The Review of English Studies Advance Access originally published online on May 23, 2009
The Review of English Studies 2009 60(246):515-537; doi:10.1093/res/hgp036
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press 2009; all rights reserved
The Review of English Studies Prize Essay
‘Preserving the Integrity of Incoherence’?: Dostoevsky, Gide and the Novel in Beckett's 1930 Lectures and Dream of Fair to Middling Women
Linacre College, Oxford
Readers have long recognised the importance of Joyce and Proust on Beckett's artistic theory and practise. Yet despite the impressive body of criticism documenting such influences, Beckett's significant debts to one of his greatest early masters, André Gide, have gone virtually unnoticed. The first part of this essay uses archival materials to reconstruct Beckett's theory of the modern novel at a crucial point in 1930, immediately following his Proust monograph and preceding his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, by only months. It is shown that Beckett's novelistic theory at this time shifted away from his thinking in Proust toward an emphasis on divided subjectivity (as articulated in Gide's Dostoievsky), fragmented form, and a ‘new structure’ of the novel in Les Faux-Monnayeurs. An examination of Dream's debts to Gide follows, and a new reading of the novel emerges. It is argued that in Dream Beckett deployed a counter-novelistic theory inspired by Gide and his Dostoevsky to parody and subvert what Beckett termed the ‘European’ tradition.
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I. Introduction |
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 Top I. Introduction II. Paradigms of Incoherence:...III. Parodying the Novel:...Notes |
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In the autumn of 1930, Samuel Beckett, then 24, returned to Ireland from a position in Paris at the Ecole Normale Supérieure to take up his appointment as Lecturer in French at Trinity College, Dublin. Beckett's lectures on the modern novel and Racine were preserved, in fragmentary form, in the notes of several of his students. These notes have been known to scholars for a number of years,1 yet the crucial importance of the theory which they outline to Beckett's fictional practise in the 30s has gone unnoticed, as have Beckett's sources for this theory. This is the more unfortunate because Beckett's discussion of literature at this time revolves around his early formulation of a problem which was clearly of abiding significance to him; indeed, though he confronted it for the first time in his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, it haunted him until his last work, the 1988 poem ‘comment dire’ (‘what is the word’), written in the months before his death. Beckett posed this problem, a paradox, to his students in 1930, and it is recorded in the shorthand of one of his pupils: ‘Artistic statement—extractive of essential real. Reality—unavailable’.2
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II. Paradigms of Incoherence: Proust, Gide and Dostoevsky in the 1930 Lectures |
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TopI. IntroductionII. Paradigms of Incoherence:...III. Parodying the Novel:...Notes |
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Beckett's focus in his 1930 account of the novel centred on the relationship between the artwork and what he referred to as an ‘incoherent’, and therefore (for the purposes of the artist) an ‘unavailable’ reality—an unsurprising emphasis given his valorisation of the ‘complexity’ of subject and object and their relation in his recently completed Proust. In that work, Beckett argued Proust's ‘excavation’ of the real reveals the ‘manifold component aspects’ of the self in space and, most importantly, time. Proust thus championed an art concerned with a ‘mobile’ subject before a ‘mobile’ object—Marcel as ‘the individual [composed of] a succession of individuals’ confronting a ‘multiple’ Albertine.3 In his lectures, Beckett's vision of an incoherent reality remained indebted to his Proust (continuing to centre on a novelistic exploration of a ‘multiple’ subjectivity), but also took on new dimensions and emphases.
Beckett defended Proust in the lectures as a modern writer with crucial insights, but also criticised him for the ultimate ‘solution’ he provided to the problem of ‘indeterminacy’ confronted by the artwork.4 Through the ‘miracle’ of involuntary memory, Beckett argued, Proust achieved a kind of resolution to the problem of the fragmented, suffering subjectivity at the heart of the novel—a Schopenhauerian vision of a release from suffering through art. Beckett repeatedly emphasised this ‘implacable recovery’ in Proust's ‘equation’ for a specific purpose: to illustrate the ‘radicality’ of other models. These were Gide (who, to a lesser degree than Proust, was also guilty of ‘coherence’), and, chiefly, Gide's Dostoevsky.5 Beckett turned to these exemplars because, in the face of a reality which was ultimately ‘unknown’, he wished to ask a question unlike that asked by Proust, for whom the ‘Whole problem’ of the artwork was ‘how to apprehend the real?’6 Rather than this Proustian urge to unite the ideal and the real in a transcendent moment of aesthetic ‘apprehension’ (a term Beckett originally drew from Stephen's aesthetic theory in Portrait and used in his 1929 defence of the ‘unified’, ‘coherent’ form of Work in Progress), Beckett described a fundamentally ‘different need’ from any he had hitherto expressed for the artwork: ‘preserving [the] integrity of incoherence’.7
As if to turn the Proustian principle on its head, Beckett thus indicated that any ‘solution’ to the problems posed by the artwork was to be avoided by the writer seeking ‘indeterminacy’ and ‘incoherence’. As becomes evident in the lectures and Beckett's subsequent novel, these terms indicate the failure to arrive at any position from which a value or set of values—including that of the aesthetic—can be conclusively asserted in the artwork. In making such claims, Beckett indicated that he was describing an artistic ‘need’ foreign not just to Proust, but the ‘European tradition’.8 This was not yet the ‘literature of the unword’ which in 1937 Beckett claimed would deploy language against itself (an art which would exploit a ‘dissonance between the means and their use’), or the paradoxically ‘expressive act’ of the ‘inexpressive’ artist suggested by ‘B.’ in Three Dialogues (1949), but it was a surprisingly early step toward the internal contradictions of the later theory.9 The 1930 art of ‘incoherence’ is the attempt to disrupt any ‘continuity’ of form or content in the novel through addressing the multiple and disjunctive facets of reality—ultimately by allowing incommensurable ‘antagonisms’ into the work. The subjectivity explored in such a novel would not only be multiple, as in Proust, but divided against itself.
The source of Beckett's 1930 argument for preserving incoherence in art was a text whose importance to the lectures as a whole, and to Beckett's subsequent work, has been hitherto largely unacknowledged: Gide's 1923 book Dostoievsky.10 While Beckett discussed this text in its own right,11 the remarkable degree to which it undergirds his thought at this point (and anticipates aspects of his later theory) is evident throughout the lectures, not simply his account of the modern novel. Racine's characters, for example, are described as having ‘depth’ and ‘solitary needs’, while his plays manifest a ‘division in [the] minds of antagonists’—qualities Gide contended for in Dostoievsky. Similarly, Stendhal and Flaubert (the ‘Pre-Naturalists’ in Beckett's terminology) are presented as the ‘real ancestors of the modern novel’ because of their Dostoevskian ‘duality’, ‘complexity’ and ‘indeterminacy’. Beckett's chief novelistic target in the lectures, and the writer who would become the fall guy of his own novel, hails from the same source: Dostoevsky's foil, the ‘Naturalist’ Balzac ‘with his self-assurance’ in the ‘perfect consistency of his characters’.12 In short, the account of the novel and art given by Beckett in 1930—a history divided between explorers of complexity (the moderns and the ‘Pre-Naturalists’) and those seeking ‘explanations’ and conclusiveness (the ‘Naturalists’)—fall along the lines of the dichotomy limned in Gide's text between the modern inheritors of Dostoevsky's ‘interrogative’ art and those following the Western-European exercise of ‘mechanical intelligence’.
