Abstract
This chapter discusses Beckett’s essays Proust and “Dante … Bruno. Vico..Joyce” alongside Proust’s descriptions of his own composition method in a 1913 interview in Le Temps, contemporaneous defenses of Joyce in Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, and Joyce’s “séance” method of translating Work in Progress into French. The chapter compares these figures’ shared negative presumptions about both middlebrow and highbrow readers, and it shows how Beckett’s rhetorical techniques exemplify modernist attempts to critique the assumptions of both without inadvertently aligning themselves with either.
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Notes
- 1.
Scholarly considerations of Beckett’s interwar nonfiction have generally not addressed this correlation but rather have focused on how Beckett’s bold pronouncements are influenced by other thinkers and what they tell us about his later creative practice. The conversation is a rich and varied one that stretches back at least to the 1970s and continues to this day. See, for instance, Lawrence Harvey, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970). Nicholas Zurbrugg, Beckett and Proust (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988). John Pilling, Beckett before Godot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 12–37. Manfred Milz, “Echoes of Bergsonian Vitalism in Samuel Beckett’s Early Works,” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 19 (2006): 143–154. Chris Ackerley, “The Ideal Real: A Frustrated Impulse in Samuel Beckett’s Writing,” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 21 (2009): 59–72. Mooney, “Kicking against the Thermolaters: Beckett’s ‘Recent Irish Poetry,’” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 15 (2005), 30. Mooney, A Tongue Not Mine, 5. Tim Lawrence, Samuel Beckett’s Critical Aesthetics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
- 2.
Diepeveen, The Difficulties of Modernism, 1.
- 3.
Diepeveen, The Difficulties of Modernism, esp. Chapter 3, “Professional Romanticism: Defending Difficulty,” 87–144, 96. Diepeveen quotes the line about professionalism’s departure from “the vocational values of independence, ingenuity, and entrepreneurship” from Louis Menand, Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 99.
- 4.
Clark, Farewell to an Idea, passim.
- 5.
The editors of Beckett’s Letters identify “Serena 1” as the poem to which Beckett refers (LI, 136). While the meaning of the word serena is unclear, scholars have speculated that it either denotes a siren song or a genre of Provençal song characterized by “unhappiness during the daytime and longing for the night that will reunite [the singer] with his lover” (CP, 283). The definition of serena as Provençal song is quoted from Harvey, Samuel Beckett, 85.
- 6.
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 6, Time Regained, trans. Andreas Mayor and Terrence Kilmartin, rev. D. J. Enright (New York: Modern Library, 1993), 352–54. See also Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, bk. 8, vol. 2, Le Temps retrouvé (Paris: Librarie Gallimard, 1927), 112–14.
- 7.
Quoted in Élie-Joseph Bois, “Élie-Joseph Bois and Proust’s Defence of Swann,” translator not named, in Susanna Lee, ed., Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust (New York: Norton, 2014), 401–4, 402–3. Reprinted from Marcel Proust: The Critical Heritage, ed. Leighton Hodson (New York: Routledge, 1989), 82–85. Originally published in Le Temps, 13 November 1913.
- 8.
“Élie-Joseph Bois and Proust’s Defence of Swann,” 403.
- 9.
“Élie-Joseph Bois and Proust’s Defence of Swann,” 403.
- 10.
Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T. E. Hulme (London: Macmillan, 1913), 2–3.
- 11.
The composition history of the final French text is complicated and diffuse, but Megan M. Quigley has shown that most of the differences between, on the one hand, Beckett and Alfred Péron’s original attempt to translate “Plurabelle” under the working title “Anna Lyvia Pluratself,” and on the other hand, the corresponding section of the final, published French version under the title “Anna Livie Plurabelle,” are attributable to Péron’s handwritten, last-minute alterations to page proofs (including the title change). Beckett’s letters indicate that the burden of the first draft falls largely to him, so the “Pluratself” known to scholars can largely be attributed to Beckett alone (see LI, 25, 31, 35). Megan M. Quigley, “Justice for the ‘Illstarred Punster’: Samuel Beckett’s and Alfred Péron’s Revisions of ‘Anna Lyvia Pluratself,’” James Joyce Quarterly 41, no. 3 (Spring 2004): 473–74. For the “Pluratself” known to scholars, see James Joyce, “Anna Lyvia Pluratself (1930),” trans. Alfred Péron and Samuel Beckett, in Anna Livia Plurabelle di James Joyce: nella traduzione di Samuel Beckett e altri; Versione italiana di James Joyce e Nino Frank, ed. Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli (Torino: Guido Einaudi, 1996), 153–61. For the final French version of “Plurabelle,” see James Joyce, “Anna Livie Plurabelle,” trans. Samuel Beckett, Ivan Goll, Eugene Jolas, Paul Léon, Adrienne Monnier, Alfred Péron, Philippe Soupault, and James Joyce, La Nouvelle Revue Française 19, no. 212 (May 1931): 637–46. For the source text from which both of these versions were drawn, see James Joyce, “Anna Livia Plurabelle, Crosby Gaige, New York 1928,” in Bollettieri Bosinelli, ed., Anna Livia Plurabelle di James Joyce, 1–28. For the final, published English version of “Anna Livia Plurabelle,” see James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Penguin, 1992), 196–201. For additional useful summaries of the composition history of the French “Plurabelle,” see Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli, “Anna Livia Plurabelle’s Sisters,” and Daniel Ferrer and Jacques Aubert, “Anna Livia’s French Bifurcations,” both in Transcultural Joyce, ed. Karen R. Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), respectively 173–78 and 179–86.
