the primary purpose, and indeed the great value of the book is its investigation into the very nature of intertextuality itself. Caselli begins by noting that Most existing studies on Beckett and Dante... while theorising the instability of Beckett s texts... oversimplify and ultimately stabilise Dante as an authoritative predetermined meaning (1). For Caselli, Dante does not operate simply as a stable master text that Beckett might, according to a Bloomian reading, creatively misread (3). Nor does Dante function simply as an authority or model that Beckett s texts undermine, through either direct parody or a

2 222 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES self-conscious failure to emulate. Instead, as Caselli s title indicates, Beckett s works textually construct and are intertextually haunted by many different Dantes, Dantes that can not only be read as retrospective productions of Beckett s texts, examples of how these texts invent their own precursors (4), but also as examples of how the sometimes invisible presence of Dante contributes to the textual production of Beckett as an author with, as Dream puts it, the bay about his brow (3). Caselli uses a sophisticated model of intertextuality that seeks to move beyond simplistic notions of quotation, source and origin, to develop a far-reaching argument about the nature of intertextuality and the models of authorship and authority that it both undermines and underwrites. As Beckett s texts construct a Dante, so Dante s texts, and mainly the Comedy, construct a Beckett. Dante, on the one hand, can be helpful to rethink issues such as authorship and authority in Beckett; Beckett, on the other, is useful for rereading the Comedy s structure and ideas of truthfulness. Analysing the ways in which Dante appears in Beckett means reconsidering both the Beckettian and the Dantean canons. (49) This complex relation complicates any common-sense notions of origin and priority, putting the two authorial names in a mutuallydetermining, and at times mutually-undermining, relationship. The structure of Caselli s book reflects this premise, each chapter dealing with a different Beckett text or texts and the unique way each constructs and is constructed by its own Dante. Although the texts studied are arranged chronologically, Caselli argues that the Beckett oeuvre, as a self-conscious accumulation of odds and ends, disjecta and residua, resists the idea of progression which presupposes a growing consciousness behind the work (201). Instead, the chronological arrangement is a conventional arrangement, which cannot avoid suggesting progress, even when it questions it (201). That said, it is certainly the case that the presence of Dante is far more overt in Beckett s early work in the very titles of Dante...Bruno.Vico..Joyce and Dante and the Lobster, and in the appropriation of Dante s Belacqua as the protagonist of Dream and More Pricks than Kicks. There is plenty of heavy intellectual

3 Book Reviews 223 spadework in the first three chapters tracing the complexities of the pervasive Dantean references in these works. To take one example, in Chapter 1 Caselli contends that, whereas Beckett constructs Dante as the proto-modernist creator of a synthetic language (14) in his essay on Joyce, in the essay on Proust, by contrast, Dante is quoted as time-honoured literary monument, an auctoritas, citable and re-usable (30). In these opening chapters the breadth and depth of Caselli s scholarship is stunning, encompassing not only a vast array of Beckett criticism in English, French and Italian, but also drawing in detail, via reference to Beckett s manuscript notebooks in the collections at the University of Reading and Trinity College Dublin, on the intricacies of Dante exegesis and commentary, from the medieval Benvenuto and the Anonimo Fiorentino to the nineteenth-century Toynbee and De Sanctis. Here Caselli shows that Beckett s approach to Dante seeks not simply to subvert the supposed unity and authority of a master text through the production of parodic fragments, but simultaneously seeks to appropriate this authority as a means of constructing Beckett as an author. Thus More Pricks Than Kicks is an early example of what occurs to the whole Beckett canon: inter- and intratextual references to Dante interconnect Beckett texts and constitute them into the Beckett oeuvre (77). However, as one might perhaps expect in dealing with Beckett, where absences and lacunae exert an unusually powerful force, Caselli s analyses are most intriguing and productive where the material seems at first sight least promising. Two of the finest chapters of the book, Chapters 4 and 5, are those dealing with Murphy, Watt and Mercier and Camier. Caselli reads Murphy alongside Beckett s early notes for the novel in the Whoroscope notebook, and particularly his admonition: keep whole Dantesque analogy out of sight (82). Caselli is particularly good here on the relation between Beckett s published works and the whole expanded Beckett oeuvre of notes, manuscripts, letters, translations, and other residua that accumulates through the gravitational power of the Foucauldian author-function, showing how, in Murphy and subsequent works, Beckett constructs Dante s absence as an invisible presence. So too, while it is clear the Addenda to Watt serve as a means of refusing the idea of textual completion, the snippet of Dante