Dostoevsky is thus introduced in Beckett's lectures as a counter-paradigm—again, not simply to French literary tendencies, but to what is described as the ‘European’ novel. This otherness essentially consists in Dostoevsky's treatment of subjectivity. In contrast to the Naturalists, Dostoevsky posits the ultimate incomprehensibility of the actions and personalities of his characters. In Gide's terms, each act is an ‘Action gratuite’ which has ‘no social motive’ and evidences a ‘secret reason for living’ which remains hidden from the individual himself.13 Dostoevsky's ‘Rejection of motive’ thus denies the fundamental assumption of rational motivation or causality that undergirds Beckett's vision of the Naturalistic novel; his work grants ‘no chain’ of cause and effect.14 Burrows's notes on this subject recall Gide's claim that Dostoevsky's contribution to the novel involves his particularly ‘Russian’ attention to the ‘inner life’ rather than ‘social connections’.15 It is this attention to his characters’ relationships with themselves, or with God, that makes Dostoevsky's work anathema to what Gide terms ‘Western-European logic’.16
This exploration into the secret areas of the self is accomplished in Dostoevsky's writing through his use of ‘light’, and most importantly, ‘shadow’. Gide's metaphor is a contrast with Stendhal's figure for the novel as a mirror (though Gide applies this same concept to virtually all novels in the French and English tradition), a plane designed to indiscriminately reflect all the available light of a brightly-lit, panoramic world. In contrast, Dostoevsky's novels are works of depth and singular focus, obscuring a portrait, like a single figure set on a stage, within a darkness which the artist does not seek to dispel but rather makes integral to the work.17 Beckett paraphrased or quoted the passage below, which I reproduce at length because of its importance to his theory of art in the lectures as a whole.
Between [Dostoevsky's] novels and those of the authors quoted above [Stendhal, Tolstoy, Voltaire, Fielding, Smollett, Lesage, etc.] there is all the difference possible between a picture and a panorama. Dostoevsky composes a picture in which the most important consideration is the question of light. The light proceeds from but one source. In one of Stendhal's novels, the light is constant, steady and well-diffused. Every object is lit up in the same way, and is visible equally well from all angles; there are no shadow effects. But in Dostoevsky's books, as in a Rembrandt portrait, the shadows are the essential. Dostoevsky groups his characters and happenings, plays a brilliant light upon them, illuminating one aspect only. Each of these characters has a deep setting of shadow, reposes on its own shadow almost.18While this concept—an art which is a consciously staged portrait in which shadows are the ‘essential’—may require some development for its importance to become evident in relation to Beckett's novels, the application to his dramatic work is obvious: stark, painterly images from mature works like Krapp's Last Tape, Not I, That Time, or Ohio Impromptu immediately spring to mind. But while literal light or shadow is not the issue in the novel, the importance of this principle to Beckett's work in this form is equally significant. Gide indicates that the novelist creates a metaphorical ‘shadow’ through introducing complexity and irresolution on two interconnected levels: the ‘background’ and the ‘figure’ itself.
At the level of background, Dostoevsky follows his ‘impulse’ to develop as many interrelations as possible between events and elements of the novel, and then, instead of resolving them through an act of artistic mastery, promotes their lack of relation to each other and the work. Again, the notes indicate that Beckett referred to a specific passage in Gide's text:
We notice in Dostoevsky a strange impulse to group, concentrate, centralise: to create between the varied elements of a novel as many cross-connections as possible. With him, events instead of pursuing their calm and measured course, as with Stendhal or Tolstoy, mingle and confuse in turmoil; the elements of the story—moral, psychological and material—sink and rise in a kind of whirlpool. With him there is no attempt to straighten or simplify lines; he is at his happiest in the complex; he fosters it.19Second, at the level of character, ‘shadow’ develops through Dostoevsky's unwillingness to inflict unity upon his characters, choosing instead to display ‘divergences’ and contradictions in their thoughts, actions and personalities. To illustrate this point, Gide quotes the French critic Jacques Rivière on the ‘two ways of materialising’ his character that an artist must choose between. It is a passage that must have gripped Beckett, for its imagery resurfaces in Dream:
[The artist] can either insist on its complexity, or emphasize its cohesiveness; [...] he can deliberately reproduce its absolute darkness, or for the reader he can dispel such darkness by his very description of it; he will either respect the soul's hidden depths, or lay them open. At need, we [novelists of the second order] force things a trifle; we suppress a few small divergencies, and interpret certain obscure details in a sense most useful towards establishing a psychological unity. The ideal we strive towards is the complete closing up of every gulf’.20Gide claims that while the urge to ‘dispel such darkness’ (to reject ‘inconsequence’) is a tendency within the European novel, it is most characteristically French, for ‘what we French require most of all is logic [....] We sacrifice truth (that is to say, sincerity) to purity and continuity of line’.21 In this sense, Gide argues, Balzac is the archetypal French novelist, and by implication, carries the European novelistic tradition of illumination to its logical end. In contrast, it is precisely areas of ‘inconsequence’, ‘black gulfs [in the novel's characters] that interested Dostoevsky most, and his whole effort is directed towards suggesting how utterly unreachable they are’.22 Burrows's notes also indicate that Beckett contrasted Dostoevsky with Hardy in this regard. Using Gide's metaphor, Beckett criticised Hardy as a ‘simplifier’ whose ‘landscape [was an] animisation of [the] inanimate’. His work thus ‘Reflects shadow + mystery of landscape – not [that of the] character’.23 Balzac paints like David, Beckett indicated, and (borrowing Gide's comparison) Dostoevsky like Rembrandt.
The notes suggest Beckett paid particular attention to Gide's delineation of the Dostoevskian incoherence of the figure in its divergence from the Franco-European tradition. Gide points out, for example, that the Corneillian hero is always recognisable as a rational, coherent entity—although caught in a struggle between the ideal to which the he strives to conform and his natural being (Gide terms this situation ‘bovaryism’). In Dostoevsky, however, there are ‘two distinct personalities in the same body’ which manifest themselves in conflict at the same moment: ‘Each character never relinquishes consciousness of his dual personality with its inconsistencies’.24 Dostoevsky's characters are thus beset by an unsettling ‘duality’. For example, in The Possessed, we find characters being split between their rational and irrational selves, tortured by the simultaneous manifestation of their twin personalities which drive the ‘inconsequential’ action of the novel.25
Although Gide claims that ‘Dostoevsky seems to recognize a kind of ‘stratification’ in the self, and that this inner division is indeed a cause of torment, there remains the possibility of a renunciation of self, and thus escape from what might be termed, to borrow from Beckett in Proust, the ‘suffering of being’.26 This was apparently an area of interest for Beckett which he discussed as the attempt at ‘abnegation’.27 In a passage which Beckett seems to have found compelling, Gide describes
three strata or regions Dostoevsky seems to discern in the human personality: first, the province of intellectual speculation, then the domain of the passions, midway between the former and the third region, a vast realm remote from the play of passion.28While critics have proposed a number of philosophical and psychological templates for the puzzling tripartite inner division evidenced in Belacqua and Murphy, the above suggests that it was in fact Dostoevsky's ‘stratification’ which provided Beckett with the framework for the ‘personality’ of his first two protagonists. Murphy and Belacqua also manifest the same Schopenhauerian tendency as Dostoevsky's figures in their gravitation toward the irrational (Belacqua longs for the ‘womb-tomb’; Murphy flirts with madness) and their preference for what Gide describes as ‘that deeper region, which is not the soul's hell, but its heaven’.29 Like Dostoevsky's characters, Beckett's protagonists seek such release through negating that ‘Hell, according to Dostoevsky, [which] is the first region [of the self], the realm of mind and reason’.30 ‘The Kingdom of Heaven’ can therefore only be attained by renouncing the self and ‘sinking deep in a solidarity that knows no distinctions’. This is
that wider region [...]: a region where love is not, nor passion [...]: the region Schopenhauer spoke of, the meeting-place of human brotherhood, where the limits of existence fade away, where the notion of the individual and of time is lost, the place wherein Dostoevsky sought [...] the secret of happiness.31Gide himself provided a blueprint for a ‘New structure’ of the novel which, like Dostoevsky's use of ‘shadow’, Beckett later adapted to his own use. Burrows's notes suggest that this new form, as Beckett would write concerning the paintings of Avigdor Arikha in 1982, would need to arise from the ‘double awareness’ that became so important to Beckett himself: a ‘grasp of the past and of the problems that beset continuance’ which was to be ‘at once transcended and implicit in [the] work’.32 To use Beckett's terminology, this past was the legacy of the Romantic, Pre-Naturalist and Naturalist traditions in France. As noted, Gide positioned this tradition within that of the ‘European’ novel—a form for him typified by Western logic and the aesthetic assumptions underpinning Stendhal's realism. For Gide, the ‘most self-conscious [and] self-critical of [French] artists’, the need to engage with this past thus necessitated the monumental attempt to ‘renew [the] traditional structure of [the] novel’.33 Gide thus could accept neither the aesthetic solution provided by the realist novel nor what Beckett termed the modern ‘analytical’ novel (the latter having been ‘killed by Proust’ anyway).34 He ‘seeks [a] new narrative form’ which is ‘analytical without being demonstrative [and] interrogative not conclusive’.35
For Beckett, Gide's ‘new narrative form’ is therefore in one sense realist, yet lacks the assumption that the real is simply that which could be reflected by the artwork acting as a Stendhalian mirror of the external world.36 In fact, in its attempt to portray reality, especially the ‘inner life’ of a character's relationship to himself, it continually confronts multiplicity and flux. It is analytical, yet in its ‘humility’ ultimately resists what Beckett termed the ‘implacable recovery’ and ‘conclusiveness’ crystallised in Proust's equation.37 The failure to achieve any ‘ending’ to the narrative (which of course became central for Beckett, as it had been for Gide) is thus highlighted as a primary concern of Beckett's conception of the ‘modern’ novel as early as the 1930 lectures.
