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An Introduction to Beckett's Dream of Fair to Middling Women

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An Introduction to Beckett's Dream of Fair to Middling Women Hitotsubashi Journal of Arts and Sciences 35 (1994) 71-83. C The Hitotsubashi Academy AN INTRODUCTION TO BECKETT'S DREAM OF FAIR TO MIDDLING W~OMEN>* YOSHIKI TAJIRI I. Genera/ Introduction Beckett wrote his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (hereafter Dream), in Paris in the summer of 1932, when he was twenty-six. He would not permit the publication of this earliest novel in his lifetime, though, at first, he had tried hard to publish it. The novel was to reach the public only in 1992, three years after his death. In 1932, Beckett was still an unknown young man who had just started his literary career. Whi]e he was teaching English at the Ecole Normale Sup~rieure from 1928 to 1930, he was ab]e to breathe the atmosphere of the flourishing avant-garde movements of Paris, for which, we can well imagine, he had had a great longing in Dublin. Among other things, he got to know James Joyce who was then writing Finnegans Wake (still Work in Progress at that time). ~eckett almost worshipped Joyce and was much influenced by him. Joyce in turn recognised this young compatriot's talent and valued his help in the composition of Work in Progress. Beckett published an essay, "Dante . Bruno . Vico . Joyce," in 1929, in which he explicated and defended the still unpopular Work in Progress. In the next year his prize-winning first poem, Wlloroscope, came out. In 1931, he published a monograph, Proust. These and other minor writings were all he had published when he wrote Dream. After he found it unpublishable, he reshaped it into a collection of ten short stories which have the same hero Belacqua and are slightly more readable.1 This collection, into which some parts of Dream were incorporated, was entitled More Pricks Than Kicks and published in 1934. Joyce's infiuence on Dream is manifest. There are many obsolete or archaic words, many coinages and there is a good deal of wordplay. Foreign languages (especially Latin, French, German and Italian) abound and mix with English. Different styles are used : visionary (dream-like), realistic, ar~haic, or parodic style. Moreover, there is an almost overwhelming amount of literary a]lusion. The title itse]f parodies Tennyson's A Dream of Fair Women.2 The epigraph is taken from the opening lines of Chaucer's The Legendof Good Women, on which the poem of Tennyson is based. The text constantiy refers to * I am grateful to Dr. G. E. H. Hughes of Tokyo University for reading the draft and giving me advice. l It seems that Dream was rejected by publishers both because it contains too many references to sex and be- cause some parts of it are terribly unreadable. 2 Mary Bryden suggests more than titular parallelism between Beckett's Drea,n and Henry Williamson's novel, Tlle Dream ofFair Women, pub]ished in 1922 (21-22, et al.). 72 HITOTSUBASHl JOVRNAL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES [Decembcr world literature from ancient myths and Homer to Gide or D'Annunzio. In this respect we could say Beckett outrageously and superficially imitate a common trend among modern- ists such as Joyce, Pound and Eliot. We can add another conspicuous feature though it is not necessarily Joycean. The narrator, who mocks the conventions of the nineteenth- century novel, irresponsibly plays with his own narrative and, as in Tristram Shandy, Iays bare his devices frequently. The story, which centres on Belacqua's love affairs, tends to be swallowed up by these experimental features. Belacqua falls in love with a voluptuous girl, the Smeraldina-Rima, and follows her from Dublin to Vienna. But he suffers from a split between the mind and the body, entailed by love. He can love her only in his own spiritual microcosm and can- not endure her carnality. After he spends some time away from her in Paris, he joins her and her family in Fulda, Germany, where they finally break up. Some thirty pages of interlude recapitulate and comment on the story. The latter half of the story is set in Dub- lin. Here Belacqua meets and loves another woman, the Alba, who seems to be more spiritual and intellectual, and in consequence more suitable to his disposition. But this love is not fruitful either. In the final scene (which is almost the same as "The Wet Night" in More Pricks Than Kicks), Belacqua comes back from a crazy party with the Alba and ends up walking out alone in the rain. As Lawrence E. Harvey says, "Stripped to its essence, [Dream] is a discourse on love" (257). And as he shows, the necessity