- 12.
Joyce, “Anna Livia Plurabelle, Crosby Gaige, New York 1928,” 4. Joyce, “Anna Lyvia Pluratself (1930),” trans. Beckett, 155.
- 13.
Quigley concludes that her evidence suggests that Joyce’s séances are dedicated primarily to completing the translation rather than to revising what has already been done, as other scholars have suggested. See Quigley, “Justice for the ‘Illstarred Punster,’” 473–74.
- 14.
Ellmann, James Joyce: New and Revised Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 632.
- 15.
Jolas, “The Revolution of Language and James Joyce,” transition 11 (February 1928): 109–16. On the publication of Work in Progress and defenses of it in transition, see Conley, ed. Joyce’s Disciples Disciplined.
- 16.
“Proclamation,” transition 16–17 (June 1929): 13. The piece is signed by Kay Boyle, Whit Burnett, Hart Crane, Caress Crosby, Harry Crosby, Martha Foley, Stuart Gilbert, A. L. Gillespie, Leigh Hoffman, Eugene Jolas, Elliot Paul, Douglas Rigby, Theo Rutra, Robert Sage, Harold J. Salemson, and Laurence Vail.
- 17.
See Churchill, “transition,” Index of Modernist Magazines, https://modernistmagazines.org/european/transition/#1464124281476-e258061f-1195f85b-14c1.
- 18.
“Élie-Joseph Bois and Proust’s Defence of Swann,” 401.
- 19.
On the readership and social position of Le Temps at this time, see C. Bélanger, J. Godechot, Histoire générale de la presse française, vol. 3, 1871 à 1940 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), 352–53, 559–61.
- 20.
“Élie-Joseph Bois and Proust’s Defence of Swann,” 403.
- 21.
Rebecca West, The Strange Necessity (London and Toronto: Jonathan Cape, 1928), 74.
- 22.
This self-contradiction resonates with the point that Beckett would again obliquely concede, years later, in The Unnamable, when he writes that it is a “deplorable mania, when something happens, to inquire what” (T, 296). A mania, however deplorable, is also something that is uncontrollable by definition.
- 23.
See Conley, introduction to Conley, ed., Joyce’s Disciples Disciplined, xvi.
- 24.
Gontarski, “Towards a Minoritarian Criticism—The Questions we Ask,” introduction to The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts, ed. S. E. Gontarski (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 3.
- 25.
See Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Penguin, 1992), 230.
- 26.
Breon Mitchell, Samuel Beckett: A Bibliography, Part 1, The Early Years, 1929–50, https://www.beckettarchive.org/beckettbibliography.jsp, 17–19, 17.
- 27.
For further details about the series, including a complete list of its titles, see John Krygier, “Dolphin Books,” in A Series of Series: Twentieth-Century Publishers Book Series, https://seriesofseries.owu.edu/dolphin-books/.
- 28.
Pilling, Beckett before Godot, 14.
- 29.
Mooney, “Kicking against the Thermolaters,” 41. Mooney cites Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 198, 14.
- 30.
Mooney, “Kicking against the Thermolaters,” 30. See also Pilling, Beckett before Godot, 123.
- 31.
Emilie Morin, Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 31.
- 32.
Stuart Gilbert, ed., The Letters of James Joyce, vol. 1 (New York: The Viking Press, 1966), 283–84.
- 33.
Diepeveen, The Difficulties of Modernism, 107. Diepeveen quotes Eliot, “Philip Massinger,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), 153–60, 157. Originally published in the Times Literary Supplement (May 27, 1920). Diepeveen also quotes Eliot, Introduction to Selected Poems by Marianne Moore (New York: Macmillan, 1935), vii–xiv, x.
- 34.
Derek Attridge, “Against Allegory: Waiting for the Barbarians, Michael K, and the Question of Literary Reading,” in J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual, ed. Jane Poyner (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 65.
- 35.
Derrida, Spurs: On Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 95, 103.
- 36.
See Bourdieu, “The Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic,” in The Field of Cultural Production, 254–66.
- 37.
See Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 152.
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Wolterman, N. (2022). Janus-faced Arguments: Beckett’s Interwar Criticism and Other Self-divided Defenses of Modernism. In: Beckett’s Imagined Interpreters and the Failures of Modernism . New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05650-5_2
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