The failure of resolution in this new form of novel occurs at two levels: that of the inner life of the character as he searches for the value of his experience, and in the mind of the novelist as he composes his narrative. It is this dual failure to achieve the certainty necessary to conclude which, Beckett suggests, delineates the territory of the modern ‘psychological realist’. As one of Beckett's other students, Leslie Daiken recorded:
‘The Essential difference between the psychological realist of the 17th and of the 20th centuries is that [in] the first, the mind [...] can become unified, and can attain a state of awareness in consciousness. But Gide's has no end. His novels don't end. He cannot see anything seriously, with a sense of finality’.38Beckett suggests that Gide partially achieved this inconclusiveness through accepting the division of the self pioneered in Proust and the ‘darkness’ surrounding the figure in Dostoevsky. In either case, the self could not be depicted in its totality for it is obscured and divided among the ‘panes’ which compose it, whether through the multiplicity of time, Dostoevskian simultaneity, or, as Beckett seems to suggest was most often the case in Gide, the ‘multiplicity’ of interpretation possible regarding any action or identity.
Most importantly, Gide's work contains several innovations in presenting such division at the level of form. Gide's development of a divided or conflicted form is particularly important because in Beckett's view the French novel was essentially the transposition of ‘Theatre strictures’ imported from French classical drama. According to Beckett, this dramatic emphasis on unity and resolution was one of the primary forces which led to the Naturalistic obsession with closure and resolution, and he argued that Gide resisted this temptation through what Burrows records as an ‘interruption’ in each of three novels.39 In the light of Beckett's own trilogy of novels (and what he once described as his ‘series’ extending back to Murphy), it is worth noting that the lectures indicate Gide's acknowledgment of a common trajectory among these three works (the soties Paludes, Le Prométhée mal enchaîné, Les caves du Vatican), coupled with the intent to address a ‘new problem in each book’.40 Using an analogy recalled in Dream (although its origin is almost certainly in Les Faux-Monnayeurs), Beckett suggested that in Paludes the ‘Action instead of being treated melodically is treated symphonically—[the] interest [is] in potential, in [...] unrealised actions’.41 Action in Paludes is thus not only a matter of what did happen, but what could happen, or what possibly happened; in this sense, action is deliberately ‘subjectivized’ as a component of each character's consciousnesses rather than granted as part of an objective stream of events. Thus ‘action’ for Gide ‘ceased to be interesting [in contrast to the] final expansion of personality’. Recycling a phrase he had used to discuss Dostoevsky's work, Beckett suggested that in Le Prométhée mal enchaîné such action is further ‘devoid of outer motive. Eg Action gratuite’.42
Les Faux-Monnayeurs, however, was Beckett's concrete example of the formal qualities of the new novel Gide had pioneered. Just as the person and his actions are composed of ‘panes’ (that is, the person is divided through time, motivation and so on, just as his actions may be interpreted on a number of levels), so the structure of the novel as a whole is divided into certain levels of internal involvement which results in ‘[n]o conclusive gesture or judgment’ and ‘no absolute value’ in the work as a whole.43 Burrows recorded that Les Faux-Monnayeurs may thus be read as a work involved with each of four increasingly complex and self-reflexive meanings:
1. Objective statement of characters.As in Proust's analytical novel, there are many levels on which events may be interpreted, but because ‘each plane [is only] potentially true’, the whole manifests the structure of the ‘Analytic novel refusing to [...] make connexions’.45 The multivalent structure of the novel is also suggested in the title, which may be examined in a number of ways: as a title for Edouard's novel within the novel, as referring to the group of schoolboys, the artistic act itself, or as a satiric reference to the Lycée's ‘falsification of education’.46 It is the ‘incommensurability’—the conflict in the work which echoes the conflict in its characters—between different levels of meaning which results in the ‘New structure’ in Les Faux-Monnayeurs.472. Intervention of Eduard [sic] (author, partly [...] Gide) assisting at material to make a novel of it – Journal d’Eduard [sic] – comments as spectator.
3. Eduard [sic] judged in turn by various characters.
4. Eduard [sic] no longer spectator – involved in action by interest in young man.44
The above breakdown of levels of meaning in Gide's novel does more than indicate different readings that Beckett felt Gide built into the structure of this work; it specifically highlights the importance of Edouard as a liminal figure at once within and detached from the novel. Gide, Beckett pointed out, was interested in just such an exploration of ‘liminal consciousness’.48 While the novel may be read on a realist level as an ‘objective statement’, the ‘intervention’ of Edouard signals what Beckett would have termed an ‘interruption’ of any such reading; Edouard becomes a problematic figure for the ‘author’ who judges his material yet who is nevertheless ‘judged [...] by various characters’. Indeed, as Edouard claims in his journal, his relationship to his own fictions is a problematic one—while their creator, he nevertheless ‘work[s] at their dictation’.49 Edouard thus embodies Beckett's claim that in order to engage with complexity, the ‘Author must be stated at [the] same time as [his] material’ and the struggle between the artist and his ideas ‘must be incorporated in [the] novel’.50 Unlike Balzac, Gide ‘refuses to abdicate as a critic even in [his] novel’ and therefore refuses to be detached from his material as a ‘moralist and cynicist’.51
Gide's willingness to enter, as it were, into the world of incommensurability and paradox of his novels leads to what Beckett described as ‘free will’ accorded to his creatures with a resultant, and laudable, ‘conflict’ between them and the author.52 In Les Faux-Monnayeurs this involvement between the writer and characters is evident in ‘Parallel planes of sentiment & action’ which even involve a paradoxical ‘Free will of creator & free will of creature’.53 While in Balzac's novels the characters can't change their minds or [the] artistic structure crashes’, this ‘traditional artistic statement [is] broken by Gide’.54 The artist instead ‘[t]urns to impulse’ in his creative work, and determines that an act is ‘only interesting [in] suggesting the (multiple) probable—(kinetic) potential’.55 As Edouard claims,
Only this remains – that reality interests me inasmuch as it is plastic, and that I care more [...] for what may be than for what has been. I lean with a fearful attraction over the depths of each creature's possibilities and weep for all that lies atrophied under the heavy lid of custom and morality’.56
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III. Parodying the Novel: Dream, Portrait, Dostoievsky and Les Faux-Monnayeurs |
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TopI. IntroductionII. Paradigms of Incoherence:...III. Parodying the Novel:...Notes |
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Beckett's first novel suggests he was already realising, though perhaps not consciously, that his own path lay not in creating art as an ‘expressive vocation’, but, as Gide wrote of Dostoevsky, as an exploration of ideas submitted ‘in the problematic state, in the form of a question’. The idea that Dream submits in the form of a question, however, is the very possibility of its own emergence under the pressure of Beckett's 1930 criticism of any aesthetic ‘solution’ to the problem of ‘complexity’ in the novel. The result is a work which parodies and resists each of the novelistic archetypes—including Gide and his Dostoevsky—which Beckett had engaged with in the immediately preceding years. For while crucial questions that provoked Dream developed out of Beckett's involvement with these counter-paradigms, unlike Gide and Dostoevsky (and Proust and the Joyce of Portrait for that matter), Beckett's novel suggests he was concerned primarily with the novel rather than a dramatic engagement with individual consciousness. In spite of all its stylistic correlations with Joyce, or its conceptual debts to Gide and Dostoevsky, Dream thus stands apart as a novel of ideas which takes the novel as its idea—a position that suggests, as Belacqua says of his narrator (a ‘Mr. Beckett’), Beckett himself was at this stage still ‘a borderman’, with Dream charting his youthful travels, not just between countries, but paradigms of the novel.