4 224 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES that appears there parole non ci appulcro (I add no fair words to say) is far more complex in its function. At one level it wittily draws attention to its own redundancy, cancelling itself out as superfluous. But at the same time, it stand as a reference, albeit a reference under erasure. In the original Dantean context, Virgil s words serve to confirm the reality and authority of Dante s eyewitness account by confirming (apparently needlessly) its self-sufficiency and self-evident truth. In Beckett s text, where the Addenda purportedly refer back to the text of Watt, where questions of reality and authority, original and quotation, are hopelessly entangled, Dante s words are... a mise en abyme of the whole movement of Watt, a supplement of a text which constructs itself as supplement (93). Again, Dante functions most literally as an absence in the English translation of Mercier et Camier, where whole passages of Dantean allusion in the French text are dropped from the English translation, sometimes with a puzzling acknowledgement of their erasure that makes no sense without reference to the French original, and sometimes without drawing attention to the erasure at all. Thus in the English text, Camier reminds Mercier of their convenant : no communication of dreams on any account. The same holds for quotes. No dreams or quotes at any price. In the French text, this exchange is followed by Mercier asking whether Lo bello stilo che m ha fatto onore counts as a quote, complaining that the words have been buzzing in his head since the day before. The quote, since it is one, comes from the beginning of the Inferno, where Dante recognises Virgil, and pays tribute to him: You are my master and my author. You alone are he from whom I took the fair style that has done me honour. As Caselli observes, By reproducing a passage where Dante seems to deny his own originality in favour of his auctoritas but which in fact is the prelude to the birth of Dante the scribe of God, the true poet the [French] text constructs a very visible authority while denying it the status of quotation (114). However, in the English text the Dante allusions are a barely visible substrate, partially effaced by a second writing (115). In the English translation of Mercier and Camier and, as the subsequent chapter shows, in Beckett s translations of the novellas and the Trilogy Dante functions as both absence and presence, he fades

5 Book Reviews 225 in and out, an authority constituted as and by the residual and the marginal (117). Caselli s final two chapters investigate the strategies of repetition and rewriting that constitute the two most overtly Dantean scenarios of Beckett s late work, How It Is and The Lost Ones, analysing their intertextuality at both the verbal and thematic level, where themes of originality and repetition, visibility and perception, shuttle back and forth between the Dantean and Beckettian texts in a mutual re-reading that once again complicates the common-sense temporality of source and influence. Caselli s study is not only a valuable demonstration of the centrality of Dante to Beckett s own writing, but a powerful theoretical elaboration of the complexities of intertextuality, and in particular of the ways texts can be constructed as much by omissions, erasures, absences and lacunae as by the words on the page. Russell Smith DOI: /E Ulrich Pothast, The Metaphysical Vision: Arthur Schopenhauer s Philosophy of Art and Life and Samuel Beckett s Own Way to Make Use of It. New York: Peter Lang, xiv pp. ISBN US$71.95; 34.80; e46.40 EUR. Especially in German Beckett studies, the philosopher Ulrich Pothast is known as the author of the first comprehensive study of Beckett s creative use of Arthur Schopenhauer s philosophy, Die eigentlich metaphysische Tätigkeit: Über Schopenhauers Ästhetik und ihre Anwendung durch Samuel Beckett (1982). The present volume further expands upon this theme for an Anglophone readership. The book consists of two parts, called Metaphysics of art and life and On some details in Beckett s literary work. Part One is a thorough explanation of Schopenhauer s main ideas, focusing on his aesthetics, followed by a discussion of Beckett s essay Proust as the work that is most explicitly coloured by his reading of Schopenhauer. In Part Two, Pothast zooms in on Schopenhauerian elements in a few of Beckett s subsequent works