of the artist to escape from the body and human relations into a purely spiritual microcosm is here explored, as it is inthe early poems. Un- doubtedly, this is the most important topic as long as we concentrate on the story itself. But there are too many other elements in the novel to reduce it to a story of love and the artist. Above all it contains many interesting images and views which anticipate Beckett's later development. (In thissense itis more important than the artistically more refined More Pricks Tllan Kicks.) In this essay I want to focus on three such aspects ofthis multi-faceted novel. They are concerned with aesthetics of machinery, intermediacy and silence. I wish to elucidate these aspects and consider how they anticipate Beckett's later works. II. A estll etics of Machinery It is unlikely that Beckett was interested in the cult of machinery among the Futurists. But in Dream, we find interesting images of machinery which are worth consideration. At the beginning of Chapter TWO (which is virtually the beginning of the entire novel since Chapter ONE occupies only half a page), we find Belacqua engaged in a strange activity. He has just bidden farewell to the Smeraldina-Rima who has left for Vienna, and remains sitting on the stanchion of the pier. Remembering her image, he repeatedly induces and checks his own tears: He sat working himself up to the little gush of tears that would exonerate him. When he felt them coming he switched cff his mind and let them settle. First the cautious gyring of her in his mind till it thudded and spun with the thought of her, then not a seccnd tco soon the violent voiding and blanking of his mind so that the gush was quelled, it was balked and driven back for a da capo. He found that the best way to turn over the piston in the first instance was to think of her b6ret that she had snatched l 994] AN INTRODUcrION TO BECKETT'S DREAM OF FAIR TO MIDDLING WOM:EN 73 off to wave when the ship began to draw clear. (4) Such phrases as "switched off" or "turn over the piston" clearly Indicate that the whole process is imagined as mechanic. But soon the machine breaks down : He sat hunched on the stanchion in the evening mizzle, forcing and foiling the ebul- lition in this curious way. Until to his annoyance the fetish of her waving the b6ret refused to work. He switched on as usual, after the throttling and expunction, and nothing happened. The cylinders of his mind abode serene. That was a nasty one for him if you like, a complete break down of the works like that. (5) Immediately after he admits that there is "nothing to be done" Iike Estragon at the begin- ning of Waiting.for Godot, he is seized with the sense that he is "cursed with an insubordinate mind" (5). In other words he wishes his mind could work like a machine as he pleased. He wishes that his emotions after parting from a girlfriend could be mechanically controlled. And obviously, this activity is also highly sexual. It is described as "the little teary ejacula- tion" (4) or "chamber-work of sublimation" (5). It can be regarded in some sense as a surrogate for masturbation. Here we find sexual matters are represented in terms of mach- inery in a way which reminds us of Marcel Duchamp's glasspainting, The Bride Stripped Bare of Her Bachelors, Even, for example. Later in the novel. Belacqua is more explicitly presented as an onanist. Since he cannot bear the Smeraldina-Rima's menacing carnal presence, the best way for him is to masturbate with her image in mind. The narrator puts forward with comical timidity the proposltion that "[l]ove demands narclsslsm" and takes pams to Justify Belacqua (39). And Belacqua cannot be satisfied with the brothel because it spoils the image of the Smeraldina-Rima after all. The narrator explains what happens in his mind in the brothel: The usual over, its purveyor null as before, there began the other outpour, streaming into the parched sanctuary, a gracious strength and virtue, a fiow of bounty. Always and only after the usual and the purveyor of the usual, conditioned by them and flood- ing over them, over the garbage of the usual and the cabbage-stalks of sex, obliterating them, only then at the end, when it was time to rise and go, was dispensed the inward spilling. And not only over the garbage of the usual and the cabbage-stalks, but over the Smeraldina-Rima herself, over her impermeable oneness and her monopoly as his donator. (41) This whole process Is some lines later called "this demented hydraulic that was beyond control" (41) The word "hydraulrc" mdicates a mechamsm operated by water. Here agam we detect the mechamsatron of sexual matters.
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