Dream as a Künstlerroman?
If one were to attempt to place Beckett's first novel into any subcategory of the genre, it would of course suggest a kind of Bildungsroman, and more specifically, a Künstlerroman, an account of a young artist's development. Dream clearly gestures toward this kind of novel; it is, after all, the story of a young poet and aspiring novelist (Belacqua) who develops a theory of art. Yet while the application of a category to any one novel will often relate only to some aspects of its construction, on closer inspection Dream suggests a deliberate attempt on the part of the writer to resist and parody the conventions of the genre, specifically through Dream's engagement with Portrait. For example, the depiction of his protagonist's youth in Joyce's novel of education serves as a one-and-a-half page condensation of tensions typical to the genre which the hero will confront (social/religious authority and the individual, the creative instinct versus the drive toward conformity, etc.), and closes with the veiled threat of retribution if the hero attempts to step out of the constraints entailed in his origins. Stephen is nevertheless shown beginning to sing ‘his song’. In contrast, Dream's introductory section takes Joyce's compression of the dynamics of his hero's origins to a comical extreme (Chapter ‘ONE’ takes up only a quarter of a page), and relates as its chief event the artist as an ‘overfed child’ beholding a ‘gush of mard’ issuing from a horse.
Indeed, while Dream may be a portrait of an artist as a young man (Belacqua is distinguished from ‘Mr. Beckett’), any education which he undergoes is closer to that of the disillusionment with ideals and the failure to become an artist charted in Flaubert's anti-romantic Education Sentimentale (which Beckett studied at Trinity) than that provided to Stephen—the much-discussed irony in Joyce's novel notwithstanding.57 Certainly, the exacerbation, rather than self-defining development, of the protagonist's situation is evident at the close of Dream. Perhaps more sceptical than even Flaubert's novel, Dream targets not only romantic sentimentality within art and culture, but the very grounds which allow the novel to exist in the first place: like the aesthetic theories of its protagonist, the narrator acknowledges that the hope that Dream itself will ever be realised as a work of art remains ‘up in the rigging’. To claim that Dream is a novel in the tradition of a post-romantic education of disillusionment, however, would place a weight of resolution on the work which it will not bear—more a result of a ‘state of incoherence’ rather than any nihilism, no value, aesthetic or otherwise, seems readily available to the protagonist or the reader as a result of this tale.
This inconclusiveness is perhaps most significantly due to fact that Belacqua is never granted the ability to ‘make sense’ of his own narrative, to achieve that self-assessment crucial for the hero of the Bildungsroman that would allow the narrative to achieve a certain closure. Unlike Stephen, who achieves some self-definition by literally becoming the writer of the novel, or Flaubert's Frédéric, who at last self-critically beholds his life-long sentimentality, Belacqua reappears in much the same manner as he did at the beginning—only in a rather worse set of circumstances. Ejected by the second of the ‘leading ladies’ of the novel, he is seen hobbling alone on his ‘ruined feet’ through the unrelenting rain on a moonless and starless night with no money for the tram (which is no longer running anyway), in so much pain he is forced to collapse in a foetal position on the pavement ‘far from shelter’.58 His incredulity at his own body and its (recalcitrant) workings echoes the opening of the novel in ‘TWO’, as does the command, here given by an unseen policeman, to move along. Like the artist who oversees his narrative, Belacqua at the ‘END’ still does not ‘quite know where [he] is in this story’; like so many of Beckett's ‘heroes’ yet to come he remains under compulsion, without ‘absolution or remission’, to go on.59
If Beckett's first novel is pessimistic concerning the very possibility of the novel as a form, this is largely an effect of its subversion of the novel of education at the level of subjectivity. As Thomas Jeffers has recently pointed out, the Bildungsroman since Goethe has posed a question which can be crudely if succinctly formulated as follows:
Does the life of a young person of sensibility have a purpose, and if so, was that purpose bestowed from without, say by nature or by nature's God, or was it generated from within, by the person's own conscious choices and instinctive impulses? Or could it in some discernible way be the product of both, as in the Protestant concept of cooperative Grace?60Dream unsurprisingly resists both answers (and Goethe's synthesis of Providence and individual choice in Wilhelm Meister) because any question like the above presupposes an integral individual essence which can be directed or developed, and it is precisely this ‘unity’ which Dream attempts to abolish.61 Similarly, if there is a Providence in Beckett's novel, it is the capricious, pessimistic voice of the clown Grock whose ‘Not likely’ subverts any typical trajectory or resolution. (‘The only unity in this story’ the narrator sighs, ‘is [...] an involuntary unity’.)62 Rather than a question asked of individual experience, Dream poses a dilemma to the novel: What is to be done with a character that is ‘trine’ ‘at his simplest’—a protagonist who is ‘Centripetal, centrifugal and ... not’?63
There is theory of the novel as a ‘portrait’ undergirding Dream, but it owes less to Joyce than to Gide's Dostoevsky, whose characters are compared to a Rembrandt figure ‘repos[ing] in its own shadow’.64 Belacqua does not seek to define himself against a world of convention, but to attain a state which can only be described as that of non-being in the face of a reality of incoherent values—a state completely without figure and ground, inaccessible to the methods and ends of realism.65 In this sense, Beckett's caricatural deployment of the conventions of the Künstlerroman reveals a parodic re-writing of Stephen's aesthetic theory in Portrait through a development of the ‘spotlighting’ theory in Dostoievsky. Recall Stephen's tripartite exposition of ‘the necessary phases of artistic apprehension’, the same theory which leads him toward his hope to ‘encounter [...] the reality of experience’ at the novel's close:
your mind first of all separates the basket from the rest of the visible universe which is not the basket. The first phase of apprehension is a bounding line drawn about the object to be apprehended. [...] temporal or spatial, the esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which is not it. You apprehend it as one thing. You see it as one whole. [...] That is integritas.66Like Stephen's integritas, consonantia and claritas arise from a perception of the object as singular and essential, just as his rise toward artistic self-definition against a background of custom and protocol assumes an authentic self which, through the aesthetic act, will be revealed in a ‘radiant image’.67
Rather than simply turning such a system on its head, Beckett's novel endeavours to revel in a complexity and simultaneity of objects by virtue of which aesthetic apprehension would simply fail. Belacqua is dissonant, not ‘harmonious’. He is ‘trine’ rather than ‘one thing’. In addition, the confusion of these elements, and the ‘disintegration’ of the character into the morass of flux and incoherence surrounding him, becomes the fundamental dynamic of the novel. More radical than even Dostoevsky's presentation of character as described by Gide, Dream thus subjects any distinction between background and figure to a principle of disintegration. Lucien, for example, is described with ‘his contours in perpetual erosion. Looking at his face’, Mr. Beckett points out, ‘you saw all the features bloom, as in Rembrandt's portrait of his brother. [...] [H]e was disintegrating bric-à-brac’.68 Recalling a metaphor Beckett used in his lectures, ‘Mr. Beckett’ suggests that it is the disappearance of figure into ground (and vice versa) that he hopes to achieve, not its definition.
The background pushed up as a guarantee ... that tires us. The only perspective worth stating is the site of the unknotting that could be, landscape of a dream of integration, prospective, that of Franciabigio's young Florentine in the Louvre, into which it is pleasant to believe he may, gladly or sadly, no matter, recede, from which he has not necessarily emerged.69
The rejection of unity: Dostoievsky as a model
The Künstlerroman and Stephen's aesthetic theory are not the only objects of parodic subversion in Dream. Predictably, Beckett's overt target is Naturalism. Like Gide in Dostoievsky, or Edouard in Les Faux Monnayeurs, Beckett scorns the ‘self-assurance’ of the novelist ‘whose chief care seems ever to be the perfect consistency of his characters’.70 While the great exemplar in this regard is Balzac, Beckett is in fact levelling his critique at Gide's Western-European novel and the effects generated by its philosophical assumptions, or, as ‘Mr. Beckett’ puts it less reverently, that ‘Pythagorean chain-chant solo of cause and effect’ ‘[w]hich is more or less [...] what one gets from one's favourite novelist’.71
The procédé that seems all falsity, that of Balzac, for example, and the divine Jane and many others, consists in dealing with the vicissitudes, or absence of vicissitudes, of character [...] as though that were the whole story. Whereas, in reality, this is so little the story, this nervous recoil into composure, this has so little to do with the story, that one must be excessively concerned with a total precision to allude to it at all.72Dream attacks this assumption of a rationally-demonstrable, integral self in order to critique the stability of values affirmed or denied through it in the novels of Beckett's Balzac and those like him—values which allow the writer to establish a hierarchy of sentiment and achieve a kind of moral resolution.
To the item thus artificially immobilised in a backwash of composure precise value can be assigned. So all the novelist has to do is to bind his material in a spell, item after item, and juggle politely with irrefragable values, values that can assimilate other values like in kind and be assimilated by them, that can increase and decrease in virtue of an unreal permanence of quality.73Instead, Beckett's characters comically appropriate the ‘simultaneity’ Gide praises in Dostoievsky. Rather than the struggle between his natural being and the ideal toward which the hero strives to conform (‘bovaryism’), or the struggle between the individual and the conventions and values of his society, Dream's characters represent conflicting natures and values within themselves. The Smeraldina-Rima, for example, exhibits a schism which represents her status as both ‘Weib’ (‘all breasts and buttocks’ as Belacqua puts it) and ideal spirit. The facets of this figure, as the narrator indicates to his frustration, render her ‘not demonstrable’ within the novelistic convention which calls for this premier amour to represent a stable value in his hero's experience (allowing the work to achieve an overall ‘harmonic’ structure).
The most problematic character in this regard is of course Beckett's protagonist, in whom the principle of ‘simultaneity’—the very rejection of any continuum—is at its most complex. Thus, in line with Gide's argument that the Dostoevskian novelist must concern himself with the ‘irrational, the resolute, and often irresponsible nature of his characters’, the majority of ‘UND’ (itself a punctuation of any narrative continuity the novel may have gathered) is dedicated to the attempt to ‘pierce the shadows and tangles of Belacqua's behaviour’, an endeavour by which the narrator, in a moment of Gidean ‘humility’, must ‘concede [himself] conquered’.74 Like Murphy (whose mind is given a similarly separate treatment in ‘section six’ of his novel), Belacqua is revealed to be ‘trine’ ‘at his simplest’—composed of the ‘three strata or regions Dostoevsky seems to discern in the human personality’.75 Yet while the ‘vast realm remote from the play of passion’ in Dostoievsky is salvific and fraternal, Belacqua's ‘third being’ is paradoxically closer to nonbeing: ‘the dark gulf, where the glare of the will and the hammer-strokes of the brain [...] were expunged’.76 Rather than the ‘complete closing up of every gulf’ championed by Jacques Rivière, Dream instead focuses its attention on the ‘dark gulf’ at the centre of its protagonist, into which he longs to escape. The Schopenhauerian attempt to escape from the suffering of willing presents a further ‘simultaneity of incoherence’ in Beckett's novel, for, as Belacqua realises, ‘How could the will be abolished in its own tension?’. Belacqua, like ‘Mr. Beckett’, is ‘a horrible border-creature’.77
As the above suggests, however, there is a crucial difference between the way that the issue of divided subjectivity in the novel is treated in Dream, and in the works of Gide and Dostoevsky. Unlike these writers, who explore divided subjectivity in a dramatised manner, Beckett submits this ‘counter-aesthetic’ dynamic to another parodic caricature, undercutting any residual Romantic sense of an inner self remaining in the characters inhabiting the ‘new structure’ of the novel. He thereby resists the temptation, as he later wrote of Murphy, to take his creatures ‘too seriously’ in Dream.78 Indeed, the characters’ outlandish names and their exaggeratedly schismatic qualities suggest the intent to rewrite Edouard's ‘novel of ideas’ (or Gide's idea of divided subjectivity and fragmented form) as an idea in its own right—a complex manoeuvre involving Dream's parody of an aesthetic of incoherence within a work of art ostensibly governed by the same principle. Thus, while Belacqua's postulates on the ‘incoherence of the art surface’ may be accepted, to an extent, as Beckett's own, the novel also anticipates his enduring resistance to embracing any definition of the aesthetic—even one of ‘incoherence’—qua definition, favouring instead complex and evasive articulations mediated through caricatural masks (as in Three Dialogues). In this sense, Dream bears witness to Beckett's struggle, as he put it later, to ‘get over’ the aesthetic paradigms which formed the matrix for his own novel—Gide and his Dostoevsky as well as ‘J.J.’.
A (doubled) portrait of the artist as a struggling writer
Though the Beckett of 1932 could subject his early counter-aesthetic to a certain ironic regard even as he deployed it against Balzac's realism and the tradition of the Bildungsroman, he remained in the shadow of his French master. For there is of course an additional Gidean ‘portrait’ in Dream looming over its problematic figures and the world in which they exist: a portrait of the artist depicted not as a romantic surrogate or budding theorist, but as a self-doubting reader/writer of the text, whose difficulties are ironically reflected in the artistic failure of his writer-protagonist. Dream thus exemplifies a way of thinking about the novel (and one of greater relevance to Beckett's mature work than his protagonist's ‘aesthetic of inaudabilities’) traceable to Beckett's 1930 account of the ‘new structure’ in Les Faux Monnayeurs, and the Gidean device of the mise en abyme.79
An artwork involved with the complexity of reality cannot simply depict that reality, Beckett argued, but must involve a ‘statement’ of the author's involvement with the work, dramatising his ultimate failure to achieve resolution in the ‘struggle [between] artist & idea’.80 In Gide's novel and the Journal he published along with it, this struggle takes place on a number of levels, only two of which Beckett co-opted in Dream: the struggle of the artist-protagonist with his potential fiction, and that of the Novelist-narrator with the fiction in which this protagonist exists. I will first examine this struggle at the level of Gide's protagonist. This is appropriate for several reasons. Most importantly, it is largely due to the problematic nature of the self as conceived by Edouard in Les Faux-Monnayeurs that this struggle must be depicted in the artwork. In addition, when approaching the ‘relationship of relationships’ which is the mise en abyme, it is perhaps best to give an account of the terms ‘from within’ before positing their correlation or disjunction with relation to the work itself.
As in Dream, it is in line with a view of the self as fragmented, mutable and nonessential (or ultimately inaccessible) and a view of reality as inherently discordant (composed, like the self, of ‘provisional’ values and meanings), that Edouard criticises the novel as a genre which has so far only ‘clung to reality with [...] timidity’ and been ‘a slave to resemblance’.81 His response to this idea of the novel is complex. On one hand, he argues for a removal of every ‘realist’ component in the form in the interests of realising a ‘pure’ novel: a work whose success would no longer be judged by the standard of ‘get[ting] still nearer to nature’.82
I should like to strip the novel of every element that does not specifically belong to the novel. Just as photography in the past freed painting from its concern for a certain sort of accuracy, so the phonograph will eventually no doubt rid the novel of the kind of dialogue which is drawn from the life and which realists take so much pride in. Outward events, accidents, traumatisms, belong to the cinema. The novel should leave them to it.83Reminiscent of Beckett's criticism in Proust of those who ‘worship the offal of experience’, as well as Gide's early flirtations with symbolism, Edouard's argument also suggests an autonomous, auto-teleological art whose governing principle is that of ‘style’. Contrasting his aims with Balzac's (who discovered the proper function of his work in its rivalry with the état-civil),84 Edouard seeks a novel freed from the transcription of ‘surface’ and given over to a stylising, aesthetic principle—a ‘formidable erosion of contours’. To illustrate his point, Edouard holds up ancient Greek drama and 17th century French tragedy as paradigms which exercise ‘the deliberate avoidance of life which gave [them the] style’ he now seeks for the novel; these are creations which ‘don't pride themselves [...] on appearing real. They remain works of art’.85
At the same time, however, Edouard desires that his novel should perform a contradictory task: to reveal the complexity of reality in its fullness, without presenting ‘life’ as cut up by the writer's pen. As he is forced to admit, however, the most obvious problem with this idea is that such a novel cannot have ‘a subject’.
Let's say, if you prefer it, it hasn't got one subject ... ‘a slice of life’, the naturalist school said. The great defect of that school is that it always cuts its slice in the same direction; in time, lengthwise. Why not in breadth? Or in depth? As for me I should like not to cut at all. Please understand; I should like to put everything into my novel. I don't want any cut of the scissors to limit its substance at one point rather than at another.86But if the novel cannot assume its shape through the selective process that gives an artwork its form, the novelist takes on a seemingly impossible obligation: no recognisable subject and no means of formally defining that subject appear to be admissible in this work about ‘everything’ and ‘nothing’. But even if such a novel were realisable as ‘the freest, the most lawless’ of literary genres,87 what about Edouard's other, oppositional urge: to create a novel which is not concerned with ‘appearing real’ but with achieving a ‘pure’ form governed by ‘style’? David Walker puts Edouard's problem this way:
The novel and the real are in fact incompatible. The novel is a work of art, and the novelist is bound to put artistic principles first. But this puts in doubt the referential value of the form – the criterion of the novel's worth, conventionally, being its truth to fact.88Edouard's non-solution (the very object of this theory being in one sense to avoid aesthetic solutions) is a profoundly interesting one in relation to Dream and Beckett's later novels. Edouard's novel does end up being written, but only as a perpetually unfinished record of his struggle to produce it as taken down in his diary along with the multitude of events and thoughts that occur to its writer. Edouard theorises that it is the very labour of creating an artwork within impossible parameters and with impossible material which will become the substance of his work.
I invent the character of a novelist, whom I make my central figure; and the subject of the book, if you must have one, is just that very struggle between what reality offers him and what he himself desires to make of it.89It is this struggle ‘to represent reality on one hand’ and the oppositional ‘effort to stylise it into art’—‘the struggle between the facts presented by reality and the ideal reality’—that will become the novel's true subject. This struggle, dramatised in the figure of the writer, is inherently paradoxical for it is the conflict between irreconcilable ends: the formal arrangement toward which the aesthetic endeavour must gravitate through the selective process that brings it into existence, and the desire to present a complexity, lawlessness and freedom which is at odds with any such process.90 The result is a work perpetually becoming in a process of forming and un-forming itself; the novel becomes a metafictional and diaristic record in which Edouard takes down ‘the state of the novel in [his] mind’ as his thinking about it changes day by day. Instead of resolving difficulties in his ‘story’, he articulates and studies them. The ‘novel’ is thus extant only in the journal's account of its author's struggle to create it. In this sense it presents not only what Edouard terms a ‘running criticism’ of its own emergence, but levels its critique ‘at the novel in general’. (Remember that in his reading the novel hides the artifice of its own construction).91
But of course Gide's novel does not present Edouard's project as ultimately successful, for his project is only a theory of a novel to be titled Les Faux-Monnayeurs and he remains a character within a fiction of that name; only the Novelist of Les Faux-Monnayeurs has ostensibly created the work which recalls its own genesis, and behind him stands the writer Gide who published the account of that fiction's emergence in the Journal des Faux Monnayeurs. Here I only wish to highlight the importance of the second term in this series in relation to Dream: the relationship between the Novelist and Edouard. Just as Edouard's approach is fraught with contradiction, so the Novelist's relationship to him is ambivalent. On one hand, much is done to suggest a correspondence between the Novelist and his writer-protagonist (both have an authorial relationship, ‘real’ or virtual, to a novel called Les Faux-Monnayeurs, they share similar aesthetic concepts, etc.). Yet Gide also purposefully institutes important differences between these writers. For example, the Novelist criticises Edouard's ambitions as idealistic, inflexible, illogical and naïve; unlike Edouard, the Novelist is not above putting ‘facts’ such as news items (and, with regard to Boris, ones which Edouard is particularly uneasy about) into his Les Faux-Monnayeurs. As Lucien Dällenbach has pointed out, the ambiguity which Gide develops in this relationship is deliberate and productive in that it allows Gide to play a ‘double game’ which distributes responsibilities within the novel. Via the mise en abyme, he could put forward and critique an incoherent theory of art which seeks to unite a ‘pure’ artistic form devoid of naturalistic detail and contrivance with the impure flux of existence.92
Though in a less complex fashion, Beckett appropriated the Gidean device of the novelist within the novel to similar effect in Dream.93 Like Edouard, Belacqua is patronised by the narrator as naïve and idealistic, but he is also given a certain status as the most complex character in the novel; likewise, parallels are developed between him and the narrator, yet Dream also suggests that it is not the work which Belacqua would have written, if his theory is anything to go by.94 Beckett thus used the mise en abyme technique to complicate any relationship between himself and his own counter-theory, and to avoid assigning his protagonist an unambiguous value within a fiction which claims to reflect ‘complexity’.
One of the more interesting ways that he did this was through re-writing Edouard's failure to accept the ramifications of his theory of a ‘pure’ and incoherent art. In effect, what this amounts to is a critique of Belacqua's concern with incoherence as another form of idealism which itself cannot confront the confusion of reality. This critique largely takes place in Belacqua's conversation with the Mandarin at the end of ‘TWO’, a passage which probably reflects something of a self-criticism (Beckett drew it up in terms borrowed from his Proust), though it also parodies Stephen's exposition of his aesthetic theory to Cranly in Portrait. Unlike Stephen, who emerges triumphant from his own discussion of art (and woman), Beckett's hero is cowed by his eiron in an exchange redolent of that most Gidean of moments in the novel: ‘the delicate moment when thought breaks down’.95 Here Beckett demonstrates that Belacqua's theory of art cannot itself accommodate an incoherent reality, for incoherence must be limited to a certain sector which he can oversee and control, namely that of art. This disintegration of Belacqua's theory of disintegration recalls two consecutive entries in Edouard's journal (October 26th and 28th) which discuss the same subjects (aesthetics and relations between men and women) in terms of ‘incoherence’. Interestingly, it seems that Beckett modelled his hero's experience on the ‘slow decrystallisation’ of love which Edouard anticipates as the subject of his novel in these entries. ‘What an admirable subject for a novel’, Gide's hero muses, ‘So long as he loves and desires to be loved, the lover cannot show himself as he really is, and moreover he does not see the beloved—but instead, an idol whom he decks out, a divinity whom he creates’.96 Apparently more naïve than Edouard, Belacqua does not recognise such a topic as a subject for art (especially not the artwork in which he himself exists), though he inevitably undergoes such a process of ‘decrystallisation’ with the Smeraldina. His model of the beloved is Beatrice, though the Mandarin tries to disabuse him: ‘You simplify and dramatise the whole thing with your literary mathematics. I don't waste any words with the argument of experience, the inward decrystallisation of experience, because your type never accepts experience’.97
Ironically, like Edouard, Belacqua is in fact a literary idealist who cannot live up to his own theory. Like the Naturalists they abhor, both characters desire to project order onto the confusion of experience. For all his consideration of the novel as a ‘lawless’ genre, it seems Edouard ultimately desires a ‘poetical’ order in the world and the artwork;98 and his inability to ‘make use of’ Boris's suicide in his novel is finally less about his rejection of ‘Outward events, accidents, [and] traumatisms’ than his need, like the crassest Naturalist, to only include those occurrences ‘accounted for by a sufficiency of motive’.99 In a similar way, the Mandarin points out that in spite of Belacqua's theorising about the ‘astral incoherence of the art surface’ he remains committed to a romantic conception of individual essence which, like the conventions of the novel which rely upon it, is seen as comically naïve.
Like Edouard's virtual novel, though, Dream may finally be less about its protagonist than its author. Borrowing another Gidean self-reflexive device (which he would return to in Watt), Beckett's narrator is also a Mr. Beckett who, as Laura warns Edouard, ‘won't be able to help painting [him]self’ in his struggle to write.100 Like Gide's Novelist, Mr. Beckett occupies a dual role. He is at once the writer and, by virtue of his incomprehension, a reader of this novel: he seems both within and without the fiction. The narrator reflects upon this ‘painful duty’ in the chapter ‘UND’, which is modelled on Gide's chapter ‘The Author Reviews His Characters’. Although less sardonic than Mr. Beckett, Gide's narrator is similar in several regards, most importantly in his uncertainty about his creation and his lack of control over it. Like Mr. Beckett, he describes himself as an unwitting and unlucky individual who by some mischance has become responsible for his irritating and recalcitrant creatures. Both narrators position themselves as the ‘undiscerning author [who] stops awhile to regain his breath, and wonders with some anxiety where his tale will take him’.101 The narrator's puzzlement and distress, his complicit tone with the reader, his disappointment and even anger at his characters, and his irritation with the novelist who has a secure set of values and predictable creatures to work with, all suggest the attempt to confront what Beckett described in his lectures as ‘free will’ and indeterminacy.
But do such techniques, and especially this inclusion of the embattled narrator, achieve the aims that Beckett was apparently striving for—to allow a lawlessness and freedom into the form which would erode the tired conventions of the novel? Beckett's lectures suggest that even in Gide's complex structure there remains a residual ‘coherence’ ‘that in spite of [his] humility he can't avoid’.102 Indeed, the title of Les Faux-Monnayeurs indicates that each attempt to achieve the authentic complexity of reality in art must involve another fiction, another form of contrivance and representation. And it seems that such counterfeiting proliferates not only at the level of the characters, but at the level of narration. To appropriate Albert Sonnenfeld's comments on La Porte Étroite, ‘the semblance of spontaneity’ in the interjections of Gide's or Beckett's narrator, though suggestive of the unformed flux of reality, is actually ‘a literary and psychological stratagem’ at one with the informing task of the traditional novelist.103 Though more self-conscious than the novels Gide's Lafcadio despises, Dream and Les Faux-Monnayeurs are of course similarly calculated, revised utterances at the opposite pole to an inscrutable, happenstance reality. As Walker has pointed out of Les Faux-Monnayeurs, although the Novelist's interjections fragment the narrative at the level of action and inhibit the reader's immersion in a uniform diegetic world, they also serve to provide a continuous experience at the level of reading. By means of his interjections, the novelist is in fact maintaining contact with the reader through colluding with him in a shared experience of bewilderment, drawing him along from one episode to the next. The narrator thus dispenses with traditional time sequences only to replace them with alternative kinds of transitions.104
In another sense, these narrators and their authors cannot escape from the circle of artifice in the novel because there is no escape from the circle of representation in language. As Gide's Strouvilhou realises, those ‘promissory notes which go by the name of words’, like the conventions on which the artist builds his work, may seem to ‘pass current’, yet they ‘ring as false as counters’ when tested.105 In this view, reality, which art strives to express in its most essential form, can only appear through an inevitably misleading representation; even worse, as in the grim teaching of Schopenhauer (whose shadow falls over both Dream and Les Faux-Monnayeurs), reality may turn out to be nothing but representation. ‘Freedom’ from artifice in the novel, like freedom of will in Schopenhauer's cosmos, predictably begins to appear as just another false coin in a currency of illusion.
Dream draws on and affirms Beckett's 1930 argument that the novel cannot resolve but only re-state the problem which confronted it in the modern age. It suggests that, though the novelist must attempt to dissolve conventions to approach an ‘essential reality’, he must ultimately admit failure in the face of an irreducibly complex, ‘incoherent’ universe. Beckett was still almost two decades away from accepting this failure and setting it at the core of his artistic theory, but by following in Gide's footsteps, he had already started down the path toward a fiction governed by a radical scepticism, and which continually erodes its own foundations.
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Notes |
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TopI. IntroductionII. Paradigms of Incoherence:...III. Parodying the Novel:...Notes |
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The author wishes to thank Ronald Bush, John Pilling, Shane Weller, David Walker and Erik Tonning for their assistance with various aspects of this essay.
1 Most recently, Brigitte Le Juez has given an account of the lectures with summaries and some transcriptions in Beckett before Beckett, trans. Ros Schwartz (London, 2008). 
2 Notes from Samuel Beckett's lectures, taken by Rachel Dobbin [Burrows], Trinity College Library, Dublin, MIC60, 105.
3 Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, (London, 1999), 49.
4 Proust remained a complex, even ambivalent figure for Beckett. See, for example, Shane Weller's analysis of Beckett's two Prousts of 1930 in A Taste for the Negative: Beckett and Nihilism, (London, 2005), 35–49. See also Beckett's later account of Proust in his 1934 review ‘Proust in Pieces’ in which he defends Proust's work as one in which ‘conflict’ is ‘only rarely to be resolved’. Samuel Beckett, Disjecta, (London, 2001), 63–65.
5 Beckett continued to be interested in these writers in the following years. He read Dostoevsky's The Possessed (in a French translation) in May of 1931 as he was writing Dream. In August of 1931 he wrote to Thomas MacGreevy that he had proposed a monograph (which was to develop his thinking in Proust) on Dostoevsky to Charles Prentice (James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London, 1996), 134). Beckett proposed a study on Gide to Prentice in February of 1932, but the idea was turned down for financial reasons. (Knowlson, n 78, 733). In the late summer of 1932, Beckett was again pondering a monograph on Gide, this time for New Statesman (John Pilling, A Samuel Beckett Chronology (New York, 2006), 38). In the early August of 1934 Beckett told MacGreevy that he had proposed an essay on Gide (or Rimbaud) to the Bookman (Knowlson, 189). None of these attempts resulted in a book, but Beckett had managed to collate a body of quotations for his Gide monograph by September of 1932 (Pilling, 2006, 39).
6 MIC60, 99 (Burrows's emphasis).
7 Ibid., 37 (Burrows's emphasis).
9 Disjecta, 172–3; see Proust, 109–126.
10 Le Juez has recognized Beckett's reliance on Gide's text for his lectures on the novel: ‘[In his lectures on the modern novel] Beckett dwells at length on Gide's essay on Dostoevsky [...] and Rachel Burrows's notes show that he scrupulously follows the order of the essay chapters’. (Le Juez, 35). Gide's book was derived from his own lectures (published with additional essays), given in the early months of 1922 before Jacques Copeau's School of Dramatic Art at the Vieux-Colombier.
11 Burrows's note ‘read Gide on Dostoevsky for Gide himself’ indicates Beckett's self-acknowledged source for his commentary on the Russian writer. (MIC60, 8). In Dostoievsky, Gide points out that he is speaking about himself as much as the Russian writer: ‘I insist [...] that I have sought, consciously or unconsciously, what had most intimate connection with my own ideas. Others no doubt will be able to discern different things’. André Gide, Dostoievsky, trans. Dorothy Bussy (London, 1949), 162.
12 Ibid., 19, 7; Dostoievsky, 17. As David Walker pointed out to me, it is important to note that Balzac was not actually a Naturalist. The Naturalist school emerged toward the end of the 19th century and is best represented by Zola; Balzac was closer to what might be termed a ‘romantic realist’. In the following, however, I use Beckett's distinction between the ‘Pre-Naturalists’ and the ‘Naturalists’ to try to follow his own theory as closely as possible.
14 Ibid., 23, 29. Burrows's emphasis.
20 Nouvelle Revue Française, February 1922, 176–7; quoted in Dostoievsky, 100.
32 Beckett quoted in Duncan Thomas and Stephen Coppel, Avigdor Arikha: Drawings and Prints 1965-2005, (London: The British Museum Press, 2006), 8.
36 ‘Today’, Gide argued, ‘the novel must prove that it can be something other than a mirror carried down the road’ (quoted in David Walker, André Gide (London, 1990), 8). This comment was published for the first time in Delay's biography of Gide (which appeared in the late 1950s), so it would not have been available to Beckett until then; but it is perhaps worth noting the Irishman's comparable challenge to Stendhal as a predecessor in the novel in his Les Deux Besoins (1938): ‘Il y a des jours, surtout en Europe, où la route réflète mieux que le miroir’. Disjecta, 55.
37 MIC60, 33. Beckett does, however, later criticize Gide for the ‘Coherence [...] that in spite of [his] humility he can’t avoid’. Ibid., 25.
38 Notes on Samuel Beckett's lectures taken by Leslie Daiken, Beckett International Foundation, Reading University Library.
48 Ibid., 42. According to Beckett, ‘Gide [was] interested in liminal consciousness ([which was] sneered at by [Max] Nordau)’. (Ibid., 42). In his Dream Notebook, Beckett noted an ‘inchoate liminal erotico-mystic presentation (of St. John of the Cross & St. Teresa)’—a paraphrase of a passage from his reading of Nordau's Degeneration (1895) joined by Beckett with elements drawn from W.R. Inge's Christian Mysticism. See also Dream's ‘erotico-mystic’ (Dream, 30), and ‘innumerable other inchoate liminal presentations’ Dream, 32–33. John Pilling, Beckett's Dream Notebook, (Reading, 1999), 91.
49 André Gide, The Counterfeiters, trans. Dorothy Bussy, (London, 1966), 105.
57 Like his forbears in the Bildungsroman, Belacqua leaves the constrained atmosphere of home (here Beckett's Ireland, figured in the censorious, uncultivated authority figures of the wharfinger and policeman), makes his way to the city, experiences urban life, has amorous affairs, concocts aesthetic theories, and writes verse. Belacqua's love affairs also gesture toward the pattern appropriated by 19th-century novels like Middlemarch from the chivalric romance (‘this frail world that is all temptation and knighthood’ Samuel Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (London, 1993), 3), presenting Belacqua with the path of the flesh and the path of the spirit embodied by two women: the Smeraldina and the ethereal Alba. Unlike Eliot's Lydgate, who easily chooses between the gift of the gods (Dorothea) and the rose of the world (Rosamond), Belacqua's tastes seem to swing toward the ethereal, though (to use Belacqua's own terms, which are derived from Mario Praz's The Romantic Agony (1930; trans. 1933), not Eliot's novel (Pilling, 1999, 46)) neither the Rosa Munda nor the Rosa Mundi are preferable to ‘Nothing’.
60 Thomas L. Jeffers, Apprenticeships: The Bildungsroman from Goethe to Santayana, (New York, 2005), 18.
61 Beckett had not read Wilhelm Meister by 1930/1, but he did in 1934 at around the same time he showed a renewed interest in writing his monograph on Gide. (John Pilling, personal communication).
66 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, (London, 1992), 178.
67 Portrait, 186. Beckett further parodies Joyce's use of religious symbolism for artistic ends with Belacqua's recollection of his own ‘first communion’: an experience ultimately forged into a ‘theory of the mystical experience’ as coincident with a ‘period of post-evacuative depression’. Dream, 185.
74 Dostoievsky, 14; Dream, 118. By ‘humility’ Beckett refers to the Novelist's admission of his lack of control over his creatures or narrative. For example, in Dream Belacqua's complexity poses problems for the Novelist's conjugation of the verb ‘to be’, a difficulty he acknowledges in another nod to Gide: ‘We find we have written he is when of course we meant he was. For a postpicassian man [...] it is frankly out of the question [...] to conjugate to be without a shudder. [...] Now he is once more a mere outside, façade, penetrated, if we may pilfer to reapply the creditable phrase of Monsieur Gide, by his façade (Dream, 46). As Pilling notes, the phrase ‘penetrated by his façade’ is ‘pilfered’ from Gide's Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs (1926), where it is applied to Gide's character Lucien Bercail (perhaps anticipating Dream's Lucien). André Gide, Logbook of The Coiners, trans. Justin O’Brien, (London, 1952), 25. Beckett also reapplied Gide's phrase to his Walter Draffin in ‘What a Misfortune’ in More Pricks Than Kicks. John Pilling, A Companion to Dream of Fair to Middling Women, (Tallahassee, FL, 2004), 90.
75 Dream, 120; Dostoievsky, 126.
79 Though originally described by Gide, this technique is perhaps best known through its revival in the 1960s and 1970s by the new novelists (especially Robbe-Grillet, Simon, Sarraute and Butor); however, it has not been recognized that Beckett was one of the first writers to have taken cognizance of it. In using the term here I refer to Gide's definition, which first occurs in an 1893 entry in his Journal, specifically referring to La Tentative Amoureuse: ‘In a work of art’, Gide wrote, ‘I rather like to find thus transposed, at the level of the characters, the subject of the work itself. Nothing sheds more light on the work or displays the proportions of the whole work more accurately’. André Gide, Journals 1889–1949, trans. Justin O'Brien, (London, 1967), 30-1. As Lucien Dällenbach has written, the mise en abyme can be described as ‘any aspect enclosed within a work that shows a similarity with the work that contains it’. Lucien Dällenbach, The Mirror in the Text, trans. Jeremy Whiteley and Emma Hughes, (Oxford, 1989), 8.
84 ‘What have I to do with the état-civil? L’ état c’est moi!’, Edouard contends. ‘[M]y work doesn’t purport to rival anything’. Ibid., 167.
93 Belacqua's virtual artwork remains untitled and he does not keep a journal within the novel.
94 Like Gide's Novelist, Mr. Beckett is guilty of all kinds of transgressions of ‘incoherence’, such as the ‘Overstatement’ he acknowledges was done in imitation of Dickens. Dream, 159.
95 André Gide, The Notebooks of André Walter, trans. Wade Baskin, (London, 1968), 122.
98 Edouard claims that ‘The only existence that anything (including myself) has for me, is poetical. I restore this word to its full signification’. The Counterfeiters, 68.
103 Albert Sonnenfeld, ‘Readers and Reading in La Porte Étroite’, Romantic Review LXVII (1976), 172-80); quoted in André Gide, David Walker, ed. (1996), 149.
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